He released me so abruptly I staggered and almost fell. I caught myself with one hand on the countertop. He held his hands up in the air. Innocent Jim. “She won’t tell anyone. It’s completely over now. No one else knows.”
“Except me.”
He pressed his palms together, beseeching me, blond hair glinting in the overhead light, dark blue eyes limpid and sorrowful—a beautiful praying angel. He spoke softly. “Sylvie, please don’t do this. I made a terrible, stupid mistake. I’ve learned my lesson. We don’t need to get a divorce. Everything will be like it was.”
I swallowed hard. The words fell out like stones. “The thing is, Jim, you didn’t just rob her of her innocence, you took mine as well. I loved you more than anyone. I let you into my heart and I trusted you.” A dry sob escaped me.
“I was so wrong, sweetheart. I know you feel angry and betrayed. I was just lonely. She meant nothing to me. I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you.” His voice rang with sincerity.
He was such a manipulative jerk, even if I could hear a glimmer of truth in his words. That only made it hurt more. Our failure was my fault too. He took a step toward me. I held up a hand. Enough was enough. “Stop. Don’t try those counselor tricks on me. They don’t work anymore. Even if I could forgive you, I can never be sure that you won’t do it again, to some other innocent student.”
He scrutinized me until the resolution in my face seemed to convince him, and, like a mask, the pleading lover fell away—and the hurt too. How many times would I allow this man to put a blade through my heart? How had I never seen the chameleon before?
Now he was calm and businesslike, a negotiator in a contract arbitration. “Look, if you have to divorce me, leave this whole thing out of it and we’ll get rid of the prenup, okay? All your bills, Amy’s student loans, your parents. You’d never have to worry about money again. But don’t destroy my life for no reason.”
And just like that, he accepted the end of our marriage. I scoffed at this, irrationally hurt. “Great, you’re trying to buy me. No reason? You still don’t believe that what you did was wrong. And that’s exactly why the truth has to come out, Jim. I’m sorry.”
He took a step toward me, and then another, his muscles and veins straining against his skin. His breath was quick, the whites of his eyes prominent, his fists raised. I backed away, truly afraid for the first time. His control had snapped. The last time he struck me, my head had whipped back from the force of the blow. He towered over me now, his face mottled with rage. I cowered. Footsteps. A blur of black. A loud crack, then Jim thudded against the floor.
Lukas stood over Jim’s sprawled form, heaving, his huge hands clenching. “Get the hell away from her.”
Jim stared at Lukas, then at me. He slowly raised a hand to the blood flowing from a cut on his cheek. He shook his head in disbelief. “So this is him.” He gave me a long, pained look, filled with hurt, betrayal, and fury. Jim staggered to his feet and glared at me. “This conversation isn’t over, Sylvie.” He shoved past Lukas and stalked out of the house.
I sank down on the floor, suddenly weak. “How much did you hear?”
Lukas came over and knelt beside me, his voice gentle. “Very little. Something about bills and money. I came upstairs to find him threatening you. Are you all right?”
I held out my arms to him like a small child. “No.” Then I was crying big heaving sobs as he held me. I felt safer in his arms. I had made such a mess of everything. My marriage was truly over. What would I do now? Oh Jim, how did we come to this? Lukas smoothed my hair and patted my back, murmuring indistinct sounds of comfort.
As I calmed, he handed me a box of tissues but kept one arm around me. He stayed on the floor next to me, leaning back against the kitchen counter. I blew my nose and took a deep breath. I rested my cheek against his shoulder.
“Husband?” he said.
I tried to speak, had to clear my throat. My voice was hoarse. “Soon to be ex-husband.”
He nodded. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head and then chuckled, giddy after all the emotion of the evening. “Do you know when my happiest moment was?”
“Changing the subject?” There was a smile in his voice.
“I had had the worst day. It was soon after I had moved to the U.S. and I hardly spoke any English. I missed you and Estelle and Grandma. All of the kids there teased or ignored me and that day, one of the girls had pinched me so hard it left a purple bruise on my hand. The worst was, the teacher yelled at me for fighting, not her. I went home, trying so hard not to cry, and Amy jumped into my arms and everything was all right. She felt so warm and happy and alive. I knew she would always love me, no matter what. She saved me then. Like you just did.”
He rested his cheek against my temple. “Are you not going to tell me what happened?”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “Not now. All I want to do these days is forget.”
I lay in the dark, comforted by the knowledge that Lukas was in his apartment next door. I wanted to stay with him, but my heart was a desert landscape filled with mirages and quicksand, nothing in it trustworthy, and I loved him too much to lure him into a hallucination with me. As was my habit when I was stressed, I rubbed at the birthmark behind my ear. It was barely visible—a distinctive spiraled circle with a bit of a tail. Amy said it reminded her of a snail. Ma had always draped my hair over it when I was a child to hide it, and so I had developed a slight awkwardness about it. The sleeping pills were not working tonight. The life I had so carefully knitted together with Jim was falling apart. I was not truly surprised. In a way, I had been waiting for this unraveling my whole life. Deep down, I had known true love was not for me.
I had loved Jim with all of me that was innocent, the part that still believed in a fairy-tale ending for the immigrant Chinese girl. I was starved for affection and he, my chance at redemption, had been generous with it. I loved the way he was so unabashedly himself. It was not until much later that I realized what I thought was confidence was actually a form of selfishness, a refusal to believe that not everything in the world revolved around him.
I was an impoverished, awkward girl who got into Princeton on good grades, unlike another girl I knew whose father had enclosed a check for half a million dollars with her application fee. She could fish with a golden hook. We were so poor, they had even waived my fee—always the scholarship student, the brain of the class, the girl in the ill-fitting clothes. But those who wish to eat honey must suffer the sting of the bees. Methodically, I had fixed every flaw I could find in myself. In high school, I skipped lunch so I could save for a few good pieces of clothing. In college, I worked several jobs at a time so I could have my crooked tooth pulled and replaced with a fake one, too vain and impatient to wait for braces.
The other kids respected me because they had no choice. I made sure I was at the top in every class, but no one liked me. Unlike Amy, who had brought her little girlfriends home regularly. I allowed myself no vulnerabilities. I told myself I did not need friendships. When you were different, who knew if it was because of a lack of social graces or the language barrier or your skin color? I read etiquette books and studied designer brands as intently as my statistics textbooks. But I never mastered the art of the graceful shrug, the careless indifference of those who summered on private islands and tied clove hitches on sailboats. I was the recipient of critical stares, the kind that were the defining characteristic of those born into certain classes. I learned that there were people who knew of no other existence than their own, a path cushioned by wealth and breeding from birth onward.