The Naked Truth

by Leslie Morgan

  “Do you want to come to the beach for a week?”

  There was silence on the phone after I asked him. He knew what it meant.

  No man except Marty had ever spent the night at our beach house, well, my house now. I’d never had sex with anyone there, not even with Marty. I wanted Jake to become part of my and the kids’ oasis. I picked a week in mid-December when both kids were with their dad, so Jake could experience for himself how the beach in winter became an exclusive, uninhabited paradise.

  I could almost see Jake’s smile over the phone after I asked him.

  “Yes, Leslie. I can’t wait to come. I’ll bring my bike. And Jennie.”

  I was so excited for him to see everything I loved there, I got up at seven the Monday he and Jennie were arriving. I mopped the floors and folded the sofa throws and fluffed all the pillows. I showered. I blow-dried my hair. I painted my toenails bright fuchsia. I went to Citarella for hamachi and fresh-squeezed orange juice. I built a fire in the living room and the library. I raked the gravel driveway. I made a bouquet of dried lavender cuttings for his bedside table.

  Jake was going to be in my bed at the beach. The holiest of holies. We were going to be a We.

  My cell rang around one.

  “Hi,” Jake said groggily, drawing out the iiii. He sounded like he had fog in his mouth.

  “How . . . are you?” I asked, disquieted by sudden panic. He sounded like he had the flu. Was he canceling?

  “Um, not so good.” Long pause. He cleared his throat. Then he laughed.

  “Dave and I went out last night. Drinking tequila.”

  My mind blanked. Who was Dave? Why would Jake stay up late drinking anything, much less a bottle of tequila, the night before he visited me at the beach for the first time? Especially so soon after the Halloween fiasco. A tiny alarm sounded in the back of my head.

  “He made me do shots. I forget how many. There’s only about an inch left in the bottle. I threw up. Twice.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Vomiting, again? All of my adult puke stories involved pets, children with the flu, or food poisoning. I didn’t know a single person over twenty-five who had thrown up after drinking too much booze. Why did Jake drink so much? How was I expected to react? I didn’t want to be all uptight and bitchy, the school principal storming into the student lounge to bust weed smokers. Confusion trickled through my brain like syrup over pancakes as I clutched my cell phone, looking around my painstakingly vacuumed white living room rug. Because I’d tried to distance myself once already, and failed because I missed him so badly, I was afraid to try again. It felt kind of like not leaving my first husband after the first time he hit me, five days before our wedding. If you don’t leave right away, it gets harder to leave the next time. But wait—this was ridiculous, comparing Jake’s self-destructive behavior to physical violence. I knew Jake loved me, wanted to see me, was dying to see me and to come to my private retreat. To write next to me in my office. To make love to me all day long. Right?

  “So, uh, okay, um, well . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Was he still coming? I was afraid to ask. I blinked furiously. My throat swelled and tears wet my eyelashes.

  It was as if he read my mind.

  “I am actually about to get in the car, Leslie. I may have to stop at my sister’s along the way to . . . uh . . . nap. Or throw up again. And the traffic will probably suck since I screwed this all up.”

  He said this with a mix of self-deprecation and wistfulness, asking for forgiveness although unable to say the words out loud.

  “I should get there late tonight. Probably by eight or so.”

  The empty day stretched before me. I’d already been up for over five hours. Every hour waiting for him felt like a twelve-hour assembly line shift.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Jake.” Trying to buff the disappointment out of my voice made my throat hurt. “I hope you feel better. Drive carefully.”

  As I hung up the phone, I looked around the house at the two roaring fires, the flowers, and the fluffed couch pillows. It came to me with a jolt. Although he’d sounded as if he regretted polishing off a bottle’s worth of tequila shots, Jake had not actually said he was sorry, or that he understood that he’d disappointed me. Or at least inconvenienced me.

  Not once.

  * * *

  Jake finally arrived, tired and sweaty from the drive, his shirt wrinkled, a queasy, drained look on his face. He held me in his arms like I was a life raft. Despite his exhaustion, his erection under his jeans grew against my right hipbone. We stumbled onto my bed. And stayed there for two hours.

