by Carol Mason
He brings a plate for himself and sits down opposite me. Our knees graze under the small table and I notice neither of us moves our legs. I wonder if he’s as in tune with this small but loaded detail as I.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.
I suspect he is referring to our conversation, not our kiss. ‘Better,’ I tell him. It’s the truth. This morning I didn’t wake up with that same sense of oppression, that feeling of being in a vessel without air. ‘Not sure what it means in the long run but I can’t deny I feel some benefit from having got so much out into the open finally.’
‘Did you manage any sleep?’
I nod. ‘Slept like a log. You?’
He looks at me with a steady gaze. ‘Not really.’
I scoop eggs on to an upturned fork. We sit without saying anything now, around us an aura of habitude and peace. I absorb the ambient chink-chink of his knife and fork, its own kind of companionable music. Even during our silence there is something so very reassuring about his presence. I’ve never really known a person be able to restore my equanimity by not even saying a word.
‘I ran into a man again who owns the boat yard at the far end of town,’ he says after a while. ‘You know it?’ He’s still wearing the towel over his shoulder, making him look so appealingly housebroken. I am alive with the ordinariness of all this, the unlikely, yet easy, domesticity of us.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ I say. ‘I’ve walked past it a few times. Older fellow. Red hair? Always smoking? He’s actually about the only person in this town who’s never bothered to give me their best interrogatory stare.’
‘Ah yes. No, he’s not that type of guy . . . He’s an ex-marine. Keeps himself to himself. I’ve chatted to him a few times. We got talking this morning and he said he’s taken on some new projects. I told him I might be able to help him out. Now that we know I’m OK with my hands.’
At the mention of his hands I think of them on the back of my neck, his thumb sliding along my jawline and down the centre of my throat, all the way to the tip of the V of my T-shirt. While my mind goes there he’s watching me with a certain mellowed-out fascination.
‘So you’ve landed yourself a job then?’
‘Don’t know if it’s that. I’m just going to help out and he’s going to pay me. So I suppose it probably is a job, yes. For now, anyway.’
‘The waitress and the carpenter. Sounds like light opera.’
He cocks me a borderline flirty look. ‘Ah, but you’re not a waitress, remember? You’re a barista. The barista and the carpenter doesn’t have quite the same ring.’
‘No.’ For some reason I think of an article I read a couple of weeks ago. ‘What sort of jobs do ex-SEALS usually do anyway?’ I ask, aware of needing to make the conversation benign. Then again, perhaps this is not the most appropriate topic, either.
‘Lots of things.’ He seems unfazed. ‘Private security, Homeland Security, military contracting, high-level business . . . The list is long.’
‘Any of those ever sounded appealing?’ I could absolutely see him as a bodyguard. Though, admittedly, my knowledge of this is limited to Kevin Costner and Denzel Washington movies.
‘Maybe at some point down the line,’ he says noncommittally. ‘One thing’s for sure, disability isn’t going to be enough forever, and I don’t want my son held back because his dad couldn’t get his shit together.’
With this sudden reminder of the existence of his family we meet eyes. ‘Hey,’ he says, after what feels like a long time. ‘If you’re worried about me then don’t be. It’ll come out OK in the end. I’ll be OK.’ Then he adds, ‘And I know you will too.’
It sounds so final. Is this his way of saying we are two roads that have come together but now must diverge? I look down at the stray morsel of egg on my placemat, stare at it until it starts to blur into a sunshine spot of colour. I am caught between wanting to be glad, and to panic. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say I’m not convinced it’s going to be OK for either of us. And yet the urge to say this swells up and dies. Instead I settle for just going with his words and being wrapped in his positivity.
Then I’m aware of the movement of his hand across the table. Gingerly I reach out my own until our fingers meet again. I am conscious of us both absorbing the significance of the fact that we are both still drawn to touch one another. But then I look up into his face. There is so much confusion in those eyes. So much confusion.
