From Part 1
Martha studied the sombre face of her son. She knew he was deeply perturbed about something, but she could detect no hint as to the cause of those concerns.
He breathed deeply and it lifted his blue spandex-clad shoulders. His eyes rose slowly and met hers. “I’m going to offer Lois a divorce,” he said.
Part 2
“You’re *what*!?” Martha shrieked before she could stop herself.
Clark had to the grace to look abashed, but he didn’t back away. “I’m going to offer Lois a divorce,” he said, no less assuredly.
“That would be the biggest mistake of your life,” Martha said, equally firmly.
“No, it would give her the chance to undo the biggest mistake of her life.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“Not yet.”
“Well thankfully, you still have a chance to regain your senses.”
Clark’s eyes glued to his fidgeting fingers and his shoulders dropped. “You think it is a bad idea?”
Martha’s heart melted at the hurt and uncertainty in his voice. “Don’t you remember how you did this once before?” she probed gently. “Before you were married, you broke up with Lois because you thought it was too dangerous for her to be connected with a target like Superman.”
“I now think I was right – that I should have gotten out of her life then. And stayed out.”
“Why Clark?” Martha asked. “Do you regret marrying her? Surely things can’t have gotten that bad between you?”
“Things aren’t that bad between us – not on the surface, anyway.” His eyes were back on his hands as they toyed mindlessly with his cup. “And I will never regret marrying her – not for me. But I can’t be who she needs me to be ... and I can’t give her what she needs.”
“So you’re doing this for her?” Martha didn’t make much effort to keep the scepticism from her tone.
“Yes,” Clark said on a rushed breath. “I want to be married to her – it’s all I’ve ever wanted. But, as I realised that time before our wedding, it simply isn’t fair to Lois.”
“You think you were right all those years ago?”
“I was,” he said with solid-rock certainty.
“Then why did you change your mind and get back with her?”
“Because I was young ... and in love.”
“You’re still young,” Martha said. “So I assume you’re saying you’re no longer in love.”
His head jolted up and his eyes bored into hers. “I will *always* be in love with Lois,” he declared.
“She is going to struggle to see the offer of a divorce as the actions of a man in love.”
“Mom,” Clark said wearily. “I’m thirty-eight years old. Don’t you think it’s time I accepted reality and stopped chasing dreams that simply aren’t possible?”
“What dreams?”
“The dream of a wife and a family.”
“You have a wife.”
“And I can never give her a family.” Clark stood and paced the length of the kitchen. When he turned, his face was rife with the isolation Martha hadn’t seen for many years. “I’m *different*, Mom,” he said. “I’m not like everyone else. I have to accept that. I have to accept that it means I get certain advantages. I also have to accept that it means there are some things I can’t have. But there is absolutely no need for Lois to miss out on those things too.”
Suddenly Martha understood the tortuous track of his thinking. But understanding did not bring agreement. “You’re offering Lois the freedom to find someone else and have the child she wants with him?”
“Yes. And I need to do it now. Before it is too late for her.”
“You really think she would rather have a child with another man than remain childless with you?”
“I know not having a child is eating away at her,” Clark said desperately. “I know it is changing her – I see her becoming someone else right in front of my eyes. I see her cramming every moment with her job so she has no time to think about what could have been. I see her wilting and becoming more and more unfulfilled as a woman. I see her struggle and there is *nothing* I can do to help her.”
Martha searched for a way to suggest – very gently – that Lois had to take some of the responsibility for how their childlessness was affecting her. But Martha couldn’t find words that didn’t sound damning, so she said nothing.
“I know that her job and her home and her marriage simply aren’t enough for her any more,” Clark continued. He lifted his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “I know *I’m* not enough any more.”
This was firmer ground. “I think you’re wrong,” Martha said. “Very, very wrong.”
“If I don’t do something now - if I just continue to ignore the obvious and hope it will fix itself, I will look back in five, ten years and wish I had acted now. I’ll wish I’d had the courage to do this while there was still time for Lois.”
