Driving With the Top Down

by Beth Harbison

  It was fair. It was the deal I’d made. In exchange, I not only regularly appeared in the style section of the newspaper, but I was also on the cover of Carolina Society Lifestyle magazine once.

  “Lew!” I had called again. A glance out the window showed his car was there. It was Sunday, so he’d have gone to church, but usually he stayed in after that. I thought for a minute: Was he traveling this week? Last week he’d gone to Tampa, but this week he was in, right?

  A small dread crossed my chest. but I dismissed it quickly. Whenever things are even a little bit off, horrible scenarios spring to my mind immediately. A pool of blood spilling out from underneath a closed door; a body hanging, bug-eyed, from the rafters; a uniformed police officer at the door, hat in hand. It was a wonder I was sane at all, though sometimes I wasn’t really sure I was.

  “Lew?” I started up the stairs and heard movement overhead. Relief flushed over me like cool water. God, why do I always have to go to ten on the worry scale? It’s ridiculous.

  There was a bang in the bedroom.

  I went up.

  “Good Lord, Lew,” I said, opening the door, “what on earth are you doing, cleaning out the closet with a battering—?” I stopped.

  My hand clapped to my chest.

  Lew was naked on the bed, on his knees. The first thing I noticed, as discordant as it was, was that the soles of his feet were perfectly clean. That’s how fastidious he is—he never even takes off his shoes long enough to make the soles a different color from the tops. Well, rarely.

  They were off now.

  His back gleamed with sweat. His forehead too, when he turned his alarmed face to me, he had a sheen that suggested it had been a long afternoon. His chest heaved, though I couldn’t yet say if it was exertion or shock.

  Likely both.

  “Wilhelmina!”

  He always called me by my whole name. I could understand why he wasn’t on board with Bitty. That wasn’t a cool name, and it didn’t even come from a particularly good trait—it wasn’t necessarily cool to diet so much, everyone called you Itty Bitty—but he’d never come up with anything else, anything affectionate, even some shortened variation of my real name.

  It was always “Wilhelmina” in full.

  Even, apparently, at the defining moment of our marriage. Or, rather, the end of our marriage.

  “I—” I started. But what? I what? There was no reasonable follow-up. I had just purchased one of my husband’s favorite treats as a surprise for him, I’d set it up downstairs, complete with wine, and come to find him so I could serve him.

  I’d even worried about him when he didn’t answer my calls.

  But here he was, the man who wasn’t attracted enough to me to kiss me on the mouth, much less create babies, pretty spectacularly en flagrante with someone else.

  Blond?

  Yes, of course. The cliché.

  Younger?

  Yup. Younger than both of us.

  Before I even saw a face, I could tell it from his smooth thighs and … tight scrotum.

  Because, oh yes, male?

  You betcha.

  Lew was in bed with a man. Naked. Sweating. Kneeling in front of the man’s mouth. There was just no mistaking this situation for anything other than what it was.

  And I’d never even seen it coming. No pun intended.

  All this comprehension churned into me quickly, like an avalanche. Every impression topped by a next impression and a next impression, giving me a slide show of different facts I could view forever and never feel even remotely okay about.

  No one ever talks about how the person looking at the deer in the headlights has much the same expression as the deer. That’s how I felt while I looked at that moment. Frozen in shock.

  I tried to swallow but couldn’t. My mouth was dry. My throat was tight. My eyes burned, but I couldn’t look away.

  Time passed in a blur. How much? I don’t know. Minutes? Seconds? Fractions of seconds? I just felt my head spinning and went to turn away, leave—I guess try to erase the entire thing somehow.

  “Wilhelmina, you need to not tell people about this.” Lew started to get off the bed, and I noticed, with shock, that he was still hard.

  How was that possible? This had to be as horrifying a moment for him as it was for me. This was a revelation he clearly didn’t want made and I didn’t want to know. That was usually the perfect recipe for wilting. Was this guy he was with such a huge turn-on that he couldn’t help it? Was he hoping to move me on out of there so he could finish what they’d very clearly started?

  Not that I was objective, but the guy really wasn’t that hot. Early twenties, the kind of blond I usually attribute to Sun-In. He had a bit of a moon face and fettucine arms. He was not a guy you risked your entire reputation on.

  Maybe Lew had taken the Viagra I’d been oh-so-subtly suggesting for the past couple of years.

  Whatever it was, the sight of it made me wince and avert my gaze. A reflex. “Should I leave while you finish?” I asked sharply. “Maybe wait downstairs with the goddamn dinner I brought you until you’re ready to resume your role as my husband?”

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” he said to me with surprising conviction.

  That brought my gaze right back to him. To them both. His friend was looking at him with as much curiosity on his face as I felt in my own expression.

  “It’s not?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay…” I took a breath. The scene was so surreal and seemingly endless that, in a weird way, I was growing used to it. I could almost pull up a chair and chat. “Tell me about it.”

