by Mailie Meloy
“Of course.”
“There’s a sitting room there,” the Frenchwoman said. “You know the house, of course. Will you stay for lunch?”
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m engaged for lunch.”
She shrugged in a French way, disbelieving him, still smiling. “I’ll send her in.”
The room was painted red. His mother had read to him there before dinner, when he was a child: a thrilling half hour of warmth and comfort, under a throw blanket, enveloped in his mother’s perfume, with the dogs sitting at their feet. The walls had been pale yellow. There was a television in the corner now, and a wheeled liquor cart. He was still absorbing the changes when Inez Martín appeared in a pink maid’s dress and a white apron. She wore her dark hair pulled back, and sat on the edge of a leather chair with her hands on her narrow knees. There were lines around the dark eyes he had loved, and the skin over her temples seemed very thin and pale, with a blue vein visible on one side, but she had the same pointed chin, the same clever mouth. His heart was racing. He hadn’t expected to have all the old feelings in their full strength. He had thought they would be diminished by time.
“I thought you were in Italy,” he said cautiously.
“I came back.”
“And your husband? His heart?”
“He’s recovering.”
He nodded. She had a small, dark, triangular scar on her smooth bare shin. Her wedding band seemed loose on her finger. She had a slight accent, from the years in Italy. He tried to clear his mind. “You saw my daughter Lucha,” he said.
“I did.”
“She’s not my finest achievement.”
Inez laughed. He remembered her laugh. It had charmed him that first night at dinner. “It was perverse to go to the interview,” she said. “I was trying to destroy my pride, so it couldn’t torment me anymore. The way they cauterize a wound. It didn’t work. But it did get me a job, finally.”
“It’s very good to see you.”
“I don’t know if it’s good to see you. My old decadent life.” She rested her elbow on the arm of the chair. “What news do you bring me? Is it as glamorous as I remember, or as sordid as it is here?”
“It isn’t very glamorous.”
“It’s the most ugly thing you can imagine, here,” she said. “People with everything, who take everything for granted.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Some are your friends.”
“Once they were,” he said. “I’m very much alone, these days.”
She looked thoughtful. “Do you know what I miss?” she asked. “I miss orange juice in the morning, in bed. I miss someone bringing in a tray, and opening the windows.”
Agustín felt an aching thrill at how easy this would be to supply.
“It’s foolish, isn’t it?” she asked.
Agustín said he didn’t think it foolish at all. His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up, battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.
“It is foolish, though,” she said. “The money is gone, and my husband thinks of nothing else. My son is in boarding school, so all the money goes there, and to the doctors.”
He was trying to keep up. “You have a son?”
“Of course.” She smiled and looked much younger, the way he remembered her. “He’s thirteen,” she said. “The age when they become awkward and skinny, but he is still so beautiful. The most beautiful child. All I want is for him not to be ashamed of me.”
He wished he had known about the son. He had deliberately avoided gossip, but how had word of a child not reached him? Why had Lucha not told him?
“I want you to marry me,” he blurted. He hadn’t intended to say it outright, but it seemed best to be direct, as she was. He had to lay his cards on the table.
There was a pause. “I’m married,” she said, without surprise or resentment.
“But are you happy? Does he treat you well?”
She studied his face. “You want to spite your daughters.”
“No.” He shook his head. He wanted to kiss her again in a dark garden, but the dream was complicated by the vision of a lanky adolescent sitting beside her in the shadows, glowering. “I could help your son,” he said. “I could pay for the school.”
“You weren’t counting on a child when you came here.”
“No.”
“But you’re serious.”
“I always was.” It wasn’t entirely true. He had been too afraid of his teenage daughters to offer her marriage, then. He had been a fool.
She took another moment, as if thinking it through. “A déclassée housemaid leaving her child and sick husband for money,” she said. “Imagine. Your servants would hate me, and your daughters would hate me, and my son would certainly hate me. I’m strong enough for this kind of work, but I’m not strong enough to be alone and hated.”
Agustín wanted to say that she wouldn’t be alone, but he understood that she didn’t agree. “Where will you go when the Frenchwoman leaves?” he asked, through the haze of shame and disappointment.
“I’ll find another job.”
“You’re not young.” They were Lucha’s words only, called up by his misery, because Inez did seem young to him.
She paused, and then she said, “No, I’m not. Is that what you came to tell me?”
He reproached himself for offending her. “I only meant that the work must be difficult,” he said. “You should have some relief.”
“I know exactly how difficult my work is.”
“I could help your son,” he said. “Anonymously, for nothing. School fees, books, whatever he needs. Holidays. I would like to do that.”
She laughed for a second time. “Lucha would love that.”
“It isn’t her money.”
She considered him for a long moment. “It’s tempting,” she said. “But no, I think temptation is a dangerous thing. We have what we need. It’s kind of you to offer.”
“Please.” He could hear the panic in his voice, at the thought of going home alone. He had refused to think that far ahead, to anticipate defeat, but now it loomed: the despair of the drive back, the months and years. “For your son,” he said.
