Philip saw the opportunity to confess. He could tell her now and have it over with, finally, for good. It would be an easy thing. He could say the words, just the simple honest words: as a kid I broke into houses. I don’t know why. It was irrational and thrilling and I did it. I did it again at Dixie Kizer’s house the night of the Aspergarters’ party. It wasn’t sex, it was … unreason.
If he told her, if she knew, if he knew she knew, it might never happen again. It couldn’t—he’d be in her power.
“Should I not have mentioned it?” Maggie said.
“I was thinking,” he said. “I confess I just don’t know.”
They lay there silent for a long while.
“I just don’t know,” he said again.
He rolled away from her and closed his eyes, waiting for her to turn off the light.
She waited too, to see if he would say “I love you” as he did all the time now. She thought of what Calvin Stubbs had said to her about short memories and forgiveness and about being cold. But she was not cold. She wanted to forgive him. She wanted to love him. If only he would say something, anything, something.
Minutes passed and neither of them said anything and she turned out the light.
20
Maggie was silent at breakfast the next day and Philip was silent too. He was thinking that he should have told her about the housebreaking, he had missed the perfect opportunity, he was a shit. She was thinking that she should not have mentioned his fling with Dixie Kizer, she should not be jealous of it, it meant nothing. She had forgiven him. She had to get on with her life, one day at a time, even though she was depressed and didn’t feel like getting on with anything at all. So they ate in silence.
When Philip was ready to leave, he said, as a kind of apology, “I’m distracted this morning. It’s work.”
“Didn’t you sleep well?”
“Oh sure, I slept like a log.”
“I didn’t sleep at all. I’ll probably take a nap this morning. So maybe you shouldn’t call. I think I need a nap.”
He paused and turned to her, questioning.
“Just a nap,” she said, and added, “I didn’t say pills.”
“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean. Have a good nap.” He kissed her quickly and left.
She watched him go and she was angry. She ought to take a pill, it would serve him right. Maybe she would.
The phone rang and it was Beecher Stubbs.
“Oh, what luck to get you in,” Beecher said. “Tell me one thing. Tell me you do not have a date for Thanksgiving. Tell me you’ll come to us.”
“Hi, Beech, how are you?”
“Tell me you’ll come to us for dinner.”
“We haven’t given a thought to Thanksgiving, Beecher. Sure, we’ll come to you. We’d love it.”
“I’m actually cooking a turkey. Calvin usually does it, you know, at Thanksgiving and Christmas when the kids come home, but I’m doing it this time, my first ever, because the kids aren’t coming this year, they’re going to France. Everybody is going to France for Thanksgiving. I can’t imagine it myself, so we’d like to have you and Philip.”
“Well, we’d love it, Beech.”
“And I’m having the Kizers too, I’ve gotten to like her, I feel bad for her.”
Maggie laughed. The Kizers and the Tates for Thanksgiving dinner. It was funny in its way.
“What?” Beecher said. “How are you doing, you dear thing?”
“I’m wonderful,” Maggie said, “I take it one day at a time.”
“We’re proud of you,” Beecher said. “We love you.”
“I know you do,” Maggie said. “It means a lot.”
She rang off and went upstairs and took a sleeping pill and lay down on her bed. She was trembling with rage. Not a metaphor, she noted, but an unpleasant fact: she was physically shaking with rage. Philip had betrayed her with Dixie Kizer: she felt the betrayal all over again, as if it had just happened.
After a while she got up and poured herself a glass of vodka. It wouldn’t smell and it would let her get to sleep. And then she could face the life of terminal clichés: one day at a time, easy does it, let go and let God.
When she woke, it was noon and the room was hot and she was covered in sweat. She took a bath and put on fresh clothes. Her anger was gone, but she was very nervous and she felt that any minute she would burst into tears. She thought of Buck and his Neon Palace, those crazy times; what could she have been thinking? She thought of Dixie and her poor-little-me performance that all the men fell for. Even Beecher Stubbs believed it. Oh, to hell with all of them. She had to be calm. She had to forget her anger at Philip and Dixie and get on with her own life. Her life was what mattered here, and she had it back on track, and she was not going to let it go off the tracks now.
