Darling?

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “When was that?” she asked, to pretend she hadn’t known.

  “1961,” he said, which would in fact have been the year the boy was born. It was true, she thought, some people are lost from the start. What to say? It reminded her of the time she met the author Haldor Laxness: he knew so much, had thought so deeply and lived so long, she hadn’t really believed he’d be able to see something so small as herself. Grief might have the same effect as wisdom: this man lived in another country, a place she didn’t know.

  “Where can it be?” he asked, peering into the darkness with anger and disappointment as if this were only the latest of the series of thefts and losses that made up his life.

  “Who brought it in?” she asked.

  “Oh, my God, of course,” he said, and ran up the stairs two at a time. “I left it in the car.”

  Coming up behind him she could hear that the party had passed some milestone and abandoned restraint. Polchikov had claimed the sturdiest chair and was attacking an immense plate on which a filet of smoked mackerel trembled atop a molded salad. Behind him two men were discussing the largest of Warren’s paintings, wherein several bright buoyant shapes bobbed in a thick atmosphere.

  “You can see,” one man said, “there’s a breast, an ass, and these are like two legs spread wa-a-ay out over everything.”

  “It’s a terrific piece,” the other said.

  “If I’d known he could paint this way…,” Drew was saying, and Cecile remembered she’d discouraged him from going to see Warren in Maine. He might have seen the paintings then, might have gotten closer to Warren, but she’d wanted to wrest him free of the other family.

  Someone fitted candles into wine bottles and lit them; afternoon darkness was closing, and Martha sat on the couch, mistily drunken, while the timid man rubbed her feet.

  “He’s here,” Martha said as Cecile filled her glass again, and leaned back with a drowsy, beatified smile. “Everyone feels it. They want to stay here, with Warren.” She gazed at Cecile fondly, a mother opening her heart to the new daughter-in-law.

  “You loved him, too,” she said. “I know. I could see.” Cecile shifted uncomfortably. “And he’s here, Cecile, he’ll always be here with us now.”

  “Drew, these people have to go,” she said, as soon as she could get him alone. “They’ve been here since noon.”

  He looked at her with amazed contempt. That’s right, she thought, I’m a shrew. Mean and hungry, all teeth. I don’t care.

  “I want to go to bed,” she pleaded.

  “Then go to bed.”

  “Eli’s asleep there.”

  “Eli?”

  “Warren’s friend.”

  A vague consternation crossed his face until he placed Eli—among the kids.

  “Push him over,” he said, and turned away.

  * * *

  There was a soup bowl of cigarette butts on the bedside table. Cecile took it into the hallway, but the stink would last for days. Eli was sound asleep, his hair a mass of dark, contrary waves. She pushed a pile of coats onto the floor, turned down the quilt, and got in.

  * * *

  Sometime later she awoke in his embrace. He seemed asleep still, but his arm was around her, pulling her tight against him. The room was pitch-black, and she could hear Jethro Tull playing downstairs—songs she’d used to get stoned to when she was fourteen and mad to smash her way into the gorgeous, terrifying world. It would have been the same for Warren—the same music, same rolling paper, same sense that all want would be fulfilled in ecstasy now they were grown. She took Eli’s hand, and an immense warmth came over—every cell changed so she was entirely soft, a thing in nature like an anemone pulsing in the tide. It occurred to her that she didn’t know him, but of course they must have the essential things—despair and longing—in common. It seemed he could carry her back, accept her as a prodigal sister returned, finally, to her own generation; the generation Drew and Martha and their ilk had wronged. She lifted Eli’s hand to her mouth and kissed his palm, and he turned her toward him as if a long and careful courtship had reached its culmination.

  Pushing his curls back, she saw his features were so strong they were almost frightening. His mouth curved as if sculpted and without the glasses his eyes seemed immense and raw, open as if he wanted her to fall in. She tried to return the gaze in its intensity, but it overwhelmed her and she closed her eyes to kiss him, finding the image of Warren in the dark of her mind.

  A few minutes later they heard steps on the staircase and by silent agreement feigned sleep again. Tim came in and shook Eli.

  “Come on, old buddy, we’ve got to give these good people their bed,” he said. Cecile lay waiting for him to go so she could lose herself in the kiss again, but Eli jumped up as if he was relieved.

