a short story by Suzanne Paschall
First published in Friday After Five: The Feast Anthology (2000)
In the beginning he hadn’t tolde her he was married. But something didn’t seem right. Catherine was young, but not stupid. After several months, she finally asked.
“Of course, I’m married,” Martin said as they lay together that night in bed. He rolled to his side facing her. She turned her back to him and he curled against her. She could feel the tension in his body, which relaxed after a few minutes of silence. She blotted her tears against the smooth pillowcase. He slept.
She wondered if he ever would have told her on his own. How was it possible to love someone who lied so substantially, and apparently with so little effort? And now, perhaps the greatest mystery, even to her…why had she stayed with him for nearly a decade?
The age difference meant little to her. She would touch parts of his face carefully: two fingers crow’s feet radiating out from an eye, the tight smoothness of an upper lip. She thought she could feel his past, perhaps divine his secrets. Sometimes he would allow it. More often he would push her hands away, frown, then capture them back, kissing her knuckles.
Tonight was a celebration, their ninth anniversary. She often thought of his wife on these occasions. How odd it was that he lived nearly all of his life, except lunches in the city during the week and the odd weekend when he could get away, in her company and wasn’t bothered by it.
“Time to go,” she said. “We’ll be late.” He wrapped her favorite cape around her shoulders, the black cashmere he’d given her three years ago at Christmas. He took one last look in the mirror and adjusted his white silk scarf under the collar of his coat. He still looks very distinguished, she thought.
Martin could be a generous, kind man. He’d learned her preferences. He’d bought her an art book of Van Gogh paintings, with a bookmark at the page showing “Sunflowers” because he knew she loved them. He tolerated the morbid German operas she loved. Easiest to attend to: her thoroughly unoriginal love of chocolate. She would find a tiny gold box of truffles in her mailbox, or a creatively molded elephant of white chocolate on her desk at work.
Nobody she had ever met could capture and hold her attention the way he could—for hours, for days, she suspected. This man knew many things. He had been at war. He had traveled Asia. He was powerful in his industry. People respected him.
She grew to accept that he loved in the ways he could. For a long time, she had believed herself to be utterly happy, safe in his presence. When asked by friends to describe her relationship, she would say that it was better than the terrible and dangerous dating scene, or a man who lived off your work and income, or many other things. But no, it was not the kind of love she had imagined as a young girl. One could not anticipate this kind of love. One did not go looking for it.
“Do you have the tickets?” Martin said now. She nodded, fanning them in her hand. She felt an urge to push them in his face, to say, “yes, goddammit, I have the tickets.” But she didn’t, he was right to check. She was unreliable at times, she forgot important things. She sometimes even forgot he was married. She phoned him at the office instead of on his cell. She once left a shop receipt in his car. He, of course, was fastidious, managing to catch any traces of evidence before being detected.
At other times, though, she remembered so sharply, so suddenly, that the pain and curiosity drove her to dangerous acts. Once she had driven to his house. She had watched his wife coming out a side door with a watering can, waving at the neighbor with a garden-gloved hand. Dark glasses on, she watched for endless minutes, parked like a detective on a stakeout. She ate a tuna fish sandwich.
“Just what the hell were you thinking?” Martin had demanded when she told him, his face red above his starched white collar.
“Let me make you a drink.” Catherine had turned her back to him. ” She didn’t see me.”
“Hardly the point,” he said.
It was all part of the grand game he had concocted. Like a boy’s game, full of schemes of great proportion, incredible complexity: large sandcastles on the beach, moats, wild animals, armies raging. To be found out would destroy the conceit. Like the tide coming in, devastating the castle, the sand going liquid, seeping back into the bland, dry, flat beach.
Even this she had eventually accepted. She was a player in his adventure, a necessary component. One autumn a few years ago, they had gone to Toronto. Martin did business there frequently. She had never been. She had been amazed at the noise a large city created. Even the buildings seemed to breathe, the underground trains pulsing like blood through veins. They made love in the back of a limousine on the way to the opera. All through Cosi Fan Tutte she felt his hand on her thigh, under the cashmere cape folded on her lap. Afterward in the hotel room he drank too much wine.
