The Brevity of Roses (11 page)

“I lied,” he said. “I deceived you.” He paused as if waiting for her to say something, but all she could manage was a weak nod. He exhaled sharply and his shoulders sagged as though his confession were a weight he could no longer bear. “When I told you I would not be faithful to you—” Jalal shook his head as if dumbfounded, and began again. “I swam laps that day until I thought I had it all worked out, but the minute I said those words, I realized what a stupid risk I had taken. What if I had read you wrong? What if, at that moment, you decided to be honest with me, and told me to hit the road? But no, you were still playing it cool, and my threat remained valid.”

Jalal swatted his wind-tangled hair off his face and stepped closer to her. He reached out to take her hand in his. Her breath came in tiny, shallow sips. Opposing wishes screamed in her mind.
Tell me now; tell me never
.

He told her, “I have never been unfaithful to you.”

She stood immobile for several seconds, then gulped air and sank back against the open car door. Never
.
He said never. He was all hers. This dream of a man standing before her had never cheated on her.

He looked puzzled. “Meredith?”

She had shifted her weight, in preparation to lean forward to kiss him, when the coin flipped. Never? Never! There was no other woman? Anger surged over relief and she jerked her hand free of his. “You son of a bitch! How could you let me think you were with another woman?”

“Because I am a selfish son of a bitch.”

“Oh. Well, then …” Her words were iced with sarcasm.

“I deserve whatever you want to say to me, Meredith.”

She closed her eyes, unable to stand the sight of him, but almost immediately her eyes flew open in disbelief. “No! Wait! Are you telling me you were lying when you warned me you would be unfaithful? Why would you
do
that, Jalal? That doesn’t make sense!”

He hung his head, turned away, and took a step toward the house. “I am freezing. Could we go inside?”

Meredith grabbed the pastry box from the car and slammed the door. She knew Jalal well enough to know he was going inside to make another damned pot of tea. By the time she set the box on the counter, kicked off her shoes, and stripped off her jacket, he had the kettle on. She watched him set out the tea, spices, sugar, and milk as though preparing for some sort of magic trick. Her wave of anger started to ebb. “Jalal, I believe you didn’t cheat on me while you were away, but I don’t understand why you would want me to think you—” And just like that, she knew. There was reason in his madness. Disbelief tussled with shock, silencing her for a moment. “You were hedging your bet.”

Jalal stilled his movements, but hesitated before turning to face her, and even then, he didn’t speak. He only searched her face like a child awaiting punishment, making her feel as though his admission of guilt had somehow transferred the burden to her. Her anger roared back. “Do you have any idea what you put me through, just to protect your ego? You completely upended my life!”

And how is that a bad thing?
Again, her anger receded. Not a single thing had Jalal changed for the worse. She went to him and, wrapping her arms around his waist, rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me.”

Jalal held her close, his voice low, as his explanation rushed out. “I felt from the first day I would be happy spending the rest of my life with you, but I also felt you had acted on impulse and would soon regret it. I hoped you would let me stay long enough to endear myself to you, but each day I feared I would see a sign you were losing interest. Then I had the crazy idea that when that happened, I could leave you for a while, and when I asked if I could return and you said no, well … I could tell myself it was only because you thought I was unfaithful. You were rejecting the act, not me. I could save face. I could lie to myself.”

“But I never lost interest, Jalal.”

“No. You did not.” He loosened his hold and, with a finger under her chin, tilted her face up. “You seemed happy to have me in your life, but that was not enough. We were still playing a game. I wanted more than that. I needed you to want me. I wanted you to need me.”

“Of course, I want—”

Shaking his head, he pressed a finger against her lips to silence her. “No,” he said. “There is no ‘of course’. I have spent the last five weeks trying to figure out why you stayed emotionally shut down so long after your husband’s death.” She opened her mouth, and he quickly shushed her again. “Finally, I thought I understood. Meredith the poet had been beaten down, turned cold by some selfish brute of a husband, and did not know how to let herself love again. Then this morning, you told me you slept with me because I reminded you of someone—someone other than your husband, I presume—and now, I am confused again. I have thought about this all day. All the possibilities. I am tired of guessing. Why will you not let me know the real you?”

