by Nicky Webber
‘I know, I know Logan. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon, even though she was discussing the details with me. She shrugged it off and kept saying she wanted to be prepared.’
They were both silent, assessing this well-trodden ground which Logan and Maddy had trampled over. Even Fred had become troubled by talking about Mila’s fateful decision and questioning why none of them had noticed her mental state.
‘Why else would she commit suicide so early in the piece?’ he had stated to the pair over lunch a few weeks earlier.
‘It made me think that I just don’t want to carry on doing what I’ve always done,’ Maddy continued. ‘I told Fred I had considered divorce.’
The last word she spoke was like four-thousand volts to Logan, shocking him out of his gloom. For a split second, he thought he must’ve misheard what Maddy said.
‘What do you mean?’ He tried, keeping his voice calm and evenly modulated.
‘I haven’t pursued it yet.’ She fired her first volley across the bow of his stunned disbelief.
Logan rebounded after a few frozen seconds and put on his best business voice. ‘We shouldn’t have this discussion over the phone, Maddy. Let’s go for a walk in the park tomorrow lunchtime so we can talk freely.’
Maddy knew she had pushed him too far. But she would not let him off the hook that easily.
‘Okay. See you at 12.30pm tomorrow at the south gate,’ Maddy stated in an equally clipped tone.
‘Sure.’ Logan clicked off his cell phone.
Maddy thought about an older friend Karen, she admired, who had enjoyed a non-live-in lover over the past eighteen years. Karen and Max each lived in separate houses, nine miles apart. They seemed, from the outside, to live mostly different lives too. Max wrote poetry to Karen, and they flew all over the world to first class holidays. They loved one another, enjoying true companionship, sharing stimulating conversations and traveling to holidays in exotic places. Maddy thought Karen had the perfect plan. It was not an actual marriage and not a single life either. But they enjoyed the best aspects of this hybrid living arrangement.
Karen discussed at length why they didn’t live together or desire marriage.
‘Why be the disaffected wife, darling, when I can be wined and dined and loved all the time? Also, I never wash his socks or have to put up with his bad moods!’
‘Do you mean you’re his mistress?’ Maddy laughed across the lunch table. ‘His on-tap sex slave?’
Karen nearly choked on her glass of Pinot Noir as she giggled mischievously. ‘I don’t like the word mistress.’ She grinned teasingly. ‘It has too many negative connotations, and I’ve only experienced the best!’
‘Yes! I can see that.’ Maddy smiled.
‘Look how long we’ve been together. It’s not a temporary off-the-cuff-bang on the quiet darling. And everyone knows who we are and that we belong to one another. There is nothing secret, and there are no other spouses involved.’
‘How very, brilliant,’ Maddy said, making a mental note to discuss with Logan at their next catch-up.
‘Max can sleep at my place as long as he takes his washing home!’ Both women shrieked with laughter.
‘Sounds too blissful to be true,’ Maddy said.
Maddy recently caught Karen ironing Max’s shirts when she popped in to drop a book off at Karen’s house one Saturday morning. Karen joked from behind the ironing board, calling her domestic action an emergency aberration.
‘That’s right,’ laughed Maddy, clearly amused that even blissful perfection in relationships always had a dark side.
Whatever it is, Maddy appreciated their arrangement, confirming their devotion to one another.
Love relationships are an infinite conundrum. There’s with no instructional handbook. Maddy’s thinks Braille mixed with alcohol and compromise helps people navigate the roller coaster course.
****
Two months later the casual, intermittent arrangement between Maddy and Logan fell back into its age-old, regular pattern. Somehow, with Mila seeming weaker, but laughing it off as lack of sleep, their secret affair didn’t feel as comfortable. Neither Logan nor Maddy could put into words. The missing X-factor element intruded into their connection and raised their levels of remorse after every clandestine contact.
On Thursday afternoon they walked beside one another talking, but not touching, not wanting to draw any public attention, as they strolled along the pathway in the public park. It was the first time in weeks they had some time to discuss what they always avoided.
