Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  Saralee accepted the offer eagerly. He knew she had no interest in him romantically, so able was he now to read the signals women gave off. It had been a nice afternoon, a companionable afternoon even. But at one point, standing in front of a bin of used novels, Saralee had thrust a book in his face.

  “Josephine Humphreys. Fantastic first novel,” she told him. “Don’t you just love Southern writers? They have this Gothic honesty.”

  And his reaction had been to blush so completely — thank God, he was completely clothed, because he was certain that even the backs of his knees had throbbed pink — that he’d had to squat quickly to study a lower shelf.

  Rich in Love. He felt found out, covers stripped: Father Rich was in love. In love, in love, in love. For the rest of the afternoon, he kept seeing the book cover, only half heard the happy chatter of his companion.

  “Louise? Can we talk?” He hadn’t even called first, afraid he’d weasel out on the phone. He needed to be there at her door. Present and ready.

  “I love you,” she’d said at the door, not even waiting to hear what he had to say.

  When Rich went to Frank Kennedy a week later, the old priest had acted personally put out.

  “Why now, Brother Rich? I’m getting ready to move over. You could have had it all.”

  I don’t want it all, Rich said once, twice, three times, as they went round and round the reasons.

  “I’m in love with someone,” Rich finally said.

  “Not in this parish,” said Frank.

  “Not in this parish,” said Rich.

  “Not a man,” said Frank looking more and more alarmed.

  “Not a man,” said Rich.

  “This will have to go upstairs to the bishop first, obviously,” said Frank. “Lines of command, as you well know. But I don’t want a big hullabaloo around here, understand? Go quietly.”

  The chapel committee took him out to supper a few days later. He’d called them each to tell them he was leaving. Most misunderstood at first, thought he was just going to a new parish. He’d had to really drum it in.

  “I’m just so shocked, Father. I mean, love is always a cause for celebration” — this from Bette Rice. “But you know, it’s a shock. I’m being honest.”

  The dinner was quiet, both camps trying to come to grips with the news. They spent the bulk of the evening talking about the choice of a new musical director — the old one was retiring and moving to Florida — as if nothing had happened. Only at the end did a few people get emotional. “We’ll miss you, Father,” said Hugh Malone. “You’re one of the few live ones left in this old, backward church of ours.”

  Maybe he should call Louise at work. The conversation with Fritz hadn’t gone down completely. Rich could feel it stuck in his chest somewhere. The leaves murmured around it.

  “I talked to Fritz…” he began.

  “And…” He always had to cut to the chase with Louise when she was at work. She did become someone else, he’d noticed. Someone tougher, someone with only so much patience.

  “Louise, I don’t know. I can’t seem to get a handle on the guy. He wouldn’t say yes or no. He’s leaving it up to some committee.”

  “Teflon priest,” Louise said.

  “How long till closing time? I miss you.” He hated the way he was sounding now. He could act needy at night with her, but not now, not during her work day.

  “Listen, we’ll do it ourselves,” she said. “I’ll go ask at all the parishes in the area and see if we can collect their old candle stubs. And then we’ll make our own candle. Just for us. Our own little tradition. Forget Fritz.”

  He wasn’t sure why he put the phone down not so gently and why he found himself in the hall closet searching for his old spring coat, a tweedy, three-quarter-length from the New York days. So not in style. Just like the old Honda he now backed out the driveway. Thank God he hadn’t let Louise talk him into getting rid of it. He drove to the corner for gas, though lately he’d found half a tank could last him a month. Pulling out, he looked left and right. Tell me which way to go.

  At the outskirts of Easthampton he turned toward Northampton, but he sped by his usual haunts, out Route 9 into Amherst, then east into Belchertown, and back through Granby, South Hadley. All that early afternoon and into mid, then late afternoon, he went toward and through one town after another. Quaint towns. Working towns. He didn’t stop. He didn’t get out of the car. He drove until the gas registered one-quarter full, until his chest was quiet again.

