Susan Phillips - Breathing Room

The weight of his guilt grew heavier.

She cupped her hand over her belly. The brazen, overly confident rich girl who’d led him on such a merry chase a dozen years ago had disappeared, and an achingly beautiful woman with haunted eyes had taken her place. “What are we going to do?” she whispered.

What are you going to do? he wanted to say. She was the one who’d left. She was the one who was never satisfied. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“We can’t talk anymore.”

“We can talk.”

“No, we just start hurling insults.”

Not the way he remembered it. She was the one with the sharp tongue and atomic temper. All he tried to do was dodge. “No insults from me.” He slipped his glasses back on.

“Of course not.”

She said it without any bite, but the knot inside him tightened. “I think what happened this afternoon pushed us past the insult stage, don’t you?”

Despite his good intentions, he sounded accusatory, and he braced himself for her retaliation, but she simply shut her eyes and rested her head against the wall. “Yes, I think so, too.”

He wanted to wrap her in his arms and beg her to let this go, but she’d made up her mind about him, and nothing he’d said so far had been able to change it. If he couldn’t make her understand, they had no chance at all. “Today proved what I’ve been saying all along. We have to buckle down. I think we both know that now. It’s time for us to buckle down and do what we have to.”

“And what’s that?”

She seemed genuinely perplexed. How could she be so obtuse? He tried to hide his agitation. “We can start behaving like adults.”

“You always behave like an adult. I’m the one who seems to have trouble.”

It was true-exactly what he’d been trying to tell her-but the expression of defeat on her face tore him apart. Why couldn’t she just adapt to things so they could move forward? He searched for the right words, but too many feelings lay in his way. Tracy believed in digging through those feelings whenever the whim struck, but not Harry. He’d never seen the benefit, only the downside.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Spoke softly. “Tell me something I can do to make you happy.”

“Be realistic! Marriages change. We’ve changed. We get older, and life catches up with us. It can’t always be like it was in the beginning, so don’t expect that. Be satisfied with what we have.”

“Is that what it comes down to? Just settling?”

All the emotional jumble inside him had come together in his stomach. “We have to be realistic. Marriage can’t be moonlight and roses forever. I wouldn’t call that settling.”

“I would.” Her hair flew. She thrust herself away from the wall. “I’d call it settling, and I’m not doing it. I’m not phoning in this marriage. I’m going to fight for it, even if I’m the only one with the guts to do that.”

She’d raised her voice, but they couldn’t have another argument, not with Steffie so close. “We can’t talk here.” He took her arm, pulled her away, steered her down the hall. “You don’t make sense. You’ve never once-never once in our entire marriage-made sense to me.”

“That’s because you have a computer for a brain,” she railed at him as they rounded the corner into the next wing. “I’m not afraid to fight. And I’ll do it until we’re both bleeding if I have to.”

“You’re just trying to create another one of your dramas.” He was appalled at how angry he sounded, but he couldn’t seem to calm down. He shoved open the nearest door, hauled her inside, and hit the switch. Big room, big furniture. The master bedroom.

“Our children aren’t going to be raised by parents who have a ghost marriage!” she cried.

“Stop it!” It was anger he felt-that’s what he told himself. Anger, not desperation, because anger was something he could control. “If you don’t stop it…” A monster sucked at his bones. “You can’t do this.” He drew in air. “You have to stop it. You have to stop it before you ruin everything.”

“How can I ruin-”

An explosion went off in his head. “By saying things we can’t ever take back!”

“Like what? That you’ve stopped loving me?” Angry tears filled her eyes. “Like the fact that I’m fat, and the novelty of screwing a pregnant woman wore off three kids ago. Like the fact that I can’t ever balance the checkbook, and I misplace your car keys, and you wake up every morning wishing you’d married somebody neat and tidy like Isabel. Is that what I’m not supposed to say?”

Leave it to Tracy to go off on some ludicrous tangent. He wanted to shake her. “We can never work this out if you won’t be logical.”

“I can’t be any more logical than this.”

He heard the same desperation in her voice that he felt inside, but why should she feel desperate when she was saying such stupid things?

She never remembered to carry tissues, and she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Today you asked me what you could do to make me happy, and I lashed out instead of saying what I wanted to. Do you know what I wanted to say?”

He knew, and he didn’t want to hear. He didn’t want her to tell him how boring he was, and that he was losing his hair, and that he wasn’t even close to being the man she deserved. He didn’t want her to tell him that he’d served his purpose by giving her children and now she wished she’d chosen differently, someone more like her.

Tears made silver streaks on her cheeks. “Just love me, Harry. That’s what I wanted to say. Love me like you used to. Like I was special instead of a cross you have to bear. Like the differences between us are good things instead of something awful. I want it to be the way it used to be when you looked at me as though you couldn’t believe I was yours. Like I was the most wonderful creature in the world. I know I don’t look the way I did then. I know I have stretch marks everywhere, and I know how much you used to love my breasts, and now they’re halfway to my knees, and I hate this, and I hate that you don’t love me like you used to, and I hate the fact that you’re making me beg!”

This was absurd. Completely illogical. This was so wrong he couldn’t figure out what to say to set it straight. Of all the… He opened his mouth, but he didn’t know where to start, so he closed it, tried again. It was too late. She’d already fled.

He stood there, numb, trying to figure out what had hit him. She was everything to him. How could she think, even for a moment, that he didn’t love her? She was the center of his world, the breath of his life. It wasn’t him… She was the one who couldn’t love enough.

