Clueless in Cle Elum

She said she was going for a walk. “Let me join you,” I said, and began putting on my shoes. 

“Well, I was hoping to get a little alone time,” Salamona said.

I stopped putting on my shoes. “Well,” I said, hurt, “If you want to be alone….”

“No, that’s fine. Would you grab Ruffing’s leash?”

“Yep,” I said, and finished tying my laces. 

It was nice just to be with her. She walks with this grace I somehow had not noticed for years. Even when she’s reading and sending texts, she moves with such confidence and sensuality. How I miss having physical contact with her.

Like most longtime married couples, we didn’t have to speak much.

“Are you going to the beach house this week?” she asked when we were getting back to our street.

“Do you want me to?”

“Well, no, you just said you were, and since then you didn’t say you weren’t.”

“Would you come with me?” I’m always looking for a chance for us to be somewhere alone together, anywhere but our house, where it feels so lonely.

“No, I told you I have work to do.”

She’s a sculptor of some sort. I don’t know the name for it. Like, she uses things she finds, like trash or weeds. Funny, even after all the hours I’ve spent with her in her studio, I don’t really have a grasp of what she does.

“Oh.”

“And Ava says she’s coming to visit.” We had returned, and were standing in the kitchen.

Our daughter, who moved out about a year ago, had tapered her visits here since she started dating someone new.

“Oh, well, I don’t want to miss that.”

“So you’re not going to the beach house.”

“It seems silly, since it would mean leaving you and missing Ava.”

When she walked out of the kitchen, I thought she was just going to use the bathroom or something. But then I couldn’t find her. I took an hour or so before I wandered out back and heard music coming from the studio. When I entered, I turned down the volume on her boom box. (Why she doesn’t use the blue tooth speaker I bought her, I’ll never know.) She looked up and frowned at me. “Turn it back up,” she said.

“Well, then I won’t be able to hear you.” She was sticking a twig into some dirt that was in a box.

“I’m not going to say anything.”

“Well, that would be kind of rude, wouldn’t it?”

“Not when I’m trying to work.”

I remembered when I worked. I didn’t listen to music at all; nor do I now.

“What are you doing?” I ventured to ask.

“Working in my studio.”

“What do you call this piece?”

“I wouldn’t call it a piece.”

“What would you call it?”

“Are you going to stay for a while?”

That remarked stung me, and I felt tightness in my throat, as if my next word might be a sob. Not wanting her to see me this way, I stepped into the adjoining room, where I used to grade papers, sat down on the wooden chair, and stared at the empty wall.

At some point I heard the screen door slam. The search for my wife resumed.

I found her in her bedroom, laughing. I smiled. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

She looked up, a bit surprised. “Funny?”

“Yeah. You were laughing.”

“Oh,” she said, and went back to her phone. I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had some mowing to do at the rental, but didn’t feel up to it. There were also errands to do, but I couldn’t remember what they were. Something about getting something fixed. Nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow, I mused.

I eased myself out of her room and went to mine. Maybe it was time for a nap. But what would Salamona do while I was sleeping?

“I’m going on a bike ride,” she called from the kitchen, and then the door slammed.

Why would she take a bike ride when she’d just had a walk?

Sometimes she made no sense to me.

As I did my errands, I wondered what route she might be taking. As it turned out, my errand run largely involved figuring that out. I found her sitting in the bleachers of a ball field at a park we used to take Ruffing to.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to approach. Laughing and shaking her head at her phone, she didn’t seem all that approachable. But she may have seen me already; I had no choice but to walk to her.

She seemed surprised, and then not surprised to see me. “Lemmy,” she said, and stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She sighed. How I love that sigh. 

“Who are you texting with?” I asked innocently.

“Oh. You know. A friend.”

“Male or female, may I ask?”

“Male.”

“I knew it!” I shouted, triumphant and wounded. “Him?”

She looked at me for a while. I looked away. “You really don’t have the right to ask me that, you know.”

“Should I leave?”

“Yes, it’s him.”

“Okay, I’ll leave.”

That was close, I remember thinking as I walked back to the truck, which was still running. Wonder no one drove off with it.

That was close — close to an argument. A knock-down drag-out may have actually broken us at that point. It wasn’t what our relationship needed, even though the therapist said it might be a good idea. A kind of leveling, she called it.

Leveling may have left me leveled! Salamona is a powerful woman when she wants to be. Even when she drinks, she’s sober. Her legs are strong beyond belief — at least that’s how I remember them. Like clamps. She doesn’t even exercise. 

By the time she rode her bike home, I was trying to nap. But I couldn’t help listening for her movements, figuring out what she was doing and what she was doing next. She has such mystery about her, like Morticia from the Addams Family or Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood and Mack. 

Now that I knew I wasn’t going to the beach house without her, I began planning my week. In my head, that is. There were the errands, and some sprucing up of the exterior of the house and studio — I’d noticed lots of bare spots on the trim. Helping Salamona with whatever she needed help with. She didn’t know how to do everything, and that artist friend of hers certainly didn’t know how to do much. People like that live on some sort of dream cloud, it seems. 

