Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  Ellie was as eager as anyone for news from home, and the girls always supplied her with plenty. Katie wrote delicious e-mails crammed with details about her new job in Manhattan, her efforts to furnish the apartment she shared with two roommates on a minuscule budget, her success at discovering discount theater tickets and free concerts. Jessie had landed a summer internship at a legal-aid clinic in downtown Boston, and she filled Ellie in on the clients she interviewed and the cases the clinic took on.

  Curt’s e-mails, unlike the girls’, were generally cautious and measured. He mentioned that the lawn service had raised its prices, that her father asked him to remind her to bring home some interesting Ghanaian postage stamps, that he’d gone golfing with a few of the guys from the firm, and while he shot a respectable 110, he still thought golf was one of the most boring games ever invented.

  The most romantic he ever got in his missives was, “Looking forward to seeing you,” and, “I hope you’re having a good time.” He didn’t sign his notes “love.” Neither did she.

  Did she miss him? Adrian was awaiting an answer he didn’t deserve.

  But she was five thousand miles from home—and home was a place where her son had died and her husband had broken their wedding vows.

  “No,” she heard herself say, even though she wasn’t certain it was true. She missed the man Curt used to be, the man she’d trusted with all her heart. But she would have missed that man just as much if she’d stayed home as she did here. “I’m afraid I don’t miss him.”

  “Ah.” Adrian mulled that over in silence. Beyond the screened walls of his porch, insects peeped and chirped in the shadows. Occasionally a car or bicycle meandered down the road. Above her, the fan hummed. “Well, you aren’t the first person who came here to get away from a sticky situation.”

  “I came here to find myself,” she reminded him.

  “And to lose yourself, too. I remember.” He shot her a grin, his teeth glinting white in the evening’s gloom. “When I took over the clinic, it was shortly after I’d endured an ugly divorce. I don’t suppose there’s any other kind of divorce, is there?”

  She smiled wistfully. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve never heard of a beautiful divorce. Or a lovely one. Rumors exist of a few so-called friendly divorces, but surely if the involved parties were all that friendly, a divorce would be unnecessary. In any event, this is a good place to lose oneself after a divorce, be it beautiful, ugly or otherwise.”

  “I’m not divorced, Adrian.”

  “Just in a bad spot with the man, then.”

  “I guess.” She sipped some beer. “But that’s not why I came here.”

  “Oh, of course not,” he said, sarcasm layering each word. In a blander tone, he added, “Your reasons are your own. I’m happy to share my reasons for wanting you to stay, however. You are a wonder with the children. You and I work well together, better than I’ve worked with Atu or most of the nurse volunteers who’ve been in and out over the years. When you encounter a frenzied little boy, you have the wit to figure out that he’s in a state because he thinks I’m going to remove an animal from his back.” Adrian leaned forward, his eyes startling in their intensity. “I need you here, Ellie. We rub along quite well together. Ah, there’s that word again—rub.”

  “‘Aye, there’s the rub,’” she quoted.

  Adrian chuckled. “Think about it, love. You could stay as long as you wanted. You could fly home, see your daughters and then return. All I ask is that you think about it.”

  “That’s not all you ask, Adrian,” she argued with a smile. “But okay, I’ll think about it.”

  FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, she thought of little else. Of course, she thought about what she was doing with her patients. She thought about prescribing steroids for a boy’s itchy rash, and about whether or not to urge a young girl to wear a sling to protect her fractured wrist, and about explaining the facts of life to a ten-year-old girl who’d raced to the clinic one morning afraid she was dying because blood was oozing from her private place and no one had ever told her that this was normal.

  But Ellie also thought about staying in Kumasi, and about going home. She wasn’t sure what was waiting for her back in Massachusetts. She’d been gone nearly six months. Had Curt been indulging in multiple flings in her absence? Or maybe found one special woman and started building a relationship with her?

  Did Ellie really want to go back and find out?

  Did she want to hide from her reality? Would remaining in Ghana be about continuing to do some good for the children of the villages bordering Kumasi, or would it be about trying to avoid the painful truths about her life? Were those truths all wrapped up in Curt and her marriage, or were they somewhere inside her? If they were inside her, wouldn’t they emerge regardless of whether she continued to work at the clinic or returned home?

  “I can’t stay,” she finally told Adrian one evening. She’d found him in his office at 9:00 p.m., reading through some papers. He looked worn out from a typically long, demanding day, but not tired. He always seemed to have more energy than anyone else at the clinic. It radiated from him, a corona of vigor spreading around him in invisible waves.

  “No need to stay,” he assured her. “I’m just proofreading a grant proposal. Bloody bore, but it’s got to be done. I can lock up here.”

  “I meant, I can’t stay in Kumasi beyond the end of July.”

  He lowered the sheaf of papers he’d been reading, rotated in his chair and stood to face her. “I’ve failed to persuade you of your indispensability, then?”

  “I appreciate that you think so highly of me, Adrian, but…” She sighed. “I realized that if I stayed, it would be because I was afraid of facing my problems at home. I may be a coward, but I’ve tried to develop some courage while I’m here.”

