by Thomas Lynch
“Of course, there’s so much baggage we had to let go of first, my ex and me, before we could, you know, grow up and grow apart, you know, together.”
Adrian nodded and smiled and stood and took her hand and held it meaningfully before looking about as a man does looking for the nearest toilet.
“Too much java,” he said, to explain himself, and the man next to the red-haired woman pointed toward the rear of the ferryboat where they all had boarded.
“Head’s at the back, Dr. Littlefield, we’ll save your spot.”
Adrian smiled and made his move to the back of the boat just as it was disembarking and climbed the stairs to the open upper deck.
Block Island was the site of his former wife’s first infidelity. He’d only ever seen it in pictures—photos that she’d brought home from her trip to New York that April, ostensibly to visit her friend Christina. “I just need to get away from Findlay, and family and kids,” she told him, “just for a week, a little perker-upper. Christina has taken the time off of work, we’re going to do girl things.” Clare was thirty-three at the time. They had a son and a daughter, ages eight and four. They’d been married almost twelve years. Her discontent was palpable.
“Oh, Ben invited us out to the island for the weekend,” she told him when she returned from the week away, leaving him with the children and the house and his own work to manage. “You remember Ben, don’t you? Uncle Harold’s friend? The artist, you know, Harold and Olive’s neighbor. Christina and I ran into him in town, at his studio in SoHo, and he invited us out to the island for the weekend. We couldn’t get theater tickets so we decided to go. Harold and Olive were going to come too but canceled at the last minute.”
Adrian remembered the determinedly plural references and the way it was supposed to work against his suspicions. And the supposed serendipity of it all, all very last-minute and carpe diem, nothing planned. Clare labored to make it all sound like happenstance, which of course made it all the more suspect. He rummaged through the photographs for any that included Christina. But there were none. There was Ben on the sailboat, manfully at the wheel, Ben in the kitchen, turning from the stove, Ben and Clare smiling from their places at a table on the porch of what looked like an old hotel. The table they were sitting at was set for two. Where, he wondered, was Christina? Where were Harold and Olive? Where were the photos of the “girl things” they had done? Afraid of the answers, he never asked.
He’d met Ben once, the year they all drove East to visit Harold and Olive in Westchester. Harold was wealthy and worked in the city making investments for an insurance company. He had an office in Rockefeller Center and spent his lunchtimes all winter skating on the rink there and in the summer jogging through Central Park. All of Harold and Olive’s friends were, like them, fiftyish, well-off, fit, and always grinning. None of them smoked. They all took vitamins. Everyone practiced some New Age regimen to guarantee a particular wellness. Ben was the next-door neighbor, “heroically still married to his disabled wife”—an artist who lived on his earnings as an illustrator but was “really just waiting to sell his marvelous oils.” He was tall and smooth-skinned and deeply tanned and his white hair and full beard made him look almost biblical. He’d done some covers for Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. Clare had confessed to Adrian the crush she’d had on Ben as a girl when visiting at her uncle’s after her parents’ divorce; Ben had made a fuss over her in some way she never elaborated, something to do with Rockefeller Center. He would have been in his thirties then and she’d always really “felt really very special, you know, that he’d make such a fuss over a fifteen-year-old girl.”
Clare’s own father had left when she was twelve, for reasons that were never made clear to her. One day he came in and said that he would always love her and then he left. Her mother always looked a little wounded after that but never said a word about the divorce except “I’m a one-man woman,” which is why, Clare reasoned, her mother never remarried. After that they spent most summers and most Christmases with Uncle Harold and Aunt Olive.
All these years since, it all looked simple and predictable to Adrian now—the girl abandoned by her father looking for an older man’s approval, attention, etc. etc. etc.—it was all embarrassingly usual, unremarkable in every way. A textbook case: she was driven, consciously or subconsciously, to replicate her father’s rejection by sexual misconduct that would assure her husband’s rejection. They had arranged their little off-season tryst while Adrian, the earnest ignoramus, stayed home with the kids and the church work, the reliable garden-variety cuckold and bumpkin, a brute if he raised objections, a wimp if he didn’t, finished either way.
