SOMEBODY'S FOOL
Title: "Somebody's Fool" (1/1)
Author: Plausible Deniability
Address: pdeniability@hotmail.com
Category: SR
Rating: R (mature language, mild sexual situations)
Spoilers: Concerns events hinted at in Talitha Cumi (3.24)
Keywords: Pre-XF, young CSM/Mrs. Mulder
Disclaimer: The characters and situations of the television program "The X
Files" are the creations and property of Chris Carter, Fox Broadcasting,
and Ten-Thirteen Productions, and have been used without permission. Also,
"Everybody's Somebody's Fool" was written by Howie Greenfield and Jack
Keller and recorded by Connie Francis. No copyright infringement is
intended.
Summary: CSM, young and in love, learns that April is the cruelest month.
This is a sequel to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," but if you haven't read that
story, you should still be able to follow this one. Just keep in mind that
it's the early 60s, CSM is still a young man, and he is involved in a
clandestine affair with Teena Mulder, the wife of his closest friend.
THANKS to my beta readers, Becky and Hindy. And a special thanks to the
poet W. H. Auden. I wasn't going to write another CSM/Teena story, and then
I read "Lullaby" and had to dust off my memories of New England.
----
Lay Your Sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful...
-- W. H. Auden, "Lullaby"
****
CHILMARK, MASSACHUSETTS
April 1961
The night is chill and moonless. I slam the car door shut and turn toward
the house, my suitcase bumping against my leg.
I am no more than halfway up the drive when the front door of the big white
Cape Cod swings open. "Well, there you are," Bill calls genially, light
streaming out from all around him. "We were starting to get worried about
you." He turns and shouts over his shoulder, "Teena, he's here."
Despite my carefully neutral expression, excitement wells up inside of me,
momentarily squeezing off my breath. Teena. It has been almost three months
since the last time that I saw her.
And then she is there, standing at Bill's shoulder, her willowy figure in
stirring contrast to Bill's square, solid build. "Well, hello," she calls
easily. Her husky voice sends a thrill through the length of me.
"I got a little lost." I climb the steps and shake Bill's hand, not
trusting myself yet to look directly at Teena. "It was already dark by the
time the ferry dropped me off, and I'd forgotten how pitch black it gets
out here. For a while there, I was afraid I was going to drive right off
into the Sound."
"We're just glad you got here in one piece. Teena saved you some dinner.
Come on in."
The house is warm and well-lit, a welcome refuge after an hour of driving
aimlessly in the windswept darkness. The furnishings have a cozy, old money
New England feel: wing chairs, bookcases, gently-worn rugs, paintings of
ships and the occasional solemn forebear. My footsteps echo on the polished
hardwood floor.
"I'll put this in the guest room for you," Bill says, relieving me of my
suitcase. "Business can wait until after you've had something to eat. You
know where the kitchen is."
Teena has already disappeared in that direction. I push open the swinging
butler's door to find her removing my dinner from the oven where she has
kept it warming. Before taking a seat at the kitchen table, I stop to drink
in the way her slender body moves. When we are apart, I always tell myself
that I can remember her accurately: youth, beauty, sophistication, a cloud
of dark hair and eyes wider than pools. But each time I see her again, I am
struck anew by the injustice that my memories have done her.
As she sets the laden plate down in front of me, I seize her by the wrist.
"I've missed you," I whisper fiercely.
"Don't -- Bill might hear." She tugs her hand free from my grasp, but her
eyes linger on mine. After a moment's hesitation, she leans closer and says
rapidly, "Listen, there's something I have to tell you --"
The sound of footsteps on the other side of the door causes her to break
off and retreat to the middle of the kitchen. I make sure that I am busy
with my dinner when Bill comes strolling in. He pulls out the ladder-backed
chair at the head of the table, and sits down beside me. "You look like you
haven't eaten in a week," he says, chuckling.
I look up from my plate of baked scrod, green beans, and potatoes. "This is
good. I'm not used to coming in and sitting right down to a hot meal."
Bill leans back and lights a cigarette. "What you need is a wife. Isn't
that right, Teena?"
From behind Bill, her gaze meets mine. "I think you're right, Bill.
Something tells me he needs a wife in the *worst* way..."
I did not know it was possible to feel both dismay and raging desire at the
same time. "I, uh -- I'm not in any hurry to settle down," I mumble.
Bill laughs. "That's the spirit." He takes a deep drag on his cigarette.
"You hear that, Teena? I'm not the only man in the world who worries about
giving up his freedom."
