by Tina Welling
This was the man I had married. The man onto whom I projected my expectations and with whom I was to share values.
I didn’t know whom to feel sorrier for: me or him.
But it occurred to me as I again recalled the scene in the photographic gallery that Jess had learned about manipulating emotions—his own—as that little boy at the funeral. And he had also learned to downplay or dismiss the emotional responses of those around him. I might remember that and not feel as if I had to bend my own personal values to match his perspective.
Each time I stumbled across a marriage rule it took me by surprise, despite the fact that it had usually made repeated appearances before I recognized it.
MARRIAGE RULE #5: Honor Your Values.
Thirty-two
Jess
I made the mistake of telling AnnieLaurie that I had met once with Lola and scheduled a second session. Annie phoned last night to see how my appointment went.
“Did you meet with Lola again?”
“Yeah, sure. I . . . I met with her. Valentine’s Day.” No need to mention I’d stood Lola up and she’d found me on the ski slope.
“Oh, we talked that morning, but you didn’t mention it. So I was picturing you skiing the King that day.”
“Well . . . I did both.”
“You sound hesitant. I just realized, this is your business, not mine. I shouldn’t be asking about it.”
“No, it’s okay. She said something pretty important. She used this term to describe my role in my mother’s death: causal link. She just set me free with that.”
“My gosh, that’s so wonderful.”
“Other than that, it wasn’t a great session in some ways. I probably won’t be seeing her again.”
“No?”
“Remember when she called me a ‘cuddly predator’?”
“I do.”
“You say that rather cheerfully.”
“Well . . . go on. What happened?”
“This time she called me a vampire.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What the hell do you mean ‘uh-huh’? What kind of therapist calls her patient names?”
“What else did she say?”
“That I was a great date, but she’d hate to be married to me. As if I’d spend another minute of my life with her, anyway.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because she doesn’t like me.”
“No, I mean, she’d hate to be married to you because . . . ?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“You always say that. You ‘don’t know’ or ‘don’t remember.’ ”
“Now you sound like Lola. What does it matter?. It wasn’t a real appointment. She never even sent a bill.”
“What’s that about?”
“Annie, for God’s sake, do you have to drill me? I thought you phoned to have a nice conversation. You haven’t even asked how I am.”
“That’s what we’re talking about: how you are.”
“Well, forget it. As usual, talking to you just pisses a guy off. Goodbye.”
“Bye, Jess.”
This morning in the store, Hadley looked worn down. Made me think of Lola saying I used everybody up. Hope she didn’t mean Hadley, too. Couldn’t let that happen. If Hadley wasn’t here, I’d have to work in the store every damn minute of every damn day. Forget my powder runs. I checked my watch; the lifts would open in half an hour and I planned to lay first tracks on that snowfall we got last night.
I hollered, “Hadley, could you pop in here when you get a chance?” A minute later she came into the office.
“What do you need, Jess?”
“Just checking on you. You look done in lately.” I got up and closed the office door.
“Things aren’t going so well at home. Nothing new, I guess, but I can’t put off making some decisions.”
“And you’re losing sleep over it.” I sat at my desk again.
“Losing sleep, losing weight.” Here she pulled her waistband out to show a three-inch gap. “Losing sanity.” She leaned against the edge of Annie’s desk—now Hadley’s—and folded her arms. “Don’t know where to go with this problem, but it seems to be escalating.”
I sat in my favorite position, swiveled sideways in my desk chair, feet resting on the overturned wastebasket. Shameful to say, but this might have been the first time in weeks that I really looked at this woman. I fiddled with a pen while I checked her out. She looked tired all right. There was a dark smudge high on her cheek-bone beneath her left eye. Probably a shadow cast by the overhead lights, but it reminded me of a couple times earlier in the season when I thought she looked roughed up—a lip that sat lopsided, despite lipstick drawn outside the line, a row of small bruises around her wrist and lower arm. I hadn’t really thought about what was going on with her.
I started to feel bad about that, but somebody was guiltier than me. I nodded to her face.
“Is that a bruise?”
“Not the first.”
“That piece of shit.” I dropped my feet, sat upright and slammed the pen on the desktop. “I’m calling the cops.”
“It’s two days old, Jess.”
“Leave the bastard.”
“Yeah?” Hadley raised her voice at me; she had never raised her voice at me in our long history together. “How am I going to do that, Jess?”
“What’s holding you up?”
“A roof over my head.” She put her forehead in her hand a moment, then looked up and spoke more quietly. “Leaving Paul means leaving the valley . . . my friends, my work.” She gestured out the window, to me, to the office. “He’s an attorney; he knows how to play it; he’s warned me about that throughout our marriage. And besides, I couldn’t find a lawyer to take my case in the state of Wyoming who didn’t owe Paul a favor or hope to get one owed in the future. That’s how it works, at least according to Paul.”
Hadley moved around to the other side of her desk, tidied paper piles, keeping her head down. “Without my savings or the investment I made in our house, I couldn’t begin to make it here. You know that. I’m looking into moving away, but . . . this is my home.”
