“I like that about you,” said Haze. “And I agree with you about evolution. I thought we would have been much further along by now.”
14
“Haze, I have missed you more than I can say,” wrote Bill in a letter he sent to her house, a letter Haze read sitting in the big high-backed wing chair, Royal’s chair.
I’m finding some things out about myself that I’m not especially proud of—number one being that I am not very good at being the husband of a sick woman. As I write that, I see how heartless it sounds, but what I mean is that fixing things is my standard m.o., and when I don’t know how to fix things, it seems I sort of fall apart. Really, Eleanor is the strong one here, patting my hand before she went into surgery, assuring me that of course everything will be all right, while I’m blubbering like a lost little boy.
I know that’s not the sort of thing you want to hear: what kind of man would write such things to his lover? What sort of man has a lover when his wife is ill? Haze, I’m all tied up in knots, and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.
Would you see me this Saturday? Susan’s parents are flying in this weekend as well as my other son and his wife, so I can go for a “walk” knowing that Eleanor will have plenty of company.
I’ll be in the office briefly Friday afternoon—just give me a nod . . .
Yours,
Bill
“Mine?” Haze said aloud, staring at the letter’s sign-off. “You really consider yourself mine?” Her brain was firing a barrage of signals, to laugh, to cry, to holler, and she did all three, and when she was done, she apologized to Brigadoon, who had been giving her worried looks throughout her tirade. She sat for a long time in Royal’s chair, the letter lying on her lap like a dinner napkin.
It had been two weeks since Haze had heard the news of Eleanor’s diagnosis and her own. She and Bill had had a few stolen moments in his office—brief, violent embraces that would break apart suddenly, punctuated with anguished whispers of apology and longing.
Haze knew there was no perfect moment to tell Bill about her pregnancy, but she also knew that these moments were too imperfect; she could wait until things had settled a bit, until Eleanor got through her surgery, until Bill seemed a little less stricken.
And now I can’t tell him, she thought, and picking up the letter with a weariness that suggested it was written on lead rather than paper, she shuffled off to the kitchen like an arthritic octogenarian to put on a kettle of water.
Why had she thought this time would be any different? Because the fathers were different. She was ashamed that she had thought this, that she was buoyed by the thought that maybe her body would hang on to an egg fertilized by Bill when it couldn’t hang on to eggs fertilized by Royal. She had been cruelly wounded by what her body had done to her and assumed it was all her fault; now she had tended to this tender shoot of hope—maybe it hadn’t been just her, maybe the fault was hers and Royal’s together, maybe this one would hold.
But as much as her mind was willing, no, desperate, her body was not, and that Tuesday—a mere two days ago, a lifetime (literally) ago—she had woken up in sticky, bloody sheets, woken up to the same deep, thudding failure.
She had called Lois then—she had to—and her friend picked her up and drove her to the clinic in Minneapolis.
“I’ll tell you everything on the way home,” Haze had said, white-faced as she climbed into Lois’s car. “Please don’t make me say anything until later.”
Lois had turned the radio on, and they listened to farm reports and disc jockeys prattling on about weather and baseball scores and to Neil Diamond singing “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and Rod Stewart singing “Maggie Mae,” and Mick Jagger singing “Angie.”
All these men singing about all these women, thought Haze, and then Carly Simon came on singing “You’re So Vain.”
The same avuncular doctor who’d confirmed her pregnancy examined her and told her he was sorry and prescribed “a couple days of pampering,” and Haze, true to her word, told Lois the story of her ongoing affair with Bill McGrath and the child that they weren’t fated to have together.
Once Lois had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a car she’d inadvertently been tailgating, and another time, she almost swerved into a van in another lane.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she said, pulling onto an exit ramp. “I can’t drive and listen to this at the same time.”
Over a pot of coffee and “Our World Famous Caramel Rolls!” at Junie’s, a bustling truck stop whose waitresses wore white nylon tiaras and frilled handkerchiefs in their uniform breast pockets, Haze finished her story, and when she was done, she sat back in the booth, exhausted.
