“Do you want me to go?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want . . .” She turned and he saw uncertainty on her face. “I want to be bold and fearless, but I’m not. I’m afraid of what people will say.”
He stood staring at her, part of him understanding, another part alienated by her reluctance to defy heaven and earth on his behalf. He was willing to defy it; why wasn’t she? Yet he did understand. She had lost a husband and a son. She didn’t want to lose a daughter, too, and who knew what reaction an outraged, infatuated twenty-three-year-old might have when she found out she’d been upstaged by her forty-five-year-old mother? And what about Lee’s mother, father and sister?
He had no answers, so he escaped momentarily into serving up pie. He opened a cabinet door and got out two saucers, cut two pieces and found forks, then carried everything to the table. He sat down with his back to her and defiantly rammed one bite of pie into his mouth. It tasted like sadness.
“Aren’t you going to eat your pie?” he asked.
She came, finally, and sat down, picked up her fork and took one bite, then stared at the wedge without eating more.
He studied her downcast face, her eyes that refused to meet his, her stubborn chin and the mouth that was trembling again after all the crying she’d done today. Hell, he hadn’t intended to make her cry.
“Lee,” he said in a tortured voice, “I’m sorry.”
When she looked up he saw tears lining her eyelids, not quite plump enough to fall.
“I love you. You didn’t need this tonight of all nights. I’m sorry.”
They dropped their forks at the same moment and catapulted from their chairs into each other’s arms, their hearts aching with love and fear and the realization that the hurt each of them had foreseen was already beginning.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said, quite desperately, with his eyes closed, “I love you.”
“Joey will be home in half an hour,” she said. “We have to hurry.”
He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom where they made love with an unmistakable tenderness, for here now was a new sexual mood: apology. It permeated their touches, murmurs, gazes.
For in Christopher lingered a profound regret for having added to her burden tonight rather than mitigating it, and in Lee the haunting suspicion that he was right, that she was hoping she’d get over him before her kids found out.
INthe weeks that followed, however, life atoned. It gave them redemptive times together, rescuing them time and again from themselves, for in the presence of one another self tended to matter less. Self was somehow seen to, in all its wants, by their giving to each other. Their primary frustration during that time was having so little time to themselves.
They stole hours.
They hoarded noons.
They grew expert at making love in ten minutes or less. Sometimes, though, friendship supplied the sustenance and sex waited. Friendship—by its thriving, simple force—drove their relationship to a new level of satisfaction.
Sex, they said to themselves, well, yes, sex. But in all honesty anyone can achieve a certain level of expertise at sex, can’t they? Ah, but to be friends, now there was an accomplishment.
Perhaps they overplayed friendship because they’d been spooked by that exchange the night he’d suggested she might use him and lose him once this period of mourning had ended.
Christopher’s deeper feelings caught up with him, however, one morning when everything had been so perfect his entire being was sated: all but that tiny corner of his wishes where a nagging hangnail of desire flapped each time it rubbed against his contentment.
Joey had spent the night before with the Whitman family at a motel with an indoor pool celebrating Denny’s fifteenth birthday. For the first time ever, Christopher awakened at dawn with Lee in bed beside him.
He opened his eyes and saw her there, on her stomach with her left arm under the pillow, her right canted against his dark pine headboard. The daylight held too little candlepower to cast shadows, thus she reposed in the dusky prelight that gave her an allover hue of Spanish moss. Only her eyelashes stood out against the delicate gray colorlessness covering her exposed shoulder blades, arms and face. Her lips were open but she appeared unbreathing. Only her left eye showed. Beneath it a tiny furl of skin took on a first morning shadow along with another beside her nose, and yet another leading from it to the corner of her mouth. As he watched, her right thumb flinched, then her left leg, which was updrawn near his hip beneath the covers. That thumb—rough, slightly spatulate— bore the remnants of yesterday’s work beneath its stubby nail. He loved, he’d discovered, her self-consciousness about her hands and the hands themselves, workworn, stained, crosshatched on the inner fingers by the abrasiveness of soil and colored by chlorophyll.
He rolled to his stomach, arranging his body in a mirror image of hers: pillow beneath his cheek, knee cocked and touching the tip of hers, his hand at the headboard seeking and finding hers, linking their fingers loosely while she continued slumbering, unaware of his touch. With his thumb he touched hers, rubbed its sandpapery pad and contemplated her face. He wanted the right to wake up beside her like this always. He wanted her coarse hands and her changeless hair and her relaxed mouth in his line of vision when he opened his eyes every morning for the rest of his life.
He waited to tell her so, watching in patience as the dawn gained strength and the light brought out pale hues upon her hair and skin. Her hair became bronze, her lips pink, her freckles rusty across her bare shoulders.
She opened her eye and found him watching her. Lifting her head, she scrubbed hard beneath her nose, squinting her eyes shut, then curled onto the pillow again. With their fingers still loosely linked, her left eye open, half her mouth visible, she smiled against her pillow.
“G’morning,” she said, muffled.
“Good morning.”
She closed her eye. “You’ve been watching me.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“For how long?”
“All night. Didn’t want to waste a minute.”
