by David Gates
“Better than I thought, to be honest. I mean, you seem to be good for him.”
“I hope to be.”
“Yeah, everybody hopes to be. Even him, I guess. Look, I don’t mean anything against Dad, okay? I just don’t feel like I ever knew him all that well.”
“But you were away at school, right? For part of the time?”
“Yeah, whose idea was that?” She pointed a thumb at the ceiling. “I don’t know, sorry, I feel like I’m planting the seed or something. Isn’t that what the stepdaughter always does? This must be weird for you too. Like which of us is the third wheel.”
“Maybe all of us,” I said.
“Right, what a concept. Like a tricycle. Or like tricyclics. I can’t believe I was so rude to you.”
“You were funny, actually.”
“So are you okay? Being with him? Not to be rude again, but he seems pretty old for you.”
“We do fine,” I said. “You’re not asking me to be graphic, right?”
She put down her glass, stuck her fingers in her ears and went La la la la la.
“Are you happy with your person?” I said.
“You don’t have to be such a priss,” she said. “Yeah, she’s great.”
“That’s what your father says.”
“Sure, because he’s hot for her—you know, I mean he was. I thought.” That pale skin made her blush easily. “Can I have just about that much more?”
“You don’t have to be a priss either.” I poured her another half glass, then more for myself. “People can be hot for more than one person.”
“Yeah, tell me.” She drank off what I’d just poured and held her glass up again. “So what were we talking about?”
“I’ve lost track,” I said, picking up the bottle.
“Okay, I think I’m boring you.” She put her hand over the glass. “I probably need to get to bed.”
When her father took her to the train in the morning—I waved from the doorstep like a housewife—I went up and stripped her bed first thing, then came down and started putting stuff in the dishwasher. I held her wineglass for a few seconds, touched the lipstick smear with my tongue and tasted that sweet, chalky nothing-taste of lipstick before telling myself, Five minutes from now you’ll have forgotten you did this.
—
He hadn’t let her know he’d be putting the Rhinebeck house on the market; before bringing her up to the loft to show her the paintings he’d been working on, he’d taken the plans for the new house down from the wall.
“I feel a little funny that she doesn’t know what’s going on,” I said when he got back from dropping her off.
“I don’t think she has any great attachment to this place. Is there any coffee left?”
“That wasn’t the impression I got.”
“Well, whatever the case. There’s time enough for her to come back and say her goodbyes if she wants to. Did you say there was coffee?”
“You were sneaky about it,” I said. I heard the washer in the basement stop, then start the spin cycle.
“I just thought it best not to throw everything at her all at once.”
“She isn’t a child,” I said.
“Are we talking about the same person?” he said. “All right, perhaps I’m the child. I didn’t want to have to deal with any theatrics.” He headed into the kitchen. “I’ll go make some coffee.”
“So you love her but you don’t respect her.”
He looked over his shoulder. “This isn’t going to develop itself into our first fight, I hope? Shall we both go sulk now and gather up our energy for the reconciliation?”
“I need to go get the laundry,” I said. “This isn’t very real to you, is it?”
“So-so. Nothing to write home about. Suppose we depart from the script: you forget the laundry, I’ll forget the coffee, we’ll have a drink like civilized people and go upstairs.”
“It’s eleven in the morning,” I said. “No, I don’t want to go upstairs.”
“It was a euphemism,” he said.
“Yes, do you think I’m stupid?”
“What’s put you in a mood? Were you two overbonding last night? I did think she looked a little blue around the gills.”
“Maybe so. I’ve got a wicked headache.” Which I did, now that I thought of it. “Is it going to fuck up the whole day to do the drink part?”
“What are days for?” he said. “I think my work of corruption is nearly complete.”
