This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  From the kitchen table Peter said, “You haven’t had an easy time of it, Meg.”

  She would not, she’d already decided, reveal to Peter that the marriage had been as good as dead well before Jim’s puzzling symptoms began to manifest themselves. Instead, she sat at the table with her wineglass and talked about the decision to quit her job, sell the house, and move up here, once looking after her husband at home with the help of hired students was no longer a way of life either she or Jim cared to go on with. She’d always dreamed of living near the sea. The inside of a nursing home—as long as it’s decent, what difference does it make where it is?

  “But will you be all right? Financially, I mean.”

  She pushed her flyaway hair back from her forehead and explained that money wasn’t a problem, Jim’s disability pension relatively generous, the kids’ educations paid for. They had a nest egg, investments that had done surprisingly well over the years. No fortune, certainly, but enough for Meg to be comfortable, enough to pay for the nursing home until . . .

  “Would you like to see him?” Meg asked, still not altogether sure she understood the reason Peter rented a car and drove the three hundred miles north from Boston, where his conference was about to convene.

  “Will he know me?”

  “Do you mean, does he still have his mind?”

  Peter found a crumb on the tablecloth and rolled it between his fingers.

  “The sorry part is that he does. He won’t be able to talk to you, though. Look, Peter, if you’d rather not . . . I didn’t mention to him that you were coming.”

  He smiled slightly, his eyes cast down on the tablecloth. “That leaves it up to me, then.”

  “Well, we can play by ear.”

  Fog, the arthritic gray tabby, padded in from the living room where he’d been napping and wound himself around Meg’s legs. She got up and let the cat out the kitchen door, which still had its screen in place. Soon Meg would have to summon the ambition to haul the storm doors and windows out of the cellar, wash and install them. Other maintenance jobs also needed attention. The dripping hot-water tap in the laundry room. A finicky switch in the upstairs hall. Leaves clogging gutters and drainpipes. Maybe Peter . . . But no, not dressed like that. He wouldn’t have work clothes in the small carry-on satchel he’d brought with him, which now reposed on the bed in the spare room upstairs.

  Neither of them had so far spoken of Enid, the wife he mentioned in his letters only rarely. Because Meg had been rattling on so much about herself, and about Jim, she decided she ought, for politeness’ sake, to bring Enid into the conversation. “Your wife. She didn’t think of coming with you to the conference?”

  Peter smiled. “I’m afraid she’s far too busy with her work just at the moment.”

  “She’s a lawyer, right?”

  He’d removed his wire-framed eyeglasses and was cleaning them with his pocket handkerchief. They’d left raw-looking dents on the bridge of his nose, as if he’d been pinched in a vice. “She’s a partner in a large firm of solicitors. They do mostly corporate work.”

  “In Oxford?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, returning the glasses to his face and the handkerchief to his pocket. “In London, in the City.”

  One by one Meg began to transfer the draining fillets onto a fresh piece of paper towel. “She must find the commute a hassle.”

  “Enid lives in North London. She has a flat in Hampstead.”

  “Oh,” Meg replied. If he had any feelings one way or the other about this coolly practical arrangement, Meg couldn’t tell. Perhaps she was missing a cue that an English person would immediately have picked up on.

  “We go on holidays together. We’re planning a walking tour of Northumberland next spring.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “You can still find bits of Hadrian’s Wall.” He paused. “Little heaps of brick, mostly. To see them you have to invade suburban housing estates, go bursting into people’s gardens.”

  She laughed, at the same time wondering whether he was going to reveal more about the situation with Enid. When he didn’t continue, she said, “Maybe you’d like a shower before we eat. Would you? Or no, a bath. Englishmen take baths.”

  While she sliced tomatoes and sectioned a lemon and put the potatoes on to boil, she listened to the bath water running overhead on the second floor. She tried not to think about Peter in the lion-footed porcelain tub, rubbing her clear glycerin soap over his body.

