I said nothing to him when he came home that evening, other than to tell him that he’d had a call that his meeting was off. He registered no guilt, no surprise, and he said nothing about the fact that his desk was in disarray. But he didn’t tell me about the Bible study either. However, a couple of days later, I noticed a study outline on his desk blotter… a subtle way of telling me to mind my own business.
“So what’s the deal, do you think?” I asked Lucy at our Saturday lunch. She had graduated and come back to Williamsburg as an associate in a law firm. It had taken us a year after the twins ran off, but we had finally made up and things were good between us again. I knew that she talked to Richard far more than I did… she had dinner with him at least once a week. She was his best friend, and she was mine. She was the only one in the world I could ask.
“Why don’t you ask him?” she suggested. “Going to church is not exactly a social disease. He’s not ashamed of it.”
“Then why won’t he tell me himself?” I fiddled around with my fork. “I mean… why was he so secretive about it?”
“Maybe,” said Lucy more gently than usual, “because it’s very personal to him. Think about it. Why do most people turn to God?” And when I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t think of a single reason why I should turn to God after the mess He’d let me make of my life, “Richard knows he let everyone down, Di. He let himself down. He’s been wracked with guilt over Francie and over you, too. I think he went looking for forgiveness, and he found peace.”
I seized on the only part of that I could face. “He admitted it? About Francie?”
“No.” Lucy took a deliberate sip of her tea. “But I know him. Stop waiting for him to confess, he’s never going to do that. But—” she studied me for just a moment, “maybe it’s time you forgave him. I think – if you did,” and now she hesitated, “he might forgive you too.”
That struck me so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. Surely Richard had never told her… but of course, he hadn’t. He would never tell anyone. I looked at her, and I saw those eyes, just like Daddy’s, just like mine, studying me intently. Oh, of course, typical Lucy, she was trying to read my mind, figure out why I was reacting so…. I tried to look nonchalant, and not as if Richard had anything to forgive me for.
If nothing else, the revelation of Richard’s newfound spirituality shook me up. It drove home to me, hard, how little I knew the man whose name and address I shared. True, I knew things the rest of the world didn’t know… that he was a fanatic about refolding the newspaper after reading it, that he misplaced his pager at least once a week, that he was one of the few men alive who didn’t worship the Three Stooges… but I really didn’t know the man anymore.
For Richard had become a man. In fact, I thought ruefully to myself one night, having a last shot of whiskey before bed, as he worked late at his desk only a room away but a universe distant, he had grown into the sort of man who would have been my downfall if I hadn’t lived up close and personal with him all these years. Although he told me next to nothing about his work, I knew from the responsibility he was given that his superiors at the firm thought highly of him. I knew from his paycheck that they were rewarding him in the best possible way. I listened to him talking to the contractors who were doing work on the stable block, and it was obvious from the authority in his voice that he knew exactly what he was talking about and they knew it too. When he and Philip got together, in the few times I saw the senior Ashmores, I saw that Philip now regarded his son as an equal.
And women found him attractive. At a command performance at the firm Christmas party, to which Richard took me because he couldn’t think of a good excuse not to, I saw more than one woman appraising him. A couple looked at me in consternation (yes, ladies, a wife really did go with that wedding ring), and one tried outrageously to flirt with him, gauging just how far she could go before I reasserted my ownership.
I couldn’t tell, as a couple of his fellow architects sized me up, if Richard experienced the same awakening about me. For the first time in years, I realized that I was still an attractive woman. I was polished, sophisticated, and educated. I dressed nicely, I had a pretty face and a good figure, and I was a good conversationalist. Men actually desired me.
Except, of course, for the man who took me home that night, thanked me politely for accompanying him, and then went into the spare bedroom he used as his own and shut the door.
“I had more sex than this when I was single!” I wailed to Lucy at lunch.
