by Carol Mason
The promise, the hope, or whatever it was I believe I saw in his eyes, dwindles. He drops his jacket into a chair; it lands with the clunky weight of too much paraphernalia in pockets. ‘I took the afternoon off.’
The air has lost its charge. I glance quickly out of the window again, to where it all was, and see only a pretty garden. And yet moments ago it had all been so vibrantly real.
‘Wasn’t feeling like it today . . .’ He looks black, sad, shrugs.
Dust motes are trapped in a shaft of light that stretches between us. There is a wedge of silence that neither of us knows how to fill. ‘D’you want a glass of wine?’ he says, after a moment or two of us holding eyes, trying to work out where we now stand in each other’s estimation, probably with neither one of us coming off too high.
‘Wine? No. I’m driving . . .’
‘But you just got here.’
‘I’m not staying. I just need to get a few more of my things. Work stuff.’ Stuff I’ve managed not to deal with for over a year. I don’t know why it has suddenly become so important now.
I continue to stand there, rooted, as does he. ‘She said she was going to Florence,’ I say. ‘Didn’t she? If I’m not mistaken it was going to be Rome first, then Venice, then Florence for a longer spell to allow her to tour around Tuscany. Am I right?’ In the absence of being told anything first-hand, I am just struggling to get a picture.
After a while he nods, says, ‘Yes.’
I am a little brighter suddenly. Jessica is in my favourite city right now! Mark watches me, appearing stilled by my comment, clearly struck with nostalgia, too, at the mention of the city where we honeymooned. It’s funny how you can go through the worst possible hell with someone, they can disappoint you in ways you never bargained for, and yet with one small reminder of the good times, the bad times crumble before your eyes; for a moment you wonder if they were ever there. Still he looks at me. But I break the spell by remembering what I’m doing here and heading towards the stairs. He stands without moving until I am almost past him. Then his eyes follow me with the slightest turn of his head until I am no longer in his range of vision. I climb the first few, pause and glance at his back. He is staring into the space where I just was.
The bad times are more easily remembered than the good, but in some ways they’re also easier to forget, and it strikes me that this is both a blessing and a curse.
As I climb the stairs, it occurs to me, like it did when I was driving here, that I might find things in our bedroom that aren’t mine and I’ve about twenty seconds to prepare myself for this. I remember him saying, If you’re so convinced I cheated then maybe I should have! And me thinking, Nice head game you’re trying to play with me. A wave of nausea and dread rock me as I push open the bedroom door. I can’t take any more discoveries, any more bad things happening.
‘She’s just a friend,’ he said at first, that day when I told him I knew he was having an affair and I even knew who with: I had seen them. ‘I work with her. That’s all.’ He said it so convincingly. I remember staring at him, thinking, How can an honest person lie so easily?
The room looks much the same: very little on either of our night tables; the bed’s unmade on his side, tightly tucked on mine. Josie will have washed the sheets yesterday. I love a newly laundered bed. I have a sudden longing to climb into it and sleep for all eternity. I had to tell her about using too much laundry detergent, though – I kept getting a rash and finally twigged why. Telling her felt like a big ordeal at the time. That was back when those sorts of things were all I really had to get het up about. Has Mark brought anyone else into this house? This bed? Would he do that? I can’t really see it, and yet I can’t stop staring at the mattress, picturing his body entwined with someone who isn’t me. His hands appreciating someone else’s ass – her ass. I have always loved witnessing which parts of my body turned him on. Someone else being cherished, prioritised, put first, in all the ways I have known and held dear – and expected to continue for many years. His feelings for me being irrevocably changed simply because he loves someone else now, because she makes his life feel manageable again. He loves her with that fresh, exciting certainty he once felt for me. And he does it because I have driven him into her arms.
