“Have you decided what you’re going to do about the baby’s bedroom?” Desmond asked.
There was a long silence from the other end of the line, and then Brian said, “I’m still mulling it over.”
“It’s getting a little late, isn’t it? I thought the baby was due—”
“Any day now. That’s true. I can put something together quickly. I did most of the work on my apartment myself, all in the course of a couple of weeks, so it won’t be a problem.”
He was still mulling over where to put the baby’s bedroom in his apartment. One thing was certain, they weren’t going to put the crib in his bedroom because he wasn’t planning to take time off and couldn’t afford to have his sleep interrupted. It was amazing, really, the way Brian managed to avoid ever mentioning Joyce or any decisions that they were making as a couple or plans the two of them had ever made together. Given what had happened in Desmond’s room a couple of weeks ago, you wouldn’t expect him to go into a lengthy description of their happy marriage, but you’d think he might mess up once or twice and let the name slip out. Desmond found it hard to listen to the two-mouthed behemoths Melanie had mentioned in Morning in America before he left town, the ones who spoke exclusively in the first person plural, but there was something about Brian’s refusal to acknowledge his wife’s existence that was eerie. It must have been exhausting dodging “us” and “we” as if they were poisoned darts. The whole thing was surprisingly unbecoming.
“What does Joyce think about the baby’s room?”
“You know, Desmond, I really didn’t call to talk about the baby’s room, okay? I called because I have a little free time this afternoon around four, and I was wondering if you’d like to get together. I could drop over.”
“I have a couple of appointments here at school,” Desmond said. “And then there’s a department meeting of some kind at four.” Specifically, the kind of department meeting to which he hadn’t been invited. “So I’m afraid I won’t be home until much later in the evening.”
It sounded as if Brian’s receptionist had come into his office. There was a discussion about a client on another line, and then he said, “Well, tell them I’ll call back, I’m busy.” When the door had clicked shut, he said, “Not that I’m counting, Desmond, but this is the third time I’ve suggested we get together and the third time you haven’t been available. So frankly, as I see it, three strikes and you’re out.”
Desmond preferred to think that Brian was the one who’d struck out, but that was nitpicking. “It’s too awkward,” Desmond said. “Joyce is about to deliver, I’m working with Jane . . .”
“That might be so, but I wish you’d thought of that before you invited me back to your place that day and came on so strongly.”
“I apologize, but I think this is for the best. It’s not as if I’m single either, you know.” It was reassuring to bring Russell into the conversation in some form, especially since they hadn’t spoken in five days and their last conversation had ended on a sour note. There was a knock on Desmond’s office door. “Who is it?” he called out.
“Ee rolovel.”
“Come in, Roger,” he said, happy for a legitimate distraction. “I’ll be right with you. Take a seat.”
“Yayaya. Dolemmeinerup.”
“I have a student here,” Desmond said, “so I should be hanging up.”
“I guess you should. I didn’t mean to snap at you before, it’s just that there’s a lot going on in my life right now, and it’s all starting to get a little overwhelming. But don’t worry, I won’t call again.”
“Maybe when the baby comes, you’ll fall in love with it, and everything will fit back into place.” Desmond didn’t believe it for a minute, but it was the generous and encouraging thing to say. Desmond thought he’d handled the whole call pretty well. Everything had been done with clean efficiency and without ambiguity. Maybe those sugar pills he was taking for Ambivalence had finally kicked in. It was discouraging to think he’d lost his ability to have meaningless sexual affairs, but nice to see he still knew how to end them. “Job well done,” he said aloud.
“Yayayaya. Thanyaverymuss.”
Roger Lovell. He’d forgotten about him. He was nervously fidgeting in the chair across from Desmond, grinning, adjusting his big, insect-eye glasses. Now that the weather had turned a bit cooler, he’d layered a few baggy, long-sleeved T-shirts under his usual outer layer, making him look more like a restless scarecrow than ever. Even if he hadn’t been trying to get Brian off the phone, Desmond would have been happy to see Roger. Roger had taken Desmond’s suggestion for writing more about his brother, and last week, he’d turned in a ten-page story about helping his younger sibling regain the confidence to climb trees after having fallen out of one and broken his arm. It was the most charming and sensitively written piece of Creative Nonfiction the class had yet produced.
“Yes, well, job well done, Roger. I’m proud of you, I really am.” Desmond reached out and shook the boy’s hand, a surprisingly cold thing considering how much time he spent clasping it and rolling it around. “It’s simple, clear, full of emotion, no histrionics.” He nodded toward Roger’s beat-up vinyl briefcase. “How were the written comments from the other students?”
“Kina fusing.”
“Confusing?”
