Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  But she had trained him well. He waited.

  Finally, with a sigh, she said, “I think we have to talk.”

  “We?” Ben asked. “Or you?”

  “You,” she shot back, pouring into that single word every bit of the negative feeling she had. Ben had hurt her beyond belief. Nothing she had done to him merited that. “I need you to tell me what’s happening here. We go through the bare motions of life as usual, but it’s a farce. Our family is falling apart. We walk around each other. We avoid looking each other in the eye. There’s zero communication.”

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  “Ben?”

  He shrugged. “What can I add? You just said it all.”

  She took a shaky breath. Old habits died hard; he wasn’t helping in the least.

  Quietly, wearily, humbly, she said, “Please, Ben. Tell me what you’re thinking. What you’re honestly thinking. I’m not telling you anything, I’m asking. I don’t know what’s going on in your mind. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “That’s a change,” he said.

  She looked at her hands. “Okay. I deserved that.” She looked away. “But it’s been a way of life, knowing what to do. I’ve always taken pride in it, and no one—including you—ever discouraged me from being that way. But I never thought I was putting you down. You may have felt that, but I didn’t intend it. I was just being me.”

  “Little Miss Perfect.”

  She studied her hands. The force of his resentment continued to stun her with sharp, grazing blows. Gathering the tatters of her self-esteem, she said, “Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Talk to me, Ben. Tell me where we go next. Tell me what you want to happen. You say that I never hear you. I’m trying to do that now, but I can’t hear unless you speak.”

  He stuck his hands in the waist of his cords and stood thinking for a while before finally saying, “Okay. We have to do something about Doug. He’s annoyed with both of us right now. I doubt he says any more to me than he does to you. I got a call from his Spanish teacher this morning asking if there was a problem at home.”

  “How did she know?” Angie asked in sudden horror. She suddenly imagined the whole world knew, and she was appalled.

  “He failed a test yesterday. He’s never done that before.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Angie said, feeling an awful defeat. It wasn’t the grade. No one made it through school without an F or two. He could make up the test or average it in with his others. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he wouldn’t have failed a test if he wasn’t deeply upset.

  “So,” Ben said, “we have to talk with him.”

  Several weeks before, Angie would have done that on her own. But Ben had accused her of being controlling and manipulative. So she asked, “What should we say?”

  He shifted one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

  She studied her fingers. If he didn’t know, and if she wasn’t supposed to tell him, where did that leave them? Holding her tongue, she looked up and waited.

  After what seemed an eternity, he said, “There are two issues. One has to do with what’s going on between us. The other has to do with him and the space he needs.”

  “They’re connected,” she said, and regretted it the instant she heard his drawl.

  “Obviously, but one is more easily solved than the other.” The drawl gave way to something more serious. “I think we should let him board at school.”

  She shook her head fast. Everything inside her rebelled at the idea, but she didn’t say a word until Ben asked, “Why not?”

  She calmed herself. “Because he’s too young.”

  “He’s in eighth grade. Mount Court kids start boarding in seventh.”

  “But if he’s failing Spanish, he may need more supervision.” She had a cursory knowledge of the language and tested him regularly on vocabulary.

  “He isn’t failing Spanish,” Ben corrected. “He failed one test. And he might get better supervision at school, what with mandatory study halls every night.”

  “He’ll be overwhelmed, being with kids constantly.”

  “Maybe. He’ll probably say that that’s better than being here every night. You smother, and I work. And he’s a lonely only. It would be different if he had a sibling.”

  “We agreed that one would keep us busy enough.”

  “You agreed. Another Angie dictum.”

  “Well, damn it, you didn’t argue, so you’re every bit as much at fault!” She thought back to when Dougie was little. She couldn’t even remember their discussing having another child. They had planned everything just so to allow for Angie’s return to work.

  They had planned? Or she had planned? She had the awful thought that it was the latter.

  “Well,” she said with a discouraged sigh, “it’s a little late to be talking about this now. Just like it’s a little late to be talking about Dougie boarding. The semester’s already begun. I doubt they’d take him.”

  Ben guffawed. “Mount Court? For the price of room and board, they’d take a baboon.”

  Angie felt as though she were in a game of tug-of-war, with Dougie in the middle and Ben on the other side. “Do you have no qualms at all?” she asked, bewildered.

  “Of course I have qualms. I love the kid, too. I like having him around. But he wants this, Angie.”

  “He also wants a car for his sixteenth birthday, but that doesn’t mean we have to give him one.”

  “Not the same at all,” Ben said. “A car is a luxury. Granted, boarding is, too, but at least it’s an experience with some merit to it.”

  “You’re right. Boarders learn great things.”

  “You don’t think he’ll learn those things anyway? You don’t think he knows that some cigarettes don’t have tobacco in them? You don’t think he knows what the term druggie means? Come on, Angie, get real. He’s a bright kid. He’s a normal kid. He’ll be discussing girls’ breasts with his friends whether he boards or not, and if he wants a condom, he’ll get one without asking you to buy it.”

  “He’s only fourteen!” she protested.

