Valeria Vose

by Alice Bingham Gorman

  “Yes, and if you could see Rosa, I mean, she’s quite pretty in a candy box way, but she’s definitely a bit overweight—not Larry’s type at all.” The idea of Rosa wearing those bikini panties under her prim navy blue suit had given Mallie a momentary smile, but at the same time she had not been able to stop wondering. Could there have been something going on between Larry and Rosa? But surely he wouldn’t have shown Mallie the panties if anything had been going on with Rosa.

  “Of course, the real question I should have asked was if he was not planning to give the panties to Rosa or to me, who did he buy them for?”

  Then she told Tom about finding the letters.

  “He left a packet of love letters in his open suitcase?” Tom leaned forward as if to challenge a completely implausible assertion. It was the first time since she brought up Julie’s attempted suicide that he questioned her in mid-sentence. Since their first meeting in his study, Tom had listened to her stories with very few comments, at least not until she finished.

  “With a ribbon around them,” Mallie said. “I knew I shouldn’t have read them. I just couldn’t help it.” She had lived with her mother’s adage that “you get what you deserve if you read someone else’s mail.”

  Mallie and Larry had gone on a week’s trip to the beach in Destin, Florida, with her sister Anne and Anne’s husband. The men had gone deep-sea fishing on the first morning, leaving the women to unpack and do the grocery shopping. The letters—a stack of six or seven—were under his folded polo shirts like a partially hidden golden egg waiting to be discovered on Easter morning.

  “They were from women all over the world,” she began. “One was from London. One from Bermuda. Another from Philadelphia, a woman named Georgia.” Mallie’s voice went flat, as if speaking about the letters was draining all the emotional air out of her. “The letter from Georgia asked if he’d gotten his divorce yet.” She remembered how shaken she had been to see the word divorce actually written in reference to her—to her marriage. She had felt the finality of something already in legal process, something ugly and warped. The memory made her wince.

  “What did you do with the letters?” Tom asked.

  “I stopped reading them and put them back in his suitcase. I just sat there on the bed and waited for Larry to come home. I think I was in some sort of shock. Anne came in at one point and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t want to tell her, Tom. I was afraid I would fall apart. Anne and I grew up together, only a little over two years apart—more than ten years older than our sister Kye. We were always so close, but after Anne got married and moved to Atlanta, we didn’t see much of each other. I hadn’t told her anything about what was going on with Larry and me. I said I had a headache and I needed to be alone for a while.”

  “She believed you?” Tom asked.

  “I’m not sure she did, but she brought me an aspirin and left me alone.”

  “What happened when Larry came home?”

  “The minute he walked in the door I could tell from his expression he knew something was wrong. He came over and tried to put his arms around me. I moved away from him—I was about to explode, but I pulled myself together and very quietly told him I’d found the letters—that I’d read them. It was so strange.”

  “What do you mean strange?”

  “Well, he looked shocked at first then he closed his eyes and said he guessed he’d really wanted me to find them.”

  Tom raised a quizzical eyebrow and nodded for her to continue.

  “I didn’t say another word to him. I could hardly breathe. Finally he sank down on the bed, as if he were exhausted from carrying a heavy load and told me he needed to talk to me. I said I’d be willing to listen—but I was so upset I wasn’t sure if I could actually hear anything he said. He began telling me that he’d been miserable for years at Malcolm Brothers. He said he’d felt demeaned, completely out of place—that he had no friends there. No one. He said he’d started talking to women on airplanes on business trips and creating stories to make friends with them. They began writing him letters. He wrote back. It all just got out of hand, he said. He hadn’t cared about any of those women. They just made him feel good about himself.”

  Mallie shook her head. She remembered how nearly impossible it had been for her to equate whatever problems Larry was having at the company and his telling lies about their marriage to strange women on airplanes. “I said ‘My God, Larry, why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’”

  “And what did he say?” Tom asked.

  “He told me his confusion and difficulty had all been tied up with his working for my father. He said he’d known within months of moving to Memphis it had been a mistake, a bad decision to go to work for his father-in-law, but he knew how much I loved him—how much everyone in town respected him—so he thought he couldn’t talk to me, or anyone in Memphis. It was easier to talk to strangers—women on airplanes and people in bars. With strangers he wasn’t immediately categorized, even mocked, as “the boss’s son-in-law” or “Yankee” or “preppie”—all the labels the men at the company had pinned on him. ‘You can’t imagine how humiliating it’s been,’ he said.”

  “Did you believe him?” Tom asked.

  “I suppose I did,” she said. “I knew there was some truth to what he said. Larry was born and raised in Rhode Island and had gone to prep school and college in the East—first to The Choate School and then Princeton. There was no doubt that moving to Memphis was a social and cultural shock. I knew enough girls from the East Coast at Sweet Briar to know that. But it seemed to please everyone, particularly Larry.

  “The truth is I’d been so convinced through the years his interest in other women was because of me—that I was inadequate in some way. I wanted to believe it was because of my father or the company or Memphis—anything but me.”

  “Mallie, surely you know what an attractive woman you are,” Tom said. He spoke with such conviction, a clear and unequivocal statement.

