She could easily talk while swimming—she didn’t once sound out of breath. She talked and talked, explaining everything. How she and Otto senior could never swim at night by diving off the big outdoors dock, where the other Clausens (in the other cabins) would hear them. But by entering the lake from inside the boathouse, they’d discovered that they could reach the water undetected. Wallingford could hear the ghosts of boisterous, fun-loving Clausens going back and forth to the beer fridge—a screen door whapping and someone calling, “Don’t let the mosquitoes in!” Or a woman’s voice: “That dog is all wet!” And the voice of a child: “Uncle Donny did it.”
One of the dogs would come down to the lake and bark witlessly at Mrs. Clausen and Otto senior, swimming naked and undetected—except by the dog. “Someone shoot that damn dog!” an angry voice would call. Then someone else would say,
“Maybe it’s an otter or a mink.” A third person, either opening or closing the door of the beer fridge, would comment: “No, it’s just that brainless dog. That dog barks at anything, or at nothing at all.”
Wallingford wasn’t sure if he was really swimming naked with Doris Clausen, or if she was sleeplessly reliving her night swims with Otto senior. Patrick loved swimming beside her, despite the obvious melancholy attached to it. When the mosquitoes found them, they swam underwater for a short distance, but Mrs. Clausen wanted to go back to the boathouse. If they swam underwater, even briefly, they wouldn’t hear the baby if he cried or notice if the gaslight flickered. There were the stars and the moon in the northern night sky; there was a loon calling, and another loon diving nearby. Just briefly, the swimmers thought they heard snatches of a song. Maybe someone in one of the dark cottages across the lake was playing a radio, but the swimmers didn’t think it was a radio. The song, which was a song they were both familiar with, was on their minds at that moment simultaneously. It was a popular song about missing someone, and clearly Mrs. Clausen was missing her late husband. Patrick missed Mrs. Clausen, although in truth they’d only ever been together in his imagination. She went up the ladder first. Treading water, he saw her silhouette—the beam of the flashlight was behind her. She quickly put on her robe as he struggled onehanded up the ladder. She shined the flashlight down at the dock, where he could see his towel; while he picked it up and wrapped it around his waist, she waited with the light pointed at her feet. Then she reached back and took his one hand, and he followed her again.
They went to look at little Otto, sleeping. Wallingford was unprepared; he didn’t know that watching a sleeping child was as good as a movie to some mothers. When Mrs. Clausen sat on one of the twin beds and commenced to stare at her sleeping son, Patrick sat down beside her. He had to—she’d not let go of his hand. It was as if the child were a drama, unfolding.
“Story time,” Doris whispered, in a voice Wallingford had not heard before—she sounded ashamed. She gave a slight squeeze to Wallingford’s one hand, just in case he was confused and had misunderstood her. The story was for him, not for little Otto.
“I tried to see someone, I mean someone else,” she said. “I tried going out with him.”
Did “going out” with someone mean what Wallingford thought it meant, even in Wisconsin?
“I slept with someone, someone I shouldn’t have slept with,” Mrs. Clausen explained.
“Oh…” Patrick couldn’t help saying; it was an involuntary response. He listened for the breathing of the sleeping child, not hearing it above the sound the gaslight made, which was like a kind of breathing.
“He’s someone I’ve known for a long time, but in another life,” Doris went on.
“He’s a little younger than I am,” she added. She still held Wallingford’s one hand, although she’d stopped squeezing it. He wanted to squeeze her hand—to show her his sympathy, to support her—but his hand felt anesthetized. (He recognized the feeling.) “He used to be married to a friend of mine,” Mrs. Clausen continued. “We all went out together when Otto was alive. We were always doing things, the four of us, the way couples do.”
Patrick managed to squeeze her hand a little.
“But he broke up with his wife—this was after I lost Otto,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “And when he called me and asked me out, I didn’t say I would—not at first. I called my friend, just to be sure they were getting divorced and that our going out was all right with her. She said it was okay, but she didn’t mean it. It wasn’t okay with her, after the fact. And I shouldn’t have. I didn’t like him, anyway. Not in that way.”
It was all Wallingford could do not to shout, “Good!”
