Tell Me One Thing (31 page)

THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE TO AN
empty bed and a sense that something had shifted. Owen wasn’t in the house, but I found
him sitting on the patio where we often had our morning coffee. Unlike the sparsely furnished house, someone had spent hours and hours in the garden making it lush and beautiful. Now, at the beginning of the summer, there were lavender and butterfly bushes in shades of purple, coral astromeria on long, thin stems, and one whole wall of iceberg roses against a side fence, cups of white petals splattered against the dark green foliage.

Owen sat at the glass-topped table, his gaze out over the lawn to the property-line fence, where scarlet bougainvillea made a waterfall of blossoms and a green-throated hummingbird pin-wheeled from flower to flower. His right thumb drummed against the handle of his coffee cup in a rhythm he wasn’t even aware of.

“Owen,” I said softly as I slipped into the chair next to him, “talk to me.”

And so he did. “Did you see the man I was talking to last night when you were with Christina?”

“Yes. He seemed so intense. Like he was trying to win an argument.”

Owen nodded. “Always.”

“You’ve known him for a while?”

“Not well, but yes, for years.”

I was sure I didn’t want to hear the answer to my next question, but I asked it anyway. “What was he trying to convince you of?”

“To go home with him.”

And I knew what he meant.

Finally, Owen looked at me. “If you hadn’t been there, I would have. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

And I did. In that moment I knew I had understood all along. It was what had kept me from asking too many questions. It was the worry tugging just outside my consciousness.

“You would have had sex with him.”

“Yes.”

“Then what are you doing with me?”

“I love you.”

I shook my head. None of this made any sense to me. I was still too young and too inexperienced to understand how a man could love me and our lovemaking but still have a more elemental pull within him that trumped it all.

“I thought …” Owen stopped and then began again. “Anna, I hoped … No,” he said more firmly, “I was starting to believe that all the rest of it would fall away.”

“But it hasn’t.”

There was a long moment of silence before Owen answered my question, which really wasn’t a question at all. “No.”

We didn’t look away from each other. We studied the other’s face and that made the whole conversation infinitely harder.

“Are you telling me this because you want to stop seeing me?”

“I’m telling you this because it happened.”

He waited for me to say something. The only thing I could manage was the truth. “I don’t know if I can simply get up and walk out of here.”

I saw relief flood his face and I grabbed onto it as validation that I should stay, that he wanted me to stay. But in the end what he wanted or I wanted didn’t matter. It took me a while to understand that, and so we continued on in a relationship that was vastly altered and yet, in its heart, remained unchanged.

For a while we were held aloft by our belief that transformation was possible, or that it might be. Then one or the other of us would falter and lose hope, but never at the same time. We went forward hobbled and hurting, and so we clung more desperately to each other. It was during one of those times, when the way forward seemed impossible and the way out seemed more so, that I finally understood Owen as I had to.

IT WAS AN ORDINARY MONDAY
, the middle of the day, and I had come to pick up Bandit for our walk. As I let myself in through the front door, I heard voices in the backyard. Angry, yelling voices. One was Owen’s and it shocked me. Over all the months we had spent together I had never heard him raise his voice. But these voices were shouting over each other, not listening, spewing forth emotion without any censor.

I remember I had Bandit’s leash in my hand and that the dog was skating with anticipation in circles around me, but I didn’t snap on the leash and leave with him. Those desperate male voices pulled me through the house and out the back door to the patio, where just the day before Owen and I had had breakfast and talked about a weekend trip to Laguna to let Bandit run on the beach, to get away together.

It was the wholesale destruction that hit me first. All the beautiful plants uprooted, the butterfly bushes and lavender flung across the lawn, the daylilies and impatiens trampled underfoot, their leaves mashed into a green pulp. There was something so raw and naked about the damage, such a statement of annihilation. The patio was littered with tender white rose petals, the bushes strewn across the bricks like debris. It felt like madness had been let loose in the yard.

