by Megan Hart
There was a story there, one he wasn’t telling. One I had no right, perhaps, to hear. “And?”
He ran a hand through his hair and shifted on the bench, all part of the ritual I’d grown used to seeing when I dug too deep. Most of the time it was enough to get me to back off and change the subject. These times weren’t about analysis, after all, not about pushing buttons.
“Never mind,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Eddie was a year younger than me. He was the smart one, I guess you could say.” Joe laughed.
“And you were the pretty one?”
I liked the fact he knew when I was teasing, and he took it. “You got it.”
“So, what happened?” I thought I could guess.
Joe leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands linked. The gravel seemed suddenly to have captured his interest quite thoroughly. “She got pregnant.”
“Oh?” I hadn’t expected that answer.
He turned his face toward me. “Yeah.”
It took me a second to understand. “Oh. Oh!”
Joe nodded. “More like, ‘oh, fuck.’”
“What happened?”
“She had an abortion. I had to borrow the money from my dad to pay for it. He told me I was a disappointing bastard, and he was right. Eddie never knew about it. By then he was sick. He had leukemia. Anyway, he…died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Joe,” I said softly and waited until he looked at me. “I’m still sorry.”
I might have reached for him, but we didn’t touch. We never touched. He nodded slightly.
“Thanks.” He got up, the story told, our time spent. “Oh, I almost forgot.”
Joe pulled a tissue-wrapped package from his inside suit pocket. He held it out on the palm of his hand. “Happy birthday.”
I was already reaching for it with the automatic response most people make when an object’s offered. At his words, though, I hesitated. The package tipped from his hand and missed mine, hitting the ground, where I bent to pick it up with a hasty apology.
“You didn’t have to get me something.” I blushed. Hard. “I hope it didn’t break.”
“I think it’s okay. Open it.”
I did. It was a small hand-dipped candle from a local boutique. A pale purple, it smelled distinctively of lavender.
“How did you know?” I asked, lifting the candle and sniffing it.
“You told me.” Joe sounded surprised, as if my question made no sense. “You said it was your favorite scent.”
“I did?” I wrapped the candle back in the tissue and held it close to me. “Really? It is, actually.”
Joe smiled. “I thought you did. Anyway. Happy birthday, Sadie.”
“Thank you.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the gift I’d decided not to give him, and gave it to him anyway. It was a book, the latest hardcover thriller from a well-known author. “Surprise. I hope you don’t already have it.”
He didn’t. We beamed at each other until our smiles said too much and we had to look away. Joe took a few steps back before turning and heading off down the path. I stared after him, the faint scent of lavender surrounding me.
Much is said about brilliance. Less attention is paid to those who live next to it. Spouses, children, assistants…if anyone thinks of us at all, it’s generally to remark upon how lucky we are to bask in the light of genius.
In the first years of our life together, I basked in Adam’s brilliance. At parties, I was proud to introduce myself as Adam Danning’s wife, to accept compliments on his behalf. I was often asked if I, too, was a poet.
“No,” Adam always said proudly. “My Sadie is a doctor.”
Not once did anyone seem surprised I wasn’t also a literary whiz, but I always enjoyed that moment of expectation in their eyes while they waited to see if I was. I never wished for the sort of creative brilliance Adam had, nor envied it of him. There wasn’t room in our house for another Adam. We’d have been like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, colander helmets and all, prepared to battle.
Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Ernest Hemingway shot off his face. Richard Brautigan apparently grew tired of trout fishing and also took the way of the gun.
Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low? As a psychologist, I felt I should know the answers. I should be able to understand my brilliant, talented husband. Yet, I didn’t.
The mood swings baffled me. When I needed to work, I went to my desk. I read. I studied. I accomplished my goals steadfastly, each in a row so tidy I could literally check them off on a list.
Adam disappeared into his office for hours and hours to emerge with bleary eyes, cursing and moaning, saying he was unable to write. He sometimes wept and threw dishes against the wall, only to laugh himself hoarse an hour later at inane television programs. My lack of comprehension about his creative impulses infuriated him.
We clashed. We fought. We made brilliant, creative, genius love that sometimes left us both weeping.
I knew him, but I didn’t understand him.
I learned to ignore his moods as unrelated to me or anything I’d done, and to leave him alone when he was mopish. I read his poems when they were published, as they all were, to increasing popularity and acclaim. I went with him to parties where sycophants fawned on him and fed us champagne and caviar, where placards with his face and the cover of his books stared at us from across the room.
I loved Adam and he loved me, and we made a life that was full of ups and downs—but it worked. I studied. He created. He pulled me along and I was not his anchor, for Adam wouldn’t be anchored. I was, instead, his ballast. Something to keep him from bouncing quite so high or diving quite so low.
His first book tour didn’t land him on Oprah or The Tonight Show. His publisher booked him at colleges and bookstores where he appeared in his leather jacket and earring and read his poems to rapt audiences of suburban housewives and English majors. There was talk of his being considered as Pennsylvania’s next Poet Laureate, a possibility that might have been pulled from the thin air of his publisher’s hopefulness but had Adam floating on that high for weeks.
