Chapter 11: Convoluted

Diane heard Eric say, “You’ve wormed your way into her heart. Can’t say as I blame her; you’ve wormed your way into my heart, too. You’re just a lovable woman.” There was that word again. If she was lovable, was what they had love?

“Look,” she said. “There is something I want to check out. Mrs. Grant thinks that I’m the first woman you’ve dated since your wife.” She hung up the robe.

“That’s right. Is there something wrong about that?”

“Not really. I should be complimented.” She didn’t take off her nightie.

“But, from your tone, you aren’t.” He was naked when he came to bed. He had the beginnings of an erection, but he didn’t make any gesture towards her.

“I am complimented, but I’m more puzzled.” She kept her nightie on to signal that this conversation wasn’t over. As he didn’t reach for her when she got in, the signal must have been delivered. “I thought I knew what our relationship was. Somehow, this being your first affair in four years doesn’t fit what I thought.”

“Well,” he said, “my parents are both divorced and remarried ... Idiocy! They could hardly one of them be divorced. Start over. My parents are divorced and both have -- each has -- married someone else.” She couldn’t see what this had to do with her question, and his struggling for grammatical precision seemed senseless. You’d think he was avoiding finishing the sentence by correcting the middle.

“And, then, my first wife died.” She ignored his adjective and prepared to argue against the verb.

He felt the bed move as she shifted and responded before she found the words. “You can say what you want about culpability. The fact is that Laura was perfectly healthy when she married Eric Barnes, and now she’s dead. Whether you look at your life expectancy or probability of the marriage surviving, marrying me is a quite risky undertaking.”

He stopped there, and was doing something with his hands.

She was shocked and insulted. She hadn’t asked him whether he planned to marry her. She hadn’t even hinted at that. All she had said was that she didn’t know how the affair looked from his side. And, really, she’d had a life all planned out and that hadn’t involve marrying him.

Of course, it hadn’t involved meeting him, much less going to bed with him. Still, she had gone to bed with three men in her life, and her affair with Eric was the one that she had never expected to lead to marriage. And, if he wanted to say no -- and saying no before he was asked was rude, anyway -- he didn’t have to make up all the reasons it was bad for her. She could make up her own mind, and he could make up his own mind. She didn’t need this patronizing “I really have your best interests at heart” bull shit.

In the midst of her fuming, a click from his night stand distracted her. She couldn’t think what it could be. All his controls were on the headboard

“Despite all this,” he continued, “and despite my claims to love you and want what’s best for you, I really would like it if you did.”

She had lost something there, and she lay waiting for one of them to find it.

“Diane,” he finally said, “would you marry me?”

“That was a proposal?”

“Yes.”

“It was the most convoluted,” she said, “least coherent, foggiest proposal that I have ever heard.”

“And, to satisfy my curiosity, how many have you heard?” He had a point, but she wasn’t going to admit it. “And, after all, you raised the question of where we were going. I was in the middle of composing a much more precise one, but it wasn’t ready yet. And, may I point out, you haven’t answered me. Do you need more time?”

“You were drafting your proposal?” She couldn’t believe it.

“Well, I’ve only proposed once before, and it hadn’t ended up all too clear.” Now, she could believe that. But drafting hadn’t helped. For that matter, the second version tonight was much better than the first. And what was her answer to his second version? She loved him; she could learn to love his daughter, might already have done so. Could she keep her independence married to him? Well, no. How much independence could she keep? And, it kept coming around to this, she loved him.

“Well,” she started out, “I grew up with two older brothers. Norm and Greg couldn’t agree on the time of day. The only thing in the entire history of our family that they did agree on was that their sister should spend her life as a vestal virgin. They didn’t even approve of my dating, much less kissing. They sure didn’t approve of my parking, and they were capable of calling on my guys together to let them know that.”

“I don’t see where this story is going.”

“Well, let he who is taciturn cast the first stone.”

“Point taken,” he said, “but I’m not the one who has to be at work at six a.m.”

“I’ll be done by then. Anyway, I get out of high school, get out of Minnesota, and go to Radcliffe. I meet this Harvard freshman, Vaughan. I thought I was in love with him. I was really in love with the freedom. Our affair didn’t last my freshman year. I dated the next year, but nothing serious. Guys told me that they loved me, and I told them that I loved them, but I didn’t really believe it. My junior year, I got serious with a senior. I was convinced that I loved Ted and that he loved me. We lived together the second half of my junior year. The night before he graduated, we spent almost the entire night making passionate love. He cried real tears when he said good bye, but he said goodbye. I was convinced that I had loved him but that he hadn’t loved me.

“Well, that is my romantic history. Except Eric, of course, but you know about Eric.” She wondered how true that last was. She sure as hell hadn’t known about Eric.

“Remember when I asked if I were your first?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it might have seemed ridiculous, but the way you looked and acted, it was a reasonable question. Now, I learn that I was nearly your first.”

“I’ve been celibate longer than you have,” she said. “I figured that out while you were stuck at the office.”

“All of this is nice to hear, but it doesn’t answer my question.”

“I expected that I would marry Vaughan ‘some day.’ I expected that I would marry Ted when he had a job and I had my degree. I never expected to marry you.”

“Well,” he said, “these things happen. Those guys didn’t propose, and so their chances evaporated. I did propose. Now, what is your answer?”

“Eric, I love you. Recently, I’ve been worrying about what life would be like after we part ways. I can’t imagine it.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “I don’t think I said that before.”

“That’s okay. You have said it other times. I love you, and I want you. I can’t imagine how life will be without you. I can, however, imagine what life would be with you. And it would be unbearable.”

“Am I that bad?”

“Am I supposed to lie,” she asked, “and say that you aren’t? You are the most generous person I know, but you are also the greediest.”

