Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  The brilliant doctor who performed magic had entered the room.

  At least, she assumed that was the identity of the man walking toward their table, a plate heaped with steaming pork stew and rice balanced in one hand and a dark beer bottle in the other. He wore blue surgical scrubs and scuffed leather sneakers, and his lean body moved with a boneless grace. His wavy chestnut-brown hair was too long, tucked behind his ears to keep from spilling into his face, and his eyes had the permanent squint of someone who’d spent too much time staring at something bright and painful.

  He was undeniably handsome. His weathered face, his economical physique, the sinuous muscles in his forearms and his smooth, elegant gait…Not that Ellie cared, but yes, she could understand how some women might find him appealing.

  He circled the table and set his plate down in front of the empty chair facing Ellie. “Our new nurse, then?” he asked, his accent every bit as British as Rose’s.

  She extended her right hand. “Eleanor Frost,” she introduced herself. “You must be Dr. Wesker.”

  The college girls remained silent, gazing at him with adoration. He ignored them. “Eleanor Frost,” he echoed, unrolling the napkin that held his silverware and spreading the square of cloth across his lap. “Pleasure to meet you. Rose tells me you’re a school nurse. Good at mopping up bloody noses, I presume.”

  “We get our share at my school,” she confirmed.

  “We get our share here, too—although here, bloody noses can be a symptom of a multitude of other problems. Medicine is slightly different in this clinic than what you’re likely used to.” He eyed her speculatively. “You’re a bit more mature than most of our volunteers,” he added, shooting a meaningful glance at the college girls, who dissolved in laughter. “A little maturity should do us all some good.”

  “Dr. Wesker,” one of the girls protested. “We’re very mature.”

  “Terribly mature, yes.” He shot Ellie a smile. “Do you prefer to be called Nurse Frost or Sister Frost?”

  “Ellie would be fine,” she said. His eyes, she noticed, were the same glinting color as his fork, a cool, metallic silver. She imagined they would be blinding if he ever opened them fully.

  “Ellie it is, then. And you may call me Adrian. We don’t stand on ceremony here, as long as everyone recognizes that I am the boss and treats me with the proper deference.” He smiled again. Ellie smiled back.

  The college girls dominated most of the dinner conversation, describing their most recent shopping expedition in downtown Kumasi. Once they’d all finished eating, Adrian filled two mugs with rich, dark coffee and ushered Ellie outside. The heat of the day had evaporated, and the evening air smelled like foliage and moist soil. He gestured for her to sit on the concrete steps leading down from the back door of the residence compound, then lowered himself beside her. His knees were only an inch from hers, the smooth blue cotton of his scrubs contrasting with her khaki slacks. She considered putting more space between them, but the stairway railing was at her back. And he might be insulted if she shifted away. He’d chosen this place to sit with her, so she decided to accept his nearness without making a fuss.

  Perhaps his subtle body language was his way of conveying the way things worked at the clinic. Volunteers worked together. They ate together. They shared a residence—except for Dr. Wesker, who, Rose had informed Ellie, lived in a small cottage just up the street, and Rose herself, who remained in the house she’d shared with her late husband.

  Personal space might be a luxury unavailable in this village on the outskirts of Kumasi, at least for the volunteers.

  “They’re lovely birds,” he said, “but rather too giddy.”

  It took Ellie a minute to realize he was referring to the college interns. “They’re women, not birds,” she said, a stern display of feminism.

  “I imagine they’d prefer to be thought of as birds. At least they’d prefer that I refer to them that way. They twitter and flutter a lot. They mean well, but our older staff tend to be more productive. You’ve met the other nurses?”

  She had. One was a thin, towering Kumasi native named Atu. He’d said little when Rose had introduced Ellie to him, but he’d had a marvelous smile. The other nurse, Gerda, was from Scotland and was, according to Rose, a fanatic about sterility. Ellie had contended that in a medical setting, being fanatical about sterility was not such a terrible thing.