  “Jared—” He gestured at the young man whose shoulders lowered fractionally, like a dog’s ears, upon hearing his name. “—is my massage therapist.”

  I gave a hard spike of laughter, involuntarily, and noticed that Jared—assuming that was the guy in my bed with my husband and not a totally different guy involved in a different story or possibly about to come out of the bathroom—also frowned and drew his head back.

  “Is this Jared?” I asked, gesturing toward the guy, then met his eyes. “Are you Jared?”

  “Yes?” His answer sounded like a question.

  “Are you a massage therapist?”

  Long hesitation. “Yes…?”

  “Tell me, what kind of massage therapy necessitates nudity and my husband’s penis in your mouth?”

  “Uh—”

  “That’s not what’s happening here,” Lew snapped, getting off the bed and pulling on some boxers he’d left on the floor.

  As horrifying as the entire scene was, I couldn’t look away. This was the end of my life as I knew it—there was no doubt—everything from this moment on was going downhill, probably to the bottom, so I had to take in every single detail until that moment.

  “Jared, what’s happening here?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I’d just asked him the twenty-fifth number to the right of the decimal in pi. “We’re— I’m— This is a massage.”

  “Prostate massage?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at Lew. “Maybe?” He mouthed the words I don’t know what to say as if I couldn’t see him. It was then that I noticed on his right hand, ring finger, a thick gold band, not unlike a wedding band, dotted with diamonds. The ring Odessa had told me she saw Lew buying. He’d given it to Jared! “Nice ring,” I tossed off.

  He looked at it awkwardly. “Uh. Thanks?”

  Incredibly, Lew threw a robe on, then marched over to me and grabbed me hard by the arm to pull me from the room. “Stop it,” he hissed.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop hounding him.”

  I would have been less stunned if he’d just punched me in the face. “Stop hounding him? Are you kidding? Have you gone crazy? I just walked in on you with a man—well, boy really, is he even of age?” How was this happening? How could I get lost in the details now when the point was so
painfully clear? My husband was having sex with a man in our bed and here I was, noticing his feet were clean, wondering if he was taking Viagra, and now asking how old his partner was.

  Worse, Lew was ready to jump right in and play up the madness. Instead of apologizing or explaining or getting in a time machine and going back in time to erase what I’d just witnessed, he was being contentious about the whole thing, scolding me.

  “He’s twenty-four,” he said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “That”—I pointed in the general direction of his privates, which had mercifully gone down—“has nothing to do with me. This”—I gestured at the bedroom door—“has everything to do with me. This is my marriage, my husband, my reputation”—my voice caught—“my life.”

  I might as well have said nothing.

  “Obviously, no one is going to find out about this.” He said it as if that were a given. An order.

  “Really?” Only then did the thought occur to me that this wasn’t the first time. Of course it wasn’t. For one thing, Lew looked quite experienced with it, and for another, at his age, it was unlikely he was only now figuring out his sexual preference. Particularly given how long it had been since he’d had sex with me. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I told you there’s nothing going on—”

  “Call the Mad Hatter so we can get some clarity here, would you? That was definitely not nothing going on in there!”

  “He’s my massage therapist, and he has some … unique therapies that, yes, might look a little peculiar, but you had no right to grill him like that. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “Apparently, that’s totally in keeping with your taste.” This kind of thing didn’t happen suddenly. If there was a hapless idiot here—someone who didn’t know anything—it was me. I’d tried for years to lure my husband’s sexual interest back in, tried like hell to please him and have, at the very least, a normal marriage.

  Every single time I saw an Oprah episode where they talked about “the average number of times a year the average couple had sex” I cringed. Per year? “Per lifetime” would have been a better measurement for me. Lew and I had had sex, or tried to. (Is it really sex if it resulted in both parties just giving up rather than climaxing?) In the beginning, our relationship had been one where we both “wanted to wait.” We didn’t want to “rush into things.” We didn’t want to “make the same mistakes.”

  Apparently, the reason our relationship had been so old-school and so respectful was because the entire time, he was dreading the day when he would have no excuse.

  “You could have told me a long time ago our sexual problems weren’t because of me,” I said. My voice was strong and angry, but inside I was crumbling. It would be a stretch to say the shock was wearing off—it was hard to imagine the shock would ever wear off—but the truth was forcing its way in. “Could you not give me that single small mercy? If you’d allowed me the benefit of the truth, then maybe I could have made better, more educated decisions about my life.”

  “Like what? Are you saying you would have left?” He gave a hurtful dagger of a laugh that went right through my heart. “You had too much to lose.”

  “Yeah, a husband who had no feelings for me.” God, how I’d tried. I’d tried everything, over and over, for years. I’d tried tonight. The proof was downstairs on the counter, going bad as quickly as my marriage.

  Lew didn’t appear to care at all. “You weren’t any more in love than I was!”

