by Belva Plain
“Why have I told you all this? Because I wanted to show you that no bad thing, barring an incurable disease, is forever. I know it’s a cliché to compare life to a river, but, believe me, it really is a river. You have to dive in and swim. Now Megan’s about to swim to Harvard. She’s the first, and the rest of you will dive in too.”
With this tale, so clearly wrung out of painful memory, Stephen had miraculously altered the spirit of the room. Everyone sat up straighter. Megan turned on another lamp. Margaret brought out a bowl of fruit and a cake. And they all sat down around the table to this little feast. It was almost midnight before they arose and the two men left.
“Well, it was quite a night,” Fred remarked.
“All’s well that ends well. That’s Shakespeare,” Danny said importantly, so that the door closed on the men’s laughter.
“What would we do without these good friends?” Margaret murmured to herself as they cleared the table. When Megan asked what she had just said, she repeated it.
Danny scoffed. “They’re not ‘friends.’ They’ve got a thing for you.”
“For a bright boy,” said Margaret, “your brother can say the dumbest things.”
“Not always.” The two girls spoke together. “Not this time, Mom.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Adam drove in just as Randi, standing in the doorway, was waving the last carful of guests good-bye. As soon as it disappeared around the bend, her enthusiastic hostess’s smile also disappeared, and he saw by her very posture that she was furious.
“Well,” she said, “you surely did your best to ruin the evening, didn’t you? I was never so embarrassed, with you running out like that.”
He was overwrought, so much so that he scarcely had energy enough for ordinary speech, let alone the altercation that was coming. His reply was very quiet.
“I was frightened, Randi. I had to find out about Julie.”
“I know. If it isn’t your Julie, it’s your Danny. Or your Megan, Miss Intellectual. Well, don’t just stand there! Come into the house and sit down or go to bed. You look like something the cat dragged in.”
He had never felt the need for liquor; a drink was what you took to be hospitable or sociable. It was a social custom. But at the moment he had a need for it. Randi, spread out on the sofa, observed him as he walked to the cabinet and poured brandy.
“So what was the big emergency?” she inquired.
“They thought—Danny told me on the phone—that something had happened to Julie. They couldn’t find her. But she had only gone out for a long walk.”
“So she’s all right.”
“Yes, thank God.”
“So for a trick like that you ruined my party.”
He wished she would stop beginning every sentence with so. Had she always done it? And it seemed to him again that he had lately been too irritated by little things like that, things he had never remarked before.
“It wasn’t a trick, and your party wasn’t ruined. People understand.”
“And I understand a lot more than you think I do. It was a trick to bring you back. That woman will never let go of you, Adam. Even after the divorce comes through, if it ever does, she’ll keep you tied because of those children.”
“You knew I had children, Randi.”
“I didn’t know you were tied to them hand and foot. She ought to manage them herself like a grown-up woman, but she doesn’t want to, and that’s the whole story.”
The lamplight glittered on the glass in Adam’s hand and the golden liquid swayed. Ancient magicians might read portents of glory in its depths, but he was seeing only time, flowing, flowing, through the liquid and the light. Days that never would return, days when his children had been growing older and he not there to see.
Randi whined, “She only wants to get you back. That’s what this was all about. It’s all one thing. Margaret and money, they’re the same. And now that you’ve had a salary cut, it’s going to be worse. Frankly, I don’t know how we’re possibly going to manage on what’s left after she gets hers.”
“People manage on less,” he said.
“Well, I sure wasn’t planning on it at this stage in my life. I thought you had a big job and we were all set.”
“I hate it when you use that expression ‘big job.’ Besides, I never told you anything of the kind.”
“You most certainly did.”
“Randi, I did not.”
Anger began to fill him with strength, or perhaps it was the brandy, which he had drunk too fast, that was pouring through his veins.
“And what if I had?” he demanded. “What was this all for? Was it for money? I thought,” he said, aware of his own sneer, “I really thought it was about love.”
“Try living on love without money.”
Years ago, he thought, she left me for a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees.…
“What if I should lose this job, too? Would you be through with me?”
“Darling, of course not. We would simply move out of the state, and you’d surely find another job somewhere.”
“When I suggested moving nearer to Elmsford, you said you’d never give up this house.”
“I’ve thought it over, and I’ve decided it’s worth doing. We’d be rid of the noose around your neck. She’d get sick of hiring expensive lawyers to track you down in another state. She’d give up, and high time too. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to do it right now.”
“It’s a very bad idea because I’m not leaving my children,” he said.
“We always get back to that, don’t we? God, if I’d known, if I’d known …”
The brandy was boiling in his gut. I’m not drunk, he thought, but my heart is pounding, my head is pounding, and this has been one hellish day from the time we got up.
Sprawled as Randi was, one shoulder ruffle had been pulled down to expose her breast. For some reason the sight offended him, and he said irritably, “Fix your dress.”
“What’s the matter? All of a sudden you don’t like to look at me? Here.” And laughing, she pulled the other side down. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I’m disgusted with everything. Seriously, we need to get away from here, Adam.”
