Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Moron,” she said, scurrying across the great bed until she seized the telephone receiver and punched the numbers 9–1–1 on the keypad. “Hello,” she said pleasantly. “This is Maggie Darling at 1803 Kettle Hill Road in West Rumford. My husband is about to beat me up with a fireplace tool. Would you come over right away? Thanks, so much.” She hung up. “They’ll be here in about seven minutes,” she smiled.

  “Oh, that was really brilliant, Maggie. Just the kind of publicity you need, I’m sure—”

  “Put on your pants and pack a bag, buster.”

  Kenneth pitched the brass shovel into a corner in disgust. It bounced off his StairMaster exercise machine. Before he could get his Gucci loafers back on, two Connecticut state police cars pulled into the long driveway. Their sirens were off, but the revolving gumball roof lights made a creepy flickering blue fantasia out of the winter landscape. Maggie flew downstairs in a red tartan flannel robe to let in the two troopers. Kenneth followed moments later, sheepishly toting a leather-trimmed canvas overnighter. He walked past the policemen and out the front door, which they had failed to close behind them.

  “Just a minute, sir,” one of them called out, and Kenneth turned around.

  “He didn’t actually strike me,” Maggie said. “He only threatened to.”

  “Ha!” Kenneth barked.

  “Well, technically you don’t have to actually strike a person to commit assault, ma’am,” said the first trooper. “Do you intend to press charges?”

  “Oh, certainly not,” Maggie said. “Just get him out of here.”

  “Uh, sir, your wife wants you to leave the premises.”

  “Really? What do you suppose I’m doing out here in the snow at two o’clock in the morning with a suitcase in my hand.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” the trooper said, apparently immune to sarcasm. “But we’ll just stick around until you leave, if you don’t mind.”

  “What if I do mind?”

  “We only say that to be polite, sir. If you don’t remove yourself right away, we’ll have to arrest you and take you in and all. You won’t like it. Even well-off people like yourself, their lawyers really don’t like gettin’ called this time of night, especially Christmas Eve, and, well, I’d just get going, I was you.”

  “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Maggie,” Kenneth said, and then, shaking his head as if utterly baffled, he headed for the garage where his BMW waited in all its Teutonic grandeur. Soon, his red and orange taillights disappeared through the gateposts. Maggie made coffee for the troopers and carved them each huge slices of the chocolate bûche de No!ël. Of course, it was an excuse for them to wait around and see whether Kenneth intended to return. But he did not. Maggie knew that they would never dwell together again under this roof. And when the troopers departed at last around three o’clock Christmas morning, Maggie trudged back upstairs to the bedroom and cried her heart out.

  Part Two

  Alone, Nearly

  1

  The Dreadful Light

  Maggie woke up at eight-fifteen on Christmas morning with the sense of having undergone a full-blown personal transformation, something like a biological metamorphosis. She was not the sort who rose out of sleep like a scuba diver slowly circling up to the surface from the aqueous depths, but rather she snapped immediately to consciousness like someone stepping out of a matinee right into blaring daylight. Blinking at the stark Christmas sunshine that reflected off the new-fallen snow onto her bedroom ceiling, she apprehended the vacancy in bed beside her and at once recalled a series of mental snapshots from the night before: Kenneth patting Laura Wilkie’s behind; Laurie Wilkie skulking out of the bathroom followed closely by Kenneth; Kenneth squealing in pain on the bedroom carpet; Kenneth standing in the snow clutching his gladstone bag; finally the soothing cup of chamomile tea that she sipped while watching the cops as they ate their cake. Only the tears shed over these events were not recalled—but neither is the pain of a root canal recalled the morning after a session at the endodontist’s, though one certainly remembers being there.

