Jean erased first the film and then the photographs, clicking through them, one by one. He struggled with her Levi’s as she wiped the images; she knew that she wouldn’t stop him and that she wouldn’t forget any of it. She was sober, soiled, and horrified; this was the punishment, no special force needed. Then, for just a moment, she thought of Vic, age about six, peering up against the sun at the big O over the Odeon cinema in Parkway. What are you doing? Jean had asked her, wanting to get home; Wait, Vic said. I’m making a memory. Dan was yanking her jeans down on one side and then the other, his hand reaching inside her underpants. But something—perhaps Victoria’s early clarity and determination—freed her, and she turned and pushed him away.
“No, Dan. Not now and not ever. Not again,” she said, putting herself back together. “You need to go.”
He stepped back, defiantly rearranging himself—and for a couple of seconds she was frightened by the stony look on his face: cresting exasperation. “I thought that’s what you wanted. Isn’t that what you asked for, Mrs. H.?”
Jean looked hard at him, her arms crossed tight over her chest. “I didn’t ask you for anything,” she said. “Not a goddamn thing.” Upstairs the front door opened and slammed shut.
“Vic?”
“Hi, Mum! We’re back! Rupert gave me a lift.”
She looked wildly at Dan who raised a hand, patting the air in front of his shoulder, as if everything was under control. Jean smoothed her hair; he shut the laptop, took back his memory card, tucked in his T-shirt.
“Come down!” she shouted. “Dan’s here!”
“Glad I could show you those mock-ups,” he said loudly. “I like your idea of a picnic—good food from the same vintage, juicy homemade pies, and rounded, golden loaves of bread, the reddest, ripest berries…” She looked at him sharply, but that didn’t stop him. “What’s a fridge without food? You’re right. They did look very sterile, very showroom. And you know they’ve done the market research, and it’s true, hungry people spend.”
The front door slammed again, and in a minute Vic was lumbering downstairs barefoot.
“Oh,” said Jean, aiming for disappointment, “did Rupert leave?” She leaned forward to kiss Victoria and smelled smoke—which she welcomed if it overlaid any ambient scent of Dan. Or was she the only one who caught that?
“Yeah. He had to get the car back. Hey, Dan.”
“Hello, Victoria.” He gave her a stellar smile and, wattage unreturned, moved in anyway to kiss her cheek. “Good bash?”
“Decent.” She went to get a mug from the cupboard.
“Darling, remember those fridge things I took to the office after dropping you off yesterday?” Jean said, filling them both in. “Well, Dan’s brought them back, to show Mark what he’s done with them. And now he’s leaving. Dad’s stuck in Germany. Fog. Major fog, apparently.”
“Really?” Vic perked up. “When’s he getting back?”
“Well, tomorrow around one, with luck.”
“My phone’s completely dead.” She moved to plug her cell phone into the charger, glanced at the computer, and said, “I’m going to have a bath.”
“All right, darling. Are you hungry?”
“Um, not really. We stopped at a Little Chef. Thoroughly revolting it was too. Anyway, Vikram’s coming round with pizza. See you, Dan.”
“Yeah, cheers. Lovely to see you. I’d better be off myself,” he said as Victoria started back upstairs.
“Okay, well, I’m sure Mark will be in touch. What a pity. Got all your stuff?” she asked as she led him up the stairs, unbelievably even now able to wonder how her blue-jeaned ass looked not only from behind but from below. Victoria had barely managed a smile—did she sense something? Maybe she was just very hungover.
How close she’d come to succumbing again, and how fine she’d cut it. And how far she’d already fallen, how effortlessly, headlong into her disgrace. Of course Vic was absolutely right about Dan; it must be obvious to anyone. And what would she think if she had any idea who her mother really was?
Victoria’s overnight bag was on the mat blocking the door, and her fleece covered Dan’s leather jacket on the sofa. Jean pulled it out for him, wondering who to call first, Phyllis or Dad.
“Bye, Jean. Take care.”