He sagged down on the side of the bed and dropped his forehead into his hands. She didn’t think he loved her? He wanted to howl.

A door creaked, and the hairs stood on the back of his neck, because the noise hadn’t come from the hallway. It had come from across the room.

He lifted his head. There was a bathroom… Dread pooled in his stomach as the door opened and a man stepped out. Tall, good-looking, with a full head of hair.

Ren Gage shook his head and looked at Harry with pity. “Man, you are so screwed.”

And didn’t he just know it.

Porcini!”

A wet branch slapped Isabel in the face as Giulia shot ahead of her through the underbrush. Her sneakers would never be the same after the morning’s excursion through the woods, which were still soggy from yesterday’s rainfall. She hurried toward a fallen tree and crouched next to Giulia in front of a circle of velvety brown porcini, their toadstool tops large enough to shelter a fairy.

“Mmm… Tuscan gold.” Giulia pulled out the pocketknife she’d brought with her, cut a mushroom neatly at the base, and laid it in her basket. Plastic sacks were never used by the fungaroli, Isabel had learned, only baskets that allowed spores and bits of root to fall to the ground so next year’s crop would be ensured. “I wish Vittorio could have come with us. He complains when I wake him so early, but he loves the hunt.”

Isabel wished Ren were with them, too. If she hadn’t asked him to go back to the villa yesterday evening after they’d made love, she could have nagged him out of bed this morning and made him come along. Even though they’d been lovers only a little over twenty-four hours, she’d found herself reaching for him last night, then waking up when he wasn’t there. He was like a drug. A dangerous drug. Crack cocaine topped off with heroin. And she was going to need a twelve-step program when their affair ended.

She slipped her fingers beneath the cuff of her sweater and tugged at her gold bangle. Breathe. Stay centered and breathe. How often would she be able to hunt porcini in the woods of Tuscany? Despite the damp, Ren’s absence, and what felt like a permanent crick in her back from crouching down to look for mushrooms, she was enjoying herself. The morning had dawned bright and clear, Steffie was safe, and Isabel had a lover.

“Smell. Is it not indescribable?”

Isabel inhaled the pungent, earthy scent of the funghi and thought about sex. But then everything made her think about sex. She was already looking forward to returning to the farmhouse and seeing Ren again. The people from the town would be gathering at ten o’clock to finish dismantling the wall, and he would be there to help.

She remembered how moody he’d gotten last night just before he’d left. At first she’d thought it was because she was kicking him out, but he’d been fairly good-humored about that. She’d asked him what was wrong, but he’d said only that he was tired. It had seemed like more than that. Maybe he’d been having a leftover reaction from finding Steffie. One thing was certain: Ren was a master dissembler, and if he didn’t want her to know what was going on inside him, she had very little chance of figuring it out.

They set off again, eyes peeled, using the walking sticks Giulia had brought along to push away undergrowth near the tree roots and beside rotting logs. The rain had revitalized the parched landscape, and the air was heady with the scent of rosemary, lavender, and wild sage. Isabel found a velvety cache of porcini under a pile of leaves and added them to the basket.

“You are very good at this.” Giulia spoke in the whisper she’d been using all morning. Porcini were precious, and mushroom hunting was a secretive operation. Their basket even had a lid to conceal their treasure should they happen to pass someone in the woods, not that anyone was going to be fooled. Giulia yawned for the fourth time in as many minutes.

“A little early for you?” Isabel said.

“I had to meet Vittorio in Montepulciano last night and in Pienza the night before that. I didn’t get back until very late.”

“Do you always meet him when he’s out?”

Giulia poked at some weeds she’d just finished looking beneath. “Sometimes. Certain nights.”

Whatever that meant.

As it neared ten o’clock, they returned to the farmhouse, taking turns carrying the full basket. The villagers had begun to appear, and Ren stood in the garden studying the wall. The way he wore his dusty boots, jeans, and faded T-shirt turned them into a fashion statement. When he saw her, his smile took away the last of the morning’s chill, and it grew even wider when he spotted the basket. “Why don’t I put these someplace safe?”

“Oh, no you don’t.”

But she was too late. He’d already snagged the basket from Giulia and headed inside with it.

“Hurry.” She grabbed Giulia’s arm and pulled her into the kitchen, arriving there on his heels. “Give that back right now. You’re not trustworthy.”

“You hurt my feelings.” His con man’s eyes were as innocent as an altar boy’s. “And just when I was getting ready to suggest cooking up a little dinner for the four of us tonight. Nothing elaborate. We could start with some sautéed porcini on top of toasted crostini. Then maybe spaghetti al porcino-a light sauce, very simple. I’ll sauté the mushrooms in olive oil and garlic, add some fresh parsley. We could grill the larger ones and use them on an arugula salad. Of course, if I’m being presumptuous…”

“Yes!” Giulia hopped like a child. “Vittorio will be home tonight. I know it is our turn to invite you, but you are a better cook, and I accept for both of us.”

“We’ll see you at eight.” The porcini disappeared into the cupboard.

Satisfied, Giulia slipped back out to the garden to greet some of her friends. Ren glanced at his watch, lifted an imperious eyebrow, and jerked a very arrogant thumb toward the ceiling. “You. Upstairs. Now. And make it fast.”

He wasn’t the only one who knew how to have fun. She yawned. “I don’t think so.”

“Apparently I’m going to have to get rough.”