The Man She Married

by Muriel Jensen

  “Why?” he asked. “What does it matter?”

  “I was just…remembering…how warm and wonderful that time was,” she said quietly, refocusing on his face. “I have this picture of the last three years of our marriage being difficult and filled with contention, but…we had some very good times.”

  Her lip trembled dangerously.

  “We did,” he agreed, looking worriedly toward Justine and Georgette, but they were still sighting through the camera lens. “But I was working too hard, and you were feeling insecure. I think worry is stronger in memory than happiness.”

  She said nothing, but looked up at the spray of leaves over her head, her mouth still unsteady. She reached up for a particularly large, brightly colored leaf, but a gust of wind lifted the branch out of her reach.

  Gideon raised a hand and snapped the leaf off the branch. “Here,” he said, eager to do anything to chase away whatever thought was about to make her cry. “You going to start another mobile?”

  She twirled the leaf in her fingers and drew a breath, the dangerous moment passed. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a landing.”

  “We have a vaulted ceiling.”

  She smiled into his eyes, and he thought he saw the old affection for him in them. “Yes, we do.”

  “You guys ready?” Justine called from across the small clearing.

  Prue sighed and squared her shoulders, turning toward him for the sake of the camera. “In my next life,” she said with a wry smile, “remind me not to model my designs in an ad campaign while trying to restore my marriage at the same time.”

  He’d wanted to restore their marriage, but now that he knew about the miscarriage, it was planted firmly in the forefront of his mind, casting a shadow over his plans. He’d lost a baby he hadn’t even known he was having. What kind of husband and father had he been, could he ever be?

  But Prue looked stressed and vaguely upset and he’d promised himself he’d get her through this shoot.

  “You have to lighten up,” he said, tucking his hand inside her hood to cup her cheek. “For today, pretend we are this couple meeting on the sly in the woods because we’re willing to risk anything to be together.”

  Her hands went to the chest of his coat. She smiled and tossed her head, seemingly willing to play the game.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “To my plantation in South Carolina.”

  “Really. And how did a Yankee like me meet up with a Southern gentleman like yourself?”

  “I came North to sell my cotton to your husband. He runs a mill, you know.”

  “Ah.” She giggled. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “We met at a party.”

  She smiled at the fantasy. He heard Justine clicking away. He had to continue the story.

  “Did you fall in love with me the moment you saw me?” Prue asked.

  “Yes. But you were married and I had to go home. We were separated for a year.”

  She stared at him wide-eyed, ensnared by the tale.

  “Then I came back,” he added.

  “Why?”

  “Because a mutual friend wrote me that your husband mistreated you. I’m taking you home with me to show you what love and marriage can be like when it’s right.”

  “But…the law?”

  He sighed, the character he’d assumed bored by the suggestion that the law could confine him. “It doesn’t exist for me. I’m a law unto myself.”

  She smiled indulgently. “Surely you know that loving me will change that for you. I’m used to the pleasures of Boston. I’ll want fine clothes and pretty things.” She frowned. “I could be trouble on a plantation.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll be so grateful to be loved and treated well that you’ll be happy and adoring and do everything I ask.”

  She leaned into him, laughing, and he swore that for those few moments she’d forgotten entirely that there was a camera on them.

  “Prue, drop the hood and take your hair down!” Georgette called.

  Prue rolled her eyes and handed him the leaf. “They will insist on bursting our bubble.” She lowered the hood and undid her hair, then Georgette handed her a brush. She pointed to a trail.

  “We’re going up there to shoot the two of you walking toward us. Okay? You’re doing great. We got some spectacular shots this time. And keep the leaf. That’s a nice touch.”

  Georgette and Justine headed up the trail, and Prue brushed out her hair, then turned to him, the silky cloud of it gleaming in the sunlight, rippling with the breeze.

  “There better be a big pot of spaghetti at the end of that trail,” she said with practical sincerity, unconsciously looping her arm in his, playing with the leaf with the fingers of her other hand. “Do you have spaghetti in South Carolina?”

  “Ah…I think we’re big on ham, sweet potatoes and collard greens.”

  “But I want spaghetti.”

  “You warned me you were going to be demanding.”

  They walked up the trail talking nonsense, the wind blowing down the corridor of trees and sending leaves flying.

  “Do you think we’d still be together,” she asked with sudden seriousness, “if I’d stopped in the doorway and listened to your explanation?”

  The question surprised him and forced a reality on him he didn’t want to deal with at the moment.

  “I guess it depends on whether or not you’d have believed me.”

  “There was a naked woman in your lap.”

  “That’s what I mean. It would have taken a lot of faith in me and our marriage.”

  She sighed. He felt her grip on his arm tighten. “I think I believed in you,” she said after a moment. “But we’d spent so little time together those last few months that I sort of forgot everything that went before.”

  She stopped abruptly in the middle of the trail. He had to retrace a step. “I don’t think it was a deliberate thing on my part, but being adored was so much a part of my identity. When I no longer had that, I…maybe…lost faith in myself.” She thought that through, as though coming to a new clarity about the situation. “Maybe it wasn’t you I doubted, but me.”

