by Jo Barney
Ron removed the phones from his father’s head and asked if it was true that he had given the house to Jackie. Fred said he remembered an agreement like that; seemed like a good thing to do when he was gone. Who’d want it?
Red blotches gathered on Ron’s neck, seeped into his hairline. “Dad. This is our family house. You still have mother’s picture in your bedroom.” Fred looked surprised at this news. “And you can’t tell me she didn’t trick you into signing that agreement.” Ron pointed a shaking finger at Jackie.
“Like you did the guardianship, Ron?” she said, pointing back.
“Yes,” Fred answered to something one of them had said, and he put the earphones back on. “I want to hear the end of this.” He smiled his sweet smile. “All settled?”
Jackie hadn’t told anyone, not even Xavier, about this fight. She didn’t want to think about someone else being Fred’s guardian. That was her job—legally, she was sure. So from then on she spent most of her days, sitting with him, rubbing his back as often as her stiff fingers allowed and feeding him the macaroni and cheese he had become addicted to. Sometimes he called her Baby, a tiny chip of memory edging up from a previous life, perhaps, but as the weeks went by, his name for her became Mother. She didn’t drink wine until he went to bed, which was quite early now that he believed he was a little boy. She dressed him every morning, adjusted his headphones and set up his tape, so that if Ron came by, he would find his father clean and in his chair. She didn’t mind feeding Fred, making sure he got to the toilet, helping him shower, but then he started peeing his pants and the rest of it. After one really bad weekend, Jackie had had it with sickness and health and old age and she hired a set of caretakers.
* * *
She still could not believe the way her marriage had come to a dead halt a month ago. She had gone to an exercise class, one of the few indulgences she allowed herself after Fred took his downturn. When she got home and called out her usual “Hello, honey,” she was answered by a slight stir of breath, her own. Nothing else. Even the caretaker was gone.
She went into Fred’s den and saw dust babies where her husband’s tapes and earphones and chair had been. In their bedroom, gray outlines marked the absence of Margaret’s scarfed picture and the silk rug. In the kitchen, on the island next to a dried up bowl of mac and cheese, Jackie found the court order accusing her of suspected elder abuse giving Ron as guardian the right to move his father to a more acceptable place—Ron’s home. It also instructed her to not come within five hundred feet of that home until the matter was settled.
Jackie’s first thought, when it all sunk in, was to wonder how Ron’s exquisitely anal wife would deal with an incontinent father-in-law. Her second thought was the realization that for the first time in almost ten years, she was free. The next day, she cleaned closets, polished window panes, and cooked dinner for herself and Xavier.
She had met the priest twenty years before, as her marriage to Mitch was winding down, and she had gone back to work as a physical therapist. One of her contracts brought her to the monastery’s care facility where she worked with elderly patients in various stages of rehabilitation or disintegration. Xavier was thirty-five to her forty-something and he had deep brown eyes and lovely hands which at that moment patted the shoulder of Mrs. Pierson, Jackie’s next client, torqued into a wheelchair. His gold ring brushed her aged neck, a ring embossed with a cross, Jackie noticed, the only piece of the man that indicated his vocation. The rest of him wore a good-looking silk shirt and slacks.
“I feel so bad,” Mrs. Pierson was saying, “and I know it is my fault. I should have never told Henry to quit snoring or go sleep on the couch.”
Jackie looked at the priest.
“Mrs. Pierson’s husband died on that couch fifteen years ago.”
Jackie nodded. “Come on, dear, we’ll take your mind off your worries with a little exercise,” and she wheeled the old lady into the treatment room. Later, Xavier introduced himself and told her he admired the way she didn’t deny Mrs. Pierson her feelings. “Everybody needs validation of her feelings,” he said, and with that, Jackie started to tear up. He led her to the chapel and they talked, the first of many times Jackie turned to Xavier for validation and for, well, she had to admit it to herself, she was attracted to him. At first, she blamed her unhappy marriage for nudging her into this impossible crush, but even after she and Mitch were divorced, she resettled in an apartment, her girls in college, her former husband successfully boxed and stored in an only-sometimes-conscious part of her brain, she still got slightly sick to her stomach whenever she thought of the brown-eyed priest.
