by Greg Johnson
“Abby, can you forgive me?” Philip had asked, that first time he’d phoned Abby.
They’d been giddy, almost childlike with relief; with an electric sense of anticipation, excitement.
“Of course, but where did you go…?”
Of course, as she recollected later, the question had gone unanswered.
Every few days Abby called her mother, once or twice with her face still flushed from the passion, or was it the shame, of her hours with Philip. She sat on the side of Thorn’s bed, which was always neatly made (just for her?—in high school, he hadn’t been particularly tidy) and let her eyes roam across the now-familiar objects in her brother’s room. The TV stand in one corner, with its stacks of videotapes on a lower shelf. The cherry-wood dresser with its jewelry box of jade-colored stone (a long-ago gift from Lucille) and a vase of tiny purple dried flowers. There were few personal touches: some childhood photos on his bureau along with a framed snapshot of grinning, raffishly handsome Carter; Abby’s own framed photo on the night table, at which she cast only the briefest glance.
“Have you changed your mind about coming home for Christmas?” her mother asked. The question had become a refrain, beginning each of their conversations.
“Mom, I don’t think so. You know that friend of Thorn’s we mentioned, the one who was ill? Thorn’s best friend, actually. He died a few days ago, and I don’t think Thom is in the mood for a trip right now.”
“His best…friend?” her mother said, awkwardly.
“Yes, a friend,” Abby said, wishing she hadn’t mentioned Carter. This wasn’t the time to start explicating Thorn’s relationships for their mother. “He lived here in the same complex. They’ve been buddies for years.”
“Oh, buddies,” Lucille said, relieved. “Goodness. Tell him I’m sorry to hear it—I mean, don’t tell him I said to tell him, it’s just that I am sorry to hear it, so if you want to—I’m just telling you that I’m sorry, but if you—”
Her mother broke off, perplexed.
“But I wondered, Mom, would you mind sending me some things?” She read off the mental list she’d composed, thinking it was modest enough: a few pieces of jewelry she missed, some jeans and sweaters. And a few of her summer clothes, she added quickly. Her shorts, her short-sleeve tops.
“But why—”
“I’m sick of doing laundry every couple of days,” Abby laughed, trying to keep it light. “Please, Mom, will you? And I’m sure the mail has been piling up, just dump all that in the box, too, will you? I gave you Thorn’s address last week, do you still have it?”
A long pause. “Is it that warm down there, honey? That you need your summer things?”
Abby said quickly, “Well, I was thinking—Thom and a couple of his friends are planning a trip, right after Christmas. You know, to get away? I was thinking of joining them.”
“A trip? A trip where?”
“Um, to Florida. Down to Key West, I think.”
“OK, fine,” her mother snapped. “You two have a great time down there sunning yourselves, while I explain everything to your aunt and cousins and try to entertain them by myself. I’ll finish all the shopping, I’ll try to find someone to shovel the snow out of the driveway, I’ll do everything. You kids have fun and send me a postcard, all right?”
To Abby’s great shock, her mother hung up.
Her mother had never hung up on her before. In fact, no one had hung up on her before. Hang up on Abby Sadler? Why would they?
She began to cry. Her insides ached, and she drew one arm across her abdomen as though the pain, so massive and somehow old, even ancient, were merely physical. Ancient, yes, but she’d never allowed herself to feel whatever it was that now welled inside her like a pooling of blood. A hemorrhage. Tears snaked along her cheeks, and she wiped them with two flat palms, and instantly more tears took their place.
That’s when she knew: she would make another phone call, too. It was time.
During the last days before Christmas, she recalled Philip’s insistence they not exchange gifts—for he truly despised the holiday, he repeated, not only for the usual reasons of disliking its near-hysterical commercialism but because he despised Christianity itself. Like her, he’d been brought up Catholic, even more of a minority in his “boxed-up London suburb,” as he called it, than in Atlanta. But the catechism was the same, he said, the nuns and priests were the same, and he’d come away with the same seething resentment toward Catholic orthodoxy and authoritarianism that most intelligent, imaginative people of his generation had felt. He complained that most of his friends went along with the gift giving and party-going even though they’d long ago jettisoned any pretense of belief, but he couldn’t stomach any of it. Checking Abby’s reaction, he looked almost sheepish.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I do want to get you something, a piece of jewelry, maybe…. How about your birthday? When is that?”
