16

GOOD AND BAD WITH LAWYERS…

One doesn’t like to believe that the older people get, the more grindingly slowly they think, but maybe it’s true; otherwise, how to explain none of them immediately inquiring into the basics? Ruth’s why and when, not to mention the how of the thing? Even taking severe startlement into account, that’s got to be embarrassingly slow-witted.

Oh, there are all sorts of reasons to be angry. Having kicked everyone off her deck, Sylvia’s now tormented by questions like itches. She’d like to stomp right down to Ruth’s room and demand a few answers. Get things straight. Set Ruth straight, as well. How dare she, and exactly what does she have in mind? Does she picture Sylvia, Greta and George feeding her pills one by one, hanging her from a doorway, slitting her narrow arthritic wrists? While Ruth, passive as a peach, gives instruction?

Still, she must have a reason, and it must be terrible. The obvious one is a desperate illness she hasn’t been able to put into words, the sort of eventuality anyone—almost anyone—is bound to consider. Even at that, unless Sylvia were too incapacitated to do otherwise, she wouldn’t think, herself, of asking for help. Wouldn’t, for that matter, know whom to ask. She has not had those sorts of friends.

Perhaps she has them now.

Whatever the reason, Ruth’s aim and request are extraordinary. If she weren’t utterly serious—but maybe she’s crazy as a bedbug; maybe they all are, it must be hard to know for sure when brain cells are slip-sliding away—but mad or not, she must be serious or she wouldn’t have raised such a subject. Which by extension would seem to imply that she chose her Idyll Inn companions right from the start with an eye to who might be amenable, useful. Which would mean that—perhaps barring George, who is mainly Greta’s project as well as more or less a group pet, veering between spaniel and unruly pit bull—barring him, Ruth must have sized up Sylvia and Greta as potential killer conspirators; at the very least as extremely, indeed almost uniquely, flexible in their ethics.

Hardly a compliment. Not necessarily inaccurate either, although bending to Ruth’s proposal would be a stretch beyond all previous flexibilities.

Or not. There are certain faint precedents.

Looked at one way, adultery is only an act, an event, so ordinary and clichéd that no one could possibly care besides the terminally righteous and those directly involved, the husbands and wives and lovers and children with their little individual lives ravelling and unravelling in romantic, troublesome, delicious or shattering but at any rate insignificant-to-the-wider-world ways. So ho-hum, and still ho-hum when all sides, husbands, wives, lovers, children, wind up decades down the road beneath the same roof.

On the other hand: Sylvia could argue that adultery is a grave matter if only because the entire human portion of the planet operates, or fails to operate, on understandings of trust and faithlessness, truth and falsehood, generosity and greed, promises and shifting loyalties, treaties kept and treaties broken; and where are these most intimately formed and demonstrated but in kitchens and bedrooms and sometimes motels and parked cars?

Nor is it necessarily a straightforward judgment. Not only are there such things as multilateral treaties, but it can also be wise to keep some agreements, break others. As blood and history show, these are not minor decisions, and neither is adultery, however common as dirt.

Ruth, with her interest in bleak historic and current affairs, might well agree. Maybe it’s exactly what she thinks concerning Greta and George: that for people who carried on in adulterous fashion for such a long time, assisting a death would be a mere bagatelle. Or, more far-fetched and against all personal evidence, that a trickle of leftover cells in Greta’s blood might lean her toward destruction, specifically of people like Ruth.

But what has led Ruth to suppose that Sylvia has successfully auditioned for an executioner’s role? Perhaps Sylvia’s own excursions into infidelity, except how Ruth could know about them is a mystery, even if there’s no discounting the power of rumour, accurate and otherwise, in this town.

To be honest, as far as Sylvia can see, Greta and George’s fling, even though it lasted so long and in much-mutated fashion lasts even now, is a not-very-dramatic, possibly somewhat steamy but fundamentally banal soap opera involving a clerk and a shoestore owner. Whereas Sylvia’s is an epic poem, an opera, some great Guernica of a canvas.

Or hell, maybe hers is also a cheap hour or two of melodramatic afternoon TV. At least no living soul knows the whole story, because the only soul who did died almost a decade ago. Jackson’s law partner was the fellow she dallied with. Dallied with twice, as a matter of fact; no point making one mistake when a person can go on to make two. Dally is a nice tipsy word. Besides being Jackson’s law partner, her lover was Annabel Walker’s father. Circles and circles, dizzying dallyings.