  She glanced at the electric wall clock above the refrigerator. Right now they’d be feeding Jim his soft supper, most of which would dribble from his slack jaw and soil his bib. Then they’d lift him onto the bedpan to produce his few smelly pellets. Jim had bedded a goodly number of his female graduate students and at least one untenured faculty member, for years lying in his teeth to Meg and getting away with it. Still, she supposed not even he deserved to end his days this way.

  After dinner, against the chill that had crept inland from the misty bay, Meg jacked the thermostat up a couple of degrees and built a fire in the fireplace. Her first fire of the season, she told Peter, sweeping up bits of bark and fungus that had fallen from the logs onto the hearth. They sat on the sofa, one cushion’s space between them, and drank decaf and port. She talked about her boys, Kevin doing relief work in El Salvador, Mike traipsing around Nepal on a year off between college and graduate school. Maybe Peter found it strange that they’d departed to remote regions of the globe when their father was dying. Actually, it hadn’t seemed like defection when, one by one, they took off: Kevin born with a passion for curing the world’s ills, perhaps inherited from Meg’s missionary great-grandparents; Mike’s wandering a kind of family joke, as a child forever going astray in supermarkets and shopping malls. With her thumbnail Meg traced a hairline crack in her demitasse cup. Now that she thought about it, though . . . Perhaps it wasn’t such a coincidence that both were so far out of reach now.

  To get off that subject she told Peter about joining a church choir in town. For ages she’d been wanting an opportunity to sing choral music. Somehow she hadn’t found the time when she was working. The church people were nice, a bit like a family.

  Did she miss her job? Peter wanted to know.

  Well, writing résumés had its moments. You could think of it as inventing people’s lives, like a novelist or a psychotherapist. Or God. But most of the clients would never do justice to the identities she’d conjured for them. Meg set her cup on the tray. Poor souls destined to fail even before they passed through Life Designs, Inc.’s frosted door.

  Why? Hard to tell, in an objective way. At one time they’d held responsible positions, successfully applied for mortgages, managed to keep families together. You couldn’t miss the doom in their gray faces, though, in the stiff way they held themselves, arms crossed over their chests, fingers clutching their jacket sleeves, dazedly watching the tropical fish swim round the tank. Rubber heels digging into Life Designs’ stained carpet.

  Sometimes, she told Peter, the ghosts of those clients used to invade her dreams. They’d shake their laser-printed lives in her face, chase her along dark, maze-like corridors, their huge shadows nearly catching up with her. Thankfully, she rarely had those dreams anymore. No, she had to admit she didn’t miss her job.

  She got up to stoke the fire, and Peter poured a little more golden port into their glasses. He took a cloth handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the stickiness from the neck of the bottle and from his fingers.

  The radiator pipes gurgled. Meg began to talk about the weird plumbing in the house, installed in a haphazard way by amateurs half a century ago. She told him how the pipes froze and burst last winter, flooding the downstairs so that she’d had to retreat to the second floor with the cats. She’d felt like Noah’s wife, she said, spinning out the yarn, making a joke of her inexperience in managing an antiquated house on her own. Her fac
e was flushed, she knew, with drink and the heat of the fire.

  In the silence that now fell over them, the clock on the mantel began to strike the hour of nine. “For me,” Peter said, soon after it ceased chiming, “it’s two in the morning.” At the same moment they set their empty glasses down on the tray, and his knuckles bumped the underside of her wrist. Attentively they gazed at one another, Peter’s haymow brows seeming to take on an agitated life of their own. She rose to her feet.

  “Peter, I don’t want to put you on the spot. I’ll just tell you that my bedroom is the one at the far end of the hall, and if you should feel chilly or lonely or anything . . . ”

  Meg didn’t wait for a reply. She crossed the Persian rug and a bare stretch of waxed hardwood and mounted the steps, leaving the port bottle uncorked and a heap of partially burned scraps of log still smoking in the fireplace.

