“But that’s what usually happens when—”
“Oh, no doubt. But he might have offered us some guidelines to rise above—”
“But he did. That’s the point.” But before she can expound on the point, the buzz becomes a roar and the point begins to recede. She stares at Daniel’s eager face with her mouth opened. Then, just as the point is rotating, possibly coming back to her, Brigit begins to cry. She holds up one finger to let Daniel know that she’ll be right back to him and turns her attention to Brigit, who has dropped her slice of bread. She glances at Pete and sees that he is laughing heartily, bobbing his head and holding his hand out a few inches from his mouth as if he might want to cover it soon. With her finger still up in the air, she sits back and searches the carpet. She spots the bread under the table and bends to retrieve it. She hears Gladys say something about Dow Jones, and she thinks to herself, Good, they’re only talking about the stock market, laughing about the stock market. But then she wonders if maybe Gladys said Tom Jones, and half-submerged beneath the table, she hesitates for a second to see whether Gladys will go on to clarify the matter. Then Brigit, whose hands she knows are smeared with food, yanks on her sleeve, and in her instinctive concern for her shirt, she re-emerges without the bread and before she can make sense of what she has just seen beneath the table.
She lowers the finger she was holding up for Daniel and gives Brigit another slice of bread. Then she stares across the table to give her mind the moment it needs to settle itself. The image recreates itself for her—Gladys’ stockinged foot at work on Pete’s shoeless one, his black sock pushed down over his heel so that it was apparent that their feet had been thus entangled for some time. Yes, that is exactly what she saw.
… LIZ
Their method of contraception, from after Katie’s birth and up until they decided to bring Brigit into the world, was a diaphragm. And one night, just after Liz had installed it, she came out of the bathroom to find Jake, whose bedroom is across the hall, snickering. She asked him what he was laughing at and he pointed to his father, who was just entering the bedroom at the end of the hall. When Pete had closed the door behind him, Jake said, “What were you doing in there?” “What do you mean, what was I doing?” Liz demanded. Gleefully, Jake responded, “Whatever you were doing, Dad was watching you.” Then he put his finger up to his lips and pulled Liz into his room and proceeded to tell her about how he had been sitting on his bed, playing Nintendo, when all at once, through his slightly opened door, he saw his father bending down to plant his eye against the bathroom door’s keyhole.
Of course Liz didn’t believe him. Jake has always been easily stirred to exaggeration. And she’d watched him play Nintendo enough times to know that someone could come to his door with a sawed-off shot-gun and he wouldn’t take much notice. And furthermore, she was certain beyond a doubt that Pete was incapable of doing such a thing. She concluded that Pete had dropped something while passing the bathroom door—maybe one of those scraps of paper he scribbles on when he has a notion about something he’s working on—and that Jake had happened to glance up just as he was bending to retrieve it. And to get Jake to understand that there are consequences to telling such stories, she threatened to call Pete in and confront him. Jake pleaded with her then—his father’s admonishments are far more lengthy than his mother’s—but he insisted that he was sure he saw what he’d said he had.
If anyone did any peeking, Liz decided in the end, it was Jake. And for sometime after that, until she eventually forgot the incident, she draped a towel over the door knob whenever Jake was about. It’s been years since she’s even thought of it. But as they are driving home from the Morgans’, she asks herself, What do I really know about Pete? and it shoots up into her mind as if it’s been sitting right there at the summit of her subconscious since its inception.
If Pete could carry on with one of his employees, Pete who she’s never even seen flirt before, then it seems altogether possible that he could be a voyeur as well. Writers are voyeurs; he says so himself—though she never before suspected he meant it literally. And she hates him as much for being that as she does for being a rake—or maybe she hates him because after all their years together, after the births and the deaths and the laughter and the tears, the trivialities and the significances, the shared weight of sustained melancholia and the first tentative glimmers of hope, she doesn’t know him at all.
“Have a nice time?” he asks once the kids have settled down in the back seat. He is all smiles. Liz nods and looks out the window at the rain that is pouring down.
“I think it went really well,” he continues. “They’re an awfully nice couple. And wasn’t it sweet of Gladys to make me a birthday cake?” He laughs. “I have no idea how she knew it was my birthday. Judy must have told her.”
Liz has many things to say to Pete, but she can’t very well say any of the important ones with the kids there. Still, she feels inclined to vent her anger just a bit. “Well,” she begins, “you wouldn’t be saying she was so nice if you’d heard the way she went on about her husband when you two were outside getting Brigit’s stuff. She really put him down. It was all so … petty. I mean, she doesn’t even know me, and here—”
He interrupts with an abrupt laugh. “That’s Gladys, Liz. She says exactly what she’s thinking. She doesn’t worry about how it sounds. She’s just very … lively.”
“Lively?” she asks, trying to control the quiver in her voice.
“Like when the phone rings at work. You know how the kids always look up when the phone rings—as if it might be someone calling to say that we just won a vacation to Disney World? Well, of course, it’s Judy’s job to answer the phone, but whenever it rings, Gladys lifts her head like that, so that you can tell she’d like to answer it herself. She likes to talk to people, to laugh with people, to say what’s on her mind. She moves fast, you know? She works fast. She’s just … lively.”
