Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  “She said she and I were…how did she put it? The outer corners of a trapezoid.”

  “What?” Joelle would have laughed if she hadn’t been so upset.

  “There are four people involved, so we can’t be a triangle. But we’re not a square, because we’ve got different investments in this situation. So we’re a trapezoid.” He must have sensed Joelle’s bemusement, because he shrugged. “I’m just quoting her.”

  “Yes, we aren’t a triangle,” Joelle said. Besides, a triangle would imply there was something going on between her and Drew.

  He shrugged again. “She said she was still in shock from the news that her husband had fathered a child out of wedlock. She just learned about it a few weeks ago.”

  “So did he,” Joelle pointed out. “Until he hired that detective to find me, he had no idea that I hadn’t used his money to get an abortion.”

  “He knew he’d knocked you up,” Bobby reminded her, his voice taking on an edge of its own. His words were cold and bitter.

  “So…what? His wife decided to get together with you and plot against Drew?” And against me? she almost added.

  “We didn’t plot anything.” He swallowed some ginger ale and leaned back in his chair. His eyes were tired, his mouth grim. “She wants her son to have a chance. I felt sorry for her. Her kid is critically ill and her husband is a freaking son of a bitch. So she wanted to drink a wine cooler and vent a little. No harm in that.”

  Like hell. Bobby had given this poor grieving woman his shoulder to lean on, and all the while Joelle had been home, exerting herself to prepare yet another special dinner for him while she fretted about how to mend their marriage. “You could have called and told me you’d be late. I was worried. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Yes, you did. Harriet Briggs told you.” He drank some more soda. “I had a drink and a conversation with a woman, and you automatically assumed the worst.”

  “Bobby—”

  He peered up at her and she noticed more than weariness in his eyes. “What did you think? I was doing something wrong with this woman? Having an affair? What?” His gaze was stormy. “You have that little faith in me?”

  “Of course I have faith in you,” she said, but her voice wavered and she averted her eyes. Yes, she’d assumed the worst. Given the current state of their marriage, given that the last time Bobby had touched her she’d instigated it and he’d wound up pounding into her like someone crazed, she’d assumed the absolute worst.

  At one time she’d had faith in Bobby, in herself, in their marriage. But tonight…the faith wasn’t there.

  “What have I done that would make you stop trusting me?” he challenged her.

  “Three days ago you came home drunk.”

  He scowled. “Lots of men come home drunk every day. My father did.”

  “And I haven’t been able to talk to you. There’s all this anger. You resent me.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It’s there, Bobby. In the silence. In everything you don’t say, everything you won’t tell me. All I feel coming from you these days is hostility.”

  His scowl intensified, making her feel even more hostility.

  “Maybe we should get counseling,” she said, then braced herself for his response.

  As she’d expected, it wasn’t positive. He hammered his fist against the table. “I’m not going to bare my soul in front of a total stranger.”

  “But we can’t talk anymore. Maybe a therapist would help get us talking.”

  “We’re talking now.”

  “And saying nothing. Nothing that matters. You’re stewing inside, Bobby. It’s like when you came back from the war and you had all this rage inside you, and you wouldn’t let it out. That’s what you’re like now.”

  “Who needs a counselor when I’ve got you?” he snapped. “You’ve got me all figured out, Jo. Why waste time talking?”

  “You consider talking a waste?”

  “Talking about this is.” He thumped his hand against the table again. “What should I say? All Claudia’s life, I was her father. Now I’m not. That’s all there is to it.”

  That wasn’t all there was. “What about our marriage?” she asked. “Isn’t that about more than Claudia?”

  “You married me because you had to,” he reminded her, his voice taut and low. “You married me to protect Claudia. Now she doesn’t have that protection anymore. The reason we got married—it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “But our marriage still exists, Bobby. You’re saying there’s no reason for that?”

  He eyed her sharply. “I was Claudia’s father, and you took that away from me.”