  Is there anything good sex can’t make up for? The next day, using his hands and his mouth and his cock, he made me come twice before noon. His tequila-fest seemed like another aberration. Like it had nothing to do with me or us or the magical way our bodies connected. He had a single beer that night with dinner. Maybe I was out of touch with how much people actually drank these days; maybe he was normal and I was paranoid. We were two good people in love, deepening our relationship and working through problems, in a way Marty and I had never been able to.

  We had a cozy, lazy week. I stole his gray cashmere sweater and wore it every day. Sometimes that was all I wore. We took slightly frostbitten bike rides and windy, sun-drenched beach walks with Jennie. We cooked fish on the grill every night and had sex twice a day in front of the fire, in my bed, on the couch, on the kitchen counter, on the steps leading to the second floor. Jake transformed my beach house into an oasis for making love, for new beginnings. I couldn’t have felt more sensual.

  Our last night together, lying naked in bed, two candles flickering and the rest of the lights out, I asked what he wanted from us.

  He smiled.

  “More of this,” he said, leaning over to give me a drawn-out kiss. “That’s my short answer.”

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours after he went back to the city, I got another email from Jake.

  God I hated leaving you.

  Especially after some of the hottest sex ever. Seriously.

  You looked absolutely gorgeous all week. You’re glowing, radiant. I’m insanely jealous of any man who even gets to look at you.

  I love you, overwhelmingly.

  You asked what I want, and I don’t really have a checklist, but let’s start with:

  I want to be with you, lots

  I want to screw you on the hood of the TT

  I want to keep exploring sexually with you, trying new things and situations

  I want to write electrifying erotic stories for you and text them to you in the TSA line

  I want to cook delicious meals for you as a way to show my love

  I want to read 2,000 books with you, side by side

  I want to swim across Long Island Sound with you

  I want to ski with your kids and do lots of other fun things with them

  I want to take you skydiving, just one time

  I want us to share our deepest emotions with each other

  I want us to be “there” for each other, for anything that happens

  I want to be the only one who gets to make love to you

  I want to be your collaborator, your first reader, and your biggest fan

  I want to be your partner, in everything.

  I was tempted to frame it so I could read it to myself every day.

  * * *

  “I need one more power hour,” I told the teacher checking me into hot yoga. “Before the Christmas insanity takes over my life.”

  She laughed, handing me my change and a bottle of cold water.

  The studio was fifty degrees hotter than the air outside in Rittenhouse Square. In the middle of Warrior Pose, stretching out my hamstrings in the heat, I reread Jake’s email in my mind, which was easy because I’d already read it so often, I’d practically had it memorized. This is it. This is why I left Marty. To find love like this. True love. With Jake. He’s been waiting for me for over thirty years. I was too blind to
see it. Reuniting with a man like Jake was the jackpot every woman who’d left a loveless marriage deserved. I should give lessons.

  When I got home from yoga, there was a card with my name and address scrawled in Jake’s handwriting amidst the Christmas cards in the pile of mail in my foyer. My heart filled as I slit the envelope open with my pointer finger as I stood by the newel post on the staircase.

  Leslie—

  Not even a psychic could have predicted that we’d be spending this Christmas together. I almost can’t believe it myself. What a strange, surprising, wonderful few months we’ve had together. And still every day (and night) with you feels like a gift.

  Love, Jake

  * * *

  December twenty-third. I held a messy heap of $19.99 wool sweaters outside the Forever 21 dressing room, surrounded by teenagers and their mothers toting credit cards. My friend Sig from high school stood next to me in his graying ponytail and plaid lumberjack shirt. Sig lived on a ranch in Montana and was visiting Philadelphia for the holidays. Starved for cheap fashion, his two teenaged daughters tried on clothes for themselves, their cousins, and Sig’s wife. Sig and Shelly had gotten married the same year as Marty and I.

