And then I’m scared that we won’t.
There are pictures on the walls of the children—as bright-eyed toddlers, middle-sized kids, and then lovely young adults. I stare up at them from the floor, remembering Lindsay’s fat little hands circling my own and Brice’s crazy, maniacal laugh. And then I see it: a framed black-and-white photograph of Carly on the bedside table. I pull myself up and go over and pick it up. She’s wearing a French cloche-type hat, with little wisps of her hair sticking out, and she’s looking into the camera with her eyes brimming and huge with feeling and her mouth drawn up in a little knot.
Collateral damage.
That’s what Jeremiah called her back then. Her and Grant. They were to be our collateral damage.
He calls from the kitchen. “Do you want Earl Grey or some of this herbal crap? Let’s see—I think there’s chamomile and, oh, here’s something called Sleepytime. That probably isn’t a good idea …”
“Earl Grey is fine.” Carly’s eyes in the photo look sad. I clear my throat and then call to him, “So, Jeremiah. Did Carly ever know … you know … about us?”
There’s a beat of silence. The refrigerator motor turns on. “God no,” he says. “At least I don’t think so.”
I take the photo and go stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch him taking down two mugs from the cabinet and setting them on the counter. “What do you mean, you don’t think so? How can you not know something like that?”
I’d forgotten how he domesticated he is, the way he moves around so confidently in the kitchen, how he looks when he concentrates, and the way his square hands become so limber as he arranges things just so on a black wooden tray: the spoons, the cream, the sugar bowl.
He sees me watching and smiles. “Ahhh, Annabelle, perhaps you’ve forgotten the kind of relationship Carly and I had. We made it a point never to talk about anything except how terrible it was that I didn’t work as hard as she did. Surely you remember that.”
“So, you told me that day at the train station that you weren’t going to leave her, and then you went back home, but … then what? Did you just sit down and eat dinner together and act like nothing had happened?”
“Nothing had happened, in Carly’s world.”
“But I mean you. Were you sad? Were you angry? Didn’t she look across the table and even suspect a little bit how close she’d come that night to losing you?”
He pours the hot water from the kettle into a green teapot, and for a moment the steam obscures his expression. When he answers me at last, his voice is weary. “Oh, who freaking knows what she knew, Annabelle? Why does it even matter? I came back home, and the twins probably needed a bath, and Carly no doubt wanted to go off by herself. We probably ate dinner. Went to sleep, got up the next day. Time passed. What can I tell you? Why do females always love to muck around in this stuff?” He’s smiling. “What’s the point? Here. Let’s have our tea, and then I want you to come with me. I want to show you something.”
“No,” I say, and we’re both caught short by my tone. “No. How can you just say that? This stuff is important.”
He bites his lip. “No, it isn’t,” he says. “Not really, not in the grand scheme of things.” He comes over and hands me a mug of tea and stands close to me and tilts his head, in his charming way, and says softly, “What was important—and what will always be important—is that you and I almost made a life for ourselves. Together. And when that didn’t happen, when I decided to do the so-called right thing, it didn’t really matter whether Carly knew or didn’t know, because the bottom line was that you and I weren’t going to be together. And that hurt both of us for a very long time, and now we’re here with apparently one afternoon to spend together out of the rest of our lives. And I, for one, don’t think we should spend it beating ourselves up. Okay?”
“So then there was nothing at all? No repercussions?”
“What is it with you?” he says. He looks amused. “You want some reassurance that you weren’t the only one who had to suffer? Is that it? Well, if it’s any consolation to you, I did suffer. I had to live with this woman for the rest of her life, knowing I wouldn’t have you anymore. Isn’t that enough suffering for one man?” He’s teasing me as he takes the photograph out of my hands and puts it facedown on the table. “Now come on, Annabelle baby, let’s drop this. Let me show you this thing I saved for you.” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and gently propels me into the living room. “You’ll get a kick out of this, I promise.”
And so, reluctantly, I allow myself to be led into the hushed, overstuffed living room and over to the desk that had once held so much fascination for me, simply because it was his. I remember being awed by the pens in the pottery bowl—oh, and the night I licked one of them. God, I was so young then!
“I was cleaning out some old boxes the other night, and I came across this,” he says. “Do you remember?” His eyes are dancing as he reaches into a drawer and pulls out a copy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and presents it to me with a flourish. Goldi had been crossed off with Magic Marker, so it just said Locks and the Three Bears.
“Oh my God yes. I remember doing this,” I say. The cover has three cartoon bears with a blond child sitting up in a bed, wide-eyed. Carly had insisted that I not only change the name, but also that I draw a cap on Goldilocks’s hair so she would seem to be a boy. Locks. How is it that this one book didn’t get returned? We must have forgotten to take it back with the others. I look up at him.
“Carly’s foray into feminist lit,” he says, and grins. “Remember how she defaced all those books, and then it was you and I who had to go and tell the day-care lady what she’d done?”
“Well, but that’s not exactly—”
“What a raw deal we got, huh? But you know what I realized? Without this one single act of hers, you and I probably wouldn’t have gotten together. This was the beginning of you and me. Ta-da! Locks and the Three Bears.” He does a little flourish.
