Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  God.

  He put a cup of water in the microwave. Longing and anxiety were an uneasy mix, like the curdled milk he tried to stir into his instant coffee. What now? There had been a time when he loved and was entertained by his wife’s emotional eruptions, but nowadays they seemed to come just before she cut him off at the knees. What now? He had very little hope, none, that Dash was calling to tell him good news.

  He went upstairs and put on his shoes. While he was at it, he combed his hair. He sat on the bed and picked up the phone, but then he put it down. This room was too small or something, the lighting too intimate. Conscious of behaving neurotically, he went downstairs and dialed Dash’s number from the bright, high-ceilinged kitchen.

  “Hello?” She made it sound like a demand, as if whatever he had to say had better be good.

  “Em, have I caught you at a bad time?”

  “Andrew!”

  “Yes. Em—”

  “I can’t talk now, I’m sorry, I really—Owen’s here, I have to be with him, I have to. Sorry—I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said blankly. Then, “What?”

  She hung up.

  He stared at the floor for a while, thinking what he always thought, that the yellowed wax needed stripping and had for several years. He took an absentminded sip from the cup of congealed coffee, and while he was swallowing he played back in his head the sound of “Owen’s here, I have to be with him, I have to.” The swallow reversed itself in the vicinity of his diaphragm. A substance like beige yogurt spewed from his mouth with disgusting force, hitting the front of the dishwasher with an audible splat. Either the sound or the sight dredged up more nausea; he made it to the sink just in time to vomit again. He put his hands over his eyes and retched until he was empty.

  When he could stand up straight, when he could think, he went back to the telephone and punched redial. It rang until Dash’s machine came on. He hung up.

  I have to be with him. It could mean something else. Although what? I have to eat dinner with him. I have to hold this board so he can hammer a nail in straight.

  She’d sounded agitated, distracted, definitely unwilling to talk. He looked down to see his car keys in his hand. “I have to be with him.” Like hell.

  Where was his wallet? On the newel post, where he’d left it. Hot night; he wouldn’t need a jacket. Good thing Hobbes was dead; otherwise he’d have to take him along, and he got carsick.

  I’m carsick, Andrew thought, taking the P Street curve too fast on Rock Creek Parkway. He could throw up again right now, pull over and puke out the window. What stopped him was the novel certainty that that would be psychosomatic behavior. Psychosomatics: the relation of psychic conflict to somatic symptomatology.

  On Route 29 he caught sight of the speedometer and jerked his foot off the gas. Besides the pain that came and went in his right chest, he had a persistent ringing in his ears and a bitter taste in his mouth. Just drive, he thought, because it was hard to credit any of his senses anymore. Some sort of cognitive disconnect was happening, an episode of distance between his perceptions and reality, making it impossible for him to conclude anything definitely. He wavered between two opposing convictions: that nothing was wrong and that he was having a myocardial infarction.

  What would Thomas Jefferson do?

  Not about a heart attack. What would Jefferson do if he found out Martha was having an affair? An absurd proposition on its face, they couldn’t have been more devoted, but just say. Think about it to focus your mind, he told himself. He’d posed that same question to his conscience in various moral quandaries before now, but never in circumstances this dire or direct.

  But imagine it. Thomas, sick of revising the legal code, comes home from Williamsburg unexpectedly to find Martha, his lovely, fragile wife, the mother of his darling little girls, in the intimate company of…a neighbor. A freeman, but rough and unrefined, uneducated. Someone Thomas knows only as the man who…comes to butcher the hogs every October. With Martha! In the long alcove bed, in the beautiful bedroom Thomas modeled after a temple by Palladio—no, wait. He designed the sleeping alcove in the 1790s, and Martha died in 1782. Never mind that—what would he do?

  Nothing precipitous. Tom was a mild, sweet-tempered man, reasonable to a fault. Disciplined. He wouldn’t reach for a musket and blow the villain’s brains out. Throw him out, though—he might do that. Bodily and with pleasure, and enough violence to assuage some of his fury and confusion. Right, he’d heave him out of the house—then he’d confront the tearful Martha, who would be prostrate, incoherent with remorse. Why? That’s all he’d want to know. My dearest love, can’t you tell me why?

