“Who’re you talking to, then?”
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“You,” he says. “I’m talking to you. Hello.”
“But you told somebody it was me.”
“I did. No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you all right, Dad?”
“What’s up?” His voice quavers.
“You sound out of breath.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he says. “Really. Christ Almighty.”
“Did Mark call you?”
“Yes,” he says, still breathless. Ariana bends to pick up her discarded clothes. She holds them, staring. “I just got off the phone with my son, yes.”
“I know he’s your son, Dad, what’s wrong there?” Gail wants to know.
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Lord.” He watches Ariana getting lan-guidly back into her clothes. “I was moving books. Moving books. Jesus Christ. I’m out of breath because I was moving books.”
“You don’t have to cuss at me. It’s upset you—Mark did call you.”
“Mark called me.”
“What did he say?”
Ariana gives him a look of playful ruefulness.
“He told me, Gail, okay?”
“I know it’s hard to learn something like this over the phone.”
Butterfield watches Ariana move to the door and open it. “Wait a minute,” he says into the phone, then he covers the speaker part of it.
“Don’t leave yet,” he whispers.
“Maybe I’ll come back.” Her lovely mouth curls up at one end, and once more she raises one eyebrow.
“Dad?” Gail’s saying. “I don’t know how else to do this. I couldn’t just show up with Edie.”
“Edie,” he says. He’s watching Ariana run her hands through her shining hair. The breath is returning to him, the ability to draw it in and hold it long enough for it to travel to the nerves and ganglia at the base of his skull. He can almost stand straight again. “Gail,” he says.
“Everything’s fine, but I’ll call you right back.”
“She’s anxious to meet you.”
“I’ll call you back.”
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She hangs up with a small, muttered curse, the first part of which he hears: “Motherf—” And Ariana starts toward him, grinning, but then he puts a hand up. “Please,” he says. “We can’t do this. We have to keep from doing this. I love my wife. Please.”
“You want me to leave?” she says with an edge of incredulity. Something flashes in her eyes. “I don’t mean anything to you, do I?”
He can only stand there, staring.
“Well, do I?”
“Ariana,” he says.
“You don’t love me.”
He can’t speak.
“This is it, then. We’re over. Just like that. I was just a fuck.”
“What?” he says. “What?”
“It’s not that simple,” she tells him in a thin, toneless voice.
“No,” he says. “Of course. I don’t—I didn’t—you—we—”
“I get it,” she says. “And we’ll see. We’ll just see.” She opens the door and goes out, leaving it open. He watches her get into her car and drive away, brakes squealing.
For several minutes, he does nothing at all. And then the phone rings again, startling him once more.
“I didn’t mean to hang up on you,” Gail tells him. “Is your emergency—
whatever it was—over? I was going to leave you a message saying I’m sorry.”
“There was no emergency,” he says. “I’m sorry, too.”
“You sound awful.”
“Thank you. So do you.”
“I’m serious. What’s happening?”
“Gail, why don’t you just call back and leave me your message.”
“Haw,” she says.
They say nothing for a space. He thinks she might’ve broken the connection.
“Well, so what do you think?” she says. “Do you think it’ll be all right with Elizabeth?”
“I don’t know,” he says, because he doesn’t.
“She’s been so much help trying to find Mom.”
He draws in a breath and mutters, “You found her?”
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“No, but I think we’re close. I do. And so does Edie.”
“And you’re together.”
“We’re in love. Yes. I feel like myself for the first time in my life.”
It seems to him now that something in his failures of the last few weeks has brought all this confusion on; it is precisely as if the unhappy elements of his whole life—the fatherless youth, the Crazies, the first Elizabeth’s abandonment, and the years of a kind of stasis keeping a bookstore, living without ambition or much real energy on a trust fund, all that—as if these are swooping down at him from some height. Anyone walking into the store at this moment would see a man hunched over the counter in the posture of someone hulking against a very cold wind. But he finds that, indeed, he has the words to speak.
“Can you bring her down sometime other than Thanksgiving?”
Gail leaves a pause. “Well, I’ve sort of already asked her.”
“Okay.”
“That’s the next visit, Dad. And I want you to meet her.”
He says nothing.
“You and Elizabeth.”
“I think you might wait until after Thanksgiving.”
“She doesn’t have anywhere to go and I’m not leaving her here, Dad.
I—we’ll stay here if that’s what you want. We’ve moved in together.
We’re together.”
He’s quiet again, looking at the neat rows of books on the wall across from him. At some point in his life, he had procured these books and set them in order, just so. He had been a man convinced about the efficacy of his own efforts.
“Speaking of Mom, Edie’s pretty sure she’s in San Francisco somewhere.”
“You know what, kid? I hate to bring up a sore subject and I don’t want to be a sourpuss or anything, but nothing in me remotely wants to see your mom. I mean, not to say hello, and not to say anything else, either. I’m not even curious.” He can’t help his voice rising, though now he attempts to control it. “I don’t even want to read her name in a phone book.”
