Dirty Love (11 page)

Laura, a Saturday morning in the fall. They’d both slept late. Mary Ann was away at college, and from downstairs came the smell of slightly burned pancakes, Kevin and one of his buddies eating them in front of ESPN. Outside their bedroom windows, the maple leaves were such a bright orange it was as if the tree was on fire and Mark could not stop looking at it.

Laura put her hand on his chest under the covers. “Hey, let’s do something today. Just you and me. I won’t even go to the gym.”

But they were building Mark’s mother’s apartment then, and the builder had given Mark a punch list of things to do. Door hardware to pick up, handicapped rails for the bathroom, drawer and cabinet pulls for the kitchen. These were tasks he enjoyed doing, and he knew, lying there beside Laura, he could have included her in them too, that they could go somewhere for breakfast, then drive to the Home Depot together, maybe even go for a walk together after that. But lately he’d seen a confused and tender hunger in her, as if she needed something from him she used to think only he could give, but now she was on the cusp of knowing she might be able to get it from somewhere else, too, and that’s why she’d looked so vulnerable that fall Saturday morning in their bed, her eyes soft, her lower lip tentative; she was asking Mark to stop her.

But her face, her voice, her hand on his chest, simply made him tired. They were all asking him to drop one project for another, and he did not drop projects. He saw each and every one to completion, and then he began another.

“I can’t today, honey. I’ve got that punch list.” And when he climbed out of bed, her hand sliding from his chest, he sensed he’d just enlarged the scope of a project he was not even aware of, one whose costs he would ultimately have to cover.

Mark passes an auto body shop. He passes a boat supply business and pizza joint, then he’s driving onto the bridge over the Merrimack River. The sun is low to the west, and there are dozens of motorboats cutting through the currents. On the bow of one, two young women in bikinis lie back on their elbows on towels, and he feels again Lisa Schena’s legs around his hips.
Are you
judging
me?

He had been. How could he say he had not?

Up ahead is the turnoff for downtown, and he takes it, stopping briefly beneath the overpass to let three teenage boys cross in front of him. They wear low shorts and loose T-shirts, one in a Red Sox cap and untied basketball shoes, and all of them have earplugs in one ear, the wires running into their shorts pocket, each of them hearing different music in their heads while also talking about whatever it is they are.

There is the feeling he is a man not of these times, one who has been left behind long ago and should have been. Then he is driving along High Street. On both sides are the large Federalists built before this country was a country. Some have ornate painted fences set into stone walls, others deep lawns cut down the center with a walkway. Frank Harrison Jr.’s is poured concrete stamped to look like English cobblestone. It’s pretentious, and Mark eases up on the gas. He sees two cars in the driveway. One of them is Harrison’s white coupe and the other is his wife’s white SUV, both of them matching the white clapboards and white flower boxes overflowing with small red flowers of some kind.

Then all of this is in Mark’s rearview mirror, and in his head is only a light pulsing, the kind he gets when he knows he has forgotten to complete an important task and can’t quite remember what it is. The last of the sun is in his eyes. He flips down the visor, glimpses on the sidewalk an old man. He’s in a scally cap and a yellow shirt, his shoulders and chest and belly sagging, a metal cane at his side, and he just stands there, staring down at the concrete as if it is telling him something.

W
HEN
M
ARK RETURNED
from Harrison’s bank and the realtor’s office’s parking lot, Laura’s car was in the driveway and whatever snow there’d been had melted, the asphalt wet and black. Entering his own house, it was as if he were willingly stepping onto a ship whose lower holds were filling with icy seawater, its bow beginning to shift skyward.

Laura stood in the kitchen, waiting for him. She wore her blue Nike running suit, and her hair was tied back, and she had one hand on the edge of the sink as if to balance herself.

“Where did you go, Laura, and don’t tell me it was the fucking gym.”

“I can’t do it.”

“What? You can’t do what?”

“We talked about it, and I—”

“
Who?
You and fucking
Harrison
?”

“If you yell at me again, I’ll leave.”

Mark’s heart was kicking at the inside of his skull. In the shadows of the kitchen, his wife stood straight and poised, her chin raised, and she appeared to him terrified yet resolute. This did something to him. The earth seemed to have more gravity, his feet in iron boots as he pulled a stool toward him and sat.

“We love each other.”