  Then—he’d forgive her. In time. Because his heart was gentle and humane, and Martha was the love of his life. (She died at thirty-three; he promised on her deathbed he would never remarry, and he was true to his word.) He would find it in himself to forgive her, even though she and the hog slaughterer had committed the greatest betrayal he would ever know. His noble heart would overcome.

  Dash—sometimes she couldn’t help herself. She was born rash. Think of the time she talked the manager at Clyde’s into letting her jump out of a cake for Andrew’s fortieth birthday. Think of the time she bought Chloe a pony. Because it was there, grazing near a PONY FOR SALE sign, and Chloe had admired it. Andrew, the bad guy, had to straighten it all out, and thank God Chloe’s heart wasn’t broken. At eight, she already had her mother’s number.

  The pain in his side was gripping him tighter the closer he got to the cabin—surprise. When this was over, no doubt it would miraculously disappear. Would he tell Dash? He might be able to forgive her for a once-in-a-lifetime fling, flirtation, dalliance—such chipper words for the most devastating blow he could imagine—but it would take all of his magnanimity. There probably wouldn’t be any left to tell her she’d been right all along. He was a hypochondriac.

  dash

  twenty-four

  What a magical night. The full moon is enormous, a perfect yellow ball rising behind the black pines. I couldn’t stay in. I brought my salad outside and sat in the old wicker rocker, the bowl between my knees and a glass of wine precarious on the armrest. “To you, Cottie,” I toasted. I toasted Dr. Pittman, too, and everybody in the ER and the CCU, and when I got toward the bottom of the glass, which went straight to my head, I was in a mood to toast my mother.

  “Mama, did you intercede on this deal? Even if you didn’t, here’s to you, because I know where your heart is. Thank you. For always loving me. I’ll always love you.” I cried a few tears.

  Now I’m sober again, relatively speaking, although I still have the music up loud. This I’ll miss. If I go home and Andrew and I reconcile and live happily ever after, I will miss this feeling of absolute freedom from having to be anything for anyone but myself. And it’s all right, it’s not that nourishing anyway, I can definitely live without it. But I’ll miss it. It’s not even particularly mature. What is it? A little wine, a yellow moon, music I love, and no one around. Just in this moment, I feel ecstatic. Possibilities come to me, brand-new thoughts, as if I am making actual, measurable personal and mental progress. An illusion, no doubt, but I like it. If it’s a state that requires solitude to replicate, I can always tell Andrew to go away for a while.

  I don’t know why I’m feeling so optimistic about us, actually. The other half of ecstasy is agony. Which I am imagining now as drifting farther away from my husband out of inertia or sullenness, until there’s nothing to do but construct a life without him. Then I wouldn’t like solitude so damn much, would I?

  Maybe Mo is on a higher spiritual path than I am, maybe the goal really is to “be no one,” and therefore need no one, but I don’t think so. Truth is, I want that hard shoulder next to me in the bed at night, that other flawed human being who knows me better than anyone else ever will. For as long as I can have him. I want that even more than doglike devotion. And when I can’t have him, because he’s had a heart attack or I’ve lo
st my marbles or he’s walked in front of a bus, then I’ll take to heart Mo’s god-awful truism that we’re all, every one of us, alone, and I’ll soothe myself with whatever I’ve got at hand, whatever’s left. But before that, I intend to hold my loved ones close, very close. And tell them all the time how dear they are to me. And count myself unbearably lucky.

  Yes, but what if it’s not up to me? What if, deep down, Andrew doesn’t want me back? How unamusingly ironic, just when I am learning how much I want him back. I always wanted him back, but a different Andrew, or a different me. I thought I was dying for change, but that was a mirage: What I wanted was to go back to the prechange time, the old us—a Peter Pan–like wish I hope I’ve outgrown. I have my fingers crossed.

  But I still want passion. I won’t live without it. Why should I set that aside along with youth and looks and menstruation and good skin? I don’t want to. I don’t want to. Cottie never did, and she’s my heroine. I take off my wedding ring, read the inscription inside, run my finger over the etched gold, like a message in Braille. I want all of Andrew back, but especially the part of him that once tramped it out in the snow for me.