She phoned Emma at school, but she was not in her room. She phoned Cole. His flatmate answered and said Cole was in the lab, he’s always in the lab. “Just tell him his mother called,” she said. “Just to say hello.” Who else could she call? Nobody. And so she was alone again, in this house, trapped.
She got down her worn copy of The Waste Land and began to read. She couldn’t concentrate, but that didn’t matter because she knew it almost by heart. The point was to keep occupied, not to think, not to let herself get angry.
But she was angry, and she was not forgiving, and she didn’t give fuck-all about any of them. They were not, they were not going to drive her to drink.
“No,” she said aloud, “I’ll drive myself. I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.”
She went into the kitchen and poured herself a vodka and, standing at the sink, she drank it down, straight. Her throat burned, and her lungs, and she began to cough. But after a while the pain subsided and she poured herself another. She took a deep breath. The worst was over.
In her dream the phone was ringing and she kept waiting for Philip to answer it, but Philip was out diddling Dixie Kizer and she would have to answer it herself. She awoke and picked up the phone.
“Hello,” she said, her voice groggy.
“Mother? Are you all right? The phone must have rung fifty times.”
“Philip isn’t home,” she said.
“Mother! It’s me. Cole. What’s going on up there?”
“Hello, Cole,” she said. Cole had been such a sweet baby. She lay back on the pillow and shut her eyes. He had been a little lamb.
On the other end of the phone, Cole was silent. She sounded completely drunk. It was bad enough that neither of them had told him about the collapse, the rehab place, the A.A. meetings—he had to hear it all from Dixie Kizer—but this pretense that everything was perfect was just about killing him. How had they ever slipped into this middle-class fantasy of happy families? Everybody nice. Everybody faithful. And meanwhile his mother was drinking herself to death and his father … Well, what was his father doing?
“Is Father there?” he asked.
“Oh, Cole, you worry too much. Your father is at work and I’m just taking a nap. I didn’t sleep last night. Your father snores.”
“Mother, you sound … bad. You sound as if you’ve been drinking.” He waited. “Have you?”
“I had a little drink. What’s so bad about that?”
“Oh, Mother.” He thought his heart would break. He repeated the words to himself—my heart will break—and like the dutiful son he was, he felt tears prick at his eyes. Why didn’t his father feel this way? Why didn’t his father do something about this? “Mother, I’m gonna come home.” He waited again. “Mother?”
There was only silence on the line.
“Mother?” he said again. “Mother?”
“You do what you have to, darling. That’s what we all do anyhow, isn’t it.” She hung up the phone.
* * *
By the time Philip got home, Maggie had slept soundly, gotten up for more pills and another drink, and was sleeping soundly again.
“Hell-o-o,” Philip called as he let himself in. The
door was locked, not a good sign. “Hell-o-o,” he called again, but it was too late. He had already seen the vodka bottle on the kitchen counter and he knew what that meant. Nevertheless he walked through the downstairs rooms, calling out to her, knowing it was too late—she’d done it again—but, in spite of the evidence, still hoping. He paused at the foot of the stairs. Since her return home, he had lived in constant expectation of trouble. He couldn’t help it. During the past year he had gotten into a number of bad habits: checking the liquor bottles, looking in her closet for pills, testing her breath, her walk, the sheen of her eyes. Looking for trouble, always. And here it was, trouble. He was shaking. He rested his head against the banister and said, “Don’t let it be. Don’t let it.” He went upstairs.
Maggie was unconscious, her face white, her brow hot. He took her pulse; it was slow, but acceptable. He moved to the foot of the bed and stood there looking at her. He was hollow inside, he was bitter, and he was angry. He had tried so hard. She had tried so hard. What did you have to do to get through this life—not well, not happily, but just get through it with some kind of decency and dignity and … what? Well, he knew the answer. This was fate, this was life, it was what they were stuck with, both of them. But he was not resigned to it.
