Devil Inside

Richard looked at her in typical male confusion, she thought. They took the world literally as if everything were a wooly mammoth that needed hunted, or a sabre-toothed tiger threatening the tribe in its cave. Only men would invent fire, she realized, but then they would burn everything in a primitive childlike glee, and then only talk about different uses for flame.

"If the client is amenable," he said slowly, "and the merger is well and truly dead, I'd go for it." But when he looked up she was no longer there.

After work, back at the boathouse, he filed down wood and pondered the conversation. What the heck was she? Slowly the penny dropped. He found a new sensation his gut, one of mixed excitement and trepidation. Surely she had not meant that. But if she did -- he stood suddenly, then sat down and replayed everything in his mind.

Thirty minutes later he had dinner on the table for his kids and grabbed his car keys. He turned to his children, guilt on his face.

"Go," said Robert. "Whatever you're doing, you haven't looked...alive... like this for, I dunno, weeks." And then he burst into tears.

Richard held him close and swore that he would keep his emotions under wrap for his children, the innocents at the altar of sacrifice brought about by an act of grave desecration to what he had thought was a good marriage.

As night fell and the birds were replaced by the droning of insects and the lush soft sound of sprinklers kicking on, he rounded the corner of the sidewalk leading up to an apartment on the West side of town. The Sheffield Apartments occupied a large segment of one of the most dreary side streets he had encountered, but it was in a safe neighborhood and quiet. He checked the address on her phone, and went to a unit on the West side of the large sprawling complex.

She answered the door before he knocked.

"You got my message?" she said.

"I'm dumb," he began in an apologetic voice.

"But you came anyway?" she said. "Why?"

"Hope," he croaked. "When we first talked, it was clear to me that you were a who not a what. There was just a vitality there, an honesty, and a direction. One door closed, you opened another. You went in there balls-out and told me the honest truth at a time when, as I look back on it, I was surrounded by lies. I was impressed, and I still am. Then today... I try to never 'fraternize' with staff, doubly so because I'm married, but she's... that's over in all but providing a stable vehicle for my children, who I love more than anything else," he finished in a whisper.

Richard shook his head to clear it. "I hoped, rather than believed, that you were asking me what I'd do in your situation. You passed a message, unless I misread it, that maybe I wouldn't be the bad guy in this equation. And I hoped, until I sort of knew it, that what you were saying, if it's what you were saying I mean, made perfect, immaculate, bloodless sense."

She handed him some kind of soft drink. He took a swig; it was the Dr Pepper clone from Costco that is better than the real thing. He took another. "Thank you," he said. "What is done is done, and wherever I failed, I will never know, if I even did. Sometimes things go bad. A storm blows in and the baby birds fall from the nest, and you find them the next morning when it's too late. Hand of God, or an aimless materialistic universe? I don't know, and I don't think it's my purpose to know. But, holy crap I'm rambling, you've always been in my thoughts, just as one of the most real people I've met."

"What about Karen?" she asked.

"What about Alex?" he asked.

Karen sighed. "And here you go, making me admit a lie from the start. Alex is not into women, if you take my drift. He's my ballet instructor, something I do as a hobby, because, well, I like it, I guess. I asked him to help put out the fire in the office, since I saw you looking at me that one time, and I knew, and I didn't want to be the 'other woman.'"

And like that, hope is lost. "I see," said Richard. "I suppose I read it all wrong --"

"No," she said. "Things have changed. I won't treat your wife like an imbecile. She made a choice, and she knows the type of man that you are. She walked away, Richard. And to be honest, I could go slap the silly bitch, but I believe in that old homily, 'never interrupt your enemy when she is in the process of making a mistake.'" She took the soft drink and gulped down a large sip.

"So I didn't--" Richard began, his brow furrowing.

"No," said Sue. "I've known for a few months. I think you have too."

He stepped forward, then slid his forehead against hers. "Hope," he said. "It'll kill you every time."

"Not this time," she said, taking his hands. "Not on my life."

