Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  “I’m feeling fine,” Louie protested. “I’d feel even better if I had a drink.”

  “I’ll talk to the bartender at the hotel lounge,” Eddie added.

  Bobby shook his head. “If the bar cuts him off, he’ll just go through whatever’s in the minibar in his room.”

  “At least he won’t be drinking in public. Let me leave so I can come back.”

  Bobby glanced at his father, who appeared to be deflating, adrenaline no longer pumping through his veins. Just blood and booze. “Eddie, I—”

  “Hey.” Eddie silenced him. “How many times did you shield me from him over the years? This is the least I can do for you.

  Now, your princess just got married. Go back inside and be a proud papa.”

  Bobby felt his energy drain away. “Thanks.”

  He watched as Eddie led their father toward the stairs and down. Louie’s legs seemed rubbery beneath him, even though Bobby was the one who’d gotten walloped. If he and Eddie were lucky, the son of a bitch would collapse as soon as he got to his room and sleep until morning. If they weren’t lucky, he’d work his way through the minibar, make himself sick and stick Bobby with a whopping bill at checkout time.

  Screw it. Eddie was right. He had to go inside and be a proud papa. With a split lip and a bruised cheek.

  He made his way back to the building, shivering as the air-conditioning blasted him. Refusing to show his face in the reception room until he’d cleaned up, he ducked into the men’s room.

  The bathroom was brightly lit and as he studied his reflection in the mirror that stretched the length of a wall above a row of sinks, the striped green wallpaper made him look even paler than he was. His hair was mussed, the skin above his jaw slightly puffy. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. At least it hadn’t dripped onto his tux. How would he have explained the bloodstains when he returned the suit to the rental place?

  I walked into a door, and the door won.

  Frickin’ bastard, he thought as he tossed the cocktail napkin into the trash can and twisted the faucet.

  The door swung open. He hoped it wasn’t one of the wedding guests. His peripheral vision caught a flutter of pale blue and he spun around. “Jo? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Someone in the lobby said you were in here.”

  “It’s a men’s room.”

  “Big deal.” She swept across the room, pinched his chin between her thumb and index finger and inspected his face. “Did you hit your father?”

  “No.” He eased out of her grasp and turned back to the sink. “I wish I had,” he added before bowing and splashing water onto his face.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Eddie’s driving him back to the hotel.” He lifted a paper towel from the stack beside the sink. It was as soft as cloth. He dabbed his lip, then stretched it to see where the blood was flowing from. Just inside, where his teeth had jammed into the flesh.

  “Let me,” Joelle said, taking a fresh towel, soaking it and pressing it lightly to his mouth and cheek. “I think you’ll live.” She smiled, obviously trying to cool his anger as much as his face.

  “I look like shit.”

  “You look like the most handsome man at the wedding,” she argued. “With a slightly puffy lip. If you smile, no one will notice.”

  He attempted a smile. It hurt not just his face but his soul.

  Behind Joelle, the door cracked open and a man started to enter. “Oh—excuse me,” he said, hastily retreating.

  “Come on in,” Joelle called to him. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  “No, that’s all right—I’ll find another restroom.” The man vanished, letting the door whisper shut behind him.

  Joelle grinned up at Bobby. “I scared him away, huh.”

  She was the scariest woman he’d ever known. So calm, so sure of herself, so determined to whip him back into shape. He could force a smile so the wedding guests wouldn’t notice his swollen lip, but he was a long way from back into shape. The anger inside him had mutated into something else, something that felt like panic, or helplessness. Something weak and frightening, something Bobby didn’t want to be.

  Joelle must have sensed it. “Talk to me, Bobby.”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted.

  “You’re upset, but your father’s gone. Eddie’s taking care of it. Put it out of your mind, okay?”

  “It’s not—” He swallowed. When she gazed at him that way, her eyes so blue, so beseeching, he wished he could tell her everything. He wished he could sob on her shoulder. But he couldn’t. He was a man, her husband, the person who had promised to make everything right for her. “I’m not upset,” he said.

