Marnie had been relieved to part company with Jake in Seattle. Her visit to Jake’s bed had not been an accident; it had not even been spontaneous. She had fumed at Paul all that fourth day of the trip and she wanted something, anything, to make her feel better, to get back at him. The next day she found it hard to face Jake. His concern for her well-being only increased her shame at how she had used him.
Mr. Andreason had insisted on driving Jake to the airport. It was the least he could do for Jake’s bringing his little girl home safe. That too made Marnie ashamed, for she didn’t want to be alone with Jake again, and she could see he was disappointed to say goodbye to her in front of her parents.
Marnie’s mother was quiet as always, but not her dad. With Jake out of the way, he wanted a post-mortem of her relationship with Paul. “What did he do, Marnie? Cheat on you? He’s a no-good bum. He’s always been shiftless and disrespectful. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself.”
Marnie bit her tongue. She wanted to throw her father’s own infidelities in his face. Instead, she fended him off as best she could. “It’s too soon,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen. I’m not ready to give up on my marriage yet.”
“Well, I don’t want you seeing him anymore. A man needs to have some respect for his wife.”
Marnie closed her eyes at the irony but let him ramble on. And as quickly as she could, she excused herself and went to her room and closed the door, claiming a headache and a need for a nap.
The truth was her guilt at seducing Jake was choking her. How was she any better than Paul? She had taken advantage of a friend who cared for her and cared for Paul. Now that friendship seemed lost to her too.
She felt terribly alone. She couldn’t talk to her mother about any of this. Her mother was a closed person who lived by the rules that she set for herself and she had little patience with the feelings of others. All through her growing-up years, Marnie had found her mother not capable of much listening and way too capable of lecturing.
And none of her friends understood her relationship with Paul. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself. She could try to blame it on her ugly duckling adolescence. When she came into herself as a woman in college, she didn’t know what to do with the attention of boys. She didn’t know how to talk to them, didn’t know how to be herself, didn’t know what she wanted. She knew she was supposed to be independent and carefree and she pretended she was, but in truth she just wanted someone to want her and love her. Her early choices had all ended in disaster, so when Paul came along, he seemed so sure of wanting her, so sure of marrying her that it never occurred to her to say no. Her friends had urged her to slow down but she didn’t want to lose him. And that’s the way it had been all these years. She didn’t want to lose him.
Paul called drunk the first three nights she was there. Her dad wouldn’t put her on the phone. “Sober up, son,” he said each time. “Be a man.” The fourth night, her parents went to the movies. Marnie begged off. She needed to be alone; she needed some time without the TV blaring and her parents bickering. When the phone rang, she answered without thinking.
“Hey, babe, I’ve been missing you.” Paul’s voice was cheerful, intimate, the voice from their best days together.
The old feelings, the old pull toward him surfaced in an instant. It was as if nothing had happened. Nothing with Melissa, nothing with Jake. Marnie took a deep breath and struggled to regain her anger. “Isn’t Melissa taking care of you?” She hoped she sounded outraged.
“That was a mistake. I made a mistake. I’m sorry, okay?”
Marnie didn’t say anything. She was disappointed. Paul’s tone was one of irritation, not of remorse. Where was the sweetness, the sadness she wanted to hear?
She could hear him putting ice in his glass. She heard him pour the liquor and put the bottle down. The sounds were so clear he could have been in the next room.
Paul spoke again. “I want you to come home, babe. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
Still Marnie said nothing. She hated how much she wanted to believe him.
“Marnie? Are you there? I said I promise it won’t happen again.”
She heard the familiar thickness in his voice, the slight slur on the syllables. She shook her head as if he could see her. “I don’t believe you,” she said finally.
She heard him take another drink, heard the ice rattle as the liquor drained away, heard him pour more into the glass. “Come on, Marnie,” he said. “You knew when you married me that I had a lot of sexual needs. And that’s all those girls are to me, just sex.”
She knew she should hang up, but something in her made her hang on. “You told me when we married that I was all you would ever need, all you would ever want. And I believed you.” Her voice sounded small and unsure, even to herself.
She heard him drain the glass again.
His voice, when it came back on the line, had an edge of meanness to it now. “Well, I didn’t need anybody else at first. Besides, you’ve been okay with it all these years. What’s the big deal now?”
