“I moaned about my husband all the time, but I loved him to death. Then he died. I never much cared for the second guy I lived with. My brother-in-law. But he was crazy about me. So I figured, ‘If you can’t have the person you love, you might as well take the booby prize and have the person who’s in love with you.
From Cry Me a River:
The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan
By the time they pulled into the parking lot of the Gulf City Hotel, the rain was coming down so hard, they seemed to be driving underwater. All Jane could see through the windshield were the vague shapes of buildings and trees. Fortunately, she wasn’t behind the wheel. The roads were deserted—that helped—and Desmond assured her that leaving the windshield wipers off made it easier to see. It was all too beautiful—the dark curtain of rain washing the afternoon sky, the green Gulf waters roiling beyond the seawall, the trees bent over in thirsty delight. Water, water, water.
Nothing had gone the way she’d expected it to today, and for once, that was happy news. Pauline Anderton was alive. However it affected their project, the mere fact of it was, at this moment, exhilarating. It showed that it was never too late for things to turn around, that it was never pointless to hope for a shift in wind direction and a change in the weather. All it took was patience, conviction, and commitment to pursuing the real story instead of inventing the missing pieces. Luck didn’t hurt, either.
Desmond shut off the engine. “Are you ready to run?” he asked.
They dashed through the wall of water, ran into his room, and collapsed onto the beds, dripping. Miraculously, the air conditioner was turned off, and the room was blessedly warm. “What’s your best guess,” he said, “about the impact of this little discovery on our pilot?”
She mulled this over for a moment. “With TV, you never know. But my best guess is: feeding frenzy.”
He got towels from the bathroom and tossed her one, then stood at the window, gazing out at the storm and drying his hair. Considering what had happened this morning, he seemed remarkably quiet, almost subdued. He looked gawky and frail with his wet clothes stuck to his body.
“Desmond?” she said. “Are you all right?”
He turned away from the window and faced her, the towel draped over his wet head. “I missed it,” he said finally.
“What?”
“The key to everything. Michael. The whole unfinished piece of the biography.”
“It probably wasn’t as obvious as it now seems.”
He shook his head. “It’s right there—in the cards she sent, the letters she wrote, the sarcastic interviews she gave. It was all there, and I was looking at it, but I still missed it.”
There was a useful cliché for this attitude, something about a gift horse. “You know it now,” she said. “That’s what matters, isn’t it?”
“You know why I missed it, Jane? Why I wasn’t seeing the key to everything in her life? Because I wasn’t seeing what it was in mine.”
“I imagine you’re talking about Russell.”
“I wasn’t looking for the missing piece, I was running away from it.”
The key to everything. What a great luxury to believe in the simple efficiency of a thing like that. If she were handed such a magic tool, she’d know where to go from here; how to forget Dale, how to feel like a real mother to Gerald, how to be Thomas’s wife.
Desmond finished drying his hair and dropped the towel onto the bed. He opened the drawer of the bedside table. “I have something for you,” he said.
If he pulled a Bible out of there, she was going to have to rethink this friendship. Fortunately, it wasn’t that. He handed her a postcard. “Tim picked this up in the coffee shop yesterday morning. He asked me to give it to you.”
She turned it over. Dear Dr. Berman—Everything I haven’t told you . . . After all the confessing she’d done in the past forty-eight hours, after baring so much of her heart to Desmond, after letting him read her fictionalized appointment books, you’d think she’d be immune to shame. And yet, looking over what she’d written—it’s just that there’s so much I don’t want to know about myself—she felt humiliation squeezing her chest.
“I suppose you read this?” she asked.
“Who could resist?”
She fanned herself with the card and turned it over a few more times. Her handwriting on the back was cramped and tight, a sign, no doubt, of stray obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Something else to be ashamed of. “What do I do with it, Desmond? Do I rip it up, stick it in the mail, slip it under the doctor’s door?”
He sat beside her on the bed and read the message with her one more time. He opened his mouth to tell her something, stopped himself, then sighed, and began again. “It’s just my opinion,” he said, “but I think you addressed this to the wrong person. I think you should cross out the doctor’s name and deliver it to your husband.”
Jane looked at the picture on the front: a beach, water, a road to somewhere. Deliver it to Thomas. Can we start from scratch? That was a question she could answer herself: No, they couldn’t start from scratch. They’d been married too long, and there had been too many disappointments and betrayals. They were both too damned old. But what if she, like Desmond, had been missing something all along? There’s so much I don’t want to know about myself Not the key to everything, that was too much to hope for, not a whole new life, a concept that was too exhausting to even consider at this stage, but the starting point of a life that was a little better, a little more truthful. She really would have to give this some serious consideration. It didn’t look as if the storm was about to blow over, and there wasn’t anything else to do in the orange room.
