Summer in the City

by Irene Vartanoff

  He was still a handsome man, very tall, his hair beautifully wavy despite the gray, and he was immaculately garbed in a dark blue suit. Nothing flashy, but it was a hand-tailored suit, she could tell. She herself was wearing one of her all-purpose knit dresses, in a pale gray. It was deceptively simple, sophisticated in its artful draping. It made a subtle impact.

  “Hello, Edward. It’s been a long time,” she said coolly, not giving anything away with her tone of voice or her expression.

  “Yes.” He said it gravely. “I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about so many things.”

  “You wanted to see me because you’re a widower now.”

  “My wife died three weeks ago. A stroke.”

  “Did she ever find out about us meeting like this?” Surely, the woman had not been so smug in her isolated social circle that she had never suspected anything.

  “No, I don’t believe so. Although it would have been hard to tell. We lived apart— informally—for the last ten years.”

  “Yet you remained married,” Rona said, trying to hide her shock and sudden resentment. “Was it worth it, Edward?”

  He had spent over forty years shackled to a woman he had claimed not to love. Shackled by choice, for the political advantages of her connections, and for her wealth that funded his political career. Rona could feel the bitterness welling up in her, bitterness she’d tried to banish for twenty-five years, but which had been waiting all this time to ambush her equanimity.

  Edward winced. “That’s an excellent question. I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate it now that I have retired.”

  “Why did you? Most senators stay until they die.”

  “It was time to change the focus of my life.”

  “Put people first for a change?” she asked, her tone sarcastic.

  Edward took the blows in her words stoically. “I felt that a younger man—or woman—might be more useful to the people of this state now.”

  “How do you see the rest of your life? Are you finally going to spend time with your children?”

  Edward appeared pained at her choice of words. “They’re both grown up now and have their own lives. My son is married. I even have two grandchildren.” He automatically made as if to pull out a wallet with photos, but stopped himself before completing the gesture. He must have realized that it would have been cruelly inappropriate in the circumstances.

  “How nice for you,” she said coldly. Edward flinched, but she felt no sympathy. The hard fact was that he had denied her the opportunity to pull out her own portfolio of family photos.

  “That’s one of the reasons I’ve been trying to see you,” he said, heavily, responding to what she hadn’t said more than to her spoken words.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Why did you ask me to come here? Why are we strolling down memory lane? What do you want?”

  “I love you, Rona. I always have.” Edward said it with a simple dignity that made it difficult for her to repay him with sharp words. Difficult, but not impossible.

  “That’s sickeningly self-serving. Where were you five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen years ago?”

  “I was still in harness. I had a job to do and I completed it.”

  He registered her silent scorn. “I know that you have always despised my political career, but for most of my life, it meant everything to me. To be able to fashion laws, to change people’s lives, to help the helpless, these were always extremely important to me.”

  “More important than love.”

  “Yes. I admit it.” Edward moved toward her, and she turned her face aside. He stood his ground, dignified even as she rejected him.

  “Rona, please hear me out. I’ve had all these years to think about my mistakes.”

  His voice had that persuasive cadence that had stood him in good stead in his political career, she supposed. Even though she didn’t want to listen to his lies, she couldn’t resist.

  “Why should I?” She stopped him. “If you hadn’t kept calling and calling, I would never have agreed to see you at all. Can’t you take a hint?”

  “I’ve had a lot on my conscience all these years.”

  “Give your confession to your parish priest,” she said acidly. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’ve sought the comfort of the confessional many times,” Edward acknowledged. His Roman Catholic faith was a key part of him. A major reason he hadn’t wanted to leave his wife. “Despite that, I have known that I needed to obtain forgiveness from you.”

  “Forgiveness?” she asked. “Are you trying to apologize for ending our affair and going back to your wife?”

  Edward didn’t answer her directly. He walked toward one of the windows, then turned back to face her.

  “I was in my late twenties and had done everything right politically. I wasn’t getting much traction as a mere representative to Congress. All of my backers and campaign advisors were ecstatic when I began to court the Clough heiress. Her money would fund my campaigns. Her family connections in business and politics would give me influence far exceeding what an elected representative might otherwise attain on his own.”

  “The perfect marriage for a man of ambition,” she said disdainfully, but Edward was talking more to himself than to her.

  “She seemed to care about me. I had never been in love. I truly thought love did not exist. Oh, there had been women, of course.”

  “I’ll bet.” She couldn’t resist the sarcastic comment, but he ignored it and continued. His mind was on the past. He stood still now in the middle of the room, but she paced restlessly, angrily.

  “It wasn’t long after we were married that I realized I had made a mistake and so had she. We didn’t share many interests after all, although we had two children together. Neither of us made any effort to dissolve the marriage because we weren’t actively miserable. We were both busy. The years went by, not bad years, exactly, but without tang.”

  “Then you met me.”

  Edward smiled. “I had a revelation. True love is real. It’s not a fairy tale.”

  She refused to echo his smile. “This is sounding like a fairy tale so far,” she said with sarcasm.

