The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  Vince moved right along, turning away from him. “Okay. Maggie? We’re stuck with early American. Who would you want to meet?”

  Maggie had finally come up with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early feminist, and Evan Price, a young architect, had gone with Thomas Jefferson. Vince himself had chosen Stephen A. Douglas. Then he had turned to Claudia.

  “Oh, I’ll pass,” she said. “This isn’t my kind of game.”

  Avery sat up straight and leaned toward her in irritation. All at once he was disconcertingly alert. “You can’t think of anyone?” he asked her much too loudly. “Not a single human being who ever lived?” He made a great show of incredulity.

  “I don’t want to play this game,” Claudia had said very mildly. She didn’t seem to notice Avery’s immense irritation, but he wouldn’t let the subject drop.

  “Okay. Okay. What about Aaron Burr? Aaron Burr. Now he would interest you. Wouldn’t he? You really would like to meet Aaron Burr, wouldn’t you?” Avery was becoming increasingly unpleasant, but Claudia looked across at him with no expression or response at all.

  “Oh, come on. Make Avery happy, Claudia,” said Vince. “You can come up with someone.”

  At the same moment Avery had risen with difficulty from the deep wing chair in which he had been sitting. He had risen laboriously and storklike, waving an arm to quiet Vince.

  “No, no, no, Vince. No, there is nobody,” Avery said, “nobody at all who could ever possibly impress my wife. Not a single, solitary person who ever existed. And it’s because what she really is… what Claudia really is is a nihilist. A real one. The real thing,” he said ponderously, and he drank down more of his drink. “And ultimately… ultimately that’s just boring. Tedious! Tedious!”

  No one said anything at all. No one had realized how drunk Avery had become. But Claudia was calm and irritated. “For God’s sake, Avery, don’t be such a fool. I’d never describe myself as a nihilist.”

  “But it’s exactly what you are! God damn it! That’s what you are.” The whole group tried hard to pretend that there was no menace in Avery’s voice, but Claudia was not in the least intimidated. Instead she was unwisely cross. She disliked being spoken for and having herself categorized in this sophomoric conversation.

  “For Christ’s sake, Avery! Will you drop it? I certainly don’t believe in nothing.” She paused for a moment, and then she smiled slightly so that all the force of her tremendous and ingenuous charm came across her face. “It’s just that there’s nothing much that I believe in.” And the whole gathering broke into mild and relieved laughter. All, of course, but Avery.

  Avery was still standing above them, and he looked around the room. “What you don’t understand…” Then he stopped in the center of the room, resting the hand of his uplifted arm on the top of his head. He stood alone, looking angular and puzzled as if he had forgotten what it was that he did understand. But the room remained attentive, and he continued. “What you don’t know, and you don’t know, and you don’t know,” he said, turning in a slow arc and lowering his raised arm at one person and then another in accusation and inebriated slow motion. “What no one seems to see is that what Claudia thinks of all of you is that you’re just a dot! That’s it! Just a dot…” He was too drunk to get the right tone; it fell short of sarcasm into a furious slurring. “A dot on the great big blackboard of life!” He had meant this as a little witticism, but there was only silence in the room, and this time Claudia had frowned. She hadn’t replied. After a moment he dropped his arm and smiled in huge pleasure at having transmitted this message, and he wandered out of the room, not choosing to elaborate.

  Claudia heard him leave through the front door, and when conversation started up again, she went and got their coats without saying anything to anyone at all. Maggie came over to her, though, moving among her guests discreetly so as not to interrupt them, and with a slight tipping back of her head, a conspiratorial downglance, had said to her, “Call me if you want. Later. Or tomorrow.” She had spoken so softly that Claudia wondered afterward if she had actually said the words or mouthed them in a silent pantomime of solidarity. Claudia had gone outside and found Avery sitting in the passenger seat of their car, looking smug. He was pleased and quiet, and Claudia drove home.

