My heart broke as I watched Jeanne cry at our kitchen table. My wife's flaming red hair hung over its surface like a shroud as her shoulders jerked with loud, full-body sobs. I had never, in our dozen years together, seen her wail like this. Never seen her mourn like this. Not when her best friend was diagnosed with cancer. Not when she miscarried. Not even at her mother's funeral. I realized only one thing could make her cry this way.
My heart broke, but it didn't break for her. It broke for me. In a monotone, I said, "James died." Startled by my sudden, unexpected appearance, she looked up at me, her emerald green eyes wide with shock and fear. My wife understood that she now had two tragedies to grieve. The first was the death of her greatest love. The second was that her husband knew, finally and for certain, that he had never been first in her heart.
Her sobs broke again, great swells of fear and pain. She reached out; whether asking for my comfort or asking to comfort me, I neither knew nor cared. "Scott--"
"Good."
Turning on my heel, I left our home without another word, pursued by her hopeless, keening wail.
I drove. It had always been what I'd done when I needed to think. I found it meditative in a way that few other things were; running could serve a similar purpose, but I knew my ruminations would last longer than my conditioning would allow. Hell, they'd likely last longer than the bones in my feet.
James had been Jeanne's high school and then college boyfriend. They had known each other since they were children. Their parents and friends all knew they would marry; but then they didn't.
He wanted to be the 21st century Hemingway, to travel the world and have adventures and channel it into his writing. Being married to Jeanne wouldn't fit with those plans. James' need to make his way in the world was greater than his desire to marry her, and so he left her behind.
His rejection broke Jeanne's heart, but by the time she and I met three years later, she seemingly had recovered. I had little indication anything remained other than a fondness of someone she'd known her whole life. She and I dated and quickly fell in love.
My wife was--is--a gorgeous woman, tall and athletic, but still quintessentially feminine. If her dreams had taken her in that direction, she could easily have become a model. Instead, she wanted a loving husband and happy family more than anything else in the world.
James barely came up in conversation when we dated, certainly no more than any of my exes. Perhaps that should have been a tip-off. She had known him for fifteen years. He should have figured more prominently in anecdotes of her childhood. It didn't occur to me then. Now, that gap made me wonder what else I had missed.
We had only met a couple of times. The first was at our wedding, where I was told that he was being invited in the role of her childhood friend, not her college sweetheart. His parents were old family friends and had been invited as well; it didn't bother me.
I found myself surprised at how different James and I were. I was brown-haired, tall and slender, with the body of an endurance athlete, one earned through long hours running and playing tennis. He resembled a fireplug, short and powerfully built, with unruly black hair. Hell, Jeanne had a few inches of height on him.
More than the physical differences separated us, though. He exuded a boisterous, take-no-shit personality packed with roguish charm, while I'm much more reserved and, for lack of a better word, solid; some might even say boring. That's not to say I'm a pushover, but I don't go seeking out trouble, either. I disliked James immediately, and he clearly felt the same way about me. Even without the lovely Jeanne as a bone of contention between us, I think we would have despised each other.
He was not, I thought, anything particularly special: moderately handsome, well-educated, and driven, but not an exceptionally smart or accomplished man. At that point he had only done a short stint in the military and worked as a deckhand on a large cargo ship, plus a few other minor adventures as he followed in the footsteps of his idol. I had him beat in almost every way, in my estimation.
Then I saw how Jeanne looked at him. When I was around, she was friendly and even sisterly to him. But when she didn't realize I was watching, I saw a longing there that concerned me. I asked her about it, but she laughed and told me it was just a bit of "what might have been," nothing more. My loving fiancée gently ribbed me about how I'd looked at an ex we'd met for coffee one time, and I let it go. She was to be my bride, after all. I'd won the fair maiden's hand.
He had won her heart, though. I just didn't know it then.
Jeanne and I threw ourselves into married life after the wedding. I was happy; she seemed happy. In every tangible way, she made me believe she was the perfect wife: loving, caring, and passionate. A true partner. We were newlyweds, and we acted that way.
But the longing I had seen never entirely went out of my mind. It nagged at me occasionally that I had never seen her look that way at me. I tried to ignore the way she'd sometimes get that same look while staring off into the distance; when I'd interrupt her reverie, a hint of guilt came before the loving smile. 'Surely it was just my imagination,' I told myself. Surely.