  He did come, after she’d decided he wasn’t going to, and lifted the quilt so he could climb into bed beside her. “Meg,” he said softly, “I don’t have . . . I wasn’t prepared to . . . ”

  She’d had her tubes tied the winter she discovered Jim was spending his evenings in the apartment of a slender assistant professor named, ridiculously, Annunziata Pardoe. “It’s been taken care of,” Meg whispered.

  Now she and Peter began to make love, twenty-seven years and four months after that sweet, urgent farewell kiss in the back stairwell of the Farnum Street apartment building, Meg’s breasts leaking painfully through her crushed-velvet dress, her husband at the table holding forth on the Regularis Concordia, full of Peter’s wine, oblivious. How close she’d come then to running down the steps after the gentle Englishman and folding herself into his luggage, and allowing herself to be transported to an England she knew like the back of her hand from reading Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. But Kevin’s wail dragged her back inside the apartment, and everywhere were perilously stacked dishes to be washed, still encrusted with the remains of coq au vin and cake.

  On Peter’s back she felt bumps and small scarred depressions, where there must have been minor surgery, and she knew he was feeling the folds on her stomach and the layered flesh that skidded awkwardly under his caressing palms. But how very good it was, this loving. Inside her, his mouth at her breast, he said in a ragged voice, “Such a long time to wait, my Meg.”

  After he slept she still held him, listening to his slow breathing and to the tide, now high, sucking at marsh grass. My Meg. My Meg.

  He wheezed a little, drew out of her arms and turned himself over—careful, even in his sleep, not to encroach on her share of the bed—snorted once, fell into a deeper slumber.

  Suddenly she remembered rescuing from the trash, that birthday night, the corks from the vintage claret. What had become of them afterward?

  Meg awoke at first light, pulled on a sweater and pants quietly so as not to wake him, and went downstairs. In the kitchen she found that before coming to bed he’d carried out the tray. She wondered whether he’d been anguishing over what they were about to do as he corked the port, as he rinsed the glasses and demitasse cups and put them upside down in the drainer. Or perhaps he’d been completely calm, with nothing more troubling on his mind than the duty to be a helpful guest, giving her time to change her mind if she wanted to. She let the cats in and fed them and then, filled with an energy she wasn’t sure what to do with, went outside.

  Over the tough grass she walked down the slope to the water’s edge. Tide on its way out again, the rising sun casting an orangey pink shimmer on pools that lingered in wet sand, stippled gray clouds above the horizon like stripes on an animal. How sad that the sunrise was wasted, Peter sleeping through it. In the woods behind her a raven shrieked quork, quork, setting off a chain reaction of quorks from spruce to spruce.

  Her muscles itched to be doing something. She turned and climbed back up the slope, skirted the house, yanked open the shed door. From a box of moldy garden gloves, the finger-ends nothing but fraying holes, she chose a couple at random and took a shovel from among the tangle of tools that leaned against the wall. She’d disturbed a spider web. Just about enough light reached the inside of the shed so that she could watch the disconcerted spider scramble up the planks.

  Leaving the door ajar, Meg forced the mud-stiffened gloves onto her hands and toted the shovel around to the vegetable garden. It shouldn’t take long to move that flat stone. She could have coffee brewing and muffins in the oven before he came downstairs. With the tip of the shovel she began to lift chunks of turf from the edge of the stone, but as she was doing so she discovered that its diameter was wider than she’d assumed, more like a dinner plate than a dessert plate. Crabgrass and chickweed had matted over the surface several inches all around the circumference. When she had that stripped away, she tried to work the shovel blade down under the stone in order to pry it up, but the blade clanked against rock. Nothing budged; the resistance jarred the bones in her forearms and set her teeth on edge. So the stone must not be flat, after all, but have some depth to it. She moved the blade away from the exposed stone half a foot or so and tried again, forcing the blade down through grass by pressing her heel hard against the shoulder of the blade. This time she was able to move some soil, which, being solid clay, stuck to the blade in clumps.

