Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  “She does seem to like it, though,” Angela said as Rosie bounced some more and crowed with laughter.

  “Don’t encourage her, the next thing you know she’ll be getting you one.”

  “My mother already did,” Angela replied, and they giggled like coconspirators.

  We made two pumpkin and two apple pies, and then we fed Rosie and took her outside. “It’s beautiful here,” Angela said. “I’m glad we came. At first Chris didn’t want to, but…”

  “I’m glad you did, too. It means a lot to Alex.”

  “To Chris too, even though he won’t admit it. Especially now.”

  “You mean, with the baby coming?”

  She gave me an enigmatic look. “That and…other things.”

  I didn’t ask what she meant—for once, Sugar, mind your business, I thought. “They’re a lot alike, you know, Chris and Alex,” I said. “Straight-forward, sure of themselves—”

  “Stubborn,” she added. “Maybe that’s why things are hard for them. I hope they sort them out before…”

  “Before what?”

  “uh…before the baby’s born. Did Chris tell you we’re going to name it after his father? Alex if it’s a boy, Alexandria if it’s a girl.”

  Jews believe it’s bad luck to name a baby after a living person, but I didn’t mention that; as Evan had said the night before when Chris and Alex argued about the war in Iraq, “This is a purpose-driven vacation, bro, and the purpose is fun, so no politics or religion, okay?”

  It was a clear, cold sunny day—perfect weather for skiing if you like that sort of thing, or playing in the snow if you’re nine months old and you’ve never seen or tasted it before. Jessie came home to give Rosie lunch and put her down for a nap, so I went for a walk, past the line of aspens at the back of the property and through the brushy woodland that got thicker and denser as it wound up toward the mountain. I followed a trail through the woods for a quarter of a mile or so. The rise was gradual, the quiet absolute—there was something almost spiritual about the way the trees made a canopy over my head.

  Suddenly the quiet was shattered by a loud thrashing noise, which was followed a heartbeat later by a deer that leaped out of the brush less than five feet from where I stood. His hooves flashed in front of my eyes as he bounded past me and disappeared into a thick stand of trees. I was so startled it seemed like my heart had come loose from its moorings and was trying to get out of my chest; first I felt a short, sharp pain and then I felt so dizzy I sat down in the middle of the path until the adrenaline rush receded and I could stand up again. That’s all it was—Generalized Arousal Syndrome, as Dr. Kaplan had explained, better known as the fight-or-flight response. It didn’t exactly cause my takutsoba, but it was what he called a precipitant. Except for work, I’d tried to avoid adding any new stress to my life, which I considered before I let Alex talk me into diving. But I did it anyway. I’d been fine underwater until I saw the octopus, and I’d lived through that, hadn’t I?

  I’d live through this, too. I willed the hormones to go back where they came from and take the octopus with them. Octopus, octopus go away, come again some other day played in my head all the way back to the house like an advertising jingle you can’t forget. Before much longer, I knew, I’d have to tell Alex about him.

  Zach came back from the mountain after a couple of runs and took over in the kitchen. The rest of us were sniffing and tasting when Alex and his sons came in.

  “How was it?” I asked

  “Incredible!” said Evan. “We went to Golden Peak, they have this amazing superpipe—you should have seen us whizzing up and down those twenty foot walls. We got Dad on a board, and he did pretty good, considering.”

  “Don’t patronize your old man, kid,” said Alex, shaking the snow off his parka and planting a chilly kiss on my head.

  “I wasn’t being patronizing, it’s like I told you—boarding’s not like skiing. Your center of gravity’s lower, and the balance is different—that’s probably why you kept falling.”

  “I didn’t keep falling, it was only twice. Tomorrow we’re hitting the Exterminator—you can ride your board, but I’ll be leaving my tracks in your powder.”

  Chris looked worried. “Dad, do you think that’s such a good idea? It’s a double-diamondback, maybe we just ought to cruise Big Bowl instead.”

