by Ann Packer
The airport in Rome was dizzying—everyone rushing around, dark and full of purpose. With Jenny on my hip I had managed to maneuver us and the metal luggage cart on which I'd piled our suitcases into a corner, and I was feeling in my purse for the envelope of lire my father had given me, and going over and over in my mind the phrase of Italian I'd memorized to give the taxi driver, when Thomas saw us. He told me later that it was my calmness that attracted him, but I know he was teasing me: I've always thought it was a vision of himself as my white knight that made him follow me and, only two months later, marry me.
How marvelous, how mysterious, how brave! people exclaim. It must have been like marrying a stranger! And of course it was; but that stranger is the man I live with, and to my astonishment he isn't much clearer to me now than he was on the day we stood in front of the justice of the peace and he said those words to me: I, Thomas. I thought we would live inside each other; but we live next to each other, in a glass house.
ON SATURDAYS THOMAS is a family man. We go to the San Francisco zoo, we drive down to the Bay to feed the gulls, we cross the mountains to walk along the cold edge of the Pacific.
Driving back from the beach today, we took a new road. When we were back on our side of the mountains and nearly home we came around a sharp bend and through a space between the pines I saw a huge, sunlit meadow and a big yellow house. It was gone so quickly and the pines were so thick along the side of the road, I wasn't quite sure what I'd seen. I asked Thomas to turn back. He drove slowly, and when we came to the break in the trees he pulled over and we got out of the car.
I have seen grander houses, but perhaps none so perfect. It was set way back in the meadow, a house the color of yellow roses, with white shutters on every window, a chimney at both ends of the roof, a garden on one side, and, in the middle of the meadow, a quivering green pond. It was absolutely still, enclosed by woods, a house someone must have invented in a dream, then found through sheer force of will. I looked at Thomas and I was terrified that he would say something and terrified that he wouldn't. Then Jenny woke from her nap in the backseat of the car and called for me, and it was over.
It's black out. I can see the lights of the valley, then the absence of lights that is the Bay. The remains of Thomas's chili dinner are still on the table. Jenny has been quiet for half an hour now, so she's asleep. We are lying on the rug, playing gin rummy.
“It was beautiful,” Thomas says.
“What?”
“That house this afternoon.”
Ah, I think, at last, at last. I look up, expecting to lock eyes with him, for this moment to be the beginning of something. But he's staring at his hand, rearranging cards.
“Thomas!” I exclaim. “How did you—I was just thinking about that house.”
“I know,” he says, shrugging. “That's why I said it.”
“You knew?”
“Sure. Is that such a big deal?”
“Oh, Thomas,” I say. “Imagine if we lived there.”
He is silent.
“I could have an herb garden, and Jenny would have all that space to play in.”
“We have a house,” he says.
I stand and walk to the window, peer out into the night. Without even touching it, I can tell how cold the glass is. I turn around. “He could have hung himself from that beam,” I say. “How can you not care? He could have shot himself, there could be bloodstains under the paint!” I run into the kitchen and start cleaning, putting the sour cream away, finding a Baggie for the unused half of the onion. But there on the cutting board is a long, sharp knife, and I can't bear the sight of it. I turn to find Thomas standing in the doorway. He holds his arms out for me, and I think, No, it's only a body to hide against; but it's no use, I'm already there.
HE'S BEEN BRINGING me flowers—pink roses one day, lavender freesia the next. I'm running out of vases and still he brings them, splashing the house with color and scent. He hands them to me sheepishly, as if each bunch in its waxy green paper is a specific apology. But for what? It's like Italy again, all those small gifts—wallets stamped with gold fleur-de-lis, silk scarves in rich reds and browns. I'd open them with exaggerated care, thinking it was all practice for the day he'd hand me his soul wrapped in white tissue paper and I'd peel away the layers and know I was holding something I was meant to keep.
“IT'S BECAUSE I'M working too much, isn't it?” Thomas says.