“I think it will destroy her.”
“Staying with me is destroying her.”
“Have you forgotten she loves you?”
Clark folded his arms across his chest. “She can learn to love someone else,” he said coolly.
“I didn’t mean that,” Martha said. “I meant that if Lois loves you and she knows that you want to be with her whatever the circumstances, she won’t leave you, even if you somehow manage to convince her that is best for her.”
His arms dropped. “So I have to pretend I want this?” Clark said incredulously.
“No!” Martha exclaimed. “No, Clark, nothing good ever comes from being dishonest about how you feel.”
“You think I don’t know that?” he said and his frustration vibrated through his voice. “If I’d been honest with her, right from the beginning, if I’d told her I’m an alien, right from the first day, she wouldn’t be in this position now.”
“You don’t think Lois would have loved you if she’d known about -?”
“She would have understood the costs.” He began pacing again. “Instead I was so darn insistent that she love the man and not the powers. I wanted her to love Clark, but in doing that I robbed her of the chance to make any real decisions about her own future.”
“She had plenty of opportunities to back out,” Martha said. “Opportunities after she knew your secret.”
“She was already in love with me by then,” Clark grated. “That is what I wanted. I wanted her to love me ... Clark ... the man. I kept telling her ... I kept telling myself ... that Clark was the real person and the suit was just a disguise so I could use my powers.”
“That’s the truth.”
“No, it’s not,” he exploded. “This is me.” He gestured to the suit. “This is who I am – an alien. I’m not a real man. I never have been. I never will be.”
“So you have no right to a life? To happiness? To the woman you love?”
“Not if she has to pay the price.”
An oppressive silence filled the small kitchen, broken only by Clark’s agitated steps on the wooden floor. Martha stared out of the window at the darkness. It mirrored her heart. Occasionally, she would glance to her son, but the anguish on his face was more than she could bear, so she quickly turned away.
She heard him slump into his seat.
“Clark?” Martha turned from the window. “I do understand the pain of wanting a child and not being able to have one,” she reminded him gently.
“I know – but it’s different for you.”
“How?”
He shot her a shadow-like counterfeit of his real smile. “I know it is dangerous territory for a man to compare his wife and his mother,” he said. “But hear me out. Lois has a drive – something inside that compels her to chase what she wants. It is one of the things I love about her. You have that drive too – but you don’t have the ... the raw fear of failure that she has.”
Martha stared at him, processing his words.
Clark tried again. “I think it has to do with your fathers. You grew up knowing that your father loved you and approved of you. That gave you the confidence to chase after the things you wanted ... but also the security to know that if you failed, it didn’t make you any less of a person. Lois’s father was distant and disapproving. He still is. Lois has an incredibly powerful compulsion to try to fill the gap left by Sam not being the father she needs. That compulsion drives her to succeed, to chase the impossible, but for her, failure is unacceptable - it eats at the very core of who she is, because it has never been buttressed by her father’s love.”
Martha leant closer to her son. “If you ... and your marriage ... and your love ... and her job – if all of that can’t fill the gap in Lois, do you really think a child will?”
“I don’t know,” Clark said with a sigh. “But it will be one less area where Lois feels she has failed her parents.”
“A divorce isn’t a failure?”
“The upheaval will be temporary,” he said. “I’m not saying this won’t be difficult for Lois – but if, in five years, she is happily married with a child, the adjustments of the next few months will be forgotten.”
Martha shook her head, but decided to take a different tack. “What have you told Sam and Ellen?”
“Nothing. When Lucy’s twins were born, both Sam and Ellen constantly made little remarks about Lois following her sister’s lead, about time getting short. Lois pretended to ignore them, although I know every single comment wormed into her heart and festered there.”
“Why not tell them the truth?” Martha asked. “That you – Lois and you – are unable to have children?”
“I wanted to,” Clark said dispiritedly. “I wanted to tell them I am sterile. Lois wouldn’t agree. Now, she believes they think she is so wrapped up in her career, she doesn’t have the time or desire for children.”
