Chapter Eighteen #4
“But you’re telling me I was the thing you thought would fix you, and it didn’t work. So you just carried on, trying other things? I was step one in your experiment? This is my life, Felix. This is all I have.” She huffed out the breath she’d been holding. “I never stood a chance.”
“That’s not true. It’s just not the case. We’ve stayed together. We’re still here, still us.”
“We’ve never been us,” she said. “There is no us. We were both pretending.”
“Margaret—”
Her voice broke, but she kept talking through the pieces: “You proposed to me because you thought I would fix you? I said yes because I was looking out for myself. We hardly knew each other. We hardly know each other now. This enormous part of you I knew nothing about—because you kept it from me. I understand—but I blinded myself to it. Just like you did, to me. All this stepping around and lying, as if there’s something precious here that needs to be preserved. ”
“Isn’t there, still?”
“We’re a sham, Felix. We’re actually more alike than I thought—we both came at this so blindly.”
“We don’t have to be blind now. We have a child, and a home together. I’m still me. We’re still us.”
She felt the past and what it held for her drawing inward, imploding upon itself. “I had an affair while you were overseas.”
He went quiet for several moments. Then: “I wondered, actually, if you had.”
“You did? Why?”
“Because you’re a woman…and not just a beautiful one. I wasn’t providing, along those lines. Not before I left, and not when I got back.”
His sensibility. His discretion. “Aren’t you even going to ask me who it was?”
He ticked his damp eyes over to her. Because they’d been outside for so long, they could see each other clearly in the dim light. “I don’t need to know,” he said.
“You do. And you need to know the timing, I’m afraid. It lasted a while, then happened again the night before you got back. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“That’s enough.” His voice was terse and he raised a hand, open-palmed, in the space between them, not as if threatening to strike her but as though to fend off a blow.
“Please, please, not another word,” he said, because this, even as he’d opened the door to his life, he hadn’t seen coming.
This had never occurred to him. “Please stop.”
Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.
The crickets, suddenly, started all together, as if after an intermission at a concert.
Their noise sounded like a snare drum. “What do we do now?” she asked.
He crushed another cigarette, stood, and said, “We’ll figure it out.” Then walked into the house.
—
An hour later, she went upstairs—to the guest room, where she lay down on the bed in which she’d made love with Cal all those years ago, and waited for a sleep that never came.
How ridiculously na?ve you are, she said to herself, thinking year after year that things would improve.
Believing he would get past whatever he wasn’t talking about.
And that he would and could give you happiness, when the whole time he’d been grieving and suffering from a broken heart, lamenting a love he would never be able to know.
Because it would have been love, right?
It would have been love.
—
Yesterday’s haze had burned out of the sky.
She waited for Cal at noon in the little triangle wedge of park beside the courthouse, on the bench where she told him she’d be, between the two weeping willows, unable to tell if the pain in her stomach was nerves or hunger; she hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.
Cal was walking with a cane now. She’d seen him with it from a distance a few times.
The lines around his mouth had deepened some, maybe; his blond hair was receding into a peak, but otherwise he hardly seemed to have aged in the past nine years. He sat down beside her.
They’d gotten their awkward greetings out of the way over the phone, when she’d called him at the store, so the first thing he said after sitting down was “Is this about Skip?”
No. It was about them. It was about Tom.
It was about her. How could she explain that she’d had no choice but to see him?
He was part of this, after all. He was going to remain part of this.
She took a breath and let it out slowly.
Said she knew what she was about to say might sound crazy.
Then she asked him if what had happened between the two of them had been real.
Clearly, the question stumped Cal. Real as in…
did it happen? He seemed ready to fudge on that, if he could get away with it.
Real, she said, as in what they’d felt for each other.
What they’d shared. Still stumped, suspecting a trap, maybe, he said, “We enjoyed ourselves, didn’t we? That felt real.”
“But was it all just a distraction for you? Could it have been anyone? Or did you desire me?”
