I was silent. Totally dumbfounded.
"And you know, Claire," he continued solemnly, "you just don't magic- ally wake up one morning and know how to be an adult. You don't know overnight how to pay bills. You work at it. You work at being responsible."
"I know how to pay bills," I protested. "I'm not a total moron, you know."
"So how come it was me who had to take care of that end of things?" he asked primly.
"James"--my head whirled as I searched for ways to defend myself--"I did try to help."
I distinctly remembered a time when I had sat with James
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as he self-importantly flicked through check stubs and ATM receipts and tap-tap-tapped with a calculator. I offered to help him that day. And he told me with a suggestive twinkle in his eye that he would stick to what he was good at and that I should stick to what I was good at. And then, if I remember correctly, and I'm sure I do, we had sex on the desk. In fact, the bank statements and the Visa bills for July 1991 still bear certain rather interesting imprints. But I couldn't find the nerve to remind him of that.
"I really did offer to help," I protested again. "But you wouldn't let me. You said that you'd be much better at it because you had a head for figures."
"And you just accepted that?" he asked nastily, shaking his head slightly as if he could hardly believe how crass and stupid I'd been.
"Well...yes, I suppose," I said, feeling foolish.
He was right. I had let him worry about threatening letters and discon- nection notices and all that. But I'd really thought he wanted to do it. Not that there were ever any threatening letters or disconnection notices or the like. James was far too organized to allow that to happen. I thought he liked being in control. That it would be less haphazard if only one of us was involved. How wrong I was.
I wished I could turn the clock back. If only I'd paid more attention to things like the date we paid our mortgage.
"I'm sorry," I said awkwardly. "I thought you wanted to do it. I would have done it if I'd known you didn't want to."
"Why would I want to do it?" he asked nastily. "What person in their right mind would enjoy being entirely responsible for the bills of a house- hold?"
"You're right, of course," I admitted.
"Well," said James, sounding a bit warmer, "I suppose it wasn't really your fault. You were always a bit thoughtless."
I swallowed back a retort. Now was not the time to antagonize him.
But I wasn't thoughtless. I know I wasn't.
James had other ideas, however.
"If only you hadn't been thoughtless when it really mattered," he mused. "Because the problems in our marriage
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weren't just about you not pulling your weight. It was about the way you made me feel."
"What do you mean?" I asked. I braced myself for another round of ac- cusations. Accusations that I didn't want to hear. But ones that I had to listen to if I wanted to make sense of why he left me.
"Well, it was always about you, wasn't it?" he said.
"How? In what way?" I asked, bewildered.
"I'd come home from work, after having had a terrible day. And you wouldn't talk to me about it. You'd just go on about your day, telling me stories and expecting me to laugh at them."
"But I would ask," I protested. "And you always told me it was too boring to explain. I only told you funny stories because I knew you'd had a horrible day and I wanted to cheer you up."
"Don't try to justify yourself," he said forcefully. "It was so obvious that you never wanted to hear anything unpleasant. All you wanted were good times. You had no interest at all in hearing about anything unpleasant."
"James..." I said feebly.
What could I say?
His mind was so made up.
And I swear to you, this was all news to me. I had never suspected that he had felt this way. And I had no idea that I had behaved in such an insuf- ferable way. James wouldn't by any chance be interested in absolving himself of all guilt in this sorry fiasco, would he? James wouldn't, by some freak chance, be manipulating me in any way?
I had to find out.
"James," I said in a little voice, "I'm sorry to ask this, but you wouldn't be trying to avoid the blame for leaving me? You know, by blaming me and making it all my fault."
"Oh, for God's sake," snorted James. "That's exactly the kind of childish, selfish response I should have expected from you."
"Sorry," I whispered. "I shouldn't even have asked."
Another silence.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I burst out. "We were so close. It was so beautiful."
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"We weren't so close and it wasn't so beautiful," he said bluntly.
"It was. We were," I protested.
He's taken enough away from me, I thought. He's not going to take my memories.
"Claire, if it was that beautiful, why did I leave you?" he asked quietly.
And, really, what could I say? He was so right.
But, hold on. He was off again. More accusations. His grievance was an unstoppable force.
"Claire, you were absolutely impossible. I had to keep so much from you. I had to carry so much worry on my own because I felt that you couldn't cope."
"Why didn't you try me?" I asked sadly.
He didn't even bother to answer.
"You were such a bloody handful. I'd come home from work, exhausted, and you'd have decided on the spur of the moment to have a dinner party for eight people and I'd have to run around like a crazy person, buying beer and uncorking wine and whipping cream."
"James, that only happened once. And it was for six people, not eight. And it was for your friends who came down from Aberdeen. It was sup- posed to be a surprise for you. I was the one who whipped the cream."
"Look, I'm not going to get into specifics," he said testily. "Doubtless you can try to justify anything I say to you, but you were still in the wrong."
"I can try to justify anything I did because I feel that the things I did were right," I thought confusedly to myself. But I didn't say anything.
"I thought you liked me being spontaneous," I said timidly. "I thought you even encouraged it."