by Nancy Thayer
“You’re right,” Jack said, lowering his head into his hands. The weight of all that had happened, that he had caused to happen, and what was going to come to him because of his actions now seemed to sink onto his back, pressing him into the ground. “Married junior professors shouldn’t screw around in public either. I was an ass. I’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
“You won’t be dismissed,” Pauline said. “You’re a popular teacher, and it would be difficult replacing you right away. You’ve got a three-year contract, right? I’m not sure what Hudson will do, but he’s not the ogre you think he is. He’ll probably put you on some kind of private probation. He’s not the type to hold a grudge. I know he’s cold, but he’s capable of generosity of imagination.”
Douglas laughed again, his brief bark of a laugh. “It won’t take Hudson much ‘generosity of imagination’ to understand what Jack was up to with Daphne. Poor old Hudson has been mooning around Daphne all his life.”
“He has?” Jack was shocked. “Then why hasn’t he—?”
“He’s married,” Pauline said. “He’s tried to be a good man.” She looked into the depths of her Scotch glass. “Now look where his goodness has got him,” she said. “I’ll bet he’s more miserable than anyone else. Poor Hudson.”
“Poor Hudson,” Jack echoed, his voice bitter. He was so depressed he thought he might actually cry. “I should go home. Thank you for your help.”
Pauline scrutinized Jack. “You’re not too soused? I don’t want you leaving here too drunk to drive.”
Jack stood up. “I’m fine.”
Douglas stood up too, and surprised Jack by putting an arm around him in a fatherly way. Looking at his wife, he said, “I find that in times like this, shock and dejection keep one unpleasantly sober, no matter how much one drinks.” He patted Jack on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right. This isn’t as bad as it seems. This is the first time I’ve heard of Hudson making such a major decision with such haste, and I’ll be very surprised if we can’t persuade him to change his mind. So this is not the end of the world for anyone.”
“You’re right, darling!” Pauline said. “He’s right, Jack. It isn’t like Hudson to make such a snap decision. I’ll bet that’s why Daphne’s gone off to Boston, to give Hudson time to cool down and change his mind. It will be all right. Don’t worry.”
The Whites’ optimism and kindness buoyed Jack up during his drive back to his house in the hills. But once back inside that house, with the cold black night surrounding him, he felt boxed in by loneliness.
The little Christmas tree, the short tree, stood on a table near the glass wall. There were no presents under it, and he had not turned on its lights, so it looked dreary, its limbs drooping. Carey Ann had been right. Every now and then it would lose a few needles, which would fall with a sifting whispering noise, a ghostly sly secretive noise, causing him to look up suddenly from what he was reading, thinking: What was that? Oh, yeah, the tree.
The ghosts of Christmas. A good literary tradition. No ghosts haunted this house—it was too modern for that, although perhaps after this Christmas there would be some. What was dying now, or could die? His marriage? Certainly, if she found out, Carey Ann’s trust. Jack leaned against the high wall of glass separating him from the plunge down the mountain and felt the glass cooling his Scotch-fevered face. The cold was almost painful. In spite of the realtor’s suave assurances, their heating bill was going to have to be astronomical; this glass might be triple-glazed and thermopaned and ten other technological wonders, but he could feel the cold coming in, and he knew it was coming in all up and down and across the height and width of this wall of window.
Below, far below, a few lights sparkled from cars passing along Route 2 up to Plover and from the few houses unscreened by evergreens. It probably was lonely up here for Carey Ann and Alexandra. It would be even lonelier as Alexandra grew older. When he was a child, one of his greatest happinesses had been to run screaming out the door and across grassy lawns to the homes of friends. Neighborhoods. Children needed neighborhoods. Families needed communities.
One thing was for sure: he wouldn’t have gone to Daphne’s in a lust-crazed fit if their homes had been in a neighborhood where people they knew might see him going in the door and coming out again.
