by Unknown
Cocktail parties were lethal melees, wherein lovers with a murmur cancelled assignations or agreed upon abortions. Craig could see in his mind’s eye, in an upstairs hall, outside a bathroom, a younger woman, smooth of face and arm, coming at him with her lips shaped to bestow a kiss and saying, softly, “Chicken,” when he backed away. But for every moment he consciously remembered from that remote time there were hundreds he had forgotten and that fought back into his awareness in the tangle of these recurrent party dreams. His sensation in these dreams was the same: stage fright, a schoolboy feeling that what he was enacting was too big for him, too eternal in its significance.
He woke with relief, the turmoil slipping from him, his present wife absent from the bed and already padding around downstairs. Sometimes he awoke in a separate bed, because in his old age he helplessly, repulsively snored, and was consigned to the guest room. On his awakening there, his eyes found, on the opposite wall, a painting that had hung in his childhood home—in the several Pennsylvania homes his family had occupied. The painting, a pathetic and precious token of culture which his mother had bought for (if he remembered correctly) thirty-five dollars in a framer’s shop, depicted a scene in Massachusetts, some high dunes in Provincetown, with a shallow triangle of water, a glimpse of the sea, framed between the two most distant slopes of sand. Had it been this painting which had led him from that common-wealth to this one, to this hilltop house with its discreet view of the sea a third of a mile away?
Various other remnants of his boyhood world had washed up in the house: his grandfather’s Fraktur-inscribed shaving mug; a dented copper ashtray little Craig had often watched his father crush out the stubs of Old Gold cigarettes in; a pair of brass candlesticks, like erect twists of rope, that his mother would place on the dining-room table when she fed in-laws visiting from New Jersey. These objects had been with him in the abyss of lost time, and survived less altered than he. What did they mean? They had to mean something, fraught and weighty as they were with the mystery of his own transient existence.
“I’d give anything not to have married you,” Grace sometimes said, when angry or soulful. She carried into daylight, he felt, a grudge against him for snoring, though he was as helpless to control it as he was his dreams. “If only I’d listened to my conscience.”
“Conscience?” he said. Chicken, he remembered. “I don’t know about you, but I’m very happy. You’ve been a wonderful wife. Wonderful.”
“Thank you, dear. But it was just so wrong. That time upstairs at the Rosses’, the way you loped toward me in the hall, you were scary—like a big wolf out of the shadows. Your teeth gleamed.”
“Gleamed?” He couldn’t picture it. He had dull, tea-stained teeth; but he recognized that the gleam was something true and precious unearthed from deep within her, giving her past a lodestar, a figment to steer by.
She said, with a blush and downcast eyes, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but at times I think I hate you.”
I hate you: she did now and then proclaim this, and would disown the proclamation in the next breath; but Craig saluted the utterance as honest, gouged with effort from the compacted accumulation of daily pretense and accommodation. As well as love one another we hate one another, and even ourselves.
One day after school his younger son had somberly told him that Grace’s son, a year behind him at school, had confided that his parents were splitting up. Craig had sickened at the casual revelation, knowing the boy to be imparting news that would soon envelop him; his trusting child was standing on the edge of a widening chasm, a catastrophe his father was in the process of creating.
At the time he kept dreaming of, he had not had stage fright. Strange to recall, he had felt oddly calm, masterful, amid scandal and protest and grief. There had been a psychiatrist encouraging him. His mother, initially indignant, became philosophical, employing postmodern irony and a talk-show tolerance learned through hours of watching television. His children consoled themselves by thinking they would some day grow up and never be so helpless again. In abandoning his family, a man frees up a bracing amount of time. Craig found himself projected into novel situations—dawn risings from a strange bed, visits to lawyers’ offices, hotel stays hundreds of miles from home—and reacted like an actor who had rehearsed the lines he spoke, who had zealously prepared for this unsympathetic role, and played it creditably, no matter what the reviewers said. So why the stage fright now, in his sleep? It had been there all along, and was rising up into him, like his death.