Marry in lust, repent at leisure—no, wait, that’s quite wrong. The very word repentance is wrong. It’s true, though, that lust casts a blinding, shining mist over the vision, so that when an admirably attractive, promising young man, son of a former mayor, comes home from law school and runs into an admirably attractive young woman feeling her oats, certain matters grow hazy. But it seems there are risks in being a young woman flung from the limber gropings and thrills of illicit affections into a multi-tiered gauzy white dress, licitly aglow with promise and hope, and then into a big multi-tiered house—who considers what will be lost rather than gained?

Oh, what a whiner. What did she lose, what great ambitions did she otherwise have for herself that were so impeded by Jackson, that exemplary man? None, is the answer to that. She got what she’d wanted and even what she’d desired, if not, thank God, what she deserved.

Which only means that desire’s real outcomes can be disconcerting. Which are pathetic grounds for self-pity.

“We’re a team,” said Jackson, eyes turned toward prosperity, consolidation, making not only a living but a life in this town. A two-person job, not only his—“I do the law, and down the road maybe some politics too, and you do the tough stuff,” and unlike any other man she might have fallen into back seats with and married, he meant it. Joining boards, playing bridge and golf with women who were sometimes a bore, as Sylvia was often enough boring herself—that was her share of the work. Matching the china and having enough kinds of forks and spoons to manage large dinner parties. Making up menus and invitations and seating plans, scrutinizing the finances of the public art gallery, one of the first boards she joined—everyone gets better with practice if they stick with what they’ve set out to do; but some things also fall into patterns, then habits, which may well lead to grievance.

Jackson’s civil law, however mundane, had to be more entertaining and challenging than her pursuits, even when he ran for council and she found she enjoyed making little speeches concerning his virtues, and shaking hands and air-kissing any number of cheeks, and standing loyally at his shoulder as he made his victory speeches—even then, she came over time to consider that she had several reasons to smoke a little too much, play bridge a little too fiercely, laugh a little too loudly at country club dinners.

She cannot imagine now, in this sunny hour, how she could have felt so hard done by. Surely it was pleasing to chair a meeting, encounter a certain deferential recognition in stores; find real gratification, not just social benefit, in planning a library addition, arranging to buy a new painting for the gallery, adding in these ways some knowledge and beauty to the community. And she was certainly free to pursue her own interests and acquaintances, had the leisure to read and the money to shop and the liberty to drive in her own car with her own friends wherever she wanted, including to out-of-town theatres, galleries, restaurants. She and Jackson went away some weekends themselves, finding that between her trim body and his increasingly bulky one, lust in strange hotel rooms could acquire a festive glamour not always present at home. How ungrateful and spoiled she must have been. Look at Greta, working and raising three daughters all on her own during what must have been more or less those same years. Sylvia didn’t even have children to care for; was wondering, actually, if Jackson was shooting blanks.

Jackson and Peter Walker were old friends from law school. When Peter joined Jackson’s practice, and he and Susan moved here to town, Susan was pregnant; the result of which expectancy turns out to be a retirement home administrator, but nobody thinks in hopeful youth of such dreary outcomes. Certainly not Susan, who for the most part stayed happily home while Sylvia, quite the old pro, became sociable for two.

Unlike Jackson, Peter specialized in criminal cases: shoplifting, assault, the very common break and enter, the very uncommon murder. Jackson brought home stories, interesting enough, of sisters and brothers wrangling over dead parents’ wills, real estate deals falling disastrously apart on their closing dates—all the business of negotiating the town’s competing losses and difficulties and griefs. That’s what he most enjoyed during his three council terms, too—arranging alliances, he said, bargaining for middle ground, bringing opponents if not to accord at least to accommodation. While Peter—here was the difference, one difference—was more expert in confrontation. He handled the cases of violent, rampaging drinkers, men who turned to fists and even guns for their pleasure, drunken, drugged youths gone off the rails, sad housewives who shoplifted lipsticks and stockings.

Richer matters, in short.

