by Brea Brown
I was really too stunned and hurt to process everything that had been said at Jude’s; all I could do was feel. And it hurt. A lot. So I tried to cry the pain away. But sleep, rather than tears, was the eventual reliever.
This morning, I wake up, my eyes puffed to slits in my face, my mouth dry, and my body covered in a fine glaze of sweat from all the layers of clothing still piled on me. As soon as I got in my car last night, I turned off my phone, but now I pull it from my coat pocket and turn it on. Twenty-four missed calls. And the little envelope that signifies unheard messages seems to be blinking more furiously than usual.
I feel the tears building again, so I quickly delete all the messages without listening to them and drag myself from the bed. Must keep myself busy. Or angry. But not hurt. And definitely not compassionate.
What if I really had been pregnant? How would I have felt after watching Jude practically rend his clothing despondently at the prospect? It’s hard to conjure the right words to explain the feeling, but “pretty shitty” comes close enough for now. It’s all fun and games to have sex with me and toss out the words “I love you” when it suits his purposes, but when it comes right down to it, he’s obviously more interested in the path his career’s taking than the path our relationship is headed down.
Of course, it’s really not fair for me to resent him for caring about his professional life. He’s doing what he loves to do, not just some job. But he’s never acted like it mattered that much; definitely not more than I matter to him. Maybe this latest development—whatever that may be—has shifted the order of things.
I think of Lisa saying, “They’ve been grooming him,” and I shiver. That terminology hearkens to mind the mafia. Maybe I’ve been watching too many Sopranos reruns. If I had been let in on this “grooming” from the beginning, it probably wouldn’t feel like such a threat, but because it’s obviously some big secret, something that Jude doesn’t want me to know about, it’s scary. Like he’s compartmentalizing everything in his life so that he can easily lop off certain segments when they’re no longer useful to him. Maybe I’ve been a mere diversion while he’s been in Chicago, waiting for his life to really take off.
And now it is, and he’s ready to move on. I can see how the news he thought I was giving him could have put a serious hitch in his plans. His being ready to move on also explains why he was so dismissive about what I was really saying. He doesn’t care anymore about my past. Like his ex-wife, I’m about to be a faint memory in a distant city, part of his past, someone he laughs about with his next girlfriend on lazy weekends in bed.
That’s probably why he’s been avoiding me. I thought it was because he wanted to resist any temptation to tell me things he’s not allowed to tell me; but really, he’s distancing himself. He’s getting ready to dump me. Ditch me. Toss me aside.
He may be surprised to find out that I have a little experience with that, believe it or not. Not by a man, obviously, but I know what it’s like to lie on the frozen ground, pitched away, waiting for someone to rescue me.
Not this time. And I doubt I’m even going to tell him about the last time. Why bother?
Something else has been bothering me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s something Jude said last night, but my mind is such a fog of anger and hurt that I can’t remember exactly what he said or why it bothered me. At the time, I was struggling to understand what he was saying in the context of what I was trying to tell him, so nothing made sense. But now, knowing what I know, something he said is throwing up a red flag. If only I could remember what it was.
Due to all the time I spent alone during the week, my apartment is clean, so there’s no housekeeping to keep me busy. I do a cursory tidying, including refreshing the litter box and gathering up some dirty clothes to take to the building’s laundry facilities in the basement. My phone rings twice, but I don’t answer it when I see “Jude” flash on the display. If he keeps calling, I’ll turn it off.
I don’t have anything else to do, so I stand in front of the washing machine while it goes through its cycles. As I watch the water and soap swishing, my underthings and t-shirts slapping against the little round window, I hear him say it, almost as if he’s in the room with me. “I know this talk.”
I furiously finger the scar in my eyebrow, the one that I painstakingly cover each day with eyebrow pencil, combing the rest of the hairs over it to hide it. It’s the only clearly visible physical reminder of the accident. Nobody knows that my leg aches from my hip to my ankle when the barometric pressure drops to a certain level. Jude’s seen the surgical scar on my hip, but he knows it’s part of my secret. He also knows I have bad headaches sometimes, but he doesn’t know it’s because I have a titanium plate in my head from where they had to reconstruct part of my skull. Those scars are well hidden under my thick hair.
“I know this talk.”
When was that, in the sequence of events? Had I told him my parents were dead? No. We were still talking about two different things: me about my secret; him about unplanned pregnancy. Or pregnancies, more like it, if he “knows this talk.”
I drop heavily into one of the plastic chairs in the dungeon-like laundry room. Jude has a kid? Maybe he’s not just running away from bad memories in England or a wretched ex-wife. Maybe he’s running away from responsibility in general.
No. I don’t believe it. Not the guy I know. There’s another explanation. I can’t think of one right now, but there is one. Has to be. He’s never breathed a word of this. No pictures of the kid, no unexplained phone calls, no nothing. I can’t believe the guy I love, the Jude Weatherington who can’t even bluff when I ask him if something makes my butt look big, could lie about something that major.
Of course, according to my definition of lying, he hasn’t, I remind myself. I’ve never come out and asked him, “Did you and Kiersten have any children?” It seemed so obvious that they didn’t. There was no evidence to the contrary.
