Fidelity

by Michael Redhill

  “It wasn’t you,” she said. “You probably think I was so horrified at your reaction that I was shaken out of my silly spiritual quest.”

  “No.”

  “I stopped because I got what I needed out of them.” She looked in a pot and tucked a lock of hair back when it fell forward, then turned the heat down. “Since you last saw me, and partook of my cuisine, and then left at midnight because you had to take pictures of some backwater children the next morning, I’ve been up to all kinds of things.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, tipping his drink back and bracing himself. She’d often told him that his interest in the lives of others didn’t come naturally enough, and this sudden volunteering of personal news signaled to him that he’d waited too long to ask her how she was. “So it’s been a busy year?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve been living in this house, and doing a little painting, and giving daycare from time to time for pin money. I’ve got some government money and some savings, so I’m not struggling too hard. I got my mom—”

  “How is your mom?”

  “You can go downstairs and ask her yourself.”

  He stared at her a moment, expecting her to laugh, but she didn’t. He looked toward the door he knew led down there.

  “She’s fine,” said Lillian.

  “What happened to your tenant?”

  “She turned into my mother. Someone must have cast a spell.”

  “I just thought you needed the income. Didn’t you get a deal at the home?”

  “They took whatever she got every month and didn’t leave her a penny for anything.”

  He pushed some ice down into his glass. He wasn’t Mrs. Brant’s favorite, and he’d been the object of a letter-writing campaign for a number of months after he and Lillian split. At the beginning the letters were rational and friendly, warm even, drawing on the fullness of her experience as a long-married woman and observing that the trials of a life with someone made for hard work. She understood that he needed time apart, she knew men had to cross over something to make it to the place most women got to easily. But after he stopped replying to her letters (politely acknowledging her point of view, lightly reaffirming his own), they became surprisingly abusive. In her last letter she’d accused him of taking Lillian’s best years and not having enough sense to know that he’d never do better. This last seemed more a slight against Lillian than him, but still he didn’t respond. He hadn’t seen Mrs. Brant since before the breakup. “Does she know I’m here?” he asked.

  “She knows I’m having dinner with a friend.”

  “Does she know it’s me?”

  “I don’t want to put her back in hospital, Tom. She knows it’s someone I see once in a while, and if she has her suspicions, she keeps them to herself. She likes to think I’m a sensible girl.”

  “How can you be a sensible girl, Lillian? You got rid of your tenant and took your mother out of the only place that could take care of her.”

  “I take care of her fine.” Her mouth had turned down hard at the suggestion that she’d endangered her own mother. “I’m not the one who finds looking after another person an unbearable load.”

  “Now, now,” he said, and he reached out to touch her, but she pulled her hand away.

  “Your only job here is to be nice.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a very good daughter. You are. I’d be lucky to have you.”

  “Fuck off, Tom.”

  “I’m serious.” She stared at him, shaking her head a little. “At center, you’re a much better person than I could ever have been.”

  She turned off all the burners. It suddenly felt that things were going to get ugly, maybe even that he’d be invited to leave. But she turned back to him, smiling pleasantly. “Do you want to eat?”

  “Do you still want to feed me?”

  She passed him plates down from the shelf and he went into the other room, grateful to have a job to do. They wouldn’t have stayed together, he thought. There was nowhere to go with the notion. He moved around the table, turning his back to the basement door. “Does she ever mention me? Your mother?”

  Lillian came through the kitchen with a casserole dish in her hands. “Well . . . sometimes, after I’ve had a date that went particularly bad, she says, ‘Men are useless.’”

  OVER DINNER, he managed to muscle the mood back around to something more friendly. He knew he was too stupid to keep out of the territory they seemed to trip into in recent years, where he ended up feeling like a bastard and she became quiet or even sour. He told her his stories, the ones he thought good to tell, where he was the dopey, faintly lovable person he thought she preferred, and he complimented her on the fantastic cooking. But when the desire to seem like a kinder person was sated, all he could think about was Lillian and her mother going down the drain. It gave him a curiously numb feeling to think that someone he’d loved could end up like this. If Mrs. Brant got any government money it bought a few cartons of milk and a tank of gas a week, that was it, he was sure. The mortgage was probably coming out of whatever savings there still were from the store, maybe a little something from whatever her mother got from her dad’s pension. He wished he were somewhere back in time with Lillian, right before the bad stuff started, wished he could turn back the pages of her biography to where everything still seemed possible.

  He could give her a good lot of cash, but that wouldn’t last. You could die in a corner in a small town like this, with no work and no one to buy your house if you needed to get out. Whoever Lillian had bought this place from had no doubt left town riding a delirious drunk: who knows how long it had been on the market. Wherever he worked, he saw two things: flags and For Sale signs. You’d be better off living on a uranium dump and collecting on the class-action suit than being a proud home owner in all the towns he knew.

  “Why don’t you guys rent a place somewhere and rent this place out?”

  “Who’s going to rent my whole house, Tom?”

  “You got a tenant before, you could get a married couple or even a family now. They pay the mortgage and the cost of whatever place you rent.”

