Bread Alone: A Novel

by Judith R. Hendricks

  “Wyn, don’t. Please, please, don’t do this. I didn’t want it to be like this. It’s for the best. You weren’t happy either. Don’t you remember what it was like? Wyn …” He’s smoothing my hair, wiping tears off my face with a tenderness I haven’t seen in months. Years, maybe. Did he think I didn’t care?

  What happens next belongs on Sally Jessy Raphael or one of those afternoon shows where people say and do things that are beyond the scope of their own imaginings. When I turn my face up to him, there are real tears in his eyes. It’s just him and me. Like it was before. Like none of this other shit ever happened.

  He loved me. He still loves me.

  Just when you think a thing is dead. Hysterical laughter bubbles up in my throat because all I can think of is General Franco. One day he’s on life support, the next he’s sitting up eating a steak.

  My husband kisses me, and my arms lock around his neck so tightly that for one wild second I wonder if I could snap it, the way they do with chickens. Then sanity regains the upper hand. I feel it rising in a cold wave. He extricates himself “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” He won’t look at me.

  Unfortunately, he’s the only one in the room exhibiting a shred of common sense. I slide my hands up under his sweater, kiss his mouth, right at the corner, graze it with the tip of my tongue. “Hold me,” I whisper. “Just for a minute.”

  Whoever said love has no pride knew what they were talking about.

  “Wyn, stop. I can’t.” It’s almost a groan. My right hand slips down to his belt, then down his thigh, and I hear his breath catch, feel him come to life against me. He grips my arms abruptly, thrusts me away. “You’re just making it harder.” I laugh at his unintentional double entendre, and then more tears.

  “David, you love me, I can tell you still love me.” I grab his hands and he pulls them away. It’s like trying to hold on to a fish.

  Now he’s back in control, and totally turned off by this vulgar display of emotion. He holds my wrists at my sides. “I’ll always … care about you, Wyn. But it’s time to get on with our lives. I’m sorry.” This is his executive-decision-making voice. I’ve just been terminated. It’s a business decision. Nothing personal.

  He looks around the room. “I’ll help you clean this up.”

  “No.”

  He’s already kneeling, picking up the vase. He drops one of the marbles in and it pings rudely.

  I try to tuck some hair behind my ears, stop sniffling, dredge up some dignity. “I want you to leave. Now.”

  He turns the table back upright, sets the vase on it. Then he’s out the door. It shuts decisively, like he’s afraid I might sprint after him and tackle him on the lawn. The school clock chimes two, startling me, and I stare at my handiwork—boxes dumped in the foyer, broken flowers, soggy carpet. My God. I’ve become a one-woman wrecking crew.

  There’s half a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, so I pour myself an eight-ounce tumblerful. I drop into a chair at the oak table and take a big swallow, letting the bubbles burn my throat. I’m suddenly limp, no bones, just a blob of rubbery flesh. When I wipe the residue of tears away, I smell Polo on my hands.

  It’s raining when my flight lands at SeaTac Monday afternoon, that kind of gentle rain that makes the locals say, “This? This isn’t rain; it’s mist.” CM’s white Camry is waiting outside baggage claim.

  “What have you got in here, barbells?” she complains as she heaves a box into the trunk.

  “Old things.” I pick up her Day-Timer, an empty Styrofoam cup, and a package of pretzels off the passenger seat and throw them into the back. We pile into the front and take off.

  “So. How did it go?”

  “Good. It was a nice wedding.”

  “Liar.”

  “Okay, it was a nightmare. Something out of Eugene O’Neill.”

  “You want to tell me?”

  I shake my head slowly. “Later maybe. I’m too tired to do it justice tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then yesterday David came over.”

  “What for?” She frowns.

  “To tell me he’s going to marry Barbarella.”

  “Shit.” She pokes her tongue into the side of her cheek. “Well, you sort of knew it was coming.”

  “Did I?” She doesn’t say anything, so I rephrase the question. “Did you ever think he might be involved with someone else?”

