Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  I was eating penne. I stabbed them like fish as I thought about what he’d said. I wasn’t happy that he wanted to see other women, and my discomfort was the first hint that I might come to the end of this experiment and want him back—and what if he was no longer available?

  I didn’t want to see other men. I was still using up that solitude deficit. I was happy to go out for dinner or drinks with friends, but though I missed sex, it seemed like too much emotional trouble. Nobody asked me out, anyway.

  “If this is how things are going to be,” Griff said, twirling some more spaghetti, “there’s no point in pretending otherwise.”

  I didn’t say that yes, this was the way things would be. I wanted to say, “Don’t take somebody else out to dinner!”

  Instead, I said, “You are free to decide whom you spend your time with.”

  Too upset to talk about all the possibilities, I pretended I was fine with all the possibilities, but that was a bad week. I thought I’d made a mistake, I’d lose my husband, but I was powerless to keep him, and I knew I couldn’t get along with him if I had him. I didn’t talk to anyone. My friends would have said, “If you feel so bad, tell him you’ll take him back,” but I couldn’t.

  Then he changed his mind—after a man I met through my work asked if I were ever free for “coffee or something.” We went to see Broadway Danny Rose. Maybe the girls found out that while they were upstairs I went to a movie with a man. Maybe Griff saw him from the window. Suddenly, he didn’t want to move away—and now, encouraged by my new popularity, I wanted him to go. I insisted that he look for an apartment elsewhere. After protests, he moved to West Haven, to an apartment near the water, and I rented the apartment upstairs to a couple of graduate students, so we could continue to afford two households. I dated the man from work for months, and someone else after that. Then Martha told me Griff had a “sort-of girlfriend” who came along on outings with him and the children.

  “How do you know she’s his girlfriend?” I said.

  “I asked him,” she said. “He said, ‘Sort of.’”

  The girls were spending whole weeks with him by then, alternating with weeks at my house. I guess that woman was a girlfriend, because she lasted. The girls liked her and I wondered if we’d divorce and she’d be their stepmother. In some respects, it didn’t seem like a bad way of living. Griff and I could be friends. Maybe we had always been meant to be friends.

  Dating other men, I was experiencing a particular kind of surprise and anticipation I had thought I was done with: the moment when I knew a man was about to make a move in my direction, the little swirl of delight when he did. I was sensible enough to pick nice people, and the sex turned out to be welcome. Nice men tend to be shy, so it wasn’t passionate, but that was okay; I didn’t have time or energy to have my heart broken every few months.

  The men were fine, but I never lost the delight in solitude I’d felt at the beginning of our separation—I still have it. The pleasure of spending an evening with these men was often pleasure I’d have cheerfully done without, as I’d realize when someone called to say he was sick or busy and couldn’t go out after all.

  Griff must have been reasonably happy with the sort-of girlfriend, because he stopped making occasions to talk about our situation. We’d get together more casually to plan vacation schedules or teachers’ conferences. A surprising amount of time passed. Then one day, more than three years after we’d separated—toward the end of a lunch we’d scheduled to make some household decision or other—Griff settled back in his chair, as people do when they have something important to say. I thought he might ask for a divorce. I got ready to feel bad. But he said, “I think it’s time we got back together.”

  To my surprise, I felt a surge of joy, as if this were a romantic comedy and, despite everything, the guy I loved had just taken out a ring. He leaned forward, and I noticed that the lines on Griff’s face had deepened. He smiled, but with so much sorrow, so much rueful wisdom, that I couldn’t give him an unconsidered answer. But I was late for a meeting at work. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “We’ll talk about it.”

