Once she’d decided, Anne never looked back, printing the neat foot-high letters of whatever phrases came to her mind—GET OUT, GO HOME, LEAVE US ALONE—working quickly, efficiently, and peppering her commands with words she’d never even thought to say aloud: BITCH, SLUT, SEX URGE. Just as she was finishing the last word on the most visible wall, directly on Hoffman Lane, a car turned off Main Street and into the alley, its headlights arcing straight for her, and she tossed the paint and ran, down Lake Street to River and up to Christ Church, where she ducked into the cemetery and slid down between a tombstone and the ivy-covered fence at the edge of the lawn.
Anne decided her parents were lucky to have her—she was back in bed before midnight, with her homework finished and her clarinet already packed for school.
Then came the newsmen and the television cameras, giving voice to Elaine Dorian’s every passing thought. Anne’s attack, meant to silence the author, had instead turned The Sex Cure into a national sensation and single-handedly sent it into a second print run. Out came her mother’s scrapbook, out went her father into the world of late nights at the office, and out ran Anne’s patience with her parents—she couldn’t fix them, she was no superhero after all, so she concentrated instead on her schoolwork and her life after here. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, then she was gone—Vassar—driven away with no thought of ever coming back.
And yet here she was again, in every sense of the word. But if Anne had learned one lesson from her first foray into intimidation tactics, it was that there could be no new scandal, no newspaper articles, no lawsuits, and when the front-porch light switched on at Caroline Murphy’s house, Anne did not even flinch. She sat up, ready. This time she was here to kill the story.
* * *
A slight woman with long brown hair stepped outside and stood barefoot on the doormat, her gray corduroy pants sitting low on her narrow hips, a cardigan hugging her tight. She shielded her eyes against the overhead bulb and peered out at Anne.
Anne removed her key from the ignition, which had the unwelcome effect of illuminating the car’s interior. She hadn’t yet applied lipstick, hadn’t checked her hair. Worse, the taste of wine had worked its way back into her mouth, and Anne quickly hunted in her purse for a tin of mints, then popped in two and chewed.
“Hello?” Caroline called.
Anne opened her car door and stepped onto the front lawn, introducing herself using her real name.
“We need to talk,” said Anne.
Caroline laced her fingers across her waist and said, “My son’s asleep,” but Anne was already mounting the porch steps; she waited for Caroline to open the door for her, then filed through.
Noting the collection of footwear in the front hall, Anne asked if she should remove her shoes.
“You don’t have to,” said Caroline, but Anne slipped out of her heels, watching Caroline from the corner of her eye. She was petite, with pale skin and full lips, her face scrubbed clean and her eyebrows uneven, as though she’d given up plucking midway through. Anne had expected her to be younger—with a five-year-old, she might easily have been in her twenties—but crow’s-feet and a smattering of grays at her hairline put her closer to Anne’s age.
Anne lined up her heels alongside a pair of duck boots and two tiny Spider-Man slippers, while Caroline dipped into a wicker basket of woolens and retrieved a blue-and-white-striped scarf, wrapping it over her shoulders and around her neck, then pulling her hair free. Her jaws worked a piece of gum, the smell of spearmint filling the air.
Anne indicated that Caroline should lead the way, then tiptoed behind her in case the child was a light sleeper. The house smelled faintly of mildew, that summer-camp scent of rain-weathered canvas and damp wool. It was sharp but not unpleasant; it heightened Anne’s sense of being on a trip.
Caroline led her into the den, which was a cozy mess, all pillows and newspapers and tattered quilts. She invited Anne to sit anywhere, but a cache of knitting supplies had booby-trapped the couch. The only open seat was a child’s Adirondack chair pushed right up to the screen of a thirteen-inch television set.
“Shit,” said Caroline, registering Anne’s hesitation. She started to clear the couch, placing one item at a time in an oversize canvas carryall, but Anne abruptly picked up a jumbo-size papier-mâché frog from the seat of a cane rocking chair and set it on the floor.
“This will be fine,” she said.
“Can I get you something to drink?” asked Caroline carefully. “Juice? Tea?”
Anne had had it with the tea; what she really wanted was a cocktail but instead asked for water, no ice.
