My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  And Jack taught English literature. He was always quoting British writers. This just made Carey Ann swoon, for they had met the year that Prince Charles married Lady Di and a wave of Anglophilia swept the world. In her deepest heart, Carey Ann thought of herself and Jack as sort of like Prince Charles and Princess Diana. After all, Jack was dark and handsome and she was fair and beautiful. Not that Carey Ann was a fool. She was just romantic. She was smart in many ways, and intuitive. She listened to Jack when he talked about his work, and she could be clever: once, when she was reading a little hands-on book to Alexandra, which involved rubbing a section of the book, then inhaling and getting a good strong whiff of peanut butter or bubble gum or peppermint, Carey Ann had grinned up at Jack and said, “Just think what kind of a scratch-and-sniff book Chaucer would have made!” When she was happy, she could make love like the Fourth of July. But what she was … well, what she really was was spoiled. She was her parents’ only child, and so pretty to look at that anyone would spoil her, but it helped that her father was so wealthy. She had gone to college in Kansas City but hadn’t been able to figure out what she wanted to do with her life except that she wanted to get married and have lots of children (another thing, Carey Ann said, that she shared with Princess Diana). After college she had moved back home into her parents’ vast house in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and she had worked at one of her father’s department stores on the Plaza, selling stuffed animals. It wasn’t what she wanted to do forever, but she enjoyed it, she was good at it, and no one could tell her she didn’t work, couldn’t hold a job.

  Jack had “courted” her—that was how Carey Ann liked to think of it—for the first year he taught in Kansas City. When his contract was renewed, he had asked Carey Ann to marry him, and had been warned by her father that he could never make her happy. Not a college professor. Not someone who made so little money and lived such a prissy (Carey Ann’s father’s estimation) life.

  But he had made her happy, that first year, when he taught at UMKC and she was pregnant. It was after Alexandra’s birth that things got difficult. Not that Lexi was a difficult baby, but any baby took a lot of care and work. And then Jack heard there was a position opening at Westhampton College and he’d applied for it and gotten it. Carey Ann didn’t want to leave Kansas City and her family and friends; the Skragses didn’t want her to leave, even though, in their own old-fashioned way, as they told Carey Ann, they believed a woman was obligated by marriage to follow her husband wherever his work took him. In the meantime, Jack had developed a depression of his own, over the realization that now that he had a child and wife to support he’d never be able to take a year off to write, at least not until he was in his eighties. His plan for his life was all turned around. But when he tried to tell Carey Ann that, she had burst into tears and said, “Well, all right, if that’s how you feel, let’s just get a divorce.” Which wasn’t what he wanted at all. “No, no,” he’d said. “I’ve always wanted to teach at Westhampton.” And that was true. He just hadn’t expected it so soon. And not with a wife and child, on a tiny salary.

  But together they had decided to make the move, and once the decision was made, they went toward their future optimistically. They almost had been happy again. But when they had come east that summer to look for a house, leaving Lexi with her grandparents, more problems had arisen. Westhampton had become such a resort area, with people flocking there in the summer for the cool mountain air and in the winter for skiing and winter sports, that the cost of real estate had skyrocketed. There was no way that young faculty, paid pittances to teach at Westhampton (but teaching there anyway, because of the prestige), could afford to buy a house. Carey Ann’s vision of herself as an American Princess Diana rapidly slipped away as she was confronted with the realistic view of a two-bedroom rental apartment with walls so thin they could hear the couple arguing next door, or a large rental house with windows that wouldn’t open, doors that wouldn’t close, mouse droppings in every room, and a kitchen with appliances that were rusty or moldy or broken or all three.