“Kinda, yayayaya.”
“In what way?”
Roger snapped open the briefcase and pulled out a wad of papers, most of them smudged with food and coffee stains, many covered in comments written in absurdly large script. Desmond tried to get a glimpse into Roger’s briefcase to see what else he was carrying around. He remembered Roger telling him he was a math major, although it could have been biology. It always happened that his interest in a student’s personal life spiked if she or he turned in a coherent piece of work. Up to that point, they tended to form a pleasant blur in his mind. He saw what looked like a row of pill bottles before Roger snapped the briefcase shut.
It was hard to make out all of the long, garbled speech that followed, but it sounded as if most of the students had found the story unfocused, boring, and pointless. (What else could “poless” mean in this context?) Most shockingly of all, almost everyone had commented that they “dinna baleeit.” How was it possible that they didn’t believe this straightforward vignette when no one had balked at perky Esther Feldman’s claims that she’d been brought up in a dark closet for the first six years of her life, or at Bill Moretti’s story about his grandmother being sold into white slavery? No one had doubted the veracity of the two students who wrote supposedly autobiographical stories about helping their parents commit suicide, one with a shotgun. Helping your brother climb a tree was the one thing they found lacking in credibility?
“You have to decide for yourself if any of this criticism rings true for you, Roger, but my advice would be to ignore it and keep writing.”
“I’mga reryeit. Maygima quawralegic.”
Desmond looked at his watch. He wasn’t going to change his mind about meeting up with Brian, but this conversation was enough to make him wish he had so little pride and so few scruples that he could. “A quadriplegic?”
“Yayayaya. Moramatic.”
Had he said romantic or dramatic? At this point, it didn’t seem to matter much. Desmond was clearly swimming against such a strong current of opinion, he was destined to drown anyway, so why not relax and enjoy the scenery as he was pulled out to sea. Roger’s generation had fact and fiction so thoroughly confused, there was no point in trying to make a distinction. Old television shows were accepted as historical documents and carefully staged and scripted media events were considered “real life” dramas. When faced with a scrap of genuine emotion, it was easier to fall back on cynicism.
“That’s an interesting idea, Roger. Unexpected. Romantic, dramatic. Excellent.”
“Yathinso?”
“Yes, I do think so. And why not do something really believable while you’re at it and make him the world’s youngest quadriplegic IV drug user with HIV, hepatitis C, and ADD.”
At the mention of the last illness, Roger’s eyes lit up. How did Desmond know, he mumbled, that he and his brother both had ADD?
Later in the afternoon, Thomas stuck his head into Desmond’s office. He was about to call Jane. Did Desmond have any messages for her?
“Tell her to hurry up with those Florida tickets,” Desmond said. “I’m dying for a suntan.”
It was a gray afternoon with a low, heavy sky and down on the street, twenty stories below, people were bundled up in sweaters and long coats. From the floor-to-ceiling window where Jane stood, the Public Garden was a distant blur of red and brown. It was windy and the trees were slowly being stripped of their pretty, dying leaves. At long last, a welcome spell of autumnal weather, even if it hadn’t arrived until November. She couldn’t wait for winter, assuming it came this year. She’d like a long spell of Arctic air to settle in and freeze the ground, the ponds, the river, and—what a comforting thought—her own heart. Dale was in the bathroom, shaving and talking on his cell phone. He was a man who needed to be in constant touch with his minions; electricians and plumbers and painters and builders. This dance of codependence was what made the world go round. They had the skills, he had the money. Most important of all, he had the forceful, ruthless male energy needed to hold it all together. When they were married, she’d often watched him at work and thought to herself that she could do what he did and do it with more grace and decency. But listening to him these past few weeks—“Then tell him to go fuck himself,” he was saying over the sound of running water. “We’ll get Tom to do it for half the price.”—she realized how foolish she’d been. There was something about his brash bullheadedness that inspired people; it had inspired her to start this documentary project. And now it was his money that was funding it.
He came out of the bathroom, his dark, damp skin set off by the thick towel he had wrapped around his waist. The Boylston Hotel specialized in thick towels and expensive soaps and cotton sheets, meaningless little luxuries that seemed to mean so much. Dale knew one of the hotel’s developers and so had access to one of the apartments—executive suites, in the silly, ego-stroking language of this world—on the upper floors. She’d rather not know how often he’d used this place and with whom, so she never pressed for details.
“New problems?” she asked.