Did that mean that man by nature would be immoral if he were certain of the security of privacy? Did that mean that Jack by nature was immoral as long as he wasn’t worried about getting caught? No. He wasn’t so clever. Look how he had behaved in Peabody Hall, of all places.
Things were not going well. Things were not working out right. Things were botched.
Jack poured himself another Scotch, pulled a chair up to the window so that he could rest, leaning forward, cooling his forehead on the cold window. Looking at the black night. Now. He would be logical. Organized. Sensible.
What did he want?
He wanted Alexandra to live healthily and happily.
He wanted Carey Ann to be happy and to love him as she had loved him the first year of their marriage.
He wanted to be a novelist.
And right there his mind screeched to a halt, slammed into the cold hard facts of life: he couldn’t support his family, he couldn’t keep his daughter happy and healthy if he tried to write instead of teaching. He wasn’t independently wealthy. He had to work.
Jack tossed back the rest of his Scotch. At this rate he’d be sloppy drunk and singing to himself before long. He could also count on a wicked hangover. Was this the way to live a life? If he was so fucking intelligent, why was he in this mess? Why couldn’t he figure anything out?
“Oh, Carey Ann,” he said aloud. “If you love me, why aren’t you with me now? If you were here, everything would be all right.”
His words, his loneliness, his desperation, his self-hatred, his need, his Scotch, and, not the least, never the least, the most, his love, his love, streaked a crystal path of clarity through his foggy brain, culminating in a thought that blazed in the darkness of his mind like the Christmas star in the night sky:
Why wasn’t he with Carey Ann?
The phone was ringing and ringing. Riiingg! That was the sixteenth time. But Daphne wouldn’t answer it. Maybe she would never answer the phone again. Why should she? Who in the world would she want to talk to? It gave her a feeling of power, not answering the phone; she sat at the kitchen table and watched the phone ring, sending malevolent glares toward the device of plastic and wires from her swollen red-rimmed angry burning eyes.
She had held up very well until now, and now surely she had the right to dissolve in a fit of self-pity, righteous anger, despair—grief. Yes, come on, you snake of bitterness, and uncoil, unwind, stretch out to your full length and slither, flick, flare, through my limbs and veins and nerves and vessels, fill me full. Of bile. She felt the monster she had always carried within her unleashed now, turning, growing, expanding, pricking, biting, spitting, piercing, ejecting poison into her every cell. If she sat here at her kitchen table, in the dark, if she sat here long enough, she would undergo a metamorphosis and turn into a viper herself, snakewoman, viperwoman: serpent. Yes, and then she would crawl on her belly beneath this house and die.
Cynthia was back in California. At least there was that: she was safely back, and Daphne had spent four dazzling days with her in Boston. Probably it was the best time they had ever had together in all their lives, at least since Cynthia was a mother-loving child. It helped a lot that Daphne had treated herself and Cynthia to all kinds of pleasures. Tea at the Ritz; twenty-five dollars spent right there. Imagine. They saw all the newest movies, and spent an afternoon at the dark, ornate, beautiful, slightly vampirish Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Taxis instead of subways, and shopping at Bonwit Teller. Well, they had been frugal then, shopping at the Finale Shop on the top floor, where everything was discounted.
She hadn’t let Cynthia have a hint of what was going on. Was that because she wanted Cynthia to remember her, for once, a
s gay and vivid and witty and splendid, since it would be the last time she would see her mother?
Well, had she thought that? Was that what she thought now?
Daphne sat at her kitchen table in the dark, without the tiniest amount of energy or desire to fix herself so much as a cup of coffee. This morning she had put Cynthia on the plane to California, and now she had called California and heard that Cynthia was safely there. There was nothing else in the world that Daphne wanted. Her stomach disagreed; it growled; she had not eaten since yesterday. But she did not care. Given time, the snake of bitterness swelling inside her would devour her stomach and she wouldn’t feel hunger pains anymore.
