The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “I know you don’t like them,” she said, as though it were merely a matter of preference, as neutral as liking blue over green.

  “It’s not a question of liking,” he said with deliberate calm. He couldn’t seem to make her understand that the houses—from their grotesque proportions all the way down to their reproduction light fixtures (“Reproductions of what? There was no electricity at Versailles! None at all!”)—were simply wrong.

  At such moments he felt as though they were separated by a language barrier. Years ago, in med school, his brother had befriended a stunning Italian classmate named Lucia Bari. The friendship (Billy’s word) had provided him with years of comic material: Billy’s efforts to explain American social behavior, Lucia’s amusing attempts at American slang. To Scott, visiting New York on a weekend trip with Jane Frayne, such misunderstandings had seemed trivial. When they met Billy and his friend for dinner, Scott was hypnotized by Lucia’s heavy breasts, her succulent mouth. Who cared what that mouth was saying? Now he saw how those differences might have mattered. Penny, in her way, was as foreign as Lucia. There were things his wife would simply never understand.

  WHEN SCOTT returned to the house, his daughter was in the living room with her friend Paige Moss. The girls wore tights and leotards. They lay sprawled on the dirty carpet, staring at the television. Penny was in the kitchen with Paige’s mother, Noelle, who lived in Loch Lomond Acres but spent, by his calculations, two-thirds of her waking hours at his house. In that time she had never consumed anything but black coffee with Equal. She was a hungry-looking woman, a platinum blonde, excessively fond of the tanning booth; she reminded Scott dimly of his aunt Anne.

  “Noelle brought her video camera,” Penny informed him. “We’re going to tape the girls doing their dance. Want to watch?”

  Scott hesitated. His daughter’s dance routines caused him paroxysms of discomfort. Last spring, during the annual recital, he’d been forced to watch her cavort around the stage with a handful of friends, dressed and gyrating like ten-year-old strippers. He had nearly swallowed his tongue.

  “I have papers to grade,” he said.

  “That’s okay, Dad,” Sabrina said helpfully. “You can watch the tape later.”

  Scott picked up his stack of manila folders and headed downstairs to his study. He used the term ironically. Penny referred to it the same way, but without the irony, and this made him cringe. Shortly after they bought the place, he’d come back from Builder’s Depot with a hatchback full of two-by-fours, and squared off a corner of what the realtor had called (ironically too, it turned out) the finished basement. The prior owner had hid the wiring with a suspended ceiling, covered the walls with paneling and the cement floor with thin carpet, but had done nothing to address the persistent dampness that bled through the foundation. Even with two dehumidifiers running, the room smelled of mushrooms, old socks, the dank imported cheeses Scott loved but Penny called revolting. They had arranged their old furniture there, a plaid armchair and stained sofa, in an approximation of what was called a family room; but even the huge new television—number four!—wasn’t enough to lure Ian and Sabrina downstairs. The house had eighteen hundred square feet of living space, but it might as well have been a one-room hut in Calcutta. Penny and the kids lived their entire lives in the kitchen.

  Scott stepped into his study. The room was eight by ten, with one high window that looked out on a corrugated tin window well and let in a thin slice of light. He dumped the manila folders on the desk—a hefty stack, one for each of the hundred and twenty juniors whose literacy he was to further that semester. Inside were sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper, blue books and—shamefully—weekly quizzes, to which he had recently resorted. The quizzes had seemed to him a capitulation, but he’d found no other way to coerce the students into reading the assigned number of pages from Great Expectations. He spent an unspeakable number of hours composing these quizzes. He found himself looking forward to quiz making, the Sunday-night ritual of sipping a glass of wine while reading Cliff’s Notes and scouring the Internet for pirated study guides, the same strategies his students used. He sometimes stayed up half the night devising questions that couldn’t be answered by these illicit means. It became a game to him, the imagined battle of wits with his students, the satisfaction of ferreting out the malingerers. It was the most rewarding aspect of his job.

  As he booted up the computer he heard music overhead, the sort of cloying dance tune his daughter favored. The flimsy ceiling groaned, shaken by the romping of two little girls who weighed maybe sixty pounds apiece.

