In the car Jane says, “He’s nice, Mom.” And she starts about all the things we did, and all the things he told her. And when she’s run out of that to talk about and we’re on the highway yet again she says, “Is he going to die soon?”
“Yes,” I say.
“When?”
“Maybe in the winter.”
“Why?”
“He’s got a disease there’s no cure for, and it’s getting worse, and I think the winter will be too hard.”
I go on about what I’ve learned. I say the words I now know, try to get used to the sound of them, tell her what the disease is called in our country (ALS) and what it’s called in Britain (motor neurone disease), that it’s very rare, that no one is sure where Fowler got it because it’s not in his family but that the nerve cells in his spine, arms, and legs are dying because transporter proteins have been lost and can’t clean up glutamate blockage. I sound logical and calm, establishing an order to the event of Fowler’s going, but the only thing I really know is that he will die in the winter. I just know this, and then . . . then what? Then there will be other voices to listen to, other things to say. Part of my life will be over as well.
“I can see why you love him,” Jane says.
• • •
Pam calls that night. I’m relieved to find out that she had no notion of Fowler’s illness.
“Are you still in love,” she says in her husky, forgivable way.
“Yes.” I don’t bother with Are you?
“Is this going to kill you?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve wanted to call you for years, you know.”
“I know.”
“I was a real jerk back then,” she says, then adds, laughing, “Still am!”
I’m softening on her, on everyone. “My son Isaac,” I say. “It would freak you out how much he looks like Fowler. He’s so beautiful. We are so lucky we don’t have to go to school with him!”
Pam says she misses me, she’s still never met anyone like me, or him, for that matter. “You guys were quite a duo!”
I agree, and then we make the inevitable vague plan to meet in the fall, just us, she’ll come into Manhattan, we’ll take an afternoon, etc. It saddens me to hang up, to feel yet another dead certainty—that a life in which Pam would be a close friend is now impossible, given our stations. After I check on the girls I fly to my room, strip to nothing, and dive into bed. There’s nothing on earth that can keep me from sleep now, not even the fact that I don’t know where my son is sleeping. I trust he is in good, local hands or with Simon and that I’d have heard about it if he wasn’t.
• • •
Early Friday a cab pulls into the driveway and Isaac and Simon get out, slamming doors the way men seem to do, not in anger or haste, just for punctuation’s sake. We crowd the foyer to receive them. I watch Isaac just as I watched Jane a week ago, searching for signs, but he heads for the front door neutrally, out of habit, not committed to any mood I can discern. He lugs the duffel I gave him in front of the high school, which has to be full of dirty clothes for me to wash.
“I’m out the door,” I assure them when they enter. I’ve arranged to meet Gillette and Barry for lunch, and Simon agreed this would give him some time with the girls before we all sit down for a powwow later. “You have a good day, and I’ll see you for dinner.”
I busy myself with accessories—pocketbook, briefcase, umbrella. Then I look up at Simon, who looks puzzled, as if there’s supposed to be some evidence of a change in me that will dictate our future. I return his gaze, then toss my hands outward in question. “What? I’m going to work. Really.”
“Good,” he says. “We’ll talk tonight. I’ll take care of things here.”
“Good,” I say, and out I go to walk to the train, one of my smoothest exits ever, so thrilled with Simon are the girls. I took in Isaac’s beeline for his sisters, his avoidance of me, and I didn’t address it.
Gillette has finally given up on fronting the work I’ve done for Barry. She told me this morning, on the phone, after my finest sleep in weeks, that she saw no reason for her to pose for Barry anymore, what had she been thinking? She was far more interested in the marketing end of things, she said, and she was going to tell him she could no longer support both sorts of efforts and that the book on cults had actually been written by me with her editorial input. I didn’t bother her about the other trash we’ve put together. Finally having a clear line to Barry would be enough, I thought. Already I’m walking more legitimately.
“You’re mellowing,” I said to her. It’s as if we’ve switched places, and she’s lost her hard edge to Latin love while I’ve absorbed that edge to negotiate the tough spots.
“Maybe so,” she admitted. “I like rolls and coffee brought to me in the morning and movies I don’t have to watch alone. And there’s the perk of traveling with someone who can speak four languages.”
My brief view of Pasquale hadn’t allowed for the language proficiency. I congratulated her.
I spread my work out over three seats on the train, admiring my refinement of plans for the book. I think Barry will appreciate what I’ve done. The idea of economic glut as a precondition for moral collapse is compelling, but it seems obvious now and not enough of a statement. Instead, I’m proposing a collection of personal commentary by royal and aristocratic women who have found themselves on the cusp of such collapse. Liselotte will be one of them, but her view will occur rather late in the book. I’ll require time and funding, and I’ll put all of this to Barry and see what he says. I’ve got nothing to lose.