I slept until five thirty in the afternoon, left him in bed and took a shower, then brought my book out onto the little back porch off the kitchen. I’ve forgotten what book, but let’s say it was Jane Eyre—Reader, I married him—just because it wasn’t. But I couldn’t concentrate, so I watched a pair of chipmunks playing around the base of a tree: it must have been the tree whose branches I saw out my window. I hadn’t written my thousand words today. Or my thousand words yesterday. It was still warm; the sun had just gone down behind the house on the other side of the back fence. So green out here: bushes I couldn’t name, a small tree I knew to be a dogwood, a lumpy square of ground, overgrown with grass, that must have been where his wife grew her herbs. His wife, did I say? I am Mrs. de Winter now.
I prayed again, sitting out there—you must be thinking I’m not too tightly wrapped, unless you’re a Jesus case like my brother, in which case you’re thinking Grace must be at work, even in this lost bitch’s soul—and this time I prayed that I would never hurt him. I probably thought this made me a good person, that’s how fucking stupid I was. I didn’t get any more specific than never hurting him, which was like lying to your shrink. I don’t go all the way with my brother, who seemed to feel, oh, a little bummed out by, but basically okay with, my father being in hell for ever and ever and ever, I suppose because that was God’s inscrutable will, which wasn’t for him to scrute. But I do believe this much: sooner or later, and in my case I hope later, you’ll have to look at exactly who you were and everything you did, and it’s going to be a shitshow.
My husband came out, with his hair wet and a glass of single malt in each hand—and what happened after that? We went in and had dinner? Watched a movie? Had orgasms in each other’s company, not to put it untenderly? Whatever it might have been, it was surely nothing we hadn’t bargained for.
4
My husband’s hilltop overlooked a wide part of the Hudson that the old-timers used to call Henry’s Pond, and the Indians had called I forget what—he had a whole section of books on local lore. Downriver, a suspension bridge crossed a narrow bend; in the days before the bridge, people would holler across the narrows for the ferry to come. From the deck or through the glass wall of the living room, you could look a mile across the water at that rocky lump of mountain, in whose gray cliffs rattlesnakes supposedly nested.
The first settlement, at the narrows, was long gone; they’d built the present town in the early 1800s, a single street of brick and wooden buildings, intersected by Broadway, the old Route 9, which sixty miles south became the real Broadway. The businesses there now had, by ordinance, royal blue wooden signs with gold letters hanging over the sidewalk. Main Street led down to the Metro-North tracks and dead-ended at the water, where it looped around a green-painted iron tank, planted with geraniums every spring by the chamber of commerce. On weekends, out-of-towners swarmed the antique shops, the nouveau penny-candy store and the soi-disant organic bakery; my husband called it “Olde Quaintsburgh”—I’m inferring both the e and the h. I never told him that I’d once done a feature about it for a section of the paper called “Delightful Destinations.”
We avoided the place, except for a sports bar where we’d go one night a week in the summer to watch baseball and eat linguine with sausage. We could have driven twenty miles to a mall with a multiplex, but he refused, as he put it, “to report for entertainment,” so a couple of nights a week we’d watch a movie at home—film was another forbidden affectation—first on VHS, later on DVD. The other nights we read: him with his Dickens
or his P. G. Wodehouse or his books of Shakespeare criticism—after admiring Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he wanted to know all about Bloom’s class—while I took down this or that from his shelves. He read all of Jane Austen aloud to me. Every week or two we’d drive to the city, to Lincoln Center or BAM, then a late supper at a place he knew on Seventy-First Street or a piece of cheesecake at Junior’s, or simply a “civilized” dinner for two at places where waiters and bartenders pretended to remember him: Café Loup, Da Silvano, the Odeon. He bought me a black Audrey Hepburn dress for the opera; he wore an Armani tuxedo, which still fitted him after twenty years, and cowboy boots. Every Thursday night he played at the restaurant, with a pianist and a drummer. I’d go along sometimes to get out of the house, but it just sounded like a lot of notes to me, so I’d watch his long fingers for a while, spider-walking up and down the neck of his big bass, then open whatever book I’d brought and end up drinking too much. He was good about putting on a classic rock station during the drive home and letting me sing along.