  “It doesn’t mean he’s going to use one, but guys talk about it for years before they do it.” He put a hand on the back of his head and held on tight. Angie hadn’t seen that gesture since the day they had moved to Vermont, when the moving company had dropped his computer. “Jesus, Angie, think about it, will you? You raised the boy. For fourteen years you’ve been teaching him to be honest and considerate and hardworking. Those values are part of him now. It’s not like all of a sudden he’s going to forget them—unless you put him in a little cage and make him break his way out by whatever means he can find. Give him air, Angie. Trust him a little.”

  “Like I trusted you?” she blurted out.

  The words hung in the air. For the very first time, she saw guilt on his face.

  “I did, you know,” she said more quietly. “I assumed you believed in fidelity. It never occurred to me that you would have an affair. Never occurred to me.”

  His hand was on the back of his neck now. He let out a breath. “It wasn’t intentional. It just happened.”

  “For eight years?” she cried. “Ben, you get real. If it had happened just once, I might have been able to buy the fact that it wasn’t intentional. But to continue it for that long? You’re a bright guy. You know what’s happening in the world. You can sit over dinner and tell me about the latest scandal that’s breaking in the government. Sometimes it has to do with money, sometimes perks, sometimes sex. I can’t count the number of times you’ve talked about some man who was cheating on his wife. Didn’t you see that you were doing it yourself?”

  He looked away. “Of course I did.”

  “Do you know how much it hurts?”

  He looked back at her, and though she hadn’t planned it, tears came to her eyes. She brushed them away, lest he accuse her of being manipulative, but they came back. Ignoring them, she asked
, “How did you get together with her?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Because it’s special? Because it’s yours and not mine? Because you’re afraid I’ll try to control it somehow?”

  “Because, damn it, I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew you didn’t expect it. I knew it would hurt you. I may have blurted it out in anger, but that isn’t how the thing itself has been all this time. I didn’t do it out of defiance. I did it because I had a real need that wasn’t being met.”

  A need Angie hadn’t filled. She felt grossly inadequate for the hundredth time in a week, such that it wasn’t quite as shocking as it had been at first. She couldn’t do everything, be everything. She was coming to accept that.

  Ben leaned against the wall with his arms folded and his ankles crossed, studying his deck shoes. In a weary voice he said, “I always go to the library to read the periodicals. She was there. We became friends.”

  “When did it become more?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Angie waited.

  Finally he said, “We probably knew each other a year before it happened.”

  “Where do you go? Her house?”

  “Angie, this isn’t—”

  “It is,” she said, but quietly, sadly. “This is a small town. I know most of the people in it. I see many of them professionally. It matters to me how many of them know.”

  “Your image.”

  “It’s more than that. My self-confidence has been shot to threads around here. You tell me I’ve been wrong. Dougie tells me I’ve been wrong. I want to know if I can leave here and pretend that I can still do something right.”

  “You do plenty right. Let’s not get overdramatic.”

  She shot up from her chair. “Overdramatic? I’m the last person to get overdramatic. I’ve been walking around for days like nothing’s wrong.” She sank back down and, quietly again, added, “I’m feeling my way through this. It’s new to me. I’m doing my best, but if I ask something that you think is inappropriate, bear with me. You’re not seeing things from my perspective.” She sighed. “All I want to know is if everyone else in town knew about this before I did.”

  “No one knows. We’ve been careful.”

  “Are you still? Now that I know?” It was an oblique way of asking that other, more frightening question.

  “I haven’t been with her since you found out. Not that way, at least.”

  “But you’ve talked.”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  “I always thought I was that.”

  “You used to be. Then you got so that you didn’t have time for me. I was like a piece of furniture. Once I was put in place, all I needed was a little dusting once in a while, a little fluffing up, a shifting one way or another to suit my surroundings. The original buy was the only critical part. After that”—he made a disparaging sound—“habit set in.”

  “Is this a midlife crisis?” she asked, half hoping it was. Midlife crises passed.

  He shook his head. “It’s more fundamental than that.”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Are we breaking up?”

  He was a long time in answering, a time of staring at the floor and frowning. Finally, in a quiet voice and with a wary look, he said, “I don’t know. Is that what you want?”

  At least it hadn’t been an outright “no.” She had been worried about that. Belatedly she started to tremble. “I don’t want it, no. I like our marriage—”

  “Like you like our goose-down comforter?”

  There it was, the bitterness again. Given its depth, it amazed her that he had been able to hide it for so long. Unless he hadn’t hidden it at all, and she had just been oblivious, which was his contention. She couldn’t believe she had failed to see or hear something so strong. “You’re very angry.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m angry that you weren’t more attentive. I’m angry that your work is so important to you. I’m angry that you put Dougie before me. I’m angry that I was put in the position of needing something so badly that I had to betray you to get it.”

  “I am not the bad guy,” she insisted softly. “I didn’t intend to do any of that. If you had spoken up sooner—really spoken up, like you are now, instead of just dropping vague suggestions—we might have avoided all this. Eight years is a long time for you to be feeling bad about something without saying a word.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “It’s done. Water over the dam.”

