Randall Kilburn didn’t allow himself to use the term love as more than a descriptive expression for warmth and camaraderie, not that he wasn’t married, enmeshed in a workably open marriage, and reasonably happy. To his knowledge, considering his former history, he had never been “in love” so tended to disbelieve that his recent affliction of pain and sensory memory affiliated with a woman he had slept with on a research trip could be such a thing.
The desert woman, the woman not his wife, “the one who caused the ache” as he referred to her, simply became an unbearable person for whom he may have used the word love, if only because, though dull and mostly diffuse, since their break-up, this ache was a constant source of worry and it had not left him for months.
If pressed by a crony in his old age, much, much later, he could imagine his story about the ache-girl could begin, were he unblocked enough to tell it, with a simple statement such as: “There was a woman I knew once who challenged me, who I hated and who I loved, if such a thing exists”– but even his therapist got only his repetitive and practiced dismissal of love, the gnashing of his teeth, and the wrinkling of his brow.
Still, after one too many instances of Randall’s refutation of his affection, even his jaded shrink wised up. It was the matter of Randall’s stylistically accomplished and yet completely ridiculous diatribes about disengagement that the learned man caught onto, telling Randall then that he could see Randall’s bland remarks and negativity for what they authentically were, which was not, his shrink stressed, Randall’s true dismissal of aforementioned events or his lady interest, but Randall’s own desire to dismiss that which his mind had no capability of controlling, or setting free.
On this point, Randall immediately agreed. “I want to set this free,” he said. “The ache is a terrible ache in my stomach. A burn like an ulcer.”
“You say you want to let this go, Randall, yet you can’t,” the therapist said. “Again and again, we return to her, so it might help to explore what it was about this girl that you can’t forget.”
“I can’t forget that she wants to kill herself every day,” Randall replied. “I’ve had my own problems with depression, you know? So why would I want to know about that or even remember it? Except, each day I want to fuck her and wonder if she has done the big sorrow. Maybe that is causing the ache, wondering if she’s offed herself out in the desert and is currently hanging from a rafter of her trailer, maybe shored up in her backyard, bled out, having decided that I wronged her somehow.”
“Why feel responsible?” his therapist said. “You don’t control her. Remember, we discussed this?”
“She said she loved me. I couldn’t love her. I don’t love. I told her this, but she was fine with that. And then she left me when I said my wife was pregnant,” he said, raking his hand nervously through his thinning sandy blond hair. “Yes. I’m probably just wondering if she’s still alive. That’s it.”
Randall looked at the clock, a silver deal with glistening hands that reminded him of butter knives. “My wife is waiting for me,” Randall said. “I have to go.”
Returning home, he paid bills and booked travel. He frantically wrote letters to friends and editors and picked up one project after the next. Still, despite endless distractions to exile her from his memory (he did not allow himself to think her name unless by accident), she who caused the ache had still taken up large residence in the back of his head, pulled up an old wingchair to get comfortable, naked in his mind save one of his button-up shirts and a pair of small white panties, and he could not (despite fine news of his child’s good ultrasound, despite his agent’s email to say he’d won a new award out of Newfoundland, and despite any number of successes) shake her loose.
He found her presence was a constant, ever muted engagement that fluttered behind his eyes or below his ribcage and also caused a low-grade schizophrenia where one moment he cast her out completely, swearing he was better off without her, and the next he longed to be near her so fervently it fairly drew his hands up from his sides, as if he could reach out to touch her, but her air was not his air. His air was rarified island air, the air where the smog and the ocean took turns with monopolizing breezes.
Her air was as dry as her desert. Besides, he could not extend his hands to her now, even if he wanted to, even if she screamed for his return. He should not return to her in any case, since she caused the question of why he’d meander with a damaging attraction bordering on obsession and burning like a brush-fire grown too close. He was happily married to someone else, he reminded himself. Someone perfect and nice. He had done no wrong. Their marriage had been open for years.
Bullshit. He hated his wife, his cold, socially demanding wife. The other woman knew this. The other women knew this.