  Just outside of Chicopee — he’d made an amoebic sort of loop, several loops really, he now realized — he pulled into a strip mall and parked in front of a store. “Lucky Buck!” trumpeted the yellow and orange banners. Rich had seen their ads in local circulars. Junk For a Buck would have been a better name, but in the first aisle he found them: two large plastic baskets filled with last year’s Christmas candles. Some were scented with fake cranberry and bayberry; some were angels or reindeer, their cute parts chipped. White showed under the gold.

  “I’ll take them both,” he told the clerk, after he’d hauled the first basket to the counter.

  “Both what?” the kid asked.

  “Both baskets,” Rich said.

  “But they have candles in them,” said the kid.

  “That’s what I want. I want the candles,” said Rich.

  “I’ll have to charge you for the baskets, too,” the kid said.

  One fit in the back seat, one in the hatch space. Rich drove off with a hundred pounds of unwanted wax.

  He was reading the instructions when Louise came in at 6:30.

  “I hate that bitch,” she said.

  He cringed at both words. Hate is a word that shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary. He’d used that line in more than one homily. Sometimes the venom in his normally loving wife stilled him. But who was he to judge? He’d lived his whole life trying to be a holy little son of a gun.

  “Witch Hazel really getting to you today?” he asked.

  “Who else? Oh, baby,” she said, taking her coat off, “I am sorry for being late. You’re pissed this time, aren’t you? Because I didn’t call. I thought about it, but…what’s that smell?”

  He looked up, really seeing her now. The truth was he hadn’t been thinking about her return. He didn’t even know what time it was. Usually he heard the car, headed for the front door where he divested her of her outer things and gave an appreciative fondle to her underthings.

  “What’s that smell?” she asked again. “It smells sweet. Are you making jam again?” She walked to the stove, draping her coat on the back of a chair.

  Rich watched her lift the lid on the jam pot, a wedding gift from Louise’s mother. Making jam was the one thing he and Louise’s mother had in common.

  “Wax,” she said. “In weird colours. What are you cooking up here, Rich? This is an awful lot of paraffin.”

  He didn’t answer right away, wanting her to get it on her own. He felt happy with himself in a way he hadn’t felt since the early days in this house when he was still amazed at having his very own life with his very own wife.

  “The Easter candle,” said Louise, and then she turned around and she wasn’t smiling anymore. “But I thought you were going to let me round up the candles,” she said. “I wanted to.”

  “I needed…” Rich gestured to the stove. The air was thick with the smell of Christmas past.

  “To do it on your own,” Louise said. She nodded. “I understand.” She took her coat and left the kitchen.

  Rich tried to go back to the directions, the original directions hand-copied by Greg so many years ago. “Fasten the plastic tubing really securely with strong twine.” “Or else,” another note in the margin cautioned, “you’ll be waxing your floors!” Rich folded the instructions and placed them on the counter, next to the plastic cylinder he’d constructed in the garage an hour before. It should make an okay mold. The thick wick was anchored to the outside, top and bottom, with generous margins. The wax wa
s just about ready to be poured. He spread the day’s paper on the floor, on the stove, on the counter, anchored the corners down with masking tape. He knew well enough: hot wax had wings. It flew.

  What colours. Swirls of Christmas gold, Old Tannenbaum green, holly red. He’d never seen a paschal candle like it. But then he’d never had an Easter like this. A married Easter. An Easter where his body would descend and rise again. I am coming back to life.

  He reached for the pot’s handles, steadied the cylinder between his feet, feeling the old fear and excitement. This was always a dramatic moment, the tipping of the pot, the aiming of the wax’s descent. You had to get this part right and it was always a gamble.

  He gripped the pot, tipped. The colours fell below him. The smell rose above him. He dared not move. He’d seen the disasters that hit a kitchen when the person on top decided to adjust the angle. The person on top! That’s what was different, too. You needed two people, at the least, to do this part: one, standing to pour; one, kneeling, to steady the mold.

  Yet, somehow, here in this kitchen he was able to do both things at the same time. All these years he’d been cautioning his people about the need for a team approach. All that gather-thee-in stuff.

  The flow was slowing. Rich tipped the pot to drain the last small pool. Louise was standing in the door when he straightened up.

