It was a mistake. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. The 1950s came and went and our house slowly filled with art. Ruth taught school and I ran the store, and even though she was growing older, part of her still held out hope. And then, like the long-awaited answer to a prayer, Daniel arrived. He became first her student and then the son she had always longed for. But when the illusion suddenly ended, only I remained. And it wasn’t quite enough.
The next few years were hard for us. She blamed me, and I blamed myself as well. The blue skies of our marriage turned gray and stormy, then bleak and cold. Conversations became stilted, and we began to argue for the first time. Sometimes it seemed to be a struggle for her to sit in the same room with me. She spent many weekends at her parents’ house in Durham – her father’s health was declining – and there were times when we didn’t speak for days. At night, the space between us in the bed felt like the Pacific, an ocean impossible for either of us to swim across. She did not want to and I was too afraid to try, and we continued to drift further apart. There was even a period when she wondered whether she wanted to remain married to me, and in the evenings, after she’d gone to bed, I would sit in the living room, wishing that I were someone else, the kind of man who’d been able to give her what she wanted.
But I couldn’t. I was broken. The war had taken from me the only thing she’d ever wanted. I was sad for her and angry with myself, and I hated what was happening to us. I would have traded my life to make her happy again, but I didn’t know how; and as crickets sounded on warm autumn nights, I’d bring my hands to my face and I would cry and cry and cry.
“I would never have left you,” Ruth assures me. “I am sorry I made you think such things.” Her words are leaden with regret.
“But you thought about it.”
“Yes,” she said, “but not in the way you think. It was not a serious idea. All married women think such things at times. Men too.”
“I never did.”
“I know,” she says. “But you are different.” She smiles, her hand reaching out for mine. She takes it, caressing the knots and bones. “I saw you once,” she says to me. “In the living room.”
“I know,” I say.
“Do you remember what happened next?”
“You came over and held me.”
“It was the first time I had seen you cry since that night in the park, after the war,” she says. “It scared me very much. I did not know what was wrong.”
“It was us,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to make you happy anymore.”
“There was nothing you could do,” she says.
“You were so… angry with me.”
“I was sad,” she says. “There is a difference.”
“Does it matter? Either way, you weren’t happy with me.”
She squeezes my hand, her skin soft against my own. “You are a smart man, Ira, but sometimes, I think you do not understand women very well.”
In this, I know she is right.
“I was devastated when Daniel went away. I would have loved for him to become part of our lives. And yes, I was sad that we never had children. But I was also sad because I was in my forties, even though that might not make sense to you. I did not mind my thirties. That was when I felt for the first time in my life that I was actually an adult. But for women, older than forty is not always so easy. On my birthday, I couldn’t help but think that I had already lived half my life, and when I looked in the mirror, a young woman no longer stared back at me. It was vain, I know, but it bothered me. And my parents were getting older, too. That was why I went to visit them so often. By then, my father had retired, but he was not well, as you know. It was difficult for my mother to take care of him. In other words, there was no simple way to make things better for me back then. Even if Daniel had stayed with us, those still would have been hard years.”
I wonder about this. She has said as much to me before, but I sometimes question whether she is being completely truthful.
“It meant a lot to me when you held me that night.”
“What else could I do?”
“You could have turned and walked back to the bedroom.”
“I could not do such a thing. It hurt me to see you like that.”
“You kissed my tears away,” I said.
“Yes,” she says.
“And later, we held each other as we lay in bed. It was the first time in a long time.”