“Mom? Is it close enough to morning so we can eat cereal?”
“Hush,” she said, because now there was some racket upstairs, feet walking along the floorboards above their heads. The footsteps tracked back and forth and then it was Eric calling her name and the children’s voices piping up in response, Daddy, Daddy!
“What are you doing down there? Kids? Jane?” He was at the head of the stairs, peering down at them. The children ran to meet him. “What happened, are you all right?” He descended the stairs, the children crowding into him on both sides, and stopped when he saw Jane on the floor. “Jane? What the hell?”
She said, “I thought I heard something.” Reaching into herself for some effort at guile. “Like somebody trying to break in.”
“Did you see anything?” She shook her head, no. “Did you call the police?” Again, no. “Well next time call, all right? That’s what they’re for.” He was only pretending to be annoyed. He was so happy to see them. He stooped over her to help her up, hesitated, until she reached up to him.
They put their heads close together and spoke so the children could not hear them.
“Sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t—”
“It’s all right.”
“Just don’t send me away. I can’t stand it.”
“It’s all right,” she said again, letting him hold her up, letting him kiss her face and carry on extravagantly and make promises he would in time forget, then skulk around feeling guilty and trying to make it up to her, let him do whatever he wanted from now on. She had seen what might happen to her if she was left on her own and it terrified her. Let it all be as before. Let them carry on and on, battering against themselves and each other.
“Daddy’s a big crybaby,” Grace said.
calculus
The summer of one year had gone by and now it was the summer of the next and they had given up pretending that they were going to stop anytime soon.
They stood in the parking lot behind Bonnie’s apartment, saying good-bye. They were always saying good-bye. Most often they did so indoors, to avoid the extra scrutiny of Bonnie’s neighbors, even though the Dumplings, certainly, and Mr. Hopkins, most likely, knew what was what. It was just easier to avoid coming face to face with them and make them a part of the farewell scene.
But on this evening of a mild, irresistible day in late June, the sky was lavender (from pollution, Eric suggested), the starlings were still chattering and whistling in the curbside trees, and even the traffic noise had a softened, indistinct sound, like an urban ocean. So they walked outside and stood for a time next to Eric’s car. Bonnie wore one of her loose, bright-colored cotton shifts, garments which she hoped did not announce, “I just had sex and I’m not wearing anything underneath,” but probably did.
Eric wore the clothes he’d put on at home that morning, and now, between work and Bonnie’s, had climbed out of and back into twice. His summer shirts and suits were expensive and just short of dandyish. The shirts were white or mint or blue or gray, plain or checked or faintly striped. She loved the architecture of his jackets, she turned the unlined ones inside out to examine the tailoring. She loved this evidence of vanity, all the things a man might do to present himself well. She didn’t have much experience with men who dressed up; she decided she liked it. Once she had asked him, in the matter-of-fact tone they used when speaking of her, if Jane bought any of his clothes for him. Eric said no, she didn’t. He said that clothes weren’t one of the things Jane seemed to notice.
The sky deepened another notch, one more moment of the most extraordinary lilac and deep violet tints. “I hope the traffic won’t be too bad,” Bonnie said, as a way of keeping him talking, keeping him there just a little while longer. “What a hassle, driving.”
“Well, not everybody can take the bus.” He was checking his phone for messages. She supposed it was unreasonable of her to hate his phone. He put it back in his pocket, opened the car door. Readied himself, smiling. “OK, kiddo . . .”
Bonnie took a step, reached up, allowed herself a brief, glancing hug and kiss. Break clean. She stepped back and he got into the car, started it, rolled down the window and crinkled his mouth in a smile. “Bye.”
“Bye.” She turned and went back inside, not allowing herself to make an affecting sight out of watching him disappear. She could never decide if leavetaking was one of the best or worst moments. Her body was still heavy and drugged with whatever mystery chemical it was that sex let loose in you. Maybe there were people who never felt such a thing, or who shrugged it off, but she wasn’t one of them. Or those for whom sex was just scratching an itch, or a smutty joke. There was no explaining it, and no one she cared to explain such things to. Not Eric. She was too shy, and anyway it would have felt like bragging, risking all their precarious luck. Because she did regard herself as lucky.
And yet it was a kind of violence to be deprived of his body, to always be watching him leave.
And yet again (back inside now, wandering from one room to another, setting right all the things his presence had disrupted), how nice it was to have her own space back again, to draw breath, relax, contemplate. She wished she ever knew what she wanted for fifteen minutes at a time.
Her phone rang. It was Eric. He did this sometimes, called while he was driving home, so as to delay, once more, a good-bye. “I was thinking,” he said, “that we don’t do a very good job of urban planning. In general. Unless there’s some opportunity, a fire, say, that levels all the old mistakes and allows for an actual plan.”
“And why do you think that is?” Bonnie asked. She didn’t care one way or the other about urban planning but she got a kick out of Eric’s enthusiasms, his serious man-talk. Anyway, it was her job, wasn’t it, to be receptive, engaged in his engagements, to be his intellectual geisha. “I mean, there wouldn’t have been any such thing as planning, at first. Just people settling near the river, or the stagecoach line. I guess you could call that a plan.”
