Crossroads

by Belva Plain

  “What does your husband do for a living?” he asked.

  “Stan has his own electrician’s shop” was the answer. An electrician’s shop! Probably a one-man band where he repaired people’s toasters. And her family owned one of the biggest glassworks in the country. No, make that the world. Jewel was right, the poor girl had married beneath her. Still, it was an interesting coincidence that the man was an electrician and JeffSon owned power plants.

  “I really should be getting home,” Gwen Wright—no, it was Gwen Girard, he remembered now—was saying. “Thank you so much for the coffee.”

  “I’ll see you to your building,” Jeff said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “We’re right across the street from each other. We’re neighbors.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know what to do for Gwen. That idiot she married won’t let me help them,” Cassie said to Walter. They were sitting on the front porch of the Wright house watching the sun set behind the red maples.

  “You can’t take Gwen’s pain away.”

  “But I want to make it easier for her.”

  “There is nothing you can do or give, darling. And if there were, you shouldn’t do or give it. Don’t you see? Gwen has a husband now. He’s the one she must lean on.”

  “Him? You heard what he said when I tried to buy them a house! All that twaddle about how no one should have special advantages because of their family or their background. Or some such nonsense.”

  “I believe he actually said that he and Gwen were no different from any other young couple just starting out.”

  “In the old days, my father would have said he was a Communist!”

  “Isn’t it nice that we’ve all evolved since then?”

  “I’m serious, Walter.”

  “So am I. You mustn’t interfere, Cassie. Right now, Gwen is still a girl. If she’s to grow up, to become a woman—and for her own happiness she must—she has to find her own way in life. And she must do that with Stan. Not you.”

  * * *

  In the dark, Gwen could make out the daisies Stan had brought her. They were in a blue vase sitting on her nightstand, where she had insisted on putting them. Stan was asleep, his body wrapped around hers the way it always was after their passion was spent. It was as if they couldn’t bear to separate from each other after such closeness, as if they had melded and would have to tear themselves apart. But Gwen’s mind could always wander. She closed her eyes. Once when she was a child, she’d spilled boiling water on her arm and burnt it badly. What she remembered about the burn was not the initial searing agony, but the days and weeks that followed as the blistered skin peeled away, leaving the raw, exposed wound. The slightest breeze passing at random over that wound could trigger new pain that was almost as strong as the original. She felt that the pain that was now inside her was like that; it was always there, waiting to hit her when she didn’t expect it, and she didn’t know when or if it would ever stop. All she could do was wait and see. She wondered if Stan felt the same way. She looked at his arm draped so possessively over her shoulder. The books said it would be better if they could talk about these things—if she could have said, I was so hurt and angry that I took it out on you, and I’m sorry, and then he could have said, I was so hurt that I pushed you away and I’m sorry. But she was learning that that was not their way. They said “I love you” and “I’m sorry” with daisies and surprise lunches and unspoken compromises. And then they came together in their bed. It might not be what the books suggested, but it lifted the gray mood for a little while and made the pain more bearable.

  Gwen turned her head to look out the bedroom window. All she could see was the office building across the street, but somewhere behind it was the moon. Tonight she was able to summon up the imagination to picture it shining down on Stan and her.

  * * *

  The penthouse suite in the glittery hotel where Jewel and Jeff were camping out consisted of five rooms with views that stretched as far off as the glassworks. Jewel got up out of bed, and walked to one of the massive bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows. How many times had she done this in her old apartment when she couldn’t sleep? Back then, she had looked out onto a dirty street and a tree that was old and bent. Tonight, she could see the whole city spread out at her feet. And soon her view would be even more grand, when she moved into her new house. The house that would make it up to her for all the early years of desperate wanting, for the time of watching Ma die so slowly and painfully, for Pop’s abandonment. And the house would do even more than that for her; it would be her ticket into the echelon of Wrightstown society populated by the likes of Cassie Wright and Gwen Girard. Finally, Jewel was going to belong!

  She wished she could go into the next room and look once again at the plans for the new swimming pool her landscape designer had submitted to her earlier that day. Behind the pool there would be an artificial waterfall that could be activated by a switch found on a panel in the foyer of the house. There was another switch which would turn on the amber, pink, and golden lights that would play over the pool. Still another switch would turn on the sound system. If Jeff had been away on one of his business trips she might have driven out to the building site, even though it was the middle of the night, so she could picture her miraculous backyard coming to life in all its glory. But Jeff was home. Jewel turned back to bed where he was sleeping. He used to love watching her pleasure at the toys and gifts he was able to shower on her. But lately she’d sensed a certain disapproval coming from him, as if there was something distasteful about her throwing her arms around him and squealing with joy over her new diamond earrings, or their new Lear Jet. At such moments he looked a little too much like his father. Trying to keep him happy was going to be difficult if he turned into the old goat. She walked quickly to the mirror and stared at her image—even without the lights on, she could see that her talisman beauty was still there. In a couple of years she’d need a nip and a tuck, but her figure was still perfect, as were her violet eyes, and her ebony hair shone in the darkness. There was no way Jeff would walk away from all of that. She went back to bed, and slipped in between the sheets—the sheets with the five-hundred-thread count from Porthault. Her negligee was French silk from Léron. The perfume she dabbed on herself every night after her bath had been specially created for her by Floris.

