Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  Down? I thought, bewildered, eyeing the smiling woman in the photo, but there was no time to go into that now. I explained why I was calling. Claudia said she’d left Viv at the stables.

  “What time was that?” I asked. “Do you think she’s had an accident?”

  Her laugh was brief and gloomy. “Not the kind you mean.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not the kind’?”

  “You’re thinking thunderstorms and car crashes. She’s had another kind of accident. She’s fallen in love with Mercury.”

  We agreed to discuss the party tomorrow and hung up. I held the photograph under the light. Marcus and Trina, it was true, were smiling, their hands full of shells. But Viv’s eyes were hidden by sunglasses, and her mouth was raised at the corners in a smile more like mine than hers. I turned off the oven, bundled the children into the car, and headed for Windy Hill. But as we reached the main road, a familiar car turned in our direction.

  5

  MY FATHER USED TO claim we were distantly related to Robert Louis Stevenson, and as a teenager, I had a phase of reading his work. Safe in my bedroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I delighted in his tales of adventure and wickedness, particularly The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So I can report that Dr. Stevenson did not that evening meet Mr. Hyde at the crossroads, but he did glimpse some dark part of himself. Even as I followed Viv down Green Street, across Herbert and onto Milton, I was turning away from the street of honesty, and heading down the avenue of duplicity.

  Inside the house Trina ran to find her mother. From the kitchen I heard her voice, then Viv’s, then the sound of the shower. I turned on the oven again. By the time Viv came downstairs, Marcus had laid the table, the pizza was hot, and I had put together a salad.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, hurrying into the room, her damp hair falling almost to her waist. “I only just got your message, and poor Drew’s. Thanks for making dinner. What can I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  She studied me for several seconds and then, although we don’t usually drink during the week, went to open a bottle of wine. As we helped ourselves to pizza, she asked her nightly question: “What did everyone learn today?”

  Marcus announced that he’d learned he was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “So you ought to let me stay up late,” he said.

  Before Viv or I could explain the true meaning of the phrase, Trina said that today was elephant appreciation day. “There used to be millions of elephants in Africa,” she said. “Now there are only thousands. I want to dress up as one for Halloween.”

  Marcus sniggered. “You’re not even five feet tall.”

  “So I’ll be an Indian elephant,” she said resolutely. “They’re smaller. They can eat three hundred pounds of grass a day.”

  I said that when I was her age, I had dressed up as a walrus for Halloween and collected money for Guy Fawkes. Then I had to explain who Guy Fawkes was and how in 1605 he, and his fellow Catholic conspirators, had plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London.

  “He was an early terrorist,” said Viv.

  Even as I wanted to contradict her, Marcus and Trina were nodding—they were familiar with terrorists—and I realized she was right. If the Catholic monarchy had been restored, then Fawkes would have been a freedom fighter, but it wasn’t, and he wasn’t. His story had all the modern ingredients: dreams of radical change, betrayal by anonymous letter, torture, confession.

  After the children were in bed, Viv refilled our glasses and told me what had happened at the stables. Claudia had had to leave early, but they were both worried about Mercury; he’d been pacing his paddock all afternoon. They thought he might kick down the gate if he didn’t get some exercise. And then, once she was riding, she had lost track of the time.

  “He’s just a horse,” I said. I was used to her enthusiasms.

  “Not just,” she said. “Imagine if you were suddenly given the keys to a Porsche. I barely touch the reins, and he knows what I want. And he remembers things. The first time around, he clipped the tallest jump. The next time he adjusted his stride and took off a foot closer.”

  Only afterwards, as she was rubbing him down, had she remembered that it was Thursday, that she was due home. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was bewitched.”

  She went to load the dishwasher, leaving me to ponder the discrepancy between Claudia’s account and hers. Claudia hadn’t mentioned being worried about Mercury. It was Viv, I was sure, who had adjusted the truth. At the time it seemed a small subterfuge, the kind of white lie anyone might tell. The main thing, I told myself, was that Mercury had cheered her up.

