Her Best Friend

The second one. This is where sad quits and pattern starts, and I can't pretend not to see it, not with it going down in my own hand.

Lisa was Emily's best friend.

I've been dreading this page, because there's no gold-light way to write it. A man doesn't fall for his wife's best friend by accident. There's no accident anywhere in it. It is the most on-purpose thing a fella can do while telling himself the entire time that it's a thing happening to him. Helpless, swept up, what could I do. That was my specialty, matter of fact: doing the deliberate thing and feeling it as weather. I'd get to a place I had no business being and look around all surprised, like the wind had set me down there and I was just the fella who happened to be standing where it dropped me.

You'd have noticed Lisa in any room. She came in loud and she left loud and she filled up everything in between. Big laugh, the kind that made strangers at the next table look over and want in on it. She smoked and she swore and she'd say the thing everybody else was only thinking, and she'd say it with a grin so you couldn't hold it against her. Trouble, plain trouble, the wattage kind, and I want to be honest that I knew it the first night I met her, standing in my own kitchen with my own wife's arm through hers. I knew it the way you know a stove's hot before you touch it. And I touched it anyway, slow, over a long time, telling myself the whole way that I was just warming my hands.

She was over at the apartment all the time. That was the setup, and it was Emily's own goodness that built it. Lisa's marriage was coming apart at the seams, ugly, the kind that has a woman crying in a parked car before she can make herself go in her own front door. And Emily, being Emily, being good, took her in of an evening. Poured the wine. Cleared the supper dishes and let Lisa cry it out at our little kitchen table under that bad yellow light, the one over the sink that hummed. And there I'd be, off to the side in the front room, playing like I was reading the paper, the same page for an hour. Emily would get up to put the coffee on or see to one of the kids down the hall, and it'd be just Lisa and me for a minute, and I'd lower the paper an inch and catch her eye over the top of it.

And here's the whole miserable truth of me. It wasn't the wanting that got me. I could've stood the wanting; a married man learns to stand the wanting or he doesn't stay married a week. It was that when Lisa looked at me, the floor didn't open. The heart didn't run. For a few minutes at a stretch, sitting in the current of a woman who was pure trouble, I got the one thing the little pill would later give me in a cleaner form. I got quiet. The roar went down to nothing. That cold hand lifted off my chest. I could breathe, and the breathing felt like getting away with something, and maybe it was.

That's the part I've never told a living soul, because it doesn't flatter anybody. Folks think a man strays because he's greedy, or bored, or can't keep his belt buckled. And sure, all that's in there someplace. But under it, for me, was a fella who'd found that a certain kind of dangerous woman could reach in and shut off the alarm that ran night and day behind my ribs. She didn't even know she was doing it. She thought I was a good listener. I was just a drowning man who'd found, for once, a place he could stand up and the water only came to his chin.

There was a night. Emily'd gone to bed early, one of the babies teething, and Lisa'd stayed too long the way she did, and we were at the kitchen table with the wine about gone, keeping our voices down out of respect for the very woman we were about to wrong. She was telling me something sad about her husband, and somewhere in the middle of it her hand came across the table and landed on top of mine, just for the weight of it, just for a person to touch a person. And I looked at that hand and I felt the whole house go still. Not guilty still. Quiet still. The best quiet I'd had in months. And instead of it scaring me the way a thing that wrong ought to scare a man, it felt like relief, like sinking into a hot bath, and that right there should have told me everything I needed to know about the shape of my whole life to come. I didn't move my hand. That was the choice. Not what came after, in the weeks and the months. The choice was a man leaving his hand on the table.

I burned it all down after that, slow and then quick. Emily found out the way they always find out, and the friendship went up like it was soaked in something, twenty years of it between those two women gone in a season, and that's the part I'd give the most back if giving-back were on the table. I broke my own marriage; that at least was mine to break. But I broke theirs too, Emily's and Lisa's, a thing that had nothing to do with me and never should've, and I did it just by needing the quiet bad enough to reach through it.

I married Lisa when the dust settled, which is the part that ought to tell you everything. You don't burn a house to the studs and then move into the ashes unless you need, real bad, to prove the fire was worth something. So we married, the two of us, and stood in the wreckage we'd made and called it a wedding, and it lasted about as long as a thing built out of that particular lumber lasts. Two people who got together by betraying somebody good cannot, it turns out, ever quite turn their backs on each other in the kitchen. She'd watch me over her coffee. I'd watch her. We'd each seen, up close, in full daylight, exactly what the other one was capable of, on account of we'd done it together, holding hands. And the quiet I'd married her for was already leaking back out by then, because you can't get it from a woman you're afraid of, and I'd taught us both to be afraid.

So is Lisa my loose wire? I keep the same question at the top of every page now; it's the whole reason for the notebook. And no. Same as Emily, I can feel the part's still good even before the meter touches it. Lisa's long gone, off living her own loud life somewhere, and she hasn't thought about me in years, and a person has to still be thinking about you to want you dead. Whatever came for me in that tub had been thinking about me recently, close up, at the breakfast table. Lisa's alibi is indifference, and it's airtight, and honest, I'm glad for her that it is.

But she is where the case gets its shape. Because Emily I could halfway explain away: young, dumb, grew apart, these things happen to good people all the time. Lisa I can't explain away at all. Lisa was a choice, made with my eyes wide open, that hurt two good women at once and got me exactly nothing but a second marriage built to fail and a few months of borrowed quiet I couldn't hold onto. And when a man does a thing like that once, you can call it a low moment, a fall, and forgive him and move on. When he does it and then keeps right on doing it, wife after wife, chasing that same three minutes of quiet down every wrong hallway there is,

well. Then you've stopped reading a sad story and started reading a diagnosis. And I'd know. I've been misdiagnosed my whole life. It's about time somebody, even if it's only me, with a pencil, in the dark, wrote down what was actually wrong.

Number three is where it turns tragic. Her name was Maggie, and Maggie didn't get out the far side of me the way the others did.

Maggie I have to tell you about gentle.