  “Say I rent somewhere with Mom, and then I can’t get anyone in here? Or worse, they fuck off without paying and bash up the place?” She was waving a green bean on the end of her fork. “It’s better we at least stay somewhere where we know what we owe every month.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just a patch of bad luck.”

  “I’m not complaining, Tom. I’m fine.” She folded the bean into her mouth and chewed slowly, looking at him. “You’re worried about me. That’s nice.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Thank you.”

  They ate for a while in silence. The light outside started to fade. In the forest behind Lillian’s house, the early evening summer light was cutting through the trees, picking out the white skins of the birches, and here and there, thin cedars with bare branches made ribs of light in the air. What kind of effort might be going on for his benefit right now, to keep up appearances, he wondered. And yet, maybe everything would correct itself in the passing of time and Lillian would be okay. Just a patch. She collected the dinner things and went into the kitchen, humming as she stacked the dirty plates, then came out with two bowls of strawberry cobbler with ice cream on top and coffees she’d put whipped cream into.

  “You remember all my favorites.”

  “I was paying attention.” She sat down and ate the berries out of her bowl with her fingers. “So. Do I have the pleasure of your company tonight?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he kept his eyes down.

  WITH HIS reassurance that she would not be alone in the night, she brightened, and they went to the couch and shared a bottle of white wine she’d saved. She bought it because it was a dessert wine, this was what the man in the liquor store had told her, and they drank much of the bottle, trying to find the right way to describe the taste. Liquory peaches, perhaps, or sugar cane in c
ough syrup. She stretched out along the back of the couch and regaled him with tales of her colorfully failed dates and made him laugh at small-town stupidity. She’d made Mount Morris a tolerable home, even if in his dire imaginings it was the site of her decline. He had the disturbing, but drunken, thought that he could go into the basement when Lillian was asleep and somehow bring about her mother’s death. He thought about it while she was talking and he was saying “God, really?” and “right, right,” but he was trying to think of how you would go about such a thing, kill a person. He imagined he could cover her face with a pillow, but remembered that they could figure out it was a murder by the buildup of chemicals somewhere in her body. These were idle thoughts, but garishly compelling. There were probably a dozen solutions to his ex-wife’s troubles.

  Then, as if she were reading his mind at some angle, she said, “I’ve always thought it would be very humiliating to be dead. I’ve been to many open-casket funerals, and there’s everyone looking at the body and saying what a good person he was, or how good she looks. I just can’t stop thinking what a terrible thing it would be to have to be dead in front of other people.”

  “I understand most people don’t mind.”

  “I think it’s worse than being nude in front of strangers. There you are, in this terribly private moment in your life, and everyone is staring at you.” She paused, lengthily, and he wondered if she was thinking of one of those afternoons in a funeral parlor. He’d been in a couple with her, trying not to look at the powdery form lying inert in the box. “People touching you, even,” she said at last.

  He leaned forward to refill his glass. She was drunk too, and morbidly philosophical. This is how it went most years with her now: dinner, then too much wine and her mind ticking over into bleak ruminations. Loneliness, infirmity, death. It made him feel like he was back in university, sitting in a circle of people talking about the kinds of things that made them nod a lot and act like they were putting it all together for the first time.

  “You must think being born is even more humiliating then,” he said. “There you are, in a compromising position, naked and all.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” she said.

  “It’s a good thing most people are only minors when it happens, or there’d be some arrests. ‘Well, Mrs. Smith, this is how we found’m, both feet up your wazoo. We’re going to take him away for questioning. Officer Jones, swaddle’m.’”

  She was looking at him over the rim of her glass. “Are you done? All I was saying is I don’t want anyone staring at me after I’m gone.”

  “Okay.”

  That seemed the end of the topic for the time being, and he was glad of it. What the hell was she doing thinking about caskets anyway? He leaned over to pick up her glass, but she misread his body language and lifted her face to him and closed her eyes. He kissed her on the cheek. She opened her eyes. “You going to pat me on the head, too?”

  “It’s late.”

  She pushed herself up against the back of the couch, and when she stood she had to close her eyes to let the blackness fizz up and disperse. “Geeziz,” she said. “Well, let’s go up then.” She held out her hand to him. “C’mon, cowboy.” He took her hand and pulled it toward his mouth and kissed it. Then gave it back to her.

  “Maybe I should sleep on the couch here.”

  “Me in the bed and you on the couch? I don’t remember it being quite that big.”

  “Well, no, it isn’t.”

  She stood staring at him, then narrowed her eyes at him and gave him a tiny smile. “You think I’m pathetic.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You think I’m too pathetic to fuck. Is that it?”

  “No, Lillian, you’re not pathetic in the least.”

  “Look at me, okay?” She stood square to him, legs apart and fists on her hips. “I’m the most beautiful woman in Mount Morris. You’d have to go all the way to Hornell to find a better-looking woman than me.”

  “Maybe all the way to Elmira.”

