Blood Secrets

by Jones, Craig

  I was halfway up when I saw her coming down. The grocery girl. Her eyes were still red and moist from crying. A cold, dull tremor passed through me as the look of recognition was exchanged. She ran down the rest of the way and out the door.

  I didn’t ring. I opened the door with my key.

  He was lying there on one of the cushions, and he jumped up before I got the door closed. His eyes were wild and fearful, but he said nothing. We stood staring at each other.

  “Where . . . did you go?” he said at last. Voice shaky. Face flushed. My eyes slid around the room for evidence.

  “I just walked. To the campus.” I could hear the chill in my voice.

  “Do you—do you feel better now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, letting my eyes drill into his. I went into the kitchen and poured a double shot of bourbon. When I turned around he was standing in the doorway, looking imploringly at me. I sensed he wanted to come closer but wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.

  “Are you still angry?”

  “I’m not sure about that, either.”

  He attempted a smile, but it faded in the silence.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” He almost whispered.

  “Do you?”

  “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  I couldn’t even manage a smirk. I was too hurt and angry. “Why the sudden compliance, Frank?”

  “I just don’t think we should let an argument come between us.”

  “Why are you so nervous?”

  Another attempted smile. “Honey, I don’t like arguing. It depresses me.”

  “And what do you do for consolation when you’re . . . ‘depressed’?” He cocked his head questioningly. “Do you call someone up for a little reassurance?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Since you’re not going to tell me, I’ll tell you. I just passed your little friend on the stairs. It was pretty obvious she’d been crying. From hearing your side of things, no doubt.”

  “Irene!”

  “One argument, and she’s back in the picture.”

  “It’s not that way! She just dropped by—”

  “Out of the sky.”

  “Honey, please! She came by about two minutes after you left. She was upset and so was I. I guess I was a little abrupt with her. She had a problem with one of her roommates again—I’ve told you about that. I was too distracted because of us; I really couldn’t concern myself with someone else. I didn’t tell her we’d had an argument, but I did tell her about you. I kind of wanted her to meet you but not under tonight’s circumstances, so I guess I rushed her out of here.”

  “Quite a rush to make her cry.”

  “She wasn’t crying when she left.”

  “And quite a coincidence.”

  “But it was a coincidence.” He made a fist and held it between his head and the doorjamb. “It was a coincidence.”

  I started to slip past him, but he spread his arm to block me.

  “Don’t, Irene.”

  “Let me past.”

  “Don’t keep running out on me.” I nudged against his arm. “Can’t you be angry and stay?”

  “Let me past.”

  “No.” He put his arms around me and pulled me to his chest.

  “Don’t, Frank.” I tried to wriggle free, but his arms tightened.

  “Honey, please, how can you think—”

  “Let me go.”

  “I have to tell you something. I’m a . . . freak.” That’s all he said for a moment. His chest quivered, then his whole body trembled, but his arms grew even tighter around me. I couldn’t believe it: he was crying. “I—I love you much too much, I know that. I love you more than it’s healthy to love someone. I try to hold it back so I won’t smother you and— Jesus! I know it’s my fault if I’m so afraid of losing you, but I never thought I’d meet anyone like you who would . . . want me too. I’m guilty of that and probably a lot of other things, but don’t accuse me of even thinking of someone else. That’s not fair, Irene, it really isn’t.”

  He went on stroking my back and my hair. Finally, my arms went around him.

  “Maybe I’m the freak,” I said. “I don’t want to be selfish, Frank. Help me not to be.”

  He picked me up and held me so I was looking down into his face. He smiled, but his cheeks were still wet. “You give me more than you know.”

  “Including a little grief now and then.”

  “Yes, indeed, but I’ll take it.” His smile widened. “You really were jealous for a few minutes there?”

  “Frank, I don’t want to—”

  “Come on, were you?”

  “Well, what did it look like?”

  He was beaming. “No one was ever jealous over me in my life. It’s a nice feeling.”

  “Don’t plan on any repetitions, mister.”

  “And no more running out?”

  “No more running out.”

  The next day, I dropped the philodendron in the trash and bought another one. Its longevity has been remarkable. For years it flourished on the window sill in the bedroom of our house. In fact, it was the last thing I looked at in that room the night I picked up the gun and slipped it into my purse.

  *

  Fearing that time and opportunity would allow me to retreat into my emotional armor, I made it a point to visit Gloria while my mood would make it easier for me to apologize. Her disapproval of Frank did not have to become an insurmountable problem; the simple solution was to keep them apart and to see her alone.

  “Irene, you don’t have to apologize.” She was embarrassed.

  “I’m not excusing what you did. But there’s no excuse for what I did, either. You’ve been good to me; you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. What I did was mean and—well, shabby.”

