I had pointed at the nametag. “Tell me Bear isn’t really your middle name.”
He looked down at the name patch. “Oh, that’s my call sign. What they call me on the radio when I’m flying.”
“Oh.” God, where had my voice gone? Why couldn’t I speak intelligently to this man? Maybe it was because I had been looking for a hero. I had caught myself rubbing the scar above my left eye and, embarrassed, locked my hands together in my lap.
He stood up. “Listen, I’d like to take you to dinner, if you’re interested."
I nodded like a six-year-old.
“How does lobster upstairs in the club dining room sound?”
I nodded again. “Th-that would be gr-great.”
“Club regs say I can’t wear this flight suit in the dining room, so I’m going to duck into the men’s room and change. Then we’ll go up.”
In two minutes, he was back wearing tailored khakis and a polo shirt. His bare arms were muscular and covered with blonde fuzz.
“Shall we?” He offered me his arm. I stood up and knew from that moment, I was falling for him, hard.
God, just don’t let this one be a loser, I prayed, as we ascended the stairs. Don’t let him be like Grant Matthews.
"I don't believe in luck," he told me over dinner. "You take life by the throat and make your own opportunities."
“Is that why you asked for the picture of me?”
He pointed his fork at me playfully. “Hey, I didn’t ask for it. Kate gave it to me. Said you’d be the girl of my dreams.”
“And what if I wasn’t? If I had three eyes, or a zit the size of Texas in the middle of my forehead?”
“I thought you were gorgeous from the minute I saw your face.”
Here was the man I thought I was waiting for.
I waited for over two weeks after that first date, cursing him and myself like any lovesick schoolgirl as I sat beside the phone. I finally gave up and spent one last disastrous night with Marcus, wishing the whole night that he was my flight-suited hero.
Paul was waiting for me at home when I pulled up, choked with guilt over how I used Marcus. Paul had been TDY since our first date, he explained, and came right over to Jubilant Falls when he returned.
I never saw Marcus again.
Six months after our marriage, we were transferred to Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle where Paul was assigned to the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing. I became everything Paul (and Mother) wanted me to be, volunteering with all the right organizations, attending all the right parties, smiling the right smile to the right general's wife, assuring that my husband moved up the career ladder.
I learned to speak in the language of this new world I married into. People didn't move to another base, they went PCS (permanent change of station). They didn't fly just fighters or bombers or cargo planes, it was F-15s and 16s, B-2s and C-130s. I watched Paul shine through UEIs (unit evaluation inspections) and ORIs (operational readiness inspections). It was a new life, completely separate from Jubilant Falls and my past, and I loved every minute.
Then something changed.
The first time I heard other wives’ whispers we were at a cocktail party at the Eglin Officer’s Beach Club. Paul and I walked to the bar, to get our drinks. In the corner, I noticed a petite blonde lift her chin, thrust out her miniscule breasts, and smile in his direction. I didn’t know her, never saw her before that moment, but there had been an air that was both proprietary and sexual in her movements. I saw Paul wink and, in another corner, a knot of junior officers’ wives stifled giggles.
Every woman wants a hero, all right—and she had mine. I didn’t know where or when or how, but she had.
“She doesn’t know?” I heard someone ask.
“
Sshh!
She’ll hear you!” someone else hissed.
I didn’t say anything that night at the club. After we came home, pleading a headache, I went to bed. About an hour later, Paul slipped between the cool sheets next to me.
“You have fun tonight?” he asked, softly.
“Oh, it was okay.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “You know, another squadron beer fest.”
“Yeah.” He kissed my hair and rolled over. “Well, good night, Kay.”
When he thought I was asleep, he slipped out of bed and out the door. As I peaked through the window, I watched him roll his red Porsche down the driveway of our concrete block base house. He cranked the engine as the car rolled over the curb and as quietly as he could, he drove down the street to meet his whore.
I sat in the darkened living room, on our blue Federal couch, clasping our silver-framed wedding portrait, when the key turned in the lock at 4:45 that morning.
Through that long, dark night, I had time to think and to cry. When the tears wouldn’t come any more, I knew I wasn’t going to get divorced over this little blonde bimbo, whoever she was. My mother’s words kept echoing in my head:
“If you do anything to ruin this marriage, there is something seriously wrong with you.”
