Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Well, clearly, she and Spencer had issues, and they had only gotten worse since Charlotte had left for her grandmother's house in the country. Catherine had expected the time alone would give the two of them a chance to reconnect. They'd go to movies and dinner together, just the two of them, and perhaps he would relax and they would talk about . . . about everything. What demons were driving his temper. Why he could be as confrontational with his wife and daughter as he was with associations of big game hunters. Why he had become so focused on work that he could practically ignore Charlotte for weeks: He would jet to Washington (a presentation on the evils of biomedical animal research to the minions of some Senate committee) or Omaha (a press conference about the practices of a company that specialized in mail-order steak) or Sarasota (something about the treatment of circus animals) and then talk to his daughter when he returned home with about the same conversational involvement that he demonstrated with telemarketers. What happened to the days when he would whisk Charlotte off to a concert or museum or one of the Broadway shows that she loved? Patiently help her use the Internet to research school papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the dolphin's glorious brain, or the reasons why we have seasons?

  Likewise, he was neglecting her, too. His wife. In the two weeks that Charlotte had been in the country, Catherine had barely seen her husband before eight or eight thirty at night, an hour that felt particularly late because she was through with work until the middle of August, when she would begin preparing her classroom in earnest for the fall. She saw friends and she played tennis and she read on the grass in Central Park. But she didn't see much of her husband.

  Sometimes she found herself flirting. She would flirt with Hank Rechter, the fifty-five-year-old headmaster of a school on the West Side--not, thank God, Brearley--when she would see him jogging near Belvedere Castle late in the afternoon. It was an amiable flirtation because he was a neighbor in their building who was as happily married as everyone supposed she was, because his smooth business suits fit his wondrous shoulders like slipcovers, because he never seemed to sweat when he ran. Because he always found a way to touch her with his fingertips that was at once chummy and rakishly inappropriate. Sometimes when he would see her in the park he would sit down on the grass beside her, and she sensed that she was speaking to this man in the sort of breathless, whispery voice her husband no longer heard.

  On occasions, she knew, she had flirted that spring as well with Chip Kinnell, the widower father of her fourteen-year-old Bronte scholar, Lindy Kinnell, stretching out their parent-teacher conferences and their visits in the hallways on those mornings he would bring his daughter to school. Kinnell was a rarity in the arbitrage circles in which he traveled: He read fiction that didn't have spies and submarines in it and could talk with Catherine--abstractedly fingering a purple Hermes tie patterned with, of all things, baby ducks--about the books he was reading now and the books he had read aloud to his wife while she was dying.

  At least once, she feared, Charlotte had watched her in a conversation with Chip and grown suspicious. But suspicious of what? She was doing nothing wrong. One afternoon Charlotte had eavesdropped on a discussion she was having with Eric Miller, another English teacher (a younger English teacher; Catherine was almost certain that Eric hadn't hit thirty yet) at Brearley, and it was clear that her daughter hadn't understood that sometimes a harmless flirtation only enhances a friendship. Deepens the camaraderie.

  It was, however, completely innocuous. All of it. All of them. At least that's what she told herself.

  And she couldn't help but believe that if Spencer hadn't become so damn mercurial, she wouldn't have begun taking small comforts from the attention that Hank Rechter, Chip Kinnell, or Eric Miller paid her. She wouldn't have paid so much attention to them. She wouldn't have talked to them about . . . meat. Yes indeed, Hank and Eric and Chip were carnivores, and they knew what her husband did (everyone knew what her husband did) and they would tease her about it. They would make jokes about souvlaki and shish kebab, and Eric would try to interest her in the Sabrett hot dogs that were sold from a cart outside on the street.

  She hoped this coming vacation would offer a meaningful reconciliation with Spencer, though she had to wonder how you could reconcile with somebody who didn't even know you were apart. Earlier this week she had imagined that with Spencer away from work in Sugar Hill--in a corner of the world that he loved--she would be able to talk to him. Perhaps he would talk to her. Perhaps they would finally work through their . . . issues. Now, however, she doubted that would happen, at least in quite the way she had supposed. Now she guessed if they talked about anything, it would be because she had chosen this week to see if dread could be transformed into something like relief when she broke the news to him that she simply could not continue any longer as she was--as they were--and she wanted change. Counseling, perhaps, though even counseling was a capitulation, a collapse of her adolescent imaginings of what her marriage would be. And maybe she wanted something more than counseling or change. Maybe she wanted out. Yes, that was it, all right. At the moment, at least, after his appalling behavior when they were packing this morning--the clock, the coffee, his retreat to their cats--she absolutely could not stand what their marriage had become and she wanted out.

