“For work? Well, her job title is executive secretary at Ardler and Sons Trucking and Transit.”
“And your father?”
“Right now Dad sells radio advertising.”
“Has he done it for long?”
“He doesn’t do anything for very long.” She runs some water into a large pot and has her back to me when she says, “He gets drunk and gets fired. Mom has started to drink a lot, too, but at least she avoids getting fired.”
Laura’s father, Frank, is a handsome man, with fine well-tanned skin, twinkling blue eyes, and graying sideburns. At dinner, still in navy sport coat and red tie, he has an air of good-humored elegance. He is the only family member who seems at ease, the pleasant and charming model-father at table. He is well-spoken, polite, and asks questions of his wife and each of his children about their day. They respond promptly, if stiffly. In between, everyone glances at him repeatedly—and not at one another at all—as if he is the only person present who is worth watching, or perhaps needs to be watched. My neighbors once had a beloved family pet, an Afghan hound, Libby, who, as she got into her later years, for no apparent reason started to turn mean. Unprovoked, she suddenly snarled at and bit people, including family members. I had dinner there one night not long after this bad turn began, a few weeks before they bought the muzzle, and about six months before they had to have her destroyed. Throughout the meal the family watched Libby with the same worried eyes Laura and her mother and Billy and Amy now watch Frank. He is oblivious to their vigilance.
Everyone except Billy and Amy is having some Chianti. This evening Laura’s father is measured both in how, and how much, he drinks, though his family drops their eyes whenever he lifts his glass, as if to look at him during the act of drinking is too painful.
After dinner, Laura and I go out for a drive. She tells me about her aunt, her father’s sister, who has made it possible for her to go to Vassar instead of the University of Virginia by promising to keep an eye on Billy and Amy. And it was her aunt who paid for the five years of speech therapy that have helped Laura with her stutter. I have the disquieting feeling, even as it is happening, that the more I find out about Laura and her family, the more distant she becomes, as if by telling me about herself, she has made me part of something she wishes to leave behind.
An hour later when we return home, Laura’s father, his head back and mouth open, is snoring in an armchair. Next to him is an empty bottle of wine. Her mother is already in bed.
✳
All these years later and now in her own house, Laura gets up and starts to clear away dishes. I help her. She runs some water into the sink and says, “I often think if I were s-smarter, it’s you I should have married.”
I am so surprised to hear this, I can scarcely credit that she has said it. “Not me.”
“Yes.”
“We…we’d have been miserable.”
Her self-possession drains away for a moment, and I get a vivid glimpse of the young woman I used to know.
✳
It is past midnight in New Haven, and Laura, sitting on the window seat, is looking through the leaded glass of the room’s mullioned window out onto the lighted courtyard. There the magnolia tree has begun to drop its thick, browning leaves. Allan and Kurt are in the library studying for final exams. I offer Laura a hit from my joint. She shakes her head. I grind it out and the dank sweetish smell of marijuana hangs in the room.
We are at our usual impasse.
“I’d like to see you next weekend,” I say.
“I’d like to see you,” she says, “but you know I’ve got a lot of work.”
“You still have to eat. You still have to sleep. We can study together.”
“It’s hard for me to concentrate on work when you’re there.”
“I’ll work in another room.” The more she pushes me away, the more an edge of desperation begins to creep into my attempts to hold on. I fight it, often not successfully.
“How come you smoke so much? Bobby says you only do it when I’m here. Aren’t you relaxed with me?”
Bobby and Laura have finally met. They are stiff and polite around each other, so I’ve made sure they do not have to spend too much time in each other’s company, a dinner here or a movie there. It’s only in retrospect I recognize the stiffness must have been their way of fighting off mutual attraction. “What’s Bobby know,” I say.
She turns to look at me. “Is it true?”
“Is what true? That I get wrecked only when you’re here?” She looks at me, waiting for an answer. I am suddenly angry. Why do I have to be so fucking restrained all the time? “I do it because I love you,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
I remind myself to be patient. “I get ripped because it lets me have a fine seat to view the human comedy of which we’re part.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That means the intake of this carbon products helps me be able to sustain the illusion of near-indifference that appears to make you feel comfortable.”
“You’re joking.”
I speak to the joint in my hand. “She says you’re joking.”
“You know, you remind me of my father.”
This comparison, at once surprising and just, fills me with dismay. “I do?”
“Yes.”
“So,” I say, “you must also think if you spend much time with me, you’ll end up like your mother.”
“I hadn’t thought that far.”
“Okay. So be it. No more smoking. Cold turkey.”
“Ben, just because I—”
“I do this because of you, I should be able to stop because of you.”
“It isn’t as if I have some kind of claim on you.”
“Oh, right. We’re supposed to be spontaneous, play it by ear. Carpe diem. Which is Vietnamese for ‘leave me the hell alone.’”
She sighs. “We’ve talked about all this before. I need a little space. I need some breathing room. Is that so much to ask?”
“Your breathing room is my absolute vacuum. Look, Laura, all I really want to know is one thing. When are we going to see each other?”