  By the time they were home, however, Avery had so much to talk about, and he was insistent that someone listen to him. He put the dog out, coaxing her because she didn’t like the dark. “Go on, now, Nellie! You cowardly hound. Go out, now, go on out!” While he waited to let her back in he roamed around the living room studying his own bookshelves, the pictures on his walls, as though there were something there of which he was suspicious, something out of kilter, put there behind his back. At last he said, “I’ll go check on Jane,” while he was still on the move around the room, and he was away in a flash. He was quick, and he was sly; Claudia had been heading in the other direction to hang up their coats.

  “Damn it! Avery, don’t wake her up! It’s almost one o’clock.” By then, though, Avery was leaning against Jane’s doorframe, talking to her. Talking and talking. Asking her opinion. Wheedling and cajoling. What fools people were, weren’t they? he said. Her teachers… “There is no one more intelligent than you are, Janie. That’s the thing. Now, knowledge. They might have you there. But, still, if you always know that you’ve got one up on them”—and he tapped the side of his head with his forefinger in a pretense of jest—“then you can be sure of a lot of things. Not happy all the time. That’s not the point. But you can always be absolutely sure that you know what you know.” And he rambled on in a sweet muttering. The pleasure of his own voice was there, full in his throat, as he lifted the sound persuasively up and down the scale, alternatingly soft and firm in tone. A joy in the night. He emitted a sound so charming it would lure the birds right out of the trees. For a little while it always mesmerized Claudia. That’s how he could be when he chose. But he grew tired there in the doorway and followed Claudia to the kitchen, where he fixed himself another drink. He always came home late from long conversations and then had more to say. He could not finish talking, and his voice altered and became a deep, insistent whine. He was distressed all at once.

  “Your real talent, Claudia, is that you suffer fools graciously! Christ! Fools. God, they’re fools. All the people we see. How can you stand it? Why do you make these plans? How can I live with a woman who laughs at Evan Price’s jokes? He’s mentally five years old! How can I live with a woman who laughs at bathroom humor? Did you know that? He’s five years old!” With the last two sentences he had pounded the wall each time for emphasis, shouting now at Claudia, while she moved around the kitchen clearing up the dishes Jane had left and emptying the ashtrays. When he had thought she wasn’t paying attention, he had put his drink down and gone slowly toward her and taken hold of her lower arms between the wrist and elbow so that she had to stand in one place and watch him. “How can I live with someone who would ever, ever laugh at Evan Price? How can I?”

  “I didn’t laugh, Avery,” she said to him. “Evan’s your friend.” Claudia always tried to explain herself whenever Avery began wondering how he could live with her. Always, at that point, her irritation became a soft fear that would arouse her own defensive anger. “You wanted to go. I hate those parties.” Her own voice rose, although he was holding her arms very tightly and shaking her when he spoke so that she was swayed from side to side.

  Avery had let her go and turned aside, arching slightly over himself in a protective and sorrowful attitude. He was quiet with his own woefulness for a moment, but then he arrowed straight up again and pounded the wall once more in frustration and to keep her attention directed at himself. “Shit!” he said. “Holy shit!”

  She never understood that there was nothing at all that he wanted to hear her say. She never understood that she was only incidental to these moods of existential and profoundly insightful despair that swept over him because of all the things he believed he knew and his experience in the world.
He was passionately agonized. He smashed his fist again against the wall, and it went right through the thin Sheetrock. Upon impact tiny particles of paperboard and insulation exploded into the room, powdering his face into a sandy look of less ferocity. Claudia and Avery stood there motionless a moment until finally Claudia laughed at him, but Jane was standing in the center of the room tense and pale in her seersucker pajamas with happy panda bears printed in rows upon the faded blue cloth.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she said over and over until Avery perceived the noise she was making and where it was coming from and turned to her, enraged.

