Save Me (15 page)

I feel myself relaxing, the warm relief from the whiskey kicking in, washing over me from my head to my feet, a welcome loosening.

“What are you suggesting?” he says. “Trust me, I’m no globe-trotting lothario.”

I laugh and gasp simultaneously, my drink spraying.

“Well, maybe I am, then! If it’s so unbelievable.” He laughs, handing me his cocktail napkin.

“I’m sorry.” I clear my throat.
“Globe-trotting lothario
.
”
I want to ask about the woman at the farmers’ market but I don’t. “I’ll stop with the inquisition.”

“It’s okay. I would rather talk about you anyway.”

“Eh.” I sigh.

He raises his eyebrows at me.

“Jack told you a few things?” I just go for it. Let’s get it over with, deal with the disaster.

He shrugs. “He told me some.”

“Great story, isn’t it?” I grab my glass off of the bar and take another drink.

“Listen,” he starts, angling himself toward me. “I’m really sorry.”

I put my palm out. “You don’t know the half of it.”

I consider whether to elaborate, and I’m tempted, even though I really don’t know him at all. I don’t know his history, his hopes, his fears—I don’t even know what his major was in college, whether he reads, what his family is like—but there is something about the way that he looks at me that makes me feel like I could tell him everything and it would be okay. Maybe (probably) it’s just the alcohol, but the point is that I don’t care what he knows, and that in and of itself is an improvement over the past few weeks.

“How about dinner?” he says, signaling to the bartender to bring us another round.

An hour earlier, I was in the harsh, commercial stink of the grocery store, clinging to an old habit. “That sounds wonderful,” I say, pushing out the words and silently thanking my sister.

I kiss him. I don’t mean to, but I kiss him. It is two hours later and we are standing next to my car and there is rain softly falling and, well, he leans toward me and I kiss him. It is strange, like I’ve never done it before, and wonderful, like I’ve never done it before, and the minute we pull away from each other, right after he brushes his thumb against my mouth and puts his hand on my back, pulling me gently toward him again, I feel guilty. The zing plummets like a dying radio signal. He must see this on my face, because when he pulls back, the first thing out of his mouth is that he’s sorry.

“It’s okay,” I say.

“No, I shouldn’t have—”

“Really, it’s okay,” I say. And it is. I
know
that it is. My heart is racing. I’m a married woman, a bona fide grown-up, kissing a man I barely know, but it’s what had to happen. I’m certain of it.

“I had fun tonight,” I say, and despite the fact that I can barely catch my breath—
Owen
—I mean it. I really do. Finally.

I
t is two days since my night out with Andrew, and Owen is asleep, collapsed on the couch in yesterday’s clothes like he spent the night at a fraternity party. I’m sitting across from him, in the sagging armchair that I bought in a secondhand store when I first moved to Durham. I tuck my feet under myself and wait.

He got in around midnight—I was upstairs in bed, reading
The Woman in White
for Annie’s book club. “It will scare the shit out of you,” Annie said. “You’ll be completely absorbed. It will be good for you.”

I wasn’t absorbed. I heard the door bang shut downstairs and I put the book down and listened. He turned on the television—
SportsCenter
—and in between the snapping commentary and the set-to-music game clips, I started to hear it again. Owen crying. Big gulping hiccups.

Blue got up and squeezed through the door, her claws
clack-clack
ing on the wood steps as she went to him. I did not. I picked up my book and tried to concentrate on the words but I just kept reading the same line over and over again.
Silence is safe. Silence is safe. Silence is safe.
The line seemed somehow prophetic, like that thing that people do where they pick up a Bible and lay their finger on a page and wherever it lands is the scripture you’re meant to see.

I watch him, the man whom I’ve loved for nearly half of my life. He is the soundest sleeper I’ve ever encountered—an inanimate dreamer.

We bought a king-sized bed a few years ago, even though it took up all but a moat of space around the perimeter of the small bedroom in our old apartment. It was something I insisted on after nagging about it for years. I wanted space, to lie in a lazy X across the mattress, to be able to roll over without having my face hit the space between his shoulder blades. Owen didn’t agree, and even when he finally did and I managed to get him standing in front of the bleak sales guy in the dim, soupy light of the mattress store, he whispered to me that he still didn’t want a new bed. “We’ll never snuggle with all of that space,” he joked into my ear. “We’ll need separate zip codes.”

