Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  “So, is Mark working terribly hard?”

  Wrestling the bags into the back, Jean understood just what she was getting at—Why the hell didn’t he come to meet me at the airport? She agreed that wedging bags into a small trunk was very much the sort of challenge Mark liked, though she wasn’t about to say so. “Yes, actually, he is. He’s working on a big account for kitchen appliances.”

  Phyllis, who’d left her hometown of Salt Lake City far behind, was an event planner at the New York Public Library, responsible for luncheons and fund-raisers and lavish dinners in the Great Hall. She didn’t choose the readings or entertainments but saw to the caterers, the extra coatracks, the massive floral displays. Jean didn’t have the energy to ask what her work was like now and was mindful, too, of holding a few safe topics like this in reserve. Phyllis, small as a child in the passenger seat, puckered and peered into a compact, reapplying her bougainvillea lipstick. Jean tried to remember why when she was little Phyllis’s public daubing had struck her as nothing less than indecent. She’d felt similarly scandalized whenever she’d seen a square of blotter tissue floating unflushed in her mother’s toilet with a ghostly lipstick-on-your-collar mouth print, like a kiss blown up from the sewer to tell her there was more to this woman than she’d ever know.

  “Gosh I’m glad to be here,” Phyllis said. “You have no idea how I’ve looked forward to getting some rest.” On the drive home she dozed, and when she intermittently jerked awake she told Jean again how tired she was, how desperate for early nights and quiet days, how advancing age had made drinking alcohol nearly impossible, how she’d given up her evening martini altogether, indeed how sobriety was the secret of human happiness.

  Six hours later, on the Hubbards’ terrace in the moonlight, Phyllis was going strong. She’d switched from champagne to the local firewater—demented cane, as Mark called it—served in thimble-size glasses he’d brought out sometime after twelve.

  “She would’ve stayed up talking all night if I’d let her,” Jean complained in the bathroom the next morning, testing with a finger the watery pouches under her eyes—eyes as red as if she’d spent the night in the ocean, her tongue pale, dry, and scallop edged like St. Jacques’ beaches. “If I could keep up with her,” she said in revision, whispering even though there was no chance her mother could hear. “What was all that about needing a rest?” No point chastising Mark for hauling out the shot glasses; nobody had made her drink. A world-class pourer, he didn’t believe in saving people from themselves.

  Jean didn’t complain about Phyllis’s frump remark and wasn’t about to remind him. What her mother had said, at 12:40, was “I really admire the way you completely ignore your appearance, Jeannie. You are so cool. And you’re absolutely right: hair, makeup, clothes, they’re totally unimportant, so why not just go for comfort?” And she certainly didn’t tell him about Phyllis’s unsolicited update on Larry Mond, the meteoric lawyer Jean had worked for in New York all those summers ago: the one who got away—or so her mother saw it. But in fact it was Jean who’d gotten away, run away, back to England, just as soon as things started to heat up with Larry, in truth the more likely candidate. At that age “likely” was no different from her mother’s approval: it was an active demerit.

  Phyllis had pronounced the house “adorable,” which Jean chose to be satisfied with. She popped two painkillers—one thousand milligrams of the common anti-inflammatory that had replaced the automatic aspirin of her college hangovers, and this did seem a better fit: a shrinking was just what she needed, of her capacity for emotion, by any means necessary, drugs, caffeine, and the resolve these ritual preparations hailed.

  Before going out to breakfast, she scanned the bedroom shelves for guidebooks and maps. Jean was going to plan her way to an early night. Forget the rum museum, which might offer free tastings. In the coming week they’d visit the picturesque port and the kestrel project, spend a day at a spa hotel, hit the covered market. Phyllis, the professional organizer, was commensurately responsive to any show of forethought. She’d be really impressed if there was both structure and choice, an expedition arranged like a multichambered candy dish set out for guests, and no place fit this bill better than the botanical gardens at Terre Haute.