Liz can’t imagine why he should be telling her all this. Isn’t her resentment scrawled all over her face? Hasn’t he heard the tremor in her voice? “I don’t know,” she says. “Sometimes I think you live in a fantasy world—”
He gives her a sidelong glance. “A fantasy world! Exactly what do you mean by that?”
“Watch the road,” she says, and she determines to say nothing more, but she can’t help herself. “She’s shallow, Pete. She removed the linen napkins I set out and replaced them with paper ones. She doesn’t give a hoot about the environment, for God’s sake. I thought she was incredibly … self-centered.”
Pete throws out one hand from the steering wheel. “Linen napkins, paper napkins. I’ll tell you what, Liz. I may live in a fantasy world, but that’s better than the gloomy place where you dwell. You accuse her of being petty and then you tell me about the kind of napkins she uses! And I really don’t know how you arrived at ‘self-centered.’ She likes herself, yes. But you have to like yourself somewhat in order to like other people.” He gives her a purposeful look. “She’ll go on about herself as long as you let her, but it’s all amusing stuff, and when she sees you have something to say, she can be a very good listener too.”
Liz feels like weeping. But as usual, the tears don’t come. “She’s very pretty, I’ll say that,” she concedes. Then she turns to see whether the kids are all asleep. “Why’d you say she was just so-so, Pete?”
He jerks his head toward her, but keeps his eyes on the road. “Did I say that?”
“You did. I asked you if she was attractive and you shrugged and said, ‘She’s so-so.’”
He responds in a voice that is notably flat after all his recent enthusiasm. “I suppose I was thinking about something else at the time. Of course she’s attractive. That goes without saying.”
He is quiet after that. Liz gets to thinking that maybe he is wondering whether he made a mistake by telling her that Gladys was just so-so—a declaration which was obviously meant to throw her off the track—especially now that he’s gone on ravi
ng about her like that. She begins to rehearse the words that she is planning to use to confront him when they get home and get the kids to bed. She is looking forward to it. She hates him. He’s an imposter. She can’t wait to get started. She decided hours earlier that she’ll slap him first, just to make sure she has his full attention—and maybe, too, to release some of the hatred that is piling up inside her. She has never slapped him before. Her mind gets stuck on how good it will feel to have her hand stinging afterward. He’s always telling her that she’s emotionally detached, that by not permitting herself a physical manifestation to accompany her emotions, she is inhibiting the emotions themselves. “Was that physical enough?” she’s planning to say. But the going is slow because of the rain, and after awhile she finds her thoughts drifting away from their imminent encounter and toward the future.
If he admits that they have already been together—and she feels reasonably sure they have—how should she proceed? Should she ask him to leave? Certainly she can’t leave the house herself. If he leaves, then she could sleep in the living room and make their room into a sickroom. That would solve that problem. She’d have to get a job. She hasn’t worked in years. Who will hire her? Unemployment is incredibly high; so many people are out of work as it is. And whatever she makes, she’ll have to pay a sitter from it. And a nurse for Dad, too, since his own meager funds will be needed to supplement Sherri’s disability and keep up the house for her. How much would Pete be able to give her? Since Gladys came on the job, he’s invested a lot of money in the equipment she’s needed to set up the advertising division. The company is currently operating at a loss. And Pete will have to get a place of his own as well—maybe a place for the two of them. Gladys will want a nice place. It will have to be big enough for the kids to visit … the kids! What about them? Some of their friends’ parents are divorced. Will they be able to adapt? And what if they can’t?
The more she thinks about it, the more hopeless it all seems—a fact that makes her hate him all the more. She hates him now for all she is worth. She hates him as much for telling Gladys that she plans to put her father into a nursing home as she does for giving up his novel writing to begin a company that will, as far as she can tell, eventually become an advertising agency. She hates him for all the years that she loved him enough to tell him that she loved his novels when, in truth, the sight of one of his extended metaphors set her teeth on edge. And now to think that she has no choice but to forgive him and forget it and go on …
It occurs to her that maybe he won’t want to be forgiven. Maybe, in fact, he said Gladys was so-so purposely, raved about her purposely, so that she’d become suspicious and make it easier for him to tell her … what? That he doesn’t love her anymore? Yes, that’s the bottom line.
She feels something erupt inside her. Pete doesn’t love her anymore. If he is somber now, it’s because he’s considering what he’s set into motion and wondering how it will all turn out. She is devastated. Pete doesn’t love her anymore. She realizes that the thing that she’s been calling hatred all night is something else entirely. She is aware of herself as appearing calm, sitting with her hands folded on her lap, her unblinking gaze on the dark and the rain. But on the inside, a chasm is opening, and her emotions are pouring out of it. How will she get through her life without him? What kind of life will it be without the jolt of his sudden mood swings and the familiarity of his lengthy lectures and expositions? If she can no longer be witness to his irrational anxieties—his fanatical concern for everything from the quality of the cookies he bakes for Katie’s Brownie troop to the proper way to bathe the dog—will she ever be stirred to laughter again?
