Chapter Eighteen #3
She couldn’t imagine anything sounding more daunting. She followed him out. He left the porch light off, and they sat in the iron patio chairs on either side of the little table, in the glow of the living room lamp that seeped through the wooden blinds inside. The window was shut.
Felix lit a cigarette.
“You’re like a chimney with those things,” she said.
He nodded. “We should keep our voices down. I don’t want Tom to hear.”
Also daunting, but probably for the best. She didn’t need them ganging up on her.
Crickets trilled in the darkness beyond the screen, looking for mates.
Nearby, a car door closed, an engine turned over.
Felix drew from his cigarette and asked her what had happened that morning.
She’d been startled, she said. In her own home—when she’d expressly told Tom that no one was allowed to spend the night.
Felix asked why the rule, and since when.
The ruckus, she said. She’d been sleeping poorly lately and didn’t want a bunch of kids running around the house at night.
“So you threw Skip out.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be here!”
“You sent him home crying. A ten-year-old kid.”
It was a point he wanted to pick at, apparently—unless he was just waiting for her to admit that she’d behaved atrociously.
She conceded that she might have overreacted, but beyond that, she didn’t know what he wanted her to say.
“How about you apologize to Tom?” he suggested, his voice heavy with smoke and exasperation.
But she couldn’t see lifting her foot, after putting it down so emphatically. She shook her head.
“Tom isn’t going to want to have any friends over here, if he thinks this can happen,” Felix said.
“Then he’d be the one overreacting.”
“He’ll resent it,” Felix said. “He’ll resent you.”
“I can’t help what goes on in his head.”
“But do you care, Margaret? Tell me, does it matter to you, what he thinks of you?”
Who’s asking? she wanted to ask. The new-and-improved Felix? The missing-a-past-love Felix? “What a question,” she said, drawing her arms across her stomach. “Of course I care.”
“You might show it a little more often.”
A moth the size of a guitar pick landed on the screen with a soft thump, and clung there. Margaret sat back against the cool iron of the chair without having realized she’d been sitting forward. Felix tapped his cigarette over the ashtray on the table.
Years later, she would think how fitting it was that the suggestion of showing affection to a child had started their unraveling.
But it wasn’t just that, of course. It was the folded square of paper tucked into her purse.
It was the day she found out she was pregnant.
It was the moment she realized she was lonely at the thought of Felix’s coming home.
So many things had started their unraveling.
She bristled at his words and asked him when he had gotten to be such an expert on parenting.
That led to some defensive back-and-forth about what their roles were, and their respective contributions to the raising of their son, and what they each brought to the household, and before they knew it they were enumerating their frustrations and each other’s faults—all in hushed voices, as the sound of the crickets faded into the night around them.
Money came up. Then, sex. Margaret asked if he ever intended on even trying to make love to her again, since it had been five months since they’d last attempted anything.
Instead of reaching for one of his usual answers—it wasn’t her, it was him; he was working on it; it wasn’t permanent—he said, “It’s a difficult situation, I know. ”
“Difficult? I’ve wondered for fifteen years why you would marry someone you weren’t attracted to.”
“We’ve been through this, Margaret.”
“We haven’t. We’ve talked around it. You never told me why.”
He put out his cigarette and stared out at the dark recesses of the yard. The faint outline of the toolshed. He said, “I thought I could become attracted to you.”
An admittance, at last. But not nearly as bittersweetly satisfying as she’d imagined it might be. She said, “Who did you become attracted to?”
In the long silence that followed, she went into the house and came back out with her purse.
—
He didn’t want to talk about the paper the dry cleaner had discovered.
His hands shook a little and he wouldn’t take it from her when she held it out to him, so she dropped it onto the table.
After several moments of his silence, she asked him to please, please explain it to her, so that she could understand at least one thing about him.
He dragged a hand, with its long elegant fingers, over his mouth.
“It’s something I’ve hidden,” he said. “For my whole life. Even from myself, at times.”
That declaration couldn’t be unsaid and unheard any more than she could unsee the note and slip it back into his jacket pocket.
