A Simple Thing (19 page)

“Quinn?” Susannah walked to the edge of the porch and leaned over the railing, peering through the evening shadows. “Quinn?”

A familiar figure strode up the road, with a duffel bag in one hand and one arm around Quinn's shoulders.

“Oh, my God,” Susannah said.

Matt looked up at her and smiled his familiar, lopsided smile.

“Surprise,” he said.

Chapter 19

Betty 1963

Of course she felt guilty. No matter what Bill had done or continued to do, she was his wife and she had taken vows and she had made promises she meant, and had meant to keep.

But she was tired. It wasn't just physical exhaustion, although some days the fatigue settled into her bones so deeply she could almost feel herself heavier, slower, with the weight of it. She also felt a spiritual exhaustion. Once she and Barefoot became lovers, Betty understood how thoroughly loneliness had permeated her life, like water seeping into a foundation, pooling in the deepest recesses of her soul. She had been starving and not even known it.

At first, it was hard to separate her feelings for Barefoot from the overwhelming power of her physical desire for him. She had enjoyed her sex life with Bill, but Bill was the only man she'd ever known. In the early days of their marriage, Bill had been an eager lover, and she, young and inexperienced, was simply happy if he was happy. His caresses excited her, but she was reluctant to let him see her excitement, afraid it wasn't “lady-like” and also somewhat scared by the power of her own sensuality. And she didn't know how to tell him that if he touched her just a little differently she might enjoy it more. She longed for a closeness with him that she approached but never fully realized. Bill didn't like to talk during lovemaking. And he always closed his eyes and turned his face away from hers, as though slightly embarrassed by his own urgency.

The first time Barefoot made love to her she was lying on her back in the bed and he entered her slowly, looking into her eyes the whole time. When she turned her head to the side, overwhelmed by the intensity of his gaze, he put one hand behind her neck and turned her face back to his. “Elizabeth,” he said, and the word was something precious and tender on his tongue, a whisper, a prayer. The contrast between the persona of him—lean and rock hard, every muscle carved into definition by his hours of pull-ups and running, independent and fierce, brilliant, harsh—and the reality of his tenderness with her was almost too much to bear. The first few times they made love, she wept every time, overcome with gratitude for his nurturing and relief that she could be her own self with him. He learned her body slowly and talked to her, asking if she liked to be touched here or there, gently like this or more roughly. She learned her
own
body through his touch. He told her over and over again how he loved her body, loved her long neck and firm thighs and even the curve of the little belly she'd had ever since her pregnancies. He wanted to make love to her in daylight, or by the glow of the fire, or with the lamps lit, so he could see her, revel in her.

Her happiness overwhelmed her and even, for the most part, overwhelmed her guilt. Bill had made his own choices, after all. But the guilt she couldn't escape was her guilt over what she saw as a betrayal of her son. Barefoot never touched her in Jim's presence, not even so much as placing a hand on her arm. She never spent a night with Barefoot, never made love with him in her home, even if Jim was at school, or at a friend's. But she wrestled with her demons, and Barefoot knew it.

“You're torturing yourself needlessly,” he said one morning, as they sat on his porch sipping coffee. Jim was at school, and she had driven up to Barefoot's farmhouse as soon as she finished her chores, as she did many days now. Deep pink peonies bloomed against the side of the house in the late May sunshine, and the fat buds on the apple trees were starting to unfold. Bill was due home in four weeks. It would be the first time she'd seen him since starting her affair.

“It's not Bill,” she said. She leaned back in her rocking chair and put her bare feet up on the porch railing. They had made love for more than an hour, and then she had gotten out of bed and put on one of Barefoot's button-down flannel shirts, and nothing else. This was the other thing he had taught her. He was so completely at ease in his own body that he often walked around the house naked, and he admired her body so openly that her confidence grew. Instead of getting dressed as soon as they finished making love, now she would often sit up naked in bed while he brought her tea, or slip on one of his shirts against the cold and sit out on the porch.