“Stop talking about sex so much,” said Lucy shortly. “I haven’t had a date in months.” The boyfriend hadn’t lasted too long. Partly, it was her schedule. Sixty-hour weeks had become the norm for her, just as they were for Richard. “I don’t know. Buy yourself some lingerie and seduce him. He’s not made of stone.”
I said bitterly, “This is Richard Ashmore we are talking about, isn’t it? Yes, he is.”
Lucy steepled her hands under her chin. “Di, you know what Mr. Spencer told me before the Berenson trial? There are no unwinnable cases. Sometimes, you have really stupid juries, but that just means you have to work harder. Same principle here. There are no unseducible men. You have a stubborn one, but you just are going to have to work at it a little harder. I mean,” she thought about it a moment, “look at Dominic. Here’s a monk, sworn to chastity, devoted to God, and it took your mother one evening and all she had to do was flutter her eyes at him and off he went. Richard can’t possibly be as tough as that.”
“I don’t know,” I said dubiously.
“Give it a try,” Lucy urged. “Really, Di, just do it. Just show your husband…” and now she hesitated. “Show your husband you love him.”
We looked at each other in a moment of perfect understanding, because, after all, we both knew the problem with that.
“One other thing,” said Lucy, after the silence grew too long, “knock off the booze. You aren’t fooling me, and I’m not breaking any confidences when I tell you that you aren’t fooling him, either. He worries about you being alone with Julie all day. He doesn’t like you driving Julie around.”
I blew up at her. “How dare you! Julie is perfectly safe with me!”
We didn’t speak for a couple of weeks, but I did try to cut down.
~•~
Something had to give. I had to act. We had existed three long years since Francie, six long years since our estrangement, and we couldn’t live the rest of our lives this way.
The direction I took amazed even me, at first.
Richard came home one Friday evening – our seventh anniversary – and I had made his favorite meal. I had foisted Julie on Lucy for the night, and I had prepared the scene with music and strategically lit candles. I had gone to the spa that day for a manicure, pedicure, and excruciatingly painful bikini wax. I had taken a long, luxurious bath. After college I had started wearing my hair in a French twist, but that evening I took it down and let it brush around my face and neck. I dressed in one of the outfits he used to like me in: simple knit shirt with no bra, filmy black skirt that floated around my legs, ankle bracelet, bare feet. Underneath, the skimpiest thong Victoria’s Secret had to offer. I looked hot.
I put new Egyptian cotton sheets on my bed and fluffed up the pillows.
Richard seemed taken aback. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.
“No occasion,” I said merrily. Maybe he’d forgotten; we hadn’t celebrated an anniversary since our first. “I just felt like it. Go put that briefcase down and get comfy. Dinner will be ready in a couple of minutes.”
He looked at me as if I had lost my mind, but maybe he was tired of the silence too. He did exactly as I asked him – placed his briefcase on the desk he kept in the alcove of our family room, went to his room and changed from his oxford shirt and khakis and loafers (what a yuppie he had turned into – but he’d always been one, I just hadn’t wanted to see it). In a few minutes, he came back into the kitchen, in jeans and polo shirt, his eye
brows knit together warily. I forestalled his question by handing him a Merlot that one of his fellow architects had given us for Christmas.
He took it with an I-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing-but-I’ll-go-along-with-it-for-now look.
“Dinner’s ready,” I said gaily, Miss Suzy Homemaker, and set in front of him a freshly tossed salad with a homemade vinaigrette, coq au vin, vegetables from Peggy’s garden, and just-baked rolls.
I drank ginger ale, which I loathed, and I was dying for something stronger. But I needed all my wits around me, and I knew he was still a little upset about the dent I had put on the side of the car a couple of days earlier when I had misjudged the distance between the edge of the road and the Ashmore Park mailbox. I had to ignore the siren call of that whiskey bottle in my bedroom. No unseducible men, I thought. Hold on to that thought. Remember that he used to be so hot for you he couldn’t keep his hands off you. Remember that sex with him was better than any shot of whiskey ever was.
