by Robyn Carr
“We had an affair that messed us both up,” he said. “Since we’re still fighting like we used to, maybe we’re still not through this. Shouldn’t we talk about it? Rationally?”
She looked into his dark brown eyes. He had eyes like Bambi. Eyes you could fall into and drown. Arms by Adonis, face by Prince Charming, temperament by Attila the Hun. She smiled at him. “You have a ponytail.”
He had to think for a minute. “Oh, yeah. It’s not a bad ponytail, though. Is it?”
“No,” she said. Ponytails were in again, but with John it was unclear whether he was being fashionable or lazy. In her memory of him, fashion was low on his list of priorities. Fashion, children and commitment. But he was such a cute renegade. “The Steak House?”
“Yeah. Let’s get your keys.” He lifted his hand toward her elbow and let it sort of hover there, undecided. Then, with a contrite, helpless look, touched her briefly. She felt a tremor. She knew she was in up to her neck right now. If he touched her again, she would crumble.
Four
Leigh arrived at seven, and John was already there. She wore a silk jumpsuit with a decorative scarf slung over one shoulder, earrings made of shells, and beige flats. She looked fashionably chic according to Jess, who had cheerfully—maybe too cheerfully—checked her over before she went out the door. This time Leigh was not pretending to join the Sierra Club. “You’ll be delighted to know that your favorite maintenance man has asked me to meet him for a glass of wine,” she had said.
John wore jeans, but decent jeans without holes, and something resembling a polo shirt with a sweater over it. To look at them, no one would know how scared they both were of this meeting. And they were both terrified of the identical things, that their love affair would officially end—and that it would carry on from where they had left it. She had a glass of wine and he a beer. They were on their second round before their words began to work.
“So,” he started, “what happened?”
“When?”
“You came back, you said, and found out I was married. I’ll tell you what happened to me if you tell me what happened to you. So what happened before that, in Los Altos?”
“Oh, it was dreadful. Max, who was recovering from one heart seizure, almost had another one. He was furious with me.”
“Why?” he asked.
She just looked up at him with that blank, bewildered, aren’t-you-able-to-keep-up-with-this? look of hers.
“For being pregnant?” he asked.
She nodded. “He said he felt betrayed... That’s what he said. I couldn’t understand that at all. I mean, it isn’t as though I did it on purpose. And there I was...pregnant. Part of me was thrilled beyond my wildest dreams... The other half was amazed at how foolish I’d been. If it hadn’t been for my mother, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, remembering the way Leigh could get so far ahead of herself, or begin her stories at the end and go backward. He had no doubt she could deliver a dissertation in clear language, but when it came to real life, she meandered. “Slow down, Leigh. He was angry about your pregnancy? Didn’t he want to be a father?”
“No,” she answered in apparent surprise. “Of course not. I know I told you that.”
“I know he didn’t think he wanted to, but after you told him you were... ” She was shaking her head, looking stunned. “That’s a damn shame,” John said sincerely. “Even men who think they aren’t ready for children usually act civilized when they find out their wife is expecting. I think I would.”
Her eyes grew amazingly round, and she looked at him strangely, as if she didn’t understand what he was saying. Finally, as though she had shaken herself free of some complex notion, she said, “You said you didn’t want to be a father.”
“Well, hell, I was being honest at the time. But I think I would have faced the prospect a bit more reasonably than Max did. I don’t think I would have accused you of betrayal.”
“Wait a minute here,” she began. “What do you think you would have done? If you’d discovered your wife, for example, was pregnant?”
“We would have had to work on our marriage.” He shrugged. “Harder,” he added, in case anyone thought he hadn’t tried.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “John...have you seen the boys?” she asked.
“No. Just a picture. Jess asked me if I’d take them fishing sometime. They’re pretty cute, but they don’t look like twins. I guess the dark one looks like his father.”
Leigh swallowed and nodded.
“Jess knows I coach Little League, and I still work the ski patrol in winter, part-time, and instruct kids in downhill. She said they’re real hellions,” he added, smiling. He rested his hand on her forearm.
“John,” she said, twirling her wineglass by the stem. “I’m not sure which one of us messed up worse...you or me.”
“How about if we just leave it in the past and go from here?”
“I don’t know if that will work. The past is following us around. And besides...go where?”
“Take a little drink of that wine, Leigh. Let’s get out of here for the rest of this conversation...in case it gets personal.”
“I think the rest of this conversation is going to be real easy and involve one little word,” she said softly. “No.”
“...‘No’ to what?” John asked.
“I’m not willing to pick this up where we left it, John. It hurt me too much. Even though it was at least as much my fault as yours, it was still very painful.”
John caressed her forearm. Boy, did he understand that. He was all through being belligerent and touchy; besides, she was right. All he wanted was to put an arm around her shoulders, maybe hold her hand, and talk about it. He had to resolve things with this woman for whom he’d carried a big, heavy torch for five years. Okay, he did want to see if being close to her caused him to feel the old feeling that he would never get close enough. But he only wanted to know. He wasn’t going to go crazy. Right away.
