He calls her landline again. No answer.
Finally, he gets into the car and heads over there, feeling as though he’s riding away from his life and his marriage. He begins to cry. Her house is the same small two-bedroom Craftsman he was showing her last year, when everything began. It was their private joke: what he had to do to get her to rent it. “Might as well this as another,” she said at the time. “And I won’t have to buy furniture. Perfect. Fancy-free. And that’s the way to go, right? Nobody depending on you, nothing required by anybody. Footloose and fancy-free.” She grinned, and looked at him through a falling lock of dark hair. It was an insinuating glance that brought him up short.
On several occasions he has visited her there during her lunch break from the drugstore.
She has access to drugs, doesn’t she? Surely she’d use some medication or other before she’d do a thing like gassing herself with the oven. He has a moment of seeing his own train of thought coldly, and the knowledge rakes through him that she might actually do it: gas herself. She’s unbalanced enough to do it. The very thought of her repels him now, and he sees this as an element of his own cupidity. It’s excruciatingly clear, a given, the mud on the floor, that he has simply utilized her craziness for his own sexual greed. He begins gagging and coughing and has to pull the car over, where he grips the wheel with both hands, as if he were speeding toward a cliff. Slowly he constructs the idea, reaches for it and holds on to it, that she’ll go to sleep and call him tomorrow and threaten or not. That all this worry and fright are simply what she wants, and his panic is absurd, something he’ll remember with embarrassment.
He turns around and heads back to his own house.
Ridiculous.
Locking the car, which he never ordinarily does, he makes his way inside. The house is quiet. He reaches into his pocket for the cell phone and sees that there are four text messages. Three from Tess, one from Olivia. Tess’s are at the emotional level of high school.
Go 2 sleep
I am
U don’t care.
They sicken him.
Olivia’s is simple: Where did you go?
In the bedroom, she’s lying with her back to the door, blankets pulled high. She’s very still. He undresses, soundlessly as he can, and lets himself down next to her.
“Honey?” she says, but then sighs and is still. He pats her hip. He loves her. He has been a good man all these years, and something about the other, Tess, even from the beginning, something deranged, wild, troubling, drew him away. He understands in the nerves around his heart that this is indeed what excited him, this element of insane will, this recklessness, a carnal extravagance. Oh God.
Not love. Hunger. Pure appetite.
“I never go into a place like this without thinking about sex,” she said that first time. “Really. A model bedroom, or where the beds are in the department stores, I always think about having sex there.” She said this, and then glanced out the window. It came to him that she was looking at the empty street. He had made her laugh in the car, being self-deprecating. She had made the remark about being fancy-free, giving him that look. She turned and grinned again. “Funny. I feel kind of turned on.”
“Me, too,” he got out.
And they flew at each other. He did not even know her last name.
“I want this again,” she said, when it was done and they were hurrying to dress.
“Yes,” he said.
“You ever done this before? Just for a fling?”
“I’ve got two kids. I’m married.”
“Poor guy.”
“No.”
“Just kidding,” she said. And kissed him again, moaning softly, deeply.
That was seven months ago—months filled with interest, exhilaration, vibrancy. The thrilling passes in the sultry Memphis afternoons made everything else seem brighter, sharper. He was a more involved father and husband, a more charming and responsive man. He believed it to be true. And it was a lie. A terrible lie. He did not really know much about her. He knew she lived alone and had no responsibilities to anyone, no family, no boyfriends, few people she spent time with. He knew she had lived in New York, that she smoked dope on occasion and liked movies. He knew she went to Brazil once, for six months, with a woman who had been a classmate in pharmacy school. There was little else. And he found it to be a very satisfying element of things. He had no wish to change or question any of it. Until the Saturday evening when Olivia, sitting across the table from him while the girls watched a movie on Netflix, murmured, “Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Hey,” he managed. Then: “What’s this?”
“You’re like somebody playing a part. I’m having trouble recognizing you.”
“No,” he said. “No,” standing and coming around the table to pull her to his chest. “What in the world, darling.” And in that moment he decided to end it with the other—find a way to extricate himself. Tess, fancy-free Tess, was abruptly and completely something of which he must learn, like a good man, to deprive himself.
Now he shivers and gets out of the bed again. The thought comes to him, a shock, that he should have called the police. How is it that his guilt has prevented him from seeing that he should call the police? Even if it means the end of his marriage. How can he have hesitated?
As he puts his clothes on again, he has a dialogue playing out in his mind with the police and with Olivia, explaining why the phone call came to him in the first place, and why he should have known enough to call for help.
No. There’s nothing but to hope that everything of the night has been a cruel lie, told for effect. He’ll call her again. As he moves to the doorway of the room, he remembers her saying that she has nothing and wants nothing. Pausing at the door, he listens. Olivia’s very still. There’s only the little drone of her snore. In the hall, he comes face-to-face with both daughters. Tricia holds Cheryl’s hand.
“Cheryl wet the bed.”
“Oh, well—can you help her, honey.”
Cheryl stands there, four years old, thumb in mouth, looking sleepy and sad, staring.