“Liar.”
“Since dawn.”
“Mmmm . . .” She acted as if she wanted to snooze some more, so he let her. His heart began racing, wondering how to pose the question, fearing she’d say no and force an end to their relationship. He thought about all the years he’d lived without really searching for the right one, then finding her in the most unlikely person of all. Thirty years of life funneling down into one crystallized moment that would affect all his days that followed. He’d never even thought of rehearsing this. He figured he’d know when the moment was right, and as for words—well, hell, a man just had to stumble through the best he could in spite of his hammering heart and his fears of rejection.
She might have dozed again, all the while he claimed her lax . ngers and kept their thumbs matched, all the while the lump of anxiety rose from his chest to his throat and lay wedged against the pillow.
God in heaven, what if she said no? Where would he ever find another woman to equal her?
Her thumb began circling his slowly; she hadn’t been dozing after all.
“Lee?” he said quietly.
Her left eye opened, its rusty iris dotted by deeper markings, like a tiger lily. “Hm?”
He lifted his head, carried her right hand down from the headboard and kissed the base of her thumb. Dread of her answer kept him mute so long that she said, “What, honey?”
He studied their joined hands while saying it. “I love you and I want to marry you.”
Her head came up. Her face appeared in full, eyes wide while reactions volleyed across her face: stunned surprise, rejection of the moment for which she wasn’t prepared, a weakness for him tempered by a realization of the strength she found with him.
“Oh, Christopher,” she said, scuttling up, backing to the headboard, sitting with the blankets held above her bare breasts. “I was afraid you’d bri
ng this up sometime.”
“Afraid? I said I love you. You’ve said you love me. Why are you afraid?”
“There are fifteen years between us.”
“We’ve known that since we first met, but we started this affair anyway.” He sat up against the headboard, too, covered to the hip, the pillow at his back, his legs crossed and stretched straight out before him. “You’d have to do some pretty fancy talking to convince me that matters one single bit.”
“You’re blocking out what matters.”
“For instance.”
When she stubbornly refused to cite a reason, he did.
“Public opinion—shall we start with that?”
“All right, let’s.” Her voice had taken on an edge. “Or more to the point, family opinion, and I don’t mean my mother’s, or my sister’s, or my father’s, or Joey’s. I mean Janice’s. Let’s start with her opinion.”
“Let me reiterate something I’ve told you on several occasions. I never once—not by word, action or innuendo—made the slightest move on Janice. I hugged her a few times right after Greg died, but everybody was hugging everybody else then, so that doesn’t count. Neither have I ever made any bones about the fact that I was taking you out or doing things with you. And if you recollect with any kind of honesty, you’ll realize, neither did you.”
She slid a thumbnail between her bottom teeth.
“ Did you?” he insisted.
She locked both arms around her knees and replied meekly, “No.”
“In fact, there were times when you asked your kids if they had any objections, weren’t there?”
“Yes.”
“As recently as New Year’s Eve, right?”
“Yes.”
He let that sink in before continuing. “Any feelings Janice supposed she had for me were strictly one-sided; and if you raised the kind of children I think you raised, she’ll realize that you’ve got a right to happiness and she’ll give us her blessings. If not . . .” He spread his hands and let them drop. “We’ll face it when we have to. I don’t have all the answers.”
“But Janice would be mortifled after the way she confided in me that she liked you, and after she bought you those tickets at Christmas and practically spelled it out that she’d like to go to that ball game with you.”
“But is that our fault? Should we back away from each other just because Janice has a crush on me? I’ll concede . . . she might be shocked when we first tell her, but she’ll get used to the idea. So what other objections do you have?”
“They aren’t objections, Christopher, they’re common sense.”
“What other common sense do you have, then?”
“I don’t like your tone of voice.”
“I don’t like your answer!”
“I don’t like any of this! We’ve never fought before.”
“Well, damn it, Lee, that’s what a man does when a woman turns down his proposal; he starts fighting for her!”
“All right,” she said, spreading her hands as if pressing down the air at her hips. “All right.” The blanket slipped down her breasts. She tugged it into place and pinned it beneath her arms. “You can disregard everything that’s changeable but you can’t disregard our ages. That part is never going to change.”
“I don’t want it to. I love you the way you are, you love me the way I am, and I don’t see that changing as we grow older.”
“But, Christopher—” She broke off her own objection, wagging her head as if this was all too exasperating.
“ ‘But, Christopher, what about kids?’ That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?” Their eyes met and he saw that some of her temper had dissolved. He felt his do the same and realized that this, above all, would be the most difficult to convince her of. When he spoke he put a wealth of earnest sincerity into his voice. “I don’t want any, Lee. I’ve never wanted any. I told you that weeks ago. I’ve known since I was a kid myself that I didn’t want to put any kid through what I’ve been through myself. And since I’ve grown up and become a police officer, I’ve seen so many poor, unloved, hungry little bastards that I just don’t want to bring any into the world and risk putting them through that.”
“But yours wouldn’t be poor, unloved, hungry little bastards. You’d be such a good father,” she said plaintively.