“I told you,” he said, almost shouting now, “I am not going to leave my children!”
“You’ve already left them. What do you get out of them except bills?”
He did not reply because it was true. He had left them.
“I’m with you a hundred percent. I’m still your father,” he had told them. But a weekly lunch together—was that being a father? Megan knew otherwise.…
“You’re afraid. You’re a weakling, Adam, that’s your trouble. You should have married me at the start, but you were afraid of your mother and of what people would say. Look how long it took before you got up courage enough to tell Margaret you wanted a divorce.”
The taunt stung: weakling! To be thrown at him who had so cherished her! Weakling, indeed. And at the same time, with some irony, he was aware that this was one insult that the male ego would not endure. Call him an adulterer and betrayer, and he would have to accept it, but never this.
“Look at yourself!” he cried, enraged. “Who are you to criticize me?” Bare breasted as she was in her crumpled dress and with tousled hair, she repelled him. Plainly, even though she was pregnant, she had had much to drink. “You’re disgusting, Randi. Go in and lie down. Cool off.”
“And just who do you think you are? Yes, you think you’re better than everybody else. You and your high-toned music and your fancy talk. You with your prissy Harvard kids. If I’d known what I was getting into, and how different it would be, I would never have come to Elmsford.”
He was astonished. “You mean you came here purposely to find me?”
“Don’t look so surprised. You ought to be flattered. Yes,” she said, thick tongued, now, “I came to find you. First I went to New York, but the place is crawling with women looking for a man, so when I saw I wasn’t get
ting anywhere, I went back to California. I could always get somebody there, but the good ones only want to sleep with you, and the ones who’ll marry you are all old guys on their last legs.”
He was hearing every word she spoke, and yet through it all there was an undercurrent in his consciousness: For her, I traded in my children.
“Then, gradually I thought about our running into each other that day in New York, and I remembered how crazy you once were about me, so I decided I would make it happen again. You were still young, good looking, and doing well. At least, I thought you were.”
Too appalled to speak, Adam stood leaning against the wall for support, just staring at her. Then, as the full import of her words struck him, he murmured, “You came on purpose to destroy a family.”
“Adam, please, don’t be holy. That was her lookout. When I saw her in the hotel that night, I knew she didn’t have any street smarts, not enough sense to come in out of the rain. You deserved better.”
“You wrecked a family,” he repeated in a daze.
“I didn’t have to try very hard. You were a pushover. You almost tore my clothes off that afternoon When your gang was in Canada. You couldn’t wait.”
It was true. But the woman tempted me. The ancient excuse went ringing through his head.
She lay back on the sofa, supine, with the silly dress bunched around her middle. Her spread position was meant to be enticing, but he could not look at her. She had ruined him, and he had allowed himself to be ruined. And why had he endured these miserable months since the day when he lost his job? Maybe she was right about his weakness.
In any case he was trapped. And feeling a frantic claustrophobia, he opened the outside door.
A soft rain, sweet summer rain, was falling. He stood there listening to its drip upon the leaves. He thought of the toil and trouble of mistakes that could never be undone. He thought of the passions that blaze and die without any explanation. You look for reason in yourself and find none. You go along with blinders on, until one day they fall off and you realize how many things there are that you were not seeing.
All right, he hadn’t had before, whatever the fault or cause, the fiery sex he had had with Randi. Fire was simply one of those things that sometimes blazed, or they didn’t. So now he had had it, and now it was gone. As it had come, so it had left.
“Come here,” Randi said. She sat up, straightened her dress, and beckoned to him. “Come here, I said.”
He looked back outdoors. The moon was in the third quarter, far from the hovering rain cloud. The air was cool. There on the hilltop, in all that glimmer of moonlight and rain, he had a sense of space without end. And he imagined, as he stood there, some sort of flying seat, a kind of bicycle with wings, on which he might soar, just leave now without baggage and go anywhere, over continents and oceans, clouds, moors, anywhere under the calm stars, leaving every weight, sorrow, guilt, and memory behind him.
“What in blazes are you doing there with the door open in the middle of the night? It’s cold.”
“I was thinking of getting away.”
“You were?” she responded, misunderstanding. “Will we really go?”
“I don’t mean what you mean,” he said.
“Ah, don’t look at me like that! So we’ve had our spat and it’s over. Come on,” she coaxed, opening her arms. “Come on, I’ll make it nice for you.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want it.”
Then suddenly the truth of what she was beholding on his face came clear, and she was frightened. “You don’t really want to get away from me. You’re only angry because you think I tricked you. Well, suppose I did. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t love you, Adam. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Nothing makes sense to me anymore.”
“Don’t look so grim,” she cried. “I had a few drinks—and I haven’t had any since I’ve known I was pregnant. They got to me, that’s all. You take everything too seriously. I always tell you that.”
“It’s when people have a few too many that the truth comes out.”
She got up and tried to put her arms around him.