They left Florida two days later. They boarded a plane and lifted off into a sky so clear and blue and clean you wanted to drink it. The plane circled out over the sparkling waters of the Gulf and swung north.
They changed planes in Atlanta, and at the gate, Desmond kissed Jane goodbye and waited for his connection to New York. This detour meant he’d miss a class or two at Deerforth, but someone who’d been hired to teach a course called Creative Nonfiction surely ought to be able to come up with a convincing excuse to tell his students.
An outer edge of the storm that had battered Gulf City had pushed up the coast, wrung the heat and humidity out of the New York air, and opened the door for autumn. Or a reasonable facsimile of autumn. In the taxi from JFK, the sky looked ocean blue, and the buildings of the city were gleaming.
The door to Morning in America was locked. At two in the afternoon? That was a first. He rapped on the glass and pulled at the handle. As he was trying to peer through the window, the carpenter from next door came up to him, sandwich in one hand, coffee in the other. “They asked me to put in a buzzer,” he said.
“Oh? Were they having problems?”
“Nothing like that. The neighborhood’s safer than ever.” He was a good-looking man with dark hair and a long, lean torso. He was wearing glasses, big brown ones, Desmond noted. Well, the world was full of eyeglasses. “If you don’t have a lock on the door, people assume there’s nothing inside worth buying.”
“I get it. And this is the bell?”
“Ring it,” he said, “and they buzz you in.”
The store was tidier than usual, and there was a Bruce Springsteen album playing on the vintage 1980s stereo near the cash register. He walked to the back of the store, and then down into the basement. The walls were covered with photos of Bill and Hillary Clinton. One Formica-topped table was labeled “’90s version of ’50s dining set.” A door to some dark recess of the decade opened, and Russell and Melanie pushed into the room, carrying a sofa.
“Desmond!” Melanie said. “You didn’t tell me he was coming in today, Russell.”
“I didn’t know,” Russell said. “I thought you were in Florida. That’s what your letter said, anyway.”
“Forget the letter,” Desmond said. “It wasn’t honest, it wasn’t truthful. I shouldn’t have sent it.”
They set down the sofa and Melanie pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket. “Time for me to go for a smoke. How long you staying around?” she asked.
“It depends.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t ask on what.” She patted his shoulder on her way up the stairs.
Desmond and Russell stared at each other for a moment as the silence of the dank basement gathered around them.
“Look, Desmond,” Russell finally said, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but there are a few things I have to tell you.”
“Don’t tell me anything,” Desmond said. “Please. Don’t confess or apologize or blame me or tell me your plans. Just sit down and listen while I tell you how much I love you.”
There was a strong, unfamiliar smell in the house, so powerful it almost brought tears to Jane’s eyes when she walked in the door. She followed it into the kitchen. Gerald was standing on his stool at the counter, pounding down a puffy lump of dough.
“Hi . . . mom.”
“Gerald,” she said. “What’s that smell?”
“Fresh bread. There’s a loaf in the oven, and this here is for a batch of pecan rolls.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. She went up behind him and wrapped her arms around his body as tightly as she could. “I’m so happy to see you. I missed you so much.”
“I can’t breathe,” he said.
She let him go and kissed the back of his head. “Pecan rolls are my favorite food in the world.”
“Yes, Jane, I know. That’s why I’m making them.”
It wasn’t exactly a hello kiss, a big, warm welcome, but it was his version of the same. “Where’s your father, sweetie?”
“I believe he’s up in your bedroom.”
By the time she got to the staircase, Thomas was standing on the landing, grinning benevolently. “Well, well,” he said. “You made it. What an adventure!”
“It was that,” she said. “From start to finish.”
Her pulse was racing, and despite the fact that the house was cool, she could feel sweat trickling down the sides of her body. Now or never, she told herself. Just dive right in. She reached out and wrapped her fingers around the newel post to steady herself. “I don’t know why anyone would want to live in a climate . . .” That wasn’t a promising start. It was best to try again. “Thomas. I have to talk to you.”
“I hope it’s not as serious as it sounds.”
“Remember the night Joyce had her baby? You told me you’d coached a soccer team, and I said I didn’t know? There are a couple of things you don’t know about me.”
He looked so ridiculously tall, standing up there on the landing, gazing down at her. After a moment, he said, “Are you sure I don’t know, Jody?”
“No, I’m not. But it doesn’t matter whether you know or not, I want to tell you, anyway.”
She began to feel clearer as she walked up the stairs. She’d always imagined she’d lead a tumultuous love life, full of money, passion, and painless tragedies. Oh well. Her marriage to Thomas wasn’t a passionate love story or a tragic love story. It wasn’t a great love story. But maybe, in the end, it was her love story.