Then he hit a tree and woke up in a hospital bed, and everything was gone. If he’d written anything since then, I didn’t know about it. I was afraid to suggest it. Writing to Adam had been as necessary as breathing or eating or fucking. He couldn’t do any of those things on his own any longer. Maybe he couldn’t write, either. Writing had been Adam’s addiction. His high. There was no mistaking the fact he suffered from its lack, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it.
Much like the shoemaker’s children who went barefoot, the husband of the psychologist went without therapy. Adam was adamant he didn’t need it, wouldn’t have it.
“If I didn’t need it before, when I was half out of my fucking head, I don’t need it now,” he said. “I’m a quadriplegic, Sadie, not crazy.”
I didn’t bother to explain that I don’t deal with “crazy” people, and neither do my colleagues. Adam had made up his mind. His accident hadn’t made him any less stubborn.
So we focused on the chair, the hourly medical care, the minutiae of evacuating his bladder and bowels and caring for a body that could no longer protect itself even from its own weight. We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but I no longer knew him.
Adam had always been brighter. Stronger. I’d been content to circle him the way the earth revolves around the sun, dependent on him to lead me.
What happens when the weaker becomes the stronger? When my independence became a choice no longer, but a necessity if we were both going to survive? The places we’d built for ourselves no longer fit. Like poor Honey, we were trapped in the past, stuck developmentally, locked into habits that had served us in the past but weren’t allowing us to grow.
Once, it had be
en enough to be what Adam wanted. Now, I tried to be what he needed. The two didn’t seem to be the same. The night I got the call that Adam had been taken to the hospital, my first fear had been that I’d lost him. Four years later, I’d somehow lost myself, instead.
I’d never know the woman I’d have been if I hadn’t met Adam. Until I met Joe, I hadn’t wondered.
Who was I now?
Chapter
08
May
This month, my name is Amy, and I’ve come in from out of town to be my college roommate’s maid of honor. The unwritten code of weddings says either the bridesmaid’s dress or the best man will be ugly enough to make you wish you were blind. Bonnie’s promised me something cute to wear and cuter to stand beside in the photos. I’ve been in enough weddings by now to doubt that will happen, but when I see the best man I’m prepared to forgive her for the dress.
He’s an attorney. His teeth are straight and white and he wears his tux as easily as if it were a sweat suit. He’s just that cool.
“What did I tell you?” Bonnie whispers from the back of the church where we’re waiting for the wedding rehearsal to begin.
“He’s cute.” I crane my neck a little to catch a better glimpse of him. “What’s his name?”
“Joe Wilder.” The name suits him.
The rehearsal is a disaster, but Father Peck assures us that bodes well for tomorrow. The whole crowd of us head over to Angelina’s Riverside, where Brian’s parents have paid for a pretty extravagant rehearsal dinner. I manage to sit next to Joe.
He apologizes for bumping me. “I’m a lefty. Sorry.”
We switch seats. Now he’s on the end, and I don’t have to share him with the other bridesmaid who’d been sitting on his other side. She’s not happy about that, but I don’t really care, since I am the maid of honor, not her. Let her glom onto her own groomsman. The best man is mine.
“Nervous about tomorrow?”
“Oh, no. This is my fifth wedding this year.”
When I tell this to Joe, he laughs and sips water from his glass. I like the way the corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles. “This is my first one.”
“Oh, a wedding virgin.” I lean a bit closer.
“Be gentle with me.” He leans closer, too. “Since it’s my first time and all.”
We laugh. We eat. And later, after dinner is over, we go to the bar and drink. A bit after that, we dance.
He’s an excellent dancer and holds me just close enough to lead me without making it seem like he’s coming on to me. I think he is coming on to me, but I appreciate his subtlety.
The wedding code says all hook ups need to wait at least until the reception. It’s only common courtesy to the bride and groom. I was at a wedding once where the best man and maid of honor hooked up at the rehearsal dinner, then with different members of the wedding party at the reception. They ended up throwing cake in each other’s faces and ruining the wedding pictures.
So I’m just about to regretfully tell him I have to get back to my hotel when he beats me to the punch and says he’s got to get going. He’s meeting the other groomsmen to take Brian out for some drinks. He’s already late.
“At a strip club, maybe?”
Joe’s got the grin of a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Maybe.”
“But Brian told Bonnie he wasn’t going to do that.”
Joe acts like he let the cat out of the bag. “Oops. Are you going to tell her?”
Bonnie swore there was no way she was going out drinking and carousing the night before she got married—not when she’d have a hundred people taking her picture the next day. We’d had our bachelorette shindig a month ago. We had, in fact, gone to see a male dance revue. I didn’t personally see what the big deal was about Brian going out to see a little bit of tit and ass before he got married. I mean, if you can’t trust your man, you shouldn’t be marrying him.
“I guess not.”
“Want to come along?” His grin got broader, as if we were sharing a dirty secret.
“Oh, right. The guys would so like that.”
“I’ll tell them you’re there to make sure I keep Brian in line.”