He twists in his chair and winks at her. She drops her eyes, and a faint
blush colors her cheeks.
"Am I missing something?" I ask, looking from one of them to the other.
"You're already married, Bill."
He grins, and stubs out his half-finished cigarette in the ashtray on the
table. "Should we tell him, Teena?"
She doesn't answer.
"I really think we should," Bill says. "Everyone is going to know soon
enough anyway."
"Don't," she whispers, head down.
But Bill is clearly pleased with his news, whatever it may be. He refuses
to be dissuaded by something so inconsequential as Teena's obvious
reluctance. "You know that he's going to find out sooner or later."
"Maybe you shouldn't -- " I begin, glancing with uncertainty at Teena's
tense posture. Her face is averted, so that I can see little more than one
flushed cheek, and the way that her hands have curled into fists.
"She's just a little self-conscious," Bill says dismissively. "Now
congratulate me. It seems I'm going to be a father."
Behind him, Teena turns toward me, a mute apology in her gaze.
"Oh. Well, then -- congratulations." My voice sounds high and unnatural
even to my own ears. "When is the baby due?"
"The fall," Teena answers. "October. I'm three months pregnant."
My scattered wits scramble to make the calculation. Three months. That
means...January.
January.
The last time we were together.
****
It is quiet in the woodshed, and I am warm and tired. Making love to Teena
always leaves me tired. She is lying with her head on my shoulder, one arm
across my chest, her palm resting over my heart.
I am not sure what pretext she used to get Bill out of the way. I am never
sure of these things. Teena always handles the details. Beautiful Teena --
more subtle than Eden's serpent.
"That was good," she sighs contentedly, sliding one long, silky leg slowly
over mine. "Well worth the wait."
I smile. It is so peaceful here, lying drowsily with Teena pressed against
me. I am sure our time is limited and that even now Bill is probably
turning his thoughts toward home, but for just a short while, I want to lie
here and feel her light breath on my chest.
"I was going crazy, thinking about this the whole time we were apart," she
says. "I thought it would at least be bearable once you got here last
night, but that only made the waiting worse. I've never wanted anything so
badly in my life."
I notice she says "anything" instead of "anyone," but I am not inclined to
look a gift horse in the mouth.
"You have to promise you'll come to the summer place in June," she urges,
lifting her head to smile at me. "And in July and August and September too.
Promise."
I grin into the half-dark. "I'd wear out my welcome with Bill if I did
that. I'd wear out something else, too, I have a feeling."
"No." She shakes her head in impassioned insistence. "You have to promise.
I'd go completely out of my mind if you didn't. Even if I am as a big as a
house then, you have to come. Promise me."
As big as a house... I had almost forgotten, or chosen to forget, that
Teena and are not alone here. There is another life, a new life, here in
the darkness with us -- a life that perhaps accounts for the heightened
allure she seems to have today, the allure of fuller breasts and flushed
skin and shameless, eager appetite. "I promise," I whisper, and retreat
back into silence.
It is so warm here...so peaceful. Teena feels so good. I am tired in that
replete, floating way I have not experienced for some three months. I could
sleep here, and never want to wake up.
And yet I hear myself ask, "Is it mine or Bill's?"
It; mine or his. I have been turning the question over in my mind since
yesterday night. Still, I never meant to blurt it out in quite so stark a
fashion.
She sighs, and raises herself up on her elbow. "I was going to tell you
myself. I've been meaning to, since the first day I suspected."
My heart leaps under her hand. "It's mine, then?"
"No," she answers quickly, almost wildly. "No, I didn't say that."
Not mine, then; Bill's. I did not realize how much I had been hoping for a
different answer until dull disappointment knifes through me. Strange; less
than twenty-four hours ago, it had never even crossed my mind that I might
be on my way to fatherhood, and now I am mourning merely because Teena has
confirmed that I am not.
"And how is Bill taking the news? He seemed happy enough about it last
night." I am heartened by the way the words come out -- cool, detached,
accepting.
"Bill!" she exclaims scornfully. "He didn't want this baby in the first
place, and now he behaves as if the whole thing was his idea. He treats me
as if I'm made of glass. He hasn't even touched me in almost two months."
I tell myself I don't want to know what happens between her and Bill in
bed. I tell myself that, even though it isn't true. King Solomon was
reputed to be a wise man. "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal
upon thine arm," he is supposed to have written, "for love is strong as
death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame." I am growing accustomed to coals and
flame.