I happen to glance in our full-length mirror and see he’s right behind me. We hold eyes through the glass as though he’s trying to read my mind. His face looks slightly distorted and yet there is still a glimmer of optimism in it; he has hope for me that I don’t have for myself. I break the spell by going into the bathroom. A quick scan of the double sinks, the side of the bathtub. Nothing out of the ordinary. A pink razor blade by the soap dish. Mine. I throw a few things from the vanity into my bag – a beloved brand of dry shampoo that I used sparingly because it had been discontinued, before I gave up caring about whether or not I had clean hair. My electric toothbrush – one more thing I’ve surprised myself by living without.
I pluck my bathrobe from a hook behind the door. ‘Don’t,’ he says, standing in the doorway, blocking me as I go to pass him. ‘Please, Liv . . .’ I wiggle by, then he pads after me to my chest of drawers. ‘Can we just talk?’
‘Talk?’ I glance in his direction. ‘I wanted to talk for a very long time. You weren’t there.’
He frowns, caught in the act of processing this, then looks intensely wounded. ‘That’s not true. You know it’s not. Why would you even say that?’
I can’t look at him right now. It hurts too much.
‘I was there. I’ve always been there. And I still am. I’m still here, Olivia.’ His tone is strident, almost defensive. ‘You’re the one who left.’
Our conversations are like a game of solo squash. I fast serve. The wall stays. I try to manoeuvre differently. ‘I’ve rented a little house,’ I say. ‘Signed the lease for a year.’
For a moment he just looks at me blankly, then he says, ‘Shit.’ He sucks in a sharp breath. In all these years of marriage I have never seen Mark have a fit of anger. Mark never lays into people, never wants to kick a wall. He has an amazing ability to take the steam out of a situation just by being present in it. But recently I have wondered, is it just because he doesn’t ever feel anything deeply enough? Is that why I can’t reach a certain part of him – because those places don’t exist? We are complicated human beings. There are so many layers to us. But I’ve recently thought that perhaps there aren’t that many layers to Mark.
He puts a hand to his mouth, rubs his palm across it. ‘Jeez, Olivia . . . Tell me that’s not true.’
‘Well, obviously, I couldn’t keep staying in a hotel. It was costing a small fortune.’
Something in his face has changed. He is looking at me as though I’m some sort of potential threat, an alien, as though he can’t even begin to fathom me because he’s just come to the conclusion I am not even human.
‘It’s a nice little place. I think I’ll be happy there.’ I absorb the frequency of his reaction.
‘You’ve won, Olivia.’ He shakes his head as though he is smarting from my words. ‘If this was what you wanted . . . you’ve got me. You win.’
This concept of winning – as though any of this is a game – reverberates and hurts. His eyes hurt. Once again I can’t look at them. I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand our dynamic any more. I no longer know who either of us is. I go back to pulling T-shirts from a drawer. I don’t get very far. There is part of me that so badly doesn’t want to do this that my arms are like lead weights, preventing me. I hold my tangerine tank top between both hands, stare at it for way too long. I stroke it with my thumbs, trying to smooth out the ribs in the cotton, combing over them and over them and over them until they blur and I can’t distinguish the lines any more. I can’t make them out for my tears. When I come round again, I am on my own. Mark has gone back downstairs.
I must sit on the floor for a very long time, or it feels that way, gazing into the carpet, the tiny whorls of cream wool, my brain loosely making shapes and pat
terns out of them and spinning thoughts. When I can’t stand the bottomless ache any longer I get up, go into my office and rake through drawers, forgetting at first what I’m even looking for. On my way back down I’m passing Jessica’s room and my feet instinctively stop at the door. I try to picture something: on the other side is Florence. Jess outside the Duomo, lingering at that little stall where you can try tiny samples of local olive oils and knobby Parmigiano, wearing her favourite fuchsia cardigan. She turns to me and smiles . . .
When I open the door, the room feels a little foreign to me, and stuffy, yet I can still detect a hint of the nice new Jo Malone perfume she’d started wearing. It makes my missing her so desperately raw. I’d hop on a flight right this minute if I could. For a second I hold it there as an idea. My eyes go to some pictures on her nightstand – the Keith Urban concert where she’s laughing with a few friends; the first time she put pink streaks in her hair. Surprisingly, it looked really good with the platinum blonde. On her dresser is her dog-eared mohair teddy we bought for her second birthday, sitting splay-legged. That teddy went everywhere with her. Why didn’t you take your teddy with you, Jessica? I think. Were you trying to make the point: I’m all grown up now. I’m not a child! Because if you were, you’ve succeeded.