  Girded though she was against the snares of emotion, Maggie did feel strangely brittle this morning, as if she might crack like a Nankin vase at the slightest provocation. There was something tragic about the block of harsh sunlight on the ceiling, something in its brilliance that evoked youthful sickrooms and loss—for instance, her bout with chickenpox in October 1959, the fever and delirium, her throat on fire, her father, Frank, with his high Magyar cheekbones and wheat shock of hair, hovering with storybooks and iced juice. (Frank was always the caretaker in the household, not her mother, Irene, who begrudged children their illnesses, even went so far as to accuse them of malingering, until they threw up or broke out in a rash, and then Irene was too disgusted and frightened to go near them.) The block of sunshine on the ceiling had confused little Maggie in her fever. She kept asking Frank to “change the channel.” The worst illness she had suffered in thirty-seven years since then was a hangover. Birthing Hooper was a breeze, compared to what most women go through. She delivered exactly on her due date, at ten in the morning, after precisely seventy minutes of labor, and was back in their first home—the spacious apartment in a brownstone on a quiet street in Chelsea—baking genoise for company thirty-six hours later, a display of efficiency that appalled kith and kin alike.

  Staring into the light on the ceiling, Maggie attempted an inventory of her losses. Her father, now dead, was surely lost. Hooper, not quite lost, was mainly absent. Irene was not absent enough. Maggie understood that she and Kenneth had lost each other years ago and that the final crisis was only a formal verification of that loss. The hole this left in her life wasn’t so much a matter of who would take care of her, but rather whom she would now care for. Even if she had ceased to love Kenneth, he was, at least, the one who sampled her chocolate hazelnut waffles, sniffed her floribunda roses, gloried in her antique linen sheets, and basked in the glow of her hearth. He was the one who was there. He’d been easily tolerated. But, gosh, wasn’t that exactly the problem? Strange too, she thought, how she had enjoyed his body long after she had consigned his hopes, dreams, thoughts, opinions, feelings, and peccadilloes—in short, his soul—to the burn slot of her personal estimation.

  The notion that her sex life with Kenneth was over, and the somewhat hysterical leap that her sex life altogether might be over, pitched Maggie into a spasm of grief that left her momentarily breathless. She sat up suddenly in bed and gasped, holding herself crosswise until, becoming sensible of her full breasts, she cupped them as in a gesture of offering to an imagined lover. Wouldn’t another desire her, she wondered? Who was this someone, and might she meet him before it was too late? She shuddered at the idea, but it also propelled her into a general consideration of what lay ahead in her life. And being, above all, a practical person, she decided that what lay ahead was breakfast.

  2

  The Giftee

  An unnatural stillness seemed to grip the house as Maggie, now dressed in a khaki Armando Tuzzi jumpsuit, moved through the finely appointed rooms until she reached the sunny east parlor, where a smaller auxiliary Christmas tree—the so-called real family tree—stood handsomely between the baby grand piano and a fine reverse serpentine slant-front mahogany desk that she and Kenneth had picked up at Sotheby’s a year earlier. Presents lay heaped under the tree. Rummaging beneath the fragrant boughs hung with gingerbread people and clove-studded orange pomanders, Maggie located all the packages tagged “For Maggie, with Love and XXX, From Kenneth.” They were easy to find since they were all wrapped in the same kind of paper— this year it was a strange sort of high-tech matte black paper tied with gold Mylar ribbon. It was Kenneth’s custom to assign holiday gift-buying duties to a professional shopper, a creature who could only exist in a world where expressing personal sentiment was considered just another burdensome chore better assigned to menials, like taking out the garbage. In theory, this shopper was supposed to become familiar with the personal de
sires and aversions of the “giftee,” as the questionnaire put it. But, unfortunately, Kenneth also assigned the chore of filling out the questionnaire to an underling, who, as regarded Maggie, had not the dimmest idea how to answer queries such as the following:

  Home decor preferences (mark one):

  1. Traditional

  2. Modern

  3. Antique

  4. Retro

  5. Other

  So, every year, Maggie received from Kenneth all sorts of things incongruent with her personal predilections: a lava lamp, an inflatable six-foot-tall rubber pencil, an automatic bread making machine that extruded loafs shaped like artillery shells with the texture of Styrofoam insulation, a biography of Gurdjieff, a martini shaker shaped like a zeppelin, articles of clothing by the egregious Lazlo Bluth, a Madonna record, a Dunhill cigarette lighter, a diamond and sapphire brooch in the shape of a jaguar just like one owned by the late Wallis Simpson, a paddleball racquet, and so on, things she had absolutely no use for.