Recently he had visited an old friend, a corpulent golfing buddy, in the hospital after a heart attack. Al lay with tubes up his nose and into his mouth, breathing for him. His chest moved up and down with a mechanical regularity recorded by hopping green lines on the monitor on the wall: a TV show, Al’s Last Hours. It was engrossing, though the plot was thin, those lines hopping on and on in a luminous sherbet green. Al’s eyelashes, pale and furry, fluttered when Craig spoke, in too loud a voice, as if calling from the edge of a cliff. “Thanks for all the laughs, Al. You just do what the nurses and doctors tell you, and you’ll be fine.” Al’s hand, as puffy as an inflated rubber glove, wiggled at his side, on the bright white sheet. Craig took it in his, trying not to dislocate the IV tubes shunted into the wrist. The hand was warm, and silky as a woman’s, not having swung a golf club for some years, but didn’t seem animate, even when it returned the pressure. Our bodies, Craig thought, are a ponderous residue the spirit leaves behind.
One of his childhood homes had been rural, with some acres attached, and while exploring those little woods alone one lonely afternoon he had come upon an old family dump—a mound, nearly grown over, of glass bottles with raised lettering, as self-important and enduring as the lettering on tombstones. Many of the bottles were broken, though the glass by modern standards was amazingly thick, a kind of rock candy, the jagged edge making a third surface, between the inside and outside. Malt-brown, sea-blue, beryl, amber, a foggy white, the broken glass bore the raised names of defunct local bottling works. The liquids the fragments had held were evaporated or had been drunk. For all the good or ill these beverages and medicines did, not so much as a scummy puddle inside an old tire was left. The pile had frightened little Craig, as a pile of bones would have done, with its proof of time’s depths, yet in his rural isolation it had provided for him, there in an unfrequented corner of the woods, a kind of glittering, obliviously cheerful company.
On his own acres, wandering, garbage bag in hand, in the lowland beyond the stray rock and the burned glove, he found a number of half-buried golf balls, their lower sides stained by immersion in the acid earth, the cut-proof covers beginning to rot. He remembered how, when first moving to this place, and still hopeful for his game, he would stand on the edge of the lawn and hit a few old balls—never more, thriftily, than three at a time—into the woods down below. They seemed to soar forever before disappearing into the trees. He had never expected to find them. They marked, he supposed, the beginning of his era.
Free
“SHE has such lovely eyes.” The remark had come from his mother, on one of her visits to the town where Henry and Leila, married to others, lived at the time. She could not have known that her son and Leila were having an affair—one which, like an escaped field fire, kept flaring up each time they thought they had stamped it out. But Leila would have known that this was her lover’s mother, and this knowledge would have injected an extra animation, an eye-sparkle, into the conversational courtesies she showed the older woman. Once, Leila’s mother had been the visitor to their superheated small town, and Henry had marvelled, looking at the stout, sixty-something woman’s profile at the little party her daughter gave for her, that a person so plain and sexless could have produced such a beauty, such a lithe and wanton fomenter of masculine bliss.
His mother’s remark had given his illicit passion a ghostly blessing, and the two women did share a love of nature—they knew the names of birds and flowers, and when he and Leila met i
t was often in the wild, in a lakeside cottage that a liberated friend, an older woman, lent her, on the woodsy far edge of an adjacent town. The off-season chill, and the musty smells of the canvas and wicker summer furniture and a bare mattress and a disconnected refrigerator, gave way to the aromas of their own naked warmth, as the lake glittered outside the window and squirrels pattered across the roof. Leila under him, he poured his gaze down into her widened eyes, which were indeed lovely—a hazel mixed of green and a reddish brown ringing the black pupils enlarged by the shadow of his head. There was a skylight in the cottage, and he could see its rectangle, raggedly edged with fallen twigs and pine needles, reflected in the wet convexity of her startled, transfixed eyes.
