The Good Enough Husband (28 page)

“Are you going to be okay on the drive?”

“I’m fine, Benjamin. I’ll call as soon as I get home.”

He patted his old man on the shoulder, still a little shy with affection. He’d gotten out of the habit of hugs and kisses with his father when he was sixteen. “I’ll see you guys, soon, I hope.”

“I hope one day you’ll come around about Marty.”

Ben tensed. It hurt, hearing that name. Not as much as before, but it still hurt. “One thing at a time, Dad. One thing at a time.”

19

“Ben, it’s Hannah. Please don’t hang up.”

“How far along are you?”

Hannah’s lids dropped briefly, her breath hissing out slowly. Maybe he still cared. “It’s week twelve. The baby is supposed to get fingernails, toenails, and vocal chords this week.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“It’s New Year’s Day. I wanted to say Happy New Year and I love you.”

He hung up.

***

“Ben, it’s Hannah. Please don’t hang up.”

“How many men have you slept with?”

“I don’t think this is a good idea…” The silence stretched. She pulled the phone away from her ear. The phone light was still lit. The connection held. “Why do you want to know?”

“Answer me, Hannah.”

This was math that no woman wanted to do. She quickly counted on her fingers. At least she didn’t need to extend the counting to her toes. “Ten.”

“Fuck,” Ben said on a swift intake of breath.

Hannah laced her voice with all the sarcasm she could muster at six in the morning. “I guess that would be the operative word.”

“Did you love any of them?”

“I love you, Ben.”

“But who were the others?”

She sighed, but reluctantly began her recitation. “My first was my high school boyfriend. I was fifteen, I think. My college bo
yfriend Lucas and I were together for three years. You know about Michael. The rest were different guys in the music scene. Or who I met taking pictures. You meet a lot of people in New York.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It’s been ten total, including you.” Hannah tried, and probably failed, to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

“Not that one. The other. Did you love them?”

Little white lies, and tact, and dishonesty were nice to hide behind. She’d erected a wall of half-truths she’d hid behind for the last five years. All this bald truth was killing her. Who could love her after knowing everything? “No, two. Lucas and you. It was a long road to get from there to here.”

“Where is here, Hannah?”

She was tired. The rested feeling she’d had after a good night’s sleep was evaporating. “I don’t know, Ben. I’m hoping for the best, but planning for the worst.”

“What’s the worst?”

“That you never forgive me, and I have to raise my baby alone.”

“Where would you go?”

“Here where my mom is or New York where my dad is. Either place. It looks like I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

Anger flared in her gut at the thought of being alone. She lashed out the only way she knew how. “Have you loved every woman you had sex with?”

“Yes.” She should have expected that answer, but it was still a punch in the gut.

***

Most people weren’t one hundred percent honest in their everyday lives, much less their romantic relationships, Hannah thought as she answered every single question Ben slung at her, this one being no easier than the last.

“Have you ever cheated on anyone else?” he asked during one of their brief phone calls.

“Never, Ben.”

“Of those nine other relationships—make that eight—you’ve never cheated before.”

“This is why I didn’t want to give you a number. It’s not at all cheap or sordid. I was monogamous with everyone I was ever with. Except, well you know.”

“Have you slept with anyone since you slept with me?”

“Michael, obviously.”

“When is the last time you slept with your husband?”

She closed her eyes. She could tell this one little lie. He would never know. She could deny, deny, deny. But if it hadn’t worked for a consummate liar like Pinocchio, the truth would probably come out. “Ben, please don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what? Answer me.”

“When I was in New York.”

“What?” His outrage covered the distance between them faster than the speed of sound. “You couldn’t help yourself?”

“Before I came to my mom’s house, I was with my dad in New York.” Ben was silent, but he hadn’t hung up. “Michael showed up on my dad’s doorstep.”

“He does a lot of that.”

“And we went shopping, had dinner, and we talked. He wanted to get back together.”

“There’s a shocker.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you. You’re not that kind of guy.”

“Then you what—fell into his bed?” he asked, ignoring her.

“You did this once. You of all people should know that ending a marriage is complicated.”

“I never slept with Samara after I found out she cheated. Never wanted to.” That settled it. He was a saint. She was a sinner.

“I don’t know what to say that’s going to make this okay. It happened.” She had no intention of sharing Michael’s inadequacies—or his attempts to overcome them. She’d hurt, betrayed, and emasculated that man enough for one lifetime. “We both knew it was the last time.”

“Are you sure—this time?”

“I’m sure, Ben. Very sure.”

“Good night, Hannah.” He hung up.

***

“Why did you marry Michael?”

“Because I didn’t want to die alone.”

“Did you…” Ben paused for a long moment. “Do you love him?”

“I love Michael, but I’m not in love with Michael. I never was. It was something we talked about in New York. I met Michael years ago. He was one of a group of friends. After I broke up with somebody, he started pursuing me. All of my friends were married. One of my mom’s friends got sick and she said the greatest regret in her life was not having picked one not-so-perfect man to spend her life with. I thought she was right. There are so many women in New York with so many rules, that some perfectly okay guys slip from their grasp. They wake up forty, alone, and regretful. I thought marriage would eliminate all of that seeking, all of that doubt. I made a choice. It took one major life decision out of my hands.”

“That seems very calculated.”

“It was a calculated effort to make my life what I wanted it to be. Marrying Michael was a safe choice.”

“What was so safe about marriage? It’s a jump into the abyss.”

The truth. The truth. The mantra played in her head. “God, only my mom knows this,” Hannah said, lowering her voice, mortification seeping through her veins. “I had my heart broken once.” She paused. Her throat closed up. She pulled the phone away from her ear and shook her head angrily. All these years later, it still hurt to think about this, talk about this.

