“So, what are your plans today?” Roger breezed into the kitchen, leather briefcase in hand. His suit was pressed and he had chosen a solid deep burgundy tie. Margaret always felt a sense of satisfaction at how his shirts started the day so crisp and white.
“Oh, some bridge at the club this morning. Then maybe over to Maura’s later to play with Sarah.” Roger kissed her cheek absentmindedly and reached around her to pour a mug of coffee from the machine.
“I’m off again this week. I have to leave Thursday, probably just an overnight,” he said casually, pouring the milk into his coffee and moving to sit at the table while she served him a bowl of hot oatmeal and bananas.
“Where to? Tampa?” Margaret drew the word out longer than necessary.
“Not this time. That may be inevitable next week, but this week it’s Cincinnati. Something easy, I think.” She relaxed her stance, slightly relieved it wasn’t Florida.
“Oh?”
“We’re looking at some new LEED commercial developments with Dan Hurwitz and his gang. Remember him? We need to beef up our expertise in that area.”
She nodded. After he left the house, grabbing the newspaper for the train and whistling out the door, Margaret stood at the kitchen sink, thinking about how casually he had answered her when she had raised the subject of Tampa. Perhaps whatever transgressions he had committed there were long over. She could only hope so.
Yet she knew with absolute certainty that Roger had been unfaithful, she had proof. It was a boarding pass from an airline that she’d found three years ago. A moment of carelessness on Roger’s part, emboldened, no doubt, by the foolish preening narcissism of a rooster in love.
She’d been searching for a smaller suitcase, needing to pack for a visit to Stu and Jen right after their engagement. As an assistant professor of technology at Milwaukee’s city community college, Jen’s teaching schedule permitted little time to plan a wedding, and Margaret had eagerly volunteered to help. She had located one of Roger’s carry-on bags in the closet, and when she yanked it off the top shelf it had fallen open. A boarding pass stub from a flight to Tampa slipped out of the unzipped front pocket and onto the carpet. She had picked it up to throw it out until she noticed something scribbled on the back.
“Come back soon. Miss you already.” It was signed “Love, J” with all the familiarity of a childhood sweetheart, and she studied the flight time and date to Florida, trying to imagine the hand that had written so breezily. Something thick had welled up and then clogged in Margaret’s throat. A weak cry escaped, almost animal-like, which she’d suppressed with her fist despite being alone in the house.
On some level, she supposed, she had been bracing for this. It had been an unspoken thing, an intuition. Roger was a handsome man, patrician and charismatic. He traveled frequently, was exposed to all kinds of people in his business. Margaret had certainly been to enough of the annual meetings and some of the resort conventions to see the temptations, the eager supplicants and hussies who clustered in bars and at dinners, advertising their availability. She imagined them to be calculating and cunning about their conquests. But she’d always hoped, however blindly, that Roger was above that.
She thought about what she’d read somewhere, that the human heart can only sustain that kind of crazy, googly-eyed love for roughly a year. Twelve months. And then it became something else, something more familiar and at the same time more critical. It separated out those couples that were going to break apart from those that were going to go on ahead, to make the commitment and stand by each other. So what happened after thirty years? And then forty?
Margaret could still recall that moment of discovery with absolute clarity. She had let the sobs rise up in her throat and overtake her. There was no one to hear. She had sat pathetically on the carpet, legs splayed, as if she’d fallen, crying in great snuffling sounds. Oh what a sight she would make, she’d thought, if someone chanced to walk in and see her hoary, twisted face, the open suitcase and the note in her hand. How had she gotten to this place in her marriage?
Her mind shuttled back to their first blind date; it was odd that Roger had recently recalled it. It was uncharacteristic of him to be so nostalgic, but she had been touched. Sitting across from him in the ice cream parlor that first night, all those years ago, she was struck by his self-confidence. Rakish was the word one of her sorority sisters had used to describe him, but it didn’t quite fit. He was too principled to be a rake, too full of regret when he inadvertently injured someone with a barbed or humorous comment. Tall, with chestnut-colored hair and a wide toothsome smile, Roger’s most striking feature was the openness of his slate blue eyes. They held a kind of expectant promise, as if he assumed the world wouldn’t dare let him down. It was as if he anticipated only good things. He’d come from a family of modest means in a small farming town in central Illinois, and he’d adopted the careful bearing and outward appearance of a man attempting to escape a penurious past while teaching himself to be invincible.
Margaret had wanted to be a teacher when she had met Roger. She had hoped to go on and get her degree after college so that she could teach high school English, but they had fallen in love and married. She had gotten pregnant with Maura soon after that, and Roger’s first job had transferred him to Cleveland for a training program.
She and Roger had been born into the era of quiet decorum. They were raised by strict Catholic parents who had lived through the Depression. Her path to marriage and a family was clearly defined. Theirs had been a quick courtship, like many other couples in the mid-1960s, in the post-Kennedy years of gathering tumult. Margaret would understand, in retrospect, that their generation had stood on the cusp of great social overhaul set in motion by the war in Vietnam and the sexual revolution in the next decade. Insulated from the burgeoning unrest by their small-town and traditional midwestern roots, they had simply flowed from dating to their engagement and then the wedding. Roger was the only man Margaret had ever slept with.
He’d hungered for her early on in their marriage, locked eyes with her when they’d made love, spooned her at night in their sleep. But that desire seemed to thin after each child. Her fatigue, the predictability and routine of being a mother and homemaker, seemed increasingly in sharp contrast to his wheeler-dealer life on the road. It was the birth of their third child, Stu, which felt in some ways as if a string had snapped on a wonderfully rich old instrument. Juggling the demands of all three children, Margaret succumbed to the vortex of need, duty, and some days, exhaustion. Somehow she and Roger simply fell out of tune, and at some unknown point in time he had begun to share a bed with someone else. The naked betrayal of that fact hit her like the slap of an open palm as she’d sat helplessly on the rug that day three years ago.
Crying and keening in a ball had felt surprisingly good. A kind of wary, spent calm settled in afterward, and she’d swiped at her wet eyes with the backs of her hands, feeling an exhausted relief as she crawled to the side of her bed and tilted her head back against the mattress. Spying her rosary beads on the bedside table, she brought them to her lap, beginning to mumble the prayers with her eyes closed, the sanctuary of words centering her through the innate hardwiring of her faith. When Margaret was finished, she leaned her head back again and gazed upward, observing a single strand of a cobweb waving gently from the ceiling fan. It was that small detail that finally refocused and repurposed her.
She sighed heavily and struggled up to her feet. Bending over at the waist, she slammed the suitcase closed and lifted it onto the bed, sticking the note in the pocket of her slacks. Margaret hadn’t consciously decided to keep it, she just didn’t want it polluting her bedroom, didn’t want it anywhere near them. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. She had stuffed it into the bottom drawer of the old rolltop desk in the living room, which housed an archive of kids’ report cards and family medical records.
Margaret could still recall exactly where the old boarding pass was, although she had never felt the inclination to look at it again. There were moments she would think of it, comingled in that drawer with the history and documented achievements of her loved ones, and wonder if J was still in Roger’s life. Or was there someone new? She had contemplated destroying the boarding pass, but in the end there was a twisted, inexplicable comfort, almost a security, in its secret possession. Roger had certainly forgotten it ever existed, and the carelessness of that, his disregard for her, was something best left unacknowledged.