Bitter Sweet (46 page)

‘Did you do all this yourself?’ he asked, amazed.

 
‘Mm-hmmm.’

‘Does one eat it or frame it?’

“One does whatever one wants with it.’

He ate it, savouring each mouthful because it was the first gift she’d ever given him, and because across the table her eyes shone with promise, and because in the candlelight he could study her to his heart’s content.

Later, when their plates were removed and the Chardonnay bottle drained, she came from the kitchen bearing a single, exceedingly heavy, hat-sized chocolate frosted doughnut on a footed
Fostoria
cake plate with a floating candle rising from its centre in a matching
Fostoria
stemglass.

‘Ta-daa!’ she heralded.

He turned at her approach and burst into laughter, leaning back in his chair as she placed her coup de grace before him.

‘If you can eat it all you win another of the same size.’

She leaned before him to set it down, and his arm circled her hips as together they hughed at the gargantuan doughnut.

‘It’s a monster. I love it!’

“Think you can eat it all?’

He looked up, still smiling. ‘If I do, I’d rather name my prize.’

His arm tightened and the laughter slipped from their faces.

‘Maggie,’ he whispered, and drew her around until her knees struck his chair seat. ‘This month has seemed like a year.’ He pressed his face to her breasts.

She closed her arms about his head, her eyes against the candlelight.

‘This meal has taken days,’ he added, muffled against her.

Her only answer was a smile, delivered while bending low over his hair, which smelled faintly of coconut.

‘I missed you,’ he said, ‘I want you. First, before that doughnut.’

She lifted his face, and holding it, told him, ‘My days seemed pointless without you.’ She kissed him as she had so tried not to think of kissing him during their separation, his face raised as she bent above it. Freeing his lips she stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers and felt the wretchedness of the past four weeks dissolve.

‘How foolish and self-deluding we were to believe we could will away our feelings for each other simply to avoid complicating our lives.’

In the Belvedere Room her pink raiment drifted to the floor, and his suit was relegated to a small sewing rocker.

Then, gladly, they gave up their wills to one another and celebrated the end of their self-imposed agony. Much later, lying with their limbs plaited, they spoke of their feelings during exile. Of feeling torn and lone and incomplete when apart; of stepping into a room where the other waited and becoming immediately total, whole again.

‘I read poetry,’ she admitted. ‘Searching for you in it.’

‘I rode the snowmobile, trying to get you off my mind.’

‘Once I thought I saw you uptown, from the back, and I ran to catch up with you, but when I got close and realized it was someone else, I felt tragic, like crying right there on the street. ‘

‘I thought of you most in those hotel rooms, when I couldn’t sleep and I wished you were with me. God, I wanted you with me.’ He touched his index finger to the cleft in her chin. ‘When I stepped into this house tonight, and you were here, waiting, in your pretty pink dress, I felt... I felt like I suppose a sailor feels when he comes home from years at sea.

There was nothing more I wanted or needed than to be in that room with you, looking at you again.’

‘I felt the same. As if when you left you took some part of me, like I was a puzzle, maybe, and the piece you took was right here...’ She laid his hand over her heart. ‘And when you walked in, that piece fell into place and I came back to life again.’

“I love you, Maggie. You’re the one who should be my wife.’

‘And what if I said I would be?’

I’d tell her. I’d end it then and there. Will you?’

‘Isn’t it odd? I feel as if the choice isn’t really mine, loving you the way I do.’

His face became amazed. ‘You mean it, Maggie?’

She flung her arms about him, smiling against his jaw.

“Yes, I mean it, Eric. I love you.., love you.., love you.’

She punctuated her pronouncement with kisses upon his collarbone, cheek, eyebrow. ‘I love you and I’ll be your wife . . as soon as you’re free.’

They clung together and celebrated, rolling side to side.

In time their exuberance changed to wonder. They lay on their sides, close, studying each other’s eyes. He carried her hand to his mouth and kissed its palm.

‘Just think.., I’m going to grow old with you,’ he said softly.

‘What a lovely thought.’

And at that moment, they really believed it would happen.

Chapter 14

Nancy
pulled into the driveway at 6: 5 Friday night. Dusk had fallen, and from the kitchen window Eric watched her headlights arc around and disappear into the open garage.

She’d always hated that garage door. It was old-fashioned, cumbersome, a son of a bitch to budge. Though it lowered with much less effort than it raised, he was nevertheless waiting to close it when she emerged from the garage.

A sharp wind bit through his shirtsleeves as he stood watching her lean into the backseat for her suitcase. She had good legs, always wore extremely expensive hosiery - aqua-green tonight, to match her suit. There had been a time When the sight of her legs had had the power to arouse him. He viewed them now with a sense of sorrow for his lost ardour, and with an unspoken apology for his stubborn insistence about this house- even this garage - which she’d hated so much. Perhaps if he’d given in on that one point alone she’d have given in on one, too, and they would not have reached this brink of dissolution.

She emerged from the car and saw him.

Immobility struck her: the lag-time of silence like that following a distant puffofsmoke from a rifle before the sound catches up. These stagnant pauses had grown common to both of them in the weeks since his ill-advised sexual assault.

Nancy
moved again. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘I’ll take that.’ He stepped inside the garage and reached for her suitcase. She leaned into the backseat for a second load, coming up with a briefcase and a garment bag which she hoisted over her shoulder as he slammed the car door.

‘Did you have a good week?’ he asked.

‘Fair.’

“How were the roads?”

‘Okay.’

Their conversations had become sterile and halting since that night. They walked single file toward the house without attempting any further exchange.

Inside, she set down her briefcase and reached for her Suitcase.