  Joelle’s legs faltered beneath her. Her vision blurred, then sharpened into painful focus on the man seated at the table in the center of her kitchen. Was that really how he felt, after all these years?

  She knew he hadn’t married her out of love. Marrying her had been an act of enormous kindness and generosity on his part—and she’d done her best to show her gratitude over the years. She’d confided in him, cooked for him, argued with him, goaded him, cheered him on. She’d shared his bed.

  Now their bed was cold and barren, a reflection of their marriage. It was no longer a haven where they could shut out the world and open to each other. It had become a place she dreaded.

  “When we got married,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level, “you said we’d go into it with the understanding that we could always get a divorce. Now you’re saying the reason we got married doesn’t exist anymore. Do you want to cash in? Play your get-out-of-jail card?”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You said I married you only because of Claudia. You married me only because of Claudia. Now that reason is gone.” Could he hear the tremor in her tone? Could he tell she was struggling not to shake? “What’s left? What is this marriage really about?”

  He turned to stare out the window, avoiding Joelle. “God only knows,” he muttered.

  “Then what do you want from me? A divorce?” Maybe if she said the word enough, she might begin to accept its weight.

  “I want…” He looked at her. “I want what we had before. And I can’t have that anymore. You took that away from us. It’s gone.”

  Bobby so rarely allowed her to glimpse his soul. Opening him up was like chiseling through solid stone. When he’d been ravaged by injuries and nightmares after the war, she’d had to drag his feelings out of him. He never would have told her if she hadn’t forced him.

  She’d forced him now, and his feelings lay plain before her. The foundation of their marriage had vanished, and he blamed her for it.

  Holding her face immobile, refusing to let him see the devastation he’d inflicted on her, she carried the tray of shrimp to the refrigerator and slid it onto a shelf. Then she walked out of the kitchen, away from her husband. Away from the man who felt their marriage no longer had a reason to exist.

  HE MADE A POINT OF DRIVING home early the next day.

  Their bed had turned into hostile territory, as ominously quiet as patrol in ’Nam. He and Joelle slept side by side like strangers. Every night he lay awake, holding himself motionless, wondering where the mines were and how close he was to tripping one. And sometimes not even caring if he did.

  Things couldn’t go on this way. He had to find his way back to Joelle. Tonight was Friday, and they had a weekend ahead of them. They would talk. Talking—real talking, personal talking—didn’t come easily to him, but he’d try.

  He’d been an idiot last night. He should have phoned Joelle and told her he was getting together with Foster’s wife after work. When Helen Crawford had said she wanted to meet with him alone, because he and she were the two “outsiders” in this situation—whatever the hell that meant—he should have said no, that Joelle ought to be included. But Helen had shown up at his office, slim and pretty and as fresh as an ocean breeze, her face unnaturally smooth and her blond hair containing not a single strand of
silver, and when she’d said, “Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he’d said sure. As they’d left his office, he’d felt Mona’s eyes on him, as suspicious as any wife, and he hadn’t cared.

  Helen had dominated the conversation; he’d mostly listened. She’d told him about how shocked she’d been to learn of Claudia’s existence. “Thrilled and appalled at the same time,” she’d explained. “Thrilled that my son might have a chance to beat his leukemia, but appalled that Drew had been so careless and thoughtless all those years ago. He’d been young and foolish, of course, but it’s one thing to be young and foolish and another to impregnate a girl and then leave her to fend for herself.”

  Bobby hadn’t had an argument for that.

  “At least you knew the truth all along,” she’d gone on. “I was the only one who had no idea what had happened way back when in your little Ohio town.”

  Not true. Claudia hadn’t known, either. The boys hadn’t known. But he’d let Helen vent, let her babble, let her lean toward him and murmur that she was sure he could appreciate why she felt the way she did, that certainly he understood her feelings in a way her own husband couldn’t begin to grasp.