  “Good heavens, Ellie, you’re one of the most courageous people I know. I’ve never seen you flinch from a snake or a suppurating wound. You’ve driven around the countryside with me in the Jeep, and I’ve been told by other passengers that riding with me can be a near-death experience. Yet you’ve done it without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “Riding in a Jeep with you is easy,” she said with a sad laugh. “Coming to terms with an estranged husband is hard.”

  “Then don’t do it,” Adrian suggested. Ellie hadn’t realized how close he stood to her until he extended his hand, snagged hers and pulled her toward him. “Forget about him for a while. Stay.”

  He touched his lips to hers, and she felt a strange rush of sensation, fear and desire twining through her. She’d been aware of Adrian’s sex appeal from the moment she’d met him—even before she’d met him, since Rose had warned her not to fall for him. And she hadn’t. He was a friend, a partner, a comrade-in-arms. A brilliant doctor. A man who lavished her with praise and made her feel more confident than she had in years. A man who inspired her to do her best, to embrace new challenges—to be unafraid.

  And damn, being kissed by him felt wonderful. Even after a long day he smelled clean and fresh, of hospital soap and laundered cotton. His mouth tasted of mint. He was warm and limber and…God, it had been so long since she’d felt like a sexual being.

  She kissed him back. At first her lips seemed stiff, as if she’d forgotten how to kiss. She hadn’t, though. What she’d forgotten was what being kissed felt like—the warmth, the pressure, the eroticism of a man’s breath mingling with hers. She’d forgotten, but now Adrian was reminding her.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and he wrapped his around her waist, and they swayed in a subtle dance as their mouths merged and opened and claimed. Standing in his tiny office, in the glare of a buzzing fluorescent light, surrounded by heaps of paperwork and steel file cabinets, Ellie reveled in Adrian’s heat, his strength, his obvious passion for her.

  She wasn’t sure how long they kissed, or who broke from whom. But eventually they leaned away from each other, both of them breathing hard. Adrian pushed her hair back from he
r face, his fingers long and graceful as they combed through the strands. “You could forget about him for a while,” he repeated, his voice a seductive murmur. “I could make you forget.”

  He could. His invitation tempted her.

  But as she gazed into his face, she understood that she couldn’t accept it. “No. I can’t do this.”

  “Why not?”

  Because she didn’t love Adrian. Because she’d given her heart to Curt and he’d broken it into pieces and flung it back at her—except that he’d clung to some of the pieces. She couldn’t make love with another man as long as Curt still had a hold on her. And to her great regret, he did.

  “I just can’t,” she said desolately. “I’m sorry.” She rose on her toes to kiss his cheek, then turned and left the office….

  FOURTEEN

  “I’VE ALREADY TOLD YOU about him,” Ellie said, her tone flat. “He was a brilliant doctor. British. A bit monomaniacal. He had a good sense of humor. Other than that, there’s nothing to tell.”

  Curt stared at the television, still displaying the image of the monomaniacal, humorous doctor with his arm around Ellie. What was that old slogan about Las Vegas? What Ellie had done in Kumasi stayed in Kumasi, right?

  Yet he couldn’t get past it. He couldn’t look at that picture on the screen and not know.

  He shoved out of the chair, crossed to the bed and lowered himself to sit on it, careful not to crowd her. She held her ground, refusing to shift away from him. “Ellie,” he said, then swallowed the catch in his voice. “I know things have gone south for us. We’re getting a divorce. What we had is gone, and if you want to place all the blame on me, I’m not going to fight you about that. But damn it, I was honest with you. We always had honesty. And I can’t bear the thought that we don’t have that anymore.”

  She studied him, appearing both curious and defiant. “I haven’t lied to you.”

  “You haven’t told me the truth, either. Did you sleep with him? Did you fall in love with him?”

  She shifted her gaze to the television, then back to Curt. “That’s none of your business.”

  “Your sex life isn’t my business. Your honesty is. Don’t take that from me, Ellie. Please.”

  Her eyes went soft, like dark chocolate melting. Her lips turned in a faint smile. “No,” she said. “I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t fall in love with him.”

  Curt hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until it emerged from him in a sigh. Just because she hadn’t slept with the brilliant doctor didn’t mean she loved Curt. She hadn’t slept with him, either.

  Her smile grew. “For all you know,” she pointed out, “he wasn’t interested in me.”

  “He was interested,” Curt argued, glancing at the two of them posed on the TV. “Look at him. You can tell.”

  Ellie aimed the remote control at the TV and poked a button with her thumb. The screen went black.

  If only getting rid of one’s past could be that easy. If only he had a remote control with a button he could press to make all his mistakes disappear. “You should have slept with him,” he said glumly. “If you had, we’d be even.”

  Ellie snorted. “It’s not a contest, Curt. A marriage isn’t a game where you score points and hope for a tie.”

  Curt agreed with a shrug. “But maybe if you’d slept with him, you wouldn’t hate me so much. You’d understand why I did what I did, even though it was incredibly stupid.”

  “I understand why you did what you did,” she said, her tone surprisingly gentle.

  “But you can’t forgive me for doing it.”