‘I can take it upstairs for you,’ he offered.

I’ll take it,’ she insisted, and did so.

While she was gone he stood in the kitchen feeling shaken and apprehensive because he knew leaving her was the right thing to do and he dreaded the next hour.

She returned, dressed in a straight teal woollen skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse with a gold rose pinned at her collarbone. She crossed the room without meeting his eyes.

He waited, leaning against the sink, watching as she lifted the lid from a pot of simmering chilli, found a ladle, spoons, bowls, and began to fill them.

‘None for me,” he said.

She glanced up with the flat expression she had perfected since the night he’d drilled her on the sofa.

‘I ate already.’ He hadn’t, but the hollow within could not be filled with food.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Eat your chilli first.’ He turned away.

She set the bowl on the table and remained standing beside it, her stillness tinged with caution.

‘First before what?’

He stared out the window over the kitchen sink at the dirty snow and the late-winter dusk. Nerves jumped in his stomach and bleakness weighted him like a heavy yoke.

This was not something one did blithely. The major part of his life was invested in this marriage, too.

He turned to face her. ‘
Nancy
, you’d better sit down.’

“I’d better sit, I’d better eat!’ she retorted. ‘What is it? Tell me so I can!’

He crossed the room and pulled out two chairs. ‘Come on, will you please sit?’ When she had, he sat across from her, forearms on the table, studying the wooden fruit he’d always disliked. ‘There’s no good time to say what I’ve got to say- before you eat, after you eat, after you’ve had a chance to kick back. Hell, it’s...’ He linked his fingers and fitted the pads of his thumbs together. Lifting his eyes to her, he said quietly, ‘I want a divorce,
Nancy
.’

She paled. Stared. Fought the sudden onslaught of panic.

‘Who is she?’

‘I knew you’d say that.’

‘Who is she?’
Nancy
shouted, rapping a fist on the table.

‘And don’t tell me nobody, because I tried calling here twice this week, and when you’re not home at
eleven o’clock
at night, there’s somebody, so who is it?’

‘This is between you and me and nobody rise.’

‘You don’t have to tell me because I know! It’s your old high school girlfriend, isn’t it?’ Her head jutted forward.

‘Isn’t it?’

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘It’s her, I know it! The millionaire widow! Are you screwing her, Eric?’

He opened his eyes and levelled them on her. ‘
Nancy
, for God’s sake...’

‘You are, aren’t you? You were screwing her in high school, and you’re screwing her now! I saw it the first day she came to town. She wasn’t on those church steps five minutes and you had rocks in your shorts, so don’t tell me this is between you and me and nobody else! Where were you at
eleven o’clock
. Wednesday night?’ She thumped the table again. ‘Where?’

He waited wearily.

‘And last night!’

He refused to answer her anger with anger, which only incensed her further. ‘You son of a bitch!’ She lunged forward and slapped his face. Hard. So hard two chair legs lifted off the floor. ‘Goddamn you!’ She rocketed around the table and swung again, but he feinted and caught only the ends of her fingernails across his left cheek.

‘
Nancy
, stop it!’

‘You’re screwing her! Admit it!’ He caught her by the forearms and they grappled, bumping the table, spilling chilli, sending wooden pears rolling to the floor. His cheek began bleeding.

‘Stop it, I said!” Still sitting, he gripped her forearms.

‘You’re spending nights with her, I know it!’ She had begun to cry. ‘And it didn’t just start this week because I’ve called here before when you weren’t home at night!’

‘
Nancy
, cut it out!’ A drop of blood fell onto his shirt.

Locked like combatants, he watched her. struggle for control and find it. With tear-streaked cheeks she returned to her chair and sat facing him. He rose and got a dishcloth to wipe up the spilled chilli. She watched him move from the table to the sink and back again. When he was seated, she said, ‘I don’t deserve this. I’ve been faithful to you.’

‘This isn’t just about being faithful, this is about two people who never grew together.’

‘Is that some platitude you read in the Sunday paper?’

‘Look at us.’ He pressed a folded handkerchief to his cheek, looked at the blood and asked, ‘What’s left anymore? We’re apart five days a week and unhappy the two we’re together.’

‘We weren’t until that woman moved back to town.’

‘Could we leave her out of it? This began long before she moved back to Fish Creek and you know it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes, it is. We’ve been growing apart for years.’

He could see her initial anger being replaced with fear, which he had not expected.

‘If this is about my working, I said I’d ask about getting my territory cut.’

‘But did you mean it?’

‘Of course I meant it.’

“Have you done it?’

She hadn’t. Both of them knew it.

‘And even if you did it, would you be happy? I don’t think so. You’re happiest doing exactly what you’re doing, and I’ve finally come to realize that.’

She leaned forward earnestly. ‘Then why can’t you just let me continue doing it?’

He released a huge, weary sigh and felt as if he was talking in circles.

‘Why do you even want this marriage? What did we ever make of it?’

‘You’re the only one who thinks this marriage is a mistake. I think it’s worth fighting for.’

‘Aw, for heaven’s sake,
Nancy
, open your eyes. From the time you started travelling, we started losing it. We stored our possessions in the same house, and we shared the same bedroom, but what else did we share? Friends? I’ve got friends, but we don’t, I’ve come to the sad realization that we never made any because making friends takes an effort, takes time, but you never had the time. We didn’t entertain because you were always too tired by the time Saturday night came. We didn’t go to church because Sunday was your only free day. We didn’t have a beer with the neighbours because you considered drop-ins gauche. And we never had kids of our own, so we never did the regular kind of stuff like taking turns in a car pool or going to recitals or Little League games. I wanted all of that,
Nancy
.’