Shadows of the Past

Shadows of the Past

There is no sex in this story. There is none at all. So if that's what you want, you may as well look elsewhere. This is just a story about two wives who moved on and two husbands who are left to heal the pain as best they can.

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It's midday Saturday on one of those almost warm days of early spring. The sun is out and it's the first hint of warmth in four months. There is still a thin, spotty layer of snow on the ground that's deeper in the shade under the trees. The crocus in the lawn have made their show, peaking through the last of the winter's snow, and are now retreating, and the daffodils will soon be sending up their shoots to break the surface of the ground to begin their show. It was a long, dark winter for the world and for me, but now I am starting to think we are both awakening. Life is returning to the land and, finally, to me as well. Two years, it's been two years of living as little more than an empty shell of a man and now, finally, I am starting to feel again. Like those daffodils that die off every year only to rise again from the bulb, I had retreated below the surface where no one could reach me and held to what little life I could find in me. Two years, and at long last I had that faint spark, that urge to reach up again and live in the warmth of the sun.

I'm sitting on my back deck, looking over the yard, wearing that late winter jacket that is as much to break the wind as to keep me warm, and I'm drinking a mug of hot tea with lemon and honey. I'm holding the mug with both hands as it warms my fingers and palms between the sips that warm my throat and stomach. I can feel the warmth of the tea slowly radiating through my body, and between the sun and the tea I'm feeling good. Sitting there, looking over the yard, I can't help but think of the old couple that had this house before me and all the years they spent building the gardens and dropping little gifts in the ground that I am still discovering. I met them almost two years ago. They seemed nice and still loving toward each other after so many years. It was a bittersweet moment for me. I wonder what they thought of me at the time, and I want to thank them now, but I have no idea where they are.

As I sit there, I hear a friendly voice from behind me, "Henry, you going to spend your whole Saturday just sitting there, or are you going to do something?"

I can't help but smile. It's Craig, my next-door neighbor. He and his wife, Cheryl, were the first to welcome me to the neighborhood. They showed up at my door while I was waiting for the moving van. Craig and I are both electrical engineers, except I'm analog and he's digital. It makes for some friendly rivalry. I tell him he only knows two things: yes and no. His whole career is built on building circuits that say, "Yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no..." He tells me that I spend so much time balancing inputs and outputs that I should work for the post office. What kind of friends would we be if we couldn't give each other a little shit from time to time?

I turn my head in his direction and call over my shoulder, "I'm going to sit here until I defrost, and my joints can move again!"

I can hear him coming up the three steps to the deck and then he pulls up a chair.

"I'm drinking tea. You want a mug?"

"Hell, yes! You don't have anything stronger, do you?"

"Too early for me, but you're welcome if you want. You know where I keep it."

We head into the house and I put the tea kettle on. By the time the whistle blows I'm ready for my second cup, so I fix two. "I'm drinking mine with lemon and honey."

"I'll have my honey from the bottle."

All kidding aside, it is early in the day and I wonder what might be bothering my friend. He'll tell me when he's ready, so with two fresh mugs we head back out into the sun and the warmth. We sit there for a time and just soak in the sun. Friends don't need to fill the void with talk. In time, when he's ready...

"I wish I knew what was bothering Cheryl."

There it is. A man has two kinds of frustration. When it's the world that's bothering him, he'll rant and rave and yell at the moon. When it's his wife, he grows quiet.

"Have you tried asking her?"

He looks at me like I'm crazy. "Yeah. I've asked repeatedly. I've asked every way I can think to ask. I've been direct, indirect, logical, subtle, and nothing works. She just says that nothing's bothering her and to leave her along."

"I've never met a wife yet who wanted to be left alone when she was happy."

He gives me a look that says, "I know."

"I'll tell you what really pisses me off! Last September, when I was feeling all that stress from the deadline on the GM chip job I was working on, I would work all day, then come home and work after dinner. You know what she did? She would come in the den and just sit with me. She never tried to talk or distract me. She would just sit there with a book and read. She'd sit there and I'd feel my blood pressure dropping and I'd grow calm, and then my head would clear, and we'd talk a little, and I'd get my work done without the frustration. When she figured I'd worked enough, she'd coax me off to bed and as often as not she'd just cuddle up next to me and I'd start to feel like all was right with the world."