However… he never lied to me about being “groomed” for bigger things at work, either. Unless you count calling himself “a cog” lying. Which I kind of do, especially if he knew that wasn’t the case. But still, he’s not any guiltier of lying than I’ve been for the duration of our relationship.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to be upset, though. Especially if he has a kid he never told me about. I mean, what if we had started talking about marriage?
Wait for it, wait for it…
Oh, I see.
She’s got it!
That was never in his plan. Of course not. I’m such an idiot. To think the first guy to pay any attention to me would actually like me enough, once he really got to know me, to marry me. I should have known that this was a fluke. My spinster card has not been revoked. I’ll be digging that out any day now.
And I haven’t even begun to probe the open, weeping wound that is the subject of the car accident that changed my life and ended my parents’ lives. I finally—finally!—trust someone enough to tell them about it after all these years, after he’s begged and pleaded with me to tell him, after I’ve agonized with the guilt of keeping it from him, but it turns out I grossly misjudged him. So not only can I not trust him, I can’t trust myself to correctly judge someone’s character.
The only one winning in all of this is Dr. Marsh. I’ll be padding his retirement quite nicely for the next several years.
I’ve moved on to supervising my clothes in the dryer when Jude appears in the laundry room doorway. I hop down from my perch on the dryer and turn my back to him. “Why are you here?”
“Because you won’t return my phone calls,” he answers simply.
“That’s usually a good sign that someone doesn’t want to talk to you,” I explain.
“But we need to talk. I know you like to run away when things get nasty, but—”
I whirl around. “That’s a really interesting statement from you.”
He eyes me warily. “Oh? I don’t recall running from trouble.�
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I want to know, but I don’t want to know. “Never mind. It’s not like I’m going to get you to tell me the truth, anyway, so what’s the point?”
Sighing, he says, “I didn’t come here to have a row with you.”
“Well,” I scoff, “you’d better turn around and leave, then, because I kind of want to scratch your eyes out.”
“Libby…” He comes closer, his arms open.
“Don’t!” I insist, pressing myself up against the dryer as far as I can. “I’m serious.”
He drops his arms. “Right. Tell me what you want from me. I’ll do whatever you want, except leave without talking about this.”
I close my eyes, unable to look at him without crying. His image is etched on the back of my eyelids, though, so the tears are unstoppable. “Damn it,” I mutter. “Damn you.”
“I know,” he says resignedly. “I made a fist of it last night. And I’m not saying this to excuse it, but I’ve been under so much strain at work of late.” His voice moves closer to me, but I keep my eyes closed. The dryer vibrates soothingly against my lower back.
“Why are you under so much strain?” I ask, figuring this is just as good a place as any to start.
He pauses. When I open my eyes to see why he’s not answering, he opens his mouth, then closes it before saying, “I really can’t discuss that.” Before I can object, he continues, speaking louder to drown out any complaints from me, “You know what it’s like… Only in my case I could lose my job if I told you. I’m not really sure what you thought the consequences were to telling me about your parents.” When the only reaction he gets from me is a stony glare, he offers, “About work… you’ll know soon.”
“When everybody else finds out?”
He nods, clearly uncomfortable with his own answer.
“That’s just great.” I’ll probably have to order lunch for the announcement, too. When I’m dumped, it’s a public, catered affair.
“I’m sorry. It’s not ideal,” he admits. “But I promise we’ll talk about it alone as soon as we have a chance. I have a lot to say…”
“Whatever,” I sigh, dismissing his offer. “I’m just a cog. On the Jude wheel.”
“How can you say that?” he asks, slumping into a chair.
I resume my perch on top of the dryer, where it’s warm. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely not! Where are you getting that?” Pulling his knit hat from his head, he drops it into his lap, then tries unsuccessfully to press his hair down against his head. It looks unwashed.
Actually, upon closer inspection, he looks terrible, in general. I experience a small twinge of satisfaction from that. I’m not sure how much credit I can take for it, but I’m sure it’s a little bit.
“All signs are pointing there,” I reply vaguely.
“You’re reading them wrong.”
I shrug as if it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. “Doesn’t seem like I am.”
His jaw tightens, then he says, “I guess we’ll have to table that one for now, because I’m not at liberty to tell you anything that would change your perceptions.”
“How convenient.”
“Speaking of… I have to say… your use of the word ‘inconvenient’ last night really threw me off.”
“What?”
“Yes. You said you hated to inconvenience me, or some such thing, and it reinforced my suspicions that you were giving me the, ‘I’m pregnant’ speech. Again, I’m so sorry I misunderstood.”
Coldly, I reply, “Well, since you’re so familiar with it, I can see how you would think you could name that tune in two notes.” Suddenly, my heart is pounding. This is it. I can tell by the caught look on his face.
“Oh, that. Well. Yes.”
“Do you have a kid?”
“No, I haven’t,” he answers calmly and quietly.
“You and Kiersten don’t have a child together? Or you and anyone else?” I feel like I have to ask every possible question so he can’t slip through any honesty loopholes.
He shakes his head once. “No.”
“Just ‘no’?”
