Planting Dandelions

by Kyran Pittman

Though it might come as a surprise to some—including my husband—for all thirteen years of our marriage, I have been continuously and completely monogamous. I’m kind of surprised by it myself. I wouldn’t blame anyone who wouldn’t put it past me to cheat. For one thing, I am married to the man with whom I cheated on my first husband. For another, I don’t play the part of reformed sinner very well. When stories of extramarital affairs come up, my friends are used to me withholding judgment. It’s not that I think it’s okay to sneak around. I just don’t feel like I have a ticket to the stoning. In fact, I’m adamant that I am not the person anyone wants counseling them through a case of hot and bothered. Not if they’re looking for someone else to put on the safety brake.

  “Adultery kind of worked out for me,” I tell them, with more honesty and less chagrin than is probably seemly. It did work out for me, but I’d hardly write it up as a prescription for anyone. It worked out in the sense that an organ transplant works out—with pain, risk, and scarring. Worse, I wasn’t the only person to suffer the consequences. That much, I do regret. But I can’t pretend that an affair is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, or that a marriage is such a fragile orb, it pops the minute someone sticks a body part outside of it. Affairs change marriages—even the ones that go unconfessed and undiscovered—but those changes aren’t always bad. A marriage might not survive them, but infidelity isn’t like breaking a spell, where everything instantly goes “poof.” Unless you’ve been living in a fairy tale, that is, in which case, something was going to burst your bubble eventually.

  As for my husband, he’s not the jealous type, but he assumes every man I meet is going to fall in love with me the way he did, and try to win me away the way he did.

  “Honey, nobody else is that crazy,” I tell him, and he has the good humor to agree. There’s a subtext to our banter, though. We’re depth sounding. Are you worried? Should I be?

  My reassurances are never as direct or unequivocal as he would like. Words like “never” and “forever” feel glib to me; easy to say, and impossible to guarantee. Like the sober alcoholic who knows “never again” is a fool’s pledge, I’ve kept my promise, for thirteen years, one day at a time. Not once, in all those years, have I so much as kissed another man.

  But I have been untrue.

  “Archer,” he said, rising from his chair to extend a hand across the restaurant table. He was more handsome in person than in his profile photo. I like to place people’s faces in time. His belonged to the nineteenth century. A gentleman farmer, I thought. Like Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, but absent of torment.

  “Hey, so great you could come out,” I said, before turning to tell the next person some variation on the same sentiment. I had business in the city, and had suggested a meet-up with some of my online friends in the area, mostly other writers, some of whom I’d met before, others whom I was meeting in person for the first time. Of all the people I was looking forward to seeing that night, his name was barely on my radar. We had connected through mutual friends and exchanged quips from time to time. I had noticed his wit, but had missed the charm. It was a pleasant surprise, but he was just one of several charming and witty dinner companions that night. It was all delicious.

  But after it was over, and I was back in my hotel room, it was the thought of him that lingered, like the Turkish spice and incense that clung to my hair and clothes.

  The thought lingered with me all the next day, and into the evening, when I took supper by myself in the bar and imagined him wandering in, us having a drink together by ourselves. It lingered through my flight home, and wafted around my head over the next few months—faintly, but pleasantly. His first message to me after our meeting made me think some thought of me lingered with him, too. Our online exchanges became more frequent, and frequently, more private. One day it came up that we both had plans to be out on our respective towns that night, with friends, and not spouses. We should text each other the play by play, we joked, with a semicolon wink. I gave him my mobile number, and we did. It was all very innocent. There was nothing in our messages I couldn’t share with my husband. Yet I didn’t.

  I am good at keeping secrets, especially from myself.

  We were becoming good friends, I thought. We should extend it to our mates. I bet I’d like your wife, I told him. You should visit, he said. We might, I replied.

  “We should take a road trip this summer,” I told Patrick. “I know lots of people we could stay with on the way.”

  There was a writers’ conference I was going to first. My friend wondered if it was something he would find of interest.

