He's Gone (15 page)

And, in spite of his solemnity, Ian wanted it, too. He pulled me to him. We always had passion, and it lit up there on the forest floor. He undid his pants and put my hand around him, and if at any time I felt a sense of my own infidelity, it was then. Not because my hand belonged to only one man, but because I had
held only one man for so many years. Ian felt different. It was like momentarily wearing someone else’s slippers. Your feet know the feeling of your own, and any other pair is wrong.

Passion—well, honestly, I was fighting to hold on to it. I felt too aware of twigs in my back and the possible sound of footsteps and the awkwardness of bra clasps. I was acting. Maybe it was like most first times, when things squeak and fumble, when you’re thinking too much. The first time can be a mission to be accomplished or a line to cross. We fixed that later.

But that day it was the effort of the outdoors and some slight embarrassment at my choice of underwear, that kind of thing. I am never exactly smooth when I want to be. It was one of those memories that become more embarrassing with time, after you know better. The next Christmas, Ian gave me six tiny thongs, and I realized my mistake. Tall mother undies, even satin, were still mother undies. I cringe at that even now.

Regardless, the mission was accomplished. The line was crossed. We lay together only briefly afterward before hurriedly dressing. If you’ve ever thought that an affair might be romantic, believe me, there are a thousand reasons why it’s not. Especially when the motivation is as serious and life-changing as love. This isn’t some sort of cautionary message of morality, don’t get me wrong. Do what you want. But there were no long hours of looking into each other’s eyes is all I’m saying. Someone always wore a watch. And even then I could feel it, the way my options were dwindling as my old ship was beginning to sink, the prow tipping upward in the black waves.

I love you, Dani. God, I love you so much. We were meant to be together
.

I love you, too, Ian
.

Shit! Look how late it is!

Oh, no! Can you hand me my—

I’ll probably break out with poison ivy. That’d be a trick to explain
.

Mark came home that night, and I set dinner on our plates and plates on our place mats and poured milk in our glasses, something I had done hundreds of times. Hundreds. But now all of that, a
lifetime
of that, was a fate I had suddenly, narrowly missed. At the table, Mark talked about work, the leads that were given to Gary when they should have gone to him, something, I don’t know, because playing over his face were images of forest leaves and light patterns among branches, skin on skin, bodies that now didn’t seem to fumble awkwardly but moved effortlessly in the replaying. I watched Mark cut his pork chops, but over the top of his hands, like those plastic sheets in some medical book showing ever deeper layers of the human body, were Ian’s hands, set on the curves of my hips. As I picked up the dishes that night, I was aware of the long red scratch from a blackberry thorn that was hidden under my sleeve.

Later that evening, I watched Mark brush his teeth at our sink. His shirt was off, and he was wearing a pair of baggy boxers. His white stomach hit the counter edge.
He’s gained weight
, I thought uncharitably. There were small round rolls spilling over the silly elastic of his shorts. Then again, I had thin white lines on my hips from being pregnant with Abby, and my breasts had started to sag.

You didn’t notice I got my hair cut
, he said.

Ah, you got your hair cut
. I was in bed already. Abby had gone to bed, too, an hour before. I had a book on my knees. I read the same lines over and over. Lines about some forest floor, a couple tangled passionately, a couple now separated and filled with longing.

Too short? I think it’s too short. Makes my face look fat
.

My heart had become closed and stingy, unable to offer any reassurance. I shrugged.

Thanks
, he said.

What? It looks fine. You worry more about your hair than I do
.

He brushed, spit into the sink. Wiped his mouth on a towel. Shoved the towel back onto the rack.

Can you?
I gestured in the direction of the towel.
It’s all clumpy
.

You giving the home tour tomorrow? Who’s going to see?
He wasn’t angry, he was joking. Trying to kid me out of some confusing mood I was in.

I will. It’s inconsiderate. I work hard to keep things nice
.

He got in bed beside me.
You do. You keep things really nice
.

I was engrossed in my book. Much too engrossed in the riveting plot to notice his eyes on me, questioning, or his fingertips stroking my arm up and down, up and down. My skin was shriveling from his touch; it felt disgusting to me. I wanted to scream at him to stop. He was staring, and it felt like he could see too much. He hadn’t seen me for years, but now there I was with my butterfly skeleton outside my body.