I knew he was awake. I've been awake for hours. It's three or four in the morning, the dead center of the night, and I've been imagining the things I could do if I got up: write a letter to my parents, get out the sewing machine and work on the dress I'm making Jenny, look through recipes for something Thomas might especially like. I've been picturing myself doing each of these things, then finding reasons to reject them, but the real reason I don't move is that I simply can't.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Am I right?” he says. “Is that what's bothering you? I'll slow down after the New Year, I promise.”
I want to answer him, but I can't think of the right thing to say.
“Claire?” He pulls me into his arms. “Claire?”
“When you married Beth did you have a feeling in the back of your mind that it might not work? Did you say to yourself, Well, we can always get divorced?”
He laughs. “Of course not. What kind of way to get married would that be?”
I lie still. I can feel his heart beating against my shoulder. He doesn't like to talk to me about Beth; he'll answer questions if I press him, but then he always changes the subject. He says he doesn't understand what it is I'm trying to find out. I'm not sure either—just that I'll know it when I hear it.
“Do you want me to say I had some sense of predestination about you?” he says. He presses his lips to my forehead. “Beth and I were happy together for a while, and then we weren't. There's not much more to it than that.”
I wonder what she thought. From what distance she saw it coming, and whether she turned from the sight of its approach, or welcomed it because she had always known it was just a matter of time. I've never met her, never so much as seen a picture of her, but I'd like just once to witness her, to watch her for a few minutes from a distance. I think that would tell me something.
He reaches a hand up and touches my hair. “Try to relax,” he says. “Try to sleep.”
I'M CLEANING. ROOM by room. I bought huge, budget-sized containers of ammonia and Fantastik, and a package of bright green sponges, each one bigger than my hand. The sharp, chemical smells please me. We had the house professionally cleaned and painted before we moved in, but there's something about doing it yourself—getting down on your knees and scrubbing until your elbow aches. Thomas says it's like a dog leaving his mark, but in reverse.
“THOMISH,” JENNY SAYS, stretching her arms up from the living room floor where she and I sit among building blocks. It is dusk, the time of day when I feel loneliest, when the sky is a thick, dark purple, but not so dark that I can't see the black shapes of the trees.
He swoops her up and down, way up and down, then gently sets her back on the floor. It's my turn. I stand, and he kisses me once, twice. “And what did you do today?” he asks as he moves into the kitchen to make our drinks. This is how it always is, the unfolding of ritual. This is how it's supposed to be.
Today, though, I have news. “I met a woman,” I begin when he returns, and he smiles too soon; he wishes I would make a friend and I wish I didn't understand this to mean that he cannot be the friend he thinks I need. “Down at the Safeway,” I say. She tapped me on the shoulder, a tall, grey-haired woman in a red silk blouse, and introduced herself, saying she recognized me from the neighborhood, saying with an ironic laugh that she was sorry she hadn't come over with a casserole or something.
“She knew them,” I say.
“Knew who?” He has turned from me slightly; he is glancing longingly at the headlines of the afternoon paper.
“The people,” I say. “The man.”
>
He nods, still looking away, but I have his attention now.
“He was a judge. John Mehring. He was forty-one.”
Thomas is forty. He looks up at me, his wide, clear brow etched with three deep wrinkles, wrinkles that are there even when his face is at peace. “Really,” he says, and it is not a question.
I pick up Jenny. “He wants his dinner,” I say, bouncing her a little, “and it's bedtime for you.”
I have pot roast for him tonight, and he is very sure to praise it, it's perfect, the salad is perfect, the perfect dinner, the perfect home.
We do the dishes together, not talking, but when the water is off he takes my hands and says he is sorry he ever told me about the man. It was something the realtor accidentally let slip—the people who owned the house right before us didn't even know.
“Of course you should have told me,” I say. “It would have been worse if you hadn't.”
“Worse how? You'd be better off not knowing.”
I pull my hands from his. “You don't understand,” I say. I turn from him and start sponging off the counter. He stays still for so long I wonder whether he's waiting for me to speak. Finally he touches my wrist, and I look up at him.
