Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  The family dined together and the talk was of Gerard’s upcoming trip. He had been invited by the government of Brazil to visit a remote catchment near the Ecuadorian border.

  “How long will you be gone?” Liz asked.

  “Six months. Perhaps longer. And then I have been offered a job—”

  “Please, Gerard,” Madame Robin said.

  “—in Belize.”

  “Do not spoil our dinner.”

  He explained to Liz, “Maman does not want her only son to leave France. She dictates my comings and goings as if I were a child.” It was clear from the way he spoke that this amused him.

  Madame Robin said, “Go to Germany if you must. To Italy or even England, but not this place, Belize.”

  Liz said, “They have wonderful rain forests there, don’t they?”

  “Exactement. There is nothing there but trees,” Madame Robin looked at her husband reproachfully, as if she resented his failure to take her side.

  Gerard smiled at Liz. His smile crinkled his eyes and drew his brows and his cheeks up so he looked like a boy whose pet project had been encouraged by the teacher. Only she didn’t feel anything like this man’s teacher. Her stomach fluttered and she smiled back and couldn’t stop smiling.

  As Madame Robin asked how he would store the books and furnishings from his apartment and Monsieur Robin complained about the farmers, Liz thought about love. She was almost forty and had been in love too many times to think there was anything magical about the process. Chemistry and proximity. By just walking away she could stop the process. It might take a little effort and register as a sacrifice, but it could be done. But, oh, what a waste it would be. This independent and slightly formal Frenchman, humorous and kind to his elderly parents, this man in love with trees and rain, a confirmed bachelor who would often be gone and would never ask for more than she could comfortably give: could there be anyone better suited to her?

  She bent her head toward him and a thick swing of dark hair slipped across her cheek. “They call the Luxembourg Gardens the lungs of Paris, don’t they?” She swirled the wine in her glass and looked up at him through her lashes, dimly aware of Madame’s narrowed eyes watching her. “Isn’t that what rain forests are?”

  The next afternoon was damp and gray with a wind like a heat-seeking missile engineered to slip between the buttons of her coat, down the neck and up her legs. Gerard gave her his muffler and she wrapped it three times around so he said she looked like she had no neck at all. Liz didn’t care. Overnight she had given in; her heart was sinking like a coin in a wishing well. They walked and walked and when the cold became unbearable they nicked inside antique shops and art galleries where the proprietors shot daggers with their eyes no matter how Liz and Gerard pretended to be shopping in earnest. As they stood outside a film revival house reading the bills Gerard took her hand and didn’t let go even when they were jostled in the streets crowded with busy urban professionals, dogs, and children in school uniforms clutching their books. At dusk they went up some stairs to a café and ordered little cups of foaming brown espresso.

  Liz kept thinking: At eleven tonight you go. Tonight at eleven you will leave me. Please don’t leave me.

  Her thoughts were in her eyes.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  It was a peculiar love affair. No proximity and no time to become lovers. Instead, they began a long-distance friendship by way of mail and phone. Brazil kept Gerard almost three years and their time in France never coincided. She was in New York or on a much anticipated trip to Africa or doing business in Canada. His parents met him in Rio for a family holiday. And then came an irresistible opportunity in Indonesia. Belize renewed its offer, and he turned it down again. During those years in Avignon Liz watched the mistral tear away the leaves of the sycamores in the park across the street and the new leaves bud and then the wind again. She was strangely patient and confident that when the time was right, she and Gerard would have their long postponed love affair. In the meantime she had an extended romance, unimportant but amusing in small doses, with Bernard, a director of the Avignon Festival through whom she met dozens of artists, actors and musicians; and she translated a book about Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris that earned her a few weeks in the media spotlight. She traveled twice to London to meet with Jeanne and Hannah and once they rented a car and drove up the west coast of Italy from Naples to Genoa. They met in New York, saw shows, ate too much and dished until the small hours.

  Often during those years she visited the Robins and eventually she met Gerard’s two chic sisters and their families and was invited to spend long weekends and holidays with them all at their country house in Brittany. One day Madame spoke to her using the familiar tu, and Liz felt the last barrier between them collapse.

  The Robins’ country home sat on a promontory in the Gulf of St. Malo, at the end of a narrow seaside road. It was an old stone barn to which they had added several rooms and a porch. In the front a swath of cut grass curved down to the pebbled shoreline. Under a vine-covered pergola the Robin family ate their meals at a table laid with bright cotton cloths, jars of grandchildren-gathered wildflowers and chipped Quimper.

  In the Victorian house on Casabella Road Liz had moused from room to room to avoid disturbing her scholarly parents and watched what she said for fear her words would give her away, reveal that she was less than brilliant. For all her effort, nothing she did seemed to please them much, let alone delight them. Not the way the Robins took pride and pleasure in their children and grandchildren. Why had this unusual French family taken her in and made her one of them? Why had this good fortune come to her?

  They see in you what I do, Gerard said. And they are determined to get me married before I’m fifty. For such a worthy goal a French family will unbend, even for an American.

