The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  Martine had always been smarter about these things, more worldly, more sophisticated. Years ago, when Gwen and Billy were babies, Martine had shown up at the Captain’s House with a friend from New York, an art director—whatever that was—at the agency where she worked. His name was Anthony—pronounced in the British way, with a hard T—a good-looking man with sandy hair cut long in the front, so that he was always brushing it from his eyes. They had all assumed Anthony was Martine’s boyfriend; but it was Paulette he followed around the house while Martine sailed or golfed, Paulette he joined at the piano in the afternoon while the children were napping. He seemed smitten with her, a startling development. Exhausted by her last pregnancy, she felt worn and homely. No one had been smitten with her in ages. She wished Frank were there to see it. (Though, being Frank, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. He had always been immune to jealousy. Further evidence that he had never loved her enough.)

  Martine, to her surprise, was not upset by Anthony’s defection. I’m glad you two had fun, she told Paulette after they dropped him at the ferry terminal. Then, seeing Paulette’s confusion: For God’s sake, he’s not my boyfriend. He’s queer, you know. Anthony was, to Paulette’s knowledge, the first homosexual she’d ever met. Martine knew a great many, apparently, in New York; she was the first person of Paulette’s acquaintance to use the word gay. Had she known about Billy all along? Probably, Paulette realized. Billy hadn’t needed to tell her. Martine had simply looked, and figured it out.

  Why didn’t I see it? Paulette marveled. Heavens, what is the matter with me?

  She glanced at her watch and wondered if Gwen had arrived.

  CLIMBING THE stairs to the porch, Paulette heard male voices inside. She was shocked to see Frank and Srikanth holding forth on the sofa. In her ruminations about Billy and Martine, she had forgotten about them both. Frank was speaking; she listened a moment and picked out two words, transgenic and mutation. Enough to convince her that nothing significant was being discussed.

  Billy’s friend was handsome. She took note of his elegant profile, the delicate arch of his eyebrows, his long and graceful hands. For years Billy had been her yardstick for male beauty, the standard to which she held all men—the very young ones in magazine advertisements, the toothy actors on television—usually to their detriment. But this Srikanth had the most beautiful skin she had ever seen on a person, male or female. His dark curly hair was glossy as mink.

  He seemed to sense her gaze. He looked up from his conversation and met her eyes. When Paulette smiled, he smiled back, dazzling her. He was, she realized, even handsomer than Billy. She was undeniably drunk, yet she felt confident in her perceptions.

  He was possibly the handsomest man in the world.

  This should not have mattered, of course. But to Paulette, it made the situation comprehensible. Her son was a homosexual, but who could blame him? The world would be rife with homosexuals if more men looked like Srikanth.

  “MY MOTHER is in love with you,” Billy said.

  They were lying in the dark in the Bunk House, Sri in the top bunk, Billy down below, having refused the double bed in the Lilac Room. He was relieved beyond words to have the day behind him. He had no regrets. Yet he was unprepared to sleep with Srikanth in the Lilac Room with Paulette to one side of them, Frank to the other. He would likely never be prepared for that.

  “She was staring at you all through dinner. It was embarrassing.”

  “I think she was a little drunk,” said Sri.

  “She was tanked. We all were. Welcome to the family.” Billy reached for the glass of water he’d placed beside the bed. “I’m going to be puffy tomorrow.”

  “I’ll still love you,” said Sri.

  “You say that now.”

  Above them the floor creaked. Movement in the Captain’s Quarters. “My father is on the loose,” said Billy. “He’s coming down here to show you his grant application.”

  Sri chuckled.

  “You think I’m joking,” Billy said.

  Frank lay awake a long time, thinking. He remembered a night long ago, driving back from Nantasket Beach with two girls and Neil Windsor. The night he had misread the situation entirely, convinced that Windsor was gay.

  With his own son he had made the same mistake, in reverse.

  A hundred times he’d questioned Billy about girlfriends. The answers were uniformly evasive. Always Billy’s reticence had stung him: Why wouldn’t the kid talk to him? Had he been that negligent a father? All these years later, was Billy still angry about the divorce?

