Possessions

by Judith Michael

  But, unlike Melanie, who would have scornfully dismissed it, Carrie began to smile. "It's not bad," she conceded. "It's kind of friendly. Of course," she added hastily, not wanting to betray her mother, "it's not as beautiful as home. But it's . . . comfortable. Like you could jump on the furniture."

  "Dad!" shouted Jon from the deck. ^They've got a jacu2U!:i!"

  "We've got a Jacuzzi," Ross said as he and Carrie joined him. *Thanks to the professor."

  "But it's his, isn't it? You didn't buy it."

  "Until he gets back, a year from now, it's ours."

  "Yours," muttered Jon, becoming very busy with the controls. "We're only visitors."

  "Jon." Ross sat on the edge of the round tub and turned his son to face him. "This is your house as much as mine. You'll be spending a lot of time here; we'll all be here, together."

  "But we don't live here." Jon turned red, then blurted, "Dad, we were wondering if maybe you'd come back."

  A deep ache filled Ross's lungs. "I can't do that, Jon. When a marriage dies, there's no way to bring it back to life."

  "Why did it have to die?" Carrie demanded. "It used to be fine. Didn't it?"

  "We thought so. But then something made us go in different directions. We started having separate ideas and thoughts, even separate feelings and dreams about the future. As if—" He paused. "If each of you tied the end of a cord around your waist, and began to walk away ftx)m each other, the cord would stretch tighter and tighter, and if you kept on walking it couldn't

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  take the stress. It would fray and then snap. That's what happened to our marriage."

  Carrie chewed the end of a blond curi. "You could tie a knot in the cord."

  "Some people try." Ross put an arm around her shoulders. "And sometimes it works. But you have to move closer together to do it. And if you've been too far apart, with too many different thoughts, the chances are you'd start straining against the cord again and the knot wouldn't hold."

  "You shouldn't pull apart in the first place," Jon muttered.

  "You're right." Ross drew his son to him and he and his children leaned against each other. "I don't know why we did. When we were married, and the two of you were bom, I thought my life had a shape, like a house I'd designed, with rooms for the people I loved and the work I loved, and places for friends and holidays and sailing ... I was so excited with my imaginary house, because everyone and everything that was dear to me was in it. And I think your mother felt the same way."

  "You're not sure?" Carrie asked.

  "I'm pretty sure she was at first. Later—I don't know exactly when—she began worrying about all the things she might be missing. But I think for the first few years she was happy. I know I was." The three of them were silent, holding each other. "But then we went in different directions and the cord between us snapped. And we've gone too far to mend it; you mustn't wait for that to happen. The only good thing left from our marriage is you, and how much we love you."

  "Love," snorted Jon.

  Ross tightened his arms around them. "That's what we've got. We're held together by cords, too, the strongest I've ever seen. And if we spend lots of time together, they'll never get frayed; they'll never come close to snapping. I promise that."

  Carrie turned and flung both anns around his neck. Ross tried to keep his voice firm. 'That's why this is your home, too," he said. "You'll have a key for when you're staying here, and you can be here whenever you want."

  Jon shook his head. "Mother said—" He stopped.

  "What did she say?"

  "Never mind."

  "You started to tell me."

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  "Never mind."

  "I'd like to know, Jon."

  "It's not important."

  "h might be."

  Stubbornly, Jon shook his head and Ross sighed, seeing his son begin to build a wall between two houses, two families, two loyalties. "Maybe someday you'll tell me. In the meantime, I'm going to call this our home, and I hope one of these days you will, too." He looked over Jon's head, past the pines in his yard, at the distant silhouette of Mount Tamalpais rising above the misty Tiburon hills. The air was fragrant with roses and narcissus; the flamboyant beauty of cymbidiums and flowering plum covered the bushes beside the deck. A stairway led to a lower garden where a neglected hedge of thorny raspberry bushes grew. Deep foghorns blasted through the Saturday morning quiet; a dog barked; someone was practicing piano scales. Our home, Ross thought. And tears filled his eyes.

