by Susan Wilson
“Every summer in July all of the McCarthys go to Narragansett and rent a couple of cottages. Sean's is a big family and where they used to be able to fit in one, now, with all the husbands and kids, they have to rent two. This was eight years ago, and Francis, Sean's dad, was still alive. The women went to the beach for the month and the men, Francis and Sean and Margaret's husband, Jack, all stayed in Providence and came down on weekends. The traffic from all those husbands and fathers traveling south was awful and they'd all try to come down midday on Friday to avoid it.
“Lily was fifteen months old, just beginning to toddle. I was seven months along and feeling like Shamu. Everything was swollen, belly, breasts, ankles, wrists, you would never have recognized me. Lily and I stayed with my in-laws. Sean's youngest siblings were there, too, so it was a house of women, happily going to the beach all day and eating hot dogs every night. We only cooked when the men came home.
“Every Friday, Sean and Francis and Jack arrived, sweaty and city-dressed. Ties loosened around their necks, they arrived looking tired and saggy. On that first Friday they arrived, Sean, who hadn't seen me in a week, made some flip remark about my size. It wasn't especially meant to be hurtful or demeaning, but, being hormonally challenged, I burst into tears and his mother took him to task. ‘You made her this way, be proud of it.’
“Sean apologized but there was something in the way he kissed me that made me think he found me slightly repulsive. As if he had to make himself touch me. We had always been very physical with each other and I craved him. By the next Friday, we had somehow given up physical love. He kissed me hello and goodbye and held my hand as we walked along the beach, but we didn't make love. I know that some men find their wives more attractive when pregnant, but Sean was quite clearly not of that number.”
I took another swallow of the first glass of wine and smiled at the server setting my haddock in front of me. Ben poured a second glass from the bottle he'd ordered and let me go on.
“I had a doctor's appointment in the city on a Thursday. Alice was going to drive me up and then I would spend the night at home and come back to the beach with Sean and Francis on the Friday. Lily was going to stay with the family. This was to be my first night away from Lily, and I was in anguish about it. Tuesday morning I got a call asking if I could change my appointment to that afternoon. If I hadn't been so on the fence about leaving Lily overnight, I might have said no, I couldn't change my plans. Instead, I saw the change of appointment as a sign from God that I should just go up and back the same day and not be away from my baby. Given Sean's sudden reluctance to touch me, I figured it wouldn't really matter to him whether he saw me just for lunch or slept beside me in our bed at home.
“‘Can you drive yourself? Do you want me to go with you?’ Alice asked, but I assured her the forty-five-minute drive up and back wouldn't tax me at all. I took orders from everyone around for various missing things to bring back from Alice's house, things like the extra set of car keys, the pair of sandals Siobhan had forgotten under her bed, last month's Good Housekeeping with the recipe in it for fruit barbecue sauce. The stuff of living ordinary lives. I kissed my baby and off I went to change my life forever.
“I didn't call Sean to tell him I was coming. I had some silly idea that I'd surprise him at work and make him take me out to lunch. I had time, so I went to Alice's house first and collected the desired items. My house is only a street over from hers, so it seemed the most natural thing to go there next. I knew that Sean was neglecting my plants, and I had a couple of things I wanted to take back with me as well.”
By this point in my narrative I could feel my heart pound as if I were reexperiencing the event from eight years ago. I stopped long enough to slow its rhythm. I allowed myself a mental deep breath by commenting on the food we were slowly eating. Ben encouraged me to keep telling my story with a gentle nod and a soft gesture of his fingertips.
“The house was as much of a mess as I had expected. Dishes, towels-strewn, papers piled in every chair. I knew he'd get it tidied up before I got home, but also that I'd spend the last month of my pregnancy cleaning the house. He'd call it nesting, I'd call it house reclamation.
