Marshmallows for Breakfast (20 page)

“After I left that night we met I got to the car,” he was saying “which was parked all the way down on the other side of the city, and decided I had to come back to get your number. I was buzzing after talking to you. I hadn't laughed so much in so long I wanted to see you again. I got to the top of the stairs, and then realized what I was doing. How I couldn't be doing what I was thinking of doing because I wasn't free, you probably weren't free and I couldn't be your friend. I couldn't be just your friend. So I left again.”

In my ears I could hear my breath, soft but ragged. I clung tighter to the sofa, closed my eyes, hoping to hide there. Trying to hide in the dark because this vehicle had gone off the cliff and was clinging on by the caught edge of the number plate. Any sudden movements and I'd be lost.

“When I saw your face earlier, when you walked into the garden and turned around and left, I realized that you felt the same. It wasn't a one-way thing.”

He gently rested his forehead on mine. My eyes were still closed but the air went out of my body. “And for the record, this, he whispered, this is attraction. He lowered his head further, gently brushed his nose against mine. “Pure attraction.” I lifted my head and slowly, gently, his lips grazed over mine. I gasped silently. Gradually his lips pressed down onto mine and his hand came up to my face. I let go. Let go of the last edge keeping me on the cliff let go of the sofa and laced my arms around him, ran my fingers up his neck, over the soft bristles of hair at the back of his head as I let him kiss me. I kissed him back. We stood under the stars kissing as though this was just about me and him.

Gabrielle's car was crawling slowly along towards the A23; we'd been in traffic forever. She hadn't asked much as I told her about Will. I was a little disorientated—talking and thinking about Sydney made me forget where I was. In Sydney that would happen sometimes—I'd be watching a British soap or film, reading a magazine or book, and then I'd look up and for a moment think I was in England. In London. That Sydney was a mirage. I, sometimes in the midst of the Will thing, would wish Sydney was a mirage.

We went back to his friend's place, which was near Evangeline's house.

He walked around turning on lights and I sat on the sofa wondering what had happened to me. I never did this. I never went back to a virtual stranger's place. I felt so safe with him though, like I'd known him all my life. He brought me a beer and asked if I wanted a glass. “Hadn't you noticed, I'm not the glass type,” I said. He laughed.

He cracked open the cold, condensation- covered can and offered it to me.

It was such a small, simple thing that changed everything for me. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for me. The simple act of opening the can showed that in that moment, in doing such an insignificant thing, he thought of me.

We fit together. His body, solid and warm, moved enough for me to mold myself against him; my upper body slipped perfectly into the nook of his arm; his head fit into the once- empty space between my shoulder and jaw.

We didn't have sex, we didn't make love. We didn't take any clothes off. We lay on top of the covers, talking. Sometimes giving each other long deep kisses, but mostly, just talking.

“We didn't sleep together any other time we saw each other. And we didn't really see each other that much—six times in total,” I told Gabrielle. “I tried so hard but I couldn't just walk away.

“We'd stop contact for months at a stretch and I'd stop thinking about him every day. And then something would happen or I'd see a book or watch something or listen to some music and I'd want to share it with him. I'd write him an e-mail but never send it.” I had hundreds of e-mails that I'd written to Will and never sent. They were like a diary of things I'd been up to.

I stared at the open road, the cars rolling in front of us. “After a few months of no contact one of us would crack. It was usually me. I'd send a couple of lines and it'd start again. The daily e-mails, the occasional text. The imagining. The guilt. The deep, unrelenting guilt. Then, about eighteen months later, his wife found out.”

She found out from an e-mail.

Not from one of
those
types of e-mails. We didn't send those types of e-mails—the ones that dripped in sex and longing and fantasizing. Not anymore. And he'd deleted all evidence that we ever had. Only a handful of e-mails had been like that. Only a few suggested this thing between us was physical. Most of it was banal and ordinary. Sharing things about our lives, about everyday things. With us, we had no past together, we had no future together, so we talked about the present we spent apart. We shared what was happening, living for the moment. Besides, we were hardly ever in constant contact. Nei ther of us could handle it. Not for anything more than a few days. What was the point when we weren't going to be together? The e-mail she read said:

Sooo, tell me the best thing about your day.

