“Case of Chapin v. Chapin,” the clarion voice of the bailiff jerked me back to the present and the cold somberness of the courtroom. I became aware that Mrs. Chapin was gripping the back of the seat in front of them with white knuckled hands. Mr. Chapin and Andrew emerged from the crowd with deliberation and took their places at the neighboring counsel table, Mr. Chapin regarding his wife with sad resignation.
The judge rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily before replacing his glasses and picking up the court file.
“Is counsel ready?” He glanced wistfully at the clock in the rear of the courtroom as he spoke, hoping that it was time to adjourn.
As attorney for the petitioner, it was up to me to start the proceedings. Before I could speak, however, a sob burst from Dorothea Chapin, the pent-up emotions breaking through.
“No! I’ve changed my mind! I don’t want a divorce!”
The murmur of conversation from the spectators and attorneys present in the courtroom stilled as the echoes of a woman’s passionate declaration hung quivering in the air.
Andrew and I remained frozen in disbelief, my weakening knees forcing me to grip the edge of the counsel table for support. Mr. Chapin dodged around the massive form of his attorney and hurried to his spouse, words tumbling out in a rush of excitement.
“Do you mean it, Dorothea? If you’ll come back to me, I promise I’ll try to give you the happiness you deserve. I love you! If you want to take classes at the University, get a job, do more entertaining or travel, it’s all right with me. I’m lost without you, darling—I can’t find a matched pair of socks or figure how to work the dishwasher. I’m so lonely, Dorothea. I want our marriage to stay intact!”
“I do love you, darling, but you’ve been so cold and indifferent lately. I don’t want expensive presents—I want you! You’ve been working these extra hours and I didn’t feel like I was important any more...”
A man of action, Mr. Chapin cut this tearful disclosure short by seizing his wife and pulling her against his chest in a might embrace.
The judge raised silver brows, bemused by the tender scene being enacted before the bench. The wooden countenance of the bailiff, however, never changed expression as he inquired as to whether I wished to dismiss the case?
Half an hour later, the newly reunited Mr. and Mrs. Chapin departed the scene without a backwards glance or a word of farewell. Andrew and I took our refuge in a deserted conference room to close the file.
“Bill will never assign another case to me again,” Andrew chuckled, loosening his tie. “We lost our fee for the court appearance and I just stood there with my jaw hanging down to my chest!”
“I hope they follow up with some type of professional counselling,” I murmured. Andrew’s presence seemed to fill the tiny room, confusing me with his nearness. I babbled on. “I could tell she was reconsidering. Sometimes the process moves along so fast that the client is unable to think, unable to realize what they have committed themselves to do.”
Andrew dropped the slim case folder of the Chapins’ marital discord on the table and moved a step closer. I was trembling inside. The shadow of the unanswered proposal hovered between us as the only barrier.
My thoughts in a turmoil, I backed away. I felt compelled to speak—to slice through the glossy façade of the professional relationship to which we still clung.
“Let’s forget about the Chapins. I want to talk about us.”
Andrew’s eyes were dark with suppressed emotion; I could sense that he was reaching out to me but I still fought for freedom.
“I’m not ready to give you an answer yet. I need more time!”
Andrew tried to speak, but I stopped him with a light touch on his lips. “I’m not sure if I’m ready for such a change in our relationship. I don’t want what happened to the Chapins to tear us apart! I’ve seen it happen. I couldn’t bear the agony of losing you, my teddy bear.” I tried to laugh at the involuntary pun but tears filled my eyes.
With compassion, he placed gentle hands on my shoulders. I bit back a sob of indecision at the warmth generated by his touch and gazed despairingly at one of the buttons on his suit coat. If only he’d get angry, roar, break the tension somehow. Why didn’t he say something?