  Maggie assembled this year’s nine packages in a neat pile beside her favorite wing chair, fetched her silver Montblanc pen and a sheaf of Christmas gift tags, and wrote out nine new tags to replace the ones on the packages. “From Kenneth to my dearest dumpling, Laura,” she penned in her fine broad-nibbed hand, “From Kenneth to Lovebucket,” “From Kenneth to darling Fuckbones,” and so on in that vein until the job was complete. Then she packed the gifts in a shopping bag and placed them in the front hall closet. At last, it was off to the kitchen, her refuge against all the gales of life.

  Maggie could see the orchard cottage from the big window over the sink. The little white guest house with the cut-out hearts on its green shutters stood a short distance down a formal alley of antique roses on a direct axis with the window—planned that way, of course. The rose bushes stood uniformed, like sentries, in their protective winter wrappings of burlap. The cottage lay nestled among a dozen or so apple, pear, and quince trees that Maggie had planted herself when Hooper was a toddler. Their black limbs were sleeved with snow. Hooper’s sporty Saab sat parked to the left, wearing its own white cap. The thought that her baby boy was old enough to drive cars and sleep with girls thrilled and appalled her equally. Thinking of the two of them down there snuggled moistly under quilts in the cast-iron bed—which she had found in a Danbury garage sale for twenty-five dollars and lovingly repainted— Maggie tried, by sheer force of will, to compose a cheerful attitude, one untainted by jealousy, peevishness, or middle-aged gall. Well, she told herself, at least here was someone to make breakfast for. She wondered if the girl—one of those suburban names: Heather? Margot? Melissa?— liked to cook. So few young women did these days. The editorial assistants at Trice and Wanker apparently subsisted on take-out sushi and diet soda. What kind of families would they raise? In the event that Hooper, God help him, actually got hitched to this Heather-Margot-Melissa—and it was hardly beyond the realm of possibility, since Maggie had married Kenneth, after all, a week after his graduation—then perhaps the object lessons couldn’t begin soon enough.

  Galvanized by the task, Maggie went into balletic motion, seizing items from the stainless-steel refrigerator, snatching bowls, pans, and implements from their various racks and shelves, flipping on the radio to fill the huge sunny kitchen with the oratorios of Christmas morn, cracking eggs and whisking batter—all the while apprehending in little illuminating flashes how wonderful it might be to finally be free of Kenneth. In short order she produced a great stack of cornmeal pumpkin pancakes with a dozen links of her own champagne sage breakfast sausages. While these things warmed in the oven, she rolled out a stick of butter on her marble pastry slab, and cut out patties with a little star-shaped cookie cutter. These she arrayed cunningly on a scallop-shaped plate and garnished with a narcissus blossom from the forced bulbs blooming on the windowsill. Finally, she poured heated maple syrup into a crystal cruet. Soon, she had the breakfast arranged on a large tray along with a thermal carafe of coffee. She slipped on her gum boots and a down vest in the mudroom and carried the tray down to the orchard cottage, delighting in the powdery, featherlight new snow and the bracing air.

  With perhaps five paces to go, however, she detected sounds of passion within the little building. For a moment she stood numbly in place trying to distinguish between her son’s striving moans and the girl’s odd, higher-pitched birdlike hoots. But then, in terror of being discovered, she shrank back to the kitchen and returned the corncakes and sausage to the oven. After what she considered a decent interval—ten minutes—she called the cottage on the intercom phone.

  “Yunh?” Hooper answered breathlessly.

  “Merry Christmas,” Maggie chirped. “Are you guys alert?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I’m coming down with breakfast now.”

  “Uh, gee—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll leave it out on the porch.”

  “Great—”

  Maggie recomposed the tray, brought it down again, set it on a wicker table near the door this time, and retreated once more to the kitchen. Sipping her own cup of steaming Kenya arabica and nervously nibbling a corncake, Maggie observed the cottage from the kitchen window. As the seconds ticked by, the tray remained out on the little porch, its steaming contents rapidly refrigerating in the nineteen-degree air. She snatched the phone angrily off the wall.