“I don’t know.”
My face grows hot. “Then maybe,” I say, “we ought to forget the whole thing.”
“What?”
They are not words I can unsay. Since I am still young enough to believe words alone can cause or prevent a relationship’s dissolution, I find this a terrible moment. “Maybe it’s time to stop seeing each other altogether,” I say.
“I just don’t know how to be the person you need me to be.”
“Neither do I. Since I visited you at home, it’s like you’ve put up a wall.”
After a while she nods. “Meeting you in Chicago…you were part of my breaking out of trying to be so damned perfect all the time, part of taking some risks. Now I feel with you just like I did at home, always pressured to act a certain way.’’
“So why do I feel pressured by you to act a certain way?”
She sighs. “I just don’t think I’m ready to have the all-consuming thing you want to have. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of risk.”
An hour of talk later, we split up.
Two years pass and on a trip to New York with her aunt, purely by chance she runs into Bobby at the Strand bookstore. They have a drink and talk over old times.
A relationship between them is not exactly practical with her in medical school in Charlottesville and him law school in New Haven, so it doesn’t occur to either one of them to tell me of this. And why should they? Laura and I broke up long before and even tried once, briefly and unsuccessfully, to get together again since.
When they meet I am in a small village in West Africa teaching English and training some villagers how to use some mechanized farming impleme
nts.
As their relationship grows and ripens, I know nothing about it. They think about telling me but don’t believe things between them are going anywhere. And by the time they recognize that something is happening, they have become too uncomfortable to tell me about it.
Eventually they write me a joint letter. It never gets to me. A bad encounter with one of those farming implements left me in tough shape—two middle toes on my right foot getting mashed by a rototiller one of my sixteen-year-old pupils put in gear before I told him to. The infection that follows puts my foot, then my entire lower leg, in jeopardy, and by the time they fly me to the States for treatment, Bobby and Laura have grown very close. When I call him from my Washington, DC, hospital, Bobby says he has wondered why he hasn’t heard from me in so long. We talk about this and that, and then he tells me Laura is doing well.
“Laura?” I say.
There is an awkward silence on his end. “You didn’t get our letter?”
“Letter?” I say. “‘Our’ letter?’’
And then he tells me.
I lie in my hospital bed, startled by the news. After he hangs up, I sink into self-pity. My septic foot throbs, my swollen leg aches. My old girlfriend and my best friend have each other and will not need me. Others are happy. I am not.
I am surprised for a while that they are able to make a go of their relationship. Between them, the realms of privacy and reserve are so vast, I think connecting them ought to be like sticking the wrong ends of two magnets together. In the meantime, when my two mashed toes keep my draft number, a breathtakingly bad 11 out of 366, from being relevant, I think about returning to Africa to try and do some good in the world, but when I am refused because of my injury, I decide Amos-like that it is justice, justice, justice I shall pursue.
✳
So Laura and I stand here in the kitchen, the room where people frequently unburden their deepest secrets, as if it is safer there despite all the sharp objects nearby, and I watch some pink areas dot her neck and cheeks. She avoids looking at me, and the silence between us lengthens.
She looks at me expectantly. I begin to hear the house ticking around us. “He’s not having an affair,” I say.
“No. Well, not with another person, anyway. Just with this damned S-Senate race.”
“Not with the race,” I say. “Isn’t it more with becoming senator?”
She nods. “He wants to make things better. He cares about me, I suppose, in his way, and Annie and Jimmy, too. But it’s not the same thing. It’s what he has instead of God.”
“You have medicine.”
“Not the way he has politics. I don’t think I ever understood as well as I do now that the world has no bottom to its supply of sick children. It’s a wonderful job, but one can never do enough. Never. If someone told me today I couldn’t be a doctor anymore, it would be a terrible blow, but I wouldn’t be undone in the way Bobby would if it happened to him.”
“I don’t know, Bobby’s a pretty tough cookie. And he knows better than anybody how dicey electoral politics is.”
“Everyone has their vulnerabilities.” She looks directly at me for the first time. “Usually in whatever it is they care m-most about.”
The air seems to have drained from the room. I breathe through an act of will. I did not see this coming.
“In most ways, you two are awfully well-matched.”
“We used to be. But sometimes you change. Sometimes people even become their opposite. You know how I used to want distance, detachment.”
“Space.”
She smiles a slow and multilayered and finally rueful smile as the word brings back some old memories—our college years probably further from her thoughts than from mine. “Space. Yes.” The smile fades almost as slowly as it has come. “Well, with him I’ve gotten it. And it’s become intergalactic. And at the moment, if Annie or I appear on his radar screen at all, it’s as another and maybe slightly more-valuable-than-average c-campaign worker.” I think of Bobby’s extraordinary ability to focus and concentrate. “Sometimes,” she says, “you need something more.”
“You’ve changed, all right,” I say, sounding more ironic than I wish.
She ignores my tone and looks at me in a way that is unmistakable, a look I do not translate but instantly feel run down my spinal column. Though she hasn’t moved, it is exactly as if she has slipped off all her clothes.
