The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  “That’s fine,” she said in a low voice. She’d spotted Barbara Marsh a few feet away, refilling her Styrofoam coffee cup. The woman could hear like a dog. “Not to worry. Four weeks is fine.”

  An awkward pause.

  “Are you driving back to New Hampshire tonight?” she asked. “To your brother’s house?”

  “Providence, actually. I’ve got a friend there.” He nodded to someone over Paulette’s shoulder. She turned to see a girl, a young woman, coming toward them.

  “All set?” the girl said to Pyle. She was short legged and a little heavy through the thighs, or maybe it was the way she was dressed: as Pyle was, in faded jeans and a plaid shirt. But her face was lovely, her skin radiant, her hair long and wavy and streaked by the sun.

  Paulette thought, She is half my age.

  “Oh, hey,” Pyle called to her. “This is someone you should meet. Paulette, this is my friend Melissa.”

  AFTER THE MEETING Paulette drove around town, feeling restless. The loan had been her own idea. Pyle hadn’t asked for it, or expected it. It seemed now that she had ruined everything, though this possibility hadn’t occurred to her that afternoon last fall, when Gil Pyle was gathering up his tools. She’d been driven by fear and need, her desperation to have him back.

  Florida will be lovely this time of year, she’d said, remembering with a sudden pang October in Palm Beach, the cool mornings, the blinding sun. Her father had died in the fall.

  I haven’t spent a winter in New Hampshire in ten years. I’m not sure I could handle it anymore. He chuckled. I might never come back.

  He must have sensed her alarm. Briefly he touched her shoulder.

  I’m kidding. There’s nothing down there worth fixing. Plenty of work, but nothing interesting. He glanced around the dining room, the hallway. He gave the door frame a smack, like the shoulder of an old friend. I’ll miss this place.

  Paulette thought, I will miss you.

  When do you come back? she asked, busying herself with a plant at the window.

  March, usually. But this year I don’t know. Depends on how fast I can dig myself out.

  Paulette looked at him quizzically.

  I’m behind on child support. It’s tough on Sharon. I’d love to give it to her on schedule, like a regular citizen, but I don’t get paid that way. I’ll tell you, I’m getting too old to live like this. Week to week, eating what I kill.

  Pyle scratched at his beard, a gesture she disliked. The beard itself had come to annoy her. One summer night she had wakened from a dream, Gil Pyle shirtless at her bathroom sink, his face lathered, herself drawing a razor slowly across it. The dream was vivid, oddly arousing. The razor had floated like a feather over his skin.

  My truck is on its last legs, he said. I might make it down there, but I’m pretty sure the old wreck won’t make it back.

  He took the toolbox outside and loaded it into the truck. When he returned, Paulette asked, What does a truck cost?

  Ten grand. Eight for a fixer-upper. Pyle shrugged. If I work like a dog all winter, I might be able to swing it.

  Well, you can’t miss the battle, she said. Who would play Gilbert? It would compromise the integrity of the whole event. Harry Good would have a fit.

  Pyle laughed.

  Because I care about preserving the heritage of New England, I insist that you buy a new truck. I’ll lend you the money. You can pay me back in the spring.

  He stared at her. Are you crazy? You’d lend money to a deadbeat like me?

  You’re not, she said softly. Don’t say that.

  He looked away. No job, no known address. Face it, I’m a flight risk. Aren’t you afraid I’ll skip town and you’ll never see your money again? His tone was teasing, but his face was flushed. He would not meet her eyes.

  No, she said simply. I’m not.

  She took her purse from the divan and opened her checkbook. I’ll see you in the spring, then.

  She handed him the check, and finally he looked at her. To her astonishment his eyes were full.

  He bent and kissed her cheek.

  AT HOME, after the meeting, she fixed a simple supper, tea and toast. She thought of Gil Pyle in the truck she had bought him, driving back to Providence with Melissa. The windows down, Melissa’s long hair blowing in the breeze.

  He had asked Paulette, once, why she and Frank had divorced. Gwen’s condition, she said reflexively. It was too much for him.

  Pyle seemed unconvinced.

  I suppose there was more to it, she admitted when he pressed her. Frank always had a roving eye.