  The next day I phoned Claudia to plan Viv’s birthday party. I was writing “potato salad” when she suggested we invite Hilary and Diane.

  “We’re not asking Merrie,” I said.

  “But this is Viv’s party.”

  Talking about his first wife, Steve once said, “She began every sentence with ‘but.’” Even as she urged the invitation, I understood that Claudia shared my reservations about Mercury and his owner. If only I had stood firm, my story would end here.

  6

  MUCH OF WHAT I learned at school has vanished from my brain, but I do recall reading a tale of Chekhov’s in which a man exclaims about his neighbor, “If only I knew what the old stick did in bed.” I have never felt that way. I am, however, deeply interested in what I myself do in bed. The first time Viv and I slept together, it was clear that we pleased each other, and until recently the bedroom was a happy priority. Jack told me that long before the decline of the Roman Empire was apparent, the percentage of base metal in the gold and silver coins had begun to rise. Months before I admitted what was happening with Viv, the pattern of our lovemaking changed. After a frenzied period prior to my father’s death and a long blankness following it, in September our normal pattern of two or three times a week had resumed. Then suddenly—was it before or after she cut her hair?—Viv was often too tired, even at weekends.

  We did, I remember, make love the Sunday before we went whale watching with our neighbor Anne and her daughters. The expedition was Trina’s idea, and she brought her sketchpad, a book about whales, and huge excitement to the occasion. As we drove to Boston Harbor, she recited various facts about whales, including that they see the world in shades of gray. It was late in the season, the boat only half full, and as soon as we left the harbor, Trina and Viv went to talk to the naturalist who was guiding the trip. In the lounge Anne leaned across the table and began to praise Greenfield School.

  “It’s not just about education,” she said. “It’s about the whole child.” Glancing at the next table, where Marcus and her daughters were playing hangman, she added that Ivy hadn’t gotten into a single fight this year.

  “Excellent,” I was saying as Viv and Trina reappeared, Trina waving the naturalist’s sample of baleen. We all admired the dusty black fringe and listened to her explanation of plankton. When she darted off to return it, Viv sat down and Anne resumed her attack.

  “Don’t you want your children to grow up believing they can do anything?” she said.

  “No,” I said, “because that’s patently false.” I offered Viv’s equation. X—our taxes fund public schools + Y—everyone deserves a good education = Z—we should send our children to the schools and work to improve them. Beside me, Viv gave no sign of encouragement.

  “Of course we should campaign for better schools,” said Anne, “but Marcus needs skilled help now to fulfill his potential.”

  Outside the windows of the lounge the sea was growing choppy. “Who knows what his potential is?” I said. “Maybe he’ll be a trade union leader, or a dairy farmer, or a swimming coach. Right now he’s an ordinary ten-year-old who’s mad about swimming. I’m happy for him to be an ordinary eleven-year-old, an ordinary twelve-year-old.”

  But the ordinary had no place in Anne’s vision; she was an unabashed elitist. Her daughters could grow up to be Nancy Pelosi or Serena
Williams or Zaha Hadid. She was describing the mentoring program at Greenfield when someone shouted, “Whales!”

  Over the years I must have seen hundreds of images of these large beings, but the reality took my breath away. The naturalist announced that we were meeting the four-month-old Millie and her mother, Ruby. Millie rolled back and forth, a few yards away, waving her flippers as if in greeting. As for Ruby, she lazed alongside the boat companionably. Her skin was the deepest navy blue. Leaning over the rail, I stared down into her small, dark eye, willing her to look back, and just for a moment she did. Then she dipped her head and blew a spout of water. A few drops, fishy and exhilarating, spattered my jacket.

