Better Than This (16 page)

I threw a last pebble. “You look cold,” I said. The breeze coming off the ocean felt cooler down there. I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders.

“Do you remember the last time we were here on this beach?” Sally asked. “We were just starting out. We talked about the life we would have together. It never entered our heads that anything could go wrong.”

She was right. Back then we’d had the invincible optimism of youth. She hunched down, wrapping her arms around her knees.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I used to think we wanted the same things, but now I realize that was never true.”

“In what way?”

“You know what I was thinking on the way up here? I started to remember what it was like, what we were like, back then. You think of those few days as a happy time, and they were, but I see now that all our problems started right here when we sat on this beach and talked about our plans and the fact is we weren’t really listening to each other. You used to talk about starting your own company one day, being successful and I was talking about the house where we’d live and the kids we’d have and we thought they were all parts of the same ideal. But they weren’t, not really. We said all the right things, made the responses, but I don’t think we understood the importance of what the other wanted. Over the last few years I’ve come to realize how much success means to you, and that your definition of it is different from mine. In the same way I don’t think you’ve ever really understood what having a family means to me. It was never something you felt passionate about. It was my dream and you just went along with it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

She looked surprised. “I didn’t think you’d agree with me.”

“Let me ask you something, Sally. What is it you want? Not then, but now. Right now. What would make you happy? Tell me and this time I’m listening properly. Tell me and I’ll understand.”

She thought for a long time before she answered. I didn’t push her. The breakers rolled in and threw surf down on the sand, sucking the beach back to the ocean before another came in and threw it all back again. I could hear the draw and rattle of tiny pebbles being worn smooth, and pieces of rock being ground down to make more of the fine yellow sand. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead, their calls carried away on the wind. When Sally answered it was quietly, thoughtfully, every word considered and given weight according to her feeling.

“I’m a woman. Having children is the most basic instinct that drives me, it’s what my body is designed for. Maybe there are other women who don’t feel this way. Maybe career or travel or whatever is what’s important to them. But I always wanted kids. I just always pictured myself that way. Sometimes I feel as if I’m kind of incomplete because I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, to give birth to my baby, another human being. I don’t think you can ever really understand what that feels like. Maybe for you it would be like being impotent, or castrated. It cuts right to the core of your self-image. I should have said all this a long time ago, before I let you convince me we should wait. First one thing then another. I started resenting you.” She paused, and wiped away her tears. “But I won’t deny it any longer.”

“Deny what?”

“The truth. I want children, and I want to have them with somebody who wants them too. Really wants them. And that isn’t you, Nick.”

I stared at her, unwilling to believe what she was saying.

“I see that now. This last year or so I’ve come to realize a lot of things. You’re not the person I thought I was marrying, and that’s not because you’ve changed so much, I think you were always this way. I just wasn’t listening properly.” Her eyes were filling with tears again and her voice was catching in her throat. “I’m not saying that it’s your fault, or that you’re a terrible person. You’re not. I know you love me and a lot of the time you can be sweet and gentle and considerate, but there’s another side to you as well. I’ve seen what you’re prepared to do to be successful.” She paused. “Marcus was your best friend as well as your partner, Nick, but you pushed him aside when he didn’t agree with you. You made decisions you didn’t have a right to make.” She shook her head. “I didn’t expect that.”

I experienced a flash of bitterness. She accused me of betraying Marcus’s friendship and yet what about her own betrayal? Was she planning to go off and have a family with Garrison Hunt? A guy who was born into money, who’d never had to start from nothing. No doubt he’d assured her that he was ready and willing to give her the children she wanted. I bet the sonofabitch couldn’t wait to prove how willing he was, starting with a practical demonstration.

But my anger subsided, because I recognized the truth in what she’d said. “You’re right,” I told her. “You’re right that being successful is important to me. Maybe in a way it’s even been the most important thing in my life.”

She hadn’t expected such an admission, and it showed. I guessed she’d been expecting me to deny it.

“I’m not proud of the things I’ve done,” I went on. “But I’ve always loved you. I’ve never for even a second stopped loving you, and I want us to have children together as much as you do.”

“You say that

“Let me finish,” I said. “You know that my dad killed himself when I was a kid?”

She nodded, puzzled that I’d brought it up but also taken aback since it was a subject I had rarely talked about.

“He did it because his company failed. He started that business himself and worked a good part of his life to build it up. What happened was another company that was in competition with him was bought out by a national outfit based on the east coast. What these people did was sit in their office in some downtown building and stick pins in the map where they thought they ought to be, then they bought some local outfit and went about expanding their share of the local market, which meant in effect that they cut their prices. They could afford to run at a loss for a while and it was all part of the big corporate game plan so it didn’t matter to them much, but for people like my dad it meant losing customers and business until in the end he couldn’t go on and he went broke.”

I sounded bitter, even after all the intervening years. Sally didn’t say anything, just waited for me to go on, which after a little while I did.

“I’m not sure what to tell you exactly,” I said. “My dad thought he was a failure and he’d let his family down. He was disillusioned by it all I guess. When he killed himself he left me a note. It was all jumbled up and confused, kind of a tirade. But he thought he was a helpless victim of big business. Faceless corporate executives with money and power stepping on the lives of the little people. Which maybe was true to some extent. But that kind of thing happens all the time. He warned me not to let the same thing happen to me. I’ve still got the note.”

Sally’s eyes widened at that. “I’ve never seen it.”

