Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (18 page)

To be with Thea during their senior year was not what Garret expected—it was pushing a boulder up a hill. It was swimming upstream.

For brief moments between classes, when he could be with her, touch her, he felt as if he was seizing for himself something illicit and dangerous. The notion that a friend, his friend, could have been hiding within herself the ability to give him so much unthinkable pleasure was more than he could understand. How could he not have seen it before? Thea, going breathless under his hands, gave him the same incredible adrenaline rush that he felt on the soccer field. He wanted more than quick, fumbling gropings between classes—he wanted to see how far he could take her, if he was good enough to make her lose herself to him. But how much longer could he stand to be held at arm's length?

At night, he went to her house, climbed the drainpipe as quiet as a mouse, and his whole body became a bundle of nerves even before he'd reached her window. Mostly, he wanted to make out. And it was what she wanted too. They'd spent their whole lives talking. He knew her soul-deep. No amount of conversation could knit their souls more tightly together than they already were.

He campaigned hard for permission for every new kiss, for the first time she let him taste the skin above the button of her jeans, the first time she let him slide off the strap of her bra. Always, she resisted—as if he was asking something she didn't want to give even as he knew by the tremble in her voice that she wanted to give it. She left him confused and—when the pain of frustration built nearly to bursting—angry.

Who was this girl who seemed to be such an innocent in the dark? Thea—his Thea—was not timid. He'd seen her volunteer to light firecrackers on the beach while other girls cowered and squealed safely in the shadows. He'd seen her climb the steep face of the cliff wall at the edge of the ocean—no rope, no hesitation, no fear. When Garret had broken his arm playing Frisbee, so severely that the bone showed, she barely flinched, but instead calmed him down and held his good arm as she walked him to the nearest open store to call Sue and Ken.

But on the floor in her bedroom, she seemed half terrified of his hands—at least, there was no other way to read her reticence. When Thea wanted something, she went for it. And yet she did not give herself, no matter how he pleaded and coaxed and demanded, with words and without. Her hesitation could mean only one thing—she was unsure of him. She didn't trust him. He guessed she was a virgin and—with a kind of desire that was almost too embarrassing to own—he wanted her virginity.

But she would not give in.

As he lay in the darkness of her room, the hard floor under his shoulder blades, Thea buttoning herself up at his side, he began to wonder if he'd made a mistake. Perhaps they were meant only to be friends after all. He vowed to himself that he wouldn't get any closer to her—that he would keep his options open with other girls if he needed to—because if her hesitation was real, and she really didn't trust him, then he didn't know how he would be able to stand it when she finally, completely turned him down. Thea had the power to wound him more deeply than any other person on the earth; he needed to be careful not to put too much of his heart in her hands.

 

 

Thea leaned against the warm grill of Jonathan's black sedan, her toes getting dusty from the gravel parking lot, and Jonathan leaned beside her, popping green grapes into his mouth and occasionally sipping iced tea from a blue plastic cup. Far below the hill where they stood, the water of the bay was an opaque, shocking blue punctuated here and there by swells of land and polite, tree-covered islands. All that was left of the sun was a sliver of pinkish gold over the far edge of the horizon, and from Thea's vantage point, she had the strange sense that she was closer to the sky than the sun was.

The high ridge had always been Thea's favorite when she and Jonathan needed to talk. They'd agreed early on that discussions and arguments should always happen in neutral places—in restaurants instead of their kitchen, in sleepy parks instead of in their bedroom. From the beginning, they'd approached their marriage as a thing to be accomplished—almost a job. When he'd asked to meet her here—in the place where they'd hashed out whether or not to send Irina to private school, whether or not Thea should work or be a stay-at-home mom—she knew that he hadn't thrown over his thoughtful and logical nature simply because of the looming specter of a divorce. And she knew that this time, he wanted to talk without fighting. To approach their divorce like he'd approached their marriage, with reason and convenience leading the way.

“More iced tea?”

Thea looked into her cup—the yellow gold of green tea that had been infused with hibiscus and mint. Her standby for hot summer days. “No, thanks.”

He poured a bit more for himself. So far, they had tiptoed around each other, chatting about inconsequential facts, gingerly testing the conversation as if poking a wound to see if it would reopen and bleed. They hadn't talked about anything overly significant—Irina's summer schedule, Sue and Ken's volunteer work with the Newport Historical Society, Jonathan's overbearing boss—no mention of their reason for meeting today.

“So what did she do?” Thea asked, smiling.

“Who?”

“Sue. Did she threaten to cut off your inheritance? Will everything to Garret instead?”

Jonathan laughed. “Not exactly.”

“So how did she get you to come out here?”

Jonathan rolled a fat green grape between two fingers. “She asked me to,” he said.

Thea nodded. In some distant and invisible place, children were playing, squealing, their happy cries carrying upward into the sky. Of course Thea knew that Sue would never threaten. But she wanted to tease Jonathan a little, to let him know she wasn't mad.