  “You are, Bobby. Why do I always have to fight with you to get you to open up? For God’s sake, talk to me.”

  What could he say? How could he admit what he was feeling? “I hate my father,” he admitted at last.

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Not because of him, or this.” He brushed his hand against his throbbing mouth. “Because…because what kind of father can I possibly be if he’s who I learned from? He’s all I know about how to be a father.” Eddie was wise not to have kids—even gay couples became parents these days, but Eddie and Stuart had no interest in that. Bobby should have been that wise, too. He carried his father’s genes in him, his father’s imprint. He’d spent every day of his life struggling to be a better man, but what if he’d failed? What if he was his father’s son?

  He should never have married Joelle. He’d done it only because she’d been desperate and he would have done anything for her—even if it meant turning into his father.

  She cupped her hands on either side of his face and forced him to meet her gaze. Her fingers were cool, firm but unbearably gentle. “You are the finest father I’ve ever seen,” she told him. “You’re nothing like him.”

  “I’m his son.”

  “He’s not a father.” Her voice dipped to a near whisper. “Contributing sperm isn’t what makes a man a father, Bobby. You know that. I know that.”

  Bobby’s father probably knew that, too. The words he’d said outside, the insinuations—had he guessed the truth? Did it matter?

  “You, Bobby DiFranco—you are what it means to be a father.” She guided his face down to her and kissed him, a sweet, warm touch of her mouth to his, light enough not to hurt his injured lip. Then she released him. “Come,” she said, slipping her hand into his and leading him out of the bathroom. “You have to make a toast to the bride and groom. Try to smile, okay?”

  Smiling would hurt. But for Joelle he would do it.

  THIRTEEN

  DANNY SHOWED UP AT FIVE-THIRTY, lugging a shopping bag full of take-out Chinese food. The aroma of soy and ginger emanating from the bag tore through whatever had been wrapped around Bobby’s appetite all day. One whiff and he realized he was starving.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of his kids’ fussing over him, though. That morning Claudia had barged in and ordered him to eat something. Now Danny was standing on the front porch, armed with food.

  At least he hadn’t taken inspiration from his brother and shown up with booze. Of all the mistakes Bobby had made in the past week—and he still wasn’t sure what all those mistakes were; he just knew he’d made plenty—downing drink after drink with Mike at the Hay Street Pub had been the biggest.

  Or maybe not. Joelle hadn’t left him after that debacle. Maybe meeting with Helen Crawford behind Joelle’s back had been a worse mistake.

  Or maybe his biggest mistake was that he was who he was—a man who couldn’t give Joelle what she wanted. A man who could provide her with a home and a car, all the security in the world, but couldn’t go all touchy-feely about his emotions.

  She wanted him to open up and let everything out? Well, damn it, he’d been as open as he could be. She wanted to know what was inside him? Rage. He’d sure as hell let that out.

  “How about it, Dad?” Danny said with forced cheer. “Can
I tempt you with some General Gao’s chicken?”

  “Come on in.” Bobby waved Danny inside, then shut the door. The house didn’t have its usual Saturday fresh-scrubbed smell. He supposed he could have cleaned the place in Joelle’s absence, but instead he’d spent much of the day working on her garden. She labored over it, and she liked to believe it was hers, but gardening wasn’t her forte. She didn’t understand that you had to thin out the carrots and radishes if you hoped to harvest edible vegetables and not scrawny little roots. You had to check the undersides of the tomato leaves for aphids, and you had to weed ruthlessly. Joelle insisted that her garden be organic and she’d forbidden Bobby from spraying weed killer and insecticide on the plants. But you couldn’t get a crop of organic produce if insects ate whatever the weeds hadn’t choked to death.

  He’d finished gardening a couple of hours ago, taken a long shower and thought about how, if he were a drinker, a cold beer would have hit the spot. Instead, he’d poured himself a glass of iced tea, left another message, less pleading and more demanding, on Joelle’s cell phone and then called Wanda. “Have you seen Joelle?” he’d asked.