  Was it just his eye that roved?

  I don’t know. I tried to find out, she admitted. I still don’t know for sure. She was revealing too much of herself, but couldn’t stop. There was an odd pleasure in confessing, a silent release.

  My first wife was like that. I was faithful, but she never believed me. I gave up trying to convince her. That’s no way to live.

  Did you love her? she asked. Your ex-wife.

  At the beginning, he said. But love is like any other material. You can only lean on it so hard, for so long. Sooner or later it’s going to give.

  A WOMAN is her body.

  That night, after her bath, Paulette did a thing she hadn’t done in years. She stood before the mirror and looked at herself. Her smooth shoulders, the delicate bones of her forearms and calves—these were still recognizably Paulette, the person she’d always been. But her flat belly was striated with pale wavy lines. Her breasts, once merely small, now looked deflated. Her pubic hair was mostly gray. Her thighs were very lean, but the skin was textured like crepe paper. Wrinkles? Did thighs wrinkle?

  Dear God.

  Clothed, she could face the world. But nobody had seen her naked in years. She remembered with a pang the way Frank used to undress her, the hungry way he’d looked at her. Keep the lights on. Let me see you. After the divorce, with Donald Large, she’d been more reserved. She was forty then, and already self-conscious. His words had reassured her, a steady stream of sweet compliments that soothed like a gentle rain. And there was this: his own body was far from perfect. Perhaps that’s why she’d chosen him in the first place.

  They’d met at an antiques show in Hartford, Connecticut. Both had arrived early, before the doors opened. Donald offered her espresso from his thermos, his breath steaming in the cold. He was twenty years older, but still handsome. She learned that he lived alone, widowed and childless, in an antiques-filled house in Cos Cob. From the outset they were inseparable. Thinking of him she remembered the clear blue skies of autumn, long drives on Sunday afternoons. On pleasant fall days they drove deep into Vermont and New Hampshire, browsing, sometimes buying. They traveled in Donald’s van, outfitted with built-in shelving to accommodate their purchases. Always Paulette took the wheel. Unlike her ex-husband, Donald considered her a fine driver. He did not bark instructions or clutch the dashboard or tap insistently with his right foot, as if hitting an invisible brake. Instead he napped or read to her, poetry or essays, the editorial page of the newspaper. They spent long days at the shows, tireless in their enthusiasm. Afterward they retired to a lovely country inn, to nap before dinner, to read or daydream or simply talk. It had struck Paulette, then, that this was the marriage her younger self had wanted. Donald was soft-spoken and thoughtful, loving and refined. He dressed wonderfully—corduroy trousers and beautiful sweaters, soft leather shoes he bought each summer in Italy. He petted and praised her, and never criticized; he cherished her exactly as she was. He loved her for more than her body. How sad, how cruelly funny that she’d met him now, when her older self had different needs.

  At first they made love occasionally, and later not at all. She’d been shocked to discover, a year into their relationship, that he’d had two heart attacks, that he injected insulin twice a day. If he’d told her these things at the beginning, would she still have fallen in love with him? He’d asked her this once near the end, as she drove him to the hospital for dialysis. Of cou
rse, dear, she said softly. He had deceived her, and now he wanted reassurance that she hadn’t minded. She had no choice but to give it. He was a sick man.

  Would she have fallen in love with him anyway?

  Paulette had no idea. He hadn’t given her a chance to find out.

  Now the thrill of undressing for a man was lost to her forever. She allowed herself to imagine it, a young man like Gil Pyle caressing her withered breasts. Why on earth would he want to? And even if he did, how could she bear to be seen in this condition?

  In that moment the truth dawned on her. No one would ever touch her again.

  To live another twenty or thirty years untouched and unloved: it seemed impossible that this was what nature intended. Her whole life Paulette had believed in a natural order, nature a loving mother, wise and provident. Yet aging and childbearing were natural processes. There was no escaping it: her ruined body was nature’s work.

  Nature was not kind.

