He said nothing. He sat on the couch with his arms folded and looked at me defiantly.
Jesus! It was like pulling teeth.
Right! I'd try again. No matter what happened I would stay calm. I would try not to kill him. I would try not to be angry. I would try not to hurt him the way that I wanted to. I would swallow my pride one more time. I would make it clear that I would forgive him for the affair. This was not easy, let me tell you.
Especially when, at the same time, I was trying to stand my ground and not be completely bullied by him.
I was trying to bear in mind that there was a fine line between being understanding and being a doormat, between standing up for oneself and being a crazed ax-woman.
"James," I said, miraculously managing to sound calm, "we really have to try and straighten this out. If I ask you questions, will you just answer me yes or no?"
"What kind of questions?" he asked suspiciously.
"Well, like did you lie to me when you told me that it was my fault that you left me?"
"You mean that you want to sit here and interrogate me?"
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he said, outraged. "You must be joking! Who the hell do you think you are? You're trying to make me out to be some kind of criminal!"
"James," I said. I was on the verge of tears of frustration. "I'm not! Really, I'm not. I'm just trying to get you to talk to me, to tell me what you really feel, what's really going on. I want you to be honest with me. Otherwise we won't have a future."
"I see," he said nastily, "so you want me to say something like `You're a wonderful person, Claire, and I don't know why I had an affair because you're so great.' Is that what you want to hear?"
"Yes," I thought.
"No..." I said weakly. "It's just--"
"You want me to take all the blame, is that it?" he said, raising his voice. "You want me to be the bad guy, the `man you and all your friends love to hate,' is that it? After all I've done for you? Is that what you want?" he ended on a shout, his face close to mine.
"But you are the bad guy," I said, bewildered. "You were the one who had the affair, not me."
"Oh Jesus!" he shouted, really shouted, this time. "You'll never stop harping about that, will you? Trying to make me feel guilty about it. Well, I don't feel guilty, right? I've been so good to you always. Everyone knows that. I am not the bad person here. You are!"
Silence followed. The room reverberated with it.
I sat very still. Feeling shell-shocked.
James exhaled hard, angrily, and started pacing the room. He didn't look at me.
I realized that I was shaking.
Am I a bad person? I asked myself.
Am I really?
A little voice in my head told me not to be ridiculous. This had gone far enough. I had to hold on to what I knew to be the truth. James was the one who had had an affair. Not me. I didn't force James to have an affair. He chose to do it. James told me that I was almost impossible to love, but he told everyone else that he loved me very much.
James wanted me to take the blame for his affair.
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As I sat there trembling, my head swimming, something became very clear to me. Something that I hadn't seen before now. James did not want to admit, would not admit, that he was in the wrong. He could not accept that he had had an affair. Well, obviously, he knew he'd had one--I'd say the memory of Denise wasn't that easy to erase--but he didn't want it to be his fault.
A little time passed. Tension hung heavy in the air.
From James's reaction I realized that he was not going to admit, not in a million years, that he had lied to me and told the truth to George.
And I happened to believe George. I was sure he wasn't making anything up--quite apart from anything else, he was too stupid! And I was sure that James didn't think for one moment that what he said to George would get back to me. He thought he was perfectly safe in telling George that he loved me very much while telling me that it was hard for him to love someone as difficult and selfish as me. I knew James hated to feel insecure about anything. He hated to be vulnerable, even about his work, not to have total control. And he wanted to feel secure around me.
I still intended to get to the bottom of the great George/Claire contradict- ory stories controversy but this time I decided to try a different approach. On the one hand I felt like telling James to fuck off, that he was an irrespons- ible, immature, emotional cripple and that a child could see that he was trying to manipulate me. But on the other hand, it was obvious that he was afraid. Or confused.
Maybe he needed someone to voice his fears, because he was too frightened to do it himself, and then I could try to put his mind at rest.
This was worth one more try.
"James," I said gently, "there's no shame in loving me, you know. It's not a sign of weakness to love someone and sometimes feel insecure. It's human. There's nothing wrong with it. And if you told George that you loved me very much, there's no need to lie to me about it. I'm not going to use it as a weapon against you. And when you came to Dublin there was no need to pretend that you barely loved me. No one's going to condemn you for loving your wife, for God's sake. And as
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for the affair, you made a mistake. [This was extremely hard to say, believe me, but I said it.] No one is perfect," I continued. "We all make mistakes. You can be honest with me, you know. You don't have to play games to protect yourself. We can work all this out and have a real marriage."
I finished speaking. I was exhausted.
There was a pause. I hardly dared to breathe. James sat silently, looking at the floor. Everything hinged on this.
"Claire," he finally said.
"Yes," I said, tense, terrified.
"I don't know what kind of psycho-babble crap you're talking but it makes no sense to me," he said.
So that was it.
I had lost.
"I can't see what the problem is," he continued. "I never said I didn't love you. I just said that you'd have to change for us to go on living together. I said that you'd have to grow up. I said that you were so inconsiderate--"
"I know what you said, James," I interrupted. I decided to stop him before he delivered the entire speech again. He sounded as if he was reading from a script. Or as if he was a robot programmed to say these things--press a button and he was off.