“Yeah” was all she could say, following him out the door in her bare feet, crossing her arms against the chill and any further bodily contact. Dan planted a kiss on her cheek, mercifully unlingering, and skipped down the two front steps, momentarily unbalanced by the heavy bag. When he recovered, he gave her a terrific smile, intimate, wolfish, but not so much blaze that it would matter if Vic caught it from an upstairs window. He turned toward Parkway, his wide athlete’s stance easily bearing the weight, and he didn’t look back.
As soon as she shut the front door, Jean went to the phone. She tried her father’s apartment on Seventy-second Street, then her sister Marianne in Westport, where he sometimes went on a Sunday. No answer.
Of course, she thought, putting on the kettle. It was July Fourth weekend; they’d all be at Marianne and Doug’s beach house. Looking in her overstuffed red book for the number, she prepared herself for a chat with her sister, always so theatrically burdened. Jean was fond of her brother-in-law, a trial lawyer, but the connection hadn’t eased relations with Marianne, who picked up on the first ring.
“Hello?” You’d think from her tone she single-handedly ran a handicapped circus, not just three young sons. Nothing wrong with their voices, anyway, Jean thought, holding the receiver and their boy screams away from her ear.
“Hi,” she said, “it’s Jean.”
“There you are.”
“Did you call?”
“Everybody’s been trying to get ahold of you.”
“Funny, I didn’t get any messages from you.”
“Didn’t Mom call you? And Dad?”
“How is he?”
“Here, why don’t you ask him. Dad! It’s Jean! John Avery, get down off of there this instant! Dylan! Outside. Now.”
So much time passed that Jean wondered if Marianne had just decided to do something else, and she tried to think wholesome, charitable, life-lengthening thoughts. (She knew that her self-disgust deepened her irritation with her sister, a woman about as unlikely as any on earth to fall prey to someone like Dan.) But she lapsed immediately: it wasn’t as if Bill was standing right there; she could’ve filled Jean in, but oh no, too martyred. Finally, she heard the phone change hands and the deep voice she loved. She’d always thought that if Bill Warner was a singer, he’d be Johnny Cash.
“Hello, darling.” He sounded tired, winded.
“Dad. How are you?”
“I’m fine, dear. Just wanted to let you know that I’m going into the hospital tomorrow—no, wait a minute, Tuesday, after the long weekend, for a little procedure. Entirely elective, nothing serious. Maybe I told you about the aneurysm. Going to get it before it gets me. I’ll be out Friday, latest.”
Not like Dad, that euphemism, to say “procedure” instead of “operation.” He had mentioned it, and so had Phyllis, but it seemed such a long shot, an exploding artery, no more vivid to Jean than cosmic impact.
“That does sound quick. Where’re you doing it?”
“Columbia-Presbyterian. The best. They do these things every day, a dozen a day, thousands of them every year. Practically like going to the dentist.”
“So you decided to do it now.”
“You know your old man—once I’ve got the information, can’t not act. Best to get it out of the way. The little bugger’s bound to blow at some point—could be six months, could be five years. I’ll sleep a whole lot better not thinking about it. And I’ve got the top guy all signed up.”
“Oh Dad, I’d like to come over.”
“Well, Jeannie, you know there’s no face I’d rather see, but to be honest, it’s really not necessary. I’ll be out before you get here. How’s Victoria? Mark there with you, too?”
“Fine
, fine. We’re all great.” What would her dear, honorable dad say if he knew how great she really was: Jean the eager adulteress and porno queen. “Dad, I’m halfway to New York. I could hop right over. I want to.”
“Darling, I know I can level with you. I’d just as soon get through this, really nothing serious, and have a good visit when I’m not all out of it and buzzing on drugs.”
“Well, then, a little later maybe. I’ll be done with my birds in a week or two.” From her first visit to the center with Phyllis, Jean had been giving Bill progress reports on the Beausoleil project—she’d had an instinct he’d be gripped and he was.
“Oh my. Are they all set to go?”
“Just about—although there’s some doubt about my little Bud, who may have to hold on a bit longer. The runt—remember him?”