When I go back downstairs he is sitting on a stool at the island. He’s got his head down like I’ve seen him do when he is both despairing and thinking hard. He’s opened a bottle of white wine, poured himself a large glass. Mark is a Scotch drinker and only ever drinks wine if we are having a special dinner out and I am desperate to order something a notch up from the measly ‘by glass’ selection. ‘Scotch is a solitary drink,’ he once said. ‘Wine is meant to be shared.’ He doesn’t seem to hear me come down, or be aware of me standing there. Then he looks up as though I’ve been there all along, the heatedness of what just happened between us upstairs dissolved. He too has pressed some sort of reset button on things, it seems. He gets up and goes to the cupboard, pulls out another glass. I am aware of the chime of crystal meeting granite, the chinkle of a bottle top being unscrewed. I take a small sip of what he pours. It’s cold and buttery: the only kind of white I can drink. Then I push the glass away. Tentacles of yearning for our old life try to wrap around me and part of me thinks, What would coming back really look like now that everything is different?
‘I’ve joined a letter-writing club,’ I say, out of the blue. I don’t really know why I’m telling him this. For want of something to follow it, I shrug.
He studies me as though I am a new object for his discovery, not the woman he’s been married to for nearly twenty years. But it’s not a pursuit he wants. He was happy with the me I used to be.
‘It’s called the Correspondents’ Club, which makes it sound quite old-worldly and grand.’ I smile. ‘Like I’m in a turn-of-the-century novel . . . I thought it might be therapeutic for me. Force me to put some order in my mind.’
‘I remember your letters,’ he says, with an air of nostalgia again. One side of his mouth tries to cock a smile. ‘When you were pissed with me, you used to write me those diatribes. Remember?’
I peer down the dim path of memory. ‘No. I don’t think so. I wrote to you that time I had to go back to England. When I found out I was pregnant.’ Reaching so far back to the early days of us makes my brows knit with emotion.
‘There was that one, yes . . . But there were others. It was how you communicated your annoyance. When I’d done something to piss you off there was always a long written analysis of it, saying what this meant for you, me and mankind at large.’ There is a note of amusement and sentimentality in his voice but his eyes quickly mist over.
I open my mouth to protest but think, God! Maybe he’s right! I do remember doing that once or twice, now he’s mentioned it. He’s always had a better memory than me. How many times have I said to him, ‘If I end up with dementia, who’ll be there to give a damn about me? To make sure I don’t get mistreated in a care home?’
‘I will,’ he’d say. ‘Always. So long as I don’t get it too. Or then we’re fucked.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ I say now. I vaguely recall him once jokingly saying I was like Churchill’s wife, Clementine. She used to write to him when she was annoyed because it was the only way she could express her side without him butting in. ‘I may have done it once or twice.’
I’m not really sure what he’s referring to when he says I was annoyed with him, though. Our disagreements were never about anything major. We could spat over a lot of silly stuff – who left the car window open when it was forecast to rain? Is anything other than three-ply toilet paper just false economy? Why did I have to agree to dinner with Laurel and Mike when he thought we were taking a social breather for a weekend or two? But on the bigger, important things, we were almost freakishly eye to eye. We were compatible with each other, supporters of each other, right for each other in the least cloying, least clichéd way possible; neither of us is overly sentimental or romantic. And that’s why, without him, every time I stand I stumble. Why I feel so easily defeated unless he’s quietly encouraging me to be stronger than I want to be.
‘It’ll probably be good for you.’ I realise he’s talking about the club again. ‘You’ll meet some people. You know, new ones.’
Who don’t know.
‘Believe me, that’s the last thing I’m looking for right now. Friends.’