“I went into the bedroom to get the maternity jeans I'd left behind. The bed was like a storm-tossed island, or a battlefield. Pillows punched, blanket on the floor, and sheets twisted tornado-shaped. ‘At least they aren't the same sheets I put on when I left’—I actually said it out loud. These were the newer, monogrammed ones, an elegant white on white, an anniversary present from his parents. I grasped the top sheet and pulled, then lifted the corners of the contour bottom sheet. A tiny square of foil bounced on the floor as I yanked. Even as I bent over to retrieve it, I knew what it was. In novels, such an act is the catalyst, the thing which sets into motion the story. The conflict. The mystery.
“In my life that action—picking up the condom wrapper from my bedroom floor—was more like an abrupt ending. At first I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the empty package. Then I carefully placed it on the nightstand on his side of the bed. Then I took it back and crumpled it up and flushed it down the toilet. The heat of that July day was suddenly unbearable. I needed the soothing breeze off the bay. I saw myself in the long mirror on the back of the bedroom door and I began to cry. It seemed to me then that I was at fault. I had let myself grow huge with this baby, safe in the knowledge that I had sprung back to normal within days after Lily. I had left Sean by himself. I had left Francis McCarthy's only son alone. We all knew that Francis had what they so quaintly called the ‘roving eye.’ We all knew, at least those of us older ones, that he'd cheated on Alice. Now Sean had cheated on me. I finished stripping the bed. I bundled my brand-new sheets under my arm and went out to the trash, where I stuffed them into a half-full pail.”
Seated in that intimate corner of the restaurant, the soft and sexy eyes of a different kind of man focused on me, I felt myself pull away from my story and back into the present and I was very glad to be there.
“Did Sean ever know you'd found out?”
“Oh yes. He did. I remade the bed. I went to my appointment and got a lecture on blood pressure. Then I drove back to Narragansett and found Alice. She'd lived through this and I needed her to tell me what to do.”
“Let me guess—she recommended you stay with him?”
I nodded and finished the last of my haddock. The fish had grown cold and I only ate to give myself time to construct my narrative more effectively. “Alice held me and rocked me and whispered, ‘There there,’ over my head. ‘They all do it, Cleo, it doesn't mean anything. You're his wife and the mother of his children and it's to you he will always come home.’
“I was too tired and too demoralized to stand up and debate her Old World point of view. ‘Things have to be different, Alice. I can't live like this.’ She agreed I must confront him, I must know who the woman was and I must exact punishment. ‘How did you punish Francis?’ ‘I hit him, square across the face, and then I told him the next time I would leave him.’ ‘And he remained true?’ ‘I never caught him again.’” Telling this story whole, speaking it out loud for the first time to anyone outside the family, I suddenly realized that all this time I had missed the nuance behind those words, “I never caught him again.”
Ben's conducting fingers brought me to speak the conclusion.
“Alice called Sean and told him to come to Narragansett that night. At first he thought the baby was coming and he got very excited. ‘No, Sean. You need to tend to your wife about something else,’ and she hung up on him. Thus alerted, Sean arrived contrite. We needed a privacy the crowded cottage couldn't provide so we walked to the closest beach and sat in the sand. It was sunset and any other night this would have been a romantic scene, shimmering Narragansett Bay, red streaks in the West, golden bands shooting through the strips of clouds on the horizon.
“‘Who is she?’ I asked. Not, ‘How could you do this to me,’ or ‘Why?’ or ‘What were you thinking?’ What I
most wanted to know was with whom. It seemed almost more important to me to find out it was someone who might look like me, like I usually did, rather than someone random. Does that make sense?
“He named a woman who lived a couple of houses up, a slightly older woman, a divorcee with three kids and not a lick of sense in her head. ‘She came over to make sure I was eating properly. She brought lasagna. We never meant . . . ’ She was attractive, I suppose, in an overdone, kind of former-beauty-queen way. But what fascinated me most was her preying on my husband. You see, that's how I saw it. She was older, lonely, horny. Sean was classic weak male, thinking with his other head, as we put it when the sisters and I discussed the matter. It was a family matter, this mistake of Sean's.