—
The floors in the new house had come out of a barn in New Hampshire, pine boards a foot and a half wide that were oiled and buffed to a fare-thee-well—he had principles about polyurethane—and I wasn’t to walk on them in what he called spike heels. Underneath were tubes for radiant heat; even in winter, the wood felt warm under my bare feet. Three walls of the living room were bookshelves, with just enough space for the Diebenkorn and a tarnished brass tuba—which mustn’t be confused with a sousaphone, and which he said was the most beautiful object ever made by the hand of man, though he also applied this designation to an old automobile called a Cord, his Bang & Olufsen turntable, the Verrazano Bridge, the Japanese flag he hauled out every Fourth of July, and an egg slicer. We went down to ABC Carpet, where he dropped forty-five thousand dollars on antique rugs. I watched the salesman profiling him: the gray hair and trimmed beard—he’d begun growing it during the construction; I suppose the jawline had been bothering him too—and the jeans and blue denim shirt and the younger woman. After he’d presented his card and signed the slip, he shook hands not only with the salesman but also with the two underlings who’d pulled the rugs we’d chosen from the heavy piles and laid them out on the showroom floor.
For that much money, 187 children could have been operated on for cleft palate, with $120 left over. Did you know that one in ten such children will die before their first birthday? I found this out the other day, on operationsmile.org, and did the math. This was something I never knew to consider when I got out of my side of the bed, with its Dux mattress, and put my piggies down into that soft wool. I must be singling out the rugs to obsess over because they were on a human scale. Like the way we’d convey the magnitude of this or that calamity to the readers of Newsweek: Every day, a town the size of TK, the writer would write, and the researcher would look up places in the heartland with however many thousand people and pick one with a leafy name.
Beneath the showy part of the house was a basement with a laundry room, an exercise room, a music room (complete with baby grand piano) and a guest suite: bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, a coffeemaker, a microwave and a mini-fridge, with a private entrance giving onto the driveway. He called the guest quarters “the Bunker,” or “the Black Hole of Calcutta,” and, after Iraq, “Abu Ghraib.” All those little things of his—not jokes, exactly; I don’t know what the word would be—like calling Verdi “Mean Joe Green,” or Lake George “Lago di Giorgio,” or a futon a “futilitron,” or pronouncing herpes “air-pess.” When Target stores appeared, he called them “Tar-zhay” until everybody else started doing it. The house had no garage: he said it would clutter up the design, though of course our cars cluttered up the driveway, and in the winter we had to clear snow and scrape windshields.
When we moved in, he bought all new furniture, dishes, silver and whatnot. Except for the books—his father’s library merged with his—he put most of the stuff from Rhinebeck in a storage unit, in case his daughter might want it someday. For all I know, it’s still there.
She never paid her farewell visit to the old house—she told him it would be too sad—but she did come to see the new place. “Seriously?” she said as we got out of the car.
“Do I take that as a compliment?” he said.
“It looks like it’s about to take off and fly.”
“You hate it.”
“No,” she said. “It’s like where somebody famous would live. Actually I guess you are sort of famous.”
“That was back when giants walked the earth,” he said. “Nowadays I’m content to sit up here and watch the passing parade.”
“Are you? I worry about you.” She turned to me. “Is he?”
“What a thing to ask,” he said. “ ‘Is he a bitter old man?’ What do you expect her to say to that?”
“I think your father’s amazing,” I said.
“See that?” he said. “Amazing. Now let me show you the inside. We’re going to put you in the Holding Tank.” He went around to get her bag.
“I’m assuming he means the basement,” I said. “It’s really comfortable.”
“I don’t know how you live with it,” she said. “I mean I love him and everything.”
“I guess we’re a lot alike,” I said.
“You and him? Or you and me?”
“Well—both. We both care about him.”
“Yeah, that,” she said. “Can we talk sometime?”
After he went up to bed, she helped me put away stuff from the dishwasher and pointed to a bottle of Rémy on a top shelf. “Would it be okay?”
