Or maybe she was just telling him how great her rolls had turned out.
“Everybody finished?” Betsy came around and collected the papers, glancing at Cindy’s few scrawled sentences, then at Cindy, then back down at the paper. Cindy felt herself wanting to fidget like a schoolgirl caught failing an exam.
Yes, her letter was different from the last one.
Read it and
weep, Betsy.
“So. Let’s start sharing some of our thoughts and feelings this week. Who wants to go first?”
Cindy threaded her fingers together and looked down at her clasped hands. She wanted to push out her lower lip, hunch her shoulders, and play the sullen, scowling child. Last session she’d been happy to talk. This week she didn’t want to say anything. The angry bees were buzzing too loudly, and no one would able to understand what she was saying.
“I’ll go first.”
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Cindy stared at Martha, along with everyone else staring at Martha. Even the birds outside had probably stopped singing and were staring at Martha. One of them should fly down and let Satan know hell had just frozen over.
“I want to talk this week.” Martha looked around as if she were asking if anyone wanted to listen. She looked oddly animated today, as if she’d finally had that cup of coffee her body needed.
“Of course, Martha.” Instead of the look of triumph Cindy would have expected on Betsy’s face, with this newest offer of a soul for her collection, Betsy’s expression had turned apprehensive. “We’re all listening and happy to hear.”
Cindy took in a deep breath she thought worthy of Martha herself. She wasn’t sure she could stand this. She wasn’t sure she could stand hearing about Martha’s perfect love, and how her man had completed her so completely, and how his loss had left her only half a person, and how her heart would never heal, blah blah blah. While Cindy only had that from a dog.
She blew out the breath. What was she thinking? How could she be this negative? Martha had been lucky enough to find love. Real love. True love. Cindy should be happy for her and leave herself out of it.
“Some of you know that my . . . that the man I love is very sick.” Her face crumpled; she inhaled and exhaled in such a way that clearly showed that Cindy was an absolute ama-teur and had no business comparing herself at all. “What you don’t know is that he was married. For over twenty years, I was his mistress.”
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pose-holding for sure. Her sit-in-the-chair-and-gape pose could go on for weeks. Martha’s words had not penetrated yet, they’d simply frozen her to her seat.
For over twenty
years, I was his mistress.
“I knew him since we were in college together. We were best friends, then lovers. He was my soulmate. No two people could be closer than we were.”
A murmur swept the room. The jury was out on whether people were touched or censorious, or holding back gags.
“So . . . then why didn’t he marry
you
?” Cindy barely recognized her voice. It sounded as if someone had taken a cheese grater to her vocal cords.
Martha turned her bulgy lash-covered eyes toward Cindy, nearly quivering with excitement over the prospect of sharing her superiority in finding love. “Because he wanted a very public career, and he needed a beautiful outgoing and gracious wife. More than anything, I wanted him to be happy, so . . . I let him go.”
“Not for long, obviously,” Cindy mumbled, then put on a fake smile when she caught Betsy staring.
“How did you two get back together?” Dinah was all agog, and Cindy was betting the rest of the camp would know the entire story by lunch.
“He couldn’t stand being away from me, and couldn’t stand being in a relationship that didn’t give him what he truly needed.” Martha bent her head meekly, as if she wasn’t worthy of such an honor as Mr. Cheaterpants picking up an extra slut so he got everything he wanted and his wife got crap.
“Oh, that’s so romantic!”
Cindy shifted her eyes to Dinah, and understood for the first time what it felt like to want to kill somebody.
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Ann snorted. “I doubt his wife would agree with you.”
Cindy was grateful. At least somebody was making sense.
Cindy had a lot to say on the topic of affairs, but she was afraid. The bees were buzzing in their hive—if she let them out, they’d sting up a storm.
“You don’t understand. He and I were meant to be. We always were, and we always will be. His wife was a necessity, a decoration. I understood that. But he only loved me.”
The hive busted as if someone had swung a shovel at it.
Cindy turned on Martha. “Bullshit. He just said that so he could get into your pants. He loved his wife. I can’t believe you fell for that.”
Martha stared back at Cindy, and her eyelids twitched.
What the hell was the matter with her?
Had
she smoked some bad weed?
“What he and I had was—”
“What you had was a totally immoral cheating affair.
You
allowed him to abuse his wife.
You
helped him do that.
You
encouraged him.” She found herself standing, fists clenched, without remembering how she got there. “You never gave him the chance to love his wife. How could he, when he had you to compare her to? He never saw you angry or overwhelmed or lonely from how much time he spent away. He never saw you sick and hideous. He never had the chance to get bored of your day-to-day reality.”
“We knew each other too well to—”
“And you had the luxury of always thinking he was perfect. That’s what he wanted from you. You never had to pick up after him, clean up after him, cook for him, do his er-rands, try to please him day after day, year after year, while you got your emotional needs met by the family pet. You 230 Isabel
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never had to listen to him snoring and farting, never had to pretend to have a life while he was out at all hours doing God knew what, never had to lie there without knowing if he was out banging someone else. You never had to—”
“Cindy
.
”
Betsy’s voice penetrated, and with it came the impression that she’d been calling Cindy’s name several times.
Cindy blinked, found herself breathing much too hard, bees buzzing so loudly in her brain that her face had gotten hot with the energy they created. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know how you could do that to someone. I don’t know how you could call that real love, when it was nothing like real love. It wasn’t even close to what real love is about. What’s more, you were
hurting somebody
.”
More murmurs. Cindy didn’t know who was being condemned and who pardoned.
“His wife got what she needed from him.” Martha said
“wife” as if she meant
bitch
, and “needed” as if she meant
deserved
. “A chance to be in the public eye, children, plenty of money.”
“No,
you
got what you needed from him. She got nothing.
She deserved more.”