The Anna C. sounded its horn once and made its way out past the harbor’s bars and seafood restaurants, out past the sunbathers waving from shore, out past the rock pilings covered with cormorants, into the open water followed by maybe two dozen gulls which soared alongside the ferry for food tossed from passengers. Adrian Littlefield, seated between strangers on the long bench on the top deck, considered his fellow passengers from the isolation he had learned to wrap around himself in public transit. There were couples with children, college students in packs of various sizes, Asian tourists, and pairs of lovers, some obviously married, some obviously not. He watched as they grew more affectionate the further out from port the boat traveled. The touching and hugging and holding, and even kissing, grew more manifest as the mainland grew more distant. This he assigned to the crossing of water, the sense of privacy that passage to an island must add to the sense that all lovers share of being alone against the world and its elements.
One young couple, kissing like newlyweds, looked to Adrian like his son, Damien, and his girlfriend. They were handsome and serious, maybe bound for their honeymoon. The young woman snuggled into his half embrace, safe and sound under his protection. The young man had Damien’s wary eyes, keeping a reliable watch over everything, against the ever-present danger of the worst thing happening.
II
“LET’S GET Mom flowers,” Damien would say, on the way home from grade school or St. Mark’s day care. “That’ll surprise her.”
The things Adrian remembered after twenty years.
Adrian knew that Damien knew that all was not well between his mother and his father. And he knew the boy would keep trying to fix it.
It still stung him to think of the way the boy, on those increasingly rare occasions when the family dined together, would rise to clear the table and offer to read his sister a bedtime story so “you and Mom can go for a walk together around the neighborhood.”
The sweetness in the boy’s eyes—his mother Clare’s eyes, huge and blue—his sense that it could all be fixed with good behavior and the proper gesture, his hope in the face of a hopeless situation, still made Adrian Littlefield wince, these many years since, at the pain he knew had been inflicted on his son and daughter by the undoing of the marriage and the family. How his son had labored to keep them all together, to keep the little family unit intact, to keep the “happily ever after” fiction going, still stung Adrian in his heart of hearts.
Damien was grown and out on his own now. He lectured in the Religious Studies program at a small private college in Michigan, happily distanced by nearly two decades from all that sadness, happily preoccupied with his own life’s course, which included, apparently, a colleague who taught Old Testament Literature and who Damien had told his father “might be the one!” That the failure of his parents’ marriage had not entirely disabused Damien of a sense of providence and kindly fates was a comfort to Adrian, who wondered at the resilience of the young, but remained vigilant for signs of permanent damage.
Damien called frequently and emailed often and drove down twice a year—for Father’s Day and Christmas. He’d brought Jocelyn with him the last time he came, a pretty and pleasant woman, a few years older than Damien, not beautiful, but fetching, Adrian thought, diminutive and bookish, a perfect pastor’s wife or professor’s.
&nbs
p; Adrian made his visits, too; whenever his lecture circuit took him anywhere near his daughter in Chicago or his son in Michigan, he’d add on a day to pay his call. They’d have dinner, see a movie or some local attraction. They had devised, if not any sense of a family “home”—safe harbor, big extended family dinners, year-in, year-out traditions—nonetheless a kind of family life à la carte, keeping up contacts and appearances, juggling the reconstituted relations admirably.
Still, Adrian’s remorse, his guilt for his part in it—the poor choice of spouse he had made, his failure to retain their mother’s love, the remarkable sense of liberty once she’d gone, and the turn for the better his own life took once she had vacated their lives and premises—it all still netted out as sharp regret whenever he thought of his daughter, Sarah, named for the patriarch’s wife, or his son, Damien, named for the saintly priest who’d served the lepers on Molokai; Damien, a beautiful, sad boy just gone eight, that awful summer all those years ago.
