Payback

by Mary Gordon

  “How long have you been married, if you don’t mind my asking…and once again, if you don’t mind, Quin, I’m very eager to know how you’ve been…I mean, how you got where you are now…such an interesting place you seem to have arrived at.”

  “I’d like to chime in here,” Rich says. “My wife is too modest to give herself the full credit for the remarkable success she’s made of her life. Talk about the right place at the right time. We met in ’82, just as Arizona was really taking off…we met because she opened a gym in Brimston…having the fantastic good sense to hire me as a manager. It was five more years before she’d let me carry her over the threshold.”

  Quin snorts. “You’ve never carried me anywhere.”

  “But to continue, she then got into real estate, at, again, just the right moment, did very well at it, as she does well at anything, and then became a feature on the local morning talk shows until the heads of the station offered her a place on one of them, until…this is the genius part…she came up with the idea for PAYBACK, this show you’re going to be part of…Quin won’t tell you this, but she’s absolutely a local celebrity…everyone talks about her, people are glued to their sets, they build their days around PAYBACK, and they talk about it for weeks afterward.”

  Quin has taken an emery board out of her purse and is filing her nails. Is she really bored by this recounting of her triumph, Agnes wonders, or is this part of their act, the song-and-dance routine they have, Agnes sees, perfected over years?

  “So yes, he’s got it mostly right, and I’m glad we’re getting this over with because this is the part of my life that won’t be in the show we’re doing with you because my audience knows it all…what we’re going to focus on is what happened to me after I ran away from you.”

  “What you’ve done with your life is quite admirable,” Agnes says.

  Quin won’t let her stay in this cool spot; she wants her dancing on the burning coals she has prepared for her.

  “It took discipline and courage to get where I am from where I came from. I won’t give you the details, I’m saving them for the show, suffice to say that when I left here, I lived in absolute squalor for seven years.”

  Rich unzips a thin black leather envelope and lays some papers on the table. “These are release forms for you to sign, Agnes, if you will, and maybe we should firm up a schedule.”

  He hands Agnes a green enamel fountain pen. Usually, Agnes is fond of fountain pens, but this one seems too thick, its point too large and cumbersome. She briefly reads the words on the page. She agrees that she will not sue, she agrees that anything she says is true. Yes, she thinks, it is easy to say yes to both.

  “We’re staying in Newport,” he says, “our crew hasn’t been to this part of the world and we thought it would be kind of a hoot for them to see how the rich lived in their versions of McMansions.”

  She understands his response to Newport; it always seemed a hymn to wrong-minded excess; why build chateaux based on the domains of Renaissance French nobility whose domains were a long river when you were at the sea and lived in the place only for a few weeks in summer?

  “I hope you enjoy it…I believe there are some first-rate restaurants…I haven’t been in years, but I could ask my daughter. She and her husband try all the new restaurants.”

  “Your daughter, Maeve,” Quin says.

  It alarms Agnes to hear Quin say Maeve’s name.

  “Yes, Maeve, she is a doctor here in practice with Christina Datchett, you remember she taught science?”

  “We don’t have children,” Quin says. “And I suppose I have you to thank for that. In my squalid years, I contracted PID, which rendered me infertile. And so, if I hadn’t lived the way I lived after I left you, who knows?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Agnes says. She sees that Rich is a bit uneasy with this turn of the conversation; perhaps it’s a raw subject, and he is not comfortable mentioning it publicly…but that would be strange, because it is, after all, their business, to make the private public.

  “I’m going to want to shoot some footage at the school,” Quin says, and Agnes sees she’s someone used to giving orders and having her orders unquestioningly obeyed. “Who do you think we need to get in touch with about that?”

  “Well, Jo Walsh is still the head…she’s retiring in two years, but she’s still in charge. I could certainly speak to her.”