“Do you miss sex?” she asked several years into their friendship. By then they were intimate and honest with each other. Good friends, in fact. Jackie had accepted Xavier’s invitation to a religious retreat in Montana, not really knowing what a retreat was. So far, it had meant a few titillating moments with Xavier like this one, and many quiet moments with herself, listening to chanting monks and red-winged blackbirds. At this particular moment, they lay under a tree, the only one within sight, chewing on the hard bread baked each morning by the retreat’s cook, a bottle of forbidden wine smuggled in by Jackie between them.
“Of course,” he answered. “I always will. But it was my choice. I can live with that decision.”
“How?” Jackie asked, thinking of her own craving for both Xavier and the several other men she was seeing. How, or rather, why would one make that decision? “Are you gay?” she asked, terrified at the thought.
“I’m attracted to women. I’m attracted to you.”
“And?”
“That’s it. “
“And?”
“I sublimate.” Seeing the look on Jackie’s face, he added, “and that too.”
“What?”
“Pray, of course.” Xavier laughed and Jackie laughed, and she felt a flurry of hope, a prayer of a chance. Somehow, the conversation swerved to her need to be the pursuer, not the pursued, the most recent example being the painter Jackie had hired who had never quite gotten his overalls back on once he’d entered the door. “Maybe I need to feel in control,” Jackie commented, not understanding that years later she would be there from necessity and that it wouldn’t feel that great any more.
“I think you’re afraid of being loved,” Xavier said.
Jackie thought about it for a minute, answered, “But you love me and I’m not afraid.”
“Yes,” Xavier said, and Jackie imagined that he was praying.
After the house painter, there was the Reichian body-work person, who met her at his door in black jockey shorts. Once she settled on his mat, he pressed at every nerve in her body until she tingled with pain and pleasure and then told her to go home. “Why?” she asked, barely able to sit up.
“It’s the anticipation,” he answered, “that we seek.”
The next time he did something with his teeth that felt like a chipmunk gnawing a nut, and she nearly exploded, and he sent her home again.
When he met her the third time, naked under a samurai’s robe, white teeth glimmering, she told him to anticipate fucking himself and slammed the screen door on his foot. Anticipation was one thing, torture was another. And so it went, one strange man after another, until she took Fred as a client and then as a husband.
* * *
Jackie rereads the attorney’s letter. As guardian of his father, Ron is initiating divorce proceedings in his father’s name. The reason, abandonment and emotional distress. Abandonment! She reaches for the phone and manages to dial the number at the top of the letterhead. A cool, robotic voice answers and after a few sputtering moments, Jackie is connected with the signature at the bottom of the page.
“Abandonment!” she explodes. “His son took him away from this house, and has not allowed me to visit my husband or to phone. If anyone has been abandoned, it’s me!’
“Mrs. Clayton. I cannot discuss this with you. I would advise you to get an attorney to help you through this
.” The man hangs up, and Jackie is left with an empty phone and a pain in her stomach. She leans back in her favorite mohair chair to sort things out. I have the pre-nup, she reassures herself, and for two months Ron has sent me the monthly check it promised. He’s just trying to scare me.
Without a blink, her eyes cloud up, and she is crying for Fred. What, in that foggy mind of his, must he think has happened? That she’s left him, dropped dead, stolen his house? Jackie blots her eyes on her collar, pours another glass of wine.
“I don’t know where to get a lawyer,” she tells Xavier the next day. “And I can’t afford one.”
She can’t read the expression on her priest’s face. Exasperation? Concern?
“I can lend you a little, to get you started. Ask one of your divorced friends for a name. It’s not that bad, Jackie. You can do it.”
