Part 44 (1/2)
So it was the doctor. Larissa felt a rising p.r.i.c.kle of irritation.
”Have you asked yourself why your lover hasn't?” Kavanagh said calmly. ”A man who loves a woman usually prefers not to have his woman share another man's bed. Why hasn't he?”
”I don't know why. He is calm. He doesn't poison me with petty jealousy. He knows how hard everything would be if he did.”
”Or perhaps,” said Kavanagh, ”this is convenient for him too. Juggle you, and other things?”
”No. It's not like that.”
”That calmness of his must come at a price. What is it? Are you just one hour in twenty-four for him also, Larissa?”
Flattened, Larissa drove home, as if she had been rolled over by a sand mixer. What was wrong with Kavanagh? This is what talking got you. No solutions, but instead a knifelike burrow inside her chest. She couldn't take a breath imagining Kai touching another woman. How did he live imagining her with Jared? Don't think about it, Larissa! Don't think about ita ”What are your plans?” asked Kavanagh.
A plan by definition involved the future. ”Haven't got one.”
”There's something you're not telling me. I feel it. I've seen this thing too many times before. What's the missing piece? Why won't you leave your husband?”
Larissa said nothing.
”Tell me more about your lover. What is it about him that drew you? Is he very different from Jared?”
Larissa described Kai.
”Car salesman? Stonemason? Drives a motorcycle? How old is he?”
Larissa said nothing.
Kavanagh opened her eyes, and pulled the legs out from under herself, leaning forward in the chair. ”He is young?” she exclaimed, startled.
”Not very young,” Larissa said, bristling. ”He's a little younger than me.”
”How much younger?”
”A few years.”
”How many?”
”I don't know, Doctor. Maybe ten. Or so.”
”Ten, or so? Larissa, to help you I need to know the truth.”
”He's twenty-one, all right?”
Falling back in the chair, Kavanagh whistled softly. For a few minutes she said nothing. Then she spoke. ”So where do you meet someone like that, a woman like you, a housewife, a mother?”
”At Stop&Shop,” Larissa replied.
”Ah, well,” said Kavanagh. ”That explains it. I don't usually shop there, which is probably why I've never run into someone like that. I go to Shoprite. It's cheaper.”
”He goes to Stop&Shop for sus.h.i.+.”
”Well, that may be another one of my problems right there,” Kavanagh said, ”because I don't like sus.h.i.+.”
”Yes,” said Larissa. ”I didn't either.”
”What does he want with you? He is a boy barely out of his teens and you're a married woman with children in the middle of your life. What are his plans for the two of you?”
Larissa couldn't tell Kavanagh about the wheels of the Ducati landing on the pavement in Pine Spring, in Willowbend, in Invercargill. Lewis and Clark and the Redwoods, and the whole d.a.m.n volcanic mist over the ocean, the beaches and the sailboats, and the Mungo outback dreams right before her sunset eyes.
”You really should've told me about his age, Larissa.” Kavanagh shook her head in disapproval. ”I understand your predicament now. And it is a predicament indeed. All this time I've been saying to you, why don't you just do what other people do. Move out. Retain custody of the kids. How fraudulent of you to let me continue giving you advice based on your giant omissions.”
”Is your advice different now?” How can there be visitation, right, Doctor? How can a mother be a visitor to her own children, be a guest in their holiness? If Larissa clenched her fingers any tighter they would fracture.
But afterward, an hour with Kai. O pine smoke bliss.
Exceptahe can't resist asking her things she can't answer either.
He is looking at her puzzled and questioning. She wishes they all would stop asking her things. She's doing her best, can't they see that?
Once I was Larissa. Then I was Jared's wife. And then I was Emily and Asher and Michelangelo's mother. And then I was Kai's lover. But long after I will stop being someone's wife, or someone's lover, I will continue to be a mother. I cannot resolve the unresolvable. The paralytic with a broken neck cannot walk, no matter how much he wants to, no matter how often or how pa.s.sionately he talks about it. I am a mother. I cannot walk.
But then another small voice clears its throat and croaks. Yes. But before you were a mother, you were Larissa. What will you be if you stop being a mother?
Every Tuesday at seven she drove to see Kavanagh to help her figure out the sick primordial mire of her life, and afterward Kai was waiting for her. That's how she made it all better. By finally figuring out how to see her Maui lover at night! And maybe soon there could be a jazzercise night, and maybe she could take a painting cla.s.s at Drew, or sign up for pottery and French. Oui, oui, madame. La pa.s.sion est la maitresse due. With any luck, she wouldn't have to be home at all.
The Ides of March had pa.s.sed.
”I love him,” she said to Kavanagh.
And the doctor replied, ”You don't think you're bandying that word about too lightly?”
”I don't bandy.”
”You love your children, don't you? You love your husband? Your parents? You yourself said you're living a dream life. Perhaps what you really mean is infatuated. Which is not permanent, you know. But the decisions you make based upon this infatuation are permanent.”
That was almost advice! And the doctor looked spent after giving it.
”Everything you say is entirely correct, Dr. Kavanagh,” said Larissa, trying hard not to fidget. ”Except I don't think you understand. Am I having a hard time explaining it? It's not infatuation. It may not have stood the test of time like my eighteen-year-old marriage, but it doesn't make it any less real. I was one kind of person, one kind of woman before I met him, and I was plodding along, and I thought I was doing pretty good, but then what happened, you see, is that everything inside me got reordered.”
”Somehow, I don't believe that's true,” Kavanagh said quietly.
”I don't mean awakened,” Larissa hastily went on. ”I mean, broken down and remade. The outside may be the same woman, but the inside is not. I can no more deny what I feel for him than I can my own name. Now we may argue that it's wrong, we may argue that I need to feel other things too, like guilt, obligation, responsibility, we may argue that I need to put my feelings aside, which is a separate discussion, but let's not talk about how what I'm feeling isn't real. It's more real than anything else I know. If it isn't real, then nothing is real. Nothing.”
”It's a bright flame,” Kavanagh said. ”It burns out.”
”But after it burns out, isn't true love what's left?”
”What if nothing is left?” the doctor stared hard at Larissa. ”You say you once loved your husband. Where did that go?”
Heavily, Larissa got up off the couch. She wanted to crawl away. ”You really don't understand. Wow. I keep saying it over and over. It's like I'm talking to a wall. I can't end it with him. I can't. In the scale of my life, he outweighs everything else.”