“Okay,” Tricia says with the air of a tired adult, turning the smaller child toward the bathroom. His little ones, his darlings, and he can’t think, can’t find the next thing to say or do, the immensity of what may have already happened out in the night gathering upon his heart. It has happened. He feels the certainty of it, trying to breathe in, and because he can’t do anything else and because this is what he must cling to now with all his strength, he goes to where they are in the bathroom and helps Tricia with her sister, helps with the washing, the clean nightie, his hands shaking, and then the kisses and the lifting of the little girl to take her back to bed, tucking both of them in under the fleece blanket with the big yellow flowers on it. “Good night, sweethearts,” he manages.
Olivia wakes. Dawn is coming.
The terrible morning. So much time has passed. While she’s in the bathroom brushing her teeth, he steps into the living room, turns on his phone, and taps in the number. He gets it wrong, twice. That sirenlike dystonic sound. After a pause, gasping, he touches the numbers slowly, more carefully, and waits. It rings and rings.
MAP READING
They were to meet at the Empire Hotel lounge on West Sixty-Third Street and Broadway, across from Lincoln Center. She told Brayton she would be wearing a blue woolen hat shaped like a ball, and a lighter-blue topcoat. “They have a great wine list,” she said. Then, through a small nervous laugh: “I’ll be early and get us a table away from the piano.” A pause, and then the laugh again. “Believe me, it’s best to be away from the piano.” She sounded pleasant over the telephone. A soft rich alto voice. She was now twenty-two. Jacques Brayton, né Drew Brayton, was fifty-one. He had never had a conversation with her in his life. Kate. Katie, his half sister.
Her letter, last month, said that she was living in New York now and had made the adult decision to get in touch with him. She had included an address and a phone number. H
e sent her a postcard: Welcome to the big city. I don’t get into town much, but we should get together. He hoped she would leave it at that. But she had called him. Their sister, Alice, had given her the number. “I was kind of worried that you wouldn’t pick up.”
“Don’t be silly,” he told her. He knew Alice would’ve given the number with the air of someone expecting nothing less from him.
That was Alice.
He took the train into the city and spent the night and most of the day in the apartment of a friend on East Eighty-Sixth Street. The friend had left for work early in the morning. Brayton, a high-school teacher, occupied himself with grading papers and reading The Great Gatsby, yet again, to teach. At four o’clock he went out into the rainy street to look for a cab. The rain was cold. There was surprisingly little traffic. He began to walk, hurrying toward Park Avenue. An easterly wind started up. His umbrella shielded only his head, and by the time a cab stopped for him, his front was soaked.
“West Sixty-Third,” he said, shivering. “And Broadway.” It occurred to him that this was life in the world: getting yourself drenched even with an umbrella. He had always been inclined to gloomy reflections. Friends noticed this. With several of them he had formed a casual club that never met, called the Doom Brothers Club.
He sat in the cab and tried to shake the icy rainwater from his coat. The cab was not moving. Horns blew. The rain rushed from the dirty sky, and the windshield wipers made a nerve-racking screech every time they swept across.
He used the newspaper he’d been carrying to absorb some of the water. He was shivering. The cabbie, without being asked, turned the heat up. Brayton looked at the back of his head. Dark hair. Dark, deeply lined neck. A beetle-browed round little man of fifty or sixty. “I’m soaked.”
The cabbie was silent, shoulders hunched at the wheel. You could hear a Middle Eastern sounding song on the radio, though it was tuned so low you wouldn’t be able to distinguish words even if you knew the language. Brayton looked out at the people hurrying along in the windswept rainy street and murmured the name, “Katie.” She had called herself Katie. “Hi, this is Katie,” she’d said over the telephone. “Thank you for answering.”
—
HE HAD SEEN HER only once, when she was three years old, in Memphis. He had traveled there alone expressly to meet his father’s new wife and child. His father got a room for him at the Peabody Hotel and they met down in the big lobby that afternoon, shortly after Brayton arrived from the airport.
“How’s your sister and brother-in-law, there, Drew,” the old man said.
“Oh, they seem fine.”
“Haven’t heard a thing from her yet, you know.”
The divorce was done, and though their mother had met someone else—a real estate man named Eddie—and seemed happy, this was a sundered family, and Alice wanted nothing to do with the old man or his new wife. Alice and her husband were devout Catholics, and in fact this devoutness was a matter Brayton himself had been at pains to overlook: Alice had problems with Brayton, too. She wanted him to repent. She believed that if he repented and sought help, and got married to a nice girl, it would bring him happiness. She did not like him using the name Jacques, and like her father she continued using his birth name. He told himself the annoyance was minor. He had always been fortunate enough to see happiness as one of the forms of emotional weather. It would always be shifting. He had learned this without words when he was very small and beginning to know that something about him was different. His sister was too simple for the world itself, he had told her once, and she answered, “Unless ye be like little children, ye shall not enter.” She actually used the word ye. She actually meant that he would not enter.
Nothing for it.