  After four or five more shovelfuls, sweat started to dampen her forehead and her heart was beating faster. Not as young as I used to be, she thought. The rock that had begun to emerge seemed to be granite, coarse-grained in texture, unevenly rounded, a pinkish color. Chips of quartz or mica embedded in the granite glinted in the sunlight. This stone was clearly a lot larger than she’d suspected, even a few minutes ago.

  Meg pushed the sleeves of her sweater up to the elbows, then circled the stone and moved another half dozen shovelfuls of the dense gray soil, rested awhile, moved yet another half dozen. She leaned on the handle, her chest heaving. This was going to be some rock.

  By the time she had the whole thing exposed, more than an hour later, it sat complacently in a pit maybe a yard deep. Streaks of gray dirt covered her arms and the front of her sweater. Her khakis were filthy, and so were her sneakers. She stripped off the mismatched gloves and tossed them aside.

  Peter, dressed in fresh white shirt and herringbone jacket, came strolling over the hillocky lawn toward the garden. “Good morning,” he said. “I wondered what happened to you.”

  “Rats. I was going to have coffee and homemade muffins all ready for you.”

  “That’s a big stone,” he said, looking down into the pit. “How are you going to get it out of the hole?”

  She thought for a moment and then began to laugh. “Damned if I know.”

  “What you need is a winch.”

  “Fresh out of winches, I’m afraid.” She picked up the shovel. “Come on back to the house, and I’ll give you some breakfast.”

  Water dripped down the nape of her neck. With her left hand she rubbed her hair with a towel, with her right she pulled on a moccasin. Peter was sitting on the edge of the bed, which he must have made before coming downstairs in search of her. “I haven’t watched a woman dress in longer than I can remember,” he said.

  She didn’t answer right away. Then, “I’m sorry it couldn’t have been a younger and more beautiful woman to break your . . . ” Fast? Vow? “ . . . whatever it was.”

  “ . . . whatever it was.” Without a smile he said, “I liked this woman fine.”

  She dried her hair some more, threw the towel over the bed rail, combed her fingers through the damp strands. “Every morning I drive into town to see him,” she said. “He’ll wonder what’s wrong if I don’t show up.”

  “You must go, then.”

  “Are you going to come?”

  “Would you like me to?”

  She sat next to him on the bed. “It’s not a lot of fun, Peter. He can’t talk. He tries to, but all that comes out are baby-sounds. Gaa
, gaa. And that frustrates him terribly, of course. Probably what he’s trying to say is: Why the hell don’t you just shoot me in the head and get it over with.”

  Peter took her hand, which was raw and blistered from the digging, and wove his fingers in with hers. She’d stopped wearing her wedding band. The back of Peter’s hand bore a couple of liver spots, as well as some spidery graying hairs sprouting from his knuckles. He wasn’t wearing a ring, either, but then, she had an idea that wedding bands for men weren’t as common in England as they were here.

  “And,” she went on, “after last night, you might feel uncomfortable, as if you’d taken advantage of him, of his being sick, though you certainly can’t be blamed for what we did, it was my idea, and—”

  “Blame isn’t the issue.” He said that gently, almost regretfully.

  “Peter, I swore to myself I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I have to now.”

  “What?” She hesitated, and he said again, “What is it, Meg?”

  “Jim cheated on me. Quite a bit. Before he got sick.”

  He looked down at their intertwined hands. “Are you saying that what you want is to even the score?”

  She was shocked he’d think that. “No, Peter. What I want is for you to understand the whole situation. Because it feels wrong to keep secrets from you, because . . . ” But how could she come right out and tell him that she loved him, without putting a whammy on everything? She withdrew her hand from his grasp and stood. Damned if she’d humiliate herself by weeping in front of him.