My Wife's Husband

by E H Davis

  What happened to the promise of those times? wondered Jens, as he was pulled back into the present by Teddy insistently calling his name, and Vivian’s unladylike laughter.

  Have you been sleeping with that bastard Laurent? he wanted to hurl at her. The wine was loosening his reserve; he’d have to make sure not to drag Teddy into this.

  “Dad, Dad, tell me again what happened when you gave Mom pot. What did she say? What did she do?”

  “Who, moi?” Jens hedged. “I never...”

  “C’mon, you know you did. What’s the big deal, anyway?” asked Teddy.

  Jens read the disapproval in his wife’s eyes. She’d stopped laughing. He knew that she was tired of hearing the story and being made fun of because of her ineptitude years ago, even though it was just pot. Any reference to what she perceived as inadequacy, however far-fetched or unlikely, made her defensive. Moreover, Teddy habitually used the account as an introduction to his favorite topic, marijuana, and the reasons why he, a sixteen-year-old, should be allowed to smoke pot at home.

  “The big deal is that you just want to talk about pot — it excites you. And thought precedes action.”

  Teddy gave him a bored look; Jens ignored it.

  “Why don’t we talk about your lackluster grades and what you’re going to do about passing Algebra I this year? Besides, Mom doesn’t like this story.”

  “This is not about you, Mom, so much as it’s about Dad and his wild days.” Teddy plucked at his paper napkin, shredding it into a neat mound beside his plate.

  Vivian tilted back her wine glass and drank. “Go ahead, you may as well tell him the rest.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to, darling.”

  “It’s not that I object to honesty. I just don’t like being made a fool of.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, trying to placate, wanting to talk about the real issue at hand.

  “But that’s what you so like to do: put me down, humiliate me. You’re always doing that. You think I’m a fool.” Her voice had risen, fueled by alcohol. She turned to Teddy. “Did your father tell you that he took LSD and freaked out?”

  Now it was Jens’ turn to glare. The steps that had led to his breakdown could not be blamed on LSD alone. It was so much more complicated than that, overlooking the part his brother’s death had played and his mother’s rejection.

  “You took LSD?” Teddy asked, incredulous. “And you flipped out?”

  Jens shook his head in stony silence. He had always planned to tell Teddy about his breakdown at the right moment and use it as a cautionary tale, a “teaching moment,” about the dangers of experimenting with psychotropics. Now, Vivian had reduced his breakdown to a weakness in character and judgment. Moreover, he’d wanted to avoid planting another dangerous seed in Teddy — that he might have inherited his father’s genes of instability.

  “You bitch, Vivian,” he said, his voice icy. “I know what you’ve been up to.”

  She stared back at him, fury and hate concentrated in her eyes.

  “Screw. You. Asshole,” she spat.

  “You’ve been —”

  “What?” she roared defiantly. “What?”

  Jens rose from his seat, his balled fists at his sides.

  “Don’t, Dad,” Teddy pleaded.

  Jens caught himself. Paused. After a beat the spell was broken. Vivian picked up her wine glass and sipped, a smug look on her face.

  Jens slapped the glass from her hand and charged out of the room.

  “Bruzza, here boy,” Jens called. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Jens’ breathing came in ragged gasps; his blood pressure soared. He told himself to calm down, it would be all right, but he doubted it ever would. He’d married a woman who was not only capable of deceiving him and denying it, but with a convicted murderer no less.

  He knew his job now — he had to get his son away from her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  He found the dog stretched out on his favorite spot, on the leather couch in the den, napping.

  “Papa needs some air. C’mon, boy.”

  From the kitchen he could hear his wife still cursing him — loudly hissing under her breath — a thing he hated because it was exactly what his mother used to do.

  Outside, faithful Bruzza trundling at his side, he inhaled the cool evening air, sharply scented by Vivian’s garden. Intimations of the fall, winter fast on its heels, filled him with gloom, a feeling that he tried to push away. A pang of anxiety, that ancient bugaboo, accompanied the thought that it had been years since he had succumbed to seasonal depression.

