‘Why, is he a homophobe or something?’
‘No, you couldn’t accuse him of that. As a matter of fact his younger brother is gay, although he’s yet to officially come out.’
‘You don’t think I’m gay do you?’ he said slyly. With that he quickly scanned the horizon, then leant down (I was sitting at my desk) and kissed me slowly on the neck.
I felt my insides contract with that now familiar feeling but I had to reprimand him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Relax, I checked, there’s no-one around.’
***
It took me a few days to realise that I was not the only one struck by the green-eyed monster after our chance encounter in the shadows of the Opera House.
It was a Wednesday night, and I was once again alone with Alex in his bed. We had just made love, me on top. Alex lay on his back, looking like the cat that had swallowed the canary.
‘You like that position best, I think?’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I can tell when you come - the intensity seems greater.’
‘Hmm, I like watching you.’
But then his expression changed - to what? I wasn’t sure until he spoke. ‘So tell me…what position does Tony like best?’
‘What?’
‘What position does your husband enjoy best?’
‘Why are you asking me that? You know I can’t talk about that sort of thing.’
‘Okay tell me this. Are you still having sex with him?’
‘Yes, but hardly ever. [‘Hardly ever’ if you used the criteria of a honeymooner maybe, but remember I was an accomplished liar by this stage.] He might get suspicious if I said no altogether.’
‘Lots of wives do say no, I hear. The thing is I had this impression that you were barely speaking to one another, but when I saw you together the other night I didn’t get that vibe at all. You seemed almost cosy.’
‘You know that people always present their best face in public.’
‘Even so - he didn’t look like a guy who was just about to walk out on you.’
‘Where did this all come from? You seemed fine about things on Friday.’
‘I don’t know…I tried not to let it worry me. But while you’ve been playing happy families all weekend I’ve had time to think - too much time probably.’
‘Okay, there has been a complication, which I suppose I should have told you about before now. The other day [actually it was more than two months earlier but I didn’t think telling the truth would be to my advantage here] I gave him an ultimatum. I said we should talk about separating soon if things didn’t improve. Anyway, he’s now saying he doesn’t want to split up and has been being making more of an effort. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this.’
‘Oh great - so where does that leave us then?’
‘Look I’m sure his behaviour won’t last. He’s made similar promises before and not kept them.’
‘What if he does this time? After seeing him I have a whole different understanding of why you might want to stay.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well I wasn’t expecting you to be married to an ugly guy, but then again I wasn’t expecting you to be married to…I don’t know…Thor the God of Thunder.’
‘Oh get lost. You’re just as good looking as Tony - better, if you ask me.’
‘No, I’m not. I look like a bloody girl. All guys want to be the big macho guy and ultimately that’s what girls like best, too.’
‘Not this girl. I love your body,’ I said, although the Ellie of ten years earlier might have agreed with him. Back then, I’d felt that nothing could go wrong when I was enclosed in my husband’s big, strong arms. Of course that all proved to be an illusion - he’d been unable to protect me from the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Instead he had hurt me, never physically, but viscerally just the same. Now my tastes were more refined I found Alex’s sleekly-muscled body just as desirable. That statement, at least, wasn’t a lie.
‘This is not about dick size is it?’ I asked. I knew this was a loaded topic with men.
‘No! I am more than happy with myself in that department. Why, shouldn’t I be?’
‘Yes…I mean no…I mean you should be happy! Besides…’
‘Besides what?’
‘No nothing.’
‘No tell me.’
‘I shouldn’t really say this…but…you’re a better lover than him.’
‘Now you’re just saying that to make me feel better.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Well give me an example.’
‘That would be inappropriate. Let’s just say you’re more inventive.’
‘Oh come on now you’ll have to give me more than that otherwise I’ll think you’re just making it up.’
‘Hmm…well okay…I’ll go for the most obvious. You know the expression it’s better to give than to receive.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, when it comes to oral sex, I don’t think Tony really believes that.’
‘What, he never…’
‘No - not never - but only when he’s had a bit to drink and even then not particularly enthusiastically. I think it might have something to do with his germ phobia. And believe me when someone is doing it just to be polite, you’d really rather they not bother.’
‘Really, I can’t believe that…I love it.’
‘Yes, I’d noticed. It’s one of my favourite things about you.’
‘So you’re not staying because you’d prefer to be with him.’
‘No, that’s not it at all. It’s all about my daughter.’
Now girls, if you ever want to make your man really happy tell him he is a better lover than his rivals (past and present), although it would probably be better for all concerned if it was actually true, otherwise there would be no incentive for him to lift his game. Fortunately in my case it did happen to be true. Alex swaggered around like a Wild West gunslinger for several days after that.
I, on the other hand, felt dreadful. In my eagerness to appease Alex I had revealed personal confidences about Tony that I should never have. I had broken those rules of engagement in the worst possible way and been disloyal to a husband who, whatever his past sins, was currently trying his best to woo me back. It’s peculiar but I felt this was even worse a betrayal than having sex with Alex. I think it was about this time that my conscience started to reassert itself and the good twin got a few grasping outstretched fingers back on the controls. She hadn’t disappeared completely, it seemed.