  Wow. That just wasn’t true. Once upon a time, I’d thought I was very much in love with him. Well, maybe not “very much.” It was nothing like Blake, but maybe one couldn’t expect adult love to be like youthful passion. But certainly I loved Lew. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. Certainly I’d come to understand my role as his wife in the years that ensued, and eventually I’d had to give up the idea of a passionate romance, but I most definitely had entered this marriage, and fought for it, based on the belief that it could still be a good and strong marriage even if it wasn’t what you might call hot.

  “I loved you,” I had said quietly, the words hard to force over the lump in my throat.

  “You loved this life.” He gestured around them. “And that hasn’t changed.” He dropped his arms at his sides. “In fact, this is liberating for us both.”

  I think my jaw literally dropped. He was actually working up to spinning this into a good thing? “Are you about to tell me this is going to strengthen our marriage?”

  He considered me for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Oh my god.” I started to turn away from him.

  He took my arm and wrenched me back to face him, easily. “You listen to me. You are my wife.”

  “At this point, I don’t even know if that’s true. Is a marriage based on such a major lie real, or is there a legal loophole there?”

  He shook his hand off me. “You are my wife,” he said, low and firm. “And as such, you have a position in this town, a standing based on my reputation and the reputation of my father, and grandfather, and great-grandfathers past. You took on that duty and, by God, you’re going to fulfill it.”

  “In exchange for what? What do I get out of protecting your secrets and pretending everything is just hunky-dory?”

  “You get everything you already have. What you win”—it was hard to say later whether something in his face or tone actually went cold or if his words just made it seem so—“is not to lose.”

  I didn’t leave right then and there. Crazy, right? You’d think I’d have happily turned on my heel and left, and never looked back. What a betrayal. What a fundamental lie. And letting me think, all these years, that it was because of me that we didn’t have sex, rather than because I could never, ever be what he wanted, no matter what.

  But the embarrassing truth is that I was so used to being Mrs. Camalier that I didn’t have the confidence to just up and leave. Or, wiser still, point toward the door, like Death in A Christmas Carol, demanding he leave. I had rights. But in a marriage like that, it was hard to keep a grip on that fact.

  So I found a place to rent, under the pretense of making it into a little art studio for myself, and slowly moved in. It didn’t take people long to figure out what was going on, of course, and in a small, self-conscious town like this, it didn’t take long for them to look at me like I was something the cat had brought in from the woods.

  I gave it a game shot, though—really I did. I see now that the error was trying it there, but by that time, Winnington felt like the only home I really knew. But then one day, they wouldn’t accept my check at the grocery store. No reason. I’d never bounced anything there. I think Lew just told them I had nothing, and they believed him. I could have given them a card, of course, or even cash, but that was the line right there—the uncrossable line between the illusion of dignity and the reality of humiliation.

  And it was at that moment that the truth hit me full force.

  There was no way for me to win. I’d already lost.

  I’d lost before I even began to play.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tamara

  The weather was hideous. The rain was coming down so hard that, from her place hunkered down in the backseat, Tamara couldn’t see the road in front of them at all. She only hoped Colleen could, but she was scared. It wasn’t unfamiliar to Tam, this heart-pounding lack of control, but somehow this felt more dangerous than anything she’d ever done.

  She also wasn’t used to caring so much whether she lived or died. God, how many reckless things had she done without a care for what happened to her? Or even what happened to her friends. That Tamara was starting to seem like a stranger.

  Replaced, evidently, by this seat belt–clutching sissy girl.

  Bitty must have shared the sentiment. “This is bad,” she said. “We should probably pull over.”

  “I was thinking the same
thing,” Colleen agreed, “but for the past twenty minutes, I’ve been looking for an off-ramp of some sort and we haven’t passed one. There must be one coming up soon.”

  “What about the side of the road?” Bitty pointed to some cars that had already done that and put their hazard lights on.

  “I’ve heard too many horror stories. Look how some of these trucks are blowing by. We do not want to get rammed by one of those jerks. Oh, look—is that a service road?”

  Tam sat up and squinted but couldn’t see anything.

  “It’s a turnoff of some sort. As long as we can get the trailer far enough off the road too, we should be okay.”

  Colleen made the turn, and a large but low, neon sign greeted them with an announcement of XXX 24 HOURS LIVE GIRLS.

  “As opposed to what, dead girls?” Tamara asked.

  “Great, now I’m poisoning a child’s mind.”

  “It’s okay,” Tam said with a humorless laugh. “I’m not as naïve as you might think.”

  “Oh, dear,” Colleen breathed. She inched the car forward through sloppy mud puddles until it was well onto the service road, then put it in park and sighed. “Think it’s going to let up soon?”

  “I think we should build an ark,” Bitty said.

  Tam laughed. She’d never been one for Sunday school, but even she got that reference.

  They sat in silence for a moment, then Bitty said, “You know, I swear I keep feeling water drops falling on me.” She looked up and felt the roof. “Here.” She held her hand to a spot right over her head. “There’s a hole here.”

  “I think there’s one back here too,” Tam said, remembering how she’d kept wondering how she was spilling her Coke when it was secured in the cup holder. “Just a small one.”