by John Langan
All of which is to say, my suspicions of Roger receded pretty quickly. Nor did I have any designs on him. I found him incredibly attractive, more so than I would have expected I could a man his age. I didn't know exactly how old he was, but he had to be at least the same age as my mother, and I've never been one for crushes on my parents' friends. As a group, they've pretty much seemed . . . old. Not that they don't have their virtues, but the times I met my dad's work buddies, they all seemed distant, preoccupied, which no doubt they were, with their jobs, their families, paying the mortgage or the car. Roger was different. He was so—dynamic, and he had the ability to make you feel that all of that energy was focused on you. He had these green, green eyes. It was not hard to imagine those eyes looking into yours. That's why—when a woman becomes involved with an older—a much older man, the conventional wisdom is that she's looking for her father. Otherwise, how could she possibly be interested in this guy? I can't speak for everyone, but in my case, nothing could have been further from the truth. If I looked hard enough, I'm sure I could find similarities between Roger and my dad, but the point is, I'd have to make an effort to find them. Dad was low-key, funny in a goofy sort of way, a huge sports fan—when he died, one of my biggest regrets was that he never made it to the Super Bowl, or the World Series. He read, but it was mostly James Clavell and James Michener, big fat bug-crushers that he liked for what they told him about the Space Program, or Alaska, or Feudal Japan.
Whatever I might have felt, I was sure there was no way Roger would be interested, so I put any thoughts in that direction away. And for the longest time, nothing happened. When I invited Roger over to watch Nicholas Nickleby on Turner Classic Movies, there was no ulterior motive. It's funny. I still remember the date: March 1. From the moment I opened the door, he seemed awfully nervous, and I couldn't figure out why until, on his way out the door, he leaned over and kissed me. What a kiss that was. It was like, my eyes opened and I thought, "Oh." All the pieces fell into place or something. His breath tasted of the wine we'd been drinking. I kissed him back, and he put his arms around me. We—he didn't make it home that night, or the next one, either, which was no big deal, because Joanne was staying at her sister's in Manhattan for the week. Who knows what would've happened if she'd been at home? No, that's not true. Roger and I were inevitable. If it hadn't happened then and there, it would've someplace else.
That first night, afterwards, when we were lying in my bed together, holding each other the way you do after your first time with someone, I asked Roger if he'd planned this.
No, he said, although he'd hoped.
Had he done this before?
Never.
Then why now? Why me?
"I had to take the chance," he said.
By now, the sun had put in its daily appearance, the apartment filled with brightness. On their way out the door, the cop without the black eye had told me I could come for Roger and Ted at nine a.m. I supposed there was still enough time for a couple hours' nap if I felt like it, but I didn't, so I headed for the bathroom and the shower.
From the start, Roger's and my affair burned pretty hot. We couldn't get enough of each other, and discretion was not our strong suit. It only took three weeks for what was going on between us to come out, and, in retrospect, I'm surprised we managed to keep it quiet that long. There were a few close calls. You know that Roger and I were discovered by Joanne—"caught," was what she said when she opened the door to his study. She gasped and said, "I caught you!" Like a line from a bad play. She'd probably been rehearsing it. She had to have suspected something. Roger was gone from the house for more and more of each day; he returned later and later each night; he seemed happier than he had in years. How could Joanne not think he was seeing someone new? This part of our relationship—I don't know. When it was taking place, our affair seemed like the most important thing in the world. It had a consecration of its own. It was new and fresh and sure this kind of thing had happened before—how many of the college's faculty are on their second or third marriage?—but not like this, not in this way. I would think that it was like Jane Eyre. Here I was, the bright young independent woman, and here was Roger, Rochester, older, kind of cantankerous, living in this big house with an awful wife. Yes, I know the comparison's a stretch, but that was okay. If I couldn't find an exact parallel for our situation, that only emphasized its originality, you know?
