Bernard was trying to be engaged in the conversation, but sometimes Gillian did have a way of going on about things. This was a party, after all, not a literary analysis. He had noticed that Aimee was hurrying out of the living room.
“Excuse me, ladies,” he said.
He found Aimee in the guest room. She had unearthed her coat and was slipping her arms into the sleeves.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Aimee’s face was tight. Her eyes were shiny beads, so black he couldn’t see the pupils.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there any woman at this party you haven’t slept with?’
“What?” asked Bernard. “What are you talking about?”
“I just want the truth, Bernard,” said Aimee. “Have you had sex with every female in that writing group of yours?”
“Aimee, what is this all about? What has anyone said to you?”
“Your friend Chris assumed I already knew that you and Gillian had had what he called a ‘thing’ in the past. He was making a joke about writers and incest. Am I the only one here who didn’t know that, in addition to Virginia, you’d had an affair with Gillian and probably Nancy, too?”
“Oh, Aimee—” began Bernard.
“Don’t lie to me, Bernard. Whatever you do, don’t lie to me.”
“I never had a relationship with Nancy,” said Bernard. “We’ve been friends since we met at Bread Loaf, but never anything more.”
“But you did have an affair with Gillian.”
“It was years ago,” said Bernard. He was about to say, “before you were born,” but stopped himself in time.
“How could you?” asked Aimee. “How could you have wanted to have an affair with her? She’s so—” Aimee broke off, unable to speak.
“It wasn’t very successful,” said Bernard. “And it was very brief.”
“But you decided to keep it from me.”
“No, nothing like that. I just didn’t tell you.”
“And why was that?”
Bernard shrugged. “It wasn’t very important,” he said.
“It’s important to me,” said Aimee.
“It was long before I met you,” he said. “What was the purpose?”
Aimee’s face looked bloated now, red and bloated.
“I came to her party,” she said. “I ate her food. The two of you make me sick!”
“Please, Aimee,” said Bernard—he knew enough not to call her by any term of endearment—“I just didn’t want to make more of anything. I just wanted to—”
“I’ve had it with you,” said Aimee. “I’m leaving. I’m taking the car, and I’m leaving. And don’t think you’re coming with me.”
She pushed past Bernard, and when he tried to catch her, she thrashed at him with her fists and dashed out. He started after her down the gravel driveway, but she got into the car quickly and slammed the door. She looked fierce sitting there as she started the engine and waited for the electric seat to rise sufficiently for her to drive. He stood for a moment in front of the car to plead with her, but when Aimee revved the engine, he stepped back and let her pass.
Part Two
Nancy
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING, NANCY LAY AWAKE LONG after Oates had fallen asleep. She strained to listen for the sound of the river beyond the house, going about its steady business, its certain, predictable presence. She pictured it in its spring high, swollen with brown water, charging along, carrying, indiscriminately, everything it was given, bearing the weight of everything it could bear, and dropping to the bottom only those few things too heavy for it: rocks and metal. Glass.
On a pad of paper on her bedside table, Nancy scribbled notes of things she was afraid she wouldn’t remember. When she read them in the morning, her handwriting was large and foreign, as if it had been written by a stranger. Sometimes the messages were indecipherable, and whatever she had hoped to retrieve was lost forever. She was certain about Oates, certain that she wanted to marry him, and yet she felt a sense of peril. She could put no image to it, it took no shape in her imagination, but it was with her, catching in her chest when she took in her breath before she could fill her lungs.
“Maybe it’s that I’m afraid if we’re married we’ll change,” she said to Oates. “That you’ll love me less. That we won’t be as happy as we are.”
“I won’t love you less,” said Oates. “And we’ll still be us, just as we are, just as happy.”
“Maybe it’s that I’m afraid you’ll leave me,” she said.
“That was some other guy,” said Oates. “That isn’t me. I’ll never leave you—you’re already part of me.”