“I am done,” she said, so softly that Lois said, “What’d you say?”
Haze’s eyes widened. “I just realized that it’s over.”
Lois reached her hand across the table for her friend’s.
“Oh Haze, I’m so sorry. Sorry for everything. You know that whatever you need from me, you’ve got.”
Haze picked up the check the waitress had set on the table.
“Including this?”
If she couldn’t make a joke—no matter how small—she was going to slide down the booth cushion and join the rest of the crumbs on the restaurant floor.
HAVING JUST PUT THE TEAKETTLE ON THE STOVE, Haze saw Brigadoon go to the back door, just before she heard the light knock. Willing herself not to run, willing herself to breathe, she walked slowly across the kitchen, not just hearing, but feeling, the pounding in her chest.
Before the door was a third open, Bill slipped inside like a cat burglar, and the couple held each other for a long time.
“Oh, my Haze,” whispered Bill into her hair, “Oh, my Haze.”
“I . . . I’ve made some tea,” said Haze, finally extricating herself. She knew the longer she stayed in his arms, the harder it would be to get out of them.
They sat at the dinette table, the table she and Royal considered a far more romantic place to eat dinner than the heavy walnut dining-room table Haze had inherited from her great-aunt Eileen. The married couple could easily lean across the small span of Formica to kiss, barely raising their backsides off the padded flecked-with-silver vinyl chair seats. And too, a chalkboard had hung nearby, and sometimes they whiled away a breakfast or dinner, taking turns writing terms of endearment or salacious invitations. Haze still regretted that she’d erased the chalkboard the morning of Royal’s death to write a reminder to him to pick up gardening shears; how she would have loved to have seen one of his doodled hearts still there, or one of his scrawled messages, “Meet me in the bedroom—clothing optional.”
She had taken the chalkboard down after Royal died and stuck it under the kitchen sink, next to a bottle of bleach, and where it had once hung, there was now only a nail hole.
“Hey, your hand’s shaking,” said Bill as Haze poured them cups of tea. “What’s the matter?”
“Well, obviously I’m nervous,” said Haze, surprised at the snappish tone in her voice. So was Bill.
“Oh, Haze. Darling. Please don’t ever be nervous with me. But . . . I know. I know it’s been a long, hard couple weeks and a bear of a situation and—”
“Bill,” said Haze before allowing the censors that were a fraction away from clamping down her words. “Bill, I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
As far as his reaction went, Haze didn’t know what she expected, but she did not expect him to sit slumped, staring at his folded hands, blinking as if he had something in his eyes. For the first time, he looked old to her.
She wanted to talk, to fill that murky, silent space that they were huddled under, but it seemed formal rules had been established, and it was Bill’s turn.
He finally took it, his head tilting as he raised it, as if it needed more support than his neck offered.
“Haze,” he said, the word coming out like the creak of a rusty-hinged door. He cleared his throat. “Haze, I wish to God I wasn’t in ag
reement with you.”
The couple stared at each other for a long moment, both of them breathing hard, competitors facing one another after a hundred-yard dash.
“But your letter,” said Haze, confused. “Your letter didn’t sound like you were ready to break things off. It sounded like you couldn’t wait to see me.”
Bill’s mouth bunched up in inverted U, and Haze thought what a handsome man Mr. William McGrath was, with a head of hair gone to silver and eyes the cobalt-blue color of the bottle of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia her mother had kept in the medicine cabinet. He had at least four inches in height and thirty pounds on Royal, and while her husband had delicate, surgeon’s hands with long fingers, Bill’s were big and thick-fingered, a whorl of silver hair filling the space between the lower knuckles.
“I couldn’t wait to see you, Haze. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I think—I pray—Eleanor’s going to get through this—but right now it’s like the whole place is shrouded in this gloom. This fear. Really, it’s like a fume I’m choking on. Christ, I’m glad the kids are here.”
Bill bowed his head and studied his cup like a tea-leaves reader trying to read the future. Haze cleared her throat, signaling him to go on.
