Seventh Wonder (15 page)

Further events unfolded as if they’d been carefully choreographed: a lissome ballet of squeezing and pulling, blankets snapping open, bodies colliding and entwining.

And always kissing. Meg had never felt so in love with kissing. It seemed that, for John, lips and tongues weren’t merely the stuff of foreplay. Were it not for their inherent need to occasionally breathe, she felt certain their mouths would never have parted.

There was something else, too, that made sex with John unlike any she’d previously experienced: his deliberate attentiveness to every part of her body. Not just her breasts and her cleft, but the other parts of her that made her a woman. Her slim shoulders, her rounded hips, her shapely calves. His hands and fingers exalted her every curve, following the path of his gaze as he stared wonderingly at her, all while staking repetitive claim to her quivering insides. From the arches of her feet to the crown of her head, she felt worshipped and adored.

* * *

The afternoon and evening were a montage of tangled bodies and glissading fingers. They were always touching in some way: interlocked legs or hooked pinkies.

They ate the peanut butter sandwiches John had brought. Afterward he lay his head in Meg’s lap, and she combed her fingers through his hair while reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude
aloud.

When the sun began to sink and she could feel her eyes strain to take in the failing light, Meg closed the book and set it aside.

“All done?” John asked. He flipped onto his stomach and smoothed his hand up the inside of the shirt she wore sans pants, letting it rest at the crook of her waist.

“It’s getting dark.”

“So it is,” he replied without glancing away from her.

“And cold,” she added.

John stretched his neck forward to capture her lips, then sprang nimbly to his feet. He wrapped Meg snugly in a thick wool Indian blanket before gathering the fixings for a fire. She felt like a girl scout at camp as she watched him scrape together the tinder inside a makeshift circle of rocks and strike a match to light it. He blew gently until the flame caught and spread, then built a tepee of split wood to catch the fire from the now red-hot embers.

When he crawled back onto the ground next to Meg, she held open the blanket, inviting him to share its warmth. He looped his arm around her shoulders, and she melted into his side, reveling in the heat of the fire on her face.

“Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asked.

“One of each. My older brother Charlie lives in Boston with his wife and my two nieces. My sister Barbara is younger - she and her husband live in Connecticut still, near my mother.”

“What is your mother like?”

His hand rubbed slowly up and down her arm. He never was one to put speaking before thinking.

“Very, very kind. Affectionate - she was always hugging and kissing us as kids, compensating for my father’s awkwardness when it came to expressing his love. She’s forgiving of everyone and everything. And she’s very patient - probably to a fault.” He turned his head slightly to rest his chin on top of Meg’s head. “Or maybe it isn’t patience. Maybe it’s bullheadedness.” He chuckled a little. “I sometimes wonder.”

Meg tipped her face up to smile at him. “Were she and your father happily married?”

She thought his face tightened a little, the corners of his mouth drawing in and his eyes narrowing into a squint - but perhaps it was the darkness playing tricks on her. “That depends on your definition of ‘happily married.’“

“What’s your definition?”

He sighed. “Honesty, for one. Loyalty for another.”

Meg swallowed, remembering what he’d said about his mother’s capacity to forgive. “Was your father unfaithful?” she said quietly.

“Yes.” He looked away, as if he’d rather be talking about anything else at all. “I was ten years old the first time I found out he was having an affair.” Meg pressed her face against the side of his ribcage, felt the vibrations of his deep voice traveling up the inside of him as he spoke. “I walked in on them. As if that wouldn’t have been traumatizing enough for a kid.” He chuckled without humor. “And then, when I saw it wasn’t even my mom he had laid out beneath him... It felt like everything I’d ever known with any certainty turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate myth, some fairytale I’d been told to help me sleep soundly at night. It was stultifying.

“I wanted to run away, but all I could do was stand there while he shouted at me to get out and the woman he had pinned to the mattress started crying. The image is seared in my mind - my dad, naked from the waist down save for his socks, still in the shirt my mom had ironed for him that morning. And that trollop with her legs spread and her panties still hooked around one ankle. The ground was dissolving beneath my feet, until there was just him and me and this huge gulf between us.”