“Business as usual. But I should get over to the site right away, stave off a meltdown.” He ran the back of his hand down her face and gently across the tops of her breasts. She’d put on her skirt, but was wearing only a bra, a new one, above it. She was completely unselfconscious around him, as if they were an old married couple, and still, she felt the warmth and texture of his hand every time he touched her, as if they were young lovers. The best illusions of both worlds: intimacy and ardor. In the waning days of their marriage, she’d been suspicious of everything he did and said, wary of his motives every time he kissed her. Now that she was in no position to judge or question him, she accepted everything gratefully: their time together in these rooms, his fingers against her skin, his advice, his money. Dale was, by nature, a lover not a husband, the way some men are built for basketball, others for racing horses. Maybe she wasn’t built to be a wife, an unsettling thought. She watched him cross the room as he took off his towel and dried his face with it.
“If you’re going to leave with me,” he said, pulling on his pants, “you’d better get ready. I’m sorry to rush off, but I have to be across town in twenty minutes.”
“I ordered a sandwich from room service while you were in the shower.” She’d ordered one for him, too, but there was no point in mentioning it now. She picked her blouse up from the chair by the window and slipped it on. “I think I’ll wait for it. I can’t remember if I had lunch or not and I’m starving.”
“I’ll bet you are, Janey. You’ve earned it.” He buttoned himself into a white shirt, knotted his tie, and shrugged himself into his jacket and overcoat. Every trace of the hour and a half they’d spent together was erased from his body and face. He kissed her on her raw, bruised lips, searched through his pockets for his watch, then headed to the door.
“How does the rest of your week look?” she asked, buttoning up her blouse.
“I’m not sure. I’ll call you at the office when I have a better idea.”
That was typically noncommittal. “You have my cell phone number, don’t you?” she asked. “I turn it off when I get home, but otherwise—”
“I’ll get it from you next time we talk.” He gave her a crisp, ironic salute and left.
The silent, ivory anonymity of the room overwhelmed her as soon as he shut the door behind him. Everything here was so pleasant, the bland furniture, the deep carpet, the thick drapes that sealed off the room from the outside world so effectively, but it all lost its charm once he’d departed. Soon, a chambermaid would come in and strip the bed and tidy up the bathroom and make it seem as if nothing had ever happened here. That was supposed to be the appeal of hotel rooms when you were having an affair, so she didn’t understand why it didn’t appeal to her at all.
She was putting on her shoes when room service buzzed, and she hobbled over to open the door, one shoe on, one off. A slender man with cropped graying hair was holding a tray at his shoulder. “Room service?” he asked. He was smiling and handsome, but Jane couldn’t help thinking he was too old and intelligent to be doing this. What personal or professional disappointment had led him to this kind of employment? Obviously, it was going to be one of those awful afternoons when everything was coated with poignancy.
“Just put it on the table by the window,” she said.
He took the covers off the plates and started to arrange two settings on the round maple table; towering roast beef sandwiches, a half bottle of red wine, a bud vase with a yellow rose, the entire romantic late afternoon lunch she’d been imagining when she’d called in the order.
“Don’t bother with all that,” she said, digging through her bag. “Just leave it.”
“Shall I open the wine?” He had a deep, cultured voice. An actor, poor man, which would explain everything.
“No, it’s fine, really. I’ll do it myself.”
He fussed a bit more, then presented her with the check and a pen. “If you’ll sign here . . .”
“I’ll pay for it,” she said. She didn’t know what the arrangement was with the room, but the last thing she wanted was to start racking up charges against Dale’s account. She handed him a stack of bills and told him to keep the change. Kindness, she hoped, was made up of small generous gestures like this that added up bit by bit, no matter what you did to those nearest to you. Although at this moment she felt more like a spoiled, extravagant Lady Bountiful. As she let him out, a woman passed in the hallway holding the hand of a child, an unsteady little boy of about three, overdressed in a gray flannel suit with short pants and a cap.
“Hello, young man,” the waiter said. He knelt down and shook the boy’s hand.
“Can you say hello?” the mother cooed, grinning proudly.
“Hello, mister,” the boy said.
Something about the boy, so tidy and polite, captivated Jane. “He’s adorable,” she said. The mother looked up at her and a shadow of confusion crossed her face.
