The Weight of Gravity (3 page)

She blamed Garner
in the beginning, but no excuse or justification would clear her conscience or repair her self-esteem. The fact was that she’d allowed Darrell to become her proverbial ‘dirty little secret.’ 

As Mandy continued to butcher the music, Erika relived her nightmare.

“I’m an ass kind of guy,” Darrell told her early on. 

Tuesday’s encounter was no different.  He liked it this way and unloaded faster, which became increasingly important to Erika -- that it was quick.  The position did nothing for her, but she indulged his fantasy because she cared just enough.  She winced when his final thrusts came with the usual primal grunts, before he flopped down next to her.  Erika turned on her side.

A soft, almost inaudible chime called her to reach out and push a button above the nightstand.  “Chelsea, is that you?”  She turned the HDTV to the security camera on the front porch, where a teenager in Hilfiger top, books clutched to her chest, slouched against the doorjamb. 

             
“Yes, Ms. Hightower,” she shouted at the door.

             
“Come round the back gate and let yourself in.  Wait in the piano studio until I finish what I’m doing.  Get warmed up on the Prokofiev.”  She turned to Darrell.  “Lesson.  Got to go.”  Erika reached for a hair clip.

             
“Come on, baby, one more for the road.”  He cupped her breast in the palm of his hand.

             
“Why do you talk like a truck driver, Darrell?  You’re a lawyer.  It'd be nice if you sounded like one.”

             
“I’m a law-ya, doll, but my roots are in the sticks.”

             
“Get out!”  She walked into the closet.

             
“Whoa, you needn’t be shitty about it.”

             
“Darrell.” She walked back into the room, buttoning her dress. “I think it’s time we both moved on to other distractions.” She retreated again into the deep cavern of her spacious wardrobe, hoping that her words would be final, that he’d dress and leave, and leave her alone forever.  But, Darrell could be mean.  She knew him well enough to know that his reality, as well as his success as a lawyer, was driven by an unwavering drive to get whatever he wanted at all costs.  Erika, and what she represented to Darrell, was a powerful want in his life.  He wouldn’t give up easily. The same fire in him that she’d thought was attractive when they’d first met now made him dangerous when she wanted to end their relationship.

             
“You’ve said that before, hon-ne-e-y.”

             
“I'm serious.  Being with you makes me sadder than I was without you.”

             
"Lady, that's not the song you were singing when we had each other in the stairwell … when this whole thing started."

             
When you had me, you mean.
  "Please don't take it personally.  It was … what it was … for the moment.  But the moments are over.”  She was trying hard to sound strong, but not overly harsh.  If he perceived her as weak or vulnerable, Darrell was likely to take further advantage of their current situation.  “We've exhausted whatever we each brought to this … union … this 'thing,' as you call it," she shouted from the closet, afraid to confront him more directly, but she couldn’t hide in there forever.  Darrell wasn’t going to make this easy, but that wasn’t a surprise.  She came out of the closet with a pair of pumps in her hand, ready to defend herself if it became physical.  She didn’t imagine for a moment that Darrell wouldn’t resort to something more violent if he felt his needs were threatened.

             
“Just like that, then?  You call quits?  Wasn’t the sex good enough?”  He rose from the bed and took her in his arms. 

She raised the pumps above her waist, but felt his passion pressed grotesquely
against her thigh.  A quick knee to the groin would be enough, she thought.

             
“Let go, Darrell.”

             
“Only if you agree to another ride.”  He pulled her against his body so hard she gasped.

             
She was foolish to think Darrell's sharp intellect would accept reason on this subject.  For someone like Darrell it wasn’t about being reasonable, but about losing a good screw on a regular basis.  Better yet, with the boss's wife.  She needed to be crass to get his attention.

She turned her head to one side. 
“I wonder what Garner would think about you pinching my ass every time you see me at the club, or in the aisles at Piggly Wiggly?”

             
“No need to get nasty, honey.”  He backed away.

             
“Get the hell out, Darrell!”  She walked out of the room.

             
“See you on Wednesday, baby, right?”             

Mandy continued to mangle Handel, pushing Erika deeper into her thoughts.

It started in the elevator when she visited Garner’s firm one day.  Darrell’s smile was charming, and he held her hand too long when he introduced himself as the “new kid on the block.”  She felt electricity when he caressed her back as the elevator doors opened.  Next came chance meetings at the tennis club with conversation that was easy and comfortable.  Then, fueled by two glasses of merlot at home and three more during the office Christmas party, Erika let Darrell have his way with her against a wall in the stairwell leading to the roof.  From the beginning, she knew Darrell got more out of the affair than she did.  At the time of the party, Garner hadn’t as much as held her hand in six months.  She needed to be touched, and Darrell touched her a lot.  Unfortunately, the stairwell encounter was the most exciting of their moments.  It would never be that good again with Darrell.  The smile quickly lost its charm.  And, even worse, she’d lost her self-respect. 

She’d also come to see a darker, dangerous side of Darrell.  It began one morning with the way he snapped at a young server at Starbucks when they screwed up his order.  Then she walked into the law firm one day and saw him ripping into his administrative assistant behind the glass enclosure of his office.
  The young woman was in tears, but he wasn’t letting up.  He turned, saw Erika and smiled, waved, and went back to his verbal attack, as if nothing was particularly unusual about the scene.  Erika was amazed at how fast Darrell could go from monster to charmer.  Obviously he suffered from some extreme bi-polar condition.  She’d wanted to end their union almost from the moment it began, but was even more determined when she realized that Darrell could be violent if the mood struck him. 

