Reed frowns and shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m going to the dance tonight with Judith.”
* * *
Jade and Desiré, bathed and in pink nightgowns, are chasing each other on the lawn. Cassandra, the baby, has been put to bed. The river is indigo in the evening light and there are enormous clouds hanging in the sky. Anne carries the salad out onto the deck and sits down at the table, where the others have started eating without her.
“Did anybody check on Mother?” asks Reed.
“Dead to the world,” Lance grins, shaking his head fondly.
“It’s nice to have her out here helping with things,” quips Anne.
“If you were as old as her—” says Eric.
“I wonder who’ll be at the dance,” says Reed, taking some salad.
“Everybody,” says Eric gloomily, drumming his fingers on the table.
“I thought about renting a movie,” says Anne to Eric. “I could make popcorn. We could have a nice quiet evening together.”
“Are you going to the dance?” Eric asks Lance.
“Not me!” chuckles Lance. “I learned a long time ago that girls just get you in trouble.”
“The best kind of trouble there is,” observes Reed.
“I wonder if they need any help behind the bar,” says Eric.
“You promised to give up the club,” Anne reminds him. “You said no more hangovers.”
“I hear the place is going to hell without me,” Eric addresses Reed, looking for sympathy. “I helped build that club with my own hands. I care about it.”
But Reed is not listening. “Gotta get going,” he says, wiping his mouth with a napkin and standing up. “Gotta shower and shave.”
Lance rises too, hiking his pants up over his big belly, and calls down to the girls, “Hey, you two, how about a game of hide-and-seek?”
“Don’t anybody rush to help with the dishes,” says Anne.
Eric looks at her critically. After the others have gone, he asks, frowning, “Why do you have to be such a bitch?”
“I don’t know,” she says, smiling glassily. “It seems to be my lot in life, doesn’t it?”
At seven thirty, not wanting to wake Mrs. King up, Anne puts Desiré and Jade together in Jade’s bed. Lance will sleep tonight on the couch, his long legs hanging over the end, and Reed, if he returns from the dance at all, will sleep on cushions on the living-room floor.
Anne picks up the girls’ damp swimsuits from the floor, closes the bedroom door quietly and goes into the bathroom to hang them up on a rod. There, she notices, through the bathroom window, Reed and Eric up on the incline behind the house, under the tall pine trees. Pressing her face to the screen, she tries to hear what they’re saying, but they’re too far away. Then she sees Eric shove Reed roughly in the shoulder with the heel of his hand and Reed push him back in the chest. Eric takes a swing at Reed’s head, but Reed, younger and more fit than Eric, ducks the punch. He straightens up, leering, and his clenched fist shoots out at Eric’s face, knocking him backward onto the ground.
“I’m out’a here, man!” Reed shouts with disgust, turning and walking up the needle-covered incline to his Jeep.
“Fuckin’ jerk!” Eric calls, still sitting on the ground. Reed stops beside his car, takes out a cigarette and lights it coolly. “Fuckin’ asshole!” Eric shouts up the hill. Reed gets into his Jeep, starts the engine and tears up the hill. Eric touches his nose gingerly, brings his hand away and sees blood on his fingers. A minute later, he is in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face. The blood has run down his arm and is all over the front of his shirt.
“What was that all about?” Anne asks him, pulling a towel off a rack. “Here, let me see your face.”
“Never mind,” Eric says angrily, pushing her aside, “I’m all right.” He removes the shirt, throws it on the floor and goes into the bedroom. Anne picks the shirt up, fills the sink with cold water and puts the shirt in, squeezing the water through it. Then she goes into the bedroom, where she sees that Eric has pulled on his black dress pants and is in front of the mirror, buttoning up the paisley shirt she gave him for his birthday.
“You should lie down until that nose stops bleeding.”
“It’s fine now. It’s nothing.”
“Why were you and Reed fighting? I want to know.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he says, picking a comb up from the dresser and running it through his hair. “It’s just between the two of us, so lay off.”
“You’re fighting about that babysitter, that Judith, aren’t you?”
“I told you it’s none of your business,” says Eric, putting his wallet and change in his pockets.
“You’re after that poor kid, aren’t you? Is she sixteen yet? You could get jailed if you don’t keep your cock in your pants.”
“You’re fuckin’ paranoid, you know that?” he shouts at her. Then more calmly, he says, “Look, I go crazy, cooped up here at night. I need to get out. I’m just going over to the club and have a few drinks with the boys. Don’t wait up for me.”
Anne follows him into the hall. “You promised me you’d start staying in at night. You said you’d start taking an interest in the girls.” Without answering, Eric walks through the living room and disappears out the back door. Anne goes back into the bathroom and looks out the window. She sees Eric heading for the car, jingling his keys.
She shouts out the window, “If I end up getting bloody AIDS from you, I’m going to take that gun of yours and blow your fucking pecker off!”
When the car has roared up the hill to the road, Anne closes her eyes, clenches her hands into fists and pounds her knuckles on her head until it’s ringing. Weeping, she leans on the windowsill and bites hard on the back of her hand. She tastes blood. Across the hall from the bathroom, the door to Desiré’s room suddenly opens and Mrs. King appears, her hair tousled. Anne straightens up quickly, thankful that the bathroom and hallway have grown dim in the softening evening light.