"Not that it makes much difference," Teena continues. "He might as well not
have touched me even before that, for all the good it did me. I felt like
Queen Victoria sometimes, lying there and trying to think of England."
"Why do you hate him so much?" It is something I have often wondered.
A pause, and then she lifts her hand from my chest to gesture wearily at
the rough wooden walls. "Look around you. This is Chilmark, Massachusetts.
The end of the earth, it seems to me sometimes. We could live in Boston or
New York or Philadelphia or Washington, DC; places full of clever,
interesting people -- but no, we live in Chilmark, Massachusetts. And he is
gone three weeks out of every five."
Is that all? Such commonplace concerns, really. Isolation. Loneliness. Such
commonplace concerns to engender such a bitter hatred.
"I was a magna at Wellesley," she says, as if reading my thoughts. "I could
have been a summa, with just the smallest bit of effort. I used to turn
heads -- "
"You still turn heads."
"-- I used to turn heads," she continues doggedly. "There was a time I
think I could have had any man I wanted. I had money, and a family who
spoiled me, and girlfriends who envied every move I made. And I gave it all
up for Bill. For this." She gestures again at the woodshed, at the greying
unfinished walls and the faded blanket we have spread over the dirt floor.
Such private, commonplace concerns. Would Bill's neglect still seem so
unforgivable if she knew the importance of the project that consumes him?
Would Chilmark seem such a prison if she knew that, to Bill, this place
represents his last hope of safety -- an island refuge, a hiding place for
his family when the fateful date of colonization finally arrives? Bill
cares for her -- though, God knows, she will never hear that from me.
"You could leave him," I say. "Even if it is his baby, you could still
leave him."
"Leave Bill? And do what?" She laughs hollowly. "Marry you?"
I lie quietly for a moment, waiting for the pain to ebb. "Is there
something funny about that? I'm every bit the man that Bill is."
She rolls over onto her back and stares up blankly at the shed roof.
"You're ten times the man that Bill is. Unfortunately, my darling, you
can't fuck your way into the Harvard Club."
I turn my face to the wall. "Don't talk like that."
"Why not?" she asks listlessly. "Because it's vulgar...or because it's
true?"
****
Bill looks both ways before pulling the car out onto the empty road.
"Thanks so much for bringing those papers out to me. I know it's a long way
to come," he says. We are on our way to Vineyard Haven, he and I, to buy a
gallon of ice cream for tonight's dinner.
"Don't mention it."
"No, I really appreciate it. You're about the only friend I have who's
still willing to make the trek all the way out here." He fidgets with the
rear view mirror. "Ronald used to visit now and then, but then one day last
year he just announced out of the blue that he wasn't going to be able to
do it any more. I guess the solitude got to him, with no one here to keep
him company except me and Teena."
I look out the car window at the low roofs of the weathered houses. "I
really don't mind."
"Well, it means a lot to me. It saved me from having to run down to D.C.
myself."
The evening shadows are beginning to fall across the wooded landscape. "I
suppose you don't want to leave your wife on her own," I say, "especially
in light of her recent announcement."
"Yes." He chuckles ruefully. "I'm pretty tickled about it -- which
surprises me, really, because initially I didn't think we ought to have
kids. I wasn't sure it was fair to bring a baby into this world, knowing
all I do. In fact the whole pregnancy came as something of a shock. I was
always...careful, if you know what I mean."
"Mmm-hmm." Shut up, Bill, I think with cold hatred. Shut up about your wife
and your surprises and your care. I don't need to hear about the great life
you have.
"Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your coming out
here. The ice cream is definitely on me."
"If you say so." I'm fucking your wife, I think vindictively. I feel a
little better, saying the words to myself. She may be having your baby,
Bill, but she's fucking me.
"So what kind do you like? Vanilla?"
"Doesn't matter," I answer evenly. "What kind does Teena like?"
He looks over at me, an expression of ludicrous gratitude on his face.
"That's very nice of you. She likes chocolate."
"Chocolate it is, then." I reach over and switch on the radio. By some
strange coincidence 'Everybody's Somebody's Fool' is playing. It reminds me
in a rush of the first day I spent alone with Teena. I can still see her in
her thin summer dress, eyes half closed, singing along softly with the
song.
Connie Francis's alto floods the car:
"I told myself it's best that I forget you,
Though I'm a fool, at least I know the score
If darlin', I did twice as good without you
It hurts, but I'd come running back for more..."
"See if you can get another station," Bill says abruptly.
"Yes," I answer, my hand already reaching for the dial. "I was just about
to do that."
****
END
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