“It was kind of you to visit,” she said. “I should help with the lunch.” She rose, the woman he had wanted so desperately, and she smoothed the skirt of the pink maid’s dress before she went out.
AT THE FRONT DOOR the comically smooth-faced Frenchwoman touched his arm. She said, in a confidential tone, that Inez could act a bit de haut, but she was honest and did good work. If he wanted her sooner, that could be arranged. He should only let her know. Agustín could hardly reply, and couldn’t hide his unhappiness. Pablino opened the car door for him, with what seemed like an extra degree of care, and Agustín tried to control his trembling hands. If he held them tightly together, his hands were still, but then they were useless. The Frenchwoman watched them drive away. The little Renault had been deemed drivable, with a flat piece of wood covering the hole in the floor. He was going home to eat his lunch alone. He could go to Africa after all. He could let someone lead him to an infirm elephant and he could shoot it until it fell down. Pablino drove the damaged car carefully onto the main road. It occurred to Agustín that the Frenchwoman’s servants would have given Pablino a coffee while he waited, and the boy would have heard the gossip of the house.
“What do they say in the kitchen about the maid Inez?” he asked.
Pablino hesitated, and said nothing.
“You can tell me,” he said.
“That she is beautiful.”
“What else?”
“That she was rich once.”
“They don’t accept her.”
“No.”
Agustín nodded. So Inez was alone and hated already. She was living this way for her son, for whom she would do anything. He tried to imagine working as a servant in order not to make his daughters ashamed. It was ridiculous; the very act
would shame them. There was a small, ugly part of him that wished for her son to recoil from her, because she had chosen servitude over Agustín’s offer. But her son would love her, as he did. The boy made everything worthwhile for her. His existence made her grateful that Agustín had been too cowardly to defy his daughters for love.
“Is there anything this afternoon?” he asked Pablino.
“Nothing,” Pablino said.
“Thank you for driving me.”
Pablino glanced at him in surprise. It was his job. It was uncomfortable, Pablino’s clear understanding that something significant had happened.
“I’m grateful,” Agustín said clumsily. “You drive well.”
The wounded car rattled along. He would go home and have his lunch, and Pablino would clear it away. They could have an English lesson; the boy would conjugate verbs if asked. There was the book on Trafalgar to begin. His older daughter would call to complain and brag about her children, to remind him that they existed, his heirs. Lucha would call to ask if the car was fixed and if he was really going to Africa.
He remembered the enormous sound of the gun going off, and felt the kick again. A purplish bruise had developed on his shoulder. If Lucha had never come to lunch, he wouldn’t have made a fool of himself in so many ways. He would never have fired the gun, or shot out the floor. He wouldn’t have known that Inez Martín had resurfaced in his mother’s house, and he wouldn’t have presented himself to the vain, silly Frenchwoman, or prostrated himself before Inez. He would be living his muted and uneventful life, unbruised, with his books and his horses and his house. If the trees could protect him from the pain that now gnawed at his heart, he would let them grow huge, but the trees could do nothing. He wanted to weep, but Pablino would be mortified, so he checked himself. He held his hands tightly together and cursed his daughter for bringing the terrible world, with its humiliation and longing, back to his door.
FIELDING ARRIVED at the lake house ahead of his wife, to find a rusted Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. He knew the car, knew the cracked, sunbleached upholstery and the embroidered Chinese good luck charm hanging from the rearview mirror. His wife would be out after work, to meet him for dinner, but her car wasn’t there. It was summer, the sun still bright on the water, and no lights were on in the house. Fielding watched the blank windows, waiting for a clue, and then he carried the groceries inside.
Jennie Taylor sat at the kitchen table with her legs crossed, in jeans and a sweater. Her dark hair was brushed straight and smooth. Fresh air and her mother’s looks had served her well. The boxy station wagon had been her parents’ car before it was hers, and Fielding was amazed it still ran.
“I let myself in,” she said.
“Good.” He set the paper grocery bag on the counter and thought that nothing needed to go in the fridge. Jennie had spent so much time at the house that she knew where the key was hidden. It was the second time he had been alone with her in there, and the first time still filled him with regret. She had been staying with his family, flirting with him all weekend, and it had caught him off guard. She wasn’t the pigtailed child of his friends anymore; she had come back from college transformed, a self-assured young woman, sunning herself in a bikini on the deck. At the end of the weekend, she had stayed behind while he locked up—he wasn’t trying to diminish his own part in the thing, but she had stayed behind—and she had stepped into his arms, so agreeably sun-warm and strong. He had kissed her at some length before stopping. It paled now, as a transgression, but at the time he had suffered the tortures of the damned.
“You’re meeting Meg?” he asked. It was a bluff; he knew his daughter was staying in town. His son, Gavin, had been vague, as usual.
“No,” Jennie said.
“My wife will be out, too.”
“I guessed,” she said.
“Is anyone else coming?”
Jennie shrugged.