  He turned his attention to the computer screen, called up the Lycos search page and typed Jane Frayne.

  He had always planned to see her again, to finish what was unfinished between them. He felt certain that Jane knew this, expected it even, that she had known it all along. And recent technology had made the world smaller. She could easily be found.

  They were adults now, wiser, sophisticated. They would laugh at the mishap that had divided them.

  I overreacted, Jane would say. I couldn’t help it. I was crazy about you.

  I was an idiot, he would protest. I made a terrible mistake.

  He imagined her still in New York, a couple hours’ drive away. He could easily slip away to see her. On weekends Penny scheduled his every waking moment, but a weeknight would be easy. He could leave straight from school. When Penny asked, he could invoke Parents’ Night, a quarterly ordeal that lasted late into the evening.

  He had never cheated on Penny, though he’d had chances: flirty barmaids, a coworker in a video store in La Jolla, the addled college girls and lonely single moms who’d bought his pot in San Berdoo. He was flattered by their interest, but something had always stopped him. There was the memory of his father, the hell of his parents’ divorce. Mostly, though, he hadn’t seen the point. Chronic exhaustion had tamed his libido. And the women who wanted him were lost souls, floundering in their own lives, unlikely to fix what was broken in his. Jane Frayne was different. Loving her might actually save him.

  It seemed worth a try.

  He waited. The computer was old and slow, the dial-up connection unreliable. He heard a scratching at the door. The dog had followed him downstairs. She approached him, tail wagging, and allowed her ears to be scratched.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you lonely?”

  Jackie O. whimpered. She was a social creature, spoiled in puppyhood. Penny had acquired her from a neighbor the summer they’d met, and lavished her with so much attention that the dog became slightly neurotic. Our baby, Penny called her—not knowing, then, that a real baby was already in the works, that a cluster of cells soon to be known as Sabrina was multiplying and dividing, the early arithmetic ticking away like a stock counter, marking off the last minutes of their youth.

  THEY’D MET on a camping trip the spring Scott dropped out of Stirling. He had fled the campus under cover of night, having spent his tuition money on an aging Pontiac Sunbird and a large quantity of marijuana, which his townie friend Magic Dave had packed loosely into a Wonder Bread wrapper and double-bagged for freshness. For three days Scott drove in a straight line westward, that wonderful bag, that bag of Double Wonder, stashed beneath the passenger seat. He slept a night in Buffalo, Wyoming, then drove the last forty miles to Yellowstone, where he planned to meet up with some buddies on spring break. He never found them. The park was as wide as New Hampshire. Scott had spent his whole life in New England; nature was Cape Cod, its cottages and clam shacks; Walden Pond, an oasis in the suburbs. The high empty plains spooked him. The landscape seemed haunted and mournful. He felt, and was, a thousand miles away from the mess he’d left at school—the dean who had it in for him, the irate phone calls from his father, the weepy disappointment of Jane Frayne who, unmoved by his crapulous groveling, vowed never to see him again.

  In March the park was virtually deserted. He hiked a day and a half before he saw the smoke of a campfire. By then his feet were blis
tered, his water supply nearly exhausted. He’d shivered all night in his summer-weight sleeping bag.

  He approached the campsite, two dilapidated tents pitched at the top of a hill. A girl crouched before the fire. “Hello!” he called in a friendly tone; alone in the wilderness, she would be scared of strangers. “Can I borrow your fire?”

  The girl stood. She wore blue jeans and a bikini top. Her head was wrapped in a blue bandanna; two yellow braids trailed down her back. Mixed in with the fire smell he caught a whiff of marijuana. “Sure,” she said. “Come on up.”

  He scrambled up the hill, his blistered feet burning. The girl sat on her haunches poking at the fire, the nub of a joint pinched between her fingers. Scott squatted next to her and watched her exhale. In a moment he understood why she wore so little: the fire gave off a blistering heat. He took his own joint from his pocket and they passed it between them, drawing heroic breaths.