While Caroline was in the kitchen, Anne swiveled to detail the room: two bookshelves dotted with glazed ceramic vases and lined with titles like Encounters with the Archdruid and Desert Solitaire, along with a sizable collection of art books; a rattan area rug overlapped with patchy Oriental carpets, one frayed, one with a hole in the middle, one that seemed to be torn in half; a stack of Barney videos on top of a VCR; a Hockneyesque photo collage of a snow-covered fir tree; and an alcove with a large wooden easel pitched over a paint-splattered floor, the back of a stretched canvas barely visible.
Caroline returned from the kitchen with two handmade ceramic mugs and handed one to Anne, then perched at the edge of the couch.
“Are you painting?” asked Anne, pointing to the alcove.
“It’s just something I’ve been playing around with,” said Caroline.
“A nude of my husband?” asked Anne, and Caroline didn’t speak, did not even move.
“Look,” said Anne, “I don’t know if Hugh told you, but I’m the lawyer for the Seedlings School in addition to being the principal’s wife. As I understand it, your ex-husband is planning to file a negligence claim.”
“I—” Caroline’s voice quavered, her mug in a death grip. “He said he was looking into the fall but I’ve already told him I don’t want any part in it,” she said. “Even if we’d been there, Graham could’ve fallen.”
There went proximate cause. Anne wished to God this were admissible.
“Just to be clear,” said Anne, “if he does file a claim, and this does go to trial, you can’t testify. It will come out that you had sex with my husband in your son’s hospital room.”
“We didn’t … I mean—”
“You mean you would have had sex, but then your son woke up. Hugh already told me.”
Caroline stared into her mug, and Anne wondered if she were wishing it were wine as much as Anne was.
“Look at me,” said Anne.
Caroline looked up.
There were so many ways Anne could go with this—guilt (do you make a habit of sleeping with other women’s husbands?), shame (this is my family; we have children at home), threat (if you come near my husband again, you’ll find yourself back in family court)—but they all felt scripted. Frankly, Anne didn’t care what this woman did with her life; her only concern was her family.
So, a question for Caroline: Had it really been only that one time? If so, maybe their marriage was salvageable.
“This afternoon,” said Anne. “My son saw Hugh kiss you in your driveway.”
“Oh, God,” said Caroline. She set her mug on the carpet and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, as though testing for a fever.
But it was Anne who felt feverish, in the grip of a life-threatening disorder, the end of her marriage.
“You did sleep with him, then,” said Anne.
The look on Caroline’s face told her all she needed to know.
Anne stopped rocking and put the mug on the floor. She liked water in water glasses and couches you could sit on and television screens you could actually see. She favored books with plots—novels, mysteries—over end-of-times histories more alarming even than her own. Caroline was not a younger, fresher version of Anne; she was a different person, and if this was what Hugh wanted, Anne couldn’t give it to him.
She took a deep breath and measured out her exhale
. Her entire life’s purpose reduced to a single goal: to get out of this house without crying.
“Thank you,” said Anne brightly, standing to go.
“Can I—”
“Please,” said Anne. She stalked past Caroline to the entry hall, fumbling for her shoes. As she slipped her heels on, Anne looked into the wicker basket, and there it was, the sleeve of her husband’s sweater, folded in with the rest of the family’s clothes. She started to take it—evidence—then changed her mind. What would she want with it? She needed no reminders of this day.
Anne squared to Caroline, towering over her. “The first thing that needs to happen is that I dispense with this negligence claim.”
Caroline ducked her head, listening.
“Until then, there can be no contact.”
Caroline nodded, and though Anne had no reason to trust this woman, she also had no choice.
“I’m sorry,” said Caroline, and Anne held up her hand but she couldn’t stop it, the lifetime of hurt barreling toward her, coming so fast and hard that the walls would break, but what did it matter, and what did it matter? Everything she’d believed in—her parents, her marriage—was already lost, so let this woman see her cry, let this woman see how deadly fucking hurt she was. And be scared, thought Anne. For the last vestiges of her love—Teddy and Julia—she would stop at nothing.
