Journal Journeys_ Living in Your Head
William had been waiting for a day just like this one. He had been able to leave the stationhouse early, buy Julia flowers and chocolates, and get home before her. Ever since she had read him her dream about their making love in the Club boathouse, he had wanted to surprise her by dressing in the attire she described in that dream – basically just a tie. He placed the courting gifts on the table in the foyer of their suite, knowing she would see them the moment she came in. Expecting her at her usual time, around 5:30, he had enough time to shower (an invention he had rigged up in their tub), put on a standard black tie, and wait for her to find him on their bed.
Finding it to be a little chilly, he tucked himself under the blankets. Moments later he heard her at the door – but she was talking. Alarm spread through him as he realized she wasn't alone. He had left the bedroom door open and it was going to be a mad dash to get the door closed before Julia and whomever she was with got far enough into the foyer to be able to see him – in his birthday suit plus a tie. He heard the key turn in the door and their voices increase in volume as the door opened before he was even out from under the covers.
"You'll see Ellie, he really is supportive of our cause … Oh my! How lovely! …" Julia exclaimed seeing the flowers and chocolates.
William thought, "Thank god I had a something to distract and delay them," as he grasped the door and shoved it closed.
"How very nice, Julia. Does he do this kind of thing often?" Ellie, an activist friend of Julia's, asked.
"Yes, he …" Julia started to say, stopping as she heard the bedroom door abruptly close. It occurred to her that he might have been indecent, explaining why he would have needed to close the door so quickly. "William, is that you?" she called out.
"Yes … I'll be right out. I didn't expect you to have company," he said, sounding a bit harried.
A shy smile curled up at the edges of Julia's mouth, accompanied by a slight blush. Unfortunately, she could tell Ellie had deduced the same conclusion and looked … uncomfortable.
"Perhaps I should go?" Ellie whispered to Julia. She shook her head 'no' and responded, "No, please stay." Then she tried to reassure William through the bedroom door, "William, I invited my friend Ellie Masterson to join us for dinner. I wanted you to hear some of her ideas on helping build support for women's rights… We'll wait for you out here. Did you order dinner yet?"
On the other side of the door, William was almost dressed. He answered, hopping to put on a sock, "No… umm not yet."
Julia chuckled to herself and felt the warmest glowing flood of love for him spread through her. She offered Ellie a glass of wine, poured one for herself and ordered them dinner.
When William emerged from the bedroom, he looked calm, cool and collected – and, if anyone had asked Ellie, gorgeous. Julia introduced them. Ellie commented, "Julia, you never told me how good-looking your husband was," leading William to blush and Julia to wrap her arms around him and agree with her assessment. Then she whispered in his ear that she loved the flowers and the chocolates, and she would be sure to prove it to him later, eliciting jolts in his groin.
Over dinner they discussed some of the obstacles to women's suffrage and other rights and some actions to counter them. Ellie seemed wise and enthusiastic. Her young age and privileged upbringing, along with a degree in political science, rendered her a strong ally for the cause. William had expressed concern that some of her ideas seemed risky, likely to lead to arrest and even conviction. He was clear that such a result for Julia would greatly upset him. He also let them both know that he had no intention of trying to talk Julia out of accompanying Ellie in carrying out such actions, but wanted her to know how distressed he was about the possibilities. He would live with it, much as she lived with many of the risks of his job.
After Ellie left, Julia closed the door and then she pushed William's back up against the door, wrapped her arms around his neck, and peppered his face and neck with kisses. In a seductive voice she asked, "So, Mr. Murdoch, what were you planning on the other side of that bedroom door?"
"Well, Mrs. Murdoch, the night is still young. Perhaps you will get a chance to see. Would you like to take a shower, get comfortable?" he suggested, returning her romantic attentions with hugs and kisses of his own.
Julia took a shower and William re-dressed in his "tie only" attire. When she walked out of the bedroom, towel wrapped around her soap-smelling naked body, he was standing right in front of her, holding the flowers.
Her eyes dilated and her smile blossomed. "William, what … oh my! Why …"she said as soft laughter took her. Being contagious, William laughed too.
Julia dropped the towel, causing his eyes to blacken and a smile to grow on his face as well. She approached him and reached out to take the flowers. Then she stepped back to better observe the sight of him. "I am quite enamored and fond of this particular outfit, William," she said, trying to sound serious, fighting the urge to laugh some more. She put the flowers down and retuned to stand in front of him. She reached out to stroke his tie, something she had done countless times before, but it felt so different when it was the only piece of clothing she could touch. A tinge of jealousy flavoring her tone, she commented, "It's a good thing Ellie didn't see you in this … suit. She clearly found you to be quite attractive, husband, and I do believe she might have lost all semblance of self-control." She pulled him along by the tie as she backed towards the bed and said, "I am very much looking forward to having you make my dreams come true."