She remembers then that she got through the evening well enough, cunningly hiding her turmoil from the others. She carried Brigit up to the Morgans’ bedroom and rocked her to sleep with the image of Gladys’ toes caressing Pete’s ankle still stamped in her mind. But when she reappeared, she was calmer. She didn’t put the image aside; rather, she talked over it, functioned over it. She was cheerful, loud, even—talking over it like the narrator in Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart.” How she exclaimed about the cake! “Never tasted such a delicious … and the little flowerettes … However did you find the time? And the patience?… I could never …” And afterward, when Katie and Jake had gone off to watch television in the den, talking to Daniel about literature … Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”… “Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” And how she laughed then to hear Daniel and Shelley so blatantly describing what should have been her passion. And then the four of them in the living room, sipping brandy and talking about education, land taxes, the medicinal qualities of herbs. “All our knowledge is second-hand,” Pete said. “We don’t chew leaves anymore to see whether or not a plant is edible. We get a book and look it up. And what’s the result? We come to feel that we are insignificant—not true authorities on anything. And then when we do have an experience which seems uniquely our own, we cling to it, we refuse to give it up. That’s why there are so many drug addicts, alcoholics, obsessives who can’t let go …” And he looked at Liz so suddenly then, so severely, that for a second she thought he must be referring to her, to her experience of Maddy. But then she remembered that he couldn’t possibly know about that, that no one knew about that, and that therefore he had to be thinking of Katie and Isabel.
She decided to take an opposing view. After all, that is what adults do when they get together. They cleave to notions to which they never before gave a thought. They quote fragments from poems they remember from their school days. They strive to confirm that they are cultured, educated, intelligent, well-informed.
She filled the room with words that meant nothing. She told them to consider the new computer technology, Virtual Reality, where people are able to view the three-dimensional surroundings of their choice, where they can travel to foreign countries or place themselves in challenging situations, move, shoot, crouch, whatever they want. She told them about the theme parks which will soon open all over the country, where you will be able to walk into a movie theater, step into a “virtual space,” and take part in the three-dimensional adventure that is going on. “People choose not to have first-hand experiences anymore,” she declared. “That’s not what they want. They prefer the second-hand. They’re easier to come by, less time-consuming.” And she gave Pete the same look he had given her a moment earlier … Pete, the secondhand man, making his living writing down other people’s experiences …
She drank, she laughed, she nodded her head and encouraged the others to put forth their insignificant, impromptu notions—and all the while it was there in front of her … her toes, his shin, the empty shoes, the declining sock.
Pete carries Katie up and Liz takes Brigit. Then she goes back out again to awaken Jake. As she is steering him through the living room, he catches sight of the sofa and collapses on it. She has to haul him up again, guide him up the stairs, and strip him of his jacket and pants.
By the time she enters their room, Pete is already fast asleep. She throws off her wet coat and her jumper and turns on the reading lamp. He doesn’t stir. She climbs in beside him in her t-shirt and underpants saying, “Pete, Pete, wake up.”
She is surprised to note that her tone sounds almost apologetic, the weak whimpering of a wounded animal. Where is the slap she envisioned imparting? He is smiling in his sleep, dreaming already, and although it is surely Gladys who is the subject of his regard, she realizes she can no more slap a sleeping man than Hamlet could slay a praying one. She clears her throat and tries again to awaken him, but the effort wears her out. She decides that she can be more forceful in the dark and turns off the lamp. And then all at once, in that first instant of fading light, there is a displacement of molecules, a shifting of shadows, a flicker of illumination—Maddy.
She would have been thirteen. The sweep of her amorphous manifestations have gotten larger over the years, so that Liz suspects that even in the c
elestial domain in which she exists, she is growing.
Maddy is gone already, was disintegrating even as she was materializing. Still, Liz strains her eyes in the dark for her. Now she longs only for sleep. If it comes quickly enough, while Maddy’s image is still fresh in her head, maybe she will dream of her. Maybe in a dream she will speak. She can deal with Pete in the morning. He will take the kids to church like he always does, and then, when Katie and Jake run out afterward to play and Brigit goes down for her nap, she will have all the time she needs.
She turns onto her side and stares at the darkness. She yearns for Maddy to appear again, for the wisdom that emanates from her being. For a long time she is content to dwell on her, on the phenomenon of the appearances, which, after all these years, seems no less a strange and incredible gift. There is a danger here; she knows that too. Each time she sanctions Maddy’s appearance, she is flirting with madness. There are times she feels the pull. After all, she and Sherri have only different arrangements of the same genes.
Time passes and she remembers her situation. She finds herself going over the evening, over all the banal events that led up to her bending down to pick up a slice of bread. Sartre … she had been talking about Sartre, about how freedom meant deciding the perspective from which to view the obstacle. How many different ways are there to view this one? She turns the pillow at an angle—part for her head and part for her arm, but still she can’t get comfortable. She gets up and feels around on the chair for her bathrobe. She rolls it up and gets back into bed with it. She snuggles up against it, as she might have snuggled up against Pete under other circumstances.
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