Lost in His Eyes Read online

  Without any more delay, I dressed, checked myself in the bathroom mirror and then walked out and got into my car. Traffic flew by on the street that ran past the motel, but there was no one outside. It looked like mid-afternoon, but when I glanced at my watch, I saw it was much later. It was nearly five. I had slept longer than I had thought. It amazed me that I wasn’t hungry, having missed lunch. I got into my car, backed out and drove out of the motel parking lot. I glanced at the office. There was no one standing in a window or looking out. In fact, it looked deserted, just as deserted as the supermarket had looked the night before. I was in a world where cars flowed like shadows spirited forward by beams of light, cars driven by people who looked built in, mannequins depicting human beings in comas.

  The drive home was uneventful. I didn’t rush, even though I knew Ronnie would be there by now. I didn’t sift through ideas in my mind to come up with stories to explain my absence either. I just pulled into our driveway, opened the garage and drove in. When I entered the kitchen, I heard nothing. Neither Ronnie nor Kelly shouted to let me know they were there, and then I remembered Kelly was going to go to a ball game and staying at a girlfriend’s overnight.

  I started toward the stairway when Ronnie poked his head out of his office and called to me.

  ‘Guess what?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve got the night to ourselves. I made a reservation for us at the Outpost.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’

  ‘You knew Kelly was staying over at the Del Marcos’, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s for seven, OK? I just want to catch up on some paperwork here.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘We can have a cocktail about six thirty, if you want.’

  ‘I want,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he said and disappeared from sight as if something or someone had pulled him back into his office abruptly. Not a question about where I had been or what I had been doing had apparently even occurred to him. Was that trust, lack of curiosity or simply a symptom of someone too self-absorbed? Did it make any difference? I didn’t have to dip into the well of fabrication to bring up a full pail of untruth.

  I smiled to myself and walked slowly up the stairway.

  I was an adulteress and I didn’t feel an iota of guilt. If anything, I felt larger, stronger and more complete than I had felt in a very long time. It was as if I had gotten younger and was back at that time in my life, in any young woman’s life, when all of her senses seemed so sharp, her body so vibrant. I was feeling as I had when I was eighteen, sensing more freedom, thrilled by travel, excited about meeting new men and new women, eager to take some chances by staying up later, drinking more and going faster. Caution was quickly dropped into the wake of my lunge forward. My laughter was longer and richer, my eyes were strengthened by new curiosity, and all the chains and limits of the young were cast aside. I felt as if I could burn my candle at both ends and go on and on forever.

  I went into the shower. I didn’t want to wash the sex off me. I wanted it to linger like some wonderful new perfume, a scent that would circle me and turn the heads of whoever was nearby. Only Ronnie wouldn’t notice it, or, if he did, would think it was because of him. How confident he was of my fidelity. I wondered. Did that mean he thought I was incapable of attracting another man or incapable of infidelity, either because I was too devoted to him or because I was too insecure about myself? Was that how most men thought of their Stepford Wives? Certainly, the wives of the men who worked with him struck me as being one or the other. They talked about flirting – some did flirt right in front of the rest of us – but as far as I knew, none had gone anywhere with it.

  ‘Hey, move over,’ I heard and turned around to see Ronnie naked, getting into the shower stall with me. We hadn’t done this for a long time.

  ‘I’ll wash yours if you’ll wash mine,’ he said.

  ‘I’m already washed.’

  He embraced me and kissed me awkwardly. As usual, he was rushing his sex. It made me think he saw it as just another thing on his list of things to check off. I found I wasn’t comfortable doing it in the shower. Was I ever? The memory seemed too vague. I backed away. His disappointment was palpable.

  ‘I’ll wash you,’ I said, and got behind him and embraced him. I brought my hands around, the soap in my right hand, and quickly got him hard. He was moaning and chanting, ‘Oh boy. Oh boy.’ My motel tryst began to play across the insides of my closed eyelids.

