Wife and Ex-Wife Ch. 08

Amelia, tired as she was, caught the silent interplay between the two of them. She licked her lips before saying, "That's very sweet of you, Nina, but I really need to get out of here."

"No, you don't!" Nina said with surprising vehemence. She threw a defiant look at Patrick: Don't you say anything, my man! This was my house before you came on the scene. "You just put this whole business out of your mind. We'll make you a nice dinner—won't we, Patrick?—and that'll make you feel better."

Patrick continued to glare at her, but said nothing.

"I'd like to help," Amelia said, rising painfully. "It'll take my mind off things." Lots of things . . .

And so the two women sauntered into the kitchen, Patrick watching their every move with scrupulous attention.

In the course of the next week, Patrick started reverting to his old habit of resuming work in the evenings, after dinner. As early as Monday he said abruptly, as they were preparing to watch a movie, "I got some work to do." Now it was the two women who watched bemusedly as he fled up the stairs.

"What's that about?" Amelia said, although she had a pretty good idea.

"I don't know," Nina said. "He's—quirky sometimes."

She shrugged, cuddled up with Amelia, and watched a romantic comedy that she and Amelia knew Patrick would have hated.

Later in the week, as Patrick again excused himself right after dinner, the two women again found themselves bereft of male companionship.

Amelia said unenthusiastically, "So . . . what movie do you want to watch?"

Nina reflected her companion's views by saying, "Not sure I feel like watching anything."

Impulsively she took Amelia's hand as they were sitting on the couch. Then she brought it up to her lips and kissed it.

Before Amelia could express her astonishment, Nina said breathlessly, "Oh, Amelia, I feel really, really close to you!" Her eyes were glistening.

"I—I feel close to you too, Nina," Amelia said, as if realizing some hidden truth for the first time.

But Nina was looking at her so intensely that she couldn't endure her gaze. She looked away, but Nina continued to speak to her as if her very life depended on it.

"Amelia, dear, I don't want you to be offended at anything I say, or to think badly of me—"

"Why on earth would I do that?" Amelia cried.

"You might," Nina said ruefully. "You may not want to tell me what I'm about to ask, and that would be perfectly all right. Really, I have no business asking."

"Maybe you should say what's on your mind, and I'll see if I want to answer."

"Okay." Nina let out a huge sigh and said, "What was the problem between you and Patrick?"

Amelia closed her eyes. That was exactly the question she was afraid Nina was going to ask. She remained silent a long time before saying cautiously:

"Nina, that's an impossible question to answer in a few sentences. I could write a book about it, I suppose. I mean, how do you explain how a marriage fell apart?" Now her eyes were glistening.

"I don't want to pry!" Nina exclaimed, coming close to throwing her arms around Amelia. "I—I just can't believe that he would, you know, walk away from you. You're so beautiful and sweet and kind and sensitive and—"

"That's very nice of you, Nina," Amelia said, "but you know full well what Patrick would say. 'You're not a man, and you didn't live with her for four years.'"

"But you and I are really very much alike, aren't we?" Nina said, a little desperately. Her eyes said it all: If he could leave you in the lurch, then what's to prevent him from giving me the same treatment sometime?

"I'm not sure how much alike we are," Amelia said. "Anyway, what happened between us was not just one thing—it was a whole series of tiny little things that just built up over the course of years. Kind of like an avalanche that gains steam as it rolls down the mountain."

"You mean fights?"

"They weren't 'fights,' really—not even 'arguments.' Just more like little disagreements or misunderstandings. Over the course of time they leave a kind of scar tissue that makes it harder and harder to remember what you really feel for your spouse and why you got married in the first place."

"I'm just having a really tough time getting anything out of Patrick on this subject." Nina gave a quick and almost terrified look toward the stairs and lowered her voice. "He'll probably kill me if I tell you this, but he once told me he thought you were a bit 'needy.'" She flinched, as if expecting her companion to lash out at her.