THIRTY-ONE
‘You got mail!’ As I walk in my garden gate, Nanette springs from her car. I had completely forgotten I’d invited her over to check out the new deck this morning.
‘Human mail,’ she says when I must look very puzzled.
‘Well then you’d better come on in,’ I tell her. I root around in my purse for my keys.
‘Ah, not today come in. Today Olibia busy!’ She cackles.
‘Huh?’ I feel like saying, Are you on drugs?
She takes backwards steps down the path. ‘Tomorrow! Tomorrow I get full status report . . . OK? On deck!’ She cackles again like we have a dirty secret.
Mystified, I watch her clamber back into her battered car. As she pulls away she waves frantically out of the window then lays on her horn, and it’s like I’m watching outtakes from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I shake my head, unlock the door and go in.
Mark is sitting on the sofa.
‘What on earth—?’ Suddenly Nanette’s silly business makes sense.
‘Hi,’ he says, and then, ‘Sorry.’
I shake my head in disbelief. ‘She just let you in? Because you asked?’
‘If it’s any consolation, I had to really persuade her,’ he says and then he beams a smile that’s trying really hard to be a typical Mark smile but not quite making it.
‘God.’ I throw my bag down on the chair. ‘I bet I could go and live on the moon—’
‘And I’d still find you,’ he finishes. ‘But you did give me your address. So admittedly it wasn’t that much of a challenge.’
The pen. I just find myself standing here and shaking my head.
‘Hey,’ he says, brighter. ‘I thought I’d stop by the local café for a latte. You know – Books and Beans. Heard of it?’ His expression changes to mild annoyance. ‘Got talking to your old pal Beth. You said you had a job, Olivia. You didn’t say you worked in a coffee house.’
‘I’m a barista,’ I say, a little defensive at the insult. It suddenly occurs to me that it’s just as well I’m not in hiding, running from an abusive relationship – with all these women freely giving out access to my life and my living room because he smiles nicely at them!
He studies me closely, letting my fit of pique come down a peg or two. ‘Where have you been anyway?’ he asks. ‘Your bed hasn’t been slept in. You look like the morning after the night before.’
‘You’ve been in my bedroom?’
‘Nanette and I were worried. We thought you might have had a coronary in your sleep.’
I am momentarily speechless. ‘If I must explain myself I went for a very early morning walk.’
He glances at my pointed-toe ballet flats. ‘Because we know you do that on a regular basis. Because we know you’re such a morning person.’
I take off my jacket and throw it on to a cushion next to him, feeling a little hot from the third degree. ‘Not sure you’ve really any right to question what I’m up to.’
‘Why?’ He narrows his eyes. ‘What are you up to?’ We stare at one another. ‘Oh, and by the way . . . your landlady happened to mention you’re paying her month to month. You didn’t sign any one-year lease. Lies are dangerous things, Olivia.’
‘You should know,’ I find myself saying flatly. ‘You’ve told a few.’
His face changes. ‘That’s a low blow.’
‘Why did you come here?’ I ask, suppressing emotions that are threatening to flood me. ‘Really, Mark? Isn’t life easier without me in the picture? I thought you’d be relieved . . .’
‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ he says after a moment or two, looking rather helpless again. ‘I figured if you won’t come home of your own accord I have to come and get you. Because this can’t go on. It can’t and it won’t. I won’t let it. Whatever fight is left in me, I’m going to fight for us. Whatever happens, I need to believe I tried.’
I sit down on the arm of the sofa, his indignation suddenly exhausting. ‘How do you plan on pulling that off?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. He looks at me as though he’s struggling to find a way to lighten the mood but has forgotten how. The old Mark would have had a witty rejoinder. It’s this loss that says more about him than anything else. ‘I just . . . I’m worried that the longer this goes, if I do nothing, you might think it’s because I feel nothing.’
The old me of not so long ago would have said, No need to worry there. You’ve already proven you feel nothing. But I no longer make myself feel better, brighter, braver by lashing out at Mark.