And he was right. For the first few weeks, I scooched over to his side or he to mine, but before long, the invisible line separating our sides became more of a no-cross zone, and in the years since, it was the way that we preferred it, or so I thought. He came to bed much later, getting off work so late, and when he kissed me good night,
if  
he kissed me good night, I wasn’t awake to notice. I slept heavily, unconsciously. I took his presence for granted, and I hate myself for that now.

I kissed someone else
, I think, watching him sleep. How would he react if I told him? Would he be angry? Or relieved because I’d evened the score in some way? Would it feel good to see the surprise on his face? Deep down, I know it wouldn’t, even if there’s a part of me that likes having my little secret. My mind can rest in that moment. For those few minutes in the parking lot, I was just Daphne—not Daphne the betrayed wife, Daphne with the messed-up marriage.

I get up and walk across the room to the kitchen to make coffee. At first, I’m careful as I unfurl the top of the bag of grounds, easy as I slide the machine across the countertop, but then I can’t take it. I open the cabinets and slam them shut, find a couple of mugs and clink them on to the countertop. I call for Blue from fifteen feet, clapping my hands. “Come on, girl!”

I want to know about Texas, if it helped him. The anticipation is killing me.

He turns onto his back and I watch from behind the kitchen island. We wanted one big great room, one big kitchen and living space, and so we tore down the wall between the two. The contractor let us take turns with the sledgehammer.
The room will be great for parties
, we said (as if we ever entertained more than the thought of entertaining),
and good for kids.

His eyes adjust to the light and he realizes where he fell asleep. He throws an arm over his face, curls up into himself.

“Hey,” I say.

He startles and sits up. “I didn’t know you were standing there.”

I rap my fingernails against one of the empty mugs. “Do you want some coffee? It’s almost ready.”

He nods and runs his hands through his hair. When he gets up and walks toward me, it’s not like before, the “good mornings” that always included a quick kiss, an idle three-second back scratch, a squeeze of my shoulder, and I’ve missed it, no matter how perfunctory those gestures might have been. It’s like missing the box of tissues on your table, the scissors in the drawer, a can opener. These mundane everyday things that don’t even register until you need them. How did I push Owen into that category? I miss so many things.

He pulls out one of the kitchen stools, sits down at the island, and rubs his eyes with the knuckles of his index fingers.

“How was it?” I venture.

He doesn’t say anything at first. I watch him trace his finger along the countertop in an infinity sign.

“It was difficult,” he says.

Our eyes meet for just a fleeting second.

“There were a lot of people there. Hundreds.”

I turn to fill our coffee cups. Owen likes his light and sweet, what people call a
regular
in Massachusetts. I pass it to him across the counter. “Thank you,” he says, not looking at me.

“Does she have a big family?” I ask, handing him the half-and-half.

He nods. “Two brothers. They all live there, and all of the aunts and uncles and cousins. And I think that with her being so young…I’d thought that there might be a lot of people, but I was still surprised at the turnout. I think it probably helped her parents, seeing all of the support.”

I nod but he doesn’t look at me and doesn’t see it.

“A couple of former patients came.”

“That’s nice,” I say. I think back to that newspaper article I found on the Internet, about the teenaged boy in New Jersey whom she counseled. I wonder if he is still alive. I bet he would have made the trip.

“It was strange for me to go,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

“Why?”

“Nobody knew.” He glances at me. “About the two of us. There was Christine, her roommate here. She knew. And I’d met her parents here at the hospital. But even one of her brothers, when I introduced myself, assumed that I was her boss. He told me that it was nice of me to make the trip for a coworker.”

I’m glad to finally know but I wonder why he’s telling me this—does he feel badly about it, that she didn’t share the details of her romantic life with her family? Or does he mean for it to make me feel better somehow, to try to minimize the depth of their relationship? So I ask:
Why are you telling me this?

Our eyes meet then. “I don’t know.” He scratches the crown of his head. It’s a gesture that he makes when he’s uncomfortable, like when he first met my father. I’ve seen him do it a thousand times.

He rubs his hands together like he’s cold.

She had a roommate. What did
she
think about all of this? Does she know who I am? Has she seen me out—having dinner with Annie, buying groceries—and whispered to a friend that I’m the one, the one whose husband Bridget is seeing?

I pour my coffee down the drain, even though the mug is nearly full. It suddenly tastes too bitter. “I’m sorry that you’re dealing with this, Owen,” I say. What else do you do? There’s no Hallmark card for it.
So sorry for the loss of the woman you cheated on me with.

“Thank you.”