He stopped her and wrapped an arm around the small of her back. Brusquely he pulled her to him and he kissed her deeply, exploring the back of her naked body urgently with his hands. He turned their bodies, directing their motion to the wall instead of the bed, and backed her up into the wall. In her ear, voice husky and seductive, he said, "I believe your dreams were more like this," as he lifted her a few inches higher and pressed his body against hers with enough force to hold her there, somewhat defying gravity. He felt her breath, exhaling long and deep, desperate and hot, envelope his ear and flow down his neck to his shoulder.
Fighting the dizzy loss of words, she said, "Oh yes, William … yes."
After raking his teeth across her jaw and sucking on her neck, she heard his voice in her ear, felt it sinking into her soul, "At the moment I saw you, it felt like I was remembering you – like I'd known you forever. I knew you were the one for me, the only one there would ever be for me." The lovemaking was powerful, lifting her further from the ground, just the tips of her toes grazing the floor. Her voice husky with desire she said, "William Murdoch, oh … you undo me." At last, her voice rumbling, he heard her, "Mmm …" as her rhythm broke and she rode the wave of pleasure. Confident in her satisfaction, he turned his concentration to his own needs and allowed himself to pick up the pace to join her for the journey.
They separated only moments before there was a knock on the door, likely the kitchen crew to pick up the dinner dishes. Julia put on a robe and answered the door. William went into the bathroom to get cleaned up. Julia spotted William's brown journal on the table by the couch. "This journal sharing sure is turning out to be wonderful," she thought. I wish we'd shared our dreams even sooner. Who could have known what an aphrodisiac they would be?" her mind wandered, causing her to lift an eyebrow at the thought.
William caught sight of her reaction to her thoughts and asked, "Want to share what's going on in that beautiful head of yours, milady?"
He had put on his pajamas, and she approached him to fondle the buttons on the top. "I was thinking about how much we have been enjoying the reading of our journals, don't you agree?" she explained.
"Oh … yes," he replied. "And I think they have provided, and probably will continue to provide, insight for each other … and have even stirred some self-reflection," he added. "I found myself thinking about your question today… about how I overcame my belief that I was not of an appropriate class to court you …" he continued. "Actually, in many ways I didn't really overcome it. I mean I did in the sense that I did eventually ask you out – to the Dinosaur Ball as you probably recall, but after you left for Buffalo … and became engaged to Darcy, the misconception festered in my brain all over again," he said, seeming to drift off in his thoughts.
Julia called him back, caressing his cheek. "For how long did you have this idea – about not being of a high enough station to have … to have a romantic relationship with me?" she asked.
"Probably until you showed up at the Policemen's Ball at the turn of the century," he answered, the memory of seeing her come in wearing that drop-dead gorgeous red dress managing to make him feel glad to be alive all over again.
Julia's thoughts drifted back to his journal. She asked him if he would read something about what he was going through during that painful time. They settled together on the couch and he gave her some background about what he was about to read. He had been working on the "fire-poker" case. He was questioning the wealthy members of the dead man's family as well as some of the servants. Having concluded his interviews, he was heading back to the station. He was on the second floor and was planning on seeing himself out.
I rounded the corner at the top of the staircase and the sight of her, from the corner of my eye, crept in, much like a flash of lightning would. Instantly parts of me were set into motion. "Oh my god this is going to hurt – going to open up a wound that can never heal," I thought as the pain-soaked, pessimistic part of myself flew backwards away from her, taking flight in an attempt to run and hide from the memory of her, planning to later lick my wounds and drown in tears, alone in my room. "But, I so want her, so love her, must be with her to live," my optimistic self declared, as it dove down the stairs towards her, hoping she had come for me, having left her chosen other.
I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I had not breathed. I stood frozen in place – lost, broken. The need for survival drove me to inhale. With the needed oxygen, I drew back in the parts of me that had drifted out. As I stood there, unable to think beyond the fact that when I exhaled the pain would burn as the warm air crossed over my deeply wounded heart, I knew there was no way out except past her. My vocal chords sang her name without my permission when I breathed out, before I felt the distracting surge of pain, allowing the optimist in me to escape once more and pull me down the stairs to her in its wake.
She was not there for me. She would not have even let me know she was in Toronto except for the coincidence of knowing the TOFFs involved with this investigation. He was meeting her family – Ruby, her father. He would be accepted. He was one of them. Oh how the optimist suffered, and oh, how I so hated that part of me for opening me up to this pain.