  “Miss Walsh. MIZZ Walsh, the only one who insisted on that ridiculous syllable, which always sounded like some slave on a plantation…the Red Queen, we used to call her. Pretending she was interested in free speech but if you disagreed with her, she’d just beat you down with arguments until you gave up from exhaustion. So you still see your old friends.”

  “Yes, I’m lucky in that. And you remember Christina Datchett…as I said, my daughter’s in practice with her. And you remember Jeanne Larkin. She and Christina were married last year.”

  Jeanne Larkin. The words hit a vulnerable spot, Jeanne Larkin, the only student she’d admired, Jeanne Larkin, who wouldn’t give her the time of day, even the day they were both on the train, the day that led to everything.

  “Well, isn’t that all just cozy…was that going on while they were student and teacher?”

  “No,” Agnes says, more defensively than she wishes. “No, not at all, they met up again when Christina was in medical school and Jeanne was a graduate student.”

  Quin sniffs. “Whatever,” she says.

  “So, Agnes, let’s say we’ll speak on the phone tomorrow, and perhaps we can start the shoot the day after.”

  “Of course,” Agnes says, “whatever you like.”

  “It’s not about liking,” Quin says. “It’s about good TV.”

  * * *

  —

  She closes the door after them. She moves to the couch and calls the dog to sit beside her. She buries her head in the dog’s neck.

  She will have to call people now. Maeve, Jo, Christina…she’ll have to gather them together and say—what? “The oddest thing has happened.” And then what, say what to Maeve, who has never heard of Heidi Stolz, has no idea of that stain on her mother’s past, or its power. Say what to Jo and to Christina, who had never sympathized with Heidi, had doubted, as had Letitia Barnes, that what Heidi had said happened to her had happened. Who’d thought that Agnes’s frantic trips to New York trying to find Heidi were excessive, neurotic, a tribute to some stale, Puritan past. So she hadn’t talked to her friends about Heidi after the first days, hadn’t talked to anyone, had made a new life for herself in Italy, become a different person as Heidi had, moving to Arizona, becoming Quin. Agnes had kept things to herself, and keeping them to herself had seemed to her the only honor that attached to the whole catastrophe. And now, she would open it up, set it out; but what was it she was opening, setting out, and to whom? Not only to her friends, her daughter, but, at Heidi’s—Quin’s—insistence, the whole world.

  “She’s a very private person.” That was the new phrase, spoken grudgingly, as if the person described were selfishly, deliberately, withholding something. It had been a relief to be in Italy, where, although there was no word for privacy, and life seemed famously to be lived in the open, people felt the compulsion to speak about what they had done, or what they felt about it. Was it the war? A whole shared past of shameful secrets. Or was it something to do with a taste for form, a kind of good taste or good manners, linked somehow to the way they set a table, wrapped a package, addressed an envelope. So you had your outdoor life, your street life, which anyone was welcome to, and then you had the life that was your own, invulnerable and valuable, unsusceptible to light and weather. A closed room, narrow, dim and shuttered, to which it was possible, to which it was desirable, to retreat. Not from shame but from a simple need, something like a need for sleep, ordinary, requiring neither excuse nor consent.

  But now the room was
forced, the shutters thrown open, the overhead light beamed toward the white bed at the center of the room, the room’s whole purpose, where someone would be free to rest.

  She felt now always in a glare. She realized that ever since Quin and the cameraman had appeared, she’d had the impulse to shield her eyes.

  But was it a good thing, entirely, this withdrawal, this closing off? Would it have been good for her and Maeve as mother and daughter (so many years there’d been between them this slight but palpable unease) if Maeve had understood her history? Would it have been better for her marriage, would Pietro have been able to understand the coolness that had come upon her, which was never spoken of between them but which she sometimes, but not always, thought he had felt?

  Yes, maybe it was a good thing, what she’d always interpreted as a contemporary mania for exposure, the unappeasable appetite to be seen and seen and seen, as if nothing could be looked at enough, nothing sufficiently revealed. It had offended her, instinctively she’d turned her imagination away. She’d refused Facebook and Instagram. She didn’t send hundreds of photos to hundreds of people every time she went anywhere at all. She didn’t even like taking photographs, it seemed to her a kind of abuse of visibility.