And there was Tony ripping the remaining plants from the soil, screaming at Owen that his work wasn’t appreciated, that Owen didn’t deserve such beauty, that Owen was selfish and self-deluding and treacherous.

And there was Owen screaming back at Tony that he didn’t want this kind of craziness, that he had the right to decide what kind of life he lived. And then Tony whirled around and for a moment the two men faced each other, no more than two feet between them, both breathing hard, and then Tony spat out,
“Coward!” and turned and continued to destroy all the beautiful work he had done.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. What I was witnessing was ugly and vindictive, something no one in their right mind would want to experience, and yet … and yet … the very air in that small backyard seemed charged with portent, the way the atmosphere feels before a storm, ions scattering and reassembling with restless speed. And the angry words, the screaming voices were the lightning strikes across the sky—sizzling, burning, and crackling with energy.

As much as I believed Owen as he screamed—“I don’t want this. Get out! Get out of my life!”—I knew without a doubt that what I saw before me went to the core of who Owen was. Not the angry words, nor even the craziness of it all. Not the ugliness. No, I knew Owen well enough to be sure of that.

But it was the intensity of the connection, that’s what I finally understood. Owen was tied to this beautiful, provocative person in a way he would never be to me.

I turned, went into the house, and put Bandit’s leash down on the dining room table where I knew Owen would find it and know that I had been there. Then I got down on my knees and buried my face in the bountiful fur of the dog’s neck and whispered over and over, “I’m sorry.… I’m so sorry,” until finally I could stand and let myself out through the front door for the last time.

OVER THE YEARS, I HEARD THAT OWEN
had moved back to New York, then Texas, for some reason. I went back to school and got a master’s in creative writing. The discipline of those two years helped me finish my short story collection, and the master’s helped me land a teaching job at a California State University campus where many of my students were bilingual.

I met my husband there. He was teaching political science and we both stood up at the same time during a faculty meeting to protest the plan to slash the Chicano studies department’s budget. This was in the early 1980s when the cultural expansiveness of the sixties and seventies had run its course.

Soon after we married, our daughter was born, and my life was so busy—new baby, new marriage, a full teaching load—that each day felt like a mountain to scale. But I was happy. I had married the right man. I was besotted with Grace, our daughter. When I thought of Owen, it was hard for me to remember the young girl who walked dogs for a living and loved a charming, graceful man who wanted to love her back.

And then he called me. My daughter was just turning four, and we were having a discussion about whether she could wear her party dress to preschool when the phone rang. I was distracted when I picked it up. We were late, the discussion had gone on too long, and I was just about ready to give in—what difference did it make if she wore her party dress to sit in the sandbox?

“Anna?” is all he said and I found myself reaching for a chair, my legs giving out under me.

“Owen.”

He laughed. “That was quick,” and immediately I thought,
I’ve missed that laugh
.

“Would you be able to have lunch with me?” he asked. “I’m in town.”

“Yes.”

ON THE DAY WE HAD ARRANGED
I made sure Gracie had a playdate after preschool, and I drove to the restaurant in West Hollywood with a certain amount of trepidation. More than ten years had passed. We were at the end of the 1980s. The country had changed. My life had changed radically. I was bound to two
people I cherished beyond measure—my husband, Alex, and our daughter. I had no idea how Owen had spent the past decade and what changes those experiences had wrought within him. Would we even have anything to say to each other?

I parked my car—a young mother’s car, a safe, sturdy Volvo—on a side street and walked down Santa Monica Boulevard to Crespi’s and then stood outside trying to gather some calm into my racing heart. The restaurant was a small place with a dark green awning and the sleek lines of a modern café. I knew the person at the reservation desk was going to be young and thin and wearing black and would show me to our table with a slight swagger. As it turned out, I didn’t even notice who that was because when I walked into the restaurant, Owen was already there, head down, reading the menu.