  Was this how it would always be now, making love to Ronnie, but really making love to my lover? Did it matter? How many married couples realize they’re not making love to each other anymore? Wives simply don’t have what they had to arouse their husbands or vice versa, and so they rely on fantasy or, if they’re lucky as in my case, a recent, very exciting extramarital experience they can load into their sex like a magic bullet and use to hit some bullseye of fulfillment. I’ve even heard the idiotic argument, maybe not so idiotic for some, that it’s good to have affairs. They strengthen your marriage. I didn’t think that was why I had done it, but how well the devil rationalizes sin.

  Ronnie moaned, leaned back and came in the shower. When he came, I held on to the stem as if I was aiming a garden hose, his body seemingly crumpling in my arms afterward. I stepped out quickly to dry myself. He began to sing.

  How odd, I thought. I feel more like a prostitute with my husband than I did with my lover in a motel.

  I made a mental note to ask my closer girlfriends if they ever felt used. I imagined one or two of them saying, ‘Of course, silly, but I always get paid one way or another.’

  I sat at my vanity table and gazed at myself in the oval mirror. Every woman wants a magic mirror; not one that tells her she’s the prettiest of them all necessarily, but one that reflects back an image of what she would like to see. In this mirror, she can cure all wrinkles and imperfections. The ravages of time melt away quickly. It’s more than just the makeup. It’s what makes us all Cinderellas. We can be potential princesses, models, movie stars, until the clock strikes twelve. Just sit here long enough to hypnotize yourself, I thought.

  There I am, truly eighteen again. I’m a man killer, so hot I can melt them and turn them into clay easily molded. Through the corner of my eye, I watched Ronnie dress, choosing what he thought was his sexiest shirt and then slipping into his abbreviated briefs, flexing his muscles or what was left of them as he stood before his mirror, and then nodding at himself as if the image in the mirror was really and truly someone else, someone to please. He put on his jeans and slipped into his blue boat shoes.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  Throughout our marriage, it was always like that. When he was done with any preparations, he’d assume I would be as well or I would rush to be.

  ‘Almost,’ I said.

  He grimaced that old boy’s grin that said, ‘Women,’ and he walked out, whistling the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai as if he was in some war movie as he bounced down the stairs. He had been invigorated, recast to play a new role. The set was changed as well as the lighting. He had a different mission than he had this afternoon. He was the James Bond of all James Bonds.

  Who lives in fantasy more, I wondered, Ronnie or me? No one’s to blame for it. In fact, we should be grateful. That’s what the highest species can do: imagine. Without it, we’d have only rain when it rained and not a romantic walk in the rain without feeling a drop. We’d be overwhelmed by age and never believe anyone envied us. We’d be at the mercy of facts.

  I rose slowly.

  What if the image I saw of myself in the mirror didn’t leave when I left?

  What if she remained there, waiting for my return, and when I did return, she mouthed, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No,’ I’d probably say, ‘but I’m getting better.’

  TWO

  Ronnie’s Usual Suspects were at the Outpost. Some were married men who had gathered at the bar after work and were taking just a little
longer to get home, as if going home was like going to the dentist. If you just could put it off a little longer, it wouldn’t be as painful.

  I took particular note tonight of how they looked at me. I don’t know if it was my imagination or wishful thinking, but it seemed that all the men at the bar turned our way and viewed me with raw male lust and longing. It occurred to me that men like Ronnie’s friends or men in general, when they saw a woman who stirred their virility, reached back as far as they could to find that youthful magic they had once had in their smiles and eyes. They were pleading. Take me to my fantasy. Get me out of this rut.

  I kept my smile very Mona Lisa and my eyes down. None of these men presented anything of interest to me, but it occurred to me that I might very well still have that glow I saw in myself before we had left, a glow I knew had come from where I had been and what I had done.

