by Robert Inman
Will got along with the Greensboro Palmers just fine. They visited Raleigh occasionally and Will and his family reciprocated, especially at Christmas and Easter. They spent summer vacation weeks at Nag’s Head. As Will’s Raleigh career blossomed, he seemed to gain legitimacy. Our son-in-law the celebrity.
Clarice threw herself into updating the Raleigh house, aided by generous annual Christmas gifts from Sidney and Consuela (though Will refused to use any of that money to pay down the loan they had used to help buy the house). And she gravitated increasingly toward Greensboro, which was now only an hour and a half away. She called daily, visited often, maintained old friendships, even joined the Greensboro Junior League by special dispensation.
Will had put up no fuss when Clarice wanted to name their son Palmer, but it it was unsettling to watch the way the Greensboro Palmers drew the boy into their realm. He visited for long stretches in the summer, in Greensboro and Nags Head. They immersed him in the rituals of their life: birthday parties, country club activities, ways of dressing and talking and conducting oneself. From his sixth birthday on, Palmer was at his grandfather’s side at every Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament, to which Sidney had superb tickets through his Duke connections.
The effect of all of this on Palmer, Will thought, was to make him a snob. Unlike his grandparents, he did consider the existence of people unlike himself. Will made sure of that, mostly by insisting that Palmer attend public school. Will was adamant about that. But when Palmer saw the real world and compared it with the one his grandparents created for him in Greensboro, he didn’t like the real one very much.
All this was unsettling to Will, but he kept it mostly to himself. And the main reason he did was that he had another thorny issue to deal with: the effect his job was having on his marriage.
“You’re like a politician,” Clarice said. “Always campaigning.”
“Clarice, there’s a part of me that belongs to all those people out there who watch me every night. They could watch somebody else. And new people move to Raleigh all the time. I have to woo ’em and win ’em. It goes with the territory.”
“You overdo it, Will. Hanging around the malls all evening? Speaking to every five-member garden club in the viewing area? Why is there so much of you that belongs to them and not enough that belongs to us?”
“That’s unfair.”
“You’re never here to help Palmer with his homework.”
“But you are.”
“And what if I’d like to go out somewhere myself at night.”
“You could always get a sitter.”
“My God, Wilbur, Palmer is thirteen years old. I’m not going to embarrass him with a baby sitter.”
“Look, why don’t you and Palmer meet me at the mall and we’ll have dinner.”
“And sit there while your public interrupts our meal and paws over you? It makes me feel like an…”
“Appendage.”
“Yes.”
Palmer took cues from his mother. “Are you coming to the band concert tomorrow night?” Translation: I know you’re not coming to the band concert because you have something better to do.
“Son, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to make a speech to the Elks’ Club banquet. I didn’t know the concert was tomorrow night. You have to tell me about these things in time for me to plan.”
“Get on your schedule.”
“Well, I didn’t mean…”
Palmer would by habit shrug and walk away, leaving Will with the sour taste of guilt in his mouth.
One hard and fast rule Will had about his job: he didn’t make weekend public appearances. Weekends were reserved for home -- family and yard.
He spent a lot of time in the yard. For the first time in his life he had a piece of soil all his own and he made his mark on it.
He began with the front yard, plowing up the grass and ripping out most of the shrubbery. He seeded the lawn with a new variety of creeping fescue that grew well in shade and babied the tender shoots with water and fertilizer until they spread into a lush green carpet. He widened the shrubbery beds and installed new, low-growing plants – box hedge and mahonia – and lined the beds with variegated lariope.
When he had the front pretty much the way he wanted, he started on the back, walling it in with holly and leyland cypress and carpeting it with a tough stand of centipede grass that held up well under Palmer’s childhood pounding. At the rear of the house he built a spacious deck of treated wood, doing all of the work himself from plans he got from Southern Living. And when Palmer reached the age where water was no longer a safety hazard, Will constructed a small goldfish pond at the corner of the back yard, complete with a statue of a Greek goddess holding a pitcher from which re-circulated water gushed.
Clarice transformed the house itself. She started small: paint, wallpaper, curtains. As their finances improved, and with a boost from the Palmers’ Christmas checks, her projects grew: ripping up carpet and refinishing the oak floors; re-doing the kitchen with new cabinets, countertops and built-in appliances; replacing bathroom fixtures, installing new window treatments across the front of the house, top and bottom.
They all had their lives, and sometimes they intersected and much of the time they didn’t. They learned to accommodate themselves to the things that unsettled them, to make peace (uneasy though it might be) with the thorny issues. There were things they just didn’t talk about.
And as for Palmer -- he reached the point, as teenagers do, where the last person he wanted to be seen with in public was a parent. Especially Raleigh’s most popular weatherman.