“Maybe I don't,” he says, “but I'd like to.”
“Don't you see?” I say. “If you hadn't told me, it would have been between us.” I press my lips together; I'm afraid I might cry.
“Claire,” he says.
His eyes are red with fatigue, and for a moment I can see how it must be for him, wondering how his wife can spend day after day thinking about something he hasn't lost a minute to. I raise my hands to his neck, slipping the fingers of one hand into his collar, sliding the others along the soft skin under his hair. He lifts his hands and takes hold of my shoulders, but gingerly, as if they might be hot to the touch.
HE NEVER ASKS me about Jenny's father. That's how he refers to him when he has to mention him: Jenny's father. As if he doesn't know his name. It's rubbed off on me, so that I rarely think Ben. I rarely see him in my mind's eye, the way I used to during the months at my parents', when I would sit out by the pool in my navy blue maternity bathing suit and imagine that in five or ten minutes he'd come around the side of the house carrying a six-pack of beer and a dog-eared paperback. It got so I would tense up with waiting for him, with the expectation of seeing him in one of his ripped T-shirts, his bony bare feet.
I FOUND A morning playgroup for Jenny; today is her first day. I was planning to stay, to sit on the sidelines in case she needed me, but the woman who runs the group told me it would be harder that way. For both of us, she said.
So I'm on my way to town. I would have preferred to take a walk until the playgroup was over, but there are no sidewalks up in our neighborhood—just gravel shoulders, and small cars whipping the curves. It's October, and the hills are still the same grey-brown color they were when we arrived. It's hard to believe that rain will come and change things.
I park in front of the travel agent's where the grey-haired woman works. Part-time, she said. I get out of the car and stand at the window with my hands cupped around my eyes and yes, there she is.
The door chimes as I go in. She gives me a formal smile.
“I said I'd stop in someday,” I say, not sure she recognizes me, not sure what I'll say next. It doesn't seem possible to just ask what I want to know.
“Of course,” she says, a little distantly—and it was only a week ago that we met. A pair of glasses hangs from a chain around her neck, and she unfolds them and puts them on. “Of course,” she says again, smiling now. “Claire, nice to see you. Are you planning a trip?”
I sit in the chair in front of her desk. “Yes,” I lie. “We want to spend Christmas in Chicago with my parents if Thomas can get away.”
She asks for dates and I invent them. She taps them into her machine.
“I just want to make reservations for now,” I say.
She looks up at me and purses her lips. “Then you can't get the good fares,” she says. “The airlines won't let you reserve without paying.”
“Oh, dear,” I say. “Thomas doesn't know—”
“Maybe you should come back when your plans are more definite?”
“Yes,” I say. “I'll come back.” I stand up and turn away, then turn back. “Oh, I almost forgot. Thomas is so curious about the Mehrings. His wife. Widow. Did she leave the area? I thought she must have, but—”
“She's down here in the valley somewhere,” she says. “I'm afraid I've rather lost touch.”
“Was it violent? Of course it couldn't be less our business, but—”
“I don't know the details,” she says. “He had cancer.”
“My God,” I say. Something inside me shifts, clears. “I didn't realize he was sick.”
“Well,” she says. “I heard they were giving him at least a year.”
A fist closes back around me. I turn for the door, thanking her for her help. I hurry to the car, wanting very badly to get back to Jenny.
THERE'S ONLY ONE Mehring in the phone book; it can't be that common a name. 7237 Loma Vista. It's listed under John, too, which I guess is understandable. She wouldn't want people thinking she was a woman living alone. Is she a woman living alone?
In a tiny, dark house.
THE LOCAL PAPER is indexed at the public library. It's a raw, grey morning, and I'm the only one here, aside from the librarian. She explains the system graciously enough, but behind her tortoiseshell glasses her eyes are curious. I said I was a student over at Stanford, and certainly I look young enough to pass; perhaps I look too young to pass. Perhaps she thinks I'm a high school girl, playing hookey. Thomas is prematurely grey, and at restaurants in Italy men used to nudge each other, even wink occasionally. I was twenty-four, and at night I would stand and stare into the mirror, looking for a sign that something, Jenny or Thomas, had put some age in my face.