Jane closed the door and went to the mirror. Her blouse was buttoned incorrectly and her hair was puffy on one side, as if she’d just crawled out of bed. She was still wearing only one shoe. She fixed herself up, brushed down her hair, put on the other shoe. Awful woman with her perfect string of “pearls” against her cream-colored sweater and her perfect little child. She hated women who paraded their children around and had them perform for strangers as if they were trained monkeys. Gerald could never accuse her of having done that. She took a few more swipes at her hair and then felt a hollow thump in her chest. Gerald. She looked at her watch. Ten to four. She ran into the bedroom, found her briefcase on the bureau and fumbled with the clasps. Her appointment book was on top. She leafed through it, looking for today’s page; a storm of notes fluttered to the floor. She squinted, afraid to open her eyes and face it head-on. But there it was, just as she’d feared, a note that Thomas had written for her over a week ago stating that he had a department meeting today and therefore wouldn’t be able to pick Gerald up at his piano lesson in Cambridge as he usually did. The lesson ended at four. She’d need half an hour—at least—to get out of this room, down to the garage, across the bridge, and all the way to the other side of Harvard Square. She yanked her sweater over her head, scurried around the room looking for anything she might have dropped. Calling the school now would only take up more time. She’d call from the car. She found her jacket and her bag, cursing herself for her forgetfulness.
She took one last swing through the rooms; for the past three weeks she’d lived in fear of leaving something important behind in this bland landscape where any personal item would be as damning as a drop of blood on a white bedsheet. Nothing here but all that perfectly good food going to waste. Sixty dollars down the drain, but worse still was the sight of it, sitting there peacefully waiting for someone to come along and eat it. Poignant. She grabbed the bottle of wine, stuck it in her bag, and ran out.
There was a young man in the elevator, dressed in a dark overcoat, staring straight ahead, carefully avoiding eye contact. If Dale were here, he’d make some joke with the man and they’d have a good laugh and wind up shaking on a deal to build the World Trade Towers North before landing in the lobby. There was something unnerving about the man’s studious avoidance of her, as if he knew that half an hour ago her head had been flung over the side of a king-sized mattress while her ex-husband stroked her throat and fucked her, and her poor, difficult son was hammering out scales, confident that his mother would be there to pick him up when it was over. But no, he couldn’t know anything. To him, she was just another forty-year-old nonentity who was starting to sweat. The elevator stopped two floors down, letting in a couple in their sixties, nicely dressed, she smelling of some faint and expensive perfume. They were wearing big smiles, professionally polite, but she was grateful. The elevator made it down only one more floor before stopping again. As three men in suits were getting in, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her bag and tried to hold it to her ear discreetly. Undoubtedly everyone else in the elevator had cell phones, but they all looked at her as if she’d just farted.
It was Thomas, asking her if she wanted him to pick anything up on the way home. “I thought you had a department meeting,” she said.
“I do, but I should be home by six. By the way, I have some good news for you, Jody. It looks as if Celeste is going to be released early next week. Helen is going home!”
The elevator bell rang. They stopped at the ninth floor, let off the three men, let on a young man in a jogging outfit. Helen was leaving. Jane felt something catch at the back of her throat. “That’ll make things easier,” she said, although she could barely get the words out.
“What’s that gong? You remembered about the change in schedule, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. I’m on my way to pick him up now. His lesson ends at four.”
The woman with the expensive perfume checked her watch and looked at her again.
“Oh, good. Are you near Harvard Square?”
“I’m in Central Square. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
When she clicked off and looked up, the friendly couple were glaring at her with open disdain.
Yes, she thought, as she ran across the cold concrete of the parking garage, you let yourself get farther and farther off the trail until you’re completely lost in the dark forest and your life is a ruin of confusion and you find yourself running through an underground garage with your briefcase dangling off your shoulder and your helpless son stranded.
As she was bending to unlock the car door, her bag slid off her shoulder, the wine bottle fell out and cracked against the concrete floor. She felt warm wine on her ankle. If she’d left the bottle in the room, the sad waiter could have enjoyed it. No time now for regret. She climbed into the car and backed out of her space.
She fished through the change cup on her dash, but couldn’t find the garage ticket. The scrawny man in the booth with the patch of pink skin along his neck had seen it all before and wasn’t impressed. “Thirty dollars,” he droned.
“Thirty dollars? I was here for less than two hours!”
He pointed to a sign beneath his window that said something about lost tickets and full prices, some infuriating bit of rules and regulations.
“I asked you when I arrived,” she said, “if there were any spaces on this floor. And you told me you’d just come on duty so you didn’t know.”
There, that ought to satisfy him, prove to him that she’d come in when she said she had. He pointed to the sign again, and she saw that she could present sworn affidavits, photos, and DNA samples and it wouldn’t matter at all. He had his job to do and he was doing it and had been doing it while she languished away an afternoon in a hotel room. Choose Your Battles, she told herself and handed over a fifty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she told him. More kindness, unless it was self-flagellation.
She drove through the tangle of crowded Back Bay streets until she was out on Massachusetts Avenue. Three more stoplights and she’d be on the bridge to Cambridge. She checked her watch again. Two past four. Not nearly as bad as she’d feared. Gerald would be coming down the winding staircase of the music school clutching his books. She’d call the school in one minute. She was scarcely late at all.