When I arrive at the office an hour later, I boot up my laptop, turning tiny semicircles in my desk chair as I wait for it. My screensaver appears—a photo of Blue on the day we moved into the house. One of the movers had left one of those huge cardboard wardrobe boxes lying sideways on the front porch, and with all of the commotion, she’d crawled inside to get some escape, her huge black blocky head poking out of one side to keep an eye on things.

I get online and find the website for the
Austin American-Statesman
. I click on the obituaries and type in Bridget’s name.

It’s just three short paragraphs, no photo.

I read it over and over again. She sounded lovely. Under different circumstances, we might have been friends. I wipe my tears, take a deep breath, and then, knowing that I only have a few minutes before I need to go over my schedule for the day, I find the website for St. Baldrick’s and make an anonymous $100 donation in her memory.

My phone rings just as I’m turning away from the computer. The area code is 415—San Francisco. “Good morning, Dr. Mitchell,” Andrew says.

“Good morning,” I say, trying to sound light.

“How are you today?”

I laugh a little. What other option is there?

“What?” He chuckles in response.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I say.

“Listen, I was calling to see if you have plans tonight.”

Plans tonight.
Do I have plans tonight? I think of Owen at the kitchen counter. He needs me, but is it the best thing? For me?

“I do not,” I say. I gulp it out. I force the words out of my mouth the way you’d remove a marble from the inside of a toddler’s cheek with one crooked finger. “I’m free.”

“Great! I thought maybe you could come for dinner.”

“I can,” I say. I close my eyes. I think of Lucy the other day.
Remember what he did to you!
I think of that kiss. I think of everyone who’s imploring me to move on.
Go ahead, dive.
“What time and what can I bring?”

A
ndrew’s cousin is an archeology professor at Duke who’s on sabbatical for the semester, and Andrew is staying at her loft downtown while she’s somewhere overseas on a dig. The apartment is in a renovated textile mill near the minor league baseball park, right over the railroad tracks that cross through town. I hear a train roaring by as I’m waiting for the elevator to take me up to his place. It does nothing to drown out the way my heart is pounding in my chest.

I can hear music softly playing behind the door when I knock, and when he answers, the scent of rosemary wafts into the hallway. He must see on my face how this pleases me, because as he kisses my cheek, sweetly, discreetly, and takes the bottle of wine that I’ve brought, the first thing that he says is that he hopes I like roasted chicken.

I do, of course. I told him when we went out to that concert, when we were doing our best not to let our conversation turn into a job interview–like litany of questions:
How many siblings do you have? Where did you go to school?
Roast chicken is my favorite meal. My mother made it every Sunday night when we were growing up, and the smell—the indelible, homey, heartwarming smell—there’s nothing better.

“Smooth move,” I joke, because I can’t help it. “It smells delicious.”

“Good,” he says. “But I have to warn you—I’ve never done this before. I almost cheated and stuck a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store in the oven but my mother assured me that I could handle it.”

“Your mother?” I tease.

“What?” He smiles, handing me a glass of wine from the bottle that’s open on the counter. “Can you think of a better reason for a man—even a forty-one-year-old man—to ask his mother for advice than when it’s before making a woman dinner for the first time?”

“I suppose that’s true,” I say, wondering again why he’s single. I can feel my face relaxing, my shoulders dropping. My mother used to physically push my shoulders down, as a joke that I never thought was all that funny.
Relax, Daphne. Take it easy.

“I also needed to borrow her roasting pan,” Andrew says.

“Oh, I see.” I laugh.

“And her meat thermometer.”

“I thought you said that you like to cook.”

“When did I say that?” he says, leading me onto the patio.

“The other night at Nana’s.” It feels illicit to bring up the night that we kissed, and silly to feel that way—aren’t we adults, after all? “You mentioned something about how the gnocchi reminded you of a recipe.”

“Well, yes, I can boil some pasta,” he says, leading me outside. “And I own a skillet, so I can do eggs. And stir-fries.”

“And grill?” I ask, pointing to the Weber in the corner.

“Obviously,” he says. “I do have a Y chromosome.”

“Har-har.”
Is this how I flirt? Sarcastic banter?
“I actually make a great grilled ribeye. And grilled salmon—I’m good at that, too.”
Owen loves it,
I think.
No, he
loved
it.

“Is that so?” He smiles. He always seems to be smiling, and I’m starting to believe that it’s an unforced, completely natural thing for him. “Well, I’ll have to take you up on that offer then.”

“That was an offer?” I say.

