The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  As Veronica walked toward the elevator, Art scuttled behind her, trying to catch up. It looked like a lover’s quarrel. They were having the fight that she and John had avoided for the past six months.

  A group of Japanese tourists stood and watched the elevator dial move. A woman in a pink sweater set peered through a handheld camera and recorded the moving dial. They were happy tourists, enamored of everything. In your own city you were stuck with yourself. And John? John’s life, swirling and changeable—his life was going on in Irvington without her.

  That was all. Was it so bad? Was this the stony dam that a marriage got to, the place where it faltered, at a simple juncture like a trip to your mother’s during which you just don’t miss your wife?

  John and Muriel might be hunched over photos of Evan in the Peace Corps as Clara slept. Evan, the great liberal. John was swept up by him all over again. Art stood silently beside her. The elevator was taking forever.

  “V, sorry, okay?” Art said. “I didn’t mean anything about John.” He was panting a little and completely sweaty. “I really need your help this afternoon.”

  “I’ve already helped you,” she said, trying to be remain icy, but the familiar, cold cloak of after was parting, lifting at the seams. “I came here, I pointed you toward the more-subtle rings that I thought Ines would like.” She picked up her phone and looked at it. It was noon, and, unbelievably, there was no call from John. The word HI flitted across her screen, from Damon. She smiled but deleted the greeting and looked up; the woman in pink was now filming another tourist who was filming that elevator dial. She and Art exchanged a brief look and then a smile. Art began to laugh and then quake silently, which made Veronica laugh. He erupted audibly, and then she did too. They were still recovering as they entered the silent elevator. She would try to call John on the street.

  She wanted John’s voice, his solicitousness. Her renewed desire for her husband was like the tip of something delicious that she couldn’t get enough of, the pointed bottom of an ice cream cone. But she considered John’s eerily complete silence. She wouldn’t go just yet. She needed to stop thinking. She turned to Art. “Do you want to get some lunch? Before I get the train, I mean?” She wouldn’t go just yet. She pictured the condensation on a glass of cold white wine. Neither Ines nor John ever drank during the day. It made Ines too sleepy, she said. John claimed he had a surplus of intense feelings and didn’t need to have any more. He was happy enough, he said, and didn’t need to become happier. But Veronica always needed to be happier, and Art always said yes.

  7

  Saturday

  John

  “What kind of name is Glittering Sands, anyway?” John asked Derek as they drove away.

  “Hey, it’s your club, man.”

  “Clearly it is not my club. I mean, Glittering Sands? They might as well call it dreamland, fucking dreamland.” Derek’s silent rejoinder was a resounding affirmation. It was dreamland. It was totally unreal; the hotel was a white plastic cutout, a turreted fluffy wedding cake pasted onto the turquoise sea. Clara was a writhing mass on his chest, her very existence mind-blowing. Veronica was a specter, a thing called a wife. He had failed to get back in touch with the office. Even his job was beginning to feel imaginary. All of it, his whole life, was vanishing.

  He was falling into this vortex; what had he done? He pictured yesterday’s meeting. John could see Lloyd Miller flipping through John’s scant report on Lancelot Drugs, fuming; a company Miller had discovered, a very attractive potential investment, postponed by a lazy and absentee stringer.

  As they pulled into the drive at Laura Simpson’s antiques shop, there was solidity again. He identified Derek’s girlfriend, Monika, right away; she was the blond, pregnant one, playing with a rough little dog the color of a Triscuit on the crab grass. There were several women in front of the shop, but John knew instinctively which was the girlfriend. Her legs were muscular, and there was something blanched and stripped about her face—too much sun at one point in her life and spotty dental work. They were having some kind of tea or shower for Monika, and the other women—both white and black—drifted away, saying goodbye. Monika smiled when she found Derek, and they embraced while her gargantuan belly pointed to one side. John watched them kiss, then turned away when she caught his eye.

  “Hey, don’t hit Daddy,” she said in a Bajan accent, because Clara had started a game, swatting at John’s face as they walked from the car. “She’s adorable, hi,” Monika said, extending her hand to shake his.

