Free The Carlton Club by Katherine Stone Page A

public airways.”
    “Wireways.”
    “Anyways.”
    Silence.
    “So, you rang?” she asked, finally.
    “I did. To thank you for Thursday.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “And,” Mark hesitated, “I was going to ask you out.”
    “But?” she asked, disappointed.
    “A new development in the trial separation.”
    “Oh.”
    “A trial reunion.”
    “Is she there?”
    “No. We don’t start until December first.”
    “Oh. Strange. In the meantime?”
    “In the meantime, I just have to think about it.” I can’t see you Kathleen, Mark thought. I can’t.
    “What do you think?”
    “I think it’s an eleven-year relationship. We meant for better or worse when we said it five years ago. We have to give it every chance. That’s what I think. What I want.”
    “Oh,” Kathleen said quietly, her voice and confidence a little shaky. Damn. Mark’s wife was so lucky to have him. “Well let me know.”
    “If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know.”
    By December fifteenth both Mark and Janet knew their marriage was over. They both knew they had tried, maybe too hard, to resuscitate something that was dead.
    Neither really understood what happened. Each understood it from his or her standpoint, but they couldn’t agree. They couldn’t make sense of it. They tried to talk patiently, but hit impasse after impasse.
    At first the frustration erupted into rage.
    Later it was replaced by sadness and grieving.
    They spent hours reminiscing, remembering the beginning, the happy times. As they talked the memories became vivid, but they could not force the remembered joy and love into the present.
    They made love once. Afterward they held each other and wept. They cried for the love that somewhere, somehow, was lost forever.
    “How could it have happened to us, Janet?” he asked, bewildered.
    Janet just shook her head, but the lyrics of a song, the song that summarized it for her, taunted her. She wanted to sing it for him; but it would just make him angry because he didn’t believe her interpretation of what had happened, and it would anger her that he didn’t believe her.
    But, it was how she felt, had always felt. Every lyric.
    If I can make you smile,
    If I can fill your eyes with pleasure just by holding you,
    Ah, well, that’s enough for me,
    That’s all the hero I need be.
    It had been enough, she knew, because there had been a time when she could make him happy, when she could fill him with peace with a touch or a kiss. It had been enough for her; she would never have wanted more, but somehow she lost the ability to comfort him. Her presence didn’t matter anymore.
    Whether Mark loved her any less, or whether his own torment, the torment he still denied, had become greater than the power of her love, she would never know.
    They were left with no feelings. No stir of love. Just a present numbness and an aching pain and sadness for the lovely memories of the past—memories of love and passion and feelings that were gone.
    The second week, their last week together, they filed for divorce and started to divide their property. The actual process of dividing their possessions was too painful to do together. It brought back too many memories: their wedding pictures, the handknit mufflers, the quilt for their bed, the souvenirs of happy times.
    Janet agreed to pack the boxes for both of them after he left, but she needed to know what he wanted.
    “Do you want the fine china or the everyday?” The four hundred guest wedding had left them with complete sets of the china patterns that Mrs. Collinsworth had insisted they choose.
    “I don’t care.”
    “Stainless or silver?”
    “I don’t care Mark snapped, then repeated gently, “I really don’t care, Janet.”
    “Is there anything you do want?” she asked finally.
    “The Cornhuskers banner,” he said impulsively. Then he wondered, am I really thinking about Kathleen? Certainly not consciously. He had focused only on Janet, on them. He had tried so hard.
    But