  “How long was I asleep?” he asked, and Tim said it had been hours. Cecile watched through half-closed eyes as they left, Eli looking quickly back at her. She’d frightened him, as she had others—her boundaries would dissolve suddenly so she spilled over, out of her life, her marriage.… She wasn’t properly civilized; she frightened herself, too. Had she really dreamt she might have a love of innocent discovery, with a man her own age? When Drew finally came to bed, she made love to him in an anguish of longing, thinking how alike they were, wraiths who hardly knew a wake from a wedding, vandals poking their fingers through the membrane that contained them into the cold dark outside. She locked her legs around him to push him farther inside her; bit his shoulder to urge his thrust—if death was real, if it might really arrive any minute, then the old agreements were void: ambition must be deeper and she would need more love—much more.

  Afterward he lay with his ear to her heart, and she stroked his hair—she’d found the stream of affection again. “It was because you were laughing,” he said. “I didn’t think you could really be hurt, when you were laughing so.”

  “I know,” she said gently, thinking he’d seen her with Eli and been too proud to intervene. And generous: he’d been waiting all this time for someone to come for her, someone in whom the life force had yet to be overwhelmed by doubt, someone her own age. He was stoic, prepared to let her go, if unwilling to attach himself very deeply to someone he knew he’d lose.

  “We have to have a child,” she said. “You know that.”

  “I do.” He closed his eyes, waiting, she thought, to feel it crush him.

  * * *

  The timid man, the one whose son had jumped or fallen, was named Duncan LaShay, and he and Martha were getting married.

  “Very small,” Martha said, “just the family, but after all that’s what you are, my dear.” And touched Cecile’s belly, smiling. Her pictures of Tim’s new son were laid out on the table.

  “Two new babies! An embarrassment of riches,” Martha said. In the months after the funeral she’d often call Drew at exactly five A.M., so they’d know she’d been up for hours and hadn’t wanted to wake them. Drew would sit up to listen, and Cecile would drape the quilt over his shoulders, hearing him repeat, “We don’t, we won’t know,” almost by rote. Then came spring, the red buds swelled and burst, and one evening they’d passed her on the street with Duncan, talking so intently she didn’t see them. Life had pushed up through grief and was stubbornly blooming. In August came Tim’s son, and Martha went down to help Fiona: task by task, she undertook, she went forward.

  “What a darling,” Cecile said, of the infant in the pictures, who looked but exactly like Warren. No one else seemed to notice, or perhaps they didn’t say. One didn’t speak the name Warren aloud anymore: it was like opening an airplane door midflight—all the air got sucked out of the room. Still, they’d all known him, and this made them like each other more. And his painting, that the men at the funeral party had understood as the parts of a woman, hung over the couch now, the flower of bliss, her own.

  “Yup, it’s a baby all right,” Emerson said, passing through. He was building Drew and Cecile’s addition: the nursery/playroom. He’d quit work a
nd spent the months after the funeral transforming the room Warren died in—it was all cherry paneled now, with acanthus and laurel boughs carved over the lintels and at the side of the mantelpiece a hinged wall, which gave onto a maze of compartments which led finally to a sort of altar behind the chimney. Word got out, and people began coming to see it; then they wanted bureaus and bedsteads and sometimes a whole room in “Rookery paneling,” as it came to be called. Other bereaved parents had come to the door, asking to stand a minute in the quiet dark there. Was it meant as a shrine? An act of contrition? Or forgetting? Emerson said it was happenstance: a wild idea he’d gotten one night. When Cecile saw it, she found herself in tears: Emerson had worked until he made something beautiful out of the bloody room.

  It made her love him … but then she loved everyone these days. Who’d have guessed it after all the talk, but having a baby had turned out to be a simple, carnal thing, and estrogen was a euphoric—since her third month she’d been blissed-out, slow and fat and pliant like one of those life-size inflatable sex dolls that flop woozily into any position. Sex being the only way Drew really knew how to absorb warmth, it made him love her more. Yes, it had been a mistake to marry him, but what marriage is not in some way mistaken, after all?

  “…’nother goddamned rugrat nose to wipe,” Emerson grumbled, grinning—a nod to cynicism, purely ceremonial.

  “Oh, Emerson, honestly,” Martha said, hand on Duncan’s knee, and to Cecile: “Have you felt it move?” Cecile laughed and told them it felt like a badminton birdie going back and forth in there, though languid, “like a match between Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler,” she said. They laughed and Cecile considered her own cleverness, leaning in the crook of her husband’s arm, one hand stroking the arc of her belly. The world seemed safer lately; the child was a new center of gravity, pulling everything into order around it, so she seemed to know, suddenly, what was essential, what to let fall away.

  “It must be a girl,” Drew said.

  “I always wanted a girl,” Martha said, “… to dress up, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, and never mind fashion,” Cecile said. “They walk sooner, talk sooner, they understand life a couple decades before boys do! No, with a boy you’re just lucky if it doesn’t slam itself into a bridge abutment or shoot itself in the goddamned head!”