  Once out the driveway, he turned right, hugging the picket fence surrounding his property until the path forked. With a waxing moon high overhead, the woods were limned with silver, and he easily found his way along the trail. Bruzza darted ahead, drawn by movement in the brush — likely a stray hare tucking into its den for the night, or a swallow settling in its nest.

  With a heavy sigh he acknowledged that he and Vivian were headed for a sundering. Most of the couples they had known on the West Coast, during his Hollywood days spec-writing for TV, had separated. He knew what would happen to Teddy if they went that route. He would take him, whether she liked it or not.

  He heard Bruzza rooting around in the brush.

  “Hey, boy, what you got?”

  The dog pawed the earth, letting out a growl that turned into a whine, and suddenly bounded into the bush. Jens shrugged and walked on, deep in thought. The dog would circle back, he had no fear.

  With Teddy, Vivian was overprotective and indulgent, thwarting Jens’ efforts to instill values and discipline. The result was that Teddy would go to her for permission to do things Jens disapproved of.

  “Here, boy,” he called, beginning to wonder what had become of the dog.

  Lost in thought, Jens found that he had wandered down a heavily wooded path. A carpet of pine needles underfoot added a touch of the surreal, as though he were floating. He looked around in the gloaming, trying to orient himself, searching for a landmark.

  ________

  He tracked Bruzza, aided by the moonlight, arriving at last to a place where the grass was tamped down in a wide circle. Deer had bedded here. A footprint from a boot, the toe dug into the earth, alerted him to evidence of recent human presence.

  Puzzled, he examined the scene like a forensic scientist, strafing it with his eyes in quadrants, discovering the outline of a human form imprinted in the grass, made by someone lying prone on his stomach, elbows dug in for support, leaving deep indentations.

  How odd. The outline aligned with his house, now visible in the distance through the bracken and thick foliage. Spooked, Jens surveyed the woods, wondering what someone might have been doing here.

  Stalking him?

  Then he saw the apple tree and thought he understood — it was a hunter’s blind, with a clear shot at deer feeding on apple drop. But his relief was short-lived; deer season didn’t begin for another two months.

  Poacher, maybe?

  He recalled the pistol shot he’d heard a few nights ago coming from the woods.

  Suddenly, it all seemed to fall into place.

  Laurent, that bastard, had been stalking them.

  Jens would take it up with her in the privacy of their bedroom, away from Teddy’s ears.

  ________

  Meanwhile, Bruzza had been following his nose deeper into the woods, sniffing out his rabbit quarry. It led him to the base of a venerable oak, its gnarled roots failing to camouflage the track to the rabbit den in the earth beneath. Bruzza began digging frantically, his front paws clawing the dirt like a windmill, spewing earth backward, between his legs. A blur of rabbit tore past his nose and he lit off in pursuit, taking him around the corner to a pine. Here, the rabbit darted into the brush and disappeared, spooked by the presence of someone hiding behind the tree.

  ________

  Warren cursed the dog under his breath, waving his arms silently at him, hoping that the hus
band wouldn’t come armed with a double-barreled shotgun. Hadn’t he killed his own brother in what the papers called “an unfortunate tragic accident?”

  Warren had left his own piece at home, not wanting to jeopardize his parole and everything he was now planning. He was not stupid; that’s why he’d lasted so long on the “outside.” Besides, tonight’s sortie was only to gather intel on his mark.

  Earlier, he’d watched from Laurent’s blind in the woods behind the farmhouse as Jens brought back pizza and sat down with his family to eat in the kitchen.

  The sound of footsteps thrashing through the bramble alerted him to someone coming. He snatched up a rock and hurled it at the dog and was rewarded with a pained yelp.

  He fled into the woods and found his way back to his pickup truck. On the way home, he began to think that perhaps the best way to get at Corbin’s loot was through his wife — made vulnerable by her history with Laurent. She could become an accomplice under the right circumstances. He could manipulate her by threatening to harm her son.