  Reflexively she picked her tennis racket up off the top of her suitcase so she would have something to do with her hands now that she had stowed her cell phone away, and much to her surprise she found herself volleying in slow motion. She'd played a lot of tennis that summer with her friends who were women, and she realized that she was looking forward to playing now with her brother and--if they were speaking--with Spencer. She was looking forward to playing with men. When she'd been younger she'd been an exceptional player: a high school standout in New York, ranked in Massachusetts when she was at college. She'd learned to play summers as a child at that goofy club her own grandfather had helped found near their country home in Sugar Hill, hitting balls for hours at a time with the different young adults who would parade through there year after year masquerading as tennis pros. Most of them were college students--and, she knew now, mediocre tennis players at best--but to a nine-year-old they seemed the height of glamour and sophistication and talent, and she had only fond memories of her afternoons on the clay courts in her shorts.

  Her first summer here with Spencer, when the two of them were working at area restaurants, she'd destroy him on those very courts at least every other day before they'd go to work in the late afternoon, and the fact that he never seemed to mind endeared him to her. He could volley with her to help her keep her stroke in shape, but he rarely took more than a game from her each set they played, and she didn't believe that he ever once broke her serve.

  It was funny: The man could not bear to lose an argument--would not lose an argument--but he was perfectly content losing to her at tennis. To his brother-in-law at golf, to his mother-in-law at badminton. Suddenly, she found this athletic acquiescence of his disturbing. Suddenly, she found all of him physically less attractive than she once had. He seemed wide-faced these days, especially now that his hair had rolled back to the top of his head, and his ears looked like uncooked Chinese dumplings. He was heavier than in college (but weren't all men?), and sometimes she thought the dark hair that once had fallen across his forehead had migrated to his back, his shoulders, and the insides of his ears. She knew he was fierce at work--spirited with politicians, feisty with the press--and though all too often he brought that fierceness home with him, he never brought it to the tennis court.

  A thought came to her: She did things with Spencer that didn't interest her--such as that vegetable garden--for the sad reason that it was easier to do things she disliked than to bicker. This couldn't be healthy, and it struck her as yet another indication that her marriage might be over. It was possible, wasn't it? Maybe that's what happened to some marriages: They just ran out of energy and forward momentum, and both halves of the equation no longer saw the future as any m
ore promising than the present. This notion made her even more queasy, and she tried to tell herself that she was wrong, that she didn't really want out, that this was all just a bad patch. All marriages had them. Still, she wondered if Spencer's motivation for playing tennis was similar to her involvement in his vegetable garden: He did it despite little enthusiasm because playing was easier than arguing.

  No, that couldn't be right. Tennis for Spencer was an element of the world of Sugar Hill, an important component of the spell the place held for him. She knew he associated it with their first summers there together, his introduction to New Hampshire.

  Maybe, she decided, focusing now with real effort on the week and a half before her instead of on the bigger problems posed by her marriage, if her brother and sister-in-law were willing to drive back to the club after dinner, she and Spencer could squeeze in an hour of doubles tonight--or, perhaps, they could even get in a game before dinner if she could catch John and Sara before they left the pool for the day. Maybe on vacation Spencer would find it within himself to care about something other than the plight of a bullhook-pricked circus elephant and actually play to win for a change.

  She guessed she'd have a better chance of rounding up a match if she asked her brother (with any luck he'd even have a fresh can of balls, a real novelty for the Seton family when they were together in New Hampshire) than if she bounced the idea off Sara, who she presumed was still bleary-eyed by her five-month-old. And so she retrieved the cell phone once more and left a message for her brother with a woman who happened to pick up the phone at the clubhouse. If he got the message before she and Spencer reached Sugar Hill, then they could drive directly to the Contour Club instead of straight home.

  Her mother would be proud: Going directly from the plane to the tennis court. Now, that was vigorous.

  Inside the shoulder bag in which she kept her cell phone and her computer were four unopened Slim Jims. Spencer, of course, knew nothing about her secret stash of beef jerky--about, in truth, any of her secret stashes of meat. She hid them along with her Altoids and those potent Listerine PocketPak strips of paper-thin mint that melted instantly on your tongue and she presumed were designed more to encourage better oral sex than oral hygiene. She considered whether she should tell Spencer she had to run to the ladies' room so she could scarf down one of the Slim Jims, but her secret desire for meat wasn't as powerful as a smoker's need for nicotine. She was not uncomfortable and she could wait.

  She told herself that she needed to approach the coming ten days with a good attitude. Or, at least, not a bad one. She would play tennis, a little golf, she would swim. And there were worse ways to spend fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning than weeding a vegetable garden or deadheading rows of annuals. Had it been all that unpleasant to plant the gardens in the first place? Not really.