  His days became fragmented, like shards of a broken bowl. In his office he worked with the BayBridge contractor, going over the final plans, and with his staff on proposals for new projects. In his lawyer's office, meeting with Melanie's lawyer, he laboriously negotiated downward her demand for ten thousand dollars a month alimony and child support, worked out a schedule for visiting his children, and arranged to have his huge collection of books and recordings packed and shipped from Tiburon to Berkeley, leaving Melanie the house and everything else in it.

  At night he sat in his new living room, with piles of work he had brought home and lists of people and companies to whom his secretary would send change-of-address cards. But he spent most of the time trying to think logically.

  What the hell was wrong with him? He hadn't had a real marriage in years; he didn't miss the glossy magazine atmosphere of the home Melanie had made—in fact, he'd never liked it—and he didn't miss Melanie. So what was he mourning?

  Twelve years ago, he'd married a beautiful, ebony-haired debutante who had enthralled him with her carefree gaiety in the dark days after Jennifer and Craig had died. By the time Carrie and Jon were bom, the carefree debutante had become

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  a restless wife; and after they moved to San Francisco it seemed the only way a Tiburon housewife, as she called herself, could allay her fears of missing out on life was by spending large sums of money, even though the things she bought always seemed to lose their desirability once they were hers. Soon Melanie's beautiful lips had tightened at the comers in perpetual disappointment and dissatisfaction, at least when she was with her husband.

  All this Ross had known and lived with, finding more satisfaction in his work as he got less from his marriage. Melanie would not listen when he tried to talk about the gulf between them, and after a while he let it go; it was easier not to try. They'd do it later.

  It had not occurred to him to leave her. Why not? he wondered now, gazing absently around his new living room.

  Because they were married. Because they had two children. Because his life was devoted to restoring, not destroying. Because he'd thought if they could work out the biggest problems, an imperfect marriage was probably better than none.

  "But it's over," he said aloud. "And it should have been, long ago." He listened to himself and understood why he had spoken out loud: to force himself to face the truth about the woman his wife had become and his own failure to do anything but drift through the years, preferring that to change.

  More and more often he thought of Katherine. She must have the same kind of mourning for a marriage, and even something like the shame Ross felt at his ignorance about Melanie; she had had to face her own, about Craig. He wondered if she carried on silent dialogues, as he did, trying to understand, and to calm the turmoil within.

  I could call her, he thought, and find out. But he did not. She had Derek—that was lasting a long time. He didn't understand how a woman as bright and proud as she was hadn't yet seen through his brother, but he wouldn't seek her out to find the answer—at least not now. It was the wrong time: there was too much he was wrestling with already. He knew he wanted to see her, but until he understood what had happened to him, and why, and where he was going, he'd stay away.

  The more he thought about it, the blacker his mood became. He took to sailing at night, having to drive to Tiburon Harbor for his boat because he hadn't yet found a slip close to Berkeley.

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/>   The drive made his mood even worse and once on the water he brooded at the dark waves lapping his boat, the brilliant white stars above, and the gold lights below, embracing the bay.

  He was a superb sailor. Tobias had called it his obsession, when, after Jennifer was killed, he grimly took lessons and ere wed for others in races or on long trips. For a year, there had been no pleasure in it; he fought the boats as if they were enemies. But as he became technically skilled he discovered that each boat had its own characteristics—almost its own personality—and if he worked with it he could use the wind and the currents instead of being their victim. Then sailing lost its horrors and he understood Craig's passion for its freedom and power the joy of skimming silently between sky and water, part of the earth yet flying, controlling yet bending to the wind.

  But after the separation from Melanie, Ross sailed simply to be alone and to wear himself out. One night he sailed for the practical purpose of moving his boat, at last, to a slip in the Emeryville marina, just south of Berkeley. But mostly he sailed to get away from everything on land.

