next.
We eat cheese and meats and drink our wine. I drink her in, the wonder of her, the size of her love.
And so we ask our questions:
When did you know for sure that you loved me?
What was your first thoughts of me when we met?
What did you feel about our first kiss?
When will you make love to me?
The last question was hers, and I tell her soon. I’m thinking that it’s maybe tonight because everything is perfect and I want it to end that way. But then I don’t want to tempt fate while it’s going so well.
I looked at my watch. Nine fifteen. Perfect.
She’s looking at me intently, wondering what I’m up to. Behind her a white streak falls toward earth, vanishing as quickly as it came - then another. She sees one behind me. Her eyes are wide with wonder. Soon the sky is filled with them, angels crashing headlong to the earth, falling, consumed by our atmosphere. Her eyes are full and bright and I can see the falling stars in them. I don’t look up, I can’t, because I can’t take my eyes from her, because she’s far more beautiful to me than any cosmic event. It finishes as quickly as it begins and she turns her eyes toward me, and they are speaking to me.
Tonight? they ask me.
Mine say: yes.
We gather our things, fold up the rug. We run to the car and climb in and head back to town and our new bed.
We hold hands in the elevator. She looks down, demurely. I glance at her often, wonder how my luck has changed so much. In our apartment I lead her down to her room – our room. There I pull the covers back and off, leaving only the bottom sheet. She bites her lower lip as I take off my shirt and then her coat. I zip her dress down and it falls to the floor…
There is a shadow in the room. I know he’s there, watching. Then he takes my place and I’m left to watch him this time. She cries with delight and I’ve lost her again.
I watch as he has sex with her and I can’t move a muscle. I have to watch this humiliating scene again, but this time there is no end. I realise in horror that this is not a dream, this is a memory. This happened.
I cry out, pull myself away from her. Quinn is confused, she’s crying my name but not with pleasure, with sudden fear. I bow my head and sit on the bed. My face is in my hands. I can’t cry, not now. I’m ashamed and I’m angry at her and him and me. My mind won’t let me love her like she wants, like she needs, and I’m a failure and not man enough for her.
“Judd…?” she says.
“Damn,” I say. “Damn, damn, damn.”
“You’re really messed up,” she says and I nod. “I did that to you. Oh, god! I did that to you!”
I feel her sit beside me. She takes my hands from my face, take them in hers.
“Look at me, Judd,” she says, but I can’t. All I see is him and her and their pleasure.
“Look at me,” she demands, and I do, slowly.
“Look into my eyes,” she says, and I do. She’s not crying, and her eyes are intent and focused. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to, Judd. This will kill us if we can’t get past this.”
“It’s too hard.”
“Not if we’re both in this. Not if we work on this together. And we will. So what’s happening?”
I swallow, nod. “I can’t stop seeing you and him, and it’s killing me. I can’t be with you when I see him with you in my head. I just can’t.”
I can tell she’s ashamed that this is her fault and she’s the source of my pain – our pain.
“You will stop seeing him, I promise you. I’ll help you stop seeing him. I will. You have to trust me. Can you trust me?”
I nod. I can. She’s hurt me so much, but she has also given me unspeakable joy. I hold on to that. I choose to see the joy in her, because if I hold onto the hurt then I’ll drown.
She lays me down on the bed and pulls the covers back up over us. We hold each other in our bed until the morning comes. It is the first night back in the room I shared with her, and she got me through. She carried me with her love despite my failures and my brokenness, my weaknesses, my impotence.
Saturday
It’s been half an hour in the car, in the silence.
“Are we going to talk about last night?” she asks me.
I exhale deeply. “Sure,” I say. But I don’t want to relive it again, not my failures.
“I loved you being in bed with me again.”
“What?”
“You slept with me, in our bed. That’s something, Judd. That’s some kind of progress.”
“Oh.”