  Once again he had misinterpreted the data. The truth had taken him by surprise, but he was too seasoned a scientist to panic at unexpected results. This outcome defied quick interpretations—it would take Frank the rest of his life to make sense of it—but it was certainly more favorable than the one he’d predicted. Billy, though gay, did not hate him. Frank still had his son.

  The bedside clock ticked loudly. On a normal Sunday night he’d be asleep by now, the better to spring awake at dawn and get an early start in the lab. Instead he lay in a strange bed in a place he’d never expected to be. The big bed in the Captain’s Quarters. Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New England, USA.

  For a dozen summers, more, he’d made grudging trips to this house—muttering and grumbling, keenly aware of all he was missing back in Cambridge. Which was…what?

  A few long days—among thousands—spent in the lab.

  Back then he’d made the trip to please Paulette. Now she no longer wanted him in Truro. And he no longer wanted to be anywhere else. Was this old age, then: the end of all wanting? In April he’d celebrated—the wrong word—his sixtieth birthday. Whatever he’d desired from life had been gotten, or not; his wishes satisfied, or not. His wants—Paulette’s too—were exhausted. It was their children’s turn to want. Billy wanted…whatever he wanted. (Best not think too much about that.) Scott wanted his freedom. And then, Gwen.

  Daddy, please do this for me. Billy isn’t answering his phone. There’s nobody else I can ask.

  Rolling out of bed, Frank groped for his shirt and trousers. The floor creaked. Years ago, before they were married, he and Paulette had been assigned to separate rooms. At night they’d crept around the house as her parents slept. Frank and Paulette in love: cursing the noisy stairs, and wanting. Always privacy had eluded them. It seemed, then, that Drew relatives were around every corner—Roy and Anne on the lawn, chain-smoking and already squabbling; Aunt Doro and the other one whose name Frank could never remember, their tipsy laughter rising from the terrace. Now the house felt empty, and to his surprise this saddened him. For years he had fled the family—his own and Paulette’s alike. Now, for the first time, he wanted them close.

  There now. There was still something left to want.

  He tiptoed down the hall, past Scott’s closed door, and refilled his water glass at the bathroom sink. He peered out onto the sleeping porch: five empty twin beds, the sixth occupied by Sabrina. She looked tiny under the coverlet, and somehow forlorn, like a girl stood up at her slumber party. To his amusement, the thought made him misty. Jesus, was this his future? A weeping grandpa.

  A crack of light showed beneath the door of Fanny’s Room. Paulette had always liked to read in bed. At the door he paused.

  The last time, yes. The summer of the bicentennial was the last time he and Paulette had shared this room. Time was no ghost; it had weight and smell and substance. Fit you like lead boots, it did. And yet those years could go in an instant. You could find yourself knocking at that same door.

  “Paulette?” he whispered. “Are you still awake?”

  “Frank? Is that you?”

  He opened the door just in time to see her hide reading glasses beneath the coverlet. She sat up in bed, her back braced by pillows. She looked astonished to see him.

  “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said.

  “I don’t sleep well anymore. Frank, what is it? Is something wrong?” The night had turned chilly; she wor
e a cardigan sweater over her nightgown. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping Gwen.”

  He sat at the edge of the bed. “I need to talk to you.”

  Paulette closed her eyes. “Not about Billy, please.”

  “You’re upset,” he said.

  “Not at all. It’s his own business, as far as I’m concerned. Honestly, I can’t imagine what possessed him to tell us in the first place.” She rubbed gingerly at her temples. “Please. Let’s not discuss it.”

  “Fair enough.” He handed her the glass of water. “Drink this. You’re going to have a hangover tomorrow.”

  She took the glass.

  “Actually, there’s something else I need to tell you. It’s why I drove down here in the first place. I didn’t mean to horn in on your vacation.” He hesitated. “It’s about Gwen.”

  Paulette frowned.

  “She called the other night and asked me to tell you—” He broke off. “Honey, Gwen isn’t coming.”

  She stared at him wide eyed.