  Still, it wasn't enough; he needed something else. He was too wound up with doubts about himself, too angry without a specific target, too lonely, with a feeling of isolation that neither his friends nor Victoria nor Tobias could ease. He thought he would explode from the energy trapped inside him if he could not find a way to work it off. And that was when he discovered gardening.

  In Sea Cliff, when he was growing up, there had always been gardeners, almost invisible except when Ross and Craig and Derek needed gardenias or camelias for the girls they took to dances. Now, trying it whimsically, then more seriously, he was amazed at how satisfying it was. It gave him a sense of accomplishment and wore him out even more than the easy sailing the bay had offered in the two weeks since he moved from Tiburon. With the vigor of a convert, he dug and hoed and chopped. At first he killed as many flowers as weeds, but soon, after a week of studying a garden encyclopedia propped up at the breakfast table, he began to tell them apart and even felt confident enough to plant two rows of radishes and red peppers. Leaning on his hoe one morning before leaving for the office, he surveyed his territory and gave a short, satisfied

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  nod. He might have made a mess of his marriage, but he sure as hell could keep a garden in order.

  On June 16 it was one year since Craig had kissed Katherine goodbye and driven off in a taxicab, waving to her through the rear window. Todd had drawn a fierce X with a red Magic Marker beneath the date on the kitchen calendar and he and Jennifer shot nervous glances at it whenever they walked past. By the time the day arrived, they had worked themselves to a pitch of anticipation, anxious and quick-tempered from the minute they leaped out of bed, spilling their cereal at breakfast and snapping at Katherine when she suggested they try not to walk through it.

  "Now hold on a minute," she said calmly, though their anxiety had proven contagious and she was as jumpy as they. Already keyed up about delivering her new jeweb^ to Herman Mettler on Friday, she also had begun to wonder, like Jennifer and Todd, if Craig would choose June 16 to return. One year, she thought, remembering back to Vancouver and the long nights when the porch light had blazed while she waited, curled up on the couch. Her memory sped forward—dimier at the Haywards*, the trip to San Francisco in a rented truck, their first dismayed look at this apartment, the strength of her friendship with Leslie, Gil Lister's daily insults, lunch with Ross, Derek's fantastic box lunch, the Exploratorium with Jennifer and Todd, her first sale to Mettler, her love for Victoria . . . A long, crowded year. A long way, Katherine knew, from the fears of those first dark nights. And as she thought that, a new idea came to her: if June 16 was the anniversary of Craig's disappearing, it was also the anniversary of her beginning to find herself.

  He left and I came out, she thought whimsically, then pushed the thought away. "Maybe it would be better," she suggested to Jennifer and Todd, "if we didn't think about today being different from any other day."

  "It's an anniversary!" Todd protested. "People celebrate anniversaries—everybody knows that!"

  "It seems different to us," said Jennifer reprovingly. "It's like a birthday. You're the same age all year, but your birthday is still different from other days. Daddy would understand that."

  Katherine felt a flash of impatience. "I understand that, too. 265

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  But I don't think a birthday is very much like the anniversary of a man deserting his family."

  "Mother!"

  Todd jumped up and stomped in a circle on the spilled Rice Krispies. "You said we didn't know why he went away and we had to wait till we heard his story."

  "That's still true." Her chin in her hands, Katherine gazed at the pulverized cereal. "I shouldn't have said what I did, at least not quite that way. But it doesn't help to he about what happened. Yoor father did leave us a year ago, without a word— we even thought he might be dead, remember?—and it took us a long time to get ourselves put together. I think we should take credit for what we did and not forget how hard it was, how unhappy we were, the trouble you had m school, the problems I had with my job . . . Even if we don't know why he disappeared, I think we ought to remember that he did just . . . leave us."

  "So you can stay mad at him?" Jennifer asked shrewdly.

  "So someday we can find out the truth," Katherine said steadily. "Whether he really had to leave or not."

  It was the first time she had said it aloud. Jennifer's eyes narrowed. "You shouldn't talk that way about Daddy. He tried to come back on New Year's Eve but you were too busy with Derek to get here in time so he left. He thought you didn't want him. It was your fault he went away; he protebly knew you were going to bed with Derek—"

  "Jennifer!"

