‘But I am very much in love with somebody.’
His smile tightened into thin-lipped disappointment.
‘Lucky man,’ he finally said.
Forty minutes later – after deciding to walk all the way down Newbury Street and across the Common – I entered the hotel. My arm was a little stiff after lugging all that paint, but I didn’t care. I was full of rising elation and manic-adjacent physical desire. Taking the elevator up to the top floor I all but bounded down the hallway to the door of our suite, used my key card to pop the door open, and saw my suitcase just inside. Fantastic! He’s here.
‘Hello, my love,’ I shouted, thinking he must be in the bedroom.
But the only reply that came was silence.
‘Richard?’
Silence.
I moved into the bedroom. Empty.
‘Richard?’
Then I saw, on the bed, his new glasses folded atop his new jacket. Against a pillow there was a note. I reached for it. I read:
Dearest Laura,
I love you more than anything. But I can’t do this. I have to go home.
I am so sorry.
Richard
Four
HAVE YOU EVER noticed how, when terrible news is landed in front of you, the world suddenly goes so quiet? It’s as if the shock of the unbearable deadens all aural recognition of everything outside the reverberations of your extreme distress. I read the note once. I sat down on the bed. The same bed upon which we had consummated our love. The same bed to which we returned multiple times to lose ourselves in each other; to discover an intimacy that was hitherto a terra incognita for both of us.
‘I have never made love like that before,’ I whispered to him as we clung to each other after that first wondrous time.
‘Nor have I,’ he whispered back.
I read the note a second time. This time I tried to negotiate with it, attempting to unearth some sort of affirmative subtext in its language:
I love you more than anything. But I can’t do this. I have to go home.
The fact that he declared his love for me so absolutely. The fact that this was the first thing he wrote. Surely that was the complete and utter truth; the veritable heart of the matter. All right, something had happened. Maybe he had to call his wife and she played some guilt card, which panicked him into thinking he had to go home. That’s why he wrote: ‘But I can’t do this.’ Because she knew she was about to lose him, and had to reel him in. I wouldn’t be surprised if she used their poor tragic son as a ploy. And my Richard – who’s always been susceptible to familial pressure – felt stricken by this and decided he should simply get home and face the problem. But once he was back with the woman he described as arctic, removed, physically rejecting of him . . . surely he’d run for his car and find me. All would be restored between us. We’d be us again
I read the note a third time. And started to cry. Because I was replaying the absurd interpretation of his words that had just raced through my head. I realized that I was sounding like one of the many patients I have seen who – knowing that their cancer is probably Stage Four – still try to assure themselves they’re going to beat the terminal diagnosis that is sure to follow.
How can you sugarcoat the unbearable? It’s impossible. Read the note again. It couldn’t be more direct or to the point. Whatever about his declaration of love, the fact is that something has made him run off back home. And he is telling you: This is truly over.
Yet, just three hours ago, in that restaurant on Newbury Street, everything had been so loving, so forward looking, so happy. We’d even agreed how we’d tell our respective spouses, how we’d move to Boston, how we’d spend six weeks in Paris, how we’d go to concerts and interesting plays and . . .
I started to cry again. The initial shock of it all had kept me muffled, constrained. Perhaps that was my way of not allowing the actual terrible reality of all this to be given credence. But all such efforts at restraint proved futile. The sobs were now something akin to keening. Me the original tight-lipped stoic – who, in recent time, was unnerved by even the slightest choked whimper emerging from my once ruthlessly rational self – was now weeping uncontrollably. I made no effort to bring it under control. Life is littered with disappointments. Life is strewn with setbacks. We all learn how to weather the small defeats, the nagging reversals of fortune, those interregnums where quiet desperation seems to be the ongoing order of the day. But even in these difficult passages, the majority of us still travel hopefully. Because hope is the one true commodity we all desire. But when hope is destroyed in such a way that it is not simply dashed, but actually murdered . . .
Outside of the death of a child, is there any death more terrible than the death of hope?
I sat on the edge of the bed, crying for a very long time. A moment came when I was so spent I felt like crawling under the covers and shutting out the world and telling myself that when I woke with the dawn this entire nightmarish tribulation would be behind me, and I would stir into consciousness to find Richard beside me and all would be right again with our life, with us.
Us.
I stood up, pacing the room, thinking, thinking. Telling myself that all I had to do was talk with him – a good long loving talk, in which I would reassure him that he could do this, that what we had was magical. As he said to me just a few hours ago: ‘How often does this – us – happen in a lifetime?’
He meant that. I know he meant that. Just as I know he adores me. Love at its most authentic, its most veritable, its most unquestionable.
Richard told me he loved me. That was no projection. That was the truth.
My hands shaking, I dug into my bag and found my phone. The quasi-rational side of my brain proclaimed:
Don’t you dare call him. He told you it’s over. Why look for further desperate grief when you know there’s no hope here.
But another, seemingly logical, part of my psyche insisted that I make the call.
