Rift (19 page)

“Who said I wanted to talk? I don't remember initiating this conversation.”

Crystal doesn't say anything for a few moments. I feel her eyes burning into my side, but still I don't turn around.

“It scares the hell out of you, doesn't it?” she asks. “To admit your weakness. To reveal your fear.”

“That's really brilliant,” I say. “Did you read that in
Cosmopolitan
?”

“Poke fun at me if it makes you feel better. But we wouldn't be having this conversation right now if you'd already had it with your wife.”

Like a surgeon's scalpel she makes her incisions, carefully but quickly, until the skin is laid open, the damaged organ exposed. I turn around, finally, but cannot hold eye contact with her.

“I've known Misty for eighteen years. We used to talk like brother and sister. Nothing was sacred, no secrets, no lies. After Luke . . . every year it gets worse. We still have polite conversations, but we don't . . . we don't talk.”

“What don't you talk about?”

“Our problems.”

“Like?”

“Like the family we never had.”

“Is it Misty or you?”

“Misty.”

“And you wanted to have children.”

I'm struggling to fight away tears again. “More than anything in the world.”

The questions stop firing for a moment, and I use the reprieve to collect myself. Crystal might as well be pulling the very teeth from my jaws.

“I bet it hurts Misty as much as you. It's her body.”

“She was crushed, apologized for failing me, for being defective. Offered to divorce me. I assured her a thousand times that I didn't hold it against her, and eventually she went on with her life. But I didn't. I pretended to, but I didn't.”

“She must've known by the way you changed afterward.”

“We were both offered antidepressants after Luke's death. Misty didn't bother, but I took them and they helped at first—made the symptoms go away, at least. But they couldn't touch the source.”

“If you wanted kids so badly, why didn't you take Misty's offer of a divorce? Or why not a surrogate mother with your sperm?”

“A surrogate would make her feel like a third wheel. And what would you think if your husband left you because you weren't fertile? I couldn't hurt Misty like that.”

“Don't you think it hurts worse being married fifteen years to someone who holds a grudge against you?”

“I never told her that.”

“But she knows, Cameron. I promise you she knows. You can pretend all you like, even be good at it, but this grudge . . . it makes you treat her differently than before. Women are sensitive to this. She's known for a while, I'm sure.”

“If that's true, why doesn't she say anything? Why stay with me for so long?”

“The same reason you've stayed. Because it's easier to hurt a little every day than all at once.”

Hearing such a thing spoken aloud is finally too much. Two days of invasive fear have dislodged the pain I have tried to ignore, that I have kept buried for so long. My mind spins, overheats, squeezes out tears that blur my vision, and I stand, ready to leave, ready to head for the bathroom or some other place where I can lock a door behind me. But Crystal grabs my arm.

“Come on, Cameron. Don't leave now.”

The sobs shake my body, so deep I can barely catch my breath. At first I try to control them, aware that real men are not supposed to break down and cry in front of others, but even this ancient filter is stripped away by the power of my pain. I am exposed, a bare nerve standing in the great room of this secluded mountain cabin, and jerk involuntarily when Crystal puts her arms around me.

“I love my wife,” I say between breaths. “I just don't know if we belong together anymore.”

         

Later, I'm lying on the sofa again. Crystal sits behind me, alternately rubbing my shoulders and temples. An eye of calm has settled into the storm of my emotions, but I know it is only a matter of time before the winds and rain return.

“I don't know why I've ignored it for so long. It seems obvious when I tell you now.”

“Probably because it's hard to imagine your life without her. You can't remember anything else.”

“And because I still love her. I don't know many people who've voluntarily ended a loving marriage.”

“Have you considered adoption?”

“I thought about it before, but it . . . I don't know. Adoption is great for a lot of people, but I just want a child of my own. That is part of me. I suppose that's really selfish.”

“Yes, it is kind of selfish.”

“But this isn't just about having children. The gulf between Misty and me is much more than that now. We seemed to . . . I don't know . . . take different paths after Luke died. On the surface nothing seemed to change, but beneath that we grew into different people. We lost our desire to be intimate. And I think, in a good marriage anyway, the opposite is supposed to happen. Over time you should slowly grow more into the same person, you know? Your likes and dislikes. Your attitudes. Political views. Even your personalities seem to merge into one over time.”

“I know what you're saying,” Crystal agrees. “My grandparents even look like each other.”

“Exactly. To me, that's part of what marriage is. And I'm not sure if Misty and I have that. I think maybe we had a window after Luke died to either grow closer or farther apart, and I don't think we picked the right one. I'm afraid that even though I love her more than anything . . . I'm afraid love isn't necessarily enough anymore.”

Crystal doesn't answer that, and I don't know what to do with the things I just said. Why am I addressing these issues only now? Does it have anything to do with the beautiful woman sitting beside me? Am I convincing myself that my marriage isn't working so that I can—

“What are you thinking?” Crystal asks me.

The lie comes easily. “I'm wondering if it would be worse to split now, after all these years, than to stay together? I'm thirty-five. I'm getting old.”

“You're not that old,” Crystal answers. “And you don't have to date someone your age anyway.”

“I'm not going to hit the bars looking for nineteen-year-olds. Besides, they wouldn't look at me anyway.”

“I promise you there are plenty of young women who are mature and who are attracted to guys in their thirties and forties. We don't all want to date twenty-five-year-old pricks who don't have any clue what to do with that club hanging between their legs.”

Crystal's hands find my head again, this time exploring my hair with her fingers.

“You don't look thirty-five, Cameron. You still have all your hair, and it helps that you work out. Women notice that sort of thing.”

