Fairy Tale Blues (2 page)

I read the note again, out loud this time. “I love you for a hundred raisins.”

My voice softened into a whisper near the end. I reached across the table with both hands and looped the ribbon around my husband's shoulders. “I love you, too,” I said.

He held one of my hands and grinned at how touched I was by his card. When Jess directed his attention my way, he knew just how to reach me, and he could always make me laugh. For the past two and a half years, though, his attention had often felt tucked away, unavailable to me. To be fair, since our sons, Cam and Saddler, had left for college, I may have expected more in the way of intimacy from Jess than I had before the house became ours alone. Perhaps starting tonight things would improve. Inside of me, a party balloon floated with hope.

“Go ahead, open it up,” Jess said, releasing my hand and leaning forward to watch.

I unwrapped the package. Inside glimmered blue topaz ear studs. Topaz was my birthstone and blue my favorite color.

I looked up, eyebrows lifted, my smile still in place, assuming he was teasing me. Jess smiled back at me, looking open and at ease.

“To match your beautiful eyes, AnnieLaurie,” he said. They were the same words he had said last Valentine's Day when he presented me with this exact gift. A pair of topaz ear studs, same starry blue. Which at that moment I was wearing. In fact, hadn't removed since he'd given them to me eleven months before.

It all came rushing in. How Jess lived in perpetual unawareness, like a second grader who came to school wide-eyed that he was late, wearing unmatched socks, having forgotten his lunch. Jess walked through his life and our marriage with this same benign look of happy innocence. Yet until now I had never been conscious of this as a source of our trouble. Or felt quite so angry.

I could barely breathe. I felt as if a geyser churned in my chest, and at any moment it would explode noisily into scalding tears.

“I'm going to the restroom,” I said when I could speak. I grabbed my purse and the satiny gift box. I passed the waiter bringing our bottle of champagne down the wide staircase from the lounge above. The Granary was built on the side of the butte, full of windows full of Tetons, though on this January evening I only saw myself reflected in the window glass, long rippling velvet skirt and silky shirt, standing at the banister.

Some women say they could live through anything but the loss of a child. But, for me, just as unbearable would be the loss of my mate. I stood on the steps, watching my husband follow the beads of champagne as they spilled into the glasses. I was forty-six years old, married to Jess for more than half my life. And I felt then as if I had lost him just as surely as if he hadn't shown up for our anniversary dinner at all.

Jess didn't look toward the staircase, though by then the waiter was glancing my way, as were a few other diners, so I continued up the steps. In the coatroom I wrapped my handwoven scarf around my neck, removed my coat from the hanger, found my fringed leather gloves and stepped out into the whipping snow to the car.

The switchbacks down the butte were iced and treacherous, and I gripped the steering wheel and negotiated the steep, curving road in four-wheel drive. This road always made me uneasy, but this January night my thoughts scared me more. I was heading for the airport.

I caught a shuttle to Denver, then another flight to Orlando, rented a car and headed straight for the Atlantic Ocean, a place where I'd always found comfort. I arrived a couple hours before dawn. Now wrapped in a hotel towel, I stood before the sliding-glass doors that led to a balcony overlooking the beach, undecided about what to do next. I barely noticed my lack of sleep; instead, I felt stunned by a sense of loss. I realized that I had been working hard on a marriage in which my partner worked very little. Resentment, built from years of keeping this fact from myself, finally toppled like a many-storied building, burying me beneath it. For two hours I had been tossing and turning in a hotel bed far from home, as if trying to wriggle out from under the rubble.

Now I realized it would take more than a few sleepless nights to tidy up this mess. Yet I didn't have any notion of what it would take. All I knew was that once my marriage had been a romance full of laughter, sweetness and spirit, and that Jess and I had met every tough time with the determination to work it out, while couples around us broke apart, switched partners, sued each other for custody of kids, cutting horses and golden retrievers.

I checked the clock beside the bed—seven a.m.—and subtracted two hours for Mountain Time. I should phone Jess, report my whereabouts.