17
A fork in the road
Not long after this Tony announced he was taking some time off work. He said he was impatient to finish off the formal dining room so we could finally look at selling the house. Part of me was reluctant to give up my home - it now looked fabulous - but it was also the repository of lots of unhappy memories so I agreed in principle. If Tony had suggested this a few months earlier I would have thought he was finalising things so we could cut our losses and part company. Now that seemed a lot less likely. However, the net result was he would be home for nearly three weeks straight, which was not good news for Alex and me.
By the end of this period Alex was getting twitchy, so at my suggestion we hired a room for a few hours one Friday afternoon after lunch, telling Melanie that we were going to an off-site meeting to ‘discuss strategy’. This was veering scarily into clichéd territory: the illicit affair. Up until now we’d always been at Alex’s place and I’d been able to pretend that there wasn’t anything particularly grubby or underhanded about what I’d been doing, but our afternoon rendezvous in an anonymous hotel room quickly put pay to that illusion.
Alex didn’t like it either. He approached the physical side with customary enthusiasm, but afterwards was quiet and obviously not happy. ‘This is tacky
,’ he said after a while.
‘No,’ I joked half-heartedly, ‘it’s only tacky if you go to cheap motels. I paid the bill and this place is really quite expensive.’
‘Don’t joke. I’m serious. I don’t want to do this anymore.’
‘Oh,’ I said. This all seemed very sudden. ‘What do you mean by that? That you want to call it quits? If so, that’s going to make things difficult at work…’
‘I don’t mean I want to end our relationship. Oh honestly, how could you think that? I want to end the sneaking around. I want to have a proper relationship with you. I want to go out to dinner with you, and to hold your hand in public and for us to hang out with my friends together. I want us to move in together actually.’
‘Well if you wanted those things you shouldn’t have pursued a married woman.’
‘I didn’t choose to pursue a married woman, as I’ve told you many times. I just fell in love.’
Jesus Christ, I thought, did he mention the L word?
‘Don’t look at me as if I have two heads. You must know that I am in love with you. It’s not like I haven’t told you before. [He had, of course, but I’d always thought it was just an expression, not an emotion.] What do you think I put up with all this shit for - the sex? I could get that every night of the week if I wanted, with girls that don’t have husbands at home.’
‘Well why don’t you?’ I snapped.
‘Because I am in love with you,’ said the remedial romance teacher, rapidly losing patience with a particularly dull student. ‘And I want you to leave your husband. You said it was going to happen early on and now it seems it’s not.’
‘I can’t just leave, Alex. It’s not that simple. If Tony found out about us he would crucify me. And his family would too - his mother hates me, remember. They would go after custody of Isabel just to spite me and they are loaded, so there is a good chance they’d win. I can’t risk losing another child, I just can’t.’
‘So what’s meant to happen? We go on like this until when? Do you love me or not?’
‘Yes,’ I said because it seemed the socially appropriate thing to say under the circumstances, but until that moment I’d never paused to consider whether I was actually in love with Alex - it had always seemed more convenient to describe what I was feeling as lust. But if I was honest with myself I knew it was more than that. He was constantly in my thoughts all those hours we spent apart and I would save up funny anecdotes from my weekends, thinking, I must tell Alex this. I genuinely liked him too. In all the time I’d spent with him I never saw cause to change my original opinion that he was a nice guy, remarkably lacking in those insecurities and vanities that beset lesser men. He was also easy to talk to, in a way that Tony was never going to be.
Was that love? I was much less confident I knew what love was at thirty-four than I did at twenty-four, at that time when I’d not long become involved with Tony. The only people I knew without doubt I loved were Isabel - with the burning fire of mother love - and my flesh and blood relatives: Mum and Dad, David and Emma. The so-called ‘romantic’ love between a man and a woman seemed a much more temperamental beast, contingent on circumstance and on each party behaving in a way that was acceptable to the other.
How could Alex be so sure of his feelings? I was completely taken aback by the confidence of his declaration after only three months of secretly-snatched togetherness. It had taken me a full year to extract anything similar from Tony and only then with a lot of prodding. Were they even experiencing the same emotion? Was ‘love’ different for every one of us?
Alex brought me back from my thoughts into the real world: ‘Well, can’t you just leave him? He’s given you enough reason over the years. Just say you want to live apart and I’ll stay in the background for six months or so and then we can pretend to start something after that. Then we could move in together - you, me and Isabel - I know you come as a package deal.’
‘Yes, I suppose that might work, although…’
‘Stop thinking of excuses or I’ll think you don’t mean it. Please think about it. I can’t do this for much longer.’
We’d had limited time together because I had to pick up Isabel by 5.30pm but in the end we showered, separately, and checked out early. Our hearts were no longer in it. Isabel wanted to chat on the drive home, but I managed to pacify her with a Play School CD to sing along with. My temples throbbed from the sheer weight of thoughts crowding my brain.