With nothing to lose, Maddy grew serious and stepped up to the plate, asking Logan. ‘What if… it’s all just too complicated for us?’
Logan held her gaze for a few seconds but remained silent, his brow furrowed, anxious about where the conversation was going.
‘Hypothetically, you know, in theory.’ she squirmed. Time was short, and maybe she was being dangerously forthright and would face a massive cold rebuff. She paused. Logan raised his eyebrows in anticipation of what she would say next.
‘Could you… or would you,’ she fumbled, smiled and lowered her voice to sound more casual and off-hand. ‘Hypothetically, if I told you I still love you,… in theory,… what would you say?’
She glanced down at the edge of the path where the concrete curb met the manicured lawn. Blood rushed into her face. After inhaling several deep breaths, Maddy slowed her breathing as hushed silence expanded between them. She was too scared to look at him. Her revelation could fill him with alarm, disgust, horror, or laughter at how ridiculous this was? A wave of humiliation crept up through her stomach and into her chest. Blood rushed up her neck and into her reddening face. Convinced she had made an idiot of herself by attempting to force Logan into an emotional commitment. But now, twenty-four hours later, she was thinking more clearly. She could’ve taken the high ground and maintained their separation while rescuing the friendship. Now she feared she had crushed the entire thing. A slow wave of nausea crept up through her stomach towards the butterflies fluttering in her chest. A wall of tears pulled at her heartstrings, painfully plucking them out one by one. These few seconds seemed like an excruciating lifetime.
‘I do still love you,’ came his crystal clear words, ricocheting across the abyss of their shared past.
She slowly lifted her head to look at him, his gently smiling face. She smiled and grasped the lifeline.
‘Theoretically, of course?’ she queried, grinning back at him. He reached his arm across and briefly held her hand.
‘Of course,’ was all he said. His eyes held the complete story. They smiled at one another.
‘So now what?’ she finally asked.
‘How do I know?’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, ‘but what’s…’
‘Yeah, I know,’ she responded. ‘Are we on the edge of a catastrophe?’
He frowned, disheartened. It was almost a full delivery, the birth of something new, with meaningful love and grace, but somehow it sounded still born.
Maddy looked at her cell phone. She felt nauseous, standing in the bloody footprints of their original broken love, eyebrow deep in the past and trying to pull their passion into the present.
‘We should try to get away for a few days,’ he suggested again. ‘But I feel uneasy about leaving Mila. She’s not been herself recently.’
It was Maddy’s turn to be silent.
‘Or maybe connect once or twice a year.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve left our run too late.’
‘You’re right Logy. I’m not sure I can carry on this way,’ she said, her voice breaking. I worry so much about Mila too, and it’s getting harder to avoid the guilt.
Logan’s eyes unexpectedly look as if he is going to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I love you. What’s wrong with that?’ He wanted a reprieve from the guilt about Mila. You’ve both been a part of my life for almost all my life. I don’t want to be without you either.’ He let her hand go. ‘We’ll have to talk again.’ He secretly hopes this hook
would hold her to him, a reason for her to meet with him again before she could close the door on him forever.
‘There’s not much more to say.’ Starting damage control on her way home was her priority. Logan walked back to her car and fleetingly kissed her goodbye. She felt electrocuted by his soft lips pressing firmly against her mouth. Maddy was reluctant to let him go. But she had to. There was no other way without breaking everyone’s hearts.
‘You don’t need to be single to love an old man.’ he smiled. She hugged him in defeat, turned, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
That was the last time she saw him or spoke to him for three long weeks. He sent a one-word text to her cell phone.
‘Bittersweet’ was all it said. Maddy understood and felt the same way. It would take weeks to recover herself and the emotional alienation it had created in her marriage to Fred.