Halfway across the long, flat bridge over the river, traffic came to a complete stop.
She looked to either side of her, but all she saw was the cold expanse of gray water. No sailboats today, just the low sky and a froth of whitecaps whipping across the river. She pulled out the cell phone and called the school. The receptionist with the affected accent had no idea what she was talking about and grudgingly transferred her to the security guard who sat at a desk in the lobby. She’d picked this school, despite its inconvenience, because it had a solid reputation and was housed in a magnificent red-stone mansion on a lovely side street near Harvard Square. What she hadn’t taken into account was that the teachers, used to prodigies, apparently, had little patience for Gerald, who tended to play in a thundering style and blame his weaknesses on his teachers. He’d gone through two in the past eight months.
“He’s probably standing in the lobby waiting for me,” Jane explained. “If you could just put him on.”
“There are about a dozen kids here,” he said. “What’s he look like?”
“He’s six,” Jane said. “Tall for his age. He has light hair and he’s wearing a light blue jacket with a hood. Although I doubt he’s wearing the hood.”
“Let me look.” But no, no one by that description was in the lobby.
“He’s a bit plump,” Jane said, realizing that the delicate euphemism for his size made him sound like a turkey.
“Sorry. If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re running late. What’s his name again?”
After she’d hung up, Jane reminded herself of Gerald’s awkward maturity and, at times, unsettling fearlessness. Most likely, he’d sit down in the most comfortable chair in the school and bury his head in a magazine, silently berating her for being late. One thing about a child with Gerald’s personality, you never had to worry about him talking to strangers. So why was she so panicked? Guilt, that was the only explanation. She had the heater on in the car, and the whole interior was starting to smell like fermented grapes. She checked her watch again. Eight past four. Not too bad, but there was no sign of the traffic breaking up. Maybe there was an accident ahead, or, more likely, some rich, spoiled students were stopping traffic to protest some imagined assault on their privileges. She leaned on her horn, a useless exercise, and one that only made her feel more nervous.
And then, thinking about how much she’d always hated Cambridge—or the smug superiority of Harvard anyway—she realized she had one more option. Brian’s office was two long blocks from the music school.
“He’s in a meeting,” she was told, which was what every receptionist and secretary in the world is paid to tell everyone.
“This is his sister,” Jane said. “Please ring him and tell him I need to talk to him immediately.”
“I’m sorry, but as I just—”
“You don’t understand,” Jane said quietly. “It’s an emergency. It’s an emergency!”
While she waited for him to come on the line, she bent down and tried to rub the wine off her stocking with a rumpled piece of tissue paper while vowing not to lose her cool like that again.
“I have clients coming by in the next hour,” Brian said. “I have three projects in trouble. I can’t drop everything to help you out with day care, Jane.”
She could hardly wait for his baby to be born, assuming it ever was. All the real work would be handed over to Joyce, who would probably accept it gratefully, but a certain amount of mess would almost certainly splatter onto Brian’s brow. “We’re talking about your nephew,” she said. “I’ve never asked you for anything and this would take all of half an hour out of your day, probably more like twenty minutes.” She spit on the tissue and rubbed hard.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Please, Brian, this is important.”
“I’m sorry, Jane, but I don’t have a free minute this afternoon. Don’t you have a baby-sitter or your mother-in-law or someone?”
She didn’t believe him. It was more of his selfishness, one more round in the pitched battle they’d been engaged in since they were children. She was probably as bad as he, except that she, in her very worst moments, wouldn’t take it out on a child. “If I had someone else, I wouldn’t be asking you.”
“The answer is no.”
Fearing he was about to hang up on her, she said, “You don’t have time for Gerald, but apparently you have time to squire Desmond Sullivan around town.”
That silenced him. She hadn’t been planning on saying it, hadn’t been planning on mentioning it ever because it was none of her business and made her uncomfortable, but he’d backed her against a wall and it had slipped out. It seemed as if minutes passed with neither of them saying anything, and for once in her life, Jane actually felt close to her brother as she listened to his harsh breathing.
When he finally spoke, his voice was weary. “Why is it that I never call you with these kinds of crises?”
Thank God he was giving in. “Wait until you have a child,” she said. But the relief passed as suddenly as it had come over her and was replaced by the realization that giving in was an admission that something had, in fact, happened between him and Desmond. “You’ll see,” she stammered. “You’ll see that . . . things come up you can’t elicit.”
“Elicit?”
“Predict. Things you can’t predict.”
“I can predict right now that this will never come up with me. I will never call you in the middle of the afternoon, completely out of the blue . . .”