Oh, how much older he looks
was my first thought. He was thinner. His face was gaunt, but when he looked up and saw me, his smile transformed his face and I saw the Owen I remembered.

I walked toward him with my heart hammering again, but when he stood and opened his arms and gathered me in, all the ten years of absence evaporated. My body still knew his body and something within me instantly settled.

“Beautiful still,” he said with his arms encircling me.

I shook my head as I pulled away and we both sat down. It was something I never believed about myself except for those months with Owen.

At first all we did was look at each other, without a word, just looking to take in the other’s face, to make sure we could find the person we used to know so intimately in a face changed by a decade of living. Without the smile, the face I examined looked vastly changed. I wondered if he felt the same way about me.

We didn’t make small talk. We ordered to get the waiter out of our hair and then we put our hands on the table and began.

“Did you bring pictures?” Owen asked. Somehow he knew I
had married and had a daughter. Maybe through Michael, whose dogs first brought us together and who subsequently became a friend. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

I had brought snapshots of Grace and handed them over. “She looks like her father.”

“Oh,” he said, “I’d never get tired of looking at this sweet face.”

“I know,” I said, so grateful he saw what I did in Gracie.

And then over lunch I told him one Gracie story after another. How she insisted on cutting her own hair when she was two. How she wouldn’t go to her best friend’s birthday party because the little girl had “said a mean thing” to her. How she spent an entire year wearing only pink, even her shoes had to be pink. He listened in that absorbed way he had listened to my recitation of Bandit’s outings, with complete interest, his eyes never leaving my face.

I felt like I was rattling on too long, so I finished with the unnecessary declaration that my daughter was strong willed and sure of herself and that she has been teaching her mother to be a bit more flexible and mellow.

Owen raised his eyebrows in disbelief and I knew instantly what he was saying—
Anna, flexible? In what universe?
—and I laughed even though he hadn’t said a word and told him I had qualified the statement with “a bit.”

“Now you,” I said, “tell me.”

And he did. Years back in New York working as a dean at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, a second house in Texas because the state has no income tax.

“Really?” I said. “There’s more to the story than that.”

And he grinned, pleased, it seemed, that I had caught him up, but he didn’t elaborate.

“Are you happy, Anna?” he asked me over coffee. And I could honestly tell him I was.

“I married a good man,” I said, and he nodded as if that fact gave him tremendous comfort.

“You know,” he started, then stopped for a second but pushed on. “I still feel guilty—”

“No,” I cut him off.

“Because I should have told you sooner.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.” I said this unequivocally.

“I think about that a lot. I should have, but I don’t know if I could have. I wanted—”

“The same thing I wanted. To love you.”

He nodded. “Yes. To love you.”

And there it was, out on the table. I didn’t blame him. I had no regrets. I loved him still and he saw it. He saw it all. It was easy for me to ask then, “Are you with someone?”

“Yes. Matt. For several years now. He’s from Texas,” and Owen grinned at me.

“Aha, the Texas connection. And is he good to you?”

“Yes.”

“With no drama?”

He looked at me quizzically.

“The last time I saw you Tony was ripping plants out of your garden.”

He shook his head remembering, then smiled gently at me. “Much less drama, but, Anna, there’s something else.” And that’s when his eyes left my face and fell to the table, where his beautiful hands played with the silverware. I waited. He kept shaking his head as if he couldn’t or shouldn’t say what he had come to say.

He took my hand finally and looked up. “Matt is very sick.…”

Oh no
, I thought,
please don’t …

“And I needed to tell you.… He wasn’t when I met him.…
At least we didn’t know enough six years ago to know.… And because we’ve been together … I’m sick as well, Anna.…”

He’s going to die
. In those early days of the AIDS epidemic there was no hope. He was going to die.

“No!” I heard myself say. It was a groan and I put my hands over my face and began to sob. I had no control over the sounds that came from me. Something split apart and a cataract of grief I had yet to know in my young and sheltered life rose up and poured out of me.