Indiscretion

by Charles Dubow

  “There’s something I have to tell you, and I hope you won’t mind,” he says. “Johnny needs to stay with me for the next three weeks. Maddy is going on a trip. She called me yesterday and told me. She’s not taking Johnny.”

  “There’s nothing bad about that,” Claire says, not quite understanding. “I’d love to help take care of Johnny. He’s wonderful.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for you to see Johnny right now. Maddy and I discussed it.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? What did you say? Did you stick up for me at all?”

  He is surprised by the suddenness of her anger, but maybe he shouldn’t be. “It wasn’t like that,” he says with a shrug, cutting into his steak.

  “Oh really? So I’m meant just to disappear for three weeks until Maddy comes back?”

  “It’s not such a long time.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Okay, so what is the point? Are you suggesting that I should place you ahead of my son? You know me well enough to know I could never do that. Anyway, what choice did I have? I need to do everything I can to ensure that a judge gives me equal time with Johnny if the divorce goes through.”

  “If? Don’t you want it to go through?”

  The question startles him. “Of course I don’t want it to go through.”

  She stares at him. “What?”

  He looks at her quizzically. “You heard me. I don’t want to get divorced. I don’t want to lose my family. I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.”

  “So does that make everything else a lie?”

  “No, not at all. There’s no need to twist my words like that. I care for you very much. I hope you know that. But I also thought you understood how I felt.”

  She looks down, biting her lip. Finally she asks, “And what about me? I’m tired of it, Harry. I love you, but I need to know you love me too.”

  “We’ve been over this. You know I love Maddy and Johnny. They’re my life. I screwed up, and Maddy hates me, but I’d do anything I could to get them back. I thought you knew that. I’m sorry if I made you think anything else.”

  She looks away. “I’m such a fool,” she says. “God.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “To have ever thought you would choose me over Maddy. When she asked for the divorce, I thought I might have a chance, but now, even when she doesn’t want you, you still want her more than me.”

  He lets her words drop. “I do.”

  Hatred flashes in her eyes. “You’re a taker, Harry. You never think about anything other than what you want. You never think about what other people want or how your actions affect other people. I know you didn’t think of me for one minute when you were talking with Maddy. And you know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel like shit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “ ‘Sorry’? Is that all you can say?”

  “This is my family we are talking about. We were happy together until . . .” He pauses.

  “Until what? Were you going to say until I came along and ruined everything?”

  He opens his mouth to speak but knows it would be pointless.

  “Forget it,” she says, standing up. “Since you want to spend the next three weeks with Johnny so much, why don’t you just start now?”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

  “What?”

  He sighs. “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other anymore. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. You’re wonderful, but I still love my wife. I need to do everything I can to save my marriage and my family. And, besides, you’re so young. Did you really think this would become anything?”

  She looks at him, stunned. Finally she says in a barely audible voice, “Bastard.”

  “Claire . . .”

  She puts one arm hurriedly through the sleeve of her jacket, and then the other, and gathers up her purse.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again but does nothing to prevent her from leaving. They look at each other like strangers.

  He watches her walk out the door, the remnants of their dinner before him. There is still wine in her glass. Her meal sits half-eaten, the knife and fork where she left them. The napkin thrown on the seat. He almost gets up and follows her but instead signals to the waiter for the check. Diners at tables nearby who had stopped talking once again resume their meals.

  He finishes the wine, leaves his money. He is a generous tipper, counting out the precious bills.

  Leaving the restaurant, he starts walking toward Claire’s apartment, partly from habit. She has not yet given him a key. He could, he supposes, ring her buzzer. Tell her over the intercom that he has changed his mind and hope for the click that releases the door, a sign that all is forgiven and that he may once more go to her. But when he reaches the front of her building, he is still unsure what to do. His legs feel leaden. His finger presses the button by her name, once, then again. He is relieved when there is no answer. He steps back out on the sidewalk and looks up to her window. No lights are on. She is not home.

  He walks down the street to a bar on the corner. Narrow, dimly lit. He enters and orders a whisky from the bartender. He stares at himself in the mirror. Anger overcomes him. Anger at himself. What the hell has he done? What the hell had he been thinking? Why is he here at all? He had once had so much love and had squandered it. Maybe Claire was right. He had taken too much, and he would never be able to get it back. But he had to try.

  He finishes his drink and leaves, turning once again toward Claire’s building. Looking up, he sees the light is still off. His apartment is blocks away, and the air is still cold, but he isn’t ready for bed yet. He turns and walks in the opposite direction, wondering if he will ever be here again.

  4

  When my father died it was, to reverse the old line, sudden and then gradual. It was the day before Thanksgiving when my mother called me at the office. “Your father’s unwell,” she told me in her precise, elegant tones. “The ambulance just left. They are taking him to Southampton Hospital. I think you had better come out.”

  I knew it must be serious. No one in those days went to the hospital in Southampton.