  John’s voice cracked as he introduced himself. For years with Veronica, he hadn’t really noticed other women; lately he’d begun to again—a strand of golden hair that grazed a jawline, fine-boned ankles—though he was guilty only of looking. When they’d returned from the hospital, his wife’s strangeness terrified him. She’d remained huge but was deflated, fine gray hairs had begun to colonize her temples, and a layer of dank white flesh shone over the top of her maternity jeans. She was bloated and fogged and AMA, as they’d said in the hospital—of advanced maternal age. She was a piece of a demographic, and he was too. To think, they’d once imagined they were unique! They were ordinary, wholly defined by their circumstances.

  Looking at Monika, he was outside any category. Monika’s pink complexion and open expression were so unsuspecting of her own future.

  Something flickered in Derek’s gaze as he noticed John, a shell of pain or recognition, and he let go of Monika’s hand. “John needs goat milk, and I had a feeling you or your mum would know where to get some,” he told her.

  “Sure. There’s this little health-food store in Bridgetown that probably has it.” She looked down. With the toe of her sandal, she nudged some pebbles around the base of a red-flowering tree.

  “There are these herbs that go with it,” John said to no one in particular, as Laura—Mum—emerged. A large, freckled woman, she burst out of a lush but messy garden set up in a corner of the yard, which abutted a wide, flat field. She had Monika’s pink skin tone and overbleached hair. She wore an enormous, slightly transparent blue muumuu, which ruffled in the breeze. Brambles stuck to the muumuu and crackled behind her as she moved forward. They were wonderful, Monika and Laura. “She hit she dad?” Laura said, as she approached and casually took the baby away from John. Clara grew anxious and twisted toward her father and was handed back to him. Ordinarily, Clara’s default holder was Veronica. Things had been easy for John. He pictured Veronica here, perching on the arm of a mahogany overseer’s chair in the shade while she sipped a piña colada. For the first time since he’d landed, he was aware of missing her. “She wants a look in the shop,” Laura said, as she led them into her store. Several mangy dogs lay in their path, on the cool concrete steps and trampled gardenias. “Her mum is here too?” Laura asked.

  “She’s actually not here,” he said, jostling the baby.

  “Sorry to hear it,” Laura said in a mournful tone, as if Veronica had died. She draped a fat arm around his shoulder very briefly as she ushered him inside. He didn’t correct her. As he crossed the dusty threshold of the store, he didn’t tell her that Veronica was alive. His own morbidity chilled him. As Derek explained to Laura that they were heading to the health-food store, John couldn’t stop his eyes from roving again and again to Monika’s belly.

  Laura said, “Maybe you can bring something back for her.”

  “For who?” John said, adjusting Clara as she started to whimper and twist. Clara then arched her back stiffly, pulling away from him as if to catapult herself out of his arms. You can hold ’em and not hold ’em, like a bar of soap! Rosemary would have said before whisking her away. But now there was no one to help him, and nothing could soothe Clara.

  “A present for her mum,” Laura replied, easily speaking over Clara’s crying. He was relieved; it was as if Laura had just told him that Veronica was not dead. Laura produced a cornflower-blue-and-white ceramic statuette of a cherubic toddler cuddling a dog with dopey eyes. “These are from Spain. The
y happen to be collector’s items. They’re fine bone china.” John examined the object briefly, as if he were considering buying it. A calmness pervaded as he fondled the blue glazed ear of the dog: No one, except for perhaps Clara, thought Veronica was permanently gone.

  “Look at the doggy, sweetie,” John said. Clara stopped crying for a moment, intrigued by the figure. John looked over the baby and around the dusky antiques shop for a phone.

  Derek was sitting nearby in a mahogany rocking chair with Monika—giggling and overblown—on his lap. That stomach! He’d never seen anything that ripe, that delicious. Without thinking, he squatted to touch it. Then Clara did too; she leaned her head onto Monika’s belly. Monika laughed, but John could see Derek’s face behind her, darkening again. Perhaps Derek was simply scowling at the score of a cricket game on the TV that was propped in the corner.

