THE AFFAIR (17 page)

Icy fingers gripped his heart and squeezed. Fear such as he’d never known invaded his entire being. He stood for a moment remembering when he was a child and afraid of the dark. But he was no longer a child. He was a man. He had no choice but to face his fears.

Larry turned toward his bedroom and began walking, slow even steps, counting slowly to himself the many years he’d spent with Mick. He didn’t want it to be over
. Where the hell was she? She knew damn well what time he was coming home.

He was doing his best to direct the pain mounting in his chest to anger directed at his wife. He didn’t like being reduced to the five-year-old old hiding inside. He didn’t like the feeling of abandonment that was stiffening his bones with each step.

Larry stood inside his bedroom door and breathed in, trying to still the rapid beating of his heart. His eyes surveyed the room. Nothing was out of place yet the air felt charged with sadness and impending doom.

He reached his hand out, now knowing why, and swept it through the air. The hairs on his arm stood at attention. Everything looked the same, but something was different. He’d stake his life on it.

The attorney in him came out as he searched the room for the obvious clues before moving on to the less obvious ones. He didn’t feel Mick’s energy in the room. He shivered.

Where the hell had that thought come from? Now he was sounding as mad as she was. She was infecting him with all that energy and past life crap.

Still, as he stood in the room fighting to analyze what was before him, he could no longer deny it. The room no longer held the essence of his wife. Her smell was missing, her warmth. Her energy.

Oh hell
, he thought and headed for her closet door. The sight of the emptiness slammed into him, with the force of a three hundred pound prize fighter. He sank to the bed trying in vain to recover.

Mick had left him. He sat there immobile, not seeing, hearing, or feeling. He stayed there until he heard the front door opening and the rustling of bags. He stood, not knowing which he feared most, wondering if his wife was gone from his life or looking into her eyes and seeing the truth.

The pain that was long ago buried began to take root and live again. It grew inside him, doubling, tripling in size. The anger was valid. It was real. But the source was no longer his mother, it was Michelle.

I stared at my husband, wanting to pretend I didn’t know what he was asking, but over twenty-six years of being married made that impossible.

“Damn it. How long, Mick?”

“Are you asking me when was the first time?”

I headed for the kitchen. The pain in his eyes was masked only by his fury. He followed behind me as I had known he would. Anger and pain darkened Larry’s features. I saw what I had done to my husband. And that alone almost stopped me.

I felt tears welling in my eyes, tears that I couldn’t give in to. I’d known full well there would be consequences for my actions.

My throat was constricted. There were words I wanted to say to my husband, to make him understand why I’d done it. Why I’d chosen after a lifetime of loving him to destroy our marriage.

I needed to explain that I’d been dying inside, that I had needed something, anything to make the pain go away. Chance just happened to be more than I had bargained for.

I watched my husband advance toward me. For a moment in time the world stopped. My head filled with an incredible pressure and I felt a sudden rush of wind inside my kitchen. I turned toward the window. It was closed.

When I turned back toward Larry, I could swear he was covered with a fine silver mist. I heard a faraway tinkling of bells.

Then the mist surrounding Larry began to dissipate, carrying with it my own broken dreams. I could see now that the hope of my marriage to Larry lasting forever was gone. I stared into his eyes and saw my thoughts were mirrored there.

“It hasn’t been long,” I whispered to him, as though whispering would make up for the knife I’d just plunged into my husband’s heart.

I watched as he continued toward me. He appeared to stagger, his hand reaching out to hold the countertop. Instinctively I lunged forward to help him. “Don’t,” he growled at me. “Don’t touch me.”

“Larry, I didn’t plan this.”

“The hell you didn’t. Now I know why you were spouting off that crap about past lives and not wanting the children here. Tell me, Mick, did you fuck him in our bed?”

I closed my eyes tightly, reeling from his words as though they were a blow. My back was pressed against the sink. I needed to move. Larry was pressing his body next to mine. His hands moved roughly over my breasts. His left knee was shoved between my legs.

“Larry, stop,” I screamed at him, at this stranger who had invaded my husband’s body. I placed both my palms on his chest and pushed with all my might. He went back and in the same instant I moved.

“Someone else can touch you and I can’t?”

I walked toward the living room trying to focus, to get words that I needed. “You can’t touch me like that. You were hurting me. Why are you behaving like this? You’ve never touched me like that.”