He fixed her pillows, straightened the sheets, got a cool washcloth and laid it across her brow. He sat beside her on the bed, her hand in his. She looked like a beautiful corpse. The booze, though, had exacted its price. Around her eyes and mouth were thin wrinkles that hadn’t been there before. And her jaw-line was going slack. He saw suddenly how she would look in a few years if she kept on drinking. Or even if she didn’t. He turned away. He forced himself to think of that moment in the motel when he had found her lying on the floor. He had lain down with her. He had held her in his arms and at that moment he had accepted her forever, however she might be, because he loved her. No conditions. No recriminations. No false hopes. And he would do it again. He took the washcloth from her brow and hung it up in the bathroom. He looked into the mirror. “You poor shit,” he said.
He went downstairs and made himself a sandwich, peanut butter and strawberry jam, and he ate it in front of the television. The phone rang but he ignored it. The answering machine took over and he heard Cole’s voice, angry, complaining, demanding that someone call him immediately. He gave Cole the finger and continued to watch the news. Cole phoned again a half hour later, and again after fifteen minutes. Philip gave in.
“Hello, son,” he said.
“Well! At last! Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“It’s nice to hear your voice too, son.”
“Look, I’m worried. I’m frantic. And I have no idea what’s going on up there, Father. Would you mind letting me know, please?”
“Since you ask so nicely, yes. As you know, your mother has had a problem with substance abuse for some time now and a couple months back, in late September, she decided to do something about it. She checked herself in to—”
“Oh Christ, I know all about McLean and her leaving you and the apartment in Boston. Dixie told me all about that. I want to know what’s going on now.”
“Dixie told you. Dixie Kizer?”
“Look, I’m coming home. Clearly it’s the only way I’m gonna find out what’s actually happening there. Why did you let this happen?”
“Oh, Cole. If only it were as easy as that.”
“I’ll be home this week. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”
“Cole, stay there and do your work. There’s nothing you can do here that’s gonna help.”
“Good-bye, Father.”
Philip hung up the phone and shook his head. They were great kids, both of them, everybody said so. But sometimes he wondered.
He looked in on Maggie and she was sleeping soundly. There was nothing he could do. He went down and poured himself a stiff scotch.
It was strange to be drinking again. Except at parties, he hadn’t had a drink since Maggie’s return home and he was surprised at how sharp the scotch tasted and how it smelled, like burned rubber. It did nothing for him. He didn’t feel different, not better, not worse.
He finished the drink and tried to watch TV. He flipped through all the channels, and then went through them again, and settled finally on one of the preachers. He didn’t know which one it was, but he was funnier than most of them. He had a prettyish face, with black curly hair that looked dyed, and big eyes and very red lips. He was sort of a clerical Kewpie doll. At the moment he was offering peace, of mind and soul, if only you trust in the Lord. “I trust,” Philip said aloud. “So how about it?” The preacher suddenly began to babble, and Philip wondered if the TV was malfunctioning, but then the preacher stopped babbling and explained that he had been enraptured, caught up in sacred converse with the Lord, and now he had a message for everybody out there in television land. “Send in your pledges. It can be five dollars or five thousand dollars. Send till it hurts and, sayeth the Lord, it will be given to you a hundredfold. This I promise you, and I”—the camera zoomed in for a frightening close-up—“I am the apple of God’s eye.”
Philip closed his eyes and slept.
When he woke, it was very dark out. Another preacher was on the TV, also asking for donations, and Philip clicked it off and looked at his watch. It was after midnight.
He went upstairs and looked in on Maggie. She had not moved. She was lying on her back, breathing easily now, and she did not move or respond when he kissed her forehead. He sat with her for a while and then he went downstairs and got in his car and drove.
He followed the route of that first night. He drove to Winchester and swung by the Aspergarters’ house and was struck again by how very rich they were. The house, the neighborhood, the low fieldstone walls. The security systems.