“I told him I should leave him, that he deserved nothing less. He begged my forgiveness.” I set my utensils down side by side on the plate and folded my hands into my lap. I stared at my clenched fists, stared at the wide wedding band on my left hand. Then I looked up at Ben. “And I did. I gave him my forgiveness. And, you know, I've never told that story to anyone because, in making my peace with Sean, I made an implied promise to keep the incident buried.”
The busboy came and removed our plates, leaving dessert menus behind.
“The thing is”—I didn't look up at Ben—”I think that he may be doing it again.” I hadn't expected to say that.
Ben simply reached across the table and took my hand. “Why?”
It seemed, as I told Ben about the little things which alarmed me, that maybe I was jumping to conclusions. They sounded so minor. I sounded so suspicious.
“I can't tell you you're right or wrong, I can only say that once trust is broken, it's almost impossible to fix it properly.”
I was feeling as if I had monopolized the evening with a dull bit of ancient history. I was tired of it and moved to change the subject. “Ben, it's an old story and one which comes nowhere close to the loss you've endured.”
“Unhappiness is unhappiness, Cleo. I think that maybe infidelity is pretty much the same as an accident. Sometimes it takes a while to assess the extent of the damage done.”
We let ourselves be quiet for a few minutes. Then Ben reached across the table and took my free hand. “Cleo, maybe the most important thing about your story is that you took a second chance. And I don't think that you've regretted it. But I never got a second chance. Talia never gave me one.”
“Why did you need one?”
“I let our lives grow apart.”
We danced. A slow dance to a bluesy song. Ben stood up and held out his hand to me. At first I shook my head, but he winked and smiled and wouldn't take no for an answer. “I wrote this tune. It's from Interior Angles' second album, so humor me.”
He placed a gentle hand on my waist, and held his other hand flat against mine. Again I was struck by what a good dancer he was. I had been so concerned with Sean's reaction the last time Ben asked me to dance, I couldn't give myself over to the pure enjoyment of it, of being skillfully moved around the tiny dance space. I felt how close our hips were as Ben leaned a little, how warm his hand was against my waist, how my fingers curled into his. When the dance ended I felt as though I had been kissed.
“We should go.” I said
“Yes. We should.” He answered.
Nineteen
It was after ten-thirty when we left the restaurant. After the air conditioning inside, the night heat was breathless. I drove slowly, not inebriated, but knowing that I'd had two glasses of good wine. We were very quiet in the big car.
We got to the cabin and it seemed natural that I should get out of the car and walk with him to the overturned canoe. I felt a strange reluctance to let Ben go, to let him paddle away across the dark lake. “Will you have a nightcap with me?”
Ben had already gotten to the canoe and flipped it over. “I should go.”
“Ben, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you ask me out tonight?”
Ben walked back up the path. I could just about make him out in the faint yellow of the porch light above us. “Why did you accept?” We stood very still in a moment of exquisite hesitation. He reached both hands to touch my face, then kissed me. It wasn't a quick, chaste kiss between friends. Now I took his face in my hands and kissed him. We let our tongues play experimentally. I felt a long-dulled desire flourish.
“I shouldn't have done that.” Ben brushed a lock of hair away from my cheek.
“I'm glad you did.” I touched the hand which touched my face.
“To get back at your husband for old sins?”
“No.” I might have said, “For new sins,” but the truth was, Ben's kiss was exactly what I needed. It had been so long since I had been kissed with more than marital affection. So long since my last first kiss, I'd forgotten how incredibly sweet and unexpected it could be. I didn't want him to think that I regarded such a sweet moment as anything else.
Ben's hand still touched my face. The porch light glittered in his brown eyes, and I could see that neither one of us would regret the moment.
“I should go,” he said again and gently pulled away.
“Thanks.” Our hands touched, fingertip to fingertip.
“Thanks?”
“For reminding me what it's like to live a little dangerously.”
He shoved the canoe into the water and climbed aboard. I watched until the darkness swallowed him.
