A Parallel Life

by Robin Beeman

  Her break wasn’t simple. Her arm had somehow twisted in the fall and the fracture had spiraled. They wanted to keep her until the next day. I spent the night in a chair at her side. In the dim room with the monitor lights colored like those on the Christmas tree still standing in the corner of our living room, Amy rode her bed gallantly like a small traveler on a space ship. From time to time I got up and placed my cheek against her narrow chest to feel it swell, its twin balloon lungs unfailing beneath ribs fragile as a bird’s.

  At dawn, Bill, looking pale—still not completely well, arrived to relieve me. I lifted my head and breathed foul overnight hospital breath in his direction as he bent to kiss me. He was a lovely man and his presence made me glad. I’d been dreaming about getting naked into a yellow taxi with Jack, who was wearing an overcoat from which his own bare legs stretched.

  Because of someone’s vacation, I found myself spending the next two weeks working afternoons and evenings with only a one-hour break from four to five. Mornings were Jack’s busy time so we had to struggle to get together—still we managed at least twice a week between eleven and one when I began work. In the middle of January, Mr. Boudreau, my mother’s landlord, phoned me from Oakland to tell me that she had started screaming at the other tenants again. I took off a day and drove down to her apartment, a pleasant sunny place only a block from Lake Merritt. She didn’t want to let me in, but I talked her into slipping the chain.

  “You’re here because he called you, but I can tell you that I don’t need admonishing,” she said, turning her back to me and walking into the kitchen. I smelled burnt coffee. Her muttering rose and fell as she turned off the gas and poured coffee into the cup. She managed to sound like those messages over the loudspeakers in airports from which only an occasional word is intelligible. “Sugar,” I heard her say, then “outlaw,” then “cockroach.”

  “Mother.” I touched her shoulder. She ignored my hand. “Mother, you’re not taking your medicine.”

  “The hell with that damn medicine,” she said, pouring milk into the cup and stirring it as she turned to face me. She was sixty-four and still trim—a fading blonde with blue eyes that seemed to capture and hold light. She’d been beautiful. Her wedding picture could still take my breath away. In it, she rose from swirls of satin as if emerging from a shell. Her right hand rested inside the grip of my father, who managed, despite his navy lieutenant’s uniform, to look like a rogue. “You and your sister—neither one gives a damn about me. I don’t know why I let you in. You’re Little Miss Fine and Dandy, and all you’ve ever thought about is yourself.”

  “I think you should let me find you a place close by me so I can check on you.”

  “The cockroaches are terrible here, but do you care? They talk to each other. They’ll be here when we’re all gone. When we’re all in hell, they’ll be strutting around. La-de-dah.”

  “There are some very nice apartments only a few blocks away from my house. You could walk to the stores. The girls could drop in on you and run errands for you.”

  “Your father was a bastard and you’re his daughter, and your daughters will wind up riding off on the backs of motorcycles.”

  “You should be taking your pills,” I said. “There’s no need for you to get so agitated.” She turned away as if I wasn’t there and began to mutter again, her voice rising and falling in pitch, dopplering in and out of my consciousness.

  I checked through her trash and then brought it down to the dumpster. I pulled down all the bottles in her medicine cabinet. Then I examined the linen closet. She’d emptied the pill bottle into an old bath-salts jar, where the tiny tablets lay half dissolved in some sort of liquid. Shampoo? I phoned her doctor and asked for more. I told him she was having a rough time. He said he’d raise the dosage but there was nothing he could do if she didn’t take them. Of course not. I got her into the car and drove to the drugstore where I picked up the prescription and bought her magazines—Vogue and Bazaar—and a Coke and watched her take the pill. Then we drove up to Tilden Park, where we could look down on the blue stretches of the bay with the winter-green land rising from it. She stopped muttering and leaned back, closing her eyes. If only someone had nothing to do but drive her around.

  We went to a Chinese restaurant downtown. She used a fork and hurried food into her mouth as if she were starving. I ordered beef and vegetables to take back. She’d never liked to cook. Her freezer was stuffed with TV dinners.

