by J. P. Smith
“Do you love me?” she asked as they drove north on this spring morning. And she turned and saw her reflection, Amelie Amelie, in the lenses of his Ray-Bans.
“Of course I do,” he said.
She looked through the windshield at the sky and the cirrus feathers that began to gather over the coast. “Then say it.”
“I do.”
“I want to hear the words.” But this wasn’t how it was meant to be. She wanted spontaneity, she wanted Ben to seize the silence, fill it with expression. In their two years together he had said very little. He had talked about things, of course, mostly about his work, but only rarely did he speak about the two of them, Amelie and Ben.
“I love you,” he said, and the words came out utterly flat, as though he were reading a sign, Five Miles to New Hampshire, or Burger King Next Right.
“Are you in love with me, though? There’s a difference.”
He looked at her.
“Because I’m in love with you, Ben. It means that I’m committed to you.” I’ll never let you go: that’s what she meant. Because if she let him go there would be Janet, and maybe others, and that would be unbearable. Better that he never existed so that no one could ever have him.
Committed to you: it sounded absurd. She who used words so well was ineloquent when it came to love. She laughed a little. “You know what I mean,” she said, clutching his hand. “It means that I’m not seeing anyone else. It means that we’ve been together a long time.”
It means that I want to live with you: that was what she wanted to say, what she meant to say; it was what remained unsaid.
“I know,” he said, and he sounded as if someone had just informed him he was to be hanged at dawn.
“Do you feel that I’m suffocating you in some way?”
“No,” he said, though it sounded like Yes.
“Tell me the truth, Ben. Do you feel as if I’m putting too much pressure on you?”
“I like it that we’re together like this.”
She had heard the words before. She wasn’t pressuring him, she wasn’t suffocating him, she’d never even brought up the subject of him divorcing Janet and marrying her. And yet the notion was always there, like something in the air, a thin wisp of a fog blurring the brilliant landscape that lay in the distance.
“Do you?” she asked. “Do you really?”
“Yes. I do.” And this time he said it seriously, with conviction, and he squeezed her hand. “I need you,” he said. “I can’t imagine not being with you like this. Of course I love you.”
She said nothing. His response begged a number of questions, at least one of them coming immediately to mind: needed her for what? For being always available? Once she had asked him about Janet, how she was in bed, and he’d only said that he didn’t want to talk about her, he was with Amelie. The gaps in his statements and the great silences of his life turned to chasms and voids.
She said, “So you don’t mind that we can’t go out together, have dinner in restaurants in town, be seen? You prefer all this clandestine sneaking around? That’s okay for you?”
He moved his hand in the sketch of a gesture, defining impatience.
“I just want to know,” she said. “I just want it to be clear for me. I need to hear the words.”
“This is how it has to be,” he said, and it sounded like a litany of things said too often before. “It’s just the way it is. I just want to enjoy today. I want to enjoy what we already have.” To her he sounded like an idiot, as though she had asked him to repeat what she had said, word for word, and he was only too willing to do it. “Right now anything else is impossible.”
“Do you still love your wife?”
“Come on, Amelie.”
“I’m just curious. I know I shouldn’t be asking it. I just need to,” and she shook her head and said nothing more. She thought of Janet sitting across from her in the restaurant after the reading. She couldn’t find a thing to criticize about Ben’s wife. She was utterly professional, obviously devoted to her work and her family, confident in herself. In her presence Amelie felt more like a ruffian, a day laborer working in the word trenches, dredging up characters and plots, trying to mend a life always on the verge of falling into sentence fragments and unfinished novels.
I just need to find my bearings, she wanted to say. I just need to know what direction I’m going in, I just need to look out for myself. That was it: she needed to take care of herself. But she didn’t say it. To speak of herself would in some odd way exclude Ben from the picture.
“It’s not so easy separating from someone you’ve lived with for almost twenty years,” he said.
“It wasn’t any problem for me,” she said at once.
“That’s because your husband cheated on you, Amelie, it’s completely different.”
“So if you found out that she was having an affair, you’d walk away from her?”
He said nothing.
“Well, would you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He took a moment. “Maybe.” And he shrugged. “I just can’t imagine Janet having an affair.”
“Why not? She’s an attractive woman. She probably can’t picture you doing it either.” She considered it not in light of her own life but as potential material for a novel. Click-click went her imagination: two people so bound up in their egotism that neither can imagine the other would stray. And then…it happens.
“I bet she’s at least thought about it,” Amelie said. “She’s very attractive and successful, and she’s done it without anyone’s help. If you can’t see how alluring all this is, then maybe you’ve just”—she sought the words on the purse of her lips—“grown tired of her.”
And then one day would he grow tired of Amelie? Or would she be the first to do it?
Click-click. Click-click.
He turned to look at her. “Right now I’m with you. This is our time together. Let’s not spoil it.”
“And if she suddenly died?”
He turned and stared at her, and she mirrored his look as she turned to him.