"Rough life, man. I feel for you."

He snorted. "I'm not complaining about that. Work was hell, but life was good. Now, I can tell she's upset. She's distant, distracted, ill-tempered; so I try to do the same thing for her that she did for me. I'll come into the living room, sit in a chair near her, and she gets up and leaves the room. It's like, wherever I am, she wants to be someplace else. I'm not asking anything of her. I just want to sit in the same room with her. I fix a snack, but she complains it's too fattening, or she isn't hungry. But it's never, 'No thanks.' It's always more like, 'Damn it, you know I'm watching my weight!' I tell you, she's not easy to love right now."

I couldn't help but smile a little when he said that. In the time I've known him, I've learned three things above all else: Craig is generous, he is patient, and he loves his wife.

"Can I tell you something just between the two of us?"

"I thought all of this was just between the two of us!"

"Well, yeah. I can barely remember the last time we had sex. It's not that she's just disinterested. Whenever I bring it up, she becomes downright hostile. I mean, you'd think I'd insulted her family or something. And with the things she says when I try to initiate any kind of intimacy, you'd think I was just using her for my own pleasure. I tell you, she's damn hard to love right now."

We sat there for a time, both quiet with our own thoughts. He was consumed by his thoughts and I was trying to find the right thing to say. I finally broke the silence and said, "I have to tell you honestly that I never had that problem with Claire. I don't know why or how, but it seemed that we were always able to communicate. I remember when we would talk long into the night about whatever was bothering one or both of us. She never made me feel that it was her against me. We were always us against the world. I think I'll always be grateful for that."

"Henry, I'm sorry I never met Claire. I really am. The way you talk about her, she must have been something very special."

"Oh, don't get me wrong. She had her moments." I couldn't help but smile. I figured it was time to bring out and dust off one of my favorite quips. It seemed appropriate to the moment. "She could be difficult. I often think about going back to the priest who married us and saying, 'You know when you said that marriage takes work? Well, that really doesn't cover it!'"

That finally got a laugh out of my friend. "No, I don't suppose it does."

I hoped that I'd helped my friend. He seemed calm and relatively quiet by then, so we sat and sipped our tea until we were both warm and satisfied. We talked about work a little and eventually Craig went back to his house to work on his patience and whatever was bothering his wife.

As I sat there, alone again, I ruminated on the past. No, marriage isn't easy. That much is true. But it's the most worthwhile thing I've ever done. I am far from the man I was when I met Claire. She changed me. From her, I learned patience and confidence in myself. Before her, I'd never had either. I could persevere and work long hours toward a goal, but that's not patience. As for confidence in myself, I knew I could do the job, but deep down I doubted whether I had anything to offer anyone other than my work and a superficial friendship. She changed all that. I came to see myself through her eyes and started to believe that I was a man worthy of being loved. A wife changes a man, and a good wife changes him for the better. The other kind of wife erodes his self-respect and prevents him from becoming the man he could be. There is probably no more powerful force in a man's life than his wife and she has more influence on the kind of man he will be and the life he will live than any other being on Earth. She has even more influence than the mother who raised him.

It was turning cool and my tea was gone. Time to go inside. I may yet start a little fire in the stove tonight. It may be warm in the midday sun, but the nights aren't warm, yet. I check the small pile of wood by the stove and there's enough if I choose to start a fire. It's too early to think about dinner, so I settle down at my desk and work for a few hours. In time, I'll reheat some of the stew that I made last night, pull a roll from the bag, and pour myself that beer that Craig's had me thinking about ever since he visited. I'll turn on the radio, keep it low, and spend a quiet evening with my thoughts.

