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Gardenias, Revised

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under marriage, writings, fiction |

So I’ve finally completed the short story I’ve had open for a long time. The writing I’ve done recently makes sense within its context, completes it somehow…

She is just about to shower when Paul begins to rattle the knob and pound at the door. He knows how she hates to be disturbed while mired in the morning routine. Still he feels entitled to disturb his wife, unclothed, just stepping into the steaming start of her day. He is risking a full day’s wrath. Kate is given to enduring grudges, punishing his trespasses with protracted silences and the occasional nasty barb.

She has already wiped the countertop free of toothpaste and suspicious hairs. She has scrubbed the toilet seat with Tilex. She has used a damp paper towel to collect the lint and dirt and pet hair that had drifted into corners.

Paul is banging so hard that he can barely hear her call out, “Is it too much to ask? Just one shower? Undisturbed?” She wishes she has turned the lock. She has given up entirely on the notion that he might try to understand her need for quiet, the occasional moment to herself, and has taken to hiding out behind barred doors in the house they share with their two children on a quiet street in an expensive suburban town with planned parks and greenways and a dozen private elementary schools where she and her family are supposed to live out their lives, together and happy.

“I’ve got a question,” he says through the bathroom door. “Do you think there will ever be a morning when you don’t wake up a bitch?”

She is stretched thin and flinty from another bad night’s sleep. The long hours spent laying face up in the darkness of their room, watching the rapid revolutions of the ceiling fan, listening to Paul snore softly and mumble incoherent nothings in his sleep, have made her mad with wanting. She is deeply, deeply afraid that she may never sleep again. Each night a little worse than the last. A self perpetuating cycle of insomnia fueled by persistent thoughts of another man, not the one who moans softly and snuffles on the pillow beside her, but the one that lives across town, the one that has, subtly and sideways, invaded her day life, her night life, become the one true thing her hectic mind can rest on.

Because she hardly sleeps, she hardly dreams. She lies still and imagines. And it doesn’t feel that wrong or wanton, being there beside her husband and thinking of another. Because as hard as she tries to conjure this other man’s hands on her stomach at the small of her back, brushing softly her inner thighs, she can only imagine her head resting on his chest while his arms are wrapped tightly around her.

She is incapable of sexual thoughts of carnal lust and physical satisfactions. But she can almost feel him kiss the top of her head and her stomach aches with the sensation of something long wanted, finally fulfilled.

She is overwhelmed by a certain peace, by the notion that she would gladly die in this man’s arms. She drifts off momentarily and wakes to find herself very much alive and sick with wanting to slip back into the fleeting dream. She can’t quite recall the exact words he has spoken to her as he held her in this imagined and important embrace. But it has inspired flooding relief. It must have been something simple and pure like, I am here now.

Before laying down each night, she is never wholly aware of feeling dissatisfied or fragile, but now, at first light, it is all so completely wrong without him. She practically writhes with the indignity of it -this desire for completion - so un-progressive, so solidly antiquated an idea.

She climbs from the bed just before dawn to make her ritual tear around two miles of golf course and back to the smallish Southern Colonial that has been recently painted a deep coral color with crisp white shutters.

She hurries, pounding, panting sprinting through the quiet, forgetting to admire the day in its rose toned beginnings, consumed by this girlish crush, sick with the anticipation of getting there, ridiculously eager to begin shepherding her migrant workers through the motions of plant placement and installation, anxious to greet him in his perfectly tailored shirt and dress pants, impeccably pressed, off to an office where he makes the kind of money that allows for tardiness and a cavalier attitude toward making people wait.

Kate hasn’t taken the time to detect the subtle shift of seasons, the increasing moisture in the air at daybreak, the languid whooping of the Myna birds as they prepare to fly south before the terrible summer and its lashing rains and bugs and horrific storms.

She is used to a more obvious heralding of spring; the dramatic resurrection of the daffodils, the collective scent of manure and early apple blossoms, the first bloom of forsythia and the return of the gold finches and robins. She is not equipped to notice the quiet shift that is winter to spring in the Tropics, her faculties of perception dulled and depleted by the energy expended thinking urgently about a man nearly twenty years her senior.

As Paul explodes into the bathroom, she stands poised on the edge of the tub, running clothes piled into the hamper, the bathroom full of the strong and reassuring smell of cleaning products.