Peter acquired—or arrived with, who remembers, who cares?—a dark tinge of danger himself. He also evidently found himself not compellingly intrigued by the domestic life of mother and squally infant; not enough, anyway, to prevent him from reaching treacherously for Sylvia late one Saturday night, while Susan sat home with Annabel, and Jackson went to get the car from the country club parking lot, and Sylvia and Peter waited together for him. “You’re so alive,” Peter whispered into her hair, standing behind her with his hands bluntly placed on her breasts. Fingers circling her nipples. “I want you.” Oh yes. She leaned back into his body, harder and more narrow than Jackson’s. He stepped aside, and then climbed innocently into the back seat when Jackson appeared with the car. A courtroom trick, probably, knowing how to give nothing away.

Imagine being wanted. Again. Like that. In that misting, shuddery way.

There are always places and ways. False appointments and meetings, long country drives as well as the reliable, thrillingly tawdry ABC Motel—wouldn’t it be funny if she and Peter crossed dimly lit paths in the parking lot with Greta and George? Wouldn’t it be awful to think they were ever in the same room?—although now that she’s had the thought, it seems all too likely. The ABC wasn’t large.

If she chooses, Sylvia can see particular moments quite clearly, but retrieving a feeling, an actual emotion, is often a different matter. Events that once must have been brilliantly coloured and sharp-edged are now grey-shaded and wavery, and it’s hard to know if that’s a decision or just what ordinarily happens to people in time: a normal fog of dispassion that rolls in with the years.

She might do better with these particular memories if she and Peter had ever spoken of love, but they didn’t. What an absurd organ the heart must be. In those months of Peter it was steadfastly clear to her, as sometimes happens in these situations, a good news–bad news equation, how very glad she was to be married to Jackson; what a compassionate, smart, upstanding man he was; how many reasons she had, in fact, to love him.

Ironic in its way, then, to find herself pregnant. “Oh Jesus,” said Peter. “But okay, we’ll get you fixed up, there are places and ways. I’ll arrange it.” He would “even,” as he said, pick up the tab.

What a prince.

If he hadn’t been so quick off the mark, so tactless and presumptuous, she might well have made that decision herself. Instead, contrariwise, “Please, sweetheart,” she whispered to Jackson, urgently placing a calculating hand on his penis as he read beside her in bed, “it’s been such a long time, and I miss you.” Desperation can be staggeringly ignoble. How touched he was. She thought of his sweet, startled pleasure later, not at the time.

And Susan? No problem there, poor pudding occupied with Annabel and as content, it appeared, as a clam.

The only lingering, indeed permanent, problem is a whole lifetime—Nancy’s lifetime—of lies.

“Finally,” Jackson said gratefully, admiring Sylvia’s burgeoning breasts, touching her belly, resting his head there. Listening, he said. “I love you. I’m so happy, you can’t imagine.”

No, she could not. “I love you, too.” Which was true.

Susan said, “It’s great Annabel will have a new little playmate. Isn’t it, Annabel?”

It’s been interesting in recent years to read how much more uncertain parentage there is than most people have dreamed. No wonder men everywhere on earth go to such great, gruesome lengths to keep a tight grip on women—they’re right, often enough, to be suspicious when it comes to paternity, when even ape females find sly ways to slip away from their mates in search of whatever apes yearn for—fresh evolutionary blood in the clan, or just a pleasing change for themselves. At any rate, it seems genetic testing has come as an alarming development to a good many mothers with secrets.

Whereas Sylvia only had to worry about who her child would resemble. What if Peter’s features were clear in its face? He had brown eyes, for instance, whereas hers and Jackson’s were blue, which meant there could be trouble the moment the infant opened its eyes.

But Nancy was, as everyone said and still says, the spitting image of her mother.

What else should Sylvia have done, she’d like to know? Thanks to her brute will, which Peter called, for a time bitterly, wilfulness, two families and a law firm survived. Mother baboons do exactly the same. Jackson was thrilled to have a child to dote on at last. He held Nancy close. When Sylvia fed her, he watched the two of them with the widest-eyed reverence: Joseph, observing the Madonna and child.

Just as deluded, but just as entranced.

Peter, undeluded and unentranced, seemed angry in a thrumming, under-the-surface way when he saw Jackson carting Nancy around, but he didn’t embrace her himself. With Annabel he made a show of jovial fatherhood, riding her about on his shoulders, tickling her. Annabel on Peter’s lap wore what Sylvia considered the smug expression of a triumphant seductress.