  The boys from the North End had paid him another visit a few days ago. He had to meet with Laurent right away and put the play in motion. He was running out of time.

  ________

  Jens lay stiffly on his side of the bed, while Vivian curled up, her back to him, on her side. He knew she was not asleep; he could hear her labored breathing. He tried to “read” her but couldn’t tell if she was defiant, still.

  “We need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  Vivian turned over and looked at him, guarded, waiting for him to continue. He searched her eyes for common ground.

  “What is your connection with a convicted murderer? I have a right to know.”

  She sat up, looked him in the eye.

  “Teddy told you?”

  He shook his head, not wanting to get Teddy in trouble.

  “I overheard your phone conversation about the letters the other night,” he said.

  “It was something that happened a long time ago. He had... expectations. It’s over. I’ve talked to him. He’ll leave me — us— alone now.”

  Jens’ heart was pounding. Did she just admit to sleeping with him?

  “There’s a hunter’s blind at the edge of the woods with a view of the house. Someone’s been stalking us. Is it him?”

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “He would never do that! Just because he’s been in prison— convicted of a crime he’s innocent of — doesn’t mean he’s come to harm us.”

  “According to Teddy, in his letters he promised to come for you. How am I supposed to interpret that?”

  “So, you have talked to Teddy?”

  “Only after I’d done some research of my own. According to the corrections website, he’s been out since August. After serving twenty years.”

  She studied him, searching for a hint of understanding if not sympathy.

  “I was the last person he cared about before going away. Jens, you have nothing to worry about.”

  He tried to read her eyes for the truth. Was Laurent really innocent? What did it matter? In the end, he did not know what to believe, or whether she was deceived herself.

  “What is he to you?” He held his breath.

  “He’s someone I once cared for deeply, before you, who got into trouble because of me. Please don’t make me explain that right now — another time maybe. All you need to know is that he’s paid his debt to society. And he won’t bother me anymore.”

  Jens’ anger flared.

  “Vivian, if I even for a moment thought this man meant harm to our family...”

  She reached out unexpectedly and stroked his cheek.

  “Can’t this keep until tomorrow? I’ve been up since dawn.”

  “I feel ... shouldn’t I call the police?”

  She held his eyes.

  “In the morning you can show me the blind. Then we’ll decide, okay?”

  “Last question. Who’s the D’Arcy guy he killed?”

  She turned away onto her side and pulled the covers over her head.

  “My ... uncle,” she said stiffly.

  Jens collapsed onto his pillow, more perplexed than ever.

  ________

  What do I want from her? he asked himself, as the familiar animal comfort of her body next to his calmed and focused his thoughts.

  He found himself winnowing down from the precipice of his fight or flight reflex. Soon his thoughts returned to his habitual preoccupation, his work.

  He lay awake thinking through his determination to write the Cassie Melantree novel. He tired himself, applying author John Irving’s comment about always knowing the last line of a novel before he began. He thought of a few last lines for his story, but rejected them for these:

  In the ambulance Cassie rode alongside Tommy, holding his hand while medics worked on him, trying to staunch the blood pouring from his neck wound, from the bullet that had nicked his carotid. “If you die, you bastard, I’ll never forgive you,” she whispered over him. At her words, his eyes blinked, and a smile curled his lips.

  Jens fell asleep thinking about the implications of the line, knowing now that Emma, the abducted child, had been saved, and her kidnapper, Orozco, was dead, killed in a shoot-out with Tommy Flaherty. Or was he?

  He dreamt he was Tommy, dying in Cassie’s arms. But then he was Orozco, flush with the pleasure of watching Tommy die.

  Strangely, an image of Orozco appeared in his mind’s eye.

  He looked frighteningly like Laurent.

  ________

  In the morning, coffee mugs in hand, he and Vivian examined the hunter’s blind at the edge of the woods. Vivian stood beside the tamped grass where the hunter had lain, staring at the spot for a long time.