“You know, she should have left him, that’s what she should have done.” Dinah looped a finger in her gold necklace and worked it back and forth. “I never would’ve stood for that kind of behavior from any of my husbands. In fact I didn’t. I always told them, I said—”
“Cindy, do you think maybe you’re projecting your situation onto Martha? ” By now that gentle “therapist voice” of Betsy’s was enough to make Cindy shriek like a banshee.
“I’m doing much more than projecting.” Cindy made claws out of her hands and clutched her temples. “I’m holding her As Good As It Got
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responsible for what my husband did. Her and women like her. How can you talk about love when you split him in half with someone else? Love is between two whole people. You split him in half, and ruined any chance he had of loving his wife completely.”
“There was no way he could love his wife.”
“How do you know that?” She was shouting, louder than she ever shouted at anyone, and she couldn’t make herself stop.
“How can you say that?”
Martha gazed at Cindy with narrowed eyes, which would have made her feel a little scared, except that she was already feeling too much crazy hysteria to fit in fear. “Because he loved me so much there was no room for her.”
Cindy backed away. She could swear that the floor was tipping her away, as if a giant hand had reached down and picked up the cabin from its foundations, as if they were all about to be tossed down the gullet of a giant foraging for food. Or maybe hurled by a tornado into the land of the Wizard of Oz. Anything would be an improvement over Camp Kinsonu and the twisted women who came here.
She turned and hurled herself out of the cabin, into the foggy woods. She raced down the path toward the shore then cut off sharply to the left, to Patrick’s cabin, wet ferns soaking her ruffled ankle socks and the too-short hems of her jeans.
Please, God, let him be there.
She took the three steps in one leap, skidded on the wooden porch turned slippery from the wet.
“Patrick.” She pounded on his door. “Patrick.”
She waited, heard him swear briefly, and her body relaxed a little into relief. He was here. He would fix everything.
The door opened. “Cindy. What is it? What’s wrong?”
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The concern on his face was enough to make her start crying. She tried to explain what had upset her, amidst sobs and hiccups and more buzzing.
“Wait.” He glanced behind him, as if something in his cabin was going to come out and attack him. “Let me get my jacket, tell Betsy you’re with me, then we’ll go for a walk and get you calmed down.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Patrick.”
She waited, shivering, from the damp and her still raging bees. Every part of her wanted to be wrapped in Kevin’s arms again, to make everything else go away. But he wasn’t there, for God’s sake, again he wasn’t there. Patrick was all she had.
She slumped onto the bench on Patrick’s porch, gazing out at the claustrophobic gray that obscured the view. The minute she relaxed even that much, the thought she’d been holding off with her panic burst through.
What if Martha’s man did love Martha? What if he really
didn’t love his wife? What if Kevin—
“Here I am.” Patrick emerged in a black nylon jacket and grinned at her. “Let’s walk.”
She got up and followed him, feeling as if her body weighed about twenty pounds more than it had half an hour earlier, feeling as if there was too much humidity in the air for her lungs to process it properly.
When they reached the shore path, Patrick turned left instead of right toward the beach, where most of the camp activities took place. Ten yards into the woods, he stepped off the path and pushed through a stand of dripping alders, gestured her onto a foggy sloping ledge. A gull took off at their approach, disappearing rapidly into the thick static As Good As It Got
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mist. Patrick lowered himself to sitting on the damp rock.
She plunked down next to him, their hips and thighs touching, absorbing his warmth.
“Talk to me, Cindy. Tell me what’s going on.”
She told him as best she could, aware as she spoke that she was not coming off as the rational or well-behaved half of the conflict. Which only made her hate Martha more.
“So that’s what happened.” She looked hopefully to Patrick, his handsome face sharp against the fuzzy backdrop of woods. Could he tell that she really needed him to take her into his arms, tell her she was right in all that she was feeling, that he was there for her until the end of time? Then she could nobly tell him she was sorry, but Kevin came first, and would always come first . . .
He didn’t take her in his arms. Nor did he tell her she was right or that he was there until the end of time or anything he was supposed to tell her. Instead he wrapped his arms loosely around his bent knees, staring out into the fog as if he could see through it. “Your husband is an asshole, Cindy.”
Cindy gasped, put a hand to her chest, preparing a de-fense for Kevin, until it occurred to her that maybe the insult was a prelude to Patrick revealing his jealousy and declaring his strong feelings for her. Probably a stupid fantasy, but at this point stupid fantasies beat out her reality by a long shot.
“Kevin is . . . ” She couldn’t think what to say since the words that came to mind to describe him were arrogant, shallow, manipulative, deceitful . . . asshole.
She didn’t like thinking that way. What happened to looking for the positive, only seeing the good things and thereby helping the universe provide them?
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“You deserve so much more than what he gives you, Cindy.” Patrick whispered these words out to the invisible sea, then turned his glorious eyes, gray as the fog, back onto her. “You deserve so much better.”
Cindy’s stomach hovered between a rise into hope and a plummet into despair. “Where would I find anything better?”
“I know out there somewhere is a guy who can give you everything you need, everything you deserve, and more.” His voice was low, rumbling comfort, except that the implied ending to his speech was,
but that guy isn’t me.
“First you have to believe that you deserve better.” His eyes were kind, but not loving, not tender.
Cindy put her hands to her head. She was on the edge of a giant abyss. Behind her Kevin and safety. Any step away from them would plunge her into terrifying nothingness.
Patrick and what he’d made her feel that night stood across the chasm, unattainable, unavailable. Gay. Or . . . whatever.
“I went through a totally hard journey, Cindy, like the one you’re facing. Years of self-scrutiny, observing and recording my patterns and destructive behaviors, to get to the core of who I really am, you know? To capture my own essence. Meditation was the key to setting myself free of my own demons.”