  “Why, you chickening out? If memory serves, the first time you skied that run, it was with me.”

  “Yeah, but that was a long time ago, before—” He looked at me and stopped.

  “Before what?” I asked. “Is it really called the Exterminator? Alex, maybe Chris is right, maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

  “It’ll be fine, Sugar, don’t worry,” he said, but he didn’t answer my other question.

  By the time we finished dinner, everyone was Chrstmassed out—the kids were nodding out, Rosie had a meltdown and refused to be soothed, and pretty soon they drifted away from the table and disappeared upstairs.

  I wrapped the leftover turkey in aluminum foil, covered the remains of the pies with Saran wrap and started to load the dishwasher, but Alex stopped me. “Leave it,” he said.

  “I can’t leave dirty dishes in the sink at night. When I try to, I get up at three a.m. and wash them so I don’t have to face the mess in the morning,” I protested.

  “Another of Frances’s Rules?”

  I thought for a minute. “Probably. We always had to clean up after her parties. My father used to bring her breakfast in bed every morning before he went to the office. When I got married, she said I should ask Ted to do it, right away, while the bloom was still on the rose—“She used to say, ‘The way you start out is the way you end up.’ ”

  “I’d tell you the staff will do it tomorrow, but it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?” he said. It was one of the things I liked about Alex—he knew which battles were worth fighting.

  He found a bottle of armagnac among the array of liqueurs on the open steel shelves that hung over the long expanse of granite that bisected the enormous kitchen, which Zach said was better than the one in his restaurant—“A million five, easy,” he estimated enviously.

  “So did you? Did Ted bring you breakfast in bed every day?” Alex asked.

  “Hardly,” I said. “But he had this thing about wanting to have his shirts freshly ironed when he went to court, so I did it, even though I hate to iron. My parents were visiting us once, right after we were married, and Frances saw me doing it—she was horrified.” I laughed out loud, remembering. “She said, just burn it, he’ll never ask you to iron his shirts again. She was right, of course—after the second time I did it, he started taking them to the French laundry.”

  This is how intimacy comes later in life, without the accretion of years of knowing someone, of a shared history—in moments when long-forgotten fragments of the past surface and suddenly you’re talking about something that happened so long ago you barely remember who you were then. (Or, as Suzanne once said, men don’t just love younger women because they’re beautiful, it’s because their stories are shorter.)

  Alex poured us a couple a snifters of the brandy and perched companionably on a stool while I washed the wine glasses by hand—they were Tiffany crystal like the ones one of Ted’s rich clients gave Jessie and Zach when they got married. She never puts hers in the dishwasher, so I didn’t, either. When the kitchen was close enough to spotless so the staff wouldn’t think we were slobs, Alex and I curled up on one of the leather couches that were grouped around the circular fireplace in the great room in an attempt to make it look less like the lobby of a hotel and more like people actually lived there. Unlike the fireplaces in the bedrooms, this one was gas-powered, and appeared to burn perpetually with a cool blue flame.

  “So what did you do all day while I was getting my ass kicked by my kids on the mountain?”

  “Read, hung out, made pies with Angela, took care of the baby, went for a walk in the woods behind the house. I almost got run over by
Bambi.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me quizzically.

  “This deer jumped out of the brush right in front of me and scared the hell out of me.” I took a deep breath. “Alex, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  ”Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “After that first time I came to Seattle, on the way to Vancouver when I stood you up for lunch…well, I didn’t really stand you up. I mean, I did, but it wasn’t because there was an emergency on the set. The emergency happened before that.”

  “When you collapsed at the bookstore.”

  “Yes, when I …how did you know about that? Did Paul tell you? Or was it Jessie?”

  “Neither one of them. I stopped in at the café a week or so later and heard about how Heidi saved some woman’s life. She didn’t know it was you, she just said it was—” He hesitated.

  “It was what?”

  “Umm…‘some old lady” I think was the way she put it. Don’t look so horrified, Sugar, she’s just a kid, anyone over 30 looks old to her. Me, too. She tried to fix me up with her mother once.”