  “So what do we do now?” They were back where they started.

  He realized it, too. She could see it in the slump of his shoulders. She remembered when she used to massage those shoulders, when as a couple they were younger, more dependent on each other, and yes, best of friends. At the earliest months of their marriage, she had loved touching him. Then time had become scarce, and she had lost the knack.

  She wondered if she could get it back, wondered if she wanted to. But before she could give the problem the thought it deserved, she was diverted.

  “We start,” Ben was saying in delayed response to the question she had asked, “by letting Dougie board. It can be for a trial semester, with the understanding that if at any point it doesn’t work out, he’ll come back home.”

  Angie was fighting a losing battle. She was on the short end, two against one. “I’m very uncomfortable with this.”

  “Then let him be a five-day boarder. He can come home on weekends.”

  That didn’t sound quite so bad—still bad, just less so. “Will he agree to it?”

  “If that’s the only option we give him.”

  But there were drawbacks to that, too. She could think of them all and would have blurted them out, if she didn’t have a sudden attack of unsureness. Once, she had known almost everything there was to know, and where knowledge left off, intuition picked up. Lately—first with Mara, now with Ben and even Dougie—she was way off the mark.

  “What?” Ben prodded impatiently.

  She shook her head.

  “I’d rather you say what’s on your mind now,” he said, “than hit me with an ‘I told you so’ later.”

  She was half-tempted to do just that. He wanted to let Dougie board; she could go along with it and then let him take the blame if things went wrong.

  The only problem was that this was Dougie’s life they were talking about. She didn’t want things to go wrong for him, not ever, which was one of the very reasons she was hesitant to let him board at Mount Court. Okay, so she could hear Ben’s arguments in favor of it; she could even give them some credence. Still, there was this other.

  “It has to do with timing,” she began hesitantly. “If we send him off to live at school now, he’s apt to think it’s because we want him out of the house so that we can either fight or get a divorce. He’s apt to worry more there than he will here.”

  Ben thought about that in silence. In the past Angie might have filled that silence with more of her thoughts. Now she remained still.

  Finally Ben said, “He’ll do fine, if we handle it right.”

  Angie waited for him to go on. She was anxious to hear what he was going to say, because it went to the heart of the matter.

  Incredibly, he looked to her for help, but she kept her mouth shut.

  Finally he said, “We can tell him that we’re letting him do this because he wants it so badly.”

  Which didn’t address the issue at all. Angie remained silent, but her expression must have said something—either that or Ben’s conscience had—because, snappishly, he said, “We can tell him that we’ll both be here waiting for him to come home each weekend.”

  “Will we?”

  “I will,” Ben said. “I wouldn’t let him down by not being here.”

  Which said nothing about what he wanted to do with, for, or about their marriage.

  “What about you?” he asked when she didn’t respond.
/>   “This is my home. I have nowhere to go. But we’re avoiding the issue, I think.”

  He drew himself up and glanced at his watch. “I’ll go pick him up. It’s time. I won’t mention this until dinner. We can discuss it with him then.”

  Swinging back out the door, he left her alone and more troubled than ever.

  Peter was similarly alone and troubled when he left the Tavern. He hadn’t stayed long, just for a beer. With no one to talk to, all he could think about were the pictures drying in his darkroom.

  He had spent hours on them the night before. He had found just the right negative this time—or so he had thought—and had made every sort of print imaginable. Then he had gone through a day of seeing patients, of talking to parents and suggesting solutions to ailments, all the while feeling extra good about himself because he had been so sure that he had it. Back home, in the light of day, he had seen that none was right. None captured the feeling he wanted. None did her justice.

  The beer hadn’t eased his disappointment at all. It had only made him aware that he was alone while everyone else was paired up, and that he would have been with Lacey if Lacey hadn’t gone holier-than-thou on him.

  Taking his camera with him, he walked to the end of the block and turned onto Main Street. The sun was lowering in the sky, creating shadows to give depth to the stores there. He took a head-on shot of the bookstore, extended his zoom lens for a shot of the church at the end of the street, retracted the zoom, and took a shot of the whole of the three blocks that made up the center of town. The amber stone looked more golden in the sunset, the signs more authentically antique, the window displays more quaint.

  He parked himself against a trash receptacle, opposite the block that held the drugstore, the card store, the package store, and Reels, and extended the zoom for shots of the latter. Mount Court kids were in town; he could see them through the store window. They were gathered in groups, some actually searching through the videos for one to rent, some simply talking to each other, some sitting on stools at the back of the store where the soda fountain stood.

  He caught sight of Julie Engel. Her head was bent over a videocassette. She read it, replaced it, and picked up another. He crossed the street, stopping where the cars were parked diagonally, and snapped several shots of her through the glass. If striking when she had her hair pulled back and her skin bare, she was even more striking now. Her long hair was shiny and gently waved; her makeup was light but put focus on her eyes; her clothing was demure in ways that suggested the opposite.