  “I did it myself,” he said, amazed to hear the four-year-old in his voice.

  He cracked up first, but Louise was soon laughing so hard she had to sit down.

  Hornet

  Sometimes it works. She imagines him sitting at one of those wood desks, the kind you see now only in movies about convent schools. No inkwell, no, that would be way before his time. She sees the amber puddle collecting, widening, beneath him. She visualizes the other kids’ faces, a sea of childhood cruelty. And for that moment she understands why from time to time he has to stick his (victimized, ridiculed, undisciplined) dick into other women.

  Mostly it doesn’t work and Martine is left with what she’s known for a while. Her husband’s a liar and a cheat. Can this marriage be saved? Probably not, but right now they’re doing the newest new thing, which is actually an old thing: EFT, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, though Martine calls it Emotionally Fucked Couples Therapy. Jerome says she never swore this way before.

  “I don’t really like it,” he tells her. “You’re better than that. More articulate.”

  “Honey, I’ve articulated and articulated,” she reminds him.

  And she has, eighteen years of articulation. But when he admitted to their last marriage counselor that he’d had a fling at a music camp two months after they were married — a heartbreak of a summer for her, the new bride who’d had to stay in the city and work — she’s found shouting expletives works better. Because what’s left to say? What’s left to say reasonably?

  But this, according to Jerome and to Harry, their new therapist, is what makes EFT so different, so superior. “Forget about working on communication skills,” says Harry. “Forget about all that Venus/Mars bullcrap.” (Martine does admire Harry’s vocabulary.) “We’re back to our little selves.”

  “We’ve done the inner child,” Martine told Harry at their first session. “We’ve done I’m OK, you’re OK. We’ve done the empty-chair Gestalt thing.”

  “This is completely, one-hundred-percent different,” Harry said. “We’re not going back to Mom and Dad and figuring out how they messed us up, all that blaming shit. Here we’re into blamer softening. Here, we’re being Mom and Dad. To each other. Here, dependence is OK. Admitting it is even more OK. You and Jerome are going to treat each other like the lovable, blameless kids you really are. Because none of us really grows up, right? From now on, you’re going to be in each other’s corner.”

  Lovable and blameless are not the words that come to mind when Martine looks over at Jerome, sitting in the corner, alone on Harry’s loveseat. In their first session they sat on it together. Now she’s across from him in a low-slung, beige chair, the kind of let’s-get-grounded furniture they’ve seen in every therapist’s office. What could possibly make any woman pant over this exhausted-looking middle-aged man? Jerome hasn’t been sleeping well lately because this time he’s afraid she’s really going to leave. Since his latest escapade, with the second violinist this time, Martine has kept a suitcase packed at the front of the closet, a fly-away bag. Escapade. She pronounces it with a French accent because it sounds more fun. And she refers to Sarah, the violinist, as the second fiddle or the plucky fuck. Also more fun. It’s gotten so bad, with so many new revelations — oh, her, too? — that it’s begun to be almost fun. OK, not fun. Funny?

  What does it mean to be in each other’s corner? Martine hasn’t a clue any more, having gradually lost the urge to do right by Jerome. Even being in her own corner — climbing the bloody Stairmaster, eating leafy greens, hanging with sympathetic friends, throwing herself into work, all those Oprah strategies — seems a job for someone braver, more butch. Being in the kids’ corner — Bram, thirteen, Steffen, eleven — comes easier. Kids need. They need now. That’s the guiding principle.

  Jerome seems to know what being in her corner means. He tells Harry and Martine every week what is necessary to keep them together. “When I feel the need to boost myself I have to look inside, not outside,” he says.

  “Look to Martine,” says Harry. “She’s your buddy. She’s your truest friend.”

  “I know,” says Jerome, eyes wet with regret. And then he tells them another story — she’s heard them, she’s heard them — about the stepmother who checked his sheets every morning of his horny adolescence, about the bullish nuns, and the college girlfriend who told him he wasn’t hung enough, and of course, the humiliation of the janitor’s visits to mop the floor in Grades 1,2,3,4, once even in Grade 5. Not to mention the child psychologist his parents lugged him to for the peeing problem, who fondled him once.

