The First Time (28 page)

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Why not? It’s the truth.”

“It’s just that she’s so young. There’s so much time.”

“Not always,” Mattie reminded him, her voice soft, barely audible.

The color drained from Jake’s face. “Oh God, Mattie, I’m sorry. Jeez, that was a thoughtless thing to say.” He brought his hand to his head, massaged his forehead, closed his eyes. “You know I didn’t mean—”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“It’s okay, Jake,” Mattie repeated. “You’re right—she’s young, she has time.”

“What did you say to her?”

“What could I say? That it’s all right for her mother and father to be having affairs, but not her?” Mattie held her breath. Dear God, what had she said? She hadn’t meant to tell Jake about her own infidelity. Or had she? Was this the real reason she’d summoned Jake home from his mistress’s apartment?

“It’s hardly the same thing.”

Slowly, Mattie released the air in her lungs. “No, I guess it isn’t.” Obviously what she’d said hadn’t registered.

There was a moment’s pause. Mattie watched Jake’s eyes flicker with confusion, indecision, and disbelief.

“What do you mean, it’s all right for her mother and father to be having affairs?” Jake asked, as if hearing Mattie’s remark for the first time. “What are you saying?”

“Jake, I—”

“You’re having an affair?”

Too late for denials. Besides, what was the point? “Well, I don’t know that I’d call it an affair exactly.”

“That’s where you were tonight? With another man?”

“Does that upset you?”

“I don’t know.” Jake looked stunned, as if he’d been struck over the head with a blunt object and was just about to lose consciousness.

Mattie found herself growing impatient with Jake’s reaction. “You think you’re the only one entitled to a sex life?”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t think you have any right to be upset.”

“I think I’m more surprised than anything else.”

Now Mattie was angry. “Why are you so damned surprised? You don’t think a man might find me attractive?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“As your daughter so eloquently put it the other day, I’m not dead yet!”

Jake staggered back as if he’d been pushed. “Mattie,
hold on. You have to give me a minute here to catch my breath. I just found out that both my daughter and my wife are having sex.”

“We’re
all
having sex,” Mattie interrupted, still bristling.

“We’re all having sex,” Jake repeated numbly. “You know, I think we should sit down after all.”

Mattie turned and walked into the living room, flopping down on the beige Ultrasuede sofa. Fatigue rushed to embrace her, climbing all over her, pulling on her neck and shoulders like a restless toddler. Why had she told Jake about her affair? Had it been accidental, something blurted out in the heat of the moment? Or had more sinister forces been at work? Had she deliberately been trying to shock him? To hurt him? If so, why was she so angry at his reaction? What had she been hoping to achieve? Why had she summoned him home from Honey’s apartment? What did she really want to say?

Mattie watched Jake fold his body into one of the rose-and-gold-striped chairs across from where she sat, his feet stretched out their full length in front of him. He raised his face to hers expectantly. “Do I know him?” he asked.

For an instant, Mattie didn’t know what Jake was talking about. “What? Oh. No,” she said, picturing her husband and Roy Crawford shaking hands. “It’s no one you know.”

“How did you meet?”

“Does it matter?”

Jake shook his head. “I guess not.” He looked helplessly around the room. “Do you love him?”

Mattie almost laughed. “No.” There was a long pause while Mattie tried to impose order on the random chaos of her thoughts. The inside of her head was such a jungle of dangling participles and disconnected phrases, she’d need a machete to hack her way through. Why had she summoned him home from Honey’s apartment? What was it she wanted to say to him? “Why did you come back, Jake?” she asked finally.

“You called,” he reminded her. “You said I needed to get home as soon as I could.”

“I don’t mean tonight.”

Jake closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“You were gone. You were starting a new life. And then Lisa called us into her office and announced I was—” Mattie stumbled, quickly regrouped. “Dying,” she said, forcing the word out of her mouth. “I’m dying,” she repeated, still waiting for the word to make sense.

Jake reopened his eyes, waited for her to continue.

