Be Mine (24 page)

I managed to tell him that we had, that we needed to take the next one, go back, turn around.

The traffic had thinned to nothing—just one wobbly truck in the driving lane, which Bram passed smoothly. Before he did, I saw the stenciling on the side of it (
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK
) and caught a glimpse of the young man behind the wheel, who was either singing or talking to himself. Chad flashed in front of me then as Bram made his way to our actual exit:

Chad, in the photograph in his baseball uniform.

Chad, eleven, unblinking, uncensored, pure enthusiasm looking into a camera.

The pounding of my blood behind my ears softened and grew more insistent at the same time.

It was Chad's little-boy voice now.

Ma ma ma.

D
RIVING
back home, I remembered it:

The tape recorder.

I'd never put it under the bed, but I'd also never checked to see if Jon had put it there.

A heavy rain had come out of the east, carried across the sky in a single massive blue-black cloud, and the windshield wipers made the sound of heavy, congested breathing as they cleared the torrents of it from the glass. I pulled into the driveway, turned the engine off, and sat, trying to prepare myself—for the rain, for the run to the house, for Jon.

No,
I thought.

It could not have been under the bed.

Surely, after our argument, Jon had taken it back to Best Buy, or put it away in a drawer.

And, even if he'd put it under the bed, even if he'd switched it on, in the morning, himself, it would have run out of tape long before Bram and I had gotten into the bed.

But, I also thought, what if it
had
been there, what if it had recorded everything?

Would Jon have heard what he'd wanted?

The sound of me fucking another man.

And what about
I want you to leave this motherfucker, baby? I want you to be mine.

What about that?

What if the machine had recorded that?

I remembered Bethany Stout, in class on Thursday, raising her hand as we labored through a final discussion of
Hamlet.
"Mrs. Seymour, isn't this business, when Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates, a really good example of deus ex machina? I mean"—she tossed up her hands here as if she'd completely had it with Shakespeare—"give me a
break.
"

Where, I wondered, had she learned the term?

Deus ex machina.

This was the same girl who, earlier in the semester, had asked why I couldn't have assigned a more recent translation of the play.

I opened my own hands, then, as if to catch what she had tossed up, and Todd Wrigley said, "What the hell is
day us Mackinac?
"

Bethany turned in her seat to address him directly. "It means," she said, '"god comes from the machine,'" and, despite her own shaky translation, she went on to explain the literary concept to Todd Wrigley far better than I could have.

No.

There had been no machine.

And, even if there had been, I was ready, I thought, to go inside, to see Jon, to explain to him, as simply as Bethany Stout had explained herself to Todd Wrigley, what we had let happen, and why we had to make it stop. I was ready to get out of the car, to walk up the steps of my house, to sit down with Jon, to talk. I really was—but there was also so much rain pounding on the roof of my car and the ground around my car that it sounded like a herd of deer, stampeding, close by, their delicate hooves thundering in unison, in panic, hurrying past the house, tearing up the yard, altering forever the very landscape upon which we walked. I sat behind the wheel of my car for a long time, listening. In a trance of listening. I might have sat there, like that, in the driveway, for a few minutes, or for many hours, staring straight ahead, listening to those hooves. When I finally got out of the car, ran through the rain, stepped drenched onto the porch, Jon was standing in the doorway.

I could see that he'd been crying.

"Were you just going to stay in your fucking car all night, Sherry? Were you afraid to come in here and talk to me?"

"H
OW COULD
you do it, Sherry? How could you cheat on me,
lie
to me? How could you bring another man here? How could you fuck him in our
bed?
"

"What?" I said.

I put my purse on the floor, slowly. There was a puddle of rain already at my feet. My dress was running with water, and my hair. Jon's hands were in fists and he was holding them up against his chest like a prizefighter getting ready to punch. I stepped backward.

"The tape recorder, Sherry. It was under the bed. I heard
everything. I heard it all.
You can't tell me you faked
that ?
"

"Faked what, Jon?" I said, as gently, as quietly, as I could, trying not to startle him into any kind of action. I said, "Jon, why would I fake anything?"