Just like that my blood simmers, surging to my dormant organ. I relish the feeling and hate myself for it. What else can a man feel when a gorgeous, intelligent woman runs her fingers through his hair and tells him how handsome he is? Married or not, what else can he feel?

Life is organic. Humans are chemical creatures like all others. Our conscious, reasoning minds may separate us, in part, from our wilder, less-evolved animal relatives, but don't be fooled. We haven't come as far as we think. When Crystal strokes my hair with her fingers and speaks those words to me, I don't choose my reaction. Sensory input is received. Chemicals are stirred, dispensed. My response is predicated upon them.

Now I have a choice—unlike the horse or the dog or the duck, I have a choice—but really, how much of the decision is left to me?
Morals!
others may implore.
They make the choice for you!
And who am I to question such common sense? You can't just sleep around, right? But maybe, instead of choice, what we really have is a continuum. The continuum is this: How successfully can I fend off a sexual opportunity presented before me?

To illustrate, let's examine two unrealistic examples:

Say I've been married for three years, have a son who is two years old, and I'm in the hospital delivery room with my wife, who screams my name as she births the first of our twin daughters. A woman walks into the room. I took her to the senior prom eight years ago. She's gained forty pounds and wears polyester pants that stretch across her expanding ass. She turned me down for sex that night, after the prom dance, and has come to offer herself to me now. Do I turn her down? Of course. This is a no-brainer.

Let's try again. This time I'm nineteen years old, second semester of college. I haven't been on a date in six months, and yet my roommate, Jake, buys condoms more often than toilet paper. In fact, he's at the lake right now, in the boat he borrowed from his dad, making his own waves with some sorority babe he met last week. I'm on the sofa watching
Star Trek.
Then a naked
Playboy
model enters the room and sits next to me on the sofa. Her perfume is exotic. Thick maroon lipstick. Heavy eye makeup. Perfect body. Gorgeous skin. Everything is waxed, everything except that narrow landing strip. She says she'd like nothing more than to do me all night long, however I like, except she talks dirty when she says this. Uses the word
fuck
five or six times. Anything I want, she says. Do I say no? Is there even a question?

These scenarios will never happen, of course, but we can use such examples as the bookends of our scale, our freezing and boiling. Everything else falls in between. Maybe it seems like a choice, but really, when sex is presented to a man, he either does or doesn't depending on where he currently stands in that continuum. Is he married? Engaged? Just dating? Single? Is he happy with his female partner? Is she anywhere nearby? Will she ever find out? How powerful is his desire for this potential sexual partner? And yes, how strong are his morals? All these factors, and a hundred more I haven't thought of, go into the chemical computer and out pops an answer.

Men and women don't always understand each other because our minds, our bodies—our chemical balances—are different. Women go through cycles that confuse and anger men. Their desires differ from ours, or occur with unpredictable frequency. They abandon intelligent, sensitive men for those with large biceps or bankrolls or for those who exude power and confidence. Should they be judged for these things? On this earth, after all, who can say what is right and wrong?

No one can.

No one.

And Crystal behind me, her head now resting on my shoulder. I could reach for her. I could take her face in my hands and draw her to me, her lips toward mine, and she would climb around me, on top of me. I would lift her shirt off and expose those beautiful breasts, her precious skin, and her soft heat would be resting upon something hard of mine. We would begin to move, slowly at first, and I would reach for her pants, bring down the zipper, her panties, tiny, almost unseen, and her smell, so soft, so moist, and I could . . . I could . . .

“I think I'll call Misty,” I blurt. Like a spring, I'm off the sofa, looking for a telephone. I spot one on a bar in the kitchen.

“No, Cameron!” Crystal cries. She appears before me and reaches for the telephone.

“I have to! I have to hear her voice and let her know I'm okay.”

“You can't! They'll trace the call!”

“But—”

“No buts.” She takes the phone from me, replaces it on the bar. “Don't give yourself up after all this running. You can try calling her when we go back to Lee's house. His computer can make untraceable phone calls.”

My eyes shift away from her, to my feet, to the living room. I walk back to the sofa and collapse into it. “You're right,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. You care about your wife. You'll talk to her soon.”

“But what if she's not there? What if Batista has done something to her because of me?”

“That would be stupid, Cameron. Your phone is tapped, sure, and there is no doubt they're watching the house in case you show up. But she's the only leverage they have against you right now. There's no question she's still alive.”

I can't think of anything else to say, so I look away from her again, this time at the television set. I'm thinking about her hands in my hair again. The smell of her. Goddammit, what kind of insensitive prick am I? Worried about Misty's safety and five seconds later lusting after Crystal again? The only thing I can hear is my own breathing. Where am I in the continuum right now? Much closer to boiling than freezing, I'm sure. Misty is a thousand miles away, Crystal is my
Playboy
model, and only inches separate us.

How many men in the world could sit where I am and not try to seduce her?

This is a question for which there is no clear answer.

“What time is it?”

Crystal looks at her watch. “Almost five o'clock.”

“
Five?
You've got to be kidding.”

“You were out for a while, Cameron.”

“A while?”

“You were unconscious on the sofa for almost two hours before you started choking.”

“My God, I thought I was only out for a minute. Seconds, even.”

“I was worried sick. I nearly took you to the hospital.”

Seizures. Minutes and hours gone from my life. What have I done?

“So I guess she knows now.”

“She?”

“Misty. She was expecting me in Houston at two forty-five today. It's close to six there. What did she do when I didn't show up?”

“I imagine she demanded to know something from Batista, and he probably told her there was an unforeseen delay.”

“Then what?” I ask. “She would want to talk to me. Make sure I was all right.”

“They would have had to make something up,” Crystal points out. “Who knows what it was. But it had to be believable enough for her to wait patiently. They couldn't have her call the police.”