“Sue wants us to reconsider,” Thea said.

“I know.” Jonathan crossed his arms, the dark hairs rising slightly in the breeze. “She told me to ask if I could move back in with you. Temporarily. Just to see.”

“Do you like living with Garret?”

Jonathan looked out over the water, hundreds of feet below, his expression thoughtful. “I miss Irina. And I miss you.”

Thea smiled gently.

“But, yes. I do like living with him. It's hard work—to be alone. But I feel like I need to stick it out. To see . . .”

“I know what you mean,” she said. She squeezed her plastic cup, and when she let go, it snapped back into shape. The sudden urge to tell Jonathan what she was feeling—what she was going through—was inescapable. In some small way, she wanted his permission to move on.

Their marriage had never been especially passionate. They'd married young and waited until after their wedding to have sex. Thea hadn't expected much. Her love life with Jonathan hadn't been like jumping headfirst into a bottomless pool but instead like creeping inch by inch into deeper waters, until she was just deep enough to feel like she was submerged without getting in over her head. At some point, the pressure to work toward a healthy sex life vanished entirely, and Thea was almost glad when it did. She felt that her job as Jonathan's wife was to offer him comfort and refuge—he felt the same way toward her—and they set about making their lives easy for one another. Somewhere along the line, good intentions had eroded into complacence like stone becoming sand.

Thea couldn't help it; she put down her cup and embraced him, hugging him tight, and she felt his arms come around her back, those same arms that had held her so many times when she was upset—a good friend's arms.

“Oh Jonathan.” She buried her face in his shoulder. “How could we have messed things up so bad?”

It was a moment before he replied. “Maybe we didn't.” He let her go, pulled away to look into her eyes. “Maybe we did everything right. Maybe we were meant to get married, have Irina. And now maybe we're meant for this too.”

“There are so many stories of people who get divorced and they mean for it to go well, but then it all goes wrong.” She squeezed his hand. “I don't want that to be us. If you have something to say, if you're upset about something, if you think something isn't fair, then come tell me. Talk to me. Jonathan . . . of every couple I know, I think that you and I have the best shot at staying friends.”

He nodded. “I feel that way too.”

She let go of him, leaned her backside against the hood of the car once again. The sun was gone now; it had vanished while they weren't watching.

“So I guess this is it,” she said.

He nodded.

To her amazement, she felt a slight clearing within her—the parting of curtains or clouds. At once, she could see the path of her life before her, and Jonathan had a place in it by her side, as if he'd finally slipped into the role he was meant for at last. They would be okay—the two of them. They were fine before. Now they would be
better
.

“When did you know?” she asked, braver by the moment.

“After Boston,” he said, his eyes holding hers, confident in the truth. “I made up this long, convoluted story about why I couldn't call you that night at the hotel. I must have rehearsed it a hundred times in the train on the way home. And when I got back, I told it to you while you were getting ready for bed. But when the story was over, it was like you hadn't heard a word.”

Tears came to her eyes; she hated to think that Jonathan had suffered because of her. “I'm sorry,” she said.

He bumped his shoulder against hers. “Don't be. Okay?”

She nodded. “I knew it too. Even before Boston.”

He gestured for her to go on.

“When me, you, and Irina went to the carnival that came through last year, Irina and I were running around like lunatics, playing games, standing in line for the rides, eating everything in sight . . . it was like you weren't there with us. Like you were just . . . somewhere else.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't be. Okay?” She nudged his shoulder. “Like you said. I disappeared sometimes too.”

They sat together in silence while a black and gray tern moved smoothly against the backdrop of the sky. The voices of the children in the distance trailed off. They could hear the faint hiss of traffic far below them, but otherwise, the evening was silent and pristine.

“I hope you find someone who makes you happy,” Thea said.

He took her hand again, held it. “I hope you do too. And I mean that. In every way.”

“Does this mean you can start picking up Irina again on the weekends, instead of sending Garret?”

He laughed. “I think he might volunteer anyway. He's taken a real liking to Irina.”

“Well, that's one thing going for him,” she said, and she smiled to let him know she was teasing. Mostly. She still wasn't certain that Garret had backed down from his vow to exile her from his family. She thought:
How ironic.
She had more hope of being friends with her ex-husband than with him.

She glanced at Jonathan, those familiar features that gave her so much comfort, even now. If she had to go through a divorce, there was no man she trusted to be sensible more than Jonathan. “So,” she said. “How are we going to break the news to Sue?”

He grinned. “I'll take care of my mother,” he said.

 

 

Garret sat on the aluminum bleachers at the soccer field, his butt getting sore. The steeply pitched gables and dormers of Newport broke up the softness of twilight, black angles silhouetted against a yielding sky. Out on the grass, Irina's sprint was beginning to slow to a jog as she dribbled the soccer ball from one end of the field to the other, narrating an intense, winner-take-all competition that only she could see.