  “Mom will love that one, girls,” Sig told them through the slatted dressing room door. What a small but meaningful gesture, to encourage your children to buy a present for their mother. Marty had never taken the kids shopping for a present for me. It was fascinating, but in some ways terribly sad, to see evidence of why Sig and Shelly’s imperfect but happy union had outlasted my own.

  Jake was already in Philly to spend Christmas with me and the kids. Jennie’s dog bed lay in front of the fireplace, next to the blue spruce Jake had helped me haul home. The kids had been with Marty for Hanukkah, but they were all mine until New Year’s. My house was filled with presents, the cats, Jennie, Tigger, and Jake, on the verge of chaos in a way that made it feel like we were a blended, messy, happy modern family.

  I had awoken next to Jake that morning, as the sugary, floury smell of Bella’s Christmas cookies baking in the oven wafted up to the second floor. I asked Bella to join us for the shopping trip with Sig and the girls, but she had to make two more batches for friends. Jake didn’t know Sig as well as I did, but they had played intramural basketball together.

  “Jake, you’re welcome to come. Do you want to?”

  “Hmmm. Shopping with teenagers? I think I’ll play pickup at Penn.”

  He’d kissed me and slid his palm slowly down my butt as I walked by.

  After four hours spent exhausting all shopping possibilities in a six-block radius, I hugged Sig and his daughters good-bye at their rental car, and walked in through the alley toward my back gate.

  To my astonishment, Jake’s Jeep was pulling out of his parking spot. I stared at his red taillights and bumper receding down the cobbled alley. Where was he going when we were supposed to have dinner with the kids in an hour? Something was wrong. Jake put on the blinker on his Jeep and turned right, away from me.

  I ran through the backyard, inside the house, up the stairs to my—our—bedroom. The room was neat and tidy and . . .

  Empty.

  His bags were gone. Jennie was gone. I looked for his toothbrush. The Eau Sauvage cologne I loved. The brown tortoiseshell reading glasses he kept on the bedside table. All gone.

  I frantically dialed his cell phone, already crying, shaky with adrenaline and fear. What had happened?

  He picked up. “Hello?” His voice was steady but laced with anger.

  I could barely choke out, “Jake, it’s me. Did you . . . leave?”

  “Yeah,” he said, the wrath in his voice increasing. “Um, I decided to go say hi to Jim and Penny.”

  But he’d had coffee with Jim that morning.

  “With your toothbrush? What happened, Jake? You can’t leave like that.”

  “Well, Bella said you were out with Sig.”

  He snapped off each word, coming down especially viciously on Sig’s name.

  “Alone,” he continued. “Not shopping with his kids like you said.”

  “Bella is fifteen, Jake. She was probably watching Scandal when you asked her where I was. Olivia Pope was probably out shopping by herself.”

  I was speaking too fast to get a breath. I couldn’t slow myself down. Growing up with active alcoholism and a childhood filled with false accusations had seared my psyche. My volatile early marriage made me even more thin-skinned. And this allegation was most definitely false.

  “You know where I was, Jake. I was with Sig and his daughters. Sig is married. We went to Forever 21 and had falafel. Did you think I was . . . sneaking off to fuck him? And now I’m lying to you about it?”

  I could not believe those words were coming out of my mouth. To the man I loved and trusted. Two days before our first Christmas together.

  It felt like the bedroom walls were spinning around me.

  “Come back, Jake. Talk to me about this. You can’t leave like that. This is . . . insane.”

  I felt small and surprised and broken. Not only that he’d accuse me of cheating, but that he’d left without even talking to me, without giving me a chance to explain or defend myself. It was as if he’d already decided I was guilty—as if he wanted me to be guilty.

  I was still crying, hunched in a ball on my bedroom floor, when I heard Jake’s boots methodically meeting the wood as he came back up the stairs. I felt like I didn’t have enough skin to cover my body. He knelt down on the floor and hugged me hard, his whole body wrapped around me, until I stopped crying.