“Even if that were the case, is it so bad?”
“It is for Lois because it is yet another area where she feels they disapprove of her choices. Another area where she hasn’t been good enough.” Clark stood. “And the irony burns like acid. She would give up her job in a moment if she could have a child.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“She might not give up her career, but she would give up the position as Editor-in-Chief. When Perry retired, we talked about applying for it. I knew I couldn’t do it – not without severely limiting my Superman activities. Lois said she couldn’t do it if there was any chance of having a child. By then, we had accepted – *said* we had accepted – that there would be no baby. I encouraged her to go for the job because I thought it would be some small compensation for our childlessness.”
“And is it?”
“On the surface, maybe. But where it really counts ...” Clark stepped towards the door and Martha realised he was drawing this conversation to a close.
But she wasn’t finished yet. “When was the last time you talked about this?” she asked. “With Lois?”
Clark looked at his feet – a gesture she’d learnt to read over three decades ago. “It’s been awhile,” he admitted. He opened the door. “You should go back to bed.”
Martha caught up to him and took her son into her arms. “Will you do something for me?” she asked.
“What?”
“Don’t say anything about a divorce to Lois. Not yet. Talk to her about how she feels, how you feel, but please don’t suggest a divorce as the solution.”
“I can’t keep putting it off,” he said darkly. “The sooner it is done, the sooner she will be able to start a new life.”
“A few weeks won’t make any difference.”
“And what can happen in a few weeks that will change anything?” he demanded. “And please don’t say you’re hoping for a miracle pregnancy.”
“No,” Martha retorted. “I’m hoping for a miracle onset of common sense.”
His face closed and he opened the door. “I’ll see you,” he said woodenly.
Martha stalled him with a hand to his arm. “Think about it,” she begged. “Please don’t do something you’ll regret.”
“I’ll give it one week,” Clark conceded. “But one week today, I’m going to talk to Lois and tell her I think it is best if we divorce.” He stepped out of the door and flew into the darkness.
Martha brushed back the hair that had fluttered across her face and stared at the spot where he had disappeared. “Oh, Clark,” she whispered. “Oh, honey. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to Lois.”
||_||
Clark flew home slowly, thinking about his mother’s words.
She was right, Lois *did* still love him. His wife would probably believe the honourable thing to do would be to stay with him - to sacrifice her desire to be a mother in favour of her commitment to their marriage. If she had the slightest inkling of how much this would devastate him, Clark knew Lois would never agree to leave him.
So, he needed to draw away. He needed to stop letting her see his looks of love. He needed to stop touching her. Pull back. Loosen the connection between them. Unbind the ties that kept her imprisoned in a childless marriage.
A childless marriage that was fast becoming little more than a crumbling house of wasted dreams.
Last night she had *cried* as they had made love.
Cried.
Clark hated seeing Lois cry. He hated himself when he made her cry. But this ... somehow this went so much deeper than careless words or unthinking actions. This went to the very core of their love. Clark knew that the memory of her tears would rip him apart for the rest of his life.
For her, their marriage was already a source of pain.
For him, it was everything that mattered.
He needed to convince Lois that she must follow her heart. If she didn’t, it would destroy her and he couldn’t face the agony of watching Lois suffer – nothing, not even superpowers could ease the pain of that.
Yes, he decided. It would be preferable to be alone, knowing she was happy, than to be with Lois and have to watch her slowly die from the inside out.
There had to be a good man out there. A man who could love Lois as he loved Lois. A man who could give her everything.
It wasn’t as if she would have limited choices. Clark was well aware of how many men eyed his wife with admiration ... and eyed him with ill-concealed envy.
His mom was right. If he just came out and said they should divorce, Lois wouldn’t take him seriously. She would claim that she was fine. She would ply him with the tired excuse that her job was draining and stressful. She would smile the fabricated smile that didn’t even begin to cover her pain. She would kiss him and tell him not to be silly.
