“No one looked.”
“I never saw,” he said, almost to himself. “All those years – I never saw. I will not make that mistake with you ever again.” He looked out at the fields for a moment and then back at her. “We’re well and truly caught. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded and whispered, “What – what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “This is a royal mess. I have no idea what we do or where we go from here. But –” he lifted her chin to look at her squarely – “whatever happens, we stand together.”
She nodded again, and he pulled her tight against him, and she pulled him tight against her, and they kissed each other. Not a kiss of passion, she scrambled to think, with the small part of her mind that even could think, but a pledge, a promise, a vow. A seal to a covenant, truer than those vows they’d each made, long ago, to other people.
They ran out of breath, and he settled her back against him, his hand against her back.
We stand together. She was not alone anymore. And he no longer stood alone, as he had for so many years, fighting his way through the consequences of his disastrous marriage. He had been in exile for even longer than she had – a silent, self-imposed exile, but no less solitary. But no more. Their cold years of exile had come to an end in this quiet pavilion.
She pressed her cheek to his shoulder.
“Listen, Laura, about what you said.” She looked up. “About faking it.”
So much for her high. She slid right back down to earth.
“Now don’t start apologizing,” he said. “It took a lot of courage to admit that.” He brushed her hair from her face. “I knew something was wrong Friday night. You were there with me – then you weren’t. I know women can fake it to get it over with, and we men don’t always see it – you have the advantage of us there. Did I pressure you, Laura? Did you feel you had to pretend to satisfy me?”
She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him the truth, that she, not Francie, had pushed him off his moral high plane on the island. He’d made it clear that he thought he’d been with Francie that day. How could she explain what had happened to her when he had moved inside her and it had all come back?
I put a bullet in you.
No. New reality. Francie did.
She made herself look at him. “I was having trouble – you know, getting to—”
“Did you have problems with your husband? Did you feel you had to please him?”
She wasn’t sure of the protocol, discussing one lover’s performance with another. “Not after a while, after we got used to each other. It took a few months before – well, I got into the swing of things.”
“That makes sense.” He sounded matter-of-fact.
It seemed very strange to be talking like this, when he was leaning against the wall and she was practically lying on top of him. “What does?”
He lifted her chin with his hand. “Good sex takes time. You’ve had – what, I’m guessing the one sexual partner before this? And you were very young when you married. There’s a learning curve. We have to learn each other, see what we enjoy together, find our own rhythm. But that’s not going to happen if you think you have to pretend in order to please me.”
She felt herself turning bright red. “Friday – it wasn’t going to happen for me. I tried to concentrate, I really did, but – I just lost it.”
“Not surprising, after the traumatic day you had – Lord, you scared me when I saw you lying on the floor. It would have been a miracle if you’d been able to relax.” He brushed her mouth lightly. “Lighten up, Laura. It’s supposed to be fun. The only one you have to please is yourself. And if I’m not doing something you want me to do, tell me. I’m not a mind reader.”
She kissed the shoulder she had wounded. “Okay. I’ll tell you what to do every minute.”
He laughed. “Thanks, Lucy. Now – last night – I have to say it wasn’t obvious. You seemed very much with me. What happened?”
She stared at his shirt. “I froze at the last moment. It was easier to let Cat take over.” She winced. “Boy, that sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It was easier to put on the Cat mindset.”
“Don’t,” and she heard the firm note in his voice. “You’re cheating us both if you do. I told you, I don’t want Cat between us. She is smoke and illusion, and I want—” He grinned down at her. “I want my mistress.”
She glanced up at him through her lashes. “You’re not going to let me forget that, are you?”
“Hell, no. I’m going to hold it over your head for the next fifty years.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Mistresses,” Richard said, “have one well-defined duty. If you’re going to talk the talk—”
Laura kissed him, loving the touch of him, the taste of him, the feel of him against her body. She felt ready to slay dragons. “Take me home.”
~•~
They talked about it halfway down the mountain. They talked about it in the car in the parking lot. They talked about it in the plane. They eyed his car on the ground, but they were so close. They could wait another few minutes.
They made it as far as the drawing room at Edwards Lake. And the only cat present waited patiently, meowed once at his oblivious owner sprawled in exhaustion across her equally exhausted lover, and went off in search of his food bowl.
Chapter 23: Diana, Smashing
I THOUGHT RICHARD WOULD DIVORCE ME. For months after the girls disappeared, I waited for him to speak… but he never did.
Home we went, back to Williamsburg, back to Ashmore Park and the old bachelor quarters, Ashmore Minor, that turned out to be a rather nice house to live in. Richard settled into his architectural career, and I found to my horror that I really was expected to settle into being a wife and mother. I wasn’t a student or a teacher anymore, and away from my group and on the days when I could avoid Daddy, I wasn’t much of a musician. I was a child care giver, but a toddler is sufficient company for only so much of the day.
And I certainly had no company at night.
I had to do something with myself. I spent a couple of weeks staring glumly at the house, listening to Julie and her little songs, flipping through magazines. I’m not a reader. But I am a looker, and one day some of those pictures in Architectural Digest made an impression on me.