Desire? Maybe? Jackie sips her latte and tries to capture the idea. As usual, Xavier is wearing civilian clothes, an open-necked sport shirt and pleatless khakis. A bit of black curl laps at his throat. At fifty, he is cragging out a little, the way runners do, the downward valleys in his cheeks giving him a solemn, thoughtful look like Abraham Lincoln. His glance sweeps into all of her empty places, and despite her depression, she smiles for the first time in a couple of days. “Thank you,” she says. She resists reaching for his hand. She always moves too fast. This will have to be slow.
“You need to take a little time for yourself,” Xavier is saying. “Nothing will happen for a while, once the attorneys take over. Why don’t you take a week’s retreat at St. Rose Ranch again? You said you liked it the first time you went.”
That’s true, she remembers. She had liked the silence, the long early morning walks, the conversations with the solemn men and women taking their annual breaks at the foot of mountains which lay like stone giants as far as one could see. She’d never felt safer. For a few days, she even thought she might become a Catholic, but as she read and talked, she understood that she could not be confined by someone else’s idea of God. Not that she had a clue what God was, even now, at least that she could put into words. But the stony peaks, the tumbleweed drifting into the fences of the ranch, the eagle soaring above her, all informed her that She existed.
Xavier is right. Jackie agrees she needs to move off this pathetic spot. “When are you going?”
“In two weeks. I’ll make reservations and we can travel together. By train?”
“No,” Jackie answers, her heart tap dancing under her ribs. “I’ll drive.”
A day later, she hires a lawyer, Beth Newman, shows her the letter, asks her to take care of it. Jackie explains that it all seems illogical, since she has a pre-nuptial contract, provision for a monthly support, the gift of the house in case of divorce or his death.
“That’s it?”
“I think so. He and his attorney met a few times a while back. I don’t think anything’s changed as far as I’m concerned.”
“You don’t?” Beth asks and Jackie understands that it has. This divorce isn’t about the supposed lack of care she had given Fred, her mistakes or the trouble with the aide, Bella Blue. It’s about a guardian removing an-ex wife from an old man’s will.
“Shit. When the two of them came out of the den arm-in-arm, I thought my almost-new husband and his loving son had been having a little confab about marriage, maybe about sex, the opposite, of course, of the usual father/son talk before a wedding. I was so stupid.”
Beth shoves a box of tissues at her and tells her not to give up. Jackie has the contract to back her up. She’ll call when she knows more. Jackie leaves the office convinced that her attorney also thinks she is stupid. When she gets home, she rubs her aching hands with almond oil and remembers Fred under those hands and his little groans of pleasure. In fact, the whole Fred thing has been stupid, as her daughter Sally had warned years before. She should call Sally, ask what Madison wants for his eighth birthday, maybe talk a little.
Sally answers on the first ring. “Oh, hi,” she says. She seems to be mewing. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just have a cold or something. What about you? You sound horrible.”
The wine is taking over. Jackie skips over the birthday. “You were right, Sally. I shouldn’t have married Fred. “
“Mom, I can’t do this right now.”
“Goodbye, then.” Jackie hangs up. No use calling her other daughters. Moira and Stephanie, caught up as usual trying to outdo each other, are in the midst of their own divorces. Xavier is teaching a course in retrograde ontology two states away. Her friends, the few she’s managed to hang on to during this marriage, are struck dumb by her situation and will only say, “Poor, Jackie.” She reaches for the wine bottle as the phone rings.
“Sorry, Mom. I’m not in a good place. I hurt your feelings.” Then Sally‘s little-girl voice wails the story her gone-wrong relationship with Billie, the fight over custody of their son Madison, the other woman, the emptying of the house including the Cuisinart and the above-ground swimming pool that Madison loves so much, and the final insult of discovering that the other woman is the other man. “How could I have been so stupid?” Sally moans, and for once in her life, Jackie can identify with her youngest daughter.
“I think we all are stupid, at one time or another,” she says. “Seems to go along with the fear of death.“ Jackie doesn’t know why she said that—probably something Xavier has speculated on in one of their attempts to be philosophical. Ontology, maybe.
