I thought about this, about how I loved his body, and his brain that was always firing new ideas. I thought of how he liked to whip my milk for my morning cappuccino and put peppermint oil in my bathwater before climbing in the tub with me. I thought of how he loved to pick out my panties and brush my hair. It had all been so lovely. It had all been so long ago.
Somewhere deep down I felt the resolve I had looked for but could never completely find when I thought about making the emails stop. It wasn’t a firm thing at that moment, but it felt just a little bit clearer. Henry was good at taking care of people and sometimes I wanted to be taken care of, but I certainly didn’t need to be saved. I just needed to become strong again, the way I was before I worked in a place that made me feel battered.
He went on. “Do you think it was an accident I ended up working where I work? Taking a job at one of your clients? A place I knew you had to call every single day so we’d get to speak again? I had a few job offers and the only reason I chose Cheetah was because I chose you.”
“You chose me? You didn’t choose me, Henry. You chose something else. I thought we chose each other and then you unchose what we chose.”
“It was a horny, three-month decision. I’m not asking you to leave your family, Belle, and I’m not leaving my own family. I’m just a guy who loves you, who has always and will always love you, fiercely, and wants to be able to express that again.”
“You’ve said that to me before,” I said.
“I didn’t.”
“You did. That’s what you said when you proposed to me. I remember ’cause I didn’t want to get married before thirty and then you said that and I thought if someone will always love me fiercely, then nothing in my life can ever go wrong and it shouldn’t matter when I get married.”
Henry put the defeated champagne glass onto a bureau, stopped for a second to put a piece of linen under it, and turned away from me.
“I need you. I need us.”
There it was again, Henry talking about Henry and what works for him. I felt a wave of calm at both the clarity and unattractiveness of this; sometimes it’s nice to know that something that is over is really over. Henry’s shoulders caved forward and he could even have been crying.
I came behind him and hugged him tightly. I had loved this man so much and with everything I had but we had split and grown and formed new branches and we had to nurture those now, not something we gave up on long ago. I spoke into his back.
“The problem with us, Henry, is that we never broke up. We never had the crying scene, the one where we sadly admit it isn’t going to work. Instead, we had this thing that began in college that was great. We traveled, we started careers, we moved in together, and our lives kicked in. I left New York City for three short months when my dad was in the hospital and even though I came back to see you every other weekend, and even though we were having nonstop, mind-blowing sex at that very same time, when I moved back to New York I find that not only have you been seeing someone else, you’re expecting a kid with her.
“Losing my dad and you all in a few months—” My voice caught, I wiped my face on the back of his shirt but was determined to finish saying what I had to say. “You and I never even had what humans call a conversation, an admission that it wasn’t going to work out. We never had the scene where we ask who gets the toaster or where I accuse you of stealing my tennis racquet.” I was sniffling into his back but wouldn’t let him turn toward me. I didn’t want this to lead to kissing. I wanted to just speak.
Henry leaned forward and put his head in his hands. His back started heaving. In all our time together, I never once saw Henry Wilkins cry. “It was too painful to break up with you because I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted.”
“So let’s say that today.” I snort-laughed. “Let’s break up, ten years after we stopped seeing each other. We’ve got six kids between us with other people, it’s hot time we ditched this thing!” This thought was suddenly hilarious to me, so freeing that I couldn’t stop talking. I’d made a giant soggy spot on the back of his shirt. I started to pat it, to clean up my mess. I suddenly found everything to be funny. “Let’s break up because you never shut up when I drive or because you dress like a golfer from Nantucket or because I hate the way you sing Beatles songs,” I gurgled.
But Henry wasn’t laughing. He just looked sad. He hadn’t taken his head from his hands. Trysting away at odd moments in this beautiful place would be so fun until it wasn’t. Then it would have done irreparable damage to everyone else in our lives, and relationships aren’t inert. It would have to go somewhere and any scenario I thought of ended in tears and broken promises. There was nothing I could do to help him with whatever it was he really wanted. I wasn’t his.
I held on to his giant body, inhaling every bit of his tight form and following his waves of sadness. It was my last time to hold him, to know what he felt like and know why I was letting it go. It felt good that this was my choice. Henry could never have saved me. It would be up to me to do that.