from me. Now I needed to be alert at all times, to try to foresee danger. Besides, I wanted him to trap my legs and I needed to always feel the weight of him both on me and in me. I listened to him because I had no choice. He told me that he would appreciate it if I would listen, without interrupting now that I was calmer. I felt patronised by this statement but didn’t show it. I had added a new layer to my façade. The story began.
It would appear that the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ as she had become to me now, not that she had ever been anything at all to me previously, had initially been going with Peter, Tom’s work colleague, married to Sophie. They are our mutual and close friends. I did interrupt at this point to warn him not to utter her name when talking with me about her, which made his story telling difficult. When he had used her name a moment ago, said it, it had brought something up within me quite primal. I suppose I had a desire to kill her. His use of her name highlighted more keenly, more sharply and acutely their intimacy, this even more than knowing he had entered her.
He said that he had felt initially intrigued by Peter’s infidelity and the way he had become so changed to appear to him more youthful. He had boasted about the sex. Deep down Tom had felt a little jealous of Peter, which had personally disgusted him. It had caused him to look more closely at her as she too worked at their site on one of the production lines. He disclosed that she had intrigued him. An electric shot of jealousy surged through me. Intrigued. That word stayed with me as he continued and although I doubted my ability to carry on listening I held on tight. He coughed nervously. He shared with me that their affair had begun just as she was ending it with Peter. Having sensed Tom noticing her and showing interest she had reciprocated in a way, which had shocked him, which was mainly that she had made initial moves. He was gazing straight ahead at this point of his story, avoiding eye contact as though talking his story through like this was cathartic for him, not me. Most ignorantly he didn’t realise the impact each and every word was making on me, how they tore open fresh wounds to be left open and raw. He could neither see nor hear my winces because he had zoned himself out to another world to be able to talk this way.
I felt like an observer at my own funeral, where he too had joined me in the clouds from the cortège to watch the service with me.
“Look” he was saying, “See what they are saying about you Anna, how wonderful you are and how badly I have treated you, what an insincere type of man that I am. It is true Anna I did not deserve you.”
He could think that speaking this way absolved him from his sins. Admitting guilt is not necessarily an indication of atonement as many a lawyer would testify and it doesn’t mean one may become forgiven. Wanting forgiveness is a different matter altogether, a sentiment aside. I was not paying attention to what he was saying as a measure of being self protective and to be honest I was disinterested in what he had to say about their get to together moments, the build of their relationship. How trite that he wanted to share that with me. I perceived him as weak and wimpish. He was portraying himself as a victim who had found himself seduced by a free thinking, out reaching sexually active woman with no strings and with no honour and loyalty to show towards partners of any new found lovers she may have decided to take up with. Had Tom no willpower of his own, no calibre, no moral fibre? Does sex rule? Yes it seems to be that way. Not that I am so ignorant not to know that he may have seen more than sex in her, or understand that he may have strayed from me because of shortcomings within our marriage. At the end of the day it boils down to self-indulgence really.
I have in the past been presented with the odd opportunity to be unfaithful. Once at a conference I had felt desire for another man, which had shocked me. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it! The boost of being desired by another man for a moment or two proved enough in itself. It I had succumbed to having sex with that man, that stranger, it would have sullied the encounter and made it different, more ordinary. I knew the ordinary side of Tom just as he knew the ordinary side of me as we faced the tribulations of life day in and day out together. Sex with a new partner doesn’t make any of that go away, in fact there is comfort in the mundane aspects of life that offers me a firm foundation and a meaning to life. Familiarisation had not bred contempt in me. What was happening now did. It was bringing out my dark side, my ugliness. It was hard to feel pretty at a time like this. It we were meant as human beings to pursue pleasure continuously then who would build the bridges in life and who would bake the bread? We are meant to do other things surely. Yet everything seems to be centred on sex nowadays and in effect it makes everything sexless. Less is more as my grandmother used to say. Had the sex between Tom and I become meaningless? Had theirs become more meaningful and at what point would their sex face the same crossroad? Am I supposed to care about this? No. I am supposed to live my own life because as my grandmother also used to say, we come into life alone and we go out of life alone. So what is the point of building a family? What Tom has done is to destroy his family in the format that it was, as old fashioned as that might appear to others. With a mum and a dad together at the helm holding things together after eighteen years of marriage; a sham really and a futile dream about life. Maybe it’s not meant to be this way. Family is old hat. It’s true isn’t it?
Listening to him again everything he said sounded rehearsed. He has probably subconsciously or even consciously prepared himself for this day. In morbid curiosity I prompted him to carry on. It turned out that Joshua his son with her aged 16 months came about from his going with her just the once in some sort of free for all encounter in the back of her car.
“Wow, top boy and top girl! High five!”
It had taken us three years to get Joseph our firstborn son. To have picked the name Joshua felt too close to home, but hey, how much closer could she be? He hadn’t used protection then I realised, how arrogant! Now it appears that by default I have slept with a great number of people. All my virtuousness has meant nothing at all in the end. How silly and naïve of me to be so. How unprotected Tom has left me from sexual disease. He wouldn’t have even have thought about it.
Apparently they had competed Tom and Peter, so see whom the lucky father was Tom, the new man in her town had taken a DNA test. All this was going on while I no doubt was doing something so mundane as pegging out washing. A full life was being lived by my husband while I like the fool on the hill, as McCartney would say lived ignorantly on. I wanted to be violent in a blood curdling way. I remembered suddenly that Sophie Peter’s wife had survived breast cancer after a lumpectomy and radiotherapy, and was now three years clear. Fighting for her life while Peter was finding his youthfulness all over again! Tom and Peter in my eyes at this moment appeared like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, such self-centred idiots! Such Bastards! I knew that I was being cynical and this fitted nicely with my feeling of ugliness.
“Good, let me be ugly! I want to be.”
Tom had reached a point of conclusion, about Joshua at least. He had felt that he couldn’t walk away from her once Joshua had been born and it had been confirmed that he was his son for sure. It seems that he felt responsible. There it is carved out in stone.
“That’s goodnight from me and goodnight from him.”
I knew deep inside that this was no time for me to be comedic in thought, but these sayings were helping me to fight back. Somehow humour has become my defence mechanism.
I remembered a black and white photograph his mother Mary had had showed to me when I first met her. It had caught the image of Tom crying and pulling at her skirt in a tantrum and his brother in contrast was pointing at him and laughing. Mary was looking directly towards the camera smiling as though determined, grimly trying to make the best of the situation. I had thought her insensitive at the time to exhibit to me his private emotions as a child so casually and I had felt protective over him then as much as I do now really. Why hadn’t she comforted him? Why pose for a p
hotograph to be taken in those circumstances? Why did Mary think it appropriate to share this image with me and was she trying to tell me something? Is it that Tom was a spoilt crybaby as a child? Did she love him? Of course she did, fiercely so. Somehow in life Tom always came off worse.
Now Tom was clutching my bedclothes as similarly as he had his mother’s skirt as though appealing to me for something, but what? He was crying. What could I give him that he hadn’t already taken and thrown away? My hand was close to his. He wanted me to hold his hand and I did. He pulled back the quilt and he clung to me under it. We were both fully clothed and desperate to hold each other, which we did madly. I pulled his hair and dug my nails into his bare arm to nip and hurt him, which he accepted. Within seconds he had found a way to enter me and I let him. The sex was complicated but necessary to us both. Afterwards I felt bereft as I loved him so much and did not want to lose him.
We slept for a long while. The kids had come home from
Letting Him Stay Page 4