Nevertheless, he is back at the Kizers’ door, he has pushed it open and now he steps inside. The house is very quiet.
He is in some kind of entryway. It is large, with storage cabinets and a washer and dryer and a huge tile planter that holds umbrellas and walking sticks. It’s like an English mudroom where you’d keep your hiking clothes for rambles over the moors. There’s a huge wrought-iron birdcage, empty. A green leather bench with golf shoes lying on it. On the walls there are framed prints, probably hunting scenes. He can’t make out the pictures in this dark.
He opens the door to the kitchen and the refrigerator begins to hum. This always happens when you break into a house. It’s a friendly sound once you get used to it. He smiles. A night-light on the counter shows him the kitchen is white: white tile, white cabinets, white stove and refrigerator, and a gleaming white work island with a white marble top, and a bank of fluorescent lights, also white. An obsessive’s kitchen.
There is a door to the right that leads to a corridor and Hal’s study and another door to the left that opens to the dining room. He chooses the dining room. Rosewood furniture, a table that seats twelve or more, a china tureen in the center, expensive and hideous. Double doors stand open to the living room. It is huge. A grand piano dominates one corner of the room. There is a central fireplace with couches on either side, matching wing chairs, some expensive-looking little tables. Lamps everywhere. And there are dark wood bookshelves all along the fireplace wall. Another seating area, with couches again and fat club chairs, looks out on a walled patio. He goes to the French doors and grasps the knob. The doors are unlocked. Do they think they can keep out intruders merely because the patio has a high wall?
He steps away from the doors and bumps into the writing desk. A bronze ashtray rattles and he steadies it. It has startled him, and he stands there listening. Not a sound. Nothing.
He is about to retrace his steps when he notices that beyond the piano is another door that gives onto a sunroom that also overlooks the patio. There are windows on three walls of this room and, even though it is dark outside, the windows admit a dim light that lets him see the wicker couch and the three chairs and the green and white arabesques of the Chinese carpet on the floor. And he sees too that someone is sitting in one of those chairs.
He is paralyzed. He cannot move, but he sucks in his breath suddenly, horribly, and the noise is very loud in the room. He wants to turn and run.
“Well?” the person says, and he recognizes Dixie’s voice. She is sitting with her back to him, looking out on the patio.
He says nothing. He cannot speak and he cannot move.
“Well, are you home for the night? Or have you got some other whore waiting for you?” She sounds very drunk. “You shit,” she says.
He takes a step toward her then—why, he doesn’t know, because his only desire is to run—and her hand flies up to protect her face and she shouts, “Don’t! No!” and she begins to cry. She is drunk and crazy and she buries her face in her lap, her hands flapping to keep him away. He realizes finally that she thinks he is Hal, that she has no idea who he is, that he is safe, he is saved.
At that moment she turns and looks at him.
He runs.
Surely this did not happen. It couldn’t have happened.
Philip rolled over on his stomach and buried his face in the pillow. “I won’t think, I won’t think, I won’t think,” he said aloud, and pressed the pillow hard into his face to smother the awful memory of it: the key on the ledge, Dixie flapping her hands and shouting “No, no,” and then his dash through the living room and the dining room, banging against chairs, tumbling into the china tureen, and out into the black night, alone.
Driving home fast, reckless, he had for one moment thought of suicide, and he thought of it now as he lay with his face in the pillow. The disgrace for his family. For poor Maggie and the kids. For the hospital, too, since they have just given him a Chair. “Goldman Professor of Psychiatry accused of breaking and entering. Theft of art objects. Attempted rape.” He could see it on the front page of the Boston Globe. He held his breath and listened to the pulse pounding in his brain. Stroke time. Or at least a cerebral hemorrhage. He got up slowly and made his way to the bathroom.
