The onions were potent and made her eyes water. She reached over the soda bread she’d made earlier, pulled off a small piece and popped it in her mouth. Holding a piece of bread in your mouth as you chopped onions was supposed to stop the tears, and she always tried it, with mixed results. Another tale from the old country. Wild women and forces of nature, and letters on blue, nearly transparent paper, but no one sent letters any longer, did they? They texted. They emailed. Hardly even called.
Texts. Yes, there was Angela’s face floating in front of her. Angela texting Carsten, even though he was only a few yards away, working in the same once-blasted plot of land. Carsten, with his back turned to Angela, texting back to her … and then the smile, the giggle and the blush.
Angela. There was a force of nature. A texting force of nature.
Eileen scraped the onions into the pot with a dab of olive oil and set to chopping the carrots and celery. A soup needed to have a good base, something homey and solid, seemingly plain, but without which the soup was thin as gruel. Then the cauliflower, the thyme and sage, the smoked paprika, a little butternut squash, a few peas, homemade vegetable broth Eileen had made a few days earlier. Oh, it was so simple, and such a prayer, this cooking business. She remembered her mother saying you had to always stir the soup clockwise, for that brought good things to you, and you had to pray as you cooked, for that put Christ into the food. A little bit of kitchen witchery there, handed down from her mother’s own County Mayo ancestors.
Keeping Angela in mind, texting and smiling, touching her lips to hide her smile, touching her breast to … what? Feel the wild beating of a wild heart? Perhaps. Eileen had always known, of course, that it was Carsten she texted, Carsten she dreamed of. And so, she stirred the pot clockwise and prayed, unsure God was even listening, that God’s plan for the good of all might be made reality. She noted the pang of guilt she felt for having been the one to introduce them, and sent that into the soup and so to God, with a pinch of salt. Guilt was not useful. It was too self-absorbed. It was now in the hands of the God she trusted — even now, even so — and for whom she would do whatever was required of her.
She did this in the hopes of feeling that wonderful and terrible awe she had felt as a child, dreaming the dream of Mary. How long had it been since she’d felt the actual Presence? The Companion? Months? Certainly. Years? Yes. Now all she felt was the terrible, agonizing Silence. A woman could let tears drop into the soup to salt it. But that would bring sorrow to those who ate it, wouldn’t it?
And so, no tears, just the same prayer: Speak, oh speak to me my Beloved. My soul yearns for you so. I wait, dying of thirst in the burning desert of your absence. Amen.
Angela
Angela bolted awake and turned to the clock. 3:10 a.m. Philip lay snoring beside her, the sound wet and thick. She could smell his stale breath. His soft bulk was like that of an elephant seal, a larded creature who might be graceful and fierce in the sea but here was out of its habitat, slightly deflated under its own weight. His arm, the red T-shirt pushed up to his shoulder, was heavy and marked with moles. She squirmed at the idea of touching it, knowing it would be moist and hot. The air conditioning cut in and out. She could never get it quite cold enough in the room, especially since she’d taken to wearing men’s pajamas to bed. The digital readout on the clock changed from 3:10 to 3:11. Time away from Carsten moved at a glacial rate, and when she was with him it fled like birds before a storm.
She reached for water from the decanter beside the bed and drank a tall glass. Then she had to pee and rose as quietly as possible. In the dark bathroom, she sat on the toilet, leaned on her elbows, and put her head in her hands. She was drinking far too much. She knew it, and that, coupled with her infidelity and all the lying, combined into an odious stew of self-loathing. She finished peeing, wiped, flushed, and moved from the toilet to the floor, her back up against the bath. She pulled a towel down from the rack and buried her face in it, weeping.
She wept, in self-flagellating torrents, because she was having an affair. A long-term affair. Not a one-night stand that could, in a pinch, be swept into a dark corner of forgetfulness. On top of the smarmy truth that she was an adulterer, there was the fact she had married Philip in much the same way a prostitute leaves the streets so a rich man can set her up in a nice midtown apartment. She’d been clever enough to get him to marry her, though, securing her financial health. A regular little conniver was she. A liar. A selfish tramp. And no heart of gold for this hooker. She was cheating on the man who’d saved her from her fears of dead-end jobs and cockroach-infested shared apartments, like the one she was living in when she met Philip. She had to admit, if only to herself, that she was an opportunist, a carrion crow, swooping down on some new blood-bright piece of flesh for no other reason that she didn’t like the nest she’d built for herself and didn’t want to sleep in it anymore.
She thought of Connor, off in the mountains of France with his Emily. If he found out she was cheating on his father, what would he think of her? What would he think of women in general? Would he ever be able to trust? And if she left Philip?
She stopped crying.
Left Philip?
Left Philip.
This wasn’t the first time the idea had floated past, obviously, but it was the first time she’d reached out and snagged it. People did it. They divorced. They found other partners, lived better lives. And after all, if she wasn’t in love with Philip, didn’t she owe it to him to let him go, to find someone who would love him as he deserved?
