by Alon Preiss
After a while, she met Pointer, who was ten years older than she, and wealthier, although that was not an issue. Lucy seemed to like him. Harriet figured, after a while, that she loved him. He was older than Blake Maurow. He was serious and responsible. He had a brain, and he could talk about sensible and important things. He was so different from Blake Maurow. He had a big big house with columns and a creek flowing by in the back, and he did important things in his work, and he had a social conscience and gave to social causes, and he always talked about civil rights and his concern for colored people. He would talk about such things with a mixture of deep gravity and thinly disguised yet self-conscious emotion.
Yet, like Blake Maurow, he had the capacity to love her fervently and intensely. His growing love for the young Harriet would light up his face, his brains would boil, and passion would shoot out his ears. And that would be that.
She felt safe under his roof. She felt that he could protect her. With Pointer in her life, nothing bad could ever happen to her. She deep-down knew that was silly, absurd, ridiculous. But it’s still how she felt.
Once Harriet had become an accepted fixture in Pointer’s life, he sat down with Harriet, held her hand, and raised some concerns. She had told him that she’d been married before. He didn’t need to be told that, of course. There was her daughter, after all. Ha ha. But her past was otherwise shrouded in mystery. In conversation, friends would raise, as established fact, utterly contradictory stories. She was a widow, some people said. Her husband had died in a terrible way. I heard about her husband’s terrible death, one said to him. A terrible thing. Another said, Her ex-husband sounds like a bastard. It’s good she’s made the right choice this time around. Different names attached to different stories. He wondered aloud why so many people thought so many different things.
Harriet shrugged. “I’ve rarely told the truth,” she admitted. Sometimes, she explained, when she felt a divorce in her past would be viewed as scandal, she claimed to be a widow. Other times, dreading the sympathy attached to widowhood, she would claim the opposite. In political meetings back at college, she’d claimed to have been knocked up by a near-stranger and abandoned. She liked the drama there. That was her favorite story. “The truth is very simple,” she went on. “My ex-husband’s name is Blake Maurow. You can hire any number of private detectives, and they will confirm my past, but no one knows his present whereabouts. I married very young. He was filled with the energy of youth. You know what I mean? Then he was not. He was cruel. I don’t need to discuss it, and I won’t discuss it. So don’t ask me. He was terribly cruel, and that’s all I’ll say. Terribly cruel.” Then, almost as a warning: “You can’t really know someone until you marry him. Or her.”
Before the wedding, Harriet said to Lucy: “You don’t ever have to think about Blake Maurow again. You will be a Pointer, now. No one will ever mention Blake Maurow to you. You don’t ever have to talk about Blake Maurow. You can forget about him, completely.” Her little daughter just stood there, her little round face empty of emotion. “Do you understand?” Harriet said. “You are a Pointer now. You can call Mr. Pointer your daddy. When you talk to him, you should say, ‘Daddy.’ ” And then, because her daughter did not answer, Harriet repeated: “Do you understand?”
At last, her daughter nodded.
“We won’t discuss this again,” Harriet said. “If you have a little brother or sister, you will be the same. Both of you will be Pointers. If you decide to mention Blake Maurow to me, I will deny knowing what you’re talking about. You are a Pointer.”
She had meant to make her daughter happy, as happy as she was to cast off all memory of their origins. But a little tear formed in Lucy’s left eye, and soon her daughter was crying real tears, and her face was crumpled up with an expression of terrible, desperate sadness. Lucy was sobbing.
Harriet pulled her daughter in close, and her daughter threw her arms around her mother’s neck.
Harriet whispered in Lucy’s ear: “Pointer girls are princesses,” she said gently. “You want to be a princess, don’t you?”
Her daughter didn’t stop crying. This conceit — the sort of fancy at which Maurow had always excelled — now sounded phony, even to Harriet. And so she gave up.
Years later, when Pointer died, Lucy cried at the funeral. Harriet looked at the children she had borne to Pointer, and she looked at Lucy. Lucy seemed to be crying just as inconsolably. This comforted Harriet in what was a time of grief and confusion.
Now, years later, standing out back on the porch behind the big Pointer house, years later, just a day after she met Blake Maurow once again, looking over a small creek drifting lazily by, Harriet opened her mouth. After what seemed a long time, a sentence came out.
“You know, I was in New York this past week. And I bumped into Blake Maurow.”
Lucy nodded, and she smiled. A bird swooped down from the sky, landed just a few feet from Lucy. The bird stood there looking quizzical, its head darting back and forth between Harriet and Lucy. Just a little bird, a little tiny bird, mostly gray, with a touch of grayish-blue.
Lucy: “Yes? Blake Maurow.”
Had Harriet ever heard her daughter say this name? She couldn’t remember. Hearing Lucy say this name sounded so strange.
Lucy filled in the silence.
“And how,” she asked, “is Blake Maurow?”
“I don’t know,” Harriet shrugged. “Let me just say one thing.”
And then again, a long silence. She stared at her daughter, who looked back, with her father’s eyes. Lucy’s face was expressionless, but there was a smile in her eyes that was always there, just like her father. A child conceived in tears, in the very last minutes of their marriage. Irony personified, sitting here in the cool summer dusk, staring her in the face.