I hit Richard’s number, and sat down again on the bed, my free hand reaching for one of the metal slats in the headboard: a way of steadying me, of keeping me somehow grounded.
The phone rang and rang and rang. Oh God, he’s turned it off. To ensure there’s no contact, no conversation, no chance of any reconsideration of his decision to flee. Please, please, please, give me a chance to—
Click. He came on the line.
‘My love . . .’ I said.
I could hear traffic noises in the background. And little else.
‘My love, my love? Richard? You there?’
Finally:
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
The voice was flat, denuded. There was a slight echo when he spoke. Coupled with all the ambient highway sounds it was clear he had me on speaker phone in his car.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I so love you and I know how huge this all is, how having to end a marriage – even a hugely unhappy one – is such a vast—’
‘Please, Laura. Stop.’
His tone chilled me. It was so emotionless, so vacant, with such a discernible sadness behind the void.
‘If you just turn back and meet me somewhere, I know we could—’
He cut me off.
‘I can’t.’
‘But you know that what we have is—’
‘I know that. And I still can’t . . .’
‘But my love, after everything we said to each other . . .’
‘Yes, I remember everything we said.’
‘Was it all one big lie on your part?’
I could hear what I thought was a sob, and one choked back quickly.
‘Hardly,’ he finally said.
‘Then you know that this, us . . .’
‘Us,’ he said, his voice so quiet, so toneless.
‘Us. As we said, the most important pronoun . . .’
Silence.
‘Richard, please . . .’
Silence. I said:
‘Certainty. You talked about certainty.’
‘I
know.’
‘Surely then you also know—’
‘That I just can’t . . .’
‘But why, why, when you know how this sort of love only happens once, maybe twice?’
‘I know all that. I know everything. But . . .’
Silence.
‘Richard?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Do you love me?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘Then please, please, turn around and come back here. We can—’
‘We can’t. Because I can’t. That’s all I can say.’
Silence. I could hear another choked sob. Then:
‘Goodbye.’
And the line went dead.
I immediately hit ‘redial’. And got a generic recorded voice:
‘The person on the other line is not answering the phone right now. Please try back at a later time.’
I tried back one minute later, then five minutes later, then every five minutes after that until it was almost six p.m., and sunlight had been supplanted by the darkest night imaginable. During that hour when I relentlessly kept ringing him back – and kept getting that generic message (had he done something to turn off his voicemail, so I couldn’t leave him a plea to reconsider?) – I kept running through our conversation, kept hearing the sob that choked his voice, kept trying to fathom why, when he all but declared his love for me, he had to keep saying: ‘I can’t.’
But the answer to that question was already there. He couldn’t start a new life with me because he just couldn’t.
I can’t.
There it was, in all its plain, unadorned truth.
I can’t.
As that distressing hour drew to a close – and I finally stopped pacing the floor, and bursting into tears, and telling myself repeatedly that if he’d just turn his phone back on we could solve this (solve – as if this was a problem with a simple solution) – those two words kept tolling in my head like a funeral dirge.
I can’t.
I so wanted answers, so wanted to know how he could, in just a few short hours, go from proclaiming I was the love of his life to ‘I can’t.’ But why look for answers when there is such a painfully evident one in front of you?
I can’t.
No explanations, no entreaties for understanding, not even an attempt to offer me the slightest possibility of hope, a sliver of light behind this wall of resistance.
I can’t.
The door had been slammed shut. Conclusively. Permanently. Try as I could to negotiate with this, the truth was non-negotiable.
I can’t.
My head was reeling. So this is what it must have felt like when that truck slammed into Eric and he was sent into free-fall. The trauma of losing all control of your immediate destiny; of having everything you believed was solid, true, there, pulled away from you. With the result that you are now heading, with great velocity, towards the hardest surface you’ve ever encountered. Eric. My love. How I had wondered, in my darkest moments, if, in those terrible seconds between the initial impact and the landing that twisted his neck and flattened the entire left side of his head, he had the horrible nanosecond realization that he was going to die. That’s the thing about free-fall. Even someone deliberately jumping out of a window must not think that there will be that horrendous impact. Until it actually happens.
I moved away from the hotel window – this jumble of free-fall thoughts spooking me.
But this was free-fall. And the landing would be a hard, despairing one: the return to my old life. The re-entry into a marriage that was lifeless, devoid of love.
The death of hope.
A living death. Based upon the recognition that the prospect of happiness had just been extinguished again.
Could I race to my car, race up to Bath, run to his front door, pound on it until he answered, fling myself in his arms, tell him we had to act upon all that we knew and felt for each other, fend off his angry wife, and convince him to drive off into the night with me?
I can’t.
Now that was me talking.
I can’t. I want to make a scene. I want to beg him to reconsider. I can’t. Not just because I know it wouldn’t change anything. But also because, quite simply, I can’t.
With this realization came more tears. I had not cried like this since the police told me about Eric. But now the anguish was underscored by twenty years of life, in which real love had been absent.
The death of hope.