‘Don’t let people’s shitty behaviour make you a cynic,’ he once said. ‘That would be a waste of all that you are.’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘You like your own company better, anyway, don’t you?’
I want to say, You’re right and you’re wrong.
‘Are you seeing her?’ I ask. I have to ask it.
I remember him saying that day, ‘Of course we’re not sleeping together! She’s married. I’m married.’ As though to remind me that those two positives could never make the particular negative I was accusing him of.
He stares at me now for a second or two while I wait for his answer, then he unscrews the bottle again, slowly refills his glass to the top. ‘My wife walked out on me, accused me of something she had no actual proof of, and now she’s telling me she’s rented a house for a year . . .’ He screws the lid back on again, sets the bottle down, looks at me. ‘If I were, I’d have a right to, don’t you think, Liv?’
A lump forms in my throat. I try to swallow. My mouth has gone dry. ‘It’s not really an answer, though, is it?’ It just feels like a lot of smoke and mirrors.
He goes on staring at me, levelly. ‘You left me and I tried to see around why you would feel you needed to do that – to go that far. You called me some shitty things I’m trying not to dwell on . . .’
‘But it’s still not as shitty as what you did to me, is it?’ I say it quietly and calmly. I have no stomach for an argument about this right now.
‘What did I do?’ he says defiantly. And then, with a stronger note of challenge, ‘What did I do, Olivia?’
I want to say to him, How do you even have to ask? But I cannot find my voice, cannot dig for the words. All of this leads to the place I can’t go. Despite the fact that I should, or that I need to, I just can’t do it.
I had never, ever, checked Mark’s phone, searched his pockets, questioned his nights out with clients, or imagined anything he told me might be an alibi. We didn’t have that sort of relationship. I am not suspicious by nature. I had never taken Mark for a liar. Not because he’s incapable of dishonesty. Aren’t we all able to distort the truth when we need to? But because I’d made certain assumptions about my marriage. I’d been unwavering in my conviction that we were happy. I was certain his definition of loving someone was the same as mine. It meant that the thought of being with someone else, whenever that thought occurred, was only that – a pleasing image in the quiet of the mind’s eye that made you feel good about how you viewed yourself for a moment. Never a significant temptation. Never a threat.
‘You’ve never got your he
ad around the fact that I’m going through hell too,’ he’d said when I found the texts, after he’d told me nothing had happened, like he’s essentially still telling me. He’d said that I’d seen what I wanted to see that day, because I was messed up and I was angry and I needed someone to lash out at. That I was making it my excuse. ‘You’ve been so wrapped up in how you feel about everything that you’ve forgotten about everybody else, Liv. Have you stopped to think that’s maybe the real reason people don’t want to be around you?’
Yes, I’d thought. Deflect it. Clever. Prey on my guilt. Put the blame back on me.
From the texts alone there was no evidence it was anything more than what he said. The most incriminating thing I could find was:
HER: Loved our lunch! LOVE how we talk so easily. Look forward to many next times . . . (with a winky face emoticon)
HIM: I know . . . And . . . thanks. Cheers.
And yet I know what I saw that day. It was not the interaction of friends.
‘Maybe we should talk about us making our separation official,’ I say now, my conviction that I’m being messed with renewed, that he’s trying to gaslight me. That same feeling I had then: profound confusion, like my head is scrambled fudge. That same thought: Mark is one step ahead of me; maybe he always has been. Maybe every truth between us has been a lie in disguise. ‘Deep down, I’m sure you think it’s for the best, and I could use a fresh start. I’m in a new place. I’ve even got a job now. I need to move on, for my own sanity. Maybe we both do.’
He takes a drink of his wine almost purposefully slowly, sets the glass down, doesn’t look at me. After a moment or two he says, ‘If that’s what you want, then go initiate it. You’re a big girl. Nothing’s stopping you.’ He meets me hard in the eyes. ‘And if you do it, Olivia, if you take those steps because you genuinely feel there’s no coming back from this for us, or it’s what you need to do for your sanity, then I promise you I’ll try to accept it. I won’t stand in your way. But don’t make it about something it’s not.’