“I’ve got an 8:30 conference call. Just need to grab something,” he says, removing a prescription bottle from the medicine cabinet, filling his dress pant pocket with a handful of Prilosec.

“What’s your day look like,” he asks, a stab at atonement for the previously nasty exchange, an attempt to reach her in the place she has gone recently, a location decidedly distant and distracted.

“Just more of the same. Astrid. Zaida. Jose…About ten other clients that promise to drive me mad,” she says. Omitting the name Ted O’Malley from the list feels like a tiny deception but one she is willing to live with.

“You need a new job or a new attitude. Either one. You choose,” Paul says.

“Since you’re feeling like my life-coach this morning, you could drop the kids at school for me,” she calls to him as he leaves the house. He simply waves as he walks out the front door. Either he hasn’t heard her request or has decided to ignore her. He is already checking his blackberry for phone messages and e-mails, busy launching a day that does not concern her.

Paul’s refusal to do carpool might make her late this morning and she hates the way she’s tried to dodge a duty she usually performs with some measure of satisfaction.

She has always liked to start the day by shaking each teacher’s hand before relinquishing control of her children. She has considered the morning meet and greet less an attempt to curry favor than an opportunity to give each instructor a look in the eye, to remind them of their precious charge, that they and they alone have been trusted to guide and advise her grade-schoolers in all things that happen between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. She has thought it advantageous that they have a healthy respect for her piercing gaze and her vise-like grip.

But in the last few weeks she’s come to realize that the hand she offers each morning has grown less commanding and assertive more limp and girlish, smelling of lilac hand lotion and seduction. She had thought she could compartmentalize it, this mounting affection for Ted O’Malley, but instead she wears it like a blush. She radiates the secret of it.

It used to be that she couldn’t imagine what a younger woman might see in a man fifteen, maybe twenty years older than herself. She has never understood the basis for that kind of attraction until now. A mother to two children, a decade married, she is growing familiar with the anatomy of an affair. Now, abandoned by the advantages of youth, she can see that appearance and age have little to do with it. There is an impossible and intoxicating allure in the flush and flutter of new beginnings, the singular thrill of developing affections caused by something as simple and necessary as the right kind of attention given at the appropriate time.

She is caught in the mounting swell of attraction, suffering all the symptoms of a new and burgeoning love. The bottomless pit of desire, slowly sucking away at all vestiges of her rational self, affecting her appetite, her sleeping patterns, making her foolish and whimsical, distracted and plotting . She can almost hear it, the rushing sound of her own libido luring her down the rabbit hole.

It has been only five weeks since she began working for Ted and his wife, landscaping their property on Alfonso Court. And just that quickly it has come to seem so natural, so separate and apart from every other thing that defines a day. She looks forward to Ted, his impatience and curt professionalism. The need to see him, just briefly, in the morning before the sun is full in the sky, before the plodding and ordinary tasks of the day, has taken on the urgent tone of infatuation.

Initially, she was reluctant to help them revive the garden. When she first walked the property, she had thought the house hopelessly unattractive with its trite palm tree plaque above the front door, a leaky pool decaying in the back yard, the pink marble floor tile throughout the first floor. Among the tear downs on Alfonso Court, she considered it a questionable keeper. There was nothing but the low and grumbling sound of destruction on the block; one more pile of concrete rubble to haul away to God Knows Where.

But Ted’s young wife, Astrid, has insisted on the restoration. She has brought a sort of intensity to the task that underscores the fact that she feels the house possesses something like a soul. Kate thinks that Astrid has, perhaps, confused the concepts of rejuvenation and salvation, intent on restoring the building to its previous grandeur but with a modern injection of Feng Shui principles and some silly notions of death and rebirth that she’d picked up at an Ashram in India.

Kate has been simultaneously amused and irritated by Astrid’s tendency to suffer so acutely about things like the proper placement of the water feature. She has had to suppress giggles of disdain on several occasions, like when Astrid confessed that a Feng Shui expert counseled her to abandon the new house. The guru of questionable qualification had pronounced the whole layout inauspicious. Astrid had whispered this revelation as if saying it aloud would somehow activate the Dalai Lama to unleash unhappiness, cancer or, at the very least, ingrown toenails.