“At least, Bill isn't the biggest part of it. Bill and I never talked about whether or not I'd be faithful to him while he's away. I think he just assumed I would. And as you know, he broke our marital vows a few years after we were married, and God knows how many times since.” She closed her eyes and saw again the woman in the yellow dress, laughing as she leaned against the railing of the ferry, Bill's hands on her tiny waist. But the sting of that moment was gone. “Of course I feel
some
guilt about Bill—but what bothers me is Jimmy. I'm the moral center of his universe. I don't want to do something that would shake up his world.”

“I don't want that, either.” Barefoot stood opposite her, leaning against the railing, one hand caressing her foot. “You're a good mother and a good role model who has taught that boy everything that matters. You've shown him how to live by how you live, and what you value.”

“But if he found out
I
—”

Barefoot held up a hand to shush her. “Sssh. He's not going to find out. Does he know his father is unfaithful?”

“No, of course not. At least, I don't think so. I've never spoken badly about Bill to Jimmy, or in front of Jimmy.”

“I know. But your boy isn't stupid, and he's sensitive. He may not know about Bill intellectually, but I'm sure he intuits it. He knows his father spends too much time away, more than he needs to.”

She sat up. “But do you think that means he'll sense that I'm not faithful to his father? That I'm—”

“Elizabeth.” He let go of her foot and leaned forward, putting both hands on her knees and staring into her eyes. “You are confusing guilt and shame,” he said. “I understand why you feel some guilt about your relationship with me. It steps outside the boundaries of what is conventional and expected in our culture. It's okay to feel guilty over something you
do
. But this
shame
—this feeling badly about
who you are
—it's unnecessary, and it's wrong.”

He stood up, and picked up his coffee mug from where it rested on the worn board of the porch railing. He took a long sip of coffee.

“Jim is a little boy. But as he grows up he's going to think more and question more why his father is away so much, and understand just how much you have sacrificed and how hard you have worked to make a good, secure life for him. At some point, he may even be able to understand why you might have found the kind of love and respect you deserve outside of your marriage.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don't want him to know about this. He idolizes his father.”

“He's seven years old,” Barefoot said. “In nine or ten years, he will see the world differently.” He leaned back against the porch railing again. “This is very new. We don't know what might happen and where this might lead us as the years unfold. I can tell you now, though, it does not feel trivial to me.”

She looked up at him. “Nor to me.”

Silence filled the space between them for a while, but a comfortable silence. Finally Barefoot spoke. “I leave June fifteenth for India,” he said.

She felt her heart lurch. “For how long?”

“Four months.”

She took a deep breath. “That's a long time.”

“Not long, actually. I'll be gone during the summer when your husband is home. It will be easier for you.”

“Yes.” She wrapped both hands around the warmth of her ceramic mug. “What will you be doing there?”

“Researching melons and collecting seeds in India. There's concern about the blight that hit the California melon crop a few years back, and they want to see if I can find some disease-resistant varieties, maybe some wild species we haven't grown here before. I'll be hunting for some herbs in Tibet and Nepal, too.”

“Claire told me once that you had a wife in Tibet.”

Barefoot arched one eyebrow at her. “Is that so?” He smiled. “I don't, although I loved a woman there once. The Buddhists have a different view of marriage.”

“How so?”

He shrugged. “The Buddhists look at marriage as a social arrangement, not a ‘sacrament,' as we would have it here. Most Buddhist texts are silent on the subject of monogamy, although the third precept warns against engaging in ‘sexual misconduct.' And to my mind, sex between two people who love each other is not misconduct.”

“I'm not a Buddhist,” Betty said.

“Meaning what?” Barefoot said. “You think this”—he gestured toward her, and then toward himself—“is a sin?”

“No. I don't know.”

