Wistful Thinking

by Suzanne Readsmith

How she had nurtured his ego, his manliness, how they had played to their roles in their marriage. Me Tarzan, you Jane! Who was he now and who was she? Which stance should she now adopt? The whimpering dog waiting for her master to return to the manor? No, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t!

  “Special Delivery!” Those were the words he always chanted when he brought home the tree. Many times she had fancied having a smaller tree, an artificial one, more contemporary. She had never challenged the traditions he had imposed, and in reflection he had never considered any she might wish to introduce. Jake came first. In the main he was selfish, yet she had cultured their co-dependency, suppressing her own will. Where were the cribs she had known as a child and midnight mass? Suddenly she wished she were a child again. Jake had a neat jigsaw puzzle of a life. Only this year a piece would be missing! Instead he’d have an odd piece from a different box that he’d have to squash into place to make it fit. A young woman with a young child of her own and a husband she was about to break the heart of, whom she knew to work in a major department store she frequented. She had watched him from behind curtain material looking across to menswear and feeling crazy. He had no clue his life was to be shattered into a million pieces. He seemed happy. She hadn’t needed to become 'Miss Marples' to locate him. It turned out that Penny her own best friend, knew someone who also knew Beatrice Beresford, as she was called - proving that a rat is only ever two feet away from us at any one time. Also that social network pages sometimes come into their own. The Beresford’s had been married for five years. Kate could gather from surface facts alone that they might not be big earners. Their child was a boy and a toddler. This was all that she knew about them. Apart from the insight into what the wonderful and all enticing Beatrice Beresford looked like, which was stunning. Oh, and the fact that she was twenty years exactly, younger than her. Because guess what? Her birthday was on the same date as her own. Life had a strange way of twisting the knife.

  Kate wasn’t leaving Jake at Christmas time to be spiteful or vindictive. She just couldn’t take the pain any longer. If she severed their relationship cleanly on such an important day, she could honour this as the marker to their breakdown, and not Jakes infidelity. Let Christmas day with all its melancholy spirit be what it took to pull them apart. Now this Christmas would become that Christmas! There would be no party smiles in the future and no drawn out parental togetherness for the family. This lump in her throat needed unblocking. She needed to breathe again, properly. Her heart beat in a new rhythm now, which was erratic and her head pounded. She craved normality and if she had to enter further into the abyss, then bring it on! She had never been one to delay pain. She was the patient who needed the truth, which had forced her detective work in the first instance and now that she had clarified all that was true she had to act upon it, as most people did. There was no alternative, was there?

  She remembered a film she had seen about a man left behind to die on a mountain and she could identify with him because she felt so alone she could hear music in her head. It was the song Jake and she had danced to on their wedding day. It wouldn’t leave her. Yesterday her eighty year old mother had had to try to console her as she’d curled on the sofa crying so inconsolably. Once Jake had been devoted to her and she couldn’t accept anything less from him now could she? She couldn’t become someone who shares a man. By nature she was a one man woman. In marriage they had become one. It wasn’t that she had lost her identity in this process; it was that she felt Jake to be a part of her. If she had been a plant she would have been a perennial faithfully weathering the elements.

  She realised that Jake was staring at her unable to make sense of her mood and her words. “God, where are you Kate? When you say you’re not here tonight, what do you mean?” It would appear that instinctively Jake was becoming wary about whether all in his life was all right. It wasn’t and a chink of worry was beginning to show on his face.

  “I’m leaving you Jake. You’ll be free to go to Beatrice! You’re breaking up your own marriage and you’re also breaking up hers. I’ve rented a flat nearer to the city. I don’t have much more to say to you than that. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until after Christmas Day dinner with the children, but I can’t help myself. I've realised that I can’t rescue someone who can only rescue them self and you don’t appear to be in any kind of pain, unlike me. I’m in a great deal of pain Jake and you haven’t even noticed. It isn’t you that needs saving it’s me.”

  She didn’t cry. Besides which she was beyond tears. The kitchen was warm, too warm and she felt flushed and suddenly acutely self conscious. It reminded her of her menopausal symptoms, which in turn made her feel like a waste of space. She never used the word ‘hormone’ because she had never thought about herself in bodily terms alone. She was acutely in tune with her sense of spirituality and soul. Her very being and existence did matter, but when life boiled down to whether one had a ‘jolly good hump’ then in these terms she could only think of herself as unwanted.

  Jake didn’t seem able to speak. His eyes were furtive with fear and his pallor had become white. She didn’t want to look at him now because she had been trying over these past weeks to slowly wean herself off him, to get used to not seeing him, because now he would be out of her life. It was something she hadn’t managed to achieve because she couldn’t imagine life without Jake. He must surely have imagined her out of his life because his favourite saying was ‘the piper has to be paid’.

  She turned to leave the kitchen and he grabbed hold of her, spinning her around to face him. This wasn’t Salsa! As though attack was his best form of defence he was suddenly pulling her about, or was it she who was grappling with him and pushing him away? She screamed for him to leave her alone, which he did. He was panting and so far he hadn’t even tried to defend his position. Even though she knew it was true she would have preferred him to have made some sort of a denial, to give her something to hold onto if only for a few seconds, but he offered nothing. The silence between them was deafening. She was facing him and holding his gaze. They were like combatants placed in an amphitheatre caldron surrounded by the icy coldness of the winter wonderland.

  “It’s over with her.” He uttered these few words weakly as though sad about the fact. He was sad about it. She had been wrong when she had said he wasn’t in pain. He was, and it wasn’t for her. It wasn’t about them. His pain was connected to her! To see her man grieving for another woman made her desire to be dead the most important wish in the world. As his dropped his head to his chest and begin to cry she pushed him. It was enough for him to have to try catch himself and to drop into a chair, which toppled over and he fell to the floor. He curled pathetically into a foetal position and between sobs he pleaded with her not to leave him. She stared at his back, his Wellington boots shiny and black. She listened keenly to his excuses, at least those she could decipher.

  “It’s finished. I didn’t mean it to happen. It was a stupid thing to do! Please?”

  He said all this without looking at her. He couldn’t.

  As he whimpered and mumbled twisting about on the floor the desperation in his voice assured her of nothing. She could only believe that it hadn’t ended between the woman and him as he had stated just now. He had said that instinctively to buy himself time. She perceived that his grief was connected to the thought of having to end it now. Now that he had been found out. She felt nothing for him in this moment only hardness and anger. She stood leaning against the central island enjoying the cold feeling of the granite work surface. She felt detached from Jake and he must have felt this because suddenly he became silent and unwinding himself he stood up to face her, his face crumpled. He tried again.

  “It is over Kate”

  “Between us it is, yes.” She stated. He gulped.

  “I meant with ….”

  “I know whom you were referring to. I’m thinking about us, somethin
g you stopped doing many months ago.”

  She sensed he was too weary to battle with her in a war of words. The game was up and when this happens there is one of two things to do. Celebrate or commiserate. She had backed him into a tight corner. What could he do or say? She had accused, tried and sentenced him and now he was a man sent to the gallows. He seemed suddenly to accept the inevitability of his fate. She wanted to talk to him, yet couldn’t bear the thought of hearing anything that could hurt her. She wanted to tell him how she felt and for him to hold her. He had been her only source of comfort for almost all of her life. Who else could help her to carry this huge burden of pain if not Jake? Could she hold onto her dignity when she felt so alone? What did other people do in her situation? The questions were too many and she wished she had a list of rules. Should she reach out and forgive him, to seek guidance and if so from whom? Seek counselling support, to hear him say what?

  His position was clear. He desired another. That he