Promises

by Belva Plain

  Adam wouldn’t have believed how quickly sweat can start, if someone had told him so. Within the space of seconds he was so wet, he might have been wearing a rubber suit. And he grunted something, words without meaning, merely for the sake of a response.

  “You ever been up that way?” Fred asked.

  The pale eyes and the placid face were innocent. The question was careless. And Adam answered in the same vein.

  “I’ve passed through. It’s nice country.”

  Fred nodded. “Funny thing, I thought I saw you a couple of weeks ago coming out of that place I just mentioned, The Grove.”

  Adam shook his head. “Me? No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Funny. Fellow looked like you. Had sandy hair like yours. The car was a green Ford like yours too.” And suddenly, from behind the innocent eyes, there shot a gleam.

  Cold now in his damp rubber suit, Adam shook his head again. “Coincidence! They say everybody in the world has a double, and it makes sense when you think about it.” He was talking too much. Voluble denials were suspicious. Yet he kept on. “Undoubtedly, we all have more than a double. There are probably a couple of hundred people in the world who look like you. Or me.”

  “You’re right,” Fred agreed. “Of course, there was the car. You don’t see many that shade of green. But after I saw the lady in the car, I knew it couldn’t be you.”

  “No, not me.”

  He knows. The nice cheerful bastard knows and wants to warn me. For my sake? Hell, no. For her sake.

  The dog whined, drawing attention away from Adam. Good dog, he thought. “Good dog,” he said. “Patient little guy. And my Margaret rescued him. Sometimes I think her heart is big enough to take in the world.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  For a moment Fred’s vision and Adam’s collided. Margaret said Fred’s eyes were always “thoughtful.” You didn’t have to wonder too much about what Fred’s thoughts were right now.…

  “Well,” Adam said, “I’d better move along. Nice seeing you, Fred. And you, too, Jimmy.”

  Damn, he thought, hurrying away. I hope to God my face didn’t show anything. What the hell was he doing poking around up there? Randolph Crossing. The Grove. Nobody goes up there except real estate bastards. Christ Almighty. Fred. Of course, he’ll never tell Margaret, he’d never hurt her. But I have to tell Randi. We’ll have to hole up in the house like bank robbers on the run. God damn! All you want is a little peace and freedom in your life. Am I harming anybody? No! I’m taking care of the home, and it’s a peaceful, good home, no fighting, hardly ever an argument, the best environment a child can have and I intend to keep it that way. If only the world would let Randi and me have each other now and then in peace! God damn.

  Back at his desk he tried to piece things together. Perhaps he should have acknowledged that it had been he in the car, that he had been—well, for instance, driving one of the employees home; she had been taken sick at work, maybe. Given time, you could embroider a believable story. The trouble was that there never was enough time when you were handed a shock like that. Anyway, it was too late now.…

  He made a halfhearted attempt to get through an afternoon’s work, did it poorly, knew he had done it poorly, and arrived at home in a state of frustrated rage.

  Margaret was alone in the kitchen when Adam came home. As she stood at the window watching him walk from the garage with his tie loosened and his jacket flung over his arm, she had an immediate sense of impending trouble. Whatever it is, she thought grimly, I am in just the right mood for it.

  She went straight to the offensive, inquiring with saccharine sweetness, “So you saw Dr. Farley, did you?”

  “What do you mean?” he questioned back.

  “Oh, stop it, Adam! Don’t hedge. Don’t fence. You didn’t see him. You lied to me. Why?”

  “I don’t have to explain anything I don’t want to explain.”

  “Adam, I’m your wife. I want an answer.”

  “You’re not talking to one of your sophomore students, so don’t you tell me what you want or don’t want.”

  “My sophomore students would be amused to see a grown man acting like a damn fool. If you didn’t want to see the doctor, you could have said so. You didn’t have to lie.”

  “I lied to stop you from pestering me. It’s that simple.”