  I wondered why Ronnie didn’t realize that my being the only woman at this section of the bar made me uncomfortable. After the initial smiles and hellos, he and his friends closed in on each other like one large hairy fist and left me twirling my Cosmopolitan in its glass and waiting like a trained puppy. Their laughter was as grating as fingernails on a chalkboard, and if any of them threw me a bone in the form of ‘What do you think of that, Clea?’ I would toss back a plastic, camera-ready smile and shake my head as if to say, ‘Oh don’t ask me. It’s way beyond me. It’s male stuff.’

  Ronnie would glance at me each time, as if he had just recalled I was with him. Finally, nearly ten minutes past our reservation, the boys began to come apart, disintegrate quickly, as if whatever glue had held them together had thinned out, causing them to leave like shadows fleeing the light, each one tossing back a glance at me, a weak smile left over from their private jokes and chorus of laughs.

  ‘How about those guys?’ Ronnie asked me. ‘Phil’s thinking of getting married again. You’d think a three-time loser would learn something from the experiences. I don’t know if he can keep his alimony straight.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure his ex-wives do all that for him,’ I mumbled.

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ Ronnie said with a smirk.

  Was there ever a man who, after his divorce was final, believed his ex-wife deserved anything more than a copy of the documents? To them, the papers were keys removing handcuffs and unlinking chains. Did they wake up years later and think maybe they had lost something? Or was it part of the male psyche never to admit a mistake? Or face the fact that he failed to satisfy his wife sexually?

  I had a theory that when most men stopped working with their hands, using their muscles either as farmers or factory employees, they began to fear losing their manhood. If a man didn’t love football, basketball, boxing, hockey, baseball or NASCAR, he was suspect. If profanity or pornography deeply offended him, he was suspect. If he favored same-sex marriage, he was suspect. In fact, there were so many suspects out there now, you had to hover closer to the urinal to protect your goods. Ronnie often said things like that. It occurred to me then that men were, on average, more paranoid than women. In fact, men were looking at themselves in mirrors more these days, worrying that something feminine had invaded their bodies or that maybe, deep inside, they had gay tendencies.

  We went to our table. Our waiter rushed to pull out the chair for me. Ronnie looked as if the young man had sacrificed himself for him. He nodded at him and sat almost before I did. I felt that I had been delivered to dinner, the wife package just shipped in by UPS.

  The Outpost was a middle-range restaurant, two or three computer mouse clicks above a Denny’s. I never ate anything here that I didn’t believe I could make far better, but as some of my girlfriends who do cook and prepare their family dinners always say, ‘We go out for a break, not for a better dinner.’ That’s the logic behind coming to a place like the Outpost. If we went to Les Agarves, which is twice the cost, but about as gourmet as we can get without actually being in France, that would qualify as a special evening out. Ronnie will do it on an anniversary or on a birthday, but I know his true opinion of it is that it’s not worth it. I’ve come to believe his taste buds can’t reach gourmet level so he can’t appreciate the difference. For him, then, it makes little sense.

  But it’s not only the food that is exquisite; it’s the ambience and the service. You feel you’re special, even if only for one night, one dinner. Ronnie likes to make it seem that only women want this. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not true. It’s certainly true when it comes to his friends or most of the husbands of my girlfriends. It’s almost as if there’s something unmanly about elegance. They’d rather associate themselves with Clint Eastwood than Cary Grant or George Clooney. Eastwood can be tough, virile and dangerous, and be grimy at the same time, except, of course, in a movie like The Bridges of Madison County, but men don’t talk about that film.

  It’s too hard to be Cary Grant or George Clooney, to have your hair always well trimmed, to care about the clothes you’re wearing and not fight wearing a tie or cufflinks. And then there’s all that sophistication, that smooth handling of women and that air of intellect. That’s too much brain juice, and, besides, you’re not supposed to think too deeply when you’re with a woman. You simply glide on your smile or the alcohol. The only thing more obvious in its intent is a shark.

