Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  Love pain, Gloria went on, it’s the worst. It’s what people with ten, twenty, fifty years of sobriety drink over. So I’d stick close to the program, hit a meeting a day till you’re through this.

  So Patsy went to a Thursday night meeting and to her home group on Friday. She did not share, she listened, gathering bits to arm herself for whichever loss was to come.

  During the day, she shut herself up in her home office and lay on her couch and let herself imagine life in the orange groves in Lewis’s little house (which she had never seen) and farther flung locales. Lewis went to Paris and St. Petersburg each year and had been looking for something small to buy—a studio apartment, a maid’s room in the tenth arrondissement, or some wrecked dacha on the Volga.

  Patsy went to a women’s meeting on Saturday morning in a church near the Rose Bowl. Three newly sober young women in a row waxed hyperbolic about the glories of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bored and annoyed, Patsy left during the break and drove through Old Town Pasadena, thinking she’d get a coffee, but couldn’t find a parking place.

  As was their custom, she went riding with Cal Saturday afternoon, a slow amble along the foothills and up the arroyo. It was true, she saw, that they barely spoke. They pointed out birds to each other; junco, redheaded sapsucker, rufous-sided towhee. They murmured to their own horses, siblings from different years, Zeno and Diotima, sure-footed bays with intelligent black eyes and pricked, shapely ears.

  On Diotima, Patsy dawdled behind Cal through the glens of thin-trunked beech. His great talents had been in AA, but Cal was no longer universally adored there either. For years he’d eschewed psychiatry and even therapy, and had only recently started to come around on antidepressants, which he’d long classed with mood-altering street drugs. If a man he sponsored had started on Prozac or Effexor, Cal told him to find another sponsor, one more knowledgeable about such things. Patsy periodically hid her own Zoloft in her office.

  She’d probably be doing so again, shortly.

  Up ahead, Cal pulled Zeno to a halt and pointed. Red-tailed hawk, he said.

  •

  She phoned Audrey in Paris and spilled the beans. I finally get what you meant about a peer, Patsy said.

  Do you have to cut him entirely out of your life? said Audrey. Can’t you bring him home, have him be friends with both you and Cal?

  Never, she said, already hoarding what they’d had.

  And une petite affaire? said Audrey. Out of the question?

  It wouldn’t be petite, said Patsy. And I couldn’t live with myself.

  Well, that’s good, for my brother’s sake. I don’t know about yours.

  That night, in bed beside Cal, guilt hit in a toxic black blast, for confiding in Audrey and betraying Cal even that much.

  Her fourth meeting in as many days was another women’s meeting, this one on Sunday in a side room of a Lutheran church in Altadena. Patsy knew most of the women around the table, and one, Yvette Stevens, raised her hand to start the sharing.

  Yvette was tall too, and willowy, and ten years older than Patsy. She wore her pale gray hair in a soft pageboy; her eyes were round and olive black and quick. She was a high-up administrator at the County Art Museum and moved with social ease between cranky artists and the city’s billionaires.

  Yvette, it seemed, was facing a near replica of Patsy’s own dilemma, with a new curator, younger, full of fire, a soul mate if she’d ever met one. Things between them had heated up, Yvette said. And I know where they’re heading.

  Patsy had met Yvette’s husband, a good-natured round-shouldered older man whose chin bumped out of a wide, fleshy neck. Buzz Stevens was not unhandsome, despite that neck, and he was very rich. He managed an exclusive mutual fund and made other people rich too. Patsy and Cal ran into them at the opera, at benefits and museum openings.

  If I was drinking, I’d jump in headfirst, Yvette went on. And to hell with everyone else. My kids, his kids, our respective spouses.

  Patsy admired Yvette for talking about her situation so openly, as she herself hadn’t spoken up once in four meetings.

  But after twenty-one years of sobriety, Yvette continued, I might just step around this one. I don’t have to sacrifice my marriage, home, and kids to my own erotic impulses. I don’t even have to kick up a ruckus with my husband. I can choose to behave like an adult. A sober adult. Who knows? Renunciation may bring its own rewards.