  “It’s sitting out there getting ice cold,” she said.

  “Give us a minute, Mom, huh?”

  “Hooper, darling. At least do me the honor of bringing it inside now so I won’t feel that I wasted an hour of my time making it for you.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Bon appétit.”

  As she hung up, the doorbell rang.

  3

  Déjà Vu All Over Again

  Maggie flung open the heavy, hand-carved American chestnut door (circa 1820) and there stood Kenneth in his costume of the previous night: a wilted tuxedo. She was most surprised by her own shock at seeing him there.

  “Feeling more reasonable?” he asked.

  “What a question!”

  “Well, you were pretty angry last night.”

  “I’m still pretty angry.”

  Kenneth flinched slightly, as though expecting a blow.

  “Maggie, can we please have a discussion?”

  “You’re sure starting out on the wrong foot, buster. Am I feeling more reasonable? What’s the assumption there? That I’ve got PMS? That I’m being inappropriate? That you’re okay and I’m not? I’m reacting to something you did, you shit heel!”

  “I’m sorry you’re upset—”

  “No you’re not. You’re sorry you got caught.”

  “How can I apologize?”

  “You can’t.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” Kenneth blurted, suddenly blubbering, his athlete’s shoulders jouncing up and down with each sob. Maggie had never seen him shed a tear before, not even at his father’s funeral, and the sight unnerved her.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, come in so I can shut the door.”

  Kenneth shuffled across the threshold.

  “Go into the library. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.”

  Kenneth nodded through his tears and moved blunderingly, like a great wounded beast, toward the room in question. In the kitchen Maggie considered dumping a shot of cognac in Kenneth’s coffee, but the prospect of what it might do to such an obviously unstable person stopped her. When she entered the library, he was merely snuffling.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me where I spent the night?” he asked.

  “Kenneth, you’re a very wealthy man. You have a fine car in perfect working order and a wallet full of platinum credit cards. This is a civilized part of the world. If you couldn’t find a decent hotel, then you’re just a hopeless case.”

  “I drove up to Hanover and back,” he said, ignoring her scorn. Hanover, New Hampshire, home of the Dartmouth Indians, was his old college town.

  “How intrepid of you.
Must have been exhausting.”

  Kenneth nodded, his mouth set tightly as though holding in more tears, his eyes rheumy and red as a cocker spaniel’s.

  “I … I thought that maybe if I went back there I could find part of myself that I somehow lost over the years.”

  “And what did you discover?” Maggie asked.

  “I want us to be the way we used to be,” Kenneth said.

  “We’ll never be twenty years old again.”

  “No. I mean, I wish we could … try and start over. I can change, I swear—”

  “Wait a minute. What was it that you lost and went up there to find?”

  “My sense of proportion. Priorities. Values.”

  “Sounds kind of metaphysical—”

  “I don’t want to lose our life together, Maggie. It means everything to me.”

  “You should have thought about it before you stuck your thingy in that strumpet.”

  “Won’t you ever forgive me?”

  Maggie sipped her coffee, ruminating before she said, “I understand that even good people sometimes misbehave, and that life is full of strange surprises. If you had banged some girl in a hotel, jeez, even if you’d had a lengthy affair off-premises and then ended it, I might have forgiven you.” She puffed out her cheeks. “The part that kills me is you doing it under our roof, with people crawling all over the house. What if it had been Hattie Moile who saw you? The humiliation! Or Connie McQuillan, for God’s sake, with her pipeline to People magazine! Inside a week I’d be an international butt of ridicule.”

  “Nobody saw anything,” Kenneth said, an irritated, dismissive note creeping into his voice.

  “Really? You weren’t patting Laura Wilkie’s little behind right in the middle of the ballroom? Don’t bother denying it. I saw it—let’s hope fifty other people didn’t. You know, the thing that really gets me is that you couldn’t have waited five measly little minutes in the bathroom before venturing out. It’s as though you were determined to get caught.”