They talked about something, and he came to on the sofa, sitting next to her and holding her hand. "It's unusual, but I'm a conventional girl," she said. "The last thousand years, maybe longer, have been a mistake. There's nothing in the rule book for this, but if you don't mind taking it slowly, I... we... we could make it work."

They had been holding hands the whole time.

Hours later, he killed the engine and coasted the car to a stop, risking a street park instead of waking anyone. It had been the most magical night of his life. From the depths of darkness, to the height of the mountain, bathed in the sunlight of morning in spring. And not even a kiss! He had held her until it was clear that what had been done was done, and they were conspirators now in an errand of hope. A mission of belief, lost in a world of people drunk with power and obsessed with death. Could it work? He fell asleep turning that one over in his mind.

She had set down the rules: never at the office, never in public, and never in front of his kids. They would be a secret, but she was, as she put it with a fierce look in her eyes that evoked her Norman and Scots ancestors, "all in." A moment later he said the same thing, speaking clearly so that no one -- his beloved, the wizards of time, the gods of the glade and field -- could mistake his meaning. Choice was forever, he realized, and any moment could do it all in, like the moments that killed his marriage. You could step away from the abyss at any time, but this abyss, he felt, was only dark on the outside, and inside full of light.

They met in the evenings, after the kids were in bed, at his rapidly-improving boathouse. He liked to cook for her, but sometimes they just sat and talked. He caught up on her background, the shy honey-haired girl who was good at writing but never quite fit in, and learned that she was a black belt in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. She brought out of him things Karen never thought to ask, like how he had served a summer on a volunteer fire-fighting corps in the piney woods. Their private vocabulary developed, and so did the affection.

One night, sitting on the couch with hands held, then both knew it was time. No words were exchanged. They got up and went to the bedroom where he ravished her with kisses, then delighted her with his acrobatic fingers and tongue, and finally pulled her to him, locking them together in the primal way. Their motion was like that of the waves, and when he felt the surge building within him, she rose to meet it and they came together, then slept unintentionally with her folded up in the comforting recess between his chest and thighs.

Eventually, he summoned the bravery to tell her of his feelings. "It happened a weird way, but I love you, Sue Scott."

She burst into tears and fled the boathouse. He was hot on her heels but she held up a flat hand, which was her signal for needing time, and then drove off. Deflated, Richard went back into the boathouse. How could he have crushed her, with something that he believed was positive?

At work she was absent, not distant or cold, just not really there. He divided himself between work and sneaking glances her way. The questions overwhelmed his mind and he fought to keep control. Sometimes the good guys don't win, he recalled his father saying. When work was over, he stood up stiffly, and mechanically made his way to the parking garage. There he sat in his car for a few minutes, fighting to make sense of what was battling it out in his head, or maybe heart. He drove home to feed the kids, and put on a brave face of listening to tales of soccer and mathematics class, a boy who pulled a pigtail (the rotter), and a diorama about the Battle of Hastings.

When they were asleep, he made his customary creep to the boathouse. She stepped out from the shadow of the wall into the light.

"I can't do it," she said. "It's like having a secret life that no one else can see. I can never be what I want to be, your wife and mother to your children, and so no one will see who I am inside and why this choice is important to me."

He held her then, brought her into the warmth of his chest and arms, and rocked her gently as she cried.

The next day, work was as much torture as it had been the previous day. When Sue returned from lunch, she found a potted plant on her desk, one purple flower peeking out from moth-eaten and sun-cooked leaves. Most women would have wondered if there had been some mistake and pitched the poor pathetic thing in the trash, but Sue knew the language of her new love, and instead disappeared to the corner store. As her open-mouthed co-workers watched, she repotted the plant, scattering soil across her desk, then snipped away the dead vegetation and watered what remained. She placed it in the light, cleaned up, and went back to her work.

As Richard strolled into the parking lot that night, aimless but not unhurried, since his children waited at home, he sensed her presence rather than saw her.

"If you want out, I'll understand," he said, surprised at how much it sounded more like a growl than the tender tone he had planned.

She slid out from behind a pillar. "It doesn't work in my mind," she said, "but it does in my heart. I love you, Richard Thomas, but I'm a torn-up mess inside."