“I haven’t been okay with it, Paul. I’ve been putting up with it because I loved you.”
“And what? You don’t love me anymore?” He waited only a few seconds for her reply. When it didn’t come, he went on, the petulance rising. “You’ve taken up with Jake, haven’t you? I always knew you two had the hots for each other. Nice long car trip, motel rooms. I’ll bet you just had one room, didn’t you?”
Marnie didn’t say anything.
“I knew it,” said Paul. “How long did it take? Did you get a room right outside of town and go at it that first night? Hell, maybe you fucked right there in his studio? How is he, Marnie? Better than me? Bigger than me?”
Guilt rushed in, but she pushed it away. “We drove hours that first night, and we didn’t sleep together.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Marnie could feel the tears coming. “Then don’t, Paul. Believe what you want. You always do.” She felt exhausted. “I’m hanging up, Paul.” And she did.
For the next hour, the phone rang every five minutes, but Marnie forced herself to let it ring. On his last try, Paul left a bitter, ugly message, and she erased it after the first sentence.
Then there was silence, a whole week of it. Paul didn’t call her and she didn’t call him, and she began to make some plans. She visited an old friend in Portland and looked at an apartment in Tamara’s neighborhood; she called about a couple of job openings on craigslist and she got an interview for a temp job teaching in a private school. It didn’t pay much but it would get her started.
The third day she drove to the Oregon coast and walked along the beach. It was a beautiful day. There had been a big storm, and the beach and sky were scoured clean. The early October sun sparkled off the water, the breeze was cool, and she felt clearer and lighter than she had in months. She thought about Paul and her heart ached. She wanted him to love her the way he had in the beginning, the way she had thought would last forever. How had it all come to this? How had she let it all happen? She didn’t see how they could put it right. Then she thought about Jake, good, steady Jake. He loved her, she knew it. He would be good to her. He wouldn’t cheat on her. Big passion hadn’t proved so wonderful. Maybe steady was the way to go. She could learn to love him. Suddenly she felt very free. Free to start over, free to do things differently.
Full of that freedom, she wrote Jake a letter right away. She thanked him for his friendship, for having taken care of her during a bad time. She apologized for their abrupt separation and her confusion in those first days. Then she held out her hand.
“Jake,” she wrote, “I know you’ve had feelings for me for a long time. And I so admire your loyalty to Paul in never acting on them. Now with some time apart from Paul and from you, I see that I have some of those feelings for you as well. I’m wondering if you’d come to the Northwest to see what can happen between us. I think I will be moving to Portland. There’s a job possibility and friends I can stay with—we can stay with—until we find a place. Call me when you get this and let’s talk. Marnie.”
She found a postbox in the small coastal town and dropped it in without hesitating. Then she went back to Portland and stayed on with Tamara. The school offered her the job and wanted her right away and so she worked Thursday and Friday and then headed back to Seattle Friday night for the rest of her things. Her parents were glad to have her staying closer, glad to know that she was leaving Paul. She had their full support.
But when Saturday came, there was a letter from Paul. It was a love letter in the best sense of the word. It was eloquent, it was beautifully written, and it seemed true. Paul reminded her of their early passion, that summer of making love on the rooftop in San Francisco. He reminded her of tender times together. Then he apologized. He wanted to come clean, completely clean, he said, and he confessed to several affairs over the years, some she hadn’t known about. They were flings, he said, stupid experiences of caving in to a moment of lust.
“I want to grow old with you, Marnie,” he wrote. “I want it to be you and me again. You mean everything to me. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t be unfaithful again. I’ll even stop drinking if you really want me too. Just come home, babe. We can work it out. I’m lost without you here. I need you, and I know you need me too. We’re a team, Marnie. Please come home. All my love, Paul.”
Marnie let the letter sit on her dresser until Sunday afternoon. Then to her parents’ dismay, she told them she was returning to Virginia. Before she left, she sequestered herself in her room with the phone. She called to rescind her acceptance of the job; she called Tamara to say she wasn’t moving to Portland. And she called Jake. She was grateful there was no answer, and she left him a message. “Jake, it’s Marnie. You must not be back yet. Look, I’ve written you a letter. I had a fight with Paul and we said some awful things to each other and I wrote some things to you I shouldn’t have. Please don’t read the letter, Jake. Please just tear it up without opening it. Take care of yourself. Bye.”