Daphne sat at the kitchen table in the same pair of black wool trousers, black boots, and black-red-and-white bulky mohair sweater that she had donned that morning, pretending to her usual vanity so that Cynthia would think all was well. After driving Cyn to the airport and returning home, Daphne had been so tired, so enervated, that she had collapsed on this kitchen chair. She had taken her dangling red-and-gold earrings off and placed them on the table side by side and played with them for a while, lining them up parallel or crisscrossing them. That was what she had done today: waited to call Cynthia to be certain she was safely home—she had told Cyn not to call her (she didn’t want to answer the phone)—and toyed with her earrings. The slender red-and-gold strips looked like fringe; but she could not braid them, they were too stiff. Finally she had just stared at them, unmoving.
Daphne thought she would just sit there forever. Or, when sleep came, she would wrap her coat around her and put her head down on the table and simply close her eyes.
Could one die so easily? Could one just give up, just surrender, and lie down, wrapped in warmth, and die? Or would the greedy body drag itself, fighting against its soul, over to the breadbox for nourishment? These were interesting questions, Daphne thought. How easy would it be to die? All the years and months and days and hours and vivid terrifying seconds when she had worried about the easiness of death: for herself, when Cyn was a baby and a little child; for Cyn always—car accidents, cancer, drowning in the summer, pneumonia in the winter; and Daphne had prayed every night that her daughter would remain alive. And she had. But all those nights it had seemed to Daphne that death was the easy thing, life fragile and vulnerable and frail. Maybe she had been wrong. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see? To see, if at some point in the future days, in spite of herself, in spite of what she truly, truly desired, her body betrayed her and ate.
Well, she could take something. She had sleeping pills, she had booze. Why not do that? How serious was she about this death business? Really. She had refused herself a good stiff drink, or rest with the help of pills, because she didn’t want the consolation, the reprieve from grief, the fog and numbing, the comfort. She had blanked everything from her mind during the four days she spent with Cynthia in Boston, but now there was no more reason for blankness, and she wanted to let it all in, accept the truth, see her life for what it was, for what it had become.
Dickens was still in the kennel. She had not picked him up yet. Good thing. He would get hungry whether she did or not. She remembered a story she’d heard about an old woman who had lived with her dog for twelve years, a loving couple, until the old woman died one day, and no one knew about it for a week, and when people finally broke into the house to check, they found that the dog, starving, had started to eat the old woman. Daphne could understand that. It didn’t appall her. The thought of old Dickens gnawing on her upper arm or thigh didn’t bother her. She envisioned him trotting around the house with her femur between his jaws; Dickens would be both proud and nervous, worried even in an empty house that someone would deprive him of his bone. He’d probably try to hide it somewhere, under the sofa, under the bed. Daphne found an odd consolation and a consoling grim humor in this vision. She wished she had gotten Dickens, after all, from the kennel.
But she hadn’t. She was alone. It was night, and very cold out, and all beings human or not were tucked away somewhere for warmth. Even she was warm. There was a thought. Wasn’t dying of hypothermia supposed to be relatively pleasant? Didn’t one just drift off into a dream? Daphne thought for a while about going outside, but couldn’t find the momentum to move.
After a while, she pulled the upper part of the coat around her, and, adjusting the hood so that it cushioned her head against the hardness of the wood, lay her head on the table, her hands in her lap. She closed her eyes. She had cried so much all day, starting as soon as Cynthia walked down the ramp into the plane to California, that her eyes burned painfully. It was a relief to close them. But more tears were building up, misery was bubbling away like a jam in the cauldron of her body. God, it hurt to be so sad!
Oh, maybe she would take something, everything.
But still she could not move.
There was a knocking on the front door. Not the wind. Who could it be at eleven at night? Who cared? Daphne didn’t have the energy to answer, and after a while the knocking went away.
“Daphne!”
The shout, so close by, made Daphne jump and nearly scream. Lifting her head off the table, she looked around; was this it, had she died so peacefully and easily, and that was God, calling her home?
