The Last September: A Novel

The last time I’d broken a rule—really, seriously misbehaved—was when I left Ladd for Charlie. I thought of all the time I’d spent since then being faithful, and the work I had done trying to forgive him, to stay with him. And before and after that, just the simple wifeliness of my days. Even in the end, the failure of the restaurant, and Deirdre—the way we’d gone back to what life would have been if it had all never happened. Day after day, for as long as I could remember, just being faithful and devoted. The great good wife, standing by while Charlie did what Ladd said he would do, what he had always done: broken my heart.

I stared back at Ladd and recognized him as full of something, in regard to me, that Charlie had always lacked. Not love, exactly. Because Charlie did love me. I knew that. Maybe what I saw instead was simple longing. Why would Charlie ever have had to long for me when I’d always been so immediately there?

“Ladd,” I said. “Do you know what I’d do? If I could take one single minute of my life? To just do what I wanted?”

His face lost the smallest amount of color. I crossed the room to where he sat in the ancient armchair. Somewhere in those few strides my feet lost their flip-flops as I walked my way over to Ladd and crawled onto the chair, my knees on either side of him, pressing into the worn springs. I placed my hands against his face and cradled it there for a moment, taking in his features, the face I used to know—not beautiful to everyone but even now beautiful to me. I pressed my lips to his forehead and then his cheek. My hands moved down to rest on his shoulders as I made my way, in a circle, kissing his face.

It took up the whole minute I had granted us. A long and very pregnant minute, during which Ladd sat frozen, his eyes closed. When it ended, they fluttered open. I sat back a little. Ladd studied me with an expression almost like sternness, and I thought he was about to accuse me of something.

“Just one minute,” I said, “out of all these days and hours.”

“Let’s make it thirty,” Ladd said. And then kissed me on the lips.

After another few minutes, I amended. “Let’s make it an hour.”

IT DIDN’T LAST AN hour, not quite, and it could have been worse. Our clothes stayed on. Our hands didn’t wander, not much, and even when Ladd reached beneath my skirt he only let his hand rest above my knee, holding me there, while we kissed and kissed. Perhaps the worst thing was the way Ladd looked when we said good-bye, a kind of expectation that this would continue, whereas by the time I got to my car, I had already returned to thinking about Charlie.

Driving back to Maxine’s, an overhead cloud obscured and flattened the sunlight. My hands shook on the steering wheel. I knew how this would all play out, the same way it had hundreds of times before. My anger with Charlie would fill to capacity and then burst, its remnants floating away on the ocean air, leaving me with the simple fact that I adored him. My husband was an elusive, inscrutable will-o’-the-wisp, which was why he drove me crazy and why I never could manage to walk away. I blinked back tears, thinking that the secret to marriage did not lie in compatibility, or even commitment, but the willingness to endure heartbreak. I, for example, had loved Charlie well enough to paste my heart back together a hundred times or more since the day I first met him.

Retreating from Ladd’s, I had no confidence at all in Charlie’s willingness to repair his heart on my behalf. My chest filled with fears that would soon be rendered entirely irrelevant.