Something New (9781101612262)

by Thomas, Janis

  Balls, Ellen. Grow some. Right now!

  I raise my eyes and stare directly into his. “Linda told me about your affair, Ben.”

  He looks at me, puzzled, and then slowly, understanding dawns on his face. He leans back against the arm of the couch and blows out a sigh. “Oh. Jesus.”

  “She was upset. I don’t think she even knew what she was saying,” I explain, suddenly protective of her.

  “No, I…I didn’t mean…”

  “So, clearly, this is not your first time…”

  “Wow. You must think I’m…” His voice trails off.

  A liar? A cheater? A bastard? Check, check, and check. A handsome, sexy, desirable one, but still…

  “It’s true,” he admits quietly. “But it was different.”

  But it was different is right up there in my book with It didn’t mean anything. I stand there and look directly at him.

  “I understand if you want to go, but at least let me explain what happened.”

  No, I think. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want you to regale me with your conquest of a twenty-two-year-old hooker with a heart of gold or how you tripped and fell and your dick accidentally landed in your best friend’s wife. What I want, what I wish for with all my heart, is to have the ability to time-travel back to yesterday noon. To have Jill show up on time, so that I wouldn’t have had to bear witness to Linda’s distress and subsequent revelation. So that I would not be caught in a quagmire of conflict, and would instead be in bed with this man, luxuriating in the feel of him holding me. His dick would probably be inside me by now and there would be nothing accidental about it.

  Ben pushes himself to his feet and crosses to me, taking my hands in his. “Please,” he says entreatingly. “Come back. Sit down for a few minutes. Then you can go.”

  Begrudgingly, I allow him to lead me back to the couch. We sit side by side, and after a brief hesitation, he releases my hands and stares down at his own, which he folds in his lap like a contrite schoolboy. My gaze lands on the scarred coffee table in front of us.

  “It was a couple of years ago,” he begins. “I was working out of L.A. South, which is about a billion miles from here. I was breaking in a new partner. She was straight out of uniform, spent a lot of time with youth services while she was on patrol. Sharp woman, but…young.” His voice takes on a faraway quality, as though he is caught up in the memory. He doesn’t look at me, just continues to inspect his hands. “We’d been working together a couple of weeks when we caught a domestic violence call. It exploded before we got there. Two kids, the mother. I’d been a cop for almost twenty years at that point, and I’d never—It was bad. It was really bad.” The way he says bad, in a low whisper, causes a chill to course through me. I look at him and see that his eyes are closed and his expression pained, as though he is reliving the scene. I want to reach out to him, but I don’t. He opens his eyes and gazes at the coffee table.

  “When you see something like that…” He clears his throat, swallows, takes a breath. “Your first instinct is to reach out to someone else who’s seen the same thing, so you can both try to pretend you didn’t see it in the first place. It’s like you’re trying to prove to each other—to yourself—that the human race actually does have redeeming qualities, despite what we’re capable of.” He shakes his head regretfully. “It doesn’t work. It only gives you a momentary escape. But it happens sometimes.”

  I think of Mia’s dalliance with Peter Stormcloud. Yes, it does happen.

  Ben scrubs at his face as though trying to wipe the memory away. “Linda blew it out of proportion. Not that she didn’t have every right to,” he adds quickly. “But it was one night. The night of possibly the worst day of my life.”

  And now, I do reach out to him, closing my fingers around his. I feel his wedding band digging into my palm, but I don’t care.

  “Still, it was cheating,” he says. “But this is different.” His eyes find mine. “I feel something for you, Ellen.”

  “You don’t even know me,” I say, so softly that I’m not even sure I said the words aloud. But I must have, because Ben counters them.

  “At this moment, I probably know you better than anyone else in your life.”

  I choose my words carefully because he is wrong. There is someone who knows me better than Ben does. That person is me.