  This made her squirm. “Did Frank suggest this apology?”

  “I may love him, but I still have a mind of my own.”

  “I hope so. It’s too good a mind to give up. To anyone.”

  Fall term began, and I carried a full load of classes. For the first time, Gloria did not choose any of the ones I took. We established a routine of having dinner together one night a week, followed by a movie or a concert on campus. Too often, I caught her looking at me with that sidelong glance of hers, but I refused to confront it. I was determined to keep the friendship running smoothly, even if that meant sacrificing it to superficiality. After my argument with Frank over the plant, I was on my guard against being glib and overcritical. On a few occasions, Gloria and I went out for a drink, but I no longer scanned the bar in search of material for snide remarks. She viewed me then the way I imagine historians view great civilizations in decline. But it was pointless for me to explain my new contentment. I would just have to wait until she herself found someone who would make the same difference in her life as Frank did in mine.

  She met him at midterm, but it seemed she made more of a difference to his life than he did to hers. His name was Patrick Malone. A veterinarian who had moved up here from Indianapolis, he had the kind of appeal women rarely find outside their fantasies. Though he was close to Frank’s height, he had twenty more pounds distributed among his chest, arms and legs. From a distance, his face was as symmetrical as a mechanical drawing, but with sharp green eyes which pierced that distance. Up close, a slight hump on the bridge of his nose added character, and his cheeks were dotted with tiny indentations, the rugged remains of teen-age acne. His smile was quick and boyish, his laugh full-bellied and richly masculine. His conversation, his gestures, everything about him, was affirmative yet gentle. My conversations with him flowed easily, sliding comfortably now and then into friendly gibes at one another. He loved the title my mother and Frank had given me—Irene the Arrogant—and he used it e
very chance he got. He liked to kid me about having had skin surgery: no one, he said, could have hair as naturally red as mine without having freckles as well. In return, I nicknamed him Craterface and told him he probably hadn’t had acne at all, but purposely poked those little holes in his cheeks because he was too pretty. Gloria loved our repartee and looked happiest when she could sit back, sip on a drink and just listen to us.

  Unfortunately, the happy threesome became a tense foursome whenever Frank entered the picture. I saw the guardedness in Pat’s manner the first time he met Frank, and I could well imagine the source of it. But I felt mildly victorious as Pat and Frank began to relax around each other. Pat loved to talk and Frank was a probing listener, always asking questions and pursuing explanations. Gloria’s icy civility toward Frank had mellowed to become an artificial and awkward friendliness, and we all felt the strain. Whenever she had a few drinks in her and her defenses were down, she would slip into staring at him, watching his every movement and judging it. Frank’s reaction was to avoid conversation with her; when he did address her, he never looked her in the eye.

  The foursome was short-lived. Frank bowed out gradually, at first with excuses of having to work. Later, excuses weren’t necessary. Measured against Frank’s “exile,” Pat’s presence made me resentful, and I soon went back to seeing Gloria alone.

  Frank and I spent an increasing amount of time alone together. We were both working very hard; sometimes during the week our only amusement was reading to each other the papers we had written. Up to the time I met Frank, I had always mailed my papers home for my father to read. He taught English at Cedar Run High School, and he was more than a little proud of his influence in getting me interested in the same field. I knew my working on a Ph.D. would complete the dream he once had for himself. Naturally, he wanted to keep tabs on that dream. When I forgot to send the papers home after reading them to Frank, I soon received a one-line note from my father which read: “Ph.D. candidates don’t write papers anymore?” Chuckling, I showed the note to Frank, but he was not amused.

  “You shouldn’t forget your father like that,” he said seriously.

  “I hadn’t meant to.”

  He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a large envelope. “Here, get your papers together in this and mail it tonight.”

  I sat down on a cushion and arranged the papers in the envelope, then wrote a short note of apology.

  “Do you ever send your papers home?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one to send them to.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They’re dead.” It was a simple statement, and he flipped a page of his book as he said it.

  “Frank, you never told me!”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No, you didn’t! I can’t believe you never mentioned it.”

  “I would have gotten around to it.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not a subject I particularly enjoy.”

  “But you’ll tell me about it sometime, won’t you?”

  “Sometime.”

  I always did my studying at the kitchen table so we would be out of each other’s way. But that night I couldn’t concentrate. I could hear him flipping pages in the other room, and I tried to imagine what I would be like if both my parents were dead. Then I realized something else. Frank had told me he was the youngest of nine kids, yet so far as I knew, he had never got a phone call or a letter from any of them during the three months we had been living together. I sat staring at the flecks in the Formica tabletop and wondered how I could have been so blind—and selfish. Although he had chosen to say nothing about his family, why hadn’t it occurred to me to ask about them?