Could it be possible? Could I leave Tony for Alex and get away with it? Did I have the courage? More to the point, did I have the selfishness? I had told Alex that the only thing keeping Tony and me together was Isabel. That had been true a few months ago, but was it now? Tony seemed to be genuinely committed this time and perhaps it was time to forgive him and do the same. My child deserved that. My marriage deserved that. As curious as it seemed for a woman in my current position I had taken my wedding vows seriously.
But the thought of giving up Alex seemed unbearably painful. Perhaps I was in love with him after all…
And what if he took it badly? No, there was no ‘if’ - I knew he would. He might tell Tony anyway to spite me and then I would lose both of them…and Isabel…
Oh God - you are a fucking idiot Eleanor. What a fine mess you’ve got yourself into.
I was expecting to find Tony covered in his usual film of paint dust when we got home but he was freshly showered and dressed and had a bottle of champagne, Bollinger in fact, on ice. Something big was up.
‘I have the best news. I got an email from management today approving my transfer back to the passenger fleet.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘How long have you known about this? Why didn’t you tell me this was on the cards?’
‘I didn’t think it was on the cards. Some vacancies came up in the 747 fleet and I applied on the off chance, but not expecting it to happen. We’ve lost quite a few guys already from the Sydney base so I didn’t think they’d let me go. Anyway for whatever reason they’ve turned around and given the okay. I’ve given up trying to predict how management are going to act.’
‘But that means you will need to be based in Hong Kong, doesn’t it? So you want us to live apart?’
Could this be my out?
‘No, of course not, I want us to live there. That’s why I’ve been keen to finish the house. I mean we could rent it out but then tenants might not look after it. The market is hot at the moment and it would be better to sell and invest the money. Cathay will subsidise our accommodation in Hong Kong. There’s a great expat community there. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
‘And what about me? What about my job?’
‘Well there’d be lots of positions in Hong Kong but I thought you might want to use it as an opportunity to have another baby. Mum says that Isabel is getting a bit spoilt now and needs a new brother or sister to settle her down.’
‘Oh does she now! Well when we have babies things don’t seem to go so well for us so you can see why I might be reluctant.’
‘But we would have a maid in Hong Kong. Things will be much easier for you.’
‘I can’t believe you didn’t even think to tell me that this was a possibility. This is a huge life change. When are you ever going to learn that marriage is about communication?’
I ran into the bedroom and lay on our bed and started sobbing my eyes out.
While I was there I started thinking: How dare he decide this without me. I’m his wife, not his goods and chattels. I’ll make him go without us. I’ll say I want to stay. And then eventually we’ll drift apart, and I will be able to ask for a separation, and then I will be able to be with Alex.
As I lay there crying, Isabel came in. ‘Mummy, Mummy, what’s the matter? Don’t be sad, Mummy,’ she said and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Are you better now?’
‘Mummy will be fine soon darling, I just need a little rest,’
I said, smiling at this little show of affection in spite of myself. Issy’s kisses had miraculous qualities but even they did not have the power to solve my current problems.
Tony entered the room. ‘Now Issy, Mummy is feeling a little tired at the moment so why don’t I get you dinner and you can watch a DVD as a special treat.’
‘I want Dora the Explorer.’
After he’d settled Isabel, Tony returned to the bedroom. I was still lying in the same position, face down on the bed, but my tears had dried by now and I was collecting my thoughts.
Then he behaved in a way that turned all my plotting on its head.
First of all he said, ‘I’m sorry. It was stupid of me not to tell you but I really didn’t think it would come off this time. Do you want me to knock it back - I could say “family reasons” or something - and reapply a bit later, when you feel you’re more ready?’
‘You know I could never ask you to do that. It’s obvious you’re not happy where you are now. And I don’t think it would be a good idea to get management offside by suddenly changing your mind. But why don’t you go ahead to Hong Kong and Isabel and I can follow in six months or a year or so, once you’re settled.’
‘Because I don’t want to go without you two, of course. I don’t think the separation would be good for our marriage…just when we seem to be getting on better.’ As he spoke he started massaging my neck and shoulders. ‘God, your shoulders are tense.’
There was nothing sexual in this gesture; it was just tenderness. I think it was the feel of his touch and something in his manner…a lack of defensiveness perhaps…that made me feel he was genuinely seeking redemption this time.
‘I need a drink,’ I said after a while. ‘Get that champagne will you.’
‘Okay.’ He wasn’t sure of the significance of my decision to open the champagne. I wasn’t even sure myself.
He uncorked the bottle and poured each of us a glass as I sat cross-legged on the bed. I took a sip or two and said, ‘My problem is that I’ve never felt that you were genuinely sorry for all the hurt you have caused me and I’m worried that if we head off to Hong Kong it will happen again, and this time I will have no family there to support me.’
Happily Ever After? Page 21