“I’m sorry, Jalal, I—” They both jumped when the screeching kettle cut her off, and then they laughed, as though the kettle’s release of steam had vented some of the tension between them. “Fix the tea,” she said, “and bring it into the living room.”

Meredith curled up at one end of the sofa to wait. Jalal had finally come around to asking the questions she feared all along. Blindsided by his confession, she had forgotten for a few minutes that she needed to make her own. She knew enough pop psychology to realize that what she blurted out this morning was intentional, even if subconscious. She had misdirected him once, withheld enough of the truth to deceive him into blaming Stephen for what she had done to herself, and today, with that slip, she misled him again.

Jalal walked in, carrying two steaming mugs and handed one to her. “I want nothing to eat just now,” he said. “Do you?”

“No. Just tea. What happened to your little glass cups?”

“I think we will have a long talk, and I do not want to be interrupted for refills.” He sat down at the opposite end of the sofa and stretched his legs out, tucked his feet beside her hip, then motioned for her to stretch her legs out along his. She did. As if to test his current status, he cupped his free hand around her right calf, then smiled when she didn’t pull away. They were yin and yang on white leather.

“So,” he began, “you were not as impulsive as I thought that first day. You sought to relive a moment from your past.”

She shook her head. “What I said this morning was true, but it was not the truth.”

He frowned. “I do not understand.”

Meredith took a breath. “His name was Ravi. You resemble him in your coloring, your hair. I fell in love with him, but I wasn’t hoping to ‘relive a moment’ because I never slept with him.”

Jalal shot her a questioning look, but she made him wait while she sipped her tea and collected her thoughts, unsure she could explain what Ravi had meant to her. “He was Stephen’s assistant for a year. And, like you, he had a sharp wit.” She paused, unable to keep from smiling at the memory. “Ravi defused quite a few tense moments with his humor. When he was around, I felt … better about myself. I think Stephen resented that Ravi could make me laugh.”

Jalal’s face hardened at the mention of Stephen. She had no choice but to tell him the truth about her marriage. She didn’t deserve his sympathy.

“You once asked me to tell you about Stephen. I said he was intelligent, intense, a brilliant anthropologist. All that is true, and yes,” she said, “maybe because he was older than me, he could be overbearing, and even a bit selfish at times, but he was never the brute you imagined him to be.” For a moment, while she focused on a time and place existing only in her memory, Jalal faded from view, and when she continued, her voice carried a hint of wonder over an echo of pain. “Stephen loved me. I never told you that. He loved me. He practically worshipped me.”

Jalal said, “But your poems—”

“Were written by a woman yearning for love?” She gave him a rueful smile and looked down at her left hand, where she had worn a wedding ring all those years, while never fully accepting Stephen as her husband. Had never quite given him her heart. Had never given him the child he wanted so badly, because that would have tied her to him forever. “And all the while, I
had
love,” she said. “What kind of person does that make me?”

“You cannot force yourself to—”

“Thirteen
years
, Jalal! I stayed married to a man I didn’t love for thirteen years. How selfish is that? Stephen could have been free to love someone who could love him back.”

“He loved you.”

Meredith shook her head in frustration. “Why won’t you understand? I did not love
him
!”

For several minutes, they said nothing. The only sound in the room was the faintest whisper of skin against skin as Jalal trailed his thumb up and down her right calf. He seemed to gaze inward. Her own thoughts were a mixture of remorse at failing Stephen and sorrow that the dream she had been living with Jalal would now end.

“I do not believe that is true,” said Jalal, finally. “Maybe you lost that romantic in love feeling, but you cared for him. You respected him. You worked side by side with him doing something both of you were passionate about.”