  “Did you go?”

  “Of course not.” He looked annoyed. “Anyway, I came in again a few days later, and she said, you know that woman I was telling you about? We found her keys in a little leather case that must have dropped under the stairs when she fell. There was a business card inside it, she said, some tourist from California.” He smiled. “I think her exact words were, ‘with that mouth on her, I was sure she was a New Yorker.’ ”

  “So she told you my name?”

  “No, why would she? She didn’t know I knew you.”

  “You just recognized me from that brilliant description, huh? An old lady from California with a big mouth?”

  “Shouldn’t I have?”

  His voice was teasing, but his eyes were serious, and locked onto mine like a laser—I squirmed uncomfortably under his scrutiny. This was not the way I’d planned this conversation. I was going to start out with something funny, like, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was attacked by the Killer Sushi?” and then maybe segue into explaining that I didn’t tell him when it happened because I didn’t want him to worry.

  “The next day I got your e-mail, so I called you at the hotel in Vancouver. When they said you hadn’t checked in yet, I put it together,” Alex continued,

  “So you knew I’d lied to you.”

  He shrugged. “Everybody’s got secrets. And their own reasons for keeping them. I figured when you were ready to tell me, you would. Or not.”

  “I guess this would be a good time, right?” And then I did: Sugar and the Octopus, the unexpurgated version.

  He listened intently, interrupting only when I insisted it hadn’t been a heart attack.

  “So this thing you had, this takotsubo—it’s caused by emotional stress, right?”

  “Well, yes but—“I began.

  “And you’re going back to L.A. and write and produce a whole season of shows between now and May, right?”

  “Not all by myself, I’ve got a writing team and a bunch of AP’s, and Robin, and—”

  “I see,” he said evenly.

  Sometimes his eyes were so purple they were almost black. This was one of those times. “No, you don’t see, not really. Look, Alex, this is what I do. It’s who I am.”

  He got up and topped off his brandy snifter. “I understand, Sugar. Believe me, I really, really get it,” he said. “But did you not tell me because you thought it would change how I feel about you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a very small, quiet voice. “I don’t know how you feel about me.”

  “You don’t?” He looked incredulous.

  I shook my head—after all, he’d never come right out and said the words.

  His face darkened. “Well, when you figure it out, let me know,” Then he stood up, took his parka from the clothes tree in the foyer, put it on and went out the door.

  He didn’t come back until after midnight. I’d already gone up to our room when I heard a car drive up and then the sound of the front door opening and closing again. I lay awake for a long time until I realized he wasn’t going to join me so I swallowed a couple of Ambien and fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, it was nearly noon and the house was empty; except for Tory and the housekeeper, everyone else was gone.

  I did what usually works when my spirits are at ebb—shopping and a massage, with chocolate for a chaser. I ran into Jessie and Zach in the village. They’d been skiing with friends from L.A. who were vacationing at their parents’ condo. “We left Rosie with their nanny, we’re on our way to pick her up,” Jessie said.

  “You should have woken me up, I would’ve taken care of her,” I replied. “Where is everyone?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Evan and Chris were on the mountain, but Alex wasn’t with them so we figured he was with you. What did you buy? Is this for Rosie? A little black leather motorcycle jacket? It’s so cool, Mom, where did you find it?”

  When we got back to the house Alex was there, entertaining a couple of friends from Houston: “Bob and Carol came in on the same plane with Chris and Angela, so I invited them over for drinks,” he said.

  It was over an hour before they left; they were pleasant enough, but I was glad to see them go. At dinner, Alex drank more than usual; he was sick in the night and it was a long time before he came back to bed.

  The next day he was cheerful and affectionate; we didn’t talk any more about my “condition,” and on the surface, at least, nothing had changed. But in bed it was a different story.