“All I really wanted, when I wrote the letter, is to see you. To hold you. But walking over here, I couldn’t get out of my mind something Susan said tonight at the dinner table.”
“Which was?” she said, ignoring the heat that was rising in her chest. She really liked Bill’s granddaughter, but at this moment she hated her.
“Eleanor wasn’t eating with us,” Bill said, his voice thick. “She makes a real effort to get to the table, but tonight she was just too bushed. So we’re there, passing around the buckets of fried chicken and coleslaw my son had picked up, and Susan says, ‘Grandpa, I wish I didn’t have to go back to school because more than anything, I want to stay here and help you help Grandma. But even without me, I know you’ll do a good job. I hate what Grandma has to go through, but at least she’s got you to go through it with.’”
Two perfectly synchronized tears rolled down the man’s eyes, and he stanched them with his thumb and forefinger.
“Even though I know I’m a cad for loving you, I can’t say I feel like one. But I realized that it’s just too much. I want to be with you, but I have to be with Eleanor.”
Haze’s head was bobbing like a horse’s with an ill-fitting bit.
“So,” she said, her voice squeezing around the lump in her throat, “so what happens at work? Should I quit?”
“Aw, Haze,” said Bill, reaching across the table and taking her hand. “No. No, you can’t quit. You love your work—everyone loves your work! Your work has nothing to do with . . . with us.”
“Yes, but we’ll see each other every day. How will we do that?”
Bill’s fingers tightened around Haze’s. “We just will.”
“It’ll be so hard.”
Bill drew her hand to his lips and pressed his lips against it.
“It will be hard, Haze. But it’ll be all right.”
“Bill, there’s something . . .”
The resolve to not tell him about her miscarriage was being snuffed by the sudden rage that flamed up in her, the scream that filled her head: Why do I feel I have to protect you from this? Who protected me?
“Well, see, it happens that I . . .”
His head was slightly cocked, and he furrowed his eyebrows, and Haze could tell he was both puzzled and concerned at her tone of voice.
“I, I was . . .”
As fast as the rage had flared up, it was extinguished. She couldn’t tell him. The man was already dog-paddling in a Slough of Despond—did she want him to drown in it? What good could it possibly do him to have this information? Haze knew it was over between them, but she still loved Bill McGrath, and why would she want to hurt someone she still loved?
“I just wanted you to know how”—there was a pause long enough to fit Hamlet’s soliloquy inside it—“that however wrong it was, it was right for me. You lifted me up from a dark place, and I’ll always be so grateful to you for that.”
His eyes leaked more tears, but Haze’s did not. She had held back her secret. Holding back her emotions was a piece of cake.
“I guess I never thought of the word grateful to explain how I felt about us, but that’s it exactly, Haze. I’m as grateful as you are.”
He squeezed her hands, and with the agile grace that belied his age, he was out of his chair and standing.
Haze rose too, but Bill held up his hand like a crossing guard.
“I’ll see myself out, Haze. Thank you for everything.”
HAZE DIDN’T SLEEP in the bed she and Bill had shared or the bed she and Royal had shared; instead she lay down on the couch, pulling the crocheted afghan draped over its side, inhaling its loops and nubs of old yarn, woven and tied together years ago.
“Mama,” she whispered, to the afghan’s creator, and after a moment, she repeated the same word but with an urgency, born out of a sudden realization. “Mama! I’ll never hear anyone ever call me that!”
Her howl filled the living room, and if sound waves had force, it would have knocked the walls down.
With Brigadoon serving as witness, her furry, loyal head resting on her master’s hip, Haze wailed, sobbed, cried, and whimpered, and when she was wrung dry and mute, she stared up at the ceiling. She saw molecules and atoms pulsing and dancing in the fuzzy gray light, or maybe she didn’t—what did it matter? What did matter even matter? Her life had been riven apart once, and she’d managed to pick up the jagged pieces and piece together a whole, or patchwork semblance thereof, but twice riven . . .