‘I thought you might make it easy for me,’ he says, defeated. ‘I thought after all this time there might have been some sort of small change.’
I stare at him sitting there, thinking, Change? But I have changed in some ways! Haven’t I? Though I don’t know how I would ever prove it to him, or if I even want to. It’s surreal to me that a mere couple of hours ago I was sitting across from Ned in his kitchen, in the path of sunlight, imagining it blossoming into some sort of new life, one that I like. All that is stripped away again and Mark is forcing reality back in my face when I was doing fine with the fantasy.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be having this conversation right now,’ I say. ‘I am better, I think. Well, not better. But . . . better than I was. And that’s because I came here. I got away from the daily reminders. And . . .’
I got away from you? But I can’t really say that because it isn’t exactly true.
I feel my brows knit with a surge of emotion. ‘And that’s why I’m not really ready to come back. Not yet . . .’ I look at him. ‘It doesn’t mean I won’t. But I won’t right now.’ Then I add, ‘I know I sound like a stuck record and I’m sorry.’ I have no idea why this man has any patience left with me, why I warrant it.
‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t. You don’t sound like a stuck record. And you have no need to be sorry.’
We look at one another and once again I’m assailed by all these confused emotions. I wish, if we were going to try again, that we could be on the other side of the bridge without needing to walk it. I wish I could wave a wand right now. I wish I could know.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking,’ he says, a tad brighter again. ‘Why don’t you keep this place on? I’m sure the rent’s cheap enough. Come home with me now. We’ll go to counselling as a couple. And if you need to come here for a little break for a day or two I’ve no problem with you doing that. In fact, maybe we can even come together some time . . . on a weekend – maybe it’ll be good for us . . . But I want you living back at home with me, under the same roof; I want our life to go on together in whatever shape and form it has to be for now, until it can be better again. I want you to at least try. I need you to do that for yourself, for me . . . and . . .’ He draws a breath. ‘I need you to do that for Jessica.’
At the mention of Jessica I stare with a hard vacancy across the room. I think of Ned telling me I was suffering from PTSD, and how valiantly I fought any idea that I might be deserving of help when I was the one still alive. Forces are pushing me towards helping myself right now. All I have to do is to allow the gentle nudge. And yet I hear myself saying, ‘I’m not ready for it.’ I frown, hating the echo of my own ineptitude.
‘I’m not asking you to be ready for it, Liv.’ He is firm with me. ‘The truth is you’re never going to feel you’re ready, and after all these many months I think even you know that. I’m asking you to stop indulging this, whatever it is, and to just make a decision. Come home and face up to things, up to life again. Face it with me . . .’
The word indulging rings in my brain. I hadn’t seen myself as doing that, but maybe he’s right. I have never asked myself what it really means to love or to feel loved. But if I did, somewhere in the answer would be this: it’s that fine line we all walk between honesty and hurtfulness, guiding and controlling, supporting while being fair. It’s seeing past imperfections without pretending they’re invisible, seeing the good in someone’s heart and remembering that even our most bungled deeds often spring gracelessly from there. Mark loves me. Every cell of my being is saying, Don’t squander this.
Mark has been my locus, my hearth. Without him the very concept of where I stand in relation to all that is around me is challenged. And yet now he’s here right in front of me, the balance is upset again. It would be so easy to say, OK, I will come home and I will let you help me. Help us. But a quiet voice is reminding me of the fragile inroads I have made here – they seem so much more pursuable than the giant challenge that awaits back there. So I say, ‘No. I’m sorry, I just can’t.’
I find him some time later down at the beach.
I join him in standing with our arms touching, a union of two people staring out to sea. It’s almost as if he fails to hear me or realise I’m here. He stands like a mast in light air, straight-backed and unmoving.
‘Why did it have to destroy us?’ he asks. He moves his head a quarter turn in my direction. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. It should have done the opposite, shouldn’t it? It should have made us even closer.’