  As she started falling asleep she thought of something Jeff had told her at dinner. He’d seen Gwen Wright that afternoon. He’d been taking a walk around the block to clear his head and he’d bumped into her, and he’d felt that it was only good manners to invite the Dreary One to have a cup of coffee with him.

  It had been all Jewel could do not to laugh out loud. She still couldn’t believe that Gwen Wright was living in downtown Wrights town! In a building that was fine—it was actually rather glamorous—if you were trying to make your way as a paralegal or a dental assistant. But if you were Gwen Wright . . . for an instant there rose in Jewel’s mind an image of a grand old house with a hill behind it and a row of glorious red maple trees on the front lawn. Now Gwen was reduced to living in an apartment building with the children of blue-collar workers who were trying to better themselves. And Jewel was the one who was going to have lawns and trees. Could anyone have imagined that this was how things would turn out? That Jewel Henry, born Jewel Fairchild, would one day be able to buy and sell Gwen Wright ten times over if she’d wanted to?

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Gwen had learned that those who said time heals everything were wrong. There are certain hurts that never go away, like the one she’d sustained when she learned that Cassie had been lying to her about her birth parents. Gwen would never forget the look of triumph on Jewel’s face when she “spilled” the secret. Or the look on Cassie’s face when she confirmed that it was true. That ache was permanent, as were the questions it raised about the man and woman who gave her life.

  But the loss of a baby was different. That pain would never go a
way, either . . . but you finally did figure out how to absorb it. It became a part of what you were and it changed who you were. At first you were convinced that you’d never be happy again, that the gray fog that enveloped you would always be there, then one morning you woke up and it was autumn, and the trees in the little park at the end of your street were spreading the seasonal gold and orange carpet on the ground. And you noticed in a deeper and more satisfying way the beauty of the fresh flowers your husband now brought home every week. And you found that far from avoiding the little room Stan had redone as a guest room you now enjoyed sitting in there when you read. The soft taupe on the walls was a soothing color, the light was excellent, and it was the one room in the apartment which was airy. That was why you’d chosen to make it the nursery—and when you realized that now you could say that word “nursery” to yourself without tears, you knew that you’d turned a corner. The sorrow for your dream of a child was in your heart, in the very blood that pumped through it, but somehow that released you to get on with your life.

  Stan seemed to feel that she was ready to move on too. One night he gave her a box wrapped in pink paper with artificial roses in the bow. Inside was a computer.

  He had one at his shop that he used for the business, but they’d never had one for their own use. “You already know how to work one . . . well, you do a little,” he said, talking fast in his excitement. “I understand that you don’t think of yourself as the technological type, but this is so user friendly it won’t take you any time to catch on.” Then he smiled his smile that made the skin crinkle at the corners of his eyes. “You always wanted to write, Gwen, why don’t you try?”

  So she did. She practiced with the computer until she knew she could work it well enough that the mechanics of using it wouldn’t interfere with her train of thought. Then she sat in the taupe-colored guest room and tried to write a children’s story about a pigeon who lived in a park. But she couldn’t make her mind think like a city pigeon who lived by begging for crumbs from strangers. She tried to write a story about a squirrel who lived near a stump on a hill behind a big white house. But she found she’d lost her connection to the squirrels and chipmunks she’d once watched for hours in her refuge. Finally, she put the computer in the living room where she and Stan both could use it, and she went back to reading when she sat in the guest room.

  But Stan wouldn’t give up. “Writing was your dream when I met you,” he said. “You say you don’t have any stories to tell, but I know one day you’ll do it.”

  She didn’t say that she needed space and sky to spin her stories. That was one of the things they didn’t talk about.

  But she didn’t go back into her shell. She made friends—in a casual way—with a few of the women she met while she was washing her clothes in the basement of the apartment building. She learned about popular television programs and romance novels and trendy shoes from them. They heard about foreign films, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturday afternoons, and Emily Dickinson from her. And while she never actually bought the uncomfortable shoes, and she doubted seriously that they ever bought a volume of Dickinson’s poetry, she found it was nice to have someone to talk to while you folded your towels. A couple of her new friends were taking a cooking course in the evenings and she signed up too. Cassie was particularly impressed by this new venture, because she couldn’t boil water.

  Once or twice a week, Gwen saw Jeff Henry’s long black limousine from her apartment window, as he was whisked away either to some meeting in town or to the airport so he could fly to some exotic place halfway around the world. She could usually tell which it was by the amount of luggage—or lack of it—that was handed so carefully into the trunk of the car.

  And once in a while, when she was walking to the market or to the park, she and Jeff would run into each other. And he would ask her if she’d like to have coffee with him and she would say yes because it was fun to talk to a man who shared her taste for Dickens and Tolstoy, and they both enjoyed their ongoing debate over the merits of his favorite opera composer, Wagner, versus her beloved Puccini. She liked the way he matched his swaggering pirate’s stride to hers when they walked down the street together. And if there was a childish part of her brain that liked it all a little more than she otherwise might have because he was married to Jewel Fairchild who was now Jewel Henry . . . well, so be it. Jewel had so much these days—the beauty which had always been hers, a handsome exciting husband, and all the money even she could want. Surely, there was no harm in Gwen enjoying the admiration she saw in Jeff ’s eyes when they shared overpriced coffee and trivialities.