A firm hand lifted my chin to meet his eyes and he spoke quietly and sincerely. “Allyson, honey, listen to yourself. You want us to draw up a formal contract, a guarantee that our marriage won’t fail. Love doesn’t bring a guarantee. It brings a commitment. When I repeat the words “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part”, it will be a vow. You have to accept my word. That’s where the trust comes into being. Love and trust are the only basis for a good, lasting marriage. There must be a commitment between two people. I can’t make the commitment on your behalf, sweetheart. I can only offer you mine.”
The last brick in the barrier I had built to protect myself from pain crumbled at his words. My course seemed blindingly clear; it was as though the sun had suddenly broken through dark clouds with radiant light.
“I love you, Teddy Bear. I will accept your love, your trust and I give you my heart in return,” I whispered.
He took me in his arms and I raised my face for his kiss. The verdict was in; both parties were satisfied with the result.
Another attorney flung open the door and we exploded into helpless laughter, clinging to one another, and overheard this comment as he slammed it shut.
“We’ll have to find an empty room,” he grumbled to an unseen client. “There’s another reconciliation going on in there. People forget that this is supposed to be a divorce court!”
THE END
Honey, Do You Love Me?
“Don’t let Sandi run amuck.” Rachel brushed with a weary hand at a curl which promptly sprang back across her left eye.
My niece giggled, alert to the sound of an unfamiliar word, perhaps picturing mud pies and splashy puddles, and skipped down the walkway to the car.
“I’ll keep her on a tight leash,” I promised my sister.
Rachel nodded, patting her swollen stomach in the absent-minded manner of a woman coming to the end of her term, surprised afresh by her girth and yet, at the same time, reassured that the baby still moved within its dark, private place.
I could bear to watch no longer. “Stay off your feet while we’re gone. Rest, woman! That’s the whole point of this expedition.”
Tugging on the handle of the passenger door, Sandi’s dancing feet embodied the impatience of four years young with the tardiness of her elders. “Come on, Aunt Claire!”
My sister grasped my arm. “You all right? Not still brooding about—”
“I’m simply wondering what I’m going to feed the munchkin for lunch. That’s all that’s on my mind.” I forced a bright smile which wouldn’t have fooled Sandi and freed myself. “Got to run before she yanks the door off my car.”
Once we were on our way, Sandi chatted unself-consciously, her shrill, piping voice competing with the sounds of Saturday morning traffic until she discovered the radio scan button.
Vintage Motown, rock, rap, and country western, spurted out of the speakers until I switched off the radio. Realized that I preferred the discordant blare over treacle-thick silence.
Bored, my niece appropriated the sunglasses I’d placed on the dash after the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
Perching them on her snub nose, she demanded, “How do I look?”
Her pert tone and confidently uptilted chin proclaimed a conviction that she had been transformed into someone stunning and grown-up. The dark lenses dominated her features, concealing childishly rounded cheeks and huge brown eyes. Strangers frequently mistook Sandi for my own daughter on our frequent outings together. “How sweet! She has your eyes!”
Not today. Mine were red and swollen from crying; the glasses Sandi modeled had been useful earlier in disguising the puffiness when facing my sister.
“You look glamorous. Tres chic, mademoiselle!”
&
nbsp; Sandi beamed and the glasses slipped off her nose and tumbled into her lap. I forced an answering smile, my shield of cheerful composure holed by pinpricks of pain.
But the release of tears must be denied until I was once more alone in my apartment, that cavern of loneliness haunted by angry voices and the ghost of a woman sobbing over a stained tablecloth and guttered candles. Party favors from an intimate supper turned into a dreadful parting repast.
“Stop wallowing in self-pity”, I chastised myself in disgust. “You’ll never be able to climb out of the mire if you continue to dwell on those memories...”
But Ken’s clipped voice overrode Sandi’s chirping song. “You’re an adult, Claire. I thought you always took precautions.”
Precautions? Instantly, I was back in the dining room chair facing Ken, the meal prepared with such tender anticipation churning in my stomach. My lover had chosen to accuse me of carelessness, his reaction peevish, as though I’d forgotten the mosquito repellant on a camping trip.
