Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Coralie Olivier

Once Thomas left the children with his parents, he felt ready to tackle the state of the house. The kids had left their toys all over the living room but he could not bring himself to care. His priorities were the dining room and the kitchen. 

Helen had made a mess during dinner, dropping bits of gooey pasta on the way to her mouth. Sam’s high chair was painted with broccoli puree. In the kitchen, fake cheese was congealed at the bottom of a pot. Thomas had made boxed mac and cheese. He wasn’t a great cook, and he hadn’t had the mental fortitude to make anything else. He hadn’t thought to order pizza until he was straining the pasta. He couldn’t bring himself to care what his wife would think once she learned that he had fed their daughter powdered cheese. 

Thomas started by cleaning the table. He had always been bad at multitasking. He worked better when he was given one task at a time. Lucy was good at figuring out where he was most useful in the house. Right now, he decided it was the table. Once he had scrubbed the goo off of the old wooden table—his parents had given them this rectangular, lacquered table as a wedding gift—he turned his attention to the dishes. 

He turned on the water and waited until it was steaming hot to start washing. Every time the boiling water brushed his skin, it distracted him from his thoughts. He stopped wincing after the first few burns. That stupid cheese was holding on hard. He scratched harder and harder. The metal pot, heated by the water, became unbearable to hold. Still, Thomas would not stop until it was clean. 

The pot slipped out of his grasp and clattered to the bottom of the sink. Thomas let out a curse between his clenched teeth. His eyes landed on the picture frame that rested on the window sill above the sink. It was Lucy and him, back in 1981, during their camping trip to Yosemite before Lucy’s last year of college. Before their wedding. 

Thomas grabbed the frame and threw it. It crashed onto the floor, bounced twice, and slid to a corner of the room, out of sight. Somehow, Thomas had thought that the crash would siphon all the anger and sorrow out of him. All it did was fuel his anger. He turned off the faucet and leaned against the sink. The last tendrils of warmth from the hot water lingered on his face. 

A knock at the door pulled him out of his ruminations. He knew who it was. Lucy had called ahead. That was why he had left the children at his parents’ for the night. He glanced at the clock on the wall. He hadn’t expected her to arrive so soon, but then again, it was Lucy. She was always early. 

Thomas brushed the last few drops of water off of his hands and threw the dishrag in a corner. He ignored the broken frame on the floor and traversed across the dark living room to the front door.

That afternoon, Thomas had come back from work to find his wife crying on the couch. Lucy was like him; she didn’t cry often. To find her in such a state had worried him beyond measure. Lucy had not stopped crying when she spoke to him, but she had spoken without hesitation. She had told him that he deserved the truth, that he was her best friend, and she loved him, but he wasn’t the only one. She was tired of lying to him. She had been having an affair with her childhood best friend, Debbie. 

When Thomas opened the front door, Lucy was standing on the other side, hugging herself. The strangest mixture of emotion passed over him. Relief that she was back. Worry to see her looking so anxious. Love, always. But also hurt, anger, and betrayal for what she had done to him. He thought about not letting her in, and slamming the door shut instead. But she looked at him with those brown eyes that he had always loved, and he knew guilt was eating away at her. Without a word, he stepped aside and let her in. 

They moved like two lost souls on familiar grounds. Lucy removed her jacket and left her handbag where she always did. Then, she took off her shoes. Thomas stood with his hand on the door handle, watching her. Normally, they would be talking about their day. He would have leaned down to kiss her cheek. She would have been asking about the children. Now the only thing Thomas could hear was the hum of the lightbulb over the dining table. 

Lucy took one look at the living room and, once she saw the mess that Thomas had not had the courage to clean up, she decided to move away from it too. Thomas followed her like a shadow. His initial surge of emotion had dissipated. Now he felt numb with anger, like the fire in his chest was burning his nerves until he couldn’t feel anything at all. 

Lucy sat down on one side of the table—her side, it had been hers for six years now—and she crossed her arms over the wood. After a moment, Thomas decided he should sit down too. He was barely in the chair when his legs started bouncing anxiously. 

