Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  * * *

  Lowie and Rupert left shortly after the women returned, Lowie insisting that she had a bad headache. “I need to go home and lie down in my own bed, Rupert,” she said.

  Yes indeedy, Emma thought, the one you’ve made. And I, in mine, in just a few moments—if I can get you out the door. But Lowie had signaled Rupert, and in no time at all they were gone.

  Emma stood staring at the closed door. Is this a scene that’s going to play over and over forever on the night of July Fourth, she wondered, my ushering people out of my house who’ve stayed too long, who have left me with ashes in my mouth and a sink full of dirty dishes? Though this year there were no shards of slivered glass to clean up.

  But maybe if I’d looked into those pieces of mirror more closely last year, if I’d looked at my face in those fragments that Caroline left behind and asked, What do you want, Emma? I wouldn’t be asking myself that now. When you cleaned up that broken mirror so quickly you didn’t save anybody from bad luck.

  “What are you doing?” Jesse asked. He was settling into the sofa with a drink. “They sure ran off in a hurry. Did you and Lowie have some kind of argument?”

  “Jesse,” she said, crossing the room toward him. She felt so very odd. She wasn’t thinking about what she was doing, just standing off watching herself do it.

  He heard something in her voice, looked up like Elmer with his ears perked, his expression watchful, sniffing the wind.

  “I know about Caroline.”

  His gaze didn’t waver. She’d give him that.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Lowie just told me.”

  “Lowie.” He spit the word out like a bitter seed. “That cunt.”

  “It’s not—” She began, but he cut her off.

  “It’s none of her goddamned business. She’s always sticking her nose in where she doesn’t belong.”

  The room was so dark and quiet around them, Emma felt that she was floating, as if the two of them—she in a high-backed chair he had bought at an auction, and Jesse on the leather sofa— were suspended. She blinked and the edges of the sofa seemed to be rimmed in light. The whole world had come down to this. There was nothing outside this room, nothing anywhere. Was this what it felt like when two people faced each other with drawn guns, life narrowed down to just one pinpoint of space and time? But that was life or death. This was love, or it used to be. She wasn’t sure what any of it was about anymore, or what she was doing here, but whatever it was, she had to play it out.

  “You didn’t know before?” Jesse asked.

  She had rehearsed this scene so many times in her head, the moment of confrontation when she would play the wronged wife. She’d run her lines, his. But that question had never been in the script.

  She hesitated. This was crucial. He was very crafty, Jesse Tree, turning this into a game. What was he holding in his hand? What should she show him in return? There was real danger when the stakes were this high and you had to make up the rules as you went along.

  “No.”

  “No what, Emma?” His full attention was upon her. He leaned forward, studying her face.

  “I didn’t know!” But her voice was rising. He’d win if she got rattled.

  “Come on, Emma. You’re a very smart woman. You knew all the time.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Don’t play stupid with me.”

  And she rose to the bait, the challenge to her intelligence, as he knew she would. “Yes, goddamn you, I’ve known from the beginning!”

  “So why didn’t you say something?”

  Why, he was pushing the move back to her, putting her on the defensive. Wait a minute. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here.

  “What could I have said? If I’d asked you to stop seeing her, would you have stopped?”

  Instead of answering, Jesse rose and left the room. Then from the kitchen she could hear the tinkle of ice falling into his glass.

  “You want anything?” he called, his voice light now, as if this were any other time. He was stalling.

  Did she want anything? As in: I’m going to the bank, can I bring you anything? Sure, how about a million dollars? But what did she want? Even now, as she stood upon the precipice, knowing that any step could be the one that tumbled them over into the abyss, she didn’t know the answer to the question.

  “Emma?”

  “Some cognac, please.”

  For a woman who had almost always known her mind—who could run her finger down a row of dresses, through a catalogue, yes, no, yes, no, ticking them off—here, in the big time, she was adrift.

  More than once she’d flipped a coin and said to herself. “Go, stay,” to see how she felt about which way it fell.

  She’d sat in bed with a pen and a yellow legal pad. One of the items she’d written under “Stay” was: “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

  Them? Them, the people who whispered, “Mixed marriage—it’ll never fly.” All those people she watched avert their eyes quickly, pretending they weren’t looking. Rosalie and Jake—if they knew. Which raised another question, the one voiced by perfect strangers who didn’t know what the Sam Hill they were talking about, to use one of Jake’s expressions, who harumphed, “Well, a Southern girl marrying a black man. That’s a pretty obvious rebellion, don’t you think?” There were people who had suggested to her, to her face, that she had married Jesse as a statement. Well, fuck them very much. If it had been a statement she ought to have told Rosalie and Jake—right?

  How easy it was, she thought, to look at other people’s lives and see them in terms of yes/no, good/bad, black/white.

  Jesse was back now, holding a balloon glass half filled with cognac in one hand, in the other his scotch. He set them both down on the table before her, ever so politely. He still hadn’t answered her question: If she’d asked him to stop, would he have stopped?