Well, it was a complicated stew of one thing and another. Jackson and Susan, like children, were the ones who got to be blissfully ignorant; or at any rate ignorant.

A further helping of stew appeared a couple of years later, when Annabel had a baby brother, also named Peter. It was unreasonable to be wounded that his father was so cavalier about the purposes to which he put his body, but Sylvia was wounded anyway. Once, a rare shared babysitter held the fort while Jackson and Sylvia, Peter and Susan attended a cancer fundraiser. “I guess,” she told Peter as Jackson and Susan took a turn on the dance floor, “I guess we’ll just have to hope Nancy and young Peter don’t fall in love when they grow up. We’ll have to guard against incest.”

“Syl!” How easily appalled he could be. Not a very bright man, really—it seems doubtful he could have been as good a lawyer as Jackson and he both claimed he was.

Jackson was altogether the worthier man; as no doubt Susan was the worthier woman. Also, all their children were worthy. Nancy in particular was fearless when it came to hurling herself off the porch or pelting over the lawn or diving, literally diving, into swim lessons. Obviously she felt safe. She was safe. Sylvia was a good mother, Jackson a most loving father, and Nancy had every care and advantage. “What a lovely, smart child,” people said.

Lucky, too, and thoroughly indulged, unlike the poor dire children of Ruth’s experience—what makes Nancy think she’s entitled to tend her fury so very diligently for so many decades?

What made Sylvia think she and Peter could without consequence take another few runs, a dozen years after their first round, out to the old, reliable, unimproved ABC Motel?

As she recalls: a woman in her forties in those days (no doubt not any more) could easily feel her life on the slide; in the sense of, who would be interested? Not even Jackson—busy with his practice, serving his third and last term on city council, devoted to Nancy, kind and respectful toward Sylvia but less noticing and appreciative, or so it seemed to her. Whereas there was Peter, still lean and thriving. Still steamy. And indicating his own refreshed interest with significantly long, languidly wicked glances, and a hand that lingered on her rear end, camouflaged (she hoped) by the crowd as the four of them left a school concert in which all their three children performed, none brilliantly, in their respective class choirs.

Oh, she should have taken up a hobby that kept her hands busy; learned perhaps, like Greta, to endlessly knit.

Back at the ABC, never mind she was in her forties, they were careful about birth control. There could still be that way to be caught.

And there were corrosive, shattering ways.

Nancy was thirteen the autumn evening she turned on her mother in the kitchen, as Jackson watched TV in the living room and Sylvia washed the dinner plates and Nancy dried them, and said in a voice that came strange from a child, “I saw you today.”

Sylvia damn near dropped a plate. She tried to remember what, exactly, Nancy could have seen: tender or quick, passionate or perfunctory, hands where? “What are you talking about?” The best defence being instant offence.

“You and Mr. Walker. Out at the ABC. You were kissing. Before you got into your cars.”

Oh shit, oh Jesus. “What business did you have away out there?”

“We got out of school early and me and Samantha went riding our bikes out on the highway. We both saw. It was really embarrassing.”

Even worse. Terminally worse. If Nancy’s friend also saw, word would be flying among the children and soon, if not already, to their parents. All that tricky, inconvenient, exhilarating discretion blown up in their faces. Peter’s lively, desiring face. “Does Dad know?” Nancy’s face, too, was changed: on some cold and unfamiliar middle ground between child and adult. And how about Sylvia’s? In the unmerciful light of the kitchen, its secrets would be as clear as the puckerings of skin at the sides of her eyes. Laugh lines, Peter called them; as if she were a woman of constant amusement.

“There’s nothing to know. You have no idea, Nancy.”

“I saw you.” Nancy’s voice quavered, near tears. Sylvia thought, I should put my arms around her, a child in such evident pain, but she was also aware that tenderness could trigger a tempest, which would draw Jackson’s disastrous attention. So she didn’t. She should have, of course. A difference might have been made, Nancy salvaged. A moment forgone.

“Go to your room. I’ll come discuss this mistake of yours when you’ve calmed down. Now, go. Right now.” She has to confess: watching Nancy stalk from the kitchen, she stared hatred into her daughter’s departing back. Her eyes contained knives.