“I keep it in my office,” I said. “The point I’m trying to make here is that I learned early that I needed money if I was ever going to get control of my life. But it’s not just about that. What I’m trying to tell you is that I loved my dad, and after he died I missed him. It changed my life, not having him around. Not just because we had to move, and we didn’t have as much money. I don’t think that matters much to kids. But I didn’t know who I was any more. People treated me differently, eventually even my friends, and I became a different person myself. It was all mixed up with not having my dad around. Suddenly there was no one to toss a ball with, to chew over problems I didn’t feel comfortable talking about with my mom. There’s a thousand different ways I missed him, and every one of them affected me and it all added up and made me want to be somebody. I always wanted us to have kids someday, but I wanted to be certain I’d be there for them in the way my dad wasn’t for me.”

I could have gone on. I could have told her that having a mother-in-law like Ellen had never done a whole lot for my self esteem, I could have related stuff from when I was a kid that made me feel the way I did. But the truth was I didn’t know exactly how to explain myself any better than I had. I couldn’t say how it made me feel when I went with a friend one time to a ball game, and we were sitting eating hot dogs with his dad, and this kid’s dad looked at his son and I caught that look as he smiled, and my friend didn’t even see him do it. It doesn’t sound like much, but at the time I felt a keen pain, and if you multiply that by enough times, and add to it a lot of insecurities about not knowing where I fitted in with my old friends any more, it all leaves its mark. And to her credit, Sally didn’t need me to fill in all the blanks. She understood at least some of what I was saying, and the fact that all these years I’d had this note from my dad that she didn’t even know about made an impression on her.

“The bottom line is I never wanted my own kids to go through what I did. I wanted them to have a perfect world, and so I wanted control of my life before we started a family so I could give them that.”

I spread my hands helplessly. Our past lives affect us, but the manner of it isn’t always cut and dried.

She was silent for a long time, thinking about everything I had said. She knew me well enough to know I’d told her the truth about myself, as much of it as I could figure out anyway.

“The thing is, Sally, this deal with Spectrum is what I’ve always wanted. I know I haven’t always done things the way I should have, but winning this account means a lot to me. But not as much as you do. Nothing like. I want us to start that family. Maybe that’s something I didn’t truly realize until now.”

“But what if something goes wrong with Spectrum, Nick? What then?”

“It won’t. But even if it did, nothing will change. I mean what I say. I won’t make the same mistakes again. You, Marcus, in the end you mean more to me than any account. Somehow we’ll get by.”

She stared at me, deep into my eyes. Her brow was furrowed and I had the feeling she was trying to peer into my soul, as if she was trying to assure herself that I knew myself well enough to claim such control over what drives me.

“Nick,” she said at last. “Even if you really mean what you say, and I believe you do, we’re not the same people we were last time we were here.”

I thought I knew what was coming.

“There are things… about us … about me

I took her hand, I didn’t want her to confess her affair because if she did I would have to know details. I wouldn’t be able to avoid asking where they had gone together, how often, for how long. Some things are best left unsaid. Someday I would ask her, when I felt able to cope with it, but not now. “Sally, all that matters is now. Right here. What’s done is done, it’s what we feel now that matters. Just say we’ll give it a chance. What’s the alternative? I love you and I think you still love me. Can you just walk away?”

She gave me a quick questioning look, but it passed and I wondered if she suspected that I knew about Garrison Hunt.

The waves crashed on the shore, and it grew colder as the sun went down. I waited for Sally to decide what she would do, and after a long time she squeezed my hand with a tentative pressure. Love may wither if it isn’t nurtured, but the roots of powerful emotions run deep and they don’t die easily.

That night I planned a romantic dinner in the restaurant that overlooked the cliff and the ocean beyond. By the time I was changed and ready Sally was still in the shower, so I said that I’d see her downstairs in the bar.

“Okay, I won’t be long,” she called back to me.

I smiled at the sound of her voice. We had gone for a long walk after our talk on the beach, and gradually our uncertainty with one another had melted away. We held hands, we started to let down our guard so that every comment every gesture didn’t have to survive the mill of scrutiny to determine how it would be interpreted. Now Sally sounded happy. I sounded happy. Or perhaps it was more prosaic than that. We sounded normal again. I left her to it and went downstairs to the bar where I ordered a beer. I asked for it to be added to my room account, which made me realize I’d brought the room key with me and Sally wouldn’t be able to lock the door. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered in a place like this, but when you live in the city old habits die hard so I went back upstairs. As I approached the door I heard Sally’s voice from inside, and I paused even as I reached for the handle, wondering who she was talking to. Her voice was muffled, so I put my ear to the door and caught the tail end of something she was saying.

‘.. . to try again. I think he really means it.”

There was a pause and then, “I know I said that, but we talked and he explained a lot of things.”

I knew at once she was talking to Garrison Hunt, telling him it was over between them. That she should call him brought home to me how far things had developed, how close I’d come to losing her.

“I know you understand how I feel,” she said after a while, and then there was silence while he responded. “You’re a good person, you know that?” she said.

I imagined he was being understanding to the last, a thoroughly decent guy, which made me sick. He was probably telling her that he hoped she would be happy, the noble loser backing down for the love of a good woman, though I was sure he’d add the rider that of course if it didn’t work out he would be waiting ever so fucking patiently in the wings. Well he was going to have a long wait. I really didn’t want to hear any more. It was the way Sally sounded that really got to me. Her voice was intimate, riddled with subtle nuances of faint regret and sorrow. The voice of a lover.

I went back down to the bar and took my beer to a table in the corner and I resolved that this ought to be a closing. The residue of anger I still felt was the price I would have to pay for saving my marriage. By the time Sally appeared, smiling, looking happier than I had seen her in a long while, I knew it was a toll worth paying.

We ate dinner sitting at a table by the window as darkness fell outside. Time might have stood still, except that when I looked at Sally I thought she was even more beautiful than she had been when we were last at the inn. It came from within,