In the shower he leaned against the tile and let the hot water beat down on him, hard. He refused to think. He would wash and dress and go down to breakfast. He would get through the day. And the week. And the rest of his life, disgraced or not. He always did what he had to do. That’s what life meant: seeing your duty and doing it. And if you fucked up every twenty-five years or so and broke into a house or two, you took the consequences and you got in step and you marched. He always had. And he would.
He put on his chinos and his yellow shirt and went down to join Maggie.
She was not in the kitchen. He looked out the window and his head throbbed at the brightness of the light. She was not in the garden either. He poured himself some coffee and stood drinking it. Maybe she had gone out. Or maybe she knew about last night. Again the blood rushed to his head and he saw Dixie Kizer sitting there in the dark, drunk, and the pain gathered behind his eyes. But there was no way Maggie could know. Unless Dixie had seen him.
He took his coffee into the family room.
Maggie was lying there asleep, peaceful, beautiful. She opened her eyes and smiled at him, and when he did not smile back, she looked away.
“I fell asleep,” she said, and sat up.
He was looking at the glass of scotch, half empty now, on the table beside the couch. She looked at it too.
“I didn’t touch it,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“I know,” he said, but he sounded as if he didn’t mean it. He was overwhelmed then by his hypocrisy and his failure and his sense that she was exposed and broken and pitiful and he was passing judgment on her. It was all backward. It was wrong and horribly unfair. He was a liar and a cheat and she was the victim. He bent down to kiss her.
“I don’t want to lose you, ever,” he said, and they embraced, hard, with a touch of desperation. They clung to one another for a long moment, and then for another moment that in the old days would have led them up the stairs to bed. But there was something between them now that was no longer simply love and, slowly, awkwardly, they pulled away.
“We can eat out,” Maggie said. “We can have breakfast at Town Line. Do you want to?”
“Winchester?” he said. “Isn’t that kind of far?”
“They’ve got that great French toast you like,” she said.
And so they put the past night behind them and dressed and went out—a happily married couple—to have breakfast at Town Line in Winchester.
3
Hal Kizer came down the stairs and went into the sunroom to see if Dixie was still there. She was asleep in the yellow chaise longue, her body twisted uncomfortably, her head thrown back. She would have a sore neck when she woke up. And her customary hangover.
There was a half-empty bottle of bourbon on the floor by her chair and an empty glass lay turned over on its side. He picked them up and took them out to the kitchen. He put on a pot of coffee.
Last night had been his monthly sex seminar up in the city and he was feeling relaxed this morning, all the tensions drained out. He never felt bad about these seminars—no guilt, no anxiety, no discomfort of any kind—and now and then he wondered if he might be some kind of sociopath. An educated one, naturally, and a sympathetic one as well. But, by definition, a man without a conscience. It was possible, though not likely, because sex had nothing to do with a sense of right and wrong, not even rough sex, not even really rough sex.
He went back to the sunroom to look in on Dixie. She was still sleeping. A silk shawl lay across her feet and trailed onto the floor. He shook it out and then carefully drew it up from her legs to her shoulders. She woke. His face was bent over hers and her eyes grew large with fear, but he smiled at her. He kissed her softly on the mouth. “Hi,” he whispered. “How’s my girl?�
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She shifted on the chaise and put her hand up to her neck.
“Sore neck?”
“Mm.”
“I’ll get you a Tylenol.”
“No,” she said.
He returned in a moment with a glass of tomato juice and two Tylenol. She swallowed the pills and took a sip of the tomato juice.
He sat down on the edge of the chaise, facing her, and smoothed the dark hair back from her brow. She still had on all her makeup.
“I’m a mess,” she said.
“You’re my mess,” he said. He always felt tender toward her after his sex seminars.
“I had the strangest dream. It was awful.”
“What about?”
“I don’t remember. I just remember it was awful.”
He looked at her, smiling easily. He was very relaxed.
She said, “It was about you, I think.”
“Wish fulfillment? Or night fears?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you kill me or did I kill you?”
“It was about you and it wasn’t about you.” She shook her head. “I can’t get it.”