Looking back, my thoughts a year ago were dark and brooding. I was filled with anger. It was hard to spend a quiet evening without the rage overtaking me and I would search for a distraction. With an old house there are always things that need to be done. I painted every wall, repointed the chimney bricks, pulled up the rugs, and refinished the floors. I still had work to do in the basement, but for now it was fine for storage. It was an old house, but the basement was dry, and I was grateful for that.

Work the next week was routine. The team was working on a new design for a compact radio receiver. It's not the sort of radio you might normally think of. It was conceived to be part of an inexpensive array of radio telescopes. There was an idea of building many of them and distributing them around the country to form one large, but disjointed, instrument. The size of the array was its strength, but if each node didn't perform as conceived, the array would not outperform the smaller, more expensive, arrays. I wasn't sure we could do it, but there was money to try and it was a challenging idea, so I threw myself into the project.

Work has never been a nine-to-five proposition for me, so around quitting time I would pack my case and head home with an evening of work planned. By Friday I had five steady days of work, work, and more work, and it was time to relax. The problem is I've never been very good at relaxing by myself. So I picked up a pair of steaks and two potatoes at the store and decided that I would fire up the grill. Now, you're wondering why I got two steaks? I'd like to tell you that I had a hot date, but I don't think I'd done so much as hold a woman's hand these past two years. And you can forget sex! I don't even remember how. No, when I grill a steak, I grill up two and put one in the fridge. I'll slice the cold steak sometime over the weekend and fix a sandwich. Then I'll throw the extra spud in the microwave and call it Saturday's lunch. When you live alone, cooking becomes more utilitarian than anything else.

That Friday night didn't turn out as I expected. I had the grill hot and the steaks were cooking when Craig stepped onto the deck. "Mind a little company?"

"Not at all! Do you mind a steak medium rare?"

"It would be a sin to cook it any further."

I looked up at my friend and while he was smiling, I sensed he was putting on a brave front. He walked like a man carrying a burden and there was no sparkle in his eyes.

"I brought a twelve pack of IPAs. I can't be showing up empty handed."

"You're an upstanding young man. I see your father brought you up right."

He smiled. "Actually, it was mom. She liked a cold one every now and then."

We settled into our chairs, sitting close to the grill to stay warm, and we each drank our first beer. When the steaks were ready, we plated our meal and headed for the kitchen table. Two guys facing steak and potatoes with some cold beers don't worry about getting fancy. I got a second plate, fork and steak knife, and then went to the fridge for a stick of butter and a tub of sour cream. "Sorry. I didn't have time to fry the bacon."

"That's okay. If you aren't doing anything for breakfast tomorrow, I'll buy and we'll get all the bacon we could want."

I shook my head. "Can't be done."

He was laughing the first real laugh I'd heard from him that night. "We can try!"

Dinner was a pleasant affair and we both had stories about work, mostly badmouthing management at our respective shops.

Craig straightened up and looked me in the eye, stabbing his fork in my direction to make the point. "There is no expert so knowledgeable, so insightful, and so certain, as a manager who can't do the job himself!"

I raised my glass. "To experts!"

"To managers!"

"And may they never meet!"

Well, I told you we had a lot in common.

When dinner was through, I suggested we take the remaining beer to the living room and find some comfortable chairs. I had no desert to offer him, but with a few more beers we didn't need any.

The conversation ranged over many subjects from music (we both thought that most of today's music is crap), to politics (when will this country get its head out of its collective ass?), to the women in our respective offices. We were both quiet after a time and I decided it was time to ask the big question. "So, how come you're a bachelor tonight?"

My friend grew even quieter if such a thing is possible, sat unnaturally still, and his eyes had that far away stare. "She went out with her girlfriends."

"Claire used to do that from time to time. She told me they had a rigorous two drink maximum, which was just enough to get silly. The truth is I think they use each other for little reality tests. I think they complain about their husbands and then they tell each other things like, "Oh, that's no big deal. Men are always doing that. It's just the little boy coming out." and stuff like that.

"I think she's having an affair."

Well, there it was. No jokes would get us around that.

"How sure are you?"