I moved over to the sofa, oblivious to the fact that there were no lights on in this room; that I was alone in the dark. I replayed everything that had happened since Friday. Every remembered conversation, every story we told each other, the first time he touched my arm, that moment in the Public Gardens when he first took my hand, the nervous delight he showed when he cast off the dull insurance-man clothes, my confession about Eric, his confession about Sarah, the dawning shared realization that we were falling in love, that extraordinary first kiss, the taxi ride to this hotel, the way he promised me to be mine forever when he first entered me, all the proclamations of love and excited future plans.
And then . . .
The death of hope.
I can’t.
I wish I could dismiss it all as a fever, a virus, to which I briefly succumbed. But I knew it to be so concrete, so authentic, so rooted in reality. That made it even more unbearable. If it had been just some gushing, crazed romance . . . But this was it. The connection that I so privately longed for; the great love story I so wanted to have in the time remaining for me. To have been given a passionate glimpse of this new life – to have been told this was my future reality – and then to have had the whole magnificent edifice decimated only moments after it seemed so secure . . .
I now wanted to be furious, to turn my grief into pure undistilled rage. But I’ve never been able to do anger at such a vehement level. More tellingly, this was a man I was certain that I loved – and who’d shown me, in turn, the most extraordinary love. So there was just the most profound sense of loss. And of hurt.
The room seemed to grow darker. I felt completely immobile. The fact that he had also left his new jacket and glasses behind – he couldn’t have been more absolute about divesting himself of the man he had decided to transform himself into, and return to the self and the life he didn’t want. A stunned rationality had taken hold of me – which I knew would soon be overtaken by even more acute grief as the reality of what had just happened truly gained purchase.
Bing.
Oh my God. A text! He’s texting me. Telling me he’s made the mistake of his life, and is en route back to me right now.
I scrambled for the phone. There was a text. It was from Lucy. I felt myself get shaky again. Tears welling up in my eyes. A cry working its way up my throat. So much for that alleged moment of clinical calm. I wiped my eyes and peered at the screen.
Just wanted to check in and get an update. You have me guessing! The apartment is yours when you want it. See you tomorrow. I am so envious. And that’s from only surmising what your news is! Love – Lucy
Before I could break down again I dialed her number. Lucy answered on the second ring.
‘Hey there!’ she said, her tone intimating that she knew romance – that commodity we both lacked – had come into my life. ‘So can you tell all now?’
‘I need a friend,’ I said, my voice lifeless, flat.
‘Oh God, I thought—’
‘That the news was good? It was. But—’
I broke off, forcing myself not to break down.
‘Oh, Laura . . .’ she said, sounding so sad.
‘I’m still in Boston. I have to go get my car, which is over by the airport. But I could be with you in about three and a half hours.’
‘You get here whenever. I’ll be up and waiting.’
I went into the bathroom and threw some water in my face, managing to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. Then I went into the bedroom and quickly fold
ed up the leather jacket – dealing with it the way I had dealt with a leather jacket that belonged to Eric, which he’d bought in a Cambridge Army and Navy shop and which I had to fold up after he died. Though I gave away most of his other clothes I kept his jacket. Because he so loved it and wore it all seasons except for the sticky height of summer. Because it too was an old Air Force jacket. Like the one which I was now folding and stuffing into my little suitcase as quickly as I could. Then, pocketing his glasses, I pulled up the telescopic handle of my suitcase and headed to the door, not wanting to look back in case the tears were triggered again.
I headed out the hotel entrance and to the street. There were a couple of cabs outside. I asked one of the drivers how much it would cost to get me to the Fairfield Inn Airport Hotel. He said around thirty bucks, plus three-seventy-five for the tunnel and, of course, there was the tip. Forty dollars. I don’t spend that sort of money on luxuries like taxis. So I crossed the street, entered Park Station, and at a cost of two dollars I made it to the airport half an hour later. Then I had to wait twenty minutes for the hotel courtesy coach – which stopped at all the terminals and didn’t deposit me at the hotel until around seven-thirty p.m.
My car was in the lot, exactly where I parked it just two days ago. Loading my suitcase in the trunk I thought: I am a different person than the one who got out of that vehicle just over forty-eight hours ago. But another part of me simultaneously reasoned: The only thing that has changed in your life is that you now have a huge sorrow to carry forth with you.
The highway was clear all the way north. I blared the radio, trying to lose myself in that evening’s NPR programing, to keep the anguish at bay, occasionally wiping tears from my eyes, keeping my foot down on the pedal, making it to Lucy’s front door just before ten-thirty. All the way up to Maine, one supposition kept dogging and unnerving me: had I been more attune to the subtext of the moment – had I said to him, ‘Yeah, let’s do the art supply shop together, then get our suitcases at the airport’ – would we be in bed at the hotel right now, telling each other yet again how lucky we were to have found such love at this juncture in life?
This question got raised around an hour after I arrived at Lucy’s house. When I reached her door she took one look at me and put her arms around me, saying:
Five Days Page 28