And at first, Kate had wondered about their peculiar arrangement. Ted and Astrid. She struggled to identify that which sustained their attraction, something beyond the obvious and the carnal. She imagined the temporary exuberance of their initial romance, long limbs tangled in late morning romps; the spontaneity a surprise to Ted, past mid-life. But now, she can see that their tolerance for one another has grown thread bare and strained. She enjoys watching Ted barely manage a tight lipped patience for Astrid’s decadence and the financial ramifications of her whimsy. She is acutely aware that Ted can hardly endure Astrid’s whimsical musings on paint color and leaf texture.

Kate can admit to herself, within the mental transgressions of her day, that Ted is not conventionally handsome. She can see his obvious flaws (slightly narrow in the shoulders, a shortfall in the chin). But she has gradually come to admire his more subtle attributes. She has noticed the effort he expends staying fit, the muscular definition of his chest and arms distracting from the minor etchings around the eyes and mouth. She has grown fond of his quick but shy smile and the strength of his hands.

It has become ritual for Kate and Ted to walk the perimeter of the property each morning. He asks leading questions about plant varieties and watering schedules, allowing her to shine with the knowledge she possesses. He seems to enjoy the effect he has on her, the way she grows red cheeked and flustered with attention.

“I don’t know the difference between a jasmine and a plumbago and still I rush home each night to see the changes, the steady progress towards completion,” he says. “It’s like you’re creating the Garden of Eden just outside my front window.”

She thinks, standing there with him in the bed of newly planted Australian tree ferns and peace lilies, He’s the matured version of my college love, my first significant sex, a total and consuming affair now lost to youth and folly. She strains for clever conversation.

“So what does Ted O’Malley do on St. Patrick’s Day?” She has remembered the luck of the Irish this morning in March and has decided on a green belt and jacket to mark the occasion. He is someone to dress for, someone she hopes might notice the shade of her lipstick or the way she wears her hair.

He laughs, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder, “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs,” a flirtatious retort, at once dismissive and suggestive and enough to reduce her to adolescent awkwardness. Later, remembering the remark, the gesture of his hand, she struggles against a mad tickle to call him on his way to work and continue the repartee.

She has begun to flirt and dabble, pretending to be unavailable, allowing his daily calls to go to voice mail. She saves his messages to replay over and over again, looking for intended meanings, clever suggestions in the voice mails he leaves about perfectly ordinary topics like sod selection and installation schedules.

She allows herself to think of dorm room sex and the smell of freshly mowed playing fields and a younger more vivacious self when replaying these voice mail messages in the quiet moments of her day.

She warms with the knowledge that he too looks forward to her, stretching out his leaving in the morning; inventing reasons to call her with questions about the irrigation pump or to say how much he likes the begonias she has planted in drifts by the front gate.

Grown reckless and feverish, it is all she can do to let him go each morning. She wants to hold on to his arm, to beg him to take her away from her day destined to be increasingly dull and disappointing in the wake of their early morning encounter. Instead she is stuck with only the memory of his saying nice things to her in the garden she is busy creating at the house he shares with another woman.

Occasionally Astrid walks out with Ted in the morning and he is careful to maintain a polite distance. He allows Astrid to do all the talking, excusing himself promptly after the day’s schedule is discussed: palm trees arriving at ten a.m., the ficus hedge along the east property line to be installed by day’s end.

“Sounds good,” he says with businesslike efficiency. And she stings and hollows with the oddly protracted professionalism of the encounter, smarting with the way his wife has kissed him full on the lips before he departed. Sick with the way she has called him ‘Teddy’, indulgently, as if he were her little boy.

And it can’t sustain her, a few secretive glances, a simple wave of his hand in her direction as he pulled out of the drive. It isn’t enough to get her through the day and she finds a reason to check her cell phone at twenty minute intervals, anticipating his apology for the forced distance. When it comes, that call is like the return of something elemental and sustaining. Her lungs and diaphragm expand into the knowledge that he has needed it too; has struggled against it, but has needed it just as much as she has.

Finishing the last of her bad coffee, too strong, a murky cold blackness, Kate pulls up onto the newly installed lawn at a quarter to nine. (It has taken ten years to adapt to this ritual peculiar to South Florida. A native New Englander does not, at first, casually drive on lawns.) She is only fifteen minutes late and the driveway is already packed with a full fleet of vans and pick-ups that belonged to the electricians, painters, and various subcontractors madly revamping the house.

