Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (20 page)

This was going to be harder than I thought.

After twenty-four hours, I had more or less decided that perhaps Ronan Robertson was not my soul mate after all. When I got home that night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs and pottered around the house, trying to keep the infatuation going, recall the lust and longing I had felt that first night. How he had looked at me, how much I had wanted him. The “rightness” I had felt. But when I crawled into bed in the early hours of the morning, I was aware of Dan sleeping peacefully next to me and I became completely overwhelmed with guilt. I struggled with my conscience all of the following day, trying to put a romantic spin on what I was increasingly beginning to suspect had been simply my own unforgivable behavior. Part of me—the creative, whimsical Tressa—was saying, “True passion is beyond your control.” The other—sensible, pragmatic Tressa—was saying, “Married women don’t mess around. You did a bad, bad thing.”

The two conflicting voices were fighting like hell cats in my head and my blood felt poisoned with my own adrenaline. By early evening I couldn’t stand carrying it around with me anymore, and I knew I had to tell Dan what I had done.

I figured out my story and bit the bullet.

“I’m serious, Dan. We need to talk.”

He was covered in grease, fiddling around with some Harley bike parts on the table. A huge boy, toys out in front of him, making a mess. “I’m sorry, Tressa. I’ll clean this all up later. Once Gerry gets here and...”

I coughed. “I
nearly
had an affair.” I looked him straight in the eye. Just like I promised myself I would.

He changed instantly from boy to man. I thought he would be shocked, hurt. I was ready for tears.

“What do you mean
‘nearly’?”

He looked angry in a way I hadn’t seen before. I faltered. “I don’t know, I...”

“What do you mean ‘nearly’ had an affair, Tressa?” he repeated, wanting an answer.

“It was this guy at the shoot that I used to go out with and we went out and had a few drinks and then...”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No.”

“Did you
want
to sleep with him?”

“Yes, no, yes... I don’t know...”

“Did you kiss him?”

“Yes—sort of—I can’t remember.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Tressa—did you kiss him?”

“Ye-es!”

I half-screamed, half-wailed it, like the drama queen I never knew I was. This was a scene I was not enjoying playing out.

“Did you enjoy it?”

He said it in a tone of voice that was so cold and disgusted, empty of any tenderness, that he didn’t even sound like himself.

He went on. “Was it—I don’t know—sexy? Fun?”

I was afraid of the way he was being and I was surprised at the fear I felt in the pit of my stomach in response to his anger.

“You don’t get it, Dan.”

“Don’t get
what
Tressa? That my wife is out there nearly having an affair—kissing, maybe fucking other men? What’s not to
‘get’?
”

“Stop it! Stop talking like that. Be yourself.”

“What the hell does that mean, Tressa? Myself? Slushy Dan, the big uneducated ape, who’s too stupid to see what’s going on under his nose? The gentle giant who’ll forgive anything...”

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“What do you want me to do, Tressa? Do you want me to get down on my knees and beg you not to leave me?”

“I’m not leaving you, Dan...”

“Do you want me to do this?” And he picked up a coffee cup and hurled it toward the back window.

I screamed, and that shocked him into silence. He stood in front of me, his lips curling into the beginning of a tight snarl, hands shivering with rage, eyes huge and sad and terrified. For a split second they seemed to be pleading.

“You are clearly not happy in this marriage, and you know what? You are making me really miserable, too. Maybe we should call it a day. Whatever. I’m outta here.”

Then my devoted husband walked out of our house, slamming the door dramatically behind him.

I was shaking, shocked. I had never seen Dan angry before, and I realized, to my own horror, that he was right. I did think he was a big soft fool who’d roll over and take anything. What I was taking in, more than anything, was the possibility that Dan would leave
me.
After all my uncertainty, all my hemming and hawing, he was holding the cards.

After maybe ten minutes, I heard Gerry knock at the door.

There was no point in hiding from Gerry. He knew he was expected.

He walked straight through the kitchen toward the back door.

“Is he out in the garage?”

“He’s not here.”

“Oh right...” and he started to rearrange the parts on the table.

“What’s cooking, Tress?”

Gerry always sniffed the air when he came into my kitchen like a homeless dog.

“We had a row. I think he’s left me.”