But Amelia just sank into the couch like a balloon with all the air let out of it. "Is that what he said? Well, maybe he's right. But, for God's sake, he's my husband!" Then, looking nervously at Nina: "I mean, he was my husband. I'm supposed to 'need' him—and he's supposed to need me! Why get together otherwise? Oh, I know, he was working really hard then, both at home and at his office, to establish himself as an artist. In all honesty, I didn't really understand the work he was doing on the side: it struck me as strange and bizarre—which apparently he takes to be compliments. He calls it 'weird': that's the effect he was aiming for. Well, if that's the case, then he hit the nail on the head! But it really wasn't my cup of tea. And so maybe I felt a little resentful that he was spending so much time after hours doing that stuff—while I was sitting around twiddling my fingers! And I think that resentment just built and built, until maybe I became something of a shrew and nagged him to be more attentive. But that's a sure-fire way to get a guy to be less attentive."

Amelia seemed exhausted from her long speech, which Nina drank in as if it were some painful but necessary medicine she had to take.

"It couldn't have been that bad, could it?"

"Oh, it wasn't 'bad.' As I say, we never had any knock-down-drag-out arguments. And we had some wonderful times—in fact, most of our marriage, to my way of thinking at least, was pretty wonderful. Maybe that's why I was so dumbfounded when he suddenly came up to me one day and said he wanted a divorce."

"It was his decision?"

"Of course it was! And I was flabbergasted. I mean, I knew we had our troubles, but I didn't think they were anything that couldn't be overcome. He just seemed to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I guess he thought there was no baby in the bathwater—but that was an attitude I just couldn't fathom. He didn't seem to want to work at the marriage: it's like he was just giving up."

"You know, he told me he doesn't like arguing."

"Well, who does? Good Lord, you're going to have arguments in every marriage. And as I say, none of our disputes even rose up to the level of an 'argument,' by my way of thinking. He just seemed to be bailing without trying to fix things."

Amelia was crying now, softly and without fuss. Nina, pained and horrified, all but forced her to sit in her lap, as if she were an overgrown daughter whom she was trying to comfort. Amelia resisted for a bit, then relented; and she held Nina's head to her chest as if clinging to a life preserver.

"Maybe," Amelia said, "we got together too fast. I mean, we started living together about two months after our first date."

"Oh, God!" Nina wailed. "Don't say that! Do you know when I asked Patrick to move in with me?"

"When?"

"One week! One week after our first date. And that first date—God, I'm embarrassed to tell you what happened then!"

"You—you slept with him?"

Nina chortled derisively. "Within one hour he had his hand on my, um, spot."

Amelia laughed through her tears. "Wow, that was fast!"

"And I've never, Amelia, ever done that kind of thing! Not even in my wild college days, which weren't all that wild."

"He's pretty hard to resist."

"You can say that again. I don't know what possessed me. But I don't want to think that it was all 'too soon.'" Nina was crying now.

"Everyone is different, dear," Amelia said encouragingly. "I don't think you have any reason to worry."

The women clung to each other. Amelia's tears rained down on Nina's head, while Nina's moistened the top of Amelia's breasts as they were revealed by her low-cut blouse.

"You smell nice," Nina said, actually rubbing her face in Amelia's cleavage.

"So you do," Amelia said.

"It's probably just my shampoo."

"No, it's you—your body scent."

"Your scent is wonderful too."

This is how Patrick found them as he came down the stairs. He stopped short as he saw his wife and ex-wife in their tearful embrace. It almost looked as if he was going to faint.

"What," he said weakly, "exactly is going on here?"

Amelia looked over Nina's head and said, "Nothing that you would understand, dear. You're a man." She hoped Nina wouldn't mind her use of the endearment.

Patrick stayed silent for a long time, chewing his lip ruminatively. Then he whirled on his heels and headed back upstairs, saying over his shoulder, "I hope you two have a nice time being women."