“Tough as a nut,” said Cleo, knocking gently on his skull.
Frank crawled forward to collapse onto the beanbag and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t fight anymore.”
“You’re sorry that you can’t keep fighting, or for saying I’m the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
“Both,” he mumbled without opening his eyes.
Cleo sat down on the floor and leaned on the beanbag next to him. They lay in silence, listening to the crackle and hiss of the fire as the room descended into a deeper darkness. One by one the tea lights burned down and snuffed themselves out, leaving only the pale-yellow glow of the tapered candles. Eventually, Cleo spoke.
“Do you remember when we were coming back from France, there was that couple in front of us at the airport?”
Frank opened one eye and peered at her. “From our honeymoon? Did we know them?”
“No. They were just this regular couple with two little kids, a baby and a toddler. They were going through security, trying to dismantle the pram and get their shoes off and remove the computer, all that shit, you know, and the baby was crying and the little girl was having a temper tantrum, screaming to be picked up.”
Frank shook his head.
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, in the middle of all that chaos, the wife looked at the husband, they caught each other’s eyes over the heads of the bawling kids, and they started laughing.”
“Why?” asked Frank.
“Because it was such a nightmare, you know? They had to laugh.” Cleo thought about this for a moment. “Actually, that’s the point. They didn’t have to. My parents would have been screaming at each other.”
“My dad wouldn’t have been there to be screamed at.”
Cleo nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “But these two, they were in it together. They were laughing.”
“And you remember that,” said Frank.
“I do.”
“Because you want that?”
“Because I realized that that’s what life requires. When it gets messy and difficult and unglamorous. That kind of partnership.”
“And we don’t have that.”
It could have been a question, but it was a statement.
“I don’t think I can have that with anyone.” She smiled ruefully to herself, remembering what Quentin had said to her the day she hurt herself. “I’m not ‘those kind of people.’”
“Who told you that?”
Cleo shook her head. “I thought we could be happy again,” she said.
“I know.”
“I thought we could forgive each other.”
“I have nothing to forgive you for.”
Cleo looked into her lap. “You don’t know everything I’ve done.”
Frank sat up to search her face. She turned it away from him, so it was no longer illuminated by the fire.
“What have you done? You can tell me, Cleo.”
“I’m so ashamed,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
She bowed her head. She was thinking of Anders on top of her. Anders’s hands on her body, his cock in her mouth. How she’d begged for him to stay as he rushed out the door. The days after Frank returned from South Africa, sneaking calls to him that he never answered. The humiliating realization that he never would.
“Sometimes the shame,” she said. “I can’t bear—” She clutched her throat as if choking. “Have you ever felt like that?”
“I’m half Jewish and half Catholic, what do you think?”
Frank tried to smile at her, but he could see when she turned her face back to him that she was tormented.
“But what could you have to be ashamed of?” he asked gently.
Cleo wanted to tell him about Anders. She wanted to reveal herself exactly as she was, flawed as she was, and be forgiven. But the price of that absolution would be more pain for Frank. Even if he could bear it, she was not sure she could bear causing it.
In that moment, Frank felt intuitively that whatever Cleo couldn’t tell him was something he didn’t want to hear. It had to be some humiliating infidelity, what else? Another blow to his manhood. And, in spite of himself, he hoped she would spare him.
Very subtly, he shifted his body away from hers, turning back toward the fire. Cleo looked at his glowing profile, and she knew he did not want to know. She stayed silent, and they both sat in the absence of her confession, each understanding the other, each entirely alone in that understanding. Finally, he reached over and took her hand.