“I’m not afraid of death, Mom. I’m afraid of life.” The silence that follows these words frightens Jackie more the sobs that preceded it.
“Come home, Sally. I’ll be gone for a week, but you can relax here, get away from the phone calls, whatever, and I have a Cuisinart. You can cook for me when I get back from Montana.”
“Mom, not the priest again.”
“He’s a friend, Sally. Maybe my one friend.”
Sally will come in a few days, bring Madison if she can get him away from Billie, and in the meantime she will try to align her life forces by practicing her Qigong and meditating.
Only after they hang up does Jackie realize that she hasn’t told Sally that her step brother Ron is divorcing his mother-in-law. Probably good that I haven’t, she thinks. You can only ask so much of Qigong. Besides, she is going to try a little meditation herself, at St. Rose Ranch, as well as whatever else that place might offer as solace. She packs her jeans and swimsuit, has her nails done, and waits for her daughter to appear at her doorstep.
Madison stands stone-like as mother and daughter fling themselves at each other. His hooded eyes examine the doormat, his upper lip stretches across two over-sized front teeth in a vise of a pout. He closes his eyes when Jackie bends to hug him. Spiky hair pokes at her breast, her kiss lands somewhere near his shoulder.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, squatting to try to look at him straight on. His answer comes in the narrow glance he gives her before he turns and wheels his suitcase through the door.
Sally shrugs. “He lost his Gameboy on the plane,” she whispers. “I told him Portland has Gameboys too.”
“Ah,” Jackie answers. Gameboys are easy. Losing someone isn’t, as her grandson is beginning to discover.
For two days the three of them go to movies, poke at the new electronic game, and get to know the dog and the boy who live next door. Madison smiles once or twice, and by the time Jackie drives off to pick up Xavier, she is smiling also. The trip will take two days. They’ll stop somewhere in the middle at a motel. Jackie does not allow herself to think any further than that.
* * *
For the first hour or two, rolling through the Columbia Gorge, they don’t say much. The yellow hills, the river that carved them, don’t seem to call for words. After a while, Xavier points out the faint trail of wagon wheels above them. “Pioneers. Left their mark on the world,” and Jackie says, “I would have liked to be a pioneer,” and Xavier tells her she’d be a good one.
Then they talk about
Sally and Madison, the chilly female attorney, and Xavier’s classes on the meaning of the term God. Then he is silent, and Jackie sees that he is asleep, his head bobbing lightly against the car window. For the next two hundred miles she punches at the radio-seek button, trying to find a music station that sends out something other than Christian rock or seventies oldies. She finally gives up and wishes she had brought along one of Fred’s tapes, anything to keep her mind occupied. The tanned, veined hand lying on its lap beside her, its ring catching odd shards of sunlight, seems to be asking to be touched. The knee, dark hairs bristling where the shorts end and the quads begin, demands to be squeezed.
Jackie blinks and tells herself to knock it off. This is what always happens. She gets swept into doing stuff she shouldn’t do, stuff that always ends with her wondering if she were possessed or something. In college she’d stalked Mitch into a barbershop and he, under a shroud of white cloth, the electric razor raising the hairs on his neck, could not escape her invitation to the Gamma Ps dance. Later, under similar circumstances involving pregnancy, she’d led him into marriage. She’d sucked the toes of the bodywork guy and look where that got her. The painter had obviously met lonely housewives before but maybe not one who asked him to use a paintbrush the way she requested. She had to threaten harassment to get rid of him. And dear Fred. He didn’t know what hit him the morning she swirled the almond oil over his nipples and then swirled on and on.
Passion, that was how she tried to explain it over wine to her sorority sisters, the time they gotten together to celebrate their sixtieth birthdays at Madge’s beach cabin. The three of them had listened in, shaking their heads, as she called home to make sure Fred hadn’t burned the house down.
“What have you gotten yourself into this time, Jackie?” They couldn’t imagine what had led her into Fred’s skinny arms.
“Wasn’t his arms,” Jackie had answered and let them suppose whatever they wished.
