“Did I? Oh, I’m sorry.”
But she went on anyway. Telling them how, one vacation a few months later, Harry Baxter saw Benjamin with his new beard and declared that he now looked like a bearded lady in a circus.
“Next time he came in the store, I told him he could go elsewhere.”
“How is Harry Baxter?” Sarah asked, pretending to be interested.
“Oh, heavens, Sarah, the old fool died years ago. Though Molly’s still around. Drives around terrifying us all in one of those little electric carts they give to crippled people.”
“Disabled, Mom,” Benjamin said quietly.
“Crippled, disabled, it’s the same thing. I can’t be doing with all this finicky political correctness, not calling a spade a spade.”
Sarah could see that Josh was about to make some mischievous retort and she glared at him just in time.
How they got through the rest of the day and the next day without murder or at least serious injury, Sarah had no idea. On Saturday morning, when Benjamin finally put his mother in the car and headed away down the driveway to take her to the airport and Sarah stood with Abbie and Josh in the cold sunshine, waving a cheery good-bye, it was like a ten-ton weight being lifted off their lives.
“That’s absolutely the last time,” Josh said, stomping away up the stairs to his room. “If she comes again for Thanksgiving, I’m out of here.”
Sarah didn’t bother to disagree. She put an arm around Abbie’s shoulders.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s make some fresh coffee. I feel I haven’t had a proper talk with you since you came home.”
They made the coffee and took it up the open wood staircase to the little mezzanine that overlooked the garden and the deck where they barbecued in the summer. The fall had been mild and there were still leaves on the silver birches that Sarah had planted all those years ago. They shone a bright and dappled yellow in the sunlight.
There were two cream-colored couches facing each other across a low mahogany table, and they settled on one of them with the sunshine streaming in on them. Abbie made Sarah slip off her shoes and took her feet in her lap and massaged them and told her all about college, things she had no doubt told Benjamin already but which, of course, he hadn’t bothered to pass on. And though Sarah listened to every word, there was a part of her that could do no more than gaze in wonder and pride at this golden child, so beautiful and brimming with life. The massage was exquisite.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s amazing.”
“Good. I figured you deserve it. Mel, my roommate, taught me. Was Grandma always like that?”
“No. It’s worse, for sure.”
“She doesn’t listen. It’s like she’s just waiting to tell another of those stories about Dad we’ve all heard a million times.”
“Perhaps that’s nature’s way. Making people you once loved less lovable, so it won’t be so hard when they go.”
“Do you think?”
“I think it’s possible.”
They both stared out of the window for a while. Two blue jays were playing a frantic chasing game in the birches.
“What’s the matter with Dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just having Grandma around. But he seems all stressed out. Kind of detached, you know? Like he isn’t really here.”
“Well, things haven’t been going too well at work. He and Martin have lost a couple of big projects. They’re having to let a few people go. That’s probably what’s worrying him.”
Sarah almost managed to convince herself.
“Oh. And what about you?”
“Me?” Sarah laughed. “Oh, you know. Same old same old.”
“Mom, I’m a grown-up now.”
“I know you are, sweetie. But honestly, I’m fine.”
“You’re such a bad liar.”
“I’m not lying. He hasn’t been that easy to live with lately, with all that’s happening. And we miss you, for heaven’s sake. We both do.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“Hey, listen. It’s nothing. We’ll get over it. Hell, I mean, in most ways it’s absolutely terrific. Less cooking, less laundry. In fact, having you come home again is a real drag.”
Abbie gave a skeptical grin.
“Let me have your other foot.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
That evening, after supper, Abbie asked if they minded her going out for a few hours to meet up with some old friends from high school. Sarah tried not to show her disappointment and said of course they didn’t mind. Go have fun, she told her. Josh took this as a cue to inform them that there was a “kind of party” at his best friend Freddie’s place and since Abbie was going out, couldn’t he too? Benjamin took him aside for yet another quiet fatherly word about alcohol and pot. Twice in the last month, the boy had come home obviously stoned. He had flatly denied it but they were worried about him. Abbie said she would drop him off and pick him up later. They would be back before midnight, she promised.
Thus the scene was set for what Sarah later realized Benjamin must have been planning all the holiday and probably much longer. Maybe for weeks or even months. Within an hour both children had gone and a waiting silence fell upon the house. Benjamin would no doubt soon mumble something about needing to do some work and head out to his studio. But the minutes passed and he stayed. From the kitchen she could see him rather aimlessly tidying the mess the children had made in the living room. She called brightly to him, asking if he would like some cold turkey with some coleslaw and tomato salad.
“Sure.”
Maybe he could open a bottle of wine?
“Sure.”