“So I told him I wouldn’t go out with him anymore. He took it okay, he’s still friendly, but she won’t talk to me. And she was the maid of honor at my wedding, if you can imagine that.” Wallingford could, if only on the basis of a single photograph. “Well, that’s all. I just wanted to tell you,” Mrs. Clausen said.
“I’m glad you told me,” Patrick managed to say, although “glad” didn’t come close to what he felt—a devastating jealousy in tandem with an overwhelming relief. She’d slept with an old friend—that was all! That it hadn’t worked out made Wallingford feel more than glad; he felt elated. He also felt naïve. Without being beautiful, Mrs. Clausen was one of the most sexually attractive women he’d ever met. Of course men would call her and ask her “out.” Why hadn’t he foreseen this?
He didn’t know where to start. Possibly Patrick took too much encouragement from the fact that Mrs. Clausen now gripped his hand more tightly than before; she must have been relieved that he’d been a sympathetic listener.
“I love you,” he began. He was pleased that Doris didn’t take her hand away, although he felt her grip lessen. “I want to live with you and little Otto. I want to marry you.” She was neutral now, just listening. He couldn’t tell what she thought. They didn’t look at each other, not once. They continued to stare at Otto junior sleeping. The child’s open mouth beckoned a story; therefore, Wallingford began one. It was the wrong story to begin, but he was a journalist—a fact guy, not a storyteller.
What he neglected was the very thing he deplored about his profession—he left out the context! He should have begun with Boston, with his trip to see Dr. Zajac because of the sensations of pain and crawling insects where Otto senior’s hand had been. He should have told Mrs. Clausen about meeting the woman in the Charles Hotel—how they’d read E. B. White to each other, naked, but they’d not had sex; how he’d been thinking of Mrs. Clausen the whole time. Really, he had !
All that was part of the context of how he’d acquiesced to Mary Shanahan’s desire to have his baby. And while it might have gone better with Doris Clausen if Patrick had begun with Boston, it would have been better yet if he’d begun with Japan—how he’d first asked Mary, then a young married woman who was pregnant, to come to Tokyo with him; how he’d felt guilty about that, and for so long had resisted her; how he’d tried so hard to be “just a friend.”
Because wasn’t it part of the context, too, that he’d finally slept with Mary Shanahan with no strings attached? Meaning wasn’t he being “just a friend” to give her what she said she wanted? Just a baby, nothing more. That Mary wanted his apartment, too, or maybe she wanted to move in with him; that she also wanted his job, and she knew all along that she was about to become his boss… well, shit, that was a surprise! But how could Patrick have predicted it? Surely if any woman could sympathize with another woman wanting to have Patrick Wallingford’s baby, wasn’t it reasonable for Patrick to think that Doris Clausen would be the one? No, it wasn’t reasonable! And how could she sympathize, given the half-assed manner in which Wallingford told the story? He’d just plunged in. He was artless, in the worst sense of the word—meaning oafish and crude. He began with what amounted to a confession: “I don’t really think of this as an illustration of why I might have trouble maintaining a monogamous relationship, but it is a little disturbing.”
What a way to begin a proposal! Was it any wonder that Dor
is withdrew her hand from his and turned to look at him? Wallingford, who sensed from his misguided prologue that he was already in trouble, couldn’t look at her while he talked. He stared instead at their sleeping child, as if the innocence of Otto junior might serve to shield Mrs. Clausen from all that was sexually incorrigible and morally reprehensible in his relationship with Mary Shanahan.
Mrs. Clausen was appalled. She wasn’t, for once, even looking at her son; she couldn’t take her eyes off Wallingford’s handsome profile as he clumsily recounted the details of his shameful behavior. He was babbling now, out of nervousness, in part, but also because he feared that the impression he was making on Doris was the opposite of what he’d intended.
What had he been thinking? What an absolute mess it would be if Mary Shanahan was pregnant with his child!
Still in a confessional mode, he lifted the towel to show Mrs. Clausen the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment; he also showed her the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. She’d already noticed how his back was scratched. And the love-bite on his left shoulder—she’d noticed that, too.
“Oh, that wasn’t Mary,” Wallingford confessed.
This was not the best thing he could have said.
“Who else have you been seeing?” Doris asked.