  I took off the next day too and called Jack. We drove to the coast in Jack’s car and walked on the beach. January can be the kindest time at the coast. We sat against sun-warmed rock and watched the seals crawl up onto the sand. I tried to talk to Jack about my mother’s problems, but he gave back only the most perfunctory comments, which made me angry with myself. He was smarting from some social insult by a client who hadn’t asked him to a cocktail party at the country club. I wondered why I was trying to talk to Jack when Bill understood everything so well and usually could make me feel better.

  We went to a motel and drank Irish whiskey in bed in a room with gold-flecked wallpaper and a purple carpet. As if to make up for having been so distant on the beach, Jack made love actively, but it felt forced and I didn’t have an orgasm, which he decided to take as an affront.

  Now that I look back on that time, I wonder how our affair lasted as long as it did. Even though I liked him, almost everything Jack did struck me as wrong headed or pathetic. He harbored relentless social ambitions. He bragged about how he’d gotten the best of almost everyone. He was a gun notcher. A keeper of scores. He wore chattery sports jackets and a gargantuan class ring. He drove a Mazda RX. jax rx said the plates. He really wanted a Porsche. He thought of Las Vegas as a vacation possibility. We had nothing in common but our time together and a certain bald lust. I had a list made up of things to hold against him. He was uneducated, he had lousy taste in clothes, and he cheated on his wife.

  “I’m going to be busy this next week,” I said as I got out in front of a vacant storefront around the corner from the library and emptied sand from the pocket of my jacket.

  “Me too,” he said and screeched away from the curb without looking back.

  The following Friday my mother called. In a calm voice she told me that she had started saying the rosary. “I began on Tuesday with the Sorrowful Mysteries. I know you’re supposed to alternate with the Joyful and Glorious Mysteries, but I just don’t feel like them right now. I pray every evening right after the ten o’clock news.”

  I told Bill about this latest development. “That’s very sane,” he said. “Maybe we should all pray after the ten o’clock news.”

  “But you don’t believe in God,” I said. “You could only pray ironically.” He was a mathematician who spent his days writing instructions for computers. His atheism had been a most attractive quality to me when I’d met him in Berkeley. His walk across the paving of Sproul Plaza had possessed a buoyancy that I attributed to a freedom from a belief in original sin. He hadn’t thought of himself as stained from the start. He’d been a dangerously thin, fairhaired young man from the Midwest preoccupied with learning, and he seemed uncomplicated in ways I had not believed possible.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “Not believing in God doesn’t mean I don’t believe in prayer.” He pulled me into the hollows of his curled-up body. He held me, his arms crossed in front of my chest to protect me. His kindness and optimism were enormous.

  A fact that never ceased to fascinate me is that Bill suspected nothing about my other men. He had never once asked me to account for my time away from him. He’d had one affair. I knew he’d been with someone else the moment he began to make love to me after getting home from the convention. There was a new sort of exactness to his caress—tentative, almost pedantic—as if he’d just learned a new formula and was anxious to apply it. I found the strangeness exciting. I also knew that he’d tell me about her. He did. A month later. She lived in Los Angeles and she’d just gotten divorced. He�
�d had too much to drink, and so on. She told him that she’d been so lonely she’d put an ad in the personals.

  I never understood why people needed the personals in the newspaper. Jack and I had found each other in the library without any help from the Dewey decimal system. We could have been wearing cards. Married. Unfaithful but discreet. I’d never had a problem locating lovers. People like Jack and me form a substantial underground—a fellowship like the Masons or the Elks. And we don’t even need a special handshake or meetings to recognize one another. When Jack asked me for lunch, I’d known what would follow. Bill did not belong to that fellowship. His affair was an accident, a freak. He didn’t even know the fellowship existed.

  I’d already had half a dozen lovers by Bill’s first affair, and the fact that I became aware at once of his affair made me wonder why he’d never appeared to notice when I’d been with someone else. Perhaps he told himself that my occasional requests for something new, for a variation on the immutability of our routine, was the result of research—something I’d come across at the reference desk. It never occurred to Bill that I might be who I was. It had never occurred to Bill that I might have a parallel life.