After their parting, time stretched out, elongated into longer, slower days and darker hellish nights. Days turned to weeks. Maddy looked back and realized the moments spent with Logan were but a heart quake, a blip on the Richter Scale of love. It was as if a smooth stone had dropped on the mirrored surface of a deep-water lake. The ripple effect had pushed her to the outer edges and washed her ashore, still shaken by the impact but moving away and caught back up into the comfort and stability of the concentric rings of her original domestic life, back home with Fred.
She told herself to take slow, long breaths. Maddy was back in the groove of her space-time continuum. The bittersweet moment of the past dissolved away. She sent Logan an email that night explaining how their lives would never intersect, even if their needs were the same. Was it wrong to want to feel loved, understood, needed, and cherished? They were at opposite tangents, and she knew now that an occasional lunch was all they would ever hope to have together.
Logan did not respond.
Like the moon affects the ocean tides, Maddy’s emotions ebb and flow, oscillating between heartbreak and love and back again. Finally, at the beginning of the fourth week of Logan’s silence, he emails her.
CHAPTER 21
He Replies
The beep on Maddy’s cell phone tells her an email is waiting for a response. She briefly checks the sender on her phone, and her heart leaps with excitement. It’s finally a message from Logan. She waits until she is alone to read his words, submerged in the luxury of peace and privacy. Two hours later she has the house to herself, makes a cup of coffee with plenty of cream before sitting down at her laptop, and opens her email.
My dear Mitch.
Here I am reading your email at Departure Gate G14 at Madrid airport.
It feels wrong to be responding to you here, surrounded by throngs of scurrying passengers and deafening flight announcements in twelve different languages. Instead, I’d rather be sitting at a quiet table under a tree, sipping a glass of something mellow and watching you laugh - in precisely the way I always remember your laugh, full, vital, and with a wisp of bittersweet on the nose.
I’d rather wait until I return to respond to you properly and in the way you deserve.
I am not as skilled as you in decoding, reordering and expressing my thoughts and emotions - mostly because I am just a man and because I am out of practice.
Maybe love is not enough in this four-way friendship/marriage/affair we’ve lived most of our lives. What exactly do we have? There are no instruction manuals, so it’s getting tougher to navigate.
They’re calling my flight. Must go. Please accept these positive and encouraging thoughts and energies in abundance, but honestly, right now, I’d rather be sitting under that tree with you.
Love always
Logy
It strikes Maddy that waiting is the primary activity she undertakes with both men in her life. But virtuous patience is also a damn frustration. She replies to Logan and reminds him of their need to be distant. Not that either of them wants that solution.
My Dearest Lionheart,
I’ve thought about how we can wrestle this on-again, off-again arrangement into unmitigated closure. Stop it in its tracks. I know you find this laughable, and I appreciate it will be one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. We will have to be strong and fight against history forever repeating itself!
Maybe, as you suggest, meeting for a casual lunch once a year? Or is that way too close to our previous encounter? Try as I might, I cannot keep the sarcasm out of my words! I will have to learn to become only your ‘friend’ and hope that when you drop Fred off after cycling, he won’t pick up on the magnetic field between us. This situation is far more torturous now than when we remained in each other’s lives as lovers.
I realize, listening to your ESP... that I may have made you uneasy. I apologize for my impulsive, over enthusiastic self. When you speak of love, I realize now, in hindsight, you mean a spiritual love, a bittersweet, go nowhere love, a love of friendship or brotherhood. I understand, brother, the struggle with moral compliance. I guess life goes on and who knows what’s next? But I remember an old reference to Roman-Dutch law where ‘alienation of affection’ is a crime! I guess it’s equivalent to coveting another man’s wife or in my case coveting a best friend’s husband!
Can we not be secret companions? Meet up once a year and share a bottle or three and talk for a few hours with no expectations? What’s wrong with that? We both believe in unconditional love.
I feel such a sense of sadness and loss when I don’t hear from you. I find it hard to believe that you are alone, single again, but so out of reach through our covenant.
I guess you only get to reap what you sow, and as you are sowing silence, I will reap the isolation. Missing you and thinking of you always.