They stared at each other. Thomas saw his wife, his rock, the one constant steadiness he’d had since they were sixteen. Lucy never quite seemed to change. She always kept her chocolate brown hair the same shoulder-length. She still wore the same kind of polo shirts and blouses, and only applied a light touch of makeup. Right now, she looked worried, with her eyebrows furrowed just the way Thomas knew. What did she see when she looked at him, he wondered. His dirty blond hair was shorter than when they had started dating. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. Did she still see that boy who struggled with math and had asked her for help? Or did she see some idiot so naïve and gullible that he was the perfect victim to trick? 

“Are the kids in bed?” she asked, breaking the icy silence. 

“I left them with my parents for the night. I told them I got us last minute theater tickets.” 

Lucy scoffed. She tried to contain the sound, but he knew her too well. She was scoffing because she thought it was a stupid excuse that his parents had not fallen for. Well, Thomas wouldn’t have had to come up with an excuse if she hadn’t cheated on him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice broken with guilt. “I…” 

“Can I start?” he cut her off. 

Questions had been boiling in his mind since Lucy had left that afternoon—Thomas had told her he needed some time alone to think so she had taken her car keys and gone. Part of him needed to know all the details, the ins and outs. Part of him wished he would just shut all the questions down, take Lucy into his arms, turn a blind eye to it all and go back to the times before, when their marriage was perfect. 

Lucy nodded. Thomas didn’t know exactly where to start. His thoughts were swept around like hay in a storm. He grasped for the first question that he could. 

“Are you a lesbian?” 

Lucy pursed her lips. Even saying the word had made him feel dirty. Lucy couldn’t be a lesbian, Thomas thought, she had been valedictorian in high school. She’d kept a perfect grade point average throughout college. She could have gone on to law school, if Thomas hadn’t proposed to her before that. Before Helen was born, she’d been a history teacher. She was uptight and serious. It wouldn’t make any sense. Nonetheless, Lucy nodded. 

“I guess I am.” 

Thomas felt something in his mind shatter. It was like a scalpel had sliced his brain in half. He frowned. He couldn’t believe it. 

“How long have you known? Did you know before we got married?” 

This time, Lucy shook her head. 

“I promise you, if I had known back then, I would have told you, or I would have… All this pain could have been avoided if I’d known sooner.” 

“So when did you figure it out?” 

“About two years ago… And even then, I was in denial for a long time afterward.” 

Thomas had not realized his teeth were digging into his tongue. He relaxed his jaw, and his tongue felt bruised. Two years ago was around the time Sam was conceived. 

“I thought maybe you suspected it,” Lucy confessed to him. 

Thomas’ confusion only grew. 

“Why? How could I have suspected it?” 

Lucy shrugged.

“I mean, you know, how we almost never… had sex.” 

Thomas’s leg stilled under the table. He felt like an ice statue. He hated talking about this, or even thinking about this. It made him feel that there was something wrong in their marriage, when there really wasn’t. They loved each, they almost never got into arguments, they were the best of friends. He loved her. Sex was just… well, it was a thing he wished they did more often, but he knew Lucy always felt uncomfortable, and he didn’t want to pressure her into it. They’d had two kids, and he didn’t need any more. 

Fury, like a sudden volcanic explosion, scorched his lungs. Sex was destroying his perfect life. 

“Is that all this was with Debbie? You just wanted sex?” 

He wasn’t sure what answer he expected, nor which answer he wanted. He was fighting his instinct to jump away from the table so he wouldn’t have to hear an answer at all. 

“It…” 

Lucy sighed. She was wringing her hands over the table, a surefire sign of her anxiety. “I thought it was a mistake, the first time it happened. We were at the cabin, and…” Thomas shook his head. 

“Spare me the details.” 

Lucy and Debbie had taken to renting a small cabin near Lake Augustus on the weekends. He’d never thought much about it, only that he was happy that Lucy was getting some time away from the kids with her childhood friend. Now the thought made him grind his teeth. 

“We were drunk and so I thought it was just a mistake. And I tried so hard not to think about it again, but I couldn’t. It’s like I told you this afternoon. You’re my best friend, the father of my children, and I love you. But I love Debbie too. I never understood that part of me, and so I could never give it to you. It was for her.” 