Later, alone, I lay on my bed once again abandoned by sleep. Tears seemed to come and go with a rhythm as the cadence of the dialogue between my hope and my despair rattled on. My agony increased with each round of memories, fueled by the tiny light of hope. It drove me to demand a stop to the suffering – punch the optimistic part of myself in the stomach, shut it up. Curled up in a fetal position, trying to close the throbbing wounds, I told myself I could go on, but to do so I had to give up on that hope – It was the only way forward.
William sighed, amazed at the strength of the pain he felt in his chest. He closed the journal. They held eye-contact, each recognizing the red, teared-up eyes in the other that they felt in their own eyes. They sat together, silent, feeling the ache together. Finally William said, "It was that optimistic part of me that pushed me to risk trying to court you those many years earlier, after I felt so ashamed in your presence at the Club, despite my reasonable mind advising against it."
Julia leaned in closer to William. She reached over and caressed his stomach. She sighed, "I love the optimist – it's what makes you such a good scientist, leads you to believe you can know the unknown, that you can solve problems, it drives you to try… I think the optimist is why you are so resilient, William."
They remained silent for a time, each following the paths of their own thoughts. Julia spoke first, "But after that I came back. Don't you remember the Jell-O mold?"
William sighed, turned to more directly face her, and said, "Julia, you came back to Toronto – to the job you said drove you to leave. The only difference was now you weren't mine – you were his. Why wouldn't I think that it was something about me that made you leave – didn't satisfy you, when being with me was the only thing that was different after you chose to return? … The pessimist in me insisted that it would hurt terribly to have you around and know that you loved Darcy instead of me. The realist settled with the need to have as much of you as possible – and if that meant merely colleagues and friends, then that would have to do… Now, my internal optimist thought he'd win you back. It may be the source of my resilience, but it was also the source of my unbearable agony. Life would have been so much easier if I had truly been able to give up on that hope."
William turned himself sideways on the couch, pulled his leg up in front of himself, and placed an elbow on the back of the couch to rest his chin in his hand. He helped Julia lift her leg over his and nestle into the space between himself and the back of the couch. He played with her curls, noticing that her hair was still damp and that she smelled wonderful. He sighed again and then said, "You know, when I really tortured myself I'd imagine Darcy making love to you… There was nothing that hurt me more… I had reasoned that you and he were already sexually intimate – based on what had happened between us the first time we kissed, remember, we almost made love that night..."
She shook her head, "Yes, but William I had already fallen madly in love with you by then. Don't you remember? We have already talked about when I fell in love with you, during the Orville case – and those lovely dance lessons." She chuckled and caressed his face, then continued, "That was before our picnic in the park. I would have made love with you that night, it's true. But only because I knew I had found the love of my life – that I would never love another like I loved, and still love, you. And those green fairies fluttering around and whispering in my ear – that mixed with what happens to me when I'm around you, your smell, the tone of your voice hits a chord in my soul…"
She placed her face close to his ear, kissed him and took a deep breath, pulling in his scent. She sighed again, "I never felt that way about Darcy. It was not until our wedding night that, umm, that we … consummated our marriage."
"Oh," he responded.
Julia caught his eye, "It is so ironic, you tortured yourself by imagining I was making love with Darcy, and the way I tortured myself was letting myself imagine I was making love with you, William. I never wanted anything more than to make love with you – knowing I never would do so hurt me more than anything in the world."
William couldn't help but smile a little, knowing that she had wanted him so much, even in those moments of his most bottomless despair, sparked a fire deep within his core. It did his heart good to know that their love had never completely wavered.
Again they stayed quiet for a time. Julia's mind had drifted forward to her wedding night with Darcy when she finally did have sex with him. She considered reading William her journal reflection from that night. She knew she didn't want to get tangled into a game of comparing Darcy to William, and she also knew that many of the things she had felt, thought, and written about Darcy, particularly when it came to sex, were not flattering and she did not want to speak badly about him. She even thought that if the time came when she disclosed to William about Darcy's somewhat abusive actions after she had been buried alive and started calling out William's name during her blatant sexual dreams, that William would have been angered at Darcy… and she definitely did not want that. She considered that she could pick and choose which parts to read, and with that she suggested it. She went to the bedroom to retrieve her journal and they sat together on the couch as she read it to William.
He noticed, and it breaks my heart – fills me with guilt to add to my despair and grief –my desperate feeling of loss. He asked, after we were wed, why I kept looking at the church doors. I think he knows somehow, about William. I could not tell him, an effort to protect him as much as possible from the inevitable suffering that I fear must come. I denied waiting, praying, for William to come.
After we consummated our marriage, a sexual act that took all of 10 minutes and rendered me empty and withering, I wondered if I would have the strength to ask Darcy to give me more, knowing it would never be enough. Darcy seemed satisfied, happy. He slept, I stole away, out to the parlor of our extravagant honeymoon suite. Sat on the couch, buried my face in a pillow, and sobbed.