  She realized, of course, that not every life unfolded as hers had. Couples could grow old together. Paulette remembered Frank as he’d looked on Christmas Eve, his eyes hooded, his red hair dusted pink. Age hadn’t spared him either. But Paulette had known him young and handsome, his athlete’s shoulders, the square cut of his jaw. In her mind the two pictures blended together. The result was something infinitely kinder than what a stranger saw.

  Paulette thought of Rand and Barbara Marsh, Wall and Tricia James: couples her own age, couples who’d endured. After so many years, did these husbands and wives still look at each other, still want each other? Perhaps that was what nature intended. No woman of fifty-six should have to undress for a new lover. She should be spared that anguish.

  There was nothing wrong with nature’s plan. It was Frank and Paulette who had failed.

  Late fall, a raw November. A steady rain soaks the dormant lawns of Newton, Massachusetts, where Scotty and his sister have been taken, as they are every Sunday, to visit their grandparents. They have kissed Mamie, answered the usual adult questions about classes and teachers. Now they are watching televison.

  (Where is Billy in all of this? He is often missing from Scott’s recollections of childhood. Was his brother often elsewhere? Or did Scott’s memory simply edit him out?)

  Scotty and Gwen are planted in front of the old Philco, a heavy cabinet model. Their grandparents are the only people alive who still have black and white. The set is kept in what Mamie calls the sitting room, a small second-floor bedroom at the rear of the house. The TV is hidden away like an unmentionable relative—blinded by syphilis, crippled by some shameful defect. Papa and Mamie were of a generation that found television extraneous. It had arrived in their middle age, and they were unwilling to reorder their lives around it. The parlor had so many other uses—bridge, reading, drinking. A television would simply have gotten in the way.

  That Sunday afternoon, Scotty lies stretched out on the uncomfortable old sofa, what Mamie calls the divan. Gwen sprawls on the floor, close enough to change the channel when they get bored. The TV has rabbit-ear antennae and receives four channels, five on a good day. This is not a good day.

  The choices are few and grainy. A cooking show, a football game, an old man preaching a sermon. Sunday movies are ancient and nearly always boring, soldiers or cowboys or detectives wearing hats. Once in a while they find a monster terrorizing Japanese people. Mothra is Scotty’s favorite.

  They stumble upon a movie already in progress. A blond girl lies sleeping, satiny sheets pulled demurely to her chin. Her lips are dark; a marceled wave dips over one eye. A stranger approaches her bedside, a man swathed in a black cape. Like the girl, he wears red lipstick. He creeps closer. The actress is a blond ingenue, her name relegated to obscurity. Bela Lugosi bends toward her. With a great flourish he buries his face in her neck.

  At that moment, in his grandparents’ sitting room—threadbare oriental rug, doilies on every flat surface—Scott experiences his first little-boy boner. (That such a thing is possible at eight—Ian’s age—will later astonish him.) He feels an odd euphoria, a lifting and a lofting. He is not aware of wanting anything. He wouldn’t know what to want.

  “This is boring,” says Gwen, reaching to change the channel.

  “No!” Scotty springs from the couch and pounces on his sister. At eight he is already bigger, but she is quick and feisty. She wriggles furiously, her white throat arching.

  “Get off me, you little freak!”

  He does not break the skin, but still he bites in earnest. The next day a purplish mark appears like a smudge on her skin.

  Darling, what happened? their mother asks at breakfast.

  Nothing, Gwen says with what will become her trademark opacity. Her flat tone discourages further questions. His sister is not a crybaby, a trait Scotty honors. Gwen can keep a secret.

  It is the beginning of his career as a biter. Around boys he is reasonably well-behaved. It is girls who provoke him. At Pilgrims Country Day no third-grade girl is safe, though some are safer than others: Carolyn Underwood, with her eczema; Madeleine Hopewell, whose fingers are always in her nose. His teacher Miss Terry tries to contain him, which only aggravates the problem. Miss Terry is young and pretty; her behind jiggles when she writes on the chalkboard. The jiggling, her blond hair, her pale blushing skin that reminds him, mysteriously, of strawberries. All this agitates him.