“In August,” she’d said, smiling. He looked pensive.
“Perhaps for New Year’s, then. We’ll celebrate the start of our first year together.”
“All right,” she said.
There had been a long pause. He’d given her an earnest pained stare. “But don’t buy me anything, promise?” he said. “I’m uncomfortable with gifts, somehow.”
She was uncomfortable with the request, but she didn’t care to argue. “All right,” she said.
Yet on the morning of the twenty-second, she gave Mitzi and Chloe their bacon-flavored treats (what Thom called their “guilt cookies,” doled out whenever he was about to leave them alone) and slipped out the front door and drove to an expensive jewelry store in Buckhead, Maier & Berkele, where she bought Philip an elegant Rolex watch. It was one of the less expensive Rolexes but nonetheless far more than she’d ever spent on a gift for anyone. More, in fact, than she earned in an entire month. As she emerged from the store with the gift-wrapped box in her hand, her face burned with her own daring, an eerie scalp-tingling excitement she’d never felt before. Within an hour she’d come to her senses: she imagined the moment when she presented the watch to him, saw the clouded look in his eyes and his pale, cemented lips, and knew it was impossible. Somehow she’d had to buy the watch, but she knew better than to give it to Philip. So she put the tiny silver-wrapped package in the glove compartment of the Altima, promising herself she would return it the following day. Was there anything more foolish than giving an unwanted gift? Her face burned and burned.
During that same week, Abby began mentioning to Philip that she might move back to Atlanta. She’d voiced the idea several times, at first tentatively, then with more conviction. She’d always had the fantasy of coming back to Emory, she said, and getting her doctorate. She was tired of teaching Jane Eyre to silly high school girls. She didn’t really care for Philadelphia, she told him—subtly monitoring the look on his face, the light in his eyes—and she probably shouldn’t be living with her mother. Getting away, staying here with Thom for the past few weeks, had made her realize that.
Yet it was such a major decision, of course. Moving to Atlanta. Changing her life.
His gaze would fall to the table, or if they were walking along he would give her hand a brief but desperate squeeze.
“I don’t know what to say. I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I’d been thinking of it, anyway. For the past few months…”
But she was a terrible liar, so she went silent.
She hadn’t told him about the argument with her mother, or that half an hour later, waiting only until she had composed herself, she’d gotten the home number of her principal at West Chester Academy and had called him and resigned. She was sorry to leave between semesters, she told him, rather than completing the year. She’d intended to return, of course, but here in Atlanta there were family problems—and there were personal problems, she added, hoping to forestall any discussion, any awkward questions. She was sorry, sorry, she said quickly, and she hoped he understood. Numbed by her own
daring, her breath coming fast, she’d scarcely listened to his reply. Within two minutes the phone call was over. It was done.
“Maybe I should wait,” she told Philip, “and finish out this year, at least.” But then she stopped herself—they were standing on the second-floor balcony of symphony hall, at intermission, gazing at the swarm of well-dressed people down below—for she’d heard the wheedling tone in her voice, and felt herself waiting with a feminine desperation for him to say the magic words, the empowering words. Behavior she despised in other women but here she stood, craven as the worst of them, her limbs seized with an age-old paralysis and longing, her very eyesight glazed and fixed. She wanted to glance at Philip, but as in a bad dream she could not. “Never mind,” she added, hastily. “It’s something I have to decide on my own.”
He let out his breath, relieved. “I’m pleased to hear you say that. It’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Back in their seats, scarcely hearing the music inside their glass shield, she sat awash in shame, her eyes burning.