That was all. Those nine words were the ones that revealed she had been sharing her husband's affections. She read that e-mail and she knew. I can't imagine what that felt like. What she did next. If she turned off the computer, if she started screaming inside, if she shouted at the computer screen and burst into tears or if she started plotting the revenge that would come later. I know she didn't call him and demand he come home. She didn't scream at him the second he walked in the door. She waited until they'd eaten dinner, the children had been bathed, read to and put to bed. She waited until they both had a glass of wine in their hands and had collapsed on the sofa before she asked him about it.

Maybe she'd been so numb that she hadn't even thought of it until they sat down together, glasses of expensive wine in their hands, feet up on the table, television carrying on in the background. That was the moment when she could turn to him and reveal that those nine words I'd typed without thinking weeks earlier had told her everything.

Will and his wife (I don't speak her name and I don't think her name, I'm not worthy of using it, of being that intimate with her) hadn't had a proper conversation in weeks, maybe months, possibly years. It'd been months since she had bothered to ask him how his day was, weeks and weeks since he'd asked her, but someone else, a woman he had never mentioned, a woman she'd never met, cared enough about him to ask. Another female had the luxury, the freedom from the day-today of running a house, raising a family, being with him through all sorts of daily dramas, to ask him about his day That's why she knew. There were no other e-mails, no texts, nothing except those nine words that told her part of him was elsewhere, with someone else.

“Are you sleeping with someone else?” she asked him when she turned to him over wine.

He replied without hesitation, “No.” It was the truth, he wasn't sleeping with someone else, he hadn't slept with someone else. “Not at all.”

She must have been scared then. Terror must have descended upon her—possibly like a heavy stone, possibly like the oppressive fluttering of a tonne of feathers—because she asked the next question: “Are you in love with someone else?” She probably whispered those words, held her breath as she waited for the answer, waited to hear if life as she knew it was over. Waited for a response that was never going to come.

Will didn't want to lie to his wife by saying no, and he didn't want to hurt her by saying yes. Being an expert at ignoring things he didn't want to deal with, Will hadn't yet accepted that he'd committed the ultimate betrayal by opening his heart to someone else. That he'd allowed another woman to slip into the places where his wife used to live. He had done something he could only have done if he was in love. He hadn't admitted that to himself, he wasn't going to wound his wife by making her the first person he acknowledged this to. So he said nothing. He looked away and said nothing.

She said, “Can't you get anything right? If you wanted revenge, you're meant to fuck someone else, not fall for them.” And then she asked, “How long?”

And he said, “Too long. Even one day is too long. I'm sorry.”

“Did you do it to get back at me?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” he replied. “I didn't go out looking for someone or something else. After I found out what had happened I couldn't talk to you without wanting to shout at you. I didn't want to shout at you, so it got simpler to keep it all in. And this thing happened because I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't concentrating on making things work with us.”

“Do you want to make this work?” she asked.

“More than anything,” he replied. He tried to take her hand but she shrank away, didn't want him to touch her. He was upset as he told me this.
What did you expect?
I wanted to ask him.
Did you think she'd throw her arms around you and say it was fine? You've done the worst thing imaginable after hurting one of your children. Did you really think she'd let you touch her?

“You can't see her again,” she told him.

“I don't see her. I don't speak to her. We only occasionally e-mail each other.”

Will thought saying that was OK. That he'd put his wife's mind to rest about it all. What he'd done was the opposite. What he'd actually said was, “Even though I have no contact with her, she's always on my mind. She's always there with me, she climbs into bed with us at night. She's there when we make love. She's with me in my fantasies.” What he should have said was, “It's completely over. I ended it because she wasn't you. I never slept with her and it's over. I don't know why she's e-mailing me.” As a woman, his wife would have noticed the absence of this, she would have noticed that he didn't say it was over. She would have noticed and she would have stored it up in her mind, in her heart. It would have been one of the things that motivated her to do what she did.

“We go for counseling,” she said. “Emergency counseling. I know you didn't want to before, but now we have to. If you want this to work then you have to be willing to do anything to make that happen.”