Candle flames cast unfriendly shadows across the cheekbones which my fingertips ached to caress. The food set on the neutral zone of the table which separated us had been prepared with love and nervous expectation. I’d left work three hours early to bake Ken’s favorite cherry dessert.
Reflected flames glowed in the eyes which locked onto mine like a target sight. I wondered briefly why I’d always regarded candlelight as romantic.
When Ken spoke again, his tone shifted to relief. “At least this isn’t a big deal.”
At my sharp, indrawn breath, he frowned in quick rebuke. “Unless you’re foolish enough to think about keeping it.”
I stiffened in involuntary protest of the pronoun. It? His casual tone might refer to a pencil rolled under the table or a quarter discovered on the sidewalk. Not our child. He was dismissing something forged on the white hot anvil of our love without a second thought.
“I didn’t want to consider adoption until we’d had a chance to talk about this—”
“Get rid of it. Now.” Ken’s voice was flat as the champagne in my glass.
I’d bought the champagne for a celebration, our celebration. My dinner companion raised his glass of wine and took a noisy sip, the omission of a toast deliberate and cruel. To us?
My mouth dried as the strong fingers which knew my pleasure zones so intimately gripped his glass in a stranglehold, betraying the tension he refused to allow into his voice.
I swallowed the lump formed from unshed tears. “What if I don’t?”
The slender stem of the glass snapped like a fragile bone and I recoiled from the sound. Ken moved his hand in an angry arc and the wine bottle he’d insisted on uncorking before dinner tipped over and passion red, blood red liquid flowed across my best linen tablecloth.
His temper escaped, mimicking the wine’s eager flight, spread out to engulf me. “We can’t put our lives on hold, Claire. Not when our relationship is based on freedom, the enjoyment of our sexuality—living life to the fullest! I refuse to be trapped into pushing a designer stroller around the mall.”
The bitter set of his mouth betrayed that this last hurtful thrust was intentional. We’d met at a shopping mall nearly six months earlier, exchanging names over fat, salty pretzels. He carried a shopping bag full of black socks with the aplomb of a diamond courier.
“I’m a fanatic about the quality of my socks.” Ken’s tongue flicked out to lick the salt from the dough’s yielding surface. “And my women.”
His smile was heart-stopping, darting into the inner core of my being and expanding until it left a void only his love-making could fill.
That smile was nowhere in evidence now and I resented his scornful reference to the site of our first meeting, a place that until tonight I still thought of as magical.
“This is our baby we’re discussing, not a bad spot in an apple to be dug out and thrown away!”
The candles sputtered in derisive response to my passion. Drops of wax burned like hot tears on the back of the hand I extended across the table to Ken.
“Touch me, darling,” I pleaded. “Hold me close again, tell me you love me. Tell me that everything will be all right.”
Instead, he pulled away, as if I’d jabbed him with my fork. “I can’t make love to a woman with a belly like a sack of potatoes. I don’t want a brat whining for attention. Make your choice, Claire. You can have the baby—or you can have me.”
* * * *
Once in the department store, Sandi had a difficult time choosing a toy. The visual testimony of my dilemma concealed again behind the dark glasses, I watched my niece sort through a selection of plastic balls.
“This one,” she said suddenly with the conviction of a mother hen picking out her chick form the scattered flock.
Her choice featured a design of floppy-eared puppies in a basket. As I made the proper appreciative comments, a woman pushing a stroller—a designer stroller—down the narrow aisle begged our pardon. We moved aside.
I caught myself patting the waistband of my shorts in an unconscious imitation of Rachel’s gesture and jerked my hand away as though the material had been threaded with red hot wires.
A nearby sign decorated with a tumbling clown pointed the way to the maternity clothes. A child hurried past bearing a golden-haired baby doll in her arms. To me, the air seemed suffocatingly thick. Cloying whiffs from the perfume counter mingled with the fresh, clean scent of the powder patted onto Sandi’s soft skin after her morning bath.