AT THE time, of course, it seemed so sudden; but in hindsight Adrian could see the turns in the journey that ended in their divorce. Clare had given up her household routines and enrolled in classes at the University of Findlay. It was the mid 1980s and she wanted to go into video production and shoot films that would get played on MTV, like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which she watched over and over and worked out to at her aerobics class in the morning; or documentaries about wage discrimination and spousal abuse, the urban poor and world hunger she would eventually sell to public TV. She was waging a war against the tummy and cellulite that had appeared on her body and which she blamed on her pregnancies. She went off in a sweatband and leg warmers and a leotard in the morning, then came home and showered and went off to school for the afternoons. Adrian took Damien to Lincoln Elementary and brought Sarah to the day care at St. Mark’s Methodist, then picked Damien up after school and brought them home and made them supper. Clare let it be known that she’d been more or less duped by the culture into marriage and having babies. Adrian was part of the conspiracy—not willfully perhaps, not purposefully, but part of the conspiracy nonetheless—that sought to shackle Clare’s life and prospects to these other lives. Damien and Sarah were part of the conspiracy too, needy as they were of so much attention. Like his father, Damien constantly strove to make Clare happy—he was an excellent third grader, he read avidly, drew colorful pictures of happy vistas. Sarah was a tidy preschooler, too young, Adrian convinced himself, to sense as Damien sensed the coming disaster.
In the end it was not Ben Walters, the aging artist back East Clare left them for, but a fellow student from her video production class whose family had money and Clare could imagine financing her own filmmaking. Ben Walters had only been a test—a springtime fling, to see if it could be done, if other men wanted her, if she could do it. The summer she eventually moved out, the summer after the late-spring tryst with Ben, she spent shifting her friendships from hers and Adrian’s circle of young parents and church families to the younger, entirely hipper, vastly more imaginative group of undiscovered artists and photographers David Eason hung out with at the university. David dressed in black denim pants and black silk shirts and wore a wide-brimmed black hat and looked artistic. David had long fingers and long curly black hair and dreams of enrolling in NYU’s photography school; and Clare thought they’d go off to New York together, live in SoHo, and be young forever, and interesting.
When it dawned on Adrian that his wife might be having an affair, after David Eason’s name kept turning up in her monologues on life and school and her widening prospects, after the same sick knot began to tighten in his stomach that he remembered from the months before when she’d returned from her adventures on Block Island, when the phone bill kept turning up lengthy calls to a number he didn’t recognize, always placed during hours when he was at the church; when she’d stopped coming to bed with him, and making excuses for her changing schedule, when he could no longer account for the changes in her, he asked if she’d “see someone” with him. A therapist or counselor, “someone to talk to about saving the marriage” because, as he tried to explain to her, “there are two little lives depending on us, to get this right and keep it together.” When she refused his suggestion about marriage counseling, he found someone he could talk to himself, to sort out his feelings of anger and fear. Eventually it was this therapist who diagnosed Clare in absentia as “possibly a narcissist” and Adrian as “possibly an enabler, a co-narcissist,” a man who would never satisfy a narcissist’s appetite for grandiosity, and the more he tried the more feckless he would seem to her and that for her part Clare was probably “already psychologically divorced” from him. It was then that Adrian hired a private investigator to follow Clare around and take pictures and document her adulteries. Adrian believed it would help with the eventual proceedings and with the custody issues. And he thought he should have certainty, beyond reasonable doubt, before dropping a hammer he knew would do irreparable damage. He could imagine a life without Clare but could simply not abide a life distant from his children’s lives.
