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Details registered. He had long hair, more than a bit unkempt. He wore a shapeless fatigue jacket and matching, slightly ragged pants. Oh, lord. He was probably part of some outpatient program at the V.A. Hospital.
“Well, I didn’t see a wedding ring…”
I looked automatically to my left hand, where I was, indeed, wearing my wedding ring. I was so stunned by this, the first outright proposition I’d had in as long as I could remember, that I couldn’t even speak. I could only stare.
He moved closer, looking hopeful. “So? Are you?”
“I’m…no, I’m not.”
The man took off running down the aisle. I looked after him, the absurdity of the situation giving the entire experience a surreal flavor. I paid for my purchases, fumbling with my change and laughing too hard at the cashier’s unfunny jokes.
I’d carried myself as a married woman for such a long time, I’d considered myself under the radar of outright flirtation. Either men didn’t notice me, or I didn’t notice them noticing. After the ineloquent come-on, though, I kept my eyes open a little wider. Was the man in the next car checking me out? Was the guy holding the elevator door for me doing it to be polite or was he giving me a once-over when I reached to push the button for my floor? Even if they weren’t, the possibility that they might be preparing to accost me with the offer of a night on the town kept me smiling.
Adam didn’t find it so amusing. “What did he say to you?”
I paused in showing off the new mug. “I told you. He asked me if I was available for dating.”
“He asked you on a date? In the middle of the store?”
“Well, to be honest, I think he was a little off, Adam.” I put the mug back in the bag.
Adam maneuvered his chair away from the computer desk so we were face-to-face. “What did you say?”
“I said I wasn’t.” Even now, the memory made me laugh. “And really, if you’d seen him—”
“What about him?”
I described the man, exaggerating a little to make the story better, but not too much. “I think he was probably on outpatient leave from a mental program. He had that look. Poor guy, his therapist probably told him to go out and take a chance, ask a woman out, and I shot him down. I probably set him back months in his progress.”
Adam didn’t laugh. “Right.”
“Adam,” I said with a sigh. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Some guy comes on to my wife and it’s not a big deal?” Agitated, he swung the chair around. It was big and heavy, and though he could operate it with agile grace, it still needed room to move. He nudged the edge of the desk and let out a curse when his papers fell down.
I bent to gather them up. A few lines of text caught my eye, phrasing from his lectures. I put them back in the folder.
“Honey, he wasn’t even cute!”
The look he gave me was long familiar, sardonic, verging on mean. “What does that mean? If he had been cute, you’d have taken him up on it?”
A snappish response teetered on my tongue but managed to cling to the inside of my mouth without spitting itself out. “Don’t be silly,” I said instead.
Adam grunted. His version of pacing was to rock the chair back and forth in small arcs. The room wasn’t big enough for him to move more than that, the chair too bulky to allow for the tight turns he’d need to crisscross the space.
“Adam, it was a funny story. I thought you’d like it. I’m sorry I told you.”
His eyes flashed. “What does that mean, Sadie? You won’t tell me about it again?”
“I’m sure it won’t happen again,” I replied with a sigh. “C’mon. It was just a fluke.”
He grunted again and stopped the pacing. “Were you wearing that outfit?”
I looked down at my clothes. “I was, yes.”
He’d always been a master of expression, with words or without. His snort made his feelings very clear. “Well, no wonder he hit on you.”
That made me laugh out loud. “Oh, really? Because this outfit is so sexy?”
My work clothes were the farthest thing from sexy I could ever imagine, most of the time. Then again, so was I. The Beatles might have written about Sexy Sadie, but that wasn’t me.
“I don’t like men hitting on you, that’s all.” Adam sounded less fierce, more what Mrs. Lapp called grexy.
I went to him and kissed his cheek. “You have nothing to worry about.”
He wasn’t so easily appeased. “Weren’t you wearing your wedding ring?”
That was it. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yes. I was! You act as if I was out trolling for business! Stop it!”
Maybe I shouldn’t have told him the story, which had been amusing and a bit of an ego boost to me. Adam was moody on the best of days. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why, but once he’d had a much better sense of humor. It was hard to remember he wasn’t the same man I’d seduced with a red ribbon stuck in a book of poetry.
He stopped talking. He went back to his computer and ignored me. I took my mug and left the room.
If he’d been cute, would I have taken him up on the offer? Gone out with a stranger I met while buying a mug? Maybe gone home with him, to his bed, or to a hotel room, to a car, to a back alley where he’d push me against a wall and merge his flesh with mine in anonymous passion?
According to Joe, things like that happened all the time, to him. But Joe never came on to me. I only listened to him talk about it, month after month, and wondered what it would be like to be asked and answer, “yes.”
Chapter 04
“Valentine’s Day is the pimple on the ass of the year.”
My patient’s blunt statement made me laugh. I know her well enough to understand she was using humor to cover up insecurity, but that didn’t matter. What she said was funny, anyway.
“Why do you say that, Elle?” I poured us both another cup of tea.
“It’s a martyr’s holiday.” She added sugar and cream to her cup.
Sometimes, patients are ashamed of me, or rather, their need to see me. Sometimes they embrace me so fully it compromises our working relationship. Elle, whom I found to be bright, funny and compassionate, had managed to strike the perfect medium. We were friendly but not quite friends—with friends the sharing of trouble goes both ways and with us it was necessarily one-sided. Still, our sessions had taken on the tone of two girlfriends chatting, rather than of a doctor counseling a patient. It showed me she was comfortable with me. It had taken her a long time.
I added lemon to my cup. “Ah, yes. Poor St. Valentine. But it’s not that anymore.”
She sipped and gave me a familiar raised eyebrow. “Sure it is. The search for the perfect gift? The despair if you don’t get just the right thing? The depression of not having someone to buy for, or having someone to buy for but not the person you want.”