“And you?” she asks softly.
9
When I arrive at the Rotary Club picnic, Bobby is winding up his stump speech, finishing the jokes and stories about special interests and how aimless things are in Washington, calling in the process for his pet issue, fundamental reforms to clean up the mess. He is beginning to shift into his stirring ending about needing a renewal of vision, “for without vision the people fail and the watchman waketh but in vain,” and I catch up with Cindy Tucker at the back of the crowd. Even before she was appointed press secretary, she heard this speech fifteen or twenty times, but when I attempt to whisper something to her, she holds up a finger and stares intently at the candidate, as if this is Beethoven’s Ninth and she wants to hear how the orchestra and choir do with “And All Men Shall Be Brothers.”
While I don’t see Jimmy anywhere, I do see his college buddy, Alexander Stafford, his Bulls hat still on backward, filming away with his fancy sixteen-millimeter camera. Annie is standing next to him, looking as if she can’t quite figure out what to do with her hands.
I have heard the speech once myself and think it is a good one. Still, as skillful as Bobby has made himself at giving speeches, I find his answers to questions in a free give-and-take even more effective. And you can watch the effect on the audience. Even if they’re never going to vote for him, people come away admiring and liking him. He doesn’t talk down to them, he doesn’t dodge questions, he makes complicated issues clear, and he combines gravity with both wit and conviction in a way that, without contrivance, shows what kind of man he is.
Cindy nods approvingly at the conclusion of Bobby’s speech and tilts her head back to give me an evaluative glance. Shading her eyes against the sun, she says, “Hello, Ben. How are you?”
I think about telling her I tried to call her recently, but finally decide against it. I do not want to begin something I will not be able to follow through on.
“I’m fine, thanks. And you?”
“Not too bad,” she says. A note of surprise creeps in her voice. “Are you a member here?”
“No. Came by to see Himself.”
She smoothes her dark brown hair back behind her ears and looks around to make sure no one is in earshot. “He tells me you were in on today’s little chat.”
“Yes. But you didn’t miss anything.”
“I didn’t? Now, that’s a relief. Because I would say it was only the single most important decision this campaign is likely to make.”
“What you missed was the chance to watch Bobby announce his decision. On some things you just cannot affect what he’s going to do. It’s like reasoning with a thunderstorm.”
“I’d like to have tried.”
“You don’t like the decision, then.”
“I don’t like not being given the chance to get my oar in the water. Annie’s a sweet kid, but I have two of my own, thanks very much, and I didn’t take the job as communications director to be a goddamn babysitter.” She looks at me, her eyes bright with anger.
I hold up both hands. “Whoa, Cynthia. You’re yelling at the wrong guy. Did you tell Bobby?”
“Of course. And he said if the decision would have been to withhold and deny, he didn’t want me in on it. He says that way he could have taken the rap for lying, not me.”
“That’s noble, don’t you think?”
“First, I’ve known Bobby long enough to know that lying isn’t his strong suit. And second, I didn’t just fall off the
turnip truck yesterday. There are dozens of ways to deny something like this and still stay on the right side of what us romantics like to call the truth.”
I double-check to make sure no one can hear us. “Oh? Let’s give it a try. ‘Tell me, Ms. Tucker, is it true that Robert Parrish saw a psychiatrist during his college days?’”
Cindy looks around cautiously herself, and then a competitive glint enters her eyes. She straightens herself and puts on a professional face. “‘There have been a lot of rumors and innuendos flying around on this, and I’m glad to have the chance to set the record straight here. The lieutenant governor has issued a full and complete medical report. He is not now seeing nor has he seen a counselor, therapist, or psychologist. And apart from his treatment for war-related injuries, he had strictly routine medical health care while he was an undergraduate.’”
“‘Is the answer to my question no?’”
“‘The answer is he had strictly routine medical health care.’”
“‘Is seeing a psychiatrist routine health care?’ ”
“‘No, I would not consider that routine health care. Check-ups, exams, treatments for colds and flu by an internist or general practitioner—those are routine.’”
“Pretty good,” I say. “‘Apart from his treatment for war-related injuries’ lets you off the hook. But if someone kept pounding away with ‘Did he ever see a psychiatrist, yes or no?’ you’d have to be awfully nimble.’’
“‘The lieutenant governor and I have addressed this question a dozen times, and we simply are not going to discuss rumors and innuendos any further.’” Her eyes flash with indignation and she pokes me in the chest with a single finger. A few people, wondering why I am being lectured, begin to look in our direction. “‘There are extremely important issues at stake in this campaign, and the people of this state are sick and tired of Congressman Wheatley’s attempts to distract them with these smears and this rumormongering. Next question?’”
I admire how she has handled herself. “That’s good, but…’’
Cindy glances behind me. Her face breaks into a theatrically cheerful smile. “Annie,” she whispers from behind her dental display. I turn and watch Annie approach. She is happy to see me, though she looks less like someone who has spotted a pal than a weary swimmer who has just sighted the shore.
Sounding the Waters Page 16