Again, he held her. To know words is to know when they will communicate nothing but a jumble. He was sorry, he understood, he was afraid for her, he was crushed. Instead he simply held her and felt her pulse through her skin.

The next day he stopped by her desk an hour before lunch. Wordlessly she followed him and they got into the car. He drove cautiously to a somewhat beat-up church on the far end of town. A kindly looking man, salt-and-pepper hair over his cassock, stepped out of the stainglass-laced door.

"And so, this is her," he said, holding out his arms. "She is everything I could have hoped. How are you, my dear?"

Richard took a seat in the sanctuary, staring at the area behind the altar where generations had worshiped. Father Mueller poured tea for her in his office, talking softly all the while. About Richard and a divorce long ago, a family so thoroughly destroyed that he had set aside two plots in the cemetery. And then, about the man that young man became, fighting every step, hiding all of it from everyone while taking the pain and drawing strength from it.

"I don't know what to do," said Sue. "My heart leans one way, and every practical I know says that this is impossible."

Father Mueller nodded slowly. "If you were on a deserted island, thousands of miles from anyone you knew, with no hope of rescue, would you be with him?"

"Of course," said Sue.

"Tell me then," he said. "What do you think marriage really is?"

Sue hesitated. "It's a bunch of things. It's a bond for life. It's a promise. I guess it's a legal contract, and also a contract with, uh, God."

He chuckled. "I don't know why he brought you here. I'm a terrible, heretical priest. I spend most of my time reading Buddhist theory and old Greek literature. I don't agree with them that we show our faith to God by doing pious and charitable works and that is how we earn our place in Heaven. I think we do it by making hard decisions like this one, and doing what turns out best for everyone in the material world, since God put us here for a reason, and in my view, it is to develop souls through suffering, including choices like these."

The priest blew on his tea and continued. "They call my view sola fide, or 'by faith alone,' meaning that faith is not in charity but in making ourselves right. If your heart is pure and your mind clear, you will do the right thing here on Earth, and that's also the right thing in Heaven. We cannot show God our faith, but must live it. That is the difference between love and a marriage ceremony. Life is random and there is no plan. Stuff happens, and it's how we deal with it that tells what we are inside."

He quoted:

⁸ For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
⁹ Not of works, lest any man should boast.

— Ephesians 2:8-9

"In other words, it's great to have religion, but when it substitutes for practical, realistic thinking however, it's a mental illness," he said. "We can guess at what Heaven wants, but it's clear that the two of you are very much in love and should be together. This creates a conflict between ego, or your sense of self-worth measured by others, and id, or your inner desire not only to love this man, but to have him. But the ego is tied to boasting, and the id alone knows true faith."

Father Mueller sipped tea and continued. "That means that if in your heart you love this man forever, you are married in the eyes of God -- I think you already are, by the way -- and the rest of this species can shove its opinions where the sun don't shine. Besides, I have a few suggestions for how you can work around this situation..."

Later, after thanking Father Mueller, she joined Richard in the sanctuary. They drove back to the office together. Sue broke the silence. "You're right, he helped me clarify things. It is my pain at not having the big white wedding, where my family finally sees me as something other than a screw-up, and all my friends ooh and aah and I finally feel like I am someone, that has made me fear."

Time moved forward. The plant in her office grew, was transplanted a few times, and eventually became a small bush in the corner. Every night, Richard took care of his children, then went to the newly-comfy boathouse and made slow tender love to Sue. He bought her a ring with emeralds and diamonds, acquired a new friend group which knew her as his wife, and had the business buy a condo where she lived with their rapidly-growing brood.

That weekend, he and Robert went out in a tin skiff with their lines in the water, a practice his son had called "hunting fish" early in life to no end of amusement for his Dad and his fishing buddies.

"I don't ever want to get married," said Robert.

Richard chose his words carefully, as he often did, knowing that children remembered every comment, offhand or studied, from their parents, often for the whole of their lives. When he was interacting with his children, Richard realized, he was not Richard alone, but first a parent, a general or pope to his family, and he had to get it right, every time.