Then she would slip back into the solitary bubble of her world and the strain of having to pretend her life was everything she wanted it to be.
He had one week to begin to ease himself out of her life.
He was nearly home. Instead of flying through the window, Clark veered ... and went in search of an emergency.
||_||
Lois woke the next morning with a pressing sense of heaviness. She was alone in the bed. It was too early for Clark to be up – he must be out as Superman. She rubbed her gummy eyes – she had fallen asleep crying.
Then she remembered why.
She and Clark had been making love – more from habit, if she were brutally honest, than from the unrelenting passion that had enraptured the early years of their marriage. And then, the unthinkable had happened.
How had it come to this?
Her thoughts moved back fifteen months – to the day she had been told she was the new Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Planet.
She had embraced the position with all the dedication and commitment she could muster. She had been determined to show that a woman could lead a newspaper to heights never before seen. She had been determined that every single edition would be momentous – every single story would be the best it could be.
She had ridden all her reporters hard. She had goaded them and badgered them and berated them and refused to accept anything less than brilliance.
It had cost her three fine reporters. People who had found her obsession too intense and her high standards too rigidly and abrasively set.
The first one had been within a month of Lois replacing Perry. Lois had watched him leave, her contempt bristling as she reminded herself that if the Planet were to become the paper of her dreams, it could not be a harbour for the half-hearted.
The second one had been harder to dismiss as a lack of commitment. Lois knew she had lost a young woman whose instincts and dedication were uncannily close to those of Lois Lane a decade earlier. But young Lois had had the advantage of Perry’s steadying guidance. Lois knew that at this stage, she was no Perry White. And the young reporter had suffered because of it.
The third one gouged deep into Lois’s psyche. She had spent many dark and sleepless hours, reciting the Planet’s continually increasing circulation figures to numb the impact of losing Jimmy Olsen. Jimmy – who was a friend as well as a good reporter and a talented photographer. Jimmy - whom she had pressured once too often.
He had simply looked at her and said, quietly, “This is a newspaper, Lois. It is important, but it’s not worth my life. I want to work hard and I want to be successful, but I don’t want it so much that I’m willing to sacrifice every other part of my life for it. You’ll have my resignation within the hour.” With that he had walked out, returned with a formally worded letter, wished her the best of luck and left the Planet office.
That was three months ago. Lois hadn’t seen him since. She had heard he had left Metropolis.
The truth was - the truth Lois had tried to deflect with a steady stream of excuses – the truth was that the Daily Planet *had* become her entire life. She devoted every waking moment to stories, to features, to introducing new sections, to increasing readership, to attracting advertisers, to staying ahead of the game.
And she had done it. Perry White had handed her a newspaper that was clearly the best in North America. In fifteen short months, she had taken it to being a newspaper that had no peer in the entire world.
She was proud of that. Immensely proud.
She’d known there would be a cost. She and Clark had talked about it before she’d applied for the position. They had both known it would eat into their lives – but they had both been convinced their relationship was strong enough that even with less time together, their love would remain strong.
And, they had assured each other, it would only be for a time. A time of adjustment while she settled into the new responsibilities. While she became accustomed to the pressures of the job.
But, it hadn’t been only for a time.
Now, more than a year later, her drive to improve the Planet had only intensified, her time dedicated to her job had increased. Her preoccupation had become an obsession.
So much so that ...
Lois felt the rise of the tears that had lain dormant as she’d slept.
So much so that last night ...
She felt the gush of moisture flood her eyes and spill onto her cheeks.
Last night, as Clark had made love to her, she had caught herself – thinking about a story.
Not a front page story ... not a breaking story that would be huge ... not a story she had chased down for weeks and was on the cusp of nailing.
No – just a story – a small, quickly forgotten story that didn’t deserve any greater prominence than page six.
Her mind had been working over that story ... instead of ...
Lois swallowed roughly as her tears tumbled down her temples and onto her pillow.
Clark deserved so much better than that.