  As I looked across the table at Ronnie and watched how he studied this uncomplicated menu, I wondered if the simple answer to all bad marriages is that one outgrows the other. Maybe people shouldn’t marry until they’re in their fifties. By then, the two people are well formed and can see clearly if they have anything or enough in common to sustain a commitment.

  What about children? someone would surely ask.

  Perhaps we should get into Brave New World faster than we are. Create children in laboratories, raise them in Israeli kibbutz-style complexes and get all that stress out of our lives.

  ‘What are you in such deep thought about?’ Ronnie suddenly asked.

  I didn’t realize he had stopped analyzing the menu, a menu that hadn’t changed for years and a menu he had seen dozens of times.

  ‘I can’t decide between the spinach or baby lettuce salad,’ I replied. I really wanted to see if Ronnie would believe that such a decision would put me into deep thought, even though it very well could.

  ‘Baby lettuce,’ he said, pointing his right forefinger at me as if he’s punching in the choice on an invisible candy machine. ‘That salad has figs in it and you love figs.’

  I was actually taken aback.

  ‘You remember that I like figs in my salad?’

  ‘Hell, yeah. Didn’t you ask me to bring some home on the way back from work last week and I forgot? I thought you might stab me in my sleep that night.’

  ‘I considered it,’ I said, and he laughed and looked around for the waiter.

  ‘Hey,’ he called. He shrugged and raised his hands as if the waiter should have known telepathically when we were ready. Of course, he hurried over to our table just the way he had to pull out my chair for me.

  Actually, he looked as if he wasn’t long out of high school. I wasn’t even sure he shaved yet. He had that orange-yellow hair and peach fuzz on his jawbone and cheeks. It was pretty obvious to me that he had just begun working here and was desperately trying to make a good impression. He was the type who would be proving his maturity all his life. He wouldn’t appreciate that until he was over sixty.

  ‘What do you think of the pork chop?’ Ronnie asked him.

  ‘It’s very good. Nice size, meaty.’

  ‘Um. Clea?’

  I ordered what I’ve always ordered here, a shrimp salad. Ronnie smirked. It wasn’t exciting enough for him. He didn’t realize that I hadn’t ordered a salad first because I was having a salad as an entrée, so the whole question of spinach or baby lettuce had been irrelevant.

  ‘I’ll have the chop, but it better be good,’ he warned, putting on his best Mafia hitman face.

  ‘Anything first?’

  ‘N
aw, that’s it. Oh, wait a minute.’ He looked at the drink he’d brought from the bar. ‘Another vodka and soda. Grey Goose. Clea?’

  ‘A glass of Cakebread Chardonnay,’ I said.

  The waiter took our menus and Ronnie sat forward.

  ‘I have a surprise tonight,’ he said. He held his wide, childish grin.

  ‘What?’ I asked with control. Too often his surprises were a new lawnmower or computer printer.

  ‘I’m going to be the office manager. Promoted. I get a nice raise, too.’

  ‘That’s great, Ronnie. You should have told me before we left the house, or at least we should have toasted it when we first came in and were at the bar.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell those losers anything. Jealousy drips from their lips.’

  ‘I meant just you and me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s what we’re going to do now,’ he said. He reached for my hand. ‘You look really good tonight, Clea. Did you change your hair or something?’

  ‘No.’

  I wasn’t shocked by the question. I had often bought new clothes, new earrings, and changed my hair from time to time, but he didn’t notice when I did. Kelly always did, and then he realized something was different and woke like someone in a daze on an escalator who is coming to the bottom or the top and had better get with it.

  ‘Well, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,’ he said.

  I smiled at the irony. If he only knew.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘So what, Ronnie?’

  ‘This promotion. How about it?’

  ‘I said we should celebrate.’

  I guess I wasn’t enthusiastic enough. He looked like a little boy who was told he didn’t do well enough at school to get the teacher’s accolades.

  ‘You know this is a very tough market right now, but I’ve done real well for the company. You know the saying: when the going gets tough, the tough get going. That’s me. I’ve been that way since kindergarten.’