  Edward shook his head. “The day I met you was Christmas Day, the Fourth of July, and a NASA launch all in one. It was the best day of my life.”

  She wished she had a comeback for that extravagant statement, but he had taken her breath away. She was fighting not to admit that meeting Edward had moved her equally. Why else had she risked everything to be with him? The passion she had felt for him had blindsided her with its power. They hadn’t talked much back then. They hadn’t even made many avowals of love. Their passion had dominated their moments together.

  He looked at her, obviously expecting another of her sarcastic retorts. Seeing her without words, he smiled a little. “I see my frankness has caught you by surprise.”

  She struggled to hold onto her core of coldness. “If you’re telling the truth, then I’m more surprised that it wasn’t obvious to everybody else in your life.”

  “It was. They all knew something about me had changed. My wife commented that I suddenly was happier. My father-in-law called me up and reminded me that I had promised him not to hurt his daughter. My mother-in-law, more practical, had me followed by a detective.”

  “You never told me that.” She had never thought much about the other people affected by their affair.

  “My aides picked up on it. I never confronted her about her invasion of my privacy. It turned out not to matter.”

  Edward gave another of his sweet, pained smiles. “It never occurred to any of them that I had fallen in love with you but chose to do nothing about it for over a year. By the time I made up my mind to tell you how I felt, all the people watching my so-public life had started to take my new attitude for granted. Even my mother-in-law, a most dogged lady, had paid off her detective and concluded that I was the perfect husband after all.” He stopped and shook his head.

&n
bsp; “I was far from perfect. At first it was enough to know that love existed, that you were in my world. But over those endless days and weeks and months, I became consumed with possessing you.”

  “We met on that education committee once a week, and neither of us ever made a wrong move all those long months,” she said reminiscently. She had felt the same all-consuming desire to possess Edward.

  “It ate up all of my patience. I wanted to keep to a professional demeanor, to avoid tainting in any way your position on the committee as a respected educator.”

  “That’s a laugh. My department chairman was working overtime trying to find ways to keep me away from the university. That’s why he appointed me. He kept hoping I’d give up and resign.” The bitterness in her voice echoed her struggles in those years, the difficulty of fighting the entrenched sexism and racism of her department and the rest of the university administration.

  “Now you’re the department chair yourself. My congratulations.” Edward’s words were instantly soothing to a part of her that she hadn’t known till now needed soothing. It was as if her achievement wasn’t complete until Edward acknowledged it.

  She couldn’t think this way. It would undo the work of decades, the harsh pain of forgetting him, the misery of cutting him out of her life. She responded with bitterness, “Why didn’t you leave me alone?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question many times in the years since then,” he acknowledged heavily. “The truth is that I am only a man, and once I had discovered that you existed, I had to be with you. It was a sin, the most serious sin of my life. How I wish it had been the last.”

  She disagreed. They’d had a great love. “A sin? Only you would think that way. That’s what broke us up, your feeling that by being in love and becoming lovers, we were also sinners.”

  “I’ve always been a faithful son of the Church,” he replied simply. “Sometimes it hasn’t been convenient, but I have never abandoned my faith, except that one time. I confessed that sin and accepted God’s grace and forgiveness.”

  “Whoopee for you,” she said, her brief softening gone as the end of their affair loomed in her memory. “What about my forgiveness? You demanded that I do a terrible thing.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, pained by her accusation.

  “It was wrong. I’ve known it for a long time.”

  “You were so worried about not upsetting your convenient life.” She said it with vicious disdain.

  “It would have caused a great scandal. Not only would I have lost out politically, but you might have lost your university post based on some trumped-up charge of public indecency.”

  She gave him a bitter look. “I would have weathered the storm if you had stood by me. If you had divorced your wife and married me. I couldn’t do it alone.”

  “Yes, we both had our reasons, but mine was the greater sin. It was I who said you must get an abortion and kill our child.”

  Their baby. Their love child, the baby that grew within her despite their efforts at contraception during their love affair. The baby whose mere existence would have plunged both their lives into scandal.

  When she had discovered she was pregnant, she couldn’t believe it. She was already thirty-five, well into the years of a woman’s diminished fertility. They had used double birth control, but pregnant she was. Even back then, there were home fertility tests on the market, though not perfected yet. To be completely sure, she had gone to a clinic and obtained an ultrasound. The clinic was free and guaranteed her anonymity. She made a substantial cash donation afterward, grateful that she hadn’t been stuck with going to her usual doctor. She hadn’t wanted a medical record on file with her real name on it. Not until she knew what she was going to do about the baby.

  Then she told Edward about their child. She remembered his instant joy, and then his despair.

  That was when she knew. Their entire love affair had been conducted in a bubble of pretense. They’d pretended that it had a future, but now they had to face reality. Neither of them had any desire to upset their careers. They might have continued their affair for years, but the coming baby changed everything. It reminded Edward that he was a married man, that he had spoken vows in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, vows with another woman who had already borne him two children. Who was raising them in innocent ignorance of Edward’s adultery.