He stared at her, at her straight jaw, the bags beneath her eyes she hadn’t tried to minimize with makeup, at her closed lips, at her long throat and arms, at her hand on the edge of the sink in the sunlight coming through the window, a tremor in her fingers. It was as if his grief were a hurricane and this was its eye, and he wanted it to never end, this calm, this quiet. Just the two of them in this space that would soon be swept away.

“Why are you shaking, Laura? Are you
afraid
of me?”

She said nothing. She kept her eyes on his. She blinked. “You treat me like I work for you, Mark. You always have. Well I don’t work for you, all right?”

“You really think that?”

She shrugged. “I blame myself more than I blame you.”

“That’s not fair, Laura.” He had to say it, he had to take a stand, but he did not believe his own words and they seemed to fall to the floor between them.

“At first I needed it, I guess. I was drifting really. Even though I had a job and my running, I was—”

“What?”

“Just what I said.” She crossed her arms. She leaned back against the counter. She seemed to be waiting for something now.

“I went to his son’s house, Laura. While you were with him in your little rendezvous, I was at his fucking son’s house.”

“Mark.”

“You think he’ll leave his
wife
for you? He fucks around all the time, Laura. You’re just the latest hole for him.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I? Talk to his son. He told me all about it. Talk to his fucking
son
.”

She was moving now, past him and through the kitchen and out the front door, the eye disintegrating too soon, too soon, and Mark’s feet were light again, his legs the ones he had as a kid, for he was in their driveway slapping both hands on the hood of her car, Laura’s Honda pulling fast away from him, bouncing into the street, then jerking forward and speeding up. “You’re going to write that fucking letter!” He was running alongside it, Laura’s face so peculiar, so still even as his fist was punching the glass that separated them, and he was yelling directives at her that she
would—
goddamnit!—follow.

But it was Mark Welch doing the following. For nine days, he called in sick. For nine days, and a weekend in between, he was the man living behind the wheel of his sedan, his heart a sick companion lodged between his ears, like having a one-way conversation with one who answered in tubercular coughs. He was the man driving three cars behind Harrison’s as he drove to his acupuncturist and the gym. He was the man following him to the state park in New Hampshire to run with Laura Welch, her husband having rented a small blue Yaris for that, to sit in the pines in it and watch his wife kiss Harrison, a big handsome man in an expensive running suit, black and shiny, his bald head shiny too. Then they would stretch on the ground together side by side, they’d chat and laugh, and Mark could see through the trees Laura’s face. It was more relaxed and contented than he could ever remember, and so he was the man who had tried to break into Harrison’s coupe while he was running with Mark’s wife. He was the man who let all the air out of his rear tires, then regretted it immediately for that meant Harrison would have to sit with Laura in her Civic while they waited for Triple A, though Mark had not waited for that, for in the blue shadows of dusk, his wife’s windows had fogged up, most likely from the heat of their running but maybe the other, too, a thought then an image then a feeling he felt himself push away from, like pushing back from a poker table when your downfall is imminent, standing and walking away, the non-feeling deepening then, this existing inside a body that did what it did. Like following Anna Harrison from her law office to the sandwich shop where she ate alone at a small table in the corner with a book, the same kind of literary-looking paperbacks Laura read for her book group. Mark was the man sipping coffee on the other side of the shop, the place loud with well-dressed workers and young mothers and their young kids, so much normal and happy noise that Anna Harrison, her sandy hair
pinned back too tightly so that she appeared compromised in some way, did not notice. Nor did she notice him follow her out, or hang back ten or fifteen paces, the man in a coat and tie for that is what his hands dressed him in those mornings, they’d shaved his face as well, and splashed aftershave onto his cheeks, that sweet-smelling burn in his skin that seemed to reach him long after. The question was: Does he tell her? Does he tell her that her husband and his wife—what? Such an old and predictable story, ageless really, like some virus that affects some marriages and not others. And that’s how she appeared to him, too. She was the woman who had accepted this sickness she lived with, a woman who took her pleasures where she could—a good novel, a hot cup of minestrone soup, a freshly baked roll and cold glass of water on a clean napkin. And if he did tell her, perhaps that would be it for her and she would be ready for what is sick to finally die, and then Frank Harrison Jr. would be living in an apartment somewhere and who would be sharing it with him but Laura Murphy Welch?