“Sure, I do. Well, good. Old Bud and I’ll be kept in for observation. And one fine day, we too shall overcome, and be restored. Into the wild.”
Jean didn’t like the sound of this at all. Into the wild. She saw in her mind’s eye a swirling thin-spun cosmos, sickeningly uninhabitable, through which she was catapulting at inhuman speed. Like her poor brother, swilling around in the cold, dark sea. “I’m counting on you, Dad. Let me know. I’ll just jump on a plane.” I’m counting on you not to die, she meant, and she hoped it didn’t come through in her voice.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll be in close touch. Bye, darling.”
He always left the phone abruptly and Jean could never get used to it, or the twinge of undispelled loneliness—the job of the drawn-out good-bye. Still, a child of the Depression, Bill couldn’t not worry about the phone bill. This time he wandered off without hanging up, and Jean wasn’t sure he knew you had to press the button—bound to be a cordless—or if she was supposed to hang on for Marianne.
She heard footsteps getting louder, as if they were marching down some school corridor straight to the principal’s office, a scolding on the way. Jean tensed—and for the first time she wondered how the little boys felt when Marianne approached. Then Marianne pressed the button, without checking to see if Jean was still there, and the line went dead.
Jean called her mother, keen to make a plan, but when Phyllis said there was “absolutely no need to come over,” she understood it as criticism that she wasn’t there already. “Marianne’s with him now.”
“I know, Mom. I just spoke to him. Dad says this is a straightforward procedure.”
“That’s right, dear. Though I suppose nothing is ever completely straightforward at eighty.”
“Seventy-nine,” Jean corrected. When she hung up, having promised she’d coordinate with her sister, she told herself she was going to have to get much better at all this, and fast. She needed some air. Jean grabbed her bag and went up to the living room. Victoria and Vikram were lounging on the sofa watching TV, guidebooks on the floor, their cardboard pizza boxes open on the sofa arms like laptops.
They were planning a summer trip around Indonesia, with a stopover in St. Jacques. Mark and Jean officially approved. Only nine months after the Bali bombings, they dissimulated their worry about terrorism on political and superstitious grounds (the lightning principle) and instead counted themselves lucky they’d been spared the big gap-year excursion, all aimlessness, danger, and expense. They’d contributed frequent-flier miles, budgeted for hotels and, she was sure, Mark would top this up with cash: the “planned economy” Vic advocated.
Vic and Vikram were loosely holding hands and transfixed, gazing at the screen. “Animal magnetism” is not a metaphor, Jean thought, pausing to look at them. They didn’t even realize it, but these two had to be touching, making contact at some point, even if it was no more than the tip of a finger on a knee. What were they so solemnly watching? A liposuction operation.
“Back soon,” she said, lingering in the doorway as if debating where to go next—St. Jacques or straight to New York? But she could hear the fat-suctioning machine that so riveted Vikram and Victoria and, unacknowledged, slipped outside.
Her next move would depend on the news from Scully. Walking down Albert Street, she thought she’d managed giving birth alone because, well, she wasn’t alone. Scully had been there. And Victoria had been there. Now here was just Jean, the same dread, the same doctor, the same competition for Mark’s time. Familiar wait, familiar worry. But no baby at the end of it. So what, then, at the end of it? She could hardly bear to imagine such an attack on her person, something from Dante’s lower circles, the one packed, if she remembered right, with adulterous women.
And as she turned into Parkway, joining the Sunday stream of families coming from the zoo, she was overcome, coursing with fresh recognition of her folly—one she’d justified by Mark’s own. There was Dad, about to go into the hospital while she’d elected to romp in pornoland with that worthless pleasure addict. Like liposuction, she thought—disgusting, maybe dangerous, self-indulgent, and totally unnecessary. In fact, it was worse than liposuction, which at least wasn’t also disloyal. Jean paused to exchange sorrowful looks with a lone little pug in the pet shop window—or not a pug: a Chinese shar-pei, the sign said. His caramel coat looked about four sizes too big, the fur concertinaed just as if all his puppy fat had been hoovered out. Such worried brown eyes, buried in those folds—imagine a creature particularly valued for its wrinkles, Jean thought. Oh, look, he’s shivering—she didn’t think he could be more than five or six weeks old. Where was his mother? Where were all the other puglets? And then it was so clear. Whatever Scully said, she’d go directly to New York, returning by the most powerful instinct to her original territory. She was homing.