Hadley choked on that last word and suddenly “home” took on all the meanings I had always taken for granted and all the meanings I had longed for since Annie left. Home. “Home” meant more than shelter; it meant the place where we loved and were loved.
Teton County, the most expensive county in the United States, was not a place just anybody could afford to live. Half the service industry that supported the valley’s resort businesses had to drive in from another state—Idaho. The other half from another country—Mexico. There were a lot of houses in our valley—the wealthy loved to buy land and build houses in the world’s most beautiful places and spend a few weeks in each of them. But there were far fewer homes—places where people kept their hearts. Hadley’s heart had been kept in this valley since the day she graduated from college, some thirty years ago.
“You can’t leave the valley.” I thought for a minute. “We’ll get you a lawyer from out of state, someone who owes Paul nothing—past or future. We’ll get one from . . . Florida.”
Suddenly I recalled Annie telling me about meeting Daniel’s fishing client, a lawyer who chose his cases based on a longtime grudge against wealthy, controlling men who abused their wives. Annie had reported that Daisy and Marcus knew this fellow by reputation; everyone in Florida did. He sounded like the Gerry Spence of East Coast Florida, though he didn’t dress in leather fringe and cowboy boots like Gerry; instead he wore brightly flowered Hawaiian shirts and huaraches and maintained a deep tan. He’d told Annie that in the beginning he was fueled by revenge for a past experience of his mother’s, but now he worked out of sympathy for women who had few resources, emotionally or financially. Maybe he’d have sympathy for Hadley.
I got up from the desk. I put my arms around Hadley.
“You can’t stay with a bastard for financial reasons. And I can’t do with
out you. When Annie comes back, she isn’t going to work in here much—I can lay money on that.”
I hadn’t actually thought that out before I said it, but I knew it was true. The days of Annie and me running the store on our own were over; the store was getting too big and Annie was losing interest. I patted Hadley, then picked up the phone and called Annie. She was out walking her dog, Bejewel or Bejesus or whatever the hell she named it. I put her on speaker phone.
The three of us talked for an hour. We sorted out problems, then assigned jobs. Annie’s job was to track down the lawyer. Mine was to move Hadley out of her house and into a safe place immediately. Hadley’s job was the hardest of all; she had to call the authorities.
The safe place turned out to be our house; I would sleep at the store. And Hadley learned from the authorities that two-day-old bruises or two-hour-old bruises all added up the same. Paul no longer held all the cards.
Hadley pressed charges against her husband of twenty years.
Paul learned from the police that Hadley had left him and was filing for divorce. He digested that news in the clinker while waiting for his lawyer to process him out. I was the only one on our team who took pleasure in that image. It saddened Annie and worried Hadley. I never liked the guy once he told me his “humorous” story about setting the house thermometer fifteen degrees higher than its reading, just to knock his wife off-kilter. I should have slugged that jerk right then.
The next day, when Hadley came into the store, I apologized to her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see the bruises before.”
“You weren’t looking. You haven’t been in the store much.”
“I don’t deserve an excuse.”
“It wasn’t an excuse, Jess. It was an accusation. You’ve been playing hooky like a tenth grader.”
That took me back. I had slept on the office sofa inside a sleeping bag last night just for her. Showered in a cold, concrete stall in our employee restroom that morning. And it looked like I’d be doing both again for who knew how long.
“I’m not covering up for Paul any longer, and as long as I’m at it, I’m not covering up for you any longer, either.” She looked severe. “I don’t know how Annie manages, but I am about crazy dealing with you.”
Hadley walked around her desk, picked up a stack of papers and dropped them back on her desktop. “Your crap.” She kicked the waste-paper can, my footstool, out of her path. “Everywhere I turn: your crap.” With her toe she nudged my ski boots, my snow boots, two other pairs of boots. “Your crap.” She pointed to the heap of my coats on a chair. “You spread yourself and your crap all over everybody else’s space. You seem to deliberately place your crap in another person’s way, just so they have to bump up against it.” She walked over to the windowsill, pointed to a pile of catalogs and books. “Your crap.”
If she said those two words once more I was going to start yelling myself. But suddenly she deflated and dropped into her desk chair, the only place vacant for her to sit. Yesterday’s clothes were flung over the back of my chair. Today I was wearing some of the store’s inventory: fleece pants and a sweatshirt. I looked like I was going to yoga practice instead of work.
Hadley said, “This is a small town. This story is going to ruin Paul. His practice will flounder. I spent half the night struggling with that. The other half I spent struggling with my problems working with you.”
“Hey, I hardly compare to some guy who beats you up.”
“There are different ways to beat up someone, Jess. You’ve taken advantage of me. I’m here today because I care about you and because I believe Annie will return and I’ll enjoy my work once again. If I didn’t believe that, I’d have to—”
“Hold it. Don’t even say it. Okay, I’ve been distracted. Annie is coming back. This has been tough for all of us. But . . . but—”
“You were ‘distracted’—if that’s the word—before Annie left. Distracted by new gear to test and customers and reps to entertain. You were distracted by fresh snow, sunshine, ski slopes, backcountry trails. . . .” Hadley got up, moving restlessly around the desks again. “I’m sorry, Jess. I’m sorry.” She folded her arms and stood looking out the window, her back to me.
