“I’d need a machete to get through there,” I said.
“Please,” said Sharon.
“I’m going to get all cut up.”
“‘All in green went my love riding,’” she whispered in that special way, “‘on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.’”
“Cummings wrote the poem, and I’m in love and gone,” I said and made my slow way down the creek side. I didn’t want to save the cat; I wanted to preserve Sharon’s high opinion of me. If she hadn’t been there to push me down the slope, I never would have gone after that cat. As it was, I cursed the world as I tripped over ferns and pushed blackberry branches out of the way. I was cut and scraped and threatened by spiders and wasps, all for a dumb cat.
“It’s like Wild Kingdom down here,” I said.
“Do you see him?” she said, more worried about the cat. I could hear the love in her voice. I was jealous of that damn cat!
I stopped and listened. I heard the cry from somewhere close.
“He’s right around here,” I said.
“Find him,” she said, her voice choking with fierce tears.
I leaned over, pushed aside one last fern, and saw him, a black cat trapped in blackberry branches. He was starved, too skinny to be alive, I thought, but his eyes were bright with fear and pain.
“Man,” I said. “I think he’s been caught in here for a long time.”
“Save him, save him.”
I reached in, expecting the cat to bite or claw me, but he remained gratefully passive as I tore away the branches and freed him. I lifted and carried him back up the bank. He was dirty and smelly, and I wanted all of this to be over.
“Oh my God,” said Sharon as she took him from me. “Oh, he’s so sad, so sad.” She hugged him, and he accepted it without protest.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t keep him,” I said. “Let’s let him go here. He’s free now. He’ll be okay.”
“What if he gets stuck again?”
“Then it’ll be natural selection. Come on, he doesn’t have a tag or anything. He’s just a stray cat.”
“No, he’s tame, he’s got a home somewhere.” She stared the cat in the eyes as if he could tell us his phone number and address.
“Oh, wait, wait,” she said. “I remember, in the newspaper, last week or something, there was a lost cat ad. It said he was black with white heart-shaped fur on his belly.”
Sharon had a supernatural memory; she could meet a few dozen new people at a party and rattle off their names two days later. During an English department party our sophomore year, she recited by memory seventy-three Shakespeare sonnets in a row. It was the most voluminous display of erudition any of us had ever witnessed. Tenured English professors wept. But I was the one who enjoyed the honor and privilege of taking her home that night and making her grunt in repetitive monosyllables.
Beside the creek, Sharon gently turned the cat over, and we both saw the white heart. Without another word, Sharon ran back to her dorm room, and I followed her. She searched for the newspaper in her desk but couldn’t find it, and none of her floormates had a copy of the old paper, either, so she ran into the basement and climbed into the Dumpster. I held the cat while she burrowed into the fetid pile of garbage.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re never going to find it. Maybe you imagined the whole thing. Let’s take him to the shelter. They can take care of him.”
She ignored me and kept searching. I felt like throwing the cat into the wall.
“This is it,” she said and pulled a greasy newspaper out of the mess. She flipped to the classifieds, found the lost cat ad, and shouted out the phone number. She jumped out of the Dumpster, grabbed the cat, ran back to her room, and quickly dialed.
“Hello,” said Sharon over the telephone. “We have your cat. Yes, yes, yes. We found him by the creek. At St. Junior’s. We’ll bring him right over. What’s your address? Oh God, that’s really close.”
Sharon ran out of the dorm; I ran after her.
“Slow down,” I called after her, but she ignored me. Maybe Sharon wasn’t a good Apache or Catholic, but she was religious when she found the proper mission.
We sprinted through a residential neighborhood, which may or may not have been a good idea for two brown kids, no matter how high our grade-point averages. But it felt good to run fast, and I dreamed about being a superhero. Fifteen minutes later and out of breath, Sharon knocked on the front door of a small house. An old couple opened the door.
“Lester,” shouted the old man and took the cat from Sharon. The old woman hugged the man and the cat. All three cried to one another.
“How’d you find him?” asked the old man, weeping hard now, barely able to talk, but unashamed of his tears. “He’s been gone for a month.”
“I heard him crying,” I said (I lied) and stepped into the doorway. Sharon stood behind me and peered over my shoulder.
“Oh, thank you, bless you,” said the old woman.
“I pulled him out of some blackberry thorns,” I said. “And then I remembered your ad in the newspaper, and I found the paper in the garbage, and I called you, and here I am.”
The old man and woman hugged me, holding the cat between us, all of us celebrating the reunion, while Sharon stood silently by. I think I lied because I wanted to be briefly adored by strangers, to be remembered as a handsome and kind man, a better man, more complete, even saintly. But it was Orwell who wrote that “saints should be always judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
All during this time, Sharon never spoke. I can only guess at her emotions, but I imagine she was shocked and hurt by my disloyalty. Standing in the presence of such obvious commitment between two people and their damn cat, she must have lost faith in me and, more importantly, in herself.
“How can we ever repay you?” asked the old woman.
“Nothing,” I said. “We need nothing.”
“Here, here,” said the old man as he opened his wallet and offered me a twenty.