“Shit, no. Coffee’d be good.”

Gerry started moving the parts around awkwardly, as if he really didn’t want to be there. I hadn’t thought that I needed to talk, especially not to Gerry, but sometimes you don’t know you need to do something until you need to do it.

He sensed he was expected to ask me questions, and although he clearly didn’t want to he said, “What happened?”

“I told him I nearly had an affair.”

“Whoa!”

This was way more than he had bargained for, so he took a step back and started waving his arms like a landing crew warning off a crashing plane. “Not my business, Tress—don’t wanna know.”

But I was bringing this baby down. Dan wouldn’t listen, so I was going to make sure I got my message across to his friend.

“I met this guy I’d known before, I thought we had something, and then I realized he was
nothing
next to Dan, nothing. My love was challenged, and I chose Dan.”

I felt triumphant.That sounded so good. No harm done, a dilemma sorted. Excellent work. Gerry let out a half-laugh and raised his eyes to heaven. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement.

“You already made your choice, Tressa. You’re not in the market for those kinds of decisions anymore.”

Then he picked up a greasy carburetor from the kitchen table and headed out to the garage to wait for his betrayed friend.

*

Reality is just an interpretation. Some people believe only God really knows what’s going on, we mortals just make up our own versions of it.

Reality one in my interpreted world was that Ronan and I were soul mates whose love was thwarted by misunderstanding, bad timing, and ultimately my marriage to somebody else. We met each other again, and in knowing that we could not be together, our souls found the freedom to express themselves honestly. We’d fallen in love—maybe. He was devastated when I didn’t come through for him, and spent the rest of the evening on the phone to his therapist.

Reality two is that Ronan, on a day off from the live-in model, bumped into a vulnerable ex and, having overdosed on twenty-year-old beauties, fancied an evening of earthy, no-strings sex with somebody else’s wife. He is the type of man who would say anything to get a woman into bed, hence all the faltering, soul-searching bullshit, which he figured (correctly) I needed to hear. There is also the ugly possibility that, having got the room paid for by yours truly, I had caught him in the act of rifling through his address book looking for a last-minute replacement, so the bed didn’t go to waste.

The real truth is, I will never really know.

The only thing that I feel absolutely certain of right now is that I have hurt Dan in the worst way. You can hurt another person by being true to yourself, but in the long term you are doing both of you a favor. You can also hurt a person by just being a selfish bitch, and there is no excuse for that. Sometimes, it is quite difficult to tell the two situations apart.

However, next time I’m not sure if I’m following my heart or my hormones, I’ll be checking in with my new friend, Conscience. She may not be as pretty as Creativity, but at least she will always tell me the truth.

I guess it’s like the sunken Christmas cake. If you take goodwill for granted and get sloppy, you might get away with it once or twice, but you won’t get away with it forever. You should always treat the things that treat you well with respect.

And if you don’t? Well then you have to be prepared to take the consequences.

James had never shown anger towards me before.

Twenty years is a long time to set a habit, and I knew my husband as a placid, mild-mannered man. He never raised his voice, or, God forbid, his hand, to any human or animal that I had ever seen. I knew he had been a captain in the IRA before we met, and although I was occasionally curious about the part he had played in our cruel war, I was largely content to think of my husband as a harmless soul. I knew of the way that other women were treated at the hands of bullying husbands but I never saw their misfortune reflected as my own good fortune. Perhaps that is the way it is when women marry men whom they have not chosen themselves. They had no hand in making the match so they never consider themselves lucky. Perhaps those who choose their partners can see the other’s good qualities more clearly and will therefore forgive their faults more easily. Although I wonder if twenty years might erode such idealism. Perhaps it is better not to fall for a person’s good points in the first place, then have time expose them as hollow charms.

I will never know because I was never given that choice. Now I think that romantic love should always stay the way I knew it. Locked away, like a precious jewel in a chest in the attic, to be opened occasionally when in need of distraction, so you might marvel at its beauty, but never to be exposed to the harsh light of day. Perhaps romantic love is too delicate, too beautiful to withstand the weight of the ordinary.

James never looked more plain, more unlovably ordinary than the afternoon we got back from the confirmation. Yet the disappointment with which he looked at me was unfamiliar.