“I would still like to reestablish the connection.”
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“Gail. Go into your bathroom. Look in the mirror, look deep into your own pretty green eyes and say, ‘What the hell?’ Do that for me, will you?”
“She’s my mother.”
“She walked away from you.”
Silence.
“Sweetie?”
“I’m here.”
“Well, you have to understand how I feel.”
“I understand it. I don’t condone it.”
“Condone?” Butterfield says. “Jesus Christ. What in the world have you been reading?”
“That’s typical male-ownership talk, double-standard bullshit talk.
This is the mother of your children.”
Now Butterfield is silent. A moment passes, more breathing on the line.
“Edie says it must’ve been a combination of things that led her to do it.”
“Well, she’s certainly got a handle on it, having not been there for any of it. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Male ownership again.”
“Ownership,” Butterfield says. “What the hell. Look, whatever you want to call it, as long as that translates to you, that with all my heart, all my maleness and my ownership and all I ever was or was not or could be or want to be and can’t or can and don’t want to be—you know?
With all that, darling, I do not want to lay eyes on that woman again or hear her voice. I don’t want to hear her breathing, walking, talking, snoring, whining, humming a tune. None of it. I don’t even want to hear rumors about her. She�
��s not dead to me, Gail— She never was. That’s the closest I can come to describing how I feel about her. And, darling, I have to say that your expectations about this are a bit unreasonable. Not to say ridiculous and overbearing, entirely academic and—well— silly.”
“I can’t help it. I want to know her again.” Gail sniffles.
He’s appalled. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I know, I know. I understand. I do.”
“And I understand your anger,” Gail says.
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His anger surges again like blood behind the eyes. “Is this a psychia-try lesson?”
Silence again.
He has an image of Ariana Bromberg glaring at him and saying
“Don’t I mean anything to you?” He has to call up the situation he is presently in with his daughter. Into the phone, he says, “Look, if you want to bring your new friend, that’s fine, okay? But I don’t want to spend the holiday talking about your mother. The fact is, my life’s ambition is to go to my grave without ever catching the slightest glimpse of her. Is that clear enough? The only thing in my life that I’m more sure of is that I’m going to have to make that trip to the grave someday.
All right?”
“All right.” His daughter’s voice, clipped and narrow and unhappy with him. He’s heard it more often over the past couple of years.
“I’ll see you and your new friend on Thanksgiving,” he gets out as pleasantly as he can.
“She’s not a friend, Daddy.”
He says, “Better make friends. Even when there’s passion, baby, it’s all better if you’re friends, too.”
But she has hung up on him again. He hears the dial tone, and, for a little space, he listens to it as if to a scolding voice. Then he places the receiver in its cradle and goes and stands in the open door of his shop.
The sky is lowering, not happy. He looks up and down the street, thinking, he realizes with a kind of shudder, about Ariana, half-expecting to see her car.
c o n v a l e s c i n g
1.
Oliver walks slow down the hospital corridor with Alison on one side of him and Holly on the other. It’s almost time for lunch, and Fiona and Kalie have arrived; they’re down in the cafeteria, having a sandwich.
Alison’s in her uniform, because this is another shift day. The hospital hallway is bright, polished, sterilely designed to be warm and reassuring. There are other convalescents walking, and nurses and doctors hurrying past. With her gun in its holster, Alison bumps a tray with glass vials on it, and their attempt to catch things only causes more havoc; several of the vials fall and break. Blood everywhere. It looks like the scene of an accident. A nurse hurries over and tells them to step back.
“Did you get any on you, Officer?” the nurse says.
Oliver knows that his daughter never has gotten used to being called officer. He’s aware that Alison doesn’t know she’s been addressed. He takes her arm just above the wrist. “Sweetie?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Alison seems more upset than is called for under the circumstance.
Oliver says, “Hey, kid. What is it?”
“I’m so clumsy,” she tells him. And looks like she might start to cry.
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“I’m getting out of here this week,” Oliver says. “Nothing more to worry about, darling.”
The nurse produces rubber gloves from somewhere on her person and puts them on with a smacking sound, bending to pick up the vials that haven’t broken.
Oliver stands straight between the two women, being held upright by them. He’s unable quite to believe that he’ll ever be able to go home. In the window of a door across the hall, he sees a reflection of his own face, the look of a kind of fixed surprise in it and the incessant slow turning back and forth. It seems to him that the world is growing ever more dangerous, with its vials of possibly diseased blood. He knows these dark thoughts are part of his recovery, yet they discourage him. He looks over at Alison and has a moment of experiencing what a weight he must be in her still-young life. Alison’s talking about how she has always been clumsy, and Holly tells about having knocked over a valuable scrim at a dinner party in a wealthy person’s house in Flor-ence, how the scrim toppled into a glass cabinet full of curios under soft light, the whole thing shattering like the end of the world. “For the longest time,” she says, “everyone in that room stared at me. Complete stunned silent consternation and judgment, staring. And all I could say was, ‘Whoops.’”