“Most important, I want you to understand that Blake Maurow would have wanted to know you, and to have seen you grow up. Maybe I knew it all along. He has no idea that we have a child together.”
Without much emotion in her voice, Lucy observed, “That wasn’t fair to him, was it?”
Harriet shook her head. “Not fair at all, really.” With a sigh, she added, “Do you want to meet him? He’s not as bad a fellow as I may have implied, years ago.”
“May have implied,” Lucy whispered, nodding.
“You could go to New York,” Harriet continued, “and you could see him. I would call him first.”
Now Lucy laughed.
“Come on, Mom!” she said, as though Harriet had made the most outlandish comment possible.
“Okay. Well. Okay then.”
“Is Maurow still the same man?” Lucy asked.
Harriet nodded. “More or less. He’s like the boy from thirty years ago wearing a mask for Halloween, and he’s fooled everyone but me.”
“What was he like, then?”
She thought. She couldn’t really find the words to describe him.
“He was a rich young man. Handsome. I thought I was pretty lucky, at the time.”
“His spirit, I mean,” Lucy said. “What he was like deep-down. Was he nice, was he mean? Did he laugh loudly at old movies? Did he help old ladies across the road?”
“I don’t remember whether I ever saw him help an old lady across the street, but I’m sure he would have, and that he still would. He once rescued a whole boatload of people who were in danger of drowning. He chased down a thief who’d stolen my purse. That was heroic, you know.”
“Heroic,” Lucy said. “He’s heroic?” She found this hard to believe. It made her happy.
“He did laugh loudly at old movies,” her mother continued. “The sillier the better. He laughed all the time.” With a sudden realization, she touched the side of her daughter’s face. “He laughed your laugh,” she said. “Exactly your laugh. And you could see his laugh in his eyes. You have his eyes, you know, Lucy.”
Lucy smiled, and there it was.
Harriet wondered what else to say about Maurow. A true believer in Magic,
in Heaven, in God, in Goodness. The best, most passionate kisser in the world. Whenever she thought about him, she pictured him running through a field of wildflowers out in the mountains, a boy running as fast as he could through a field of wildflowers someplace where the air was clean. She’d been married to a young man, but she could barely picture herself and Blake as more than children. He was the most naive boy in the world — an uncontrollable mess of emotion, and for those few years, she let him pull her in.
Instead, Harriet said, “He was a nice man, or boy, or whatever he was. I was really quite fond of him, back then. You know. For a while.” And she shut her mouth.
“Why didn’t you hold onto him forever?” Lucy asked, and it was a real question, something that now seemed to bother her. Maybe she was picturing what their life together as the little Maurow family would have been like; maybe she wished that it had happened, that she could go back and change time, persuade her twentyish mother to re-think her decision. “It sounds as though we would have been happy, living out there in the mountains. Why,” Lucy insisted again, “didn’t you keep him beside you for the rest of your life?”
Harriet shrugged, as though that were unanswerable. She sighed. “These things happen, I suppose,” she said.
Harriet had other things to say, but she thought that the time to say these things had passed. Maybe it had been hard for her daughter, being a Maurow-fille, feeling like her last name, Pointer, was really some kind of fraud; surrounded every day by genuine Pointers, by kids who looked like the real father of the house. Harriet wanted to tell Lucy that she was sorry if she had made it all harder. But she kept all that to herself.
That was that. Lucy left. She didn’t really say anything else; nothing about wanting to meet her father. She said a few things. She supposed that it was good that her mother had finally told her, if this were something that had been burdening her. She had stuff to do. And she left.
When Harriet said goodbye to Maurow in the restaurant, it was like their last goodbye, decades ago, and when she turned and walked away, feeling his eyes focused on her back as she moved out of view, she had some of the same feelings she’d had back then: deep regret, a sort of noble sense that this was all for the best. What she lacked, now, was the rebellious, youthful triumph that she’d felt at the time; the dark, angry comedy that she’d somehow been able to find in Blake’s youthful befuddlement, all those years ago. That was gone now; even the sort of tentative relief she’d always felt that she’d managed to end her marriage to Blake; that was gone too. And her efforts to vilify him — she would continue to try, but would she ever again succeed in convincing even herself?
She took the elevator up to the tenth floor, standing against the back wall surrounded by businessmen, and also well-off elderly couples holding hands. Then the doors slid open, and she left the elevator, walked down the hallway to her hotel room, and settled heavily into bed, fully-dressed.
She just managed to fall briefly asleep when the doorbell rang, and when she rose, she saw Blake Maurow through the peep-hole. She swung the door open.
He tried to smile.
“I made you mad,” he said. He held a dozen roses. “I saw that look on your face, and I couldn’t leave. I never liked making you mad.”
Harriet put one hand on his shoulder, let the other hand curl around the back of his neck. “You’re so silly,” she said, and she broke into a laugh. “I’m going back home tomorrow morning. What am I going to do with these beautiful roses?” They were beautiful, too; perfect, strong and young — somehow, among the most beautiful roses she’d ever seen.
