One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  Was she the only one ripped apart by his decision to leave?

  Then she recalled something else, a clear mental image of a younger Matt, embellished with paint, lit with pride. “You painted the walls there,” she said, her words thick. Someone had to say something. “It was kind of a mocha color. Very cozy.”

  “I think I got more paint on myself than on the walls.” His tone was rueful, intimate, redolent of a thousand mornings whispering abed so that they didn’t awaken Annette.

  Leslie could have curled up in his voice and slept for a month. Instead, she slid deeper under the covers and tried to pretend that recent conversations hadn’t occurred.

  “I don’t think I missed my calling as an interior painter for hire.”

  “But it looked better than it had been before.” She twined the phone cord around her fingers, savoring the most important part of that incident. “And you surprised me.”

  “I knew you hated that orange.”

  “I never said anything!”

  “You didn’t have to. It was hideous. And you had to study there at night. You needed the right environment to work on your thesis. It was important, the key to the future. We couldn’t do much about the kitchen table doubling as a desk, or about the smell of the caldo verde, but painting seemed the least thing I could do to help out.”

  Leslie sighed. They had been so close then, so much in love, and the future had seemed full of promise and possibility. “Maybe it wasn’t such a bad place, after all.”

  “It was our place,” Matt insisted. “And we were happy there.”

  She rolled to her side, not wanting to spoil the mood. “Remember when your parents came to dinner the first time?”

  “Don’t remind me!” Matt chuckled low. “I’d rather remember how the morning light came through those drapes you found at Goodwill.”

  Leslie swallowed. “Thank God for the pill,” she joked. “Or we would have had a dozen kids before Annette came along.”

  “True enough.” He cleared his throat slightly. “I wanted to help you finish your thesis, Leslie. You had a passion for your studies, a genuine calling that I never had. You need to find that again.”

  It seemed somehow important that he hadn’t said that he wanted to help her find that. Leslie stared at the ceiling, the warm glow dismissed. “You’re whispering.”

  “Well, I don’t want to wake anyone up.”

  Leslie sat up, knowing exactly who ‘anyone’ was. Was he lying in bed beside Sharan, whispering into the phone to her? What exactly was going on there? How could she ask? Why didn’t he tell her?

  Or was his continued presence in Sharan’s house (bedroom?) all that Leslie really needed to know?

  She folded her arms around herself, suddenly cold. She realized that she was sitting much as Annette had on the patio the night before.

  “So, I’ve been thinking, if you’re not happy in your job, why don’t you quit?” Matt’s tone was hard, challenging, as if he was daring her to leap off the tightrope and knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Quit?” Leslie squeaked. “Quit a tenured professorship?”

  “Why not? It’s not even giving you the chance to do the research you want to do. I’d say that walking away from it is a gimme.”

  Leslie felt her mouth opening and closing, though it took a while for her to force out a sound. “But quit? As in, walk away forever?”

  “Yeah, just like.”

  “But, but I couldn’t! I can’t! It’s impossible…”

  “Nothing’s impossible, Leslie,” Matt said roughly. If he was trying to shake up her preconceptions, he was doing a pretty good job. “Think about it, it makes perfect sense. You don’t like the job. Most people would then find another job, quit the crummy job either after or before.”

  “Most people don’t have tenure.”

  “Sounds more like a liability than an asset.”

  Leslie still was having problems forming a coherent objection. “But Matt, if I quit, they’ll stop covering my paycheck.”

  “Well, nothing comes without a price.”

  “You can’t be so cavalier about our sole source of income!”

  “You can’t be so cavalier about your own happiness and job satisfaction. Quit. It’ll work out.”

  That he could believe such a thing left Leslie gaping again. “How, exactly, will it work out?” she asked, her voice higher than usual. “How exactly will we eat and pay the mortgage and send Annette to university…”

  “You’re thinking about it too much. When you make good choices, good things happen. Staying in your job is obviously a bad choice, so take a chance.”

  “I am not going to take a chance on our losing everything we’ve worked to gain!” She wondered even as she protested why she was still thinking of them as an economic unit.

  “Why not?” Matt asked. “Money doesn’t matter that much and it certainly isn’t everything…”

  “But money makes everything easier! Matt, money doesn’t matter to you because you’ve always had it coming out of your wazoo!”

  “Objection, your honor. I can categorically state that I have never had money coming out of my wazoo.” His words were slurring slightly, she noticed now, evidence that he’d been drinking.

  Again.

  Still.

  “I may not be the most observant man on the planet, but I would have noticed that.”

  Leslie wanted to push him to seek counseling, but guessed how well that would go over. Instead, she aimed for a closer target. “Matt, this isn’t a joke. You don’t respect money. You don’t know what it’s like to not have any. You’re not seeing how important this is.”

  “No, I see exactly how important it is,” he argued, his voice turning harsh. “I’m just saying that your goals and general happiness are more important. And besides you’re not being consistent: why else did you want me to win that case, if not to secure that job and give you the option of quitting?”