Then he visited our home, three years after we wed. Visited Jeanne, to be more accurate. When I came home from work, they sat at our kitchen table talking quietly. I caught only snatches of their words before they noticed my presence, but their body language and the urgency of the quiet conversation they shared gave me pause. James' hand laid atop hers, and they leaned close to each other. His face was earnest; hers conflicted.
My concern further escalated with their reactions when they noticed my presence. James was poised as he pulled away, with a smug expression somewhere between challenge and disdain. Jeanne almost leapt to her feet and rushed to give me a welcoming kiss. "Sweetheart! I'm so glad you're home!"
"Clearly." I stared at the interloper at my kitchen table. He held my gaze.
"James is--"
He stood. "Actually, I was just leaving. I wish I could stay, but I'm shipping out early tomorrow. Headed down to McMurdo Station in Antarctica for six months."
I didn't pretend to be sorry he was leaving. He didn't pretend to care. Jeanne quickly read the room, politely but clearly dismissing him. "You'll have to visit us when you're in town again. I'm sorry you can't stay longer."
James smiled at my wife as she broke away from me, then kissed Jeanne on the cheek and hugged her just a little too long, just a little too close for my liking. The lout made as if to shake my hand as he released her. "Scott, thank you so much for taking care of Jeanne. I can tell how devoted you are to her. She's very lucky to have found her true love."
His manner had shifted to one that was almost affable. But something hid there, a joke concealed behind the pleasant façade. He was laughing at me. By the way Jeanne pulled in on herself, she was in on the joke but didn't find it nearly as funny. I stared daggers at him, ignoring his outstretched hand, then nodded dismissively. "Safe travels."
After he left, we rowed. Something more than an old friendship existed between her and James. We both knew it, but she wouldn't fess up. I didn't believe that Jeanne had cheated on me, but I couldn't put the possibility out of my mind, either. She gave me the silent treatment for a while, but I knew that I was right. There was some guilt there, some indiscretion I could see the outline of, but not the whole form.
Within a few days, things had thawed between us. James was gone on a boat to freeze his ass off, and we were still here. She did everything she could to make me forget about my anger and my suspicion; I loved her, so it worked. We spent the whole weekend in bed making up and nine months later...
Nine months later.
I yanked the wheel of my car, almost rolling it while trying to get off the road. It was only by pure luck I didn't get hit by another vehicle as I burst out the door and onto the shoulder, spewing my lunch across the asphalt.
Nine months. Oh god. Rachel didn't look anything like me; she was a clone of her mom. Nathan was the same. Oh god. Oh god!
I sat in my car on the side of the road for a long time, until well after the sun went down. The dings of text notifications and my wife's unwelcomely cheerful ringtone sounded over and over, but I scarcely noticed. My eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, trying to find some type of equilibrium in a world that no longer made sense.
I am not normally the most emotionally demonstrative man. I won't say that I don't cry; any man who does is either lying or emotionally stunted, in my opinion. But I almost never did in public. By the time I was ready to pull back onto the road, my face was tear streaked and my shirt almost soaking wet.
In a cheap motel room, I finally looked at my phone. To her credit, Jeanne's text messages went from apologetic to worried to fearful. They were never angry. The same could not be said of mine; a simple
FUCK OFF
was all she received in reply. Then I turned off the phone and laid staring at the water-damaged ceiling, wondering if I was getting a divorce. Wondering how I was going to explain the divorce to my children. Wondering if they were my children.
Misery will only keep you awake for so long. I was exhausted, and the worries and heartache were finally left behind for a time. I could only wish they wouldn't return as soon as I awoke, that they had been nightmares and would vanish in the light of the morning sun. But then I opened my eyes again and smelled the faint scent of mildew and cleaning chemicals. I knew that it was my marriage that had been the dream, and my wife's paroxysms of sorrow yesterday had been my awakening.
There was no point in showering; I would only have to change back into the same clothes. I had to go home eventually. "Eventually" might as well be "immediately."
Jeanne was sleeping on the couch when I opened the door, but she jumped up as I came in, saying... something. No clue what. I still couldn't process what I'd already learned, so my brain just let her words glance off of it. The way she ran to me, though, reminded me of nothing so much as when she leapt up from the table to assure me that nothing untoward had happened during James's last visit to our home. Or what I had imagined was his last visit to our home; I had certainly never seen him again, but what did that really mean?