He came through into the kitchen and pulled a bottle from the rack and stood uncorking it on the other side of the divider where she was preparing the meal. It was a long and narrow counter of polished gray granite, the sort of place every kitchen had, where things that had no other home got dumped, old magazines and stacks of letters and unpaid bills, a wide wooden bowl where they kept coins and car keys. The only sound was the saw and clack of her knife as she carved the turkey. His silence filled the room like an invisible cloud. Perhaps she should put some music on. He took two glasses from the cupboard and put them down, clink, clink, on the divider beside the opened bottle.
“Abbie seems in pretty good shape,” she said cheerily.
“Yeah.”
“Boy, what I’d give to be that age again.”
She became aware that he was shifting nervously from one foot to the other. She stopped carving and looked at him. He was very pale.
“Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“What’s the matter? Are you feeling sick?”
He swallowed. There was a long space of total silence. And then she knew. Knew exactly what he was about to tell her.
“Sarah, I—”
She slammed the knife down with a loud crack on the granite.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Sarah, sweetheart, I can’t—”
“Don’t say it! Don’t you dare say it!”
“I have to go. I just can’t live like this—”
“Shut up! Just shut up! What the hell are you talking about?”
He seemed for a moment to have lost his voice. There was a terrible imploring in his eyes. She was staring at him, waiting for an answer, but he couldn’t hold her gaze. He looked down and just stood there, shaking his head.
“Are you having an affair?”
She heard herself. How she snarled, almost spat the word, as if she were trying to rid her mouth of a foul taste. He shook his head, still not looking at her. Like some sniveling coward. The sight made something inside her explode. She ran around the end of the counter to get at him.
“You are! You bastard! You are!”
She tore into him like a rabid animal, lashing at his head and shoulders and chest. He shielded
his face but didn’t step away, just let her thrash and slap and punch him. And this only fueled her fury further, that he should stand there, so wretched and demeaned, like some flaccid martyr of a fanciful God.
Then suddenly she broke away and stood there with her eyes clamped shut, clasping her head in both hands, blocking her ears too late to what she now knew, her mouth contorted in a soundless cry.
“Sarah—”
He tried to put a hand on her but as soon as he touched her, she lashed out and screamed.
“No-o!”
And then she looked at him and saw the tears rolling down his face, saw him standing there, so broken and hopeless, and she sobbed and her shoulders sagged and she reached out and drew him slowly toward her, both of them crying now. Her voice frail as a frightened child’s.
“No, Benjamin, no. Please. Please, don’t say it.”
He put his arms around her and she pressed her head against his chest, tried to burrow into him, to find some place in him where still he might love her and want her. Begging him softly, Please, please. She felt his body shake in counterpoint to her own. This wasn’t happening, he didn’t mean it, he couldn’t mean it.
“Sarah, sweetheart. I just—”
She put a hand across his mouth.
“Sshh. I don’t want to hear this. Please.”
And then the thought of somebody else in these arms, some other woman breathing this warm familiar smell that had always been hers and hers alone, reared and stabbed her in the chest and she clenched herself and shoved him away.
“It’s Eve, isn’t it?”
He hesitated then shook his head and started to say something, but she knew she was right.
“Have you slept with her?”
Her voice was like someone else’s. Low and quivering, like a sheet of ice about to break.
“It’s not like that, it’s—”
“Have you slept with her!”
“No!”
“You liar.”
“I swear to you—”
“You liar! You filthy, goddamn liar!”
He shook his head and turned and began to walk away. And the sight was so momentous that she couldn’t bear it and she ran and grabbed him and turned him around and tried to get him to hold her again. Only now something had changed and even though he dutifully put his arms around her again, they were limp, uncommitted, as if some final switch inside him had been thrown.
How many hours it was, he couldn’t tell. Time seemed suspended, its passing marked only in the fluctuation of their separate sorrows. She drifted around the house like a bereft ghost and he would follow her and find her, sitting hunched on a staircase or crumpled in the corner of a room they never used, sobbing or staring like a catatonic at her hands. Sometimes she would fly at him with her fists and scream at him and abuse him and the next moment she would grab him and drag him into her arms and plead with him, asking why, why, and telling him they could make it work, surely, after all these years. She could make it work, she could be better. If he would only give her a chance. For the children, for themselves. Please, Benjamin, please. Just one last chance.
Out on the deck, clinging to each other in the chill night air while the wind whisked the leaves of the floodlit birches, her sobbing subsided and a dazed and mournful calm fell at last upon them. They came in from the cold and he poured the wine that he had opened in what now seemed another lifetime and they took their glasses to the living room and sat together on the couch and talked.
She sat tense and straight-backed and in a small voice that sometimes cracked, she asked him about Eve and he answered with care and as honestly as he could, telling her that, believe it or not, it was true that they hadn’t slept together. In a phrase he had rehearsed—and which now, as he mouthed it, sounded so—he said Eve wasn’t the cause of his leaving but the catalyst. He expected Sarah to erupt at any moment, or at least interrupt, but she didn’t. She simply sat there, sipping her wine and watching him. And he could see something forming inside her as she heard him out, some new opinion of him, some new lens or prism through which henceforth she would see him, harder, clearer, more sharply focused.