“And?”

“His name was Lucas.” The shaking breath she took was long and deep. “Lucas Campbell. He was the first person I ever fell in love with. He…we were together in college. His family didn’t really approve of me. He dumped me. Took me two full years to emerge from that hellhole. I never wanted to go back there again.”

“But you got married, what, more than ten years later. It doesn’t follow that this guy had much of an impact. It was your first heartbreak. We’ve all had that. We all get over it.”

“It’s not like it sounds. A few years ago, I got very emotional. I’ve always made bad decisions with my heart. Instead, I decided to make a very rational decision with my head. I wanted to control my life. If I married Michael, I knew I couldn’t be hurt like that again.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” she said, clearing her throat. “Because I learned a very important lesson.”

“Which is?”

“I discovered that friendship isn’t love. A relationship and a marriage needs romance and passion. Fraternal love isn’t enough.” He didn’t ask the next question. Hannah answered it for him anyway. “Ben, I love you in the second way. The moment I met you, I knew my life was about to change. You aroused that long forgotten passion in me. I want you in my life. I want you in my bed. I want you to be the father of my children. I can’t imagine loving anyone else now that I’ve loved you.”

“Good night, Hannah.”

She’d put it all on the table. The ball was in his court, now.

Hannah heard the rumblings of her mom and Axel starting their morning routine. With only one bathroom, it would be a while b
efore she got a turn. She pulled her laptop from her bag, a plug converter, and booted up. Switching to English, she typed Lucas Campbell into the search engine. As she scrolled through the results, she realized she hadn’t done this in a few years. When Lucas drifted away from their college friends, she used to look him up every six months or so, tracking his movements across the northeast. It had probably been five years since she’d done this, but the internet had evolved too. It only took about five minutes before a picture popped up from a popular professional social networking site. She sat back in the hard plastic chair and looked out at the slate roof of the building next door. She clicked on the picture, and it expanded before her eyes. There he was, Lucas Campbell in all his middle-aged glory. Hannah held a hand to her heart, felt it beating a normal rhythm. Devastation didn’t rip through her gut. Only mild curiosity replaced the usual freefall.

She read his bio, from the bottom up. He’d graduated from Vassar, gone to graduate school at NYU, and worked at a series of jobs in publishing. According to his company’s website, he was an associate editor at John Wiley, acquiring and editing non-fiction book titles. One of his authors was a Nobel Laureate. That was it. He was another Joe like everyone else. A few more clicks and she found he was still married to Anne Campbell, a woman she knew he’d met in graduate school.

Three more clicks and she found his address, a two bedroom condo in Williamsburg. She clicked back to the beginning and looked at the picture again. He was older, heavier, with close-cropped hair and reading glasses. She could see some of the guy she once knew and loved, but this was just another man, another New Yorker she’d once known. How had she let her relationship with this one person control so much of her life? She closed the lid on the laptop. It was a love lost so long ago. She stood and stretched, realizing she needed to relieve the insistent pressure in her bladder. She didn’t want to lose the man she loved now. Devastation would tear her inside out this time.

***

“Ben, please don’t—” Some time during the last few weeks, he’d stopped hanging up on her. He was finally listening to her, but he was asking questions as well. Hard questions.

“Why did you leave Michael?” Because Michael didn’t love her, he loved the idea of her. Because she was tired of being a tr
ophy. Tired of caring for a man who did not care for her. Because she wanted more. Craved more. Craved Ben.

“Because I felt stifled,” she said. “I’d changed everything in my life and I wasn’t happy.” It was all she felt comfortable saying. He had a way of making what had seemed rational and well thought-out appear foolish in the light of today. But she’d made a mistake, realized it, and tried to fix it. Shouldn’t she get extra cr
edit for that?

“You were running away from your own decisions.”

“I made a bad decision. I needed time to decide whether to stay or go.”

“If you’d gotten pregnant with him, would you have stayed?”

Hannah patted her rapidly swelling body. What woman wouldn’t do anything to protect her child? “Probably,” left her lips on a weary sigh. How could she prove her loyalty to this man? She would never hurt him again.

“If you hadn’t met me, would you have stayed?”

But she hadn’t stayed. On her way to Oregon, she’d already made the decision. “No.”

“Do you always run away when things aren’t going your way?”

“I don’t run away.”

“You were running away when you met me. You’re in Cope
nhagen now. Five thousand four hundred miles feels like running away to me.” He’d counted the miles.

“Where else would I be?” Her brain flicked through images like a slide projector—through Los Angeles, Newport Beach, New York, Copenhagen.

“Here.” Hope bubbled up through her chest. “Good night, Hannah.”

***

“You wrote ‘Melancholy Moon?’”

The mention of the song startled her. “You Googled me.”

“About time. Don’t you think?”

She wanted to share all of her life with him, and owed him an explanation for this glaring omission. “My dad and I co-wrote it when I was a sophomore in high school.”

“Hannah, that was the most popular song of 1993. I danced to that ballad at my senior prom. This must have been huge in your life.”

But she had spent years downplaying her art. Out of habit, she said, “It only made it to fourteen on the Billboard chart.” Of course it had been huge. It had been her third trip to the Grammy awards.
The first time she’d been invited in her own right, not as her father’s ‘date.’

“Who sang it? I would have remembered seeing you.”

“Mariah Carey recorded it.”

“How in the hell do you sell a song to Mariah Carey?”

“We don’t sell songs. The singer performs them.”

“How do you get paid?”

“Are you sure you want to hear this? The whole thing is kind of boring.”