  The look she gave Jens said it all. He’d let his imagination run wild, fueled by jealousy. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Poacher?” he offered.

  They walked back to the house, talking about the desiderata — duties, errands, and chores — that hold a marriage, fragile or otherwise, together.

  For the time being, things were back on track. Jens would write his new book, Vivian would paint, and Teddy would soon return to school.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The meeting with his agent Jean Fillmore-Smart did not go well. Not at first, anyway.

  Jens had awakened early, showered, and shaved. Dressed smartly in an off-blue broadcloth shirt and light-weight navy trousers, he’d gone up to his study, intending to flesh out his outline for Forsake Me Not. And rehearse what he was going to say to her.

  The more he thought about his “brilliant” idea for a breakthrough novel, the more it seemed flat and unconvincing. He decided to stick with a pitch, learned from his screenwriting days, and hook her with it. He found his notes written at the cabin the day he and Teddy rescued Daniel, and played with them on his desktop until he was satisfied.

  Their melancholy faces stare out at us from milk cartons, accusing us of indifference, taunting our complacence. Cassie Melantree’s seven-yea-old daughter was abducted by a pedophile and slain only moments before Cassie crashed his secret lair. Her life’s mission is to hunt down these predators and save the children. She’ll stop at nothing to save the children. All the children ...

  He printed his pitch on an index card. After reading it aloud, he decided to cut it down by eliminating the first and last lines. Less is more, he concluded, drawing a line through the reference to the children on milk cartons and the superfluous line, “All the children.” He read it over a few more times and decided it would work.

  _______

  At Portsmouth’s “Dock-In,” a landmark waterfront restaurant and drinking hole built on a tugboat, he spotted Jean seated on the deck, with a scenic view of the north bank of the Piscataqua River.

  She was angled toward the entrance, apparently to keep an eye out for him. She already had a drink in front of her, her usual gin and tonic. She looked up just as Jens waved, and she wave
d back. Sidestepping the hostess, Jens pointed to his lunch date and went to her table. Jean smiled up at him as he sat down, her serenity total.

  A young waitress approached their table with menus. Jens ordered a gin and tonic and offered a refill for Jean. She declined, putting her hand over the top of the glass. The waitress smiled, apparently mistaking them for lovers.

  They laughed at the waitress’s gaff; it happened all the time. For some reason, thought Jens, people saw them as ideally paired. They were about the same age, athletic, attractive, and youthful. Jens admired Jean’s fair Scandinavian looks — her luminous skin, golden hair, arched brows over an aquiline nose that was slightly tilted, broken in a boating accident on the Charles River when she was a teen. There was the matter of the similarity of their names — Jens and Jean — twining them ironically.

  A different waitress dropped off his drink and he stirred it compulsively.

  “It’s good to see you,” began Jean. Both took perfunctory sips from their drinks.

  Jens nodded. “Likewise. You look great.”

  He glanced up at the luxury condos that towered over every square foot of prime waterfront property; then he looked east, to the river swirling past the cement stanchions supporting the new Memorial Drawbridge to Maine. The river massed eastward, toward the Atlantic.

  “So ...” Jean pushed a blond lock from her face as she studied the menu, “how’s Inspector Poulon doing? Well entrenched in a tasty new enigma, I trust? How’s his love life?”

  Jens, who’d been waiting for this moment of truth, but now felt preempted, stammered.

  “Fine, just fine.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, not so fine.”

  He paused just as their waitress came to take their food orders.

  “Give us a few more minutes, please,” he told her, his eyes locked with Jean’s.

  “I’m afraid it’s time to talk about it.”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  Jens took out his pitch card, studied it, and then put it back in his pocket.

  “Ah, hell, let me begin at the beginning. Teddy and I were up on Black Mountain for Labor Day Weekend when we saw a bear. No, wait, it starts before that, at a convenience store in Ossipee. We were on the way to Conway, and we saw this black Escalade, you know how much I hate them ...”