  John turned to find Laura and the phone, but she’d wandered away. “Do you think I could use your phone?” he called out. “Mine isn’t working.” He found Laura dusting a tea set in the next room and stood watching the green feather duster dance in the white heat. He wanted to ask her again but she looked up at him blankly, as she would to any customer, any stranger in her shop. He was a stranger in her shop. “Yes?” Laura said, but John heard Monika playfully beeping the horn as she and Derek sat waiting in the car.

  * * *

  Clara cried for the entire twenty-minute drive to Bridgetown. There was traffic, and young men in synthetic pants wandered between the cars, jaywalking. John was sweltering but didn’t dare loosen Clara from the carrier; it was all that protected her.

  They found the stuff in the back of the health-food store, in dusty cardboard boxes. Clara drank a lot of goat milk and passed out on the way back to Laura’s, leaving a deep-brown stain on John’s belly where her diaper had leaked. His high was fading but Derek seemed friendly again, offering him a clean T-shirt from his car.

  Laura had a tray of glasses and a pitcher of rum punch waiting when they arrived, and she signaled them to follow her. They cut through the brambly garden and into the polo field, where there were only the sounds of the wind and horses’ hooves and the occasional whack on the ball. About thirty white people dressed in pastel colors were already seated, in rows, under a striped canopy. John was relieved not to have to speak. He took a few large sips of his cold drink. He’d been parched. The cinnamon and sugar were sticky on his lips. Then he crouched on the grass behind the audience and changed the soiled diaper. Clara grabbed the swizzle stick from his glass and licked it, her eyes happy again.

  When the baby was clean, John knelt in the grass and drained his glass quickly; Laura appeared and handed him another one. Now that he’d fed Clara goat’s milk, albeit without the special herbs, Veronica receded in his mind.

  “Come sit,” Laura said, ushering him to the front row, where she had saved four seats.

  “Here?” John said, surprised.

  “I married that one,” she whispered, pointing to a man attached to a horse, trundling past in a puff of cologne, thunder dirt, and hay. Where Laura was flabby, her husband was taut; where she was loose, he was chiseled. He was a gorgeous man. An athlete married to this lovely unkempt woman. Their physical incongruity signaled a deep connection. They were the real thing. The thing that Muriel and Evan had been.

  The baby was facing out and kicking her feet. The straps of the Björn, now wet with perspiration, dug into his shoulders and back. It was shocking how much he wanted to put her down, to hand her to someone else, but the drink was perfectly spicy and cold, the sunlight was softening, dappling, under the shade of the tent. He would tell Veronica about it all soon. He could remember her. He could remember her finger tracing the edge of her beer glass the first time they met. How smooth and unlined her fingers were, like new pencils. He would tell her this. With this resolution, he started to rise to go find a phone.

  Behind him, the sound of the mallet hitting the ball was both new and familiar: like a baseball thwack but cleaner, sharper. He had leaned down to get a zwieback toast from the diaper bag at his feet when the ball met his temple.

  * * *

  There was blood on his fingertips as he held them up above his face. Fingers that were pink sausages. A hammer beat in his metal skull. None of this was as frightening as the emptiness in his arms, the space where Clara had been. He sat up fast, despite his pounding head. He was on a cot inside a white tent, and a woman’s tanned legs were beside him, like roots growing out of the ground. It was Monika, but Clara was gone.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  He stood up and tore open the sash on the door, as if Clara might be sitting on the grass playing with a hibiscus. But she was not there. Farther afield, the game was continuing, but she was not over in the audience where he’d last held her, where Derek now sat disconsolately—this time he was sure of it—sipping his drink.

  “She’s had some bad diarrhea,” Monika’s voice said. “Mum is cleaning her off in the house. You both need to go see Dr. Bunbury in Speightstown.”