Alison laughs and thanks her for the solace, using the word.
“Well,” Holly says with a touch of friendly sarcasm, “I’m glad it makes you happy.”
“Did Stanley come to work at your house this morning?” Alison asks suddenly.
“I left so early,” says Holly. “I haven’t talked to Fiona.”
Alison glances down at her hands. To her father, she has always looked small in the uniform, like a kid playing at being a cop, though she’s, in fact, very good at her job and well respected by everyone with whom she works.
“Why the—interest in Stanley?” he asks her.
“I want the work to proceed.” Her smile is cryptic.
“All right,” Oliver says, and smiles back.
“Nice young man,” Holly puts in, standing there with one hand on t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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her hip and the other on Oliver’s elbow, helping to support him. Oliver can move a little easier. In fact, things are improving—aches and all, setbacks and all. He can feel the returning strength in his legs as he moves again, shuffling along. It’s so hard to make himself fully believe it.
“I never can get used to this equipment hanging off me,” Alison says, moving the belt with her pistol in it around toward her middle. He thinks of touching the side of her face, a gesture he has mostly stopped making, but he brought her up with it from the time of her earliest infancy, the hand, open, lightly pressed to her cheek, and he would say,
“Hello, little girl.” He can do no such thing now, of course. Not now.
He says an old joke between them: “How many guys went too fast today hoping you’d pull them over?”
She shakes her head but smiles and pats the back of his hand. It sends a thrill of fatherly pride through him: this grown woman.
Earlier, he and Holly talked a little about his time in Vietnam and her life in Scotland with Mr. Grey. Holly went on about Mr. Grey’s temper and his sense of justice. Oliver felt strangely diminished by com-parison, and he observed this feeling in himself, surmising it. Because he was uneasy, he began telling stories and was happily surprised at her obvious enjoyment of them.
He told her about a time when he and his father used his father’s knowledge of electricity to rig a friend’s television set with a circuit breaker—this was back when tubes were still in use—so that it would turn off when it reached a certain temperature, that of a normal television fully warmed up. The friend, his name was Clarence, was a Yankee fan and rather insufferable about it, because the Yankees were always winning, always beating the hell out of the old Washington Senators.
So, Oliver’s father, with the aid of Clarence’s wife, rigged the television set so that it would shut off just as Clarence was getting comfortable with his potato chips and his dip and his can of sardines and his Senators-Yankee game. Oliver and his father sat on a little rise in the backyard and watched through the picture window of that house as poor Clarence railed and raged at his television set, which would act like any normal television set until the moment when he sat down again and was dipping one of his chips or picking up one of his sardines. And when 280
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it became clear that Clarence was going to give up and walk over to the neighbor’s house to watch the game, Oliver and his father hurried in, to where his mother already had the television tuned to the movie of the week. Oliver and his father feigned deep interest in Swiss Family Robinson, and poor Clarence tr
aipsed back across the lawns, followed in the dark by Oliver and his father. They sat comfortably in the backyard and watched Clarence struggle with his incredibly consistent television, which kept shutting down at exact intervals, just as the game was fully visible and the announcers were clearly audible. “That’s how I got interested in electricity,” Oliver said. Holly, who had laughed through the telling, went down into something of a fit at this statement. She coughed, and her eyes bulged, and Oliver put his arm around her and was happy in that way that feels as though it might change everything forever.
“God,” Holly said. “I laugh at the story and then you said that and then I was laughing at my laughing.”
“It just hit you that way,” Oliver told her, liking her laugh while being faintly embarrassed for her.
Now, being helped by her and his daughter in the busy hallway of Point Royal Hospital, he has a surprising sense of comfort, even as he totters and has trouble getting his bearings. The two women are talking about other incidents of clumsiness, Alison telling about the time she fell asleep in a movie theater with a large Coke in her hand, and it dropped in her lap, so cold, and she laughed at it, and realized that the laugh had come at exactly the saddest moment in the film, and everyone looked at her as though she were some sort of psychopath. He kisses the side of her head, and then finds himself turning to do the same to Holly.
Holly leans slightly to accept it, and then looks at him, this woman who has hired him to divide her house in two. And who seems, since his trouble, to be getting along very well with Fiona. He says, “I have a feeling the work on your house might not be necessary anymore.”
She smiles. “That’s the sweetest thing any gentleman has ever said to me.”
He realizes with a start that she thinks he has offered some sort of gesture toward romance. The strangeness of this evidently shows in his t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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face, because she seems to hesitate, her face flushing red, and then she seeks to recover the light tone. “I’m twenty years older than you are, at the very least you know.”
Oliver’s at a loss. He hears himself say, “You and your aunt seem to be getting along so well these days.”
“Well.” She has understood him at last. “Fiona’s still doing things that drive me completely batty.”
He squeezes her arm, once, lightly. “Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
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