  “Does it perhaps occur to you that I pester because I’m worried? What are you hiding? Have you got cancer or something that you’re afraid to talk about, even to me?”

  “No, I haven’t got cancer or anything else,” he retorted.

  He was still standing with the jacket over his arm. Angry as she was, he seemed pathetic to her, like someone standing on a street in a strange city, looking around for help. And this flashing picture began to soften her anger.

  “Sit down here for a minute,” she said quietly now, “before the gang comes downstairs. I have to know what’s wrong. It isn’t fair to me this way.”

  His response then was equally quiet. “It’s a phase, Margaret, one of life’s phases, and I suppose it’s unexplainable. I have pressures at work and they spill over at home. You know that.”

  Of course he meant the sex business. Poor man. It was a far greater blow to a man than to a woman when that business went out of order. And she thought she understood that he was afraid to talk about it, to delve, for fear that delving might make it worse. She thought she remembered having read something to that effect; the papers and magazines were so filled with pop psychology these days.

  “All right,” she said. “I do know. Let’s drop it for now. Let’s just relax, have dinner, and afterward some music. Let’s put what’s bothering you up on the top shelf of the closet. Okay? I won’t be angry, and I hope you won’t be.”

  “I won’t be.” And he gave her the weak, grateful-seeming smile that she had been noticing of late whenever she was especially soft toward him.

  She was fearful, with a cold hollow in the pit of her stomach, although what it exactly was that she feared, she could not have told.

  She bought some sex books, a pseudoscientific text as well as a popular illustrated guide, and concluded after she had read them that there was not much in either of them that she had not already known. The general effect of her reading was discouragement, not because the advice and admonitions were not valid, but because if a person was not willing, they certainly would not work. She had left the books on a night table where Adam could see them, but whether he had looked through them she did not know and did not ask, remembering again that the worst thing she could do was to make him self-conscious. Patience, then, must be her way.

  When, she asked herself, did this all start? The immediate answer might be: on the night when Adam had so plainly rejected her. But as she considered, it became plain that it had begun some time before, in gradual, small accretions, isolated incidents that, if it were not for the present trouble, would have receded into the blur of daily living and forgotten trivia.

  A few weeks ago there had been that totally untypical brush between Adam and Megan.

  “Only a little more than a year till I’ll be seventeen,” Megan had said brightly. “What are my chances of getting a car, Dad?”

  Adam, who had been relatively silent all evening, had looked up from the newspaper and given a cross reply.

  “None. Absolutely none.”

  “Dad! Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a millionaire, that’s why.”

  “I only meant a secondhand car. You don’t have to be a millionaire to have that,” Megan pleaded. “And I’ll help with my baby-sitting savings.”

  “I said no,” Adam said sharply, “and that’s what I meant. No. The neighborhood’s too full of spoiled babies who think the world is one great big toy store,” he added.

  “If I’m spoiled, and I certainly don’t think I am,” Megan argued, “I wonder who spoiled me.”

  “That’s enough,” Adam said. “I don’t want to hear any more. The subject is closed.”<
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  This was not the way of the household, and Megan, bewildered and hurt, turned toward her mother with a silent question.

  At that point Margaret intervened. “You’re not quite sixteen yet, Megan. So why not wait till the time is ripe, and then we’ll talk about it. For my part, I do think it might be very convenient for you to have a little car.”

  Adam got up and left the room.

  Margaret looked at the three puzzled, upturned faces. Certainly she was aware that a great many families bickered and snapped, and that a great many fathers habitually spoke to their children as Adam had just done. But we have never been such a family, she thought, nor has he been such a father. And suddenly, the room seemed hostile, a strange place, not like home.

  “Dad’s tired,” she had apologized.

  “He’s always tired,” Megan had said.

  “Megan, that’s not true.”

  And it was not true. Adam was not “always tired.” Most of the time he was his recognizable self. But he was too often tired.

