The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [97]
She stood and gathered her clothes. He watched her put on her complicated bra, zip her much-wrinkled linen dress, step into heels — the reverse of love, the reverse of expectation. And, in a moment he would remember for the rest of his life, she knelt and bent over his face, her hair hanging in sheets that gave them ultimate privacy and whispered into his mouth the unforgivable thing she had just done.
It might have been Confession.
______
Roland had his arm around Regina. In a corner, a baffled Peter was speaking to the back of Linda’s head. Guests were leaving — casually, normally, unaware of catastrophe — or if they were aware, giving it a sidelong glance, a quizzical stare. It would entertain, this story, become part of the pantheon of stories of illicit love in Kenya, a footnote to the Happy Valley days. Or not even that. Forgotten before the nightcap, the principal players not prominent enough to warrant sustained attention.
He had missed the central drama.
In the end — strangely, but perhaps to be expected — it came down to his soul. He who thought he did not have one. A concept he could not even name. It was elegantly simple: he couldn’t let Regina lose the child.
Regina’s wail rose on the street; and in the car, she threw herself from side to side, battering herself against the door, asking, demanding to know: Did you sleep with her? And, How often? Screaming at the answers and the silences alike. Wanting dates and details, horrendous details he would not give her. In the cottage, she hurled herself against a wall. He tried to calm her, to touch her, but she was wild, having had, despite her news, her own goodly amount to drink. She vomited in the bathroom and wanted him to help her just as much as she wanted him to die. And all the time he was thinking: I cannot let her lose the baby.
He shook his wife to stop the hysteria. Telling her, as one would tell a child, to go to bed. She whimpered and begged for him to hold her and he did, dozing for seconds only, waking to fresh wails. Waking to fury and accusations and threats. She would kill herself, she said, and he would have two lives on his conscience. She kept this up for hours, seemingly beyond endurance — his or hers — astounding him with the depth of her anger. Till finally she fell asleep, and for a time — blessed hours — there was silence.
______
In the morning Thomas dressed, thinking that he had to go in person, that this could not be done by letter. His only theatrical gesture was to take the letters and put them in his pocket.
It was the saddest drive of his life. She was sitting at a table when he arrived. She might have been there for hours. Just waiting. Just smoking. A chaste cup of tea in front of her. Her skin was blotchy, her hair and face unwashed. Doubtless fresh from personal horrors of her own.
—Why? he asked in the nearly empty café.
She couldn’t answer him.
—It has to end, he said. I have no choice.
No need to mention that Regina was pregnant, for that had been revealed to Linda, out of his hearing, the night before. No need for Linda to say she loved him, for that, too, had been said to Regina the night before. Out of his hearing. Though he’d heard the words repeated often enough in Regina’s shrill voice as she’d hurtled around the room.
—I’ll always . . . Thomas began. But he couldn’t finish the sentence.
There was a great clap of thunder then — the clap of a jester at a royal performance (pay attention now!) — and the rains began, a sudden deluge that released a thousand — no, a hundred thousand — knots of tension in an instant. The rain was warm, nearly hot, the café umbrella furled and not giving them any protection. Linda was crying with no shame. He put the letters on the table, tucked them under her hand.
He made himself walk away,