  Well, okay, Patsy thought, walking back to her car in the church lot, that’s that. No privileging my own erotic impulses over my husband’s well-being.

  No kicking up a ruckus.

  So that’s that, she thought again, driving home. Could it have been spelled out more clearly? Wasn’t that what she’d gone to meeting after meeting to hear? She’d thrown herself upon the program, and her higher power had spoken through the thin, prettily curving lips of elegant Yvette S.

  Okay, she muttered, not without relief. If that’s the way it is.

  She would not be Anna Karenina, or Emma Bovary, or the Lady with the Lapdog.

  •

  Lewis said not to come by his office, not to call, not to cross his path. Let’s not draw it out, he said. I’m an old hand at this. The cleaner, the better.

  I think that’s right, she said. But if you ever want to be friends . . .

  I’ll call you, he said. And if you ever change your mind, you call me. But not until.

  She couldn’t eat. Her concentration evaporated. There was nothing she wanted to do or see. Teaching gave her some relief; she could show up for her students, lecture, answer questions. Then she found a carrel in the second floor of Hallen’s library, where on Tuesday and Thursday, in the late afternoon, she could see Lewis leave his building and walk a diagonal path across the commons to the parking lot. She once invoked faculty privilege to evict a student and all his books to claim her vantage point.

  Lewis had a large black knapsack and a black leather car coat; he walked aslant, the backpack slung over just one shoulder. Intercepted by a student, he stopped. Patsy saw the sudden freeze of his shoulders and then his head tip back—and even from eighty, a hundred yards away, she knew he was laughing.

  Laughing. He could laugh.

  She was furious all night, rising from her bed to go to her office, to call him, to browbeat him for his laughter, for being able to laugh.

  But he had told her not to call unless she’d changed her mind.

  She could hardly bear Cal’s presence and felt her lips start to curl at everything he said. When he placed his hand over her rib cage one night, she firmly removed it and left the bed, as if insulted, to sleep in her office. But sleep was no longer her primary nocturnal activity. She thought and kicked, and turned on the light and stared miserably at the line where the ceiling and wall intersected. She attempted to calm herself by counting breaths, losing count, going back to one, again and again. She tried to relax her muscles starting with her toes and heels, the way her yoga teacher ended classes in shavasana. Corpse pose. She went tense again in seconds, then rose, sat at her desk, clicked through the World Wide Web, her attention lasting a few sentences into any news story.

  Gloria told her to make a gratitude list:

  1. This beautiful world

  2. Not being in prison

  3. Human consciousness

  4. The existence of L.F.

  5. Diotima

  A lot of help that was.

  Gloria’s next assignment was an inventory, in which Patsy was to write answers to these questions: What do I want? What am I afraid of? Who am I lying to? How do I want to appear? She wrote the questions down on a legal pad and threw the pad across the room.

  Burt called to invite her up for Easter. No, she said, and lied about having other plans.

  She could not bear going back to Burt’s living room, where they had met. Her own office at Hallen, the floor where Lewis had stood, the chair he sat on, the bookcase he’d ranged back and forth in front of all bore witness to his absence. Driving past Casa Bianca a
nd seeing the people waiting out front was like glimpsing a bright warm world from which she’d been expelled. There was no place she cared about being; everywhere she was, some essential animating force had been bled from the surroundings.

  On Palm Sunday she and Cal went to Spencer’s home for dinner. Spencer had married his girlfriend from Stanford, Anna, a molecular biologist who’d quit a job at GenTech after their daughter was born. They lived three miles from the Ponderosa in a tidy suburban neighborhood full of affluent young families.

  Anna served grilled chicken breasts, rice, and green salad. Afterward they sat around the table drinking mint tea. Three-year-old Lily, who’d been set up with a video in the next room, wandered in in her pajamas.

  Go to Ruthie’s house, she said.

  Oh, but honey, Anna said, lifting Lily onto her lap, it’s way past your bedtime. And Ruthie, I’m sure, is already fast asleep.

  But Lily was not dissuaded. Ruthie’s house, she said. I want to.