  He was well aware of the change in himself. The awareness troubled his days and his nights. He knew that he was testy, absentminded, tense, and frightened.

  Why had he snapped at Megan simply because, like most other teenagers, she dreamed about having a car? True, he had later gone to her room in an attempt to explain himself and apologize.…

  Why had he shouted at Danny last Saturday? He had gone to Randi’s for lunch and forgotten his promise to take Danny and Rufus to the vet. The dog had a painful infected ear, and for a whole day afterward the boy had been unforgiving. That time, too, Adam had apologized.…

  Mounting worries stabbed at him. And he recalled those medieval paintings that showed a flock of little devils poking pitchforks at a man ten times their size.

  Fred was a worry. Each time they were together, when he and Margaret unexpectedly met him one evening at a restaurant, or when he dropped in on a Sunday afternoon, as he had been doing for years, Adam reassured himself that Fred would never say the wrong thing. What information, after all, did he possess? Nothing worth a red cent! And yet he was a worry. You never could be certain that someday something, whether deliberately or accidentally, might pop out of Fred’s mouth. And he found himself watching Fred, wondering whether there was any slight, subtle change in his manner. He worried when Fred came to the house, and worried when he did not come; could this absence mean that he was staying away because for a second time he had seen the green car with Randi in it?

  Disturbing events were taking place at the office too. The place was a spy’s nest of rumors. In New York, at headquarters, they were negotiating a deal with Magnum to sell its latest software for a song, a giveaway, because the company was starved for cash. Some, on the other hand, were saying that the company had made a profit in every quarter this last year. But then, back to the other hand again, the Elmsford office had just let three men go, three bright young men. Of course, they were newcomers and lacked experience, so it was not as if they had dismissed anybody on Adam’s level.…

  But what if the rumors were true, and a real downsizing were beginning? And he, Adam, were called into the office one day and politely, regretfully, told—Imagining himself sitting there in front of the uncomfortable, smug, safe bearer of the news, he turned cold. The family’s bills were enormous. Or so they seem, he thought bitterly, to a wage slave like me. I suppose I’ll have to work and worry till I die.

  It’s not that we all want so much either. We’re not extravagant, unless it’s extravagant to want the best colleges for your children. My mother managed for me, but I was only one. Now I have three. And each one of them had to have his teeth straightened. If I were Fred Davis, I’d put up another couple of houses and it would be no problem. Or if I were Dr. Farley, or Margaret’s moron of a cousin, Gil. Now, up at Randi’s, her friends are satisfied with less. They don’t even think about the Ivy League. If the teeth are a little out of line, it’s not the end of the world to them.

  He had expenses on Randi’s account too. Eating so many meals there, especially now that, ever since the encounter with Fred, they no longer went anywhere near Randolph Crossing to eat, he certainly had an obligation to contribute. There had been the occasional weekend in Chicago or Houston, when ostensibly he had gone to a business conference; delightful, gala days they were, but inevitably expensive. Sometimes it seemed, as he reckoned with his separate credit cards, almost as if he were supporting two households.

  Certainly he was juggling two in his head. That morning, two years ago now, when he had spent the night with Randi, he had opened his eyes into confusion, missing the wallpaper in the room he shared with Margaret. Now it often happened that when he woke beside Margaret, he looked for the sky above the clerestory window. And then for a while he would lie still in an agony of self-blame and doubt.

  He would look at Margaret’s head on the other pillow, seeing there a slight frown on the forehead that had been always so serene; it was likely that her troubles had followed her into her dreams. She didn’t deserve her troubles. She deserved to be desired. But he couldn’t help that he was unable to desire her; ever since Randi had come back into his life, he had lost the ability to want Margaret. The shame and the pity had come when, for what he knew must be her final effort, she had tried to tempt him, and he had been unable to respond. He had felt her humiliation as if it were he who had been rebuffed.

  What was to be done? Where were they heading?