And maybe years of listening to Richard praise the glories of Monticello had rubbed off.
So I turned into an interior decorator. For months, I ran around with fabric swatches and measuring tapes, picking out tiles and colors and paints. I rearranged. I painted. I varnished. I replastered. I installed crown molding. I scoured antique stores for the right finishing touches. I even installed a new dishwasher.
I spent Richard’s paycheck with a vengeance, and he never uttered a word.
With nothing else to do, I finished the house in record time. So, in true Jeffersonian fashion, I started all over again. And I finished that.
I thought about getting a job, but the problem with being a pianist is that the only real-world job out there is teaching, and teaching high-school music ranked way below digging ditches. I’d hated every minute of it. I talked about doing some part-time consulting with some of the builders in the area, but Richard said that consulting involved too much time and travel, and he didn’t want Julie in day care again anyway. (Bloody hypocrite. When he needed free time, day care was fine, but when I needed to save my sanity, I wasn’t being a good mother.) I volunteered my time at Williamsburg, but that lasted only during tourist season. The rest of the time, they didn’t need me.
Most of my friends from high school had scattered to the winds. The few who had returned were in graduate school or pursuing their careers, like most of the architectural wives. I might have found someone to pal around with among the other stay-at-home moms, except that they were in full reproductive mode, engaged in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. After the third “When are you going to have another one, Diana?” I closed the door to anyt
hing beyond a nodding acquaintance.
I didn’t even have Peggy to talk to. She and Philip were sensitive to our problems, so they left us alone, and that turned out to be even worse than if they’d interfered. Sometimes I’d see my nice Irish mother-in-law, who probably could have given me pointers on being married to a workaholic if I’d asked her, and she’d be working out in her gardens or dashing off to her volunteer work. She always had enough to do. The hours of the day didn’t weigh heavily on her hands.
They weighed on me so heavily that one day, while grocery shopping, I bought a bottle of wine. It lasted three days. I bought another, and it lasted two.
The third one went in an evening.
After a month when I became the Wine Cellar’s best customer, I tried some Scotch. It felt like fire going down my throat, but it did make the long evenings after I put Julie to bed easier to take.
Sometimes I’d lie on the sofa at night before Richard came in, drinking my libation of choice, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I wanted to paint a mural à la Michelangelo or just splash some paint à la Pollock, and wonder what Laurie and Francie were doing.
Francie, I speculated, was in dire straits, waitressing or working a blackjack table (I always saw her in Vegas). She went home to her cold garret every night and wept in remorse for her sins against me, or maybe – and I liked this even better – she was so hardened that she went to bars and let men pick her up for money.
Laurie I saw in a quiet New England college town, wearing a twin set and Mama’s pearls and working as an au pair while she studied music. Despite her perfidy in not telling me what Francie and Richard had been up to, I couldn’t really stay mad at Laurie. (Of course, now we know she married some zillionaire, or he wasn’t yet, but he was going to be, and she was writing songs, well on her way to becoming Cat Courtney. But she was still probably wearing a twin set, even in Texas.)
It says volumes about the mind-numbing sameness of my life that I envied Francie turning tricks or Laurie taking care of someone’s brats, because at least they were doing something with their lives.
I didn’t even have my music. We couldn’t afford a grand piano, and I was too stubborn to settle for a studio piano when Richard still had his blasted plane and we were paying hangar rent every month. Daddy tried to bribe me back to voice by offering to buy me a piano, using the money he wasn’t spending on the twins’ tuition, and I wanted one so bad I almost said yes. But I had nowhere to put it. The one room that would have been appropriate for a music room, an insulated room off our garage, Richard had taken as a workroom so that he could work on his stupid model airplanes.
Besides, if Daddy bought me a piano, I’d have to go back to voice. He’d control me again.
So I lay on the sofa, stared at the ceiling, drank whiskey, and thought of what I’d wanted to do with my life. And the only time I got to play was when Daddy was out of town, which thank God was a lot, and I could go over to the house and use his piano.
I was so damn lonely! Richard worked late, came home and worked some more, and rarely talked to me. Even with the recession, building was on an upswing, and even though he didn’t have his license yet, he was seen as such a comer that he got picked for the plum projects. He spent several months on the road one year, working on a museum building project in upstate New York, living there during the week and flying home every weekend. He spent those weekends catching up on his work, doing whatever chores needed doing, seeing his parents, and being with Julie.
Me, I certainly came too far down on his list to get around to.
One thing I couldn’t hang on him: he didn’t neglect Julie as his career blossomed. When he called every night from New York, it was to talk to Julie. I existed only as a receptionist. He spun her a never-ending story about Duchess Julia and her talking cat, and Julie looked forward eagerly to each new episode. My few feeble attempts to read Dr. Seuss to her flopped; she wanted Richard to read to her. So they read Dr. Seuss together over the phone, each with a book, while I sat nearby, seething, wondering how on earth I had given birth to such a daddy’s girl.