It had happened too quickly, she supposed, but didn’t it always happen quickly? In life, as in books? She had studied all the books, but they had not prepared her for this.
Each of their outings led to the muted excitement of their drive back to that lovely old house Philip had inherited, he’d told Abby, from his grandmother, the bequest that had brought him to Atlanta almost a decade ago.
“Tell me about her,” Abby had said. “How did she come to live here?”
During their long, languorous afternoons together in Philip’s bedroom, they would make love several times, slowly, luxuriously, and in between their bouts of passion, they would discuss their families, backgrounds, histories, in the seemingly haphazard but selective way in which new lovers come to know one another.
Startled, Philip made an exaggerated gesture of slapping his forehead. He laughed. Yes, he said, he’d forgotten to tell Abby that his father was an American—he’d met his mother while stationed in London during World War II. He’d brought her here to Atlanta shortly after the war (they’d been married in St. Philip’s, in fact, right on Peachtree, and years later, when her son was born, his mother remembered that beautiful church, and thus she found her baby’s name), but after a few years she grew homesick and “fretful,” as Philip’s father later told his son. So the couple had moved back to London, where Everett DeMunn went to work for his father-in-law’s insurance firm, acquitting himself quite well, and where his wife was happy again among her family and friends, which in turn made Everett happy. (“My father was a somewhat uxorious fellow,” Philip told Abby, with an indulgent grimace.) And there they’d lived until that night in December 1989 when both his parents had died in a head-on collision while driving home from a Boxing Day party.
Philip delivered this information in a light, almost jocular tone that left Abby uncertain of how to respond.
She began, in a tentative whisper, “I’m sorry to hear—” but he interrupted with an abrupt, barking laugh.
“I’ve never been sure that it wasn’t my father’s fault,” he said. “He always claimed that after thirty years, he still couldn’t get used to driving on the wrong side of the road.”
Abby stayed silent. Much to her relief, Philip’s defensive, almost hostile smirk had vanished, replaced by a look of dreamy reminiscence. They lay in their usual posture after lovemaking, cuddled in one corner of his overlarge but wonderfully cozy bed, shielded from the chill of this dusky high-ceilinged room by the quilt they’d drawn across their shoulders, both reclining against a bank of thick pillows. Philip began stroking her side absently as he continued with his story.
When his parents died, he’d been only twenty-one, a few months away from graduation at the University of London, and by the time he did finish school his grandmother, too, had died. Since the accident Grandma had been inconsolable, Philip whispered, for Philip’s father had been her only child. Her grief was such that she hadn’t been well enough to fly over for the funeral. Within months her heart had failed. Having no serious ties in England, Philip had decided with a young man’s impulsiveness to sell his parents’ house and move to Atlanta. He’d visited his grandmother several times as a boy, then as a teenager, and had loved Atlanta—the climate, the lovely trees and vegetation, the friendly people. So he’d started work on his MBA at Emory, and here he’d stayed.
“After a while, I saw that almost everyone in Atlanta was from somewhere else, like me,” he said. “Somehow I found that appealing, along with the newness of everything, the energy.”
Abby said nothing. As a native, she saw the city differently.
“So you moved in here—” she said, breaking off. She’d had the sudden thought that this might have been his grandmother’s room; perhaps even this bed, this quilt, had been hers. She decided not to ask.
Philip resumed his story, as though she had not spoken.
Deciding to pursue a business degree had been difficult, he said, for he’d wanted to study acting after graduation. The freelance securities work he did—he’d gestured toward his laptop, on a cluttered table near the door—was just to pay the bills, and frankly bored him silly. In London, he’d planned to attend the Royal Academy, but then, after moving here, he’d gotten involved in Atlanta’s lively theater scene, where he’d found his niche fairly easily in the annual Shakespeare Festival and in the many classic plays mounted by various small theaters around the city. He’d done Shaw, he’d done Wilde. He’d done Moliere and Chekhov and Ibsen. Abby might think it odd, Philip said, his lips creased in a wry smile, but actually he preferred American roles, American playwrights—Tennessee Williams was his favorite, and he loved O’Neill, Miller, Mamet—but despite his ability to mimic a flawless American accent, the local directors seldom cast him in the parts he longed to play. A classic case of typecasting, Philip said, with a rueful laugh.