  In the last ten hours or so, her miscarriage had absolved her in his mind of any responsibility for anything.

  “Any woman would have probably reacted in the same way,” he said. “And we’ve beaten that subject to death, anyway. Let’s just let it go.”

  “But…it’s the root of the problem,” she insisted, her expression urgent. “The wall between us.”

  “I’m not aware of a wall,” he said, surprised to find that he meant that.

  She gasped. “You aren’t?”

  “No.” He put an arm around her shoulders and indicated Justine ahead of them encouraging them to come toward her as she looked through the view-finder.

  Nothing separated them but his own inability to reconcile his responsibility in the loss of their baby.

  PRUE SAUTÉED onions and celery in olive oil for spaghetti sauce. Georgette rested and Justine went to the portrait studio’s lab to make a contact sheet for the day’s work.

  When they’d finally finished for the day, Gideon closed himself upstairs to work on the security plan for Hank Whitcomb while Prue tried to relax in the kitchen. She and Gideon had reached a mature connection they’d never quite accomplished when they were married, yet she felt him drifting away from her despite the love in his eyes, the tenderness of his touch, the insistence that there was no wall between them.

  He was right, though, she thought. It wasn’t a wall but a chasm—a long trench that extended from the moment she’d opened the door in Maine and across the past year to the present. They understood each other better than they ever had, seemed able to accept their share of the guilt for their breakup, yet the coming together that would be the natural result of such an epiphany wasn’t happening. There was no animosity, no disagreement, just a giant hole where reconciliation should have been.

  She added a bottle of s
paghetti sauce to the onions and celery and turned down the heat, then tried to remember where she’d stored the angel-hair pasta. She tried several cupboards, the drawer under the silverware, a corner of the counter where she’d grouped several tins. She checked them all, forgetting what she’d stored in them. No angel-hair.

  Drifter watched her primly from behind his bowl, his eyes widening when her search grew more desperate.

  She slammed cupboard doors as she started over, the need to find the pasta making her feel frantic.

  She stood on a kitchen chair, searching behind canned goods and boxes, then stepped onto the counter to see in the back of the top shelf, when she heard a loud crash behind her. She turned carefully in her stocking feet to see Drifter sitting near the overturned chair. He’d probably leaped onto it and knocked it over.

  She was marooned.

  It was the last straw in a weirdly emotional day. Nothing was going the way she wanted—except the shoot. That seemed to be progressing well. But if she didn’t resolve her relationship with Gideon and did decide to move her operation to New York, she’d probably never see him again. He’d go to Alaska, file for divorce, and they’d communicate through their attorneys and live the rest of their lives apart.

  She began to cry.

  LIFE WITH PRUE had always had a curious skew to it. Gideon had gotten used to her unpredictable reactions and curious behavior. But when he ran downstairs to investigate a lethal-sounding crash and found her standing on the kitchen counter in her stocking feet, her face contorted in tears, he considered it a new high in eccentricity.

  Then he saw the cat, the overturned chair, and figured out what had happened. Except for the tears.

  “You’re looking for high tea?” he teased, approaching her with care. She looked both upset and volatile.

  “Ha, ha!” she snapped at him, folding her arms when he would have reached up for her to help her down. She turned away from him with her chin in the air as though she was on a street corner waiting for a bus.

  “I was looking for the pasta,” she wept. “Only I can’t find it because I don’t remember where I put it.” Then she added in a loud, angry whisper, leaning down toward him for emphasis, “Because I don’t really live here!”

  He raised his hands to catch her, certain she’d over-balance. But she didn’t. She turned away from him on her narrow perch. “I should never have agreed to this.”

  “But it’s working,” he pointed out, wondering what was going on in her mind. “You’re going to become a household name among best-dressed women.”

  “Is that all my life’s ever going to be about? Clothes?”

  He frowned up at her. “I thought that was what you wanted.”

  “So did I.” She sniffed and leaned back against the upper cupboard, looking up at the ceiling in dismay. “I love designing, but it doesn’t make up for everything else like I thought it would. It doesn’t make up for my mistakes—or yours. It doesn’t make up for the fact that you couldn’t trust my discretion enough to tell me what you were doing about Senator Crawford, and the fact that I didn’t have enough faith in our marriage to believe you when you tried to explain. It doesn’t make up for the loneliness or the disappointment or the sense of failure I feel because I lost a baby and a husband in the same week.”

  “Now you’re just willfully torturing yourself.” He caught her around the thighs and let her fall over his shoulder, then deposited her on her feet. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t blame yourself. That’s what you keep telling me, and I have more reason to feel responsible than you do.”

  “You’re withdrawing from me,” she snapped at him, “because you feel responsible. Or it’s a handy reason if you just don’t want to be with me. I think we both behaved badly. We both want to assume guilt for our baby’s loss because we think that’ll somehow make us feel better or make the situation better. But it doesn’t! I don’t want to think we’ve just screwed it up so badly it can’t be made better. Can’t we just forgive each other and start over?”