  PERHAPS THAT EXHILARATION WAS partly responsible for what happened the next day. From her questionnaire I knew that Bonnie Dawson was twenty-nine, married with two children; she worked in a middle school cafeteria. Of the five people in the waiting room that morning, three were women around thirty. Bonnie, I guessed, was the one in the corner, a little heavyset, listening to her iPod. But at the sound of my voice a woman in the middle of the room lowered her magazine. She wore a cream sweater with a cowl neck, jeans and black boots, clothes Viv might have worn but that were, I somehow knew, of cheaper quality.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said, offering her hand.

  Not many patients shake hands, and her clasp was warm and firm. Her eyes were that color we call hazel. I made some comment about the weather, nice for late October, and then we were in my inner sanctum. “So tell me why you’re here,” I said.

  She took off her ugly tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed her eyes, two-fisted, like a child, as she told me that her husband had said she was imagining things. “But I don’t do imagination. There’s this shadow inside my head. A few months ago it was skinny as a knife. Now it’s like a door I’m trying to see around, but how can you see around a door in your head?”

  “Look at the wall. Can you show me where the shadow is?”

  She covered one eye and slowly raised her other arm. “Just below that certificate. If it gets much bigger, I won’t be able to see what I’m putting on the kids’ plates.”

  I asked if she’d had problems with her eyesight before, and she said as a baby she’d had a lazy eye. “You can see me in pictures, looking two ways. I wore a patch like a pirate.”

  I turned out the lights. As I told her to blink, look up, look down, I noticed something moving in the gloom. Bonnie’s head was perfectly still, but her hands were writhing. When I said I needed to dilate her eyes, she said she was already late for work; she’d make another appointment. Before I could protest, she was out of the chair, out of the room. Two minutes later I was discussing the weather with my next patient, but for the rest of the day I found myself thinking about Bonnie. I had watched the marriages of several friends blow apart, but this, I told myself, was only a slight breeze. My mother might be on the move; I was not.

  LIKE MANY OF THE events in this narrative, I recall Viv’s birthday party in two ways: as I experienced it, and as I later came to understand the role it played in our story. At the time the party was notable for one thing: Viv’s new haircut. For as long as I had known her, her hair had hung almost to her waist. She arrived at the party with it shorter than Marcus’s.

  “I felt like a change,” she said, running her hand through the feathery tufts. “New age, new look. Don’t you think it suits me?”

  I was so dismayed I could barely speak. The children, with no such scruples, protested vehemently. “You look like someone else,” Trina said. Marcus announced that hair grows at the rate of half an inch a month. It would take two years for her to look like her old self.

  “But I don’t want to be my old self,” said Viv.

  Besides my mother, Claudia, and her great-aunt Helen, the guests included friends, neighbors, and Hilary and Diane. Claudia had organized everyone to bring contributions, and Steve ran the barbeque in the backyard. It was a lovely October day, the sun shining, the leaves resplendent. We sang “Happy Birthday,” and Viv closed her eyes to blow out the candles.

  “Did you wish for your hair back?” Trina asked.

  Claudia hushed her. I assumed Viv had wished what I always wished on such occasions: good fortune for our little family. Months later, when she told me she had wished for success with Mercury, I slammed the microwave door so hard the hinges broke.

  But that was still to come. As we ate the cake, I found myself next to Hilary. Diane was doing so much better, she said. She was speaking up in class, making friends.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Viv told me you help people sell houses.”

  “Yes, I do this weird thing called staging. I help owners present their houses in the best possible way. Who’s the guy with the camera?”

  “Claudia’s friend, Rick. In real life he’s an accountant.”

  “Oh, that’s Rick. And what about the guy who looks as if he’s hiding from the camera?”

  Following her gaze, I saw a handsome man wearing sunglasses, a black shirt, and black jeans, playing cat’s cradle with Trina. When he first came to see me, Jack had described how for years he’d denied his poor eyesight, going to the movies, rollerblading, cycling, running for buses. Even now, when he often used a cane, he was adamant that his blindness did not define him. I’m not your blind friend, he insisted. So I was only following his orders when I failed to mention that his dark glasses too were a kind of staging.

  “That’s Jack Brennan,” I said. “He teaches Latin and Greek at the university. Don’t you worry that you’re deceiving people?”