This is where it all began, his trouble. He drove around for a while, aimlessly, and then took the cul-de-sac past the Kizers’ house. No cars in the drive. No lights anywhere. Hal must be out somewhere buggering a corpse, and Dixie … better not even think what Dixie was doing. He drove home.
If Maggie was awake, he would tell her now and be done with it. It was a stupid secret at best but, stupid or not, this was the dark thing that lay at the heart of their problems, he was certain now. It was his secret—not what it was in itself but what it implied—that had caused them to drift apart. It had made him hold back in their sex life. And even though addiction was a mystery of its own, he was sure that his secret somehow explained Maggie’s surrender to drugs and to alcohol.
He would tell her. Now.
He went upstairs and found Maggie sitting up in bed, a drink in her hand.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
“No,” he said, “let me.”
She laughed, a harsh sound. She was very drunk. “I thought I forgave you for the affair with Dixie. But I didn’t. I don’t.” She could barely speak. “Maybe tomorrow or next week or … sometime … when I’m sober, I’ll tell you that I do forgive you, but I don’t, Philip, and I never will. I want you to know that.”
The glass slipped from her hand and a dark stain spread across the blanket. Philip set about cleaning up the mess.
21
There was every reason why Thanksgiving should be a disaster. Maggie was only in her third day of recovery. Philip was raddled with guilt and anxiety. Neither of them wanted to see the Kizers. For that matter, neither of them wanted to see the Stubbses or anybody else, particularly not their irate son Cole. And on top of all that, Beecher Stubbs would be cooking dinner.
After her startling lapse from sobriety, Maggie had made an amazing recovery. She woke the next morning, headachy and depressed, but she showered and brushed her teeth and asked Philip to join her for a run. They jogged for a short while and then walked for a longer while and then she went home to bed. They didn’t talk about what had happened. They didn’t talk at all. Philip went off to work and Maggie set the alarm clock in time to attend a noon A.A. meeting with Calvin Stu
bbs. “It’s a matter of getting right back on the horse,” Calvin told her, and though she found the image less than helpful, she attended another meeting that night. She worked out on the exercise bike, she jogged, she drank a lot of coffee. By the time Cole arrived home on Wednesday night, she was calm and in control and, in the face of Cole’s outrage, she was casually dismissive.
“Would you please explain to me what’s been going on!”
They were in the little family room and Cole was confronting them, his back to the TV.
“Cole, Cole,” Philip said. “What a tone to take.”
“I think I’m owed an explanation.”
“We’re adults, Cole, with problems of our own. We do the best we can. I don’t think we need to be talked to in this way. I won’t have it and it upsets your mother.”
“Let me explain,” Maggie said. “I had a drinking problem—I have a drinking problem—and I’m doing something about it. Since it hasn’t yet affected your life, Cole, it seems to me that it’s none of your business.”
“Exactly,” Philip said.
“Well, I don’t think that if I phone you up and find you’re drunk out of your mind, it’s none of my business. I think it’s very much my business. And I think somebody ought to be in charge around here.”
“You?” Maggie said.
“You,” Cole said. “Or you.”
“Thank you for that,” Maggie said. “I’ll be in charge if nobody objects. And since I’m in charge, I’d recommend you get some rest tonight, Cole. We’re having Thanksgiving dinner with the Stubbses and the Kizers and I know you’ll want to be at your best. And now please move from in front of the TV because your father and I would like to watch the eleven o’clock news.”
Cole, outraged but silenced, went out to look up friends.
Beecher Stubbs was nearly out of her mind.
“Come in, come in, you dear things,” she said. “Oh Calvin, get them drinks, they’ve got to have drinks. And Cole, what a sweet boy you are to come to an old people’s Thanksgiving dinner, and so handsome too, and so tall! I’m cooking it myself, so God knows what it will be like. You know the Kizers, don’t you? Cole is an old friend, a young one. He was just a baby. And Dixie has taken up painting again, such a good painter, have you seen? And all you shrinks must promise no shrink-talk tonight. I must go look at my turkey.”
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