Through the Heart (22 page)

“You bastard,” she said. “You knew I was here.”

I didn’t contradict her. “Would you like some wine?”

Instead of answering, she took my wineglass out of my hand. “Let me taste it first,” she said, but she didn’t take a sip. She set my glass down on the counter, moved in closer to me, and raised her face for me to kiss her.

I want to take a moment here to say what I had intended. I had intended to tell her that I’d fallen in love and that it was over between us. In fact, I was looking forward to it. But when she looked up at me like that, I kissed her.

One kiss and it was over for me. I didn’t pick up my wineglass again. I picked her up instead. Not to go to the bedroom, not even to the couch. I picked her up and put her on the kitchen counter. I laid her down there and opened the robe, and, as I suspected, there was very little underneath. The lingerie she was wearing made her seem more naked than if she’d been wearing nothing.

What can I say? I loved Nora, but the sex with Celia was out of this world. It always had been. It was forbidden and illicit—and irresistible. At one point I thought I was in love with Celia. I met her after she started dating Marcus. I remember wondering how on earth he’d found her first. Of course, the answer was that he went to gallery openings and crap like that, while I never bothered.

I won’t bore you with the short, sordid story of how I started sleeping with my best friend’s girlfriend. Or how, for months after that, every time I saw her, I tried to convince her to leave him.

She always said no to me. But when Marcus asked her to marry him, she said yes. She explained to me that I was not the kind of man a woman should marry. I was the man you should have an affair with. Marcus was the kind of man you should marry.

At the time I thought it was my first heartbreak. Now I can see that it was just my ego that got bruised. I comforted myself with the thought that I didn’t want to marry a woman who would cheat on her fiancé—and with his best friend no less. (I know, it doesn’t say a lot about me either, but you have to remember that I was used to that vision of myself.) The funny thing is, it was a very good reason not to marry her, but when I was using it, I didn’t really believe it.

After she got engaged, I stopped the affair. Or maybe she did. I don’t remember. At any rate, we didn’t see each other for a while.

I was the best man at the wedding. And Celia and I started sleeping together again two weeks after they got back from the honeymoon.

That’s why I wasn’t so comfortable going out for drinks with the two of them. I don’t think that makes me a better person or shows that I have scruples. It wasn’t that I felt guilty. I just found it unpleasant. I don’t have any explanation as to why she always tried to set something up with the three of us, or when she succeeded, why she seemed to enjoy it, except that she is a very twisted woman—in so many ways.

That night we went from the kitchen counter to the couch to the shower and finally to the bed. After we finished, normally she rolled away from me, but this time she wanted my arm around her, and she rested her head on my chest. So I couldn’t see her face when she said, “I’ve missed you. Where have you been for the past month? You can’t go disappearing on me like that, damn you.”

For most men, that might have made it harder to say what I was about to say. But I was heartless.

“I was in Kansas.”

“What on earth were you doing in Kansas for a month?”

“I met someone.”

I sensed rather than saw the change, but her tone was still light when she said, “Does she have a dog named Toto?”

“I’m serious,” I said. “It’s serious.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m in love with her.”

“You can’t possibly know that after a month.”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to argue with her about it.

She sat up and turned around to look at me. The lights were off, but I had a wall of windows in my bedroom, and it faced the towers of the financial district, and there was so much light in the room that I had to lower the shades to sleep. I could see her face in the glow.

“It won’t last,” she said. “What are you going to do? Go live in Kansas?”

“No. I’ve asked her to come here.”

“So of course she’s back home packing.” As I watched her, I thought for a beautiful woman she looked rather ugly in that moment.

“Actually, she said no. But I’m hoping she’s going to change her mind.”

“Do you see a pattern here?” she said. “You seem to fall for women who tell you no.”

I saw my opportunity, and I took it. I slid the knife in and twisted it. “Yes, but in every other way, she’s as different from you as you could possibly get. And one way it’s definitely different this time is that it’s the real thing.”

Celia stared at me for a moment. Then she got out of my bed and started getting dressed.

“I didn’t realize you could be this cruel,” she said, pulling on her skirt.

“Oh, come on. I know you didn’t think I was a paragon of virtue and consideration.”

“You’re just trying to hurt me because I wouldn’t marry you,” she said, buttoning up her shirt. “You’re still upset about that.”

“I’m not still upset about it. Quite the contrary.”

She had sat down on the edge of the bed to put on her shoes. But when I said that, she stopped. She turned around and stared at me hard. Then she said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want to believe,” I told her.

I was telling her the truth. I didn’t care. You can’t fake that kind of indifference. She heard it in my voice.

“So what about us?” she asked.

“Us? Is there an us?”

“Well, whatever it is we do. What’s going to happen to that?”

“I suppose we could continue on, sometimes anyway. But we’ll have to meet in a hotel since Nora will be living here.”

She snorted. “You think I’m going to put up with that?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You’re in love with someone else,” she said, bending to put on her shoes.

“You’ve been in love with someone else since we met,” I pointed out.

She was quiet for a minute. Then she said softly, “No. I never said I was in love with Marcus.” She turned around and looked at me, and she looked like someone I’d never seen before.