  Atu appeared younger than thirty. Gerda looked closer to sixty. Both, Ellie assumed, met Adrian’s definition of mature.

  “You’re here for six months, then?” he asked.

  She nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  “You will work far harder during these six months than you have ever worked in your American practice, Ellie. You will see health problems you haven’t heard of before. Your heart will break ten times over, and it will soar at least twice as often.”

  “I’m looking forward to the soaring part,” she said with a smile.

  He smiled back, his eyes nearly disappearing. “Tell me, then,” he asked, “why are you here?”

  “A friend mentioned your program to me, and I researched it on the Internet,” she said. “It sounded interesting. I thought I’d enjoy it, and I knew I’d have something to contribute—”

  He cut her off with a snort. “Spare me the do-gooder speech. Everyone who passes through here is oh, so altruistic, so eager to save the world.” He tempered his cynical tone with a chuckle. Deep lines framed his mouth and dented his cheeks. At one time, they might have been dimples. Ellie wondered how old he was. His hair was more brown than gray and his forehead was relatively smooth. But the creases framing his eyes and mouth indicated that he’d spent many years in the sun.

  He shifted on the steps so he was facing her, his back against the wrought-iron rail and his knees bent toward his chest, and took a sip of his coffee. “People come here for one of two reasons. They come here to lose themselves, or they come here to find themselves. Which reason fits your purposes?”

  She leaned back against the cast-iron posts of the railing and drank some coffee, using the time to contemplate his question. Had she come here to lose herself? Hell, she was already lost—but she’d come to get even further away from everything that was wrong with her life back home. Her empty, echoing house. Her bone-aching grief. Her husband’s betrayal. Her dread of the darkness that kept threatening to swallow her.

  Yes, she’d wanted to lose herself.

  But she’d also wanted to stand tall again, and feel as if her life had purpose. She’d wanted to save sick children. Her own son had died, and she would never get over that. But if she could save enough other children, if she could bring them health and the promise of long, happy futures…Would that qualify as finding herself?

  “Both,” she told Adrian. “I think I’ve come here for both….”

  FIVE

  AT WHAT POINT should Curt start worrying? At what point should he surrender to his Neanderthal instincts and go after Ellie? Not that worrying about her safety was Neanderthal, but she would probably think it was.

  Ellie had always been a stubborn feminist, and now, more than before, she was determined to prove she didn’t need him. Yet sometimes she did. When her heart was breaking, when the memories were like razors cutting her to shreds, when she needed a shoulder to cry on, the way she’d needed his shoulder after she’d been overcome by the movie the girls had made…

  Once he and Ellie were divorced, he supposed, she would find another shoulder. A shoulder that belonged to a man who hadn’t wounded her the way Curt had.

  As far as he knew, she hadn’t found that other shoulder yet. His remained the only available shoulder, and rather than let it absorb any more of her tears, she’d bolted from the room. Now she was off somewhere, wandering around late at night at an inn on a dark country road. Damn it, he wished she’d left him the key. The night clerk probably had a spare; he could go downstairs, get the extra key and then head outside in search of Ellie.

  Not to cont
rol her, not to force her back to the room. Just to make sure she was all right.

  His gaze snagged on the frozen image on the TV screen: him in his graduation robe and Ellie tucked into the curve of his arm, holding the roses he’d bought her. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought he should present her with roses as well as a diamond ring when he asked her to marry him. She’d already told him a million times she loved him, in a million different ways. They’d constantly discussed the distance between Brown’s campus and Harvard Law School, how they’d still be able to see each other regularly, how she would only apply to nursing programs in Boston so she could join him there once she graduated. They’d talked about the children they hoped to have. She desperately wanted to be a mother, and he couldn’t think of anything better than to make a few babies with her.