Then Joanne walks in on us on the fold-out couch in Roger's office and it's, "I caught you!" and suddenly I didn't know what to think. Maybe my—our story wasn't that new. Maybe it was more a farce than a romance—some kind of second-rate Peyton Place. It turns out there is a precedent for what you've been doing. You just didn't see it because you were looking for it under literature, and it's filed under trash. Didn't Tolstoy say that God is a lousy novelist? Seems like it, sometimes, doesn't it?
Joanne was wearing a vanilla blouse and brown slacks. She stared at us trying to wrap this tiny blanket around ourselves; she hit her mark and delivered her line; she walked out. Roger was buttoning up his shirt when we heard her Mercedes start. He ran for the door, but Joanne put the pedal to the floor and peeled out of there. We stayed where we were, Roger, his shirt half-buttoned, untucked, no socks or shoes, his hand outstretched for the doorknob, me, still holding that blanket up in front of me, my hair in my eyes. For the last twenty-one days, we'd been living in our own private world full of secrets, secret signals, secret jokes, secret meetings. The rest of the world—what I thought of as the real world, which is strange, now that I think of it, because what we were doing was as real as it gets—the real world felt incredibly far away. We were living—if I call it a fairy tale, I'm not trying to be sappy or romantic—I mean, Roger was a little old to be playing Prince Charming, and my credentials for the part of Snow White were seriously lacking. It's just there was that same sense you have living in a fairy tale that here is a world that operates according to different rules than the ones we're used to. Mirrors can answer questions; animals can speak; there are dwarfs and witches and glass slippers. When we could tear ourselves apart for a minute—usually at the diner—we'd talk about where this thing was leading. We knew there would be consequences to what we were doing—we knew it, though we didn't really believe it. Consequences was just a word.
When Joanne stood there looking at us, however—when she tore out of that driveway like a bat out of hell—it was like our private fantasy world came smashing into this one. All the things we'd talked about, the possibilities we'd discussed, up to and including Roger leaving Joanne and moving out to my place, went from so many words to real possibilities. Yes, we had what we wanted. Isn't there a curse that goes, "May you get what you want"? Here we were, where we wanted to be, and it froze us.
But we thawed. I fully expected Roger to panic, say, "This has been nice, but I have a marriage to think about." I'm no fatalist, myself. It's just, they'd been together for thirty-five years. When Roger and I started sleeping together, I'd promised myself I wouldn't be stupid. I knew how I felt about him, and I thought I knew how he felt about me, but love doesn't always win the day, does it? I'd take this for what it was worth, get what I could out of it, but I had no doubt it was temporary. Even during our most—intimate moments together, this little voice in the back of my head kept reminding me, "This won't go on forever."
How shocked was I when Roger turned to me and said, "Get dressed: we have to go to the bank immediately"? All their accounts were joint, and he was afraid Joanne was on her way to empty them. "In case she's been there already, how are you for cash?" he asked as I pulled on my jeans, and it was with that question that I realized I'd been wrong. This wasn't over; this was on its way to something else entirely. I finished dressing in a hurry. We went to the bank. Joanne hadn't cleaned out their savings, so Roger took half of what was there and opened his own account. We returned to the house, and sat in the kitchen eating left-over fried chicken. Later, we watched TV in the living room. Everything was so real. It was as
if we'd been living in a Monet, all fuzzy edges and warm glows, and suddenly been dumped into one of Lucian Freud's hyper-real canvases. I had this feeling—I was aware of shifting from one state to another, in a way I've been only a couple of times in my life.
A week later, Roger moved in with me. He and Joanne commenced their long and messy divorce. I became the Whore of Babylon. I'd rather not rehearse those couple of years. It would take me the rest of the night to catalogue what a complete and total bitch Joanne was. I mean, she broke into my apartment, for God's sake, and tossed it like some kind of amateur private eye. All the while, Roger and Joanne's old friends took her side, as if they had any idea what that marriage was really like. I guess the women were all afraid their husbands saw Roger as a secret hero, and the men were afraid they did, too. It was like high school, all over again. I always thought that, when you got older, you matured. How wrong was I? Here were these people two and three times my age, and we might as well have been passing notes in study-hall. Honestly, Roger and I were happy—you wouldn't believe how happy—but this childish stuff did get to us, sometimes.