  “I would be lying if I told you that I don’t want to be with you,” I say. At this, he raises my hand to his lips and kisses it. His beard stubble against my skin sends shivers down my spine. “But,” I say, gently withdrawing my hand, “this whole thing, between you and me. It’s the same as your…one night with your partner. It’s an escape. We’re drawn together because we’re…we’re new to each other. I feel like I’m the best version of myself when I’m with you.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer. “It’s not. But you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know any of the ugly stuff. The secret stuff. The things that make me who I am. For better or for worse.”

  “I want to know.”

  “No, you don’t. That’s not what affairs are for.”

  “Ellen.”

  He suddenly reaches out and pulls me to him and kisses me fiercely. I start to recoil, but when his tongue presses against my lips, demanding access to my mouth, I am unable to resist. We sink against the cushions, fused, as my insides burn. But Ben takes the kiss no further. He retreats, only by inches, and holds my face in his palms.

  “I want to know the ugly stuff, too. I want to know all about you. Tell me. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before.”

  I smile at him. “Just one thing?”

  “Everything.”

  “This could take a while.”

  He chuckles and his breath is sweet. “I’m doing surveillance, remember? I’ve got all day.”

  Five hours later, completely drained and in need of a long soak in a hot bath, I pull the Lexus into my driveway. The sun is low in the sky and a faint breeze flutters through the trees, but I am warm, have a surplus of heat flowing through me from my time with Ben.

  When I open the front door, I know instantly that something is amiss. There is no sign or telltale sound of Sally. Also, the air feels different, as though it has shifted in the wake of something larger than a dog. My first instinct is burglar, and I consider walking out to the front lawn and calling 911. Except for the fact that I can’t call 911 from the lawn because my cell phone is currently lying in the bottom left drawer of the kitchen among a veritable buffet of dead batteries that await recycling.

  I tentatively tread across the floor of the foyer, my senses on alert, expecting someone to jump out at me, cheap horror-flick style, from any number of hiding places. I stop at the archway and turn toward the living room and let out a frightened screech of deafening proportions.

  “Jesus!”

  Jonah sits on the couch, staring at me expectantly. He stands up, but doesn’t move an inch in my direction.

  “Jonah! What are you—shit! You scared me!”

  “Sorry,” is all he says. He is looking at me like I am a total stranger and my stomach roils with sickening dread.

  “Where are the kids?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “I dropped them at Jill’s.”

  Oh, God. What did my cousin tell him? Did she call him and relay my whole sordid week to him, hickey included? Tell him to get his ass home before things went from worse to downright irreversible? No. Jill wouldn’t do that. Would she? No. She wouldn’t.

  “I guess you parked in the garage,” I say dumbly.

  “Yup. You did a great job in there.” While his words are complimentary, his tone is anything but. I am sweating with guilt and shame and wonder if Jonah can smell the scent of my sins from across the room. He narrows his eyes at me and shoves his hands in his pockets while I stand there, taut with tension, awaiting a verbal firestorm. “What happened to your cell phone?”

  It takes me
a minute to process his question, since I was expecting a far different one, then quickly think of a few alternatives to the truth. Stolen by a marauding purse snatcher, crushed beneath an alien spaceship’s crash landing, borrowed by MacGyver to avert nuclear holocaust. Anything to deflect the blame away from my irresponsibility. As if my mishap with my cell phone is the worst thing I’ve done.

  “I dropped it in the toilet,” I say finally. At least I can be honest about that.

  “I didn’t realize you were so attached to your cell that you brought it with you to the bathroom.”

  “It was in the back pocket of my jeans. I keep it there sometimes.”

  “Since when?” His voice is laced with sarcasm.

  I realize that this conversation is probably not about my cell phone, and if it is, it shouldn’t be. Wearily, I drop my purse on the stairs and head into the living room. As I move toward him, Jonah recoils from me as if he were a sea urchin being poked by a stick.

  “What are you doing home, Jonah? You weren’t supposed to come back till Saturday.”

  “Yeah. Sorry to disrupt your schedule,” he says coldly.