  He liked that thought, he just wasn’t sure how practical it was.

  “I mean,” she cajoled, putting a hand to his chest, her eyes dark with emotion, “you did all this for me.” She spread her arms to indicate their surroundings. “You let your aunt believe we were still married so she’d do the shoot for me. You brought me back into your life just to help me out. That was open-hearted and generous.” He held her gaze while wondering if she could see in his eyes the plotting that had gone into this. She apparently caught sight of something and squared her shoulders. He waited breathlessly for her to question his motives. “Unless you’ve regretted having me here?” she asked.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to reassure her that he did not regret it—as well as to prevent her from seeing the relief in his eyes. “The warming drawer under the oven,” he said.

  She looked up at him in confusion. “Pardon me?”

  “The pasta. It’s in the warming drawer under the oven. You bought that really long stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else.”

  “That’s right!” She pulled out of his arms and went to retrieve it. “I thought I was going insane!”

  A loud rap sounded on the door and Gideon went to answer it. Paris and Randy stood there arm in arm. Prue came to the door at the sound of their voices.

  “Hi, guys!” She hugged her sister, then Randy, and drew them inside. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s great,” Paris said. “But I need something borrowed for the wedding. And I wanted to make sure you found something to wear.” She went to the wing chair where Drifter had resettled. “When did you get a cat?”

  Prue explained about his habit of coming and going, then apologized abjectly for not having done anything about her maid-of-honor dress.

  Paris turned to her with a smile, the cat hanging limply in her arms, purring. Prue looked offended by his preferential behavior.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Paris said, “knowing how busy you’ve been. Couldn’t you just use that little black dress in your collection? It was the in thing a couple of years ago for attendants to wear black. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Then you wouldn’t have to stress out over finding something else when you have the shoot going on.”

  Prue looked doubtful. “You think black would be all right?”

  “I think it would be fine.”

  “Okay. And I’ve got just the thing for the something borrowed.” She turned to Gideon. “Can you stir the sauce while I find my wedding garter for Paris?”

  “Sure,” he said as the two women left the room.

  “Things must be better,” Randy observed, leaning back against the counter while Gideon stirred the contents of the big iron frying pan. “She seems very cheerful.”

  “Yeah. We’re holding our own.” Gideon opened the refrigerator door. “Beer? Wine? Cola?”

  “Cola, please.”

  Gideon handed him a can and took one for himself. “We’re talking about starting over.”

  “That’s great. Paris will be thrilled. She keeps telling me how much she and her mother loved having you in the family.”

  Gideon took a pull on the cola and stirred the sauce, wondering how a usually bright man like himself had created this complex predicament.

  “Yeah. I love them, too. But what Prue doesn’t know is that I set up this whole thing. My aunt knew we were separated, and I suggested she pretend she didn’t so I could get Prue here to win her back.”

  Randy closed his eyes and shook his head. “Man! Don’t either of you believe in telling the truth?”

  “I was a very honest senator,” Gideon said, the whole thing mystifying him, too. “I just seem to be a cagey husband. I think she does that to me. I don’t always understand her and that makes dealing with her directly difficult. So, here I am. Hoping she doesn’t find out.”

  “Good luck,” Randy said wryly. “Nothing ever gets by Paris. We can only hope
Prue’s different.”

  PRUE DUG INTO the bottom of her closet and located the box that held the memorabilia she’d been so sure would lend a convincing quality to her and Gideon’s life together. In it, she found the little plastic bag with the ruched white garter, its decorative blue bow centered with a tiny pearl heart. She stepped backward out of the closet, her hair rumpled, and handed the bag to Paris.

  “There you are!”

  Paris sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the garter out of the bag, smiling over it. “I remember helping you get dressed that morning. I was sure you were going to be so happy and that I’d never find that kind of love.”

  Prue thought back to that morning, surprised to remember how innocently selfish she’d been, how completely convinced that the world was hers, that Gideon had been sent to make her happy and all she had to do was enjoy it and be happy.

  “And here’s your something blue. Just a loan, though.” She gave her the cloisonné earrings Paris had given her. “And here we are, everything different for both of us.”

  Paris took her hand and squeezed gently. “Thanks for the loan of the earrings. But what’s happening between you two? You look deliriously happy one moment and troubled the next.”

  “That’s about the way it is.” She leaned sideways on an elbow and plucked at the bedspread. “We’ve fallen in love all over again, but there’s so much old stuff between us.”

  “You still convinced he was cheating?”

  “No,” Prue replied, surprised to find that she truly no longer thought so. She felt as though she’d gotten to know him all over again, only better this time than she had before. “But…something happened when we split up that I never told you or Mom.” She regretted that now, but then she had so many regrets.

  “Something to do with the hospital bill I brought over?” Paris asked.

  Prue drew a breath and told her about the miscarriage.

  Paris’s eyes brimmed with tears and she wrapped her arms around her. “I’m so sorry, Prue. We’d have only wanted to help you.”