“I
know,” Barefoot said. “I believe love—real love, not lust and infatuation, but romantic love that includes deep, caring, generous, kind, and often selfless commitment—is the preeminent and transcendent moral value. It trumps the marital vow. We fulfill our deepest human potential in the context of loving relationships. That can't be wrong.”

“It doesn't
feel
wrong.”

“Trust that, Elizabeth.”

She looked up at him. “Why do you always call me ‘Elizabeth'? No one calls me that, not even my mother.”

“ ‘Betty' is a maid.” He looked into her eyes. “ ‘Elizabeth' is a queen.”

She flushed, embarrassed, and looked down into her coffee mug, then back up at him. “Oh, please. That's a little corny, isn't it?”

He shrugged. “Decide for yourself which name you prefer, and that's what I'll call you.”

She felt the fullness of his love for her, of who she was with him.

“Call me Elizabeth,” she said.

 

When Barefoot left in June they agreed not to write or talk until his return in September. She spent the late spring and early summer shearing the sheep, planting and sowing lettuces and watercress, and thinking hard about her marriage and herself. She came to realize that the problem with Bill was that he wanted something different from what he
thought
he wanted, but didn't know himself well enough to understand that. He had thought he wanted a woman who was strong and independent, someone feisty and different, but in actuality he wanted a woman who would do what
he
wanted 96 percent of the time. Living on Sounder might have been an unorthodox choice, but everything else about their marriage was as traditional as could be. She'd given up her job for Bill, moved to Sounder for Bill, spent months and months alone for Bill, and chosen to ignore—hell,
bless
—his infidelities.

And as she looked hard into the mirror of her marriage, she didn't much like what she saw of herself, either. She had given up a job she loved because Bill hadn't wanted her to work outside the home. She'd listened and encouraged him about Alaska, a place she had no desire to visit, let alone live in. She'd moved with him to Sounder even though she hadn't wanted to leave Seattle and her family. She'd taken up farming—
farming, for God's sake
. If you had told her at eighteen, the year before she got married, that she'd be getting up at four thirty every morning to take care of chickens and muck out goat stalls while wearing dirty dungarees, and then pore over seed catalogs at night, she'd have laughed at the sheer lunacy of it all. For better or for worse, she had made herself over in Bill's image of what he wanted her to be. Now,
that
felt like a sin.

Barefoot had unlocked parts of her she hadn't remembered were there. Over these past months he had asked her about authors she liked, and so she had dug out some of the novels she loved from the bottom of a duffel bag in her closet—in eight years on Sounder, she hadn't unpacked them—and she and Barefoot read aloud to each other:
How Green Was My Valley
and
Memoirs of Hadrian
and her favorite,
East of Eden
. They talked and argued about the books, and he introduced her to new books—
Siddhartha
and
The Story of the Stone
and
The Arabian Nights
.

He never stopped admiring her body, and she took a renewed pride in her sinewy strength. As a child and teenager she'd been adventurous and physical—the only one of the four kids in her family who learned to snow ski and water-ski, the fastest in every foot race. He encouraged her to try push-ups and chin-ups and lauded her increased strength. He challenged her to a push-up contest—he'd do two for every one she did—and laughed when she won. He cooked for her—fresh scallops sautéed in white wine and butter; lamb chops marinated in soy, ginger, garlic, and mint; bouillabaisse with local fish and shellfish in coconut milk. He would leave the food on her porch in a big cast-iron skillet with a lid, so she could set it on the stove to warm up before Jim got home from school.

She listened to his stories, debated religion and philosophy with him, rubbed his sore muscles with sesame oil, and didn't question his absences when she didn't see him for a few days. Sometimes she would drive up to the white farmhouse on Crane's Point and find it empty, the fireplace cold, and then she would drive home and go back to her chores and her child. Sooner or later Barefoot would appear on her back porch—sometimes within an hour or two, sometimes two or three days later. She understood that he was a wild, independent creature, and had no desire to tame him. His absences gave her a chance to pull herself together again, recover a little from the intoxication of her time with him.