  The vast gardens, near a ragtag village, radiated outward from the patch on which the island’s first governor had laid his vegetable plot. But according to Jean’s guidebook the botanical garden had been the dream of a Belgian, two Frenchmen, and then a Scot, each of whom had brought some new dimension to the enterprise. After that, under the authority of the newly created Department of Agriculture, nothing more had been added; or, Jean understood, the spirit of invention turned as murky and stagnant as the lily ponds.

  She stopped reading to look around her. Of course a garden had to be the projection of a single mind, or at least a succession of single minds. Unlike a marriage, she thought, even if marriage was often likened to a garden—a private district. What the Belgian and the Frenchmen and the Scot had in common was this: they’d dared to shape paradise on an island that could easily have won the bid for Eden just as they found it. “For these men,” she ventured out loud, auditioning a sentence for use in print, “nothing they found could compare with what they could make.” Phyllis was squinting at a hand-painted map of the gardens.

  “What did you find, honey?”

  Jean was just warming up and didn’t really want, just yet, to explain her free associations, these thoughts that ran from plants to persons and other imports. Ideas percolating, voiced aloud—this was a familiar, delicate process signaling the start of a column, just a nibble, nothing more, usually accompanied by a disproportionate surge of euphoria: the glow of being useful. Since Giovana, Jean was overcome with a desire to do good, like her lawyer-dad, in fact like both her parents, as if only this could turn everything around.

  Anyway, the next week’s column was now solved. Forget the properties of individual plants; it was digging in the dirt that rejuvenated (and that explained the rarity of the teenage gardener). A commonplace? Or was weeding salutary only in contrast to her recent life of stunting imposture and filth?

  “Well, what a perfect place for a party,” Phyllis said, inspecting a hothouse of ferns, orchids, begonias, and anthuriums. They came through juniper and Indian walnut trees, past a great banyan with exposed roots hanging like hair, to a massive mahogany and, irresistibly placed before it, a bench. “You know what I wish?” Phyllis said, plonking herself down.

  “What do you wish, Mom?” Jean sat beside her.

  “That instead of scattering the ashes we’d buried them under a big, beautiful tree. So we could sit with him. I hate to think of him swilling around out there in that freezing ocean.”

  Jean was accustomed to her mother starting this conversation in the middle, the thought never far from any of their minds. Billy, her older—and now much younger—brother, was killed at fifteen by a drunk driver in the winter of 1970. They’d scattered his ashes at sea; in fact, in New York Harbor, below a snow-cloaked Statue of Liberty.

  “Hmm,” Jean said. In a way her mother was right—he was still out there. Matter remained, forever. “Maybe we should bury something else of Billy’s under a big beautiful tree. Like that yellow ski hat. Whatever happened to that thing anyway?”

  Phyllis laughed. “Oh, I have it.” For a whole year, his last year, Billy had worn his stupid ski hat, during the day when he could get away with it and every single night, in an effort to mat down his wild wiry hair.

  “Do you ever worry that you’re forgetting him?” Jean asked.

  “Never. I think about him all the time.” One more way, Jean thought, grief was different for the mother, who was accustomed from the start to tracking her child’s constantly changing form. Maybe, for her, Billy’s deathly shape was only a “phase”; his being dead now, swilling around out there in the dark deep, this was just the next thing and not any kind of end to his story. Jean had worried that he was fading—his laugh was less distin
ct, though not, for some reason, his croaky, still-unresolved voice. But it wasn’t he who had faded; she’d finally figured that out. It was everyone else, including her. After his death Jean had withdrawn a little, hanging back, perhaps to stay or get nearer to Billy. Who knows if she wouldn’t have been wildly outgoing if he’d been around? The dead of course were undiminished, Jean thought, and the ghosts were all still alive, wandering along their garden paths. Certainly, on account of Billy, she simply couldn’t take any more: no more death.

  That’s it, she realized. That explained her dread of Phyllis’s visit: the possibility, now ever present, that her mother would come bringing the very worst news. Just as she had that snowy Saturday morning, after her night of hospital vigil beside her artificially breathing son, to tell Jean, at the breakfast table eating her cereal—Life cereal, in fact—that he was gone.