In the driveway, Anne buckled her seat belt and started the car. Sober, focused, calm, she backed into the tire ruts and eased onto Route 166, then set off in silence, wind battering the windows, the reach of her headlights on the road remarkably bright. Twenty years ago she had been after perfection, a husband who would never let her down. Now they were kicking just to stay afloat, and Anne wondered what it would feel like to let go. Was this what her mother had been trying to tell her out at her father’s farm, that there was love in the letting go? Anne had believed—how had she believed this?—that her mother would be with her at the end of her own life, that if Anne had come into this world with Joanie, then she must also leave with her, and yet Joanie was gone, and the tears that had eluded Anne at her mother’s funeral now sleeted her cheeks, a sob with no end, and it was unexpectedly comforting to finally feel it.
Close to midnight, Anne pulled into the driveway on Susquehanna Avenue, and if she’d expected Hugh to meet her at the front door, she was grateful when he didn’t. Inside, she crept toward the kitchen, leaving her keys on the center-hall table. The house was silent; maybe everyone was already asleep.
Then Hugh emerged from the den with deep red lines impressed on his face: the corduroy couch. She could tell he’d been sleeping downstairs and realized they might never share a bed again. Anne took a deep breath and held it, considering the individual moments of their marriage that had led them here, hairline fissures across their past when she and Hugh had stood on opposite sides of the cracks. If she had been honest with him about her childhood, could they have prevented this, or, like ice floes in the ocean, had they been destined to drift apart?
“I don’t think she’ll testify,” Anne offered.
“What did she say?” asked Hugh.
Anne looked past him to the cavern of their den and saw that he’d already placed a blanket at the end of the couch. A thousand thoughts chased through her mind as she tried to compose a response. “Hugh,” she began, but before she could continue she heard footsteps on the back stairs, and Anne looked up to find her father’s slippers descending into view.
11
When he slept, he dreamed, and Joanie was there. Bob, she said, I do not have all day. Either make up your mind to mow the lawn or I’ll get Ruth Potter’s son over here to do it. She wore a sleeveless dress with a floral print and it looked pretty on her, but he didn’t say so. Ruth Potter. Before Bob could stop her, Joanie had picked up the yellow rotary phone and dialed, then Bob listened but he couldn’t hear.
In the hallway outside his bedroom: thunder. Clodhopping monkeys, wooden-soled devils, his grandchildren pounding down the stairs. He heard Teddy say something about fainting, but it would take a great deal more than that to get Bob out of bed. He reached for the glass of water Joanie always left him, passing his hand over pill bottles and wadded tissues, a folded newspaper and a pair of reading glasses, his fingers hovering spectrally, then folding into a weak fist as he remembered that Joanie wasn’t here.
Bob had aged a year for each of the nine days his wife had been gone. His only solace: at this rate it wouldn’t be long until he followed her into the grave. At eighty-six, he wasn’t afraid to die but he hadn’t anticipated the pain. A battery of daily pills—digitalis and diuretics and vasodilators, in blue and orange and white; giant nutlike things that he could barely choke down—eased the symptoms of his congestive heart failure but turned an unchristian eye on the rest of his body. When he walked, his joints ached; when he slept, his calves bloated up like wet loaves of bread. Nausea, dry mouth, incontinence; dizziness, headache, irregular heartbeat. For every new complaint, Dr. Brash’s pen flew across his prescription pad, until Bob was in possession of a Russian nesting doll of pills to treat problems caused by pills to treat problems, all the way back to the tiniest doll, his failing heart.
Bob’s bladder was awake again and he had no choice but to tend to it. He needed those pads but couldn’t figure out how to ask his daughter for them. At the house last week, Anne had found his supply under the bathroom sink and assumed they were for her mother; now they were gone, with all the rest of his things.
At the count of three, he pushed off the mattress and grabbed hold of the nightstand. Dr. Brash extolled the benefits of a walker but Bob couldn’t keep track of his—always downstairs when he was upstairs, in the bathroom when he was in bed, like a stooped silver man haunting him through the house, his feet lovingly retrofitted with Julia’s tennis balls.