He enjoyed the dinner and wine, and, after a couple of minutes when I knew he was trying to figure out what I was up to, he even talked to me a bit about his current project. I asked his opinion about the aftermath of the Gulf War – like I cared – and we gossiped about the senior partner of Lucy’s law firm, who had left his wife for one of Lucy’s fellow baby lawyers, a former Miss Roanoke. We talked about the pros and cons of starting Julie on swimming lessons during the summer. He even – gasp! – asked me what kind of cabinetry we should look at for the kitchen in the remodeled Folly.
I felt a pang. This was real married conversation. Husbands and wives were supposed to talk to each other like this. Seven years of marriage, and I couldn’t remember the last time we’d really talked.
I cleared the table, and he shocked me by saying, “Relax, Di. You worked hard over dinner. I’ll take care of the dishes.” And he did – rinsed them off, put them in the dishwasher, and scrubbed the pots and pans. When he finished, I told him firmly that he could just leave his stupid computer alone for one night, and he said, “Sounds like a plan.” He followed me out to the just-repainted family room, settled down with his Merlot on the newly-covered sofa, and even smiled at me.
Good enough. Time to drop the bomb.
“I want to have another baby.”
I had thought it through carefully. Julie would start kindergarten in the fall, and if I knew one thing, it was child care. Peggy had hinted broadly that Julie needed a sibling, and it had occurred to me that, not only would it be a good thing for her, but for Richard and me, as well. After all, having a baby required some basic preliminary bedroom activity, and the physical intimacy might lead to communication beyond “Please pass the butter” elsewhere in the house.
Plus, I’d gone almost six years without sex, and Richard, I was now certain, hadn’t been with anyone since Francie. He had to be going as crazy as I was.
If pregnancy was the price I had to pay, so be it.
Well, I took him by surprise, that was for sure.
He put his wine glass down in a very measured way, the kind of precision that may make for great architecture but makes a wife want to knock his head in.
“Diana,” he said, and I could tell that I had thrown him for a loop, he was trying to marshal his thoughts, “Diana, are you pregnant?”
I had anticipated that question, and I knew I deserved it. Still, I felt myself flushing. “No,” I said, “no, I’m not. But I’d like to be.”
He stared at me blankly. “Why?”
Why? I had rehearsed this. So I gave my little speech. How Julie needed a brother or sister, how I thought he might enjoy a son, how I was more mature now and ready to handle motherhood. How a baby might bring our family together. I recited it all, in my brave confronting-Richard voice, and all the time he stared at me as if I were some stranger asking him for a sperm sample.
And while I talked, his mind raced. I knew that lightning fast Ashmore mind, I’d been its captive for too long. I knew that he was combing through all the implications, twisting each one inside out and examining the impact on the balance of power in our marriage. It must have occurred to him that he stood on shaky ground. Up till now, he’d held me by his threat of claiming custody of Julie, and because he had covered his tracks on Francie.
But this wasn’t about Julie now, or about Francie. This was about us. A wife was asking her husband, very reasonably, to make love to her. On no grounds, moral, legal, or human, could Richard turn me down.
So he stalled. He pointed out, equally reasonably, that Julie was about to start kindergarten, and I was about to be free of constant child care. Perhaps we could consider my getting a job, or I could go back to school, or I could join Peggy in her volunteer work….
I interrupted what promised to be another endless discussion of why he was right and I was wrong. “Richard, I want another child.”
“Diana,” Richard said, the man of intellect and rationalism, anything to keep from being the self-righteous bastard who wouldn’t take care of his wife’s sexual needs, “you hated being pregnant. You hated every minute of it. You hated the way you looked, the way you felt—”
“Oh, that.” I waved my hand airily. “I was twenty years old, what did you expect, earth mother stuff?” Yes, that was exactly what he had expected – someone like his damn mother, thrilled speechless to be reproducing. “I’m older now. Sure, I hated it, who wouldn’t? But it’s not forever, and look at the prize you get at the end. Besides—” and before he knew what I was doing, I slipped onto his lap, straddling him, “getting there,” I purred, “is all the fun.”