  Beyond her control, Mallie’s eyes filled with tears. Tom’s encouragement, or whatever it was—was it just flattery?—was more than she could accept. What she had once seen in the mirror herself and all the positive things she had been told through the years by her friends—by Larry, too, during their first few years—had disappeared with her suspicions of his relationships with other women. She turned her eyes away.

  Tom stood up and reached out for her, bringing her to her feet next to him. She did not move a muscle while he held her for several minutes.

  “You are a beautiful, smart, lovely woman, Mallie,” he said, his soft voice close to her ear. “An exceptional woman.”

  She kept her head down, her eyes closed. The warmth of his words filled her whole body. She tried to think of him as her consoling counselor, but her heart leaped to imagine him as a loving man who cared about her. Still, she knew he wasn’t just a man; he was a priest, a married priest with a wife and grown children. She knew all that, but she could not help what she felt.

  “It’s true, Mallie,” he said. He took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “It’s time for you to see yourself as you really are—as God intended for you to be.”

  She wanted to burst with happiness. In that moment, something inside of her clicked on, as if a light suddenly revealed all those things she ever dreamed about herself—a beautiful, smart, lovely woman—exceptional—everything Tom said she was and all she once believed, all that had been buried in the rubble of Larry’s lies.

  Each Tuesday afternoon their conversation became more intimate. It felt like psychic weight loss to release those secrets of her marriage that she had never been able to tell anyone. She felt freer and freer to tell Tom everything she had been hiding through the years. She could count on his response of compassion and support, renewing her belief in herself as a desirable woman. Each week when he greeted her in his study and each time he said goodbye, his hugs lasted longer and became more meaningful to her. She could think of nothing else for days. />
  One night she woke up from a dream in which she was making love to Tom. She was appalled at herself. Since 1960, in the sixteen years that she had been married to Larry, she had not allowed herself to consider touching—or being touched by—another man. And here she was dreaming about her counselor—an older, married Episcopal priest. Oh God, no. All wrong, she thought. She tried to push the lovemaking image out of her mind. But she could not stop smiling. However faint, she heard a new song. It was as if her senses had been dead and had come back to life.

  Before the day following the sexual dream was over, Mallie began a fearful dialogue with herself. Should she tell Tom the way she felt about him, that she dreamed of making love to him? Suppose he sent her away—or recommended that she see another counselor. She tried to quiet her doubts. It was impossible. It would have been easier to coax a small child away from the candy canes on the Christmas tree. Not now. She would not tell Tom anything about her dream or her feelings for him. Whatever might happen down the line, she could not risk losing him in her life.

  Chapter Ten

  At the end of a Tuesday afternoon counseling session in mid-February, roughly six weeks after they began, Tom Matthews surprised Mallie by suggesting that it was time for her to have a joint session with Larry. She could not imagine being in the same room with the two of them. Her time alone with Tom had become so important to her that the idea of having Larry there felt like an invasion of privacy.

  Mallie and Larry had been continuing their semblance of normal married life. None of their friends and family—with the exception of Mallie’s sister Anne and her closest friend Jenny—knew that they had begun marriage counseling. She could never have confided in her mother. Joan Malcolm thought any form of therapy was for weak people, and besides, “Never hang your dirty linen out in public” was one of her strongest dictums.

  In accordance with Tom’s recommendations, Mallie and Larry were carrying out a loosely formed agreement that they would each make an effort to improve their relationship and hold their marriage together. When Larry was not away on a business trip, they would follow a routine of spending time in the evenings doing familiar family things. Larry shot baskets with the boys. Mallie helped with their homework. They would not criticize each other or bring up any of their problems of the past. No mention of the situation with Julie, nothing that would dredge up unpleasantness. Mallie waited for Larry to initiate sex and responded as best she could, her mind drifting further and further away from any hope—or even desire—to rekindle the excitement that had once brought her such pleasure. She tried not to dwell on any projection of Larry’s true feelings for her.

  Twice during that time, Larry had called to say that he would be late coming home from work—a departure from his old habit of never letting her know his plans—and once, in early February, on the threat of snow, he’d left the office to stake up the little pine trees they had planted in the front yard the summer before.

  Mallie knew that Larry was trying hard to show a positive attitude, whether it came from any real desire to change or whether, like her, he was following Tom’s instructions. At the same time she could not deny that some internal mechanism of hers had shifted. She continued to perform her given chores of the day, the boys’ activities at school, planning meals for the family, her civic and cultural board meetings—the board of MIFA, the Memphis Inter-Faith Association, and The Memphis Art Academy—but all the while she was listening and moving to the rhythm of a new song, as if in her real life—in the life of her heart—she were somewhere else. Her daydreams went far beyond her daily life with Larry. In some undefined way, she was beginning a different life without him. Maybe someday, impossible as it seemed at the moment, her life would somehow include Tom Matthews.

  With great reluctance, Mallie agreed to have a joint counseling session with Larry during her weekly scheduled appointment in Tom’s study on the following Tuesday.