“I hope so.”

The dinner is delicious.

“Your chicken is almost as good as my mother’s,” I say, putting down my fork. I think of Owen eating a bowl of cereal at our kitchen table in the dark, and maybe it should maybe make me happy that he’s paying his penance, but it just makes me sad.

“Almost as good as your mother’s is a compliment I’ll take,” Andrew says. There is no furniture on the patio but we decided to eat outside anyway because it’s such a beautiful night. He found a blanket in the linen closet—a blue, batik print one that reminds me of the kind of thing that my friends and I hung on the walls of our dorm rooms in college.

“So tell me about your cousin,” I say. “Where is this dig she’s directing?”

“She’s in the south of France, in the Perigord region.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s an area known mainly for its foie gras and truffles.”

“She’s excavating truffles?”

He laughs. “There’s some cave there. I’m not exactly sure.”

Her apartment looks like what I would imagine an archeology professor’s would—lots of printed wall hangings, statues, lithographs, oddly shaped rocks displayed as art. I’m sure it’s all significant but, to my untrained eye, it doesn’t look much different than a Pier 1 Imports showroom.

“What’s your place like in San Francisco?” I ask.

“Well,” he starts, stacking our plates and setting them to the side so that he can settle in closer to me. I let him. I lean back against the wall and admire the sunset, orange and pink, casting a delicate glow over everything. “The cost of living is a bit different out there.”

“I am aware,” I say. I swirl my wine in my glass.

“I’m in Marin County, just north of the city. My place was originally an old barn but the architect who owned it before I did turned it into a three bedroom.”

“I bet it’s amazing.”

“It’s not bad,” he says.

“You can tell so much about a person by how they live.” I think of my mother and her chaos, my reflexive obsessive neatness.

“That’s true,” he says. “Jack says your place is pretty great.”

“Yes,” I manage. “Do you miss being there? It’s a bit more glamorous…”

“Than Durham? Nah.” He smiles. “I love it here.”

“I do, too.” I look out at the skyline of former tobacco warehouses and mills, the water tower with the Lucky Strike logo, the brick smokestack, the trees beyond—the home I’ve come to love.
Could I leave now?
I wonder, permitting myself to fantasize a bit.
Could I take off for Northern California, find work in a little practice with a view of
the Golden Gate Bridge, tour wineries on the weekends?

“So how is it going…here?” I venture. I want to ask how much longer he plans to be in town but I don’t want to seem too forward.

He looks at me before he speaks. “Actually, it’s been pretty tough.” He presses his lips together and squints at some deep-down thought. “Dad’s doing much better but it’s still not great,” he confesses.

“I’m so sorry.”

He tells me how he visits his father at the rehabilitation center for several hours each day, where he meets with the speech therapists and sits in on physical therapy sessions.

“I’m glad I’ve been able to be here to help out my mother,” he says. “And meeting you has been an unexpected plus.”

“It has,” I say. I feel myself blush. “So what do you do when you’re back home?” I ask, partly because I really want to know and partly because I’m too scared of what will happen if we wade into a conversation about us.

He reaches for the wine bottle and refills my glass. “I see movies, I go out to dinner, I work. The usual stuff. But I travel so much, to be honest, that I feel like I have to relearn how to just be at home every time I return from a trip.”

I laugh.

“What?”

“It’s just such a contrast from what I’m used to. My life is so predictable.”
Was
so predictable, I think. “I can practically tell you what time I brush my teeth each night.”

“That can’t be true,” he says.

“
I don’t know
,” I say in a singsongy voice. “Your life sounds pretty fabulous, I have to tell you. I think that most people I know would trade places with you.”

“It’s not bad,” he says, winking.

I look at him for a moment, trying to decide whether to ask the question that’s been on my mind. “Okay, I hope you won’t be offended, but I have to ask,” I say, taking a courage-building sip of my wine before I continue. “Why are you single?”

He laughs and tips his head back against the wall. “You sound like my mother.”

I shrug. “It’s a valid question, I think. I know that we don’t know each other
that
well, but you seem relatively sane.”

He laughs. “Relatively?”

“Well, like I said, we don’t know each other that well,” I joke.

He shifts his weight on the patio floor, and I can’t tell if he’s physically uncomfortable or if my question’s made him that way. “I was in a relationship for a long time. It ended a couple of years ago,” he says. “Are you sure you want the whole sordid story?” He smiles at me but for the first time it looks strained.

“Only if you’re sure you don’t mind telling me,” I say.