  “I don’t want to get in the middle of this,” she’d replied, which indicated that she had seen Joelle and knew something about what was going on.

  “She won’t return my calls,” he’d said.

  “I suppose she will when she’s good and ready.”

  “Will you ask her to get ready soon?” He’d been unable to sift the impatience from his voice. “We can’t work anything out if she won’t talk to me.”

  “Or if you won’t talk to her,” Wanda had said.

  He’d almost retorted that he’d been attempting since yesterday to talk to Joelle, but she kept refusing to accept his calls. But why argue with Wanda? She didn’t want to get in the middle of this, and he didn’t blame her. “Tell her I called,” Bobby had said. “Tell her I’ll keep trying.”

  “You better try something,” Wanda had said cryptically before hanging up.

  Discouraged, he’d turned the CD player back on. The carousel was still full of Doors disks, and the first song to play was “The End.” He’d sat listening to the dirgelike number, absorbing Jim Morrison’s howls of pain. “The end of laughter and soft lies,” Morrison sang, leaving Bobby so depressed he almost hadn’t heard Danny ringing the doorbell.

  All right. Food had arrived, food and his youngest son. He was still depressed, but not quite as much as he’d been a few minutes ago.

  “Lauren says Asian cuisine tastes better with chopsticks,” Danny said as he removed plastic tubs and waxed cardboard containers from the bag and spread them out on the kitchen table.

  Bobby reminded himself that Lauren was Danny’s girlfriend, the woman who’d dragged Danny off to Tanglewood to listen to symphonies. Bobby had met her a couple of times, most recently at a barbecue at Claudia and Gary’s house to celebrate Memorial Day and Claudia’s birthday. Lauren seemed nice enough—but she also seemed like the sort of person who’d use words like cuisine and insist on using chopsticks.

  “This is America,” Bobby said. “I’m using a fork.”

  Danny grinned and accepted a fork, too. He helped himself to one of the microbrewery beers in the refrigerator door while Bobby poured himself a fresh glass of iced tea. Then they settled at the table and dug in. While Bobby inhaled a third of the General Gao’s chicken and a small mountain of steamed rice, Danny described the client he and Mike had visited earlier that day. “He asked for terracing, but his property doesn’t slope. If we did terracing, we’d have to recontour the land first. It seems like an awful lot of effort just so the guy can have terraces.”

  “It’s a profitable job,” Bobby explained. “If that’s what he wants, we’ll rent some earth movers and recontour his property. And we’ll make a lot of money doing it.”

  “Yeah, well, Mike and I wrote down the guy’s specs and figured you’d have to calculate the cost. We weren’t sure whether the company can do that kind of job.”

  “We can.”

  Danny nodded. He was eating even faster than Bobby. Twenty-four years old and he still went through food like a ravenous teenager. He piled some spring rolls onto his plate, then picked one up with his fingers and chomped on it, managing to consume half of it in one bite.

  “So, what’s the deal?” Bobby asked once Danny had made it through all his spring rolls. “You kids are on some kind of rotation?”

  Danny gave him an innocent look. “Rotation?”

  “Yeah—taking turns feeding me. Is Mike scheduled for tomorrow morning?”

  “Mike.” Danny snorted. “He’s pissed. I told him to stay away from you.”

  That brought Bobby up short. He lowered his fork. “Why?”

  “Because of the whole Claudia thing. He doesn’t want to forgive you for not telling us the truth.”

  “You do want to forgive me?”

  Danny shrugged. Along with his adolescent appetite, he still had a lanky adolescent build. Working for DiFranco had added some heft to his torso, however. His chest and shoulders filled his T-shirt well. The front of the shirt featured a picture of a rock band Bobby had never heard of. “I figure, what the heck,” he said. “Claudia’s my sister. End of story.”

  “You don’t mind that your mother and I lied to you?”

  “People lie. They have their reasons.” He rummaged through the food containers, apparently contemplating what to eat next.