  YES, I texted. PLEASE come!

  Well, that was a bit much, I thought, immediately after I sent it. What’s gotten into you? I modified my encouragement with a nonchalant e-mail. It’s a great conference, I wrote, as if the program was what had me so excited. There are lots of sessions you’d find interesting. By all means, come. If you want to.

  Please want to.

  He was there somewhere, in the crowd milling around the coffee urns. I stopped at the entrance and scanned. Where are you? I texted.

  Here.

  On one sudden, indrawn breath, the feeling that had wafted so airily around my consciousness for months filled the hollows of my skull and moved into my chest, as dense as smoke. It made me high.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  Dizzy, I nodded, and followed him into the bright sunshine, and we walked a few blocks to a pub. We ordered drinks, and he began talking about his marriage. He loved his wife, he said. He would never do anything to hurt his family. Thank God. Providence was going to save me from myself. Me too, I said. Me neither.

  We went back out into the bright sunshine. It was all going to be fine. I could take in this giddy, high feeling, and breathe it out when I left. Nothing was going to happen. And nothing did, though we seemed to be at each other’s side, or texting our way back there, for most of those forty-eight hours. On the last night of the conference, we gathered with other attendees in the lobby bar, amiably lounging side by side on a leather banquette. We were laughing and talking, and then it hit me.

  “We’re never going to see each other again,” I said, too softly for anyone but him to hear. It wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway.

  “Probably not,” he said, looking at me over his old-fashioned glass as he raised it to his mouth. He lowered it and gave the ice cubes a swirl, watching them meditatively.

  I was suddenly, miserably, homesick and tired. The party was over. People began to return to their rooms. I gave him the same hug and kiss on the cheek good night that I gave to everyone, and then he was gone. I went back to my room, and realized I had left my key card at the bar. It was nearly empty when I got there. A jacket had been left hanging over a chair. I picked it up. His, of course.

  Well, fuck me. At least that’s what it was going to look like when I knocked on his door. But I couldn’t just leave it there. Sighing, I took the elevator up.

  “You left this,” I said, trying to be businesslike about it, when he answered the door. There was a snort, and a click behind us as his roommate locked us out in the hall together. He turned his reddened face to the door and knocked in mock desperation.

  You bastard, I thought. Obviously, I had become the butt of a late-night fraternity joke. He turned around again to face me. Say something, I begged silently. Say that we can’t, but that you would, if we could. Say that you feel the same thing. Be gallant, at least.

  He looked at the carpet instead.

  “Good night, Archer,” I said, turning down the hall. “Good-bye.”

  I was the proverbial furious woman scorned. What had I been thinking, I asked myself, all the way home. He was a milquetoast, not half the man my husband was. Patrick, in fact, had never looked better. It was like waking up from a bad dream that causes you to cling to your beloved all day. I had been reckless, playing chicken with the edge, thinking I could jam on the brakes at the last minute.
But would I have, if the corridor scene had played out differently? It was hard to say. What I felt that night was intensely physical, outside my brain’s jurisdiction. It was heady, like the hot, alcohol note of freshly uncorked wine—the whiff of it invited a taste. To put it very simply, I was turned on. And it wasn’t that easy to turn off. In fact, I didn’t want to turn it off. For the short duration of my crush, I felt sexier than I had in a long time. I had more sex than I’d had in a long time, with my husband, and not as a stand-in, but starring as himself. My on/off switch is a toggle, not a dial. It may have been someone else that tripped the switch, but once it was on, it was on.

  It had all been delectable. Until I scared myself. I had probably scared Archer, too. As the days passed, and my fury burned down to less hellish proportion, I found sympathy for him. He did what he had to do to protect his family, and who could fault him for that? It was how I’d want Patrick to act in the face of some other woman’s weak moment. I thought about his wife. From what I could tell, I might have liked her. And even if I didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t wish to cause her harm. There was a time, when I was much younger, when I considered a lover’s marital status to be his concern, not mine. But I wasn’t that girl anymore; hadn’t been in a long time. Staying married is hard enough when there are only two people involved. Over and above fidelity to my husband, I owe an allegiance to other wives and mothers. And other daughters.