A series of night-lights lit the path across the rug to the bathroom, where, without Joanie to reprimand him, Bob had left the seat up again. Dr. Brash recommended that he sit to urinate, but Bob had a bit of dignity left, thank you very much. Holding on to the pedestal sink, he turned his eyes to the mirror, and he could almost believe he was looking at a photograph of his father: white hair circled the base of his scalp and made a fan of wisps on top of his head. Whatever muscles he’d had in his youth had gone the way of his cartilage—he was a pair of blue pajamas on a wire coat hanger, and it was hard to believe he’d grown so old when it seemed like only yesterday that he’d begun to grow up.
Bob shook and flushed and returned to bed, careful not to look at the clock, then pulled the covers up to his chin and nestled in. For fifty-four years, he and Joanie had shared a bed, chasing each other left to right and headboard to footboard across the matrimonial battlefield of their queen-size mattress, and now Bob couldn’t sleep without her. When Joanie had been cross, he’d burrowed under her pillow, trying to conciliate her until she’d ceded her cushion and slunk sleepily away. When Bob had been distant, Joanie had cleaved to him while he slithered to the edge of their mattress with his eyes on the window, on the street, on the village and the whole world beyond. Times when Bob and Joanie had fought, they’d shared one pillow, keeping a watchful eye on each other from the center of the mattress while their bodies forked apart, Bob once waking to find Joanie’s feet squarely on the carpet, as though she were preparing to run away. Bob couldn’t know how Joanie had slept on the nights when he wasn’t there, but he had an idea that it was straight across the bed: there had never been a centerline between them.
Bob reached across the nightstand and switched on the light, sending an orange glow over the room. Anne had given him a bureau for his sweaters and cleared a closet for his slacks and shirts, but all his things were still folded in his suitcase at the foot of the bed. Bob needed to believe this situation was temporary, and he hadn’t objected when Anne had said he could bring only a few possessions: his beetle collection; his hat stand, though no one but him wore hats anymore; his trombone, which he’d played in the marching band in hig
h school and also in the Navy in Charleston a lifetime ago. Next to the lamp, he’d put up a framed picture of Joanie, her chestnut hair curled at her shoulders and pinned back by two silver barrettes, her lips painted red. They’d been on their way to a dance somewhere, and although Bob didn’t remember the dance, he did remember the afterward. Even when he’d wondered what someone else’s body might look like in comparison, he had loved his wife.
How horrible to discover, after all these years, that Joanie had kept that book. Bob had been so certain she’d gotten rid of it, a gesture of absolution, forgiveness in their final act, but no, it’d been right under his mattress this whole time, trying to tickle his memory, to force him to look back. After he’d endured for years the sight of The Sex Cure flapped open on the coffee table, left on the kitchen counter, winged across his recliner when he came home from work, Joanie had brought it right into their bedroom with them, and Bob couldn’t understand it—what did she want from him that he could still give?
Discordant notes of deafening music sounded from his grandson’s bedroom next door and Bob dreamed of having the energy to charge over there and jerk the cord out of the wall. There was a disturbing lack of discipline in this household. Not only had Teddy cut school this afternoon and destroyed a thousand-dollar baseball card, he’d stuck his nose in his father’s business, where it didn’t belong. He was too big for his britches, but rather than reminding the boy of his place Anne had taken Teddy’s side and now Hugh was in the doghouse while Teddy was feeling his oats and what Bob wanted to know was, who was in charge around here?
Bob pulled the pillow over his head and closed his eyes. All the pieces of his life were in place except one: ventricular fibrillation or acute pulmonary edema; confined to the ICU or quickly and mercifully in his own bed? Any which way, Bob was ready. He thought of his friend Roy Lamb out at the nursing home on Beaver Meadow Road, where Joanie and Bob had visited once a month. Remember Nona Fredrickson? Bob would ask, stealing a look at Joanie, then running his hands down his sides in the shape of a Coke bottle. Remember the rope swing we tied to Mr. Wyatt’s rotten elm tree? For one glorious week, they’d taken turns swooping out over the sun-sparkled lake, letting go at the last possible second, then wheeling into the water with satisfying splashes. Roy looked at his Velcro shoes, at his plastic water bottle, at the two people sitting across from him, side by side, and Bob could see that Roy no longer remembered. The mind wanted to forget, it bent toward letting go; it took work to hold on to all these thoughts, and yet here was Bob with a lifetime of memories nipping at his heels.
Love All: A Novel Page 23