“Let’s go for a walk, huh? Alone? Talk a little. And I promise, you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.” He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
* * *
“You were never a Boy Scout, were you?” she asked later.
“No.”
“I should have known,” she said.
“It was only one kiss,” he said. “I just wanted to check and see if it was as good as I remembered.”
“And was it?”
“Yep. But what that means, I guess, is that it can be just as bad as it was, too. So we’d better finish that conversation.”
They had abandoned their walk because the April night was a bit too brisk and chilled them into the shivers. They were in his truck, parked up on a ridge from which they could see a million miles out into the sky and across the land. If they’d been looking out, that is. With his lips on hers, it was inward that Leigh was looking.
There were things she had learned about herself since the last time they had kissed. She was going to have a lot of startling information for John...but, like a coward, she decided to start slow and sneak up on it.
For example, she explained, her adolescence had been very lonely. She was a woman who had reached her intellectual peak at eighteen and had entered puberty—at least emotionally—at twenty-seven.
John hummed in appreciation, though what he really wanted was to be kissing her neck. He was smart enough to keep that to himself.
Next she went on to explain her marriage, which she knew she had never adequately explained to John before. She and Max had rarely made love. They were a team in the lab; he was her mentor. Since she had never had any friends her own age, since she’d never had a boyfriend in her entire life, she hadn’t realized her relationship with Max was peculiar. If she hadn’t fall
en into a “thing” with John, she might not know even now.
“But you’re so gorgeous... ”
She shook her head. “I didn’t think of myself as attractive. Honest. I thought I was a freak. I never dated anyone. I was twenty before I realized my colleagues were intimidated by me, and women seemed to really dislike me. Well, except older, more matronly intellectual women, and scientists. But maybe the hardest thing about living that kind of life is that if you have a terrifically busy mind, it’s fairly easy to avoid looking closely at your personal life. I never bothered to examine my unhappiness closely, because it was easy for me to find something else to think about. It’s a dysfunctional behavior.”
“Maybe a lot of people would like to have something better to think about than their problems,” he suggested.
“No, John, I’m not talking about avoiding self-pity. I’m talking about denying what’s going on in your life. The problem with denial is its finite... At some point you run out of it. Usually, by then, whatever you’re denying is bigger than you are.” She paused briefly and smiled at him. “I almost had what some people call a nervous breakdown when I found myself trying to juggle two tiny little boys,” she said quietly. “Two five-pounders...counting on me. I couldn’t give them a good life because I had no idea what a good life was. I didn’t even know what good was. So Jess came to L.A. to help me, and I went to a counselor—a wonderful counselor who helps kids with abnormally high IQs adapt socially. I was her first twenty-eight-year-old kid.”
John was quiet, and she wondered if he was able to understand, fully understand, the significance their relationship had held for her. But apparently he wasn’t. “I guess I never thought of your life as hard. I guess I never thought of you as not smart enough to know what to do.”
She chewed her lip a little. She should do a scholarly paper on this. She had felt—had been—a misfit. She never learned the eighth-grade boy-girl dynamic, because when other thirteen-year-old girls were finding out how to flirt, she was taking Physics II at the university as part of the gifted program. When other girls were crying because they didn’t get asked to the prom, Leigh was crying because she hadn’t been admitted to a master’s program to which she had applied. One of the neighbor girls flunked her driving test; Leigh lost out on a major grant. When she got her first period her classmate, a twenty-year-old coed who was wearing an IUD, told her to “Stay cool, doll face, and just pin this little puppy in your panties like so, and pretty soon you’ll graduate to tampons...”
“Ever have a friend face you with his envy?” she asked John. “With real hot jealousy? Like when you win a medal skiing, and you complain a little because your muscles hurt, your bank account is dried up, your best girl left you because she wasn’t getting enough attention while you trained, and you’re exhausted. I mean, you worked so hard for it! And the friend says something like, ‘Yeah, yeah, cry me a river...didja win or not?’...”
John thought about that for a long time before he replied. He had never been gifted in anything except getting along. He was good at a lot of things, but he wasn’t the best at much. He had to remember way back to just before he went into the navy, when he had competed in downhill skiing. He’d gotten into a fistfight with some loudmouth jerk who was taunting him about having some secret “advantage.” Hell, John had about killed himself in training and had taken enormous risks. After a while he’d guessed the guy was just jealous. “Yeah. Yeah, I have.”
“I never,” she said seriously, “had otherwise.”
“I was never jealous of you...”
“Oh, John, I know that. But I’d like you to understand why I have never known what to do with a boyfriend... With a lover. I never had one. Never. Max wasn’t a boyfriend or a lover. We married in a state of confusion and inertia. He was leaving a project at Columbia to take on a new one at Stanford. He wanted me to go along... It wasn’t exactly true love, though I suppose Max loved me as much as he could.