“They think of me as the local Brit, period. Ironically, the actors who grew up in the South are jealous of me. They’re all dying to play Hamlet, whereas I’ve done all the major roles so many times I’m thoroughly sick of Shakespeare.”
Abby said, “I can understand that. Growing up, I read Austen, Dickens, the Brontës. Even now I read Martin Amis or Anita Brookner—never the Americans. Believe it or not, I’ve never read Gone with the Wind,” Abby said, feeling unaccountably pleased with herself.
“Abigail Sadler,” he said in a severe, censorious tone, propping one arm against his naked hip—the quilt had fallen away, exposing his smooth olive skin that looked so pale, ghostly in the half-light—“and you call yourself a Southerner? Well, let’s see if you recognize this: ‘Sick people form such deep, sincere attachments.’”
The line sounded vaguely familiar, she thought, but it had the ring of the kind of Southern Gothic claptrap she couldn’t abide.
“Sorry, no,” she said. “Who is it?”
Philip gave a mysterious smile, his eyes narrowed. “I’ll never tell.” He moved closer, bringing his mouth to her vaguely parted lips. Her body had tensed, as always, but then relaxed as his hand caressed her side, the outside curve of her thigh. Then the inside curve, gently parting her legs. Already her breath came quickly. For another long while, she said nothing at all.
When Abby arrived home she went to her bedroom dresser and without thinking took the letter from its hiding place among her underclothes. She went into Thorn’s room and dialed the memorized number. Mitzi and Chloe, accustomed to her routine, had rushed ahead, yipping frantically, and had leapt onto the bed, positioning themselves so there was exactly enough room for Abby to sit between them. The manic Chloe flopped eagerly onto her side, and with her long black tail thumping the bed, she whimpered softly until Abby, shaking her head, placed the letter on her lap and rubbed the dog’s soft, plump belly; on Abby’s other side, the more sedate Mitzi contented herself with burying her pointed snout into the crook of Abby’s arm, snuggling into the warm folds of her fluffy pink wool sweater.
“You two girl
s aren’t spoiled, are you?” Abby asked, as she half-listened to the ringing phone.
After that embarrassing earlier attempt when she’d hung up, panicked, at the sound of Valerie Patten’s voice, Abby had waited several days and then, steeling herself, had tried again. But Valerie had not answered. Nor had the machine picked up. Almost every day she’d tried again, wanting not to interpret the shrilling phone as a sign that something was wrong. If anything had happened to Marty Luttrell, after all, wouldn’t the line have been disconnected? Yet each time her heart skittered as the phone rang ten times, twelve times. Why did this faceless stranger matter so much? Why couldn’t she simply toss the letter away and be done with it? She hadn’t really thought about what she would say if Marty himself answered the phone. Hello, you don’t know me, but I’ve got your suicide note here, and I just wondered if you were still alive. But the next day she’d be back again, dialing the number, not smiling, holding the letter in her trembling hand. The telephone rang and rang.
Now it was the twenty-third of December, almost a month since that airplane flight from Philadelphia, and it seemed unlikely, Abby thought, that Valerie was still in town. Whatever had happened between her and her husband had happened, and by now Valerie had resigned herself to having lost the letter. At the moment Abby decided to give up, to throw the letter away and forget all about Valerie Patten and Marty Luttrell, there was a click on the line, and the sound of a woman’s hoarse, sleepy voice.
“Yes? H-hello?”
“Valerie?” said Abby, startled. “I mean—is this Valerie Patten?”
“Y-yes. What time is it? Who’s this?”
Abby glanced at her bedside clock. “It’s a little after three. I’m sorry if I woke you, but—”
“Three o’clock? Good grief.”