His mother had never warmed to his wife: Irene was too citified, too proper, too stoical. For Henry, she had been a step up, into a family of comfortably well-off lawyers, bankers, and professors, but in the small incessant society of their home her dispensations of intimacy were measured, and became more so rather than less. Henry tried to restrict his appetites to match, and rather enjoyed his own increasing dryness, his ever more effortless impersonation of a well-bred stick. His mother, whose ambitions for him took something florid from her unfulfilled hopes for herself, saw this domestic constriction and resented it; her resentment fortified him when, with Leila more intensely than with several others, he strayed from fidelity and inhaled the wild, damp air of outdoors.
Damp: he never forgot how Leila had abruptly stripped, one sunny but chill October day, and executed a perfect jackknife—her bottom a sudden white heart, split down the middle, in the center of his vision—into the lake, off the not yet disassembled dock and float. She surfaced with her head as small and soaked as an otter’s, her eyelids fluttering, and her mouth exclaiming, “Woooh!”
“Didn’t that kill you?” he asked, standing clothed on the wobbly float, glancing anxiously about for the spying strangers that all these autumnal trees might conceal.
“It’s ecstasy!” she told him, grimacing to keep her teeth from chattering. “If you go forward to meet it. Come on. Come in, Henry.” Treading water, she spread her arms and butterflied her body up so her gleaming breasts were exposed.
“Oh, no,” he said, “please,” yet had no choice, as he saw this erotic contest, but to drop his clothes, folding them well back from the splash, and to dare an ungainly, heart-stopping lurch into the black lake water. The pink leaves of swamp maples, withered into shallow boat-shapes, were floating near his eyes when he came up; his submerged body felt swollen and blazing, as if lightning had struck it. Leila was doing an efficient crawl—her tendony feet kicking up white water—away from him, toward the center of the lake. He gasped for breath, doggy-paddling back to the dock, and from this lower perspective saw the trees all around as the sides of a golden well, an encirclement holding him at the center of the circumscribed sky. This was one of those moments, it appeared to him, when a life reaps the fruits that nature has stored up. This was health: that little wet head, those bright otter eyes, that tufted, small-breasted body at his disposal when the electricity ebbed from his veins and their skins were rubbed dry on the towels Leila had foresightedly brought.
But even then the less healthy world intruded. He wondered if Irene would smell the black lake on him, with its muck of dead leaves. She would wonder why his hair was damp. He was not good at adultery, not as good as Leila, because he could not give himself, entirely, to the moment, rushing forward to meet it. His mother’s blessing did not save him from gastritis, and an ominous diagnosis from his doctor: “Something’s eating at you.”
The justice of the phrase startled Henry; his desire for Leila was a kind of beast. It would pounce at unexpected moments, and gnawed at him in the dark. “Work,” he lied.
“Can’t you ease up?”
“Not yet. I have to get to the next level.”
The doctor sighed and said—there was no telling, from his compressed and weary mouth, how much he guessed or knew—“In the meantime, Henry, you have to live on this level. Give up something. You’re trying to do too much.” This last was said with an emphasis that struck Henry as uncanny, like his mother’s blessing out of the blue. The air itself, his illusion sometimes was, hovered solicitously over him, superintending his fate while he plodded on in a fog.
He resigned from his church’s fund-raising drive, of which he was co-captain. This, and giving up coffee and cigarettes, made his stomach a little better, but it did not cease to chafe until Leila suddenly, for no reason she ever explained, confessed to Pete, her husband. Within the year, they moved to Florida; within a few more years, the word came back, they were divorced. Her marriage had always been mysterious to him. “He doesn’t need me,” she had once said, her eyes breaking into rare tears, while she focused somewhere over his shoulder. “He needs my asshole.” Henry couldn’t quite believe what he heard, and didn’t dare ask her to clarify. There were many things, it occurred to him, that he didn’t want to know. Though life brought him advancement at work, and vacations in Florida and Maine, and grandchildren, and, with Irene’s guidance, an ever more persuasive impersonation of a well-bred stick, there was never another love-beast; such fires burn up the field.