She knew he was right, knew that it wasn’t Oates she was worried about, it was something else. At night she couldn’t sleep, and as the date approached, she woke early in the morning, before it was quite daylight, and couldn’t fall back asleep. She went through the day tired and anxious. Finally she decided to consult a psychiatrist whom she had seen briefly years ago, while she was suffering through her divorce.
The bathroom off the waiting room at Dr. Veifreck’s office had Venetian blinds tilted so that you could look out at the parking lot without people outside being able to see in. There was a bathtub that obviously no one used. An old curtain still hung there. The vinyl was brittle and cloudy. It was a vestige of when a family had taken showers there, when the building had been a home inhabited with normal lives rather than a collection of therapists who listened to fifty-minute-long summaries of lives, unhappy person after unhappy person. Suddenly it seemed ridiculous to her that she had come to consult Dr. Viefreck. She was happy. She had everything she wanted—a kind man who was going to be her husband. A wonderful daughter. She had some prewedding jitters. She’d been single for fifteen years, who wouldn’t? Nancy accepted the prescription for anti-anxiety medication that Dr. Viefreck gave her and slipped it into her wallet. She knew she wouldn’t use it—she wanted to feel what she was feeling, she wanted the authentic experience—but it seemed rude to decline to take the prescription. Outside of the office Nancy felt freed, vindicated. She opened the sunroof as she drove away, exulted in what seemed like an escape. Oates was in the backyard when she got home, painting the door to the garden shed, where the bar for the reception would be set up.
He held his paintbrush out to the side when she came up and embraced her with one arm. “What’s this all about?” he asked.
She kissed him hard on the mouth. “I think we need to go upstairs,” she said. She took the paintbrush from him and laid it on the ground.
“Let me at least close the paint can,” he said. She watched him take the lid and place it on the can. He thumped it down. Paint oozed up around it, a white halo.
Upstairs in their bedroom, they dropped their clothes in two piles on the floor. Nancy pulled back the spread and lay down across the bed. The skylight above her gave her a square of unblemished blue. She turned towards Oates. He had paint in his hair and sweat in the creases of his brow. She kissed his brow, and his nose, and his neck. She closed her eyes and pressed against him. She was off duty now. She was out of reach of all her thoughts. She wasn’t Nancy anymore. She was skin and sweat. She was tongue against tongue. She was body enclosing body. She was gasps and yelps and shudders and sighs.
NANCY’S MOTHER, DEIRDRE, came to stay with them the week before the wedding. She said she wanted to be of help. Nancy knew she would be no help at all, but there was no way to tell her without hurting her feelings.
Deirdre’s hair, once blond like Nancy’s, was grey now. She wore it pulled back with a velvet scrunchie, but hair escaped around her face. Unlike Nancy and her father, Deirdre was not a tidy person. In Nancy’s house she left a wake of disarray. When she made an attempt to clean up or put things away, she created more disorder. She rearranged things to suit herself, adding artistic touches that seemed somehow critical of Nancy’s home decoration.
When Nancy was growing up, her mother was always misplacing things—the
keys to the car, her handbag—and the rest of the family was constantly involved in archaeological expeditions. Now old age had exacerbated this tendency, and in the few days with them Deirdre had lost her eyeglasses, her cell phone, her wallet, her pills, and, most puzzling, the dress she had planned to wear to the wedding. (She’d hung it on the back of the door to the guest room.) To keep her out of trouble, Nancy asked her to make the place cards for the tables at the reception. Her mother had always been good at crafts projects, making elaborate Halloween costumes for Nancy and Nick, and decorations for their birthday parties. Deirdre threw herself into this project with considerable energy. She went to town and bought wisteria-colored paper (it was her idea of a color scheme for the wedding—Nancy hadn’t thought to have one), then made another trip for a paper cutter and a calligraphy pen. She took over the entire dining room table for the enterprise.
“She’s making such a big to-do about this,” Nancy whispered to Oates in their bed at night. “I wish I hadn’t gotten her involved.”