  Moreover, soon she would get to see her daughter--though, these days, Charlotte was as likely to be a source of anxiety as she was emotional quietude or maternal pride. She adored the girl, but she didn't look forward to the way she and Charlotte could fight over nothing. Charlotte knew precisely how to push her buttons: which slang annoyed her the most, which music she found the most offensive. She was like her father in that anything could lead to a confrontation, any interaction could become a power struggle: which bathing suit to wear, when to go to sleep, whether it was appropriate to read Cosmopolitan in the orthodontist's office waiting room--whether an orthodontist should even have Cosmopolitan in his office waiting room. The child knew exactly where to leave her drool-swaddled retainer to cause her mother the most discomfort (the mouse pad beside the living room computer one day, atop whatever magazine Catherine was reading the next), and exactly which cosmetics were absolutely off-limits and therefore she simply had to use (the lids of which she would be sure to leave askew on her mother's vanity).

  Before she had left for her grandmother's home for the summer, she'd even begun to challenge the antimeat, antileather, antizoo dictates of their household. She wanted a leather skirt. Leather shoes. Catherine suspected that she'd been to McDonald's. Hormones were starting to course through the girl like river rapids, and Catherine hoped they wouldn't transform a difficult child into an ungovernable adolescent.

  When Spencer had finished with the forms for the rent-a-car, they each grabbed their suitcases and carry-ons, their tennis rackets and golf clubs, and labored their way through the tiny concourse and out into the small parking lot. The sun was still high and the air was warm. She thought it irrational that with a week of tennis and gardening and after-dinner family badminton challenges before her she was still so filled with anxiety.

  But, of course, she also understood why that disquiet was there.

  Chapter Six.

  Spencer stood in front of the vegetable garden, dinner behind him and the sun at the very tip of the highest of the scalloped foothills to the west, and considered going inside to boot up one of the laptop computers that sat inside the house in their nylon ballistic carriers. Perhaps the Internet held a solution to this problem with the deer. Sure, there had been no way to stop them in Connecticut, but that was both because there were so many and they were so comfortable in the Long Ridge suburbs. One time when he was inching along in traffic just south of exit 34 on the Merritt Parkway--exit 34, barely thirty miles from his office near the Empire State Building--he counted nineteen in a single, mile-long stretch nibbling the delicate April buds that grew on the trees just beyond the asphalt. The animals would pause, raising their heads so he could see clearly their great black marble eyes and their eyelashes--as long and lovely as human bangs--and then they would resume eating.

  The only predator he knew of in Fairfield County was his neighbor Rick Salieri and his Ford Expedition: Salieri had managed to slam into deer on three separate occasions.

  Spencer was sure there couldn't possibly be as many deer here in this part of New Hampshire, and they couldn't possibly be as sassy or fat. Not with all the hunting that must occur in the fall. Not with winters here so much colder and longer than in southern Connecticut. The snow pack so deep. This herd had to be a reasonable--a manageable--size. Plus, here Spencer knew he had that lupine to work with. Clearly deer hated lupine, and as big as the garden was, it was still a small island in the midst of a sea of the stuff. It grew like grass, except that it was waist high and the roots were like vines. If only he could find the right Web site for gardeners or wildlife management . . .

  Perhaps he could somehow build an impenetrable tangle of lupine, a barrier that would keep the animals at bay.

  He was imagining exactly such a wall--a hedgerow made of lupine, the enclosure creating a secret garden of almost Victorian sensibility--when he realized his brother-in-law, John, was standing beside him, holding two bottles of beer by their long, thin necks. He'd already pulled the tops off them both, and he handed one to Spencer.

  "You're depressed," John said to him with mock gravity and earnestness. "I understand."

  Spencer took a swallow. "I'm not finished."

  "You plan to sleep out here?"

  He smiled. "I won't go that far. But I am shocked. How could everything have been thriving only yesterday?"

  On the other side of the house they could hear the squeals from their girls as they played badminton in the yard against Grandmother and Catherine. Catherine wasn't as proficient at whacking birdies as she was tennis balls, but she was a Seton and thus had a genetic ability to swing things--rackets and golf clubs and, in the summer she'd lived at home immediately after college and thus wound up a part of the Brick Church's co-ed softball team, a baseball bat--with hereditary competence. Sara was nursing Patrick on the porch.

  "Well, I presume it was only yesterday when the deer discovered what kind of good eating we'd put in the ground for them," John answered.

  "They'll be back tonight, you know."

  "And they'll bring their friends. Yes, I do know."

  "I remember one year in Connecticut--the first year we tried to have a gard
en--they devoured the whole plot in two nights."

  "It will take them more than two to finish off this one. Unless there's a whole herd that's interested."