  Well, for Pete’s sake. I can’t believe someone’s coming. What time is it? Headlights shine through the trees before I hear a car’s engine. “Sock,” I call, so she won’t get run over, and so she’ll come and protect me if it’s a rapist. She ignores me, starts barking and wagging her tail; she recognizes the sound of the engine before I do.

  Owen’s truck.

  Well, hm. This isn’t how I saw the evening going. I get up to greet him—then stop. Is it Cottie? Oh God! Something he didn’t want to tell me on the phone? He stops the truck too fast; tools slide up and strike something metallic in the bed. He throws the door open and puts one foot on the ground. Something’s wrong; it takes him forever to set the other one down. The moon is behind him, I can’t see his face. Walking toward me, he stumbles on a rock or a dirt clod in the driveway, and his white teeth flash. He chuckles.

  I fold my arms.

  He hasn’t seen me yet. When he does, he says, “Dash!” as if he forgot where he was going, but now that he’s here he’s pleasantly surprised. “How are you?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Great!”

  “So I s——”

  His arms wrap me up and he lifts me completely off my feet. What can I do but laugh and hug him back? He sets me down, takes hold of me by the shoulders, and kisses me on the mouth.

  “Whoa.” I sound a little shaky. It started out exuberant, this heady kiss, but it turned into something else so fast, I wasn’t prepared and I let it last too long. I put my hands on Owen’s stony biceps to put some distance between us. His eyes are dancing. Sexy blond beard stubble has grown in since I saw him a few hours ago. He smells incredibly…real. I’ve been intrigued by those assertive, jutting lips of his since I first saw them. He is such a rock of a man.

  And now I’m not interested in him at all. Timing, my God, it’s everything. If he’d kissed me before, if he’d kissed me yesterday in the garden or in the duck house—who knows? My whole life might have changed. I’m so thankful it didn’t, I want to kneel down in the driveway and say a prayer.

  Luckily I know how to deal with this. For some reason I’ve had a lot of experience in this particular area. “Why, Owen Roby. Thanks,” I say with a laugh that’s equal parts surprise and matter-of-factness. I know just how much humor to put in the laugh so it’s the sound of mutual fun—never ridicule. My, aren’t we silly people, and aren’t you something, and wasn’t that a delightful, one-time experience? It’s not a strictly feminist response to male aggression, I know, but it’s my style, and more important, it works. And life goes on.

  Owen—what a nice man. He steps back and grins, looking down at his feet. “Me and Shev, we got a six-pack to celebrate. I went and drank three of ’em. I’m drunk!”

  “Three beers, wow.” I gesture playfully to the rocking chair on the porch. “Maybe you’d better sit down.”

  “You wouldn’t have anything to drink around here, would you?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Nah.” He glances up at me through his eyelashes, very boyish and winning, hands in his back pockets. “I’m still celebratin’.”

  I do an exaggerated, put-upon sigh. “Okay, come on in. I can probably dig up a dram of something or other somewhere.”

  I happen to have three bottles of beer in the refrigerator; I’ll give him one, but I don’t know if I’ll tell him about the other two. What a cheap drunk—I love that in a man. Andrew’s the same.

  I get a Coke for me, and we go in the living room.

  “You like this music?” Owen flops down on the couch and takes a long pull from his Corona. “Scuse me,” he says after a satisfied belch. I turn off the Pretenders and sit next to him. “Here’s to Miz B.,” he says, and we toast. “After you left, I went in and saw her. They got her breathing oxygen and hooked up to this and that, but she looks fine. She talked just like herself.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “They’re talking about letting her come home in a day or two. I still can’t get over it. When she went in for the valve last year, I was scared, sure, but I had a feeling she’d be okay. Maybe because she was so sure, and she talked us into it, me and Shev.”

  “I can see her doing that.”