  “She went back to the island. Apparently she’s patched things up with the guy.”

  Paulette listened in silence as he told her everything he knew.

  “But why?” she said when he’d finished. “Why couldn’t she tell me herself?” Her voice startled him, husky with anguish. It was a voice he’d never heard before.

  “I don’t know,” Frank admitted. “I begged her to, but she was adamant. She wouldn’t say why.” He reached for her hand, this woman he’d made his life with. Paulette who hadn’t changed and wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t; who had loved their daughter so imperfectly. Who had so imperfectly loved him.

  “Paulette, I’m sorry. I know how important this was. You wanted the whole family together, and now everything—”

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  prognosis

  Winter comes late to St. Raphael. The November sun sets early. The big ships return to the harbor. The resorts, empty during storm season, begin to fill.

  At Thanksgiving, at Christmas, the tourists appear like refugees. They are escaping the holiday, the anguished pilgrimage to the family stake. Instead they fly southward, moneyed travelers with seasonal depression, ashamed of their pale winter hides. Gwen is glad to see them, and not just for the dollars and euros they charge to their credit cards. She greets them kindly, with a warmth she’d never suspected she possessed. To her they are survivors of natural disasters. Her impulse is to offer cots and blankets, to bandage wounds.

  There was a time, not long ago, when she wouldn’t talk to strangers. That time seems remote now. Like a dream remembered, it haunts her for a moment, then quickly seems like nonsense.

  Where did you come from? she asks them all. Are you here for the holidays? The two questions are enough. Travelers are lonely. They hunger to discuss themselves, to remember who they are.

  It is Gwen who mans the storefront, a trim stucco building on the Quai des Marins, Gwen in her Steelers T-shirts, her reassuring Americanness. She does not often, these days, pilot the boat. The new one is large and cumbersome, difficult to maneuver. The boys, Alistair and Gabriel, handle it expertly; so she is content to stay landlocked, to hand out tanks and equipment and take calls from the cruise lines. The cruisers keep the dive shop in business. They show up without so much as a snorkel, and Gwen outfits them from top to bottom. Masks and fins; a hundred brand-new regulators; BCs hanging on wheeled racks, in bright shades of yellow and green. The equipment had cost a small fortune. Rico had been reluctant to make the investment, to take on any more debt.

  We have to, Gwen told him. The cruise lines would deal only with full-service shops, able to equip boatloads of divers. And the cruise lines were their ticket to freedom, independence from the greedy resorts, which made huge profits on dive excursions and paid the outfitters a slim 20 percent.

  At first Rico had balked. Gear for a hundred would cost more than the 2STE. But Gwen persisted, and finally he listened. Two years later, the loan was nearly paid.

  In large matters she is adamant. In small ones—the daily schedule, the hirings and firings—she lets him have his way. The boy Gabriel is a friend of Alistair’s, another delinquent Rico is determined to save. Gabriel is prompt and responsible, a better sailor than Alistair. Gwen thinks of them sometimes, the three boys on the boat. Her husband, despite his posturing, is less man than boy. Gwen still notices the comely tourists, the flirty divers in their bikinis. Undoubtedly Rico notices them too. But there are no more dive excursions at night.

  She has been married three years, and she chooses to trust him. The other road is her mother’s, ending in heartbreak. A road she chooses not to travel.

  Rico is her family now, Rico and Alistair and Gabriel. The two boys are her children, the only ones she will ever have, or need. Her other family she thinks of rarely. They have receded for her, like buildings on a distant shore. She phones Billy once a month, sends occasional e-mails to her father. In this way, she learns that Penny has decamped for Idaho, leaving the kids with Scott. That—is it possible?—Frank has sold his house in Cambridge and moved back to Concord.

  The earth has tipped on its axis.

  To these revelations Gwen does not respond. At first she pretended her silence was unintentional. The move to St. Raphael, the buying of the dive shop: she was preoccupied with other things. Then her life settled, and still she remained silent. It was better that way.

