Ed tries to pull her against him, to comfort her, to make her feel safe and whole. He can do that. But she struggles away, lurching to her feet, toppling the chair behind her, and shouting, “Goddamn it, Ed. You don’t get it. I needed your arm around me years ago. I needed to be your fucking wife. Not another patient you could solve. And Jesus, if I was going to be a patient, I needed you to at least do a better fucking job with my treatment.”
She rights the chair and grabs her sweater from the hook by the door, and then she’s gone.
How many times will he have to watch her leave?
Bonnie and Pete both pound their beers and open new ones.
“I’m sorry, brother,” Pete says.
Ed looks at them, his two friends across the table, a great couple. “How do you do it?” he demands, nearly angry. “Pete works the same damn hours I do, and he drinks the same after-work drinks. Why the hell are you still around?” He glares at Bonnie as though this is her fault.
She lays her hands flat on the table, a gesture Ed recognizes in the back of his mind as a pacifying move, as well as a powerful one. He hears Hank laugh at something on the TV.
“Are you sure you want an answer to that question?” she asks.
No. “Yes.”
“I’m still around because Pete’s never fucked around with one of his patients.”
“Jesus, Bonnie.” Ed glares at Pete. “Did you tell her that?”
“Those weren’t my exact words.”
“Come on, Pete,” Bonnie says. “What are you protecting yourself from now? Laura’s gone.” She gives Ed her own glare. “Pete told me about your relations with Penelope, Ed, but you know who else did? Your fucking wife. And I did my best to defend you, but it got pretty damn hard when you missed Benjy’s birth. So you go right ahead and call your attention to that girl whatever you want, but we all saw it as something else. And I can say for damn sure that if I ever had an inkling of suspicion on that front in regard to Pete, he’d be out the fucking door.”
“Calm down, Bonnie.”
“Shut up, Pete.”
Ed has rarely seen them argue. “I was Penelope’s doctor. I went to Great Falls because she needed my expertise.”
Bonnie scoffs. “Just like she needed individual therapy sessions with you back in Boulder?”
“Jesus, do you guys have a running file on me? And who the fuck are you to judge me, anyway? What the hell are you doing with your life, Bonnie? Drinking yourself drunk and hoping your kids don’t hurt themselves while you’re passed out? And Pete—you’re just putting in your goddamned time out there, going through the paces. You don’t care if we fix the system. You probably don’t even give a shit if we help anyone.”
“I swore to Laura you weren’t an asshole deep down, Ed. Don’t make me doubt that, too.”
“Fuck you, Bonnie.”
Pete and Bonnie both shake their heads, and Ed hates that they can reunite over their disappointment in him. Hates that they can reunite at all. Pete’s no better a man than Ed is. And Bonnie’s sure as hell no better a woman than Laura.
They keep quiet as they collect their boys.
At the door, Pete says, “You know Bonnie’s surly, but we’re here for you, brother. You’ll get through this.”
Ed is tired of being assured he’ll be all right.
Chapter 22
Pete and Bonnie on day seven. Preliminary meeting with lawyers on day fourteen. Parenting plan established on day sixteen, an even split of time. On day twenty-one, exactly three weeks after Laura got takeout and told him she was leaving, Ed bangs on the door of her new house at midnight, drunk, crying, begging, and a man arrives in his boxers. Ed tries to hit him and misses, bringing his hand against the doorframe. Laura appears, an apparition in an oversize men’s T-shirt, those long legs bare, and Ed lunges toward her, needing to hold her, needing to be held, but the man stops him. An arm catches Ed’s chest and sends him to the floor. He can hear Laura talking, those same words, “Ed, you need to go. Ed, this isn’t okay,” and new ones, “Ed, if you don’t get off my porch, I’m going to call the police,” words that make him crawl back down the steps and push himself to standing in the middle of her new yard. “At least give me my goddamned dog!” he shouts, and he’s surprised to hear the clatter of Beau’s toenails on the porch, then the warmth of his breath. When he looks up, the man is standing there, this stranger giving up the dog Ed and Laura have shared. Ed loads Beau into his car and somehow manages to drive home.
— —
Every night, the house is dark when Ed arrives. Every night, he thinks the same thing: Why is the house dark?
And every night, he remembers.
The night after he showed up at Laura’s and swung at that man—Who the fuck was that man?—he went to Dorothy’s and took Lynn to a hotel after her shift. He was too drunk to remember whether it was any good.
— —
On day fifty-three or fifty-four (he’s lost one somewhere), Laura brings divorce papers to the house for Ed to sign. It’s eight in the evening, and he’s drunk already, starting into a bottle of whiskey the moment he walked in the door.
“Where’s Ben?” he slurs.
“At home.”
“With that guy? Who the fuck’s that guy, Laura? I don’t want him around my son.”
“Jesus, Ed.” She goes to the sink and fills a glass of water, brings it to him. “Drink this. Want me to come back later so you can look these over when you’re sober?”
“Laura.” He reaches for her, again and again, and she steps away, again and again.
She is scratching Beau’s ears. “I’ll leave them on the table here, and you can look at them in the morning, all right?”
