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“Then, you’ve got to let him know.”
“He won’t understand.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s his problem if he doesn’t.”
“Why are you saying this to me?” Gail turned to her totally baffled.
“Because I think your relationship has had a false foundation from the beginning.”
“You screw him. Is that what you want? Rossi to yourself?”
“Good heavens, no! I’m a sensualist. I like lots of men. Rossi is just an occasional fling. I have many more I prefer to his brand of fun. But he is good for certain functions. I suppose you probably think our relationship is pretty weird, especially having sex when his own wife is in the next room. Truth is, I have never thought of your marriage as real.”
“Really? You think it was bogus?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s legal. But you never asked for it, you never really agreed. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s time to get out.”
“And how would I do that? He controls everything.”
Meredith’s face turned sly. “He doesn’t control your family trust. Why don’t you call up Daddy—just this once.”
Gail was suspicious of Meredith’s motives, but she presented a solution so easy that it seemed ridiculous that she hadn’t thought of it herself. Where had her thinking been? What had her life become? One brief discussion with a friend and it seemed that the whole relationship with her husband, mentor and disciplinarian lover had unraveled before her eyes.
“I couldn’t wait to talk to Rossi. And of course, he ignored me when I first broached the subject of my feelings. But they were real and not going away. I’d begun to wonder if I’d been in a trance for three years—or if I’d been asleep and had suddenly awakened from a vivid dream. I felt conscious. Alive. And very distant from my husband.
“Rossi spent several days ignoring any effort I made to speak to him, and he was starting to piss me off. He wouldn’t listen.
“One night when Rossi was out late, I packed my bag—though I took very little because even the clothes he’d picked for me had begun to make me cringe. I took just enough to see me through a few days. By then, I’d have some new dresses and would throw these away, too. I left a note…
“We’ve gone far enough. This doesn’t feel like a marriage, or a life. Daddy’s attorneys will be in contact. Thanks for what you’ve given me, but I can no longer be your project. Gail Henry.”
“Brief. To the point. Abrupt. I never saw him again.”
“Never?” KC asked.
“Never. He’d be too proud to fight me. In fact, I’m sure in sixty seconds he had me written off. He would have sat back and smiled, deciding that he’d finished creating me and was glad I was on my way. Next time he lectured at the University he would have to scan the crowd for his next victim.”
“And did he?”
“I don’t think so. At least not right away.”
“Maybe he was more hurt than you thought?”
I put down my ice cream spoon, letting it clatter inside the bowl. Then, after setting the dish on the table said, “I never thought of myself as a cold person, KC, but you know… I just don’t care what he’s doing.” My response was flip and proud.
“Three years… what an end,” he summed up this quick telling.
“Seems as though there should have been more to it. But there wasn’t.”
“I’m surprised you could pull away so easily.”
I shrugged. “One day Rossi controlled my life, the next he didn’t.”
KC gave me a puzzled glance, which made me nervous. “Except that he’s never really left you.”
