Commitment (67 page)

“I’m not . . .”
the phone on her desk rang.
“I’m not ‘stringing you along’.
Two
weeks, okay?”

She reached for the phone and Dawn backed out of her office.

“I’m holding you to that,” she said as she shut the door.

“
Riley
?”

It was Tracy.
She’d developed this new
system
where she didn’t say anything upon picking up the phone, li
stening to see if it was Shawn.
Sometimes she literally ached to speak to him and other times she thought she would throw up if s
he so much as heard his voice.
Today was one of the latter days.

“Hey.”

“You okay?”

“Bad day,” she said without elaboration.

“I know,” Tracy said.
“Still thinking about your conversation with him last night, huh?”

“Yeah.
Y’know what the worst part is
?
I can feel
him getting impatient with m
e.
And it makes me wonder if I’m making a bigger deal out of this than . . .”

“You’re not
. Okay?”
Tracy said firmly.
“
Don’t you ever think that!
You have every right to feel every one of your feelings.
And he has absolutely no right to be impatient.
”

Still
Riley
could hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere, so she asked.

“Well.
I was just going to say that
for you, sooner or later you’re going to have to get to the point where you decide whether you’re going to try to forgive him, or you’re going to walk away.”

“Sometimes I feel like I
could forgive him.
When he came by the office, all I kept thinking, even while I’m standing there being mad at him is how I just wanted so badly to be able to hold hi
m and say we could work it out. But it’s like . . . I’m stuck.
I’m still so fucking
mad;
I could gouge his eyes out
. . .”

“And that
’s natural,” Tracy said gently.
“So take your time a
nd think about what you want.”

“But I’m scared, Tracy.”
She
had never admitted this before. Not to anyone.
Hardly to herself even.

“Of what?”

“That he’
ll
just give up and leave me.
Or t
hat I won’t ever feel the same way about him . . . .
and that maybe I shouldn’t
even be trying to forgive him.
I mean, maybe what he did is unforgivable and I should just move on and I’m just too
much of a
needy
,
weak . . .”

“
Riley
,
y
ou
’re none of those things, okay?
You
’re
married
to
him.
He’s not just your boyfriend.
You’re
right to think seriously about saving the relationship if you can.”

“But what
the hell
happened?”
Riley said, her voice cracking.
She lowered her voice, realizing she might easily be overheard by
someone walking by her office.
“I don’t u
nderstand what happened, Tracy. He loves me.
I know he loves me, so what
happened
?”

“I do
n’t know, sweetie,” Tracy said.
“I don’t know.”

g

Riley
left work early to get back to the apartment and pa
ck a few items for the weekend.
She set out around four and hit
heavy
traffic leaving the city, but was on the Henry Hudson Parkway by a quarter to six, and cruising north to the s
ounds of Sade on the CD player.
It was a slow ride because Route
9N was not exactly a highway
.
It was
a
four-
lane parkway that
meandered
through the small picturesque towns of Westchester County. 

Riley
had enjoyed this drive since s
he was a freshman in college
—
s
he and Tracy would pile into a borrowed or rented car with
the
guys they were currently dating and drive into Manhattan for some high jinks that usually involved fake
ID
s a
nd a hangover the next morning.

Lorna had been really permis
sive about that kind of thing.
She believed in letting kids find their own way in the world, only stepping in when the choices they m
ade presented imminent danger.
Riley
used to wish for a mother who
established
clear lines
and almost envied Tracy’s constant negotiations with her own mother to extend tho
se boundaries.
Now she was just happy she had the kind of
mother
she could actually tell about the condom incident without having to resort to euphemisms.

After Sade was done,
Riley
groped at the pile of CDs on the passenger seat and held the cover up to s
ee what she should put in next.
As luck would have it, the CD she’d picked up
was Shawn’s latest.
On the jacket he was standing shirtless with his arms folded, legs planted wide apart and his head cocked
to one side in a defiant pose.
Riley
took the CD
out of the case and put it in.
The music blasted through
out the car and then his voice.
Familiar, but diff
erent because it was so fierce.
Riley
listened to the whole CD, pulling off the exit ramp just as
the last song cued up
.