He told her about the boy his father had caught him with when he was fifteen, about his “fumbling around” in college.
He told her about the mold he’d wanted to fit into, about the offer-slash-ultimatum his father had put to him, and the ruse of his first engagement.
He alluded to a few experiences he’d had in the years before they met, and said nothing had happened since—until it did.
He wanted her to know he’d loved her when he proposed, and he loved her still, and that he’d believed marrying her would turn things around for him, sexually.
When it didn’t, he thought it would take time. That was always the plan.
All the times she’d wondered what she was doing wrong, why she couldn’t meet his particular carnal needs.
Also, she hadn’t known she was someone’s plan.
What she remembered was his telling her things were about to click into place and get better every time something good came along.
The promotion. The house. The holiday bonus.
Always some good thing that was like a marker he had to get past in order to turn a corner—but he never reached the corner.
She was, somehow, both numb and pinpricked, all over. “Felix,” she said, “I’m sorry, but…you still have not explained the note.”
—
His voice dropped. He realized he would have to tell her now about Augie.
He didn’t want to, spoke almost in a whisper, not saying much but the bare bones of it he felt would suffice and he hoped would make sense to her.
Still, she couldn’t suppress the ferocity of her tone—was it hurt?
envy? he wasn’t sure—when she asked, “Were the two of you in love?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“You can tell me, Felix. You might as well, at this point.”
They hadn’t used the word love, he said.
But he’d felt it, and at the time he’d suspected Augie did too.
But he really hadn’t known. Time was short, on the ship, he lost his nerve—and then it was too late.
After the sinking, and the hospitals, he’d just wanted to get home to her, and see if he could still be the person he was before the war.
Or the person he’d been trying to be. And then Tom came into their lives, and he felt so happy, Tom’s birth seemed to bode well, he said, like a good omen, no more than that, and all he could think to do was stay the course, be a husband and a father and hope that all of it—everything connected to his past that wasn’t who he wanted to be, right now—would slide off of him, fall away.
She nearly reached for one of his cigarettes, thinking it might help her get through this. “Go on,” she said.
Waiting to feel different had been like slow dying, he said.
For years. It wasn’t until he spoke to somebody, and sorted some things out, that he was able to make any sort of peace with himself.
He stopped wishing a whole part of him would die—that helped.
He figured out that being who he was…didn’t preclude being who he was, if that made sense to her.
(It did, and didn’t.) He said he was sorry she’d found out the way she had. He never wanted to hurt her.
So this was the person in the poem that was not a poem—he’d loved this Augie, she thought, and Augie had died.
She’d known grief was a part of what he was going through, so many people he’d sailed with had died on the Teague.
But she hadn’t known he’d been grieving a specific person.
A lover. Right there was the undertow, the lower-than-low moods.
The epicenter of the storm inside him. And yet, now that she understood, he seemed further away from her than ever.
His eyes would not meet hers, he was staring straight ahead at the screen, the darkness beyond it.
In the silence that accumulated, she had a realization. Added two plus two. She asked if it was the fortune teller, Skip’s mother, who’d helped him “sort some things out,” as he’d put it.
“She’s not a fortune teller, she is a spiritualist,” he said. “But, yes.”
Could she possibly care how Becky Jenkins labeled herself? “She helped you…feel okay? Laid it all out for you? Like a psychiatrist?”
He shook his head. “It’s more than that. Becky found Augie for me,” he said.
“Found his ghost, you mean. She found the ghost of the man you fell in love with, and told you he loved you back?”
How strange it was for him to hear her say those words aloud. Stranger, still, to hear himself clarify the matter: “Augie told me. Through Becky.”
The chatter of crickets and all other night noises had faded.
A train whistle nudged against the dark.
She didn’t know quite what to think of Becky’s “helping” him in this way, whether real or not.
The idea of Becky’s being involved in their lives at all felt wrong to her—but also fitting, somehow.
Margaret felt stupid. Deceived. “How could you do this to me?” she said finally.
He took a breath. “I thought it would be different. I thought I could be—fixed.”