"Marriage is the hardest thing I've ever done," said Richard. "It is also one of the best things I have ever done, if not the best. I got you guys out of it, and you're not mini-Me versions of me, in my mind, but your own people who carry on the best of what your mother and I had to offer."

"But Mom's never home," said Robert. "It's like you're not married at all."

"I love your mother and always will," said Richard. "She made some choices which -- well, it's hard to see how things are going to shake out in the long run -- have made things difficult. I'll always love her and forgive her, but her choices have consequences."

Robert watched the line in the water. "Is that why you're living in the boathouse, and Mrs. Sue comes to visit at night?"

Can't fool them, ever, Richard thought. "Yes, it is," he said. "She's a good friend."

"Is she going to be our Mom?" asked Robert.

"No," said Richard. "It's a little unconventional, but I think most lives are, being both normal and having to work around the difficulties that arise. She's my friend, and your mother is your Mom. She always will be. We're going to be a family, but just like your mother has some needs and wants, so do I."

Robert thought for a little while. "Okay," he said finally. "That makes sense. So now I have two moms."

"Yeah, basically," said Richard, reeling in what turned out to be a soft drink can covered in weeds. At that, they laughed and turned the launch back down the canal toward their home. Robert headed off to see some friends, and Richard went back to his little cabin on the water with a ruined household behind it.

"So this is what you have been doing," Karen began as she approached the boathouse. Richard was sanding that silly sailboat, as he always seemed to be doing, although she had to admit that it was further along.

"It's nice of you to take interest in what I've been doing," said Richard, puffing on his pipe to keep it lit as he applied another coat of oil to the wood drying in the sun. "This boat was left to rot in a barn for too many years, and may have always had some -- how shall we say -- internal flaws, but I threw out the pieces that were never meant to be, and replaced them with new wood."

"I signed the document," she said, tossing it toward him. "Rodolfo, my attorney, said it was pretty standard and a good way to protect our money, but thought the corporate responsibility section was odd."

"What, that we donate 10% of any profits to the Arboretum?" Richard puzzled, but kept his eyes guarded. At moments like this, they regained some of the sparkle they had from before he discovered her infidelity.

"No, the bit about a morals clause and, even more, the need for contribution," Karen said. "It seems like you are grabbing ahold of my salary and 401(k)."

"The trust only works if we put all of our wealth into it," said Richard. "I'm sending everything I earn there, as I've done with this marriage."

"That's why I signed it," said Karen, "but I had Rodolfo add a clause specifying that any personal purchases of mine came out of my earnings before contribution."

Richard thought. "As long as the same applies to me, I'm okay with it," he said. "That way we're equals, and all that." He had anticipated her demand, after all.

"Good," she said, walking away. "Just initial the changes." She congratulated herself on yet another successful business interaction, but in the back of her mind, the thought briefly flitted that Richard was, after all, a professional negotiator.

Richard vomited a steady stream of green into the grass, then unsteadily got up to get the hose.

Ten years slipped by. When Suzanne left for college with the intention of studying compiler design and machine learning, Richard felt a great sense of pride. His four kids had all gone on to do interesting things. Robert had, surprisingly, joined the Marines, and intended to get professional certifications in HVAC and IT so he could manage networked SCADA systems for warehousing climate control. Kaya got a scholarship to a private college, and Daniel had made it out and was running his own plumbing business for luxury homes and corporate rentals, making more money than he knew what to do with. Suzanne was starting high school.

One sunny afternoon, Karen sprinted down to the boathouse in rage, then stopped. What was the procedure? She knocked on the double doors. Finding them unlocked, she went inside, clutching a thin folder in her grasp.

"What in the name of God..." she exhaled.

Someone had replaced the rickety old boards with new ones, grooved to fit together, and then sheetrocked the whole place. It had a little bathroom, albeit with a composting toilet, and was wired for electricity. He had an office nook, a kitchenette, a secluded bed up in the former attic, and the comfiest man-cave living room she had ever seen, with leather sofas at adjacent angles to the television. A full-size fridge, she checked, was full of meat, beer, and the occasional vegetable which probably suffered from self-esteem problems. Was he having parties in here? Sure looked like it.