• • •
The way I remember Barry—loud, portly, opinionated—is not at all the way he appears now. He’s slim and suntanned, and he gestures generously at the empty seat after Gillette and I have done the hugging and exclaiming over this and that. I met Barry only once, at a party at Gillette’s after the book on cults came out. My dislike for him was affirmed within the hour. He began a conversation with me and left in the middle of it for the bar and someone in a backless dress who had left modeling for writing and Barry’s editorial tutelage. The minute I’d told him where I lived and that I was working out of my home (I’d been instructed by Gillette not to let on what the nature of that work was), he’d glazed over.
Now he’s drinking iced tea, as is Gillette. We sit, and Gillette resumes the serious face she had on when I arrived. The French place is way west on 43rd Street, Barry’s idea. Everything—the music, the menu, the Provençal decor—is relievedly understated.
I order iced coffee and the same entrée that they’re both getting, and then, like a Renaissance king in his battle tent, I lay out the plans before them, more interested in the perfect logic of my strategy than in what they think of it.
“I’ll go back to the ancient Greeks,” I inform them, after a preliminary overview. “I’ll have to find out if there’s any documentation on the wives of the Greek leaders. So far all I know is that Sappho’s writing survives only in snippets and that there were certain strictures that women were meant to observe in the time of Homer. But if Penelope is any indication, there were ways around some of those stringencies.”
Barry looks at me, amused. “Go on.”
“There’s more on Egypt, of course, and I’m thinking Hatshepsut would be my best representative, as she was, in fact, a king.”
Gillette is wearing a long face, losing focus, her mind, I feel sure, on Pasquale. I am, comparatively, in tremendous command, which is probably why Barry, as we begin our upscale warmed salads, invites me to talk further with him at his office after lunch. Gillette applauds the idea.
“I’ve got to get back uptown anyway,” she says. “I’ll drop you.”
We have crême brulée and espresso, and I change the subject to the food, which I absolutely love. When Barry excuses himself to take care of the check, Gillette says, “Go for it! He’s totally into it. When have you had time to do all this?”
“So easy,” I lie. �
�I give up a few nights’ sleep per week, power nap when the kids are in front of the tube, and get the work done.”
“And you’ve got time? With all that’s going on with Simon and Fowler?”
“And Isaac and Daisy and Jane!” I laugh out loud, drawing the irritated stares of some business types. “The thing about two men,” I say with authority, “is that it gives you all kinds of time. You’re really not with either one of them, so you’ve got the same kind of time you have when you’re alone.”
Gillette shudders. She’s too far from being alone now to see that it’s bearable.
“More power,” she says. “You’re a rock.”
She drops us on a corner in the West Fifties and Barry leads me to his office in a building full of offices devoted to like causes—agents, publishers. I sit in a red leather chair while he sifts through papers to find a sheet of standard criteria for me to follow when I write up a formal book proposal, a “query,” as he’s calling it.
“Frankly, I’m glad you’ve revised the first idea,” he says. “It lacked punch, that dialectical stuff—peace begets crisis begets peace, et cetera. Get me the new proposal as soon as you can and I’ll push it. They’ll probably make an offer, and you’ll tell me what you want to do.”
We shake on this, and I thank him for the lunch.
“Thank you,” he says. “Gillette seemed pretty unenthused about the project. I’d rather see someone who’s charged take it on. Here’s my card. Be in touch.”
Outside I walk south in drizzle to the library to peek in on Eliot and get more books.
“You’re a sight better,” he says. “Where are my women?”
“With their father. I came for more books.”
“Are we doing France or medicine?”
“Neither. Greece. Antiquity. Aristocratic life.”
“You got it.”
He keys in commands, and the printer spews out titles. As it does so, Eliot asks about Fowler. I tell him about going to the Seaport.
“Can you handle this?” he says. “I know whereof I speak.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No,” he says. “It’s just such a long way down. Farther down, maybe, than you’ve ever been before.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say.
• • •
At home I find Simon out in the garden with Jane. Daisy’s asleep in her travel crib on the porch. Isaac, I gather, is out with a friend.
Jane says she’s tired of weeding and asks if it’s all right if she goes in and watches TV. I tell her to go ahead.
“Have you seen him?” Simon asks as we sit at the picnic table.
“Yes.”
“Is this likely to continue?”
“What? Is what likely to continue?”
“The contact.”
For once he’s talking to me without doing a second thing, flipping through a computer magazine or wielding a hoe.
“Yes,” I say. “Until he dies.”
“And do you expect me to wait until that happens and then return to being the man in your life?”
“No.”
“What do you expect?”
I mull this over. “I don’t expect anything, really, except that we continue to be available for the children. I don’t think I can expect much, do you? I’m not sure that expecting is all that wise of a thing to do in general, anyway. You set yourself up.”
“Yes, you do,” he says. “But the children expect things. They expect their parents to live under the same roof. We’re disappointing them.”
“I don’t know as that can always be the ultimate consideration,” I say.
“You’ve always bemoaned the fact that your parents didn’t live under the same roof. Now you seem to condone it because it suits your whim.”
“I know that’s how it seems,” I say, “but I think I’ve been misguided in criticizing them. They’ve pointed that out to me for years. They live as they think they have to.”
“I can’t afford a hotel anymore,” he says. “And I’d like some time in my house as well.”