“Central governments didn’t develop until later,” Eric said. “The whole concept of a central government having regulatory authority is fairly recent.”
“That makes sense.” She listened to him go on about urban sprawl, and the tyranny of the automobile, and any number of other such judgments. Bonnie provided occasional interested and encouraging noises. She didn’t care about any of it. She only loved that he’d called, that he wanted to try out his important-sounding opinions on her. You could delight in a man’s small affectations and flaws as you might a child’s. At least, until they became tedious. She had to wonder what brought this on, this particular big idea. Urban planning not her first post-bed thought.
After a time Eric said he’d better get off the phone and concentrate on driving, the traffic was getting heavy. “Bye,” Bonnie said. As before, not making any kind of goopy, huge deal out of it, because they would be thinking about everything they had done to each other while together, and that too was a part of good-bye.
They did not see each other all that often, since Eric’s schedule truly was unpredictable, demanding, and crazy-making—Bonnie could sympathize with Jane here. And the children had their own absolute and unimpeachable needs. And so Bonnie occupied something like a corner of a corner, or a slice of a slice, of Eric’s time. That was the deal. If she was being shortchanged of some portion of his presence and his attention, well, so was everyone else in his life. Get in line.
Besides, she was a free agent. She could come and go as she pleased. Take a new job, up and move, cut herself loose without regrets. A wild card you didn’t much want to play.
A week or two or more might go by when they did not see each other, and then it might only be for lunch or drinks, that is, not for sex. But they spoke almost every day, and sometimes throughout the day. “I just never shut up,” Bonnie said to him once, meaning it in a humorous, self-deprecating way th
at also managed to have some showing off in it. And Eric surprised her by saying that he hoped she never would. She had a vision then of Jane, and of silences as vast and lofty as a vaulted ceiling. She guessed that in conversation, as with sex, she offered a different kind of entertainment.
And was that her purpose, her function, to offer him variety and diversion? She did not like to think in this way.
Because most often things between them were fine, more than fine. They were good companions, good lovers, sounding boards for each other’s troubles. She loved him. She thought he loved her. He didn’t say so. Neither of them said. But regardless. Was that enough? Should it be? Then again, what kind of venal idiot was she being, allowing herself to be so used? It was a precarious balancing act, calculating, keeping score so that she might judge when it was time for her to end it. That was the only possible outcome. You could see it coming from a mile away. She would withdraw herself from him and he would return to his everyday life and he would miss her.
Or perhaps replace her with someone else.
When she was in this injured state of mind, things ceased to be fine. It was a familiar, bitter mood that spilled out in the occasional comment that she tried to make ironic and knowing but which always gave her away.
By now, at least in such difficult moments, Bonnie had reached a certain baseline level of self-loathing, in which she acknowledged that she was a dishonest and disloyal person who had no real intention of changing her behavior, and her occasional bouts of bad conscience and self-recriminations were only whatchacallit. The tribute vice pays to virtue. Hypocrisy.
If Eric went through any similar process of feeling bad about himself but not bad enough to do anything about it, or if he justified himself in some convincing way, or if he managed never to think very much about such things at all, he kept it to himself. Bonnie could not decide if he was being gentlemanly or just a typically oblivious man, but she was just as glad. Talking about the relationship, that cliché of magazines and advice columns, was overrated. It was something you were supposed to want to do, and men resisted because they did not want to lay bare their feelings, etc. They had to be led like a balky horse, with various threats and coaxing, to whatever declaration or endpoint was desired. But Bonnie didn’t want to talk about unpleasant or ambiguous circumstances any more than he did. And so they did not, at least most of the time.
As for Bonnie and Jane. It seemed that it was possible for the two realities to exist side by side, one in which Bonnie was the lover of Jane’s husband, and one in which she and Jane were friends. It was remarkable, the ways you could accommodate two such contradictory things. The thinking part of you, or the moral, censorious part of you, simply ceased to keep office hours. It was true that between the two of them, Bonnie and Jane, there was often a certain distance. This might have come about regardless. They weren’t kids anymore, all full of themselves—well, Bonnie had been full of herself—needing to announce themselves and their intentions and anxieties every fifteen minutes. Their lives had taken certain shapes. Perhaps they were a little bored with each other by now. Or if not bored, exactly, they were thoroughly known quantities to each other.
At least, when it came to those things they each believed they knew.
Here are Bonnie and Jane and Eric, on an outing with the children at Brookfield Zoo. This is Jane’s idea, since she believes the children need a number of formative experiences, such as visiting an overcrowded zoo on a hot day and becoming tired and fretful and walking long distances between exhibits and becoming distressed at the smells. Bonnie has been invited along because she is such a good sport around the kids, plus she entertains them, they are less likely to pitch fits or fight with each other when she’s around. “Should I go?” she’d asked Eric. “Is it better or worse if I’m there?” And Eric had answered, with a certain amount of irritation, that she should do whatever she wanted, it wasn’t going to move the needle much. He did not share Jane’s ideas about the necessity for such organized fun.