He got photos of Clare and David coming and going at hotels along I-75, tastefully north and south of Findlay, where only transients and other adulterers might be. There were detailed logs of their arrivals, departures, room numbers, dates and times. Adrian calculated that the average stay was 2.75 hours, which he tried to divide into foreplay, intercourse, and afterglow, and was bothered to find himself slightly aroused by these contemplations. After twelve years he felt he knew Clare’s sexual repertoire—what she liked to do and have done to her—and the thought of her doing those things with someone else first enraged, then excited, then sickened, then saddened him. There were photos of them having dessert at a Cracker Barrel restaurant near the Lima exit. They looked like teenagers, sharing a piece of Boston cream pie, surrounded by booths full of old married couples, their forks hovering over the pie on the plate, nearly touching, their eyes fixed deeply on each other’s eyes. There was a background workup on David Eason, who, except for the fact that he still lived with his parents at age twenty-nine, in the carriage house of one of the great mansions on Sandusky Street, and had been hospitalized once for an unspecified nervous disorder, seemed unremarkable in every way. A month or so into their affair, midway through the spring semester, Clare and David planned a romantic weekend at a boutique hotel in Cincinnati. Clare had told Adrian she was going to film a short movie about the Anderson Ferry that brought cars back and forth across the Ohio River, to fulfill requirements for her video arts class.
“It’s the last of the old ferryboats on the Ohio—since 1817! There’s a whole crew of us going, production and sound, camera and lighting, we’re going to submit it to short film competitions. We’ll be staying in dorm rooms at Mount St. Joseph. There are no phones. I’m riding with the other camera operator.” Clare had her story perfectly constructed. Adrian had smiled agreeably, and nodded and said nothing except that he’d watch the kids. While she packed a small bag, he called his detective.
That evening, after Clare went off waving from David Eason’s Toyota van, Adrian took Sarah and Damien out to St. Michael the Archangel’s for the annual parish fair and let them ride the rides and eat cotton candy and sit under the big tent eating spaghetti and meatballs with the Catholics. He walked with them among the booths of crafts and white elephants and children’s games and bought them both chances at ringtoss and beanbags. He could not resist the urge to spoil them with diversions and easy pleasures. He peeked into the casino tent with blackjack tables and roulette wheels and tables of bingo games and wondered at the way these otherwise devout people would wallow in sin for a worthy cause. Whereas the Baptists had bake sales and the Methodists did Christmas bazaars, the Episcopalians favored crafts and antiques sales and the Presbyterians were forever doing dinners and teas to raise money for their various causes, there was something to envy in the way these Poles and Germans, Italian and Irish Catholics would indulge their nearly pagan appetites to put some
money in the priests’ pension fund or a new roof on the rectory or construct a bell tower to sound the Angelus all over town. Food and drink and dance and games of chance—St. Michael the Archangel’s parish fair had become the biggest and best of the churchy entertainments in Findlay, the opening of the summer season, and folks from all over Hamilton County came.
Adrian sat at a long table littered with half-empty plastic cups of beer and soda, under the main tent where a band was playing. He gave Damien a roll of tickets for rides and games and told him to hold his sister’s hand. He sipped a Coca-Cola and looked at his watch to figure how far south Clare was by now. An accordion and clarinet wheezed between drumbeats from the bandstand at the end of the tent and Adrian found himself fixed on the long-married couples—bald men with plump bellies and women half again their marriage weight, still holding one another, after thirty or forty years, through waltzes and polkas, a little tipsy with the beer, the press of coreligionists and the humid evening air, like figures out of a Flemish painting, all knees and elbows and red faces sweltering under the canvas and party lights, circling in this rollicking dance.
“How you keeping, Adrian? Good of you to come.”
The priest startled Adrian from his contemplations.
“Oh, yes, yes, Francis, fine. And how are you? This extravaganza gets bigger every year!”
“First full convergence since the sixteenth century! You wanna raffle ticket?”
Adrian was still catching up to the priest’s conversation.
“Convergence? Raffle?”
“Yep, first time since the Council of Trent that Friday the thirteenth and the full moon in June fall on the same day—should be lucky. First prize is a trip to Cancún for two. Clare would like that, Adrian. What say ye?”
The priest could sell anything, Adrian thought, especially in his slightly manic, larger-than-life incarnation as Father Francis Assisi Concannon, priest of God—half huckster, half holy man—the six-foot-four-inch lumbering frame clad in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, one fist full of dollars and another full of raffle tickets. Adrian fished five dollars from his pocket and handed it over.
