And in the moonlit dark full of the smell of sugar cane smoke, heading to his bed with this young woman beside him, Michael struggles to stop this memory. He does not want these words in his head. But they happen. As he remembers them. Stripped down. And when they were spoken, he felt very little as he heard them, as he tried to comprehend them. And when he found things to say in return, he heard his own voice as if it was someone else speaking.
“I’ve been sleeping with a man,” Kelly says.
At first he has no words at all, not even in this other voice.
“It’s over,” she says.
“How long?” he says.
“For a month.”
“Over for a month?”
“It lasted for a month. It’s over now. For a few weeks.”
“Why did it end?” And he realizes how odd this question is, preceding the more obvious why did it start.
“He stopped loving me,” she says.
He takes this in. “And if his feelings hadn’t changed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you telling me?”
Then no words for a time. And then her voice again. “I find it’s not so simple just to resume.”
Then no words.
And then he says, “So it’s done?” And he hears the ambiguity. Though she has already implied that the affair is done. But he could still be asking about that. He isn’t. She has slept with another man and she has stopped because he has stopped loving her. She is not answering. He clarifies. “Our marriage?” he says.
She does not speak, and he feels himself catching up to all this. Those last two words came directly from his own mouth.
She says, “Is it?”
And he better turn his back now and move away because he knows already what is next, and that would be as difficult for him to face as the thing he has just faced: his eyes are growing thick with incipient tears. He is a wretched fool of a worthless child lost in the woods and about to cry. He turns his back to her and he walks to the open French windows and he clenches his eyes shut to stop the tears without touching them, without giving her the slightest clue as to what he’s doing. Sightless, he hears a train whistle — one of the working trains rolling heavily along the edge of the city, out by the river. He says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the middle of New Orleans,” and he has lost touch with his own voice again and he is losing touch with his own feelings again, as well, for he finds he can straighten and take a breath and set himself, and he will do what he needs to do. He allows himself a quick, heavy palming of his eyes so there will be no trace of any tear, and he turns to his wife, who, he is relieved to see, is staring not at him but at the floor. She seems to sense him watching. She lifts her eyes, and she looks at him, and her face is utterly blank. This always sweetly animated face has no trace of a feeling on it — in this extraordinary circumstance, there is no affect at all — and he knows the answer to the question. But he is all right, he is staying strong now: he imagines she needs him to be strong now, so that she can do what she needs to do.
And she says, “Yes. It’s done.”
“What is it?” This is Laurie’s voice. Michael looks at her. They have stopped moving.
Her upturned face is blanched white in this light, and she seems young, so very young. But made alabaster by the moon, made into an ancient statue of a very young woman, she seems timeless, as well, grown already old in some distant past. And to this sense of her, Michael finds he can speak the thing in his mind.
“What did I miss?” he says.
She knows at once he’s speaking of Kelly. “That she was cheating on you,” Laurie says.
But that’s not what he’s trying to understand, and he can think of nothing more to ask.
“Did you ever cheat on her?” she says.
“No,” he says.
“Were you ever tempted?”
“Abstractly. A time or two. But only in the abstract.”
Laurie laughs, though it is a low, soft-edged laugh. “See,” she says. “This is also Men. Or it once was. Here’s a little secret, my darling. Some of us miss you old-fashioned guys. I’m a lucky girl.”
Now she has stopped being a statue. Her dark eyes are intensely alive in the midst of her moon-cold face. And she no longer seems young in any way. He takes her in his arms and kisses her and the kiss goes on and then it turns into a gradually diminishing flutter of pecks and lip-pluckings and finally it ends.
They pull back slightly and they look each other in the eyes. And Laurie says, “I hope you realize that I’m falling madly in love with you.”
∼
On this night, as Michael hears an overt declaration of love from a new woman and as Kelly stands naked in the middle of her hotel room near her Scotch and her pills, as they both continue to churn with the past that brought them to this present moment, neither will turn to those strangely muted weeks following Kelly’s confession. Michael moved into the Crowne Plaza, covering the desk with his papers and neatly lining up his empty two-a-night mini whiskey bottles on the TV cabinet, and Kelly often stood in the center of rooms for long stretches of time, listening to the ticking of her house or the humming of her refrigerator or the bratting of a motor boat passing on the bayou. When the two of them spoke, it was to deal with the details of the divorce, and they were sad and calm and quiet and business-like and mutually, wearily agreeable over assets.
One Sunday afternoon in the midst of the process, as Michael returned to the house to clean out his office downstairs, Kelly retreated to her office next to the master bedroom upstairs. Her office. She looks around. She has always worked. But Michael made it possible for her to work hard and not worry about making money. On the wall are photos of her with charity bigwigs and politicians. And framed thank-you letters. Make-A-Wish and the homeless. Habitat for Humanity and the symphony. The four causes she worked for over the years. Too many causes, perhaps. She was too restless. She should have stayed with one. But they all said thank you. And there were times — especially away from the offices, away from the fundraisers — at the hospitals and the shelters, at the building sites and the dressing rooms — there were times when they even said we love you. She thinks: how pathetic I have been.
She rises up and goes out of her office and into the bedroom and she closes the door and she locks it and she lies down on the bed and she begins to do the silent little number-mantra she’s used over the years to clear her head and sleep. Oh three oh six eight four. Oh three oh six eight four. Keep those imageless numbers sounding loudly in her head, and the image-laden, free-associating thoughts — the sleep killers — don’t have a chance to enter into her. But she sits up abruptly now. The numbers became simple sounds over the years, but the source of them lurches back into her now: March 6, 1984. Mardi Gras. The day she met Michael. She lies back down. She whispers softly to herself, “Oh shit.” She will keep the house but she will lose her sleep aid.
But she soon sleeps anyway. And she wakes. And she has no idea how long it has been. It feels like a long time. She assumes it’s been a long time. Her head feels pumped full of something hot and gaseous. She has a bitter taste in her mouth. She goes out of the bedroom and along the hall and down the stairs, and as she takes the last step into the foyer, Michael emerges from the hallway to his office. They both stop abruptly. It feels to her like the dark, alternate-universe equivalent to her stepping from the preparation room before her wedding, heading off to pee, and there he was. Out of place. Wanted and not wanted.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“I’m empty handed,” he says. “But it’s all sorted. I’ll have someone come and move the things.”