Who said this to her? Could’ve been her doctor. Could’ve been him. She hoped it wasn’t him.
“Even if your husband doesn’t find out, eventually your lover might get tired of sharing you with another man, no?” said Kavanagh. “Men can be funny about that.”
So it was the doctor. Larissa felt a rising prickle of irritation.
“Have you asked yourself why your lover hasn’t?” Kavanagh said calmly. “A man who loves a woman usually prefers not to have his woman share another man’s bed. Why hasn’t he?”
“I don’t know why. He is calm. He doesn’t poison me with petty jealousy. He knows how hard everything would be if he did.”
“Or perhaps,” said Kavanagh, “this is convenient for him too. Juggle you, and other things?”
“No. It’s not like that.”
“That calmness of his must come at a price. What is it? Are you just one hour in twenty-four for him also, Larissa?”
Flattened, Larissa drove home, as if she had been rolled over by a sand mixer. What was wrong with Kavanagh? This is what talking got you. No solutions, but instead a knifelike burrow inside her chest. She couldn’t take a breath imagining Kai touching another woman. How did he live imagining her with Jared? Don’t think about it, Larissa! Don’t think about it…
“What are your plans?” asked Kavanagh.
A plan by definition involved the future. “Haven’t got one.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me. I feel it. I’ve seen this thing too many times before. What’s the missing piece? Why won’t you leave your husband?”
Larissa said nothing.
“Tell me more about your lover. What is it about him that drew you? Is he very different from Jared?”
Larissa described Kai.
“Car salesman? Stonemason? Drives a motorcycle? How old is he?”
Larissa said nothing.
Kavanagh opened her eyes, and pulled the legs out from under herself, leaning forward in the chair. “He is
young
?” she exclaimed, startled.
“Not very young,” Larissa said, bristling. “He’s a little younger than me.”
“How much younger?”
“A few years.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. Maybe ten. Or so.”
“Ten,
or so
? Larissa, to help you I need to know the truth.”
“He’s twenty-one, all right?”
Falling back in the chair, Kavanagh whistled softly. For a few minutes she said nothing. Then she spoke. “So where do you meet someone like that, a woman like you, a housewife, a mother?”
“At Stop&Shop,” Larissa replied.
“Ah, well,” said Kavanagh. “That explains it. I don’t usually shop there, which is probably why I’ve never run into someone like that. I go to Shoprite. It’s cheaper.”
“He goes to Stop&Shop for sushi.”
“Well, that may be another one of my problems right there,” Kavanagh said, “because I don’t like sushi.”
“Yes,” said Larissa. “I didn’t either.”
“What does he want with you? He is a boy barely out of his teens and you’re a married woman with children in the middle of your life. What are
his
plans for the two of you?”
Larissa couldn’t tell Kavanagh about the wheels of the Ducati landing on the pavement in Pine Spring, in Willowbend, in Invercargill. Lewis and Clark and the Redwoods, and the whole damn volcanic mist over the ocean, the beaches and the sailboats, and the Mungo outback dreams right before her sunset eyes.
“You really should’ve told me about his age, Larissa.” Kavanagh shook her head in disapproval. “I understand your predicament now. And it is a predicament indeed. All this time I’ve been saying to you, why don’t you just do what other people do. Move out. Retain custody of the kids. How fraudulent of you to let me continue giving you advice based on your giant omissions.”
“Is your advice different now?” How can there be visitation, right, Doctor? How can a mother be a visitor to her own children, be a guest in their holiness? If Larissa clenched her fingers any tighter they would fracture.
But afterward, an hour with Kai. O pine smoke bliss.
Except…he can’t resist asking her things she can’t answer either.
He is looking at her puzzled and questioning. She wishes they all would stop asking her things. She’s doing her best, can’t they see that?
Once I was Larissa. Then I was Jared’s wife. And then I was Emily and Asher and Michelangelo’s mother. And then I was Kai’s lover. But long after I will stop being someone’s wife, or someone’s lover, I will continue to be a mother. I cannot resolve the unresolvable. The paralytic with a broken neck cannot walk, no matter how much he wants to, no matter how often or how passionately he talks about it. I am a mother. I cannot walk.
