A Case of You - continued page 2
There are scenes in women’s novels, romance and literary, where a man and woman meet eyes and instantly know that they will be lovers. Some writers can even make that moment believable, if they don’t dwell on it too long and get on to the good part. But people write novels, even bad ones, to make sense of what happens in the real world, and in the real world, when Ben and I hugged we both knew we were done for.
We both had ostensibly happy marriages, decent spouses, good children doing well in school, mortgages, car payments, work, aging parents, all the detritus of bourgeois existence. None of that mattered. It never does. If it did people wouldn’t fuck other people to whom they aren’t married, now would they? And though the fact that Ben was dying might have lent poignancy to the whole affair, it would have happened anyway. I might not have hugged him at that moment outside the library, but across some room, at some time, our eyes would have met. They would have had to. The whole script was, after all, already written, and we were just actors learning our lines. Weren’t we?
Ben and I stood talking on the sidewalk for a few minutes. He seemed cheerful enough, if self-conscious about dying. I could understand that. Dying is such a public thing.
My children tumbled about the back seat of the car (I had, after all, just planned to drive through and drop off books, but then I had seen Ben and said: “Kids, hang on a minute. I gotta say hello to someone.”) His child was nowhere in sight, nor was his wife. Apparently he had been at the library researching his disease. I told him he could stay at home and do that on the Internet but he admitted to having a fondness, still, for books, and for looking things up in them. I agreed to that and asked him how Marcia was taking the news of his illness and he said, again, “Well, you know,” and I thought I knew all about that too. She was a nice woman, sturdy and capable, she would make his last moments bearable, I thought.
But then, and this actually happened, I swear to God, I knew somehow that that wasn’t right at all. I felt that he would be with me, not Marcia. At the end, I thought, it won’t matter a bit what she thinks of his last moans and groans, because I’ll be the one there changing his diapers and holding his hand and guiding him on to the next place. And as if he had heard me think all of that, as if I had said all of it out loud, Ben said to me, as I stood on the sidewalk looking at him lovingly, expectantly, “D’ya wanna have lunch sometime?”
And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “How about tomorrow?”
It is true that life changes in one tiny moment: the moment when a child is conceived, when one says, “I do,” instead of “No, No, No!” When one misses a plane that crashes or steps off the curb into an oncoming bus, when one picks a certain path over another. There is always a moment, too, to stop whatever is going to happen, but sometimes we don’t know to do it. Sometimes we do know to do it but we can’t. Or think we can’t. When fate catches up with us and we just go with it. Lunch with Ben could have been just lunch with Ben. Instead, it was like running to catch the plane that crashes rather than waiting for the next one that won’t.
How does one live a life with the idea of something and then actually do it? I couldn’t say now. I couldn’t have said then. I couldn’t have articulated what it was that made the difference, not even if someone had put a gun to my head–which was, in effect, what happened. Ben was the gun. He fired the shot that destroyed me and I hadn’t the sense to get out of the way. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the gun was loaded. I did. I did. And still I put myself straight in the path of its trajectory.
It’s not easy having an affair in a town the size of mine. Perhaps if it had been easy I might have done it sooner or not at all. For years my husband and I would joke about adultery. He would say that he was much too busy to screw around and anyway he was at work all day and what did I think he was doing anyway (I really had no idea, actually). But, he would add, You, you, are home all day and I have no idea what goes on, you could be doing anything, which of course only made me angry, as if he thought I was one of those housewives who sat around and ate chocolates and watched Jerry Springer or went back to bed until it was time to pick the children up from school. I could have, of course: I could have done just those things, or others. But then the bills would not have been paid and the house would have been a mess and nothing would have gotten done. But then I knew people who lived just like that, with no good excuse. So having an affair was then something I did in my copious spare time. Of which, I discovered, I had more than I thought. Work does, after all, expand to fit the time we have to do it. I just became much more efficient once I was meeting Ben on a regular basis. In fact, I became a whirlwind of activity. Even my energy level increased.
We began with the first lunch, which neither of us would have admitted meant anything, really. And then we had another, and a morning coffee, and then we managed to run into each other here and there. In a small town like ours it’s easy. But it wasn’t until I offered to drive him to chemotherapy that anything important happened. And even that offer to drive him to chemo was made out of what I convinced myself was true altruism. His wife Marcia worked, it was hard for her to get off. She was grateful. I even told my husband I was doing it, it was all so aboveboard.
Sitting there opposite Ben, in a matching lounge chair, my book open on my lap but unread, I watched the chemicals snake their way out of the plastic bag and through the thin tubing and into his hand and ultimately, I hoped, into his liver. He looked exhausted, he had already begun to lose weight, his appetite was off, things tasted funny he said, and the dark bags under his eyes were larger and sadder but, I thought, beautiful. He was beautiful. Still round and soft and puffy like a teddy bear, and his hands, as I watched them lying on the arms of the chair, were gorgeous. I could not take my eyes off them. I brought him a soda, and I crouched beside his chair, and I handed it up to him, guiding the straw to his mouth and I knew that I had to lie with him in a bed somewhere and put my head on his chest and just warm myself with him and give him something, I didn’t know just what, it wasn’t only sex, I wasn’t even sure if he could have sex, and that was when I knew I was in big trouble. One does not look for rescue from a dying man unless one is dying oneself, or thinks she is. I felt fine, but that couldn’t be, could it? I had to be sicker than he or I could not have imagined what I was imagining in the first place.
Ben reached over and placed the hand that wasn’t connected to the IV on my head. Later, as I helped him walk to the car I realized he was somehow holding me up instead of the other way around. When I reached over to help him buckle his seat belt I kept my face close to his until he had no choice but to kiss me. At least that is what I told myself, allowing him no culpability, he was after all dying, and I was driving, I was in charge.