She could see the traffic ahead starting to move, a little break in the line of cars. “I’m more grateful than I can say. Please . . . if you could leave right this minute . . .”
When she arrived at the school, Gerald was sitting on the steps leading to the street with his arms folded over his music books, and the corners of his mouth turned down. Daylight Saving Time had ended last weekend and it was nearly dark. The rooms of the school were lit in warm, golden light, and even through the closed windows of her car she could hear pianos and the rasp of cellos. Gerald was wearing a baggy, orange sweatshirt, not the blue jacket she’d described to the security guard. Why hadn’t she noticed it this morning? The whole afternoon might have gone differently if she’d given the guard the right description. Brian was pacing on the sidewalk, wrapped up in his dapper tweed sports coat and a long, dark scarf. She’d always thought there was something suspiciously vain about him, although she’d been too absorbed in their rivalry to pinpoint exactly what his vanity made her suspect. How had she missed what now struck her as so obvious it was almost embarrassing? It was a little before five, and now that she was here and Gerald was fine and within thirty minutes they’d be at home and Gerald would be standing at the kitchen counter cooking, the panic of the past hour dissolved. All things considered, she’d handled it rather well.
Gerald opened the door, tossed himself into the passenger seat and slipped on his seat belt, all without looking at her.
“Hi, honey,” she said, and gave him a kiss. She wasn’t going to make a big deal of this and alarm him retrospectively. “How did the lesson go?”
Silence, and then he said, “Have you been drinking?”
“Excuse me?”
“It smells like wine in here.”
Brian rapped lightly on her window, his fingers tightly encased in brown leather. He motioned for her to roll down her window. “Mission accomplished?” he asked.
She nodded toward Gerald and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to make a big production of this, but I hope you know how much I appreciate it.”
“As I was walking over here, I realized it’s the kind of thing you’d do for me. Not that I’d ask.”
The gloves were definitely a bit too much for this time of year. Thomas usually didn’t get around to wearing gloves until midwinter. She turned back to Gerald. “Did you thank your uncle for coming to meet you?”
Gerald said nothing.
“Gerald? I asked you a question: Did you thank your uncle Brian?”
“Thank you,” Gerald said to his chest. “Now could we please get going?”
“All I can do is thank you again,” Jane said. The scarf, too, seemed an affectation. The temperature was probably in the fifties.
“You could also give me a ride back to my office.”
She moved some papers around on the back seat and he climbed in. “Take a right at the end of the street and then another right,” he said. “What’s that smell in here?”
“It’s wine,” Gerald said.
Gerald was banging his legs against the seat, obviously trying to get a rise out of her. Maybe it was best to simply let him blow off some steam in this harmless way. He hadn’t said a word since they dropped off Brian, not that he’d been talkative when Brian was in the car, and now they were almost home. She decided to make one last stab at civility. “Was your teacher happy with all the practicing you’ve been doing, sweetie?”
Bang bang bang, and then he slid a little lower in his seat and actually kicked the dashboard.
“I asked you a question, Gerald.” Carefully enunciating each word, she said, “Did the teacher notice how much practicing you’ve been doing?”
Bang bang bang, kick kick kick.
“Gerald! Enough!”
He fluttered his legs rapidly, like a swimmer racing to the finish line, and then exploded: “Where were you, Jane?”
She wished then that she hadn’t been so quick to allow him to use her first name. It had sounded cute when he was two, a tiny boy calling his mother Jane, so incongruously grown-up in that incongruously grown-up voice of his. But now it seemed to put them on an equal footing, as if they were peers, as if she had no authority over him. Saddest of all, there was no turning back; it was unlikely now that he would ever call her something as tender as mom. “I told you, sweetheart, I was stuck in traffic. There was a terrible accident and I was stuck on the bridge. There was nothing I could do.”
“Doubtful.”
“You’re being very rude, young man.” Bang bang bang. “And please stop that annoying thing you’re doing with your legs.”
He gave the dashboard one last kick. “Grandma said you’d probably forgotten me.”
“Grandma? You called Sarah?”
“I called her when you didn’t show up. What was I supposed to do, sit around and wait to be kidnapped?”
“The security guard was looking for you. You didn’t hear him?”
“He was looking for someone named Jerry and since that isn’t my name, I paid no attention.”
“Exactly what did your grandmother say to you?”
“She said she hadn’t heard from you and didn’t know what you did with yourself half the time. Then she asked me if you and Dale had spent a lot of time together when we were up in New Hampshire, and then I saw Uncle Brian come in and realized he was looking for me.”
She pulled into their driveway. It was bad enough that Sarah was continually trying to drive a wedge between her and Thomas, but trying to turn her own son against her was purely sadistic. Sarah had answered that one call from Dale, months ago now, and desperate to have something to use against Jane, had come to all kinds of conclusions. At least she could have the decency to keep them to herself.
