The year She Fell (35 page)

It was hard, I told myself, being irresistible.

“You need a woman.” That was Dad’s second-favorite prescription. “Not one of those silly tarts you keep bringing here, more hair than wit. You need someone who can make you forget the girl you left behind. A real woman.”

He packed me off down the street to my apartment, and I was as sad as only an Irish boy drunk on ale and fiddle music can be. If it hadn’t been
three a.m.
and my address book lost somewhere in the depths of my closet, I would have made a miserable penitential drunken call to Ellen, and very likely none of what transpired would have transpired.

But it was more dignified to fall into bed fully clothed and sleep off the drink and the despair.

And the next evening, Dad brought over the woman who was going to erase my sad memories and infuse me with new life, or whatever it was he thought a night of meaningful sex with a woman who knew what she was doing would do for me.

Every man should have a father like mine.

He’d come up with the perfect antidote—a dark-gold-haired beauty queen in hiking boots. It was June, and all the other women at the bar wore strappy sandals, at least the ones who weren’t wearing power pumps. But Dad’s choice was wearing a khaki shirt, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. I couldn’t help but look down that long expanse of tanned bare leg and focus on the little rim of red sock above the ankle of the boot, the only spot of color in all that tawny tan and brown. Delicious. I fell in love.

“She’s going to hike the
Appalachian Trail
,” he told me. And he told her, “My lad Tom here went to
Jefferson
University
. That’s right off the trail.” He was holding her hand, all paternal benevolence, and she glanced at him with a wry little smile, showing that she saw right through him but appreciated his performance.

That impressed me more than the
Appalachian Trail
information, that she recognized my father for what he was, a professional Irishman. Now that he’s gone—he died while I was in
Tehran
—I look back and wonder why I thought that so discerning of her, for sure it took little enough good sense to recognize the blowhard in Trevor O’Connor. It took a bit more to sense the truth that lay underneath.

But she turned that wry smile on me, and removed her hand from him and extended it towards me, and as I took it I felt that strength, that easy force of the born athlete. I couldn’t help it; I slid my hand up over her wrist to her bare golden forearm. I’d never felt muscle like that on a woman—no bulk, not like a man’s muscle, but instead the lean flow of power under the smooth feminine skin.

She drew in her breath, and drew back, and then, quite deliberately, she took back my hand and leaned close, her lips against my ear, and said, too soft (I hoped) for my father to hear, “I feel like that all over. Take me home and I’ll show you.”

I defy any man, any single straight man at least, to resist that. Every man should have the chance, at any rate, once in his life, to face such a temptation.

I faced the temptation. I surrendered to it. I was twenty-two, and she was a few years older and a dozen years more experienced, as sleek and ruthless as a cheetah, and in a week she had me trapped in a world of sensuality and power and pleading. And in another week, she was gone.

There are women put on earth to ruin men’s lives. You know the sort I mean, and yes, I realize how self-serving and self-pitying that is, but it’s true. There are women who are just like men, only female, and when we come face to face with these assertive, physical, commitment-phobic types with firm breasts and full lips, we’re goners. It’s like making love to ourselves, only female, and it interrupts the time-space continuum and rips the fabric of order in the universe.

Oh, all right, it just ruins our lives. It teaches us a lesson, anyway, what life would be like if women really were, as Shaw kept requesting, more like a man. Life would be bad. Take my word for it. Your ordinary man doesn’t have the resources to protect against a beautiful woman who sees sex as sport and men as both rivals and teammates.

Now I remember few details of our time together. There was sex, but that wasn’t all of it. She was too restless, too physical to just repeat one activity over and over. Every night after I got off work—I didn’t know if she worked, hell, I didn’t even know her last name; it was that lost free era where you could love a woman till your foundations shattered and never ask such trivial questions—she was waiting to take me on some adventure, show me some night vista of the city I thought I knew, discover some exotic spot for secret trysts. We did a day and night on the Trail, near the Cunningham Falls, and I fell asleep holding her and listening to the roar of a mountain lion over the patter of the rain on our tent. I remember those flashes, but little else, and nothing of our conversation. I think, hard as it is to believe, we talked hardly at all. I gave that up, that skill of mine with words, to descend into her world of experience. That might be why I lost myself, because I gave myself up.

And maybe, if we’d talked, I would have known to leave.

I did, I remember to my eternal shame, give her the first few chapters of my novel, the book of my heart that no one, not my dad, not even Ellen, knew existed. All journalists, you know, secretly have the first few chapters of a novel. We think that we can be another Sam Clemens, a great newspaperman who could also write the great American novel. It is a useful corrective for us, to learn that telling stories is something very different than reporting them.

It was the novel that drove her away.

I have to laugh, remembering that now. I came home and there was the novel on my bed, with a yellow note paper-clipped to it. “Not my sort of story. Too slow. Good luck with it. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

H.L. Mencken couldn’t have written a more brutal rejection letter.

Then she disappeared as effectively as she appeared.