She drove the rest of the way to Lorna’s trying to remember what the R&B radio
station was this far up north.
Finally pulling into the driveway, she saw that the lig
hts were on in the living room.
It was a
just
past
seven-thirty
.
S
he could hardly wait to get inside.

Before she had even gotten out of the car
completely
, Lorna opened the front door,
clad in
jeans and a tank, not unlike
what
Riley
herself was wearing.
They smiled at each other
and then Lorna opened her arms.
Riley
walked into them and
allowed herself to be hugged.

Lorna held her at arms’ length.
“You look like shit,” she said
, still smiling
.

Riley
nodded, tears in her eyes.
“I feel like shit, Mom.”

Lorna hugged her again t
ighter this time, and
Riley
dissolved into
noisy
tears of relief to be home
and with someone whose love was pure and certain
.

They made green tea and
Riley
sat at the kitchen counter watching as her mother walked about, choppi
ng vegetables for Western omelet
s, and beating eggs in the
chipped,
big blue mixing bowl that had been around for as long as she could remember.

“The
funniest thing happened today,”
Lorna said, her hand working the fork in a ci
rcular motion through the eggs.
“I realized two of my students had turned in identical paper
s
.
And I mean absolutely identical.”

“How is that funny?”
Riley
asked.

“Well, it’s funny because I called them into my office and it turns out that they both b
ought it from an internet site. The same site.
You
could tell they were pissed—
n
ot at getting caught necessarily, but because they spent good money on this
paper—
which
by the way was only worth a ‘C’.”

Riley
smiled politely.
They were avoiding the subject that they both knew
they would discuss eventually.
She decided not to waste time.

“I saw Shawn
yesterday
,” she said.
She could detect a reaction in the slight pause of Lorna’s hand as she beat the eggs.

“How was that?” she asked.
Her voice was a study in forced casualness.

Riley
shrugged.
“He said what you’d expect him to say.”

“And what’s that?”
Lorna looked up.
She was melting butter in the skillet now.

“That he’s sorry. He loves me. It only happened once.
Blah, blah, blah,”
Riley
droned.

“And you don’t believe any of those things?”

“I believe he’s sorry.
I can’t figu
r
e out what he’s sorry for though.  Getting caught, or doing it in the first place.”

“So you don’t believe he loves you and you don’t believe it happened only once.”

“I don’t kno
w about either of those things.
I can’t just take his word anymore,”
Riley
sipped her tea.
It was getting cold.

“So wha
t does that mean?” Lorna asked.
“For your relationship.”

“I don’t kno
w that either.
But I know this;
it can never be the same between us.”

Lorna didn’t say anything, but
Riley
could see a twitch working at the corner of her mouth.

“What is it?” she asked.
“Tell me.”

Lorna emptied the ba
tter into the skillet.
“It’s just . . .”

“What?”

“It just seems like a romantic notion to
me—
‘It’ll never be the same’.
Why the hell not?
And if not the same, maybe it’ll be better.
”

Riley
leaned forward, her eyes wide.
“Romantic?
And
better
?
He
screwed
som
e girl
!
Months
after we got married
.”

“What I mean by ‘romantic’ is that by saying that it’ll never be the same, you’
re accepting this Hollywood
version of what relationsh
i
ps are, and what commitment is.
A
s though before he did this, your love was like some precious frigging white rose, and now it’s been stained and can never be as white and as pure as it
once
was.”

“And?”
Riley
deman
ded.
“So what’s so awful about that?
”

“
What’s awful is
that’s basically a crock of s
hit,
Riley
.
R
elat
ionships—people—
are
more complicated than that.
We hu
rt people we love all the time.
We do st
upid, hurtful, selfish things.
That’s what makes us human.”

“So you’re saying I should just forgive hi
m and pretend nothing happened?
Coming from you . . .”

“I’m not saying that
. . .” the
veget
ables went into the skillet,
“. . .
I’m saying
don’t make your decision about whether or not to stay with him on the basis of some myth.”

“And the myth would be what?”

“That you get marri
ed and live happily ever after.
You were thinking that
marrying him was the end-game.
That all of a sudden everything between you tw
o would be settled in some way.
But it
’s not, and so you’re panicking
.”

“I’m not panicking,”
Riley
said sharply.
“I’m mad as hell—not to mention hurt—
that my husband is fucking someone else.”