  She’d been coming on to him. Subtly, not openly, but he’d picked up on it. He wasn’t interested—women whose faces were stretched tighter than a bedsheet on a barracks cot weren’t his type—but he was a man, and when a classy New York City lady sent signals, he would have had to be dead not to feel a little flattered.

  Helen Crawford was distraught. She was resentful. If it made her feel better to flirt, who was he to stop her? He hadn’t encouraged her, hadn’t reciprocated, but given how unpleasant things were at home, he’d allowed himself to enjoy the moment.

  Today he felt guilty. Last night he’d fumed in silence at the fact that Joelle didn’t trust him, and today he was prepared to admit that maybe she’d been right not to trust him. He didn’t like dredging up old crap, probing his emotions, analyzing things to death, but if Joelle wanted to talk to him tonight, they’d talk.

  He’d take her out to dinner. He’d massage her shoulders and neck, if she’d let him. He’d fight his way back to her. This had been the angriest week of his life—worse than any week he could remember in ’Nam, even after he’d gotten blown to shit. It was time to assess the damage, time to reset the broken bones and start rehab.

  Joelle’s Prius was gone from the garage when he got home, and a note was waiting for him on the kitchen table:

  Dear Bobby,

  I need some time to myself, to clear my head and think things through. If the kids have to reach me, I’ve got my cell phone. The shrimp I was going to cook last night is in the fridge. Fire up the grill and lay the skewers on. When the shrimp is pink, it’s cooked. It shouldn’t take more than five to ten minutes on each side.

  Not a word about where she’d gone or when she’d be back. Just cooking instructions.

  He read the note again, crumpled it into a ball and hurled it across the room. Then he retrieved it, grabbed his reading glasses from atop that morning’s newspaper on the kitchen table, smoothed out the note and read it once more. His glasses didn’t alter a word of her message. She was gone, and he should grill the shrimp.

  He crossed the room to the cordless phone and punched in her cell-phone number. After four rings, her taped voice answered: “Joelle can’t talk right now. Please leave a message.”

  A message, he thought frantically. There were plenty of things he wanted to say. Like, Jesus Christ, Joelle—where are you? How could you run away like this? Here I am, ready to talk.

  All he said, however, was, “Come home. Please.”

  He knew why she’d run. Four days ago, he’d stormed into the house drunk from a binge, broken a vase on the floor and thrown up. He’d gotten crocked and acted violently. Shamed by his behavior and infuriated by Joelle’s refusal to pity him, he’d withdrawn. He’d been nowhere, nothing, way out of reach. More accessible to Foster’s wife than to Joelle.

  Of course she’d left. Why would she want to hang around with a screwed-up asshole like him?

  He swung open the refrigerator and found, along with the tray of shrimp skewers, a few bottles of microbrewery beer. Joelle kept them on hand for when the boys dropped by. They liked gourmet beer, which Bobby considered a contradiction in terms.

  He pulled out a bottle and carried it out the back door to the patio. The evening sky was the pink of a dogwood blossom, pale in parts and more richly hued where thin clouds streaked above the horizon. He sprawled out on one of the lounge chairs, tapped his palm against the bottle’s cap but didn’t twist it off, not yet.

  Where would she have gone? She was still close to that woman Suzanne, the senior member of the communal house she’d lived in while he’d been in ’Nam.

  Suzanne was living somewhere in the Southwest. She and Joelle still exchanged Christmas cards. He wondered if they kept in touch with e-mail, too.

  E-mail. If he could open Joelle’s account, he might find evidence of where she’d gone. He had no idea what her password was, but he could probably figure it out. Her maiden name, maybe, or one of the kids’ names.

  No, he couldn’t hack into her software. She’d left him because she didn’t trust him anymore. He wasn’t going to win her back by doing something untrustworthy.

  He lifted the bottle again. Its brown surface was slick with condensation. He closed one hand around the cap to twist it off, then hesitated and balanced the unopened bottle on the arm of his chair.