  Privacy. The right to privacy…it had seemed to her endangered, like one of those species of birds suddenly extinct because of the thrust and press of contemporary life. Her love of privacy had made her seem to herself out of step, old and cut off, but she had no desire to live differently, as she’d had no desire to go topless on the beach in the years when every Italian woman seemed perfectly happy to do it.

  And yet she was uncomfortable with those Middle Eastern women who were concealed, covered except for their eyes…

  * * *

  —

  So perhaps they were right, the people who liked Quin Archer’s show. PAYBACK, it was called, she’d said. But it didn’t matter whether it was right or not. It was happening.

  Agnes lifts the telephone. She tries to decide who to call first. Jo or Christina. One thing she knows: her daughter will be last. Although it is difficult for her to determine which call will be the most difficult; Jo and Christina had never liked Heidi, had actively disliked her as long as they knew her.

  Like, liking. Such a meager word, she thinks, such a minor concept. And yet, without it there was…what? Nullity, or worse, the opposite of liking: dislike. She had been interested in Heidi. She had even admired her; her relentless insistence on the unsentimental, her freedom from the usual teenage desire to be liked. Heidi Stolz. In the countless times she had tried to determine what it was she had felt for Heidi, she had never come to a satisfactory answer. Heidi had interested her; she felt a responsibility to Heidi Stolz. In that interest, in that responsibility, there was no doubt a large quotient of vanity. But did she like her or did she merely love herself for her unusual choice in not disliking her; she had to admit that the first sight of Heidi at the door of the classroom or making her way down the hall had caused in Agnes a drawing back, a slight flinching—Heidi had had only two postures, either she slunk, making her way through a doorway, around a corner, as if she wanted to be invisible; or she strutted with her head stuck out in front of her, like an animal not quite on the attack but ready for it should the need arise.

  No one liked Heidi, so no one understood Agnes’s distress; they thought of it—they didn’t say it, but she knew—as neurotic, hysterical, excessive. The most people would grant was that Agnes had made an unfortunate mistake. Because people loved her and disliked Heidi, they focused on Agnes’s side of the event, what Agnes had done, what Agnes was feeling, not what the effects of what she had done or not done had on Heidi.

  She calls Jo first—she doesn’t quite know why, except perhaps that both she and Jo are unmated, Jack Walsh having left Jo for an intern at his law firm, soon after the Bush v. Gore decision came down. He said he could no longer live beside someone who had “lost all political faith, all political hope.”

  “And perky breasts,” Jo said one night to Agnes, when the two of them had gone to a movie. After all these years, it was still more comfortable to be one-on-one with either Christina or Jo; Christina had an impulse to needle Jo, and Jo seemed always to rise to the bait.

  Only she and Jo had made conventional marriages, and only she and Jo were alone. A widow and a divorcée. She envied Jo the word that went with her condition; divorcée sounded slightly dangerous, slightly seductive; to be called a widow, Agnes thought, made you sound bereft and hollowed out, as if you’d been declared, based on your husband’s deadness, half dead yourself.

  * * *

  —

  Hearing Jo’s panicked tone, she wonders if calling her first had been a mistake. She’d forgotten Jo’s doomsday tendencies, and her first response did not promise well. “Have you been diagnosed with cancer. Are Maeve and Marcus moving back to Italy? To California. Has Leo been hit by a car?”

  “Nothing like that. Nothing so dire. It’s complicated.”

  “I hate it when people say that. What they mean by ‘It’s complicated’ is ‘It’s a big stinking mess.’ ”

  “Yes, well, Josie, that too.”

  Maeve and Christina were more difficult to schedule…but everyone was free by nine that evening.

  Maeve would come with Marcus; Christina with Jeanne.