  Leslie stopped. She rubbed her temple with one hand. “You’re right. I hadn’t gotten that far in my reasoning. I just knew that if you had won, if we had another paycheck coming in, then I wouldn’t feel so pressured.”

  “Under siege,” Matt concurred softly. A change of tone and he undermined her resistance as surely as a tunnel dug under a medieval fortress would do. Leslie felt the walls she had erected against him crumbling. “Because you’re doing something you hate.”

  Leslie blinked back tears. “Yes. ‘Under siege’ describes it perfectly.” She heaved a ragged sigh. “And Dinkelmann just keeps lobbing more Greek fire over the walls. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last.”

  There was a silence again, but it was a thinking silence. It gave Leslie the sense (the illusion? the delusion?) that they were trying to resolve something together again.

  Which was probably what they should have done sooner.

  Was it too late? She feared it was.

  Leslie closed her eyes and imagined Matt shoving a hand through his hair. He would have a shadowy bit of beard as he always did in the morning, his shirt collar would be loose and he’d have an elbow braced on the wall. He would be frowning, in concentration not in anger, the way he did when he helped Annette with her math homework. A lump rose in her throat at the image and she held the phone closer.

  It was somewhat colder than he would have been.

  “You make it look so easy, you know,” he said slowly. “I never even guessed that you were under so much pressure.”

  “Well, it’s tacky to come home and whine.”

  “We used to talk about things at other times, in other places.”

  “In bed,” Leslie affirmed.

  “Is Annette there?”

  “No.”

  His voice deepened, roughened, dropped to a murmur that undoubtedly couldn’t be heard by anyone but her. “Then tell me what bra you’re going to wear today.”

  Leslie’s skin immediately heated. “It’s one you haven’t seen. It’s black lace…”
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  “Black is my favorite.”

  She knew that. The memory of that first trip to his apartment almost shorted her circuits. “It’s like a tank top, but made of the lace and cut to support. I mean it wouldn’t work if I was more buxom…” Leslie shut up abruptly. She sounded less provocative than she’d hoped. More desperate. She closed her eyes, fearing she’d only made things worse.

  Matt said nothing, nothing at all.

  “Your mother is here, you know,” she said brightly. It was a change of subject typical of Annette’s evasive tactics.

  Matt’s surprise was clear. “No, I didn’t know. How did that happen?”

  “She got evicted for non-payment of rent. She thinks Robert did it before he died…”

  “Well, that makes some sense. He was paying all of her bills while the divorce settlement was being worked out.”

  “But I thought your mother was the one who came from money. Doesn’t she have money of her own?”

  “She gave full power-of-attorney to my father years ago, I don’t know why, and he was using it.”

  There was an odd silence then and Leslie wondered what Matt was thinking, whether she had inadvertently awakened another, less pleasant, memory than the apartment on Inman Square. “Are you all right?”

  Matt laughed though the sound wasn’t merry. “So long as I stay smashed. Why?”

  “The chief of police from Rosemount wanted you to get into counseling for shock. Did he call you?”

  “So, you were the one who gave him the number here. I wondered about that.”

  Leslie tightened her grip on her belly, sensing that this conversation was going to go from bad to worse PDQ. “So, I’m not supposed to help the police in locating you when you’re not where you tell them you’ll be?”

  Matt’s voice was bright with suspicion. “Where’d you get the number?”

  “I didn’t.” Leslie bristled that she should be the one being interrogated, as if she were the guilty party. “I guessed where you were and I gave him the address.”

  “And where’d you find that? I have my Day-Timer here.”

  Leslie gritted her teeth. Her husband was sleeping with an old girlfriend and they were arguing about the location of his Day-Timer. “It was the return address on Sharan’s last Christmas card. Does it matter?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, which eloquently answered her question. Then he asked the question she most feared to hear in a tone of voice that sent chills down her spine. “Did you read the card?”

  Leslie stared across the room, unable to decide whether to lie or have it out.

  She went for the middle ground and tried for a mild tone of voice. “Why? Was there something in it that I might have found inappropriate?”

  “You did read it,” Matt said with disgust. Leslie had time to think that the problem with knowing someone well for twenty years or so is that you can’t possibly lie to them before Matt tossed another firecracker onto the table between them. “I can’t believe it.”

  “You can’t believe it?” That was it. Leslie gripped the phone and spoke her mind. To hell with Demure Spouse. “I have never opened your personal correspondence because I trusted you. So, yes, I got that card for the Chief of Police to help him find you, as any law-abiding citizen should do, and then, yes, I did succumb to temptation and read it. And what did I find out? That my trust in you was misplaced. So, don’t go telling me that I’m the guilty party here, Matthew Coxwell: if you didn’t have anything to hide, my reading that card wouldn’t have mattered.”

  He was bristling. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “Please! How stupid do you think I am? You’re staying in her house and don’t want to wake her up…”

  “Because she’s in bed with another guy and the walls are paper-thin in this place, maybe thinner than in that apartment.”

  Leslie closed her mouth at that. A menage à trois was not something she would ever have imagined would work for Matt.

  But then, there were proving to be a lot of things she didn’t know about her husband.