Children know things, even when their backs are turned. This is what turns mere soap opera into an epic poem, some days a Guernica.

Possibly priorities do, as well. The power, the sheer electrical surge of her need to save Jackson, her home, her whole life, nearly knocked her flat. She phoned Peter. “I’m sorry to call you at home, but we have an emergency.”

“Oh hell, what kind of emergency? I can’t get away.”

“You don’t have to, just listen. Nancy saw us out at the ABC today. And she was with one of her friends. I doubt she has the stomach to tell Jackson, but other people know now. That’s why I’m calling, to see if you have any bright ideas. Is that enough of an emergency for you?” Honestly, she couldn’t help that last sentence.

There was a long silence, although she could hear his deep breaths. Then, “Oh shit fuck goddamn cunt bloody goddamn fucking cunting hell.”

How attractive. “I gather you’re alone.”

“Yeah, but I have to go pick up Susan and the kids from the movies in a few minutes.”

“Then don’t let me keep you. I thought you might have a suggestion or two, but I guess all we can do is hope for the best.”

“And what the fuck would that be?” As if he blamed her, the coward. Again. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “the two of us, that’s got to be over.”

Oh, honestly. “No kidding.”

“And you’ll be careful? No phone calls or the four of us getting together, no dancing, nothing, right?”

“When do I ever phone you, besides tonight? But we can hardly cut off contact. We didn’t before, and we can’t now. It’s not just you and Susan who are so very attached, you know. So are you and Jackson. Anyway, she would notice and so would he, never mind everyone else.” Once again: how good a lawyer could he be, thinking so slowly?

“You’re right, you’re right. We’ll just have to be totally careful and cool, can you do that?”

“No problem. Really. Goodbye, then. Good luck.”

A pathetic, clumsy, hostile farewell, yes; fortunately no emotion, even nostalgia, survives contempt for very long.

Upstairs, still wary of touch—afraid to touch, really—she explained to Nancy that Peter and Susan had had a misunderstanding, and he’d asked her advice, so they’d met to talk and all Nancy’d seen had been a friendly hug and kiss of gratitude. She said it was a private problem in his marriage that Jackson didn’t know about, because he and Peter didn’t like personal things coming up in their practice, but that it certainly didn’t mean anything between her and Peter. He’d asked her advice, she told Nancy, because she was Susan’s friend, not because she was his. She said it was a shame Samantha had seen, because it would be cruel if something wrong and hurtful got back to Annabel or young Peter, so maybe Nancy could straighten her friend out. Carefully. So the situation didn’t get worse. Oh, she piled it on. Nancy should have believed her, but considering that Nancy is now half a century old and still cold and unkind, it seems she did not.

Still, she never told Jackson. Always quite a daddy’s girl, protective that way.

As he deserved protection. Sylvia is embarrassed, even alone, to find tears in her eyes. Getting soppy in her old age.

Sylvia, who can no longer quite bring Peter’s features to mind, and who sees Susan’s each day in Annabel, and whose own bones have replicated themselves in Nancy—Sylvia sees Jackson’s lost face, young and old, in photographs and in memory. Love, companionship, affection, familiarity, respect—what a compelling gravitational force they exert. With silence the payment a person makes in return.

When Ruth reads out her awful stories, does she ever wonder what those torturers of hers tell their wives and children when they go home from their long days of rampaging with guns, electrodes, waterboarding and rape? Sylvia bets they say whatever keeps the family together and brings comfort at nightfall, and if that means strains and silences, well, they’d be disastrously worse for the telling of truth.

Keep up a good front and a strong spine—how’s that for another compelling gravitational force? Ruth tells of being a gymnast, long ago. Perhaps that has encouraged her to disregard gravity now; although it could just as easily have done the opposite, really.

Like mistaken fatherhood, death too happens in sly, sliding, possibly merciful ways more often than people think. Or so Sylvia has read, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t be true.

Somewhere in the Idyll Inn there may be people with straightforward lives they’ve conducted strictly according to Hoyle. Judging from the record so far, it doesn’t seem likely—there must be many other misadventures and crimes lying tucked under prim double-bed blankets. Still, Ruth isn’t necessarily wrong to imagine she’s put her finger on a couple of people of vast flexibility; like Sylvia, who has done and not done what she has done and not done, and may be capable of far more—right this minute, even she cannot be sure.