Her eyes burned, but she ordered herself not to cry. She set her cup on the floor and drew her knees up to her chest. With her forehead pressed against them, she struggled to take even breaths, to keep control. Jalal didn’t know her—not the real her—and now, as though he had never pushed her to face the truth, he refused to believe it himself. Because this wasn’t the truth he wanted. Because, if he accepted this truth, he would see her through different eyes. He would despise her. But she could no longer deny it; she had said the ugly words aloud, spoken the truth at last.
Some of it.

She claimed no responsibility for Stephen’s death—her guilt didn’t extend that far—but she had denied him a legacy, made sure that no part of him lived on. She had given him nothing. Her breathing hitched, and as her face crumpled, a low keening rose in her chest.

In one motion, Jalal set down his own cup and leaned forward, reaching for her. He pulled her into his arms. “I wouldn’t give him a child,” she sobbed.

He held her, lying beside her while she wept.

When Meredith woke, Jalal was sitting on the floor by the sofa, reading. She reached out and touched his hair.

He took hold of her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I made some soup,” he said, “and after we eat, we will return to Coelho.”

“I don’t want to leave here.”

“We will come here whenever you want, but tonight, I need to show you something there.”

Forty minutes later, she peered anxiously into the darkness ahead as the car wound through the mountains. The road before them seemed to exist only as far as the headlights shone. Though she knew it was irrational, she couldn’t still the fear that just outside those beams something huge and solid—a stalled semi, a mountain—waited for them to slam into it at full force. They rode in silence. At dinner, Jalal had asked her not to even think of their conversation earlier. They needed a breathing period, he said. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and she didn’t believe he had either.

“Jalal, I don’t—”

“No! Not until we get home. Turn on the radio, or better yet, tell me what you have planned for the garden.”

Home. He had called her house home. Meredith distracted herself with the implication of that. Twenty minutes later, they walked into the living room, where Jalal took her photo album off the shelf and led her to the sofa. “You brought me here to look at my own photos?”

“No,” he said, “I brought you here to
see
them.” He thumbed through the album, stopping on the first page of snapshots taken of her and Stephen.

She closed her eyes. “Jalal, please, I really don’t want to look at these tonight.”

He took her hand in his. “While you slept this afternoon, I thought about what I had seen in these photos before. What I saw, but did not want to see.”

Curious, she opened her eyes.

He paged through, pointing. “Here and here and here. See how happy Stephen looks in all these?”

She still refused to look. “People always smile for photos.”

“Do they? Maybe children do—usually.” He leafed back to the beginning of her album. “See, here you are with your little friends, grinning like fools … and here, another. Were you a happy child, Meredith?”

She hesitated. What was he asking? She had been a healthy child, a good student, pretty and popular. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Now, see these photos of your parents? Please look, Meredith. You have several family portraits in here. But, except for the baby shots, where is your smile?”

“I smiled,” she insisted, but as she compared the photos, she saw that Jalal was right. Neither she, nor her parents smiled. Suddenly, she recalled one of those sittings, remembered feeling stiff and anxious as the photographer tried to tease a smile from her, but she had forgotten why she wouldn’t oblige.

“Did you love your parents?”

“Of course I did! My parents were highly respected by everyone, and—”

“I did not ask if you ‘highly respected’ your parents.”

“That’s enough!” She pushed the book away and jumped to her feet. “I don’t see the purpose of your questions, and I don’t want to answer any more of them.”

Jalal closed the album and laid it aside. He sat quietly for a moment, leaning forward with head bowed and forearms resting on his knees. Finally, he stood up and reached for her hand. “Stephen was happy because he knew you loved him.”

She said nothing, but she met his gaze. Jalal’s assertion inched through her mind trying to find a place to fit, trying to light some dark spot. She shook her head. Jalal was wrong.

He sighed and squeezed her hand, bringing her back to the present. “Can you forgive me for letting you think I was unfaithful to you?”

Meredith stared at him, not daring to open her mouth, not because she was angry, but because she struggled not to smile. His logic escaped her. She had taken him back believing he had cheated on her, yet he thought she might not forgive him now that she knew otherwise? “You’re a little hard to stay angry with.”