“No, no. Wait,” I say. “Jeremiah, that’s not what got us started. Don’t you remember? Carly made me sit up with her one night and cross out all the sexist things with her, and then I had to sneak them back in the next morning before the day-care lady noticed—only then she caught me, and she was so mad. It was awful. And remember? She told us she wouldn’t watch Brice and Lindsay anymore after that, and then you and I walked home together, trying to figure out what we were going to do with the kids.” I open the book and look at all the black marks I’d made, at my handwriting changing the wording, and everything about that uncomfortable night floods back—Carly lecturing me on how men will always try to take my power away, and me feeling so young and uncertain but going along with her just to be nice. Why was I always trying to be nice back then?
“Well,” he says, “you may have had to make the marks, but I think I finally know why she had you do it. And trust me, it wasn’t in the interest of feminism.” He ambles across the room and sits down on the couch and sprawls his legs out in front of him and smiles at me. I know this tactic of his: get farther away from me, make me come to him. It’s cat and mouse. But I am too upset.
“She said we had to do it because children’s books were too sexist,” I say. “She gave me a long speech about that. And about power. Men taking away my power.”
“No. That wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that she didn’t want me to finish my novel, and she knew I was close to finishing it. So she wanted the kids to get kicked out of day care. Because if they couldn’t go to day care, then I would have to watch them, and I wouldn’t have the time to write my novel while I was on sabbatical. It was very Machiavellian of her. Very Carly-esque, you might say.”
“But, Jeremiah, she didn’t even know about your novel then. Don’t you remember? You kept it a secret. It was our secret.”
“She was quite a piece of work,” he says. “She made sure she got things just the way she wanted them.”
Damn it! Doesn’t he remember? He doesn’t even
remember the day he started the novel and we sat on the floor together and talked about it, the day he realized that writing a novel was what he most wanted to do. And Carly didn’t know anything about it! It was me. He and I were the ones who figured out that that was what he should be doing. I am suddenly struck by how he seems to admire this view of Carly he’s conjured up. Have we really told ourselves such different stories? We’re now a love story that got started because Carly didn’t want him to write? No, no, no.
I should let it go, but I can’t. “Let me remind you,” I say patiently. I sit down on the edge of the ottoman across the room from him, putting the Three Bears book on the coffee table between us. “I was the one that Carly asked to watch the twins. Remember that? Since I wasn’t doing art anymore, she thought I should be willing to pay you guys back by taking care of the children. She seemed so angry with me that I wasn’t doing art.”
He smiles and says in a soft, silky voice, leaning forward so close he could reach over and touch me, “Yes! That was Carly for you. She always had opinions about what everybody was supposed to be doing with their lives. But we outsmarted her, didn’t we? She didn’t figure on the fact that there you were, not only beautiful and willing to go to bed with me, but also quite willing to listen to my stupid-ass prose and even tell me it was wonderful.” His eyes are shining, and he bites his lip and cocks his head. “Annabelle, please just come over here and sit next to me. I can’t get over seeing you here. I never thought this could happen. Us. Together again. Even if it’s only for a short time, I just need to have you near me.”
I shake my head and stay where I am.
“Aw, come on, don’t be mad,” he says. “Okay, let’s just say you’re right. It was you she wanted to watch the children. She didn’t know a thing about the novel. Okay? I’ve got it all wrong.”
“No. Forget it. I’m sorry.”
We sit there in silence, and then he says, “Well, I do remember the important stuff: you and me chasing each other around the apartment when the kids were napping. And all the close calls we had.” He smiles down at the book, touching it as though it’s a sacred talisman from the past or something. The fucking Holy Grail. I hear the heat come on and a radiator clangs somewhere down the hall, the noises of domestic life. I’m feeling almost faint with such a mixture of feelings—disappointment and lust and also as though something is draining all the hope I’ve been carrying for so many years. I look at him and wonder if I was just one in a series of lovers he might have had during his marriage to Carly, a marriage I now think was always unstoppable. Why hadn’t I seen that at the time?
“I’ve often wondered just what we really meant to each other,” I say slowly.
He looks up and smiles at me, and I think it is a practiced smile, something you might see an actor doing in rehearsal. “You know what I think?” he says softly. “You saved me. I think adrenaline, especially sexual adrenaline, is really a drug that can actually keep people from going off the deep end. You and me—that sex with you might have saved my life.”
“So we’re going to think of it as simply sex?” I say. “I think what you’re really saying is that it was the adrenaline that saved you. It wasn’t really me at all.”
“No, no, no! It was you. Why are you taking everything the wrong way? You, Annabelle, caused the adrenaline. I’m trying to tell you that you saved me. I mean, I’m still not sure we could have kept it going for a whole lifetime, but it was great while it lasted.” He smiles sadly, and he suddenly looks tired, and for the first time since I ran into him, I’m aware of how much older he is now, how really changed he is. He falls silent and then he rubs his hands hard over his face and sighs.
The silence that falls between us seems to demarcate something. I am shocked at how hollow I feel. He gets up and walks to the kitchen, and I watch him leave. He is moving slowly, wearily. I am probably more trouble than he bargained for. He doesn’t remember how it was.