Meg thought of the indelible image she had of Michael with that girl on top of him, the redhead with small, perky breasts. She squeezed her eyes shut out of habit, but reopened them in relief when she realized the wave of nausea that usually accompanied that memory was lacking this time around. Perhaps she’d finally conquered it.

“I cried for a week,” John said, “refused to come down for dinner. I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t see him sitting across the table from my mother and my siblings, as if today was just like any other, passing the butter and the salt and pepper. I know my mom was worried, but I hated her, too. Hated her for her blindness.” He hung his head in shame. “Every time she looked at me with that sad, sympathetic look on her face, I thought she was the one deserving of pity. I couldn’t understand how she could be so oblivious, so
stupid
. I decided if she refused to see what was right in front of her, I wasn’t going to be the one to make her see.

“For a while I successfully avoided my father, but I couldn’t dodge him forever. About a week later he was waiting outside for me when school let out. He put his hand on my shoulder and asked if we could go for a walk, maybe talk about what happened. Man to man, he said.” John snorted, still disbelieving. “We walked around the playground. He asked me who all I’d told - wanted to know how much damage control he had to do, I suppose. He must’ve guessed I hadn’t said anything to my mom - I’d hope she would have brought it up to him if I had, although I’m not even sure about that.

“‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ is what he said to me. As if that was all he had to apologize for. He never said sorry for doing it, for making fools out of all of us - our entire family. He was only sorry he got caught at it.”

Meg crossed his stomach with her arm and held tightly to him. It was all she had to give: some fraction of the comfort his parents should have offered him twenty-three years prior.

A moment later, she said, “You said ‘the first time’ you found out he was having an affair. Were there other times?”

“At least one other.” Again he sighed. “I was a senior in high school by that time. We’d mended some of our fences, but there was still a gaping hole in the Trust one that we’d somehow managed to mutually ignore for the better part of a decade.

“Then one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks before Christmas, I was with a friend in New Haven. We were visiting a couple of our old teammates at Yale - I don’t think I told you I played hockey in high school.

“I was driving - I’d borrowed my mom’s ‘49 Plymouth convertible, the one my dad bought her brand new for their twentieth wedding anniversary. It was the first car she ever owned, and she was terrified to drive it.” She could hear the fondness in his voice. “It was also completely impractical for New England, of course, but that was sort of his style - all form and no function.

“So anyway, we were coasting through town, had the heater blasting to keep from freezing our asses off since the seal on those ragtops wasn’t so great, and I saw him getting out of his car at some restaurant. I was about to say something, but then I noticed him walking around to open the passenger door for somebody else - some leggy blond I’d never seen before.

“I’d never been angrier. I pulled the car over right there, jammed it into park right in the middle of the parking lot, and jumped out to confront him while my buddy was still in the car. I wasn’t a scared little boy anymore, and I wasn’t going to tolerate any more of his shit.”

Meg felt his grip tighten in remembered frustration. She squeezed his leg in an attempt to soothe his anger.

“I got in his face. I told him he wouldn’t get away with it this time, that I’d tell my mom and my brother and sister, so they’d all know what a worthless lowlife he really was. He tried to tell me I had it all wrong, that it wasn’t what it looked like. ‘This is Suzanne,’ he said. Tried to introduce her like she a business associate - as if I gave a shit what her name was. I could see what they were doing. It was freezing outside, and yet she was dressed like some kind of upper class call girl. The fifties were a conservative time, and she looked anything but: this skirt with the hemline well above her knees, high heels, even some cleavage. Hell, maybe she
was
a call girl. She sure as hell wasn’t in the insurance business, I can tell you that much.”

He shook his head, resetting his thoughts. “I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to lie to me. Unfortunately for him, his introducing her only resulted in my rage finding a new target. I feel sort of sorry about that now - I’m sure she had no idea what she was in for. I asked her if she was in the business of ruining people’s marriages. Asked her if they’d talked about his family, if she knew he had a wife and three kids.