I watched as Larry gripped his head in his hands. He was clawing at his hair, his reddened face turning purple. “Honey, calm down, you need to sit,” I said to him from a safe distance across the room. He glared at me, but sat. I moved to the sofa directly opposite Larry and sat down. I’d known this day was coming. I sighed, trying to decide how to start.

He stood up and came to stand over me, glaring with righteous indignation. The veins in his neck appeared to have swollen to ten times their size. Despite what was happening I found myself more worried about Larry’s health than the unraveling of our marriage.

“If you can’t keep your legs closed unless I’m at home to watch you, that doesn’t say very much for either of us, does it?” he screamed at me.

He knelt before me on the floor. With his right hand he tilted my chin up so my eyes were looking into his.

“How many times have you done this?”

“This is the first time,” I answered him before my breath caught on a sob. “I mean…this is the only man, but I was with him once before.”

As I watched my husband’s eyes, panic replaced some of my own anger. A shudder passed from his body into mine. It was revulsion. I could feel it.

I attempted to shrink into the sofa pillows, but my husband’s fingers bit into my flesh, not allowing me to escape even an inch from his wrath.

“Larry, you’re hurting me,” I whispered to him, my eyes again pooling with unshed tears. I felt the immediate loosening of his grip.

“Tell me everything, Mick,” he demanded, his voice low and dangerous.

“I told you two months ago.” I watched his head as he dipped it lower, his mind a mental calculator trying to recall when I’d dropped such information in his lap.

I watched as he paced around the room throwing me looks of disbelief. I saw fear in his eyes, fear that I knew was for me before he constructed a mask and dropped it into place to hide his feelings.

He walked to the other side of the room and stood there looking at me, not speaking, just a puzzled little frown tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Larry ran his hand roughly over his face, his eyes red rimmed. He was no longer glaring at me. Instead, his eyes were a mass of confusion.

“So, you’re fucking some guy, some stranger you met in a parking lot, because I was trying to protect you?”

I wanted to tell him he should be grateful to Chance, that if it had not been for him, I would probably be dead right now. I didn’t. I didn’t have a death wish and right then Larry looked as if he wanted to strangle me.

“It wasn’t like that. I needed someone to listen to me and he was there.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me? I’ve always been there when you needed me. I’ve always listened to you.”

“No, you haven’t. I talk, but you don’t hear anything I have to say. You always paint this picture in your mind of what you think I said, or what you think I want. You’ve never asked.”

I stopped at the look of pain that literally desecrated my husband’s face, leaving him looking old and beaten.

I gentled my voice. “Honey, you made me into what you wanted me to be. You wanted me to be this wonderful mother. You wanted me to want a house full of kids. When I said no, you didn’t hear me. That wasn’t your picture of me, so what I said didn’t count.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you felt this way?”

“I tried, Larry. For twenty- six years I’ve tried. But you were happy…and I made a promise to you.” My voice broke on a sob. “I couldn’t break my promise to you.”

I saw a look cross his face that was much worse than the pain I had already inflicted. I knew before he asked what he was thinking.

“Were you only with me all these years because of a promise, Mick? Did you ever love me?”

“Yes, I loved you, Larry. I still love you. This,” I waved my hands around my body, “this affair,” I could barely say the words, “had nothing to do with my not loving you. Things were happening to me, inside my head. I wanted to talk to you, but you wouldn’t let me. I tried to tell you that I needed you.”

“When, Mick?”

I could tell Larry was confused. Why shouldn’t he be? I was doing a miserable job of telling him what I meant. A horrible thought hit me. What if he’d never understood me because I’d tried to tell him in the same garbled way I was doing now. For a long time neither of us spoke. Then I heard a strangled sound coming from Larry.

“That doesn’t give you the right to destroy our marriage. And if you stayed with me because of a promise, I have to tell you, you failed miserably. You broke your promise, Mick.”

I knew what promise he meant. “I’ve had practice. I broke my promise to Viola also.”

He got up, throwing me a look of disgust. I sat on the sofa shivering as he stomped into the bedroom. The vibration of the slammed door caused me to jump. We’d settled nothing.

I sat on the sofa for over an hour, waiting for Larry to come back out. I couldn’t fix our lives alone. I wondered if he was waiting for me to come and apologize, to tell him that Chance meant nothing to me.

I realized we had not really talked about Chance. I tried hard to remember what we’d actually said and for the life of me I couldn’t remember.

Was this how it was when a marriage dissolved? The most important words in my life had been spoken by us and I didn’t know what they were.
Dear lord, help us,
I prayed.