  I was just shy of sixteen when I was first confronted with undeniable evidence of my father’s infidelity. A couple of lines of type, on a white piece of paper rolled around the cylinder of his typewriter at the dining room table. The salutation caught my eye. A woman’s name. I didn’t have to turn the knob to see it was a love letter. In an instant, I knew all that I already knew. There was an underlying order to all the chaos: the bitter arguments in the middle of the night, my mother crying in the bathroom, the sudden separations and reconciliations. It wasn’t random after all. I was almost relieved.

  Later I learned of other women: some whom I knew well, others who were peripherally familiar to me, pretty faces hovering at the edge of a memory, a foreign accent when I picked up the phone. Some were brief, but none were casual. My father was not a casual man. I think he loved all of them. When I told him I was leaving my first husband for Patrick, he acknowledged there had been affairs, and that he regretted only one—the one that ended his marriage to my mother. He was honestly surprised when she finally divorced him.

  I knew that my father’s unfaithfulness hurt my mother, but I never really considered how it hurt me. I had always identified with the cheater or the mistress, and I had played both roles. I never saw myself in my mom’s shoes until I got old enough to line my feet up next to hers. As we passed our tenth anniversary, and I approached forty, marriages started coming apart all around us. A few weeks after I came home from the conference, I stood in a dark parking lot outside a restaurant, letting the latest casualty notification sink in. Patrick was twenty feet away, saying good night to one of the people we’d just come from dinner with, white ash drifting from the end of his cigarette as he gestured. I looked at my girlfriend.

  “My God,” I said. “How awful.”

  She nodded. “I’ve heard he’s already moved out and is living with the new woman.”

  “Jesus.”

  We kept our voices low, more out of solemnity than secrecy. If we had been ten or fifteen years younger, such news would have been gossip. Pretty, young things can go whistling past the graveyards of other women’s marriages. At our age, we all but crossed ourselves. I wished we were truly alone, and I could confess my summer crush in depth. Instead, I gave her the abstract.

  “Sometimes I feel like I should run out and have an affair, now, just because,” I said. “Because what if I want to later and I can’t, because nobody wants me anymore? What if it turns out we squandered all of our youth on men who go and leave us later for younger women?”

  What if they are all like my father?

  Relaying the news to Patrick on the ride home in the car, my voice turned to thick liquid, pooling in the back of my throat. I again felt the urge to confess everything. But I didn’t have it in me to do the necessary reassuring. I was too badly in need of that myself. I thought I would start to cry.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like for a woman to get older. Your currency will just go up, while mine goes down. You don’t know how that feels, how scary it is to think you’ll become invisible. How it feels like you’re running out of something you’ll never get back.”

  He let me carry on in the key of “You don’t” for about half the drive. Then he spoke, in the low and quiet tone he uses only when he really needs me to shut up and hear something.

  “You listen to me,” he said. “You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen when you were twenty-five. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen now. If I live that long, you will be the most beautiful woman I will ever see when you are eighty. You will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me, because you are the only woman in the world for me. And nothing will ever change that.”

  I looked at the man who had told me those very same words on the day we met. The man who repeated them every time after, when I told him again and again it was over and sent him away. The man who traveled for seven days on Greyhound buses through the worst blizzard of the century, for over 2,500 miles, with no reason to believe that I would keep my word to meet him at the last station, only an abiding belief in his own word. Those words. This man. The One.

  What was there to confess that was not already seen and understood? I felt known, seen, and loved. Everything else was incidental.

