The Secret of Joy (21 page)

Tim slid the mess of cucumber slices into the salad bowl and then slammed the bowl down so that the cucumbers flopped right back out. “Jesus Christ, what do you people want from me? I don’t know, okay? No, I do know—for the fun of it. Satisfied?”

“Tim, no one’s ganging up on you,” Harry said. “It’s just a conversation. We’re all just trying to figure out what’s going on with us, and right now, you’re up.”

“Lucky me. Can I at least have a beer?” Tim asked. “I’m not really into wine.”

Harry got a Sam Adams from the refrigerator and uncapped it. “Not cold yet, but here.”

Tim gulped half of it.

“Let me just ask you this,” Ellie said, her eyes red-rimmed. “Is it fun because there’s no emotional component? Nothing tied to it? Or is it fun because there’s the possibility of that, too—that you might actually fall for someone you hook up with?”

He barely looked at Ellie, preferring the floor or the rainbow-colored tile backsplash along the stove wall. “It’s not like I’m looking for another
relationship
. I know I’m married. Sometimes it’s about the thrill of the chase, sometimes it’s just about the fun of how it is when you first meet someone and you’re flirting.”

Ellie’s face crumpled. “So you’re saying you don’t really know? You could see meeting someone and falling in love?”

Tim glanced around at everyone. “Oh, come on, who can’t?”

“I can’t,” Harry said.

“I can’t,” Charles seconded.

“Me either,” Ellie said, and burst into sobs.

Rebecca ran into the bathroom off the kitchen for the box of tissues. She handed it to Ellie, who clutched it like a lifeline.

“Can I ask you something, Tim?” Rebecca said as she helped Charles slide four loaves of garlic bread into the oven while Aimee cleaned up the garlic and put away the butter. “Why did you propose to Ellie? I mean, she’s a lovely young woman, but why did you want to get married in the first place?”

Tim let out a deep breath. He glanced at Ellie, who was trying to stop crying. “I didn’t, really. You kept pressuring me, though, right? Hinting about a ring … And then, I don’t know, my father died and I was really low about that, and Ellie was really great—you were really there for me—and I guess I just got her a ring one day and proposed, but then a while later, I started feeling like I always did, like I wanted to go out and party and meet women and have fun.”

“But now is now,” Ellie said, dry-eyed. “Now is now and I need to know. Will you stop running around? I need to know now.”

“You’ve been saying that since we hooked up two and a half years ago, Ellie.”

“And if she’s now saying your affairs are a deal breaker?” Rebecca prompted.

Tim glanced from Rebecca to Ellie, who stared at him. “She can say it, but I don’t think she means it because she never means it. She always lets me come home eventually.”

Ellie stood, her hands braced on the chair. “What if I told you right now that this is it. That there’s no coming back. That
if you can’t tell me right now you choose me, you choose our marriage, that I’m filing for divorce on Monday?”

He shrugged. “I don’t believe you, I guess. I don’t think you’ll do it.”

Rebecca noticed that he didn’t even seem to flinch at the word
divorce
.

“So you won’t tell me right now, pledge in front of all these people to be faithful, to be my husband?” Ellie asked Tim.

“Jesus, Ellie, come on. I do love you. Doesn’t that count for something? It’s not like I want to break up.”

Everyone stared from Tim to Rebecca.

Rebecca turned on the light switch to peer at the garlic bread. “Break up? Tim, when you’re married, it’s called divorce. That’s very serious. And very painful.”

“Yeah, man,” Charles said. “You’re not in high school, for Pete’s sake.”

“I’m who I am,” Tim said, then gulped the rest of his beer. “Take me or leave me. Whatever.”

Whatever. What an ass. Ellie deserved so much more than this.

“Timothy Rasmussen,” Ellie said, staring at him. “Do you want to be married to me? In all that that means.”

“If
that
means being fucking miserable for the rest of my life, then no, I don’t.” He slammed down the beer bottle on the counter.

Ellie ran out of the kitchen. Rebecca heard her heels on the stairs. “I’m filing for divorce on Monday,” she called from the landing. “So just go, Tim. Get out of here. There’s nothing left to say.”

All eyes turned to Tim, who was pulling open the refrigerator in search of another Sam Adams.

“
Is
there anything left to say?” Rebecca asked Tim. “Are you going to walk out of here? Walk out on your marriage? Let her divorce you?”