"No evidence, but things aren't right. She hardly talks with me and she gets nasty for little to no reason. Everything I do is wrong and every discussion degenerates into criticism and assessing blame. Then there's the snarky little attempts at humor that aren't remotely funny. It's like she's lost respect for me and I don't know what I did."

"Are you still talking with her?"

"Many times. The first time I tried, she apologized and said she was just distracted by work. After that, she became dismissive and eventually she got downright nasty. It's clear to me she doesn't mind starting a fight whenever she wants to shut me up or get her way and that takes an added toll. I think she's already left the relationship and just hasn't left the house."

That was a lot to digest and I sat there quietly thinking of what to say. I didn't want to push my friend toward destruction, but I wanted to assure him that he deserved better than that. "Have you decided what you're going to do?"

"I'm not sure. Tonight was the first time I've said it out loud. I have to tell you the pressure has been building in me for a couple of months now. I feel like the valve just blew and I can feel the pressure draining away if only a little." He kept staring into space for a time and said, "Now I'm just pissed!"

I looked my friend in the eyes and said, "There's one thing I can tell you that I know is true regardless of what she's doing. Don't you do anything stupid. You have to keep your cool. And for god's sake, don't raise your hand to her whatever you do. She'll have the cops on you before you can say you're sorry and the locks changed before you make bail."

Craig was nodding and he wasn't denying anything I said. The man was in pain.

The conversation grew quiet after that. I suppose everything that needed to be said had been said. We spent the rest of the evening listening to an oldies channel on the radio with talk moving from one superficial topic to another. Every so often he would mention some behavior or a slight to add to the growing list of disrespect his wife was showing him, and with every new addition I would offer some poor attempt at understanding. The truth is I didn't understand, and I would never understand a cheat. If Cheryl was cheating on Craig, I didn't know what to say to him. All I could do was be a friend, listen, and support him as best I could.

He stayed late that night and we agreed to have breakfast the next day. After too many beers, we changed breakfast to lunch.

Once my friend went home and I was left alone, all that talk of Cheryl took my thoughts back to my marriage to Claire.

What is it they say? "Man makes plans and God laughs." No, he wasn't laughing at me, but there was a time when I thought he was. There was a time when I doubted that He existed at all. How could a loving God do something so horrible, so heinous, that my life was forever over, rent, torn asunder, and burned to ash? No, it's taken two years, but finally I have begun to see the fault wasn't His. I knew who my tormentor was, and I knew he was just as far out of reach. In time, I had come to the decision that it would not be the loss that will define me; it is the memory of once having, once holding, and the sharing that I will carry forward. That is the decision I made over this last year; but deciding and doing are two very different things. Every day has been a struggle, but the struggle gets easier with time.

Two years ago I was living in one of those god-awful McMansions in a new subdivision on the edge of town. My wife, Claire, wanted it. It was one of the few things that we never really agreed on. She always thought that new was better and I liked the old. Old things were comfortable, they were familiar, they had the bugs worked out and the hard edges smoothed. So we compromised and we bought new. That's what you do when you love your wife; you prioritize and pick your battles. If she wanted new, we'll get new. If she's happy, then I'll be happy. I was happy. I hated the house, but I went home to my wife and that made the house a home.

She wanted clean, unmarked, modern furniture. I liked worn, stressed antiques. We bought modern. We never had a comfortable chair in the whole damn house, but I was happy because I had her. Prioritize. We needed two cars because we worked in different directions. I drove a twenty-year-old Volvo. She drove a two-year-old Subaru. She hated my car and wouldn't ride in it. She said she was always afraid I'd break down on the highway, get hit by a truck while I worked on the car, and... She worried a lot. I knew her car would get her there and back in any weather any day, so I never worried. Compromise. I had a butt-ugly house with modern furniture in a sterile subdivision where the oldest tree was planted just a year ago, but I also had the sweetest, most lovely, warm, soft, and loving wife to hold close at night and I was happier than I'd ever been in my life. These were the memories that I eventually carried to bed with me that night and I slept peacefully.