  One morning, lying a few minutes late in bed, he listened to the noises of the household; the back door opening and banging shut was somebody letting Zack and Rufus out; the front door was someone getting the newspaper from the lawn. The brief squabbling in the hall was the girls’ inevitable disagreement over the ownership of a sweater or scarf.… In an access of terror he sprang out of bed. This thing that he was doing, this brinkmanship, must stop before it destroyed the life of his family. These were his people! What the hell was he doing to them?

  “I think,” he said to Randi after they had been talking for an hour, “I think we should stop.”

  “Stop talking?” She wiped her swollen red eyes. “Is that what you mean, or—”

  “Both.”

  His voice caught in his throat. Women weep their tears, he thought, and men’s throats ache from stifling them.

  “You can’t mean it, Adam. Can you really walk away after these two years? We’ve been—why, we’ve been married for two years here, Adam! This is your home!”

  Home, he thought. But my children are home. If only I could have my children and Randi, too, all in the same house every day.… But the very concept was absurd. It was idiotic. It was sick.

  She got up and walked to the fireplace to stare into the tumbling flames. She had prepared the fire against the gray fall day for him, he knew, because he loved a fire. She had made a hot toddy and put a bowl of autumn leaves on the table. These were things that wives do, wives who care about their home and their man. And he sat there watching her struggle, her head bent and her shoulders shaking.

  When he could bear it no longer, he went to her, turning her toward him, and in his broken voice saying for the tenth time or more that day, “Listen to me. I don’t want to mean it, but what can I do? We are all, or will be, torn in half if this goes on. What we are doing, this road we’re traveling, leads nowhere.”

  “I don’t care, Adam. I’ll take this. It’s better than nothing.”

  He wondered about that. Her hints, her faint, vague hints, had not gone unnoticed by him. She wanted permanence, marriage. Of course she did.

  And he said very gently, “I have no future to offer you.”

  She cried out, “You are my future. You’re all the future I want. Oh, Adam, I love you so. You can’t leave me. I won’t let you. And you don’t want to leave me.”

  No, no, he did not want to. She was pressed against him, enfolding him, pounding heart to pounding heart and mouth to mouth, while she murmured against his lips.

  “We’
ll manage. As long as we can have a little time together like this—like this—it will be all right. Oh, it’s so sad to think of parting! It would be like dying. My darling, it will be all right.”

  Yes, like dying, he thought, and we’re not ready to die.

  And her eyes, her lovely, weeping eyes, implored him. “Tell me we’ll live. Say so.”

  His grief was dispersing slowly, like smoke. “Darling, darling, we’ll live,” he said.

  In the evening when Julie finished practicing, Adam often asked her to play something for him. His choice was Romantic music, Schubert’s or Brahms’s, music with a dying fall. When he closed his eyes and laid his head back on the chair, Margaret observed a little smile on his lips. It was an odd sort of smile, with a twist to it, as though he were keeping something to himself. Still, wasn’t it rather stupid of her to be reading things into a mere smile? And she would go back to her tenth-grade papers.

  Then after a while, she would look at Adam again. Had he always had such a slack, weak mouth? Her thoughts embarrassed her. And she tried to account for the nasty thought with self-analysis: I am hurt and scared by my helplessness. Therefore, I am angry and finding ridiculous fault with him, whereas I ought rather to comfort this overworked, possibly sick husband with all his responsibilities.

  The trouble was that he did not respond to her comforting. He was away somewhere in a place of his own. Even when he was doing ordinary, pleasant things with them all, having dinner, taking a family walk, or helping with homework, there was a part of him that was absent. And she wished there were someone in whom she could confide to ease her stress. But there was no one. The subject was too intimate, too intimate even for Nina, if she had been there.

  And that was another pain in Margaret’s heart. That such a total breach could have happened between Nina and herself! And between Nina and the children! Poor children. How could they possibly understand it all?