Bitter Sweet (42 page)
Instead, let’s believe this was predestined, like our first time in Easley’s orchard. A lovely, unexpected gift.’
He drew back, studied her serene brown eyes and thought, you’re not going to ask, are you, Maggie? Not when you’ll see me again, or if I’ll call, or any of the questions I have no answers for.
‘Maggie M’girl...’ he said lovingly. ‘It’s going to be very hard for me to walk out of that door.’
‘Isn’t that the way it should be when two people become lovers?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled and brushed her jaw with his knuckles.
‘That’s the way it should be.’
They said good-bye with their eyes, with the lingering touch of his fingertips on her throat, and hers on his jacket front, then he bent, kissed her lightly, and whispered, ‘I’ll call you.’
She moved through the day vacillating between gladness and gloom. Sometimes she felt as if she radiated a halo of well-being, something shining and discernible. If a deliveryman were to come to the door, surely he would raise his eyebrows in surprise and ask, ‘What’s that?’ and she would reply, ‘Why, that’s happiness.’
Other times she was struck by a wave of melancholy. It would stop her in the middle of a task and leave her with her eyes fixed on some inanimate object on the opposite side of the room. What have you done? What’s going to happen? Where will this lead? To certain heartbreak, she was convinced, not for two people, but for three.
Do you want him to come back?
Yes.
No.
Yes, God help me, yes.
He moved through the day experiencing intermittent flashes of grievousness and guilt that would stop him cold and draw the corners of his mouth down. He’d expected it, but nothing this heavy, if he were to drive out to Mike’s, his brother would frown and ask, ‘What’s the matter?’ and Eric would undoubtedly confess his wrongdoing. He had broken his marriage vows, had wronged a wife who, in spite of her shortcomings, deserved better, and a mistress who, given the grief she’d recently suffered, also deserved better.
Are you going back there?
No.
Yes.
No.
By
he missed her so badly he called simply to hear her voice.
‘Hello,’ she answered, and his heart thrust harder in his chest.
‘Hello.’
For moments neither of them spoke, only pictured each other and ached.
“What are you doing?’ he asked at last.
“Brookie is here. She’s helping me hang a wallpaper border strip in the dining room.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment seemed to crush him. ‘Well, I’d better let you go then.’
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to tell you that I don’t think I’d better come over tonight.’
“Oh... well...’ Her pause told him little of what she felt. ‘That’s okay. I understand.’
“It isn’t fair to you, Maggie.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ she said quietly. ‘Well, just call whenever you can.’
‘Maggie, I’m sorry.’
‘Good-bye, then.’
She hung up before he could explain further.
For the remainder of the afternoon he walked around hurting. Listless. Staring. Torn. It was Wednesday.
Nancy
would be home on Friday around four; the two days stretched before him like a bleak, featureless desert, though her arrival would bring him face to face with what kind of man he was.
He went upstairs and lay down on the bed with his hands stacked under his head, his insides quivering. He thought about going out to Mike’s. Or Ma’s. Talk to somebody.
Yeah, he’d go out to Ma’s. Fill her fuel oil barrel.
He rose and took a shower, shaved and put after-shave on his face. And his chest. And on his genitals.
What’re you doing, Severson?
I’m getting ready to go out to Ma’s.
With aJier-shat, e on your pecker?
Goddamn you!
Come on, man, who ‘re you kidding?
He slammed the bottle down and muttered a curse, but when his eyes lifted, the same alter ego regarded him from the mirror.
Go there one more time and you’ll go there a hundred, then you’ll have a full-blown affair on your hands. Is that what you want?
I want to be happy.
You think you’ll be happy married to one woman and consorting with another?
No.
Then go to Ma’s.
He went to Ma’s and stalked in without knocking. She tamed from the kitchen sink, wearing maroon double-knit slacks and a yellow sweatshirt, sporting a green pickerel leaping after a lure.
‘Well, look who’s here,’ she said.
‘Hi, Ma.’
‘You musta smelled my Swiss steak dear in town.’
‘I just stopped for a minute.’
‘Yeah, sure, and a snake’s got toenails. I’ll peel another couple of potatoes.’
He filled her fuel oil burner. And ate a chunk of Swiss steak and a mound of mashed potatoes and some detestable green beans (these as penance). Then he sat on her lumpy sofa and watched one game show and an hour and a half of championship wrestling (an even greater penance) and one detective show, which brought him safely to
.
Only then did he stretch and rise and wake Ma, who sat slumped in her favourite rocker with the pickerel folded in half across her flaccid breasts.
‘Hey, Ma, wake up and go to bed.’
‘Whuh?...’ she muttered, the corners of her lips wet.
‘Mmm... You going?’
‘Yeah. It’s
. Thanks for the supper.’
‘Yeah, yeah...’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Yeah, g’night.’
He got into the old whore and drove at the speed of a glacier, telling himself if he burned up another half hour, by the time he reached Fish Creek it would be too late to drop by Maggie’s house.
When he got to town he told himself he’d only head up Cottage Row to see if her lights were on.
When he drew abreast of her snowbanks he told himself he was only crawling along so he could peer down the path as he flashed past, make sure she was all right.
When he caught a quick glimpse of lights in the lower level, he ordered himself, keep going, Severson! Just keep your ass going!
Twenty feet beyond her house he braked and sat motionlessly in the. middle of the road staring at the tip of someone’s roof and a dark dormer window. Don’t do it. I’ve got to.
