Bread Alone (5 page)

“You’re not listening to me.” His voice took on a too familiar edge of impatience. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I need a complete break from the whole …” His hands opened, then closed into fists. “I need to have the psychological freedom to take risks, to fail. I can’t feel like you’re depending on me to take care of you.”

“I don’t want you to feel like I’m depending on you. I wouldn’t mind if you depended on me a little more. I’m perfectly willing to go back to work, so you can—”

“Wyn.” He cleared his throat. “You’re missing the point here. What I need is to be completely independent. Of you.”

A somewhat belated flash of insight. This wasn’t about us, it was about him. What he wanted. What he didn’t want.

He said, “I’ve wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know exactly how to explain it. And the other problem is, you don’t deal well with the unvarnished truth.”

Sudden tears pooled in my eyes and overflowed, dripping into my lap. He handed me the pressed, white linen square he just happened to have in his pocket.

“David, the unvarnished truth is, I love you. Don’t you—?”

“It’s not that I don’t love you.” The words sliced cleanly through the mush of my sentiment. “I just think it was a mistake to get married. Like we did. So quickly. I don’t think we really knew each other. And I need …” He picked up the handkerchief off the floor where I’d dropped it, handed it to me again. “I need to figure out what’s important to me.”

Sound concerned, but not hysterical.
“If that’s how you’ve been feeling, why didn’t you say something before now?”

He looked pained. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that we’re miserable. Don’t you even know when you’re unhappy?”

“I know it hasn’t been so wonderful lately, but we’ve had seven good years. Let’s not throw it all away just because—”

“Wyn, listen to me.” He eased closer, took both my hands. I hated that determined look on his face. “I’m being suffocated—not by you,” he added quickly. “It’s everything. I feel like all my options are closing off Like I’m trapped in this—”

Outside, a car alarm began to shriek. One of ours? I remembered that rain was forecast for tonight and we should close the windows on the west side of the house. The housekeeper was coming tomorrow. Did I write her a check? Was I supposed to call Lisa Hathaway about the publicity committee meeting for the symphony fund-raiser?

My life was going down the toilet and my brain had picked this moment to go out on strike.

“I don’t know.” He took his hands from mine, carefully, as if he wasn’t sure mine would stay put.

“So what are you saying? That you want a—”

“No.” Too quickly. Then, “I don’t know. Maybe we both just need some time alone, some space.”

“David, I don’t need any more time alone. That’s about all I have right now.”

He seemed not to hear me. “Maybe you should move out for a while. I saw a great condo the other day. Not too far away. We could still see each other.” His voice rose just slightly. Like you do when
you’re trying to talk a child into taking her medicine:
Hmm? Wouldn’t we like to do that? It would be so good for us.

A tiny prickle of anger started at the back of my throat. He’d been looking at condos for me?

“If you’re the one who needs some space, why do I have to move? Why don’t you get a condo?”

He straightened, his gaze over my head someplace. “Because it’s my house,” he said.

I remembered this woman I knew who was hypnotized at a magic show and made to do all kinds of funny things. When the guy brought her out of it, and she noticed everyone in the audience laughing, she felt stupid without knowing why. Just now I had that same sense of having missed something important.

He slept in the guest room. We hadn’t made love in months anyway, but sleeping by myself in the king-size bed without even the shape of his body nearby was cataclysmic. I couldn’t have felt more alone if I’d been sleeping in a crater on the moon.

The weekend was interminable. He spent most of it at the office. Or at least that’s what he said. On Sunday afternoon, I dialed his extension, listened to it ring six, seven times, till voice mail picked up. It didn’t mean he wasn’t there. He could have been in the men’s room, the kitchen, a conference room, a screening room. He could have been on another line. I knew if I asked him, that’s what he’d say. “I was talking to Hank.” Or Tom. Or Grady.

I hesitated for a second, then called the main switchboard. When the automated receptionist started ticking off everyone’s extension, I punched in Kelley Hamlin’s number. It rang twice before I slammed down the receiver. I wasn’t going to start checking up on him. I trusted him. If he said he was working, then he was working.

Obeying some ageless instinct, I took a long bubble bath. Too long. My fingers shriveled. I put on a classic black skirt and ivory silk blouse that he’d always liked. I stared at the naked face in the mirror, somewhat
reassured that the woman reflected there still looked pretty good, hadn’t changed all that much.
You’re in your prime,
I told her. I reached for the makeup tray.

I had my mother to thank for the dark eyes and good skin. The straight nose and wide mouth came from my father. My hair was the problem. Why couldn’t I have gotten my mother’s hair, dark and shiny like an artist’s brush? Or my father’s—thick, blond, and straight as a Swedish sea captain’s? Instead I got hair like my father’s mother and sister—light reddish brown, thick and curly, completely unmanageable. I battled it now, smoothing the kinks out with a hot comb.

I chilled a bottle of his favorite Puligny-Montrachet. I put on the music he liked, the Brandenburg Concertos. And I waited.

I was sitting on the bed with a book and a glass of wine, doing more drinking than reading, when he appeared about eleven-thirty.

“Are you hungry? There’s some soup.”

He smiled politely. “No thanks. A couple of us were working on a pitch. We sent out for Chinese. You should hang up your skirt before it gets all wrinkled.” He eyed the bottle on the night table disapprovingly. “Don’t you think—”

Before he could finish, I refilled my glass with childish defiance, but he was already headed for the bathroom. I tossed aside the book, drank some more wine, riffled the pages of a magazine, listened to the water running in the bathroom. He came out, picked up his pillow. The sweet, clean smell of him wrung my heart.