As she got out of the car, Helen, poor, fading beast, came up from the backyard, making a noble effort at wagging her tail. She’d lost weight in the time she’d been with them, despite Jane’s attempts at fattening her up, bringing home special packages of hamburger and ground chicken. Helen went over to Gerald, but he ignored her completely and made straight for the front steps. From this angle, he looked tall, erect, and adult, and she didn’t want to let him go.
“I want you to come back here right this minute,” she said. “I want you to come back here and pet Helen, right on the head.” He spun around and made a great show of marching back and running his hand across Helen’s head as if he were wiping crumbs off a counter. “No, I don’t mean like that, I mean with a little bit of genuine feeling. She’s going to be gone very soon, and I want you to look back at the time that she was with us and remember that you did something nice and kind and decent for her. Do you understand?”
He touched her head, a little more gently this time, and immediately withdrew his hand. “She smells funny,” he said.
“She smells like a dog, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because that’s what she is.”
“May I go now, Jane?”
“Yes, you may.” But when his key was in the lock, she said, “And from now on, I’d like you to call me mom or, if you can’t manage that, mother would be acceptable.”
She strode across the damp, leafy lawn, nearly tripped on a stone in the middle of the dark path, and knocked on the door of the barn. No, not the barn, the carriage house, the very nicely, expensively appointed carriage house. She looked down with dismay at her wine-stained stockings, but she had to take care of this now, before the whole situation got out of hand. Eventually, she heard Sarah shuffling across the floor, and when she’d finished rattling the locks, she opened the door wrapped in a blue and red and yellow blanket. Undoubtedly, it had taken her this long to answer the door because she was searching for this attention-getting prop, a not-so-subtle reminder to Jane that she was freezing to death in the overheated “barn.”
“May I come in?” Jane asked.
Sarah opened the door wider. “It’s your house.”
“Thomas and I own it, if that’s what you mean, but I’ve never once come in unless I was invited.”
“No. In fact, I can’t remember the last time you were in here, Jane.”
So the gloves were off!
The washing machine was running in the room off the kitchen and the whole house smelled of bleach. Jane couldn’t remember the last time she was here either, but she remembered the smell; Sarah seemed to have a bleach fetish. She washed everything in bleach, she cleaned every surface with it, for all Jane knew, she bathed in it. As soon as Jane left, she’d probably disinfect the air with it. Jane sat on the sofa and Sarah, very carefully and slowly, lowered herself onto a Bentwood rocker piled high with worn cushions and pillows. It was one of the few pieces of furniture Sarah had supplied herself and, judging from the looks of it, the only piece of furniture Sarah used. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and forced an unconvincing shiver to run through her body. It was so unattractive, a robust woman like Sarah playing the infirm old lady. Jane wasn’t going to play nice-nice, not today. They’d gone past that.
“If you’re cold, you can turn up the heat,” Jane said. “We installed the most efficient and reliable heating system we could find, so there’s no need to sit here shivering, wrapped in blankets.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Jane.” Sarah reached up and touched her big white wig. What was the point, Jane wondered, of going to the trouble, expense, and discomfort of wearing a wig if it only served to make you look worse than you did without it? “I won’t be here much longer, so I’m not going to be running up your heating bills.”
“You know where the thermostats are and you know how to use them and I know for a fact no one has ever mentioned heating bills. The rest is up to you.” Jane adjusted a pillow behind her back to make herself more comfortable for what was coming, and found it was pushing her off the cushion. She reached behind her and tossed it to the far end of the sofa. Sarah watched, stone-faced. “Listen, Sarah,” she said. “I think you know why I’m here.”
“Not really. Unless I forgot to pay the rent this month.”
All $100 of it, always paid in fives and tens to make it look like they were gouging her. Don’t Engage. “I just brought Gerald home, safe and sound. There was a traffic jam getting into Cambridge. When I realized how bad it was and how late I was going to be, I called my brother and had him rush down to the school from his office and wait with Gerald. He wasn’t alone for more than a few minutes. Ten at the most.”
Sarah stared at Jane for a very long time, then said, “I’m glad to hear it.” She put her feet up on a crocheted stool, another piece of furniture that belonged to her. Perhaps she spent her days trying to figure out how best to avoid touching anything that Jane had come in contact with. She folded her hands on her lap, and in a flash of panic, Jane saw a busty version of her husband and her shrink sitting opposite her. “All I know,” Sarah went on, “is that when he called here, he was so terrified, I thought something terrible had happened to him. I thought he was hurt or lost. I tried to calm him down, but I didn’t know what to tell the poor thing.”
