'It Had To Be You', by Kent Jacobson

“When you find the right people,” James Lee Burke said, “you never let go.” It was hot in Boston, early spring as I remember. Museum administrators, academics, and foundation executives huddled in a historic house to discuss a matter of importance, though I can’t recall what. I sat at a well-lived, elongated maple table with chairs mostly empty, people milling, business not yet started. I waited.
Across the table and down a few sat Martha Lyon. She wore a sleeveless dress whose folds concealed her slenderness, yet not the dark hair that flowed unpinned down her back. She scanned the room with green eyes, her expression alternately serious and laughing. No cynic, this one. She leaned forward with elbows lightly on the table and I sneaked peeks at the long bare arms. 
I headed to another table steps away and poured a cup of coffee, and forked strawberries and pieces of cantaloupe and honeydew onto a small white plate. I sensed fingertips on my back. 
“How are you?” she whispered. 
I smelled perfume, a touch of cinnamon. I turned, hoping to play down my delight. 
“I’m good. And . . . and you?” 

We met first some months earlier, at another professional gathering.
“I’m Martha Lyon. I direct the historic preservation program at the Massachusetts Arts Council. Are you Kent?” 
The delivery was tentative and polite, the voice fine-tuned at some white-glove school. She’s a kid, I also thought, and nice. Nice made me twitch, nice a disguise people donned when they had something to hide. 
I was living with Jill, and we talked about marriage before Jill admitted to alcoholism. There had been three years, and I had suspected nothing. I felt deceived. I was forcing down a glob that I did not want to eat. I was testy with Ms. Lyon and then some.
“What’s the perfume?” 
The brashness startled her. I had hoped to cut through the formality and catch a glimpse of the real beneath the nice. 
She stepped back and her chin dropped. She mumbled words I could not catch. She knew edgy men like me. 
“It’s lovely,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t want to scare her. “When can we meet about the conference?” An historical organization had asked us to team for a presentation.
I didn’t realize I was scouring for someone I could trust.

She laughed constantly when we talked a month later at my office, me the associate director at my foundation. My boss, a joker, claimed Martha stepped on his size-thirteen foot when I introduced her. He noticed the energy between Martha and me. 
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she grinned when I told her the boss’s claim. “No way that happened.” She was older than I supposed, although twenty-five, and no white glover. A dark-complexioned brunette, calm and familiar.  
We were slotted for an hour of the assembly, and the organization requested we speak to local historians about projects our two foundations funded. Conferences like this, Martha and I agreed, were normally drags. Too much time inside, too much time on our fannies, too many eyes fixed on a cutie, too much meandering yak-yak. We would force the audience to participate with us, we decided, to stir the talk. 
The audience wanted money from our foundations. We would quiz each other on stage about our institution’s elusive passions and procedures and nudge the listeners to join our jabber. Let their responses mark the way. It was not a spectacular idea, nothing dramatic, but it might work. They slotted us to follow lunch: “That guy in the brown suit in row six,” Martha quipped, “will be taking a nap.”  
They cancelled the conference a few days before the scheduled date. There were too few registrants for the two-day affair. They would do it later. I telephoned Martha’s office and left a message on her machine: “We’ve missed our chance for fame.” 
She was phoning me as I was phoning her. I like you, her warm tone said. We made a date to go for a drink if we found each other again. 

So, here we were, sitting days later in an historic house at an elongated maple table with too many others in the room. I was sweating, my thin shirt stuck to me. It was hot that day, as I’ve said.
I can bring back little about the bar afterward or the wine. We didn’t say a lot, nothing about our bruised histories or tangled lives. Martha teased me about my pink linen shirt, and I can’t call up what she said. We walked to her three-story Victorian, with a tight stairway up. The rented digs were tiny on the top floor: a sitting space with a fold-out futon and a weaving loom, a galley kitchen for one, and a single cramped bedroom with a brass double bed. 
A few minutes passed, and she grew quieter. She poured two glasses of water from an icy pitcher. The bar’s cheap red had made us wobbly. 
This had to slow. I was committed to someone else. Time to leave. Martha’s lips parted as she studied me. 
I wanted to say, I am forty, you know. And my life has no room.
“I’ll see you again,” I mumbled. “I had a wonderful time.” 
I let myself out the door and down the winding stairs. I was alive and softened and deeply myself, the person I wanted to believe I was beneath too many severe faces.

You stumble into your life and the stumbles can seem reckless to a witness. You feel drawn to someone and cannot describe why. What pulls you? A smile, a glance? She bends your way when you speak, and you wonder what you know. Your body says you like this place. It tells you that you might find a home here, move closer. Move closer. She’s a mirror so you can see yourself true at last. 
She is not a mirror. She strides at a different pace, in different attire, with a different air, a separate silhouette. She is not you. Yet you sense the path you walk with her may be yours. 