“A person starts to tell the truth and it’s like a dam breaks; all the boundaries erected for love and money . . . crumble.” She turned toward me. “I don’t blame you if you fire me now. You’ve given me your home and helped me with my trouble. I love you and Annie; I’d like to continue here at TFS. But I cannot nor could I ever count on you . . . if the powder was especially good.”
I guess she was thinking about yesterday when I left her and Annie to finish talking on the phone and I went out to ski.
“You have a good heart, but you do take care of yourself and your pleasures first.” Hadley looked exhausted from her outburst.
“Oh, my.” Hadley slumped into an extra desk chair, sitting on top of a couple jackets of mine. “Forgive me.”
What the hell was this? Paul was the bastard we were talking about. Now suddenly it was me, too? What next? Every male on the planet? I paced around the textured concrete floor of the office in a big circle like some frustrated tiger at the zoo. Once around, twice around. Hadley just slumped there, drained of emotion, expression and—I should have been thankful—further accusations. At least for the moment. Though my experience with women and their accusations suggested that if I gave them a chance, they’d come up with more.
The solution: don’t give them a chance.
With Annie, I walked away, moved right out of reach. When she started following me, I stopped listening to her. With Lola, I stopped showing up for appointments. That hadn’t worked last time, but I thought she’d keep her distance now. With Hadley . . . I wasn’t sure what to do. The thing with Hadley was: she didn’t need me as a mate, like Annie did. Or as a client, like Lola did. I was Hadley’s employer, and we both knew with her excellent reputation she could replace me anytime. But I couldn’t replace her. Hell, I’d had other business owners approach her right in front of me.
I looked at my watch. The lifts had opened twenty minutes ago. I’d missed it again. Just like yesterday. By now all the fresh snow was skier tracked.
If my life was going to go well—with or without Annie—I needed Hadley working at the store.
“Got a deal for you, girl.”
I didn’t say one damn thing to Annie first. She left me in charge, so I took charge.
I offered Hadley part ownership of TFS.
Thirty-three
Annie
Lately getting sense out of my dad was like getting chewing gum out of a carpet. After a particularly irrational conversation on the phone with him, I decided to drive down and see him, instead of getting Daisy involved. She had enough going on with the twins and the store.
I set up Kia with extra seed and water in her cage, packed up the things Bijou and I would need for an overnight stay and hit the road. No Interstate 95 for me today, not in that big a hurry; I drove over to A1A so that I could catch glimpses of the ocean and dunes along the way.
It wasn’t the phone call with Dad that captured my thoughts while driving though, but rather the last phone call with Jess—also confusing, but what was new there? Since I’d been away from home, I’d begun to realize that Jess typically spoke in ways that couldn’t easily be tracked, as if he didn’t want to be held responsible for anything he said. Reading between the lines of the conversation the other night offered far more information than Jess had meant for me to have. Just because he diminished Lola’s words didn’t mean I did. I found a wealth of support from Lola in the bare-bone pieces Jess set out for me, then quickly snatched away. And the fact that he was now soured on her just emphasized what she’d said. Wasn’t it just like Jess to belittle her worth once she found the least fault with him? He was one of the most even-tempered people I knew, yet he could turn on a dime and expose a severely sharp, nasty edge. That was especially true when his defenses were challenged.
Clearly, Lola had challenged them.
Still an old two-lane, it was the A1A I remembered from years ago when I was a child and the family drove south from Ohio along this coast. I could remember the FREE ORANGE JUICE signs and the ALLIGATOR FARM signs. Not that Dad would pull over for anything. Daisy and I had to threaten to wet the backseat before he’d make a stop on those Cincinnati-to-Miami trips. Today, traffic was scarce and I returned to thoughts of my phone call with Jess.
His position of “I don’t know, I forgot” had kept Jess safely out of the reach of responsibility, similar to the story Lucille had told about Shank and how he held to his old family patterns for his new relationship with her. In Jess’ case his survival as a child depended on an innocence tightly gripped.
That dark-haired little boy at his mother’s funeral, adults sobbing all around him, had maintained his staunch ignorance of what was taking place and his role in it. Perhaps this was the four-year-old boy’s fear: that he would die of his own awareness.
I stopped at a deli near a public beach and picked up some lunch to eat while I drove. Before leaving, I let Bijou out and gave her water. While she drank, I leaned against the car and watched boys surf the whitecaps, balancing on their boards as gracefully as ballerinas on toe shoes. Then we got back into the car and continued on the road to Dad’s.
While raising our sons, Jess had diminished the importance of near concussions, cuts and bruises. And I had accepted his view as the tough, fatherly position that balanced my own soft, feminine one. Today, I saw this was Jess’ typical position of minimizing events as a form of survival. He was in constant danger of being overwhelmed, so like the surfers I’d been watching, he maintained vigilance against losing his balance and being dragged under.