“I wouldn’t call it greedy.”

“You don’t know yourself.”

“I know precisely what you mean,” he said. “It’s just that ‘greed’ isn’t the word I would use to describe it.”

“You have your own life, but you want mine.” And he wanted Valerie’s but she wouldn’t say that then.

“My life was empty from the time I killed Laura to the time I met you.”

“And that’s precisely what I mean by greed,” she said. “Your wife had her own life and her own death. Then you make that death all about you. It’s not about you. Oh, you lost something precious, as did Valerie, as probably did lots of people I haven’t met. But you didn’t kill her. You have a life that was more than many people have. You have a daughter to raise and a company to run.”

“And you’re afraid that I might try to run you, too.”

“‘Might’ isn’t the word I would use to describe it. ‘Afraid’ isn’t either.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re sounding damned afraid.”

“Yeah, but I’d say that I’m certain that you would try to run it. And you’re so determined. When you try to run it, you would run it.”

“When you draw a line, I try to respect it. Couldn’t we do that?”

“I don’t have the energy to protect my boundaries all the time,” she said. “It’s a strain now. I keep asking myself that if you try to own the latest in a string of mistresses, then what would you do to a wife?”

“Well, in self defense, I didn’t try to own the latest in a string of mistresses. Is that what you thought you were?”

“Yeah, until tonight.”

“Well,” Eric said. “That was never the way I thought about you. It was never even factually accurate. So, while I might be too possessive towards you for you to stand, I wouldn’t be more possessive if we were married.”

“You’d have more chances, especially if I move in after the residency is over.”

“Well, that’s true. In another defense, I needed to send someone to pick you up. Instead of sending a file clerk whose working day was over, I sent a building guard who was on the clock. Well, DSI building guards are armed. He didn’t draw his weapon, did he?”

“Heavens, no,” she said. “I just felt a little odd. You don’t keep guns in your house, do you?”

“With Sparky around? Do you know how many kids shoot themselves with guns they find?”

“You’re talking to a pediatrician, dear. It’s a serious problem, and we raise the issue with parents. You’re not going to report my conversations about Valerie to Dr. Kleinfeld, are you?”

“No!” he said. “Certainly not the ones we have in bed. Is there something which would bother him? He asked me the question about guns.”

“And well he should. It’s just that I’m not her ped, and some doctors, not Dr. Kleinfeld especially, worry about residents’ poaching.”

“My lips are sealed. Talking about sealing things, I said that I would honor boundary lines drawn exploit enough. Wearing a nightgown isn’t explicit enough. Is that your shy hint that you don’t want sex tonight?”

“Well, it wasn’t at first,” she said. “It was my not-so-shy statement that I wanted a serious discussion first. Now, however, I have a great deal to think about, and an alarm that will ring much too soon. I really think that we shouldn’t.”

“Does that extend to cuddling? Because, I’ll give you fair warning, one boundary I will not honor is any rule against sleeping in the same bed but not hugging you. It’s hard enough to keep my hands off you when I’m awake. On the other hand, there are beds in the guest bedrooms, and clock radios, too. I could sleep in one of them.”

“Eric, you’re sweet. This is your bed. Anyway, I think I’d like a cuddle.” She thought she needed a cuddle. She loved this guy, and she had just turned down a life with him. They got into the spoon. It was the first time she had slept in a nightie in this house.

And, what with the delicate temperature balance that Eric maintained, the winter-weight nightie, and Eric’s style of cuddling which kept her more than half surrounded, she found the nightie nearly soaked with sweat when the alarm went off. She had another in the closet, and she dropped this one into the hamper as she grabbed a robe and went into the bathroom.

For breakfast, Mrs. Grant served her one egg and one slice of bacon with the pancakes. She had apparently read her comments on the menus.

“Look, call me tonight,” Eric said in the car. “You know how I’m loaded between 7:30 and 8:00. If you can’t stay up past eight, try calling around seven. Okay?”

“Sure.” He drove her almost all the rest of the way to the hospital entrance in silence.

“Start deciding now,” he said as they got close, “whether I’m going to get a kiss.” Well, put that way, he was going to get a kiss. She’d got a cuddle when she had needed one. It was a sweet kiss, even if they kept their mouths closed. She got to the floor several minutes before six, and had a cup of coffee before she was officially on duty.

When she got to Delilah on her rounds, she told her that the plush frog was hers to take home when she went home. She was thinking “if Delilah ever goes home” to herself, but you don’t say that to a small child.

When her day was finished and she had had supper, she went back to her room and prepared for bed. She took the cell to bed with her and called Eric.

Eric was playing Legos with Sparky when Diane’s ring tone sounded.

“Excuse me, Sparky.” he said. “I’m going to go into my room and talk privately on the phone for a while.”

“I’m going into a place I can talk privately,” he said into the phone while walking. “Tell me anything you want while I get to where I can talk.” He kept the cell to his left ear while he unlocked the bedroom door.

“I told Delilah,” Diane said, “the girl who loved the plush frog, that you said she could take it home. She was thrilled. Now, if only she can go home.”

“That bad? Don’t express it that way, though. In certain Christian circles, ‘going home’ is going home to heaven, what a doctor would call dying.”

“And others don’t call it dying?”

“Lot’s of people call it by euphemisms,” he said. “I nearly fainted the first time Madeleine talked about ‘putting Val down.’ She meant laying her down in her bed. Anyway, I’m in our room, now, and I can talk freely.”

“Then do. I made the call but you requested it.”

“Okay. The first question is what do we have? I had, until last night, one relationship, and you had another. Well, you learned that you’re not the latest of my long string of affairs, and I got my marriage proposal rejected.”