  She’s the picture of intense concentration on the road. “It crossed my mind once or twice.”

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  We stop at a light and she turns to me. “I thought that you knew and didn’t want to deal with it.” The guy behind us honks his horn and she flips him off.

  “The light’s green,” I say. She turns onto the freeway and puts the hammer down. “How would I have known?”

  “It was a textbook case, Wyn. All the signs were there. In fact, from all the stuff you told me, I thought—”

  “You’re my best friend,” I blurt out. “Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  For a second, I think she’s going to get us killed as she exits across three lanes of traffic. At the bottom of the ramp, she pulls into a deserted parking lot and stops the car, swivels in her seat to face me.

  “I couldn’t be the one to tell you. For God’s sake, I thought you were telling me. All the things you said. You were just dancing around it.”

  “Like what? What did I say?”

  “You were always talking about how he was never home. How he didn’t talk to you. That you hadn’t had sex in forever—”

  “That doesn’t have to mean someone’s screwing around.” I hit the window button, and the cold air revives me.

  “No,” she says. “Not always.” She reaches over to squeeze my hand. “I’m sorry, Baby.”

  She starts the car again and gets back on the freeway, driving fast. I close the window. Headlights rushing past us in the opposite direction become long streamers of light. Neither of us says another word till we get to the foot of Queen Anne.

  “I think you should stay with me tonight,” she says.

  “I have to go to work.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  After I’ve unlocked my door and turned on all the lights, we lug the boxes and my bag up from the car and put them in the office.

  “Thanks for coming to get me.” I collapse into the club chair and she sits down on the futon.

  “Look, I’m sorry. Maybe I should have—”

  “CM, it’s okay. Really. I’m sorry I blew a gasket on you.”

  She looks dubious. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m just exhausted. I should probably try to grab a nap before I go to work.”

  We trade hugs. I know if I gave her any opening at all, she’d stay. We’d drink some wine, and I’d end up telling her everything. Maybe I’d feel better. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Too much sympathy can be worse than none at all. You start holding on to the hurt. You hoard it, stroke it, polish it like some perverse treasure so you can justify all this sympathy you’re getting.

  Besides, I’m fresh out of openings tonight.

  Thirteen

  You look like you could use a boat ride.” Mac McLeod stands on my porch Sunday morning, smiling with just his eyes. “What I could use is about three more hours’ sleep,” I grumble.

  “Sorry. You haven’t been to Bailey’s all week, so I thought I’d check on you.”

  “I didn’t get back till Monday night. I’ve been trying to crawl back into my rut.”

  He laughs at my surliness. “Come on, get dressed. We’ll just ride over to Bainbridge and back. Being on the water might improve your attitude. Works for me.”

  We get coffee at the Market, walk down First Avenue past the adult movie houses and used bookstores, the Oriental rug showrooms with their absolutely rock-bottom, no-joke, going-out-of-business-sale signs, homeless people asle
ep in doorways under dirty overcoats. He tells me the nicknames of all the skyscrapers. Washington Mutual is the Phillips Head Screwdriver building, Fourth & Blanchard is the Darth Vader building. First Interstate is the vacuum-cleaner tube, Century Square is the Ban Roll-On building.

  It’s cold by the waterfront. The coffee cup feels good in my hands. At the Colman Dock, we run for the Spokane with a few other passengers, stand by the aft rail as she pulls away. The wind’s still kicking up whitecaps, but the clouds have broken and long fingers of sun test the water.

  We stay outside aft, sheltered from the biting wind in the lee of the passenger decks. The boat shakes with the effort of the engines and the wake trails out before us, a white road back to the pier. I hang over the rail. “Tell me a story.”

  “About what?” he says.

  “I don’t care. You must hear some great ones at work.”

  He gives me his little wry grin. “It would be a flagrant breach of professional ethics.”

  “Then tell me one about you. Tell me the Gillian story.” A gull flies up and hovers alongside, eyeing us impassively.

  “I don’t think this is—”

  “Please. Distract me.”