  There it was, the appalling jack-in-the-box, springing out with no warning, and from Cecile’s own mouth. Only one beat though before Martha’s light laughter washed over them. “Look,” she said gently, “it’s snowing.”

  “We’d better get on,” Duncan said, standing up, going to embrace Cecile while Martha congratulated Drew one more time. “How lucky, lucky for all of us, to be expecting a new life!” she said. “Now your little one will be playing with Tim’s—maybe we should have Christmas Eve together next year.”

  “I’d love that,” Cecile said, with her whole heart. Her child would need its tribe.

  “Every foot goes in the mouth occasionally,” Drew said to comfort her, when everyone had gone.

  “Not all the way down the gullet like that.”

  “I doubt they even noticed,” he assured her. She smiled: she knew they’d tell themselves they hadn’t. They were bound and determined to like her.

  “It’s like the Red Sox,” Drew said. “Why lose by a point when you can blow the whole season?”

  They laughed, together. It was like their beginning, when she felt she’d found a man as fierce as she was, as curious, as likely to go wrong. After that, one act of her will, her calculation, or her hubris, had followed another—the wedding, the house, now the child. And if the first task of the child must be to seduce the father … well, perhaps a child of hers might succeed? Nothing was true, nothing whole, her deep sense of well-being now was no more credible than Warren’s despair. But she felt it, she had no choice but to trust it. Dusk belled over them, a luxuriant purple, full of snow, and she went to the supermarket for a pot roast, in case the power went out … or rather, in case they wanted to bask in the comfort of their life, light a fire, stir the pot, make love with their child, their future, between them.

  Everyone in Spinnaker seemed to have a similar vision: the one main street was crowded with cars, the snow falling over them like ticker tape on a parade, the physical manifestation of the abundance, the accidental grace of their lives. Polchikov waved Cecile in ahead of him, and “Natural Woman” came on WRLS, “Radio Lost at Sea,” Spinnaker’s only station. As the procession wound up through the cemetery toward the supermarket, Cecile saw blue lights flashing: Officer Manny had pulled over the hearse.

  “Speeding, speeding in the hearse, I am shocked!” she said when Wizz got in the express line behind her.

  “‘Natural Woman’ came on,” he said, and threw up his hands.

  “You’ve got a radio in there?”

  “My God, honey, I drive to the crematorium in Providence two and three times a month! Sometimes I have to pick up a stiff in Tewksbury, in Wrentham … What am I going to do without a radio?”

  “I, I just never thought of it,” she said.

  “Well darlin’, there’s a lot people never think of, about driving a hearse,” Wizz said. “Speaking of which, you know that guy who collapsed on the dance floor at Piggy’s last week?”

  Now everyone—the immensely fat man in front of her with a package of chocolate eclairs, the mother with an infant in a yellow snowsuit, which Cecile in her impatience had considered kidnapping—turned to listen. Here it was unbidden, in the grocery line—the sense of belonging to something if only to an odd, lonely town boarded up for the winter against the cold wind off the sea. Spinnaker wasn’t much different now, Cecile thought, than in 1850: they were terribly alone here together, with only each other for comfort and a vast dark beyond.

  “Well, you know they got his pants off and found he had a pepperoni strapped to his leg—for a codpiece—”

  “Wizz!” Cecile said.

  “I prefer a salami,” the fat man said, and he laughed, and the woman with the baby laughed, and Cecile and Wizz laughed—together, brimming with the tender condescension the living so often feel, during the time of their great, brief, victory over the dead.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Sarah Blake, Margaret Carroll, Christopher Hewat, Roxana Lehmann-Haupt, A. Thomas Lindsay, Maureen McCoy, Daniel Mueller, Camille Paglia, William S. Pollack, Candice Reffe, and especially my husband, Roger Skillings—colleagues whose thoughts and visions have added so much to this book, friends who have inspired, encouraged, and sustained me.

  Jennifer Carlson’s intelligence and advocacy have meant the world to me, especially in her finding the wonderful Reagan Arthur as my editor. And my abiding thanks to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, fertile ground for so many writers over the years.

  ALSO BY HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

  The Rose Thieves

  DARLING? Copyright © 2001 by Heidi Jon Schmidt. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.

  Frontispiece art courtesy of Corbis Inc.

  “Songbirds” was first published in Epoch, Winter 2000.

  Lines here from Collected Poems in English and French by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1972 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic.

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  First Edition: September 2001

  eISBN 9781466886094

  First eBook edition: October 2014

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  Heidi Jon Schmidt, Darling?