Chapter Twenty Two

The Remedy went to her house with the intention of ending their relationship altogether.  He had decided that he was 40 years old, and that he had better things to do than to sneak around with another man’s wife.  It didn’t matter, he had decided, that he still loved her to the point of desperation.  It didn’t matter, he had decided, that he was without a single other meaningful relationship.  He had to be stronger than her for once, he had decided.  He was running out of time.

        He was driving up the hill toward her house, his gears grinding from an abrupt turn he’d taken near Magnuson Park, his car’s muffler unable to contain the complaints of an engine that had endured years of punishment, which had already pushed him up so many hills, only to have him drive back down these same hills later on.  It was a dark-colored sports car bearing many dents and scratches along its surface, more like the rotting carcass of a car than a car itself, a car yet living.  It might have been dark blue or black.  It might have been brown.  It was impossible to tell at night.

        He had driven there from his apartment.  On the way he had stopped at a couple of bars, and he knew that he reeked of beer.  Cocooned inside the car, he wore a gray hooded sweater and a fraying pair of cargo shorts.  There was several days’ growth of beard over his face, and most of the stubble was grey.  Fast food wrappers and old mail littered the back seat of his car, and from his radio a male voice was growling over an endless dirge of drums and downtuned guitars and random bits of distortion.

        He knew that her husband wouldn’t be home that night.  Her husband would be at his campus office, grading laboriously written papers, or pouring over obscure texts.  Her husband would be enveloped in a world into which she could not penetrate, a world she hated, because it spelled out everything that wasn’t real, that wasn’t present, and that wasn’t of her own, bounded self.

        She often talked about her husband as if he inhabited some distant planet, a planet whose atmosphere had become so rarified that few could breathe there.  She said this in a mocking tone, intended to mock her husband.  But as the years had passed, it seemed that she was really mocking him, her lover.  

In the end it came down to the same kind of logic: the struggle between himself and her husband, the husband with his rights calculated on the one side, and he with all his attractions on the other.  The husband’s ignorance demanded it.  The husband could come and go at will, he could fail to fuck her at his convenience, and even if he didn’t find it convenient it was still the same game of waiting and hiding, lurking out of view, and waiting for the lights to go off.

        She was the love of his life, but she would never leave her husband.  He knew this in his soul.  This was the reason he had to be strong that night.  This was the reason he had to be willful, for once, with her.  This was the reason he could not allow himself to be swayed by her charms.  He had to try.  He had decided.  He had to try.

        His gaze followed the glare of his own headlights as he turned off the suburban street into her driveway.  He switched off the radio, and as he applied the brakes the cans and wrappers in the backseat made a shuffling sound.  He put the car into park and sat there for a moment, taking in the measure of her house.

        Her and her husband’s house was not far from Lake Washington, with a view all the way across to the Cascades.  But the sun had gone to sleep hours ago, and now there were only the long shadows between the trees, and warm illuminations from outdoor lamps.  Many of the houses in that neighborhood were large, and some could have been called estates.  All of the residents of these houses, tucked safely behind lawns and security systems, had gone to bed.  No one saw him enter the house, yet he wasn’t sure if that fact pleased him or not.

        As he opened the unlocked front door, he ran a hand through his graying hair.  He was going to be entirely gray soon, and he hadn’t taken proper care of himself.  It was growing more difficult to find other women.  The younger women that populated his bars and clubs were more and more indifferent to him.  He knew that the clock was ticking.  He always knew that his end, however shameful, was coming.

        During other times he would have thought that his years of furtive love deserved some acknowledgment from her, some kind of reward, some advancement.  But perhaps these years only labeled him as a coward, as a man who couldn’t set up his own house, as a man who had plundered the home of another.  He knew what he was, at 40.  He didn’t like himself for it.

        As he stepped into the house he thought briefly of what her husband might be doing at his office.  In his mind there flashed images of woodcuts, of heretics burned alive in stylized flames.  But no, they wouldn’t have branded either of them a heretic.  Their crimes were too average for that.

        Inside, the living room was quiet.  She was waiting for him by the stairs, sitting underneath a picture of two girls on swings.  She had turned off all the interior lights except those in the kitchen, and everything around the two of them had been reduced to the barest outlines.  He could see the shapes of the stairs where she sat, rising upward to the second floor.  He could see the looming presence of her husband’s bookcases, loaded down with books in the adjacent living room.

Everything about that house cursed him, but there were times when that resentment was a source of satisfaction.  He could see the outlines of himself in the arrangement of the furniture.  He could see all the holes where more authentic things ought to have been.  But those more authentic things were not there, and the arrangements of that house were undisturbed.  It was as if the walls were speaking to him.  As if to say: you might hate me, but I have a secret…

        Before he had even opened his mouth to greet her she was in his arms, kissing him to mark her possession.  His love was always returned with futility.  Her daughters were supposedly asleep upstairs, and either one of these daughters could have come down, just then, and seen the two of them together.  She was careless when it suited her, but never careless enough to leave her professor.

        He pushed her away.  “I can’t do this anymore,” he was hyperventilating, “You’re just a year younger than me and you’re never going to leave him.  I know you’re not going to leave him, ever.  Maybe one day he’ll get hit by a bus, but that’s the only way you’ll ever have enough opportunity to love me the way I love you, to risk… to risk…”

        Her answer was another kiss.  She knew how to fight him.  How many times had he tried to break it off with her?  How many times had he tried to leave?  And all the while her roots had grown into him, preventing escape.  He wanted to escape.  He wanted to escape his own sorrow.

        Her husband was a man with a good salary, a fine house, a beautiful wife, and two lovely daughters.  There was nothing to make her husband believe otherwise.  But there he was in their living room, and then she was being even more careless, pulling him towards the living room couch.  Telling him not to worry.  Maybe she wanted to apologize for something.

        It made him feel sick that she was all he had.  A shitty apartment on the bad side of town, a menial job, the chance to see her and to service her: this was the entirety of his existence, without the hope of anything better.  This was him, fulfilling his function.

        And she was pulling off his belt and undoing the buttons on his pants, and then her own pants had fallen to the floor, and he had only her firm thighs spread open upon the couch, with her wet pussy between them.  There was no way out of the maze.  She was too happy with things the way they were.

        He had his fingers inside of her and she was pulling his cock out of his underwear, willing him to mount her.

        But he just wanted to leave, even though his body was against him.

        He didn’t hear the sound of footsteps from the stairs.  He didn’t see the two pairs of eyes, peering at them from the darkened hall.  He did not know, moreover, what waited for him the next day.  Even still, he had known that there was no other ending in store.  He had known this from the beginning.