Free He's Gone by Deb Caletti Page B

graphic-design work part-time after Abby was in school, brochures mostly, travel brochures and new products displayed in three panels. I was teaching myself how to create websites. I had a handful of clients—two tour companies, a husband-and-wife team who sold personal-care products, and a mom who delivered homemade baby food to the “choosiest parents.” (I believe we used those exact words.) I spent the school hours in front of my computer, looking at images of cobalt waters and white sand and sensual bottles of eco-friendly shampoo. For days I rearranged photos of vegetables. I would try to put the pieces together in a way that was whole and desirable and enticing. I aimed to please. Well, I sure did.
    Sometime after that concert, Ian began calling me in the afternoon. I would be there at my desk and the phone would ring and my heart would quicken. He would call for some made-up reason—an invitation, a news article about a music performer we liked. The cobalt waters and white-sand beach would sit in front of me for too long, and my tuna sandwich (tuna, mayo, potato chips laid inside, white bread, perfection) would find itself uncommonly ignored.
    The voice on the other end, the talk, real talk, talk between two people—not talk that was effortful, a counseling session, anger avoidance, careful stepping around land mines, all the things talk was with Mark—it was a new world. I didn’t know that’s what talk was like. I had met Mark when I was nineteen, and I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for some battle, but I finally knew that he had won. It wasn’t just the anger that had done me in, the moments when he would thrash and rage and a fist would go through a door right next to my face—it was the daily tending of an emotional person. The violent outbursts (his hands on me, his feet kicking) would come once or twice a year, more sometimes, but the mood reading, the way I was a perpetual ranger at a perpetual weather station watching for ominous signs, that was a constant, and that’s what defeated me. Our marriage wasn’t all rage, of course. Of course we had our good times. Of course there were things I loved about him. I patched that door he’d punched the hole through, though. I hid the damage. I used spackling paste and a flat-edged tool I found in the garage. I painted over it, but you could still see the rough edges where his fist had gone in. I wore long sleeves sometimes, too.
    With Ian, when we talked—I got something back, and this seemed like a revelation. I learned things about his work. I learned about his life. I learned about what he wanted and didn’t have, and what he had and didn’t want. He was calm. He was kind. His life seemed so … controlled. But I also spoke. I didn’t know there was a door you could open to a whole land of yourself. Or maybe I suspected it but finally saw it was true. There were all these ideas I had, dreams, all this energy .
    Do you know what Mark told me once? I just remembered this. He told me that he didn’t want to hear about my day when he came home. He needed me to listen to him . What I can’t believenow is that I must have gotten in bed with him that night, after he said that.
    Still, what Ian and I did was the coward’s way out. I know this. I know it now, and I knew it then, although I justified it. Adultery often happens, I am sure, because you are on the sinking ship, and you need to leap but can’t leap. You are too spineless, maybe, to leap. The water is too dark and choppy and the sea is too large. Saving your own life, even, isn’t enough reason to jump—no, you need the hands at your back, pushing, the hands of something as unavoidable and inevitable and imperative as love. It’s got to be something that big, you know, to get you to jump. That life raft down there is too small, and the unknowns are so immense, and you know where the kitchen is on the ship; you know where your own bed is,