This wasn’t going as he’d hoped. But how much more trouble could Patrick get into by telling Mrs. Clausen about Angie? Surely Angie’s was a simpler story.
“I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night,” Wallingford began. “I was just horny.”
What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!) He told Doris about the phone calls from various members of Angie’s distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused—she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (All the gum-chewing didn’t help.) “Angie is a good-hearted girl,”
Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mentally disabled. “No, no!” Wallingford protested. “Angie is neither underage nor mentally disabled, she’s just… well…”
“A bimbo?” asked Mrs. Clausen.
“No, no! Not exactly,” Patrick protested loyally.
“Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with—that is, if I accepted you,” Doris speculated. “And since you didn’t know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason not to sleep with her.”
“Yes, maybe,” Wallingford replied weakly.
“Well, that’s not so bad,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean.” He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away—she stared at Otto junior, who was still blissfully asleep. “I have more trouble understanding Mary,” Doris added. “I don’t know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she is pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean.”
“Yes, it does,” Patrick agreed. Again he thought: What was I thinking? Wasn’t this also a context he had overlooked?
“I can understand what Mary was up to,” Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn’t turn away. “Who wouldn’t want your baby?” She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. “You’re like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your effect. It’s not that you’re dangerous because you’re handsome—you’re dangerous because you don’t know how handsome you are!
And you’re thoughtless.” The word stung him like a slap. “How could you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You weren’t thinking of me! Not then.”
“But you seemed such a… remote possibility,” was all Wallingford could say. He knew that what she’d said was true.
What a fool he was! He’d mistakenly believed that he could tell her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because her relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she’d tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn’t worked out—that was all. Alongside Mrs. Clausen’s single misadventure, Wallingford’s world was sexually lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed. Doris’s disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was still wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he’d noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he’d seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake. (She’d put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant.)
What Wallingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you all of it.
Patrick Wallingford’s world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wallingford also realized was that she had actually taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered everything seriously. In all likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he’d once thought—he’d just blown it.
She sat apart from him on the small bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at—often at this hour of the night or early morning—many times before. “I should get some sleep,” was all she said.
If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wall—at the darker rectangle on the wall of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.
“Something used to hang on the wall… in the other bedroom,” he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. “What was it?”
“It was just a beer poster,” Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.
“Oh.” Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Naturally it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn’t have wanted to go on looking at it.
He extended his one hand, not letting it fall in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers. “You used to have a metal thing in your belly button. It was an ornament of some kind,” he ventured. “I saw it only once.”
He didn’t add that it was the time she’d mounted him in Dr. Zajac’s office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!
She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn’t want him touching her anywhere else. “It was supposed to be a good-luck charm,” Doris explained. In the way she said “supposed to be,”
Wallingford could detect years of disbelief. “Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn’t work, except with you, and you probably didn’t need it.”
“So you don’t wear it anymore?”
“I’m not trying to get pregnant anymore,” she told him.
“Oh.” He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.
“I should get some sleep,” she said again.
“There was something I wanted to read to you,” he told her, “but we can do it another time.”
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Well, actually, it’s something I want to read to little Otto—when he’s older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to hi
m later.”
Wallingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he’d told her. He felt ridiculous.
“What is it?” she asked again.
“Stuart Little,” he answered, wishing he’d never brought it up.
“Oh, the children’s book. It’s about a mouse, isn’t it?” He nodded, ashamed. “He has a special car,” she added. “He goes off looking for a bird. It’s a kind of On the Road about a mouse, isn’t it?”
Wallingford wouldn’t have put it that way, but he nodded. That Mrs. Clausen had read On the Road, or at least knew of it, surprised him.
“I need to sleep,” Doris repeated. “And if I can’t sleep, I brought my own book to read.”
Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now—all the more so because he hadn’t known that it might have been possible not to lose her.
At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web aloud (and naked) with Sarah Williams, or whatever her name was. Out of context—possibly, in any context—that story would have served only to underline Wallingford’s weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn’t have been good. Now he was just stalling because he didn’t want to lose her. They both knew it.
“What book did you bring to read?” he asked.
Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other small bags containing the baby’s things. It was the only bag she’d brought for herself, and she’d not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it. She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was The English Patient, a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wallingford hadn’t read it but he’d seen the movie.
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