“Don’t think about it. Just let it come.”
She closed her eyes. She was in a dark room, asleep, alone. But then somebody was there, watching her. Hal was there. He was angry. He was about to hit her. She opened her eyes and he was smiling at her.
“Got it?”
She lifted her hand to his face, stubbly because he hadn’t yet shaved, and she thought, Why can’t he always be like this, why can’t I always love him like this?
He kissed her again, this time on the forehead.
“Get a shower,” he said, “and I’ll bring you coffee while you dress. And then we’ll go out to breakfast, what do you say?”
She clung to him and he held her dutifully and after a while he pushed her away. She was crying, grateful.
He wanted to say, Snap out of it, but he was being quite consciously patient, and so he said nothing. He gave her little soothing pats on the back. “Okay,” he said, “it’s okay,” and then she went upstairs to shower and he was free to have his cup of coffee and flip through the latest New England Journal of Medicine. Stern stuff, this.
After a while he poured a cup of coffee and took it upstairs to Dixie. He put it on the dresser and glanced into the bathroom. She was standing there naked, blow-drying her hair, and when she saw him she covered herself with a towel. He smiled at her and said, “There’s your coffee,” and went downstairs to wait.
He was deep into an essay on carcinogens when she appeared, in white slacks and a red and white striped shirt, looking fresh and young and sexy, all part of the illusion.
“Denny’s,” he said, “or Town Line?”
“Town Line,” she said.
“Town Line it is,” he said.
4
It was inevitable that they would meet in the parking lot at Town Line. It was inevitable that they would say what a nice party it had been last night, what wonderful hosts the Aspergarters were, how right and just that Philip should have the Goldman Chair and all the perks that went with it. It was inevitable that Hal would insist on their all having breakfast together. A postcelebration celebration. A good start to a great day.
They sat and the waiter brought coffee and took their orders—French toast all around—and they were left on their own. Nobody knew how to begin. Luckily, Calvin and Beecher Stubbs came in and were seated on the upper level, so for a while they talked about Calvin and Beecher. Then they talked about the Fioris, who always had Saturday breakfast here but hadn’t come in yet this morning. Finally, inevitably, they talked about the Tate kids, Cole and Emma, who would be coming home soon for a quick visit before taking off for the summer. Cole had a research assistantship at Hopkins doing blood work, HIV stuff. Emma was going to some Greek island to intern as a dirt-sifter on an archeological dig. Great kids, both of them. No drugs. A little too serious maybe, but who could complain?
Good kids led to the subject of bad kids, and it was only another minute before they were talking about old Gaspard and his daughter’s lawsuit and the whole business of recovered memory.
“It’s a crock, if you ask me,” Hal said. “It’s just irresponsible therapy. You suggest, you imply, you create the desire for approval, and you give that approval as soon as the ‘memory’—in quotes—veers toward anything sexual. And it’s only a small step from a sexual memory to the ‘memory’—in quotes—of sexual molestation. Am I right?”
“Hmm,” Philip said. He was watching Dixie, who sat there silent, a smirk at the corner of her mouth. Was it a smirk?
“I feel bad for the Gaspards,” Maggie said.
“And then of course there’s this cult of Victimhood. With a capital V. Everybody wants to be a victim today. The blacks, the Chicanos, the Indians—Native Americans, I mean—well, they are victims, but they revel in it, is the point. It’s an excuse for not doing anything with their lives. It’s an excuse for just collecting welfare and bitching and moaning and, you know, etcetera, etcetera. There’s no shame attached to it anymore. They go on television and talk about it. It’s a way of being special. My point is that the whole notion of heroism has been supplanted by victimhood. Rape victims, molestation victims, minority bias victims … I suppose it’s only a matter of time until we have skinhead victims. There aren’t any victimizers anymore, there’s just victims.”
The waiter came with their breakfasts and it looked for a moment as if Hal had been derailed, but he tasted his French toast and returned to the attack.