  Danny had apparently made his peace with Bobby and Joelle’s decision not to tell anyone about Claudia’s origins. Why couldn’t Mike? Was it simply that Danny was a mellower guy, or happier because he was in love? And where did Claudia fit on the scale? She’d agreed to have her blood tested, but she seemed agitated about the whole thing.

  Beyond the kids, what about him? What about Joelle? What would they do if Claudia wound up being a genetic match for Foster’s son?

  Would they even still be married by then?

  “So, when do you think Mom’ll be coming home?” Danny asked after washing a dim-sum dumpling down with as wig of beer.

  “I don’t know. She won’t talk to me.”

  “Man, what did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” Bobby said, then pressed his lips together and stared at the thick brown sauce spread like an oil slick across the surface of his plate. He’d done something. Saying he’d done nothing was just another lie.

  He and Joelle had survived worse, hadn’t they? They’d survived his return home from Vietnam, his nightmares, his long, arduous months of rehab. They’d survived years of scrimping, years when the only vacation they could afford was a day at an amusement park with the kids, when their idea of a new car was anything less than ten years old.

  “Maybe you ought to go out to Ohio,” Danny said as he scooped a pile of beef and broccoli onto his plate. “Sit down with her and talk things out.”

  “I just told you—she won’t talk to me,” Bobby said.

  “Maybe you ought to get in her face. Then she’d have no choice but to talk to you.”

  Bobby regarded Danny. Danny tended to be more impulsive than Mike or Claudia. He thought a thing and then he did it. Get in her face, he’d said. Go out to Ohio.

  Bobby wasn’t one for dramatic gestures, and he’d never chased after a woman who didn’t want him. But this wasn’t just a woman. This was JoJo. His wife.

  The woman who’d betrayed him. The woman who’d taken his daughter away from him.

  The woman he’d adored since he was ten years old.

  He couldn’t fix this mess alone. He wasn’t sure he and Joelle could fix it together. But a part, they would never make things right.

  “I wonder how soon I could get to Ohio,” he said.

  JOELLE’S CHILDHOOD BED WAS A lot less comfortable than her bed at home in Gray Hill. It was even less comfortable than the hard king-size bed in the room at the West Side Motor Lodge, where she’d stayed her first night in Holmdell. Yet after checking out of the motel and moving int
o her old bedroom at the rear of the first-floor flat on Third Street, Joelle slept as if someone had clubbed her over the head, a thick, black sleep without dreams.

  The small room overlooking the backyard was warm and stuffy. Her mother had never installed an air conditioner in that room, and she left the door shut most of the time so the air-conditioning gusting through the rest of the apartment wouldn’t be wasted in a room she rarely used. She’d set up her sewing machine on Joelle’s desk, and an ironing board along the far wall. A pile of fabric squares in a basket next to the sewing machine indicated that she was working on a quilt. Joelle could sew it while she was in town, but it was her mother’s project, so she left the fabric and the machine alone.

  She used to sew a lot when the kids were younger. They were always outgrowing things, always in need of a new shirt or dress. Ratty old furniture had to be spruced up with new slipcovers and pillows. But lately she’d been neglecting her sewing. When she went home, she’d start a new project.

  When she went home. Once she decided it was time to return to the house in Gray Hill. Once she knew whether the mistakes she’d made were reparable, whether her children would forgive her, whether her husband would ever, ever open his heart fully to her.

  Until she was ready to face everything that awaited her in Connecticut, the cramped back bedroom on Third Street would do, even without air-conditioning. The scuffed chest of drawers that used to hold all her clothing now contained stationery supplies, old magazines and odds and ends, but the bottom drawer was empty, enabling her to unpack her suitcase. The closet was empty, too—except for her high-school prom dress, still hanging from the rod, draped in clear, protective plastic. As if she’d ever wear the thing again. Just touching the synthetic fabric made her skin itch.

  The pillow on her bed smelled musty, but the sheets were cool. She’d opened the window to let in the night air and asked her mother to let her sleep late. She hadn’t slept well for so many nights. Maybe a night alone, without Bobby lying right beside her yet light-years away from her, would allow her to get some rest.