“You upset the bishop, Bernadine.”

I knew I had done wrong, that I had put my husband’s reputation, our very livelihood at stake. I knew that had I been in full control of my senses, I would never have let such a thoughtless insult spill out of me without considering the consequences. I knew I should have bitten my lip, smiled in silent decorum, and offered my intolerance up to a decent saint, who might see to it that the miserable weasel burned in hell for all eternity. I knew I was entirely at fault, and that just made it all the worse. I married a man I had not chosen and clambered hard all of my married life to make sure I stayed one inch above him on the moral high ground. I was not an affectionate wife, but I was always hardworking and diligent in carrying out my responsibilities. I was respectful. I did not love him in the way that he wanted me to, but when push came to shove, I had never failed him. Until now.

“You upset the bishop, Bernadine.”

James said it in a patronizing, schoolmasterly tone that irritated me. But my anger was rooted in my own failure as a wife. If he was raging, I did not notice. Anger was not something I had to watch out for in James. There was no reason to be ever alert to it. If his voice shook over the words, I did not think it any reason to hold back. Twenty years is a long time. Long enough to know what to expect. I had started now and I could not find a way of stopping. I did not think there was any good reason to.

“How dare you speak to me like that? I have sacrificed twenty years of my life to be your dutiful servant.” And then I said it, the unforgivable. “We both know I was destined for greater things than the dull life of a schoolteacher’s wife.”

The devil darted out of his eyes and towards me in a pin-sharp flash.

“Greater things?”

Still, I did not believe there was anything to be afraid of. I stuck my chin in the air, although probably a fraction too high, as I was beginning to feel unsure.

“Yes. A certain Michael Tuffy that I was doing a line with? We were matched?”

“Oh, I see. And that match never came to fruition because?”

There was a nasty slant to his face. A tight look to his mouth, such as you might see on a bitter old woman. I had turned my gentle James into a monster. But I was no quitter. I had to see this through.

“Don’t you try and torture me, James Nolan. You know very well my parents did not have the money for that match. If they had had a penny, they would never have settled on you...”

“But your Aunt Ann had the money.”

This sick dread descended on me like red mist. I had to make him stop.

“Didn’t she, Bernadine?”

I had one more rage in me, a cruelty that I spat out. “You will never be
half
the man Michael Tuffy was...” Even as I said it, I knew it was my last stand. Tears were already streaming down my face, my veins coursing with the heat of my confession. “Michael was
my world.”
Perhaps if I had not hurt him so badly with the awful truth, James might have let it go. But I was
his
world, and he couldn’t stop himself. James knew I loved Michael over him, and he had found a way to live with that. It was the telling of it that he could not bear.

So he punished me by telling me the truth about Michael Tuffy.

*

Maureen tuffy was, indeed, the widowed wife of Michael Tuffy Senior from Achadh Mor, but it seemed that was the only true thing that could be said about her. She never made legal claim to her husband’s land, and it was assumed that was because it was of no great value to her. But the truth was that the land had never been her husband’s, but his brother’s, who was living in Chicago. He got wind of her scheme to embezzle him out of his inheritance. Arguments over land rights at that time were forgivable, but bigamy was not and Maureen Tuffy’s greed had made a bigamist of her son.

He had already married one other young woman who was from a wealthy New Orleans Catholic family. The girl had run away to New York at the age of eighteen in search of adventure and immediately she arrived in Grand Central Station she had met and fallen in love with Michael Tuffy. He took the girl back home to meet Maureen, who immediately got the measure of the girl’s wealth and contacted her parents. Relieved that their daughter was safe and in respectable company, they rewarded Mrs. Tuffy with a generous allowance to cover rent and board. Within months, the girl was pregnant, and a marriage was quickly arranged and a dowry negotiated. However, as time went on, the girl began to miss the trappings of her wealthy Southern life. Weeks before the child was due to be born, she said she was homesick for her parents and tried to persuade Michael to go back to New Orleans with her. By this time, it seemed, Michael had tired of her rich-girl whining and told his mother he did not want to move from New York. The girl was put on a train back to New Orleans, her dowry was pocketed by the Tuffys, and no mention was ever made of a divorce.