  Jake didn’t explain why he suspected me of cheating. He didn’t apologize for scaring me. I couldn’t discern whether he even knew he’d frightened me. But how could he not see how upset I was? I was alarmed by his possessiveness, his lack of maturity, his rush to judge me. But blocking out all those feelings was a flood of gratitude that he’d come back. I wanted—needed—to believe he had not abandoned me like that.

  Still reeling, I splashed water on my face and squeezed a few allergy drops into each eye. The walking-on-eggshells dread that came from growing up with an alcoholic parent, and then living with my troubled, abusive first husband, had long ago wormed its way into my bones. I’d become perhaps too adept at swift recovery following a crisis. Oddly, it felt normal to walk downstairs with Jake to make dinner for the kids. Jake tackled the salad. I put the chicken in the oven. Quiet and shaking inside, I told myself, Everyone has insecurities. What matters is that he’s facing them. With me.

  Was he facing them? With me, or without me? I didn’t know. How could Jake simultaneously be afraid of commitment and jealous? Why couldn’t we talk about it?

  I tried not to think about our fight over dinner. The kids jabbered and teased each other about what they were getting for Christmas. When Jake and I got into bed that night, we made love silently. I woke in the middle of the night, and he was still holding my hand under the covers. So forgetting how he’d made me feel wasn’t as difficult as perhaps it should have been.

  * * *

  The mermaid sat proudly, to me at least, amidst the dead brown sticks of my midwinter backyard. It was Christmas Eve. Jake was carrying two Whole Foods bags heavy with roast beef and Yukon Gold potatoes for Christmas dinner. I had two CVS bags filled with stocking stuffers, M&M’s and gum for Timmy, makeup and hair conditioner and eos lip balm for Bella.

  “Hey,” Jake said, putting the bags down on the brick walkway. He turned and smiled at me over his shoulder.

  “Any chance I can have the mermaid for a Christmas present? I’ll put her at the cabin.”

  I put my bags down and faced him. He loved her, too. Because she was me. At that moment, I felt like I’d give Jake anything he asked for.

  “I’ll consider an adoption,” I said. I kissed him before he could react. “But if you ever break up with me, I get her back.”

  Our fight, or whatever it was, seemed like ancient history. I hadn’t told Winnie or KC or Sara about the cheating accusat
ions; I didn’t want to embarrass Jake. It was a misunderstanding that would never happen again. This was what Sara called “relationship repair”: a fight with hurt feelings, followed by apology, explanation, reconnection, and an agreement to avoid any such future misunderstandings. In other words, a normal bump in an emotionally healthy union, a concept with which I was still rather unfamiliar.

  Jake wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “Deal,” he said.

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve. Jake and I got home after eleven, sated with trout almandine and foie gras. I’d made dinner reservations five weeks before at a new French bistro we’d spotted on one of our city walks. The day after Christmas, the restaurant critic from the Star awarded it four bells, making me feel like a foodie psychic. Bella and her friend Izzy stayed home with Jennie, delirious and hyped to be unchaperoned on this epic night, getting excited to watch the ball drop in Times Square on TV.

  I went upstairs and got our biking clothes from my closet. I came back down. Confused, Jake eyed the bike pants with a puzzled frown.

  “Wanna go biking around the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall?” I asked. “To ring in the New Year?”

  Jake’s shoulders dropped and he smiled.

  “Hell, yes. What a great idea.”

  It was fifty degrees out, warm for late December. The streets were dry, and we didn’t get chilled, even when we were speeding on the bikes. We both had blinking lights on our front handlebars and helmets. Touring the historic square over the bumpy cobblestone streets, we had the world of 1776 all to ourselves.

  After the midnight bell at Old St. Joseph’s chimed, we stopped in front of Independence Hall. The 250-year-old brick building was lit from the inside, as if exclusively for us. Jake took off his helmet. His hair was plastered to his head, like a kid waking up in the morning.

  “I’m so lucky,” he said, leaning over the handlebars of his bike to kiss me. His nose was cold and running. Mine was, too.

  “Can I be with you for the next fifty years?” he asked, his gray-blue eyes shiny and soft.