  What did they talk about that night? For the life of him, he couldn’t recall. He remembered only how slowly she spoke, how relaxed and reflective and content she seemed. How unlike Jane Frayne, who spoke in whole paragraphs and slept five hours a night, yet refused to temper her manic energy by chemical means. Pot made her paranoid, she said, and beer was a waste of calories. To Scott, who got high once or twice a day, this seemed an irreparable defect in their relationship, her unwillingness to follow him into the place where he was most completely himself. That night, staring into the fire next to Penny Cherry, he saw this with utter clarity, and decided he’d been right to leave. There was no turning back.

  They squatted by the fire until his thighs ached. He noticed, but did not care, that sweat was running down his back, soaking his cotton turtleneck. Penny noticed too. “Take off your shirt,” she told him, and he did, a little self-consciously. Three and a half semesters of beer and college food had padded his torso. This girl was lean as a deer, a wild creature. Men’s jeans (whose? he wondered) hung low on her hips.

  It was full dark when the others arrived. They brought fresh trout for the night’s supper—caught out of season, pounds of slippery contraband. Scott watched them in hushed awe, like wildlife glimpsed through his binoculars. They were tanned, handsome people in boots and battered jeans. The females were wide eyed, long haired, unadorned. The largest male had a web of paisley tattoos snaking down his forearms; the others lacked distinctive markings, but appeared fast and strong. Scott looked for mated pairs, but the arithmetic eluded him: three girls, including Penny, and four guys. They assembled the dinner in cooperative fashion, with affectionate touching all around. A squat Mexican kissed each girl’s mouth. Scott kept his eyes on Penny, to determine whose she might be. Anybody’s, he decided. But after the fish was eaten, a bottle of whiskey and then another joint passed, it was Scott’s hand she’d taken, Scott she had led, silently, deep into the woods.

  She was a California girl, born in North Hollywood—a dump back then, she said, but an easy drive to Burbank, where her father, Whizzer Dooley, worked as a TV stuntman. He appeared mainly in a detective series called Vegas Jack, but he had done movies too. (Penny rattled off a list of titles: Death Rangers, Rage on Wheels, The San Antonio Outlaws—but only one, The French Connection, was familiar to Scott.) Whizzer had doubled for Robert Wagner, James Garner, and once—famously—for Steve McQueen, whom people said he resembled. Penny’s mother, a former Miss Fresno County, had been Whizzer’s high school sweetheart. They’d come to Hollywood in the late sixties, when Penny’s older sister was just a baby—to the scorn of both their families, who called Whizzer a dreamer and a deadbeat and his wife a ninny who was throwing her life away with both hands. Whizzer proved them wrong by finding work immediately, on the set of Vegas Jack. The director loved Whizzer, who was not merely fearless but young and good looking. His resemblance to the show’s star made shooting a breeze. Whizzer enhanced the effect by bleaching his hair and growing a handlebar mustache. “Vegas Jack!” a little boy once cried, pointing to him in the street.

  Penny was seven when Whizzer left, for what she called “the usual reasons”: somebody had screwed somebody, or was thought to have done so. She was the last in the family to see him alive. She was walking home from the school bus stop when she saw his lemon-yellow Chevelle pull out of the driveway. The windows were down, AM radio blasting. Whizzer seemed not to see her as he threw the car into gear. “Hi, Daddy!” she called, holding aloft her lunch box in a clumsy wave.

  The car rolled past her—then, abruptly, squealed to a stop. Whizzer stepped out and ambled toward her, his hair wild, his face red. He wore a pink plaid shirt that was Penny’s favorite, with pearly snaps down the front. These details she would remember forever. They were hers and hers alone, like the velvet-lined box of rhinestone jewelry she kept under her bed, a plastic ballerina twirling inside.

  “Hey, baby,” he said, a little breathless, and scooped her into his arms. He had not shaved; his rough neck was warm and tangy, the beery smell she loved. Over his shoulder she saw the car packed full with boxes, his guitar case, and what looked like (but couldn’t be, oh no) the family Ping-Pong table folded in half. The gaping trunk was secured with rope.

  Where are you going? she didn’t ask.