  But right now, week four, they’re not focused on Jerome and the mortifications of his flesh. They’re on Martine.

  “I’m not feeling much,” she tells them.

  “Tell us,” says Harry. “How did we get here?”

  Martine looks at the two men. What can they know of a woman’s large, absorbent, suffering…heart, she was about to say. Then she thinks of the place Jerome still frequents, the core of her, the core of all those women, where he surrenders his mad, mating-dog self. It’s us and them, she thinks, and we’re out-manoeuvred.

  “How did I get here?” Martine asks. “Well, I passed Go, but I didn’t collect two hundred anything. And, Harry, I swear every time you refer to blamer softening I think you’re talking laxatives.”

  “She always made me laugh,” Jerome says to Harry.

  “Sometimes we use humour to deflect intimacy,” says Harry, and Martine wants to pitch something hard at his smooth face. Harry has the mouth of a punk, but looks like a Boy Scout. “I think we should use him as our investment broker, too,” she said to Jerome after their first session.

  “I’m not trying to be funny,” Martine tells the men. “I’m trying to be honest. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “The hurt,” Harry says.

  “The betrayal,” says Jerome.

  “We call it attachment injury,” says Harry.

  “I like that term,” Jerome says.

  Martine is about to say, “Why don’t you two have yourselves a little talkfest?” but she has to stop, tears suddenly, alarmingly, close.

  “I miss my dad,” she says.

  “Oh, baby,” Jerome says.

  Jerome has always said she enjoyed an unusually close relationship with her father. Close is what he calls it, but abnormal is what she hears. Her father has been dead for nearly four years now, but Martine still cries when she’s home alone with the radio on and an old Broadway song…“Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” or “I Gotta Crow”…brings him wondrously back. The hospice-care people joked that they were getting a Broadway
retrospective, with visitors popping cassettes into the tape recorder on his nightstand. After he died, Martine drove herself nuts trying to remember his last song. Her brother thought it might have been “The Impossible Dream,” but that was so convenient. One of the nurses said she thought she remembered taking Oliver out of the case that last evening. Her father would have gotten a kick out of “Food, Glorious Food” as his swan song. But it had to be better than that.

  “He was so simple,” says Martine to the waiting men, and feels ugly bubbles rise.

  “A good man,” Jerome explains to Harry.

  “Not like you,” Martine says to Jerome.

  “It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it, Martine?” says Harry. “You’re distressed.”

  Martine deep-breathes. She is the Lawrence Welk bubble machine gone bad.

  “Let it out,” says Harry. “You’re holding an awful lot in there, Martine. It’s time to face the dragon.”

  And Jerome coaxes, “I’m trying real hard here, honey. But I can’t do it without you.”

  “You do it without me all the time,” Martine says.

  “But I don’t want to anymore,” says Jerome in the you’re-absolutely-right tone he’s adopted since he came clean about Sarah. “I’ve told you that.”

  All the paintings on Harry’s wall — small, framed oils of what seem like the same landscape — are crooked, Martine notices for the first time. One, the ubiquitous old mill amid fall foliage with no humans to spoil the joint, is especially off-kilter.

  Martine points. “You trying to make us all crazier, Harry?”

  “None of my clients are what you’d call crazy, Martine,” says Harry.

  “What would you call us, Harry?” Martine asks.

  But it’s two o’clock and Harry has a merit badge for punctuality. “That’s a promising place to start for our next session,” he says. “I suspect control, specifically being out of control, might be an issue for you, Martine.”

  The two who are married talk outside in the parking lot. They stand by Martine’s van; she doesn’t see Jerome’s car. “I’ll get Bram from hockey on my way home from rehearsal,” says Jerome, by way of saying, see, no post-rehearsal pouncing for me. Their boys have been spending a lot of time at various friends’ houses and various rinks. Jerome and Martine know why the kids are doing this, especially Martine, who’s getting the brunt of it. Unjustifiably, she thinks. Just when she needs the love and support of her sons — about time — they turn away, cool and non-partisan.