  I woke up in the middle of that night to a vision of my mother on her knees in front of the dark television set pulling the beads one by one through her long pale fingers. I saw the brown-speckled backs of her hands. I saw the cross swaying like a pendulum as her fingers rubbed the faceted crystal surfaces, releasing from the fastness of each set of stones its store of devotion to the terrible—the agony, the scourging, the thorns, the burden, the crucifixion and death. My heart pounded and my mouth went dry. Bill lay beside me sucking air in ragged gulps between snores.

  My split shift was restored to me. Amy’s bone knit. Bill began to jog in the mornings before work. Mandy acquired a boyfriend who collected stamps. She asked me to bring home books on stamps so she could know what to talk to him about. We got record rainfall.

  When, after a couple of weeks, Jack called and asked if I wanted to see him, I said yes. Jack’s friend had had the walls of his rooms painted a pale, hard gray. According to Jack, his friend now had a girlfriend and she was redecorating for him. There was a new black-leather sofa, a chrome-and-glass table with chrome-and-leather chairs. We now made love on gray-and-red plaid designer sheets. Jack’s friend hadn’t told his girlfriend about our using the place. We were pleased by that. As we drained the champagne from a bottle in the refrigerator and finished the Brie, we smiled. The chance to assume the role of interlopers honed a new edge on the afternoon.

  The days away from Jack had given me time to want him again. On the night before Jack called, I’d made love to Bill for the first time in weeks—and it had been astonishingly good. Missing Jack allowed me to succumb to Bill’s tenderness, and Bill’s tenderness had made me wake up hungry for Jack’s urgency, for Jack’s ability to forget I was there—so that I could get lost too—so that I could savor sex without a relationship attached to it.

  Jack’s friend’s girlfriend had left a hair dryer on the bathroom counter, so I washed my hair in the shower. When I came back into the bedroom, Jack was still in bed. He’d turned on the television and was watching a soap. There’s something too quiet about soaps. There’s almost no modulation in the voices even though dreadful things are supposed to be happening to the characters.

  “These shows make me uneasy,” I said, pushing aside a heart-shaped box of chocolates. It was Valentine’s Day and Jack had presented me with the box right before we began making love. I’d laughed. It had seemed a sweet and slightly campy thing for him to do. We’d eaten chocolates, swapping fillings as we kissed. Now I put the lid on the box and slipped on my blouse.

  “Me too.” He swung his legs over the edge and sat hands on knees. “I don’t know why I turned it on.”

  “To watch adultery being sanctified by the networks.”

  He didn’t seem to hear but kept his eyes on the screen. Two women, both blondes, looked back at us as if seeing us in the haze of a crystal ball. “My wife went to the doctor yesterday,” he said after a moment. “She found a lump in her left breast.”

  I felt as if he’d hit me. “They’re mostly benign,” I said, catching my breath. “We just got a new report on breast lumps last week.”

  “She had a mammogram. There’s something there. She’s going in for a biopsy tomorrow.”

  “The prognosis for a cure with an early discovery is excellent,” I said. I felt dizzy. “I keep up on it. We get so many calls.”

  “I guess you do.” He sighed and stood and put on his shirt. “I’m trying not to worry.”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said as I tucked in my blouse. I wondered if I sounded convincing.

  He walked around the bed and stood in front of me, his flaccid penis hanging between the tails of his open shirt. I placed my hand on his thigh, gently, non-erotically, the first stage of a pat. He bent and kissed the top of my head. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “I haven’t touched her breasts in months,” he said and turned, giving me his rear, and stepped into his shorts.

  II

  The public library is right downtown. Walnut Grove is a moderate-sized California city in a coastal valley. A few years ago to counter the bloom of shopping centers on the outskirts, the city fathers redeveloped this part of town, which meant tearing down a lot of fine buildings and turning the old courthouse into the kind of mall where pricey little stores sell things that I can only imagine buying as wedding presents for someone I hardly know. But then I’m not a shopper. The former lawyers’ offices and coffee shops are now restaurants and antiques stores. The winos who recently roamed this section had disappeared—rounded up and shot, for all I know.