“You’ll put them in a vase,” he said, “and during the night, you’ll look at them and think of me, and know that no matter what, I always want you to be happy.”
She pulled him into the hotel room, shoved him up against the wall, and pushed her lips against his. She expected him to pull away and to run out of the room, to run through the city streets and not stop running until he arrived, breathing heavily and sweating profusely, in the bedroom that he shared with his beautiful young wife; but instead, Blake kissed her back firmly and furiously. She felt warm tears coming to her eyes, and she didn’t even know why. It was ridiculous. She had never missed Blake. Not for a minute, not for a single second, in the past three decades. Not even during her recent lonely years. She’d never missed him, or longed for him, or even thought tenderly romantic thoughts about him. Never.
From a car phone, the next day, in another state, hundreds of miles away, in the backseat of the limo that was taking her home from the airport.
“I think it’s good that we didn’t sleep together,” she said.
A little pause. Harriet glanced at the back of the driver’s head, tried to catch his stare in the rearview mirror. He had heard all this before, she supposed. He was part of the car, like the engine, or the steering wheel.
“Let me close my office door,” Maurow said, ever-cautious.
She heard him get up, walk across the room. She heard the door click shut, and she heard Blake sit back down in his chair. She pictured him in his huge power-office; she could see the expression on his face as he settled back behind his desk.
“I agree with you,” he said at last.
“I appreciate that you came back last night,” she said. “I don’t think that we did anything wrong.”
He sighed. Then he said: “Hmm.” He was quiet for a moment. “I think that I did something wrong,” he replied thoughtfully. “But it wasn’t your problem. It was my problem. I did something wrong.”
“Not something so very wrong,” Harriet tried.
“I think maybe you’re right,” he said. “I did something wrong, something bad. But not the worst thing that someone could do.”
“No,” Harriet said.
“Like losing your temper,” he said, “and speaking sharply for a moment to a store clerk, or a telephone operator. Then you calm down, and you stop speaking sharply. One of those things; a loss of control on the spur of the moment. Things one should be forgiven for. Something not so horribly bad that someone shouldn’t be forgiven.”
“Fine, then.”
“Good.”
When he left the hotel room the night before, Harriet gave him a photograph of the two of them together on some warm, summer Colorado day. Black and white, having a picnic, mountains rising up in the background. Young Harriet and Blake laughing; it looked as though they were laughing together at whomever was taking the picture, some friend who was probably taking too long to focus. In context, at that moment, it was probably quite funny. Some friend neither one of them spoke to anymore.
“I had a nightmare at three in the morning,” Blake said. He voice was steady, matter-of-fact. “I dreamed that you and I got a divorce, then got old. And other bad things — you know. I also dreamed that I was married to Alice. In the dream, I knew it was just a dream, that Alice wasn’t real, that she was just a figment of my imagination. I knew I would wake up, that Alice would be gone, that you would be back, that I would be twenty again, or whatever — some young age, something like twenty. When I woke up from the dream, I rolled over. I thought I was in bed with you; I thought it was you, young.” He continued, his voice still steady, impassive, almost curious at this interesting dream. “Then I realized that it was Alice, not you. Alice looks like you, Harriet. I never noticed it before.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Harriet whispered. She was deeply sad and tremendously flattered at the same time. “I don’t think you should say a thing like that, even if it’s true, and I’m sure it’s not true.”
He laughed a little bit, still startled by his experience of the night before. “So confused — I thought that my whole life from just before the divorce, up to this point ... I thought it was all a dream. Isn’t that funny?”
“Like that episode of Dallas,” Harriet said.
“Sorry?”
“When Bobby died,” Harriet explained. “And then he came back, and it turned out that Pam had dream
ed the whole previous season. And Bobby ... well, he was still alive.”
“Which one was Pam?” Blake asked.
“Victoria Principal,” Harriet said. “And Bobby was Patrick Duffy. The Man from Atlantis. That was a boy show. Maybe you saw that one. And Victoria Principal posed naked or topless or something for Playboy.”
There was a long pause.
“Sorry,” Harriet said. “Go ahead.”
“What did you think of the new Darren?” Blake asked.
“Thought he was nicer to Samantha,” she said. “So I liked him better.”
“I thought he wasn’t agitated enough. He killed the comedy. Couldn’t watch it anymore.”
“If we’d stayed married, we would have been fighting about Bewitched every week,” she said.
“I guess.”
“You have a wonderful wife, Blake,” she said, though she didn’t really know.
“Of course I do,” he said.
Of course, it was true; she could hear it in his voice, in this casual confirmation. He had a wonderful wife. Harriet realized that she wished that Blake did not have such a wonderful wife, and she wasn’t entirely certain why she would wish such a thing.
“Just talk to her,” Maurow muttered, his words muffled by the pillow.
Carly was grumbling on the answering machine, her voice so grating in the quiet of the bedroom. Carly’s voice, floating free in the dark air of the warm, quiet bedroom that Alice shared with her husband. It was, Alice mused, like Napoleon invading Russia. Or whatever it was he invaded. It was an invasion. It made Alice mad.