It surprised Will when Palmer announced during his senior year in high school that he wanted to be a doctor. He couldn’t picture Palmer caring for real, live human patients. Palmer was fastidious, given to interminable baths and excessive attention to hair and nails. Not that a doctor couldn’t be fastidious, but occasionally he would have to get his hands dirty -- flesh and fluid and bodily orifices and all that. And the thought of Palmer dealing with flesh and fluid didn’t compute. A researcher perhaps, Will thought. Test tubes and laboratory rats. But the Greensboro Palmers thought medical school was just marvelous, just exactly the right thing. Among his high school graduation gifts from Sidney and Consuela was a stethoscope.
So Palmer went off to Duke with the intention of becoming a doctor. And Clarice discovered real estate.
At first, it was part of her grand plan to re-make the house. But it became a great deal more than that.
She did it exactly the way she said she would. She completed the community college real estate course, got her license on the first try at the state exam, and started to work at a small firm that specialized in moderately-priced residential property. She was a quick learner, patient and hard-working, adept at sizing up clients and guiding them deftly into homes that cost slightly more than they really wanted to pay. She struggled at first, slowly building contacts, listings and referrals, but over the next three years she became one of the firm’s top salespersons. Then she was wooed away by Sniveley and Ellis. Clarice did stunningly well.
Will had mixed feelings.
On the one hand, he was genuinely proud of her. He got into the habit of rising earlier than usual each morning so he could have breakfast with her and hear reports of her dealings – some disappointments, but increasingly, successes. Clarice’s commissions grew steadily. Will insisted that she keep a separate bank account. It was her money, he said. She could do whatever she wanted with it. He asked occasionally about the addition to the house. “Not just yet,” she kept saying.
Work changed Clarice in other ways. Will had never thought of her as well-organized. She had been prone to lose things, arrive late, forget phone messages. She had once had her car stolen when she left the keys in the ignition while she shopped for groceries. But now she was quite the buttoned-down businesswoman, leaving the house each morning with briefcase, cell phone, Palm Pilot, and Multiple Listing Service book in hand. She couldn’t affo
rd to lose keys or forget phone messages or be late to appointments, so she didn’t.
And then there was that more subtle thing. Clarice was more confident, more self-assured, than Will could remember in years, more like the feisty young woman who had shared his Chapel Hill bed and defied her Greensboro upbringing.
“I’m myself,” she said when he mentioned it casually one Sunday evening as they sat on the deck with cocktails in hand. She had spent the afternoon at an open house in North Raleigh. “I’m not just the weatherman’s wife any more,” she said. “I’ve found something that’s just mine and I’m good at it and I enjoy it.”
“And you didn’t have to run off with a siding salesman to do it,” he said good-naturedly.
“No. I considered that, but thought better of it. None of the siding salesmen I’ve met are all that attractive.”
“Well, it looks good on you.”
“Yes. It does.”
Another thing. Clarice stopped complaining about his job, or at least the way he approached his job. If he was working the malls or emceeing Rotary Club ladies night, she might well be showing a house or returning calls or updating her listing book or attending a Board of Realtors meeting. Or if she happened to be at home in the evening, she seemed perfectly happy with the peace and quiet after a busy day of coddling clients and coaxing lenders.
The down side to all of this was the way Will spent his mornings. Clarice was usually away before nine, and the hours between then and his departure for work could be interminable. He puttered in the yard when the weather was good and in the garage when it was bad, even helped out with clothes-washing and house-cleaning. But as Clarice’s car pulled out of the driveway each morning, the empty spaces seemed to expand around him, amplifying the house-noises. He found himself welcoming the ringing of the telephone, a knock at the door, the arrival of the mail. And he began to accept more invitations for morning appearances – school groups, garden clubs, civic organizations.
Face it, he missed her. Missed her moving-about, her domestic routine, her company at lunch. Especially missed the morning sex. He missed, in short, what she had been. The molecular structure of their marriage had shifted. She had moved on somewhere beyond him, had broken free from the orbit of their lives. And there was now an extra dimension of time and space he had to reach across to touch her. He realized that the first time he phoned her pager.
“What’s wrong?” she rang back.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just trying to find the electric bill. I think they made a mistake on the meter reading and I want to call about it.”
There was a long pause. “I’m with a client, Will,” she said.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Do you know where the bill is?”
“It’s in my briefcase,” she said. “I’ve already called the power company. They explained that they don’t read the meter every month. They estimate. And then when they do read it, they adjust the bill.” She sounded like a schoolmarm, explaining to a kindergartner the necessity of flossing.
He felt a flash of irritation. “Well. Go back to your clients. Sorry to have bothered you.”
She hung up without saying goodbye. He did not page her again, even when her mother called in tears from Greensboro one morning to report that the family’s ancient Irish Setter, Archimedes, had passed away. He left a note for Clarice on the kitchen counter. When he got back to the weather center that night after a PTA speech, there was a message.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she demanded when he phoned.
“I thought you didn’t want to be interrupted when you’re working.”
“Well my God, Will. If it’s something important…”
“The goddamn dog died, Clarice.”
“You don’t have to curse.” He could hear the woundedness in her voice. She might cry.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Archimedes.”
“I loved that old dog.”
“And I love you.”
Again, she hung up without saying goodbye.