  "Well, everybody does, don't they? When they're out late and go to somebody's apartment? I used to wake up when you came home and look at my clock and see how late it was and the kids at school always talk about it so what else were you doing? Daddy knew. That's why he left; he feh awful and he went away again." Stonily she looked at Katherine. "What did you do to make him go away the first time?"

  Stunned, Katherine stared at her. Once, they had asked what they had done to make their father leave. "What did / do?"

  "Well, you and Mr. Doemer lied that Daddy stole money, so we figured you made that up so you could pretend it wasn't your fault he left—you did something that got him mad— because why else would he go away from us unless you made him—?"

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  "Stop it, Jennifer! This instant! You don*t know what you're talking about!"

  Jennifer burst into tears. "I know I don't! But you never tell us anything!"

  "Mom," Todd blurted, looking from Jennifer to Katherine. "Should I sweep up the cereal?"

  Katherine's eyes met Jennifer's and unexpectedly a small laugh escaped them both. "In a minute," Katherine said. "First, we'd better talk."

  She contemplated them across the breakfast table, her bright, beautiful children who had to pick their way through the minefields of adult behavior. Children ought to be happy and carefree, Katherine thought, but how can they be, if they're caught in our complicated lives?

  "I didn't lie. It does seem that Daddy took money from the company; I told you, I'm waiting to hear what he says about it. But that's separate from everything else. I didn't want him to leave; we didn't fight; he wasn't angry at me. We loved each other, and we were happy. All of us." As vividly as if she were in Vancouver, Katherine saw the slanting afternoon sunhght bringing her living room to life—the flowered furniture, the patina of Craig's oak desk, the gleam of black Eskimo sculptures—and Craig's smile when he held her close, telling her he loved her. "We were happy," she repeated and her voice broke on the words. It hadn't seemed so real for months.

  "What about Derek?" Jennifer asked, her voice subdued.

  "Derek was exciting," Katherine answered truthfully. "I told you about those enormous houses we went to, with fancy
food and bright lights and people wearing beautiful clothes. All those parties, where no one was poor and no one ever seemed worried about anything... Going out with Derek was like being in a fairy tale."

  "I guess that was wonderful," Jennifer said.

  "A lot of the time it was. But Derek turned out to be not so wonderful, and after a while I didn't want to be with him anymore. You know that, because I told you when I stopped seeing him, almost two months ago."

  Wordlessly, Jennifer scrutinized her. "No," Katherine said. "I didn't go to bed with him. I thought about it, but I didn't."

  "You thought about it?"

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  "Everybody does," Katherine replied, using Jennifer's words. "It's one of the important things men and women do together. But every woman doesn't do it with every man and I didn't do it with Derek."

  Jennifer's eyes were bright with relief and gratitude. "Now," Katherine said, looking for a change of subject. "Could you give me some help this morning? I'm trying something new for my last piece for Mr. Mettler and I'd like your opinion, and some help in polishing. And I thought tonight we'd have dinner at the Hippo; I could use a good hamburger. How about you?"

  "Me too!" Todd grinned.

  "Jennifer?"

  Shamefaced, Jennifer looked at her lap. "You're so nice. But I wasn't nice to you."

  "Not very," Katherine agreed. "But you were unhappy, and you tried to spread it around. Remember what we decided at the Exploratorium? Don't keep things bottled up; let's talk about them."

  "Dad kept things bottled up, didn't he?" said Todd, making a discovery. "Maybe if you'd asked him to talk about them—"

  "I did," Katherine replied shortly. "Now I'm going to work. After you sweep the floor, come on in."

  Filled with sudden resentment, she sat on the stool at her worktable. Please go away, she begged Craig silently. Stop creeping into all our conversations; let us get on with the things we have to do. But then she added quickly, I'm sorry; I didn't mean it. Of course we should talk about you. Jennifer and Todd need you and I know you're still part of our lives. But you make it very hard for us.