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"It's not your fault."
She knew this. Of course she did. She'd known it from the moment he'd told her. She'd known it in her soul as his guilty face told her before his words did.
Perhaps, in little ways, she'd known for years that it was not exactly her fault.
But that didn't stop the guilt - both secondhand from him and her own, the festering kind that unsatisfied grief and starving anguish left. The type that begged for a way to untie the Gordian Knot - and eventually ended up slicing rather than untangling.
"I know." She mumbled the words my rote. "It was his choice."
Peter nodded. His eyes were so compassionate. He didn't know this pain, and yet he somehow was able to experience it along with her.
Ivy was learning what a dreadful thing empathy was.
"But," he continued, "you know it - and even now your heart is making up the reasons. Times you were cross, tired, unavailable. Times you will put forward as reasons. But, oh, Ivy, the sins of man are enough! Leave them to their work - don't take responsibility."
She smiled, a bit. "You don't think I could have any part in this?"
"In the adultery? No. That is not your sin, regardless. In the failure of your marriage? You could, but I don't believe you do."
He was right, of course. Ivy had a thousand reasons, and many were caused by her. "I could be, in a small way, responsible. If only because I never asked for him to respect me - but I had thought I earned it - or at least that he did respect me."
Peter sighed and ran a hand over his eyes. He was tired of her, probably. Tired of the endless ramblings ... or maybe he wasn't. Not everyone was against her - and Ivy chided herself for that, too.
If she lost her faith in goodness, in the very nature of Christ existing in small pockets of joy on this earth, she would have nothing left at all.
When Peter spoke, it was more of the same. "You are deserving of respect as a human, of love as his wife, and of honor as the mother of his children."
She bit her lip and nodded. "But then there was ..." She flushed. "I think we turned intimacy into an escape from emotion rather than a place to express our deepest feelings. That was when I lost him, I think."
He actually laughed at that. "Oh, yes, and I'm sure you'll tell me you were the one who emotionally distanced yourself in ... that situation. No, Ivy - no."
And then she couldn't tell him, and it frustrated her. She couldn't tell him that she wasn't a girl of eighteen any longer. She couldn't tell him that marriage had taught her that her husband's body wanted her even when he was angry or frustrated, even when he wasn't present in the mind, even when it had been a day full of disappointments and exhaustions ...
Equally as important was the fact that she could not respond in like. Not exactly.
But, if she disconnected herself far enough from the situation to watch, helpless, as another Ivy took her husband, she could be close to him even when she couldn't reach him in every other way.
And when he fell asleep, and she lay still and listened to him breathe and felt the strange deadness that always slipped over her - not numb, exactly, but certainly not very alive, she blamed herself for once again initiating something she didn't like or understand - and then pretending it was something that came naturally to her.
Why did she always expect Jordy to understand more than he could? Perhaps if she had explained the experience, he would've told her why, why she didn't long for his body in moments of exhaustion, why she couldn't experience pleasure outside of intimacy ... and why he could.
Why he had betrayed the Ivy who sat, distant from the physical, watching the adultery in their own bed every night ...
Why didn't he know that Ivy existed?
But she couldn't say that. So she must blame herself - she must.