“Simon,” I tell him. “Sleeping arrangements can be made. For God’s sake, I’ll go to Mother’s at night if it’s too unspeakable to be in separate rooms for a while.”
“For a while? You act as if you made a small, forgivable error! As if you dented a fender or broke a glass!”
“I don’t feel as you do. I can’t help that.”
“We have to make a plan!”
“All right. I say we continue to share in the household duties, and if you want a week alone here I’ll make myself scarce, but if you don’t mind, I’ll continue to live and work here and be your wife and the children’s mother.”
He looks at the back of his hands, flattened on the table. “As if nothing is different.”
“No,” I insist. “As if we know everything is and we can manage it. As if it isn’t so awful. How awful can it be, for God’s sake?”
Of course, my mind is on Fowler, his legs and arms betraying him.
Simon tells me he’ll take the porch, as he likes sleeping out there in the summer. He asks that I confine my Fowler visits to times when they will not be obvious to the children. He says that as far as he’s concerned, this is a temporary arrangement, until one of us takes up residence elsewhere.
“All arrangements are temporary,” I remind him.
“That is only as you would have it,” he says.
We go inside to see to the girls and dinner.
chapter nine
In summer in ancient Greece industry slowed, men lay about, recovering from the cooler months’ labor, the manufacture of battle gear, battle itself, and agricultural duties. Women, according to one of my sources, “grew soft and languorous.” But during other seasons the women were as industrious as the men and as free to be at large outside the manor houses as their husbands. Granted, they kept separate quarters within the house, and visits to the husbands’ quarters would occur upon invitation, as it was customary for the men to have concubines as well. The women took separate meals, but they joined their husbands and male guests in the great hall, the megaron, at banquet’s end and often presided over the conversation and entertainment.
For my part, separate sleeping quarters and meals don’t seem uncivilized customs, and I mention this to Simon while he’s making up the cot out on the porch.
“A convenient philosophy for some,” he mutters. “However, you aren’t taking into account that these privations were balanced by a reward system I don’t think even you would approve of.”
“Meaning.”
“First of all,” he explains (Simon has read far more than I have on ancient Greece, having studied the great mathematicians for most of his educational life), “you’d have to be willing to spare a maid to answer the door when my concubines came to call, you’d have to forget about Fowler and external work, and you’d have to spend a good share of your time at the loom and in preparation of side dishes for me and my friends. You wouldn’t be permitted to cook the meat.”
“Let’s talk about whom you’d invite,” I say playfully.
He tries hard not to smile at this suggestion. “Let’s put our efforts toward a more elevated purpose. Like who’s going to go driving around and find Isaac. It’s after eleven.”
“Let me,” I say.
“That wouldn’t be allowed in B.C.E. Athens.”
“You made your point,” I say. “A hundred times.”
“Do me a favor,” he snaps, “and don’t expect business as usual.” He sits down on the squeaky cot, disgusted.
“I don’t. That isn’t what I want.”
Again I’m out in the car in search of my son, first over to Garland’s, where there’s no answer when I buzz up, then to the Burger King he frequents with his baseball pals, then to the movie theater, where the nine-thirty showing of Speed is about to let out. I stand under the marquee for a while, but the night is so sluggish and thick with humidity that I go ahead in and buy a co
ffee and sit on the carpeted stairs in the air-conditioning, grateful not to be confined to housewifely duties.
When the doors finally open I see Isaac, his arm draped over the very tan shoulder of a dark-haired girl who is as tall as he is. I stay, frozen, in my seat on the stairs leading to the upstairs theater.
As soon as our eyes lock, he nudges her in the direction of the exit furthest from me. She hasn’t taken any of this in, intent as she’s been on telling him something private, close, right in his ear. Her smooth, tan face framed by long, straight hair, animated by the secret she’s told him, is prettier than any girl’s face I’ve seen at Hastings or in movies or in Manhattan’s most glamorous shopping districts. They leave the theater for the hot outdoors, and I watch them climb into a royal blue Miata parked in the first row, her car, I’m assuming, as she’s the driver.
Nothing—not Kirsten’s longing for Simon, Fowler’s mild pursuit of Pam, Adrienne’s poisoning my daughter against me—has prepared me for this.
“Ma’am?” a sweet voice behind me says.
The creamy-faced girl who sold me the coffee stands alone in the lobby, carpet sweeper in hand.
“We’re closing,” she says apologetically. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I’m sorry.” I expel myself into the hateful heat, desperate not to admit the jealous rage I’ve been denying my husband, fighting to keep the composure, the nobility of a woman who knows (and reveres) her place. But this vision, of Isaac with a girl, doesn’t fit with any I’ve ever had of him. I am incredulous. My son has a girlfriend. It’s an outrage.
• • •
At home Simon is at the computer, typing up some sort of an announcement.
“Did you know that Isaac has a girlfriend?” I ask.
“I had that sense.”
“Has he said anything to you?”
“He’s said plenty. But not about that.”
“I just saw them leaving the movie theater together.”
“Really.” I can’t tell if this bothers him.
“What are you doing?” I say.
Every Day Page 15