  “No more than a woman wearing makeup, or a man in a suit.” She smiled easily. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to look one’s best.”

  “But a house is the most expensive thing most people ever buy,” I persisted. “Shouldn’t they be making a rational decision?” Near the barbeque, Viv was talking to her friend Lucy. Why, oh why, had she done something so irrational, without even asking me?

  “People make decisions in lots of different ways.” Hilary slid her fork into the cake. “Only a few of them rational.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Steve, who had joined us. “My wife believes people think more clearly if they frown. She marched around open houses with a scowl. I knew we’d found our new home when she looked furious.”

  “So Donald probably makes excellent decisions,” Hilary said.

  I served them more cake and went to ply the other guests. The next time I looked, she was talking to Jack. Head on one side, he was listening to her light, pleasant voice. How could any of us have known what would come of their conversation on that warm October afternoon?

  7

  THE WEDNESDAY AFTER HALLOWEEN, I attended the funeral of a patient. Mr. Lombardo had died in his sleep the night before he was due to have his first cataract operation. I was sitting in a pew near the back of St. Catherine’s, gazing at a stained glass window showing the saint on her wheel, when the buzz of conversation ceased. The only sound as the priest entered was a piteous sobbing. My patient, I learned, buried his fig trees every winter and made excellent wine. He had gone out in the middle of the night to help a young family whose boiler had sprung a leak. The day before he died, he had played bocce with friends.

  Afterwards I waited in line to shake the hand of Mr. Lombardo’s oldest son. When I introduced myself, his face darkened. “You’re the one who made him get surgery,” he said, dropping my hand.

  I nodded dumbly and hurried away, guilty as charged.

  That evening on the sofa I told Viv about the exchange. “It was as if he blamed me for his father’s heart attack.”

  “That makes a kind of sense,” she said. “His dad was fine. Then you announce he has cataracts, and the next thing he’s dead. Everyone knows there’s a connection between stress and heart attacks. Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but you loaded the gun.”

  If there was a gun, I argued—at the time it was only a metaphor—then it was loaded by genes and habits. The autopsy had found
three of his four arteries almost entirely blocked.

  Viv shook her head. “Sometimes, Don, for all your lenses, you can’t see what’s right in front of your face. Think how you felt about Edward’s death. And you had years to prepare yourself.”

  Before I could argue further, she said her day too had been difficult. That morning the police had appeared at Windy Hill. During the night someone had broken into the nearby farm stand, destroyed a greenhouse, and set fire to two sheds. “They wanted to know if we’d seen anything,” she said. “Which we hadn’t.”

  “They’re bound to have insurance,” I said.

  “But imagine if someone broke into the stables.”

  She looked so dismayed that, for the moment, I forgot the Lombardos and did my best to be reassuring. The stables were set back from the main road, I said; lightning didn’t strike twice.

  OSTRICH-LIKE, I HAD BEEN hoping that Viv had forgotten Greenfield, but the next morning she reminded me of our plan to meet at the open house that afternoon. Despite myself, I was impressed by the airy classrooms, the language lab, the library and Thoreau room (for contemplation and religious practice), and especially by the polite, articulate students. Trina was thrilled by the art room and asked voluble questions; Marcus throughout was monosyllabic. Viv wisely didn’t press him and afterwards suggested his favorite restaurant: China Garden. Not until the next morning, when I was walking him and Trina to school, did I ask what he thought of Greenfield.

  “The kids are stuck up,” he said, “and the diving team sucks.”

  “They’re meant to have great labs,” I pressed. “Challenging teachers.”

  “Who wants to be challenged? It’s school, not a duel to the death.”

  Sensible boy, I thought. Before I could praise his answer, his friend Luis joined us. The two began to argue about whether their new history teacher wore a toupee. Trina asked if I’d noticed that Nabokov was losing his feathers.

  “I saw some on the bottom of his cage last night,” I said. “Has he been losing them for long?”