But when Nancy watched Deirdre bent over her work the next day, she felt sorry for her. Deirdre, her eyesight bad, had attached an extension cord to the floor lamp so she could pull it over to give her more light, and she had a pillow wedged behind her hurting back. She labored over the place cards she had cut, lettering them and drawing a delicate border on each one. Nancy wondered if any of the guests would appreciate her artistic efforts.
“Why don’t you come for a walk with me?” she asked her mother.
“Shouldn’t I finish these first?”
“It’s nice out now,” said Nancy. “Take a break, and you can finish later.”
Deirdre held up the list of guests who had accepted. “Some of the names here on your side I don’t recognize at all,” she said.
Nancy looked at the list. “Those are people in this writing circle I’ve joined,” she said. Bernard was coming on his own, now that Aimee had moved out. Adam wasn’t coming, but Chris was. Virginia and Joe were coming, and, to Nancy’s surprise, Gillian and her husband were coming. Nancy had been hoping, she realized, that Gillian would not come.
“I thought this was going to be a small wedding, just close friends,” said Deirdre.
“I had to bend that a little in this case. I wanted to invite my old friend Bernard, but he’s one of the writers, and I couldn’t really invite him without inviting the others.”
“I’m surprised you joined a writing group,” said Deirdre. “I thought you didn’t like such things.”
“I don’t in general,” said Nancy. “But these are pretty high-powered writers, and I was flattered they wanted me.”
“Oh, flattery gets us into all sorts of things, doesn’t it?” said Deirdre. “Still, I wouldn’t think you’d want a bunch of other writers telling you what to write.”
“They don’t exactly tell me what to write,” said Nancy, laughing.
“Criticizing what you write, then,” said Deirdre. “So have they all become your friends now?”
Nancy pointed at the list. “Virginia, certainly—you’ll like her, Mom—and Chris, maybe. Gillian, no, not at all.”
“Oh dear,” said Deirdre. “Why not?”
“She’s ambitious, egotistical, and . . . I just don’t trust her,” said Nancy. “She’s always perfectly nice to me, but there’s something about her . . .”
“And she’s coming to your wedding!” exclaimed Deirdre.
“I have no real reason to distrust her,” said Nancy, “and she’s a close friend of Bernard’s.”
“Bernard!” said Deirdre. “There’s someone I hope you don’t trust.”
“Bernard’s fine, Mom,” said Nancy. “He’s absolutely harmless. And he’s in low spirits now, so go out of your way to be nice to him. His wife—that’s Aimee, his most recent wife—left him.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Deirdre.
Deirdre put on her running shoes, new, too-white shoes with gigantic soles. She looked with concern at Nancy’s worn sneakers. “Those don’t look like they’re giving you enough support,” she said.
“They’re fine,” said Nancy.
“Would you like me to buy you a pair of decent shoes while I’m here?” asked Deirdre.
“Mom,” said Nancy, “if I want new shoes, I can buy them for myself.”
“All right,” said Deirdre. And she held up her hands in a sign of truce. Nancy felt sorry she had spoken sharply. She slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze. Nancy was small, like her mother. Now Deirdre had shrunk, so she was an inch shorter than Nancy, but the thick soles of her shoes made her almost the same height.
They hadn’t gone very far up the road before Deirdre turned to Nancy. “How is that novel of yours coming along?” she asked.
“It’s done,” said Nancy. “I wanted it off my desk so I could turn my attention to my wedding. So I worked like crazy to finish it and send it off.”
“Bravo!” said Deirdre. “When do I get to read it?”
“It’s not a book yet, Mom,” said Nancy. “I just sent it to my agent.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she loved it, but it was a quiet, elegiac—that was her word, elegiac—novel and would probably be a tough sell.”
“Why doesn’t she just send it to that old editor of yours. What was his name?”
“Gareth,” said Nancy. “But he’s not at Simon and Schuster anymore, and all he’s doing now are celebrity memoirs.”