In time Irene died, of cancer in her sixties, and he was free. By way of his friends—those inescapable, knowing friends—he had kept track of Leila, and knew that she was again unmarried, after two post-Pete marriages: the first to an older man who had left her some money, the second to a younger man who had proved, of course, unsuitable. He learned her address, and wrote her a note suggesting he come see her. It had been his and Irene’s custom to visit Florida for two weeks in midwinter, staying at a favorite inn on an island off the Gulf Coast—more Irene’s favorite than his. The inn smelled of varnished pine and teak, and had stuffed tarpon and swordfish mounted in the long corridors, and photographs of old fishing parties and hurricane damage; on the sunny broad stair landings stood cased collections of shells, the ink on the dried, curling labels quite faded. It smelled of Florida when it was a far place, a rich man’s somewhat Spartan paradise, and not yet the great democracy’s theme park and retirement home. Yet since Irene’s death, after the two years of shared agony, of hospital trekking, of rising and falling hopes, of resolute hopelessness and then these posthumous months of relief and grief and numbingly persistent absence, Henry had grown timid of straying from the paths she had marked out for them to travel.
The inn was on the west coast, below Port Charlotte, and Leila’s condo was on the east coast, in Deerfield Beach, above Fort Lauderdale, so it proved an arduous drive, south and then east into the sun, against what felt like a massive grain in the scrubby Everglades landscape. The east-coast congestion—the number of aggressive dark-skinned drivers, the blocks of white-roofed one-story houses laid out for miles on the flat acres of sand—disoriented him. Old age, he was discovering, arrived in increments of uncertainty. Street signs, rearview mirrors, and his own ability to improvise could no longer be trusted. He asked directions three times, steering away from the young people on the bright streets and pulling up alongside skittish and wary seniors, before finding Leila’s condo complex; squintingly he doped out the correct entrance and where the parking area for visitors was hidden. He found himself inside a three-story quadrangle, each unit facing inward with a screened sunroom. Piece of scribbled paper in hand, he matched the number there to one on a ground-floor door. When his ring was answered, he had trouble relating the Leila of his memory and imagination to the tiny woman, her nut-colored face crisscrossed by wrinkles, who opened the door to him. Her face had seen a lot of sun in these past thirty years.
“Henry dear,” she said, in a tone more of certification than of greeting. “You’re over an hour late.”
“The drive was longer than I thought, and I kept going around and around within a couple blocks of here. I’m so sorry. You always said I was disorganized.” From the way she held her face up and motionless he gathered he was supposed to kiss it; he abr
uptly realized he had brought her no present. It had been the nature of their old relationship for him simply to bring his body, and she hers. Her cheek had a dry pebbled texture beneath his lips, but warm, like a dog’s paw pads.
“I can’t complain that lunch has gotten cold,” Leila said, “since it’s cold salad, chicken, in the fridge. I began to think you might not make it at all.”
More than once before, he had failed to show up—some sudden obstruction at work or in his duties at home. That her anger never lasted or triggered a permanent rupture had indicated to him that, strangely, he had a hold over her much like hers over him. How much had changed? In her voice he heard hardly a trace of Southern accent, just an erosion of the New England edges. But her manner was edgy enough. Had she become one of those spoiled, much-married women who say whatever rude sharp thing comes to them, take it or leave it, as if sassy were cute? Her clothes—lavender slacks, a peach silk shirt with the two top buttons undone, white platform sandals, magenta toenails—had that Florida swagger, which women anywhere else wouldn’t dare at her age.
“Please forgive me,” he said, playing his courtly card until the drift of the hand came clearer. His heart had been thumping throughout his long drive, to the point where he imagined an onset of fibrillations, and his panic had grown as he searched the blocks of Deerfield Beach, with their unreal green lawns and ornamental lemon trees. Now that he was here in Leila’s presence, a kind of glazed calm, a sweat of suspension, came over him, as it used to when Irene would take a sudden downward turn, or during those endless last nights when there was nothing for him to do but stay awake, hold her hand, and feed her morphine and ice chips. How marvellous he had been, the network of friends confided to him when it was finally over. To himself he had just been correct, obedient to one of the few still-unmodified phrases of the marriage vows, “in sickness and in health.”