  That summer bolted like a neglected garden. Early one morning in August, I walked around the yard to assess just how far it had gotten away from me. Trumpet vine had taken over the dog fence. The fig tree was turning yellow, and the birds were beating us to the ripened fruit I thought we would be devouring all season. The dogwoods and forsythia were wizened with thirst, beggars in my path. The children were wild. During the day, I’d catch glimpses of them through the hedges, brown skinned, running half naked with handfuls of hard green pecans and tall pointed sticks. Everywhere, there were hidden caches of sticks, rocks, and nuts. Provision or ammunition, I couldn’t tell. I had let it all go, myself included, and it had been the most luscious, rambling summer in years.

  But it was time. Time to pull back the lovely tangle of vines before they choked the life out of something, time to beg forgiveness from the dogwoods and forsythia so they would love me again in the spring, time to brood even one fig into full sweetness. Time to give Peter his thimble and gather in my lost boys.

  I nursed my indignation over Archer for a little while longer. It made me feel like less of a fool, and filled the space where my crush had been. I didn’t miss him, but I would miss that. There’s a trade-off for being happily long-married. The energy of anticipation diminishes, just like collagen or pigment. You can simulate it, but it’s not the same. There are no more first kisses. But there is deeper intimacy, and paradoxically, there is more mystery. In the early years of our relationship, we had to know everything the other thought, felt, did. Every issue had to be exposed, examined, and resolved, immediately. It was like living in the nude. Sexy for a while, but eventually too familiar. Our second decade feels more spacious, as if we’ve moved into a different house, where the doors are left open, but there is room to retreat, rest, and change, without anyone having to sneak out a window. So far, I like it, though if I thought my husband was texting flirtatious messages to another woman from one of his rooms, I might start knocking holes in walls.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I tease him when we do our depth sounding, and he accuses me—rightly—of a double standard when it comes to being nosy. “I know what I’m up to.”

  But I don’t always know what I’m up to, any more than I can really know what’s happening with him. I was right about his currency going up. He grows
more attractive, more confident, more interesting every year. I’m unlikely to be the only woman who takes note of it. I’m unlikely to be the youngest or the prettiest. I don’t think I need to know. I’m fairly sure I don’t want to know. I’d rather just trust him. If I can survive the occasional bout of wanderlust and temptation, he surely can. If he gets a little lost while daydreaming down the path not taken, I have to believe he’ll find his way back, like I did.

  There is, in every woman I know, a creature that cannot be domesticated. It prowls through our dreams, enters the house, casts cold eyes on our mate and children, and holds us rapt in its terrible beauty. You can love your husband and children with every breath in your body and still feel restless and detached sometimes. You can be a good mother, and have daydreams of running, or simply walking, away. It’s the ones who can’t accept this paradox who have the most to fear, are most vulnerable to the sudden ambush of desire.

  My favorite maritime legend is the story of the seal wife, trapped in human form by a love-struck fisherman who steals her pelt. They marry, have children, and she lives happily ever after on two legs, until one morning she finds her hidden skin, and remembers herself. She puts it on, and goes home. Just like that. No hand-wringing, no good-bye note, no dropping off the kids with the neighbor. Some mornings I step outside in my red satin robe to pick up the newspaper, and gaze down the length of the driveway, past the minivan, bikes, and soccer balls, to the street beyond. I picture her walking down to the sea. A whisper of satin, a splash, and she’s gone. Her red robe at the water’s edge, the newspaper still rolled.

  We belong completely to the lives we’ve made. And still, not at all.

  I’ve heard from my old crush a few times since the bonfire of my vanity died down. Brief and probably impulsive updates to let me know all is well with him and his family. I don’t think of him much in between, but when I do, I still see him as the gentleman farmer, cultivating his garden, maintaining good fences. It makes me happy to know I didn’t trample it. I can’t imagine what would have attracted me to such a tidy and careful person in the first place, except maybe our own garden needed a little tending. Years ago, we listened to some marriage enrichment lectures that suggested married crushes can be used as diagnostics, pointing to some characteristic that is deficient within the marriage. I decided to test it on my husband’s admitted object of extramarital fantasy, a temp receptionist at his office.