  Denied again, she began to weep. Anna, smiling gently, stroked her back, murmured into her hair. The sobs grew louder, the breaths more ragged.

  Spencer checked out the window to see if there were signs of life at the neighbors’ house, but the lights were out.

  The crying escalated into chordal wails. Then, screams.

  The patience of these young parents amazed Patsy, whose own mother would’ve tolerated half to one of those extravagant, long, high-pitched whines before sending the child to her room, to cry and rage herself to sleep.

  Oh, Lily dear, Patsy said, thinking she might break the spell. Ruthie can’t play tonight. But you’ll see her tomorrow, I’m sure.

  Anna’s hand fluttered up off Lily’s back, signaling that Patsy needn’t bother. The girl was beyond comfort, inconsolable. She roared and kicked the table legs and screamed bloodcurdling screams. Her face grew red and swollen, her eyes were slits, a clump of hair stuck in her mouth.

  I’ll take her to bed, said Spencer finally.

  I’ll do it, Anna said, standing. She apologized to Cal and Patsy for leaving them. I’ll be back, she whispered over her daughter’s sweaty brow.

  And for another half an hour, from another part of the house, came sobs and roars and the mother’s patient murmurs.

  She’s overtired, Spencer said.

  More tea was poured. Father and son talked about the new Audi convertibles. Patsy monitored the child’s impossible, ongoing fury.

  A tantrum. Throwing a tantrum over something that wasn’t even possible. Wanting what she wanted, when no agency on earth could grant it.

  And not even a mother to hold her.

  Silver would have at least let her vent. Silver wouldn’t have made her write gratitude lists or inventory her motives. Silver would have let her rant and rage with the same amused, motherly detachment Anna employed, albeit for fifty minutes only.

  The convulsive sobs. Screams thickened with fury.

  Where did such oceans of sorrow reside within a human being?

  •

  Cal came to bed in flannel pajamas that were a little raggedy but soft like skin. Their room was chilly; they both liked to sleep with a window open for the air and the sound of the stream. Will you do me a favor? she asked. Will you just hold me?

  She fit into the curve of his body. He slid one arm under her and pulled her closer, clasped her around, and kissed the bone behind her ear.

  At first she could barely stand it. All of her muscles coiled to repel him. He sensed this and began to rub her arm, her shoulder and back.

  Consciously, she set about relaxing, one muscle after another, giving them over to him. Cal hummed and cupped her forehead in his wide palm, caressed her face, stroked her neck and down her sternum. He knew, without her telling him, that she didn’t want sex. For this intuition she was grateful.

  As she relaxed, she began to weep, silently at first, but then she couldn’t hide it. Cal tried once to turn her to face him, but when she didn’t comply, he desisted. In a low voice he said, Do you want to talk? She shook her head no, and he didn’t ask again. Never was she more grateful for his incuriosity, his aversion to probing conversation. Her sobs grew louder and quite painful but were even more painful to suppress. So she wept like the tired child, and Cal held her and sometimes caressed her, reclasped her, and kissed the back of her head again and again until her crying subsided and they both fell asleep.

  •

  She woke in the daylight. Cal was filling his pockets from the top of his dresser. Keys. Change. Billfold. Money clip. She turned, and through a gap in the curtains could see a slice of mountain ridge in dark shadow, and above that a milky sky. No, this wasn’t where she wanted to be. And Cal, now threading his belt and looking at her with some concern, was not the person she wanted to be with. But these thoughts arrived with less force than they had, and with somewhat less urgency. And that was a start.

  PART FIVE

  24

  Spring 2001

  March was visiting again, as a family of four.

  I wish they’d waited till after my break, Patsy told Cal. I have so much work to do.

  Grading. And a seminar on Modernism to prepare.

  They’re easy, Cal said. You can hole up and nobody’ll mind.

  They had arrived three days earlier than Patsy expected. She came in from an afternoon ride to find everyone in the kitchen: Ava, three; Beckett, nine months; Forrest, passing apple slices around; and March, on the brink of evicting Bob the boarder from the guest suite.

  We always used to stay there before, said March.