Yet his wife was expecting now, he reminded himself, having passed the first trimester in her pregnancy with no troubles like the last time she’d miscarried and they’d grieved, though already distant from each other, so it was all that it could have been.
He had wealth. He had connections. He had everything he possibly needed. Besides, he doubted the validity of the ache she (who caused it) had caused. Could his reaction to her be more simply an aggravated lust complicated by the pain of pursuing her emotional train wreck? He was determined to ride out the pain. Thus, after the last weekend’s bout of tennis and sundry shopping, replying to editors and strangers, staring out at the waterfront view from his home, he knew only that instead of progress, he had backtracked, tasting the blackest bile he had known since the split—since everything lately, but mainly the water before him, saddened him so severely he was nearly moved to uncustomary tears solely because she (who caused the ache) saw no similar expanse!
He wanted her eyes to see through his, and vice versa. But they could not. His separation from her was therefore more than distance tracked with miles, more like belonging to another universe that she could not see, where she stood in the sand, which was hot and dry as the bone of something that died there, and he and his wife stood in a habitable dwelling on an island with glittering promise, perusing the daily, oceanic splendor of the urban skyline.
In this place, he had an identity with a constant household. His wife was concrete. Yet travelling caused breaks in his realities when he approached the desert landscape; it always had. There was never any wife amidst the shifting dunes, only a lover who cut her wrists with dull tools and wore the scars to show her long hobby was not new, a lover with pale hair and full lips, a lover with track marks that had all but faded at the insides of her elbows–for she had been an addict too.
He had given up the drugs and liquor long ago, landing back in his wealth and privilege and surmounting his brief bouts with self-destructive decimation in decided triumph. Two million dollars his flat cost. He was far from the place where he’d trade anything important for a bottle or a hit. Yet today, he missed the lover so much it seemed that even his gums hurt, missing her totally and viscerally, even missing her dangerous and overly dramatic moments when she, bleeding, shivering after an episode, clung to him and pressed her wrist wounds to the bare skin on his back to close them, pulling him deeper inside her, half crying, half demanding, “Get closer. Shove inside me, you asshole,” as his body obliged her. He had long, strong, capable arms. She loved how he lifted her. How they held her.
But he needed to turn to his wife, to forget that other thing like a nightmare deferred. His wife was pregnant and needed him, which meant that although their marriage had always been a party to new women or men entering their world, more now was expected of him by way of conversation, gentle touches, and soothing reassurances. This was to be their first child. Her other lovers had abandoned her. They had gotten married in order to have such a child.
When the news went out, their friends rallied around them, thinking it might mean the end of the suffering for one or the other, the same suffering these friends secretly believed was caused by the couple’s constant flirtations with marital disaster, and “A baby,” one good friend said. “That will show them that they need to be strong together. Else why stay together so long?”
When he heard this as he walked back into his study, his blood went cold. He hated them and wanted to flee. He looked cruelly to his wife’s stomach. The word baby started to give him a chill, though he had thought, at one time, that he wanted one. A baby was something he imagined they needed many times, obsessed by his own ancestry as he was, but he had no practical experience with childrearing.
Wanting a baby occurred to him, suddenly, like wanting a Lamborghini, the one of few things in his late forties that he still wanted yet did not have. Yet, such a thing did not appear from mid-air. Babies were made. Sex and proximity were required. Perhaps this was part of why she-who-caused-the-ache had abruptly cancelled his trail-membership in her life. As his wife Karen expanded, her expectations expanded too. The lover could see this, feel it in his removal. The baby had made this happen.
Now, he was to go to medical appointments with Karen. He was to help pick nursery décor. He was to be around and cook when the nausea overtook her, also: avoid long trips. He was to call if he were gone more than a few hours.
Often, lately, for she was five and a half months along, he watched her growing belly and wondered what that tiny soul would expect when it emerged enraged and squalling at the drafty surface of the world. Would that soul be a miracle or a disappointment?