He stiffened, but resumed his search of the beer. He took out a bottle and uncapped it, then sighed and set it down on the counter and walked into the living room.

Rebecca glanced at four people holding their breath. They all crowded into the doorway so as not to look like they were spying, which of course they were.

Tim stopped just before the landing. He stared up at Ellie. “For what it’s worth, Ellie, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s worth shit,” she called back, and ran inside their room, then reappeared a moment later with his brown leather jacket and his duffel bag, which she flung down at him. The jacket hit him in the face, and the duffel bag landed with a thud at his feet. He picked it up.

“I’m gonna walk down to the tavern we passed,” he said to no one in particular. “I’ll call a buddy to come get me.”

And with that he was gone.

When dinner was ready and gentle knocks on Ellie’s door hadn’t brought her back down, Joy brought up a plate, but reported that Ellie waved the plate away and sobbed on her bed. Rebecca planned to try a little later with an Irish coffee and one of Marianne’s pumpkin whoopie pies.

And so the heavy-hearted group sat at the beautiful old
farmer’s table in the dining room and poked and picked at the food. Only Charles seemed to have an appetite.

“This is Tim,” Harry said, taking his fork and using the back of it to smush a cherry tomato. But it was too firm and he gave up. “Fitting, since I guess he did win.”

Joy speared a piece of ravioli, but then put her fork down. “He lost, really. Ellie’s the best thing that’s ever going to happen to an ass like Tim. It’s hard to imagine another great person actually falling for him.”

“He doesn’t seem to want that, anyway,” Charles said, taking a piece of garlic bread from the basket in the center of the table. “He doesn’t seem to know what he wants.”

There was no disagreeing or discussion to be had about that bit of truth, so they ate in silence until Ellie could be heard coming down the stairs in the high-heeled ankle boots she’d bought especially for the trip.

“I called Maggie,” she said as she came into the dining room. “She’s coming to pick me up.” She carried a pack of tissues in her hand, but seemed to be out of sniffles or tears at the moment. She glanced around the table. Joy had taken away Tim’s chair and everyone had moved over to make his absence less glaring. But perhaps the gesture had the opposite effect.

Joy stood. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I know you had very different hopes for this trip.”

Ellie sat and took a piece of plain Italian bread from another basket, alternating between eating little pieces and ripping the chunk into shreds. “At least I know for sure. At least there’s no more, ‘What do you think that meant?’ He made himself clear in front of witnesses.”

“Are you going to file for divorce on Monday?” Aimee asked.

Ellie nodded. “Maggie said she had a really good lawyer.” She burst into tears and Rebecca pulled her chair closer, sliding her arm over Ellie’s slight shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, Ellie,” Rebecca said.

Ellie sniffled and dabbed under her eyes with the wad of tissue. “I know you’re probably feeling bad about the conversation not exactly turning out the way I wanted. But you did what no one’s been able to do since we’ve been breaking up and getting back together for two years. You got him to the truth. And you got him to say it. I’ve just wanted him to say it, you know? Or maybe I haven’t. I guess I haven’t. I guess I was never ready for it. But I am now, as much as it hurts.”

“We’re all here for you, Ellie,” Joy said. “No matter what you need, okay?”

Ellie sniffled and nodded and managed to eat a few bites of her pumpkin whoopie pie. Harry fixed her an Irish coffee in a thermos, and thirty minutes later, when the crunch of a car could be heard on the gravel drive, Ellie and her bags were gone.

Harry made Irish coffees for everyone (a virgin for Charles, who didn’t drink) and the group gathered in front of the big stone fireplace in the living room. The two couples each shared a love seat, and Rebecca sat on the rocking chair facing them.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask how the Ellie-and-Tim business made us feel?” Charles asked.

Rebecca smiled. “Told you I wasn’t a therapist. But how
did
it make you all feel?”

“I’ll tell you how it made me feel,” Harry said. “Sick to my stomach.” He looked at Joy and took her hand with both of his. “It made me realize that we’ve got our share of problems, but immaturity isn’t among them. That we can work on what’s been causing these stupid fights and cold wars.”

Joy’s face crumpled with emotion, relief, and happiness, and then she burst into tears. She could only nod. He took her by the hand and led her upstairs.