To Julie, I was good only for the mechanics of life, and even those she mastered early on. It became obvious that she didn’t need me, and didn’t even really want me around, unless it was to fix her hot dogs and get her drinks of water or put new videos into the VCR. Laughably (or sadly), she perceived me as a rival for her father’s affections. One cold rainy weekend, Richard and I spent a rare evening together watching a pay-per-view concert in our den, and because his recliner was out being reupholstered, we had to share the sofa, stretched out at opposite ends under a large afghan. I put my feet alongside his leg to keep them warm, and, after a moment, he put his alongside me. I think it was the first time in years that he had touched me. Julie, bored with her toys, wandered in, spied her parents behaving like real married people for a change, and immediately plunked herself right down between us.
I told her to move. She refused. Richard told her to move. She started whining for him to read to her. When he told her no (because he really wanted to see the concert), she burst into tears and sobbed so noisily that he finally gave up and carted her off to her bedroom. I watched the two of them as they left the room, and over Richard’s shoulder, Julie, still sobbing her heart out, gave me such a feline smile that I swear I could see the canary feathers sticking out of her mouth.
Julie was smart, and by the time she was four, she knew the lay of the land. Her Barbie and Ken had separate bedrooms. Barbie kept her dream house, and Ken left for work. Barbie watched a lot of television and drank “grape juice,” and Ken worked late every night. Barbie and Ken never kissed. She made that abundantly clear when Lucy brought a boyfriend home to meet the Ashmores, and Julie saw Lucy give him a quick kiss after a get-to-know-you family dinner. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.
Lucy laughed. “Because I like him.”
The men seemed not to be paying attention, but Peggy had come up, and of course my dear mother-in-law had to throw in her two cents’ worth. “It’s a grown-up thing, Julie. Ladies and gentlemen kiss each other when they’re in love.”
“They do?” said Julie, and her childish voice fell into one of those moments when it seems that all conversation has stopped and everyone is listening. “How come you don’t kiss Daddy, Mommy?”
Not, of course, Why don’t you kiss Mommy, Daddy? Her voice had an uncanny echo of the past, as if Francie had come back to mock me. That moment of hearing my hated sister in my daughter was so traumatic that I don’t even remember what transpired to smooth over the horrible awkwardness of the silence. I remember being in shock, so much so that later that evening I consumed an entire bottle of Jack Daniels before I calmed down enough to go to sleep.
It took longer than a drunken night to forgive my daughter. I never was quite convinced that she hadn’t meant to needle me.
During the week, she pestered me so much— “Where’s Daddy? When’s he coming home? I want Daddy to call me. I want Daddy to tuck me in. I want Daddy to kiss me good night—” that it was a relief, even the way things were, when he walked in the door each Friday evening.
She was his problem until Sunday evening.
But then… he started disappearing for hours on the weekends. And when I called him in the evenings in New York, to tell him an estimate on the car or find out where he had put something, often I couldn’t find him in. During the weeks when he was back home, working from his office, he often called to say that he would be home late – but he was not working late at his office.
This time, I was not stupid. This time, I kept notes of dates, times, excuses. It didn’t take long for the pattern to emerge… Sunday mornings when he said he was going to church with his father (as if!), Wednesday evenings until ten. I wondered if she was married too, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all about the other woman, who she was, why she felt it necessary to sleep with my husband.
All I cared about was that this time I wasn’t going to burn the ev
idence up. I was going to wait until I had enough, pack Julie up, and leave that perfect Ashmore atmosphere forever.
No way was Richard stopping me this time.
I bided my time, kept my suspicions to myself, kept out of his way… and then, two weeks before Christmas, it all collapsed. It took only that one phone message, and someone who forgot to call him at the office.
“Richard,” a deep male voice, and one that might have seemed attractive to me if I hadn’t taken a vow of chastity, “group’s off tonight. I’ve got a patient who looks like she’ll go into the evening, and Tom is tied up in court. I’ll try to reach the others about next week, but with the holidays, who knows. Give me a call at the hospital, though, we have to talk about the Luke study. It’s your turn to lead.”
I must have played that message twenty times, trying to make some sense of it. Whatever “group” was, it accounted for those Wednesday nights (I sadly waved goodbye to my fantasies of charging Richard with adultery). So he was meeting with some men to study something? Why had he been so mysterious about it? And who or what was Luke?
I spent hours that day searching his desk there at the house, scrutinizing his address book, rummaging through his room. Other than an old box of condoms (unopened), I found nothing of interest. I even managed to bring up a schedule on his computer, but he had no suspicious entries. All the while I searched, I kept turning that name over and over in my mind: Luke. Luke. Luke….
And then it hit me, all in a flash.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
Bible study?
And those Sunday mornings …was he going to church?
Now Richard had never been religious; in fact, he had always said that, if God existed at all, He had long since walked away and left the universe to run on its own. Peggy was a devout Catholic, and Philip was a devout Episcopalian, but Richard had been even less interested in organized religion than I was. Daddy, the fanatic ex-priest, had resigned himself to my permanent fallen-away status, and he had hardly squawked when I had Julie baptized as an Episcopalian. (Which I did because the Catholics made the parents show up for classes before they’d allow a baptism, and the Episcopalians were, like, whatever.) Richard hadn’t been interested in her baptism at all. So why was he now studying the Bible?
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 56