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but if I were to come home from Florida as a two-time divorcee, she wouldn’t see it that way. But I also wasn’t going to let Paul get away with it.
I watched the doorknob turn slowly, as the man who’d been my hero tried not to make a sound as he stepped inside the door. I hurled the wedding portrait at him. It landed short of its mark, the glass shattering around his tennis shoes. There was a quick gasp, and he stood suddenly straighter.
“Kay, I—”
“So, did you fuck her? Was it better than what you get at home?”
Paul stepped over the broken frame, coming toward me, his muscular arms extended in supplication.
“Baby, I—”
I bolted from the couch and crossed the room, picking up a Waterford bud vase Mother gave us as a wedding present. I clasped the neck of the vase like a baseball bat.
“Answer me!” I screamed, my voice raw and ragged. “Answer me, Goddamn it, answer me!”
Paul’s arms fell limply at his sides.
“I’m sorry, baby. It didn’t mean anything.“
“Didn’t mean anything? Didn’t mean anything?” I swung with all the power in my arms and flung the vase at his head. This time, my aim was better. The vase shattered on the wall just above his head. He ducked, to avoid the flying glass, but made no move toward me.
“Why, Paul? Why?” I screamed, waving my clenched fists. Paul stepped over the broken glass and the ruined portrait and came toward me.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”
He fell to his knees and folded his thick arms around me, burying his blonde head in my stomach. He smelled of fresh soap, and his hair was damp. He had stood in her shower, used her towels to dry himself off, so I wouldn’t detect the smell of sex or her perfume. Maybe she’d been in the shower with him. I cringed at the thought of them playfully covering each other with soap, rubbing their wet, naked bodies against one another.
“Baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I don’t have any excuse,“ he murmured into my nightgown.
I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back, forcing him to look at me. There were actual tears in his eyes.
“Tell me you don’t love her,” I whispered, struck by his contrition.
“I don’t, baby, I don’t. It was just some crash-and-burn queen…I met her in the bar before. She’s got a thing for pilots.”
“Tell her go fuck someone else's husband, then.” I looked into his eyes.
“It won’t happen again, I promise.” Tears ran down his cheeks. At that moment, I believed him. I stroked his face.
“Please, Paul, don’t break that promise. Whatever you do, don’t break that promise.”
He stood and took me in his arms. “I promise, baby, I promise,” he whispered.
Of course, it happened again… and again. But by that time, I had Andrew. I didn’t want to take this gurgling little baby boy away from a father who adored him, and I wasn’t about to listen to Mother tell me how much of the problem was my fault. It would never cross her mind that Paul Armstrong was congenitally unfaithful.
And so we struggled on together. No one else knew the pain and the tears, the deployments when he left in anger, the hang-up phone calls in the middle of the night, the whispers behind my back that no one thought I heard at the Officer's Wives Club meetings. A lot of wives took the attitude, what goes TDY stays TDY, but I had never been able to do that. More than once, I heard the line Gear up and rings off!
Every woman wants a hero. Not just me.
It took me years to acquire this mask of the Good Officer’s Wife. Soon, though, I found I played my role too well. Like all the citations and awards that hung on our wall, I became an ornament to be seen and paraded about. I thought that's what everyone wanted of me. Left to my own devices, I crashed and burned; wasn’t that what Grant Matthews was, one big accident, one big train wreck? I needed Paul, I thought, as my redemption for Grant.
Then it struck me.
Why should I make him look good, after all he done to me?
I had two babies now. Lillian was conceived in another period of infidelity, fighting, and making up four years after Andrew’s birth. I didn’t want my daughter’s role model to be a woman who tolerated her husband’s wholesale whoring.
After a while I stopped caring about how it looked and got on with my own life. At Eglin, I started a soup kitchen for indigent veterans who slept on the beaches. At Osan Air Base, in South Korea, I worked at an orphanage for Amer-Asian children. At Langley, on Virginia's Chesapeake Bay, I worked with the mentally ill at Eastern State Hospital.
