She wondered whether she was being hard on her husband. He had, after all, more than earned a rest after teaching for so many years. She hadn’t heard anything from Connell yet about it, and she expected that the boy, who was becoming a more sullen presence in the house as he slunk into adolescence, would be oblivious enough to his father’s new routines to allow her to conclude that it was all in her head.
Connell noticed, though. “So what’s with all the record listening?” he asked one night, snapping his gum in that insouciant way that usually annoyed her. Now she saw that the attitude gave him the courage to speak.
Ed looked up but didn’t respond.
“What’s up with the headphones?” he asked again, stepping closer to his father.
Given the strange way Ed had been behaving lately, she thought he might fly into a rage, but he simply took the headphones off.
“I’m listening to opera.”
“You listen to it all the time now.”
“I decided I didn’t want to die not having heard all these masterpieces. Verdi. Rossini. Puccini.”
“Who’s dying? You’ve got plenty of time.”
“There’s no time like the present,” Ed said.
“You don’t have to use those,” Connell said, pointing to the headphones.
“I don’t want to disturb anyone.”
“You don’t think you’re disturbing anyone this way?”
? ? ?
Another night, when she picked him up from track practice, Connell asked her in the car if his father was unhappy.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I think he’s quite happy.”
“He always says, ‘You have to decide in life. You deliberate awhile, you think of all the possibilities on both sides, and then you make a decision and stick to it.’?”
She’d never heard this particular line of reasoning from Ed. This must’ve been one of those things he and the boy talked about when she wasn’t around. She could almost feel her ears pricking up.
“Like with girls. He says, ‘When you’re getting married, you make a decision and that’s it. Things aren’t always perfect, but you work at them. The important thing is that you decided.’?”
Her stomach tightened.
“But what I don’t get is, if it’s such a chore, if you’re talking about having to stick to it because you decided it, why do people do it in the first place?”
“They do it because they’re in love,” she said defensively. “Your father and I were in love. Are in love.”
“I know,” he said.
It occurred to her that perhaps he didn’t know. Overt affection had always been uncomfortable for her, but in front of the boy it felt impossible. Ed used to squeeze and kiss her when Connell was a baby, but she would wriggle out of it. Certainly she didn’t reach for him herself, but he knew when they married that he’d have to take the lead. She wasn’t like the women a few years younger who wore miniskirts. What she offered instead was the negotiated submission of her fierce independence. She was different in bed with him than she was anywhere else, but this wasn’t something her son could have any idea about.
“Your father is happy,” she said. “He’s just getting older, is all. You’ll understand someday. The same exact thing will happen to you.”
It didn’t feel like the best explanation, but it must’ve been good enough, because the boy was silent for the rest of the ride.