“Not anyone,” Cal said, glancing around, leaning back on the bench as if to tuck himself out of sight. Though he turned his head so that his blue eyes met hers and held for a moment, his voice was potholed with reluctance. “In that—situation—under those—circumstances, I desired you, yes.”
Romance had never been the point, she reminded herself. Clearly, he could only assign to her the kind of desire that produced sex, then memories of sex that could be locked away in a vault. Well. She was done being the vault.
He turned to face her on the bench, his cane held upright between his knees. “What’s this about, Margaret? Has something happened?”
“Felix and I are separating. We’ll divorce, I suppose.”
His mouth went slack for a moment. He asked her why.
She wasn’t going into that, she said. It was over because it had to be, and she wouldn’t discuss the particulars with him or anyone else.
Cal sat with the impact of that for a moment, looking out across the little fences cordoning off the grass. “Why are you telling me?”
“You know why. We have a child together.”
He actually looked stunned by that. He either hadn’t known—how could he not have known?
—or couldn’t believe he was finally hearing it from her.
She didn’t have time to watch him process what she’d been living with for a decade.
If she weren’t around, she said, did he think it would be better for everyone if their spouses knew the truth?
He asked her what she meant by not being around.
She waved that off, rephrased her question: didn’t he think, for Tom’s sake, that Becky and Felix should know?
It was as if all the blood had suddenly drained to his feet. “Did you tell him?”
“Please answer my question, Cal.”
“Do I—No. Why would that be a good idea?”
“I guess I’m asking if, in your heart, it bothers you that they don’t know. Do you think Becky has a right to?”
He’d never thought of it in terms of who had a right to know; he’d thought of their affair only as something no one should ever know about, because it never should have happened.
He felt a surprising flicker of doubt about what she—this person he’d been so passionate with, so intimate with, so many years ago—was telling him.
But he had to doubt her, didn’t he? Just as his brain had eventually brought a measure of doubt to what she’d told him in the garden shop.
Suddenly, this felt like a defining moment, and none of the definitions he could think of were acceptable.
“No,” he said. And added, “Please don’t do this to me. ”
A slight breeze picked up, waving the strands of the willows on either side of them.
“Why is it something I’m doing to you?” she asked. “And why has dealing with this been all on me? I’m not asking you what I should do, Cal. I’m asking what your thoughts are. And I guess I have them now.”
“What are you going to do?”
She didn’t answer but thanked him for seeing her. She picked her purse up from the bench and stood.
“Wait,” he said, and stood, too, but she asked him to please not walk with her or follow her. When she was near the entrance of the park, almost to the brick sidewalk of Main Street, she heard him call out, “Where are you going to go?”
It was the last thing he ever said to her.
—
Early afternoon. Felix was at work, Tom was at school. The house was empty and cool and quiet. It smelled of Murphy Oil Soap. Cigarettes. The light-blue carpet in the living room still bore the treads from the most recent vacuuming she’d given it.
She moved quickly. Brought two suitcases up from the basement and filled them with some of her clothes.
Took half the checks out of the checkbook, half the emergency cash out of the Band-Aid tin they kept behind Felix’s socks.
Rolled up her toiletries in a towel. Took her jewelry.
Took photos of her husband and son, in a hinged frame that closed.
She put the suitcases into the trunk of the car, plus a grocery bag of shoes, then tossed her coats into the back seat and slid the Dolice in on top of them.
At the secretary’s desk, she took out a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote:
Dear Felix,
I’ve gone away. Not because of what you told me, but because we’ll never be what we need and want in each other, and if there’d ever been a possibility for that, there surely isn’t one now.
I promise you: I’ll never tell Tom or anyone else what you shared with me.
It’s no one’s business but yours. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. The heart knows where it wants to go.
I need to tell you, though, that I’ve done something terrible I’ve we’ve been living with for a long time.
The affair I had was with Cal Jenkins. I ended it as soon as I got the telegram about the sinking, but we were together once more—the night before you got home.
I slept with him less than twenty-four hours before sleeping with you.