  I’m leaving you forever, he did not answer. I will call you once, next year on Christmas, and give your mother a phone number that will soon be disconnected. I will race cars and live with a dancer in Nevada who, after I drive into a wall at a hundred twenty miles an hour, will send you a box of worthless crap that will tell you nothing about why I left, nothing at all.

  “You’re so pretty,” he said instead. “Never cut your hair.”

  She watched him get into the car. The door didn’t close the first time; he reopened it and slammed it harder. Driving away, he stretched his left arm out the open window, as if he meant to pull her along behind him. He turned at the corner and was gone.

  There were stepfathers. Henry Cherry was a widower with five blond sons. He had come to town on business; Penny’s mother met him at the steak house where she’d been hired for her looks. Soon they moved into Cherry’s sprawling ranch house on the outskirts of Boise, a lowslung place on six flat acres of grass. Penny and her sister had their own bedrooms; the five blond boys slept in bunk beds in a single large room down the hall. (Years later, Penny’s mother told her the reason: to prevent them from touching themselves. A boy with his own room would have his hands down there all the time.)

  In Idaho they heard services, and did chores. Penny picked vegetables from the garden, fed chickens, and gathered eggs. In North Hollywood her mother had been a casual housekeeper: toast crumbs on the counter, blue toothpaste misfires in the sink. Now, at Relief Society meetings, she learned pickling and preserving. Cherry’s first wife had amassed a large collection of canning equipment, Ball jars boiled dull and smooth.

  To Penny, who had recently eaten crackers for dinner, the transformation was alarming. She retreated to the hills behind the Cherry house with Benji, the youngest of her blond stepbrothers, a boy who scarcely spoke but could climb like a goat. Benji had been left back in school and was called slow, but he knew the names of trees and flowers, the scat of deer, antelope, and moose. Benji could identify bear tracks, start a fire without matches. He saw the shapes of constellations, the warriors and goddesses hidden in the stars.

  Benji? The name reminded Scott of a movie he’d seen as a child, the misadventures of a scruffy little dog.

  Penny was not amused. He saved me, she swore with surprising vehemence. It was Benji who’d kept her company until her mother’s marriage collapsed—for reasons Penny didn’t know, but could guess.

  She told Scott this—all this!—in their first night together. At the time it had fascinated him, the twists and turns of the story, its exotic locales. Soon, though, there was a burden in so much knowing. This strange girl confiding her heartbreaks, her childhood terrors, believing him the first man who would not fail her.

  He was nineteen years old.

  That s
ummer they rented an apartment at the beach in La Jolla, where Penny found a job in a surf shop. They bought a VCR and rented a copy of The French Connection, a film she had never seen. Together they watched the credits scroll past, the names of stuntmen long retired or, like her father, violently killed. Twice, three times Penny rewound the tape, but no Whizzer Dooley was listed in the credits.

  About that, about everything, her father had lied.

  SCOTT STARED at his computer screen. Lycos had returned half a dozen hits for Jane Frayne, including the Web site of her production company, Plain Jane Films, located in Brooklyn, New York.

  What was a production company, exactly? He wasn’t entirely sure. Still, he was impressed.

  At that moment he heard a sudden commotion overhead: a rumble of footfalls, a sudden thud. Mom, Ian’s in the way! His own chaotic life asserting itself.

  “Scott!” Penny called. “Can you get up here? I only have two hands.”

  After eleven years he could still be amazed by his wife’s voice, which cut like a buzz saw through the flimsy walls and floors. He got up wearily from his chair.

  You got one chance in this life, he reflected, one precious chance. He had blown his years ago, on the tree-shaded campus of Stirling College, too dense to understand that every door in life was open to him.

  He had made his choices. Now he was thirty years old, and all the doors were closed.

  chapter 3

  Tom and Richard served sushi for dinner. The delicate bundles of rice and fish were stacked in pyramids on lacquered trays. The dinner was served buffet style in the large living room; the men filled their square plates and repaired to the dining room, where calligraphed place cards were set. Billy McKotch examined his closely, impressed by its delicacy. He knew Tom’s usual handwriting, the cramped block printing typical of architects. That these graceful letters had come from the same hand seemed a small miracle.