Fever by Sharon Butala Read Free Book Online

must be two of me, I often thought, because even while I was steeped in that long-ago moment, suffused by my old misery and shame, I noticed when the cake batter was mixed, I poured it into a prepared pan, I set it in the pre-heated oven. Some part of me continued to do all those things, even as it did them then, when the phone rang and it was Lucas saying something had gone wrong with the car, it had stalled in downtown traffic and he’d be home late because he’d managed to find a mechanic who was willing to fix it then. I’d serve supper to Steven, Karen and Michael, supervise their homework, get them into bed, and all the while be imagining which woman Lucas was with and where and what they were doing, while the other person in me worried about the cost of Lucas’s imaginary repairs, which at that moment I believed to be real, and wondered if I should keep his supper hot since he’d be hungry from standing around for hours in a cold and gloomy garage.
    Lucas, of course, having learned that his actions would go unchallenged, grew more and more reckless. He became cruel to me in everyday ways, he taunted me about my failings, he ridiculed my remarks. In public he claimed never to have said the words or held the opinions I had just quoted as his which he might have said to me as recently as breakfast of that same day. Time and time again he left me stumbling through the wreckage of my self-esteem. His affairs grew stupider and more pointless, the women younger, increasingly naïve. I chased them away when they came to our house hoping to see more of Lucas by becoming friends with me. One of them even came to me in tears to tell me she had slept with my husband and wanted me to forgive her.
    He had, by this time, apart from our older mutual friends, a circle of younger friends of his own. I rarely had anything to do with them, because around me they were sullen and hostile, any other attitude toward me would have forced them to face the situation they were a part of and that they didn’t wish to admit to. So Lucas always saw them alone. I had become more and more isolated, I had no strength left for friendships of my own, and I finally began to realize that in all the world I had no allies. That was when I first began to muse on the nature of justice.
    Eventually my self-delusion had to end. There was no great revelation, no conscious decision, the subject of Lucas’s infidelities simply leaked slowly into the open and then became a flood, unstoppable. But even after the pretence was over there could be no peace between us. I was too full of chaotic love and rage, simultaneous, inseparable, that paralyzed and silenced me, and Lucas, seeing at last the hopeless state our marriage had sunk into, could with relief leave the blame at my door and depart.
    I read an article the other day, sitting across from Gary as he chatted on the phone with his sister in Edmonton—it was their weekly call and I envied them both that closeness and unquestioning affection—written by an American officer who had been a P.O.W. in Vietnam where he had been starved, beaten and tormented. The only wisdom that bewildered military man had been able to gain from those years of suffering was simply that life is not fair, that terrible things happen to some people whether they do anything to deserve them or not, and like Job, those victims can only wonder why and try to bear their fate. I felt a kind of amused sympathy for the man, that it took that much to shake him into wisdom, then was faintly ashamed of myself for equating our experiences.
    These last few years were peaceful ones, the first in my adulthood that went on in a pleasant way day after day withoutcalamities, disasters, or even minor blow-ups to destroy them. I had almost forgotten about the kind of suffering most people go through day after day all their lives. And when I thought of Lucas, which was seldom, I could find almost no pain. Those unbidden moments from the past had stopped