  Many years later, summoned to a bright classroom at Walker Elementary School, he remembered the jiggling behind of Miss Terry, how he would have given anything to bite her neck. His son’s teacher, Ms. Lister (they were all Ms. now) would prompt no such impulse. She was a pale, doughy young woman who managed to look both overfed and undernourished. Her lank hair, pulled back with a barrette, seemed to be thinning. There was a crusty white residue at the corners of her mouth. On a good-looking woman this might seem sexual. On Meredith Lister it suggested toothpaste, or a vitamin deficiency.

  Listerine, he thought. Listeria. Yet compared to the classrooms of his childhood, Ms. Lister’s looked quite aseptic. At Pilgrims the rooms had been drafty, the wood floors creaky. Each classroom had its own cloakroom, a word that had delighted him. He would have loved, like a studious young Dracula, to go to school in a cloak.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Ms. Lister, shaking his hand and Penny’s. Meeting in the classroom was an indignity that seemed calculated: the shamed parents squeezed into desks sized for eight-year-olds. Penny was able to pull this off with a modicum of grace, her deerlike legs pliable from daily yoga; but Scott hadn’t touched his toes in ten years. Even as a high school athlete he’d never been limber. Now—at six feet, one-ninety—he had nowhere to put his limbs, no conceivable way of extricating himself when the ordeal finally came to a close.

  “This visit is long overdue,” she said. “My fault. Ian has had behavioral problems since September, but I’ve been so swamped I haven’t had time for conferences. We have a new principal this year, and with all the standardized testing—”

  “Say no more,” Scott said warmly. “I understand. I’m an educator myself.”

  She looked at him with grateful eyes. “So you know, then. Where do you teach?”

  “At Ruxton.”

  “Oh.” Her smile faded. “That’s private, right? I mean, sort of.”

  Sort of.

  “And you do lots of testing,” she added.

  “Exactly,” Scott said smoothly. “So I understand how disruptive that can be.”

  He had her. She was overworked, underpaid and starved for appreciation, a condition Scott knew all too well. A little empathy, a little appreciation from parents would go a long way toward softening her attitude. Suspending an eight-year-old was disproportionately harsh, the act of a desperate woman. Yet it was an impulse Scott understood. On a daily basis, he experienced such desperation himself.

  “Great,” said Penny. “But the thing is, Ian’s really upset. He feels like a little criminal. I don’t know what to do with him.” She paused. “Just coming h
ere today, you know? You wanted to see both of us, which I understand, but where is Ian supposed to go? We had to get a sitter, and you have no idea—”

  “Honey.” Scott shot her a warning look. Their difficulties with babysitters—none, to date, had agreed to a return engagement—would do nothing to help Ian’s case. If Penny would keep quiet and let him handle it, they’d be home in ten minutes.

  Ms. Lister folded her hands. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mrs. McKotch, but I don’t think you understand. We’re not talking about normal misbehavior. Ian is showing symptoms of a much larger problem.”

  She paused a moment to let this sink in.

  “But he’s trying,” Penny insisted, as though she hadn’t heard. “He’s at the computer all evening. I make him show me his homework every night before he goes to bed. And he’s amazing on the computer. You should see the way he clicks around. He knows more than I do.”

  Please shut up, Scott thought. He saw them both clearly through Ms. Lister’s eyes: the father clueless and disengaged, an affable bullshitter. The mother whining and defensive, raising a misunderstood genius. He and Penny were the kind of parents teachers hated. The kind he himself hated.

  “Maybe so,” said Ms. Lister. “But I never see this homework. He manages to misplace it somewhere between home and class.” She counted on her fingers: “Ian is easily distracted. Disorganized. He shows poor impulse control. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.”

  “All of it,” Scott said with feeling. “All of it sounds familiar.”

  Penny shot him a fierce look.

  “I thought so,” said Ms. Lister.

  “Wait a minute. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Penny.

  The teacher leaned forward in her chair. “I think Ian should be evaluated for attention deficit disorder. And perhaps depression and anxiety as well.”

  Scott blinked. He’s eight, he thought.

  “Ian’s always been a happy boy,” said Penny, responding to the word depression. Scott had learned long ago not to overload her; she processed ideas one at a time. Whether she was stupid or simply very focused was a question that plagued him. After all these years he still wasn’t sure.