“David …”

He turned, but not all the way around to face me. Like he was on his way to something important and I was detaining him. “Wyn, please. Don’t make it any harder than it has to be.”

“We could go to counseling.” I rolled the hem of the sheet between my fingers. “Do you know how long it’s been since we made love?”

He exhaled through his nose. “Things at the office are crazy. I’ve been working my ass off. I’ve got so much on my mind I can hardly sleep, and then I come home and you expect me to perform like a trained seal—”

“I don’t expect anything.” My voice cracked annoyingly. “I just miss
how it used to be. I want you to hold me. It’s not just the sex. You don’t even touch me anymore.” I swallowed audibly. “Do you realize that?”

“Haven’t you thought about anything I said Friday?”

“I’m going to look for a job tomorrow.”

A frosty smile of approval. “Good idea.”

I closed the magazine in my lap. “But I’m not moving out of this house.”

The smile vanished. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, setting his jaw. He turned and walked out of the room, pillow tucked under his arm, like a little boy running away from home.

When I drew my legs up under me, the magazine flopped open. “Hottest Careers for Women in the Coming Decade.” I picked it up, scanned it hopefully. “Finance.” I
can’t balance my own checkbook.
“Teaching.”
Been there, done that.
“Police Work.” I
don’t think so.
“Construction.”
Are they serious?
“Child Care.”
No way.

I drank some more wine and pondered the realities of returning to the workforce, then I closed the magazine and heaved it across the room. When I stood up to take off my skirt, my knees wobbled under me. I sat down heavily, dissolving against the pillows.

Time to get ready for bed. I wanted to lay out the suit and shoes for my interview tomorrow. And the purse. Jewelry. But my head felt large. Unwieldy. I’d close my eyes.

Just for a minute.

Three

M
y oma told me that the best friendships often start with a quarrel. She said there’s a closeness that comes from a good, healthy fight that you can’t get any other way, and I think it must be true. Look at CM and me. Our friendship started with a fistfight, and twenty-two years later it’s still going strong. The friendship, I mean.

The fight was about a boy. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time we were the two tallest girls in the third grade, and Michael Garrity—while neither attractive nor pleasant—was the only boy taller than we were.

After the playground monitor had escorted us to the office, with CM holding wet paper towels on her bloody nose, and our mothers were sequestered with the principal, we were left by ourselves in the hall to await sentencing. We turned to each other as if on cue, and the instant our eyes met, we started to laugh. We got a two-day suspension from school. Our parents grounded us for a month. On our first day of freedom, we went behind her garage and gouged ourselves with her dad’s rusty Boy Scout knife to become blood sisters.

She accepted a choreographer’s fellowship position with a dance company in Seattle over a year ago, and we haven’t seen each other since. But whenever we talk on the phone, it feels as if we’re picking up right where we left off only a day or two ago. She’s the one person I want to talk to now,
but before I can call her, she calls me on Monday night. At the sound of her voice, my seething emotions attain critical mass and I start to bawl.

“Wyn?”

I blow my nose and keep blotting the tears that refuse to abate.

“What’s going on down there?”

“I don’t know. David is … We’re—I think we’re splitting up.”

As I’m pouring my heart out, I suddenly realize she’s laughing. Surprise stops my tears in their tracks.

“I’m sorry, Baby. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that I was calling to tell you Neal moved out.” Now I’m laughing, too, albeit a bit hysterically. “I think we should fall back and regroup,” she says. “Why don’t you get your ass on a plane and come up here for a nice, long visit?”

The following Saturday, one of those blue-and-gold September afternoons, finds me on an Alaska Airlines flight heading for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. My mother’s reaction to my departure was predictable.

“Have you taken leave of your senses? This is exactly the wrong time for you to go away. You need to be there. Show him you love him. Cook dinner for him. Make your presence felt.”

The fact that he’s never home for dinner, doesn’t want to feel my presence—in fact, acts slightly surprised and annoyed when we pass each other in the hall, as if I’m a long-term houseguest who’s overstayed her welcome—none of this registers with my mother.

David’s unabashed enthusiasm was depressing. “I think it’s a really good idea, Wyn. I need to do some thinking. It’ll be good for me to be alone.”

The plane’s docking ritual seems lifted from a religious service, as in “Thank God we made it.” There’s a final lurch, lights blink, chimes sound. The pilgrims rise en masse, pressing forward through the jet way, straining toward that first breath of fresh air. I scan the crowded terminal for CM. She’s easy to spot, with her mass of auburn hair a good four inches above most other heads, but she’s already seen me.

“Wyn!” She runs up and gives me a big hug. “You look way too good for someone who’s just been dumped.”

Actually, she’s the one who looks great. But then she always does. CM—or Christine Mayle to the rest of the world—is the only woman I’ve ever known who even looks good the week before her period.

Analyze her features and she’s not classically beautiful. But at just under six feet tall, with creamy skin, green eyes, and long auburn hair, she doesn’t look like very many other women. Her taste in clothing is, frankly, weird—handmade this, ethnic that, strange color combinations. But somehow it all looks good when she puts it on, and she carries herself like the dancer that she is, striding rather than walking. I always expect her to break into a
tour
jêté.

Her apartment is on the fifth floor of an old brick building at the top of Queen Anne Hill, and it’s very CM. Two bay windows frame sweeping views of the city and Mount Rainier and the ocean—”Elliott Bay,” she corrects me. It has built-in cabinets and a fireplace, crown molding, green-and-black tile in the kitchen. No water pressure, but tons of ambience.

“I’m sorry I don’t have a guest room.” We settle ourselves on her couch. “This thing is a Hide-A-Bed. I think it’s pretty comfortable.”