“You aren’t in touch?”
“No.”
“But you still think about him.” A statement, not a question.
“Not very often,” I tell Win. “Not until you told me about Thane.”
She smiles. “Well, well, well. Methinks the doula doth protest too much.”
“I’m happily married,” I remind her.
“So am I.” She starts to paint again. “So…why did it end?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, right,” Win says. “You could probably tell me in excruciating detail the last conversation you two had.” She dips her brush into the blue, and then into the red, and makes a small purple heart on her palette.A medal for courage.
“Why did you wait so long to find Thane, if you never stopped loving him?”
“Because I also never stopped loving Felix,” Win says simply. “And women don’t get to have midlife crises where they run off to find themselves.”
I consider this—how many husbands have walked out in pursuit of some elusive happiness. Men leave their wives and children behind every day, and no one is shocked. It’s as if that Y chromosome they hold entitles them to self-discovery, to reinvention.
Was that how Brian felt?I wonder.With Gita?It makes me feel unsteady. Brian has always been home base, my anchor, the knight who rescued me. To think of him faltering is to imagine the earth veering from orbit, the seasons reversing. What if he, like me, made the assumption that we were forever—but couldn’t help his thoughts from straying to someone else. If love is, as Win said, just chance, then the only way to feel secure is to never pick up the die again after that first roll.
Brian was my second roll.
Felix comes back with buttermilk, and soon the house is filled with the scent of baking. He brings us a plate, biscuits still steaming, honey on the side. Win eats two, and after Felix goes to wash the dishes, she picks up the thread of the conversation. “It’s okay, you know.”
“What is?”
“To admit that you think about it. Where you might be now, and with whom. Whatif. It’s not being unfaithful. It’s not even saying that you wouldn’t make the same choice, if you had to do it over again. It’s just…”
I meet her gaze. “Part of life,” I finish.
“Part of life,” Win repeats.
She taps her fingertip against the center of the canvas. “Acrylics dry fast,” she says, satisfied, and turns the painting toward me.
Her portrait of death lives in shadows. It’s midnight blue and dusky violet and violent black, but if you stare at it hard enough, you can make out two faint profiles, a breath apart, unable to complete that kiss for eternity.
“Now,” she explains, “we take it off the stretcher bars.” She reaches for a tool in her fishing box, a staple remover, and starts to pluck out the fastenings that hold the canvas stretched tight. One end begins to curl like an eyelash.
“You’re going to ruin the painting!”
“What painting?” Win replies calmly. By now the canvas is a coil of color, a scroll of pigment. She turns it over. “All I see is a piece of stationery for a letter I need to write.”
—
ONLINE,IFINDall sorts of Thane Bernards who are not the right one. There’s the man who runs a crab-fishing boat in Alaska. The public works director in Johannesburg. The hedge fund employee who is selling his house on the Margaret River in Australia. There are three Thane Bernards who have gotten married in the past year who are too young to be Win’s Thane, and four that have died, but who are too old to be him.
I find one promising lead—a man of the right age who teaches figure drawing at a university in Belgium, and I pull a photo of him up on my phone. Win, in bed, actually sits up a little as I am doing this. She straightens her robe and dabs a little bit of Blistex on her chapped lips before she takes the screen from me, as if he might be able to see her.
It breaks my heart.
“Wait,” she says. “What do you know about him?”
I know that he has been employed for ten years at this university. I know that he belongs to a rowing club and has competed as part of a master’s division four with coxswain. I know that he wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper about a town ordinance that would affect bike lanes.