But then another small voice clears its throat and croaks. Yes. But before you were a mother, you were Larissa. What will you be if you stop being a mother?
Every Tuesday at seven she drove to see Kavanagh to help her figure out the sick primordial mire of her life, and afterward Kai was waiting for her. That’s how she made it all better. By finally figuring out how to see her Maui lover at night! And maybe soon there could be a jazzercise night, and maybe she could take a painting class at Drew, or sign up for pottery and French.
Oui, oui, madame. La passion est la maitresse due
. With any luck, she wouldn’t have to be home at all.
The Ides of March had passed.
“I love him,” she said to Kavanagh.
And the doctor replied, “You don’t think you’re bandying that word about too lightly?”
“I don’t bandy.”
“You love your children, don’t you? You love your husband? Your parents? You yourself said you’re living a dream life. Perhaps what you really mean is infatuated. Which is not
permanent, you know. But the decisions you make based upon this infatuation
are
permanent.”
That was almost advice! And the doctor looked spent after giving it.
“Everything you say is entirely correct, Dr. Kavanagh,” said Larissa, trying hard not to fidget. “Except I don’t think you understand. Am I having a hard time explaining it? It’s not infatuation. It may not have stood the test of time like my eighteen-year-old marriage, but it doesn’t make it any less real. I was one kind of person, one kind of woman before I met him, and I was plodding along, and I thought I was doing pretty good, but then what happened, you see, is that everything inside me got reordered.”
“Somehow, I don’t believe that’s true,” Kavanagh said quietly.
“I don’t mean awakened,” Larissa hastily went on. “I mean, broken down and remade. The outside may be the same woman, but the inside is not. I can no more deny what I feel for him than I can my own name. Now we may argue that it’s wrong, we may argue that I need to feel other things too, like guilt, obligation, responsibility, we may argue that I need to put my feelings aside, which is a separate discussion, but let’s not talk about how what I’m feeling isn’t real. It’s more real than anything else I know. If it isn’t real, then nothing is real. Nothing.”
“It’s a bright flame,” Kavanagh said. “It burns out.”
“But after it burns out, isn’t true love what’s left?”
“What if nothing is left?” the doctor stared hard at Larissa. “You say you once loved your husband. Where did
that
go?”
Heavily, Larissa got up off the couch. She wanted to crawl away. “You really
don’t
understand. Wow. I keep saying it over and over. It’s like I’m talking to a wall. I can’t end it with him. I can’t. In the scale of my life, he outweighs everything else.”
“
Everything
else?”
“Doctor, what are you talking about?” Larissa exclaimed. “There are sixteen schools of psychotherapeutic thought, but only one second law of thermodynamics. Take a good look at
me
, not into a book. I’m spinning into chaos right in front of your eyes. I’m paying you—my husband is paying you—a hundred and forty dollars an hour to notice. Don’t you notice?”
Kavanagh was cold and calm. “Your lover or your children, Larissa.”
She slammed the office door so hard on her way out, the glass jar on the glass coffee table rattled and fell over.
Dear Larissa,
Why haven’t you written to me? Why do you only send me money with a superficial note full of platitudes?
You cannot believe what’s happening to me. I’ve wanted to be a mother for so long. At forty, I’m finally having the baby I’ve been praying for my whole life, with a man I love so much. I can’t believe what’s happening.
Lorenzo went out to protest with that cursed Peace Brigade, and he was given weapons to carry with him for the demonstration: three knives and a smoke bomb. The protest got out of hand, a fight between the mob and the police ensued, and Lorenzo got carried away and threw the bomb. He was told by Agas Ilocano, the council leader of the Brigade and his close friend for seven years, that it was a smoke bomb, just a little tear gas to let the cops taste some of their own medicine, but he was duped. It was a nail bomb. And it exploded into a hive of cops. It blinded two of them, and critically injured several more, including one who got a nail stuck in his temple. He was taken to the hospital, and died three days later.
Larissa! My Lorenzo has been charged with murder!
Nineteen people saw him throw the bomb. He told his public defender that he absolutely didn’t know it was a nail bomb, or he never would’ve thrown it. So the prosecutor asked Lorenzo to name names of the leaders of the Brigade, and Lorenzo refused.