Her silent stare was beginning to unnerve him but he tried to keep his voice calm and measured. He told her that for a long time he had been unhappy and that if Sarah was to be honest, she would have to agree that things hadn’t been good between them for years. He was no longer the person she married. And anyway, for God’s sake, they’d married so damned early, hadn’t they? It was then that he noticed she was shaking her head. She didn’t take her eyes off him, just gave this little, almost indiscernible shake of her head as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard.
“What?” he said.
“So, that’s it, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You share your life with someone for nearly a quarter of a century, have children, then decide you got married too young, you’re not happy, and leave.”
He had to lean forward to hear this, for it was uttered in a kind of breathy, shuddering whisper. But there was a new tone now that unsettled him, a gathering anger that was colder, more steely and controlled. And it frightened him. And maybe that was why he felt impelled to defend or justify himself and spoke the words he would later regret.
“I’ve never felt wanted by you. Never. And I look at you, at us, at the way we are. And I think, that’s how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives . . .” He stopped and swallowed. “And, Sarah, I can’t. I just can’t do it. There has to be more.”
She stared at him for a long time, her chin tilted upward. It was a look of almost detached assessment, icy and regal. Then she swallowed and slowly nodded and at last looked away.
“So. When are you going to tell the children?”
“Tonight. Or tomorrow morning. Whatever you think best.”
She laughed.
“Oh, please. It’s your party.”
“Then I’ll tell them tonight.”
“Fine. Oh boy, Benjamin, you sure do time things well. Happy holiday.”
She raised her glass and drank the last of her wine. Then she stood up and walked to the doorway where she stopped and, after a moment, slowly turned to face him again.
“When you say I’ve never wanted you, you’re wrong. You have always been wrong about that. What you are actually saying is I haven’t loved you in the way you wanted me to love you. You are such a goddamn control freak that you even want to control the way other people love you. And I’ve lived with that for all these years. Trying to be what you want me to be. But nobody can ever measure up to what you want them to be, Benjamin. Nobody.”
She stood there awhile, looking at him, her face quivering but defiant as she tried to hold back her tears. And then she gave a little decisive nod and turned and went.
He sat there for a moment then followed her through to the kitchen. She was scooping the uneaten turkey and salad off their two plates into the garbage. He walked over and came up behind her and tried to put his hands on her shoulders but she violently shrugged him away.
“Don’t touch me.”
He tried to help her clean up but she told him not to. She could do it, she said. So he went back to the living room and sat down on the couch. A few minutes later he heard her footsteps and turned to see her standing again in the doorway, looking at him. She had something in her right hand but her arms were folded and he couldn’t see what it was.
“This is your home, Benjamin. I’m your wife. These are your children.”
She unfolded her arms and spun what she was holding across the room so that it landed on the couch beside him. It was a framed picture of Abbie and Josh, one they’d taken on a skiing vacation in Canada two years ago. Sarah turned and disappeared and he heard the familiar clack of her shoes on the wooden stairs. He wondered if he should follow her but decided not to. In the vain hope of finding something to distract him and to shift the leaden weight in his chest, he switched on the TV and settled ba
ck to wait for the children.
Martin had already told him he must be mad. He was the only person who knew what Ben had been planning. One evening last week, he had invited Martin for a drink after work. It was something they rarely did and Ben could tell that his old friend was curious, even a little wary.
They were in a bar just off Jackson Avenue, one of those trendy new places that were all style and no soul. They were the oldest people there by a good twenty years and the music was so loud that they had to shout. They spent about five minutes making small talk about their kids and plans for Thanksgiving and then Martin cut to the chase and asked what was up.
“I’m leaving Sarah.”
“You’re what?”
Ben told him about Eve and Martin said he had half-guessed. Why else would he have been pushing those god-awful paintings, he said. He couldn’t believe the two of them hadn’t yet been to bed.
“So why the hell don’t you just fuck her and get it over with?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Ben, hello? Are you out of your mind? You want to throw everything away and you don’t even know what for? Jesus.”
Ben didn’t really know what to say, except that things hadn’t been good between him and Sarah for a long time and he felt he needed to, well, get out. Breathe. Feel alive again.
“How often have you seen her?”
“Eve? I don’t know. Four or five times, maybe. We talk a lot on the phone.”
“Jesus.”
“She makes me feel—”
“Alive.”
“Yes. As a matter of fact.”
Martin shook his head and stared into his vodka martini. Then he downed it in one gulp and ordered another. Ben hadn’t exactly been expecting sympathy. For many months the two of them hadn’t been getting along that well. Although Martin hadn’t spelled it out, Ben knew he blamed him for not bringing in more business and, in particular, for losing a project that they had spent almost two years developing. Just like the McMansion job, Ben had lost his temper with the clients and the whole deal had come unstitched. The difference was that this time it hadn’t even been over a matter of principle. He just couldn’t stand the people.