Planting Dandelions (27 page)

He was there somewhere, in the crowd milling around the coffee urns. I stopped at the entrance and scanned. Where are you? I texted.

Here.

On one sudden, indrawn breath, the feeling that had wafted so airily around my consciousness for months filled the hollows of my skull and moved into my chest, as dense as smoke. It made me high.

“Let's take a walk,” he said.

Dizzy, I nodded, and followed him into the bright sunshine, and we walked a few blocks to a pub. We ordered drinks, and he began talking about his marriage. He loved his wife, he said. He would never do anything to hurt his family.
Thank God.
Providence was going to save me from myself. Me too, I said. Me neither.

We went back out into the bright sunshine. It was all going to be fine. I could take in this giddy, high feeling, and breathe it out when I left. Nothing was going to happen. And nothing did, though we seemed to be at each other's side, or texting our way back there, for most of those forty-eight hours. On the last night of the conference, we gathered with other attendees in the lobby bar, amiably lounging side by side on a leather banquette. We were laughing and talking, and then it hit me.

“We're never going to see each other again,” I said, too softly for anyone but him to hear. It wasn't a question, but he answered it anyway.

“Probably not,” he said, looking at me over his old-fashioned glass as he raised it to his mouth. He lowered it and gave the ice cubes a swirl, watching them meditatively.

I was suddenly, miserably, homesick and tired. The party was over. People began to return to their rooms. I gave him the same hug and kiss on the cheek good night that I gave to everyone, and then he was gone. I went back to my room, and realized I had left my key card at the bar. It was nearly empty when I got there. A jacket had been left hanging over a chair. I picked it up. His, of course.

Well, fuck me. At least that's what it was going to look like when I knocked on his door. But I couldn't just leave it there. Sighing, I took the elevator up.

“You left this,” I said, trying to be businesslike about it, when he answered the door. There was a snort, and a click behind us as his roommate locked us out in the hall together. He turned his reddened face to the door and knocked in mock desperation.

You bastard,
I thought. Obviously, I had become the butt of a late-night fraternity joke. He turned around again to face me.
Say something,
I begged silently.
Say that we can't, but that you would, if we could. Say that you feel the same thing. Be gallant, at least.

He looked at the carpet instead.

“Good night, Archer,” I said, turning down the hall. “Good-bye.”

I was the proverbial furious woman scorned. What had I been thinking, I asked myself, all the way home. He was a milquetoast, not half the man my husband was. Patrick, in fact, had never looked better. It was like waking up from a bad dream that causes you to cling to your beloved all day. I had been reckless, playing chicken with the edge, thinking I could jam on the brakes at the last minute. But would I have, if the corridor scene had played out differently? It was hard to say. What I felt that night was intensely physical, outside my brain's jurisdiction. It was heady, like the hot, alcohol note of freshly uncorked wine—the whiff of it invited a taste. To put it very simply, I was turned on. And it wasn't that easy to turn off. In fact, I didn't want to turn it off. For the short duration of my crush, I felt sexier than I had in a long time. I had more sex than I'd had in a long time, with my husband, and not as a stand-in, but starring as himself. My on/off switch is a toggle, not a dial. It may have been someone else that tripped the switch, but once it was on, it was
on.

It had all been delectable. Until I scared myself. I had probably scared Archer, too. As the days passed, and my fury burned down to less hellish proportion, I found sympathy for him. He did what he had to do to protect his family, and who could fault him for that? It was how I'd want Patrick to act in the face of some other woman's weak moment. I thought about his wife. From what I could tell, I might have liked her. And even if I didn't, I certainly wouldn't wish to cause her harm. There was a time, when I was much younger, when I considered a lover's marital status to be his concern, not mine. But I wasn't that girl anymore; hadn't been in a long time. Staying married is hard enough when there are only two people involved. Over and above fidelity to my husband, I owe an allegiance to other wives and mothers. And other daughters.