Each of Lucy’s words hurt like a hatchet to the chest. Thomas could feel his throat closing off. He heard it in his voice when he pushed his next question off his tongue: 

“Couldn’t you have just pretended? We were perfect.” 

“I tried, but now that I know, I can’t go back. And I’m sorry, but even when we were at our best, we were never perfect.” 

Thomas couldn’t hear another word of it. He stood up from the table and rushed to the kitchen before any sobs could escape his lips. He grabbed onto the sink with one hand and

clenched his fist until his knuckles were white. Hot tears ran down his face as he did his best to contain his sobs. They all clustered together into a hiccup. 

He heard Lucy moving, and he knew she would be coming over, but he was cowering in the corner of the kitchen, and there was nowhere else to hide. When Lucy entered the kitchen, he kept his back to her. He heard her faint footsteps stop on the tiled floor. She picked up the picture frame off the floor, and he heard her collect all the little pieces of glass. She set them aside on the counter, then spoke: 

“I’ve been there. I tried to convince myself that we were perfect. We’ve always worked effortlessly, haven’t we? But don’t you want more?” 

Thomas whirled around. He brushed the tears out of his eyes as he glared down at his wife. “What more would I need?” he asked. 

“I don’t know. Someone who could love all of you unconditionally? I never did, even though I tried as hard as I could. Don’t you think that you deserve that much?” 

Thomas was shocked by the question. In his mind, there had only ever been Lucy. Ever since they started dating in high school, his father always told him that Lucy was the perfect girl, the kind you married and lived happily ever after with. It had never occurred to him that there could be someone else, someone better suited for him. 

Slowly, Lucy closed in the distance between them. At first when she wrapped her arms around him, he flinched into her touch. 

“I’m sorry,” she told him again. 

That seemed like all Thomas needed to break down into her arms. He buried his face into her shoulder and took in the familiar scent of her. Her perfume and conditioner had been the same for years. This was the smell he most associated with home. Was there a future where someone else’s smell would become that home for him? The thought terrified him, and he clung to her even harder. 

Lucy rubbed his back until he had stopped sobbing. As Thomas pulled away, he realized that he had never cried in her arms like that before. 

“I’ll make us some tea, alright?” she offered. 

Thomas nodded. While he moved away to give her space, he spotted the fragmented frame beside the toaster. The glass had broken on impact into a spider web. The wood of the frame was snapped where the glue once held it together. Thomas looked at it for a moment. He’d thought it was a good frame with nails holding it together, but it had just been a cheap frame glued together. The picture inside was still good though. He took it with him to the dining room table.

When Lucy joined him, she was carrying two mugs of chamomile tea. They were their mugs, his Snoopy mug and her bear paw mug. She set his drink in front of him. Instead of taking her seat across from him, she drew one of the side chairs closer and sat beside him. She leaned toward him to look at the picture in front of him. 

“Things were so much easier back then,” she said wistfully. 

Thomas frowned. He had thought those college years were the most difficult for them, especially after he’d quit and returned to their small hometown to work for the mayor’s office. He’d missed her constantly, even though they spoke on the phone every day. He’d always thought that everything had become easy once they got married. He never knew Lucy saw it the opposite way. 

“Does she love you too? Debbie?” 

He was less apprehensive of the answer. Somehow he felt like he knew it already. He just needed Lucy to confirm it for him. Lucy tried to hold back a smile. 

“She told me she’s been in love with me for almost as long as you have been.” 

Thomas expected more anger. Instead, he felt peaceful. He loved Lucy, still, and he wanted her to be happy. If Debbie could make her happy, then he was at peace. 

“We still have a lot to talk about,” he told her. 

Lucy nodded. 

“Of course. This changes everything.” 

He moved his warm hand away from the mug and placed it on her hand. She flipped her hand to take his in hers. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. He knew Lucy wasn’t about to run away with Debbie and abandon him. He knew she cared too much for him and the kids. They would have to put it all down, all the rules and all the changes. Though it would take time for Thomas to forgive her, he knew he still wanted Lucy by his side. They were embarking on this new trip together. Thomas felt ready.