Kate has missed Ted’s departure by only minutes and she wilts with disappointment, seeing Astrid on the front steps, smoking, still in her morning robe.

As she makes her way to the front door, she steals furtive glances at the garden. There is something almost pornographic about the unrestrained fertility of the earth and the visible density of the air, heavy with pollen and the smell of ripening mangoes. The plants are a damp and startling green in the weak morning light. She congratulates herself as the garden appears to be blooming and expanding, struggling only slightly as the South Florida Spring, its ruthless sun and brewing heat, has just begun in earnest.
Astrid rises to meet her with a measured nonchalance as if she has not been waiting for Kate at all but been doing something far more important and has been interrupted at that essential task.

With shoulders hunched and feet shuffling, Kate braces for the cheek to cheek. Where she comes from, true warmth is a brisk handshake or a casual wave with an observation about the weather.

“I’m beginning to worry about the garden. We’ve spent $20,000 dollars so far and…” her voice trails off, and, as if for emphasis or maybe as an insult, Astrid tosses her cigarette into the planted bed beside the door.

Kate’s begins to sweat. Dampness develops in the creases of her baby-tee. She maintains a sense of calm by reminding herself that Astrid knows nothing of her affection for Ted.

Astrid sets off along the cedar mulch path, wending her way through the densely planted anthuriums, white throated spathiphyllum and fragile begonias, occasionally crushing a newly installed plant or tripping over a hose extension.

“What do you think about these plants here in the front of this bed? The one with all the dead flowers,” Astrid says.

From the beginning Astrid has insisted on Gardenias by the front door, caught up in the idea of them, their heavy fragrance evoking the pure essence of the South, their glossy leaves conjuring up gracious porches where sweet tea is served.

“Don’t you think the smell will be heavenly when we come and go?” Astrid had said in her way of making hyperbolic statements in the form of questions.

Kate had tried to talk her off the Gardenias. She always thought them a messy, imperfect shrub, never meant for close up scrutiny as all the deliciously fragrant blooms hanging bent and brown and dying, before they drop like crumbs. She has always thought it disappointing to get too close to a Gardenia.

“The Gardenias were your idea,” she says hoping Astrid will recognize the impatience in her tone.

Astrid sighs audibly and reached into her robe pocket for her cigarettes. As she cups the lighter and bends to the flame, her eyes grow bright with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She dabs at her eyes with the sash of her pink and silky robe that reveals tanned cleavage while catching suggestively around her legs. “It must be all the hormones and the pressure of this construction that just seems to go on and on and on.”

Kate begins to sink into a state of panic, thinking that, perhaps, she will have to speak of menstrual cycles here on the lawn, in the light of day.

“Ted and I are expecting. I’m a little off. Overcome at the strangest times,” Astrid manages between exhaling and crying and wiping her nose.

“Expecting what?” Kate asks.

“I’m three month’s along,” Astrid says glancing down her nose at the cigarette. “I know I’m going to have to quit, but the garden, the painting, the kitchen remodel, it’s all so discombobulating.”

Kate is too stunned for comment and they stand silently, side by side, watching the clogged fountain in the northeast corner of the garden struggle to produce a dribble up through the fountain head.

“Is this a surprise?” Kate finally blurts out before self edit.

“Ted’s not happy,” Astrid says. “He says he’s done the family thing.”

Kate senses that Astrid wants more than a discussion about Gardenias. She wants a friend, a fellowship. She craves shared secrets about deliveries and hemorrhoids and chapped nipples.

But Kate can manage only paltry attempts at consolation as she is suppresses her urge to vomit.

“Be patient with the plants, Astrid. We’re just entering the growing season now. All of this will soon explode with growth,” she says. “I’ll give Ted a call and let him know that we’ve decided to let things settle in,” she shouts over her shoulder, blundering to the car and ducking inside before she is asked to recommend pregnancy books or pre-natal classes, or even worse, before Astrid begins her regular musings on Ch’i and the proper direction of the universal energies.