  Damn it, JoJo.

  The coppery sun rode along the spiked tips of the pine trees that edged the horizon beyond his yard. Purple shadows stretched across the grass and reached into Joelle’s vegetable garden. Her tomato vines were covered in yellow flowers, her zucchini shaped a tangle of dark green along the ground and her chard looked like miniature shrubs leafing out from the soil. He’d created that garden for her. He’d bought the house and rebuilt it for her. He’d bought her the damn Prius she’d run off in because she wanted to save the environment. Everything he’d done, everything he’d become—it was for Joelle. He’d given her everything he could.

  Apparently everything wasn’t enough. The one thing he couldn’t give her was marriage to the man she’d loved.

  Thirty-seven years. He and Joelle had had good times, great times, tender times, but the knowledge that he wasn’t the man she’d been in love with burned like a pilot light inside him, never extinguished. She’d married Bobby only because she’d had to, because the alternatives had been worse. Bobby DiFranco had been her second choice, her desperation choice.

  He sat outdoors long after the light faded from the sky, after the crickets began to chirp and the mosquitoes to bite, and the air cooled down and filled with the pure scent of evergreens and grass. He sat listening to the emptiness of the house behind him and wondering whether marrying Joelle had been the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life, or the stupidest.

  Finally, after slapping a mosquito dead on his cheek, he rose from the lounge chair and went inside to wash the bits of bug from his hand and face. He put the unopened beer back into the refrigerator.

  Drinking wasn’t going to help.

  AFTER HOURS OF INSOMNIA, he rose from bed early the following morning. His forehead felt tight, his throat was dry and his empty stomach grumbled. He threw on an old pair of shorts and a T-shirt, staggered down the stairs and entered the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, he saw the skewers of marinated shrimp and lost his appetite again.

  Joelle’s absence was like an invisible beast. All night long, lying in their bed alone, he felt that beast’s hot breath against his neck. Never in his life had he felt so alone.

  He put up a pot of coffee to brew, then wandered into the living room and crossed to the hutch that held their stereo equipment. Doors, he thought—he needed the Doors. He slid four Doors CDs onto the carousel, punched the “shuffle” button and returned to the kitchen to get some coffee.

  Damn. He had an appointment to meet with a
potential client that morning. Joelle was supposed to dust and vacuum and scour the sinks, and Bobby was supposed to traipse around yet another estate with yet another proud new home owner and promise to create yet another weekend paradise of flowering shrubs and hot tubs and stone walls.

  He couldn’t even bring himself to shave. Dealing with a new customer was way beyond him.

  Mike could handle it, he decided, grabbing the phone in the kitchen. He punched in Mike’s number, apologized for calling so early, said he wasn’t feeling well and asked Mike to walk the property with the prospective client and write up his specs. “Bring Danny with you,” Bobby suggested. “Between the two of you, you’ll get it right.”

  “Danny’s with Lauren,” Mike said.

  The symphony girl. “Are they at Tanglewood again?”

  “No—I think they’re at his place.”

  “Then it’s not a problem. He can go with you.” Being one half of a couple didn’t mean you stopped doing what you were supposed to do.

  Being one half of a couple when the other half had vanished, however…That was enough to stop Bobby dead.

  “Have you been drinking, Dad?” Mike asked.

  Great. His wife was gone, and now he had Mike distrusting him, too. “No,” he said coldly. “I only drink when I’m with you.”

  “Right.” Mike sounded just as cold.

  “I’m not hungover, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just…”All alone and scared to death. “Not feeling well. Take the client for me, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  He said goodbye to Mike, listened as Jim Morrison ordered him to break on through to the other side and lifted the phone’s handpiece again. He entered Joelle’s cell-phone number, then pressed the phone to his ear. Four rings and her taped voice requesting that he leave a message.

  He’d already left the only message he had for her. Come home. He disconnected the call and lowered the phone to its base.