He slumps into a chair and rests his head in his arms on the table, a sad, broken child. His eyes are closed, but he can feel her hesitating, hovering. Soon he’s crying again, his shoulders shaking, everything rattling loose in him, and then he feels her hand rubbing his back, small circles. He makes himself stay seated, makes himself keep his head on his arms so they won’t grab for her because he knows his touch will drive her away, like a scared animal that’s carefully initiating contact. He has to prove he’s tame and good and kind. He can sit here and be petted, see? A gentle, good beast.
“You’re going to be all right, Ed.” He loves her voice. There are so many other things he wants it to say. “Lay off the booze a little.”
And then her hand is gone.
— —
On day sixty-seven (or eight), he reluctantly signs the papers that will end his marriage and resign him to being a half-time parent.
“We’re still married in the eyes of the Church,” he tells Laura.
“You don’t believe in God, Ed. We got married in the Church for your mother.” She takes the papers from his hands. “Thank you.”
He brings Lynn home that night, a woman named Kathy the night after, then Lynn again, and then a twenty-one-year-old college girl, so young and innocent that he drinks himself into oblivion for days trying to forget.
— —
Sometime later—he’s lost count of the days entirely—his mother arrives. She slaps him across the face and then holds his head in her lap for exactly ten minutes. Then she takes him by the shoulders and says, “We learn from our failures.” She firmly pats his cheek. “Go take a shower. I will make you a meal.”
She stays for three days, cleaning the mess that has accumulated in the house and cooking large meals Ed stuffs himself with.
“You are all right,” she says the day she leaves. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk your dog. Or you will both be fat.”
— —
The following Monday, he wakes early, makes a pot of coffee, fries an egg and puts it on toast. He takes Beau for a hike, then showers and gets dressed and goes to Boulder, where Martha says, “It’s nice to see you again, Ed.”
“It was only a weekend.”
She hands him a stack of mail and notes. “It was longer than t
hat, but we made do. Welcome back.”
His office waits for him, his patients, his doctors and shoddy staff. He is good at this, and he will give it everything he has on the days when he doesn’t have Benjamin, and give it enough on the days when he does. He thinks briefly of Penelope, out there in town somewhere. Not a patient. Just a healthy young woman living her life. He doesn’t know if he’s responsible for any of her success, but he knows she’s responsible for much of his failure. He remembers that moment by the river. Her hands.
Still, he has to believe he’s a good doctor.
Should
* * *
MAY 1976–FEBRUARY 1977
Chapter 23
— Laura —
Ed and I have been divorced nearly a year, and I am in Thriftway buying groceries and a pregnancy test. George is my bagger, and he chants my name as he nestles my items into paper bags. “La. Raw. La Raw.”
“It’s good to see you, George.”
I don’t look at the checker or George as they handle the small box.
A woman pushes her cart up behind me in line and starts unloading her groceries. A teenage boy clings to the cart’s handle, his eyes a bit too wide-set, his lower lip too forward, fat and pink. When he turns his head, I see a scar at the base of his skull, running down his neck, disappearing into his shirt. He would be at home out in Boulder. I would’ve invited him into my art class.
“So this girl likes you?” the mother says absentmindedly, her eyes on the food she’s unloading.
The boy huffs, frustrated. “She doesn’t just like me. She’s in love with me, Mom.”
“Ooh-la-la.” The woman dances her hands, mocking him, and I want to tell her about Frank and Gillie out in Boulder, their mismatched heights and their deep, devoted love of each other, a romance as sweet as any I’ve seen. They drew pictures for each other, picked grasses and flowers to form bouquets, walked hand in hand through the yard. They fought, too, like any couple. Theirs was a true relationship, as real as any out here, and I want to defend them to this woman and, in so doing, defend her son and his wistful heart.
These are the people Ed is saving, and the anger gives way to sadness.
I am pregnant with another man’s child.
I decline George’s offer to help me out to my car, and I load my bags into my trunk and rush the cart back as quickly as I can, so I can leave this place with its reminders of Ed.
Bonnie warns me regularly about Tim. “It’s all bright and shiny with this new guy now, Laura, but it’s going to get hard and ugly pretty damn quick. The same problems haunt every marriage.”
“I’m not looking for marriage, Bonnie.”
But that comes with a baby.
Bonnie is still rooting for Ed, slipping in stories that cast him in a favorable light, and I keep slapping her away, firm in my decision, but I am struck by the enormity of all that I’ve slapped away. I was not wrong to leave Ed, but I am missing him right now, and I would deliver him to the seat next to me if I could, lean my head against his thick shoulder, and ask him what I should do. He was always so good at helping other people direct their lives. So there’s this hypothetical woman, I would tell him, and she’s pregnant with a hypothetical baby, and the father of the baby isn’t her husband, and her husband isn’t her husband, either, though she catches herself thinking of him that way still, in fleeting moments, and mostly, she feels relief and freedom, but there are times—like right now—when she is doubled over with the pain of what she no longer has. Tell me, Doctor, what should she do?
He would tell me to marry Tim, have the baby. He would tell me I’ve already made a new life away from him, what are a few more steps?