Kate is foolish with tears as she grabs her cell phone and listens to the last four messages she has saved. She listens for even the slightest indication of his waning affections. Something she might have missed, some hardness, some measured distance in his voice. She finds nothing to suggest his disaffection and she feels the betrayal acutely though she knows she has no right to it.

She imagines Ted already at the office this morning, working up real estate deals, generating the kind of money required to resurrect 61 Alfonso Court in the manner compliant with eastern philosophy. And she rehearses the conversation she will have with him about Astrid’s concerns, carefully planning her comments in order to mask her outrage.

She dials twice but can’t force herself to press Send. She is afraid this is the end of it - the thing between them that never really began. Though she knows that this is as good a place as any to cut it off and resume her regular life, she is powerless to make the call.

Instead she cancels the rest of the day’s appointments and drives home to sulk and weep in the quiet of her empty house. She phones her best friend, Amy, who will surely talk her off the tottering ledge, will right her wobbling emotional stability.

She tells Amy everything including her inability to properly fantasize a sex scene with this man, that she can only conjure their holding each other in some sort of profound embrace.

Amy, nothing if not matter of fact and efficient says, “Oh honey, you’re way gone. I can tell because he’s become something like your very own version of God. You’ll be okay. Let yourself miss him. We all do, honey, we all do. Miss God, I mean.”

And Kate weeps softly with disappointment while she drafts a fraught letter, hand written and blurry at the edges, a note she will later crumple and tear and tuck safely beneath the cereal remnants in the garbage pail, a hand drafted good bye to man she hardly knows beyond the space he occupies in her brain.

In the days to follow, Kate finds herself driving by the house, feeling a little flare of happiness when she notices that Ted’s car sits alone in the driveway. She secretly celebrates Astrid’s absence, imagining her sporty Nissan gone to the grocery or to meditation class.

The grass at Alfonso Court begins to grow long. Leaves accumulate on the driveway that is still sullied with mud and the trappings of construction. She is remarkably satisfied by the way things are slipping into wild, lush abandon without her careful pruning and expert attention.

Her cell phone rings incessantly, all day - clients, contractors, Paul calling to say he’ll be late coming home. Again. Despite the phone’s cheerful chirp and chatter, Ted’s silence is deafening and distracting, enticing her to elicit the attention she needs above all else, beyond water or food or breath.

Kate conjures multiple excuses for stopping by Alfonso Court, deciding on the best, most believable one before committing to the task. She decides it is her duty to return there under the pretense of Gardenia surveillance. “I am merely keeping my word,” she repeats to herself as she approaches the front door. She declares, firmly to herself, I won’t stay long. The kids will need to be picked up, the dog walked before dinner preparations.

The sound of the bell is an echo in what appears to be a nearly empty foyer. She can see that the paintings and furniture, carefully selected and arranged according to Feng Shui principles, have been removed. There is scant evidence of inhabitance save for a pair of men’s driving shoes and a pile of mail on the hallway floor, just inside the door. Kate avoids looking at the plants, clearly suffering neglect. She pauses there, preparing, working herself up to the task of goodbye while Ted comes thundering to the door, uncharacteristically expansive and spectacularly drunk.

“Kate Adams? Well, come in. Join me. I’m set up for Mojitos.”

“That’s okay. I’m just following up on the garden. When I last saw Astrid I told her I’d come by and check things out in few weeks.”

“I appreciate that,” Ted steps aside and makes a sweeping gesture, ushering her inside though she has vowed to stay well outside that front door, poking around in the garden, making lists of maintenance requirements.

“Update,” Ted says. “Astrid’s long gone and I’m selling the place before sinking another dime. You don’t have to worry about fulfilling any promises you’ve made. You’re off the hook.” He leads her back to the kitchen overlooking the pool gone filthy green with neglect.

“Jesus, Ted, it’s a mess out there. You can’t put the house on the market with a yard looking like that. Let the guys come by and finish the driveway. Make it look appealing from the street.”

“It’s just an investment for me Kate. The whole idea was to flip it. To improve it only slightly and turn around and sell.” He is crushing mint leaves with the back of a spoon as he speaks, efficient and intent on his host’s task despite the fact that he is several drinks deep and his usual tailored appearance had been replaced by a more disorderly version of his former self, untucked, unpressed, like he’d been sleeping in that particular dress shirt and pair of pants for days.