  She ran her thumb along the edge of the remote control, her eyes focused inward on her own thoughts. Maybe he’d hoped she would finally relent and offer her forgiveness, but she didn’t. She just moved her thumb back and forth on the black plastic, gazing at nothing, ruminating.

  No forgiveness. Fine. Curt moved on. “So you didn’t sleep with him. But you came home a different person.”

  “By the time I came home, I wasn’t a basket case anymore.”

  “You were cool and collected. No—you were cold and reserved.” He forced the words out. “You weren’t wearing your wedding band. Something happened over there that made you decide you wanted a divorce.”

  “The only thing that happened over there was that I realized I could function on my own. I could accomplish things. I could take care of myself. I could live some good days and go to bed feeling as if my life was worth something.” Her gaze sought his. “And the divorce was something we both decided.”

  He conceded the point, reluctantly. He recalled checking out her hand every day for weeks after she’d gotten back to see if her ring had made a reappearance. When it hadn’t, he’d confronted her. Over one of their cold, reserved dinners, he’d asked, “Are you ever going to wear your wedding band again?”

  She’d touched her bare finger and closed her eyes. “What’s the point, Curt? We can’t go back to where we used to be.”

  “Do you want a divorce?” He’d had to force the words out, yet they’d emerged low and even, as if they’d possessed some inherent logic. Perhaps they had. He and Ellie had lost a son. They’d lost each other. They could never get Peter back; maybe they could never get each other back either.

  She’d stopped rubbing the naked base of her ring finger and gazed steadily at him. “That would probably be the most sensible thing.”

  If Ellie could discuss such a devastating emotional step in terms of how sensible it was, he’d supposed, she must have given the subject plenty of thought already. That late-summer night over dinner had been the first time he’d allowed himself even to think the word divorce, let alone speak it. Yet she hadn’t seemed surprised. She’d already reached a conclusion. She’d decided to be sensible.

  He loved Ellie. He’d wanted her happy. That was all he’d ever wanted, for her to be happy and whole. “All right, then,” he’d said. He could have fought her—he’d always loved a good fight—but this fight wouldn’t have been good. They would have been fighting over whether Ellie deserved to live the rest of her life the way she wanted to. He couldn’t deny her that right.

  Yet he’d never wanted a divorce, and he definitely didn’t want one now, even though he wondered if he could remain married to a woman unable to forgive him. “What if I told you I was opposed to divorce?” he asked carefully, watching her and bracing himself. He had no idea what her reaction would be.

  “Curt…”

  The hell with being careful. He was in a battle for his future, for his family, for everything that mattered to him. He was a natural-born fighter, and he had to shoot for a victory. “We’ve just watched a movie of your life—and a lot of it is our lives together. We’ve lived so much, shared so much. There’s so much affection on that DVD, Ellie. So much joy. I don’t give a damn if you can’t forgive me. I don’t care that you think I’m some kind of monster for what I did. I don’t want a divorce.”

  Her eyes widened. “I never thought you were a monster.”

  “A sex-crazed beast.”

  She opened her mouth to dispute him, then shut it and gave him another enigmatic smile. “You want to argue semantics?”

  “I want to argue about putting our marriage back together, Ellie.”

  “We’ve been discussing a divorce for the past two months. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “Because you wanted the divorce. And I thought, if that’s what it would take for Ellie to be happy, then that’s what we’d do. Because I can’t stand the thought of you going through the rest of your life as sad as you’ve been.”

  “And now…what? You do want me to go through the rest of my life sad?” The absurdity of her statement made them both smile. Then, simultaneously, they stopped smiling. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “I saw that movie.” He gestured toward the television. “And I realized my happiness is important, too.” He shifted on the mattress, turning to face her fully. “I crossed a line. God knows
I did, Ellie—but it was because I felt as if we were both slowly dying. I struggled to keep you from going under, but nothing I tried worked. So I finally figured I had to save myself. I wasn’t looking for fun. I wasn’t looking for excitement or passion or love. All I wanted was to feel like I wasn’t dead.” He sighed, scrutinizing her, wishing she were easier to read. What was she thinking of this overwrought confession? Was she even listening to him? Did she care?

  “What I did was wrong. I admit it. I bared my soul to you, told you what I’d done, apologized as many ways as I could. I didn’t want another woman. I didn’t want an affair. All I wanted was you, Ellie. All I’ve ever wanted was you.”

  Her eyes glistened, and she lowered them to stare at her hands in her lap. He lowered his eyes, too. She might not have been wearing her wedding band and eternity ring when she’d stepped off the plane at Logan Airport a couple of months ago, but she was wearing them tonight. Only because she’d been faking it for her parents, but the reason didn’t matter as much as the fact that those two bands—one gold, one set with diamonds—circled her finger.

  He eased the remote control out of her hand and tossed it onto the night table. Then he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her ring finger. He felt the hard edge of the diamonds against the inner skin of his lip, the smoothness of the gold band, the silken softness of her skin.

  “Forgive me, Ellie,” he murmured, then rotated her hand and kissed her palm. Her fingers curled reflexively, and he heard the whisper of her breath. “Forgive me,” he implored, pulling her toward him as he leaned forward. “Please. Forgive me.”