The only people who weren't complete jerks to us were Addie and Harlow. I can remember how surprised—how pleasantly surprised I was the Saturday afternoon my phone rang and it was Addie, whom I didn't know, inviting us over for dinner. There was half a second when, as I was climbing the front stairs to their house, I panicked and was sure her invitation had been some kind of trap, and Joanne would be waiting for us, but I needn't have worried. Dinner could have been awkward—I mean, these guys went back to Roger and Joanne's arrival in Huguenot—but from the start, Addie made everything pleasant and comfortable. Thank God for her.
Even after an extra-long shower, there were more than three hours to go before I'd see Roger. I could have started to clean up the mess he and Ted had made, but I was more inclined to save that for him. I didn't want to be in the apartment anymore, however; so I decided that there were worse ways to kill some time than reading that day's Times over breakfast at the Plaza Diner. It took me a while to dress, since I wasn't sure whether casual or formal was more appropriate for picking your husband up from jail. In the end, I decided on formal, a robin's egg suit with a white blouse. I put my hair up and left my glasses on, both to make me look older and more serious. Then I left the wreckage of my living space for an early-morning drive to All the News that's Fit to Print and a plate of eggs Benedict.
The whole time his parents' divorce was being fought out, we never saw or heard from Ted. I was sure he'd at least call or write a letter—this was the end of his parents' marriage, after all, and you know the first thing Joanne did the day she left was phone Ted and give him her version of what had happened. I wanted Roger to call him and explain his side of things. Otherwise, I said, it made it look as if Roger was admitting he'd done something wrong. No, no, he said, it was already too late. Ted would be only too happy to believe his father was the villain. I didn't argue with him—he'd obviously made up his mind, and we had other things to worry about—though I thought about writing to Ted myself. Roger deserved to have someone offer his perspective. But when I sat down at the computer, I didn't know what to say. I couldn't figure out how to begin. "Hi, this is the woman your father left your mother for"? I couldn't see how to present Roger's version of events without seeming totally self-serving. I didn't want to do what Joanne had done, you know? There's still a file on my hard drive called "Ted Letter." Open it, and you see a blank screen.
No, all the while Joanne was breaking into my apartment, and sending me hate mail, and calling and screaming at me, we didn't hear from Ted. The times I brought him up to Roger, he said that Ted's silence spoke volumes, didn't it? All the bitterness and anger he'd felt about Ted as a teenager hadn't left him. He'd stored it, put it in boxes and tried to forget it, until he went looking for it again and found it was still bright and shiny as ever. This was when I understood how much Ted had hurt him—over a morning cup of coffee, I realized that he despised his son. It was frightening, to think that a parent would feel that way about their child. I mean, from everything Roger told me, Ted wasn't half as bad as I'd been when I was his age, and my parents never despised me. (I don't think they did, anyway.) If we hadn't been where we were—if those feelings hadn't come out of storage so recently—maybe it wouldn't have bothered me as much. But I felt like I was living with someone who had a loaded gun by the side of the bed.
(What is it Chekhov said? If you're going to introduce a gun in act one of your drama, it must be fired by act three? Something like that.)
And then came the wedding. Roger and I weren't planning it. He was barely out of his first marriage; I was content to wake up next to him each morning. We didn't need to get married. The next thing, I found out I was pregnant. We'd been rolling the dice—Roger wasn't much good with condoms, and I honestly didn't think anything would happen. Yes, stupid—and wrong. It was after the divorce was finalized. Roger had given Joanne everything—he said he wanted to make a clean break—everything except the house. That was what made the divorce take twice as long as it should have: Belvedere House. As if it hadn't seen enough misery, already. First Joanne wanted it and Roger thought it should be sold. Then he wanted it and she thought it should be sold. Then they both wanted it sold but couldn't agree how to split the proceeds. And so on. Finally, they negotiated this ridiculously complex deal, the upshot of which was that the house wasn't sold. It was rented, with the profits put into three accounts, one each for Roger and Joanne, and one for maintenance of the place. I'd suggested that exact solution to Roger a year before, but did he listen to me? No.