“You may not have known what to tell him, but apparently what you did tell him was that I’d forgotten about him. You tried to ‘calm him down’ by telling him that I’d abandoned him like some abusive mother who leaves her kids stranded in a shopping mall.”
Sarah said nothing to this, merely stared at Jane with self-righteous contempt. She pursed her mouth and made a soft, sucking sound.
“There was a change in our usual schedule,” Jane said, “and, I admit, I forgot where I was supposed to be and when. And then, on my way to pick him up, I was stuck in a traffic jam. That is what happened.”
“Oh, yes, Jane, I’m sure it is. I am sure that’s exactly what happened.”
Jane leapt to her feet. “Well it doesn’t matter if you’re sure or not, Sarah, does it? What matters is that I fucked up and when I realized I’d fucked up, I dealt with it as quickly as I could, and Gerald is safely at home and everyone is fine and I’d like to put the entire unfortunate incident behind me.”
Sarah’s mouth was actually twitching, and when she spoke, her lips were drawn so tightly, they were white. “Don’t you dare use that filthy language around me! Who do you think you’re talking to, Miss Cody? Why don’t you go take a look at yourself, all dirty and disheveled! You disgust me!”
Everything that Sarah had said to her over the past seven years had slid off the surface of Jane’s defenses. She’d chalked all of it up to a sick rivalry for Thomas’s affection. But these words knocked the wind out of her. She felt unsteady on her feet and was afraid she was going to cry. “You’ve never liked me,” she said softly, a reminder to herself, as much as to Sarah, that this wasn’t about whatever she imagined had happened this afternoon. It wasn’t about Dale because she couldn’t know anything about that, whatever she suspected.
“I’m the mother-in-law in the barn. I’m not allowed to have an opinion. But I told my daughter the first time I met you, I called her right up on the phone and I said, ‘That woman is never going to make my Thomas happy.’”
Jane could feel tears rolling down her face, but she wasn’t about to reach up and brush them away. Now Sarah looked like Gerald, like Gerald and Thomas. Sarah and Gerald and Thomas, a trinity. And she was the outsider. She’d always been the outsider and maybe that was why she’d started up this ridiculous affair with Dale, because she wanted to feel like she belonged somewhere. “Thomas has been happy,” she said. Her voice was weak, as if she were the old woman. “He’s been happy with me, and he’s been happy with Gerald, and he loves this house. That might be hard for you to accept, but it’s true.”
It was true. It was undeniably true. She had made Thomas happy. She’d made him forget the woman who’d left him, and she’d given him a son whom he adored. She had made a home for him. She’d even taken in Sarah, made room for her nemesis in her own household. What more did she want, blood?
“You’re a fine one to go talking about what’s true,” Sarah said. “You with all your lies and your lists. You want to hear truth, I’ll tell you some truth. I got the results back from those tests of mine the doctor took last month, and I’m about six months from dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My whole body’s full of cancer. Every damn inch of it.”
Jane sat back down on the sofa and wiped her eyes, not sure what to make of this. “Thomas said the doctor gave you a clean bill of health.”
“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. You’re the first person I mentioned it to. And I don’t plan to tell anyone else, so please don’t go spreading it around.”
Jane found that she was taking in short, shallow breaths. Sarah had made the announcement of the cancer as a big “Gotcha! Score one for me!” Still, Jane was struck dumb by the news. And moved, in some unexpected way, by the fact that she’d chosen to tell her at all. She wanted to cross the room and take Sarah’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. What did they say . . .”
Sarah waved one of her big hands. “I’m not going into detail. And don’t be sorry for me. Just know one thing, Jane, I plan to make sure everything’s right before I crawl into the grave. For Thomas and for Gerald, and even for you. So let’s not dance around each other anymore.”
Back in her own bedroom, Jane sat on her bed and stared at the phone. Now she saw clearly that the whole desperate day had been headed toward this. Be like Chloe, she told herself, learn from your mistakes. It would be a relief, a huge sigh of relief once she’d done it. She called his private voice mail. No personal message from him, so at least she didn’t have to hear the sound of his voice.
“It’s me,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. Let’s pretend it never happened. No hard feelings, all right? And please, don’t call me back. Let’s just leave it at this.”
Like all heels and rakes and cads, Dale was a man of honor; he’d respect her wishes and she wouldn’t hear from him. In six months or more, they’d bump into each somewhere and act as if nothing had happened. She took off her clothes and stuffed them all into the bag for the dry cleaner. But no, she didn’t want any reminders of her last afternoon with him, so she stuffed them into a plastic bag, tied it closed, and tossed it into the wastebasket.