I was just shy of sixteen when I was first confronted with undeniable evidence of my father's infidelity. A couple of lines of type, on a white piece of paper rolled around the cylinder of his typewriter at the dining room table. The salutation caught my eye. A woman's name. I didn't have to turn the knob to see it was a love letter. In an instant, I knew all that I already knew. There was an underlying order to all the chaos: the bitter arguments in the middle of the night, my mother crying in the bathroom, the sudden separations and reconciliations. It wasn't random after all. I was almost relieved.

Later I learned of other women: some whom I knew well, others who were peripherally familiar to me, pretty faces hovering at the edge of a memory, a foreign accent when I picked up the phone. Some were brief, but none were casual. My father was not a casual man. I think he loved all of them. When I told him I was leaving my first husband for Patrick, he acknowledged there had been affairs, and that he regretted only one—the one that ended his marriage to my mother. He was honestly surprised when she finally divorced him.

I knew that my father's unfaithfulness hurt my mother, but I never really considered how it hurt me. I had always identified with the cheater or the mistress, and I had played both roles. I never saw myself in my mom's shoes until I got old enough to line my feet up next to hers. As we passed our tenth anniversary, and I approached forty, marriages started coming apart all around us. A few weeks after I came home from the conference, I stood in a dark parking lot outside a restaurant, letting the latest casualty notification sink in. Patrick was twenty feet away, saying good night to one of the people we'd just come from dinner with, white ash drifting from the end of his cigarette as he gestured. I looked at my girlfriend.

“My God,” I said. “How awful.”

She nodded. “I've heard he's already moved out and is living with the new woman.”

“Jesus.”

We kept our voices low, more out of solemnity than secrecy. If we had been ten or fifteen years younger, such news would have been gossip. Pretty, young things can go whistling past the graveyards of other women's marriages. At our age, we all but crossed ourselves. I wished we were truly alone, and I could confess my summer crush in depth. Instead, I gave her the abstract.

“Sometimes I feel like I should run out and have an affair, now, just because,” I said. “Because what if I want to later and I can't, because nobody wants me anymore? What if it turns out we squandered all of our youth on men who go and leave us later for younger women?”

Relaying the news to Patrick on the ride home in the car, my voice turned to thick liquid, pooling in the back of my throat. I again felt the urge to confess everything. But I didn't have it in me to do the necessary reassuring. I was too badly in need of that myself. I thought I would start to cry.

“You don't understand what it's like for a woman to get older. Your currency will just go up, while mine goes down. You don't know how that feels, how scary it is to think you'll become invisible. How it feels like you're running out of something you'll never get back.”

He let me carry on in the key of “You don't” for about half the drive. Then he spoke, in the low and quiet tone he uses only when he really needs me to shut up and hear something.

“You listen to me,” he said. “You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen when you were twenty-five. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen now. If I live that long, you will be the most beautiful woman I will ever see when you are eighty. You will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me, because you are the
only
woman in the world for me. And nothing will ever change that.”

I looked at the man who had told me those very same words on the day we met. The man who repeated them every time after, when I told him again and again it was over and sent him away. The man who traveled for seven days on Greyhound buses through the worst blizzard of the century, for over 2,500 miles, with no reason to believe that I would keep my word to meet him at the last station, only an abiding belief in his own word. Those words. This man. The One.

What was there to confess that was not already seen and understood? I felt known, seen, and loved. Everything else was incidental.

That summer bolted like a neglected garden. Early one morning in August, I walked around the yard to assess just how far it had gotten away from me. Trumpet vine had taken over the dog fence. The fig tree was turning yellow, and the birds were beating us to the ripened fruit I thought we would be devouring all season. The dogwoods and forsythia were wizened with thirst, beggars in my path. The children were wild. During the day, I'd catch glimpses of them through the hedges, brown skinned, running half naked with handfuls of hard green pecans and tall pointed sticks. Everywhere, there were hidden caches of sticks, rocks, and nuts. Provision or ammunition, I couldn't tell. I had let it all go, myself included, and it had been the most luscious, rambling summer in years.

But it was time. Time to pull back the lovely tangle of vines before they choked the life out of something, time to beg forgiveness from the dogwoods and forsythia so they would love me again in the spring, time to brood even one fig into full sweetness. Time to give Peter his thimble and gather in my lost boys.