  “Okay.” He pulls his hat down lower on his forehead. “I was hitchhiking from Auckland to Wellington. This guy in a beat-up old Land Rover picked me up. He took one look at me and asked if I was interested in making a few bucks. I was practically running on fumes, so I was extremely interested. He owned a sheep station and they were in the middle of the shearing season. Somehow a shearing shed had caught fire and it had spread to some other buildings. Anyway, the family and all their regular help were too busy shearing to rebuild, so they were looking for guys to work construction in return for room and board and a few bucks. I was thinking I’d work for a week or two and then move on.

  “So that night we’re having dinner at this long table—about eight or ten guys—and this young woman comes in to help her mother serve. The daughter of the guy who picked me up.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Not beautiful. Really not even what you’d call pretty. Brown hair, blue eyes. Tall. Rangy. She had that body ease that people have when they’ve grown up doing hard physical work …” He smiles. “If you looked at her, she looked right back, like she was checking you out. I didn’t pay much attention to her at first. She was just there every day, helping her mother. Then one day she didn’t come and I realized I was looking for her at every meal. She was gone for a week. She came back the morning I was leaving. In fact, I was walking down the drive when this car pulled up and she got out. We just looked at each other there in the driveway. She smiled. I turned around and went back into the bunkhouse and unpacked my bag. I ended up staying for six months.”

  “My God, how romantic.” I grip the rail, lean back. “So what happened?”

  He turns around, his back against the metal pole that braces one of the lifeboats. Over his shoulder, Mount Rainier pokes its snowy head up through a lei of clouds.

  “Nothing. She wanted to get married, have kids, raise sheep. I didn’t, so I left.”

  The wind whips a strand of hair across my face and he hooks it behind my ear, being careful not to touch my face.

  We get off at the Winslow terminal, buy ice cream from a cart in the parking lot. We stand, shivering and laughing because we’re cold and eating ice cream anyway. He asks me what my favorite flavor is.

  “Rocky Road.” I say it without hesitation, without thinking.

  I have a sudden, crystal-clear memory of my mother and me standing in the shade of a eucalyptus grove beside the little Sebastian general store on Highway I in San Simeon. We’re eating Rocky Road ice cream cones while my father takes our picture. The golden hills and the towers of Hearst’s castle rise in the background. I can see the waves of August heat rippling off the road and smell the piercing scent of eucalyptus oil.

  “What?” He’s looking at me.

  My gaze veers to the terminal. “I think they’re boarding.”

  Coming out through the turnstile at Colman Street, he finally says, “So how was the wedding?” One lurching sob and the waterworks open. This is getting old.

  “That good, huh?”

  He puts one arm around me and lets me cry all over his fuzzy flannel shirt that smells like pine trees. He rubs my back a little, but gingerly, as if I have something sticky all over me and he doesn’t want to get it on him.

  He hands me his handkerchief, not one of those white, ironed linen things that David carries, but a blue bandanna. As I’m trying to clean up my face and stop hiccuping, he takes my elbow and steers me over to the escalator. “Let’s walk back up to the Market.”

  On the way, I spill my guts. I tell him every gory detail, every disgusting nuance of the weekend. I tell him about my mother and me sniping at each other, about me getting drunk and being a bitch to Gary and pushing Howard’s boxes down the stairs.

  I say stuff that I wasn’t even conscious of until it pops out of me. Like how I thought it was a slap in the face to my father to have the wedding in the house he and my mother shared. I tell him about David giving me my pink slip, even how I tried to seduce him and he wasn’t buying it. I tell him about CM and the way we parted company that night. He just walks along beside me, hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, the heels of his cowboy boots making a hollow tap with every step. He doesn’t make any noises like sympathy or disgust or outrage. It occurs to me that’s exactly why I can tell all this to him and not to CM, say, who’d be all sympathy and righteous indignation, ready to fly to L.A. and kick David in the crotch. He’s just letting me dump it.