  He knows he knows he knows is all I can think. But how?

  As if in answer, he says, “I read your blog.”

  My mind reels. My blog? I can’t access enough words to form a question, but, again, I don’t need to. Jonah continues without being prompted.

  “My mom showed it to me.”

  Oh God, of course! My mother-in-law has been an avid reader of the Ladies Living-Well Journal since its inception in 1963.

  “Drove me crazy about it, actually.” Jonah laughs without warmth. “She’s been following the competition from the beginning, kept going on about this one blogger, almost as soon as we got there. Said I had to read it. Said all men should read it if they want to know how a woman’s mind works.”

  Well, I’ll be goddamned. Margaret likes my blog. Margaret agrees with my blog. Margaret and I are like-minded about something. I don’t think this has ever happened in the entire course of our thirteen-year relationship. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know who wrote it, however; otherwise she would not only dismiss it as garbage, but would come after me with her husband’s precious rifle because no one messes with Margaret’s son.

  “Obviously, she didn’t know you wrote it,” he says, his words mirroring my thoughts. “But I figured it out pretty quickly. Imagine my surprise.” He glowers at me. “Can you? Can you possibly imagine my surprise?”

  I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly furious.

  “Actually, I can,” I say defiantly. “I imagine it was the same way I felt when I found that sweet little love note hidden in your desk drawer. You obviously didn’t read my blogs closely enough or you’d know that I found it. Tell me, Jonah. Who is T? I figured the J part out all by myself. But the T kind of stumped me.”

  The color drains from Jonah’s face and his shoulders slump. He leans back against the arm of the couch, exactly the same way that Ben did earlier. In fact, I am having a vague sense of déjà vu as I wait for Jonah to explain his own extracurricular activities.

  “It’s not what you think,” he says and I almost want to laugh at the cliché. Almost.

  “I feel so much better,” I snap, not feeling better at all. “Tricia, right?”

  He nods but says nothing. A silence stretches between us, and I recognize this moment as a turning point. No cannons firing or cymbals crashing, just a quiet moment between two people whose future is unclear.

  Jonah pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers, then lowers his hand. He has the decency to look up at me as he talks. “Her brother died a few months ago. Car accident. Crazy thing. Fluke. She took it hard. He was all the family she had left. I thought I told you about it.”

  I shake my head. He shrugs. “Maybe I didn’t.”

  Maybe he did but I wasn’t listening. Or maybe he thought he did, but he wasn’t really speaking. Such is marital life.

  “She asked me to go with her to the funeral, and I ended up taking her home and staying with her. I was afraid to leave her alone. I let her talk through it, get it all out.” He looks at me. “I didn’t sleep with her.”

  I can tell by his expression that while he may not have done the nasty, he did more than just listen. But I am not angry. In fact, I suddenly feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. It’s not that each of our individual actions serves to cancel the other out. It’s because the rug has finally been pulled away, revealing the dust beneath. The dust that accumulates in a marriage. The dust that has to be swept up, whether or not the marriage is going to survive. His secret note and my anonymous blog have opened up fresh wounds in our relationship, but perhaps open wounds are exactly what we need in order to start seeing and hearing each other again. And paying attention to the course of our marriage rather than allowing it to blow whichever way the wind carries it.

  “Did you sleep with him?” Jonah asks quietly.

  I drop my arms to my sides, no longer defensive, and really look at Jonah for the first time in a long time. He looks tired and sad and hopeful at the same time. He is worried about my answer, but ready to accept it, whatever it is.

  “Does it matter?” I say. “I wanted to sleep with him. Isn’t that enough?”

  His eyes focus on my face and I can tell that he is doing exactly the same thing to me as I am doing to him. Seeing me, as if anew. He slowly shakes his head.