Mark had followed her the most. As she left the realty office for the gym, as she left the gym for a run with Harrison in the state park, as she left the state park for the Marriott. Three times that first week, she left work at noon to have lunch with Harrison at the Panera two blocks from his bank. They took window seats, brazenly happy together, each leaning forward as the other spoke, nodding their heads, sometimes laughing, one or the other reaching over to touch a hand or arm, his wife’s face looking as it had only twice before that he could remember—after the agony of giving birth to their daughter and son, the skin of her face smoother somehow, a light in her eyes that could only come from deep relief and a hard-earned joy.

Sitting in his small rented Yaris, Mark had felt small himself, a grasping failure of a man. How could he deny what he was seeing? Wasn’t it time to let her go? But to allow the question into his head and heart was to allow a black tumor to take residence there where it would grow. But the only thing growing was this distance between himself and the world he supposedly lived in. He’d become a man things happened to, and he found himself groping for the tools of his work: Risk response and its plans for contingency and mitigation. The monitoring and controlling of the results of those plans. Staring out the driver’s window of his parked rental car across Water Street into the Panera booth, his wife and lover settled there so comfortably, the only contingency plan he could consider was this: He would not leave her, he would not kick his wife from her home, for then she would create one with Harrison. Mark would move into his mother’s apartment. He would stop telling Laura she could no longer see him. He would stop telling her to write a letter telling him goodbye. He would pull back and throw his hands up and let what was coming come. Let his wife’s mistake take care of itself. For in Harrison’s lean and shaven profile—the way he leaned forward at all times, the way his ears lay flat as a wolf’s against his bald head—Mark sensed the predator his son’s choice of words had revealed. Her husband would let her keep a place of refuge she would need later, and in the meantime, he would take the high road. He would be her “bully” husband who had chosen to move into his mother’s apartment until his wife came around, until Laura Murphy Welch came back from the woods one day scratched and bloody and looking for the man who had loved her all along.

M
ARK STEERS SLOWLY
down his street. It is late afternoon, one of his neighbors is grilling burgers, the charred smell of it in the air. In the driveway are his mother’s Buick and Laura’s Honda, his space vacant between them, and he pulls between the two cars and thinks of his father before he became Welchy, a big man who walked in the door at the end of the day laughing loudly, swooping Claire and Mark up into his stubbled kisses that smelled like Vitalis and cigar smoke, popcorn and whiskey, his eyes taking in his children as if they were his only cure. Then he was gone and Mark was fourteen, scooping a grounder into his glove and gunning it to Danny O’Neil, the smack of the leather, the runner two strides late, the sun low behind the field so that they were all in a warmly shadowed light that seemed etched from someplace golden and far away where somebody good was in charge and they didn’t have to worry about anything, just play.

For so many years he has worried, but not now. Strangely, not now. Between his legs is the lingering warmth of what he’d emptied into Lisa Schena, and he wants to call her and apologize. If she’ll let him, he may even want to see her again, he is not sure. He is not sure of much, but he knows something has tipped and shifted, and something else has let go and something else is now coming.

He rises out of his sedan. He leaves the sunroof open and the windows down. If it rains tonight, then it fucking rains. He unlocks his trunk and takes the plastic tub and places into it the glue and mortar bag and various tools he’s going to have to learn to use. When he slams the hood, Laura is there, her profile in the kitchen window, her hair and face and torso silhouetted against the rear window to their backyard, the maple trees in the late afternoon light. She’s talking on the phone. Maybe to Harrison. Maybe to one of their children, whom they never seem to see much of anymore, something that probably won’t change and there’s little to be done about it. Laura is only in shadow. Her long hair hangs down her straight back, and she is young again and there is the dull stab of remorse, not for what he’s done today, but for something he never did but vowed he would for this quiet woman who was nothing like those he’d dated before, no biting wit or even very much charm, no seeming desire to rise up some glimmering corporate tower. She didn’t have one’s generous curves or another’s dark eyes promising pleasures both sensual and intellectual. But there was something so accepting about this woman who had sold him his condo that he was soon inviting her into it, the sun low over the water, Mark distracted by the gold in her hair, her deep green eyes, her high cheekbones and straight clavicle, and he liked how she wanted to hear about
him
, his job and his boyhood, but not like she was interrogating him or sizing him up. There was a calm to her, a passivity he could only do one thing with—to take it in his two hands and begin to shape, then manage her as he saw fit.