With Unmitigated Love Mitch x
Has Maddy gone too far? Although anxious at having upset Logan, she holds her ground. She knows him well enough. He will eventually crack and contact her even when they’ve agreed not to.
As the silent days turn into weeks and the weeks yawn into months, Maddy understands Logan’s silent signal. Their situation is unsustainable. Understanding didn’t help. The power of silence, the do-nothing, escape-hatch response to resolve concerns is heartbreaking. She tries to push him to the back of her consciousness, desperate to let him go too.
The very next day, Logan texts her cell phone to ask if he could come over to her house on his way back from the shops. This shocks her out of the gloom and into sharp focus. Within ten minutes, he is ringing the doorbell. He strides into the house, pecks her on both cheeks, full of joy and positive noises about Christmas celebrations with family and friends. Maddy has barely finished making coffee when the doorbell rings again. It is her youngest son, Hawke, standing forlornly on the front step.
‘Come in, darling,’ she says, hugging him. ‘Look who’s here.’
Hawke walks into the open plan living area as Logan stands up from an armchair.
‘Hawke!’ smiles Logan. ‘Great to see you. How have you been Bud?’
The two men hug one another closely. A fleeting shadow casts across Maddy’s face as she watches Hawke, now twenty-three-years old. Both men look more alike than ever.
‘Cool, Uncle Logan.’ He heaves an enormous sigh.
‘What’s that about? Living in the actual world getting too tough for you, eh? How’s the job going?’
‘It’s, errr… going, I guess. It’s been two years now, so I guess I’m welded to the coalface.’
‘Jeez, I can’t believe it’s been two years since your graduation,’ Logan says. ‘Wow, how time flies when you’re locked into the daily treadmill.’ He pats the sofa beside himself. ‘Come sit here, I want to hear all about those algorithms and heavy math formulas you’ve come up with for those banking executives.’
‘How about a coffee?’ Maddy interrupts. ‘Or a beer?’
‘Actually, it’s good you’re both here. I want to talk about something, and I think Dad would get angry and distressed.’ Hawke runs his hand through his heavy, dark fringe, dragging his fi
ngers across his head. His warm blue eyes, Logan’s eyes, are clearly visible. Maddy inspects her son.
She frowns. ‘Are you alright?’ Hawke slumps his tall frame onto the sofa and looks from one adult to the other. He habitually presses both hands along his thighs, towards his knees several times.
‘No. Not really,’ Hawke replies in a softer voice.
‘Look if it’s work. I can help you out,’ Logan says with concern etched on his face, hoping it isn’t more issues with drinking or drugs.
They had all endured a tumultuous ride through Hawke’s teenage years. But he pulled himself together two years ago and surprised everyone by graduating with a mathematical science degree. Fred pulled a few strings, and Logan put in a few good comments with business contacts which resulted in Hawke landing a job in one of the big commercial banks in L.A. Once dressed in a navy suit, Hawke transformed from a boy to a grown man. But the look on his face now was that of a child, a lost child, anxious and uncertain about how to voice his fear and misgivings.
Maddy places her hand on Logan’s shoulder and squeezes it, warning Logan to let her son talk. ‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘Where’s Dad?’ he says before continuing.
‘Away on business won’t be back until Wednesday. Don’t worry about him. Logan and I can talk it through with him when he’s back home. So, Hawke?’
He lifts his head to look directly at his mother. Maddy’s heart skips a beat. Admittedly, he doesn’t know about Logan, but his expression makes her heart miss a beat.
‘What’s wrong?’ asks a very apprehensive Logan as Maddy slides into the armchair opposite the pair.
‘I’ve been feeling tired. Well, exhausted, really. At first, I thought I was overdoing the late nights, so cut back. I didn’t have to try very hard cos it was all I could do to get home from work at night. I had a kind of fever on and off and thought it’s just a virus.’ Hawke clasps his hands together and looks from one concerned face to the other.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ asks his mother. ‘I would’ve taken you to the GP.’