  Bob stays put, Patsy said, hoping he’d overheard none of this. You can have the possum trot again. Or take all three bedrooms in the east wing.

  I don’t see why Bob gets the best guest rooms, March said.

  We want him by us, in case your dad needs him.

  But we’re here now. We’ll keep an eye on Dad.

  Patsy said, I’m not making Bob move each time someone visits.

  Just out of curiosity, said March. Where does Roberta stay when she comes down?

  The Huntington Sheraton, said Patsy. Ted gets a special rate—two, two-twenty a night.

  I hate the trot, said March.

  Really? said Forrest. It has those views.

  Forrest, she said.

  He hauled suitcases and fold-up crib to the east wing, trip after trip. He was fit and lean, a devoted runner, snowboarder, and sailor—a pleasure seeker, said Cal, who had disapproved of the marriage.

  I’m sorry, Cal said when Patsy caught him alone. I thought I told you they’d be early. I know I meant to.

  It doesn’t matter, said Patsy. They’re here now. But the beds aren’t made up, the rooms aren’t aired.

  They don’t care.

  They did care, Patsy thought. Haydee wasn’t working today, so March would have to make up the beds herself, unless she helped.

  She helped.

  That first night, Patsy scrubbed potatoes, put a pork roast in the oven, picked her homegrown lettuce for a salad. They ate in the garden room, Bob the boarder joining them as usual. Cal sat with three-year-old Ava on his lap. Beckett, strapped in his high chair, screeched like a seagull. So sweet of you, Patsy, to cook such a nice dinner, March said. But didn’t Patsy remember that the children don’t eat pork? Also, potatoes turn into sugar the second you swallow them. You might as well feed kids Snickers bars, March said. Nor was the salad safe. Yes, she knew the lettuce was organic, except that it had been fertilized by stable leavings, and the horses had had antibiotic shots, hadn’t they? I try not to expose the children to secondhand antibiotics, March said. Luckily, she had brought tofu dogs and apples, which was all Ava wanted to eat, anyway, and Beckett was satisfied by his mother’s breast and certified organic carrot puree from a jar.

  Bob the boarder helped Patsy load the dishwasher. I’m not sure, he said, but technically, aren’t we talking about third- or even fourth- hand antibiotics?

  •

  March installed herself
in the kitchen. Forrest set up his computers in the dining room. Five years earlier, he and some college friends had started an Internet company that hooked up twentysomethings with global travel, shopping, and dating; venture capitalists bought them out for a small fortune.

  It was high time now for another, larger fortune; Cal had been sending checks for Ava’s school and, recently, a tax bill.

  Patsy came home from giving her last final with a boxful of blue books and term papers from her twentieth-century U.S. cultural history class. En route to her office, she stumbled over Beckett. He’d shot out from nowhere. They stared at each other with mutual amazement, and he took off. Preparing to crawl, he had an idiosyncratic, leg-dragging scoot that was surprisingly fast. He propelled himself up and down the Ponderosa’s long halls with the clumsy swiftness of an alligator. Patsy worried that the boy would fell Cal like a tree.

  March was heating a slab of tofurkey and simmering a big pot of soup in the kitchen. Patsy peered into the watery broth, with its bobbing carrots. If it’s okay with you, she said, I’ll just take a bowl to my office.

  But we’re eating in ten minutes. And it’s important for the kids to have the family all together at mealtime, March said.

  After so many false starts—biology major, a short stab at law school, a Realtor’s license—March had found her calling. Expert mother.

  •

  Your new kitchen too! Sarah cried. Couldn’t you declare it off-limits?

  And cause World War Three? said Patsy. It’s only for a couple weeks, and Cal’s so happy they’re here.

  A couple of weeks!

  But he did agree to Cambridge, said Patsy.

  She’d been invited to give four public lectures in the fall and do research for her next book. Cal had promised to come along, accompany her on a work trip for once, although he was already muttering about the plane ride, his hips, the damp English weather.

  After all those hideous board meetings he dragged you to? said Sarah. He owes you years in Cambridge.

  I don’t know, Patsy said.