  We had lived past Helen’s death and Val’s book and Val’s death. Griff would always be someone who thought he knew best what other people ought to do—he still is—and he still thought I’d done wrong to write that essay. I knew he did; I didn’t have to ask. But I’d lived enough to feel sure of what I believed, whether he approved or not. It’s tricky to marry someone who thinks for hours a day about ethics and God and how to live. I hadn’t known that I too had a moral code, but it turned out that I did, and it wasn’t identical to his. I believed in freedom of the imagination. I believed in Val’s freedom, however uncomfortable her book made me. I could never say it shouldn’t have been written, trashy or not. But that meant I too had freedom. Freedom to write what I had written. Freedom to love my reprehensible, lost friend.

  So it took a few days, but then I said yes. The guys I’d dated couldn’t compete with Joshua Griffin. The upstairs apartment happened to be empty when he moved back, so for the first time, we had the whole house to ourselves. A year or two later, renovations made it more like a one-family house: we took out the upstairs kitchen appliances and removed a door at the bottom of the stairs. In some ways, it still felt more like two houses, and Griff occasionally complained. The arrangement suited me.

  When Griff—decades later—became president of the board of Barker Street, I was angry, and I guess I was right to be, not because, as I had predicted, there were so very many meetings and other obligations but because Barker Street upset him. One morning, he blurted out something about the previous president, who seemed to think his job was to prevent anything anyone wanted to do. Griff, the board must have thought, would be an improvement, and I knew he would be. But from the start, Griff and Jean were at odds. I didn’t understand why he was so negative about the employee Jean kept talking about, Paulette, and since he was, why Jean kept talking about her. Finally, Griff explained that he’d persuaded Jean to hire Paulette in the first place, and then they’d both changed their minds. Whenever the name Barker Street was mentioned in our house, he’d predict trouble.

  It wouldn’t have mattered to me if he’d followed me around complaining about Jean Argos or her staff member. But instead, he became tense and quiet—touchy. After dinner he climbed the stairs in his socks. I heard him go, but it felt as if he was sneaking up there, to Annie’s old room and the TV. I resented his departure, though I knew that if I’d let him keep the TV downstairs, he’d be downstairs with it. Lying on the sofa in the evenings with laptop and books—trying and failing to write, yet again, about Bright Morning of Pain—I’d hear the muffled sound of a sports broadcast: crowd noise, the announcer’s sharper tone at a tense moment. Baseball—a bad end-of-season for the Red Sox—gave way to football.

  I didn’t spend all my time on Val’s book. That fall, I worked on three projects: an intricate book about embroidery, a subject I do not care for; an essay I’d been writing about some novels written after the First World War; and the essay about Bright Morning. Which still went badly. The editor sent emails: it was nearly due, then overdue. I stayed downstairs, accomplishing little, heaving myself off the sofa to move through the downstairs rooms—kitchen, living room, and the room behind the kitchen that had been our bedroom when we lived on the first floor, now used mostly for storage and wet boots. Then I’d lie down again, without having found a sufficient reason for standing up. It seemed that, after all, I had nothing left to say about Bright Morning of Pain.

  If I had been working well, the solitude would have been fruitful. When Griff was upstairs, it was as if he had gone out, and I could think. But in the bad mood that persisted, the arrangement felt hostile: it recalled the years before he moved away. Sometimes, again, he’d be asleep before I got into bed. Sometimes, he’d have gone to work before I woke up.

  One evening shortly before Christmas, I heard his phone ring, and then his urgent voice rising. “What
? What did you say? I didn’t hear you.” The conversation persisted. He sounded alarmed, maybe angry. He hung up, and then his phone rang again, and again I heard urgency. Concerned, I went to the staircase, then upstairs.

  Annie’s old room is small, and the TV is large. Griff had moved a chair out when he bought it, so he mostly sat on the bed—sprawled, almost lying down. But now he was sitting on the edge, staring at his phone.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Barker. I knew this would happen.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody’s dying. He’s probably dying.”

  “A client? How—”

  “One of those unsupervised employees, though technically I believe they had fired him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He set himself on fire.”

  “What? On purpose? On the third floor?”