“No, Randi,” he told her, disengaging himself. “No, Randi.” And he pushed her, not roughly, but unmistakably, away.
“You son of a bitch,” she said. “You make me sick.”
They stood there staring into each other’s eyes.
“You hate me,” she said. “I see it in your eyes.”
“You’re wrong. What you see isn’t hatred. It’s contempt, and it’s as much for myself as it is for you.”
“Contempt!” she cried. “I think you’re crazy. Listen. It’s two o’clock. We’ve talked enough. Come to bed.”
“I’m not going to bed with you, Randi. Not ever.”
She ran to him, flailing him with her fists and shrieking. “Bastard! Crazy bastard! Drop dead.”
Trying to calm her, Adam led her toward the bedroom and said, “Randi, we’re both exhausted. Lie down and rest. We’ll talk later, in the morning. Go rest.”
For an answer she slammed the door and turned the key in the lock.
She was still sleeping when he left for the office not long after dawn. He had a long day’s work ahead and he had hardly slept. Even so, a day at the office would be less wearing than yet another in the series of his troubled days at home with Randi. By nightfall, he hoped, she would have calmed herself enough for them to talk reasonably. He had no idea at the moment what he wanted to say to her. She had in his mind become a horror, and he knew only that he had to be free of her. A future with her was unthinkable. And still he wanted in no way to hurt her. Perhaps by nightfall his thoughts would clarify themselves.
At a diner where he stopped for coffee and a bun, he lingered in a kind of dreamy state, observing people. There were truckers, a pair of motorcycle cops, and some nurses on their way to the morning shift at the hospital. He wondered, as people do when they are beset, whether any of them was as beset as he was. A couple came and sat at a booth with their two small boys, one of them a clown like Danny, talkative and bright eyed. Once the young father reached across the table and squeezed the wife’s arm.
Adam asked for a second cup of coffee and sat holding it between his hands, staring at the wall. After a while he went out and got into the car. At the next intersection came the turnoff so familiar to him, the way to the old street. On impulse he made the turn and drove slowly past the house. Already neglect had overcome it; two shutters were loose. A diagonal glimpse of the vegetable garden showed a scrubby patch of weeds. Too lazy to care for it, he thought, and sped the car away. How it must hurt Margaret to see her cherished family home falling into decay!
He drove on through downtown, past Danforth’s, where he had bought Danny’s first grown-up suit with a white shirt and regimental tie, past Magnum ADS, and on toward the bluff along the river where rose the gray roof of the high school. A thousand years ago, beneath that roof, he had fallen in love with a red-haired, gray-eyed girl.
The teachers were filling their segregated parking lot. Margaret had always tried to find a certain spot near the side door and now, for no reason he could explain even to himself, he drove in toward it. Really, he did not think he wanted to see her or be seen. Yet he cruised slowly in a wide circle and found the car with Margaret just getting out of it.
When she saw him, she looked fearfully startled, and stopped. They were only a few feet apart, so close that he was able to see the scattered, pinhead freckles on her forearms and to note that her face and neck were still purely unmarred by any. Her hair was damp; she must have showered late and in a hurry.
“Hello,” he said. “You’re wearing your favorite color.”
She looked down at the periwinkle blouse as if she had forgotten what she was wearing, or as if she had not understood.
Around her neck there hung a thin gold chain with three hearts dangling from it.
“That’s pretty,” he said, pointing to it. “Is it from Fred?”
“Does it matter?” she replied.
Her arms clasped books to her chest, thus revealing her hands, and he saw that she had taken off her wedding ring. Well, naturally she had.
“Why have you come?” she asked, not unkindly.
“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to see you.”
For a long moment she looked at him, and then gently, very gently, replied, “Well, now that you have, I have to go. I’m late this morning.”
He nodded. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
But she had not heard him. He watched her rapid steps up to and through the door. Then he swerved into the exit and drove away, eastward, toward the sun.
We were married twenty-one years ago this month, he thought.
There before him lay the river with the arch of the bridge making its leap across to the low bluffs on the other side. There it rested on its huge cement legs, and they on their concrete elephants’ feet. The tires whistled on the pavement as the car accelerated down the hill.
Twenty-one years, they whistled and sang. Twenty-one years.
It was all green, a dazzle of gold and green, as spring turned into summer. Bands of shade like rippling water, cooled and dark, crossed the road beneath the trees. All the beauty, all the peace! he thought while the blood went thundering through his head.
Twenty-one years!
The car sped faster and faster down the hill, flying over the road, under the sky, aimed toward the huge gray elephant feet.
Let it end, he thought, for God’s sake, let it end. And he pressed with all his strength upon the pedal.
Crushed metal, crumpled like a flimsy can, lay glistening in the sunlight until the tow truck had collected the last torn pieces and carted them away. The crowd that had waited through it all began to disperse.
“Ambulance,” remarked one. “What for? There was hardly enough left to—”
“They take them to the morgue, I guess,” another said.
“The speedometer stopped at ninety-five miles an hour.”