Bail has been set for two and half million pesos! It might as well be two hundred and eleventy bazillion pesos. We don’t have a hundred pesos for a bus to the free clinic. I, with my big belly, have been visiting the people Lorenzo worked with, trying to elicit sympathy, but no one is willing to risk even ten pesos on him because they all say he is a flight risk. They take one look at my belly and say he is a flight risk!
They’re right. He is. If he got out, he wouldn’t stay a second in Manila to await trial. He says the Brigade leaders tricked him, deceived him and abandoned him. They knew he never would’ve thrown a nail bomb. And so far they’re in hiding, and none of them has come forward to say Lorenzo didn’t know it was a real bomb. No one. But he’s still not willing to rat them out, because he says he wouldn’t survive five minutes on the street if he did. He thinks even as they’re quiet, they’re secretly raising money for his bail. He is so deluded! But I keep saying, Lorenzo, if you don’t tell the truth, you’re going to go down for murdering a cop!
I get money from Father Emilio to take the bus to come and see Lorenzo in the city jail. He says I’m the only person in the world who loves him. He says he is an orphan now and I’m all he’s got.
Thank you for the money you sent me last month. You know I’ve stopped even pretending I don’t need it. I live on that money you send me. I love you.
Remember I wrote to you about wars and rumors of wars? How it was just the beginnings of sorrows? All I
keep praying for right now is, dear God, please please let this not be the beginnings of my sorrows. Do you know what I mean, Larissa?
It’s starting to feel like I’m running flat out of options. Do you know how that can be sometimes? When you’ve just flat run out?
“Larissa! I just got my free Jag. And it’s April already. Have you thought anymore about Pine Spring?” Kai asked. It was a Friday.
“Of course I have.”
“Well, you haven’t said anything. Hard for me to know.”
Fridays were difficult. She knew a whole weekend without him was about to descend on her. Friday afternoons were heavy, this one made particularly wearing by the weight of his question and the promise of his offer, like an anchor into quicksand. Is he for real? she wondered. And how will I know? How can I know? Is this a pursuit thing? Is it a pride thing? Is it malice? Is it true?
What if Kavanagh is right and I’m blind to the truth; can that be? Of course it
can
be; but
is
it? Kavanagh certainly thinks so. But she’s not in bed with him. Larissa is in his bed, and he is naked, so lean and young and beautiful, he’s almost ready to go again, they have ninety minutes today, he makes sure of that, and he gives himself to her prolonged and twice, so that the aching until she sees him again is doubled, not halved. And today he’s asking her questions to which he wants and expects an answer.
“What do you want me to say, Kai?” Why is it that the gift of her answers is divided not multiplied?
“Yes would be nice.” Slowly he gathered her nipple into his fingers and pulled on her gently, as if buzzing for an answer. His hand remained cupped around her breast.
“Kai, you know it’s not as easy as me saying yes. You know I want to say yes. But you also know I can’t. I have to think long and hard about what to do. I’m trying to figure a lot of things out. A
lot
of things.”
“What have you been doing all this time with me?”
“Drowning moans and flames.”
He gathered the whole of her into his arms, lay flush with her on the bed, inhaling the smell of her hair. “Larissa,” he whispered. “What we’ve been having is not enough for us. Not for you. Not for me. It’s not
enough
. We need more. Can you just imagine us, Larissa?”
When she did allow herself a blink’s worth of reversed imagery behind the eyes, the picture of the future was not like a sweet and sunny summer morning. It was more like photographic negatives of carnivals. Black was white, and white was black.
“You want more choices?”
She would. Choices not offered here.
“Alice Springs, Pine Spring, Missoula, Monte Carlo. It doesn’t matter. Without knowing the way, we’ll figure it out. We’ll go where no one knows us. We’ll go to lunch together, in a public place, not with paper bags in bed. We’ll have our own little place where we’ll go to sleep at night, naked in
our
bed, and we’ll wake up in the morning, naked in our bed. Together. I will make you eggs and coffee. And we’ll work together. We’ll travel everywhere. We’ll build a new life, far away from bad things, from bad memories, mine and yours. We’ll be unencumbered, like gypsies. We’ll be free.”