  “No, the stove. On purpose? Of course not. He was drunk. Of course he was drunk.” I finally got him to tell me what happened. A former employee had been allowed into the building by the man in charge of the third-floor rooms. The man who got in tried to light the oven and caused a fire. He was in the ICU.

  “He was lighting the stove? A gas stove?”

  “I suppose it’s a gas stove if he was lighting it. The oven, I guess.” It reminded me of something, something to do with Helen, and then I remembered the oven in the apartment. It almost seemed as if it were the same stove, finally doing the harm we’d feared.

  “It took her all day to call me. It’s on the news websites already—I just checked. She finally figured it was time I heard about it!”

  “You mean Jean?”

  “I’m the last to know. Why did I say yes? Why did I let them have overnights?”

  “You didn’t advocate letting drunks light the stove.”

  “If the building weren’t open, nobody would have let the man in, and this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Griff,” I said. “This is not your fault. For God’s sake.”

  Griff stood up. He looked at me. “Nevertheless, if I hadn’t agreed, it wouldn’t have happened.” He put on his shoes and went to the hospital to see about the injured man.

  The man died. His family turned up—he was from an Italian family in Waterbury. He had grown children who hadn’t seen him in years. After the accident, Griff worked closely with Jean, and, overhearing conversations, I could tell that at heart they were similar; they should have been able to work together. They apparently spent hours on the phone or sitting across from each other, talking and then falling silent, sighing and trying to talk again. Meanwhile, the fire had damaged the agency’s kitchen, and repairs were necessary. An insurance claim had to be filed. Overnights on the third floor were discontinued; the agency had to close for a few days.

  I wasn’t in touch with Jean. Our friendship had faltered once I no longer had need of friendly visits. I wanted to see her, but a phone call might have been an intrusion on Griff’s business. Then, a week or two after the fire, I stopped at a market in our neighborhood to pick up something for supper and met Jean at the meat counter. We dropped our wire shopping baskets to put our arms around each other, holding each other as if at a funeral. The store was crowded, so it was something of an accomplishment.

  I told her I was so very sorry, and she shook her head with a you-don’t-know-the-half-of-it look. So I invited her to come home with me for a glass of wine. During the school year, I never expected Griff early, and I thought I remembered a late meeting that night.

  Jean wanted to come—I had a feeling she needed somebody to do something for her, anything. I hurried through my shopping and met her with her smaller bag of groceries outside, and we drove our separate cars to my house, a few blocks away. I poured wine and sat her down in the living room. “Tell me about it,” I said. “Griff talks in riddles. Unless you’d rather not?”

  Jean took a deep breath. She talked for a long while. Then she said, “There was nothing wrong with the overnight project. There is nothing wrong with Paulette. Well, there is plenty wrong with Paulette—but she’s worth it.”

  I said, “You’re angry with Griff, but don’t be angry with me.”

  She hesitated. “No, that’s right.”

  “I don’t invariably agree with him,” I said. “Hardly ever, come to think of it.”

  “You two are pretty independent,” Jean said.

  “Too independent,” I said. I usually told myself we were just independent enough.

  We talked for more than an hour. What troubled Jean most was something she thought Griff had been trying to tell her all along. “Everything gets trickier when you’re talking about night,” she said. “All night. That’s what he meant. At three a.m., people think crazy thoughts. I didn’t think of it as different from day, only extra day.”

  “You don’t still think the project could work?” I said.

  Jean put down her glass, started to get up, adjusted her pants, sat down, smoothed her knees, picked up her glass again. “Yes,” she said. “It can work. I’m not sure I ever thought it could work. I do now—but we need to do some things differently.”

  I thought she looked younger, oddly—then realized she’d gained some weight. Her face was rounder, more attractive. “Are you still seeing Zak?”

  No. “He’s impossible.” They had stayed together until Arturo died. She had almost broken up with him several times. Then she did. “Nothing in particular happened, this time,” she said. “But I was sad—well, he wouldn’t be sad. Couldn’t be.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Oh, so am I!”