I couldn’t help my runaway thoughts. Yesterday, drained from hours of weeping, I had curled up in the closet which still contained an elusive hint of Ken’s cologne and reached a decision.
I wanted this baby. But without Ken, I would shrivel up like a plant denied the life-giving rays of the sun. He had been gone for less than two weeks and I already hated eating alone every night, dreaded facing the lonely expanse of the bed.
My lover’s ultimatum could be read in the jangling, hanger-filled emptiness of the closet, in his absence in the bed where we’d made what I thought was love every night.
I could see it in the absence of his shaving cream in the cabinet, and in three scribbled sentences on a note stuck to the refrigerator with a Huckleberry Hound magnet. “I want you, Claire. Just you. Call me if you want me.”
“I want you, Ken,” I whispered.
A tug on my hand brought me back to the present; I winced from the renewed assault of the kaleidoscopic displays and piped-in music on my strained nervous system.
“Let’s go to the park and play with my new ball,” Sandi suggested.
I’d promised to keep custody of my niece until at least five o’clock. Sandi, displaying the budding of exotic tastes, chose rum raisin from the flavor selection available in the frosted depths of the ice cream wagon parked in the shade of an ancient oak. After a few tentative licks, however, she proposed an exchange and I handed over my sensible strawberry cone.
The morning clouds had vanished and the sun beat down on my uncovered head. Black ants and lady bugs accepted the barrier of my sandal-clad feet as a detour through the grass. My legs were still slim, but I punished myself by picturing them puffy and blue-veined in the last stage of pregnancy.
Sand pranced up. After twenty minutes of energetic motion, the exposed flesh around the neckline of her sunsuit had turned bright pink and beads of perspiration darkened her hairline.
“Come sit with me,” I coaxed, moving into the shade.
She reluctantly collapsed onto the blanket I’d unearthed from the clutter of belongings in the trunk of my car and cradled the ball in her lap. Leaning against my shoulder, she began her favorite game, head tilted back to catch the first glimmer of a smile on my face.
“Honey, do you love me?”
The proper response came easily to my lips. “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.”
She seemed pleased. Her small, quivering body generated the radiant heat of a furnace and I reached down to mop up the clear drops of pers
piration that glimmered like crystal tears on her upturned face.
“Honey, do you love me?”
“Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.”
Again, “Honey, do you love me?”, this time injecting wistfulness into her tone while wrinkling her nose comically, a sun-pinked bunny sniffing a succulent lettuce leaf.
Her gaze was fixed on my mouth, her eyes alert for the smile that was the signal of victory and her cue to pounce for a free-for-all tickling assault.
“Honey, I love you—”
The remainder of the ritualistic reply stuck in my throat. I’d screamed the first part, those very words, at Ken’s back and had been answered by a door slam.
The sunglasses fell to the ground as I covered my face and wept, only dimly aware of Sandi’s hands clutching my elbow in distress.
“Aunt Claire, don’t cry! Don’t cry! We don’t have to play!”
I tried to look at her through burning, streaming eyes. Instead of her piquant features, however, I saw the eyes of my unborn babe staring imploringly back at me.
Ken or the unseen child? Choosing the baby meant being forever denied Ken’s caress, never again sipping coffee together while bathed in morning sunshine with the Sunday papers scattered across a bed rumpled from making love. Doing without Ken meant raising a child alone and pushing that designer stroller on solitary walks.
My heart was a stone, calcified in the moment of betrayal, of coming home to find no evidence that the man had ever inhabited my life except for the faint scent of cologne and his seed growing within me...
Sandi patted my shoulder with tender concern. “Aunt Claire, did you hurted yourself?”
I had loved and lost. I’d offered up my vulnerable soul for repudiation. I wiped at the tears with a corner of the blanket. “Yes, darling, I did.”
“When I fell down yesterday, Mommy kissed my sore knee and made it better.”
Love Has The Best Intentions Page 7