“No, no,” I said. “I don’t need that. I just wanted to be good, you know?”
He forced the money into my hand; I accepted it.
“You’re a good man,” said the old woman.
I shook my head, took Sharon’s hand, and walked away, leaving those grateful strangers to their beloved pet.
“Why did you do that?” Sharon asked as we walked.
“I needed to,” I said. That was the best answer I could give her. It wasn’t enough.
“You lied to me, you lied to them, and you took their money,” she said. “How could you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sharon broke away from me and ran.
I didn’t see her that night as I got ready for graduation, and I didn’t see her the next morning.
“Where’s Sharon?” asked my mother as she adjusted my cap and gown.
“She’s with her parents,” I said, which was a true statement, I suppose, but hardly close to the truth.
I went through the ceremony alone; Sharon went through the ceremony alone; we sat ten chairs apart.
The day after graduation, Sharon was still missing. I didn’t know where she was. When my mother asked me about her absence, I said she was on a spiritual retreat.
“One month of silence,” I said, lying to my mother, to another woman who loved me. “After a big event, like a graduation or birth, the Apaches leave for a month. It’s an Apache thing.”
“I wish I could do that,” she said. “I think everybody should do that. Make it a law. Once a year, everybody has to be silent for a month. We’d all rotate, you know? You have to be quiet during your birth month.”
“It’s a good idea, Mom, I’m sure it would go over well.”
“Sarcasm is a sin, honey.”
After another day of unceremonial silence, I assumed Sharon had left me forever, and I finally confessed my fears to my mother
.
“Mom,” I said. “I love Sharon and I destroyed her.”
Was I overreacting to Sharon’s overreaction? I’d told such a small lie, had taken credit and reward for such a small act of heroism. But then I wondered if Sharon had always had her doubts about my character, and perhaps had always considered me an undependable braggart. What if she’d been gathering evidence against me all along, and I’d finally committed the last unpardonable crime?
“You have to go find her,” my mother said.
“I can’t,” I said, and it was true and cowardly.
My mother turned away from me and cried while she fixed dinner. Later that night, while she washed dishes and I dried, my mother told me how much she still missed my father.
“He’s been gone twenty-two years,” she said. “But I can still feel him right here in the room with us. I can still smell him, his hair, his skin.”
My mother didn’t call my father by name because she wanted the dead to stay dead; I wanted to learn magic and open a twenty- four-hour supermarket that sold resurrection and redemption.
The next morning, Sharon came to see me. I was so grateful for her presence that I leaned against the wall to keep from falling down. My mother hugged Sharon until they both cried. Then Sharon asked my mother to give us some privacy. After my mother left, Sharon took my face in her hands.
“You’re a liar,” Sharon said. “I’m going to marry a liar.”
I didn’t want to ask her why she came back. We were so fragile, I worried that one wrong word could completely break us.
For the next twenty-nine years, we lived as wife and husband, as the mother and father of four kids (Sarah, Rachael, Francis, and Joshua) who suddenly grew into adults and became wives and husbands and mothers and fathers. During our long marriage, Sharon and I buried her mother and father and my mother, all of our grandparents, and many of our aunts, uncles, and cousins. I covered high school sports and reviewed movies for the local alternative weekly; an odd pair of beats, I suppose, but I enjoyed the appearance of being odd while living a sedate life. Sharon ran her own coffee shop and wrote lyric odes she never published. We paid our taxes, owned a modest home, and made love an average of three times a week. We didn’t have nearly as much money as our parents, and that could be viewed as our failure, but we felt successful. We weren’t triumphant, by any means, but we lived a good and simple life, and I often wondered if I deserved it.
All during those years, at every house party, group dinner, family gathering, and company picnic, Sharon told the story of the lost cat.
“My husband, the liar,” she always called me. At first, she told the story to hurt me, then she told it out of habit, and then she told it because she’d turned it into a wildly funny and exaggerated adventure: And then he fell in the creek! She loved to make people laugh, and so they laughed at my small sins. I wanted the laughter to absolve me, but I’m not sure if that was its purpose. I never asked to be forgiven, and Sharon never offered her forgiveness. We never talked about the lost cat in private; it was our most public secret.
But there were other secrets, of course. Sharon kept most of hers, and I kept most of mine. Those kept secrets were small and ordinary, having to do with broken diets and hidden pornography, and they were of little consequence, but one evening, a decade into our marriage, Sharon confessed to an extramarital affair.
“I don’t love him,” she said. “It’s over now. I only slept with him three times. To be fair, you can ask me three questions about it, and I’ll answer them as honestly as possible, and then I don’t ever want to talk about it again.”
I was hurt by the frankness of her words, by her deal-making, but she cried, and her voice trembled as she spoke, and she’d never been one to feign emotion or cry for dramatic purposes, so I was lost in her contradictions.
“How could you do that to me?” I asked.
“Is that a real question?” she asked. “Or is it rhetorical?”