New York
Lurching into the city from Kennedy Airport, Jean didn’t want to distract the driver—a stressed Sikh shouting into his cell phone—by asking him to slow down. Was he plotting a murder, or putting in one very exacting dinner order? Forget him and his girlish nape with its long black hairs, and look at your own hometown—right there on the horizon, glowing in smoggy, timeless monochrome. The grimy heat extended a wobbly carpet to the great mirage that was Gotham, and Jean was excited to be back and happy, her life recently returned to her. Scully had given her the all clear (“though we’ll want to have another look in six months”), and she received the stay of execution, the papal waiver, with elation and, very soon, with oblivious entitlement. She’d picked over this (hoping as ever for column yield), the physics of fear: how mortal fright could take you and hold you in its Kong-like grip and then, phttt, it was just over, like falling out of love, and you were frowning with incomprehension at all the medical notes you’d scribbled only the week before. Could it really be as if it never happened? Wasn’t there some residue or stain—the fear itself taking years off your life, even if for now the cancer had been run out of town?
The taxi toiled along the Van Wyck Expressway, then onto Queens Boulevard with its soot-caked clusters of nursing homes so unutterably grim that only the most despised old people could be remanded here. From this approach you hardly noticed the loss—less than two years before—of the Twin Towers, she thought, noticing all the same. It seemed to her that she alone remembered how hated they once were. But her early views were the voice of a mob, acquired when she went as a kid on a march protesting against their construction, with Auntie Eunice, Bill Warner’s charismatic, conservation-minded law partner.
A pack of implacable New Yorkers plus Jean, they’d walked down the Avenue of the Americas from the West Village to city hall, chanting, “Too ugly! Too tall!” Her mother had thought marching not only ineffectual but tacky. Dad was proud: the making of a citizen. For Jean now, it was sobering to remember the simple rectitude of that protest, the passionate certainty. She’d come to recognize this day as the birth of her lawyer’s heart, but the image that seized on her developing mind then was not the World Trade Center—it was the women’s prison on Greenwich Avenue, and the thin arms waving through slit windows to the marchers below; a dozen Rapunzels trapped
in another ugly tower.
After that march, like a tourist in her own city, Jean had gotten into the habit of looking up instead of down, and she went to the Village whenever she could—to the secondhand shops where she acquired a first style, composed from men’s shirts and suits, and to Washington Square, grayer but more intimate than any corner of Central Park, the drug dealers more forthright. “Sense, sense, sense,” they’d say, for sensemilla, and “Pass me by, won’t get high…” Among the dealers, she had a “friend,” Wayne something, who come to think of it was not unlike Christian in St. Jacques—gap toothed, flirtatious, and black. “Need something for your head?” he’d ask; Jean always said no but was thrilled by such adult consideration. (At the time she was still coating her face each night with Phyllis’s cold cream and then, on top of that, talcum powder, in the mysterious belief that this combination would blanch her freckles.) One afternoon, worried would Wayne lose interest in her, she bought a nickel bag. When he invited her back to his place to smoke it, she said no and never returned to Washington Square.
The prison was torn down, Jean didn’t know when, and now the Twin Towers were also gone; so improbably from the view of thirty years ago, they were greatly mourned: they were too ugly, too tall—but they were ours. Billy died only six months after that protest; his lift from the party plowed into a lamppost; his rib poked a hole in his heart. In the cab speeding to her ailing father, Jean was glad the masterful Sikh didn’t permit air-conditioning. She wanted to feel everything. Today was Friday: she’d timed her trip to land her in town the moment Dad arrived back home and was ready for visitors. Or so she thought. But the day before, Phyllis had told her, “The doctors are keeping him in intensive care for observation.”
“What does that mean?” Two days had passed since the surgery.
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