Free What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell Page B

two of them were brothers from Alaska and had never before left home. I let them paint sticky henna on Daniel’s back. The characters, they said, spelled wisdom. This seemed excellent.
    Sam found us in the twilight, having spotted the car. He busted into our fairy circle in a polo shirt, clean-shaven, intolerable, jangling his keys in his pocket. I was prepared to stand my ground without quite knowing why.
    “Mom ate Froot Loops,” said Daniel.
    “I know she did.” Sam gestured toward the parking lot. “Come on, let’s go.”
    “Why?” asked Daniel.
    “Yeah, why ?” I echoed, only half joking.
    “Because it’s eight. I’m hungry.” Sam was trying to be politic and not to cite the cause of his worry in front of our new friends, but the hippies latched on.
    “Woman, bake me a pie,” they chorused.
    Daniel stood up and padded over to his father. Sam leaned down and Daniel whispered in his ear. The two of them went up to the car. In half an hour, I felt ready and found them throwing a football in the parking lot.
    “What did he say to you?” I asked Sam.
    “He said I should leave you alone and you’d come up in half an hour.”
    We looked at Daniel, who was throwing the football straight up in the air and diving to catch it. The henna on his back caked terra cotta and flaking, his chest white, almost blue in this waning light. Like a child from some science-fiction tribe. “How does he do it,” he was saying. “He is the most amazing football player in the whole entire history of the world. The people cheer.”
    In this way Sam would rescue me. But what works with a wife doesn’t work with a son. In my rarest and worst moments, people would catch Sam’s eye sympathetically. Once I would not be dissuaded from diving into a pond to try to touch the ducks. People stood with Sam on the shore, watching the ducks scatter, watching me slog back euphoric and covered with guano. They saw his patience and the glint in my eye, and they thought, Here is a good and patient man, to stand by such a woman. But if Daniel did the same thing, they would assume something else altogether: Here is a father with no control over his son. This father’s laxity has put his son at risk. This child is not getting what he needs. Sam did not feel responsible for my behavior, but he did feel responsible for Daniel’s, and that made all the difference.
    We started to split the first time Sam walked away from one of Daniel’s rages. We were trying to seat ourselves ten minutes into a movie, and Daniel refused to sit in the middle of a row. He wanted the end seat, he shrieked, he needed the end seat. He took hold of the armrests and tried to pull the seat out of the floor. A hundred blue-lit faces, parents and children, watching us instead of the screen. Carrie moved ten feet away and pretended to belong to another family. And Sam just walked out to the car and left me there. He sat in the driver’s seat until we came out. A year later, we were through.
    I slept with several men during our marriage, and I know Sam was unfaithful at least once—a woman’s gold bracelet left on my bedside table, never claimed. I met mine at the gym, at my various office jobs, in the stands at Carrie’s soccer games. Sometimes I felt somebody wanting me, and it woke some ravenous part of my heart that would not sleep until satisfied. I wonder if this is how it felt for my mother at her most divine—how many of her clients she ravished on the rumpled sofa in her office while I was outside going through their cars. Sam knew how my enthusiasms could play out in this arena, and it was never the poison it can be for other couples. He only pretended it was, toward the end, to justify his cowardice. Something to say in a language the divorce lawyer could understand.
    I STAND AS close as I can to the wall that is gone and look out at the Atlantic. The tide is going out. Foolish boys are trying to surf in the twilight. The sky is a velvety bluish gray now,