  “Come on, Mom.” Jean helped her up from the bench. “We’ve got miles more to go.” They turned and by wordless consent headed toward the famed lily ponds. They hadn’t gone far before Phyllis stopped again, before a towering tree—an Indian Albizia, sturdy, smooth, its trunk the warm gray of a Weimaraner. But it wasn’t the color that had arrested her mother. The tall tree was, in fact, two tall trees. A twisted vine, a vigorous Australian vine, had grown upward from the Albizia’s center, splitting the trunk to nest within it, entwining itself in the upper branches. “Symbiosis? Or parasitism?” Jean asked her mother, but Phyllis was completely captivated by this impossibly slow dance. The vision of eternal embrace made Jean think of “An Arundel Tomb,” the Larkin poem about a noble couple carved in marble, one she’d written about her senior year. She ran the end of it, or at least what she could remember, silently past her ear:

  Above their scrap of history,

  Only an attitude remains:

  Time has transfigured them into

  Untruth. The stone fidelity

  They hardly meant has come to be

  Their final blazon, and to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  It was “the stone fidelity they hardly meant” that pierced Jean now, forced as she was to think of Mark, entwined with his own Australian creeper; but to her mother she quoted only the famous last line. And she told Phyllis that the marble couple was holding hands. Her mother responded by squeezing her wrist, as if she didn’t want to presume to hold hands. Keen to dispel the solemnity of the moment, Jean reported something she’d read in Larkin’s biography, what he’d scribbled on a draft of the poem: Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years. She didn’t tell her mother another tidbit from the life, one that hadn’t struck her when she read it: that the poet liked his pornography. He would circle specialist outlets on his trips to London, usually “funking” actual ingress, losing his nerve. Schoolgirls and spanking, that’s what did it for Larkin, and a magazine called Swish.

  They stood there a while longer not talking, and then Phyllis said, “Have you been in touch with your father?”

  So here it comes. “Yes. I spoke to him, let’s see, about a week ago. Why? Any special news?” It was odd that Phyllis had said “your father,” not just “Dad.” She heard the wistful note in her mother’s voice—and it wasn’t the talk of Billy: on the contrary, communing with him was a refusal to consign him to death.

  Was Dad ill? But she’d have called, not flown for eighteen hours to tell her so.

  It was twenty years since their divorce. Could there possibly be someone new in her mother’s life? No, she’d have known. In Dad’s? Childish, of course, but the thought filled her with revulsion. No, no, and no. The parents were going to stay just as they were: plain divorced. So what was on her mother’s mind? Again she had the uneasy feeling of a preview, this one suggesting that time and age could unmake any agreement—if not her own marriage, then her parents’ divorce.

  When Phyllis spoke again she was looking at the tree, not at her daughter.

  “For nearly thirty years, I thought we’d never part. And then, for what was perhaps a mere…peccadillo—Bill was extremely handsome in those days—well, part we did. I was right. But I was also wrong. I don’t know how to explain it to you. Not so easy to disentangle, you know. However much you have right on your side.”

  Okay, this was not a death notice. But the word “peccadillo”—it was almost jaunty, the Great Peccadillo on his flying trapeze. Where was the virtue in downgrading emotion? Behind this question was her impatience with Mark’s mustn’t-grumble British upbringing—the prime cause, she felt, of his missing candor now. She wished everyone would quit trying to shield her, if that’s what they imagined they were doing. Jean remembered how she’d had to insist on being allowed to go to the hospital and see Billy one last time, to say good-bye before they unplugged his breathing machine. “Are you saying you and Dad split up because he was having an affair?”

  “Yes. In a word. I am.”

  “Mom, I was twenty-six years old then. Why wait to tell me now?”

  “It wasn’t the moment. And your father, he isn’t well, Jean. This is what I wanted to tell you. He’s had—I don’t know how much you know—several what they call ministrokes, no one even knows how many. Some of them symptomatically the same as a stroke stroke but not supposed to do any lasting damage. So they say this week. You know Dad. He’s not going to make an announcement. And he’s going to ignore it as long as possible. Practically deaf and he won’t consider a hearing aid. But to answer your question, I didn’t tell you at the time because, well, you had your own difficulties. Your pregnancy—with the prewhatchamacallit.”