  The realtor had suggested they try Vermont, just a few minutes away. The school system wasn’t as good as the Westhampton one, the realtor told them, but Carey Ann proclaimed they’d be long gone from this area before her daughter was old enough for school. And the A-frame was a spectacular buy. Nestled in the side of the hill, it overlooked a green and winding valley. The living and dining rooms had a splendid two-story-high cathedral ceiling. Two doors led off the area, one to the small kitchen, one to the room that would become Alexandra’s playroom. A staircase led up along one wall to a sort of gallery where the two bedrooms and bathroom were. The banister and railing were all knotty pine, sturdy, unshakable, and the space between the balusters was too small for Alexandra to stick her head through. Whoever had built the house had taken care that a child not be able to fall from the high second floor. The bedrooms had wall-to-wall carpeting, as did the playroom; the living-room and kitchen floors were beautiful flagstones; and the entire house was full of light. There was even a fireplace built into the living-room wall, and Jack had been afraid that it would be a long time before he could buy a house with the luxury of a fireplace.

  Best of all, they could afford it. Barely. With Carey Ann’s father’s help. Jack agreed to borrow the down payment from his father-in-law; what else could he do? And to give the old goat his due, Mr. Skrags went out of his way not to make Jack feel second-rate or obligated or indebted.

  So now here they were, in their beautiful house in the mountains. Jack had his job and Carey Ann had her baby, and she was down there crying and he was up here sitting on the toilet in his underwear. He rose, made a face at himself in the mirror, and went into the bedroom to put on his sweats. Then he took a deep breath and went downstairs.

  Carey Ann and Lexi were sitting on the floor with a wooden puzzle. Carey Ann rose and went up to Jack, nuzzling against him. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I mean about getting all maudlin about the party. I’m just having a real insecurity attack, I guess. I don’t know anyone here, and the faculty wives I met when you interviewed here … well, people are just so different. They’re so cool and boxed up. They make me feel like I’m funny-looking or something.”

  “You could never be anything but gorgeous,” Jack said, hugging her to him. (It flashed in his mind at just that moment, however, that he had noticed—and he wasn’t usually aware of women’s clothes—how different Carey Ann had looked next to the faculty wives when they were all out to dinner when he was being interviewed in the spring. All the other women wore little gold shells in their ears if they wore any jewelry at all, and there Carey Ann had been with her earrings swinging back and forth like pieces of a chandelier amid her shimmery hair. But he couldn’t tell her that, could he?) He tried to be helpful. “Listen, when I interviewed, we met only the old faculty. There are lots of young faculty wives around. I know you’ll make friends.”

  “I want to show you something!” Carey Ann said, pulling away from him, a smile on her face.

  Honestly, Jack thought, when his wife smiled she could light up the night. She led him to the little room under the stairs, which was to be Alexandra’s playroom.

  “Ta-da!” Carey Ann said, opening the door.

  The shelves along one wall, which had been meant to hold Lexi’s toys, were stacked now with Jack’s collection of books, mostly textbooks and novels. Their old card table was set up against the window looking out over the valley, and on top of that was his old faithful portable manual typewriter, and next to that an unopened box of bond paper. There was a coffee mug on the card table, holding pens, pencils, scissors, his letter opener. Behind the card table, within easy reach, were his dictionary and thesaurus.

  “I wanted to put your leather desk set out,” Carey Ann said shyly, “but there was really no place for it, since you don’t have a desk at home. Besides, I know you like to write on the typewriter instead of longhand.”

  “Come here,” Jack said, and hugged his w
ife against him, hard. He was overwhelmed with emotion.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it? Now you’ve got your own study. Now you can write your novel.”

  “I thought … Lexi’s playroom …”

  “Well, I could see I wasn’t going to have any luck getting Lexi to keep her toys in just one room. She likes to be wherever I am, so she’d always be dragging her stuff out into the kitchen to watch me cook, or to the living room. Besides, she’s got enough room in her bedroom for all her stuff. And she doesn’t like being stuck away from everyone. But you do. You need a room all to yourself to get your writing done. Do you like it?”

  “I love it, Carey Ann. This is really sweet of you. This is really thoughtful.” He kissed her.

  “Go on,” she said. “Sit down. Look at the view.”