“The whole project took on a life of its own. Astrid really began looking at this as a home not a return investment,” Ted says as he fixes her a drink in a suspiciously cloudy glass. She sips at it, sloshing it around, making polite and companionable sounds with her ice cubes. After all, she thinks, it’s not even four o’clock.

“Sounds to me like you’ll be needing something like a real home in another few months,” she says.

He glances up quickly, something wildly apologetic and shameful in the way he meets her gaze. “So you think I’m an asshole for not being enthusiastic?”

“No. I think you have every right to be wary of it, at your age. God, I’m tired of the parent thing and I’m only thirty-six.”

“Kate, she took everything. She’s staying with a friend in Pompano for awhile.”

“It’s just an argument. It’ll blow over,” Kate says, between gulps of her Mojito that she now drinks with vigor, needing something to do with her hands while sustaining uncomfortable conversation, the alcoholic equivalent of chewing her nails.

“Jesus, it’s more than an argument. It’s an existential divide,” he says.

Kate wonders at the powers of alcohol. How loose Ted seems with these private details like there is penance in having this conversation, here , with her, in the afternoon at an empty house, save for the clear rum and the tumblers and the sound of a broken pool pump.

Kate, sitting at the bar stool across from where Ted stands, feels her presence there inevitable, scripted, like she is the recipient of his shame.

He covers her hand with his own. She registers the weight of it as comfort and companionship. Their two hands like a pre-game cheer, resting there beside the glass she had drained of the sweet, severe taste of alcohol.

“Astrid’s beautiful, right? And, it was easy for me. Relationship-lite,” he says, fairly whispering this admission. “Promise you won’t get all righteous on me before hearing me out,” he says while moving around the granite island to sit on the stool right next to hers.

“I needed that light thing for awhile after what was long and serious and dramatic. Truth is, I was married to another woman for thirty-six years and she’s dying right now in Winston-Salem where she lives with her mother and sister while doctors pump her full of chemo and radiation and all the other shit that buys a person a few agonizing, painful years.”

He runs that very same hand, that was only minutes ago resting atop her own, through his hair with a restlessness and agitation that he’s been drinking at for some time.

“Marilyn’s leaving me is a long story that reflects poorly on me. But it was two years ago. You almost get over a thing before another one bites you in the ass.”

Kate fumbles with the spoon that has little specks of chopped mint pressed to its back. She suppresses a powerful urge to leave. She feels he deserves to tell this story, and she is perversely relieved that she had been wrong in her previous assessment. She had always assumed that he had deserted his former wife for the younger Astrid. The fact that he is the one that has been abandoned surfaces like hope. Now she won’t need to hold him accountable for such a severe disloyalty.

“I guess a person can kind of derail when faced with death,” Kate offers now, as consolation.

”No, it wasn’t sudden like that. Thirty five years after you’ve met someone, there’s not much left of the old charge. You keep at it because it’s the right thing to do, because you’re Catholic and watching the thing die on the vine is expected. When she learned she was sick again, she decided to leave. She didn’t have the energy to keep pretending. After the initial shock of it, I found a distraction…”

“How do you know what’s happened to her, to Marilyn, I mean?” Kate asks.

“I get information from our three sons. I wait for phone calls, updates about end of life care.”

Kate stands abruptly, urgently needing to use the bathroom if just to gather remove from Ted, to ponder the suggestion of that hand.

She talks to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her lips damp with rum, her cheeks glowing with drink. He is only sharing the truth with someone, anyone. There is no harm in this. She manipulates her shirt back into the waistline of her jeans, she smoothes her hair and purses her lips. She stares at herself long enough to discern the slight difference between her two eyes, one just a hair smaller than the other. And she returns to the kitchen where Ted offers her another full drink that he has busied himself with in her absence.

He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequate and attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.

And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the countertop to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that she has been working towards for months.

He is an efficient lover and it is a brief but satisfying coupling, free of promises or possessions, that allows her plenty of time to collect herself on the ride to parent pick up.

He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper anything profound that elicits a torrent of great relief. She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.

Despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other. She feels ordinary and slightly defeated. She begins to sleep again. She can feel herself returning to the present.

It is over as quickly as it began. And for a time, she is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth, like a schoolgirl with a secret. She suspects that, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul had already forgiven her this trespass.

Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the Gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.

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