“I’m sensing some anxiety over Valentine’s Day.” How easily I put on the doctor’s cap. Girlfriends or not, Elle was there to talk, and I to listen. She didn’t always take my advice but then, not all of it was good.
The way she tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair meant what I’d said was true, but I didn’t push. Some of my colleagues favor a more antagonistic approach, call my methods the “soft and fuzzy” school of psychology. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I can only do my best.
“I do love him.” She spoke low, but not hesitant. “It’s not that I don’t.”
A year before she wouldn’t have admitted that much. I offered a smile. “So then, what is it? You’re afraid to buy him something?”
“It’s so much pressure.” Elle shrugged and spun her spoon around in the cup. “And I think…I think he’s going to make this a big one.”
“More than flowers and candy, you mean.”
She nodded, her face shadowed. “Yeah. I think so.”
“We’ve talked about this.” I sipped my tea, watching her. “How relationships grow. It’s part of change.”
She laughed, ruefully. “I know. Dr. Danning, I know that.”
I knew she did. Elle had been with her boyfriend for over a year. She danced around the idea of marrying him and having children, of making what she called a real life. She had other issues, bigger ones, but it all came back to that in the end. Marriage and children, whether she could take what he offered her or not, whether the past had any right to influence her future any longer. She’d come a long way in the year she’d been seeing me, but sometimes it’s the sunshine that frightens us more than the big black shadows.
“It’s just hard.” She sounded ashamed. “It shouldn’t be. He makes it so easy. But it’s hard, anyway. Even when I fight with him, he just comes back with something so perfect I can’t chase him away.”
“Do you really want to?”
She sighed. “No. But do you know how hard it is to be with someone who’s perfect?”
“Nobody’s perfect, Elle.”
She gave me a look. “Some are more perfect than others, Dr. Danning.”
I laughed a bit. “Yes, that’s true.”
She stirred her cup as if she could dissolve her troubles the way she dissolved the sugar in the tea. “I keep thinking…”
“Yes?” I asked, when waiting for her to continue failed to prompt her into speaking.
“What if he’s the last man I’ll ever sleep with for the rest of my life?”
I fussed with my own tea to create distance from a question that hit too close to home. “Would that be so awful?”
Elle put her cup on the edge of my desk and rubbed the arms of her chair, her face angled away from mine. “No?”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
The look she gave me was pure, vintage Elle Kavanagh, stubborn and self-effacing with a hint of snark. “I anticipate the rest of my life being a very long time.”
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” I told her, and we both laughed.
“I don’t want to cheat on Dan. But I’m afraid I might. Just because.”
“Those things don’t happen by accident.”
She seemed chastened by my sterner than usual tone. “I know.”
I studied her before saying, “The offer still stands, if you want it.”
She looked up. “See both of us. I know.”
“Dan’s a wonderful man and he’s been good for you. You know putting the onus of your happiness on someone else isn’t healthy. But neither is refusing to allow someone to help you gain it.”
“I know, I know, I know!” She groaned, tipping back her head. She grimaced. “Bleah! I know! Stupid fucking Valentine’s Day!”
“Maybe you’re getting yourself too worked up. What are you doing for him?”
She straightened in her chair. “Heart-shaped meatloaf. With asparagus. And some sex.”
I meant to answer right away, but sudden immobility stifled my words. I filled my cup with tea. I didn’t want to cover the fact I couldn’t speak. The teapot rattled against the cup and I had to force my hands to steady.
I envied her. Fiercely. Suddenly. Horribly. I envied Elle for her meatloaf and plans for lovemaking to celebrate a holiday she hated. I envied her fear that she had something to lose.
“Dr. Danning?”
I put on the doctor mask. I owed her that. We might laugh and drink tea, and I might be privy to her deepest, darkest secrets, but we were not friends.
“It sounds lovely. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it.”
She nodded, slowly. “Yes. I think so.”
“And whatever happens after, Elle, remember that he’s doing it because he loves you. And it’s all right for you to love him back.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d cried in front of me, but this time her tears made my own throat close in sympathy. Or perhaps I wanted to weep for myself, and not with compassion for her. Either way, when I handed her the box of tissues, I took one for myself, too.
“When does it stop?” she asked, as though I had all the answers.
“I don’t know, Elle. I wish I did.”
It wasn’t the first time I didn’t give her the answer she was looking for, but it was the first time I felt I’d failed her.
When did it stop? That was the question of the day. When did the fear go away, when would I stop longing, when would I cease wanting something that was wrong?
It was easy for me to sit in my doctor’s chair and counsel Elle not to cheat on her lover, but what right did I have to be so smug? I could give my patients advice but couldn’t take it from myself. If I’d been in front of me, I’d have counseled myself to understand that my feelings were normal and natural. That my marriage had undergone tremendous strain and changes because of Adam’s disability. That wanting and missing sex was natural and normal, and the desire to be held, to make love…yes, even to fuck, that was normal, too.
I was normal.
But I also would have counseled myself to stop seeing Joe. That the emotional infidelity was as real as if I’d gone to bed with him, and perhaps worse because merely sating a physical need was one thing but the inevitability of what was happening was something else, entirely.
Just because Joe and I never touched didn’t mean we weren’t having an affair.
I knew it. I didn’t want to stop it. Frankly, I couldn’t stop it. The first Friday of every month, our lunches, his stories and the relief they gave me were a bright and shining thing in the otherwise gray palette of my existence.
It was wrong, and I didn’t want to let it go.
The ringing of my cell phone distracted me from my navel-gazing. I took the call at once, fearful as always it would be from one of Adam’s caregivers, telling me there was a problem.
“Sades, it’s me.”