“It’s just a hypothetical. Let’s say she got really sick and died. Or was killed. In a car accident, say.”
He threw up his hands. “This is crazy, Amelie.”
“Anything can happen. That’s life. One minute everything’s fine, the next…tragedy strikes.”
For a few minutes neither said anything. The road they got onto was lined with strip malls and outlet stores, fireworks dealers and gun shops, and the occasional sex den where cursive neon spoke of CDs and mags and toys and peep shows.
Amelie remembered how when Nina was little she and Richard would drive north with her, they would go to the beach and then find a restaurant and eat lobster rolls in the quaint rusticity of a seafood shack, the tables wooden and pitted and stained, the walls covered with old fishing nets and floats. She remembered Nina in her bathing suit, bending over in her funny, awkward way as she collected shells and stones. She and Richard would hold hands and walk as the tide washed gently over the sand. Gulls stood on one leg and stared out to sea.
Now her baby had left home. In less than four years she would graduate. Richard had Sharon and in September they would have a new family. There was little about him that didn’t strike Amelie as absurd or comical, and yet he was living with another woman who loved him, who took him seriously, just as she once had. Had she missed something in him, had she overlooked his true nature, the goodness in this man? Or maybe he just needed to be with anyone but Amelie to turn into the man he’d become. And the thought was not just sobering, but depressing.
She didn’t deserve it, this solitude: she had the sense that if she thought long enough about it she would see that Ben was a mistake, that as the days and months and years went by he would still be with Janet and Andrew, and she would be by herself. In ten years she would be fif
ty. And if she didn’t think about it, if she didn’t allow herself to see things with such cruel clarity, she would be aware of only the bliss and the sweetness of things, the richness of her work.
Right now anything else is impossible: that’s what Ben had said to her. Did right now imply that later, sometime after now, it would be possible? How long would right now last, how long had it been there, was right now an illusion, a syntactical error, something he had pulled from the air? Or did it have its margins, was it like an ocean or a desert, where stranded in the middle you thought of it as the whole world, going on forever in limitless, endless dunes, the monotony of waves, and yet you knew that sooner or later you would arrive at some other place, older, exhausted, hobbled by the struggle. She parted her lips, she was about to speak, she heard the words formulating in her head, she pulled off the road and began her descent, and there, like the scattering of broken glass in the sunlight, was the sea.
21
An hour later it was raining. They had sensed it coming as they walked along the beach and the clouds had begun to weave one into the other. On the horizon, fishing boats were stalked by whirling flocks of seagulls, frenzied and ravenous, their cries filling the air. There were few other people on the beach; it reminded her of a shoreline she’d visited in England: a wasteland of broken shells and shingle, the odd spaniel snouting about for things, the overdressed old people losing their footing on the stones and the edges of rock pools. The sea seemed to draw the solitary and the ancient toward it, as if they were slowly being returned to some former uncomplicated kind of existence.
Today the air was too briny, the color of the sea ugly. She saw no magic in the waves, nothing beckoning to her. It was dark and cold and its depths were filled with horror. Ben had said little as they walked; Amelie felt a gathering sadness, the sense that the days were rushing past her without delineation. In the richness of her hours something was breaking down, growing stale. By the time they got to the restaurant she could feel the onset of thunder in her head, the swollen pain of it.
She ordered her usual vodka martini. Ben asked for the craft beer of the day. They still had nothing to say to each other. She had introduced death into the conversation, just as she sometimes did in her books, and the mood had darkened. She wondered if he was considering what she’d said. If Janet were dead…
A minute later their drinks arrived. Cheers. Cheers. She had to put on her glasses to read the menu, the words sole and haddock and lobster coming into focus. A week ago she hadn’t had to use glasses and now she did. She wondered if she’d already grown dependent on them, if this was what aging was all about: you picked up a cane one day just to help you get over a sprained ankle and you relied on it forever, teetering toward the grave. Ben looked at her: “I like them on you.” His smile faded a little. “They’re nice.”
After they ordered he said, “I’ll be gone for a little while.” He said it as though he had been meaning to say it all along, as though what might have come to the boil had reached a steady simmer and had been that way for hours.
She looked at him. “Business?”
“The school vacation’s coming up,” he said.
She couldn’t at first see the connection.
“We’re thinking of going away for two weeks. Janet and Andrew and I. Rachel will be at college.”
“You’re going away with Janet.”
“Shh,” he said, for her voice had suddenly grown loud and indignant.
Without thinking, she finished the rest of her martini in one swallow and felt it instantly go to her head. “I’d like another, please,” she said, and the waitress rushed over to the bar to place the order. A retired couple ate in silence at a table in the middle of the room, looking at everything but the spouse sitting across from them, and Amelie wished they weren’t there, she wanted the room to be empty for fifteen minutes so she could have it out with Ben, air her views on this impending leave-taking, and for a crazy moment she seriously considered walking over and politely asking them to go into the bar or simply stand outside in the rain until she was done. Later would not be good; later would be for other things, not arguments, not the changing of minds, not the sadness of the future. Now the gulls were circling low, as though waiting for things to die, things that could be pulled apart with their beaks, things that could be split and devoured.