There are a number of entries under his name, and I twist through the microfiche, looking. His appointment to court, judgments, sentencings, and finally I find it, October 24th, 1979, the obituary. “Judge John Mehring was found dead in his home last night … cause of death was not stated … survived by his wife, Alice, and two daughters, Carol, 8, and Cathy, 14.” There is a picture of him in his robe, smiling, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. I stare at it, trying to read the eyes, the mouth.
HE SAYS WE should get out more. He suggests the opera, the symphony, he learns about out-of-the-way restaurants, Italian, always Italian, he offers a weekend in Mendocino, at Tahoe, on our own in an elegant small hotel in San Francisco. But I don't want to leave Jenny.
I DRIVE SLOWLY, looking at the numbers on the mailboxes, until I find it. 7237. It's a medium-sized pea-green house, identical in nearly every detail to the grey one on its left, the white one on its right. It's mid-morning, and the street is quiet. I can tell just by looking that no one is home. She works, of course. Alice.
Surely Cathy has grown up and moved away, but Carol must still live here, a high school student alone with her mother, eating TV dinners in silence, going early to her room, her books, her telephone.
I accelerate until I am around the corner, then I park and walk back. I stand on the sidewalk for a few minutes, just looking. There's a picture window that must be the living room, but there's too much glare and I can't see in. I look around. There's no one on the street, no cars coming as far as I can tell. I take a step up the walk, then another, until I'm too close to turn back; then I hurry forward, squeeze between the bushes and the house, and cup my hands around my eyes.
A couch, a couple of chairs, a TV. A bookcase full of books. A doorway leading to a kitchen. What did I expect? But I'm glued here, straining to read titles, to see what's in the one frame hanging on the wall—a painting or a mirror. It's too dark to tell.
“DEAR THOMAS,” I write. “What I have to say is this. It's not so much that you don't know me, as that you don't seem to know that you don't know me.” I cross it out.
“Dear Thomas,” I write. “We need to talk—we need to have talked.” No.
“Dear Thomas,” I write. “I feel like I'm holding my breath. I feel like something is going to shatter.”
Dear Thomas, I can't write to you.
THE STREET LOOKS different at night. Living room lights are on; there are cars in driveways; and inside, although I can't see them, people are getting ready for dinner. It makes me wish I lived in a house where you could see your neighbors' lights.
I brake across from 7237. Jenny starts playing with the belt on her car seat and I tell her No, we're not getting out. We're just looking.
All the lights are on and I can see the back of someone's head above the couch against the living room window. The TV isn't on; maybe she's reading or just thinking. Today's the 28th of October; he died eight years ago last Friday. Does she think died or killed himself?
“Mommy,” Jenny says, impatiently. She's not used to being out at this hour; neither am I. But Thomas has a dinner meeting tonight.
“In a minute, Sweetie,” I say. I lean back and kiss the top of her head. I love it when I pull my mouth away and some of her silky hair comes with it.
When I look back at the house I see that someone else has come into the living room. I take Thomas's binoculars out of their case and train them on the window.
It's a teenaged girl. Carol. She's tall and pretty, with shoulder-length blond hair. She's talking, smiling, waving a hand for emphasis. Her mother, whose hair is short and dark, nods once or twice. Then the girl turns and walks through the doorway to the kitchen.
After a moment I realize I'm holding my breath, waiting for Alice to get up and follow her. But she doesn't. She stays where she is. She sits alone with her head bent. A few minutes later, my neck stiff, I lower the binoculars. Alice hasn't moved.
“CLAIRE,” HE SAYS, “maybe you should talk to someone.”
“Why can't I talk to you?” I say.
“I mean someone professional. Someone who might be able to help you sort things out. You seem so unhappy.”
I stare out the window, into the blackness.