  By the time I’m through, it’s almost five, and I ask him if he wants to get a pizza or some Thai food, my treat.

  “I’d really like to,” he says, “but I have something I have to do tonight, so I’ll take a rain check.”

  Men. Why the hell can’t he just say he has a date? And what do I care? I was only offering because he baby-sat me all afternoon.

  As soon as I get home, I sit down and call CM. When a man’s voice says, “Hello,” I think I dialed the wrong number. Then remembrance and recognition collide in my brain. It’s Neal. This is the weekend of his seminar.

  “Oh hi, Wyn,” he says cheerfully. “She’s right here. Hold on a minute. She’s drying her hands.” She probably cooked dinner and did the dishes while he sat on his skinny ass reading some esoteric treatise on the sociopsychological implications of hangnails.

  “I forgot this was the big weekend,” I say when she picks up the phone.

  “No problem.” Her voice is elaborately casual. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I just called to apologize for being so weird the other night, but—”

  “It’s not a problem,” she insists. “I’ll call you later and we’ll talk.”

  This has to be the shortest conversation she and I have ever had.

  It’s there when I pick up my mail Monday afternoon, the plain white envelope with the return address of a law firm in Beverly Hills. “There you are,” I say to it. “I’ve been expecting you.” One of the big advantages of living alone. You can talk to inanimate objects without getting a lot of weird looks.

  I rip open the envelope and skim several pages of legal war chant. Looks like the way it works is, if one person says the marriage is broken, it is. Never mind what the other person says. It doesn’t seem quite fair. We both had to say “I do” to get married but only he has to say “I don’t.”

  The faceless gray army of legislators and judges and lawyers and clerks who, in their infinite wisdom, created our legal system apparently have decided that you wouldn’t want to bind someone to you who didn’t wish to be bound. So it’s no longer necessary to prove insanity or substance abuse or infidelity or nonsupport or abandonment. All you have to do is say “I don’t” and start dividing up the stuff. Sort of takes all the fun out of it. No more corespondents, no more alienation of affection, no more medical records or expe
rt testimony from prominent psychiatrists. Just “I don’t.”

  I fold up the papers and slip them back in the envelope.

  Every afternoon when I wake up, I think about calling Elizabeth. But I know that once I do, it’s the cannon shot that sets off the avalanche. My whole world becomes a rumbling mass of debris, irreversible in its slide to the bottom. I don’t know how long I would have procrastinated, but while I’m still floundering, she calls me.

  “Wynter, it’s Elizabeth Gooden.”

  I can’t help it. My first thought is my father telling me how sharks pick up the minute vibrations of an injured fish flopping around erratically in the water. Then I’m ashamed of myself. She’s trying to help me.

  Before I can tell her I’ve been served with papers, she says, “Our information specialist has come up with registrations from some rather pricey hotels in Cancun, in Scottsdale, and in San Francisco. I’ll give you the dates, and you tell me if you accompanied your husband on any of these trips.”

  “I can tell you right now I haven’t been to Mexico in at least three years.”

  “Interesting. Cancun’s the oldest one.”

  I bite my lip. “When?”

  “Let’s see, that one was … last December. December fifteenth to twentieth.”

  It’s like being smacked in the face with a wet towel. My birthday. The important client meeting he had to attend. “And the registration was for … two people?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. David Franklin.”

  The ache inside me transmutes to a molten rage, expanding to fill every crevice in my body. I’m certain it’s going to flood out of me, like a pregnant woman’s water breaking.

  “Wynter? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  It’s not just that he lied, repeatedly and across a span of months, it’s that I believed him. Long past the point where I should have started questioning. I was willfully ignorant. I was stupid.

  I remember reading a few years ago about a woman in Malibu who solved her sticky divorce situation by pumping her husband and his girlfriend full of .38 slugs as they slept. I’ve always wondered what led her to the moment of decision. What was the last straw, the final humiliation? Or was it just an impulse? Ya know what, Jack? I’m not going to put up with your bullshit one more minute. And out the door with her Saturday-night special.