He turned on a kitchen light, in case the others arrived, but the pale bulb was overwhelmed by the slanting sunlight. He opened the pantry closet and started the hot water heater. He wondered how many more times he would do that, and what would happen to the lake house—a winterized shack when they bought it, now a maze of additions—once he got up the nerve to tell his wife. She was a lawyer and would have the upper hand.
“You’re leaving Raye,” Jennie said.
He felt a surge of adrenaline, and steadied himself on the closet door. “Does it show?” he asked.
Jennie smiled. “I’ve known you since I was born,” she said. “You think that means you know me inside out, but really it means I know you.”
He thought of correcting her: he had known her before she was born. He’d watched her mother, hugely pregnant and happy, floating in the lake with her belly at the surface. Her father so proud you’d think no one had ever knocked up a pretty girl before. The two families had done everything together, before Jennie’s began to disintegrate. Jennie was his daughter’s age, two years younger than his son, and he remembered her at six in just a bikini bottom, darting in and out of the water. Or bundled in a snowsuit in winter, riding a plastic sled on her stomach across the ice. She was twelve when the marriage finally ended, and her father had sung drunkenly, here in the lake-house kitchen, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, don’t make a pretty woman your wife,” and then cried over what the divorce might do to Jennie.
“Does my family know I’m leaving?” he asked her now.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It was my mother who saw you. In a car, with a girl. She asked me if she should tell Raye. I told her not to.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“My mom kept telling me it was my swimming teacher. That really upset her.”
“She hasn’t been that for years.”
“Is that what you tell yourself ?” she asked. “Does it help?”
“I’m not doing this lightly,” he said.
He knew what he was getting into. He had thought of taking his mistress away from the town he’d lived in all his life, rather than face the collective disapproval. Eleanor had taught everyone’s kids to swim; she had a gift for it, even as a teenager. They had all watched from the park benches outside the chain-link fence at the pool, while Eleanor coaxed their children to swim toward her, to reach and pull, breathe and blow. The chlorine gave her hair an angelic sparkle, and she had lovely breasts in her red swimsuit; she exuded encouragement and warmth. Now she had moved home, and those parents who had watched were going to judge him, when he had known them all in the wild old days, getting high while the kids slept on the floor, wandering off with someone else’s wife.
“You think Eleanor’s a strange choice,” he said.
“Were you sleeping with her back then?”
“Of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t I wonder?”
“Because she was a child. She was seventeen.”
Jennie rolled her eyes.
“I saw her in the hardware store a few months ago,” he said. “She was buying a nightlight. I hadn’t thought about her for years, I had forgotten her name.”
“Do you know how you’ll break it to Raye?”
“I haven’t gotten that far.”
“She’ll freak.”
“She’s very resourceful,” he said. It was true. You could drop his wife alone in the dark woods and she would make tools out of nothing, build herself a shelter and tame the bears.
“Does she know about us?” Jennie asked.
He wanted to say that there wasn’t much to know, but he said, “No. She wouldn’t let ammunition like that lie around.”
“Did you ever tell my dad?”
“Of course not.”
“You haven’t seen him lately.”
Fielding thought of the fat joints smoked on the deck, and Frank Taylor holding forth over a glass of scotch, a million years ago. The children played an elaborate game of tag, using the dock and the b
each and the little rowboat. Gavin galloped along behind Meg and Jennie; the girls were younger but imperious and in control. Their hair was like the dry grass on the hillside, their bare feet toughened by summer. They moved as effortlessly into the boat and across the water—pulling one oar hard, spinning the boat around the dock—as across the land. Amphibious children. “We’re creating little hedonists,” Frank used to say. “Nothing will be as pleasurable as this for the rest of their lives. They’ll search everywhere for something that can measure up, and nothing will.”
“You’re going to hear from him, when he finds out you’re leaving,” Jennie said now. “He thinks divorce ruined his life.”
“Did it?”
“Sure,” Jennie said. “I mean, it ruined what was his life.” She studied him. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I feel like kind of an expert,” she said, “because I’ve thought about how long sex with someone younger could keep you interested, and how soon you’d be tired of it. And what it would do to you to horrify everyone you know, and be stranded with someone who’s basically a kid. Who’s going to want kids of her own. You know Eleanor will want kids, right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I used to have this fantasy,” she said. “It’s so stupid. I can tell you now. You would leave Raye for me, and it would be a huge scandal, but we would go to my dad together and explain it. It would be a shock to him, but he would get over it, and you would be friends again. It’s a crazy fantasy, but I wanted it.”
Fielding heard a car pull up outside.
“But I never would have asked you to do it,” she whispered earnestly. “I’m not insane. And then my mother saw you in that car. God. Gavin’s here.”
The screen door slammed shut and his son was in the room, in the baseball cap and sweatpants he wore to coach soccer. Fielding was struck by how much his son looked like him: the broad face, the comic slant of the eyebrows. Lately, his children’s adult presence made him feel very old.
“Hey!” Gavin said, with undisguised joy at seeing Jennie, and Fielding understood that his son was in love, unrequited. She took the tribute seated, like a queen.