  I was accustomed to the rhythms of our lovemaking; I’d learned to savor his slow, unhurried pace, the way he reined in his excitement, holding himself back until I couldn’t come one more time before he did. It sounds crass to say it, and I winced when I did (to Carrie, who’s the only one I ever share the nitty gritty with) but Alex fucked like a man half his age. Or at least, he had. Now he handled me carefully, as if he was afraid I’d break.

  Maybe I wasn’t getting his passion, but the mountain seemed to be. He left the house early in the morning, sometimes with the kids, sometimes alone. Paul, who dropped out of college to train for a place on the U.S. Olympic ski team and came within a punishing eight seconds of making it, told me privately that he thought Alex was risking his neck. “I wouldn’t even try some of those double black diamonds, not any more,” he said dubiously.

  I’d been a spectator at Paul’s first few important races, but my tension was a distraction: “I can feel it just as I get to the finish line and it throws me off, Mom,” he said, so I stopped going. He still skis, but not with the same intensity. One night he said he and Chris had watched Alex from the High Line chair lift that afternoon. “I said, what’s with your old man? It’s like he’s trying to kill himself.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said his father’s always done things his own way, why should he be any different now?”

  I tried to bring up the subject with Alex but he brushed me off brusquely. “I don’t tell you how to live your life, do I? Don’t tell me how to live mine.” He apologized later, but his words still stung, especially since I didn’t have a comeback.

  He was uncharacteristically moody for the rest of the week—sometimes he snapped at his boys, and once or twice at me, especially when I came back in from having my nightly cigarette. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You nearly bit Evan’s head off yesterday, just because he left the lights on in the car, and if I were Chris and you talked to me the way you did to him tonight I’d have slugged you.”

  “Don’t tell me how to talk to my kids—I don’t tell you how to talk to yours, do I?” he snapped.

  “Why? Is there something wrong with the way I talk to them?”

  “Besides the fact that you’re always telling Jessie what to do with Rosie, and sometimes i
t seems like you treat Paul more like your lover than your son, no,” he said.

  “I do not,” I said angrily. “At least my kids know I love them.”

  “And mine don’t?”

  I threw up my hands. “Alex, stop it. This is crazy. Why are we fighting? I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re not yourself—at least, not the Alex I know.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” he said cryptically.

  “Maybe I don’t,” I replied, and he walked out of the room. I tried again the next night. We’d had sex, but it was more cursory than passionate—it felt like a duty fuck, the kind you have when you know you should but don’t really want to. Afterward, just as he was turning over to go to sleep, I said, “Alex? Is this because of what I told you?”

  “What did you tell me?” he said sleepily.

  “You know…about my heart thing. My, umm, condition. Is that why you’re being so, well, distant?”

  He rolled back over and faced me. “We weren’t so distant a few minutes ago, were we?” he said.

  “Not physically. But emotionally…you’re not here, Alex. I don’t know where you are, but you’re not with me.”

  He kissed me on the forehead. “It’s not about you, Sugar,” he said, more tenderly than he’d spoken in the past couple of days. “It’s not always about you.” And then he turned over again, and in minutes he was snoring.

  I had too much on my mind to sleep and I didn’t feel like reading or watching TV, so I went downstairs to what was a decorator’s idea of a library, even though most of the books that lined the shelves didn’t look like their spines had ever been cracked. But there was a desk equipped with a fax machine, copier, printer and computer. I opened a blank word document and looked at all that white space for a few minutes and then I began to outline an idea for a story, which turned into some scenes and then into the first act of a script for the show.

  It was almost dawn when I stopped. That’s the thing about writing—when it’s going well, your mind is too occupied to think about anything else. You don’t notice time passing—it’s as if you participate in it, a state the Greeks call kairos. You’re in a whole other world, one where you make things happen instead of letting them happen to you. It’s always been my escape hatch, and that night, I was grateful for it. When I printed out the pages later that day, I was glad to see they were pretty good; by the time New Year’s Eve day rolled around, I had a complete script, or at least a solid draft of one.