Lizzie was just about to ask what was wrong, when the waiter came by for their order. Once he left, George asked abruptly, “Who’s Jack?”
“Jack?” Lizzie asked stupidly, stalling for time and hoping that there was some innocent explanation for his question, that he wasn’t really asking about her Jack. When George just continued to stare at her, with an expression that made it clear this wasn’t a casual question, she said, “How do you know about Jack?”
“I don’t know about Jack,” George told her in the patient tone of voice you would use with someone for whom English was not her native language. “That’s why I’m asking you.”
Naturally Lizzie’s first thought was to lie, but her second thought was that if George knew about Jack’s existence, maybe he knew all about what happened and was just testing her truthfulness. Her third thought was that this didn’t seem like something George would do; he wasn’t the gotcha type. Her fourth thought was that maybe Marla was right, that omitting a fact or two from the résumé of your life was one thing, but telling an enormous whopper to the man you were married to was quite another. Lizzie took a deep breath, trying not to panic.
“Jack is who I dated spring quarter of my freshman year. He went home for the summer and then didn’t come back to start grad school like he was going to. That’s who he is, just someone I dated for a little while.” Lizzie knew that the most inaccurate word in that sentence was “just.” It was the word that made the statement false. She tried not to look at her bracelet. Here she was, lying even when she tried not to. It was pathetic, really.
Days, months, years went by before George spoke. The waiter brought their food, moo shu vegetables and orange chicken. Lizzie felt too sick to eat. Finally George said, “I read Marla’s most recent letter to you. You know, the one you left on the counter in the bathroom. As if you wanted me to read it. That’s the letter where Marla asks if there’s any news on the Jack front.”
“You shouldn’t have read it.”
“If it was so private, why did you leave it out? Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
No, not really. Lizzie definitely didn’t want to tell him anything at all. “I just couldn’t,” she began. “I just can’t seem to get over him. I think about him a lot and I’m always looking for him, wherever we go.” There. Surely that was enough. She didn’t have to go into a detailed description of all those phone calls in the various cities they visited for George’s speaking gigs, did she?
“How come you never told me about him?”
“Oh, George, come on. Look how upset you are, and you have all that Opportunity for Growth stuff to fall back on. Of course I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, what would I have said? Did you want me to say, ‘No, George, I can’t marry you because I’m still in love with this old boyfriend who walked out of my life and I’ve never heard from him again’?”
A gaping hole opened between them. George said quietly, “And are you? Still in love with him?”
This was getting more difficult by the moment. Lizzie tried to figure out what she wanted to say. “I don’t know, George. It sounds crazy, even to me, to think that I could still be in love, whatever that means, with a guy I haven’t seen for longer than we’ve been married. All I know is that I can’t seem to stop thinking about him.”
“Do you still want to be married to me?”
“Yes, of course! I love you, George, really. I usually think our life together is great. But it’s different from the way it was with Jack.”
“Of course it’s different; all relationships are different, one from the other. And are you sure you remember what it was like with Jack? Sometimes you can’t even remember to return your library books on time.”
“Don’t be mean to me, George.”
“Mean to you? Are you kidding me? Don’t you think your lying to me for our entire marriage justifies a little hostility on my part?”
Neither of them had eaten anything. They refused the offer of boxes to take the food home. George paid the bill and left the restaurant, not waiting for Lizzie to catch up. Back at the apartment, he pretended to watch the news on TV, and Lizzie pretended to read her book. They avoided looking at each other. When Lizzie went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, George said, “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No, don’t,” Lizzie said, suddenly terrified of being alone in their bed. “I don’t want us to be apart tonight. Can we pretend until tomorrow that this never happened?”
They got up the next morning still without looking at one another. Lizzie carefully measured out the coffee and made sure to use the filtered water for the French press, both of which she knew were important to George and both of which she usually blew off. She sat down at the table with her toast, waiting for him to finish showering. A stranger watching wouldn’t have been able to tell that it was any different (other than the filtered water and the carefully measured coffee) from virtually every other morning of their marriage, but to Lizzie it felt momentous, as though she and George were about to enter into unknown, previously unexplored territory. Everything had changed.
After pouring his coffee, George sat down across from her and began the next part of the conversation. “Look, Lizzie, I love you, but you can’t have it both ways. You can have our life together or you can go off and chase your fantasy. You have to choose. You don’t need to decide this minute. I’m willing to wait, but I want you to know that it can’t go on this way forever. And you have to be honest with me about your feelings, even if that’s hard for both of us.”
Once George left for work, Lizzie called Marla, to tell her what happened.
*?The End of Many Things?*
James was dying.
Marla phoned early one morning about a week after the Difficult Conversation to tell Lizzie that James was still coughing a lot, which of course Lizzie had noticed the last time she visited, but that now he’d started coughing up blood, which was something frighteningly new. Their family doctor immediately sent James to a specialist. The future wasn’t bright.
“Ironic, isn’t it, that the only thing he ever smoked was pot. He never touched tobacco,” she added. Lizzie could hear that Marla was starting to cry. “Although his parents were cigarette fiends, so maybe it’s all that secondhand smoke.”