“I know,” she said aloud, to herself, to her dog, and to a God she hoped, but wasn’t sure, was listening, “I know that on a scale of human suffering, I’d rate, but not as much as a hollow-eyed child starving to death, or as an earthquake victim searching through rubble for her family, or as a . . .” She hiccuped a little sob. She had compassion for the millions—no, billions—whose suffering was at a primal level not understood by herself, but as trite and silly as it sounded, it was all relative. Her world—the only one she could attempt to understand—had more than enough of the needed essentials . . . and still, she wondered where the nearest rock was because she’d like to curl up under it and die.
She was surprised, but not flabbergasted, when after an hour or so of marinating in her misery, she sat up, wrapped the afghan around her, and turned on the end-table light. Squinting against its glare, she got up and retrieved from her purse hanging on the kitchen doorknob a pen and a notebook. She had to do what she’d done all her life: write it all down.
SHELLY NEVER PARTOOK of the office Happy Tea; when her work week was done, the last thing she wanted to do was yuk it up with her co-workers at the Gazette. She couldn’t be bothered with the office gossip she was certain was a large part of the gathering, and she didn’t like drinking in public, preferring to host her own happy hour, which was never really happy, but at least the drinks were generous.
Still, knowing what she knew, she was tempted to slide into a booth next to Mitch as he unspooled one of his convoluted, unfunny jokes, or listen as Ed, the sports editor, droned on about the North Stars playoff chances; she was tempted to tell a piece of news that would have had all of them bug-eyed and gape-mouthed: the news that their revered and married boss, Mr. Bill McGrath, was carrying on an affair with their revered and widowed co-worker, Haze Evans.
One Friday evening, Shelly got so far as the door of the Sundown, but as soon as her hand reached for the handle, she drew it back as if someone had shouted, “hot!” and lurched away in a giant step, nearly breaking into a trot. She was breathless when she got to her small house, whose repairs Ray used to keep up on but which now seemed to sag under the weight of worn roof shingles and her own disappointment.
Shelly didn’t allow herself to feel deeply (her TV favorites were shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Miss
ion Impossible—heavy on the action and light on emotion), cocooning herself in bitterness and resignation, but when she saw Mr. McGrath and Haze Evans locked in what her romance novels described as “a torrid embrace,” the shock she felt was so strong, it felt electrical.
It had been after five, and Shelly would have left the offices like everyone else, but as she was locking her desk drawers (she was not about to let the cleaning staff paw through her things), she was seized with an urgent need to get to the restroom ASAP, and she raced down the hallway, sweaty and flushed, thinking she might not make it in time.
She did, but a brutal case of diarrhea kept her on the toilet for at least ten minutes, and cursing when she left the stall, shaky and weak, she washed her hands and splashed cold water on her face and leaned over the sink for a long time, breathing slowly and wondering if she were sickened by a random bug or the spiced ham sandwich she had had for lunch, made from lunch meat that tasted fine, even though it’d been in the refrigerator for nearly a week.
She lobbed the crumpled paper towel into the waste basket, and after rearranging her purse straps on her shoulder, froze, hearing a high-pitched squeal of laughter, followed by a lower echo. It traveled down the hall, and slowly, carefully, Shelly opened the door a crack.
Haze—she knew it was Haze because of the tacky print dress she wore—was pressed against the wall of the hallway, and doing the pressing, and much more, was Mr. Bill McGrath, whose tossed-off suit jacket lay crumpled on the floor.
Shelly, whose general opinion of the human race was fairly grim, nevertheless was stunned. Bill McGrath struck her as one of the few men whose natural reaction to anything wasn’t to zip down his pants; truth be told, she harbored a little crush on him. It was safe to have a crush on him; his age, his courtly masculinity, and his obvious dedication to his wife made him untouchable.
But not to Haze. The thought was so bitter that Shelly thought she actually felt a rise of bile. She was tempted to storm out into the hallway just so that Haze would know she wasn’t getting away with this . . . adultery, but instead, when the couple nearly collapsed into Mr. McGrath’s office, she carefully slipped down the hallway into the reception area and out the door.
Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes) Page 14
