“Maybe Tony was a safe harbor,” Abby considered, referring to my ex-husband as we drank Cognac in my kitchen.
“Tony was practical,” I replied. “Or so it seemed at first.”
“Makes sense. I’ve done it before in my own pathetic love life.”
She reached for her snifter. “I’ll have so passionate fling, and God knows there have been few and they never last long. But when it ends, I’m like a wounded soldier limping home. I wind up in the arms of some guy with the charisma of a slug who promises to take care of me.
“That’s the fairy tale.”
“Right out of Grimm’s,” she agreed, bitterly. “They say they’ll take care of you, but what they mean is they want you to be there fixing dinner and washing their shorts.”
“You’ve just described Tony to a T,” I said.
“What ever happened to him?”
“I haven’t talked to him in too many years to count.”
“People at least ought to be friends.”
“He didn’t want to be friends,” I said.
“Do you still think about him?”
“You can’t live six years with somebody and not think about him. That doesn’t mean I want to be with Tony. But a part of me will always care about him, hope he’s doing well.”
“Were you in love with him when you got married?”
“I thought I was.”
“Maybe so,” Abby said. “But it sounds to me as if you never stopped loving Mark.”
I refilled our glasses. Both of us were going to feel like hell in the morning.
“I find it incredible that you got together again after so many years,” she went on. “And no matter what’s happened, I suspect Mark has never stopped loving you, either.”
When he came back into my life, it was as if we had lived in foreign countries during our years apart, the languages of our pasts indecipherable to each other. We communicated openly only in the dark. He did tell me he had married and his wife had been killed in an automobile accident.
I later found out he had forsaken his law practice and signed on with the FBI. When we were together it was euphoric, the most wonderful day I had known since our first year at Georgetown. Of course, it did not last. History has a mean habit of repeating itself.
“I don’t suppose it’s his fault he was transferred to Denver,” Abby was saying.
“He made a choice,” I said. “And so did I” “You didn’t want to go with him?”
“I’m the reason he requested the assignment, Abby. He wanted a separation.”
“So he moves across the country? That’s rather extreme.”
“When people are angry, their behavior can be extreme. They can make big mistakes.”
“And he’s probably too stubborn to admit he made a mistake,” she said.
“He’s stubborn, I’m stubborn. Neither of us win any prizes for our skills in compromising. I have my career and he has his. He was in Quantico and I was here. That got old fast, and I had no intention of leaving Richmond and he had no intention of moving to Richmond. Then he started contemplating going back on the street, transferring to a field office somewhere or taking a position at Headquarters in D.C. On and on it went, until it seem that all we did was fight.”
I paused, groping to explain: what would never be clear. “Maybe I’m just set in my “You can’t be with someone and continue to live you always did, Kay.”
How many times had Mark and I said that to each other? It got to where we rarely said anything new.
“Is maintaining your autonomy worth the price you’re paying, the price both of you are paying?”
There were days when I was no longer so sure, but I did not tell Abby this.
She lit a cigarette and reached for the bottle of Cognac.
“Did the two of you ever try counseling?”
“No.”
What I told her was not entirely true. Mark and I had never gone to counseling, but I had gone alone and was still seeing a psychiatrist, though infrequently now.
“Does he know Benton Wesley?”
Abby asked.