“Then they’ll really hate me!” I shake my head, but laughing. “Brian won’t want me there, Joe. I’ll ruin the fun.”
“Bet you won’t. You don’t look like that sort of girl. Besides, you know Brian, right?”
“Since college.”
“So, don’t you want to send him off to be married in grand style?”
This was a slippery slope, but it was either go back to my empty hotel room or go with Joe, and suddenly, all the wedding rules didn’t seem to matter.
“Do you really want me to come?”
He nodded and pulled me close for a dip. When he pulled me up, his breath gusted along my ear and made me shiver.
“Yes. I do want you to come.”
Fuck the rules. A nun wouldn’t have been able to resist him. I sure as hell couldn’t.
In the parking lot of the Sahara, which looked like any other bar from the outside except for the big sign in the window that said alcohol prohibited, Joe’s cell phone rang.
“Wilder.”
I giggled at the way he answered his phone. Joe smiled at me. I leaned forward to look through the front window at the building while he talked.
“What? No way. Really? Damn. You’re sure?”
That didn’t sound good. I looked over at him. He held up a finger, mouthing “one minute.”
I waited. Men talk so differently than women. Short, sharp sentences without the frills and furbelows we add to every conversation, no matter what it’s about. Joe listened, he spoke, once in a while he nodded. Finally, he closed his phone and looked at me.
“Bonnie found out about Brian’s plans so now he’s not coming.”
“Oh…too bad.” I hadn’t realized how excited I’d been by the thought of going to see the strippers until just now. “Well, he’s got to keep her happy, I guess.”
Joe made a flicking gesture with his hand. “He’s whipped.”
I felt bound to defend my friend, though I didn’t disagree. “They’re getting married.”
Joe’s smile is like a sliver of sunshine. “Yeah. Lucky bastard.”
“You think so?” I’m at the age where most of my friends have been steadily taking the leap into the marital abyss. “I’m not so sure I’m ready to get married.”
“Everyone says that,” Joe answers. “Until they meet the right person.”
My heart skips a little, but I remind myself he’s not talking about me. We just met. Even though weddings can make people all starry-eyed, it’s not necessarily a good indication that it will last.
“So, what do we do now?” I ask.
Joe looks toward the Sahara. The door opens and music and light spill out, along with a crowd of pretty rowdy guys who head for a truck a few spaces over. They look like they’re drinking something out of a paper bag. They all look pretty drunk, already.
“Why don’t they serve alcohol?” I point to the sign.
“Pennsylvania law.” I hadn’t forgotten Joe’s a lawyer. “Any place that serves alcohol can’t have full nudity.”
I blink. “You mean…the girls in there are totally naked?”
He smiles. “Yep.”
I blink again. “Wow. I thought they’d have a G-string on or something.”
“No. Not a stitch. Want to go in?”
Somehow, being part of a big group of carousing boys watching girls in pasties and thongs dance seemed way different than Joe and I going in to see totally bare-assed women shake their stuff.
“Yeah, sure.” I sound more confident than I feel.
Joe reaches for my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
I laugh at that, feeling silly. “All right, c’mon.”
My stomach’s jumping nervously when we go inside. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but it’s not this. The inside of the Sahara looks
something like a cross between a cheap hotel lobby and a frat house basement. Several small stages, complete with poles, scatter the area. Worn couches provide seating. There’s art on the wall, of the cheesy pin-up variety. I see girls dressed in typical stripper outfits circulating with money sticking out of their garters. Some of them stop to talk to the men sitting all around, and every so often, one of them will get up and go toward a back room with one.
Joe has to pay a cover charge for himself, but not for me. The man behind the counter doesn’t even seem surprised to see me. Maybe they get more girls in there than I’d thought.
At any rate, I’m a lot less nervous as Joe takes my hand and leads me toward a love seat near the front of the room. It’s right in front of the main stage, the one with three poles and a set of gymnasts’ rings.
“Hi, hon,” says the first girl to come up to us. Closer inspection reveals she’s not a girl. She’s got to be older than me. She’s thin but has stretch marks on her thighs, and I’m pretty sure she’s wearing a wig. Suddenly, I feel a lot better about myself.
“Hi,” Joe says. “How’re you?”
“Oh, can’t complain, hon, can’t complain. Either of you want a lap dance?”
She looks at me when she asks, and I freeze, unable to answer. Do I want a lap dance? And if I do, do I want one from a stripper who looks as though she’d be making a grocery list in her head while she does it?
“Maybe later,” Joe says easily. “We just got here.”
“Fair enough, hon.” She winks, and her smile shows several prominent gaps. “We got three girls starting in about two minutes, so you just enjoy, okay?”
She wanders to the next table where I hear her asking the same questions. Joe turns to me.
“I’m sorry, I should have asked you if you wanted one. Did you?”
“Uh…no…no thanks.”
He laughs and leans in to whisper in my ear. “Later, maybe.”
I think it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pay for a lap dance from a woman, but it would be rude to say so. The next moment, I jump at the blast of loud music that blares from the speakers. Joe takes my hand again, his thumb passing back and forth over the back of it and making me shiver.