“I don’t mind,” he says, and when our eyes meet, he holds my gaze for a moment before he begins. “So, I met her out there, through one of my business partners, and we were just good friends for a long time. She also travels a lot for her job, so it started out slowly, with one of us calling the other whenever we got back into town from wherever we’d been. We had a convenient kinship—we’d meet for dinner, lament about jet lag, quiz each other about which airports have the best frequent flyer lounges.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a photojournalist. She started out at the
Chronicle
doing city politics but she’s on her own now. She covers a lot of big headline stories—natural disasters, that sort of thing.”

“That has to be intense.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And it requires a lot of spontaneity. You have to be okay with packing a suitcase and taking off at a moment’s notice. My job isn’t quite like that but we got each other, you know?”

I nod, thinking of how impulsiveness isn’t something that’s ever applied to me. “So what happened?”

“Well,” he says. “I was in Chicago. We had just started scoping out that old bank for our next property, the one that Jack mentioned? And I was planning to surprise her. I’d schemed with one of her editors to concoct a fake business meeting on the East Coast, and the plan was to show up at the airport and whisk her off to Paris.” He pauses and swirls the wine in his glass. “And, well, I was going to propose. But when I got there, ring in my front coat pocket and everything, she wasn’t there. I waited for hours, tried every way I could think of to get in touch with her—I was worried that something had happened to her—but she had essentially vanished into thin air. When I eventually made it home, I found a letter from her explaining that the editor friend had slipped and told her. Turns out, she’d been secretly seeing another photographer she’d met years ago in Asia. They’d been rendezvousing during each other’s assignments for years.”

“Oh, Andrew,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It was pretty tough. I guess I’ve been a little gun-shy ever since.”

“I can understand,” I say. Our eyes meet and this time when he smiles at me, I’m sure it’s sincere.

“I know you can.” He squeezes my hand.

“How did you get through it?” I ask, wanting to know his secret.

“Hmm,” he says. “Time, I guess? You know the old saying,
Time heals all wounds
.” He shrugs. “But I don’t know, I wish whoever had said that could have been more specific. It’s been two years for me and…” He laughs and shrugs again. “It does get easier. It really does.”

I nod.

“I’m so sorry about what happened to you,” he says.

“Thanks. It’s been something.” I shake my head. “You don’t even know the whole story.”

“Do you want to tell me?” He nudges closer to me and puts his hand over mine.

“I do,” I say, realizing as I say it how much I mean it. I take a deep breath. “I guess the first thing is that he moved back in.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.
Why did I start with that?
I feel the slightest jerk in his shoulder, in his leg next to mine, the unconscious tensing of his body in reaction to what I’ve said, and my heart starts to beat faster. “That sounds worse than I meant it…or maybe not worse, but different. Let me start over.”

“It’s okay, take your time.”

I nod, and then I tell him everything, every last detail.

“So I don’t know where this is going to go exactly,” I finish, drowning the last bit of my wine. I feel a bit like my mouth has run off ahead of me, but I can’t stop myself. “Despite everything he’s done, I feel an obligation to help him through this. We’re married, and he was—” I stop again. “He was everything.”
Shit.

When I finally get up the nerve to look at him, I expect to see disappointment in his eyes.

“I think it’s honorable,” he says, surprising me.

“Listen, I’ve loved spending time with you,” I say, intent on steering the conversation toward something positive.

“Hey, Daphne, it’s okay,” he says, taking both my hands in his and looking into my eyes. “I get it. I really, really do.”

I turn to him and search his face for signs that this has shifted things. Maybe he’s as sincere as he sounds. Or maybe, who knows? Maybe he doesn’t even really care that much. I still don’t know what his relationship is to that woman at the farmers’ market, despite the wedding ring I noticed on her finger. For all I know, I am one in a stable of many, solely a way to pass the time. I realize that it’s paranoid of me to think this way, and something in my gut tells me that he’s as genuine as he seems, but given how faulty my instincts have proven to be, I can’t count anything out.

What I do know is that I need this one good thing in my life, whatever this one good thing is. I can’t let what’s happened with Owen’s life spill over mine like water on paper. That’s
his
life, not ours—something I need to remember. I need to lean away from him, as scary as the first steps might be. I
need
to. And for that very reason, before Andrew can give me any indication otherwise, I lean in and I kiss him, in a way that will show him how much I am here—or
trying
to be here. And I know, putting my hand to the nape of his neck, that I am doing it to convince myself of it, too.