  I went to bed and lay there waiting for him. I kept telling myself it was ridiculous to be jealous over something I didn’t know. Yes, I was jealous of withheld information. I wanted to know everything that had ever happened to him. After all, the death of one’s parents was not a casual scrap of information.

  I didn’t move when he got into bed. With a short groan he stretched out on his back. We had lived together long enough to have established communication in the dark; I knew that still as I was, he knew I was wide awake and waiting.

  “My father was killed in a bar when I was eighteen. My mother died of pneumonia four years ago.” He said it quickly, dispassionately, then sighed heavily to signal me he wanted to sleep.

  “Killed? How?”

  “He was shot.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a holdup. When the bartender wouldn’t surrender the money, they shot up the place. My father was hit by accident, along with two other men.”

  I was about to say “How did you feel?” but realized how ridiculous it would sound. Instead, I asked how often he saw his brothers and sisters.

  “I don’t see them at all. Not since my mother died.”

  “Why not?”

  “Our house was so small, we spent half our time trying to get away from each other.”

  “But now that you all live apart, surely you can see each other once in a while.”

  “I don’t care to see any of them,” he said flatly.

  “But weren’t any of you close to each other?”

  “Too close; privacy was at a premium. When you’re scraping elbows at the dinner table and using the bathroom three at a time, you don’t want to spend your free time exchanging intimacies. You want to spend it alone.”

  “Not all large families are like that, are they?”

  “I guess not. But I’m not going to have a large family to find out.”

  I remembered him saying: I hate it when people just breed. In a way, he was making the same statement again.

  I said, “Are you sure my living with you isn’t disturbing your privacy?”

  “You’re living here because I want you here. You’re my family now.”

  “Am I?” I moved over and put my head on his shoulder. We lay still, saying nothing for several minutes. His chest rose, and he held his breath.

  “Irene, would you marry me?”

  I didn’t intend to keep him in suspense, but I wanted the words to linger.

  “I mean,” he said, “would you think about marrying me?”

  “No, I won’t think about it.” I pressed my mouth against his ear. “Just promise me we’ll make it soon.”

  Gloria took the news standing up and with a look on her face that said: “I knew this would happen.” But all she said was “Congratulations”: from past experience, she had learned not to verbalize her thoughts about Frank and me.

  We went to Cedar Run for Christmas and told my parents. My mother seemed genuinely pleased, while my father made a pretense of being pleased. From my recent experiences with Gloria, I was sensitive to being watched, and I felt my father watching me the more he pretended not to. I suspected he knew he had not been told everything, and I was not looking forward to the task. The night before Frank and I were to leave, I stayed up late and alone with my father to confess the rest.

  “I’m taking a leave from the Ph.D. program,” I began.

  “You mean you’re leaving the program.”

  “I’m going to take education courses next term and practice-teach in the spring so I can get a job in the fall. In a couple of years, I’ll go back and get the degree.”

  He was sitting in his recliner. He laid his head back and sighed. “I might have expected this.”

  I bristled. Gloria had done her best to suggest my life was taking a downhill slide; I did not need the suggestion reinforced by my father. “It’s my life. Don’t you think I have the right to make a few decisions about what I want to do with it?”

  “You have every right. I suppose I hav
e no right to be disappointed. But I am. Was this Frank’s idea?”

  “No, it wasn’t. In fact, he was against it at first.”

  “But he’s going along with it?”

  “It’s what I want to do. Dad, do you remember what you said that day you and Mom came down to Frank’s—about college being removed from reality? I’ve thought about that a lot, the way I’ve been living in a shell. I’ve lived away from home, but I’ve never really been on my own. The English Department has been my guardian and I’ve been its good little girl.”

  “So now you’re Frank’s little girl. I wouldn’t call that being on your own, either.”

  “Yes, it is. Since I’ve known Frank, I’ve been on my own in a very painful way. I’ve had to admit things about myself that aren’t very pleasant.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just the way I’ve been, the way I never paid any attention to Neil and Barry.”

  “That’s natural. You’re the girl, you’re older, you’ve had different interests.”

  “I’ve never had a job, not even a summer one, and before I met Frank I never had to consider anyone else or even meet them halfway. I’ve never allowed myself to be challenged. Do you remember in tenth grade how I hated gym and we got Dr. Patterson to write that phony letter so I could get excused? I’ve been doing that kind of thing all my life. When I got to college, if I didn’t like a class the first two weeks, I dropped it. If I didn’t bowl or play tennis well the first few times out, I quit doing it. I could always run back to the books and get my A’s.”

  “You’re blowing this way out of proportion. Studying is hard work. Dedicating yourself to a goal demands discipline, and you’ve always had perfect discipline, the kind most people never have. I won’t let you minimize that. As for bowling or tennis, no one can excel in everything.”