And what if it was damaged somehow, the fetus? What if it was not what he wanted? The child would be a teen when he was in his sixties. It could ruin all major travel they did for some time. Karen would be affected too, he decided–was already being affected—researching preschools and sitters. So what sort of effect would a constantly pressing need have on both of their lives outside of home? It, meaning the baby in this instance, could be a problem. It could change everything.
But “You have to call the baby he or she, Randall,” Karen admonished this afternoon, tossing her burnished hair behind her back and stretching on her toes to put soup cans in the cabinet. “Stop calling the baby ‘it.’ That bothers me.”
“Everything bothers you,” he said.
“Fuck you, Randall.”
“I did that,” he said. He walked behind her and placed his hand on the small of her back. “We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” he said. “So I call the baby it. How can I assign a gender?”
“It’s not an it,” she said.
He took another can from her hand and put it up on the shelf. He blocked her from reaching the rest. “Sit down, Karen,” he said. “The baby is what I meant every time I said it.”
She sat. Clouds gathered. She watched them with dull eyes. She was the somewhere else he often saw her go when she thought of someone or something other than him. Years of that had happened. Her hair was neat, groomed as usual.
Yet he was somewhere else, too, fighting the roiling despair that rose in waves. He wanted fresh sunburn on his skin, arid heat, sand below his sandaled feet. He wanted she-who-caused-the–ache to apply aloe to his burns, smiling and mocking him as he winced, while the sky darkened around their solitude. He wanted to walk through her house and find her somewhere, seated on a loveseat in torn jeans or some other perch where she would have been reading, and he wanted to make love to her wherever she was. He wanted to see a lizard appear in the shower stall or watch the light drop behind her house, with a cool drink in one hand, ice rapidly melting, and her small hand in his other hand.
But he had a philanthropic publicity gala tonight, had rented a monkey suit. He would ride a ferry to the shore then a taxi to the party. Here, where the water and city lights made a sparkling urban smock of flash and humidity, nothing was dry. Even the air from the air-conditioners had an alternate smell.
There was so much water around his house that, as he ate two soft-boiled eggs and rye toast for lunch earlier, he’d decided the whole panorama of his daily view was not just the symbol but the summary of the problem. For his wife, there was an ocean in her belly, some ocean of repressed needs, of new demands, of their failures, for years, to love each other. There was a literal ocean around him. Glass and bronze ornaments of the sea accumulated like flotsam throughout their house– and there was a clean sterile space within that house, too, albeit humid from the occasional cracked window. Even tap water was piped in invisibly and neatly chlorinated. As he wandered around his place that day, he could find no dust anywhere.
This immediately led him to the connection that there was also a lack of awareness on Karen’s part with any of the very sullied or personal parts of himself that he most despised. He had started to tell her. Once. She didn’t want to know. And so? And so a divide. You refuse my dark, he thought, so I cannot give you the light either. I am not me when I’m with you.
She was hydrated motion with unbroken lines– constantly moisturized, clean, flowing–in control of her own emotional well being, no matter what unseen part of her may exist. Everything was beautiful and terrible about her unflappable spirit, he mused. She had never disparaged his past, unlike someone else, never cut open her wrists and said, “Fuck you, Randall! I feel what you do not allow yourself to acknowledge.” Karen did not demand what he said he would not, or could not give. Love. She never had.
“I will not ask you to be in love with me,” she once said, and this was an early agreement, he remembered, that they’d always kept.
“Karen,” he’d said. “I’m just not emotionally accessible. I have problems with the idea of being in love. I have problems with wanting to die sometimes, too. Like when I work. But my therapist says this is not an act I’m likely to actualize. And my work is everything to me.” The one who caused the ache broke his laptop, flung it from the table and threw herself on top of him, taking him, kissing him, biting him, making him hers.
When he and Karen married, she was thirty seven. Her ovaries could stop working soon. They tried again and again to conceive and finally got it right. “You must use condoms with other men while we do this,” he remembered saying to her before the confirmation of pregnancy, mixed in his sentiment. “We need to make sure this is our child.” She had agreed. This went on a year before the test came back positive in the new definitive way.