  Larry met her in the parking lot of St. Michael’s. They greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek, no more intimate than two old friends entering a cocktail party.

  Once inside Tom’s study, the three of them sat down and formed a triangle: Tom behind his desk, Larry and Mallie side by side across from him. For about fifteen minutes, Tom urged both of them to express their feelings about their marriage, about each other. Mallie felt that she was being split in half, one half connected to her old life with Larry and the other half reaching out for a new life. The division left her speechless. She could not bear to look at Tom. Across the desk from her, his demeanor was far from the warm and loving Tom she had come to know when they were alone in his study. He looked closed, judgmental. She could not summon any of the trust she had developed with him. Larry, meanwhile, began mumbling about how he thought certain things about their marriage were better.

  “What things do you mean?” Tom asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Larry said. He shrugged his shoulders. “It just seems better.”

  “And how do you feel about the marriage, Mallie?” Tom asked her.

  Mallie wanted to duck as if he had thrown a foreign object at her. The harsh tone of his voice was so different from his gentle probing into her stories when they met privately on Tuesdays.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly, not looking at either of them. “I suppose I think things are better.” She knew she was not telling the whole truth. Only the surface things were better. Mallie was no longer sure about anything—neither that she wanted to be married to Larry, nor that she wanted a divorce. All she thought she knew for sure was that she wanted to have her time alone with Tom Matthews—yet, at that moment, he seemed to be very much a stranger, perhaps even an adversary. He was not the same person who had been so sympathetic, so completely supportive of her during the past few weeks.

  Without warning, as the answers to Tom’s questions became more elusive and more inane, he stood up and announced: “I cannot seem to get either one of you to be truthful. Maybe you’d do better alone in this room without me.” He looked sternly from one to the other, a sargeant addressing his callow recruits. “I suggest you stay here until you’ve said what you need to say to each other. This is your best opportunity.” With those challenging words, he walked out the side door.

  Mallie felt instantly abandoned. In spite of her confused emotions, she had maintained a certain confidence as long as Tom was in the room. Without him, she felt cut loose, adrift. Neither she nor Larry spoke.

  Finally, she turned toward her husband and in a soft voice she said, “Do you love me, Larry?”

  He looked away.

  “No,” he whispered, then quickly turning toward her, he added, “I mean, I don’t know.” He dropped his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know how I feel anymore.”

  Mallie held her breath, She could not move, could not look at Larry. She had not expected him to say no. Through all the years of lies, of doubt, of questioning herself, she had convinced herself that he still loved her—and there were many things she still loved about him. Like rewinding an old film, her mind raced through images of the good times with Larry, the way they loved the same music and danced together, the summer sunsets they shared in Watch Hill, the sailing trips, the nature walks, his surprise gifts to her on Christmas morning—so many things. The most important thing, of course, were the boys, their sons. How thrilled they had been at the birth of each one. But he had just told her he didn’t love her. She felt something rip, as if a force greater than her will had reached into the depths of her life and torn up her marriage commitment. Mallie’s mind went blank. She waited for him to say something else.

  “I just don’t want to be married to you anymore,” he said, his eyes on the floor in front of him.

  Larry’s words sounded a death knell. At the same time, they rang like the echo of a distant lifeboat. Mallie felt a strange sense of relief, as if she had been released from a lifetime obligation—her promise before God of faithfulness to Larry “until death do us p
art.” In that moment she did not feel rejection or sadness or fear. Her mind jumped to a startling conclusion: the end of the marriage would be Larry’s choice, his responsibility, not hers. She could imagine that her boys, her family and her friends would not blame her.

  “I guess that’s it,” Mallie said with cool resignation, “if that’s what you want.” Maybe he intended to marry Julie. Whatever was in his mind for the future, the end of the marriage was Larry’s decision. “Is that what you really want?” she said.

  He nodded his consent, offering no more words.

  Mallie stood up and in a voice she hardly recognized, she said, “Okay then. That’s the way it is.”

  For a second their eyes met. Two blind people, looking at each other, unable to see.

  “I’ll go by the house and pick up a few things,” Larry said. “When the boys get home, you can tell them I’ve gone out of town on a business trip. Whatever you want to tell them. We can deal with the rest later.” His voice was a monotone recitation, as if he were speaking to someone at the office, giving instructions to be carried out by a subordinate.

  They left Tom’s study through the side door and got into their separate cars.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mallie spent most of the night fighting off waves of fear. The initial relief was gone. In its place was a kind of panic that she had never felt before. Her whole being was threatened. Whatever might happen in the future, the present—the prospect of being divorced—felt like a dark and remote planet, a place where she would have no idea who she was. She had been a daughter living at home with her sisters and her parents for twenty-one years. She had been a wife living with Larry and her boys for eighteen years. If she were not a married woman, who would she be? From the time Mallie was a child she had believed that she would grow up and be a wonderful wife; she would have only one marriage in her lifetime. She would be like her mother, who had disagreements with her father—there were plenty of nights when her mother screamed at her father and he screamed back, slamming doors before he drove around for hours alone in the car—but he always came home, and they stayed married.