“What’s all the shouting? Where is everybody?” yawns Mrs. King, coming forward to turn on the bathroom light and peer into the mirror.
“They’ve gone to the dance.”
“Eric too?”
“Yes.”
“Those boys!” cries Mrs. King cheerfully. “They’ve broken my heart a thousand times. Look at this hair!” she says despairingly, pulling at it as though it were alive. She turns and sees Anne’s red eyes. “Have you been crying?” she asks, but does not come forward to comfort her. “What’s the matter?” she asks in a practical, challenging tone. “Is it Eric? I don’t know what I can say. You knew what he was like when you married him, didn’t you? A party hound from way back. His father was a boozer, so what can you expect? You can’t ask a man to sit home all the time. I tried to make Eric’s father do it and look what happened.”
In the living room, Anne finds Lance in front of the television.
“Eric went to the dance,” she tells him.
“I know,” he says. “I figured he would.” He picks up the remote control and changes the station.
Anne sits down in a chair in a dark corner of the room, where she has a view of the river. She hears Mrs. King running water in the bathtub. Looking out at the evening, Anne says, “You know the first time Eric and I had sex?”
“No,” says Lance absently, absorbed in the television.
“It was in the back of his car on a night like this. We’d met at a party that evening, up here in the country. Eric gave me my first joint. He knew I was a virgin—he could spot one a mile away. He offered to drive me home, but instead we went parking. One thing led to another. The next thing we knew, a police car had pulled up beside us. Eric was dressed and out of the car before I had even reached for my clothes. I couldn’t make out what he and the officer were saying, but finally they laughed together. Eric knew every cop in the district, and they knew him, of course, by reputation. Eric opened the car door and leaned in. ‘He wants som
e information,’ he said to me, ‘and I realized I don’t know your name.’”
Anne turns and sees that Lance hasn’t heard a word. Finally he senses her looking at him and glances over at her.
“Did you say something?” he asks.
Anne laughs ruefully and gets up. “No, nothing at all,” she answers, passing behind him. She slides the screen door open and steps out onto the deck, inhaling the soft night and the weedy smell of the river. In the sky floats a cloud shaped like a white ship, full of innocence and promise. Anne leans with both hands flat on the railing and sighs.
“You could go out too and tie one on,” Lance calls encouragingly from the living room.
“I’m too old for that. I’m over the hill.”
“No you’re not, you’re still beautiful,” says Lance, and raises the volume on the TV.
For Anne, there is a sadness in the evening, in the slow, glassy movement of the river, the deserted deck with towels drying on the empty chairs, the hollow drilling of a woodpecker in a tree, the memory of cool-cheeked girls on summer nights like this, when white ships sail in the sky.
II
“What were you doing back there?” Anne asks Eric. “I told you I don’t like you creeping around the bedrooms. It makes me nervous. I want you to stay in the living room when you’re here, or outside, where I can keep an eye on you.” She’s in the kitchen, cutting the string off the bakery box containing the cake for Jade’s sixteenth birthday. Anne is wearing her hair in a short, modern cut. She’s lost some weight in the past few years, and now she has a leanness of neck and jaw that is not altogether attractive. It makes her look older and tougher, like a piece of driftwood stripped of its bark.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” says Eric sheepishly. His hairline has receded noticeably and there is a look of defeat and caution about him and also a certain quality of injury in his face that Anne believes he cultivates to prey on her conscience. “I just like to look around when I come up,” he tells her innocently. “You know. Renew old acquaintances. Sometimes when I’m lying in my apartment at night I try to remember how the different rooms in the house look, where the furniture is placed exactly and what colour the walls are and the curtains.”
Lifting the cake out of the box, Anne pauses to look at him. “You’re getting weird,” she says, unsympathetic, and licks some icing off her thumb.
“You don’t know how lonely it is living by yourself.”
“I would have thought you’d be laying everything in sight, now that you’re free.”
“You’re the only woman I want,” says Eric.
“Fine time to decide that,” says Anne. She has noted Eric’s dress pants and his flowered Italian shirt, which she knows he’s put on in an attempt to make himself attractive to her. She should tell him it’s no use. Anne now believes that there is a brief moment in life when a woman is young and generous with herself and susceptible to love. If she throws that moment away on a man like Eric, she doesn’t get any more chances. She had had hopes of meeting someone else after she threw Eric out two years ago. She had started to take better care of herself, but there did not seem to be any good prospects out there. She is not even sure why she’d want to meet another man. She does not think she believes in love any more.
In a few weeks, Anne and Eric’s divorce will be final. Eight years ago, Anne reluctantly handed over what was left of her inheritance to Eric to buy the tavern he wanted. The business limped along for six months, then folded. That was when Anne decided to give up her psychiatrist and go out and get a job. Eventually, she set up a small business of her own, handling office moves, arranging for vans, packing up equipment, moving furniture from old offices to new ones. She has a crew of ten men working for her. Eric, who is on unemployment insurance because of civil service cutbacks, has asked if she’ll give him a job and she has refused. She is looking forward to signing the divorce papers, to putting the marriage behind her, but Eric is still hoping for a reconciliation.