“You were expecting me to talk about us not having sex, I suppose.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, while we are talking about it, what are you going to do? You can’t just ignore the problem or hope you get over it in time. You know what this is doing to us, right?”
“I know.”
“So, what’s your plan?”
“I was thinking of talking to Grant about it.”
It made a lot of sense. This was a marriage problem and that was his job, after all.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Apparently they talk about sex. A lot, I think. I imagine they’ll talk about sex with us at some point.”
“I can hardly wait.”
I chuckle. “At least, if I can get this sorted out in my head, and we do... you know... then we can make that part short and sweet.”
She’s shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“Probably not.”
“I want you to know something,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I don’t think about him anymore, not really. He’s out of my mind. I wish he was out of yours.”
“Me too,” I say honestly.
We drive for another ten minutes, and a thought comes to me. “Oh, I have some good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Alice is pregnant.”
Quinn smiles warmly. “Finally,” she says. “She’s been trying for what? Over a year?”
“Something like that.”
“Good girl. And our baby will have a cousin. I like Alice. Of all you Altmans, she’s the easiest to get along with.”
“She’s not really an Altman,” I point out.
“Of course. That would explain it.”
She laughs and I join her. I know how my family could be.
“We should drive down there and congratulate them,” she suggests. There is a change in her, I can see it, and this another example.
“You want to see my family? Really?”
“I can handle them. They’ll do what they do and ignore, or pretend to ignore, what’s happened. Everyone will avoid the obvious. The only one I can count on for brutal honesty is Phillip.”
“What about my mother. She has no filter.”
“I know, right?” Quinn laughs. I love the sound. “I can’t wait to see her new breasts.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m just poking fun, Judd. Anyway, stop being such a prude. I know you like breasts.”
“But I’m trying not to think about the ones attached to my mother.”
“What about your wife?” she asks playfully.
“Those I can think about.”
Quinn is crying. She sits forward with her head in her hands, leaning over. I have my arm around her, running my hand up and down her back - because she needs it, and because for once I’m not the source of her pain. She sits up again after a while and I take her hand in mine while she wipes away tears with the other.
“He would just go, for months at a time. I didn’t know if he’d ever come back,” she says.
“You know what he was doing?” Mary asks.
Quinn nods. “Church work. All over the country. Overseas. But I was six and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t be home with us. And then we he was he couldn’t be near us. I... I know he didn’t want me bothering him. He’d go in his office
all day and not come out and spend any time with me. I didn’t understand that either.”
“What about later?”
Tears are running down her cheeks again. I didn’t know that the human body could hold that much inside it. Apparently grief and pain causes a lot to be made, ready for release.
She shakes her head. “When I was older... I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me. We couldn’t talk. We’d speak but... there was nothing between us.”
I remembered Quinn’s father walking her down the aisle to me. It was his duty that he took very seriously, but I could see that there was no love between them. I can still she them dancing at the party afterwards, stiff and formal, the both of them hardly looking at each other.
And that’s the difference between our families. Mine is in your face informal but making avoidance an art form, and hers is rigidly formal, cold to the point of clinical, blunt.
“Was there any form of abuse?” Mary asks carefully.
Quinn looks up suddenly. “What?” she says quickly. “No.”
“I’m sorry. I had to ask. If there was then we would have to... well, do things differently. I’m glad that is not the case.”
I am too. Quinn has never talked much about her growing up. I guess my dysfunctional upbringing was enough drama for both of us. But she runs deep, my wife, deeper than I could ever have imagined. She’s kept this from me, maybe deliberately, but I’m guessing not. Our collapse and rebuild is opening up so many old and forgotten wounds, pains that we have both brought unintentionally into our marriage, pains that without our knowing it have slowly destroyed us.
If I was still feeling angry with her about what she has done to me then I’m positive that I would have let it go right at this instant. I see the brokenness of her, the pain deep within, and I’m drawn to her more than ever. I swore to love and protect her nine years ago and only now am I just beginning to realise