There’s no one who
can do misery like an Irishman, and I did it right— a weekend of deep melancholy punctuated by jottings of broken poetry, three nights of whisky and comrades who’d also been destroyed by love once upon a time, and finally, when I sobered up, the phone at my desk singing a siren song.

I waited until after deadline, when everyone in the news room slid out the door bound for bed or bar. All alone then, I called Ellen. She sounded startled to hear my voice. Nervous. She would never be impolite, but I could hear something abrupt in the way she asked, “What was it you wanted?”

I sensed I had to get to the point quickly. She would find some excuse and hang up if I tried the small talk route. “I want to see you. Again. Soon.”

There was a quick intake of breath. “Tom . . . ”

“I can drive up tonight. Be there by morning. I have to be back by three for work, but—” But that sounded suitably impetuous and romantic—driving through the mountain night to get a glimpse of her, only to turn around and drive back.

“Let me call you back.”

This wasn’t the answer I expected. I started to worry. If she got away . . . “When?”

“A few minutes. I’m—I’m in the middle of something.”

Would she really call me back? I didn’t know. She wouldn’t lie, but maybe she’d find a way to forget. “I’ll call you back instead. Ten minutes.”

Ten minutes later, I had her back on the line. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Tom.” She was speaking carefully. “You were right back in May. We’ve run our course. No need to drag out the ending. It was just a college thing.”

She was reading this out loud. Jesus. She’d taken the ten minutes and written herself a script. I knew what that meant. She wrote things down when she meant to inscribe them in marble. Her to-do list was sacrosanct. If one night some dream inspired her to scrawl “Climb Everest” on a bedside pad, in the morning she’d be strapping on the crampons and picking up the ice axe. She believed in the certitude of ink on paper more than any reporter I’d ever known.

She meant to break up with me. Or not let me un-break up with her. I got scared. “Ellen, sweetheart, this isn’t some college . . . thing. This is a life.”

She didn’t have an answer to that in her script. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.

“I mean—” and I let it take over, that timeless rhythm, the voices of Yeats and Tom Moore and all the nameless bards who wrote the sweet sad songs I’d sing when I’d had a couple pints and Dad brought out his fiddle, the poets who always said the right words in the right key to make girls want to do what they oughtn’t to do, “I mean, this is killing me, losing you. I can’t do it. Can’t live like this. Can’t live without my Ellen. Can’t stand waking up and knowing I won’t see you today, or hold you tonight. There’s no joy here, no music, no laughter, and now I know why—because I lost you, and it was the stupidest thing I could ever do, and—and I know I’m no good for you, and you’ve every right to hang up on me right now. But I’m dying here without you.”

“Tom,” she whispered, “I—I can’t.” And it was then I knew I meant it, all of it, that something in me needed her just that much, needed the Ellen who had never hurt me, who didn’t even know how to hurt me, the Ellen who could heal all those broken bones in my soul just by loving me again.

“Yes, you can. Marry me, and I’ll show you.”

I don’t know where that came from, except that I’d always sensed she was enough her mother’s daughter that she wanted to do the conventional thing when it came to the long-term. She’d long refused to move in with me, claiming that it would kill the romance even if it improved our finances, but I figured it was the echo of her mother’s voice—
Why should a man buy the cow when he gets the milk for free?

I knew only one way to blot out that skeptical voice. “Ellen, I love you. I can’t live without you. Please say you’ll be my wife.”

I got nothing but silence in reply. I cursed myself, thinking how badly I’d handled it. I should have waited for moonlight, and a diamond ring, and—if I could wait that long, I wouldn’t have to propose. “Ellen.” I didn’t care if I sounded desperate. “Say yes.”

And then she laughed. It was a shaky laugh, but I heard the joy in there. She said, “Okay. Yes. I had other plans for this year, but—”

But she’d throw away her to-do list for me. Change her mind, change her plans, change her life. I didn’t deserve her. I’d make it up to her. I’d marry her.

And it worked out just
fine—a quick wedding in our college chapel, a quick baby girl, a quick European assignment. Before I knew it, we had a real life. And my ripped heart scarred over, and my broken soul mended, and I had just decided tentatively to trust in the benevolence of the universe—a baby making a healthy transition to toddlerhood does that to a man—when I came home one day to our little cottage on the banks of the canal in Bruges and found—

Anyway, I lied.

What no one seems to understand is, it was the simplest thing in the world to do, to keep this secret. I made only one decision, once, and that was not to tell—not to lie, but not to tell. Enacting that decision took no energy at all. I never had to make another decision, or take another action. There was no active deception, no scramble to confabulate—until that evening in
Bruges
. And then again, when the boy Brian came into our home and demanded the truth.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

After that confrontation in the
Wakefield
library, I couldn’t stay in this town a minute longer—couldn’t take Ellen’s rejection. So I shoved my bag into the jeep and climbed in. A mile down the road, I pulled over and called back to the Super-8, making a reservation to return two nights hence.
 
Typical of me—acting on impulse, chasing a lead, but planning ahead.

The plan. The plan. The plan was to get out of town so I wouldn’t sit around in that damned motel room, waiting for Ellen to call. Also to get back just after she started worrying about where I was.