I didn't look forward to the call. Jess' first response would be to construct a story to excuse his actions; his second would be to diminish the issue. This time, I'd refuse to get entangled in his defenses. For once—despite how unreasonable it was to flee three thousand miles without notice—I had taken action and not just talked about my trouble while following Jess around the house, trying to hold his attention.

As I hovered near the phone, I pictured Jess' expression when I opened the earrings and I realized the guy was so intent on shedding responsibility that he turned innocence into a vice. He wore it like a mask, peering at the world through a pair of blue eyes as clear and faultless as those topaz stones he had given me.

See? Already distance on my marriage was offering insight.

Jess

 

 

I
will never forget looking up the staircase at the Granary in time to glimpse the vanishing hem of AnnieLaurie's black velvet skirt. Why the hell was she going to the restroom? That girl had a bladder the size of a rain barrel. Her mother had taught her to never use the public restrooms at school, and so she had trained herself at age five to wait all day until she got home to use her own bathroom. Something else rang off-key that night. A kind of déjà vu floated around while I watched her open the box holding the earrings.

After she went upstairs, I sat there and sat there until our waiter approached and said, “Sir.” I looked at him with a kind of wariness. As if he were going to tell me something more upsetting than that the chef was out of food for the night. Something about Annie. But what could go wrong in a ladies' restroom, I encouraged myself, besides falling into the toilet?

“Sir, would you like to order now, since the lady has left?”

“The lady left? What lady?” I asked stupidly.

The waiter gestured to AnnieLaurie's glass of champagne, tiredly sending up a bubble now and then.

“What do you mean she left?”

“She took her coat . . . and drove away.” The guy looked miserable. “They told me upstairs.”

“In my car? Our car?”

“A Tahoe.”

I knew it. During that long wait I had stared out the window, my mind deliberately blank. I mean, my brain had removed its own batteries. Now I spoke to the waiter in a voice I'd use asking a doctor,
It's cancer, isn't it?
I said, “Black and red?”

“Yes, sir.”

I yanked the ribbon Annie had placed around my shoulders, wadded it up and tossed it across the table beside the torn wrapping paper from the gift I'd given her.

 

As it turned out Davy, who worked in our store years ago, now managed the bar upstairs. He offered to drive me home in half an hour. While I waited, I finished the bottle of champagne. Figured I'd go home and face the music with a bit of a buzz. I pictured Annie sitting on the sofa with her well-ordered grievance laid like a snare, waiting for me to place one word in the noose. It'd be a full hour before I could get Annie giggling over the problem and carry her off to bed.

While Davy drove and described his day of skiing—“I'm not kidding, Jess, powder to the armpits.”—I worked up a good anger about the wasted ninety-five-dollar bottle of champagne. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Annie's probable response bubbled to the surface: That the money wasn't as wasted as I was. Hell, I'd be better off apologizing right away, I decided. But all the while I knew this night was not usual. Neither of us was the dramatic type. We didn't slam doors or yell or throw pots of oatmeal at the walls. And we never just up and left the other guy.

Davy dropped me off in the driveway. My heart beat so fast I detoxed on the doorstep. Sober as the sun, I opened the door and found an empty house.

When Annie didn't turn up by midnight, I called my friend Judge Eddy and urged him to discreetly ask questions at the police station about any road accidents, avalanches, a woman hurt.

I finished throwing up the champagne about three in the morning. At five she phoned.

Annie

 

 

H
e picked up the phone on the first ring. “Jess,” I said. “Annie Laurie. God, are you okay? Where are you?” “Florida.” “Florida.” He said it like a foreign word, as if trying to wring meaning out of incomprehensible sounds. He even pronounced it
Flor-da,
leaving out a syllable.

I didn't know how to explain myself, so I jumped in with the obvious. “I'm going to spend the day here.”

“The day?”

“Well, maybe longer. You know, take some time.”

“No, I don't know. What the hell are you doing?”