“Sleep, Martin,” she said. “You have a long day tomorrow.”
He was like a child. “l don’t want to sleep.”
She’d sighed and told him that she was crazy to be in love with him. He fell to his knees before her then, held the silk of her skirts tightly in his fist, cried against her thighs. “You can’t ever leave, Catherine,” he mumbled into the fabric. “Promise.”
“l promise.” She too fell to her knees, hugged his poor head against her chest.
His breath evened out as she held him. He fell asleep. There on the floor, his body draped across her lap, she stared at the floral pattern of the bedspread for some time, wondering how she could ever leave, and how she could stay.
He had gone to Belgium with his wife shortly after, for the month of February. There had been a fight, a skirmish over him taking her instead of Catherine.
She’d sat in her apartment on Valentine’s Day, reading a book, thinking of what Brussels might be like. A box arrived by courier. The card inside written in Martin’s hand. Today on the cobblestone streets of Grande Place I found the original location of Godiva Chocolates, it read. This gold ballotin is full of my love for you.
Catherine had carefully removed the gold-edged black velvet bow, slicing open the gold foil paper with a letter opener. Folded the paper and opened the box. Nearly one hundred and fifty chocolates. Her hand slowly over the collection. She picked up a toffee carré and ate it, then a praline caramel paola, a raspberry starfish, a grande mint. She thought about Grande Place, and the cobblestones.
She saw Martin walking along them, his elbow crooked through his wife’s arm, talking low, pointing. She moved on to truffles — honey roasted almond, strawberry, gingerbread. She brought a glass and the bottle back into her living room and placed them next to the gold ballotin. She washed cherry cordials down with the wine. Chocolate mousse was next, vanilla caramel, crème brûlée dessert chocolat, mochaccino mousse. She cracked her teeth through the marbleized scallop shell. Worked all the way down to the milk chocolate praline heart and finished the wine. She sat a very long time before she went into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet.
“l haven’t heard much about this play, have you?” Martin pulled the seat belt across his chest, then looked at her and paused. He smiled. “You look very beautiful tonight.” He reached over and clasped one hand over hers. “Nine years.” He looked back at the road. It was starting to mist. He turned on the wipers to remove the sheen from the glass.
“Have you been happy?” His eyes still on the road.
She looked out her side window. “At times,” she said. “Many times.”
She waited, but Martin didn’t ask about the other times.
All through the play, she worried over the question of her happiness, of his. It took effort to maintain the conditions for his adventure, their life, his life.
Once, when they were away in Ottawa walking to a meeting, she had tried to sneak her hand into his coat pocket to hold his hand. Martin jerked away from her as if she was a thief trying to steal his wallet. Instinct, she knew. “Well don’t have a heart attack,” she had said.
“Next year will be a decade,” he said now. He parked the car, turned off the ignition, pulled out the keys. She could see the lights of the restaurant a half-block down. Suddenly she wanted to go somewhere else.
“Are you all right?”
“A bit of a headache,” she said. “Probably the wine I had at intermission.”
He opened the door of the restaurant. She stepped in and the warm air enveloped her. The room smelled of mushrooms and wine and rosemary.
“It’s hot in here.” He plucked her cape off, careful not to touch her shoulders.
They were seated at a tiny table at the back of the restaurant. They reviewed the menu, discussed it pleasantly, ordered as they always did: for each other. “The lady will have mussels to start.” Martin’s head a bit back, reading glasses perched forward on his nose. He looks quite sweet like this, she thought. “Then the caramelized salmon. Would you prefer the asparagus or the squash, dear?” The waiter looked to her, expectantly, as if it was perfectly acceptable for her to be here, with this man, with him calling her dear.
“Guess.”
“She’ll have the asparagus.” Martin closed the menu.
“And the gentleman would like the red pepper and goat cheese salad and the roasted garlic pork loin.” The waiter opened the wine, took away the menus.
“You’re slipping in your old age. You called me dear right in front of him.”
He smiled but couldn’t quite conceal a quick nervous glance toward the neighboring tables. Her chest tightened at his reaction.
“See anyone you know?”
“Please let’s don’t, not tonight,” he said.