  But while he was in the kitchen he had thrown off his watchful look and exchanged it for one she absolutely hated—righteous indignation, which made his back ramrod straight. His mouth turned down at the corners, yet with a whisper of contempt, as if he smelled something nasty, as if he were Prince Hamlet. Yes, that was it. There was something rotten here, which was certainly not his fault, and he was going to weed it out, then rise above it.

  But he never pulled it off as tragedy. No, Jesse, she thought, your princely posturing is melodrama, and it stinks.

  “I never would have started it, you know,” he said now as if he were speaking from some lofty place, a balcony, “if you hadn’t wanted me to.”

  “I wanted you to have an affair with Caroline?” Had she?

  “Who told me that very first day,” he looked down at his watch, “exactly a year ago, that she was attracted to me?”

  “Yes. I did. I said that. And it was true, wasn’t it, that observation? But that didn’t mean I wanted you to go right out and screw her.” Emma could hear herself, an angry woman, her voice raised way too loud.

  Jesse flared his nostrils as if she had said something unforgivably inelegant.

  She pushed on. “Is that not what we’re talking about—your screwing Caroline?”

  He rose from the sofa and leaned against the fireplace, punctuating his speech with gestures of his glass. “Not really. What we’re talking about is why. Which you know very well, Emma, is because you didn’t want to. You never wanted to be close.” His lip trembled, and his voice shook.

  I am standing off and watching this as if I were in another body, watching myself in the audience, she thought. Go ahead, Jesse, pull out all the stops.

  “You never wanted me, never!” He leaned toward her, and his fist smashed down onto his lovely coffee table. Don’t savage your art, that disconnected part of her thought. The ice in his glass shivered, his drink slopped.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When?” Tears poured down his face, into his beard. “When?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Why did y
ou turn off? How did you get so cold?”

  “I didn’t get cold, Jesse. Not all by myself. Your need, your never-ending need, wore me out. You say it’s because you want me, but I don’t think that’s it at all. Sex is the way you hold on to me, control me. Sex is what you use when you’re frustrated with yourself, with Skytop, with whatever the fuck it is that’s keeping you from going back to making art. I can’t be everything for you, Jesse!”

  “I don’t want you to be. I just want to feel you close to me. You’ve slipped away from me, Emma. You just keep slipping away.”

  And as he said those words, Jesse could see Blanche all those years ago in a shimmery slippery satin dress, jumping into a golden Cadillac and waving, calling to her children, “I’ll be back in a little while, don’t worry.” That little while was endless when measured by the clock of childhood.

  And he could hear his father’s words, the only words of advice he’d ever given Jesse: “Only so many fucks in you, Jess. Want to make sure you get ’em all in. But don’t let the women catch you, boy. You want to stay loose. They want to tie you up.”

  He’d stayed loose, hadn’t he, he’d done what his old man said, until Emma, and look what had happened. He had let her tie him up, tie him up in knots, and now she was the one who was always slipping away. Quicksilver. He had reached out for her, thought he had her, and she was gone, like a firefly.

  “Oh, Emma,” he cried, and his sobs began. His shoulders shook.

  Emma reached out for him. These tears were the genuine article. This was no act, the real part of her said to the part that had been standing off, a witness. This is your husband. This is his pain. And with that the part of her that she always kept inside, protected, the part that had plugged its eyes and ears against Caroline (against Helen, against Rosalie, against Jake, against Jesse, against betrayal and trickery of any kind) opened its mouth and screamed. Then Emma was crying, too.

  “Let’s try,” she whispered into his ear. “Let’s stop pretending that we don’t care. We do, Jess. I do.”

  16

  “I don’t know why you think it has to be a sex therapist.”

  “Because that’s where all our problems lay.”

  “Lie.”

  “Fucking English teacher.”

  “Nonfucking English teacher,” Emma said sweetly. Too sweetly. “Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what you want to tell Dr. Quack Quack?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to see someone. Not I.”

  Well, hell, what else were they supposed to do? Continue crying and yelling at each other? This was California in the seventies. On every street corner people were getting themselves improved, analyzed, actualized. Letting go, talking it out, they said, could solve everyone’s problems. They sat in circles, took off their clothes and exposed all their warts and fears before equally imperfect strangers. In this fruit basket of the U.S., human growth had become more popular than any other kind. Who was Emma to fight the tide?

  Though she did think about how funny their going to Dr. Ente would seem in West Cypress. You had problems, well, hell, everyone had something nasty on his plate. You just bore down and made the best of it. No one questioned maladjustment—or even madness—back home. Like most Southerners, they were almost proud of their quirks and cosseted, rather than confined, their eccentrics. For example, there was old Miss Priscilla Whitmore, who had a thing about money, never touched the stuff, though her family had left her bushel baskets of it. When her dividend checks came each month, her maid took them from the mailbox, opened them and made the deposits. But the bank insisted that Miss Priscilla sign them, so she did, wearing white cotton gloves. Even so, that act called for absolution—washing her hands over and over with Purex straight out of the bottle. After a while, of course, the bleach ate right through the flesh, and it was not unusual to see Miss Priscilla in church after dividend time with red stains seeping into her gloves. People looked away politely and nodded rather than taking her hand. But no one would ever think of recommending that Miss Priscilla see a shrink. Why, that would be rude. Besides which, Emma wasn’t sure that there was a shrink within miles of West Cypress.