And during this year, halfway through it, this was right about the time when their open marriage grew complicated with his sudden desire not for babies but for blood and fire emanating from the desert. Or was this after? Was there a time and space when both desires happened concurrently, but he could assume them to be removed from each other, as if he had two lives, spatially delegated?
For the wife, he was to be respectful, kind, and decent. In contrast, for the one who caused the ache, he was expected to belong to her, heart and soul, body and mind, to never discuss the wife unless necessary, and to listen to her daily discussion about her desire to kill herself or calmly overhear the many ways she might go about doing so until she climbed on top of him and let this all go. Sometimes, this sickened him.
The demands were heavy. She did not say, “Be yourself, as long as this fits an appropriate image,” as Karen did.
She said clearly, in many ways, “Be who you deny being, but really are.”
“I am like her,” he thought that evening while regarding his tux, his hand on his abdomen where the bulk of her ache sat like a small anvil. But he always felt most similar to her, the other, while sitting in the dark, pondering his own thoughts.
“Get ready, babe,” Karen then called from the living room and he turned on more lights to contemplate the suit wrapped in plastic. And as the lights blinded him he felt nothing like her, that girl in his sandy memory, as soon as he was fully dressed for the party, wearing the false face he wore for guests and acquaintances. He was a different man. The one who had no doubt about his right to stand among the well-heeled people he called his acquaintances. No one would say to him here, “Shut up, you little bitch, and mount me. Give me what I want! Now.”
No stranger to his own multiple masking or sudden bouts with depression, in fact, he sometimes wondered if dating her were not an exercise in self-annihilation or mutilation, but an exercise in positive comparison, such as: “I am not that crazy because She is far more crazy. I am not that damaged because She is far more damaged.”
In his moments before sleep, he acknowledged that he appreciated her swirl of emotion since it forcibly engaged him with living like he’d lived in his doping days, but without the liquor or drugs. She ripped him free from his tendencies to minimalize or avoid self-expression or avoid commitment: I will marry you but I will not...A,B,C,D– to avoid even friendships that presented themselves as too binding too quickly. I will speak to you, but on my terms, with a harrowing display of both proximity and removal until I test you to be truthful.
Really, he was a kind man most of the time. He always tried to be, though sometimes this came off as non-committal. Or non-committal came off as non-committal. His ache girl’s rage forced his responses. His honesty. His heat and pain and passion. It was fascinating to feel these things while sober. Yet now he burned with them, became part of the fire they created even in her absence, himself a burn victim with seeping wounds made by the hot licking tips of the life fire itself.
Before, he did not think such feelings existed for him anymore. Not anywhere. Certainly not here where the hair from his chin fell to the sink as he shaved, only to be washed away at the turn of a knob. Here where plans were made suavely by a beautiful woman called his wife, with perfect hair and aplomb, who more often wanted to kill him for his transgressions with timing or intimacy than be truly jealous of them or in any way damage herself. Yet even his compliments to Karen were now couched in a comparison mode with the other. What would his shrink say to that?
He would say, “You love this other woman, Randall.”
And Randall would say, “I cannot love.” And another hour would go by.
And so: There were two lives. One in mild, happy fatherland-to-be. One in hell that sometimes felt like heaven just long enough to rake some coals through his soul.
Shawna. Okay, that was her name.
He thought her name, thought it again, and saw her face even now, getting on the ferry with Karen on his arm. Even later, he knew from experience, Randall’s mind would throb for her. Alone in the bathroom, hand on his cock, stroking, he would think of her, picturing how tightly he remembered having pulled her close and the dry, sun-stripped texture of her straight blond hair against his cheek that smelled of leaves and sage. But he could not go to her again.
“You violated me by doing that with her!” she last said, shouting hysterically about his news of making a baby with his wife.
“She is my wife!” he announced, a little indignantly.