It's amazing the effect small objects can have on the rest of our lives: one letter, with one Korean postmark, containing one little photograph smiling back at me with those familiar green eyes, shaking all my foundations. The letter contained a handful of Korean bank notes.
I save money for us by house in USA for all three of us, the letter read. The pen strokes were broad and black, despite the poor English.
I knew then that it was over.
But Marcus—why did I always come back to Marcus? He was safe; that was why. He knew me as I really was and never asked me to be anything else.
Yet, until everything was settled, I was still married to Paul. That bound me.
* * *
The doorbell rang, echoing up that God-awful presumptuous staircase. Quickly, I threw the kids’ clothes into a box.
"Coming!"
Balancing the box on one hip, I threw open the door.
"Darling, must you yell down the stairs like that? It's so like a fishwife." My mother, dressed in a glittery cocktail dress, folded her perfectly manicured hands in front of her.
"Mother. Hello."
"I was just coming from one of Lovey's little soirees and saw the lights on, so thought I stop by." With a practiced, perfect step, she slipped by me into the foyer.
For a sixty-seven-year-old woman, she was, as always, in perfect shape. Mother's addiction to cosmetic surgery was a poorly kept secret—only she thought no one noticed. Her friends kept an active, gossipy tab on the number of procedures she had done. I knew of one tummy-tuck and a chin job in the last few years; maliciously, I glanced along her carefully coiffed hairline for any telltale pink lines.
"I'm expecting company any minute, Mother."
"Oh, I won't be long. Are the children in bed?"
"No, they’re out playing in the backyard."
"Isn’t it late for that? My goodness, Kay, I'm not the Wicked Witch of the West! I'm your mother! Aren't you going to ask me in for a cup of coffee?"
I sighed and put down the box and signaled for her to follow me into the kitchen. "Come on."
"That's better."
She folded herself gracefully into one of my kitchen chairs, while I fussed through the clutter trying to find a pair of clean spoons.
"I really wish you’d let me send Novella over to clean for you."
Novella, Mother's live-in Jamaican maid, was one more of her affectations, but easily forgivable. Novella had worked for our family for years, returning to her own home after our dinners were cooked and the kitchen cleaned up. After Novella’s two sons grew up and her husband died, Mother had invited her to move into a small apartment she built for me above the garage. I refused to live in it, but it was a perfect set up for the two of them. If not for Novella, Mother would be completely alone in that enormous house near the country club.
Novella had given me those intangibles that a mother normally did.
“Now stand straight, Miss Kay. You want the world to notice you when you enter a room,” she’d said.
“Remember, Kay, you’re a lady. Keep a little bit of mysteriousness about you. Be elegant. Be grand, but remember those who aren’t as fortunate as you.”
Novella made certain my hair was combed and my clothes were spotless when I left for school. She helped with homework when she could, but most often referred me to my father. Despite her thirty years of being in the US, her voice never lost the lilt of her homeland.
"I don't think so, Mother. I’d rather my children learn how to care for themselves."
"It certainly doesn't look like your lesson is sinking in."
My teeth grinding together, I slapped some Oreos on a plate and banged them on the table, along with two mugs.
"Oreos? Are the biscotti I gave you last week gone? They are so delicious and—"
I slammed my hand on the counter. "Mother, why in hell did you stop by, if all you wanted to do was needle me? My house isn't clean enough, I have bad manners, and now I'm a poor hostess. I'm so glad you're here."
"Now, Kay, I only meant—"
The doorbell rang again.
"I know exactly what you meant. Excuse me."
"Hey! Ready to go?" Marcus, leaning comfortably against the doorframe, smiled invitingly at me. I wanted to trace the line of his worn lapel up his collar and feel the warmth of his face in my hand, but not now.
"Thank God, it's you. I can’t. Mother's here." I dropped my voice to a whisper. "Save me."
"Ah, Mr. Henning, I recognize that voice anywhere." Mother appeared in the foyer, offering her hand like some kind of feudal queen.
"Mrs. James." Marcus shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded.
Mother raised her eyebrows at his snub and folded her perfect hands. "I'm assuming that the
Journal-Gazette
will be present next Thursday at the symphony auction. The proceeds benefit the music scholarship fund at the college."