“Then I met you and had no idea what hit me. It was my very first acquaintance with real lovemaking. I think that’s why we weren’t able to salvage anything. Too complicated. Not enough experience on my part.”
“What do you really want, Leigh?”
“Not a lot, actually. I want to be a good mother and have some friends. I just want to be okay like I am. Acceptable. There are a lot of reasons why I was disappointed that we weren’t able to work things out. Just one is that I haven’t had much fun since we went our separate ways. I know you think I’m a pain, clumsy, forgetful...but I had fun camping and hiking. We used to laugh a lot. I think I might like to learn to ski...”
John frowned as the mental picture of Leigh tripping around the slopes, getting lost and falling down came to mind. Well, there were bunny slopes... How did she imagine she was going to raise two boys?
“I’d at least like my kids to learn to ski and play ball... They already love anything physical and don’t read anything that isn’t previewed on the Saturday morning cartoons. They’re completely normal.”
John had discovered, in the years since Leigh had left him, that he actually liked kids. He wouldn’t mind taking her boys to a ball game or a ski lesson. Getting them early like this, they might do pretty well.
“You’re going to stay here, then?” he asked.
“There’s a trust from my father’s estate that I could use to live modestly but comfortably, but I plan to work. I’ve been studying ethics. I’m doing a paper on the ethics of scientific research called ‘The Fear of New Knowledge.’ It could turn into a book.”
“How about the fear of old knowledge?” he asked. And old lovers? “What got you interested in ethics?”
“It’s profoundly interesting, both simple and highly complex,” she said. “What’s your definition of ethics?”
He shrugged. “It isn’t too complicated to me. Honesty, fairness, decency, knowing the difference between right and wrong. Treating people nicely, the way you’d want to be treated.”
She leaned against the seat, looking out over the vast Colorado terrain, dimly lit by the moon. She was beginning to feel safe. She sighed deeply. She wouldn’t bother to tell him that he was right—exactly, absolutely right—and that still she could make a whole profession out of the study. Part of the study would show that the real role models for ethical behavior were people who naturally did the “right thing” without studying the subject. It wasn’t as though ethical people were flawless or never made mistakes; they sought rightness and rectified mistakes when they could. Like John.
Which was why she hadn’t argued for one second when Jess called and said, “I need you to come home.” She was grateful; she had needed a nudge. There were lots of “rights” in there. Of course you came home when your mother, who had been your life raft every time you ever got into trouble, called. And also, Leigh had already been thinking of returning to see if she could tidy things up with John, bury the hatchet and see if there was a way to get along. She’d expected to find him married and had prepared herself to negotiate friendship with him and his wife. And she hadn’t made this decision during her preliminary study of ethics, either. Rather, she had known all along it was the right thing to do. However tough it was for her and John to see eye to eye, she knew he was a good and honest man who would naturally do the right thing—and she needed such a man to be a role model for her sons.
For his sons.
“So,” John said, “what’s next?”
“Do you think it’s possible for us to be friends?”
“Well, anything’s possible. But what might make it hard is that I remember,” said John, “when I held you before. I remembered holding you at the weirdest times. I missed you so much, Leigh. I never told you how much you meant to me. I missed all my good chances to say all the right things, all the smart things. I was absolutely crazy in love with you, and scared to death... You fascinated me. You terrified me.
All I can say is thanks...for coming back and making an effort to be friends again, to work things out... I’m such a—hey! Why are you crying?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Oh, Leigh, it’s okay. C’mere. It’s okay to come here so I can put an arm around you while you—”
“Easy does it, John. Let’s go slowly... Please...?” But she was moving into the protective circle of his arm just the same. She felt so good, so secure, when she curled up against him like this and let herself pretend, for just a second, that there was someone to lean on, someone to care for her.
“Yeah, that’s livin’ right... Let’s pretend everything is okay. Okay?”
“Okay.”
* * *
Leigh put a hand on Jess’s shoulder to rouse her. “I’m home. You didn’t have to wait up.”
“Hmm? Oh, I didn’t mean to wait up. I must have dozed off. Did you have a nice time, dear?”
“Yes, Mom. You feeling okay?”
“Sure,” she said, and yawned. “Sure I am. Just dozed off. Did you discuss the landscaping with John?”
“Yes. I think we’ve covered everything.”
“Isn’t he a nice young man?” Jess pushed.
“Yes, Mom. I’m going to bed.”
“Do you think you’ll be seeing him again?”
“I’m sure I’ll see a lot of him, since he’ll be working on the yard for weeks. G’night.”
Jess frowned. “Leigh, have you been crying? Your eyes are all red around the edges.”
“Me? I never cry.”
Never used to, Jess thought. Only love can really bring on the tears.
“It must have been the cigarette smoke in the Steak House.”
“Ah,” said Jess. But Leigh didn’t smell of smoke. She smelled slightly of woodsy aftershave. Jess hid her smile.