  “The night before she had to go in, we were all in this motel restaurant near the hospital having dinner, except Shev and I couldn’t eat. And bad as it was, somehow she got us to laughing. Called it the Last Supper, you know, and started telling all these”—he breaks off to laugh—“these terrible jokes about what we’re supposed to do when she’s gone, what to have at the wake, songs she wants at the funeral, Perry Como and Peggy Lee, she wants ‘My Way,’ by Frank Sinatra—”

  All at once he’s not laughing anymore. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the tears flood his face, it’s like a dam bursting, and he grits his teeth but a terrible, devastating sob escapes. It’s horrible. Shocking.

  “Owen, it’s all right, she’s—no, that’s okay, go ahead. Go ahead, it’s good.” I hold him and he gives in to it. Chloe used to let me comfort her like this. Owen cries so hard, so heartbrokenly, it’s as if this is his first time.

  “I saw it all going,” he says against my neck. His tears are scalding. “I don’t want to lose. Everything again. It hurts. I couldn’t—”

  The phone rings.

  He pulls away, hiding his face, rubbing his nose against the arm of his shirt. The only thing that stops me from letting the goddamn phone ring is the certainty that it’s Andrew.

  I put my fingers in Owen’s hair and squeeze his temples. “Two secs,” I promise, and make a dash for the kitchen before the machine can come on.

  Yes, it’s Andrew. Dear Andrew. He sounds especially dithery, but out of my other ear I hear the screen door slam. Owen is leaving? “I can’t talk now,” I say in a rush, “I’m sorry, I really—Owen’s here, I have to be with him, I have to”—if he’s still here. “Sorry—I’ll call you later, okay?”

  No, he’s still on the front porch. I’m so relieved—it would’ve been awful if he’d left like that. This feels like a second chance.

  I go and stand beside him at the rail. What should I say, I ponder as we watch the moon rise and listen to the frogs singing. “I’m okay,” he says, his voice thick and nasal. “If I can just stand here for a minute.”

  It takes me a couple of seconds to get it: He wants to be by himself. “Oh. Sure.” I mumble something about coffee and make a sheepish exit.

  I take as long as I can in the kitchen. If he feels humiliated because he broke down in front of me, I don’t know what I’ll do. It seems best to leave him be, but I wish there was something I could do besides absent myself. I take a pile of laundry out of the washer and put it in the dryer, and I fold the clothes that were in the first dryer load into neat piles and carry them upstairs. I want him to get tired of being alone and come inside without bei
ng asked. But time passes and the coffee’s getting old, so in the end I pour us two mugs, lots of milk and sugar in Owen’s, and take them outside.

  He’s out in the driveway, throwing a stick for Sock. When he sees me, he comes over and sits beside me on the stoop. He blows steam from the coffee mug I hand him and takes a sip. After a pretty long time he says, “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s been a hell of a day.”

  He won’t look at me. “I never did that before.”

  “So what?”

  “It was the beer. I don’t drink usually.”

  “Would you forget it? I’m all emotional today, too. It’s good for us. To carry on once in a while. What are we supposed to do, bottle things up forever? We’ll explode!”

  He laughs a little. But then he doesn’t say anything more, and I follow suit. It’s a peaceful silence, calm, tension free. I believe, in all the time we’ve been friends, it’s the first time we’ve ever been completely at ease with each other.

  The moon has come out from behind the trees. It’s platinum white, not yellow anymore, and so bright you could read a newspaper by it.

  “Hey, Owen. Let’s go for a walk.”

  We set off down the drive, Sock ranging ahead. Here in the woods, the crickets finally outchirp the frogs. Lightning bugs flicker like clouds of little match heads firing on and off in the trees. There’s a coolness in the air that won’t last much longer; in a week or two the nights will be warm and buggy. But for now I rub my bare arms and let the mild chill remind me that nature is separate from and ungovernable by me. Hence the thrill.

  At the road, there’s no need to hang back in the shadows and watch the infrequent cars hiss by—a man is with me, I’m safe. But the dog, who except for riding in them has hardly any experience with cars, can’t resist sniffing around too close to the road, and I have to pick her up. Owen still isn’t talking. I’m tired. There’s nothing I’d like better than to crawl in bed and doze off reading, Sock at my hip, but I can’t let Owen go until he’s his old self. That’s what he came for, I think, more than to celebrate for Cottie, certainly more than to kiss me.