And that afternoon in Memphis, sitting in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, seeing the cute little girl with soft blue eyes and black, black hair, he felt his own nearness to this member of the broken family as a shock. He could not quite take in her existence. He discovered an odd reluctance to look at her. The greatest likelihood was that there would never be any close relationship between them.
His father’s young wife appeared tired and worried. When she wasn’t dealing with the baby, she kept wringing her hands in her lap.
Here he himself was, doing his own kind of judging.
They sat around a low table, and aside from a gentle awkwardness nothing seemed particularly out of order.
His father said, “You think she looks a little like her older sister?”
“Can’t see it.”
“Alice remembers growing up in my house like it was paradise. And she resents—no, she hates—that I broke it up.”
Brayton said nothing.
“Well. Anyway.”
As five o’clock neared, the old man decided they should stay and watch the famous Peabody Ducks make their anticlimactic waddle along the red carpet from the fountain to the elevator that would take them up to their penthouse home. They all waited and had more drinks while the crowd gathered. The young wife, Delia, wanted to know how he liked teaching, what sort of students he had. She had done some elementary-school teaching, she told him, but that was different. “High school must be so much more demanding.”
“Well,” he told her, “these days none of them read, and neither do their parents.”
“Not like us,” said the old man. He had spent his working life as a contractor, building houses. He read history.
“You always had something to read.”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
“I read to him sometimes now,” Delia said. “His eyes hurt him.”
“Have you had them examined?” Brayton asked him.
“Dry eyes,” said the old man. “But you like reading to me, don’t you, dear.”
“Sure.” She was mostly concerned with the little girl now. Katie wanted to get into the fountain with the ducks.
The old man had already had something to drink earlier, and while they waited for the ducks he had three whiskeys on ice. He always drank more than you thought he should, and seldom showed any effects from it. Brayton looked at the high ceiling, and at the gathering crowd. Finally the fanfare played, and then the march, and the famous ducks were prodded along into the elevator going up. The doors closed. Much of the crowd dispersed. And the three-year-old girl pulled down into herself, wanting the birds to come back. It was a long afternoon and evening, Delia trying to manage a cranky child and an increasingly gregarious husband. Brayton, watching her, thought of fine crystal: the kind that broke when sound waves got too high. By the time they walked across the street to Automatic Slim’s for dinner, the old man had made friends with several of the barmaids and waiters. At the restaurant, nobody had much appetite. The old man ordered a bottle of Sancerre and drank most of it alone.
“We don’t go out much,” Delia said, wrestling with the girl.
“Must be hard to find the time.”
“We stay home and enjoy this one, mostly.” She kissed the top of the child’s head.
“You don’t need a TV with a kid this age,” said the old man. “All the entertainment you need. It’s a comedy show just watching them move around. Used to get the same kick watching you, Drew. And your sister.”
The child climbed into her mother’s lap and whined low about something.
“Past the kid’s bedtime.” The old man got up and made his unsteady way to the restroom.
“He doesn’t usually drink this much,” said his wife. “I think he wants to celebrate your being here.”
“I’ve never seen him drunk, but I’ve seen him drink more than this. I wouldn’t worry.” Brayton smiled at her. “He’s from another age, really.”
“Oh.” She looked down. “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to say anything.”
“It’s fine,” he told her. “I didn’t either. Really, it’s fine.”
She gave him a strange, evaluative look.
“What is it?”
“Do you see your coming here as a p
eace trip?”
He realized that his father’s young, anxious wife had also drunk more than was usual for her. “Not necessarily,” he said. “I think we’re okay. He’s—he’s got his ideas, you know. I mean—I guess we’ve had the usual troubles. But it’s Alice I think who bothers his sense of peace.”
“He was surprised—but very happy you wanted to come.” She seemed about to cry. She held the child and nuzzled the little fat neck.
The old man strolled back to the table and pulled out his wallet. “We should get.”
“I’ve already paid,” Brayton said.
“Well—if you’re sure.”
He watched them get themselves into the car, with Delia behind the wheel. They drove off toward Union Avenue, and he waved, without being able to see whether or not they waved back.
In the lobby bar, he met another young man who was looking. They had some drinks together and then went upstairs. The man, Peter, smiled gently when Brayton told him about teaching high school. He said he was a med student at the university. Epidemiology.
“Of course,” Brayton said.
“Not what you think,” said Peter. “My interest is influenza.”
He left before light, and Brayton slept a little more and took a Xanax when he woke. His father called. “We’ll have breakfast at the Peabody—pretty good buffet up in the penthouse. We’ll meet you there in half an hour.”
“I’ve got a flight at three-thirty.”
“Plenty of time.”
No use arguing with the old man.
The Peabody penthouse had five long tables, each one laden with dozens of foods to choose from. The city looked gray out the windows. Pale with what he said was a little hangover, drinking black coffee and a Bloody Mary, the old man asked Brayton about girlfriends.
“Actually, there are always several candidates,” Brayton answered, not wanting to quarrel over anything, and hoping he sounded casual enough.
Living in the Weather of the World Page 10