Chapter Seventeen

 

 

 

Margaret

 

After he drove away, I stood thinking about cows. Cows are so disappointing. The Lord never made a more clueless animal. All day long, they stand there, chewing and burping. Just chewing and burping, all day long. Their interior lives must be thrilling. I guess it’s time to chew again. Time to burp. Time to chew. Time to swat a fly with my tail. Time to chew again. That last burp was fun, let’s do that again. Is it time to swat yet? Where’s what’s-his-name with the hay?

It’s infuriating, the way they wallow in their complacency. The look on a cow’s face reveals nothing—no sensibility, no awareness. The cow doesn’t know that she’s stuck, and if she did know, she wouldn’t care. She seeks no solution to her life, no hint of a next step or a different way of being.

And yes, I know. Physician, heal thyself. But that’s what’s so infuriating. Their ability not to know. I envy it. Because when you know, you’ve got to do something, and if you don’t, well, then it’s all your fault. The cows, however, get off scot-free. Because they’re such idiots.

He looked so young. Julian. Yes, I can say his name. Julian. I had never seen him in the flesh before. Of course, I’d seen that video of him with Paul at the airport, but you couldn’t really get a good sense of him from that. They also kept showing that picture from his ad, but in that he just looked ridiculous, like a cartoon. Men who would get turned on by a picture like that are right up there with the cows, if you ask me. Idiots. But when I saw him driving away from the church, he looked like a kid. Like he was Jacob’s age.

I stood there for a long time, letting myself think about what Julian was doing there, about what he had been doing with Paul somewhere inside that building while I was obsessing over flowers that only had a couple of weeks left at best. I let myself think about it, and I let myself see it. It wasn’t pretty. By the time I got to an image of Paul bent over the couch in his office, I had to stop.

We’d been married over thirty years, so of course there had been others. But none of them were like Julian. None of them mattered the way he did. Even at the very beginning, Paul had been obsessed with that guy from grad school. Who knows what they actually did, but whatever it was, it didn’t last. Paul came running back to me, like he would again and again in the coming years. Sometimes I knew, sometimes I just suspected. Suspecting was bad, but knowing was worse, like that time we were on vacation at the state park, when I came upon Paul and another man with their pants around their ankles, tugging on themselves. They weren’t even touching each other, as if the other person didn’t even need to be there. I’d never seen a more ridiculous sight in my life.

Each time he fell—that was what he called it, his fall—he was filled with remorse. He was so repentant. I would hate him for a few days, but I couldn’t hate him more than he hated himself. At some point, I just stopped trying. But I thought it was such a laughable euphemism. A fall. Like he had tripped or stumbled right into another man’s whatever. But what I came to realize is that it was a fall. He had fallen off a cliff, a sudden and total lack of control, with nothing but terror between him and the ground, where he would be shattered into a million pieces. Someone had to put those pieces back together. Someone had to pick him up and make him whole again. Who was going to do that, if not me?

But after Julian, I couldn’t put him back together again. He wouldn’t let me. He simply refused to let himself recover. He was enjoying being that torn apart. That was when I realized how different Julian was from all the others. To lose Julian was one thing, but to lose the pain of losing him? He had to hold on to it. I guess it was the only piece of Julian that he had left.

When that poor young man took his own life, something shifted. It wasn’t grief anymore—it wasn’t just the loss of whatever it was he’d had with Julian. He let go of hope. I think he let go of faith. One afternoon, a few days after Neil’s death, I went into the kitchen and found him sitting there. He wasn’t eating or reading the paper or working on a sermon. He was sitting, staring at the tablecloth.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I started to sit down with him, but something stopped me. There wasn’t room enough for both of us at that table at that moment. It took him a while to look up and even longer to answer. The way he stared at me, well, it made me shiver. It was hatred, finally. After all that time. After everything I had done for him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Everything. Everything is wrong.”

He got up from the table, got in his car, and left. I thought maybe that was it. He wasn’t coming back. But he did come back, late that night, and when I asked him where he had been, he didn’t answer. But I knew.

I could feel it. He had been wherever men like him go. He had been in malls or rest stops or parks. He had debased himself again and again. He had done terrible things, and he would do them again the next day, and the day after that. And what I knew for sure was that the remorse was gone. Those days were over, the days of the fall, followed by me scooping him up and nursing him back to life. Those days were gone.

I had to figure out what to do in this new world, a world where he had stopped needing me and started hating me. Because as long as he needed me, I could stand it. But now that he hated me, I didn’t see the point. And I needed to figure out how much of a cow I was going to be. Would I keep chewing, and burping, and swatting, and waiting for the hay? Because if I did, that would make me the biggest idiot of all. Because now I knew that the hay was never coming. There was no more hay.