The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [128]
“Gwen, I feel you haven’t been telling me everything.”
“Everything?”
“About Karl. Why did you leave?”
The question catches her off guard. Her thoughts are far from her husband, her domestic situation. She seems almost relieved by the change of subject. She sinks on the chair next to his bed.
“There was infidelity,” she says.
“You said Karl was insistent nothing happened, that he didn’t even realize what that woman on the Facething was trying to do.”
“No, not Karl. I cheated. Just once—no, that’s a lie. I still can’t tell the truth about it. More than once, but it wasn’t what you would call an affair. It was something really stupid I did, but something I can’t take back. Last summer, with someone at the office. Someone much younger. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could be fired over it.”
“And Karl threw you out?”
“No. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect.”
“So why did you leave?”
“Because I don’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how to go forward if I don’t tell him. Yet if I do tell him—”
“He will throw you out.”
Gwen shakes her head. “Worse. He’ll forgive me. If only for Annabelle’s sake. But I’ll be in his debt forever, then. It will be official: I’m the bad one and he’s the saint.”
“Husbands and wives aren’t working off a balance sheet, Gwen. Look, I think it would be OK not to tell him. I really do. This mania for honesty—”
She catches her breath, almost as if she has been hit unexpectedly.
“I’m just saying that people don’t have to tell each other everything.”
“Easy for you to say, with your perfect marriage.”
He takes her hand. “Really? That’s what you saw? A perfect marriage?”
“Yes. You never quarreled. You adored her. You saw her, encouraged her, praised her. My husband can’t even pretend to be interested in what I do. And perhaps by the standards of what he does, it is shallow and trivial, and perhaps people shouldn’t have to pretend . . .” Her voice trails off, her point lost even to her.
“Gwen, I’m not even sure your mother truly loved me.”
“How can you say that?”
“We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”
“That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”
“I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of going to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”
“Well, of course you did the right thing.”
“No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married—and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”
“She loved you.”
“To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”
“She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”
“Gwen—most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”
Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”
“Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have—what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously—well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”
“The