  * * *

  —

  Maeve’s car is the first to pull into the driveway.

  Marcus kisses her cheek and heads for the kitchen.

  “I’ve brought ice cream, and I need to put it in the freezer.”

  “What’s up, Mom,” Maeve says, stroking her mother’s hair as if she were a feverish child.

  “Let’s just wait till the others get here.”

  Christina and Jeanne arrive on foot; Jo, as is her habit, is last.

  “Let’s sit around the dining room table.”

  “Are you going to read a new will?” asks Jo.

  “Jo, can you bear waiting one more minute or will your head explode,” says Christina.

  “It’s just. Well, it’s worrying.”

  “I told you, it’s nothing life threatening. It’s just, well, strange. Maeve, this will all be very new to you…it’s something I never talked to you about. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with you, with my life after I married your father, after you were born.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I have a sibling you gave up for adoption.”

  “Geez Louise,” Christina says. “Can’t any of you wait?”

  Agnes laughs. “No, nothing like that, Maeve, I would never have done anything like that. No, it’s, it happened when I was a teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School.”

  “The three of us taught there, that’s how we knew each other,” Jo says to Maeve. “Only I seem to be a lifer. Your mother was a wonderful teacher. The students worshipped her.”

  “Not so wonderful, not so wonderful at all. That’s the point. I was a disaster in one of my students’ lives.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Christina says, “Heidi Stolz.”

  “I remember her,” Jeanne says. “She was smart…you tried to connect us on a senior project, Agnes…we went down to New York on the train together…it was just before she disappeared. People kept asking me about her, but I didn’t know her at all…we weren’t friends…I didn’t even like her. Well, I didn’t like anybody then, but I disliked her particularly. She just gave off this weird vibe, like she was desperate for something, but she looked down on everything, too.”

  Jo shivers. “It’s like a ghost walked over my grave.”

  “She’s not a ghost, thank God,” Agnes says. “All these years I’ve prayed that she wasn’t dead, or horribly damaged.”

  “So, she’s not a ghost,” Christina says. “Why are we talking about her?”

  “It’s all so strange, it’s all so strange…�
�� Agnes takes her hair out of its clip and pins it up again.

  “She arrived at the door this morning…with a cameraman. She has a reality-TV show. Somewhere in Arizona. It’s called PAYBACK. She finds people who feel like someone in their life hurt them and got away with it, and she arranges for what will feel to the victim like a payback. She wants to do a show about the two of us.”

  “My sweet Lord,” Marcus says.

  “Well, you’re not going to let her,” Maeve says. “I mean, you have to agree to it, don’t you?”

  “I have agreed,” Agnes says. “I’ve already agreed.”

  “I can’t believe you did that, Mother. Why did you do it without asking anyone…without asking us.”

  “I didn’t need anyone’s advice, I didn’t need anyone’s permission,” Agnes says in a cold severe tone that is so unfamiliar to the people around the table that they look at each other to be sure that they’ve heard.

  “Well, that’s the goddamn stupidest thing I ever heard,” Christina says. “You made a mistake…you blurted something out…she woke you up…you were half asleep…”

  “I’m lost,” Maeve says.

  “I felt sorry for her…I was interested in her…no one seemed to like her.”

  “Because she was completely unlikeable,” Jo says. “She took pride in being the only pro-war girl in her whole class; every time anyone on the left made the slightest wrong move, she rubbed my face in it.”

  “She had her own ideas, and this is what I admired, although I wasn’t comfortable with her ideas…I thought, well, this is someone who isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, who puts her mind to things that no one else around her was…and yes, she was intelligent, and she could be witty.”

  “And she followed you around like a goddamn puppy,” Christina says. “It was pathetic.”

  “I didn’t handle it well. Yes, I knew she was attached to me, and the very fact that no one else liked her appealed to my vanity…I should have kept her more at a distance…I should have been much cooler with her. A good teacher knows how to keep the right distance.”