“That’s not easy for me to say,” Mattie said. “It’s even harder for me to believe. I mean, I keep telling myself that it’s not possible. How can I be dying when I’m only thirty-six years old? I still look pretty good. I still
feel
pretty good. Just because I fall over occasionally, and my hands shake almost all the time now—”

“They shake all the time?” Jake sat up straight in his chair. “Have you told Lisa?”

“I’m telling you,” Mattie said quietly.

“But there may be something Lisa can prescribe.”

“It’s nothing I can’t handle, Jake. Besides, that’s not the point.”

“The point is, you’re experiencing difficulty—”

“The point is, I’m dying,” Mattie reiterated, the words no easier to understand, despite the repetition. “And I can’t keep denying it, much as I’ve tried. My body just won’t cooperate. Every day when I wake up, I can feel a subtle difference. I tell myself it’s my imagination, but I know it’s not. I never had that great an imagination.” She tried to laugh, but the sound threatened tears instead. “I can’t keep pretending I’m going to get better, that this is all just going to go away,” she said. “It’s too much work. I don’t have the strength.”

“No one’s asking you to pretend.”

“You ask me to pretend every time you walk out the door,” Mattie told him, her thoughts suddenly focusing, becoming clear. “Every time you call to say you’re working late at the office, or that you have to meet a client for dinner, or go in to work for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. You asked me to pretend tonight, for God’s sake,” Mattie said, her voice rising. “I can’t do it anymore, Jake. I can’t pretend any longer. That’s why I called you at Honey’s apartment. That’s why I asked you to come home.”

Jake said nothing for several long seconds. “Tell me what you want me to do,” he said finally. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Why did you come back, Jake?” Mattie asked again. “What did you think would happen? What was your objective?” A lawyer’s phrase, Mattie thought. Jake’s phrase.

“I felt I should be here,” he said, as he had said before. “For you, and for Kim. We discussed this. You agreed.”

“I changed my mind.”

“What?”

“It’s not enough,” Mattie said simply. “I need more.” She thought of Roy Crawford, felt his fingers on her breasts, between her legs. “And I’m not just talking about sex.” She pushed Roy’s hands aside. “I need more,” she repeated.

Jake opened his mouth to speak, closed it when no words were forthcoming. He shook his head, looked helplessly into his lap.

“Did you see how happy Stephanie looked last night?” Mattie asked.

“What’s Stephanie got to do with this?”

“She looked radiant,” Mattie said, ignoring his question, talking more to herself than to Jake. “I kept looking at her and thinking, I want to feel like that. Please God, just give me one more chance to feel like that. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

Jake shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

Mattie pulled her shoulders back, pushed her body to the edge of the sofa. “Let me make this simple for you, Jake. The doctor tells you you have a year to live. How are you going to spend it?”

“Mattie, this is irrelevant.”

“It’s very relevant. Answer the question, counselor. One year—how do you spend it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you spend it living with a woman you didn’t love?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he argued.

“On the contrary, it’s very simple. You married me because I was pregnant, because you’re basically a decent man who wanted to do the right thing, the same
reason you came back when we learned I was dying. And that’s good and that’s admirable and I appreciate it, I really do. But you’ve served your time. You’re paroled for good behavior. You don’t have to be here anymore.”

“You’re going to need someone to take care of you, Mattie.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Mattie insisted. “What I need is to be with someone who loves me. What I
don’t
need is to be with someone who loves someone else.”

“What do you want me to do? Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

“I want you to figure out why you came back,” Mattie said again. “Was it for me, or was it for you? Because if it was for you, so that you could feel good about yourself, then I’m not interested. I won’t let you feel good about yourself at my expense. I’m the one who’s only got a limited amount of time left to feel good, and I don’t want to spend it with someone who makes me feel bad.”

“God, Mattie, it was never my intention to make you feel bad.”

“I don’t give a shit about your intentions!” Mattie cried. “What I want is your passion. What I want is your loyalty. What I want is your love. And if I can’t have those things, if you can’t at least
pretend
to love me,” she said, that word again, “for a year or two or however long I have left, then I don’t want you here.”