  “Don’t you ever get out of bed this late at night and interrupt your mother and me when we’re discussing something. You aren’t supposed to be out of bed, are you?” His voice was not loud so much as it was suddenly voluminous with rage. “None of this is your business. You don’t have any idea about our privacy. You seem to think that you’re an awfully grown-up little girl. You seem to think you can do just about anything you want to, don’t you? Maybe it never occurred to you that your mother and I have something to talk about. By ourselves! Just go back to bed!” He started to move in her direction for two or three steps, but he had never touched Jane when he was angry, and she stood her ground right where she was, shaking her clenched fists by her sides with each word.

  “No, I said stop it! Stop! Just stop it!” And she wasn’t quiet until Avery left the house in a fury, slamming the door and roaring out of the driveway at two-thirty in the morning.

  Now, the next morning, in the kitchen and the sunlight, sitting across from Jane, Claudia undid the buttons at her wrists and pushed back her full sleeves. She held out her arms to see that, in fact, they were smudged with bruises where Avery had held onto her. She turned her hands palm up and studied the marks on the pale white underside of her arms with curiosity.

  “Oh, well,” she said to Jane with vague irritation, “I just don’t think that should have happened! Look at my arms! Damn! That just shouldn’t have happened.” Jane was looking out the window again, and Claudia was mostly musing to herself in any case. She rested her elbow on the table, settling her chin into her hand, and gazed and gazed at nothing. One corner of her mouth twitched downward in an expression of distaste. With this first dissipation of her slippery morning expectancy, disappointment grew apparent in all her movements, especially in the subtle hooding of her large, wide eyes. Her appearance was as susceptible to disillusionment as a morning glory that wilts with fragile translucency when the light fades.

  Jane had moved to the counter to make herself more toast when her father came in, and Claudia was still leaning into her hand, absorbed in her own thoughts; she didn’t look up right away. Jane put two more pieces of bread in the four-slice toaster and poured another glass of juice to give to her father.

  Avery was disheveled. Even in his handsome green robe and still crisply creased pajamas he had an air of being askew, and he was not quite sober from the night before. But he was not uncivil. He was hesitant and quiet; he came into the room as though he might immediately back out of it. Avery was a man, this morning, to be pitied, and he wouldn’t shun pity. That was how he looked. He carried his injury with him. It defined him for this day, although it didn’t make him less pitiful; it only made his abjection less savory. He didn’t have much to say when he sat down at the table; he gave only a halfhearted nod of greeting. When Jane put some toast and juice down in front of him, he was careful to thank her with elaborate courtesy.

  Claudia did not acknowledge him at all except to raise one eyebrow in an expression that Jane had often practiced in the mirror. Her mother didn’t aim this expression at her father; it was a comment she was making strictly to herself. Disdain. It was superb disdain, and only a light sigh accompanied that look as she very deliberately cleared her place and rinsed her cup and saucer. She swirled her robe out of the way—flicking it to one side or the other with a twitch of her hand—to avoid catching it on Avery’s chair, which was in the way now that he had drawn it out from the table to sit down. She even wiped the residue of jam and sugar from the counters and shook out her place mat, making a swipe beneath it with a cloth to clean the table.

  “I’m going to get dressed,” she said out into the room with no inflection. Perhaps it was a bit of information just meant to float upon the air, and she left the room with a final sweep of her robe and impressive urgency. Finally Jane went to get dressed, too, while Avery remained at the table, solemnly eating a piece of toast.

  Avery was writing a book, and he took a second cup of coffee into his study and sat down at his long bleached oak table, so spare and functional, which was laden with neat piles of research notes across its surface. He turned on his draftsman’s lamp and sipped his coffee and studied the tidy stacks of paper. He needed to bring all his wits to bear on this book in order to make it interesting. He had grasped hold of an idea that was just beginning to be tossed around with great seriousness now that discussions of the greenhouse effect had finally filtered down to the cocktail party level. His book would be an investigation of the notion that the more civilized a culture, the less adaptable it is to environmental and climactic changes. He knew so much to say about it. He would reexamine the ancient cultures—the Anasazi Indians in particular—and bring the narrative forward to encompass humankind in the space age. And he knew how to string his words together in pages full of wit and grace so that the message unfolded with an ease that assured him of a large audience. It would require great concentration to get the arrangement of information just right.