“To her credit, she kept her mouth shut. She even had the decency to look ashamed.

“My dad corralled her back into the car, but he didn’t drive away immediately like I thought he would. He came and faced me like a man, and that took me a little off-guard.

“He...
apologized
. This wasn’t like the other time, either. He seemed tired, like he was done fighting. I got the sense he was apologizing for all of it, not just the fact that I’d once again caught him committing a wrongful act. I was still madder than hell, though. I told him I was going to drive straight home and tell Mom, and he didn’t even try to argue or give me any reason why I shouldn’t. He just said, ‘I know you don’t owe me anything, but please - will you let me be the one to tell her?’

“I was shocked. I agreed, because what else could I do? I told him he had one week, and he just nodded, looking resigned. Then he got in his car and drove away.

“When I got home late that night, his car wasn’t in the driveway. My mom was in the kitchen by herself, crying. I knew right away what happened, but I had no idea how to make it better. I wanted to fix it for her, this entire fucked-up situation, but I felt completely helpless. It almost made me question whether telling her had been the right thing.

“He stayed in a hotel for close to a month. Charlie was away at Penn State on a wrestling scholarship, so he was blissfully ignorant of the mess we had on our hands. Barbara was a sophomore. She knew my dad was in trouble, but I never gave her any details like I’d originally planned. She was always a daddy’s girl, and I couldn’t find it in me to take that respect away from her, the way it’d been stolen from me.

“A few weeks later he came home. He slept in the guest room for a while, but eventually he moved back into my mom’s room. Slowly they repaired what was broken, and gradually we all forgave him in our own way. For whatever reason, I think the forgiveness part was even harder for me than it was for my mother. Maybe because I’d been the one to see him with those other women. He died knowing I believed he’d never be good enough for us.”

John let out a ragged breath. His shoulders slumped from the exhaustion of reliving years’ worth of haunting memories.

“I wish there was something I could say,” Meg said softly. This after an extended period of a silence that was fraught with sadness and the smarting of wounds that had never entirely healed.

John shifted so he could look at her. “Enough ‘saying.’“ He kissed her, first tenderly, then with a desperation that led Meg to wonder whether he was simply using her to outstrip his ghosts. When he laid her back gently against the blanket and slid his hand between her legs, she decided that if he couldn’t forgive, for tonight at least she would let him try and forget.

Chapter 7

It was the shrill cry of a circling hawk that woke Meg the following morning. She could sense she was alone even before opening her eyes.

Pale gray daylight filled the tent. The coolness of the air raised the hair on her arms when she stretched them overhead, and she quickly drew them back under the blanket. She felt a heaviness in her bladder and knew she would soon have to brave the chilly temperature outside, but for now she was content to lie on her back, sliding her legs against the scratchy wool of the blanket beneath her.

Eventually she emerged from the tent, dragging the heavy Indian blanket with her to shield her naked body from the frosty morning air. She walked a ways along the line of trees before crouching to relieve her bladder, then made her way over to the canyon’s rim. The day was overcast, and the canyon was an ocean of fog from which the monoliths and mesas reared their noble heads. In the distance, the sun winked from behind a sheer screen of clouds.

She made her way back to their campsite and lowered herself onto a rock next to the charred remains of the fire John had built. Poking at the clumps of ash with a stick, she wondered where he’d gone. The Jeep hadn’t budged, so it couldn’t be far.

Glancing at the canyon’s edge, her chest suddenly constricted in panic. Surely, if anything had happened she would’ve heard something...right? She swallowed, afraid to go and look. It was so foggy, she’d never be able to see to the bottom anyway.

Then, as if in answer to her prayers, she heard footsteps behind her. She whirled around to find John wading through the brush, his arms full of wood he’d claimed from the forest behind. Meg ran toward him, her heart thrashing with both relief and vestigial terror.

John, seeing her approach, quickly dropped the wood just in time for her to tackle him. He bundled his arms around the outside of the blanket she wore as a cloak and rubbed her back vigorously to warm her as she covered his neck and face with kisses.