  At the rear of the house a neighbor farmer grazed a herd of black-and-white milk cows in a field enclosed by a stone wall. The littlest Robin grandchildren begged Liz to walk around the paddock, with them on the wall pretending to be tightrope walkers.

  That one, the big one? Is it a bull? If I fall . . .

  I’ll be here, Mignon (Nu-Nu, Armand, and the others). I will protect you.

  She loved the Robin family long before she felt anything but unsatisfied lust for Gerard. Imagination was Liz’s gift, what Mrs. Buhler in the sixth grade said she had more of than was healthy, what her father said she must make her servant, not her master. On those summer days walking with the little ones, helping to prepare the meals and at the end of the day in her bed she pretended that Anouk and Etienne were her real mother and father.

  Still she expected that when the Robins really got to know her the invitations would cease. She imagined a luxury train had stopped to pick her up, a ragamuffin by the side of the tracks; and someday it would stop again and boot her off.

  All this she confided to Gerard in letters and his response was always the same.

  You do not appreciate yourself. Maman would not have chosen you for me if you had not been extraordinary . And besides, they know I love you.

  But what kind of man loved a woman he’d never slept with? He had left for Brazil too suddenly, and since then they had barely been alone. Kisses, yes, and long, tantalizing embraces, but never time for anything else. This made them laugh. If they were twenty years younger fifteen minutes in a broom closet would give them all the time and privacy they needed.

  Another funeral, this time Madame’s, a sudden and cataclysmic heart attack as she applied her makeup in the evening. Gerard was somewhere in Indonesia and could not be reached, but Liz attended—almost as a family member—and wept openly, without inhibitions, like a typical American. At the reception afterwards she stood by Etienne and held his hand. It was icy and the skin over the bones slipped beneath her fingers like satin.

  “I’ve decided to take the job in Belize,” Gerard said.

  They were in Avignon, in Liz’s condominium, four years, eight months and two weeks from
the day they met. It was winter again and despite central heating and a log fire Liz was cold. Icy rain rapped on the windows and she had stuffed a blanket under the balcony door to stop the draft but it hardly seemed to do the job.

  “Will you come with me?”

  She wrapped her bulky fisherman’s sweater more tightly around her and settled into the cushions of the overstuffed couch.

  “For a holiday. See how you like it.” He waited a beat. “It is warm in Belize, Liz.”

  She avoided his eyes. “We barely know each other.”

  “Think of sunbathing and skin diving.”

  “How many times have we been together? Barely at all and yet we’re such good friends, Gerard. I’ve never had a better friend.” Jeanne and Hannah didn’t count. They were sisters, Gerard was not a brother. She feared losing him. He knew her, he was perhaps the only person who did; but if they lived together he might not like what he knew so well. “We’ve never—”

  “We have exchanged letters twice a week for almost five years. We have spoken on the phone. You know my family better than I.”

  “But . . .”

  “Why? Because we have not been lovers?” He laughed and looked perplexed. “I admit, this is unusual. Uncharacteristic. And I mean to remedy the situation as soon as you stop talking.” He traced the line of her chin with his index finger. “With your cooperation, of course.”

  She shivered, not from cold.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said. Hackneyed words. Spoken by how many lovers over time? “Don’t you think this is kind of perfect . . . the way it is? . . .”

  “No. I am lonely without you. I love you, my Liz. I know you. I know you think my feelings will change and that you will be stranded in Central America. But I am set on this, on loving you.”

  He said come to Belize for a holiday; but he meant come to Belize, pretend you are on holiday, and if you like it stay with me. His expression said: I know this is outrageous, risky and perhaps foolish, for both of us. But come to Belize anyway. I want you, Liz.

  She told him no, she couldn’t. She didn’t have the money. Her work was in France. She didn’t have the time. She wasn’t brave anymore. She was too old. He’d change his mind, turn away, and then where would she be?

  He held her face in his hands, held her gaze in his dark brown eyes that so perfectly matched her own. And though she told herself to look away again, her heart wasn’t in it. Now at last she would know if what she felt for Gerard had been worth the years she’d given to it. Down on the street a horn blared and the wind whipped the sycamores against the roof. She closed her eyes when he kissed her and breathed deeply the faint scent of Bay Rum on his burnished skin. His arms encircled and drew her close. She let his lips open hers and tasted him on her tongue.

  An image of Bernard, the artistic director, appeared in her mind. For an instant she saw him strutting and pontificating about music and dance and wine and five-star dining, and she felt a sudden powerful revulsion for her life. She was filled with a sense of adventure she realized she hadn’t felt in many years and a desire for risk and hope and a compulsion to leave her old life and begin a new one.

  She had been seven years with Gerard. They had known each other, been good friends, for twelve. He was her longest and most committed relationship, and she loved him with a constancy of which she had not thought herself capable. The accumulation of anniversaries amazed her until she reminded herself how well they suited one another. He had his work and she had hers. Even their social lives were mostly independent of each other. Her friends were Divina, the fortune-teller, and Petula, the Englishwoman running charter boats. His were men and women who shared a passion to preserve the forest. They worked together on the guest house, but only when and as it suited them. They were faithful but free to come and go, no rites or documents held them against their will. It seemed to Liz they suited one another as the doves did on the phone wire. She loved Gerard and hoped to stay with him the rest of her life. But why shake things up with marriage? A baby would fatally unbalance them.