  “I used to be the most beautiful woman in Elmira, too.” She stood in front of him, watching him not move, and she protectively brought the hand he had kissed over her stomach. “So what’s the problem, then?”

  “I just think I should stay down here.”

  She nodded, fuzzy, trying to figure him out. “So I should stay down here?”

  “I don’t think you should, Lillian.”

  Now her smile faded. “You here, me there. That’s what you mean?”

  “I think so. Listen Lillian, I should have—”

  Before he’d finished, she was halfway up the stairs, muttering, instantly sober. He heard a closet door open, and then a shower of bed things rained down over the banister. They came waving down like furled parachutes, and then her face appeared over the railing. She looked flushed, her face glowing a little, like there was a faint light behind her skin. “I don’t beg for sex, Tom!”

  “I didn’t mean you—”

  “I get laid a lot! Anytime I want!”

  “I know you do, Lillian.”

  “So I’m a slut now?”

  “Let’s . . .” He put his hand over his forehead.

  “What.”

  “We’re both drunk.”

  “So now you draw the line at drunken sluts, huh? You’ve raised the bar for Tom Lumsden. That’s good, you got some class!”

  “Now you’re the one not being nice.”

  “Nothing’s nice. Go then,” she said, throwing a hand into the air. “Some of tomorrow’s best minds are probably waiting to be photographed by you, a man of good taste.”

  He got up to mount the stairs, but she vanished immediately and slammed her bedroom door. He stood at the bottom, collecting his breath, and then he went and pulled the sheets off the floor and the furniture and set them up on the couch. He sat for a while, staring out into the room. It had always seemed a little charmed to him, this thing they had, but now they were finally in the place most divorced couples got to before they split up. Nothing he did now would be right, and that was probably as it should be. But it made him aware, for the first time, that the place they’d been headed after their breakup had always been inevitable, and now they were there. It made him sorrowful to realize it.

  He tried to turn his mind to what his day was supposed to be like tomorrow, taking some refuge in his own order. But it was as difficult as keeping his eyes focused. He would have to find some way to give her money—this he’d already decided—but now it was going to be harder. His sample case was still in the car—he’d gone through it before lunch, looking at the orders that had come in from Wilkes-Barre and Stroudsburg. A total of seven schools, and the replies had been good. Since he came by and picked up the envelopes himself (a courtesy that encouraged people to fill out their orders), many folks paid in cash, and there was probably $800 out there. He could send her more later. He wanted to sneak downstairs and visit Mrs. Brant, if only to take an account of what kind of shape she was really in. How much more care would this person need? If he knew that, he’d know a lot. He reached for his glass and rolled the wine around in it, then tilted the remains into his mouth. Crass science, this, making money in order to live. It had killed his father, counting out his days in short piles. No upside in retail, he’d say. Better off betting on the ponies. Retail had killed him, owing seventy cents on the dollar to the supplier, then another twenty-five on rent and payroll. Who can live off five cents? It was a good business, his father would say to him, until the big stores came in. Those guys can hold their breath until you drown.

  Tom lay down and turned his back to the cool fabric along the couch’s frame. Tomorrow he’d be going up above the border, to a couple of new schools in Hamilton and St. Catharines, small cities in a part of Ontario they called the Golden Horseshoe, which struck him as the kind of name a place gets called, rather than one it calls itself, like the way they called Wisconsin the Milk Jug of America, or something like that.

  He settled himself, tu
cking the sheets between his knees, and he adjusted the pillow. He could hear the sprinklers on people’s lawns kicking in, a series of syncopated, repeating sounds, like little races going on all around Lillian’s house. He’d grown up in the suburbs of Buffalo, back in the sixties before it had become a joke and they had to spend a lot of money making it sound like everyone was actually really proud of it. But he’d had a lawn as a kid, and the same neighbors throughout his whole childhood, and bike trails only he and his friends knew. Back when his father had been proud to have a little hardware store, the family name LUMSDEN’S arced in gold paint across the front window. Later his father scraped the name off and the store was called just HARDWARE, as if it were the archetype of such a place, and little curls of gold flake drifted around the wooden floors for years after that. It was a safe, circumscribed world. Most of what he knew of all of these places was gone now. That world was still there in its way, but as part of a swelling mass that had chewed up all the neighborhoods and little corners that had seemed so distinct to him as a child, and then as a young man.

  His father had died of a heart attack. He’d been opening boxes of bird feed. An insignificant, unscheduled death while alone in the store. For years after, the theme of his father’s death was all that his mother could talk about. The punishment of a good man. “And what does he get for all that?” she’d keen, and Tom would comfort her with cooing sounds and remembrances, but nothing could convince his mother that she wasn’t widow to a universal injustice.

  He’d used his father’s death to combat Lillian’s desire for children, saying he didn’t want to sacrifice himself like that. But even without kids, he saw that, like his father, he was himself little more than the groove he was making in the earth. He’d just covered more territory. There was no getting away from the way life spent you, whether you were busy with children or with loneliness.

  He hadn’t heard her come down the stairs, and he startled when he saw her, standing at the foot of the couch, her arms crossed over her T-shirt.