Anyway, I started to feel nauseated. After about three days of being unable to keep down anything more substantial than water and saltines, I started to suspect I might be pregnant. I was in denial for the next week, then I bought a home pregnancy test and confirmed it. That's the reason I married: my sixty-four-year-old boyfriend knocked me up. Neither of us was brave enough not to marry. For Roger, it had to do with the way he'd been brought up, which it did for me, too—but there was more to my decision. Once I'd decided I was going to have this baby, the prospect of everything ahead of me was overwhelming. I felt alone and terrified. Had Roger not proposed to me—which he did when I brought the home test out of the bathroom to show him: he looked up from the couch and said, "Does this mean you'll marry me?"—if he hadn't popped the question, I probably would've kicked him out.
As it was, he did, so the next day, we went to get our marriage license, and the day after that, at Town Hall, Judge Carol Tuttle officiating, I became the second Mrs. Roger Croydon. I wore a slate blue dress with a pale yellow jacket. Roger wore a shirt and tie and that blue blazer every English professor seems to have—they must get them with their doctorates. I was feeling pretty sick, and dizzy besides. I was afraid I was going to throw up on the judge. She was pretty annoying. Throughout the ceremony, she kept looking at us as if we were a sideshow attraction. "Come and see the woman who's marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather." Gasp. She was probably a friend of Joanne's.
For our wedding meal, Roger wanted to take me to the Canal House. It would have been a waste. The sight of anything more than crackers and a little clear broth was enough to send me running for the bathroom. Instead, Roger ordered a veal parm sub from Manzoni's, and we spent our wedding night curled up on the couch, watching an Outer Limits marathon on channel 11. At some point, Roger carried me through to bed, but it was just to tuck me in.
We kept the news of our marriage quiet, at first. It was nice to share a secret, again. We didn't tell anyone I was pregnant, either. We figured they'd know in due time. After a couple of weeks, when more people were noticing the plain gold bands on our fingers, we sent out notices to our families and friends. They were just plain white cards that said, "Roger and Veronica Croydon will be residing at 308 Springgrown Road, Huguenot, N.Y., 12561." Roger insisted on adding the first line of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet: "How do I love thee? Let me cou
nt the ways," which I thought was too much, but he wanted to make a point. Almost everyone ignored us, except for Addie and Harlow, who sent a beautiful card, a massive floral arrangement, and a cappuccino machine. Oh, and my mother called from California.
I haven't said that much about her, have I? Suffice it to say, I've pretty much been on my own since I was sixteen. Until then, we'd had your more-or-less standard nuclear family, dad, mom, kid. Then the dad died, the mom went to pieces, and the kid was left to fend for herself. You know who got me into Penrose; who filled out the admission forms, the financial aid forms; who went to meeting after meeting with this financial aid person and that scholarship representative? It wasn't Mom. Until the middle of my freshman year at college, she didn't do much more than sit on the couch and watch old videos of her and Dad. Nobody's grief was as profound as hers. She loved to say, "My father died, too, so I understand what you're going through. But you've never lost a spouse." I swear, I could have screamed. Anyway, over Christmas break, my first year at Penrose, she decided she'd been in mourning long enough and what she needed was a change of scenery. Her younger sister, Aunt Shirley, had invited her to come out to Santa Barbara for a while, maybe think about relocating there. Mom expected me to come with her. I had no intentions of leaving school. There was a huge fight, the upshot of which was that she moved to California, I stayed where I was and got an apartment, and we didn't see or hear that much of one another. I must've talked to her during the time after Roger and I got together, but it wasn't more than half a dozen times, and never for very long. I'd mentioned I was involved with someone, and pretty seriously, but she hadn't shown any interest beyond a, "How nice for you," so I hadn't felt obliged to fill her in on the details.