Will wrote it off to her prickliness. She had always been a little prickly, and now that she had staked out this piece of territory quite apart from him – apart from them – she seemed both self-conscious about it and determined to defend it. And there was an element of fairness here, too. Payback for all those evenings he hadn’t been home. Odd hours and life with a celebrity. Payback.
*****
“ You’re not funny anymore,” Clarice said to him one Sunday afternoon. They lay naked abed in the calm after sex, warm and drowsy from the familiar coupling, pleasure-patterns worn into their bodies by time, like pebbles smoothed by rushing water. At the exquisite moment, as always, they seemed both joined and entirely separate, diving in tandem into a warm, bubbling spring, rising to look into each other’s eyes with the old astonishment. Even after all this time, there was astonishment, which was the way it had all begun.
“What,” he said now, “am I supposed to make orgasm jokes?”
“You used to do those imitations,” she said. “You were really funny. You used to make me laugh so hard I had to jump up from bed and run to the bathroom. Winston Churchill getting his rocks off, that sort of thing.”
“In the course of human affairs,” Will began with a Churchill growl…
“You used to do Mister Rogers at the dinner table and Palmer would almost topple out of his chair.”
“It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood…"
“You don’t do that sort of thing any more.”
“Well, Palmer’s gone and we’re both so busy.”
“I miss that.”
“So do I.”
But what to do about it, he wondered?
He admitted to himself that he had become, over the years of their relationship, a less spontaneous person. Marriage and career and all sorts of responsibility would do that to you. “You project too much,” Clarice had said to him once. “Why can’t you just take things one step at a time?”
“I’m a forecaster,” he had told her. “I look into the future so people can plan ahead.”
And sure, it carried over into other aspects of his life. He found himself mentally projecting, for instance, the whole sequence of a vacation: the route they would follow, the places they would see, the people they might meet. He would order up a routing map from Triple-A, even if he was familiar with the roads, because Triple-A would warn him about construction, detours, new points of interest and the like. He didn’t like surprises.
“Why not just set off across country?” Clarice would ask.
“Because,” he would answer, “you never know what’s out there.”
Now, that didn’t mean he was averse to seeing new places. When Palmer was twelve, they had flown to Argentina and spent a week on a cattle ranch in the Pampas. Clarice had read about it in a magazine and she wanted to book everything herself. She spoke fairly good pidgin Spanish and would have considered the planning to be as much of an adventure as the trip itself. Fly to Buenos Aires, rent a car, get a map, strike out toward the Pampas. But Will considered a week on an Argentine cattle ranch, surrounded by whooping gauchos, to be adventure enough. Let a travel agent arrange everything, he insisted. Sure enough, they had three flat tires between the airport and the ranch. But they were all repaired by the jocular driver who owned the car and who had been lined up in advance.
Sometimes, his penchant for planning and organizing paid an unexpected dividend, as it had one morning when Palmer was maybe five or six. Will was up early, getting a start on preparations for a summer trip to the Nags Head beach house. Palmer heard Will rustling about downstairs and came down to help. Will fixed him a cup of coffee -- mostly milk, actually -- but Palmer fairly glowed with the novelty of it, being up and about when it was still dark outside, drinking a grownup cup of coffee. They had carried their own suitcases to the car and stowed them away in the trunk, leaving room for Clarice’s things, and then had gone to wake her. It was barely light. She rose and joined them in t
he kitchen where Will and Palmer fixed toast and scrambled eggs while she sipped coffee at the breakfast table and watched them, amused. They had been on the road by seven, beating the rush hour traffic out of Raleigh. It had been a good morning.
But no, there hadn’t been anything like that in a good while. And maybe
Will wasn’t as funny and spontaneous as he used to be. But why would Clarice say something about it now, just when they had finished making love?
From the very beginning, their sex life had been spontaneous, frequent, and inventive. Clarice was a willing experimenter, even an instigator of new acts, positions, locations. They balled lustily and Will found himself in a perpetual state of delighted astonishment at what they did and where they did it.
When Palmer was five, he had tubes implanted in his ears to relieve pressure and improve hearing. He developed a low-grade fever and was kept in the hospital for several days. Clarice slept on a cot in his room. Will visited every morning and on his dinner break at night. One evening, as he was preparing to leave, he kissed her at the door, just a peck on the lips. Then she touched his cheek -- just the slightest touch, but it was enough. It was a private room with its own bath. They closed the bathroom door, and with Will seated on the commode and Clarice astride him, they thrashed against each other feverishly. Near orgasm, they heard the outer door to the room open. A nurse: “Mrs. Baggett…” They froze, both suspended in that most exquisite of moments. “I’ll be out in a moment,” Clarice managed in a strangled voice. Then they heard the door close again. Will returned to Channel Seven that evening with the intense smell of her permeating his brain like nerve gas.
Okay, so their sex life was not as spontaneous, frequent, or inventive as it had once been. After this long, whose was? And with Clarice working days and Will working nights, they were sometimes like ships passing in a fog. But when they did make love, there was still that old thing. The astonishment.