“I can be that to yours if I marry you. Maybe not to Janice, but to Joey. I love Joey already, and if I’m not mistaken he feels darn close to the same thing for me. I’ve been playing a father’s role with him ever since Greg died, and if I marry you that’ll just make it official.”
She knew he was right about Joey, who worshiped the very breeze left by his passing.
He was hurrying on. “And you’ve forgotten about Judd. I’ve made a promise to myself that I’m going to stick by Judd till he’s got a diploma in his hand and a reasonably firm foot into adulthood. He’s going to need it. I’ll have all the fathering I want, getting him over the hump . . . and you’re right, I think I’ll be good at it. Good enough to head that kid in the right direction, because whether he goes back to his parents or stays in foster care, he’s got a hell of a lot to overcome, and I’m the one who can help him do it . . . me, who overcame it myself.
“As far as Janice is concerned, I don’t think I’ll ever be a father figure to her because she’s too old, but I can round out the family and fill that space that’s been vacant since Bill died. I know it’ll take time with Janice, but once she falls in love—really falls in love with some nice young man she’ll meet someday—she’ll forget she ever looked at me twice. And when she sees that you’re happy, she’ll be happy, too.”
Lee let her head fall back against the headboard and her eyes close. What peculiar and bittersweet luck they’d had to find each other and fall in love. How unfair that a chance thing like a number—fifteen—divided them and created a barrier to their happiness. She loved him—oh, her heart didn’t question it for a moment—but with that love came a responsibility to look into a future that he was too young to heed, so she, with her greater life experience, must heed for him. She rolled her face toward him.
“You make everything sound so logical.”
He took her hand and held it on the sheets between them. His voice was quiet when he replied, “There’s nothing logical about love, not the way it happened to me. I just . . .” He shook his head in wonder. “Hell, I just fell. Hard. Sudden. Boom, there it was: This is the woman I want to spend my life with. It rattled me when I first realized it, but not for the reasons you think. I never cared that you were older or that people would talk. I got scared because I knew that when this day came and I asked you, you’d say exactly what you’re saying.”
He was staring at their joined hands, and she could see how devastated he’d be at her refusal. She loved him so incredibly much at that moment that she allowed herself the fantasy of picturing herself as his wife with everyone she knew ideally happy for her. But their situation offered too many obstacles for idealism. She tried to put all she felt into the quiet, loving tone of her voice.
“Please understand, Christopher . . . I have to say this. I’m a family-woman, committed to family. To rob you of having children, who can bring so much joy into your life, seems like an act of selfishness, not of love.”
“I told you, Lee . . .” He met her eyes and said with unflappable certainty, “I don’t want any of my own.”
“Everybody wants children of their own.”
“You’re wrong. You can’t judge everybody by your own standards.”
She sighed, deep and long, and let her shoulders droop as her gaze drifted beyond the foot of the bed. He rubbed his thumb over hers and said, “Fifty percent of American families aren’t traditional anymore, did you know that? Fifty percent. We’d fit right in.”
It might be true, but somehow she felt distanced from statistics, and unhumored by his pithy observation. Fifty percent . . . .fifty. Lord, what had happened to this country?
They sat sil
ently for a long time, involved in their private thoughts: he with disappointment creating a new knot in his throat, she with the worry that if she said yes he’d come to regret what he gave up years from now, when she aged before he, and when he wished he’d married someone younger and had children of his own, maybe even when her sexual drive died before his did. Within the next decade, possibly half a decade, she’d be facing menopause while he would hit the prime of his life saddled with her. There seemed, upon honest consideration, an actual edge of immorality to the idea of accepting his offer and doing that to him.
“Oh, Christopher,” she sighed, “I don’t know.”
When he spoke, there was a note of appeal in his voice.
“Could we lie down, Lee? Please? Here it is, the first morning we ever wake up together, and you’re over there against your pillow, and I’m over here against mine, and I’d rather be holding you while we talk about this.”
She gave in to his gentle humoring and let him stack both their pillows. They settled down belly to belly, covered to the shoulder by blankets. They hugged, twining their legs and caressing one another’s backs, though the embrace remained reassuring rather than sexual.
“Oh, Christopher,” she sighed again, happy to be returned to his long, warm nakedness beneath the covers, but uncertain about their future just the same. “I’m sorry I got angry with you but this is such a hard decision.”
“Do you realize,” he said, “how fully I’ve already blended into your life? I do everything a husband would do. I help you buy your Christmas tree. I put it in the stand for you. I fix your hoses and level your washing machine and mow your lawn, and give your kids a talking to when they’re sloughing off on their obligations to you. I comfort you when you’re sad, and make love to you when you’re happy, and sometimes I fill in that man’s chair at the end of the table, and you love having me there, don’t tell me you don’t. I take your son out driving for the first time, and I go to his football games, and I’m the one who comes running when you’re scared to death he’s dead at midnight. Now, mind you, I didn’t do this on purpose. I didn’t mean to inveigle myself into your home life, but the fact remains, it happened. For you to tell me a marriage wouldn’t work between us is damned unbelievable, Lee.”
Family Blessings Page 36