So Bonnie arrived at the zoo, parked, paid her entrance fee, and made her way to the Aviary, which was their rendezvous point. It was late morning, less than an hour since the zoo opened, but the place was already full of slow-moving crowds, family groups with children, mostly, making their straggling progress along the broad walkways, stopping to consult maps or to buy T-shirts, animal hand puppets, lemonade, peanuts. The day was bright but humid and the sun glared. Bonnie was wearing a pink summer blouse and blue cotton slacks, cork sandals that she hoped would go easy on her feet. Her clothes were chosen both for utility and to convey only an appropriate, casual attractiveness. Besides, she’d been putting on weight lately, and when she retrieved two of her favorite sundresses from the back of the closet, their front buttons had gapped. What to do? Drink less? An unwelcome thought.
She’d parked at the wrong entrance, she realized, at least if she wanted to be close to the Aviary. Now she had to walk the length of the park to get there, and it didn’t take her long to turn sweaty and unfresh and decide this was a bad idea for any number of reasons. She didn’t like zoos, even at their most spacious and professional. They only existed because of marauding humanity. She always felt sorry for the captive animals, sorrier than they probably did for themselves. She didn’t like crowds of shrieking children, not that anyone did. And she’d grown confused about her motivations for agreeing to be here, whether there was anything genuine about them, whether she really wanted to see the children, or Jane, or even Eric, or if it was all a messy pretense in which she attempted to prove different things to different people. How natural and unaffected she was in their presence, just like always, no breath of suspicion, nothing to see here, move along.
She decided that yes, it would at least be nice to see the kids. They were good kids, and every time she saw them they had become, somehow, more and more themselves, as if their natures were there from the start and the hard or soft protective shell around them had only to be worn away. Was that true of people, the same way it might be true of racehorses or dogs? You were who you were and so you remained? She couldn’t have said.
She passed the central fountain, with its spire of teasing, splashing coolness, and soldiered grimly on. Perhaps she was here because of Eric, although not in the way one might expect. There had been a slight, unspoken bruising of her feelings lately, a sense in which he has been rushed or preoccupied in his dealings with her. A sense in which she is an accomplished fact and no longer must be wooed or fully engaged with, an entire constellation of behaviors that fall into the category of being taken for granted.
Perhaps she wanted to be around him in a place where he would want her but couldn’t do anything about it except sit and stew or flirt in some depraved way that only the two of them would recognize and yes this really was a bad stinking idea but before she could reverse course and leave and phone in with some excuse, Jane spotted her and called her over.
They were sitting on a bench outside the Aviary, that is, Jane and Eric and Grace were sitting while Robbie careened around them, imitating—an airplane? a charging elephant? The others all looked to be in some bad moods of different varieties. Grace was pink-faced and wilting from the heat, Jane was tense, and Eric was having a particularly unattractive fit of scowling. He seemed to be pretending he did not know the rest of them, and had been forced to share a bench with them because of lack of space.
Jane at least looked glad to see Bonnie. Some relief from the unhappy claustrophobia of the family unit. And Bonnie snapped to it. She knew what to do. “Hey you guys! Ready to see the lions and tigers and bears? Gracie, did you see the flamingos yet? The big pink birds? Robbie, whoa.” He had jumped up on her like an untrained puppy, which made Jane scold him, mortified. “OK buddy, I’m happy to see you too.” Bonnie disengaged from him and pumped up her smile. She had to coax and prod them into something resembling a good mood, since they certainly would not do so on their own. “Did you see the birds yet?
”
“We were waiting for you,” Jane said with a hint of grievance, but she made shooing motions to the others to get them up and in motion. Bonnie thought, not for the first time, that she liked any of these people better by themselves than in a group.
Robbie complained that he did not want to see a bunch of old birds, he wanted to see snakes, he wanted to watch them feed live rats to the snakes. Eric said, “Robbie,” in a warning tone, and Robbie said that is too what they eat, live rats. “That’s enough,” Eric said, and Robbie went quiet and sulky from being told, one more time, to stop bothering everybody, and Bonnie knew she might not be the right one to save these people from themselves, but she wished somebody would.
Things got better once they were inside the bird house, part of the obedient crowd looking through the glass windows at the secret green worlds. Grace spotted a small rust-colored bird before anybody else did, and that lifted her spirits. Robbie, bloodthirsty as ever, wanted to know if they had any hawks or other birds of prey, but he was used to being disappointed by now and shrugged it off. Jane was absorbed in the educational aspect of things with Grace, reading the placards. Eric was cruising along behind them, and Bonnie lagged a step so that she could speak to him. Sometimes they overcompensated and practically ignored each other, when before, that is, before the sex, they might have hugged and carried on. At times like these Bonnie felt herself to be a stray explosive substance roaming around loose, ready to ignite or detonate, a walking sexual charge. No matter what half-assed good intentions she might have, no matter what the social proprieties or basic decency required, she might go off at any moment, she might willfully set herself ablaze.
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 26