It was years later in Northampton where we lived. The universe made a mistake. How did I get this old? I sat downtown with the Mini running, it was March and cold, and I anticipated Martha’s return at any moment. 
Memories surged up about my former partner Jill, regret pulling at me. I told her stories about my father, and the stories likely stalled Jill’s own admission of alcoholism, one my father never made. I told her about a five-year-old at a small red kitchen table at dusk, the sun going down, my chin just clearing the four-person pine tabletop, me with shiny curls and peachy skin. I waited for Dad, Mom at the sink peeling potatoes, steam rising from the open pot of boiling water, her back to me and the outside door, my stomach in a churn, waiting on a giant man. 
Who would walk in tonight ⸻ the angry drunk, or the warrior, my hero, the one who fought fires to save people’s houses and lives? 
He drove a state forest service Chevrolet with a siren and flashing light. Coming home, the siren wailing and light flashing, Dad had had a good day. He burst through the door, the barrel chest ⸺ you didn’t notice the withered leg and limp from childhood polio ⸻ and he would boom, “What kind of day did you have, Libby?” Libby, my mother’s nickname.
Without the siren and red-light flashing, he would show up late soaked in whiskey. I sat up straighter. I smelled the booze, a brown paper bag in the shape of a bottle under one arm, the limp more severe; he dragged the withered leg across the floor. He had pulled into a joint on the way home.
Those nights, Dad sat at the tiny red table and glared across at me, his face brutally tight. I focused on the table and his calloused hands. He angled closer; I avoided the narrowed eyes. I pretended the stink of the whiskey wasn’t there, that it didn’t bother me.
“Your responsibility is that dog. Where is he?” 
“I . . . I . . .,” I couldn’t get words out. We lived in a forested state park and cocker spaniel Mac wandered.
Dad poured an Old Crow at the table, one huge hand wrapped around the six-inch highball glass.
“Calm down a little, Eric,” Mom said. 
“You’re turning your son into a softie,” he answered.
Mom remained at the sink and peeled potatoes. 
He lifted the glass for several swallows and poured another.
The nights ended in mangling distrust. I festered inside and the little boy grew colder. I would not let Dad get to me. I wouldn’t. I armed myself against him and, eventually, everyone else. What does a boy fathom about such a father and his rage? I became a stone that would not crack, a wary boy and warier man.  An abstracted Ph.D.
Dad died, not long before Jill and I met. I told her all this. I trudged alone beside a ghost, I said, and I hoped that she would find a way to understand.
She came home one weekend at midday in a police car. She had totaled her Volkswagen. The police officer left, and she confessed she was drunk and the police didn’t realize. They didn’t smell the vodka. She had been drinking for days, she said. I saw the pain in her twisting hands, the face white with shame. The accident could have killed this warm, embracing woman.  
She would go cold turkey, she promised, and start today. She did. She meant what she said. She tried. And the months passed; I lived in anguish and yearned not to. When would she fall? She had to fall. She would, I was sure, and the drinking would return, the suspiciousness from my father’s addiction rooted in me. 
There was no good way to say goodbye, no good way. Why do I keep remembering the end in the darkness on the side of an unremarkable house in someone’s forgotten yard? Jill may have been pressing about marriage and a response tore out.
I said what I had at no time said before. 
“I grew up with an alcoholic father and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life the same way.” 
The words were wrong. Nothing seemed right. Jill stared at me in disbelief with a drained face. The words were cruel. The words were true. There must have been another way. Why do I keep remembering? I lost contact with Jill years ago. 

The Mini warm, the weather still blowy cold, I spied a slim woman in a green, leopard-spotted hat. It was too beautiful, too much her. Martha smiled as she approached, expectant, the flow in the walk, the dancer’s grace that did not leave.
She opened the passenger door and handed me a small paper bag: “Stay here, I’ll get the rest.” Peanut butter cookies and Moroccan sandwiches ⸻ lamb and hummus and tomatoes. The juices oozed through the paper and over my open palms.
“How could a man not love a woman like you?” I said when Martha came back and got in the car. 
She grinned. “Why, what do you mean?” She held my gaze.
“I mean, I am out here to buy paper clips and pick up the mail, and you? I know you. I know who you are. You’re here to make this a ramble, a noontime delight. Haven’t you learned yet, we’re not here to have fun?”
She is the heart of whatever it was I ever wanted.


Kent Jacobson has been a foundation executive, filmmaker, and teacher. His nonfiction appears in The Dewdrop, Sport Literate, BULL, Talking Writing, Punctuate, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and elsewhere. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, landscape architect Martha Lyon. Find him at kentjake@verizon.net.

Artwork by Ann Knickerbocker