She let her dreams spool out like murmurating starlings, swirling into the ether of possibilities … She would move into Carsten’s house. They would toil side by side. She would plan community projects in Trenton. Maybe get a degree in landscape architecture. The work would be useful. She would be contributing to the world. And although she was drawn to the goodness and meaning of such a life, in every image whirling across the sky of her mind it was Carsten’s presence that kept forming and reforming. They would be cooking in the kitchen with Chet Baker’s trumpet drifting like smoke through the air. Carsten would take her in his arms. Slow dance across the wooden floor. They would shop at a farmer’s market. They would eat croissants and drink strong coffee from a French press in the morning. They would wake up next to each other. They would talk about poetry, read aloud to each other late at night — Neruda and Donne, Shakespeare and Austen, Sappho and Joyce.
Was it so wrong to want this? To want a life in which she was true to herself, a life lush with love and elegance and passion?
She dried her face. She didn’t want to go back to bed. She crept through the house, down the stairs. She got a mug from the kitchen, went to Philip’s office, and poured brandy into the mug. She padded into the greenhouse and sat in the dark on a wrought-iron chair next to a matching circular table where she sometimes took tea, just like the English ladies in the books she’d devoured as a child. Roman Kaiser’s book on the scent of orchids lay atop it, as did Dr. Henry Oakeley’s books on orchids, and a couple of others.
Building this conservatory had been like prestidigitation, like conjuring. She’d dreamed it into being. For months she had studied architectural and gardening magazines, looking for precisely the right design. And then she’d found it. A glass cupola, leaded copper roof, and trimmed on the inside with mahogany bead board. She had worked with the designer for another three months, going over every detail of pattern and structure. It took nearly a year to complete. She had measured every shelf, every window panel. She’d drawn the designs she wanted on the stained glass surrounding the cupola and the half-moons where wall met ceiling — delicate flowers in red, blue and gold with oval leaves and silver leaf patterns along the frame. She’d insisted the roof be left clear so that the sky would always be visible … sun and moon and stars and clouds. Philip had given her free rein, paid every outlandish bill without complaint. Called it a ten-year anniversary present. She had cried the day it was finished. Cried again when her first orchi
ds arrived, delicate as lace, lush as velvet.
Philip had sat with her at the wrought-iron bistro table and poured them champagne. “To the beauty you bring to our home,” he’d said. She cried again then.
Now, the ghostly flowers surrounded her on the wooden slatted tabletop. Palest of pink, yellow, lavender, shadowed red and burgundy as well as white. Bone-white. Under the tables rested bags of earth, and, on the shelf next to the coffee maker, the trowel and fork, green gloves, and spray bottle were tucked neatly into baskets. The air smelled of loam and the flowers’ scent, faint at night — notes of cinnamon, raspberry, coconut, vanilla, roses. Angela could pick them out, each one, after all these years of cultivating not only the flowers, but her senses. She stretched her legs and rested her head on the back of the chair, looking up through the glass panes. She sipped the brandy and watched the waxing moon and stars move across the blue-black velvet sky. This place was her Eden and her observatory, her church and her sanctuary. She would have to give it up if she was to have a new life. It would hurt like being skinned, but she’d have to do it, have to sacrifice, she told herself, on the altar of love.
How slowly the stars and moon moved. We are all just hurtling through unforgiving space, she thought. Tiny, minuscule dots of light, of no consequence whatsoever, and she found that oddly comforting. The brandy sang its sweet song along her neurons. Whatever it was that hung the stars in the sky was all part of a cosmic intricacy far too complex for her to figure out. She was less than the speck in the eye of a dead ant. She didn’t have to figure it out. All that could possibly be required of her was to do what she thought right, what felt right in her gut. Why couldn’t people like Sister Eileen see how simple it all was? Let the rest of the universe take care of itself, and that included Philip. Life, she reasoned, was so short, so bizarrely brief, that not following one’s heart was tantamount to sacrilege, since the heart was surely the human seat of God.
She downed the brandy and decided she wouldn’t go back to bed. She’d sit there and wait for the dawn. Tomorrow she would speak to Carsten. They’d make plans. She would tell Philip. The sooner the better. By the time Connor came back from France at the end of the summer, they’d be well on their way to sorting out the details. He’d be off at college, anyway. He’d be upset, of course, but not terribly. He’d be busy with his own life. Hell, it was quite possible the majority of his friends’ parents were divorced.
She decided she needed a little more brandy, just to keep her nerves from getting the better of her.
“ANGELA! WAKE UP!”
Philip was shaking her shoulder. He stood over her, dressed in his red T-shirt and pajama bottoms. She was staring at his bare feet.
“What are you doing here? Did you sleep here?”
Angela moved, and as she did a pain shot up her neck into her head. She must have fallen asleep with her head at an awkward angle. She scrunched her shoulders, turtlelike, trying to pull away from both Philip’s hand and the pain. She massaged the spot and managed to straighten her back.
“I was watching the stars,” she said. Croaked. Her throat was dry as plaster.
“The stars. Really?” He picked up her cup, smelled it, and then put it down again. He folded his arms over his chest. “Do you think I don’t know, Angela? Do you really think I don’t know?”
