Vincent was an honorable man, at least he thought so, and at least his father taught him so. When he was thirteen, his father caught him watching pornography, and beat him, and told him, “You need to be a good man and do your family honor justice.” He followed his dad’s advice, abstained from his sexual desire, and beat himself if not physically, at least mentally whenever he relapsed into porn or other bad habits.
His dad had set a very good example, the perfect husband: humble and hardworking, had only one wife in his life and died peacefully and honestly. This was the man Vincent was thinking of when driving through the southern highway of Michigan while holding the hand of a woman who was not his wife.
Kathy was a woman of contradictory characters and ideas. She believed in selflessness, as her mother’s family had taught her. She also believed in self-serving, as her father’s family had taught her. These two sides of her didn’t get along, just as her mother and father didn’t get along. They alternately picked her up from her boarding school. She rarely saw them together. The news of their divorce did not disturb her. The most relevant question by the end of that week was which side of her family she would have to live with that weekend.
In her mother’s house, she sat on a brick bed, her mother cleaning the stoves, her grandmother knitting their new year’s clothes, and her grandfather in black-rimmed glasses sat beside her and read stories to her. Her mother would ask her which family she preferred: her mother’s or her father’s. “Mother’s.” She would answer quickly and sweetly, and snuck under her mother’s apron, putting her hot face against her mother’s comforting inner thigh.
In her father’s house, which was as large as an imperial palace, servants passed through the corridor outside the carved windows. She would sit on futons with the grandparents, while her father was still late at work. Her grandparents drank tea and bickered. That was what they did all day, she observed. When one had nothing important to tend to, even the slightest off-taste in the tea could be the biggest annoyance. Grandma often won those arguments, because as Kathy noticed, she was cleverer, fiercer, and meaner. By the end of an argument, as a final blow to her senile husband, the old woman would set down her tea cup, look intently at Kathy and ask whom she liked more, her or her grandpa. “Of course it’s you, grandma. My father always looks up to you.” That tickled her in the right spot, Kathy noticed, so she said it every time, and to flatter her even more, told her that she preferred much more the grand house of her father’s over the cramped small apartment of her mother’s.
It was this double life that she had lived through in her childhood. It was the same double life she was about to start now, when she, while riding in a car that sped across the plain yard of southern Michigan, gave her ringed hand to the man who was not her husband.
“I love you,” he said to her painfully.
She listened with joy.
“But we can’t do this. This is wrong. What about my wife? I can’t hide things like this from her.”
She said nothing but traced her hand up his arm, round his neck, and kissed his cheek.
“I can’t. Kathy, don’t do this to me. Please.”
“I love you too Vince. We don’t need them to know. Just you and I here.”
Vince turned and looked at her angrily, and then beggingly. “Why can’t you divorce? I would divorce for you.”
“Vince. I love you. But I can’t divorce. You won’t like who I really am.”
“What do you mean I won’t like who you really are? You are you. I’ve known you for five years. You are the gentlest person I know. I know you as much as you know me, as much as anyone knows me.” Including my wife, he added to himself hatefully.
“No, there’s another side of me you never saw. I have told you this and you won’t believe it.”
“No, I won’t! Just divorce, Kathy. And we can live together forever after. Don’t you see? We are perfect together. We understand one another like no one else.”
Kathy saw the man in front of her degraded to a boy by love and she didn’t know what to do to make him see sense, and it could just be a fling, a wonderful fling on a business trip. She looked at Vincent’s handsome profile and imagined what it would be like to kiss him. Then the face became that of her husband, old, tired, wrinkled, no emotion, he made love to her with the same coldness as he handled his fish, she wondered what it was like making love to Vincent, and that got her excited.
She had her hand inside his shirt. And he was nearly crying. Gripping the steering wheel, he looked at her quickly, seeing the gentleness in her eyes that once again melted his heart. He remembered all the poems he wrote her in the past year, all done behind his wife’s back, and he cried the tears of regret because he knew with how he felt now he wouldn’t be turning back. The fire had been set, and it would burn through the night, and die in the light.
He pulled the car along the curb and drove onto the grassy verge. Then he climbed onto her hungrily. She yielded like a flower being crushed. She tasted the salty tears in his kiss, then saw him pulling away, folding over himself in his seat, hands around his knees, crying.
It was this tenderness that she had fallen for him and she won’t let it go. She knew he was thinking about his wife. She knew she should think about her husband, but somehow he didn’t come forth. She felt a bit sad about her coldness, sad not because she thought it was wrong, but she knew the day Vincent found out this side of her was the day that their affair would be over.
Finally, she coaxed him out of his shell, and let him taste her breasts. She hugged him like how her mother used to hug her and tried to give him the best of her. He reciprocated this love, now completely forgotten his wife, hungry to taste and feel every part of her body. The body he had dreamed of for a whole year.
“You are my soul mate.” He said, looking at her tenderly. “You are the only person who understands me.”
“I always admire you, Vincent, since the first week at work.” At this point, she didn’t even know what were lies and what were her genuine feelings.