  Rona knew all this because twenty-five years ago Edward poured out his heart. He told her how much he loved her, how much her love had changed his life. Then he told her to kill their baby.

  “That’s why I wanted to see you again,” he said. “To admit that it was wrong of me to ask it of you. To say how sorry I am.”

  The pain on Edward’s face was balm to her ravaged heart. She had suffered so much, and for so long. She was glad that Edward had suffered, too. She was used to thinking of Edward with a strong tinge of bitterness. To stop from yearning for him all these years, she had told herself over and over that he was a user, a callous adulterer, an older man who took advantage of her relative youth and inexperience. She knew that wasn’t true. Edward was basically a decent, honorable man. His flaw was that he put his calling and his loyalty above love. If he hadn’t been so devoted to the good works of his political career, he would have faced up to divorcing the wife he didn’t love. Rona believed that.

  Edward thought it was his duty to continue his public service. He put it above any other consideration. Even though he was in love with Rona, not with his wife. He sacrificed their love, and their baby, to keep doing the work that was so important to him. She had tried to hate him for it. She never could, because she understood what a deep-seated passion to achieve something in the world was all about. She had the same passion. Until the last few years, striving to be the best scholar and academic she could be had been almost everything. Almost.

  Back then, she would have hated being tossed out on her ear. Yet if Edward had been willing to marry her, she would have let her brilliant career be consumed in ashes.

  Bitter anger welled up all over again that he’d made the choice for both of them.

  “Now, all these years later, you come to me,” she began in a low voice. “Now that you’ve lived out your selfish dream, you want forgiveness. You’re twenty-five years too late,” she said coldly.

  He winced. “I’m ashamed to admit it. I should never have pressed for a personal relationship with you. It should have been enough that you were in the world.”

  He sat on the edge of one of the armchairs. “At the time I met you, the years ahead seemed to stretch on endlessly, filled with important work to do, but also empty because of a personal loneliness that no one ever suspected I felt. My wife, a good woman, did not know who I was nor did she care to. No one else was close enough. Then I met you, and you knew me right away. I had to have you. Being with you made life make sense for the first time.”

  She couldn’t bear it. He was ripping her apart. She sprang up and faced him. “How can you say that, when you were the one who destroyed our love? You were the one who turned your back on us? We weren’t living in a 1920s tearjerker, yet you acted as if we were. It’s not as if divorce was impossible to obtain without sullying someone’s reputation or dooming them to a lifetime of social obloquy. By the 1980s, it was easy enough in New York State, contested or uncontested.”

  “It took a year. Our child could not have been born in wedlock.”

  “That was already becoming less important back then and it’s completely unimportant these days,” she said heatedly.

  Edward smiled. “That’s my fighter girl.” He took in her argumentative stance with pride and admiration. “How I have missed you.”

  His sad expression returned. “Even though we don’t share the same Christian faith, I wanted to marry you in the church, to say the vows to you that are meant to last a lifetime. And mean them and live by them. I couldn’t do that. Instead, I broke the vows I had already undertaken and I betrayed my wife.

  “The day came when I had to
decide. Go with you and make a new life and see myself as a different and lesser kind of man than I had always thought I was. Or stay with my wife, stay with the life I had freely and actively sought out. A divorce would have been a triumph of dishonesty, to seek an annulment so the church would bless my remarriage. Staying married to my wife was the honorable thing to do, even while it was dishonorable to abandon our love and to force you to destroy the living proof of that love.”

  “That’s sophistry at work, Edward, the result of your Jesuit education,” she said, hot-eyed and trying to hide the evidence of her own pain that their mutual walk down memory lane had stirred up. “Your arguments with yourself were all well and good, but you still made the selfish decision. What’s done is done.” Her brisk words belied the pained expression she could not hide. It revealed some of the suffering she had faced. Alone.

  Edward saw past his own pain to hers. He stood and opened his arms to her. “Oh, my darling.” He enfolded her slender body against his chest. “I’m sorry to dredge up the misery of our mistakes so long ago.”

  With his touch, she felt transformed as she always had. No longer was she the geeky brain who did her brilliant job brilliantly. She was a woman who experienced the complete riches of the life of the body. She began to shiver, as she felt her inner core heat up in anticipation of coupling. Even though she wanted to remain cool and impervious to Edward, her body still ached for him.

  Edward felt her sag against him, felt her transforming heat. He drew back a fraction and looked at her face with wonder in his own. “Can it be? Still? After all these years?”

  “Yes,” she said. She lifted her lips to kiss him.

  ***

  Two hours later, Rona went home in a cab, after lovemaking so exquisite that she could not bear to think about it. She must have been insane. What the hell had she done? He was the same selfish bastard he was before. That same silver tongue had coaxed a physical response from her that she hadn’t experienced in twenty-five years. He had pierced her so deeply that she’d had orgasm after orgasm. She raised her hand to her face, seeing it shake in delayed reaction.