“Pour me some too,” I said. “Snifters are over in that cupboard.”
I took an end of the sofa, thinking she’d join me, but she took her high-tops off, got into the leather armchair and put her stocking feet up. “So here we are again,” she said.
“More or less,” I said. “Is it strange seeing him in a new place?”
“I don’t know, maybe less so. In a way. Could we have some music? If we put it on low?”
“What do you like?”
“You choose. Not jazz.”
“I’m with you on that.” I put on Rumours, since who didn’t like Rumours, except probably my husband. “This okay?”
“I guess. What is it?”
“You’re as bad as your father.” I handed her the jewel case.
“Oh right,” she said. “That’s them? She’s pretty. I mean, they’re all pretty. Listen, I know I said I wanted to talk, but do you mind if we just kind of be here?”
“Of course not. I’m a little tired myself.”
“Am I keeping you up?”
“No, I’m just—I don’t know what I am.”
She got out of the chair and picked up her sneakers. “I’m keeping you up.” She pointed to the jewel case. “Can I take that down with me, for my Walkman? I want to hear it.”
“No, stay,” I said. “I’m enjoying it too.”
“We both need to go to bed,” she said. “I didn’t even realize.”
I missed saying goodbye to her in the morning, when her father drove her to the train. I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, and around three in the morning I finally got up and drank more Rémy—and, I have to say, masturbated in my workroom—then didn’t wake up until ten o’clock. I looked for the Fleetwood Mac CD on the shelves, then in the guest room. Maybe I’d given it to her and not remembered. Or had I meant to give it to her and she’d somehow known?
—
In good weather, I’d bring coffee out to the deck and read the Times; part of his morning routine was to trot down the half mile of driveway, get our copy from the box, then run back up and shower. Then I’d look out across the river and watch the light creep down the mountain as the rattlesnakes came out to take the sun. I’m just being imaginative here: of course it was too far to see them, and they might after all have been just a local legend, and the earth turns too slowly for anyone to detect the creeping of daylight. Once I beli
eved I saw a tiny figure making its way up a cliff and had the insane thought that it was my first husband. When I was done dawdling, I’d get down to business. You can watch the creeping of the word count at the bottom of the screen. Three hundred fifty-three, three hundred fifty-eight. And then, when the sun got too strong, the deck too hot, I went inside to my new room of one’s own. My husband’s door would already be closed, the music in there already going.
My first idea was a book to be called 5 Blondes. The figure 5, not spelled out: I think I had something in mind about women being commodified. Meditations on five women, real and imaginary: Marion Crane, Sylvia Plath, Blondie (not Deborah Harry, the one in the comic strip), Jayne Mansfield and myself. (Marilyn Monroe had been done to death, no pun intended.) I’d have to trust to my ingenuity to make it all hang together, though first I’d have to trust to my ingenuity to come up with things to think about them. Three of them came to bad ends, there was one thought, which they had deserved because of sexual transgression—wasn’t that how the culture read their stories?—while Blondie and I went on and on, to no end at all. Blondie was drawn by an artist named Chic Young, and I planned to make much of the notion that Blondie looked both chic and young, despite the housedresses. Yet she was so stupid that only Dagwood would want her. She never had an affair—of course, what did you expect in a comic strip?—or even a flirtation. Not that Dagwood seemed to want her either, so I guess there was her punishment. Which left me—this was going to be the personal part. How I fit in was that I’d dyed my hair blond when I was sixteen, then let it grow back out.
Another try: Medusa’s Daughters (a title I changed to Daughters of Medusa because it sounded more resonant), about images of angry-faced women. I had the Statue of Liberty, the woman on the Starbucks logo—both of them now look more blank than angry to me—and when The Fellowship of the Ring came out I added Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, with her face in psychedelic negative, ranting about how all would love her and despair. I was going to argue that repressed anger was the true solution to the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile, but once I had that thought I couldn’t take it any further.