  As had happened once before when Jean was visiting, Griff came home unexpectedly. I felt a slight thrill when he arrived. Maybe I had taken that chance because I wanted to be present when the two of them were together. When he saw Jean, he sat down without taking off his coat. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. He didn’t sound friendly.

  “No, no,” we both said.

  “Did you eat?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Neither did we,” I said. “Should I cook?”

  “I’m not staying,” Griff said. “Meeting Kevin.” This was a former student Griff had befriended at a time of trouble. Kevin still needed counseling occasionally, or at least friendship, and they’d meet in a coffee shop.

  “What about food?”

  “They have sandwiches.”

  “Right,” I said. “The last sandwich leftover from lunch—cold and stale.”

  “For me, they heat it in the microwave,” he said, smiling.

  “Mmm,” I said. “Hot lettuce and mayonnaise.” Griff looked old when he smiled, like someone’s grandfather.

  Jean put her glass on the table. “I should go.”

  “Stay,” I said. “Griff’s going.”

  “I hate to ruin your evening, Joshua,” she said. “I’m not who you want to see in your only ten minutes off all day.”

  “You’re not my enemy,” Griff said, looking straight at her.

  “So you’ve come around?”

  “What?”

  “I’m reopening the third floor,” Jean said. “We’re starting respites next week and overnights two weeks later.”

  Griff didn’t say or do anything for a few moments. Then he stood, reaching reflexively into his pants pockets to check for his wallet and keys. “We’ll talk about this another time,” he said.

  I thought that was that, but on his way out, he turned, a hand on the doorknob. “You know I’ve never cared for your third-floor program,” he said. “And certainly not overnights.” I saw Jean sit up straight. Griff went on, “Doubtless, there are elements I fail to understand. But we’re not having any more suffering while I’m the president of this board, and I plan to do what it takes to prevent it.”

  Jean looked up at him. “You’d can me?” she said.

  He was silent again. “I’ve been on boards that let a director go,” he said. “It’s the most painful process there is. I’d rather not.” He smi
led a weary smile, and again he looked old—and kind.

  “Joshua,” Jean said, as he stood with his hand on the front door, “listen to me. If we worked in a law firm where somebody caused a fire and died, we’d be very, very sad, and we would try very, very hard to make sure it couldn’t happen again—but we wouldn’t close the place down. If it happened in your school, you wouldn’t close the school. If it happened anywhere but in a social services program, everyone would be sad, but life would go back to normal.”

  “This was never normal,” he said. His voice got quiet. “The third floor must go. I don’t mean you have to give up the space. Maybe the respite program is all right. But while I’m responsible—no overnights. No Paulette, no Dunbar. We don’t even know yet whether Arturo’s family will sue.”

  “We have insurance if they do,” Jean said. “I think maybe they should. It shouldn’t have happened. No one understands that better than Dunbar. He’s devastated. I don’t want to lose him. I want the benefit of what happened that night, not just the pain.”

  “You’d put him in charge again?”

  “It’ll be different,” Jean said.

  “Paulette has to go. Dunbar has to go.”

  “No.” Jean stood. “I’m sorry, Olive. I don’t think I should stay. Joshua—I don’t think you’d have the votes to get rid of me. Just saying.” She left. Neither of us saw her out.

  I thought Griff would wait just long enough for her to drive away before he went to meet Kevin, but he sat down again. I looked at him. “You’re still wearing your coat,” I said.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “I’m not saying I entirely agree with you,” I said.

  “Have you ever agreed with me?” He looked older than ever, like someone who’d been the chief justice of the Supreme Court for decades and had suffered over every ambiguous case that might do harm to anyone.

  “About anything?” I said.

  “About anything,” Griff said.

  There was a silence so long that it felt as if my life might have changed. Then I said, “Yes.”