  In the kitchen Hannah hung up the phone next to the refrigerator and said, “That was Betts. She needs someone to run Angel over to the clinic. She’s got a fever of one hundred and one.”

  Dan said, “That’s nothing for a baby.”

  “For her it is.”

  “Babies run high temps all the time. You know that.” Dan poured a cup of coffee.

  “Can you pick Eddie up after practice and get him some new shoes and a haircut?”

  Dan added sugar to his cup and sat at the counter opposite Hannah.

  “Please, Dan?” She dug in the junk drawer for an elastic to hold back her thick curly hair. “Dan?”

  “What happened to Betts’s car?”

  “The battery’s dead. Someone left the lights on last night.”

  He shook his head.

  “Betts needs help and she called me. I’m honored that she feels comfortable doing that.” Dan stirred his coffee. “Just tell me, will you help out with Eddie? There are Nikes on sale at Big Five.”

  “Are you the only person Betts knows with a car?”

  She threw down the dishrag. “Why are you doing this? Why can’t you just say—”

  “I’m serious, Hannah. Can’t she call another volunteer?”

  “It’s Angel. You know how I feel about Angel. What if something happened to her?”

  “Your time is already committed. Or do you have more hours in your day than the rest of us? Why couldn’t you tell Betts you can’t help out because your son is counting on you to pick him up after football? And you’ve got a houseguest and you’re giving a dinner party tonight? Why couldn’t you say that?”

  “The party’ll take care of itself. I’ve already made the curry.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The point is you don’t want me to help Betts. For some reason, you resent the time I spend with Angel—”

  “Resent?” Dan laughed and tossed the spoon across the kitchen, clanging into the sink. “If I were to really let go and tell you how I feel, resentment wouldn’t begin to cover it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Take it any way you like, Hannah. Just call that woman back and tell her you are otherwise occupied today.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t take care of Eddie.” Anger thinned and hoarsened her voice; the sound diminished her confidence. “What’s the big deal, Dan. He’s your son.”

  “He’s yours too, but not so anyone’d notice. Especially not him. You act like he’s got rabies. Apart from mealtimes, you haven’t had a conversation with him in months. It’s like you’re afraid to get near him. He tries to tell you something and you ignore him.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “He loves you and you practically cringe when he’s within a foot of you. Don’t deny it. I’ve seen with my own eyes. What the hell’s going on?” Dan reached across the counter for her hand. “This is more than menopause, Hannah. There’s something the matter and I want you to tell me.”

  “Don’t goddamn doctor me.”

  Ingrid stood in the doorway. “I could hear you guys clear upstairs.” She walked to the sink and rinsed Liz’s coffee mug. “Can’t you at least wait until Aunt Liz is gone?”

  “This is none of your business, Ingrid,” Hannah said. “Unless you want to pick your brother up after practice and take him for shoes and a haircut.”

  “Dammit, Hannah.”

  Ingrid gawked at her. “You’re kidding, right? That was like some kinda macabre middle-aged joke. Right?”

  Hannah saw Dan tug on his earlobe and knew how angry he was. She hated it when Dan was angry with her; the tension clamped her chest like a vise. If she opened her mouth, her voice would sound like terminal laryngitis. But it wasn’t too late. She could stop it right now. It didn’t have to go further. Dan’s temper flared hot and then when it was over, it was over and he never held a grudge. A call to Betts was all it would take to
have him smiling again. He was right that someone else could get Angel to the clinic. But Angel didn’t need just anyone or someone.

  She spoke to Ingrid. “I’m going to San Jose in a few minutes. Angel’s running a fever. I told Betts I’d take her to the clinic.”

  Ingrid stared at her.

  “Eddie can wear his old shoes another couple of days. Give him some money and he can get a haircut on his own.” Hannah concentrated on tidying the kitchen. The automatic movements—she could load the dishwasher with her eyes closed—soothed her and she didn’t have to look at the faces of her husband and daughter. “Ingrid, what are your plans today?” She spoke as if there had been no argument.

  “Paco’s coming over in a little while. We’re going to study at his house.”

  “I thought his parents were on a trip somewhere. Japan?”

  “Korea.”

  “And they’re back now?”

  “I s’pose.” Hannah didn’t have to see the face to know the expression that went with the tone of voice. Pouted lips, sullen brows. “I dunno.”

  “I don’t want you spending the day over there alone.” Hannah ran the water hard and scrubbed ferociously at the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

  “Let her go, Hannah.”

  “If they want to study, they can do it here. In the dining room.”

  “And I say, she can go.” Dan spoke each word precisely. “You go too. Do what you must. I’ll take care of things here. Eddie’ll get his shoes. And his haircut.”

  Hannah stood like a stone, clutching the blue dishcloth so tightly it dripped onto the floor.