Cork came home late. Jo pretended to be asleep as he undressed for bed. He had to be exhausted, with so little rest since the shooting on the rez; but he lay for a long time, and although he was quiet, she knew his eyes were open and he was staring at the ceiling in the way he always did when he was worried. When he finally nodded off, she was certain his dreams would be troubled.
She couldn’t sleep, either, but she didn’t want to talk to him. Pretending sleep was easier than pretending other things. Like pretending she had never loved Benjamin Jacoby, loved him desperately.
Cork rolled over, his face, so familiar even in the dark, close to hers. She could feel the strong grip of his love around her, her own love covering him like a blanket.
So what was this unsettled feeling, this rumble of fear? Ben Jacoby was twenty years ago. She’d lived a whole life since then, a full life with Cork and her children at the center.
Oh God. Was it possible that even after all this time, after all her experience, there was still some ember alive in her heart, burning for Ben Jacoby? Could she still feel something for the man who’d abandoned her on a cold rainy autumn night twenty years before-abandoned her without explanation?
She’d met him at law school, the final semester of her second year. He was older, funny, brilliant, gorgeous. They’d become lovers.
She was living in a small apartment in a run-down building on South Harper in Hyde Park, an easy walk to the University of Chicago Law School. Ben worried that it was not a good neighborhood, but Jo, a military brat, assured him she knew how to take care of herself.
Although they often ate out, he had come to her place for dinner that evening. She was a horrible cook, but she knew how to make spaghetti and that’s what she’d prepared. He brought a good Chianti. He looked tired when he stepped in, and when she kissed him, he seemed to hold back.
She took his wet overcoat. Cashmere. He always dressed well, as if he had money, or his family did, although he never talked about it. In fact, he never talked about his family at all. He claimed he was a man of the moment. He didn’t discuss his past, never speculated on the future, his or theirs together. Jo had a brief glimpse into his life, however. Ben had a younger sister, Rae, a student at Bennington, an art major, a fine artist already from the things Jo was allowed to see. Rae worshipped her older brother. In the long summer of Jo’s affair with Ben, Rae, home from college, had joined them on some of their outings. She’d once taken them through the Art Institute and proved to be a knowledgeable guide. Jo liked her immensely. Rae was under strict orders not to talk about family, and although she tried to hold to that, once in a while she let something slip. Often it was something harsh about “Daddy.” In September, she returned to Bennington.
Jo wasn’t reluctant to talk to Ben about her own life, her own past. About the rootlessness that went with being raised by a single parent, an army nurse. About her teenage rebellions, her drive to excel in everything she did so she could escape the alcoholic mother whom she referred to as The Captain. She’d confessed her fear that, like her mother, she drank too much, was too harsh in her judgments of people. Ben Jacoby had been a marvelous listener, something new to her in a man, and although his intellect was towering, she never felt it was a shadow he cast over her or anyone else. He was, in her experience, a rare, good man. And she loved him powerfully.
“Are you all right?” she asked that rainy October night.
“Just a little tired,” he said.
On graduation from the U of C Law School, he’d taken a prestigious clerkship with a state supreme court justice, a demanding position, and he worked long hours.
“I have something for you.” He handed her a cardboard tube.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
She popped out the metal cap and from inside pulled a rolled canvas. She moved to good light under a standing lamp.
It was a portrait of her. She sat on the green grass of Grant Park, in a white dress, looking at something to her right that must have pleased her because she was smiling. Behind her, Michigan Avenue was an impressionistic mist of suggested buildings and pedestrians. It was a beautiful painting, and she fell in love with it immediately.
“Oh, Ben, where did you get this?”
“I asked Rae to do it. I gave her a photograph.”
“I love it. I absolutely love it.”
She kissed him passionately, but again felt his reserve.
Often they made love before dinner. That night they simply ate, seated at her small kitchen table in the glow of candlelight, with the sound of rain against the windows.
“You’re quiet,” she finally said. “And you keep looking at me like I’ve just left on a train out of town. What’s going on?”
He said, “Jo.” One word, but oh, it was like a funeral bell.
She sat back in her chair as if he’d hit her. “It’s over, isn’t it?”
In the candlelight, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. Men never cried when they said good-bye. They found some way to make it not their fault, to feel justified. They left behind a foul sense that somehow it was all wrong from the beginning, a mistake everyone was better off forgetting.
But not Ben Jacoby.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
“Then why?”
He shook his head and looked truly bewildered. “I wish I could say the thing that would make it all clear, but it’s so complicated. It has nothing to do with you or with what I feel for you.”
“Right,” she said, not bothering to hide her bitterness.
He reached across the table and took her hands. “If I had a choice, I would stay with you forever.”
“You always have a choice. It’s clear you’ve made it.”
“Not being with you will just about kill me.” He gripped her hands so powerfully that he’d begun to hurt her a little.
“Just go,” she said. “And here. Take this with you.”
She gave him back the painting.
“That’s yours,” he said.
“I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to remind me of you. Take it. Take it, goddamn it.”
He didn’t argue, didn’t try to wheedle from her one last time in the sack, didn’t suggest a last glass of wine or a final kiss. But he didn’t hurry, either. He left with an air of profound sadness, and when she was able to think about it later through the filter of time, without anger or hurt, she realized that he’d left with a sense of dignity, his and hers, somehow intact. And for that she loved him, too.
They hadn’t made promises, but they’d been in love, and there had never been a clear reason for the ending. Time had helped put him behind her. Time and her marriage. She hadn’t thought of Ben Jacoby in years.
That something inside her still responded to him-his presence, his voice, even the scent of him, the same after all these years-surprised her. There was something going on with her emotions over which she seemed to have no control. She knew she would never act on what she felt, but it still frightened her.
She studied her husband, sleeping restlessly beside her. There had been rough periods in their marriage, but they were in the past. And the truth was, she loved Cork, as much for all he’d committed to working through with her and forgiving as for all that had been effortless and good between them.
He stirred, moaned softly. She lifted herself, leaned to him, and gently kissed his lips. Although she knew his sleep was troubled, for a moment in his dreaming he smiled.