“I’m sorry for you both then.”

I know how that sounds. But for once I actually didn’t mean to be cruel. In that moment I was truly sorry for both her and Marcus.

“I’d better go,” she said.

“Yes, Marcus will be waiting for you.”

“No, he’s out of town.” She gave a little laugh. “I thought you’d be so pleased that I could stay the whole night.”

“I suppose you could still stay.” But I made sure that I said it in such a way that she would know I didn’t want her to. Well, what can I say? I didn’t. It was Nora who I wanted in my bed the whole night. I wanted to see her hair spread out on the pillow next to me. I wanted to see the way her face looked when she woke up from a deep sleep. I wanted to stand behind her and put my arms around her while she was standing at the sink brushing her teeth.

Celia was usually pretty sharp, but she didn’t seem to be picking up on things tonight. She said, slowly, “Maybe I will stay . . .” and she looked over at me.

I shrugged. “Whatever you want. I’m just going to be sleeping. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re here or not.”

That’s when Celia, who I always considered hard as nails, actually began to tear. I could see it. Her nose turned pink and her eyes got very bright, though she managed to keep them from spilling over. At least that was something. Part of the reason I liked her so much was that I never had to deal with this kind of crap.

“I’m going to go,” she said again.

I know she wanted me to argue with her. To tell her to stay, that it would be all right. But instead I said, “Yes, that’s probably best.”

I didn’t even walk her to the door. I didn’t enjoy seeing a woman who had been so strong fall apart right in front of me. When I heard the door close behind her, I got up to pour myself another glass of wine, to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t going to marry someone I didn’t love. Now I could see that I’d been lucky to escape getting married to Celia, because that’s how I found Nora. And I was so sure Nora and I would be different from other couples.

I could look back now and think that was foolish.

But I don’t.

No, I think you should celebrate whenever you can. Take that momentary feeling of being lucky, that feeling of being on the right track, and enjoy it. It won’t last.

 

 

 

 

I was leaving Kansas.

I had decided, and I wasn’t changing my mind. If my deciding to leave was a seed, it was as if it had been planted and had grown into a huge oak overnight. A seed can be blown away; an oak needs a hurricane to uproot it.

My mother was the potential hurricane. I decided not to delay facing the storm. I waited a couple of days for her to recover from the effects of the chemo, and then Monday, after work, I took out the folder that Neil and Timothy had given me. It was my ammunition.

My mother was in her room when I came home. I knocked; then through the door I asked her if she would come downstairs because there was something I needed to talk to her about.

I half expected her not to come down, but about ten minutes later, she appeared.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when she came in. She crossed to the fridge and got out the orange juice. As she was getting a glass down from the cabinet, she said, “So what’s this big thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

“You know how I told you that I met someone?”

“Mmm,” she said, seeming to pay more attention to pouring her glass of orange juice than to what I was saying.

“I know I didn’t tell you much about him—”

“Some slick businessman from New York,” my mother said casually, and picked up the glass and took a sip.

“What?” I looked at her blankly.

She licked her lips daintily and said, “Timothy Whitting. Isn’t that right? Quite good-looking from what I hear. Though, of course, I wouldn’t know since you never brought him here to meet me.”

“Wait, how do you know all this?”

“Honey, he’s been there every day at the awful place where you work. You think I don’t have friends who tell me things? You think I never leave the house?”

That was actually what I thought—because that’s what she always said. She always complained to me that she’d been sitting around all day.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you knew?” I asked.

“What was the point? He was just going to go back to New York. But now I imagine he’s invited you to go to New York with him; is that it?”

This was not at all how I had imagined it going. I had planned out this whole elaborate scheme for how to tell her: I’d carefully explain everything before I told her about him asking me to go to New York. Now I didn’t know what to say. So I just said, “Yes, he did.”

“And I imagine you’re going to do it. You’re going to go chase him back to New York.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “He wants me there.”

“Yes, but for how long? Right now you’re different from all the New York girls he’s known. You’re a shiny new toy. But what about when he gets you back to New York, and you don’t quite measure up? What happens when he gets bored? It’s not like he’s asked you to marry him.”

“We barely know each other,” I protested.

“You think it gets better? You think that’s what happens? You get to know each other and you fall more deeply in love?” My mother snorted. “You’re going there to live with him without requiring anything from him. Why on earth would he ever ask you to marry him when he doesn’t have to?”

“But I don’t want someone to ask me to marry them because they have to.”

“Which is why you’re not married,” my mother said. “I would like nothing better than to see you settled and happy with someone. But I have to tell you, I just don’t see it happening. Not when you act like this.”

“It’s not like that. He cares about me.”

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, as if I’d just said the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.

“Look what he did for me.” I put the manila folder on the table.

I don’t know why all of a sudden I had to prove it to her. No, wait. I do know. I had been so certain, and she made me doubt it. So I thought if I could convince her, it would take my own doubt away.

She came over to the table, opened the folder, and looked through the papers. I watched her as she did it—and I swear to you, her face didn’t change. Not a muscle. Not for the mortgage or for my loan or for my student loans or for the money in the bank. Nothing.