  Maybe he was in an experimental mood.

  Maybe she couldn’t tell anymore when he was lying.

  There was a scary prospect.

  He exhaled with impatience. “Look, Leslie, I’m not going to get counseling. That’s for other people. I’m working through this on my own, and so far, there seem to be two ingredients to success: a minimum blood alcohol level and evidence that I’m not alone.”

  His voice was slightly unsteady and Leslie’s heart went out to him. “Was it bad?”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t ever need to see something like that again.”

  “So, don’t you think that maybe the chief has a point?” Leslie suggested with care. He seemed volatile, which wasn’t like Matt, and she didn’t know what to expect from him. “That maybe, given the circumstances, counseling might be the way to go?”

  Even though she thought she was ready for anything, Leslie was shocked that he shouted at her. “I am not going to get counseling! There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not cracking up, and I’m not losing my grip, and I’m not having problems dealing with this. Understand?”

  Leslie understood that this outburst proved not only that the chief had been dead on the money, but that she’d only make things worse by insisting on it. “Everyone awake now?”

  “Shit. Thanks a lot.”

  Leslie opened her mouth to protest that his outburst wasn’t her fault, but decided against it.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Matt said dismissively, his tone businesslike and indifferent.

  As if she was a check-out clerk who’d slipped up on his change.

  And that tone, as much as anything, made Leslie determined to not let the really good questions slip away unanswered. “I don’t think we’re done talking about that Christmas card,” she said, forcing the words out. It wasn’t like her to be confrontational, but she wanted to know the worst of it. “There was a time, maybe in that small apartment on Inman Square, when you would have told me your secrets.”

  “Well, the roaches weren’t going to listen.”

  Leslie refused to be deflected by humor, not now. “You might have told me, instead of Sharan, that you intended to lose that court case.”

  “But I was sure you knew.”

  “I didn’t know. I never guessed.”

  “I’m sorry then. I thought I just had to lose to set everything right between us again.” He half-laughed. “But I had it backward, didn’t I? You wanted me to win and sell myself into slavery in my father’s business.”

  “You make it sound as if I don’t want you to be happy…”

  “Well, it sure doesn’t sound like you do.”

  Leslie acknowledged the silence and the hardness of his tone, but she couldn’t let this go. “Or you could have told me about your novel.”

  He let out a long breath. “Oh, right. I forgot that she mentioned that, too.” An awkward silence followed, one that Leslie didn’t fill.

  Finally, Matt spoke, his words spilling over each other in a very un-Matt-like way. Was he embarrassed? That he had written a novel or that he had been caught? “It’s just a work in progress. I don’t even know if it’s going to come together. I just had an idea and started working on it, and I guess I knew that as an artist, Sharan would understand the challenge of it. And the joy of it.”

  This little speech did exactly nothing to reassure Leslie.

  In fact, she thought she might be sick.

  When she didn’t say anything, Matt continued. “We’ve made some atypical choices, Leslie, but we’ve done it on purpose, to get further together than we ever could alone. And I didn’t mind, because I didn’t know what else I wanted. Now I know what I want and you’re not going to tell me that I can’t pursue it, just because it doesn’t leave you with complete freedom to do whatever you want.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking of you!”

  “Aren’t you? It sounds lik
e it from here. Well, newsflash, Leslie.” He was angry again, his voice rising. “Something has finally caught hold of me and won’t let go. I need to do this. I’m going to do this. And that’s why I left. I have to protect this. I have to give it my best shot and that means being with people who understand the impetus behind it. I don’t trust you to not sweep me into your agenda and whatever my assigned role is there.” He half-laughed. “And I don’t trust myself to say no to you when you have that light in your eyes. It’s that simple and that complicated.”

  The news that Matt believed she couldn’t be relied upon to supply any encouragement for his dreams, after he had done so much to support her own, was shocking, but Leslie had no opportunity to argue her side.

  Because this time, Matt hung up on her.

  She stared at the receiver, dumbfounded. Why wouldn’t he have at least tried to talk to her first? Had she really been such a crummy partner? Leslie couldn’t believe it. Her glance fell on the call display, S. Loomis and the New Orleans telephone number gleaming in red, and she felt sick.

  She waited, watching the phone, but Matt didn’t call back and she knew he wouldn’t. He had left because he didn’t believe she would help him reach for his dream.

  It was the most depressing thing anyone had said to her or about her in a long time, and with Dinkelmann in the accounting, that was bad news.

  Aubade, today, Leslie decided as she got out of bed. Definitely Aubade. She’d wear that black lace undershirt that she’d told him about, as a gesture of optimism if nothing else. It had no wires, nothing but excellent cut to shape and support.

  Thank God it was Friday.

  * * *

  Well, that had gone well.

  Matt congratulated himself on his smooth delivery as he snagged another glass of orange juice. This one got a double dollop of rum, just to take the edge off.

  “A bit early for drinking, isn’t it?” Sharan asked.

  Matt pivoted to find her leaning in her bedroom door, a silky kimono tossed over her shoulders. She was naked beneath it and her long hair was tangled.