He throws his hands up. “That’s the answer to your question. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
“I want you to explain the sentence, ‘I know this talk,’ which you said when you incorrectly assumed yesterday that I was telling you I was pregnant.” I cross my arms over my chest and wait.
His nostrils flare. He rubs the back of his neck. “Right. When we were getting divorced, Kiersten came to me and told me she was pregnant. I reacted a bit more maturely with her than with you,—again, sorry—but still not as well as I should have, looking back…”
“Maybe you can perfect your technique with subsequent girlfriends,” I snipe.
He grits his teeth, then continues, “Anyway, the more I thought about it and did the maths, the more I realized that something wasn’t adding up. I knew about her boyfriend, of course, so I was legitimately suspicious the child wasn’t mine. I told her I wanted a DNA test done when the baby was born. It turned out to be unnecessary, however.”
“Why? She decided it would be easier to just raise the kid alone than drag you kicking and screaming into fatherhood?”
“The child was black.”
That shuts me up. “Oh.”
“The best thing about it? Her boyfriend wasn’t.”
I catch myself snickering with him about that and immediately stop. I clear my throat and play with my shoelace. “That still doesn’t excuse the way you acted last night.”
“I didn’t say it did.” He flaps his hat against his knee. “To my credit, though, I never once asked if I was the father.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“What? I think that’s important.”
“That you didn’t add insult to injury? That makes you a prince, huh?” The dryer stops, so I jump down and open it to retrieve my clothes. I’m so ready for this conversation to be over. All I need to do is collect my things and go upstairs, where I can lock the door in his smug face. “You’re disgusting.”
“I only mean that I could have been a bigger jerk, believe it or not.”
“You were still inappropriate.”
“Granted.”
“Especially because… never mind. My feelings were really hurt by the whole thing. Your reaction to the possibility of my being pregnant is an infinitesimal part of it.” I slap the last pair of panties on top of the pile in the basket, then impulsively bury them under some other clothes.
When I turn around to leave the laundry room, he stands, too. “I reacted badly all round. I admit that. I feel especially badly about giving you the impression that I’m glad it was merely your parents’ deaths you wanted to talk about and not the other thing.” He reaches out to touch my shoulder as I pass him. I shrug him off.
“Don’t. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he reacts under stress. I found out a lot about you last night. A lot I didn’t like.” He turns his head and juts out his jaw. “So… I hope it’s a relief to have one less thing to occupy your mind during this stressful time in your life.”
His eyes snap back to me. “What do you mean?”
My eyelids flutter as more tears gather behind them, but my voice is steady when I say, “If you think I’m going to sit by like a pathetic… virgin… and wait for you to leave me behind while you move on with the rest of your fabulous life and career, you’re nuts.” I flip the light switch and head up the four flights of stairs to my apartment. He’s right on my heels.
“Wait! Are you… chucking me? Because I was an arse and hurt your feelings during a moment of weakness?” He voice echoes in the stairwell.
As I unlock my door, I say, “That’s an extreme trivialization of what went down, but… yes. I am.”
When I open the door, he shoulders his way in right behind me, before I can slam it. I suddenly picture him on the rugby field, his arms wrapped around the ball, his elbows flying left and
right as he bowls through a muddy group of bodies.
“How can you do this?” he demands, his face screwing up into an expression I’ve never before seen on it. If I had to name it, I’d call it “agony.” “I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ve… I’ve…” Suddenly he stops. Every muscle in his face slackens. He raises his hand and drops it, nodding his head. “Right. Well. I refuse to beg you to reconsider.”
“Good. I think you should leave.” Before I change my mind. Before I cry most unattractively.
He wrenches the door open fully, pauses, and turns around one more time. “I’m sorry. Again. Really. I…” He chokes but clears his throat and says lucidly, “I wish I could have heard more about your mum and dad.”
This statement brings on the most gut-wrenching sobs I’ve produced since their funeral. Somehow I manage to choke out the biggest lie I’ve ever told him. “I’d rather find a… a… bum on the street and talk to him about it than tell you another word!”
Chuckling mirthlessly at my immature statement, he replies, “Right,” and exits, pulling the door softly closed behind him.
I drop the laundry basket and stand in the middle of my apartment, sobbing, until even heartless Sandberg starts rubbing against my legs.
23
I slept the rest of the weekend away. It was the only way I could keep from crying. But I slept so much that this morning, I was sore from lying in bed all weekend. And not sore in a good way, like I used to be. With him.
Now it’s Monday, and I have to be brave. I have to do one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in a long time. Harder than any exam in college. Harder than giving up my dream of traveling and observing other cultures and societies. Harder than taking care of my little brother when I was hardly more than a child myself. Today I have to get out of bed. I have to go to work. I have to swallow my pride. And apologize.
Because I can’t go through with this break-up. Even if it means I take him back just in time for him to say “See ya” on his way to bigger and better things, I can’t be the one to end it. Call me weak, call me spineless, call me whatever you will. What it comes down to is this: I love him. Irrevocably, inexorably, inexplicably, inescapably, and inevitably. And I’m too inexperienced at this to have any pride about it.