  Of course there were droves of them in California. Right down the hill in Los Gatos was the birthplace of primal scream.

  And scream was what Emma thought she was going to do with the Teutonic Dr. Ente, a disciple of Masters and Johnson. She was sorry she’d ever gotten them into this. Drawn swords under the redwoods at dawn was more her style.

  “Now that I’m into it, I think Dr. Ente’s really okay. Why don’t you like him?” Jesse was saying. Their second visit was only two miles and two minutes away.

  “Because he’s a Nazi. Because he’s a big fat slob with food stains on his shirt. How can I talk to anyone like that?”

  “Come on, Emma.”

  “Besides, he doesn’t even listen. He talks all the time. You know he’s no good as a therapist. You like him only because he makes it sound like it’s all my fault.”

  “No, just that it’s not all my fault.”

  “His office looks like an abortionist’s.”

  “Have you ever been to an abortionist?”

  “No. But if he were any good, he could afford a better office.”

  “This isn’t going to work if you don’t cooperate. I’ll bet you’re going to resist the hypnosis.”

  “And you’re hoping he’s going to turn me into a nymphomaniac.”

  * * *

  “Relax. Watch the watch.”

  Watch the watch? What kind of talk was that?

  “You’re going to become very sleepy.”

  Actually, she was becoming very antsy. This Dr. Quack Quack who was waving his grandfather’s watch in her face was just that.

  “Play like you’re children,” he’d said. “Take baths together. Buy some rubber duckies and paddle around. Then play dress up.”

  “I have some black lingerie. You want Jesse to wear it or me?”

  “Watch the watch. You’re not trying.”

  “That’s what Jesse says. Why don’t you hypnotize him? Why me?”

  “Jesse doesn’t have the same kind of problem.”

  She sat up on his cracked plastic couch. “What kind of problem is that?”

  Dr. Ente and Jesse exchanged a look.

  “Hey, guys, I can stay home and watch Jesse and his friend Rupert shoot knowing glances for free. I don’t need to come here for that.” Emma heard Rosalie’s voice coming out of her mouth. Well, Rosalie wasn’t wrong about everything.

  “Emma, Emma. Come, sit here.” Dr. Ente patted the chair beside him. “Let’s put all our cards on the table. Let’s talk.”

  * * *

  “So you knew about Jesse’s affair for a whole year? Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do. That’s no answer.”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I let it ride.”

  “Didn’t it make you angry?”

  “Of course it made me angry.”

  “But not angry enough to say anything about it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Let’s try another tack.”

  “Do you sail, Dr. Ente?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you sail? You know, boats, water? Tack’s a sailing term.” Oh, how she’d like, right now, to be out on the Grits.

  “You’re avoiding the issue, Emma.”

  Jesse rolled his eyes at her. But she knew he was loving this. Ente had been grilling her for the last half hour.

  “Now, as I was about to say, let’s be specific. You knew when Jesse was going to see Caroline, and you knew, or at least you suspected, where he was going.”

  “Yes.”

  “Put yourself in one of those situations. What did you do with your time? Did you sit at home and stare at the walls? Did you cry? Did you talk to friends about it?”

  No, I called my lover and we went for a sail and fucked our brains out.r />
  “I tested recipes. I catered dinner parties. I prepared for my classes.”

  “You could concentrate? You could do all that while your husband was with another woman?”

  “What was I supposed to do? Slit my wrists and bleed into the tomato sauce?”

  “Emma, Emma. That wit is hiding an enormous amount of hostility. Come, now, did you never want to follow him? To get in your car and see what he was doing? To catch them and…let’s say, shoot them?”

  “Wait a minute.” Jesse laughed nervously.

  Dr. Ente frowned. “Emma, you never wanted to do any of these things? You never wanted to get back at Jesse in some way, to, let’s say for example, have an affair yourself?”

  “No.”

  “So you never had an affair yourself?”

  Goddamn this son-of-a-bitch. If she admitted the truth, it would be all over. It was one thing for Jesse to screw around, for her to do so was a completely different matter. “Fucking another man,” he’d scream, “when you could have been with me?” She could hear it now. He’d storm out of this office and keep on going. Telling the truth was going to get them exactly the same place this bullshit therapist was getting them, she thought. Nowhere. They were right in West Cypress. Let it lie. Lay. It would work itself out. If it didn’t, take it behind the barn and beat the shit out of it.

  “No,” she said.

  “Emma,” Dr. Ente shook his head, “I worry about you. I’m afraid you’re not at all in touch with your feelings.”

  * * *

  “So you haven’t seen Caroline in three weeks, since just before you came to me. Right, Jesse?”

  “Right.”

  “And what has been her reaction to this?”

  “She’s very upset.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “It makes me sad. I care a lot for her. She’s a very nice woman, and she’s very sensitive.”

  * * *

  “Your nice, sensitive girlfriend called me on the phone a little while ago, Jesse,” Emma announced the next afternoon.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she was going to kill herself.”

  17

  October 1974