Are you okay?
he asked.

I’m fine
.

He was still waiting.

I went for the all-purpose fatigue-and-illness excuse, our other favorite evasion. What would we do without it—all the honesty it’s helped us avoid, all the intimacy?
I’m tired, is all. I think that dinner didn’t sit well with me
.

You need a Pepto-Bismol?
Brief flash—forest floor interrupted by the realization of daily issues like stomach upset. Somehow you don’t picture a lover fetching Pepto-Bismol. I felt a little panicky at the flimsiness of the dreamy light flickering among evergreens. Soul mates would still occasionally eat at some bad
taco truck or get the flu. My husband had seen me give birth, and he was still here.

I’m okay
.

I turned the page, even though I hadn’t read it. Mark reached around on the floor by the bed, found the remote, and flicked the TV on.

Mark … I’m reading
.

He gave me that long look again, and then he turned the volume low, low enough that he’d have to lip-read to watch the show. I set my book down now that he’d ruined it with moving mouths and silent dialogue. Really, I couldn’t even hear it. Still, I turned my shoulders away from him in a huff.

I could feel it in my chest, the spinning piston of irritation. Mark felt it, too. He began to stroke my arm again.

Something else had happened that day, I could tell. I could feel it in Mark’s needy fingers. It was remarkable. It was temporary. But it was good while it lasted: The tables had turned.

It changed things, making love with Ian. It was like losing a second virginity. Marriage sends you back to some sanctioned state of purity in regard to sex, and now Ian and I had broken that, and we’d broken it together. It was not done lightly and the ramifications were not inconsequential. God, do you hear that? It sounds like I’m discussing contract negotiations, not pleasure. I guess it
was
a contract negotiation of sorts, contract
re
negotiation. We thought about our relationship differently after that. We thought about our marriages differently after that, too. It solidified things between us. Not entirely. But we went from the liquidy state of Jell-O to the point where you could drop the fruit in it. We would have had a mess if we’d taken it out of the mold right then, but you get the idea. Not the best metaphor. Whatever.

I wanted Mark to know after that. The marriage was finished in my mind, and staying now felt intolerable. His eyes were the wrong eyes and his body was the wrong body and my life was the wrong life. Even if Ian and I didn’t ride off into the sunset together, I knew that the marriage was irretrievably broken if I could have those kinds of feelings for someone else. Before then, every time I faced the thought of leaving, every time I sobbed after some frightening altercation or held my pillow in the night or watched his jawline for signs of mood, it felt too large.
Over
was just too big.
Alone
was even bigger.

They call an abusive relationship a cycle of violence, when really it’s a cycle of hope. It’s a cycle of misguided optimism. One day that optimism is gone, if you’re lucky.

Here are a few things (the few that I care to disclose): Mark came home one afternoon and told me he’d quit his job, just like that. With a baby and a mortgage and me not working yet. He’d gotten into a fight with his boss. No matter where he worked, he was always getting into a fight with a boss. And there’d been sexual-harassment charges at another workplace. Another thing: On Christmas Eve, his sister told me that he’d once dislocated his own arm while beating her up when they were teenagers. Another: He spent more than we had. And this: One night, after shoving me hard onto the bed and screaming in my face and battering me, he left. He left for hours. Where? A porn theater, he admitted later. I washed the clothes that he wore that night. They smelled of cigarettes and of old men in overcoats slunk down in worn velvet theater seats. The woman who washed those clothes—it’s like talking about someone I once knew.

You can get too small to save yourself. You married a tiger because a tiger is large and fierce, but he’s fierce to
all
humans, even you. Especially you, because with you he can hide behind the word
husband
and the doors of your own home and no one
will ever know. You start to understand that if living with the tiger is bad, leaving the tiger is going to be worse.

