Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty Page B

seemed I had a new voice to go with it, a lower, more detached sort of voice, which was the very opposite of what I felt in the dead center of my heart. It was terror I felt. Because he’d stolen my sense of our past, and I had nothing to replace it with yet.
    I got all their names. Besides Anita there was Lisa, the same Lisa again a year later, Savannah, and Lily.
    I sat and wrote the names down on a yellow tablet. I wrote them in a list, while Jude sat and rubbed his eyes. “Oh,” he said, “Patty, I forgot Patty. She was manic-depressive.”
    â€œNo, Jude, not yet, I don’t want the stories yet. Just the names.”
    â€œIf you count one-nighters there was also Rhonda Jean.”
    â€œRhonda Jean,” I murmured, writing it down. “Rhonda Jean! Was she a country-and-western singer, Jude? Was that the year you were always listening to Tanya Tucker?” I held the list up so he could see. “Does that look like all of them?”
    He nodded. “You’re stooping pretty low with this.”
    â€œJust meeting you on your own ground, Jude.”
    â€œCertainly. But it’s ground well beneath you. You’ll probably leave me, too, and that’s understandable.”
    â€œIs that your hope? That I’ll leave you?”
    â€œNo, no, of course not.” He yawned, and I thought tears filled his eyes. He looked down at his own hands.
    I was not ready to baby him. I took it girl by girl. I made columns for the following categories: duration of affair, age, hair color, height, weight, breast size, intelligence, family background, hobbies. This was beneath me, embarrassing even at the time. I was driven by an old fury finally coming to life.
    The affairs had happened before Anita Defranz, most of them when Jude was in his thirties. Only Lily had been recent.
    â€œSo we can start there,” I said. “We can start with Lily. You tell me the story, and I’ll listen up.”
    I spoke with calm authority. I spoke in unconscious imitation of Berna.
    â€œLily is nobody you’d ever want to meet,” he said.
    â€œBut I need the story, Jude.”
    â€œIt will mortify me to tell you.”
    â€œSo be it.”
    â€œShe was in her twenties, she called herself a poet, I met her at Reed Carone’s house, he was her professor at the time, she wore a beaded top, she was nice enough, in the summer she worked with deaf children, she was a girl , can we stop now?”
    â€œJude, it’s interesting to me.”
    â€œIt was physical attraction, that’s all. The most elemental kind. I’m sorry. We’d go to her crummy apartment. She was a slob, and I had to endure the presence of her roommate who called me the pig. Finally the roommate said the pig could no longer enter the sty, so it was a Howard Johnson’s hotel. We went there weekly for seven months. Then she fell for a young buck from Cuba, introduced me to him so I’d get the picture of how far up in the world she was moving. I was relieved. And after that I’ve been faithful, and will be until I die.”
    â€œFaithful.”
    â€œI certainly love you. Nobody else.”
    â€œNice words, Jude, but who are we? I want to hate you. But then, that would be like hating my life. I don’t want to do that. Do I?”
    My eyes stung with tears. My life, echoed in my brain, and I saw myself as a little girl running down a road in Indiana, the first time I’d ever felt that sense of my life! I’d been stung by a bee. I remembered my father in the doorway of the kitchen, scooping me up. I cried, not from the bee sting but because I knew I had a life, and was alone living it.
    â€œSo what did Lily look like?” I said. “Like Anita Defranz?”
    â€œMore or less.”
    â€œI’d like to hate you, Jude. For all those nights you fell asleep beside me, so exhausted, so spent. You wouldn’t even talk to me! I’d like to kick you, and slap you.