  “Preeclampsia.”

  “Right. I just didn’t think you needed that information. I know how close you are to your father.”

  There was a long pause during which Phyllis combed through her bag, looking for her eyedrops. Jean continued to let the silence between them weigh as she watched her mother finger each eye in turn and deposit her tears.

  “You mean you felt humiliated,” Jean said at last.

  “Well, it wasn’t a barrel of laughs, you’re not wrong there.”

  Another longish silence. Phyllis wiped her eyes with the back of a spotted hand. Peccadillo, ministroke, all quite harmless and unlikely to lead to minideath, Jean thought—and then she remembered that this was, according to Mark, the French term for orgasm: le petit mort. But she’d turn away from his mental universe—how was Dad really? How was Phyllis? Jean wondered if she had, maybe unconsciously, used eyedrops to cover any natural tears she didn’t want her to see.

  “I guess I should thank you. I know you were trying to be protective.”

  “Well, yes. But truth be told, we were just getting through. And frankly it was before the age—or before my age—when talking about something seemed like any kind of help. I hardly knew what hit me, and then, suddenly, it was all decided and there was no…recourse. Almost like I wasn’t even there.”

  Jean thought this might be an invitation to speak out about her own marriage, though she wasn’t ready for that either. “I don’t mean this as a complaint, Mom, but you know, for Marianne and me, it might actually have been better to think there was a reason.”

  “There’s always a reason, Jeannie.”

  They crossed wooden bridges and cobbled walkways, and before long they met a large tortoise, uncaged and untethered, its wrinkly neck the only indication of its vast age. The rounded shell was like a toy car big enough to sit in, not so much standing still as parked.

  “They live to be something like a hundred and twenty years old,” Jean said, unconsciously putting her hand to her own throat, touching the fold in the loosening skin where, she often thought, standing in front of the mirror, the frown line between her eyes had now reached—a facial bifurcation gradually extending like some new section of highway. When she’d first spotted this groove, she considered how next it would supply her first marked cleavage, and eventually she’d be fully traced down the
middle and easy to snap in half, like a dried-out wishbone.

  “The trick is to not move at all, is that it?” Phyllis said. “Maybe you should recommend that in one of your columns, Jeannie: Don’t move, and live forever.”

  Phyllis was suddenly in high spirits, perhaps relieved to be unburdened at last of her secret. She was wearing an Easterbright twinset, obviously bought for the trip. Even her skin looked different—some new self-tanning product? Surely she’d have known about a face-lift, Jean thought, absently stroking her old brown skirt, one Mark particularly disliked, made from a fabric like milled granola—more proof that clothes don’t matter.

  New clothes, special creams, possible face-lift: Jean wondered if all this worried effort had begun with Bill’s affair. That’s what it did to people, forced them to unpick and unravel themselves year by year until they got back to where they started in the marriage, and then begin again as they found themselves now, all squiggled and jangly and unsure. After the divorce Phyllis had taken her first job ever, as a docent at the American Folk Art Museum, where she was like one of those brave ladies on a naïve weather vane, arm extended, finger pointing to the horizon, tin skirt permanently rippling in the wind. Jean now saw what was expected of her: she’d not only have to endure Mark’s affair but be improved by it.

  At least Phyllis’s cheerful mood made their silence companionable, though Jean sensed her mother was tiring, and she steered her toward a pair of empty benches in the shade.

  Phyllis stretched fully out on one, arranged her bag for a pillow, and laid an arm across her eyes. “Just the smallest of naps… You won’t sneak off and leave me if I doze awhile, will you?” Her mother was out before Jean could think of a reply. She claimed the companion bench, spreading her stuff along it so no one else could sit down. And then, as if in celebration of their having completed the full loop around the garden, a brilliant cloud of butterflies unfurled over them, white as the wake of a speedboat. A breathtaking sight, it reminded Jean of a different kind of day trip, more than twenty years ago, to Bayonne, New Jersey, with Larry Mond: there, too, they’d been surprised by a great lather of butterflies churning over a field of yellow flowers.