“Of course, you can’t say any of that, publicly anyhow, because it marks you as a racist or a sexist or a supremacist or whatever. I think it’s a crock,” he said. “So what do you think?”
“Of?”
“Of recovered memory. Of the Gaspard girl. I mean, you must know her. I’ve never laid eyes on her, thank God, or I suppose she’d be accusing me as well.”
“She’s a very quiet young woman, as I recall. None of us really knew her.” Philip looked to Maggie but she had nothing to say. “It makes me uncomfortable,” he said, “this whole business of recovering memory. I’m sure that memories can be suppressed, repressed, completely ‘forgotten,’ and then surface all of a sudden at some crisis moment. There’s no question that it happens. But it’s awfully hard to believe you can completely forget something as extreme as molestation. I know it happens and even I find it hard to believe. But then, I was never molested.”
“So far as you remember,” Maggie said.
“So far as I remember,” Philip said, and they all laughed, a little nervously.
Philip looked at Dixie and raised his eyebrows. Was she going to say something finally or just sit there with that look on her face?
Dixie cleared her throat and started to speak but then stopped.
“And what do you think?” Philip asked.
“Oh,” Dixie said. “I don’t … I mean, I’m not qualified …,” and she looked over at Hal and then down at her plate. The smirk disappeared. It had not been a smirk after all. It was tension, perhaps even fear.
“Well, say something,” Hal said, “for Christ’s sake, you’re not a mute.”
Dixie said, “Oh,” and then nothing. There was a little silence and Maggie said, “Dixie probably thinks the same as I think.”
Dixie looked up at her.
“That recovered memory is better left to the professionals. They’re the ones that make their livings off it.”
“Yes,” Dixie said.
“The spouses just clean up after them.”
“Yes,” Dixie said.
“The dutiful spouses,” Maggie said. “What would life be without them?”
Dixie said nothing.
“Which means?” Hal said.
“We put up with you,” Maggie said, and smiled. “We listen to all the things you remember and we remember all the things you forget—and there are plenty of things you want to forget—and we remai
n mindful, always, that you’re the still point of the turning world.” She put her hand over Philip’s hand. “Isn’t that right, sweet?”
“Whew!” Hal said, and began to study her.
“And we love you for it, of course,” Maggie said, and to Dixie, “Don’t we?”
Dixie was just looking at her.
“Well, we do.” Maggie lifted her cup of coffee in a mock toast and took a sip.
Nobody knew what to say next. The waiter brought more coffee.
“I like that they give you more coffee before you ask,” Dixie said.
“I do too,” Maggie said.
Another silence.
Hal was still studying Maggie. “So,” he said, “you must be real pleased with Philip’s Chair. It’s quite a thing at … What are you, Philip? Forty? Fifty?”
“Forty-five.”
“Forty-five and you’ve got a Chair of Psychiatry at the foremost teaching hospital in the country?”
“It’s wonderful,” Dixie said. “I think it’s just wonderful.”
“Not too shabby,” Hal said, turning back to Maggie. “That must make you feel real good. I don’t have a Chair.”
“But you have a supportive wife,” Maggie said.
“And beautiful too,” Philip said.
“But not a Chair.”
“Maybe … um … when you’re forty-five …,” Dixie said.
“I may be dead when I’m forty-five. You may be dead when I’m forty-five.”
“How old are you?” Maggie said. “With such a young wife.”
He looked at her. “Thirty-something,” he said.
“He’s thirty-eight,” Dixie said.
“And do you like it here? Without a Chair?”
“He’s thirty-eight,” Dixie said again.
“We heard you,” Hal said. “Nobody cares.”
“And I’m thirty-one,” Dixie said.
“My, my,” Hal said. “She speaks and everything.”
“And I’m a second wife.”
“A rich second wife, be it known,” Hal said. “Don’t forget rich.”
Having Everything Page 3