Ed is all smiles when I see him at the Benjy exchanges. He’s polished and strong and healthy, though the stories I hear say otherwise.
Ben comes home with his own tales of their adventures, a three-year-old now, with so many words.
“We built a cabin from logs.”
“We collected ants.”
“We hiked up the mountain.”
“We built a fire in the pit in the yard.”
I admit it’s painful how good a father Ed has become in my absence.
— —
Benjy is with Ed, and I am alone in my little green house, and I sit at my kitchen counter and pour myself a short glass of wine. Tim will be over soon to take me to dinner, and afterward we will come back here and have quiet, pleasant sex that makes up in comfort what it lacks in excitement.
Tim walks in the back door and immediately folds me into his arms. “What sounds good for dinner?” he asks.
I don’t know what sounds good—I’m a little nauseated—so I say, “I’m pregnant.”
He pushes me to arm distance. I have been so focused on my own feelings that I haven’t given a thought to what Tim might think or want. He is good with Benjy, but I have no idea if he wants children of his own, and I am suddenly frightened that he will ask me if I want to keep it, which will mean that he doesn’t, and then—I can’t see that road, what it looks like, where it might go, and whether I might prefer it, too.
His hands are on my upper arms, and I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes, too fearful. “Laura,” he says, “look at me. Is this good news?”
I don’t know. “Do you want to be a father?”
He takes a deep breath. “Hypothetically, I do. I mean, I’ve always thought I would be. It wasn’t in my immediate plans, though. Aren’t you on the pill?”
“We don’t have to keep it,” I blurt out, not sure whether it’s a real offer.
“Laura.” He pulls me against him, and I’m relieved to hear him say, “I’d never want that.” He pets my hair and answers his first question: “It’s good news,” though I’m still not sure.
— —
I arrive early for my lunch with Ed. I tried to get him to meet me at the Grille, or the tea shop—someplace that isn’t dripping wet with our history—but he refused. “Dorothy’s,” he said. “I eat nowhere else.”
Benjy has been asking if Beau can go between the two houses with him, and that’s the main subject for our lunch, a change in the dog plan. I will tell Ed about the baby, too. My upcoming marriage. Small asides at the end.
Gail is hostessing, as she always is, and she sits me in our old spot, a two-top against the north wall, rough wainscoting about four feet up, giving way to old stone. A black-and-white photo of the Marlow Theatre hangs over us. It was torn down the second year we were here—urban renewal claiming so many of Helena’s old buildings. Every table at Dorothy’s has its own tribute. When they took down the Marlow, the streets smelled like popcorn for a week.
“Get you anything to drink while you’re waiting, hon?” It’s Lynn, one of the newer waitresses, though she’s been here for years.
I order a beer and a shot of Jameson. I will meet Ed on his own ground.
I take a cigarette from the pack I bought on my way over. Tim has gotten me to stop smoking, but it’s a constant longing, and the smoke that fills my lungs feels like a past home, someplace I once knew well.
Ed is ten minutes late. My shot is gone, and half my beer. I stand to greet him, somehow expecting to shake his hand in some new formality, but he folds me against his chest as though we are still the most intimate of lovers. I have always liked the shape and warmth of his body, how it can envelop me, swallow me whole. I make myself pull away after staying longer than I should, and when my face is free, he grabs my neck and kisses me on the mouth. Again, I linger too long before putting a hand to his chest. “Ed.”
“A friendly kiss, that’s all.” He holds his hands up, innocent. “You taste like whiskey.”
“I had a shot.”
“I better catch up, then.” He waves his hand in the air like he is the conductor of his life, all the world swirling around him, ready to follow his orders. Lynn bristles a little as he requests two rounds for himself and another for me, which I shouldn’t have.
Our new drinks arrive. “W
ould you like to hear the specials?” Lynn directs her attention to me.
“I don’t need to,” I say. “Ed?”
“Oh, I know what Ed will have. He always orders the same thing.” The woman looks too long at him now. “Or are you shaking things up today?” He must have gone to bed with this woman, one of many, I’m sure.
He doesn’t look at her as he says, “No, I’ll have the regular.” Teriyaki burger with Jack cheese cooked rare, fries, a vat of ranch on the side. I order a turkey club and fries, though I doubt I’ll be able to keep much down. The confirmation of the pregnancy seems to have set all the symptoms into action. My breasts hurt. I’m exhausted. I’m throwing up everything I eat.
When Lynn’s gone, Ed says, “Damn, it’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.” It’s an automatic response I recognize as true once it’s out. It is good to see him, to be in this place. We were happy here, for the most part.
“You look amazing.” He does, too, his beard shorter, neater, everything even tidier yet still strong. But there’s a redness to his eyes that speaks of late nights and too much booze.
I thank him for the compliment, and he begins talking. “Man, life is crazy right now. I’m sure you’re following all of it in the papers, but we’re so close, Laura—Boulder is way out in front of the deinstitutionalization movement, and I’m making incredible headway with the governor’s office. We’re going to see everything change—everything. Institutions, as we know them, will be gone—” And I am back in that life, just one more audience member in a sea of listeners.
The Behavior of Love Page 14