  I put my hand out to him and he takes it, then gives it a squeeze. A few seconds later, he stands up and opens his arms to me, and I step into them, feeling their strength as they envelop me. I slide my hands around his waist and rest my head against his shoulder, detecting his heartbeat against my cheek. Jonah’s hugs have been a constant in my life. He hugs enthusiastically, always has, and his hugs are an infusion of warmth and energy. But today, his embrace feels different. It feels like a safe haven, a calm port in a hurricane, a momentary respite from being alone in a big bad world. Today, his embrace feels like something new.

  We stay that way for a long time, neither of us willing to break free. When the living room becomes full of shadows, and we hear the faint scratch of paws on the kitchen door, I lift my head and look up into Jonah’s face.

  “We better let her in.”

  He nods and kisses the top of my head. But instead of pulling away, I nestle my cheek upon his chest once more.

  “Then,” I tell him, in rhythm with his beating heart, “I’d like to go pick up our kids.”

  Fourteenth Post: March 29, 2012

  SomethingNewAt42

  A LESSON LEARNED

  So, my friends, we come to the end of the blog competition and my final post. I must tell you that these past few weeks have been quite an amazing ride, and although you have been privy to only a fraction of my life, doubtless you can understand what I am talking about by what you do know.

  I took an hour to read through all my earlier posts and realized that every single title is made up of three words. I didn’t plan this, nor did I think about it when I was writing each blog, it just happened. It’s kind of funny, though. And as I looked at each title, I thought about those other three words that are perhaps the most used three words in the history of the world, and I do not mean Give me drugs! or I need chocolate! You know the ones.

  I love you.

  Those three words are bandied about all the time. Sometimes they are said with true emotion behind them, and sometimes merely spoken in order to get laid. They are whispered to sleeping children in the middle of the night and cheerfully called to canines who have finally mastered scratching on the sliding glass door instead of peeing on the rug. They are said with regret and remorse and tearfully sobbed to lovers on departing trains. They are said by almost-forty-three-year-old women to their mothers over the phone (which are sincere) and to Hugh Jackman on the TV screen (which—alas—are not really sincere). They are said to coffins being lowered into the ground and to inanimate objects (like the Keurig I’m g
oing to get for Mother’s Day) and to favorite foods (generally the high-fat, high-caloric kind because who would say I love you to a stalk of celery?). They are said all the time in all manners of ways.

  But they are rarely said by us to ourselves.

  I have learned a great deal about myself in the last month. I have learned that I am not such a moral person as I thought I was. I have learned that I can rationalize with the best of them. I have learned that I have a rash daredevil inside me. I have learned that while I love what exercise does for my body, I loathe my treadmill. I have learned that I easily bend to temptation, but at least I am willing to admit to it.

  You know what else I’ve learned? That despite my lines and limitations, I love me. For better or for worse, the good, bad, and the ugly included. I love me. And I’m going to start telling myself that I love me, aloud, at least once a day. I dare you to join me in this pact. Each morning, when you wake up, go to your mirror. Don’t worry about your bedhead or your morning breath or the fact that your boobs are sagging a fraction of an inch lower than they were yesterday. Just look at your reflection and say, “I love you.” It may be awkward at first. You may stutter and stammer and grow hot with embarrassment. But say it anyway. Aloud. It will certainly be something new. And eventually, after a while, after a lot of practice, it will end up being Something True.

  EPILOGUE

  As it turns out, I was the overwhelming favorite of the blog competition, and readers demanded that I win first prize. Everyone, that is, except my mother-in-law, who, when she found out I was the one whose blog she loved, reversed her opinion about my posts, demanded that Jonah divorce me, and started an e-mail crusade to the Ladies Living-Well Journal in which she harangued them for awarding $10,000 to a cruel, heartless, adulterous debaucher. She has not spoken to me for months now, even goes as far as hanging up when I answer the phone. Since Jonah and I are making an effort to work on our marriage, I keep my derogatory comments to myself, but I’ll have you know that the next time she gets a jar of rose-infused honey from me will be the twelfth of friggin’ never. (But to keep Masood happy, I have added dried dates and walnuts to my diet, which give me a boost of energy in the afternoons.)