I had no idea what I was doing. Leaving like this was the most impulsive act of my life. Then the perfect answer came to me. Last year, at the store, we'd hired a professor from an East Coast university who was taking the winter off in Jackson Hole to rest and do research.

I said, “I'm taking a sabbatical.”

“A teaching sabbatical?” Jess sounded completely puzzled.

“A marriage sabbatical.”

“Shit, what does that mean?”

“A semester or two off. You know . . . some time.”

“Annie, why?” Anger crept into his voice; he sounded defensive already. “What the hell? Didn't you like the earrings?”

Jess thought he was making a joke. “Nice as the ones you gave me last Valentine's Day.”

Silence.

“Really? Oh. Annie, gee,” he said boyishly. I heard him sigh; then he gathered momentum. “But look, it's not like I got my girlfriends mixed up. I got my earrings mixed up. We can solve this. You don't just walk out on me in a restaurant while I wait and wait and the champagne goes flat and people stare.”

How embarrassing. I hadn't thought of that. Then I came to myself. This was often how our arguments turned. I slipped easily out of my own feelings and sank deeply into his.

“Well, AnnieLaurie?”

I held my silence.

“Please come home, Annie. We'll talk.”

My favorite thing—talk—and he knew it. However, it really meant: I talked, and Jess sat with his jaw muscles clenched, his eyes staring into the distance.

The image settled something for me. I could not take that look one more time without doing something a lot more drastic than going on a temporary leave of absence. If I didn't deal with the feelings I'd been experiencing in my marriage now, my miseries would continue to mount.

“I'm not coming home. Maybe in a few months.” Suddenly I felt as though there was much catching up to do, as if I had missed a lot of classes and needed to hand in makeup work. I had been accusing Jess of not dealing with our problems, but now I suspected that was true of me. I had pushed my dissatisfactions aside while doing my work and Jess' at the store, wearing myself down to ensure that I would be too tired to do anything more than numb out each evening on the sofa, too weary even to fight for control of the TV remote.

I would take a sabbatical, rest and do research.

“No more talk, Jess.”

“Look, I'll fly down. We'll work this out. I love you. I'm sorry about the earrings. I just . . . forgot.”

“You didn't forget, Jess. I've worn those earrings for almost a year. Every day, all day. You don't look at me anymore.”

“Oh, now it's that I don't
look
at you. Usually it's that I don't listen to you. What next, Annie, I don't
smell
you?”

“I need a rest from being your wife, Jess. Don't come down; give me the time I need. Maybe a few months will do it. I'll be fine. My family is close.”

“A few months is too long. Besides, even your sister, Daisy, would notice your presence among her piles of crap after that long and wonder why you're still around.”

“I'm not at Daisy's.” Leave it to Jess to get smart-alecky when he lost the reins. “I'm in a hotel. I'll let you know when I want to see you. And I will want to, Jess.” My voice had begun to shake. I hung up.

 

I looked around the hotel room, then sat on the edge of the bed on bunched-up sheets, where I'd tried to rest those couple hours before dawn. I opened my mouth to inhale a big breath, and a wail rose from my chest that sounded so alien I nearly checked behind me to find the source. A sob wrenched my body, doubling me in half. I curled onto the bed and muffled my face in the pillow. I bawled loud and hoarse, sounding like a bison calf lost in the sagebrush. I bawled until my throat ached and my stomach muscles were sore from the heaving.

I sat up and reached for tissues on the bedside table. Blew my nose and saw that the early-morning sky was brightening. The rosy carpet almost matched the line of clouds lifting the sun into place. Crying made me more miserable, as if the baptism of tears gave confirmation to my sorrow. Even so, I lay down on the bed again and let the pillow absorb more whimpers.

I must have dozed off a bit. When I opened my eyes, my palms immediately pressed against my chest, and I wondered what awful injury I'd sustained. Undigested grief, as if a bonfire, smoldered there. More like a “bonefire,” as it was called centuries back, a fire of bones burned inside me.