That was the last straw. Her words had hit the mark. They rioted Vincent, and he made love to her fervently. She was finally cherished by someone she cherished. Her cold husband was pounded by those thousand pounds into a single point. He was minute, insignificant. It was the man before her she loved.
The daylight came; it shined through the window. It was stuffy inside, and humid with the reminiscent scent of body fluids. Vincent reached over his head from the passenger’s seat and rolled down the window. There were few cars in this early morning, and he could hear the birds chirping.
He pushed gently the naked ample body that lay over him, put on his clothes in the awkward space of the car and stepped outside.
He called his wife, she didn’t answer. Did she know? It was the first question he asked himself. Had she found out the crumpled letters of confession he hid in the drawer? What should he say to her?
He was calm now, as calm as the day. One could always be calm in the day, he thought. It was another story to be calm in the night, especially with a woman in a car. He decided to leave Kathy a letter and go for a walk. Then his phone rang. His wife called.
He told her what happened. What he asked for was not forgiveness but a divorce.
“I will give all my money to you. All my money in the bank.”
“Who cares about your stupid money? You poor bastard.”
It was not a pleasant conversation, but he had expected it and won’t regret it. He was glad his father was not here to witness it.
He went back to the car and gently shook her bare white shoulders.
“I love you, honey.” He told her half-dreaming eyes.
In the dream, Kathy was back in her middle school. It was the day when she heard about the divorce of her parents, sent by a letter from the principal’s office. Both her mother and father were waiting to pick her up from the school. They fought for her custody at the school gates for everyone else’s amusement. She hid her face and ran back to the dorm. Mom and dad never saw eye to eye, and they were not supposed to be together. The world was calm if they were not together, and her compartmentalized space should remain as they should be. She loved her mother; she loved her dad. Why can’t she love them both, like every other kid. Everyone is asking her to take a side. Can’t she love both…
She saw her mom in that kind wide-set eyes of Vincent, and went forth to kiss him. He returned the kiss eagerly. The spark had been struck again. She put herself close to his body. But he held her back, “We need to talk,” he said.
She looked at him confusingly.
“I phoned my wife. I told her I wanted a divorce.”
“Oh don’t!”
“I told her we had sex. I told her about us.”
Her skin grew cold. It was a deed she thought he would do, so she didn’t blame him, not truly. Now as she heard the cars roaring by on the highway, she felt conscious of her naked body, and the tenuousness of her compartmentalized life. Would Vincent tell her husband? Would his wife tell her husband? Did they have his phone number, are they friends on Facebook, what about Linkedin, WhatsApp? Her head was spinning and overwrought with questions. She hid her face in her hands and cried.
His arm arrived dutifully. “It’s okay, Kathy. Now you divorce, we can truly live forever together. Think about all the time we could have. Just the two of us.”
“No, I don’t want a divorce. I can’t.” Her parents’ divorce, abandoning her in the boarding school. The single child. Pity faces from the teachers. She cried louder.
“How can you not get the divorce, after what happened last night?” He looked around the car, her strewn skirt, patterned red and black. Somehow he wanted to have sex again with her despite his disappointment.
“After what happened?” She looked at him angrily through her blurry tears. “It’s just a fling, it’s nothing!” She saw his astonishment turned into a dark temperament, and she got scared.
Instinctively she changed her attitude, before she even realized it herself. “I’m not as brave as you, Vincent. I wish I could be like you, but I can’t. I want …” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word “comfort”. So after a pause, she said “you” awkwardly. She hugged herself and rubbed her palms against her naked skin. Vincent brought her her clothes, and helped her dress.
“Can’t you be satisfied just with what we have?” She regained her composure. “Today, tomorrow, after this trip. You can always have me. I can come to your house.”
Vincent shook his head and clenched his jaw. Someone he had known for five years could say something as unfaithful as that. In his anger, he wanted to fuck her more than ever, to punish her, to break her. And as he trained himself over the years of his adult life: when the desire hit, he became afraid of himself, of his father’s searing belt. So he left the car, shut the door and her behind him.
How strange life could be, thought Vincent, as he walked away from the car and down the grassy bank. Behind him, the vehicle sat in silence. Below, a lake spread out — still, blue, and clear as the sky above. He knelt at the edge and splashed the cold water against his face. The cold water woke him and made him realize how cold Kathy equally was. He had been used as a pawn. And he would never break into her world like how she had broken into his, and he would never change her mind.
He looked at the calm lake and knew, more than ever, that he was doomed. He knew despite all these, he would still divorce his wife and wait for Kathy to change her mind. He would suffer all the following indignity and disgrace to prove to her that he was worthy of her love. He knew it wouldn’t change a thing, not because he was not good enough, but because she had loved him the best as she could ever love anyone from the selfish heart of hers and that was the most she could ever do. Her indecision came from her fear, and fear like this wouldn’t go away, and the longer the battle, the more the fear of change. He thought of all these, and despite them, he knew he would hold his ground, on his divorce, and on waiting for Kathy. He couldn’t do otherwise, because he loved her.
Francis' Life 