His mouth opened, as if in astonishment, and he let the fists fall then, in slow motion, in front of him. Sudden and enormous tears fell out of his eyes, onto the floor at his feet. They looked like cartoon tears. Illustrated tears. How could real tears be so large, fall so quickly? He said, as if he'd been completely defeated, "Sherry. Do you hate me that much? Do you really hate me that much?"

I stepped toward him carefully. I put my hand on his arm. I tried to caress it. I tried to look up into his face, but then he yanked away, snapped to attention, and glared at me.

Again, I stepped backward, away.

"You fucking cunt," he growled, and I put a hand to my throat. "You sick bitch," he hissed.

"Jon!" I said, holding my hands out to him. I said, "Jon, why are you acting like this?" I said, "Okay, okay, the tape. You heard it. You heard it all. But this isn't something you didn't already
know.
This isn't something you didn't tell me over and over to
do.
"

Jon sprang at me then, pushed me with the palms of his hands on my chest, and I stumbled backward onto the love seat with my mouth open in surprise, and he shouted—loud enough, I thought, for the Henslins to hear all the way down the road—"You bitch! You lying bitch! Don't you blame this on me! That was a
fantasy,
and you know it. I never told you to do
anything.
What kind of husband do you think I am? What kind of a fucking monster do you think I
am}
"

I continued to watch him with my mouth open.

The roped veins in his neck.

The terrible burning flush on his face.

The baffled, wild rage.

His eyes—pure black, but flashing.

"Jon," I said—and I felt it, again, as I had in the hallway with Sue: that telescoping. Back this time through the weeks, the sex, the whispered insistences—was it possible? Had it all really been a game? Had he somehow never known? Had he thought—?

No.

"Jon," I said. "What did you think, then? What did you think would be on the tape: recorder if—"

"I thought you would
invent
something, Sherry. I thought you would
play along.
Like: the bite marks. I thought you'd
fake
something. For the fantasy. I thought you'd—"

He stopped talking, sank to his knees, began to sob—horribly, inconsolably—into his hands. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the sudden, total silence out there was startling, disorienting, maddening. I put my hands to the side of my head to cover my ears, to block it out.

C
HAD
at the airport:

I saw him from the back, first, watching the baggage carousel.

When he was little, I could scan a room full of children, or the pool, or the park, and find him instantly.

It had nothing to do with what he was wearing, or any of the details of him—haircut, height. It was everything, all of it, all at once—the whole of him set absolutely apart from all other children. My gaze could pass over a hundred others in a blur, land on him with perfect accuracy
(mine)
and with a swiftness that never failed to surprise me.

But this young man at the baggage carousel, with his head bowed, watching its slow revolutions, could have been any young man. My gaze slipped past him the first time and settled mistakenly on a laughing boy with a bag of golf clubs, and then an older man with Chad's build, and then a little boy—ten? eleven?—before I saw him, my son, watching the luggage traveling past him, waiting for his. I had to catch Jon's arm to steady myself, seeing our son—a wash of fear moving through me so swiftly it felt like something that had been injected directly into my veins.

Did he know?

Could
he know?

Could Garrett have told him?

A phone call? An e-mail?
(Your mother's lover threatened my life)

Or were there, perhaps, others who knew, who might have told him—out of spite, or concern, or self-interest?

Sue? Beth?
Bram?

Or, was it possible that he was so much a part of me, my body, still (my baby), that, somehow, he simply knew}

But then Chad turned around at the luggage carousel as if he'd heard or felt us behind him, and he smiled, stepping toward us, his arms open—and the wash of it in my veins rose from me, a cool and floating sensation in my limbs, in my chest. No, I thought, he doesn't know. Garrett, the good boy, the patriot, the loyal friend—Garrett would go to his grave with a secret like that. And there was no one else who would want to hurt us that way. And it was impossible to simply
know
—with that distance of the continent between us.
Chad didn't know.
I let him take me in his arms, my face pressed into his denim jacket, the smell of fuel, ozone, airport on him. Behind us, Jon stood with his hands in his pockets, and when I turned to look at him I saw that there were tears—slippery and iridescent—in his eyes.