Why didn't he come? George said he gave him the letter – he had to have read it. He knows I would have preferred him – that I love him. My only conclusion was that he doesn't love me, or at least not enough to bond himself to a woman who can't have his children and who required him to make a public spectacle by stopping her wedding to another man. Now that I'm back in Toronto, I find that I have a slight hope that I am wrong – that he does love me that much, but that something else steered our fate. He is gone and Constance Gardner was freed. Perhaps something happened there… More guilt, I didn't think it was possible to feel anymore guilt, but I do. William could have hung, and I did nothing to help. If things were reversed I know he would have moved heaven and Earth to exonerate me. All I did was prove he had been drugged. Inspector Giles be damned, I wish I had done more.
Well, what's done is done… But, when I look to the future, a future without William, truly a future without my soul-mate, I feel that my worst suffering will not be that he did not love me enough, but rather that I love him too much. It feels as if my heart has been ripped from me – like I will never be able to love again.
Julia closed the journal, leaving it on her lap and reached over to place her hand on William's shoulder, and said, "Well, of course I know now that you did love me enough to do those things, but I didn't then, at least not for sure. But William, I have to say that on some deep level I never doubted your love for me. I was surprised to find out though that my love for you was so strong that I couldn't possibly be happy without you… And my god, William, I died inside thinking that I would never even kiss you again. Honestly, I was much more aroused by just a kiss from you, sometimes even from just standing close to you, than I ever was with Darcy at all… The physical attraction between us still astounds me."
He pulled her towards him, bringing her head to rest against his chest. "Yes," he said, "Our love, on all of its levels and in all of its aspects, is amazingly powerful, it's true." He whispered to her, "And we are married now… Sometimes I think that the reason we are so happily married is because of all the trouble we had getting together – that it really made us appreciate each other..."
"… Made us see the value of living each day together with all of our hearts, all of our souls," she finished. She moved away to better see him and asked, "Do you think all of the times we almost lost each other – not just because of mistakes we made, like living in our heads and not communicating, but also because one or the other of us almost died, too, heightens our love for each other?"
William showed he was considering her thought by wrinkling up one side of his face. "Seems wise," he concluded.
Julia looked back down at her journal in her lap and said, "You know, William, living in our heads has caused us so much pain. And we know we each have this tendency to think we know what the other wants and needs and to accept less than what we ourselves want to meet those imagined needs. It makes me think that we should be more conscious of this … Like, are we doing the same thing right now in any way? And if so, let's fix it." She knew that these ways of relating were most likely used when dealing with difficult issues, and so she thought a likely issue to consider was having children. She felt fear creep into her belly, confirming her reckoning. She knew she would have to bring it up even though the fear was growing exponentially.
William took a deep breath, pulling her out of her thoughts. She was surprised that he was going to be the one to tackle their possible problems first. As she watched him stumble and stutter, bravely battling his fear, a warm feeling of love for him grew in her chest. It seemed to put out the fear that had developed there.
"I have been thinking, umm … well, that … I guess I have been afraid that you, umm, that you don't actually want to have children at all. I mean not even to adopt … And so, I think I have been telling myself not to want children either," he said. He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. His eyes held such worry.
Her fear was back. Such thoughts had been crossing her mind. She knew she needed to at least confirm his concerns, but she also knew how terribly conflicted she felt about the whole thing too. She needed to be careful, because the truth was she didn't really know what she wanted and he might see her ambivalence as wanting to say 'no' to adopting children, but trying to protect him from the disappointment.
The phone rang.
She realized she did not feel relieved by its stopping her from telling him, and that comforted her. She wanted to authentically share with him. She realized she actually even needed to. William was clearly disappointed by the timing of the call as well. He answered the phone – as they both suspected he was being called to a crime scene. It was a robbery, so Julia wasn't needed. She decided she would tell him what was in her head while he dressed. They both agreed that they felt better having talked about it and that they weren't yet done discussing it.
As William stood at the door getting ready to leave, she noticed he had put on the same tie that he had worn earlier. She reached up and stroked it as she said, "Now William, I do think I have a new favorite tie. This one has a very special place in my heart. Actually, I'm surprised there's any room there for anything else – it is so full of you."
He gave her a soft kiss and then wrapped his arms around her, bringing his lips close to her ear. He said, "That's the funny thing about love, the more you do it, the more it grows. You'll make room."
"Seems wise," she responded.
After the door closed, she found herself wondering if that was the reason she so worried about adopting children – that maybe her heart wasn't big enough to love them adequately and still love William – and her career, too… Perhaps she should do a little journaling now. It does often help clear the jumbled mind – to help get you out of living in your head.
