by Gwen Masters
(02/01/2006)

Sometimes it just happens -- no rhyme or reason and no stopping it. Desire is like the wind. It chooses where to blow, and how hard, and how sudden. There is nothing on earth a person can do to stop the wind once it sweeps them up.

The night was a little too hot and I was a little too lonely. Not good enough reasons, I suppose, but there you have it. Desire strikes in the oddest places and at the least opportune moments. There I was, dressed in a pretty gown and a thin layer of sweat, looking out the window at the last of summer struggling with the first of autumn under the harvest moon. The heat would succumb and become cooler, cool enough to force me to take those quilts down off the clothesline and lay them across the beds.

Those quilts moved gently in the breeze and I listened, hearing the sound of cotton and leaves and birds calling to one another. The occasional owl made its presence known and the shadows of her wings made designs across my porch. The crickets were sparser, mellowing from annoying to pleasant with the change of seasons. The sweet scent of the last moonflowers drifted from beside the porch, beckoning those that would give them new life for the next spring.

A bobcat cried and I shivered at the sudden flitter of fear. The night seemed to have a different edge, an acknowledgment of the full moon. My own body seemed filled with urgency. How long had it been? Only three nights since Andrew had left with a peck on the cheek and an impatience that cut me to the bone?

Each of those nights had felt like a season. The first was summer, life dawning in full glory and affirmation. The second felt like an autumn that seeped in and drained the flowers of all they had posed and postured about for so long.

And tonight felt like winter.

I hadn't seen Mark in almost two years. Two years, during which the most intimate of touches had been replayed only in the middle of the night when no one else could possibly know, when Andrew slept and I took to the open fields of memory, where I dressed in nothing but moonlight and remembered Mark's hands on me. The memories razored through my mind with the sharpness of a knife. But the pleasure was greater, and I moaned behind closed lips while Andrew slept beside me, oblivious to where his wife's mind had gone.

And in the mornings I had tried to be more present for him, tried to make love to him as he awoke with an intensity that would erase the images of Mark in the rain, of Mark between the sheets, of Mark's eyes as they grew darker and his hands clenched in my hair and his mouth fell open with a silent cry of pleasure. But always Andrew's too-gentle hands would become blurred with memory and before I knew it I would be lost again, desperately trying not to say a name, for I had no idea which one would come from my lips.

I didn't know where Mark spent his days, but he spent his nights in the bedroom of my mind.

Andrew and I had a normal marriage. Bills piled up, we argued over who should take out the trash in the ungodly hours of Tuesday morning, the car had to be repaired and we bought a dog. On our third anniversary, I had a miscarriage. Afterward, Andrew told a friend that we had a miscarriage and the fury that rose in me was so intense that I couldn't look at him for a week. We never discussed trying again and thank God for that, because my emotions were so raw that I would have said demeaning and unforgettable things that would have meant the only recourse was an attorney's office and more money than we could afford. And somehow we wound up with six years and our separate sides of a king-size bed.

Andrew never mentioned Mark. Not once. That part of my life, that man I had fallen in love with and watched grow away from me seemed to cease existing in Andrew's mind the day I took my vows. But a good wife could never tell her husband, even in the heat of the most hellish argument, that she closed her eyes not to savor the moment, but to pretend it was Mark's ring sliding onto her hand. Some things would kill bigger things than a marriage.

The absence of discussing Mark drove him farther into my heart and mind and maybe even my soul. It became so big that the presence drove Andrew out with little bursts of pain and occasional regret. Perhaps if he had simply sat in front of me one night when I was melancholy. Perhaps if he had looked into my eyes and said Tell me about Mark, tell me about the man you loved, Tell me about what it was like to lose him. Perhaps things would have been different.

But things were not different, and when Andrew had mentioned he was going to a training seminar two states away, I had suggested calmly that he take more than the required two days. Four, perhaps. Or maybe more. The look of understanding on his face cut deeper than sorrow would have, and it took all the strength in me to walk him out to his car. I watched him walk away and I knew it would only be a matter of time, months, perhaps even weeks, before we removed our wedding bands and took to our respective sides of the courtroom downtown.

It wasn't that I didn't love my husband. I did. But I never loved him with the passion I had reserved for another, and he knew this even if he pretended he didn't. That didn't bother either of us. For most of a marriage is based on pretending. One pretends that it's okay he has to work extra hours to pay for that car, and the other pretends it's okay that there is only one person at the dinner table most nights. Then the woman looks the other way while the secretary doesn't, and the man lies awake at night wondering if his wife even cares enough anymore to notice his cries for help. The truth is, deep down she's too busy worrying about herself to care. And so the deterioration begins even before the marriage does.

Mark came to me in the hours I slept, in the moments when my guard was down. So it was natural, almost expected, when the knock came at my door in the middle of the night.

How did he know I would be alone?

"I took a chance," he said as I opened the door.

"Jesus, Mark..."

"Is he here?"

I knew it might be a dream, it might be real, but whichever it was, it was all I wanted.

"Who?"

Mark stepped into the house and left the door open. The breeze was caught on his skin. His fingers were cool when he touched my heated face. The world tilted.

"Two years," he said.

"I have two days," I answered.