  “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  “He had a seizure. He had been feeling off recently. I found him on the kitchen floor and called 911.”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  I had been planning on driving out the next morning anyway to have Thanksgiving dinner with them. It was a family tradition. A few friends of my parents would come for drinks around two in the afternoon, and then we would sit down to a bird prepared by Genevieve and served by Robert. Between the turkey and the dessert, which was usually an array of pies also prepared by Genevieve, we would wrap ourselves up and stroll down to the ocean and back to work up an appetite. Then, the next day, my parents would depart for Florida and shut down the house until April.

  In the old days, Maddy; her brother, Johnny; her father; and whichever one of his wives happened to be in the picture sometimes joined us, but that was usually more at my insistence. My mother didn’t care much for Mister Wakefield, and I suppose she knew he drank, but she was too well-bred to say anything, in front of me at any rate. When they came, Mother always put out the smaller wineglasses and had only one bottle of wine brought up from the cellar. I am sure Maddy’s father knew what was going on. He was too smart not to. As for my father, he could find the good in anyone, and since the two men had been neighbors since childhood, even though my father was the elder by the better part of a decade, they had more than enough to talk about. And Mister Wakefield could be very entertaining as long as he hadn’t had too much to drink; then he would become mean as a snake. They stopped coming the year they sold the big house, which was the year after Maddy’s grandmother died, but by that time, Maddy and I were already at Yale.

  After my mother’s call, I hung up the phone and went to find my boss, a prematurely aging striver who had recentl
y been made partner and commuted every day from Manhasset. I was a young associate then and not my own master. We were working on an important contract and had been in the office well past midnight every day for the past several weeks. I explained what had happened, and he sighed and told me reluctantly I had better go. Death is still one of the only things that the legal profession respects more than the needs of the client.

  I had an old green Audi then and drove it as quickly as I could out to the hospital. The holiday exodus had already begun, and it took me longer to make the trip than I would have liked, even though I knew all the back roads. This was before many people had cell phones too—I certainly didn’t, although I did have a beeper from work—and I didn’t know what the situation was when I pulled into the parking lot.

  My mother was in the waiting room, looking remarkably composed. Not a hair out of place. After she called me, I’m sure she had carefully selected the right skirt suit for the occasion, chose the appropriate earrings, handbag, and shoes, and sat down at her desk to write in her distinctive cursive instructions for Genevieve in her absence. Only then would she have had Robert drive her to the hospital in the big old Cadillac.

  “How is he?” I asked, after giving her soft, old cheek a perfunctory kiss. As always, she exuded a subtle hint of Chanel No. 5.

  “He is under observation,” she replied in a firm voice. “The chief of medicine is attending to him.”

  He should have been. My parents were generous supporters of the hospital.

  My mother stopped a passing nurse and asked her to have the doctor come out to explain to me what was happening. That was a harder thing to do than it sounds, but she had always had the knack. Nurses, waiters, stewardesses, taxi drivers, government officials. There was something about the way she spoke and carried herself that commanded attention, even of those who in most cases would be least inclined to stop. It may have helped that her father was a general, but I think it was something she was born with.

  My father was a gentler soul. Tall, serious, kindhearted. On my mantel at home, I have a photograph of him as an undergraduate in the late 1940s. No one would have called him handsome, but he had a solid, reassuring face and the broad shoulders of an oarsman.

  When my parents married and had me, they were older than most of their contemporaries. It was, I think, a happy marriage. She played bridge and ran their lives. He worked at one of Wall Street’s great banks, where he was apparently greatly respected for both his fiduciary acumen and his integrity. He traveled a good deal on business, usually accompanied by my mother. For a while, he even served as an undersecretary of the Treasury in the Nixon administration. One of the senior partners of my firm, who had known him for years, remarked to me shortly after joining, “I have always admired your father. He was an indispensable man to many dispensable people.”

  It was difficult to see him lying on the hospital bed unconscious, an oxygen mask over his face, intravenous tubes in his now skinny, pale arms, a catheter, a battery of blinking machines in the background. Ever conscious of his dignity, he was a man who wore a necktie even on Saturdays, always kept the tail of his tennis shirt tucked in, and I don’t think ever swore, even when another driver swerved in front of him. He would have hated the thought of being poked and prodded by a group of strangers, and I was secretly grateful he had been sedated.

  “We are not sure what exactly caused the seizure,” the chief of medicine informed me. “We have run a series of tests, X-rays, CT scans. So far nothing is conclusive. Your mother has filled us in about his diet, sleep patterns, and exercise. We had his personal physician in Manhattan fax out his records, and nothing’s presenting itself yet.”

  “But surely you must be able to tell something?”

  “We will continue to run tests. For the moment, it is better to keep him sedated. We will keep you posted.”