Still
, her loneliness allowed their union to continue for another two months, taking greater and greater chances that their affair would be discovered.  Lying naked with the likes of Darrell, she concluded on Tuesday, was an all-time low.  No matter how unhappy she was with her marriage, an affair wasn't the solution, particularly with a volatile man like Darrell.  It was a quick fix, an act of substituting lust for emotional starvation.  She had to find another way to deal with her unhappy home life.

In truth, t
heir affair was risky business for both.  Darrell wasn’t married, but he was a junior partner in Garner’s firm.  She wondered many times what Garner would say if he walked in on them.  She mused that his first thought might be, “Damn, she never gets in that position for me!”

Her life with her husband was good in the beginning.  He was a talented lawyer on the rise, with old money on his coattails.  He romanced her with rooms full of flowers and candle-lit dinners as they jetted to Vegas in the Hightower company plane – his father’s personal Lear.  Their lovemaking, too, was passionate from the start.  Garner loved her deeply, so Erika was thrilled when he proposed.  But after Jay’s birth sixteen years ago, Garner didn’t touch or look at her in the same way.  The expensive gifts continued through the years.  He was generous even in the off-season, between birthdays and Christmases, causing her to wonder if Garner didn’t have dirty little secrets of his own.

Certain the romance had drained completely from their marriage more than a decade ago, Erika was ready for what Darrell was selling. 
If I can’t get the emotional from Garner, at least I’ll get the physical somewhere else.
  In walked Darrell on the heels of her desperate need for companionship.  Now, the guilt monster that she swore would never come in the beginning was rearing its ugly head. 
Why did I let myself get into something like that?

Why had she stay
ed with Garner when the passion died?  Maybe for Jay, maybe that “till-death-do-us-part” thing, or maybe it was the fact that they lived in the nicest house in town, took family vacations to exotica, and didn’t fight about much.  She’d grown comfortable with Garner’s distance, too.  He was frequently gone, and that suited her.  The solitary moments became her favorite times in the marriage, but it made her sad when she dwelled on it – that she should be happiest in the absence of her husband.

As Mandy came, joyously, to the final page of music, Erika recalled a time when someone – a dreamer, destined to be a novelist -- touched her both emotionally and physically.

That was a long time ago and we were both very young.

Max drove south, past the lumber mill and over the Southern Pacific tracks.  Jaguars were not designed for rutted, graveled roads.  Four miles off the pavement he turned through a barbed wire and cedar-post gate, into a four-acre clearing, and up to the house.  “
La Casa de la Luz y la Sombra
,” Pop called it, “the House of Light and Shadow.”  The original structure was prefabricated – pulled from the box – but with extensive modification the home eventually had five large bedrooms, family room, kitchen and den.  Pop added an enclosed back porch that stretched the length of the house, where he put the pool table and fifty-four inch projection television.  It was so like Pop to mold everything to his own liking, he thought.  Pop and Doris lived there for twenty-two years before he died.  There were forty acres of nothing but desert surrounding them.  Very private, the way Pop said he wanted it. 

He waited until Doris came out onto the front steps.  She shielded her eyes and ran her free hand down the front of her apron.  A gust of hot wind forced her to use both hands to keep her dress from flying up around her waist.  He could tell she had no idea who it was.  Max got out of the car and started up the walk.

“Shit!” she said when he came within arm's length.  “If it isn’t the high and mighty Max Rosen.”

“Hello, Doris.”

“Whatcha need, Max?”

“Just visiting, Doris.”

“Hell, I know you too well, Max ... you know that.  So don’t bullshit me, okay?  You never do anything that ain’t got somethin’ in it for you.  Just like your daddy.  You’re too selfish.  Cat doesn’t change stripes that easy, Max.  Maybe you’ve been gone too long to remember, but I never bought any of your shit-talk when you were a kid.”

“You got me there, Doris.” He smiled.

“Iced tea?”

“Love some.”

Doris led the way into the house.  It smelled of room deodorizers and bleach.  A needlepoint picture of a ranch house by a stream still hung just inside the door.  Cheap ceramic figurines on oak shelves above the wood stove and a homemade gun cabinet in the corner were enough to make Max consider turning around, climbing back into the Jaguar and driving away.
It was all just too nauseatingly familiar. He was sure that absolutely nothing had changed since the last time he walked through the door.  He sat at the kitchen table – the same table where he celebrated his fifteenth birthday.

“Let me guess,” she said, handing Max a glass and sitting down with her own.  “You’ve been gone long enough that you found a defect in the merchandise.”

“A defect?”

“Yeah, you took it out for a test drive and found things weren’t as hunky-dory as you thought they were.  Something’s missing.  Something that’s making you itch.  You came back here to find it.”

“Okay, maybe you’re on to me,” Max conceded.

“Erika?”

“That might be part of it.  Sure.  I’ll admit she’s a big reason I’m here.”

“Why couldn’t you come to this realization before your old man died?  He could have helped.”

“Maybe, but my troubles started long after he was gone.  And I’m not convinced that whatever’s going on in my head has anything to do with this place or the people.”

Max drew a line through the condensation on his glass, then another, and another, until the entire side facing him was clear.  The ceiling fan over the table was on
high, so it made a sharp flutter sound as it cut through the moist air in the kitchen.

“So, why the visit?”

“I can’t sleep and I don’t know why.”

“You can’t sleep?”

“I haven’t slept in months.  I doze, but never go to asleep.  It’s killing me.  I don’t sit and eat meals either, or have a desire to do anything.”