I gaze at the sea trickling in and retreating from the waterline. ‘I don’t think it destroyed us. I think we just coped differently with it.’
I can almost feel him thinking this through, as though I’ve said something highly insightful. ‘We can try again. To do better,’ he says. ‘Can’t we?’ Then as though anticipating my answer, ‘Why can’t we?’
I look at his sad, tired face. ‘Too much water under the bridge?’
His eyes fix on mine, blonde brows knitting. ‘No. I don’t agree. What water?’
It’s like we’ve just opened a floodgate and I am hit with the most incredible compulsion to just say what I need to say without always stopping myself, without always holding back. ‘I wanted more from you, Mark. I know it’s wrong, you had your own stress and sadness, but frankly it just wasn’t the same as what I was dealing with . . . I don’t feel I had a partner who was truly there. I needed you to listen when I said I needed to talk. To understand that if I was asking for it, when I so rarely have, then you had to try. But you had no patience for it.’
‘That’s not true. I just wanted you to stop going on about Sarah. Sarah . . .’
‘Because that was my way of dealing with everything! Don’t you see? I don’t know why you can’t see that . . .’
I am feeling a little out of breath but I’m determined to get out what I want to say without letting emotion override it.
‘The whole for better, for worse thing . . . I can’t help but think you love me, yes, but you love me when I’m fine. You have a limited reserve of sympathy when I’m not. Emotionally you jumped ship when I needed you there as my anchor. You turned to somebody else. And I know you don’t see it that way. Perhaps you never will. But it feels like you let another woman into that very private place that should have been just for us, and that makes what we have not so special any more. And I am worried what this says for us going forward.’
‘It’s incomprehensible to me how you can keep harping on about Meleni.’
I am almost immune to his intransigence on this now. ‘It’s not really about her or anyone else.’ I try to say it calmly. ‘It’s about you and it’s about me. And it’s about how we are different now. How we view each other differently.’
‘I don’t view you any differently. Why would I?’
The answer beats there. I can’t say, Because I changed your life. All our lives . . .
After a time he says, ‘I needed someone to talk to as well. You’d forbidden me from
speaking of it to anyone who we knew because of this insistence it got kept within our four walls. I was terrified of even running into neighbours, always dodging everybody, heading off their questions . . . careful how I trod. It was a living nightmare. And you know what, I was living a nightmare that never got acknowledged because yours got to be bigger . . .’
His face is flushed from the sun. It hurts my ears to hear his side. Yet I can’t contradict him. He’s absolutely right.
‘It’s hard living with somebody day in and day out who you can’t reach, who is mad at you because you can’t feel the sum of their pain the way they feel it themselves. Who you can’t even ask, Can we figure what’s going on with us? Because they’ve retreated so far into themselves that there isn’t an us . . . Meleni listened. She had perspective I didn’t have myself. She didn’t know anyone we know. She wasn’t going to run her mouth off to anybody. She had no agenda. I promise you.’
No agenda? ‘She knew you were attracted to her from day one. You knew she knew and you sort of led her on.’ He can’t be so dumb as to not see this.
‘How do you make that out?’ His bemusement says perhaps he is.
‘You’re older, attractive, high up in your job . . . When you were sitting there in that courtyard outside of Neiman’s in front of the fire pit having a nice cosy drink with her, confiding in her about your pain and the state of your marriage, you were basically telling her, I’m vulnerable. I may be available. How can you not see it?’
‘How do you know about us sitting outside of Neiman’s?’ He is genuinely astonished. Then he adds, ‘Been sitting on a bus spying on me again?’
‘I didn’t know that, actually,’ I say, surprising myself and giving myself a second’s pause. I honestly didn’t. ‘But it’s what you would do, isn’t it?’ I feel like saying, Because it’s what you would do with me.
‘Jesus.’ He wipes a hand over his mouth. ‘You leave me lost for words, you know that?’
‘Well, sadly not lost enough . . .’ I say it without even a hint of bitterness.