Deirdre sighed. “Well, I know you’ll find someone who will feel lucky to publish it. Don’t worry about it.”
“Actually, I’m not,” said Nancy. “I’ve had so much to think about for the wedding, I haven’t had room left for anxiety about my novel.”
“Why don’t you let me read the manuscript in the meantime?”
“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “It’s sweet of you to want to read it, but I think I’d rather wait till it was actually published before I show it to anyone.”
“You always were a bit touchy about your work,” said Deirdre.
“Touchy?” Nancy asked.
“Didn’t want anyone to see it until it was all done. You never showed me your papers until you had gotten them back from the teacher. You showed your father, but you never showed me.”
They had walked nearly all the way to the Kleinholz farm. In spite of her high-tech running shoes, Deirdre was showing signs of fatigue.
“Want to turn back now?” Nancy asked.
“We could,” said Deirdre. “I have those place cards that need to be finished.” Deirdre turned to Nancy. “You know you haven’t even told me what this novel is about,” she said.
Nancy took a moment to form her answer. It had been difficult for her to share her novel with the Leopardi Circle. Showing it to her mother was a different problem. Her novel was fiction, after all, but her mother would dig right through to the base of the story, cast aside the artistry, and seize on the central portrait, which was based on Nancy’s father. What was true about the character in the novel would disturb her only somewhat less than what wasn’t true, than the liberties Nancy had taken.
“It’s about the changes people make in their lives,” said Nancy. “The choices they don’t realize they have, and the choices they take advantage of.”
Fortunately Deirdre was drawn away from the subject of the novel. “Changes!” she said. “Big changes for my Nancy! Happy ones! Oates is such a nice man.”
“Obviously I think so,” said Nancy.
They were at a place where the road came close to a bend in the river, and they stood on the high bank, looking downstream. Aliki had suggested that Nancy and Oates travel to the wedding by canoe, float with the current down to the guests, who’d be waiting to greet them on the riverbank. It was such a romantic idea that Nancy had actually considered it before she ruled it out as entirely impractical.
“Of course Douglas seemed like a nice man, too, when you married him,” said Deirdre.
Nanc
y didn’t say anything, hoping that Deirdre would move on to something else. But after a moment Deirdre asked, “By the way, didn’t you tell me Douglas developed some sort of strange neurological condition after he left you?”
“Trigeminal neuralgia, also known as tic douloureux,” said Nancy. “It causes episodes of severe facial pain. I did an article on it in the newsletter.”
“Everyone wished him ill, and I’m happy to hear we were not disappointed.”
“I didn’t wish him ill,” said Nancy. Though at the time she had thought it was entirely appropriate that he should develop a condition which caused him to flinch as if in response to the deceits of his life.
“The trouble with you, sweetheart,” said Deirdre, “is that you’re too nice. You should enjoy your revenge.”
“I’ll save revenge for when I really need it,” said Nancy, laughing. “And you know, Mom, I really don’t regret Douglas at all. I got Aliki. And now I have Oates. It’s all worked out just fine.”
They started walking again back to the house. Nancy hoped they were done with the subject of Douglas, but just by the rhododendrons at the side of the road, Deirdre reached out for Nancy’s shoulder.
“You know, I blamed myself at the time,” she said.
“Blamed yourself? What for?”
“For Douglas. For not seeing into his character better, for not warning you against marrying him.”
“Seeing into his character was my job, Mom. I was the one who was marrying him.”
“But you were blinded by love,” said Deirdre. “I wasn’t. I should have seen him more clearly. Your father saw him. He had lots of doubts about him, but unfortunately I put his fears to rest.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nancy. “I don’t remember him saying anything about Douglas at the time.”
“He was very upset at the wedding, and everyone thought it was because his little girl was getting married. But it was because he didn’t really like Douglas. Your father saw things quite clearly,” said Deirdre. “It was because he was a teacher, he was always looking into the souls of his students. We usually think of women as having intuition, but your father was a very intuitive man.”
The Writing Circle Page 18