I lay a long time awake, thinking about that kiss, about the fire it had ignited in a banked bed of embers. Oh, I was on dangerous ground. That's what I'd meant. I was playing an emotionally very risky game with a man who deserved to have someone come to him unencumbered. Nothing could come of teasing ourselves. Then I thought, Ben hasn't asked anything more of me and I don't believe he will. Satisfied with that, I told myself that we understood our boundaries and that we would not cross them. A kiss good-night was not so serious. Even such a one as we had just shared. True, he should not have kissed me and I should not have kissed him back. But I lay alone in my bed and gave myself the freedom to not regret it.
I woke at dawn wondering how we should greet one another when we met, as we surely would, on the raft.
I ran and then heated coffee to get my creative juices flowing. Jay and Karen were looking very dull to me and suddenly I was struck by the absolute certainty that Jay would cheat on Karen. It had to happen. For so long I'd been avoiding the adulterous plot in my novels, afraid that I would spill some truth out onto the page. Now, in telling Benson Turner my story, I had somehow broken the seal on the envelope and the contents were public record. I bent to the task and the morning flew by. Nothing about their story resembled mine. As always, the genetic material was shuffled and made wholly new.
Twenty
I had two loads' worth of laundry and was blessed to be only one of two people using the small laundromat this beautiful afternoon. I'd put in almost six hours of writing by one o'clock, choosing to stay put rather than go out to the raft. I didn't see Ben out there, either, and I imagined that he, too, was a little uncertain how we would greet each other this morning.
The heat in the rectangular yellow building was intense and I went outside to sit on one of the available picnic tables. The Dairy Bar was situated close by and I went over to buy a hot dog for lunch. Bees followed me from the Dairy Bar window right back to my picnic table. They seemed to like the smell of the relish I'd layered on my hot dog and I had to watch every bite I took not to eat one of them. Ben joined me almost as soon as I'd sat down.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I answered over a bite of hot dog. “Laundry day for you, too?”
“I came in to pick up my car.” Ben gestured toward the Cameo Lake Garage. “Timing belt this time. I think it may be time to put this one down.”
“My timing belt went just before I got here. That's why Grace lent me her SUV.” It was a little hard to believe that we could be having such a mundane conversation, as if the past evening had
been something I'd committed to paper, not memory.
“Grace hasn't been one of my fans now for over a year.”
“She has been misled.”
“At least she speaks to me when I see her.”
“Has she been blunt with you? I mean, Grace generally speaks her mind.”
“A little.”
“Poor Ben. I know how scathing Grace can be.”
“Oh, she wasn't exactly scathing. But she was blunt when she accused me of leaving the community out of the mourning process when I didn't have a funeral service.”
“Surely she knew that was your decision. It might have become a media event had you not.”
“Apparently, according to Grace, I robbed this community of something when I . . .” Ben turned his face away in an effort to chose his words. “When I didn't.”
“Do you think that's why they've been so unforgiving?”
“Part of it. That, and the part where they think I . . .”
“Ben, please don't say it.”
He didn't look at me for a moment. “It's the impression they were left with. To tell you the truth, it's one that I've encouraged in them.”
I wanted to reach over and brush the hair from his forehead, as I would had he been my child. But I settled for brushing the hair from my own forehead in sympathy. “Why, Ben?”
He didn't answer me, only shrugged away the question. I stood up to go collect my dried laundry. Ben caught at my arm as I crossed in front of him. “Can you give me an hour?”
I looked at my watch, I had some time before I had to go get the kids and I said as much to him. Then asked him why.
“I need to show you . . . I need you to see something.”
I threw my dried clothes into my basket without folding them. Ben took the basket and set it in my car and then we got into his aged Wagoneer. Within a few minutes we were on an unfamiliar road and moving away from the lake in a more or less westerly direction. Ben gave me nothing by way of preamble. No clue at all as to where we were going, except that it wasn't far, maybe only twenty minutes away. There was something in the set of his jaw which prevented me from demanding anything more. My only comments concerned the scenery, which was comprised mainly of trees and roadside shrubbery waving in the backwash as we sped past.