When I first found out about Riff, she said he was just a friend. He was sort of my friend, too. Had been, that is. Sure, I could have been more supportive when his current ex-wife gave him the old heave-ho, but it seemed like he was doing all right. Had he been doing all right with my wife? When my friend Cooper told me he’d seen the two together at a restaurant we’d never gone to, I didn’t think much of it, until he added they were caressing each other’s feet under the table. Not very sanitary when you’re eating tacos!

I came to understand why she had seemed happier and to be laughing so much while alone in her room. There was someone new in her life. 

That’s when I knew it was time for me to take early retirement and put forth the time it takes to repair a relationship, especially one that hadn’t seemed to be having any problems up to then. 

Salamona hadn’t seemed all that happy when I told her. “Eso es el tiempo, creo,” I said, in the native tongue of hers I’d committed myself to learning.

“Yeah, well, what the heck are you gonna do now?” she said in mine.

“Well, I guess finally spend the time with you I’ve been wanting to for a long time now.”

I don’t remember her reaction to that.

She didn’t attend most of the celebrations and functions that are standard when a teacher retires from the school I’d been employed by for over twenty years. At the one she did, she spent most of her time on the phone, laughing and smiling wistfully, as if she was missing something important to her.

We were set for life — yet she didn’t seem to be all that secure and happy about it. Most recently retired couples go off on trips together, reaping the benefits of all their hard work. When she reminded me she hadn’t yet retired and probably wouldn’t for at least another twenty years, I blurted something she seemed to resent me for ever since.

“What is it you’re not retiring from?”

She looked at me with the closest thing to a scowl I’d seen on her handsome face. “From making art. From selling art.”

How much art had she actually sold? I’d never kept track. She did pretty well, I suppose, at Christmas and spring sales. There were commissions she did now and then. Though I’m sure those must have helped, it seemed her largest contribution to the family had been cleaning the B&B rental property we had over in the next town. Oh, and raising Ava while I got my teaching career off the ground. 

It was clear to me now that a nap wasn’t going to happen, so I got up and looked in the fridge to see what was there. Nada mucho! Just ingredients. Salamona used to make the best lunches; such care went into them. Obviously she was too distracted these days to make meals for me. I opened a can of sardines and ate them while looking out the kitchen window at her studio. Was it living up to its potential? Or was it mostly just sitting there, doing nothing? Maybe I could rent out my half of it to a friend or someone. 

I pulled out my phone, turned it on, and saw I had missed a text. “They were at Ol’ Fool last night you know. Thought you should know.” Cooper, the same friend who’d told me about the public footrubs. 

So, she was sneaking out after I’d gone to bed. To bars. Or at least last night she was. Should I confront her about this? Maybe she was breaking it off with Riff. Maybe she had finally realized they had no future, that together they’d be a train wreck. I decided rather than bring up a sore subject, I’d watch her closely for the next few days to glean what was going on.

She wore a tight skirt the next day to attend a Garden Club meeting, but later I found out she had actually gone to the meeting. Riff wouldn’t have been there; he’d be more likely to keep a bowling alley than a garden. He has what we garden types call a “green toe,” meaning he steps on rare and precious plants. Is that what he had been doing to my Salamona?

Later I spied her, outside near an old porch glider I’d been meaning to get rid of, eating a banana more slowly than I’d ever seen her eat anything.

At night, the laughing from her room continued, less restrained now, and that for me was the clincher. She had not broken up with Riff; rather, she’d kept things going at a fever pitch.

I

went with her on a bike ride. I hadn’t taken my old Schwinn out in years, and it responded by refusing to shift out of second gear.

When the chain broke, Salamona kept riding on — before I began the long walk back I fiddled with it to no avail. She returned two hours later with my truck, wearing different outfit. I surmised she’d either changed out of sweaty clothes or had had a tryst with Riff. A two-hour cita.

You would probably think the shame of living this way would eventually cause me to lose my temper and ask her to vacate the house. But I was too intrigued to act on my humiliation. And she’d been too kind to me over the years to merely discard her that way. 

However, when I followed her from a safe distance on her walk a few days later with my now-repaired bike ($428!!) and saw her just enter Riff’s little house on Merton without the slightest of a knock, I knew it was time to issue an ultimatum.

When, after a bottles worth of wine had been poured into my gullet, I stood in the doorway of her room and said, “Okay, you’re telling me which one it’s gonna be, him or me,” her suppressed smile was the only answer I needed. She had indeed chosen me, and was willing to end things with Riff.

That’s why it was so surprising when she ended up, almost unannouncedly, moving in with Riff. Not so surprising was when she called one evening and begged for my forgiveness. I said, “You are welcome back any time.” She thanked me.

It’s been seven days now and no sign of her. As with me, I suppose she’s letting things between her and Riff drag on and on. I’ll wait.