  Jack sat on the old wooden chair in front of the card table and looked out at the sweep of valley. She just doesn’t have a clue, he thought. How could she imagine he’d ever have the time to write a novel when he was teaching such a heavy load at Westhampton? He didn’t want to hurt Carey Ann’s feelings, but God, didn’t she understand the first thing about his life? Now that he was married and had a child, now that his life was all turned around, he had to get tenure. He dreamed of tenure like Percival dreaming of the Holy Grail. Tenure meant security, a wonderful financial and emotional security that would set him free later to write his novel. If he could get tenure, he could get a sabbatical, and in seven years he’d have his year off to write. But getting tenure these days, especially at Westhampton College, was about as easy as getting hold of the Holy Grail. It required hard work and dedication and publications, not fiction, but critical essays in the best and most erudite journals. Publish or perish. If he did any writing, it had to be critical. And he wouldn’t have a chance to get to that sort of thing until Christmas vacation.

  No, he wouldn’t find time to write fiction for years.

  But now was not the moment to break this news to Carey Ann.

  Jack pushed back his chair, rose, took her in his arms again. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  They kissed, and moved closer to each other, and Jack would gladly have shut the door and made love to Carey Ann on the floor right then and there, but Alexandra came toddling into the room, waving a plastic elephant. Wanting to please his darling daughter, wanting to please his wife, he swooped Alexandra up in his arms and carried her upside down out into the living room. He roughhoused with her for an hour, giving her pony rides on his knees, tickling her till she howled, playing with her until he was exhausted. Then he gave her a long bath and put her to bed with her bottle.

  Later, though, when Jack and Carey Ann went up to bed, Alexandra awoke, as if from an instinctive alarm, called out, climbed out of her crib, came into their bedroom, and merrily climbed into bed with them. She sat between her parents, grinning happily.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Carey Ann sighed. “I can’t get her to realize she’s got to sleep in her own crib.”

  “Let’s just put her in there and shut the door,” Jack suggested.

  Carey Ann looked at him as if he’d just become one of the criminally insane. “We can’t do that! She’d cry. You know how she’s cried whenever we’ve tried it before.” She cuddled the baby against her. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “She’s wet again.”

  It was after eleven when they fell asleep, all three of them, in their chaste bed.

  The next morning was Friday, and Jack awoke at six-thirty. He had such a routine, had awakened so regularly for so many years now, that he almost couldn’t not wake up at six-thirty, except for a week or two in the fall and spring when daylight saving time threw him off.

  He looked over at Carey Ann, who looked dead. When she slept, her skin did the same weird thing Alexandra’s did: it paled out so completely that it seemed her heart had stopped pumping and had withdrawn all the blood in her body into a tight hot chamber in the center of her heart. If he touched Carey Ann now (which he wouldn’t—she’d cry with exhaustion if awakened so early), he knew she’d be hot at her stomach, burning at her crotch, but her face was so drained of color that it looked frosty. Her long blond hair was every which way all over the pillow, and her long eyelashes curled down onto her cheeks. She looked innocent, a child herself, too young and helpless to be taking care of another child.

  Alexandra lay in the middle of the bed, as zonked-out as Carey Ann, sleeping on her stomach with her bottom sticking up in the air and her thumb at her mouth. The back of her neck was damp with moisture, her blond, almost silver hair curled from the moist heat of her little body. She had her thumb poised right at the edge of her mouth, as if even in sleep she kept it near for emergencies, and her bottle, a plastic thing that used to look like a bear but had lost some of the markings, lay next to her, drained.

  His little girl. His baby. When Alexandra saw Jack, her face lit up with ecstasy, every single time. No one else adored Jack as Lexi did. It really was something to have the power to make another human being so happy. It was also a responsibility.

  Carey Ann used to say, before they married and in that first year, that she could never ever be happy without him, but now he wondered if she could be happy with him. He would do anything in the world to make his two females happy. If only he knew what to do!