Her head was muzzy. What did he know? She blinked, trying to clear her thoughts, her vision. Carsten?
“What are you talking about? You know. Know what?” She stood up and tried not to let Philip see how painful her back was, how cramped her neck.
“You’ve been drinking every day. You’re drinking like a longshoreman.”
He followed her into the kitchen. She rinsed out the cup and put it in the dishwasher. Had she brought the bottle of brandy into the greenhouse? How much had she drunk? She had a vague memory of several more trips to Philip’s office.
“My drinking’s none of your business.”
“Is that so? Well, I disagree. I’m starting to think you have a real problem.”
She wanted water so badly but didn’t take any. Downing a glass of water would only confirm his suspicions. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine.”
He glared at her, leaning straight-armed on the island. His mouth was ugly, contorted. Would it be so bad if he did know about Carsten? Maybe that would simplify everything. She tried to meet his eyes, to be dignified in her truth. Philip’s arms were trembling. He looked as though if she said the wrong thing he’d crack and crumble to dust.
“I’m too fucking old for this shit, and so are you. Holding a girl’s head while she pukes might be tolerable when she’s in her twenties, but not at your age.”
So, drinking, then. Not Carsten.
“You’re a fine one to talk about drinking. Have you gone to bed sober once in the past I don’t know how long?”
“Living with you would make anyone drink.”
The morning light coming in from the eastern-facing windows made Angela feel like a vampire. She couldn’t hold off any longer. She grabbed a glass and filled it with tap water. Drank half of it.
“Piss off, Philip.”
He shook his head. “You get your shit together Angela. If you don’t care about me, at least give some thought to how what you do affects your son.”
She reminded her husband that Connor was in France, with his girlfriend, and upon his return would embark on a new life in which his parents would be only peripheral figures. As she talked, however, it was as though the person speaking was doing so without Angela’s involvement. While this woman — and a shrewish-sounding person she was, too — waffled on, Angela tried to figure out what Philip meant. She hadn’t hurt Connor. He had no idea what she did or didn’t do, and as far as Angela could tell, he didn’t care all that much. What teenager did?
“My son loves me,” she said. “And I love him.”
Philip said, “Don’t make him feel about you the way you felt about your mother.”
She wanted to rake her nails across his cheek for that one.
Isabelle. Her mother, dressed in witchy, black flowing dresses and high-heeled boots, bosom like a ship’s maidenhead; long, tangled, dyed-blond hair. She’d had her greatest year, reached her peak, in 1968 and never descended. She clung to the side of that hippie mountain like a pot-infused barnacle.
In 1980, Angela overhead her grade five teacher speaking to the school nurse after Isabelle had flounced into a Christmas pageant, pausing at the door so everyone was sure to see her. Who does she think she is, some flower child? A little wilted, I’d say. And they laughed.
How old would Isabelle have been when Angela was ten? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? That seemed young to her now. Isabelle never gave up on her vision of herself as a black-lace-clad seductress, though. She showed up at Angela’s senior prom, saying she didn’t get enough pictures of her and Steve, her date. She’d put on a lot of weight by that time and the clothes that had looked silly on her at thirty-three looked frightening and pathetic on a woman over forty. She pawed Steve, saying how pretty he was, prettier than Angela, she said. She tried to kiss him, leaving a smear of lipstick across his mouth. He pulled back, pushing her away, wiping his mouth. The mirror ball whirled, House of Pain sang “Jump Around” and everyone laughed and pointed.
Angela left the prom in tears. She never spoke to Steve again. She left home a month later and rarely spoke to her mother after that. Saw her only on holidays, out of a sense of guilt and obligation. Philip was always kinder to Isabelle than Angela was. Angela thought he got a kick out of her. She died skeletal and angry and — between coughing fits that left her near-drowning in phlegm — telling Philip that Angela wasn’t nearly good enough for a big old handsome man like him. When Angela buried her ashes in a municipal plot, she cried for the life she might have had, if she had just accepted things the way they were.
And her father? Angela never knew him. He left Isabelle, to whom he wasn’t married, when Angela was six months old, to b
e a musician in California, Isabelle told her. She hadn’t even kept a photo.
Angela was nothing like her. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Now, Philip cocked an eyebrow, and smirked, knowing he’d hit a nerve.
The rage Angela had felt a moment before splintered. Instead, she rather enjoyed Philip’s cruelty. It justified her own.
“Well, if Connor felt about me the way you feel about your mother, would you like that better, Philip?”
Three months after Philip’s father had died, his mother, Evelyn, had moved to Taos with her “best friend,” Edna. Philip was furious, saying she was disrespecting his father, which was about as serious an insult as Philip could imagine. Evelyn told Philip to like it or lump it — her words exactly. She said she’d lived her whole life for other people and now she was done. She was going to love whom she wished to and live how she wished to and that was that. Philip never forgave her. He felt she’d lied to his father the whole of their married life, let him work himself to death and had probably been “carrying on,” as he put it, with Edna since they’d gone to Sarah Lawrence together back in the day. He was probably right. Angela admired her. In fact, at this moment she admired Evelyn enormously.
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