And then they said nothing, each one staring straight ahead, Mattie at the windows behind Jake’s head, Jake at the Rothenberg lithograph over Mattie’s right shoulder. It was so ironic, Mattie thought. She,
who could pretend no longer, was insisting her husband do just that. For a year or two or three or five. Was it really so much to ask? Was she really so difficult to love?

Her father obviously thought so. He’d walked out of her life without so much as a backward glance. Years later, she managed to track him down to some artists’ colony in Santa Fe, and she called him longdistance and demanded to know why he’d never once tried to contact her, and all he could do was mumble something lame about it being better this way, that they should let sleeping dogs lie, an expression her mother would surely have appreciated had Mattie confided in her. But her mother had long ago deserted her as well, emotionally if not physically. And Jake had only married her because she was pregnant. Yes, they were lining up to love her.

What was she going to do if Jake got up from his chair right now and walked out the door? Call Lisa? Ask if she could borrow her husband? Or Stephanie? Ask her if Enoch had a friend? Or Roy Crawford? Just think how he’d react to anything as complicated as a wheelchair, Mattie thought, too tired to laugh. Too frightened.

It was just a matter of time before a wheelchair was exactly where she’d be. And then what? Professional caregivers were expensive. She’d only be able to afford one for so long. And the next step? A chronic care facility? A state hospital? A place where she could be abandoned and ultimately forgotten. No one wanted to be around a woman whose every gasp was a reminder of their own mortality. At least Jake had been willing to
stick around. What difference did his motives make? Who was she to be so proud, so foolish?

“Could you do that, Jake?” Mattie asked, her voice small but surprisingly stubborn. “Could you pretend to love me?”

Jake stared at Mattie for what felt like an eternity, his normally expressive face impossible to decipher. He rose slowly to his feet and walked across the room, stopping just in front of her, extending his hand for her to take. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

They didn’t make love.

There’d been enough sex for one night, they both agreed.

Mattie took off her robe, letting it fall to the floor, and climbed into bed as Jake walked to the window.

“Please leave it closed,” Mattie said. “It’s so cold out there.”

Jake hesitated, standing in front of the window for several seconds, as if paralyzed, his body swaying precariously.

“Is something wrong?”

Jake shook his head. Then he pushed himself away from the window and quickly stripped to his boxer shorts before climbing into bed beside her. Mattie felt the mattress sink beneath his unexpected weight. She watched him fall back against his pillow, his eyes open wide, staring blankly at the ceiling.

He’s trying to figure out what he’s doing here, Mattie thought, watching him. He’s trying to understand how he ended up back in the middle of this mess, this mess he thought he was finally clear of, the mess
he’s right back in the thick of, and he doesn’t understand what happened. Would it help you to know that I don’t understand it any better than you do? Mattie wanted to ask, suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. Can you really pretend, Jake? she wondered. Can you pretend to love me?

As if he heard her thoughts, Jake rolled over on his side to face her. He kissed her softly on the lips. “Turn over,” he said gently. “I’ll hold you.”

At first Mattie thought the sounds were part of her dream. She was being chased through the streets of Evanston by a young black man, his long serpent’s tongue stretching toward her, threatening to ensnare her. She struggled to outrun him, her breathing increasingly labored and painful, as loud as her footsteps on the hard pavement. “No!” she gasped, through lips that didn’t move. “No!”

A crowd suddenly gathered, and Mattie realized she was naked. The black man chasing her was naked as well, his long muscular legs gaining on her, his hands reaching out to slap at her sides. She felt his fist connect with her back, knocking the wind right out of her. Mattie stumbled, fell forward. “Watch out for the gas main,” a bystander warned. “Watch out for the gas.”

“No!” an onlooker shouted, slapping at her arm. “No!”

Mattie forced her eyes open, suddenly aware of Jake moaning beside her. It took her a minute to realize what was happening, that Jake was beside her in bed, that their dreams were interlapping, that she’d incorporated
parts of his nightmare into her own. “No gas,” he was saying over and over again, his arms flailing about in growing panic, so that Mattie had to jump back to avoid another blow. “No. No gas. Don’t. Don’t.”