I panicked. I didn’t want to waste my three questions. I wanted to know details, the facts and figures, and not emotional states. But which particular details did I want to know? And which questions would elicit the most information? I needed to be a brutally efficient interrogator. I couldn’t believe I was participating in this horrible transaction.
“Listen,” I said, “this is ridiculous. Let’s talk this out like normal people.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “Everything is so normal. You didn’t used to be normal. I didn’t marry normal.”
She was a thirty-two-year-old woman with four young kids, and she owned and managed a small business. So she was one of those notorious superwomen. I knew she was always exhausted, but what could I do to help her? I could never tell her she worked too hard, and I certainly couldn’t tell her she should spend more time with the kids. I couldn’t ask her to choose between her work life and her home life. As a man, I would never be asked to make a similar choice. I spent most Friday and Saturday nights watching other people’s children play football, basketball, and volleyball. What kind of father was I? I could best be described as cordially absent on weekends and lovingly distracted on weekdays. What kind of husband was I? Apparently, I was the kind of husband whose wife needed to sleep with at least one other man and an untold number of others who might be waiting in line. There are millions of those clueless husbands, aren’t there? Wasn’t I yet another cuckolded husband, slightly distinguished by knowing how to self-define with an Old English word? I was eight hundred years old. I was historic, predictable, and planned. I was normal.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name is Michael Joyce,” she said. “He’s a regular at the shop. I’ve asked him to never come back. He agreed. He’s a good man.”
I was surprised to discover I wanted to hit my wife. I wanted to punch her in the stomach and make her fall to the floor. I wanted to see her gasping with physical pain. I would never hurt her that way—I hadn’t struck another human being since the third grade—but the violent impulse was there, and I was frightened and exhilarated by it. My wife had no idea how dangerous I could be. I felt better knowing I could hurt her far more than she’d hurt me. And then I was revolted. How could I love a person and want to hurt her so much? How could I look at my wife, the mother of my children, and feel only the need for revenge? I paced around the room, ran my fingers roughly through my hair, because I needed to move. I needed to find another space in which to exist. I studied the details of the living room: the antique lamps purchased for full price and the end tables rescued from garage sales and refurbished; the brown leather couch and black leather recliner; the Monet and Kahlo prints on the walls; the bookshelves stuffed with novels and sports histories; and the coffee tables adorned with art books. All of it was tasteful and beautiful and appropriate and hard-earned and useless.
Sharon wore a red blouse and blue jeans. Her feet were bare and needed a pedicure. Once a month, her feet were scrubbed clean and polished by a Vietnamese woman whose name and exact place of business I would never know. Sharon wore a fake pearl necklace her mother had given her for some birthday, and real pearl earrings I’d given her on our fifth anniversary. The fake pearls were prettier than the real ones. I don’t know why I noticed her physical details, but it seemed important to take note of all I could. I felt the insistent need to be exact. Since it was laundry day, I knew she’d be wearing her oldest brassiere, and would never initiate lovemaking while wearing it, but would gladly receive my advances after first dashing into the bathroom to quickly remove the tattered bra. How many times had she emerged topless from the bathroom and run laughing toward me? Who keeps accurate count of such wonderful moments? Wouldn’t a better husband know that number by heart?
“I’m a bad husband,” I said. Why was I apologizing?
She turned away and sat on the couch as far away from me as possible. I kept pacing around the room.
“He’s white,” she said, volunteering the information, and I was strangely relieved.
My emotions were changing and shifting randomly. If I’d been an actor in a musical, I would have broken into song for no apparent reason. I would have tap-danced to the primal 4/4 beat of betrayal. I would have leaped over the couch where she was sitting and rewon her heart with my grace and strength. What a dream life I have, and how instantly I can immerse myself in it! Can you believe I was happy to hear she’d slept with only a white man? I would have been tortured to hear she’d slept with another Indian man. Considering her beauty, ambition, and intelligence, I could conceive of an amazing white man or black man who might love her and be loved in return, but I doubted another Indian man of my particular talents existed out there in the world. Call it a potent mix of arrogance and self-hatred, but I was certain I was the one Indian man who was good enough for my Indian wife.
I believed I was being rational, but who can be rational in such a painful situation? Wouldn’t my wife and I hold entirely different standards for what made a man good or great? What if she’d slept with a plumber or a construction worker? What if she’d slept with a supermarket graveyard-shift worker or a high school dropout? I couldn’t stand the thought of my wife sleeping with a blue-collar man who’d read fewer books than I had. I wanted to believe my wife slept with another man because she needed to be loved in a new way, a more educated and intellectual way, and not because she wanted to hurt me. I didn’t understand what I was feeling, and I didn’t know what to do, and I couldn’t ask her to help me, because that might qualify as my second question and would leave me with only one.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she said.
“What way?” I asked.
“Like this is inconceivable. Like I’m the Loch Ness Monster.”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking, feeling, or seeing.”
“That’s the problem. You’ve been blind for years.”
I sat on the couch beside her. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to comfort me. And I don’t get to comfort you. You have two questions. Ask them.”
I was struck with the terrible fear that she’d had sex with Michael Joyce in our house, in our bed.
Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories Page 23