“When did you decide this?” she said.
“We haven’t had a vacation for a few years, and we just thought it was time.”
“Just like that. You just thought it was time.”
“Please don’t start, Amelie.” He looked out the window. In the distance a fishing boat was chugging by, followed by a flock of hungry seagulls.
Amelie continued to stare at him. “You and her.”
“And Andrew.”
“Was it your idea? Yours alone?”
Now he was looking at something over her shoulder. Had she taken a moment, she would have realized they were becoming like the old people at the other table, people who’d heard each other’s stories a thousand times, and Amelie wondered if all this arguing, all this debating, was wearing him down.
“Ah. It was hers, then,” she said. “It was Janet’s idea.” Had Janet learned in some obscure manner of their affair? Was she dragging her husband off to Vacationland just to tighten her grip on him?
“It’s what families sometimes do on school vacations. We thought Andrew would enjoy it.”
She speared the stray olive in her drink with the little plastic épée. “So I won’t see you for two weeks.” She looked out the window. She saw nothing, as though what before now had been ocean and flowers and trees had been ravaged by earthquake, reduced to gray rubble.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re pretty sure we’ll head west.”
“West.” The notion of tumbleweed rolled across her mind.
“California anyway,” he said. “Possibly into Mexico. Baja,” he added with a shrug.
“I hope you have a good time,” she said, and even though her head was killing her she made quick work of most of her second drink just as the food arrived. She thought of asking for a glass of wine and decided against it.
For a little while they ate in silence.
“Is there a problem, Amelie? I mean—”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“It’s just.”
“Yes, Ben. I know. It’s just that this is something you have to do with the family. I understand. I really do.”
“We’ve done this long enough. You should know how it works by now.”
She set down her knife and fork. “This. This is what this is? It’s just this? I thought it was something more than just that,” she said, and the retired couple in the middle of the room took in this drunk woman with a glance. “An affair is not just a this. You have a this with a hooker, Ben, not with your lover of two years,” and again Ben said Shh.
The image of Ben and Janet on a beach left Amelie in a state of vague disquiet. Waves washed over their legs; he oiled her back, rubbed lotion into her freckled skin; in the water they played, he touched her, she touched him. She saw them leave the beach and return to the room. Andrew would sit in front of the television and watch something with monster trucks in it while his parents went in the bathroom and soothed their overheated skin under the shower. She saw Janet soaping Ben, arousing him, and she knew what this was like because they had often done it themselves.
“Please don’t go on, Amelie.”
She said nothing. She looked only at the slab of fish that lay on her plate. Slowly she reduced it to a mess of flesh and bones.
22
“Thank you,” she said after they’d been driving for fifteen minutes. “Thank you for lunch.” She looked out the window. Lunch was something she had quickly forgotten. What had she eaten, what had she drunk? They could have served her a plate full o
f garbage and leftovers for all she knew, crushed seashells and overcooked barnacles. It had become a mere exercise in the movement of the jaw, open, chew, swallow, open, chew. And the martinis had not helped, they seemed to have killed not only the flavor of her food but also the memory of it.
A billboard showed a merry middle-aged couple on diabetes medicine playing in the ocean. Another said that Lavalle’s Guns and Ammo was a mile up the road. Only the words they had exchanged remained vivid.
“It was very nice,” she said, though of course it wasn’t very nice, it was very horrible.
He was about to say something, she could sense his lips shaping a sound, but he said nothing.
She said, “I’m sorry about that. I was upset, that’s all.”
He said nothing.
She said, “I’ve been booked to do another reading next week.”
He said nothing.
“It’s outside the city. It’s a long drive.”
He said nothing. Heavy rain started to pelt the car, and the sky seemed to fall onto the highway in thick dirty sheets. She switched on her wipers, to little avail. He said nothing.
“It wasn’t fair of me to do that to you,” she said.
He said nothing.
“I was just upset. You understand. This…surprise. You going away…”
He said nothing.
“I love you, Ben. It hurts me to love you so much.”
He said nothing.
“I love you to death.”
23
It was still raining when Amelie pulled into her driveway. She shut off the engine, and they sat in silence as the windshield was blurred by the flowing water. Ben reached over and slid the keys out of the ignition and then got out of the car and let himself into her house. She imagined him wandering around the rooms in a state of anger so fierce that he was methodically breaking up the accoutrements of her life: her paintings and lamps, her tables and laptop, the books she had published and those she was intending to read. But he had no reason to be angry, he was going off to sunny California with its palm trees and sandy beaches, he would sit by the pool with Janet in her bikini. He had, on the contrary, every reason to rejoice, just as she had every reason to be upset. He was going to take Janet and Andrew to California and Mexico and they would behave like a family and she, who was so much a part of his life, would be left behind. Two weeks.