  Over winter break his senior year, he’d traveled to Pinebrook to meet her parents, and they’d fawned all over him, probably because he’d brought her family impressive Christmas presents: a staggeringly expensive bottle of Scotch for Ellie’s father, a crystal bud vase for her mother and Carl Yastrzemski baseball jerseys for her brothers. Ellie had traveled to New York City to meet his family over spring break, and they’d adored her. They would have loved her even if she hadn’t brought his mother a potted Easter lily. Gifts didn’t dazzle them. Ellie’s intelligence, her humor and her commitment to her calling did.

  Despite all that, despite the family introductions and the planning and the fact that they spent nearly every night together in his bed in his scruffy third-floor walk-up on Hope Street, she could have said no when he’d proposed. She could have come up with some logical argument about how they should wait to figure out how they felt about each other when they were done with their schooling. She could have pointed out that he wasn’t Catholic and she was. She could have told him she loved him as a college boyfriend but not really, not till-death-do-us-part.

  So he’d softened her up with a dozen red roses to hold during the graduation ceremony. And he’d sent his parents to their hotel room for an hour and walked Ellie back to his apartment and out onto the porch where he’d first started falling in love with her, and he’d reached through the flaps of his graduation gown to the little velvet-lined box he’d stashed in a pocket of his trousers. He’d handed the box to her and told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He’d said, “If you say yes, Ellie, I promise you, it will always be Hope Street. Wherever we live, wherever life takes us, we’ll live on the street of hope.”

  And she’d wept, her tears sprinkling all over the velvety petals of the roses, and said yes.

  So much for that promise. So much for hope.

  People got divorced. He and Ellie weren’t the first couple to have their hope shattered, to prove unable to survive the worst kind of tragedy. They’d get through this unpleasant step and move on with their lives as best they could. She’d find someone else to hold her together—if she ever allowed herself to fall apart again the way she had with him. And maybe he’d find some other woman who didn’t mind crying on his shoulder every now and then. Ellie would no longer be his responsibility. He’d remind himself, every day if he had to, that he wasn’t supposed to worry about her anymore.

  But damn it, she could get hurt out there in the dark. She’d been gone too long. They weren’t divorced yet, and he worried.

  Turning his back to the television, he closed his hand around the doorknob. It twisted in his palm and the door swung inward. Ellie had come back.

  She stood in the doorway, apparently startled to see him. The perfume of an October night clung to her. Her hair hung loose around her face and her cheeks were flushed.

  “I was just going to look for you,” he said, backing into the room and wondering whether she’d cross the threshold.

  She did. “That wasn’t necessary,” she said tersely as she set the key down on the dresser.

  “So shoot me. I was worried. You were all alone out there.” At least he assumed she was.

  “I sat on a bench for a while and then I got cold and came inside. You don’t have to take care of me, Curt. I’m fine.”

  His gaze collided with hers. Like hell she was fine. Just before she’d fled the room she’d been a wreck. The only reason she’d fled was that she couldn’t bear the idea of letting Curt clean up her wreckage.

  Skeptical about just how fine she was, he decided to test her. “How about watching a little more of the girls’ video?”

  Her lips tensed. She knew he was challenging her, and she was too proud to hand him a victory. “Sure,” she said, a bit too readily. She returned to the bed, settled onto it, kicked off her shoes and swung her feet up onto the mattress. Then she reached for her glass of port, which she’d left on the nightstand when she’d bolted. She took a sip and nodded at him. “Let’s watch some more.”

  She’d passed that test. Why not give her another? He carried the decanter over to the other nightstand, then climbed onto the bed next to her, propping a few pillows behind his head and shoulders. He shot her a smile that he hoped looked more confident than it felt, aimed the remote at the TV set and clicked the button.

  Accompanied by music from the Evita soundtrack, a series of photos depicted Ellie’s final year at Brown. Ellie grinned at the photographs of her at assorted social gatherings and sports events. Jessie’s voice broke through the background music to intone, “‘In a way, our last year at Brown was great because Ellie had more time to spend with her friends. Sure, she missed Curt and spent most weekends with him in Boston, but when he wasn’t around, we hung out together, danced all night at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel and volunteered to be stagehands for this bizarre campus production of a play called Ovum. It was about an egg.’ Anna Krozik.”