This is such a mistake, being here. There’s a noise from the kitchen; he’s rinsing his cup. I remember how he used to put the dirty dishes in the oven, his act of rebellion against Carly’s rules. I suddenly want to get air, to go back outside, to get away from this view of things. When he comes back into the living room, he’s carrying the picture of Carly, holding it out to me, saying something like, This was taken two days after we found out the cancer had gone into remission. We renewed our vows. She said we had to. I didn’t want to do it, but it was actually quite … moving. I was there for her for the end, the way I should have been all along.
My blood is beating so loudly in my ears that I can barely take in what he’s saying. What then does he see on my face that makes him come over and touch my cheek? He says, “I’ve made you mad. I’m so sorry, Annabelle. I didn’t mean to hurt you again.”
“It’s okay. It’s just that I thought—I thought that we saw it the same way, and we didn’t,” I say. I look up into his face, which now seems naked with pain. “I just can’t have you calling it adrenaline, when it was love. It was love. Big love. And I’ve held on to it all these years, even though I wasn’t ever going to see you again; I thought of you and dreamed of you, and when things were hard for me, I remembered that you had loved me, really loved me, and it got me through so much. And now—now you bring me here, you insist that I come, and you’re just trying to act as though we had some toxic chemicals in our blood or something. What you’re saying to me is that it would have been a horrible mistake for us to end up together.”
He smiles at me. His eyes are watering. “No, it wouldn’t have been a mistake,” he says. “We would have worked it out, but it would have hurt so many people. But I missed you, too. I still miss you, Annabelle.”
“But not the way I missed you,” I say. “There was such a long time when I wasn’t always so sure I could live without you.” I’m light-headed.
“But you did,” he says. And I have to agree.
He laughs and touches my nose with his index finger, and then we’re staring into each other’s eyes, and I think we’ll probably kiss again, and that maybe we’ll fall together after all and go into his bedroom and throw all his stuff off the bed and take our clothes off and make love one last time. It won’t be the way it was once; hell, it won’t even be what I had hoped for earlier today. But it could still happen, as a piece of theater. I feel myself tip and fall into his eyes, those swimming eyes. And then the electricity just fizzles, and he’s the one who manages to resist. The kiss he plants on my nose is one of closure.
“Well,” he says. “We both lived, didn’t we? We have this great past together to look back on. That’s more than most people have. And if I was unkind to you, I’m sorry. I was so fucked up back then. I probably should have been quarantined as a danger to society.”
I detach myself from him. My body temperature seems to have dropped about fifteen degrees. I’m almost shivering. “I’m glad they didn’t quarantine you,” I say. “I’ve loved you so much, throughout everything.”
“But not anymore,” he says.
He’s wrong about that. I have it for him still. It’s over in the corner of my brain now, diminished a bit by time and reality. It’s lost some of its shiny promise. But it’s there.
I let myself kiss him, but I leave without sleeping with him. I have to walk for blocks and blocks before I can admit that I went there hungry for the drama of him, that I had craved that heightened sense of loving and being loved once again. I am so lonely for love. I have to stop walking for a moment and lean up against the warm brick facade of a building, where the sun is beaming down. I watch a homeless man who is calmly waiting, approaching each person who comes by, asking for coins for his little paper cup, and then somehow out of all that—the homeless guy and the people shaking their heads at him and moving on and leaving him there, the warmth of the bricks, the sun shining down—I know that restraint was actually the best thing that could have happened, and that I am going to be all right, and that it’s okay to still love Jeremiah just a
little, or even a lot, and yet not do anything about it.
[sixteen]
1980
Here’s a crazy thing. When I left the train station that day, I actually thought that Jeremiah might run and catch me, that any moment I’d feel his hand on my shoulder and turn to see him smiling at me. “I’ve changed my mind!” he’d say. “How could I possibly throw all this away?” Or maybe he would say that this had all been just a test—a test of my love.
When it started to get dark, and my arms and legs were aching, I went into a little run-down restaurant in a neighborhood I’d never been to before, and sat at a booth in the back all by myself. This was the first time I had ever been in a restaurant alone, and I sat there in the dimness for a long time, running my fingers along the carved initials in the wooden table. When the waitress came by for the third time, I ordered French fries and tapioca pudding and was surprised a little while later when that was exactly what was brought to me, glistening and gross. My brother had called tapioca “fish-eye pudding” when we were little, just so he could get both my portion and his.
I listened to the conversations of normal people and stared through the faraway windows as the lights flared and faded, red and green blinking on and off, headlights sweeping past. The door opened and closed; clumps of people arrived and departed, in groups, like schools of fish. After a while I noticed they were wet. It was raining. I saw the water rolling down the pane of glass, distorting the neon signs outside, the headlights of the cars. There was a loud clap of thunder, and the lights flickered but stayed on.
Maybe, I thought, I should call Grant. If I called him … if I told him I’d been hallucinating and begged him for forgiveness, would he come and meet me and take me back home? He was probably in such terrible pain right now. We could be in pain together, climb our way out of it by holding on to each other.
The Stuff That Never Happened Page 27