  But gradually, as one does with a good friend, she and Jeff started opening up about less trivial, more personal matters. He told her about his teenage years as the nerdy son of two pretentious intellectuals, and Gwen talked about her childhood as an odd duck, the animals she loved and the stories she used to make up about them. And then she found herself opening up even more.

  “I’m adopted,” she told him. “And I’ve thought so much about my birth parents. Wondered about them. And then . . .” She paused. She wanted to tell him everything about those two unknown figures who still loomed in her life, but she couldn’t. The story of the man who had been married to Cassie Wright and cheated on her with another woman was Cassie’s to tell. Jewel had spilled the tale without Cassie’s permission and that had been wrong. Gwen was not about to do the same thing. She changed the subject.

  “And then when I knew I was going to have a baby I felt like I was . . . not carrying on their legacy, exactly, but . . .” She searched for the right words.

  “ ‘Leaving behind their footprints on the sands of time.’ ” Jeff supplied a quote.

  “Longfellow,” she said.

  “Slightly mangled.” He smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  She paused again to search for the right words. For he had given her a gift—the one we always receive when we hear or see or read a work of art that has endured the test of time. Because we are reminded then that we are not isolated, that whatever we are thinking or feeling has been felt and thought before, and we are comforted by the connection to the rest of the humanity that has been where we are.

  “For putting things in perspective for me,” she finally said. And he nodded that he understood. And if that childish part of her brain gloated again because she knew there was no way he could have this exchange with his beautiful charming wife . . . it was such a little victory; it wasn’t hurting anyone.

  So time passed, and Gwen’s gray fog lifted more each day, and before she knew it, a year had passed since she’d lost her baby. For that day the fog threatened to descend again. She hadn’t told anyone that she’d hoped that before the sad anniversary came she’d be pregnant again. It wasn’t the kind of thing she could say to Stan; he might find something morbid about remembering the date, and there was no point in saying something that might cause him grief. Still, she wished she could talk to someone. She thought of Jeff, who listened and would find something to say that would help. It would be nice if she were to run into him today, she thought, as she left the apartment and headed to the elevators. She was going out into the neighborhood, to pick up Stan’s jacket at the dry cleaners.

  * * *

  Jeff stood at his window and watched Gwen walk out of her building. He thought about rushing down to the street to stage another of his “accidental” run-ins with her, but instead he looked back to his desk where a report waited for him. It had been assembled by his staff at his request some time ago, but he had not read it yet. Because when he did he would have to make a decision that he’d been putting off. It was the worst kind of decision—it mixed his business and his personal lives. It concerned the woman who was now walking down the street in the direction of the shops that serviced the neighborhood. Gwen Girard was probably doing some wifely errand, shopping for some last-minute item at the grocery store, or picking up some shoes that had been repaired.
He frowned; he didn’t like to think of her involved in such mundane pursuits and yet he knew from a recent conversation with her that she had finally found a kind of peace in them. She still longed for a house of her own, he knew that, but she had told him that Stan didn’t want to purchase one until they had enough money put away for a sizable down payment. “Stan’s careful,” she’d said with a laugh.

  Stan’s a dolt, Jeff had thought. And he couldn’t help contrasting her minimal desire with Jewel’s never-ending grasping.

  * * *

  Jeff moved back to his desk and sat. For a while now, he’d been serially and consistently unfaithful to his wife. He was discreet, when one was away from home as much as he was, that was easy. Although he wondered if it would have mattered to Jewel if she had known. Her passion, he had finally come to understand—or perhaps he had always known it, and just hadn’t wanted to face it—had nothing to do with him and everything to do with what he could provide. She never ever denied herself to him—of course she wouldn’t; she was an ideal wife. But he’d had enough women to know the difference between skillful fakery and the real thing. The only time Jewel was genuinely excited in their bed was when she wanted something. Or when he’d just given her something she’d wanted. At first, when he was still besotted with her, he’d happily handed out the baubles and gifts she craved. But his first wild desire for her had died, as infatuations must, and, as his father had warned, there was no basis for anything more between them.

  The realization had come to him slowly, as it dawned on him that his hopes for the day when she would share his tastes and interests were futile. His campaign to introduce her to what he thought of as the finer things in life had failed miserably. Not that she ever refused to go with him to the ballet or a museum. She would sit through a performance of Die Zauberflöte or Die Meistersinger, but it was clear that she was just waiting for the outing to be over so she could go back to her celebrity magazines, her gossip, and her shopping. His fantasies of opening her mind to fine books and great art once she had the leisure and the money to enjoy them, were just that—dreams. It wasn’t her fault that this annoyed him now; he was the one who had changed. And he did understand her desire for expensive things, because he shared it with her. But he wanted more. She did not.