  “Ovum?” Curt scowled. “I don’t remember that.”

  “I didn’t tell you everything I was doing while you were in law school,” Ellie said, sounding a bit smug.

  “Dancing at Lupo’s? I used to take you to Lupo’s.”

  “When you were in Providence. Once you moved to Boston, I went to Lupo’s with Anna, instead. And other friends.”

  “Hmm.” Of course he’d known that she’d had a life in Providence while he’d been busting his ass at Harvard. He’d had a life, too. He’d hit the bars with his classmates, scored occasional tickets to Red Sox games, caught Bonnie Raitt performing one night at a coffeehouse near Harvard Square. But he couldn’t recall dancing at a rock club with anyone other than Ellie. And he certainly hadn’t worked backstage at a show called Ovum. “What was that play about?”

  “You heard what Anna said. It was about an egg.” Her cryptic smile let him know she was enjoying herself at his expense.

  He played along. “So, what did the stagehands do? Build a nest on the stage?”

  “It wasn’t a chicken egg. It was a human egg. The play explored reproductive issues. Two guys played sperm.”

  “Lucky guys.”

  “They were the comic relief.”

  He feigned indignation, but inside he was laughing. All right, so maybe Ellie was fine. He detected no lingering symptoms of her earlier despair.

  The movie moved on to Ellie’s graduation from Brown. This time she was the one in the flowing brown graduation robe, while Curt was dressed in civilian attire. One photo showed her flanked by her parents; one featured just Ellie and Curt. In that one, she was holding another bouquet of roses that he’d given her.

  When was the last time Curt had given her flowers? Maybe if he’d showered her with bouquets, she wouldn’t be divorcing him now.

  Yeah, right. A gift of flowers would have infuriated her. In the days after Peter’s death, their house had filled with flowers. Flowers from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from Peter’s classmates and teachers. So many flowers that the perfume had cloyed, and then the flowers had died. Day by day, petals had faded to brown and dropped from their stems. Day by day, stalks had drooped and pollen had spread in a fine, pale dust under each vase. Watching the bouquets die
was like reliving Peter’s death over and over.

  Two weeks after the funeral, Curt had arrived home to find Ellie cramming all the dying bouquets into a huge black trash bag. He couldn’t imagine bringing her flowers after that.

  Shoving away the memory, he focused on the video. A few shots of the nursing-school building at Boston University, where Ellie had received her RN degree. A few shots of Children’s Hospital, where she’d worked while he’d finished law school. A few shots of the building that had housed their first apartment, in Allston. He’d had to commute on the T across the Charles River and into Cambridge to reach the law school every day, but the place had been cheaper than the rentals on the Cambridge side of the river, and with Ellie often working a night shift, he’d wanted her to have a quick commute.

  They’d been happy then, he recalled. Shabby apartment, budgeting their pennies, both of them working like dogs, sometimes too tired to eat, let alone make love—but they’d been so exuberantly happy. Their flat had been furnished with Salvation Army castoffs and they’d dined on macaroni and cheese several nights a week. Ellie’s parents had been appalled that she was living with Curt without the benefit of marriage. “He’s never going to marry you if you live with him, Ellie. You know the saying. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk free?” Ellie’s mother had often nagged. But her parents did like him, and once he’d finished law school, he’d bought the cow.

  A title appeared on the screen: The Wedding. “Oh, God,” Ellie muttered.

  “We survived it,” he reminded her.

  “Barely. I wonder how the girls are going to spin this part of the story.” She nestled back against the pillows and sipped some port.

  The screen filled with a photo of an engraved wedding invitation and then a faded clipping of the engagement announcement that had appeared in the New York Times. “I’d forgotten that,” Ellie murmured. “Your mother got our engagement into the Times.”

  “My mother could have gotten it onto a billboard in Times Square,” Curt noted. “She was very well connected in the city. She probably still is, even though they don’t live there anymore.”