Watching a marriage implode in front of their eyes had done something to the two other married couples, and by breakfast on Saturday, there was a magic in the air. The fragility, what they stood to lose, had turned both the Jayhawk-Joneses and the Cutlasses into “whatever you want, honey” peacekeeping romantics.

“No, whatever
you
want,” Charles said to his look-alike wife when Joy asked if anyone wanted the heat turned on. The temperature gauge attached to the bark of a tree outside the kitchen window read 51 degrees. Cold enough to Rebecca to turn on the heat, but perhaps not for true Mainers. Everyone except Rebecca wore a fleece pullover.

“My work here is done,” Rebecca said with a smile as she set down the carafe of coffee on the dining-room table. Once again, the group had cooked together, Harry on western omelets, Charles on bacon, Aimee on bagels (Mainers did not eat untoasted bagels the way New Yorkers did), Joy on the
fresh-squeezed orange juice, and Rebecca on coffee (she was on her third cup).

Charles Cutlass added a helping of bacon to his plate, ate a piece in two bites, and said, “They scared the shit out of me.”

His wife’s eyes widened and she laughed. “Did you just swear? He never curses.”

Charles placed his hand over his wife’s. “I don’t want something to happen to us. I’m really not so sure if I’m ready to be a father right now. But if it’ll make you happy, truly happy, I’ll go ahead with looking into adoption. China, Guatemala, whatever you want.”

Aimee squeezed his hand. “And I want you to be happy. But I really believe that you won’t feel differently a year from now or two years. You’ll always think you’re not ready. And I’ll just be sitting in wait. I think once you become a father, once you hold that baby in your arms, you will feel what I feel. I say that based on having known you for seven years, Charles. I love you enough not to force you into something I don’t think would make you happy.”

“Then let’s do it,” he said. “I mean it. Kids are great, right?” He directed this last at Harry.

Harry nodded. “Rex has made me want to be a better person.”

“So what
are
the main issues between you two?” Aimee asked, looking between Harry and Joy.

Joy stared at her eggs. “It just feels like we’ve grown apart somehow. We’re both only twenty-six. With a three-year-old child. And it’s like we’re this old married couple who eat in silence, who have nothing to say after ‘So how was Rex today?’
After dinner, I go read or plan a tour, and Harry’s in his office, working on a design or on the computer.”

“What do you want to say?” Rebecca asked.

“Everything. I want there to be this rush of conversation, like in the beginning.” She shook her head. “I sound like Tim.”

“No you don’t,” Rebecca said. “You sound like you want your husband back. You sound like you feel as if you lost him inside your own house, inside your marriage.”

“That is exactly how I feel,” Joy said softly.

Harry picked up his mug of coffee. “She’s been saying that. And I’ve been saying, ‘I’m right here.’ And she says, ‘You don’t understand,’ and I say, ‘You’re right, I don’t.’ And then we go back to our silence, our separate rooms. I’ve been living in the half-finished basement for the past six weeks.”

Joy stared at him, then down at her plate, then back at Harry. “You say I’m cold and emotionally frigid. How do you think that makes me feel? I am the way I am.”

“Didn’t Tim just say that?” Aimee asked gently, tucking her frizzy orange curls behind her ears.

“I’m not making excuses,” Joy snapped. “Sorry,” she added.

“Yes you are,” Harry said. “You’re saying you’re just not warm and fuzzy. But you
are
. I’ve seen how you are with Rex. I’ve seen how you let that wall down when you’re with him. I’m asking you to
keep
it down.”

“Does anyone want more coffee?” Joy asked, jumping up.

“Tim ran off, too,” Harry said loud and clear.

“I’m going into the
kitchen
,” Joy snapped.

Harry rolled his eyes and walked over to the fireplace to add another log. The flames mesmerized Rebecca. She wished they’d offer some wisdom, the right thing to say.

When Joy came back with her mug full of steaming coffee, Rebecca said, “Can I ask you something?”

Joy shifted as though she were about to get up, but then resettled herself. She had been about to storm off and had stopped herself. That was good. “Okay.”

Rebecca picked up her own coffee mug and took a bracing sip. “Your mother is renewing her vows. How does that make you feel?”

Joy leaned her head back and stared up at the ceiling. “Truth? Like a total failure.”

“Does she know you and Harry have separated?”