His jacket fell to the floor with a whisper of leather. His eyes were the same beautiful hazel they had always been, the same array of auburns and blues and greens that made up almost brown, but not quite. He smelled the same, the mixture of man and brass and clean cotton. And he felt the same when he pressed his body against mine.

"I watch him," he admitted. "I watch your house. I watch you at night, standing in the doorway. I see you in the backyard in the rain. I watch."

I nodded in acceptance, not knowing how it had happened, only knowing that it had.

"I think of you," I whispered as the straps of my gown disappeared from my shoulders. "I think of you in the middle of the night and I pray for the rain. I pray for it because it's the closest I can get to you."

His hands cupped the heaviness of my breasts. I closed my eyes.

Outside, the wind picked up; the quilts snapped on the line. A storm was coming. All the windows were open and the rain would come in, would ruin the wax on my hardwood floors.

I took Mark's hand and led him through the house. Past the couch where Andrew and I sat in silence. Past the kitchen table where we ate dinner separately. Past the hallway, and down that hallway was the nursery we had lovingly put together, now only a marking of a time when we were happy, when we had a future, and when hope was alive and kicking inside of me.

I had never felt that hope again. Until now.

I opened the screen door to the back porch and stepped into the autumn heat. I was naked and it felt glorious. The first drops of rain began their freefall and I fell with them, the thunder rumbling as Mark laid me down on the soft green grass. A quilt shimmied above us. The leaves whispered and the branches clacked.

"Two years," he said again.

"Hurry."

His hands were everywhere at once, the dream slowly becoming reality as he delved into all those places that I touched when I thought of him. He remembered. He remembered just the way to touch that place under my jaw. How much I liked the feel of his fingertips on my thighs. His breath on my belly, taunting.

Mark spread my thighs with his strong hands. I threw my hands above my head, let the rain cover me, felt the water coat my skin and run together like a tapestry of tangible emotion. My body was awakening from the years of slumber with every drop. I was alive, tingling, needing nothing more than that, that feeling of his hands on my thighs and his lips on all the right places and then his tongue making me cry out and clench handfuls of the sweet, wet grass.

"Beautiful," he whispered in praise, and I suddenly was.

His fingers delved into places any good woman would reserve for her husband. I was glad for the darkness that hid my eyes, hid the shame that warred with the desire I had no way to hide. Then Mark was above me and the memory stole my breath, made me whimper in need, took away all reason. He slipped the wedding band from my finger -- the slickness of the rain made it easy, just as easy as my own passion made it for him to slide as deep into my body as he had ever been, as deep as he could go.

I opened my eyes to the falling rain falling. I watched the drops fall from impossible heights and grow larger until they seemed to loom like the roundness of conscience, obliterating all else, then the breaking of those drops on my face, so much like tears. Mark moved within me and his eyes watched mine. His body was the same, the roughness of his thighs and the smoothness of his throat under my lips, the power in his arms and the gentle slide of us, together, fitting so perfectly that nothing else ever seemed as right, nothing at all...

"Mark," I cried, finally letting go for the first time in almost as long as I could remember, saying the name that came to mind, for I knew with absolute certainty which one it would be.

He didn't ask if it was safe. He didn't ask and I didn't care. So when he groaned and pressed deep and I felt the flooding of him within me, the only thought in my mind was that it was okay, whatever happened was fine and I couldn't imagine stopping him for anything in the world, even for that. The raindrops mated and mingled on our bodies and slid down to the ground. The soaking benediction of it echoed the river of freedom that poured from me, that found voice from lips that trembled on his skin.

"I have waited so long..."

"I have, too..."

"It was always you, always...why did you have to leave me..."

"It was a mistake. A mistake and I will change it, if only I have a chance..."

The whispers of two lovers were drowned out by the roar of the thunder and the flash of the lightning. The rain saturated the quilts on the line and poured from their tattered corners. The gutters flooded and added their pounding noise to the deluge. The water made its way through the open windows and left first spots, then puddles on the hardwood floors. The late season flowers in the windowsill drank their fill of the midnight tempest.

Inside the house, the grandfather clock chimed a lonesome note and the phone rang, a call coming in from two states away. A call from a man who sat on the edge of his lonely hotel bed and knew without really knowing, felt the questions form in his mind, felt the dismissal of them just as quickly. She was sleeping. She was in the shower. She was out late at night with her best friend, drinking a little too much and laughing at everyone else in the bar. She wasn't out in the backyard in the rain with the man he had always feared but never mentioned aloud, as if the absence of his name would make the ghost disappear.

No. She wasn't doing that. She was his wife and she wasn't doing that.

When Mark said we should go in, we should make love on the bed, I knew I would. I felt his wetness slipping out of me and mingling with the rain and I knew I wouldn't only make love with him on the bed but in the old nursery too. And on the couch where Andrew watched television rather than watching me, and maybe even on the kitchen table so I would have something to hold onto when Andrew came home and I sat there across from him and told him in my calmest voice that I wanted a divorce.

The rain ruined the floors and the phone stopped ringing. I felt the giving up with every long second of silence. I held onto Mark and for the first time I wished it were Andrew. For the first time I knew the bittersweet pain of getting, finally getting what I believed I deserved.

I was grateful for the rain that gave me refuge, hiding the tears that only I would ever know I had cried.

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