I
MADE
spaghetti for dinner. Garlic bread and salad. Chad was starving, it seemed. He ate so much that I didn't take seconds for myself, afraid there wouldn't be enough for him if I did—although I was also strangely hungry, as if I'd gone days without eating (had I?), or run a marathon.

Jon and I asked him the usual questions about school.

Grades (all As). Dorm life. Cafeteria food. Friends.

But the conversation was exhausted early—the long flight, for Chad, I supposed, and the time change.

And, for Jon and I, the last two days since Bram had come to the house spent huddled in anxious conversation with one another, reassuring ourselves about our marriage, about our lives. Two sleepless nights. Two long days of oblivion, limbo—conversation, grief.

There'd been weeping, screaming, stunned silences, and, at one point, Jon had stood over me, shaking his fist. "How could you do it?" he'd shouted. "How could you do it, whether you thought I wanted you to do it or not, you fucking
whore.
"

But that was the last name he called me, and it had surprised me how quickly his anger had softened into sadness, into pain, and then we were holding on to one another, kneeling together on the floor, both of us sobbing, clutching at one another, weeping, stammering.

He stroked my hair, and said, over and over, "It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault."

"Of course it's not your fault," I sobbed. "How could it be
yours
? It's
mine.
"

"No," Jon said with such conviction that I didn't argue with him about it anymore. "It's all my fault," he said.

For hours that first night we groped and clawed at one another on our knees—lovers drowning in a shallow lake—sobbing, sobbing, talking, talking, talking. And kissing. Tasting one another's tears. We went to the bathroom sink together and took turns washing our faces. When Jon rose from the basin, water running off his eyelashes, down his cheeks, he looked up at me, and said, "Sherry, how could I not have known?"

I put my hand to his forehead, as if checking the temperature of a child, or baptizing one.

I said, "Jon. Jon. You never suspected? Not at all?"

"No," he said—under his breath, sounding awestruck, amazed. "It never even crossed my mind, Sherry," and there was a look of such ravaged pain in his expression that I had to look away. I looked at his chest, focused my eyes on some vague place around his heart, and I said, "And, you—"

I couldn't say it.

—forgive me?

Because what if he said
no?

"Of course I forgive you, Sherry. You're my whole world, Sherry. What good would it do me not to forgive you?"

He stood up straighter then and went to the towel rack, put his face into the towel, leaned against the wall, heaving into the towel for a few minutes while I stood, motionless, watching, frozen in place, in time, and then he looked up from the towel—and when he turned around, I was shocked to see that he was smiling—distantly, sadly, but he was smiling, and he said, "I didn't know you, did I?" He said, shaking his head, but still smiling, "It's embarrassing. Really, Sherry, that's what it is. It's embarrassing. I was in an imaginary world, all these weeks—no, all
these years—
while you were living in the real one."

I didn't smile.

I went to him.

He took my head in his hands. He looked at me closely, as if trying to read an answer to a question in tiny print on my face. He said, "But it's over, now, right? Now, it's over?"

"Oh, yes, Jon. God. Yes. It's over," I said.

He kissed my forehead then. He inhaled. Kissing my hair, he said, "I just want everything exactly the way it was before. The way it's always been," and he wrapped me more tightly in his arms.

We stayed in that embrace for two days.

We stayed in the same room at all times, kept our hands clasped together, our knees touching, our shoulders. We lay down together on our bed at night, but we didn't sleep, we didn't make love, we never even got under the covers. We stared at one another for long, lingering moments. For hours. Occasionally, I saw Jon squint, or grimace, as if he were remembering something, but then he would see that I'd seen it, and he'd try to smile. He'd kiss me—my lips, my eyelids, my ears. We cried, and the crying turned to laughter, and we laughed, which turned to crying. We didn't answer the phone. We didn't leave the house.