  After work, I had decided to walk to a candy store to buy Bill a box of chocolates. He’d be pleased, touched even. On my way I passed a bar that had once been the place where reporters hung out. Now the old plaster had been sandblasted away and the place was all rose-colored brick, brass, and indirect lighting. Its current owner staged a weekly lingerie show during happy hour. As I passed by the doors, the lingerie show had ended and people were leaving. Some stood, glowing with alcohol, just outside in the mild February evening.

  Two men bracketed a woman beside the door. I saw her face, a flash of pink, between the backs of the men as I came closer and I could tell from the postures exactly what was going on. Each of the men was trying to win the woman for the rest of the evening. Seen from the rear, one of the two men struck me as a slightly taller and older version of Jack. He wore the same sort of sports coat Jack would choose, the same cut of slacks, the same kind of shoes, and he had the same expansive gestures and the same confiding hunch of the shoulders. As the man turned enough so that I could see his profile, I realized with a start that it was my father.

  I veered and crossed the street, skirting a car backing into a parking space. I hadn’t seen my father since Christmas eve when he’d come for dinner—my mother always came on Christmas day—bringing his latest girlfriend, a listless woman, younger than me, who was a secretary at the Chrysler dealership where he was in his own evaluation “the top man on the floor.” My father is shameless and I didn’t want to have to run into him on the street and endure is glib patter intended to disguise the fact that I had come upon him outside a bar trying to score.

  He left us when I was ten and my sister, Maureen, was twelve. I know that he would say that he didn’t leave us, that he left our mother, but Maureen and I had a hard time not feeling that we shared our mother’s fate—which seemed not like a fate then but a punishment. All three of us had done something wrong and all three of us were being banished for misdeeds—only we stayed and he was the one who was gone.

  Not that he’d ever been around all that often. Even then he was “in sales” and a traveler. But when he was home, he was unmistakably there—a presence, a force—making jokes, flirting with me and Maureen, calling us his sweethearts, his tru
e loves and then plunging into a sulk because no one appreciated him. During these times he would refuse to talk and my mother, as if he were deaf not dumb, would raise the pitch of everything she said, banging pots and pans onto the table for punctuation.

  “You see how she drives me out of the house,” he’d say, putting on his hat and jacket in the open door while the wind off the ocean pushed the fog into the room.

  We lived in San Francisco then in the Richmond district on the bottom floor of one of those countless pallid houses, proper and domestic, in which our kind of people lived. Jack Duggan had grown up not far away. Four years older than me, he’d gone to the same high school as my boy cousins, and this evening I’d thought of him when I’d seen my father’s back.

  My hand was shaking as I handed the woman in the tidy white dress the twenty-dollar bill and it shook as I took the red heart-shaped box from her in the shop smelling of chocolate. There was a crush of people. I wondered how many of those waiting on the black-and-white tiles for their numbers to be called were like me—like Jack Duggan. I wondered how many heart-shaped boxes my father had bought that day.

  Bill sat on a stool in the kitchen watching basketball on the small television. He grinned when I pulled the box of candy from the large canvas book sack I carry. Bill and I had made a pact a long time ago not to honor public holidays, and here I was breaking the rules. I could tell he was delighted. I let him kiss me, holding me against the refrigerator, tilting up my head, and sliding his tongue between my teeth. His lips went along my chin, down my neck. I felt his erection growing as he pressed against me and I wondered if my father had ever wanted to cry at times like this.

  “The nets are too low,” I said.

  “Ummmh?”

  “Basketball.” I gently pushed him away. “I don’t get basketball anymore.”

  We drank vodka and orange juice at the round glass table overlooking the Jacuzzi, which overlooked the county administration center. We hadn’t touched each other yet. Jack was pale. He mixed the first drink and swallowed it in the kitchen, then he mixed another for himself and one for me. I hadn’t had lunch. I sliced through yesterday’s French bread that sat on the table. Outside, the rain turned the mountains into smudges.