“I was looking at the outbuildings earlier,” Eric says. “I noticed that the door of the shed is hanging on one hinge and there are a dozen or so loose shingles on the workshop roof. I put a lot of work into those buildings. I hate to see them going to hell.”
“If I had the money, I’d get them fixed,” says Anne, rummaging in a drawer. “I was sure I had some birthday candles somewhere.”
“Why pay someone to do it when I could come up anytime—”
“The judge said,” Anne cuts in impatiently, slapping her hand down flat on the counter while glaring at Eric, “six months before you see the girls. I think that’s a good stretch for you to get your act together. Also, it gives them time to get over your little drama. I was crazy to let you come up here today, but you got Jade so worked up I had no choice. You shouldn’t have phoned her. That was against the rules too. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. My lawyer would have my head if he knew you were here. I hope you’re going to behave yourself today.”
“I promise I’ll be a good boy,” says Eric somewhat mockingly and Anne gives him a stony look.
“What’s Lance doing here, anyway?” Anne asks. “And your mother? I don’t remember inviting them. I’m not sure there’s enough cake now.”
“They wanted to see Jade. They wanted to see you.”
“Sure they did.”
“Mom was driving downtown the other day and she saw you on the street dressed in one of your business suits, carrying your briefcase and all. She was impressed as hell.”
“She’s sure got old and sour,” observes Anne. This is the first she’s seen of Mrs. King in a year. The last time was when Eric was admitted to the hospital after swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.
“It wasn’t a genuine suicide attempt,” Anne, who’d responded reluctantly to a phone call, told Mrs. King at the hospital. They were standing beside Eric’s bed in the psychiatric ward. He was sleeping, under sedation. Anne looked down at him, unmoved. “He’s just trying to get attention,” she told Mrs. King. “He’s trying to get back at me. If he’d really been serious about killing himself, he would have blown his brains out. It’s not as if he didn’t have enough guns handy to do it with.”
“He was the best father he knew how to be,” said Mrs. King. “He had nobody to teach him.”
“He never learned how to love,” Anne told her. “He may not have had a decent father but you could have taught him that much, at least. But I guess you have to know how to love before you can teach someone how.”
Then Mrs. King had started to weep. “I’ll never forgive you for saying such a thing,” she told Anne.
“I don’t want your forgiveness,” Anne told her. “I got your son and that was more than I could stand.”
A few months ago, Eric turned up unexpectedly at the house one Sunday afternoon, saying he wanted to talk to Anne and the girls. He got them to sit in a row on the couch and he sat down in an armchair opposite them and pulled a revolver out of his pocket. He held it to his temple and said that if any of them moved or spoke, he’d blow his head off. Then he told them the whole story of his pathetic life, about how his father had pickled his liver and beat Mrs. King and the boys before finally kicking the can when Eric was only ten. About what a failure he was at school. About a series of close scrapes with the law during his teen years. About hating his job until he found unemployment was even worse than working. About living alone in a sterile apartment and missing them all, especially the girls, and still loving Anne with all his heart and feeling now like he wasn’t worth two cents, and the only thing that kept him every day from jumping off his apartment balcony was hope. Hope that Anne would take him back. It took an hour to get all this out, during which time the girls, frozen in their seats, wept and trembled and came close to throwing up.
Anne heard him out and then said, “Well, I’ve got better things to do than sit around here listening to this garbage. I’ve got vacuuming, and if you want to pull the trigger, be my guest, it’s your stupid life.” She
got up, went down the back hall and pulled the vacuum out of a closet. She plugged it into a wall socket in the hall and roared into her bedroom with it. There, she picked up the phone and dialled 911. “There’s a madman loose in my house with a gun,” she said into the receiver. The police arrived within minutes and took Eric away in handcuffs.
Now Eric is seeing a psychiatrist, on a court order. Before the separation, Anne had asked him to see an analyst, but he’d just laughed at her. “Shrinks are for nuts,” he’d said. Now his shrink is all he can talk about. “I’m sick,” he tells people unabashedly, slightly boastful, scratching the back of his head. My shrink says this and my shrink says that. “My shrink wants me to take these pills, for a while anyway.” And, “My shrink says it all goes back to my father.”
“Don’t think having a lousy father absolves you of responsibility,” Anne told him.
* * *
“If there isn’t enough cake, I don’t have to have any,” says Eric, full of self-sacrifice. He has insisted on carrying the paper plates, napkins and plastic forks down to the patio, though Anne says to him, “Why lift a finger now when you never did before?” Anne follows him down to the river, bearing the cake, flaming with candles.
The afternoon is hot and humid. There is a pearly light over the sluggish water that distorts vision, giving the illusion that the river is wide, wider than it actually is, that they are standing in a dream, with the real world pushed back to a far, far shore. This is the kind of perfect, windless day that makes the sky seem deeper, the clouds more baroque, the daylight hours longer than anywhere else in the world. Anne wishes the river weren’t such a picture because she knows it will fill Eric with a maudlin nostalgia.
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