  He swiveled his chair to one side and looked out the tall window that flanked his table on the left. There was nothing there to see except the long slope of the hill above the house and the autumn trees wound around with trumpet vine. He missed their orange flowers, which he had looked out upon through the summer. He turned from his window to his papers and then to the window again. He moved some notes from one pile to another, and he thought about this and that. He sat still and quiet and now and then picked up a pencil and twirled it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, occasionally leaning over to jot a note to himself on his legal pad. And what he had decided by late morning was to make some of his homemade chili for lunch. He left his study, still dressed in his pajamas and robe, and called up the stairs to Claudia and Jane.

  “I think I’ll make some chili for lunch. Hot, this time. Hey, I’m going to make some chili for lunch.”

  In the kitchen he was very busy, and Claudia and Jane hovered about. It was irresistible; they came in and out. It was quite a production when Avery made chili. Jane opened and drained and rinsed the beans, and Claudia leaned over a counter where the chessboard had been set up and studied the chess puzzle taped to the wall above it. Avery opened a beer and sipped it from the can while he stirred and seasoned the meat, and then he joined Claudia and they argued about the solution to the chess problem. Avery put forward only gentle disagreements, while Claudia was adamant and went to find the book that had the answer.

  Jane saved the chili every time. She stirred the meat up from the bottom whenever she smelled it beginning to scorch. Her parents were absorbed, now, in their board game. Avery opened another beer, and Claudia looked around the kitchen for the pack of cigarettes she had hidden from herself the day before so she wouldn’t be tempted.

  “Now, look, if you’ll just think about it, Avery,” she said when she came back to the board, “you’ll see what I mean.” She bent over to peer at the little chess pieces, and she pushed her hair straight back from her forehead in exasperation, holding it there abstractedly, so that her chin was aimed like a pencil point at the game laid out in front of her. There was nothing coy about Claudia; she was intense at every moment.

  Jane added the beans and tomatoes to the chili but then turned the heat down under it and left it to simmer. She went out of the kitchen to her own room to read a book. She had a book report due Monday, and Claudia and Avery were still peacefully debating some p
oint of chess.

  Avery drank some red wine with his chili and poured a glass for Claudia, too, and they sat at the table to eat with the chessboard between them and the puzzle Claudia had taken down from the wall and laid out to one side. Jane didn’t join them for lunch, and they didn’t notice. The Parks never worried much about meals; as far as eating went, it was mostly catch as catch can.

  Avery carried his wine with him after lunch, and followed Claudia into the living room, where she pulled her chess books from the shelves. She took down Byrne and Reshevsky, but she had stacked them beside her chair and was leafing through Bobby Fischer’s Best Games. She bent over the book and began making a diagram in the margin with her pencil, and Avery stretched out full length on the sofa, in his robe and slippers. He was very pleased to have his wife there, his dog there. Five hours into the day he could still think of his drinking as a tender undertaking, only enhancing the precision of his thoughts. And he dazzled Claudia in the afternoon with his pleasant verbosity. He was so nice to look at, long and lean, with his features charmingly uneven. Every day about this time Claudia let any sense of foreboding drift loose from the moment because for a little while Avery was so pleased with the idea of his work, pleased with his house, glad to have her as his wife.

  “Look at this dog’s head, Claudia! Look at Nellie’s head!” Nellie had curled up on the floor next to Avery on the couch. “Now, I knew the first time I saw her that she was a good dog. An exceptional dog.” He put his wineglass down so that he could ruffle Nellie’s collie coat all up and down her back, and the dog leaned into his arm, fawning and arching her neck. “She has a wide forehead. You see that! Look at that head! They’ve bred the brains right out of most collies. Christ! Have you seen those dogs? Heads like needles.” He paused to think this over and was satisfied for a moment. “This Nellie is no needlehead!” It was a wonderful thought. “No needle is Nellie!”