Before he could think of one more stall tactic or say one more reasonable word, I put my arms around his neck and I kissed him.
And, before his brain could remind his body how despicable and deceitful and all-around unworthy I was to be an Ashmore wife, his mouth kissed me back, one hand covered my breast, the other pulled me closer, and the Standing Stone of Ireland sprang immediately to life beneath the thong.
Well, some things hadn’t changed. He was still, hands down, the best kisser I’d ever known, and I was swept away with nostalgia and even – hallelujah! – hormones. Oh, it felt so good to be in a man’s arms again – and this was a man now, with a man’s body and a man’s confidence and authority – it felt so good to have a man’s tongue in my mouth again, tasting me as if I were the most precious elixir – and I could taste the Merlot – it felt so good to feel his fingers on my breast, tweaking my nipple.
I never knew what “swoon” meant before then, but I wanted to swoon from the feelings that came flooding back. I wasn’t a girl now. I was a woman, with a woman’s body and a woman’s desire, and I wanted a man to touch my body, to feel warm skin to skin, to feel him sliding into me, filling me. I’d forgotten how damn good his hair felt beneath my fingers, and I thought I’d forgotten, but I hadn’t, how much he liked it when I licked his ear and kissed my way down the side of his neck. He was breathing harder than when he came in from an evening jog, and beneath me, he was hard and heavy, hot right through his jeans.
Oh, God, it was going to happen. He was going to take me, and the long empty years would end, he’d look at me again with desire and love, we’d have life and laughter and fun in the house again….
And if it meant that I had to give up my body’s sovereignty to grow a perfect little Ashmore, that in nine months’ time I had to lie in a delivery room, pushing nine pounds of a perfect little Ashmore out into the world, well, I’d take it. Maybe this time he’d show up and hold my hand.
I pulled back for a moment, and I don’t know if I started to take off my knit shirt, or if he did, but somehow both of us were pushing it over my head, and it floated back down in front of the sofa. He put one hand warmly on my back, and he leaned forward and suckled a nipple into his mouth – there was my devout breast man again, and I wondered if he noticed that they were a little larger than the last time he’d seen them, before Julie – and I thought I would melt right down into him, because his m
outh was tugging on all my senses right down to my womb, and whole galaxies were cart wheeling behind my eyes, and I thought I was going to come, right then, right there.
He was about to bust the zipper on his jeans.
This was going to be a great night.
He switched breasts, and his other hand slid gently up my leg and under my filmy skirt to the thong, and I sighed in happiness, because his mouth felt so warm and exciting, and his fingers felt incredible, and I felt so alive, and the nightmare was about to end. And then I said it. God knows why I said it.
“Take me, Richard,” I whispered. “Take me, it will be so wonderful, it will be like it always was, think of how you liked to be inside me, you always said it was the most welcoming place in the world, think of us making a son, it’ll be like the night we made Julie—”
He went completely still – his mouth, his hands, the Standing Stone of Ireland.
I froze.
He sat up so fast that I toppled off him sideways onto the sofa and then onto the floor. I landed hard on my butt, and for a second I could hardly believe what had happened, what I had said. I glanced up, not even wanting to breathe, afraid to say one more word, and he was leaning forward, breathing hard, his hands clasped together, his knuckles white, staring down at the ground.
This had to be fixable. No unseducible men. Lucy had been right. We were too close to finding each other again; we couldn’t screw this up, not now, not when the end of all the loneliness and coldness and silence was so close….
“Richard….” I said softly, and I knelt there on my knees before him, bare breasts and all – and oh, how they tingled, how alive they felt – and I let my hand trail up his blue-jeaned thigh to his crotch.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 57