  She could not forget what her family had done. The truth had come clear to her in a single moment, at the Mexican restaurant with Heidi Kozak. Scott had given the money to Rico. The money and the plan—the cruel, insulting, breathtakingly devious idea—had come from her mother.

  That night she’d dialed Rico’s number. My brother gave you the money. He paid you to leave me. Why didn’t you tell me?

  If my brother had done such a thing, he said, I wouldn’t want to know.

  Were you? She stopped, started again, knowing that the rest of her life hung on his answer. Were you going to leave me?

  Never, he swore. You left me. I would never leave you.

  But you took the money.

  You don’t know what it is to be poor, he said. How could you possibly know?

  IT WAS astounding what a person could forgive, if she wanted to.

  This: Rico had taken money from her family.

  And this: Scott had engineered this betrayal.

  And this: Gwen herself had allowed it all to happen. She had run away in silence, ready to believe the worst.

  She forgave Rico. There was no other choice. She refused to surrender the life that was possible. Anger and shame were no match for love.

  Forgiving herself was more difficult. Compassion did not come easily to her. Kindness toward her former self, the Gwen who’d flown to St. Raphael, innocent as a sparrow. She had been ill equipped for love. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. It pained her, now, to recall those first months on the 2STE: the frantic way she’d adored Rico, her creeping doubt and fear. She was a grown woman, yet she’d loved him desperately, as a young girl would. Her first love: two bodies conjoined, sharing a heart. Now Rico is her husband, and she loves him differently. She maintains a heart of her own.

  She’s so little. She needs time to catch up.

  Finally, finally, Gwen had caught up.

  FORGIVING SCOTT took longer. Pride wouldn’t let her hear his apologies. His letters she sent back unopened. She refused to answer the phone when he called. Finally, in desperation, he had sent a telegram:

  I SUCK. I HOPE YOU FORGIVE ME.

  I LOVE YOU. SCOTTY. P.S. DON’T BLAME MOM.

  In the end his Scottness had melted her. You do suck, she wrote in an e-mail. You also bite. I love you too.

  She ignored the telegram’s last line.

  Gwen had learned that forgiveness was elastic. Forgiving Rico, and later Scott, had been a stretch. But never in this life could she forgive Paulette. The very thought of her mother nearly snapped the band.

  For months, a
year, she was sick with rage. Mysteriously, it was marriage that cured her: saying the vows had unblocked a drain, and in that moment her anger seeped away. Now her mother is with her always, a curious development. Years ago, after Mamie died, Gwen had thought of her grandmother constantly, as she hadn’t when Mamie was alive. And now that Paulette is lost to her, Gwen remembers her mother with great tenderness. It is perhaps a feature of Gwen’s condition, or perhaps her own personal strangeness, that she finds it much, much easier to love a person who is dead.

  She no longer wonders what is normal, whether she feels correctly. It is impossible to say. Her whole life she’s known that her condition is untreatable. Now she understands that it requires no treatment. The difference is vast; you could fit a whole life in the gulf between. And so she has.

  FOR A long time, then, her life seemed finished—not ended but polished and sealed, like a piece of furniture, as though it had achieved its final form. The hot summer, slow and quiet. In September, on Gwen’s birthday, she and Rico celebrated their second wedding anniversary. That night Hurricane Cleo swept across the Caribbean, battering St. Lucia. Gwen and Rico boarded the shop windows. This time at least, St. Raphael was spared.

  A week later she was sitting behind the counter, poring over Smithsonian magazine, when Gabriel rushed into the shop.

  “Turn on the radio!” he cried. “Some crazy shit happening in New York.”

  The radio was tuned to a local reggae station. Stir it up. Little darling, stir it up. Gwen turned the dial. Static. More reggae. More static.

  “This fucking island, man,” Gabriel fumed. “It’s like we living on the moon.”

  “What happened?” said Gwen.

  “A plane flew into a building.”

  “That’s all?” New York seemed as distant as China, or Pluto, or heaven. Still she locked the store and followed Gabriel across town. At the Ambrosia Café a crowd had gathered around the television. Gwen stared. The gaping hole in the tower, the rising cloud of smoke.