  Speightstown. It sounded like Spitestown. Not Bridgetown or some other town. Spite and retribution town. A long time ago he had climbed into a cab on Canal Street and driven away. This woman named Monika, who smelled of patchouli—how had he not recognized it before—was looking into his face, asking again if he was all right. Her eyes were blue and spacious; inadvertently, he inhaled her scent. His first real girlfriend at Amherst had worn the oil, and it always reminded him of sex. He didn’t even like the smell of patchouli. Quite suddenly he did not like Monika—a stranger—at all. He craved the familiar, his wife. He ran toward the house, his head pounding, to find Clara. Monika shouted, “Slow down. You may have a concussion!” She said something else he couldn’t make out, about heads and concussions and things that seemed wildly irrelevant. Panting, she caught up to him. “John, stop, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine!” he muttered.

  “You need to take it easy,” Monika said, her voice a bit distant, wary.

  A cool dread skittered across his chest. He needed to see Clara. He walked fast and couldn’t answer Monika. Nothing mattered but the empty BabyBjörn and Laura saying. “Her mum is here too?” as innocently as if Veronica had never been in danger.

  He was aware of Monika’s belly as she hurried along beside him. It had reached a stage that was familiar to John, both round and pointed at the same time: a giant egg-arrow, with all the fragility and determination of such a thing. The enormous oval shook as she moved. Initially alluring, Monika’s body now haunted him.

  John rushed across the lawn holding his pulsing head. With each step he took, his head seized. He mounted the steps to Laura’s shop two at a stride, accidentally squashing the ear of an old boxer, who wailed in pain.

  8

  Saturday

  Veronica

  Veronica listened as Arthur called Ines from the Oyster Bar to tell her what he was having for lunch. “No, the white one,” he said, “with heavy cream,” referring to his chowder. Lately, John didn’t care what Veronica ate. Ines must’ve been interested, because Veronica heard Arthur say, “No, no, not dinner rolls, the little crackers—you know, in the packets.… Old drunk men at the bar, uh-huh, as usual.…” He laughed and winked at Veronica. “And some drunk women too.”

  Veronica smiled at him across the leather booth and licked cream off the back of her thumb. Yes, she was eating heavy cream. In a bar. The “food Nazi,” as John had called her, who’d arrived after the birth, was gone. Her lips were thick from the two martinis, which had done their magic of simultaneously slowing down and speeding up time; they mitigated anything that competed with the pleasure they provided, so that missing her one P.M. train to see Clara, and then missing the two P.M., was tolerable. She had left messages about being remiss on both numbers. But he was the one who was remiss. John. She mouthed his name a few times, until the name became a sound and the sound became strange. When Art hung up, she asked, “How’s Ines doing? Is she all
right?”

  “She’s still upset but very limber. Apparently they did a lot of hip openers.” Art grinned, delighted at the thought of his wife’s hips.

  “She’s still pretty down?”

  “Yup. It’s abstract for me. For her … it’s inside her. She puts—every time—the sonogram photo on the kitchen counter. They look like snails, but it’s a real person—you tell yourself that—and then it’s suddenly not.” He began chewing on his olives very fast.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “This one has to not do that, you know?” He looked away for a long moment. “The damage is accruing for her. It just can’t happen to her again.”

  “No, no, it can’t happen. It won’t.”

  “Can you distract her later, take her out to dinner? We could all go.”

  “You think John will be back any minute, right?” She stared at Art as he spread his short fingers out on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth and studied them. “Art?”

  “Hell yes, before you can say Jack Robinson, pumpkin! Sorry, sorry, you’re not my pumpkin. These are good. You want another?” He gestured with a cloudy martini glass, then plucked out the extra blue-cheese-stuffed olive at its base.

  “I should probably eat more first,” Veronica said, opening her package of saltines and shaking it into the bowl as Arthur moved to the bar. The crackers were crisp and blended well with the leftover chowder. She wanted to lick the bowl.

  Art returned with two martinis, even though she’d said no, and placed one before her. “What you should probably do is come with me to the diamond district. I’m going for only a minute, before we meet Ines.”

  “I’m … I need to speak to John and find out what’s going on.”

  “I think you should stay.” Arthur looked at the edge of the Jasper School lunch-project folder emerging from her handbag. “What you should do is advocate a steady diet of heavy cream and vodka for all second-graders,” he said, “and stay in the city with us.”