“Only because you’re afraid I can’t stay sane long enough to have your baby,” she replied. “Or, you think I’m too old? You don’t love me? Or maybe you’re afraid an ex-addict would make a poor child, another addict in the gene pool? Maybe Karen’s family has no history of mental illness? Any of this? You are ripping out my heart Randall and feeding it to the dogs!”
“I don’t belong to you,” he replied, frightened again by her intensity. “I mean, I do belong to you somewhat when I’m with you. But I can’t say love. I don’t say love. And I don’t love you. Or I do love you, in one way or another, but I’m not in love with you, okay? I am fucked up.”
“Fucked up people say love, Randall, and fall in love,” she replied, furious. “It happens all the time. And you are in love with me, so you need to say that– right fucking now. I want to hear you say it. Tell me you love me. With words.”
“Stop pressing me,” he argued. “You know how much I care. So, now what? I’m supposed to regret I’ll be a father?”
“No,” Shawna had said, her voice dull. “You’re supposed to regret not having that child with me, Randall, because I love you more than she does and you love me and you know it. Because I want to hold you so close every night that I can feel you breathe and I can kiss every inch of your body until there is not one place my mouth has not been. This is goodbye because children are your future and you are starting a new one without me, that does not contain me. Did you think I should be glad for that?”
“Do you have a future you can see?” he thought then, but he could say nothing, and this is where the ache began, the ache along with the silence. The ache he felt right now.
“I want to kill myself today by standing behind your car and letting you back over me,” he remembered Shawna said as he left that day. “I want you to kill me.” She sobbed as she stood before him, her body shaking and her face hidden in her hands. And then she said, backing away from him before walking into her house and locking it. “It’s over, Randall. You have to go. Don’t call me.”
But that was in the past. He was in the city now with a shoreline and high-rises and a wife. His citified clean hand rested on the small of Karen’s back as he helped her off the ferry and then into a taxi. Karen smelled like linen. She smiled. Her teeth were gleaming white. Outside, everything was clean, wet, and safe. There was ocean and also rain.
As they exited the taxi, he had an umbrella ready. He opened it for them, walking close to Karen. When they arrived, he went to the coat closet and sent Karen ahead to greet the crowd of well-wishers and friends. But in that room, with all those garments, it was a warm, quiet place. He hung Karen’s aqua Dior coat beside a faux fur jacket and found another hanger for his black trench, which he placed beside a sandy camel sports coat.
The coat looked soft. He reached to touch it, finding it similar in color to the sand he’d considered earlier. But all was shadowed. The closet was rather dark. He touched the fabric. It was soft like the light blond hair on a woman’s upper arms. “Did you kill yourself yet, Shawna?” he asked.
No answer.
“I do love you,” he then said, clutching the empty sleeve in a maudlin way. “All right. I am in love with you.” It was out. He could not take it back. Like a guilty child, he dropped the coat and went to rejoin his glowing wife.
He stood very close to her, as if to wear her like a shield. “Oh, this rain! Oh, this rain,” Karen said faintly, referring to the water cascading down all the visible glass in the bookstore. “Sometimes, it seems it will never stop. It’ll be nice to have a nice, dry day.” She rubbed her stomach again, as pregnant women do.
It’s coming, Randall thought. The baby. His baby. His baby with her. What was a baby anyway?
The photographer approached. He said, “Smile. Smile.”
They did.
For the perfect shot, Randall put his hand beside Karen’s hand on her belly, let it rest there until he felt a small insistent movement below his palm, until the camera was done clicking, until he almost forgot what he was doing in any regard except trying to hear motion through his palm, and then his wife, usually eager for his affection or touch in a public setting, grew tired of the staid weight or heat of his open palm so turned half away from him on her sprightly toes towards another group of ardent well-wishers, removing her belly (because it was hers) from his handhold, which had never felt more precarious—and delicately, smiling in a fashion that never once touched her eyes, Karen then, with a casual grimace that broadcast to him yet again that they had never loved each other in a way that caused any kind of heartfelt ache, because she was his wife, because she could, lightly shrugged his touch away.