Jack knew it had started before the money had come along.
After all, the money had been a shock, a shot in the dark that had hit the target and left them reeling in surprise. Rose's wealthy uncle on her father's side had left her everything, and they traded in their dead end jobs and torn and stained clothing for the large, two-story home with pristine white carpet and marble mantles. The dingy clothes of the working class burned in their fireplace for heat that first night, and the finest suits and gowns delivered for them to lounge about in. It was her life, it was the way she had been brought up, and she had stopped seeing the wealthier guys behind his back for a while, proudly telling him, "This is our life now, Jack. This is for us."
They drowned the ever haunting wounds from Titanic in cognac and expensive tobacco rolled into cigarettes by the most dexterous of hands, and for a while they could forget how unhappy they had been. But eventually Jack realized that he was living in another man's suits and smoking a finer gentleman's cigarettes, and when he expressed his feelings to his wife, it had been another unhappy row. He didn't want her to have this. He wanted her to be poor with dirty nails and rough hands and in return she wanted him to dress up and pretend to be someone that he wasn't, someone he had never been, to make her happy. And no sooner were those words out of his mouth than he realized…that was exactly what she had done for him for nearly ten years.
And so she was gone most nights again and he met he a maid in the neighborhood who was young and free and reminded him so much of someone who had died a long time ago. He invited her over for drinks first, hiding all signs that he was a married man, including the ever present band of gold on his fourth finger, and drinks became dinner and then more drinks and eventually they were hungry for more than food and wine and expensive false cognac. Jack had her all over the house, their room, the kitchen, the rooms that should have been filled with little blonde and auburn-haired children…
And life was cold and bleak and had no meaning. Jack felt nothing, no pleasure or pain or fear. He remembered holding onto a rail for dear life and plunging into the sea at a speed that shouldn't have let him swim back up, and the scary part was, he didn't remember coming up. Didn't remember air or warmth or rescue, just the cold burn of death and despair. He missed work, he missed his friends, and above all, he missed the wife who had gotten to New York with him. Missed lying there with her at night, counting their blessings and feeling truly saved by the serendipity that had brought them together. He missed hearing her heartbeat and knowing that it existed only for him. Those days were far behind him.
The day it all came down he had gone out for a long walk. The blistering cold had been strangely soothing, and he had thanked whatever invisible God for it. Eventually, the numbness gave way to pain, and he hurried home to the brick house on the corner of the street, near the park. A home that had never really been home, but had served its purpose well enough. Opening the door, he immediately knew what he was going to come across, and yet a strange force guided him to take off his hat and coat and hang them up, and then walk silently up the stairs. It was the same odd force that had guided his attention to her, standing on the railing a deck above the poop deck, staring out into the distance with sad eyes. Destiny, perhaps, he thought. Creeping down the carpeted hall, he passed four doors before his skin tingled at his own, and he swallowed hard past a premature desire to vomit everywhere.
The door opened without a creak. He used two fingers to twist the knob and pushed the fine wood into black nothingness. Nothing, perhaps, he hoped. Licking his lips in anticipation, anxious for an answer, he whispered, "Rose?"
Rose. It came almost like an answer to his question, a soft breathless response that he scarce heard and almost believed he imagined, but then there was the familiar tension of release in the air and Jack, his heart breaking and his body shaking, reached a hand to flick at the electric light switch that was on the wall. The light revealed his fears were well-founded tenfold. His wife was wrapped in her lover's arms and they both gasped when he revealed them, panting in a heap. One look at the person she was with and Jack's eyes flooded and he darted out of the room and down the hall. Back down the stairs while she called his name, and he grabbed his jacket and hat, almost like the story had been rewound.
Jack.
He gazed up at her, at the top of the stairs in a silk robe, bright and crimson and shaking with fear. He had seen her like this once before, right before and after he had drawn her. Suddenly, his life hit him right in the gut with a hammer and he threw open the door and spilled his stomach all over the stoop. Rose winced and Jack took a moment to heave before he wiped his mouth and looked back, almost sickened again by the sight of Caledon, in the buff, with his built arms wrapped around his wife.
"Come now, Dawson, you didn't really think you ever belonged in this house, did you?"
"That's just it," Jack said tightly, his eyes glancing at his wife with red agony. "I never did."
He stole a few of those fine cigarettes from the table nearest him and he set the gold band that he had hidden behind next to the box. He didn't say anything else, didn't ask her why, why him of all people, and why the way she had. Because after the maid, he had no right to. Cal was not just another wealthy lover that Rose could take up with. He broke the rules. He was raw emotion and familiarity, and he was as plain a symbol of the past as any. Closing the door behind him, still not fully recovered from the cold he had walked in before, but numb again, he journeyed out into the snow, waiting to live, waiting to die.
Waiting for an absolution that would truly never come.
The End.