Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

She heard Tom say — his long, hairy-topped fingers turning the ugly, institutional salad fork over and over like a prayer totem, his solemn gaze fastened on it — that it was absolutely over with Crystal now. Her hillbilly boyfriend had apparently set the phone down from talking to Nancy, driven to Crystal’s studio and kicked it to pieces, then knocked her around a little, after which the two of them got in his Corvette and drove to Myrtle Beach to patch things up. Tom said he would find another space for his work; that Crystal would be out of his life as of today (not that she’d ever really been in his life), and that he was sorry and ashamed. But if Nancy would forgive him and not leave him, he could promise her that such as this would never happen again.

Tom brought his large blue cop’s eyes up off the table and sought hers. His face — always to Nancy a craggy, handsome face, a face with large cheek bones, deep eye sockets, a thick chin and overlarge white teeth — looked at that moment more like a skull, a death’s head. Not really, of course; she didn’t see an actual death’s head like on a pirate flag. But it was the thought she experienced, and the words: “Tom’s face is a death’s head.” And though she was sure she wasn’t obsessive or compulsive or a believer in omens or symbols as sources of illumination, she had thought the words — Tom’s face is a death’s head — and pictured them as a motto on the lintel of a door to a mythical courtroom that was something out of Dante. One way or another, this, the idea of a death’s head, had to be somewhere in what she believed.

When Tom was finished apologizing, Nancy told him without anger that changing studios shouldn’t be necessary if he could stay away from Crystal when she came back from Myrtle Beach. She said she had perhaps misjudged some things, and that trouble in a marriage, especially a long marriage, always came about at the instigation of both partners, and that trouble like this was just a symptom and not terribly important per se. And that while she didn’t care for what he’d done, and had thought that very afternoon about divorcing him simply so she wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, she actually didn’t believe his acts were directed at her, for the obvious reason that she hadn’t done anything to deserve them. She believed, she said, that what he’d done was related to the issues he’d just been talking about, and that her intention was to forgive him and try to see if the two of them couldn’t weather adversity with a greater-than-ever intimacy.

“Why don’t you just fuck me tonight?” she said to him right at the table. The word fuck was provocative, but also, she realized, slightly pathetic as an address to your husband. “We haven’t done that in a while.” Though of course you’ve been doing it every day with your retarded girlfriend were the words she’d thought but didn’t like thinking.

“Yes,” Tom said, too gravely. Then, “No.”

His large hands were clasped, forkless, on the white tablecloth not far from hers. Neither moved as though to effect a touch.

“I’m so sorry,” Tom said for the third or fourth time, and she knew he was. Tom wasn’t a man distanced from what he felt. He didn’t say something and then start thinking what it could mean now that he’d said it, finally concluding it didn’t mean anything. He was a good, sincere man, qualities that had made him an exemplary robbery detective, a superb interrogator of felons. Tom meant things. “I hope I haven’t ruined our life,” he added sadly.

“I hope not, too,” Nancy said. She didn’t want to think about ruining her life, which seemed ridiculous. She wanted to concentrate on what an honest, decent man he was. Not a death’s head. “You probably haven’t,” she said.

“Then let’s go home now,” he said, folding his napkin after dabbing his mouth. “I’m ready.”

Home meant he would fuck her, and no doubt do it with ardor and tenderness and take it all the way. He was very good at that. Crystal hadn’t been crazy to want to fuck Tom instead of her nasal, crybaby boyfriend. Nancy wondered, though, why she herself expected that now; why fuck me ? Probably it was fuck me instead of fuck you . Since she didn’t much want that now, though it would surely happen. It made her regretful; because she was, she realized, the very sort of person she’d determined Tom was not, even though she was not an adulterer and he was: she was a person who said things, then looked around and wondered why she’d said them and what their consequences could be, and (often) how she could get out of doing the very things she said she desired. She’d never exactly recognized this about herself, and now considered the possibility that it had just become true, or been made true by Tom’s betrayal. But what was it, she wondered, as they left the restaurant headed for home and bed? What was that thing she was? Surely it was a thing anyone should be able to say. There would be a word for it. She simply couldn’t bring that word to mind.

The next morning, Friday — after the night in Freeport — they ate breakfast in Wiscasset, in a shiny little diner that sat beside a large greenish river, over which a low concrete bridge moved traffic briskly north and south. The gilt-edged sign outside Wiscasset said it was THE PRETTIEST VILLAGE IN MAINE, which seemed to mean there were few houses, and those few were big and white and expensive-looking, with manicured yards and plaques by the front doors telling everyone when the house was built. Across the river, which was called the Sheepscot, white summer cottages speckled out through forested riverbank. This was Maine — small in scale, profusely scenic, annoyingly remote, exclusive and crowded. She knew they were close to the ocean, but she hadn’t seen it yet, even from the plane last night. The Sheepscot was clearly an estuary; gulls were flying up-river in the clear morning air, crisp little lobster craft, a few sailboats sat at anchor.

When they’d parked and hiked down toward the diner, Tom had stopped to bend over, peering into several windows full of house-for-sale pictures, all in color, all small white structures with crisp green roofs situated “minutes” from some body of water imprecisely seen in the background. All the locales had Maine-ish names. Pemaquid Point. Passamaquoddy something. Stickney Corner. The houses looked like the renter cabins across the river — places you’d get sick of after one season and then have to put back on the market. She couldn’t gauge if prices were high or low, though Tom thought they were too high. It didn’t matter. She didn’t live here.

When he’d looked in at two or three realty windows, Tom stood up and stared down at the river beyond the diner. Water glistened in the light September air. He seemed wistful, but he also seemed to be contemplating. The salt-smelling breeze blew his hair against the part, revealing where it was thinning.

“Are you considering something ‘only steps from the ocean’?” she said, to be congenial. She put her arm in under his. Tom was an enthusiast, and when a subject he wanted to be enthusiastic about proved beyond him, it often turned him gloomy, as though the world were a hopeless place.

“I was just thinking that everything’s been discovered in this town,” he said. “You needed to be here twenty years ago.”

“Would you like to live in Wiscasset, or Pissamaquoddy or whatever?” She looked down the sloping main street — a block of glass-fronted antique shops, a chic deli, a fancy furniture store above which were lawyers’ and CPA offices. These buildings, too, had plaques telling their construction dates. 1880s. Not really so old. Harlingen had plenty of buildings that were older.