No. It was Hudson Jennings, standing outside her kitchen window, hands cupped around his mouth, looking in at her. If the moonlight hadn’t been so bright on the snow, she wouldn’t have been able to make out his features so clearly. His thick dark hair was disheveled and hung down his forehead, brushing against the top of his glasses. He was wearing a cashmere coat with the collar turned up around his neck against the cold. His hands were in thick dark brown suede gloves. Daphne knew these clothes well; Hudson came to work in them every day. But he wasn’t wearing his plaid cap. He always wore his plaid cap in the winter. Claire wouldn’t have let him out the door into the cold without that plaid cap. Hudson was going wild. Daphne stared at him, thinking all these things, still too tired to do anything.
And why do anything? Why get up, why let him in? He would bumble and stumble and apologize, she assumed. Probably he would say he had arranged for her not to be fired but to work in another department, in another building. Daphne didn’t want to work in another department in another building or in his department in Peabody Hall. Daphne didn’t want to do anything.
“Let me in!” Hudson commanded, pounding on the window with both fists.
“Go away, Hudson,” Daphne said, but not very loudly. She didn’t have the energy to yell.
“Daphne! Let. Me. In!”
Daphne pulled the hood of her coat over her head and laid her head, thus insulated, back down on the kitchen table, facing away from the window so she wouldn’t have to look at Hudson. His noises were muffled. He would go away soon.
When the sound of splintering glass came, Daphne was surprised enough to sit up again. Hudson had put his hand through a pane in the kitchen door, and was reaching in to turn the door handle. The jagged glass sliced into the thick cashmere sleeve; Claire would not be happy about that at all.
Hudson entered the kitchen, stomping his feet to shake off the snow. He looked slightly insane, his hair flying in all directions, his skin blotching red and white with cold, his glasses sliding down the ridge of his nose, his eyes above them as huge as a madman’s.
“I really don’t want to see you, Hudson,” Daphne said. She thought about putting her head back on the table and covering it with the coat, but decided that would be too childish. She might as well keep some dignity about her. It was a pleasure to watch Hudson losing some of his.
Hudson crossed the kitchen without speaking, opened the drawer where she kept her odds and ends, and pulled out a roll of tape and scissors. He reached between the stove and sink and pulled out a brown grocery sack. Back at the kitchen door, he framed the broken pane very neatly with a triple layer of grocery sack and taped it on. Then he put the tape and scissors away, shut the door, threw the rest of the sack in the trash.
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
12
The day after Hudson Jennings caught Jack with Daphne, Jack packed his bags and flew to Kansas City to be with his wife. It wasn’t until he was at the airport that he remembered he was supposed to see Hudson Jennings that morning; he called the office and left a message with Hudson’s secretary that he had been unexpectedly called out of town on an emergency. Let Hudson get pissed off that he didn’t show up for the reprimand, Jack thought. How much more trouble could he be in, after all?
He didn’t call Carey Ann to let her know he was coming—he thought a surprise would be more romantic—and he didn’t plan his life any further than that. Across the aisle from him on the plane was a family with a little girl much like Alexandra. She was three years old, and talkative and strong-willed. Jack had brought a book with him to read on the flight, but he found himself unable to concentrate on it. He sat staring at it, pretending to read, but really listening to the family across the aisle, and even, occasionally, sneaking glances at them.
The mother had her daughter in her lap and was reading to her from The Cat in the Hat. The little girl echoed the words, articulating carefully, and traced the pictures with chubby fingers, then finally nuzzled up against her mother, twisting to get comfortable; she stuck her thumb in her mouth, she sighed, she relaxed against her mother’s arm, and immediately fell asleep. Her skin was so very white and her curly hair so fine that the little girl looked terribly fragile, and Jack wondered if the mother shouldn’t put her seat belt around the little girl somehow; was the mother’s arm protection enough?