The hell you do.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered as he slammed the truck into reverse, flung an arm along the back of the seat and careened backward at thirty miles an hour. He swerved to a halt at the top of her sidewalk, killed the engine and sat studying Maggie’s kitchen windows between the high snowbanks - pale gold ingots of light drifting from somewhere deeper in the house. Why wasn’t she asleep by now? It was going on eleven, and any woman with a lick of sense would have stopped waiting for a man by this time of night. And any man with an ounce of respect would leave her alone.
He threw open the truck door and slammed it vehemently behind himself, bounded down the steps and arrived breathless at her back door. Angrily, he knocked, then waited on the dark verandah feeling as if someone had driven a wedge into his larynx, watching for her approach through the darkened kitchen.
The door opened and she stood in a veil of night shadows wearing a long quilted robe.
He tried to speak, but couldn’t - apology and appeal trapped in his throat. In silence they confronted one another, their own vulnerability and this terrible, magnificent greed they felt for one another. Then she moved, hurtling against him with a faint, lost cry, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him as women kiss men who have returned from war.
‘You came.’
‘I came,’ he repeated, lifting her free of the verandah floor with her feet trailing inches above his as he hauled her over the threshold.. He elbowed the door shut with such force the lace curtain caught in the weather stripping. In the semidarkness they kissed, openmouthed and ravenous, abandoning grace and reserve, clawing at clothing and dropping it where it fell. Their impatience was a lightning bolt carrying them from one forbidden pleasure to the next - a puddle of clothing upon a kitchen floor; untrammelled seeking; an almost manic compulsion to find, touch, taste everywhere; his mouth upon her breast, belly and mons; hers upon him; her back against the kitchen door, his arm clamping her waist and hauling her down to her knees atop their discarded clothing, a frantic coupling and the racking of limbs, accompanied by the baring of teeth and their rasping cries of release.
Then two people panting and wilted, waiting for their breath to return.
It ended where it had begun, beside the kitchen door, with both of them astounded by their own abandon, still trying to sort through the maelstrom of emotions.
He fell to his back, watched her roll away and sit beside him running a shaky hand through her hair. The only light in the kitchen came from the opposite end of the house, barely illuminating her silhouette. A lump of clothing bored into his waist and a cold draught threaded in beneath the door.
‘You said you weren’t going to come over tonight,’ she said, almost defensively.
‘And you said, “okay,” as if it didn’t matter one way or another.’
‘It mattered. I was afraid to let you know how much.’
‘Now I know, don’t I?’
She felt like weeping. Instead she got up and padded to the small lavatory around the corner.
He lay where she’d left him while the light snapped on.
The water ran. He sighed, then got up and followed. He stopped in the open doorway and found her standing naked, staring at the sink. It was a tiny room with an angled ceiling, papered in dusty blue with a border strip following the ceiling. It contained only the sink and the toilet, on opposite walls. He spied a box of tissues and moved inside to stand back to back with her, tending to necessities. ‘I didn’t want to come back tonight. I went out to Ma’s and stayed there late enough that I thought you’d be in bed. If the house had been dark I never would have stopped.’
‘I didn’t really want you to come over either.’
She turned on the water and cupped some against her face. He flushed the toilet, then turned to study her rounded back bent over the sink. She reached up blindly, found a towel and buried her face in it while he stroked the hollow between her shoulder blades and asked, ‘Maggie, what’s wrong?’
She straightened and drew the towel to her chin, meeting his eyes in the mirror, an oval mirror mounted high on the wall, cutting off their reflections at shoulder level. ‘I didn’t want it to be this way.’
‘What way?’
‘Just... just lust.’
‘It’s not just lust.’
‘Then why did I think about it so much today? Why did that just happen in the kitchen, just what I thought would happen if you came back?’
‘You didn’t enjoy it?’
‘I loved it. That’s what scares me. Where was the spiritual element?’
He fitted his body close behind hers, slipped both arms below her breasts and dropped his lips to her shoulder.
‘Maggie, I love you.’
She aligned her arms with his. ‘I love you, too.’
‘And what happened in the kitchen was the result of frustration.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be very good at this.., having an affair.
I’m already an emotional wreck.’
He lifted his head. For moments they studied one another’s troubled eyes.
‘May I stay here tonight?’
‘Do you think that’s wise?’
‘You didn’t question wisdom last night.’
‘I’ve done some thinking since then.’
‘So have I. That’s why I went out to Ma’s.’
‘And I’m sure we came up with the same conclusions.’
‘Nevertheless, I want to stay.’
He spent that night and the next in her bed, and on Friday morning when he prepared to leave, the same pall fell upon them. They stood at the back door, his hands on her upper arms, hers at her sides. She had armoured herself by assuming a mood of dispassion.
‘I’ll see you next week,’ he told her.
‘All right.’
‘Maggie, I...’ He struggled again with his great inner conflict. ‘I don’t want to go back to her.’
‘I know.’
He felt some confusion at her lack of dinging. She remained cool, almost remote, lifting tearless brown eyes, while he was the one who felt like crying.
“Maggie, I need to know what you’re feeling.’
‘I love you.’
‘Yes, I know that, but have you thought about the rest of your life? About ever marrying again?’
‘ Sometimes. ‘
‘About marrying me?’ he asked simply.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Would you? If I were free?’
She paused, afraid to answer, because in the last three days she’d had time to consider how rash this had all been, and where it was taking her life.