  He slipped from the bed, grabbed up his jogging things where he’d tossed them on a chair, and went into the bathroom. Then he crept out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. The sun hit him like a spotlight. God, it was a warm and brilliant day. He stood in his driveway, doing warm-up stretches. He’d been jogging five times a week for six years now. He’d started jogging at Yale when he was working on his Ph.D., feeling the need to stretch out the body that spent so many hours bent over a book, crooked and cramped at a desk or typewriter. He used to go every weekday morning to the gym, where gradually he worked up to jogging four miles around the track. He kept it up for a while when teaching in Kansas City, because he found the morning run exhilarating and refreshing. He taught better, his mind worked more quickly, his responses were sharper. After his marriage, and especially after Alexandra’s birth, he just couldn’t find the time—or the energy—to keep up those four miles. So he had settled for two, which took him only about fifteen minutes, even when he was taking it easy.

  He’d gotten in the car and measured a route up here the first day they moved into the house. It was almost exactly one mile from his doorstep to the end of a funny little lane giving onto an old cottage, and back again; then a mile in the other direction, down to the remains of an old barn, and back. It was a pretty run along a country dirt road, perfect for jogging, not as hard as street pavements, but well-packed, with no other houses in sight, mostly forest bordering the road, and dusty wildflowers and grasses, and an occasional view through the trees, as the road turned, of the valley so far down below.

  The realtor had shown him and Carey Ann the cottage. “Only forty thousand dollars,” she had said. “You just can’t find anything at that price anymore. But it’s been sold. Just like that, this spring. After being on the market for over a year.”

  “Ugh,” Carey Ann had said. “It looks like something imported from the Ozarks.”

  In a way, Jack liked the property the cottage sat on better than his own—they had no land, just a small yard—and although the view out the front was spectacular, Jack was already worrying about the heating bills and the winter wind. Their A-frame felt exposed. The little cottage, on the other hand, was sort of nestled down in among an orb of trees. It seemed so cozy, protected, a fairy-tale place cut off from the world.

  Now he headed down the dirt road, taking it easy, concentrating on his breathing. The road narrowed to a lane, the grass and saplings flickered closer to him, and the taller trees arched over, cutting off the sun. He ran through the shadowy tunnel, and, coming out into the light again, saw, with a shock, a woman seated on the steps of the cottage.

  In the instant before she opened her eyes in surprise
, he saw that she had been leaning against the cottage door, wearing a short white terry-cloth robe, her long bare legs stretched out in front of her. She had been soaking in the sun, and, perhaps, the silence, before he broke it. His breathing sounded like roaring in his ears. He supposed he was trespassing. In any case, he couldn’t just turn around and jog away; it would be rude. It would look strange.

  “Oh, hi, sorry!” he said, coming just a little closer to her, jogging in place. “I didn’t know anyone was here yet. I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, smiling. “You gave me just the shot of adrenaline I need to start the day. I didn’t know anyone lived around here.” She had short dark hair, large blue eyes, and freckles. Freckles all over, from what he could see.

  “I’m Jack Hamilton,” he said, and stopped jogging. Breathing deeply, he walked toward her, holding out his hand. “My wife and daughter and I just moved into the A-frame down the road. You have to pass it to get here.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” she said, shaking his hand. As she reached forward, her loosely tied robe fell open slightly so that he couldn’t help but see a great deal of her heavy, swinging, plump, and freckled breasts. “I’m Daphne Miller. I’m moving in today. My furniture’s coming up this morning. I was just having coffee, enjoying a few more moments of peace before the madness hits. Would you like some coffee?”

  She gestured toward the Styrofoam cup next to her on the step, and he realized the wonderful rich dark smell he had been unconsciously enjoying was coffee. Brewed coffee. Carey Ann didn’t like coffee; didn’t drink it. She would get up in the morning and pour herself a tall glass of warm diet cola, without ice, or, if it was winter, she’d put a spoonful of instant-iced-tea mix in a mug and stir hot tap water into it, making a lukewarm murky brew. He used to think the sight of her doing that, drinking that stuff, was surely one of the things people got divorced over. But now he knew that was nothing; there were much more serious matters.