  My mother and I dined at home that evening, attended by a worried Genevieve and Robert. Mother had already been on the phone after returning home, calling up the handful of guests who were expected for dinner the next day.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” I heard her say from her office near the drawing room. “But I am afraid I have to cancel Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I know it’s terribly last minute, but poor Hugh’s not well, and we had to take him to Southampton Hospital this morning. Yes. Thank you for being so understanding. No, no, please, no need to send anything. I am sure he’ll be home in a few days, right as rain.” Click.

  “How are you, dear?” my mother asked me from across the table, putting an emphasis on the pronoun. “Any news?”

  I was startled by her questions. Her husband of three decades was lying in the hospital, quite possibly dying, and she was keeping up the façade. I wanted to tell her what I really thought but instead only answered, “No news, Mother. I’ve been working hard, but that’s to be expected.”

  “Any girls?”

  “Alas.”

  She sighed, so I said, “You mentioned on the phone this morning that Father hadn’t been well for a few days. Do you have any idea what was wrong with him or whether it’s connected to his seizure?”

  “Dr. Marshall told me the tests were inconclusive, as I believe he told you. I am not sure what good it does to speculate. Neither of us is a trained medical professional.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but I was wondering if there was anything you told the doctors that could shine a light on why Father’s in the hospital.”

  She shrugged and took another bite of her dinner. “I told the doctors what I know. I am sure you do not appreciate it when a layman tries to tell you how to do your job any more than a doctor does.”

  My father lingered for days. Thanksgiving was a joyless affair. Just my mother and me. After dinner I went for our traditional walk to the beach but did so alone. It was cold, and I wore a scarf around my neck, my tweed jacket protecting me from the wind. I stood there overlooking the waves for a long time, praying silently for my father’s recovery. I had already offered up more vocal prayers that morning with my mother when we went to Thanksgiving services at St. Luke’s. By then news had spread around the congregation, many of whom were my parents’ friends from the club. The rector stood by the door in his long white surplice and held both my mother’s and my hands warmly, tendering his most sincere thoughts and prayers.

  Mother’s friends were no less attentive. “Oh, Elizabeth,” they said, swarming around us, the older ladies dressed like my mother, skinny, artificial hair; the men in blazers, tweeds, and club ties, most of them walking with sticks and with hearing aids in their ears. The men tended to hold back while the wives pressed forward. I couldn’t blame them. It must have been damn depressing for them to see one of their own go down, leaving each of them to wonder who would be next.

  On Friday a battery of specialists came out from Manhattan. Nephrologists, neurologists, cardiologists, even tropical disease specialists. “Had your father been to Brazil in the past six months?” one of the last asked me brightly.

  The next day my father woke up, groggy and confused. I was there when he did, having spent each night with him, as I knew he would have done for me, sleeping on a chair. “Walt,” he said, a look of panic in his eyes, “what the hell is going on?”

  “You’re in Southampton Hospital, Dad. You had a seizure at home. They’ve been keeping you sedated.”

  I could tell he still didn’t quite comprehend what I meant, so I repeated myself. “You’ve been here since Wednesday.”

  “Since Wednesday? What day is it today?”

  “Saturday.”

  He looked away from me. “My god,” he said, the reality of the situation beginning to press in on him. “And your mother? How is she?”

  “She’s fine, Dad.”

  He patted my hand. He looked so small and etiolated. Not my father but a pale shadow of him. “Walt, could you ask the nurse to bring me some water? I’m awfully dry.” He ran his hand over his face. “I also need a shave. I must look like a bum.”

&n
bsp; For the next several days, he had moments of lucidity, but the doctors usually tried to keep him pretty dopey. I would go home every morning to shower and have breakfast, and then, unless my mother needed me to run an errand for her, I returned to the hospital. Of course, I grew to hate the place, the beginning of my apostasy toward the medical profession in general. It was so depressing, the smells of shit, disinfectant, and death. The lonely people moored in those impersonal rooms, televisions blaring, the coughing and moaning from behind pulled curtains, doctors and nurses walking in clusters up and down the fluorescent hallways. The lack of information, the air of superiority, and yet, for all their training and experience, they still hadn’t been able to find out what was wrong with my father.

  It often seemed to me as though the tests were making him worse. They kept trying out different medications, many of which made his heart rate increase, or they pumped him full of solutions so the scanners could do their job. The worst thing, for me at any rate, was that there were always new doctors popping in, many of them absurdly young, scanning charts and asking me the same questions over and over. How much did he drink? (Not much.) Was he a smoker? (Quit years ago.) Did he exercise? (Several times a week.) Was there any family history of heart disease? (Not that we knew of.) Had he been to Brazil in the past six months?

  It went on and on like this. It was exasperating. I kept wondering what the scrawls and hieroglyphics on those charts actually meant. Why didn’t the doctors confer with each other? If lawyers handled our profession the same way, without any communication between the different attorneys working on the deal and going back to ask the clients the same questions repeatedly, it would lead to utter chaos. It was a joke. But now, faced with a crisis, these doctors seemed less competent than the man at the office who fixes the copy machine.