The point is, I forced myself to see the good in Mark because of my own cowardice. The ways he was a great father to Abby. The bike rides. The baseball practices. The times we were a regular family, joking, taking vacations. Running out to the waves on some beach, holding hands. Thanksgiving, when he said that what he was most thankful for was me. He made me laugh sometimes. Your hatred lies low, disappears in your fear of what it might mean to leave. I reminded myself instead of the endearing way he’d crack up at his own jokes, or the joy he showed coming back from some trip to buy lumber, or his earnest, good intentions with some self-help book. It’s like the thing you do when you don’t have money (well, I did it, anyway, after I was divorced)—you turn the radio up because the car’s making some noise you know is going to cost more than you can pay.

I was “in denial,” which sounds like I was “in” some foreign country, which I guess I basically was. I stayed in denial until I saw the slightest shadowy figure of a rescuer who might have held a ticket out of there. Ian wasn’t even a real rescuer. He made no promises. He hadn’t yet decided what his own life and marriage needed to be. He was merely the
illusion
of a rescuer. That was enough. Even if it was a trick of the eye, it suddenly appeared that I wasn’t facing the tiger alone. You stand there and look and look and look at the tiger. You stare and stare at his teeth. And then, seemingly all at once, standing there a second longer is worse than the possibility of being eaten alive. There was no knight, not really. No sword. But I was ready anyway. Finally I could say,
Enough
.

Finally I could say,
Go ahead and eat me, fucker
.

I remember reading something once, in one of Ian’s books. It reminded me of us. The Aztec goddess of love, Xochiquetzal,
held a butterfly between her teeth as she made love to young soldiers on battlefields. It was a promise of rebirth, should they die while fighting for freedom.

On the way to BetterWorks, I pray. As I drive past all of the photoflash images of typical Seattle—the six coffee places, the thin, speeding bikers, the cafés featuring sustainable food—I silently ask for my family’s safety and well-being. This is what I settle on after some initial perplexity about what to pray
for
. You know: If he left home, do I pray he returns? If he’s swimming in the sea somewhere, do I pray for a shark attack? Or do I pray for mistaken identity, for Evan Lutz’s girlfriend’s bad eyesight, for it to have been some bank employee with Ian’s profile she saw there in Bagel Oasis? I don’t have a great deal of confidence that God is really listening to me, anyway. There’s probably some strikeout system Up There, and I’m sure I’ve gotten more than my share.

I pull into the BetterWorks lot. My stomach is roiling, a boat riding ocean swells. Ian might come out of those glass doors right now. He might spot my car and bolt. He won’t exactly want to see me, will he, after ditching me in such a cruel way? I didn’t even know he had reached that point. Being disappointed is one thing.

I am struck with a blow of frigid air from the air-conditioning when I walk in. He keeps it too cold in there. Kitty and Jasmine are at the reception desk. They’re chatting and laughing together, but when they see me they stop. It’s not one of those social situations for which there are rules. Kitty collects herself enough to speak.

“Mrs. Keller!”

“Is Ian in?”

She looks baffled. Kitty and Jasmine glance at each other. My voice is bitter, even to me. Those embarrassing moments that seem worse later—this will become one of them.

“He’s not been in since …” Kitty waves a hand in a small circle, treading emotional water.

“Last Friday. Saturday. The party,” Jasmine says.

“Saturday. The party,” Kitty repeats.

I guess I’m relieved. I’ve been worried he’s in his office, wearing his missing clothes, eating another lunch from Bagel Oasis. But Nathan would have told me if he’d seen Ian, wouldn’t he? Nathan has a good heart.

“Is Nathan in?”

“Not yet, Mrs. Keller.”

“I’m actually here to see Evan Lutz.”

“I’ll buzz him,” Kitty says, which leaves Jasmine to deal with me. Her eye contact is awkward. I realize I haven’t showered. I probably look a little crazy. I pat down my hair. I have a sudden fear that I’m wearing only socks, but, no, thank goodness, my shoes are there.

I remember: Jasmine is a part-time employee. She’s a student. Something-something, I don’t know. “How’s graduate school? How are your classes going?” Jasmine tilts her head, troubled, but I persist. My husband may have left me in some cruel, unimaginable way, but I can still manage.
I
can be kind. And I’m just fine. See?
Fine
. He might have left me because my clothes aren’t sexy enough, or because I am annoyingly forgetful about tying boats down, or because I waste food, or because his daughters hate me, but I’m perfectly okay without him. “Business marketing?” I say to Jasmine.