When had it started? When had their love-making been reduced to something that could be multi-tasked?
Lois’s tears surged as she faced another truth. She had allowed the pain of knowing they could never have a child to dilute her joy in her husband’s love. When they still had hope, their lovemaking had been infused with wonderful possibilities that seemed to imbue the actual act with almost magical joy. As the months and years had passed and there had been no pregnancy, the joy had been replaced with desperation – as if somehow, they could force conception by sheer willpower.
They couldn’t of course.
And when Dr Klein had confirmed what they already suspected, their lovemaking had moved to another phase. Sadness had clouded them. A realisation that this was all they had. That they could enjoy all the beauty of their intimacy, but it would remain as making love and could never progress to making life.
That had been heart-breaking.
Lois had been so devastated that she couldn’t give Clark the chance to be a father. She knew he had wanted the whole family scenario for so long.
And for herself too – it was only after the final death knell had sounded on their hopes that Lois had realised how much she wanted children, how much she longed to see Clark hold their child, how much she yearned to watch a new life grow and flourish in the shelter of their love.
But it was not to be.
And it had left her hollow – a void she had tried to fill with her job.
In essence, the Planet had become her baby. Her child. But it was an undisciplined and demanding child - a child whose needs and wants were never satisfied.
And Lois had become enslaved to its constant demands.
The cost had been huge. Far higher than she could have anticipated.
But she wasn’t the only one paying.
Her relationships had taken a battering.
Her parents – the last three times her mother had called to suggest they go to lunch together, Lois had declined. She simply couldn’t afford the time.
Yet ...
She could have gone. Should have gone. What was one hour away from the office? Would the paper collapse if she were out of the office for an hour? Would she lose one reader if she took the time to have lunch with her mother?
And her father. She hadn’t seen him since the twins’ birthday – that was six months ago.
And Lucy. In the time since the boys had turned one, Lois had seen her sister only once. Her nephews were growing and changing and she had missed so much of it.
And Jimmy. She had lost one of her truly dear friends. All in the pursuit of driving the Daily Planet to dizzying heights.
And doing it mostly alone.
She wasn’t a team player.
Lois grabbed a bunch of tissues from the box next to her bed and soaked up her tears.
And Clark.
Surely, he had paid the greatest price of all.
Her husband. The most wonderfully loving and caring person she had ever known. The man she knew loved her with every ounce of his being.
She had pushed him into the shadows of her heart, relegated him to the background of her life. She realised with a sickening start that she could not remember the last time they had relaxed together over a meal.
The last time they had laughed together.
The last time they had simply enjoyed each other’s company.
They ate together once or twice a week. Usually she would come in late and Clark would put before her the meal he had prepared. She would gulp it down, barely tasting it, barely showing any appreciation, barely taking the time to ask about his day – unless it was directly related to a story – either something he’d written, or a Superman activity that had become a story, or a case he was pursuing in the hope of a story.
She didn’t remember the last time she had asked him how he felt about ... anything.
Was he still mourning that they would have no child?
Did it still hurt him? It would, she realised. But was his hurt still a sharp stabbing pain, or had it dulled to an ache that had been somewhat eased by time and acceptance?
She didn’t know.
Because she hadn’t bothered to ask.
Hadn’t thought she had the time to listen.
Lois reached for the tissues again and blew her nose. She rose from the bed and checked Clark’s closet. His three pairs of business shoes were all there. He was definitely out as Superman.
She wished she could call his cell and ask him to meet her for breakfast. When was the last time they had done that?
They hadn’t done it this summer. Perhaps in the spring. They must have. She couldn’t remember it though.
Lois showered, dressed and applied her makeup - always listening for the whoosh that would signify Clark’s arrival.
She ate a hurried and scant breakfast as she drove to the Planet.
Just as she did every morning.
Except this morning was different.
Instead of her mind being full of stories and leads and advertising space and column inches, it was full of one man.
Her husband.
She missed him.
She wanted him back.