“Sorry.”
Her mussels arrived with his salad. The waiter poured the wine. A rich ’94 pinot noir from the Willamette Valley.
Then, another ritual, tasting each other’s food. She watched him scoop out the meat of the mussel she handed him and place the shells back in the bed of sea salt. She took a bite of his salad, savored the roasted richness of the grilled red pepper and the heavy smoothness of the goat cheese.
She picked up a mussel, looked down at the pearly inner shell, the tiny piece of pale meat. She put down her fork, poured a little wine into the shell and drank slowly from it. She looked at Martin, who was staring at her in some kind of daze. She pinched the meat between her thumb and forefinger and gently dislodged it, slipping it onto her tongue. She chewed and swallowed. She licked her fingers and smiled at him.
“Catherine,” he said.
It was exactly the right moment to reach out and place his hand over hers on the table, beside the candle. She looked at his hand clutching the table’s edge, not moving.
The dinner was spectacular. He said the pork loin was tender and full of garlic, would she try it? She said her salmon was amazing with its burnt brown sugar crust. They cut pieces of this and that for each other, they laughed often. From a distance, she thought, they probably looked like a father and daughter, out for a special occasion, a birthday perhaps, or a graduation.
Catherine felt light-headed after the wine and the rich food. She excused herself to the ladies’ room. She patted her face with icy water and looked at her pale face in the mirror.
There was cognac and coffee at the table when she returned. “I’ve ordered dessert for us,” Martin said, half rising as she sat. “Le Mort Par Le Chocolat. José here assures me it is the height of decadence.”
“How wicked!” she said.
“The chef tells me they’ve added a new ingredient tonight. Can you guess it?”
Martin was cheerful, reveling in an evening well executed. His face was flushed. He was relaxed. She felt a slight wave of nausea.
“I can’t. What is it?”
“Chopped cashews, my love,” he said. Cashews, Catherine’s favorite nutmeat. He had given her an enormous box of them on their first anniversary.
The dessert arrived, and they clinked together the first spoonful in a silly sort of toast. “To nine years,” Martin said.
“To nine years,” she repeated.
The smooth cream of the mousse melted around her tongue, down her throat as she swallowed. The scent of the rich ganache filled her nostrils. The crunch of the cashews was indeed delightful.
She looked at Martin in the candlelight and frowned. His face looked suddenly strange. Like he was holding his breath, and tense again, around his eyes, mouth. He tried to cough. He was choking, trying to suck in air. There was a frozen moment where they stared at each other, his eyes reflecting the terror she felt rising in her. His silverware clattered to the floor as he tried to stand. He reached out his free hand, flailing toward her. Catherine rose up, started to move toward Martin, but couldn’t get clear in her mind what she was supposed to do. Instead, she stood, stupefied, paralyzed. José had arrived. He screamed.
“Call 911! Call 911!” He moved quickly behind Martin, wrapping his arms around his chest. Martin’s head dropped forward and his body slumped. The waiter struggled to keep him from falling to the floor.
A wave of commotion rose from the front of the restaurant and spilled toward the scene Martin was making. A man at the next table stood, his dinner napkin fallen to the floor, his eyes wide, staring.
Blackness closed in on her for a brief moment, but then she felt herself step back. Her vision cleared. She heard sirens and saw the flashing lights through the crowd that had gathered in the secluded back of the restaurant, now the most public of places. A paramedic dropped to the floor next to Martin, ripped open his shirt and began pumping Martin’s chest with his hands.
Catherine looked up at the crowd, at the front door far away, at the other end of the restaurant. She looked at Martin’s motionless body, took another step back, then turned from him and began shouldering her way through the crowd. She felt as if she was moving in slow motion. The faces of the people she passed were focused on the emergency. Nobody saw her. Nobody questioned who she was, why she was leaving, where she was going.
She prayed for the crisp night air, the cold, clean rain, and it came rushing toward her as she pushed the front door open. The lights and motion of the restaurant dissolved behind her. She gulped in the air, felt raindrops on her cheeks. She thought of nothing but getting home. She walked briskly to the corner and held up her hand to hail a cab, the faintest taste of chocolate lingering on her tongue.