Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “I know…” He ran all ten fingers through his hair, then flicked the water from his hands. “Sometimes I wonder…if I had been the one to go, would Tess have taken it so well?”

  “I think in some ways your relationship with Tess was…” Be kind; the poor lost mother’s been dead barely a month. “Your relationship with Tess was more hands-on.” He looked pleased by this, but she cut him off before he said something self-congratulatory. “Kids this age adapt really well. It’s scary, in a way.”

  “Why scary?”

  “Because if you lost a child, it would destroy you. But if your child lost you…well, he’d keep right on growing—learning to talk, learning to read, learning to love someone else. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow.”

  He locked his hands behind his head as he continued to look right at her. He was either completely unself-conscious or an accomplished poser. She tried to avoid staring at him, but his shoulders and chest and arms seemed to obstruct every possible line of vision.

  “Does your boy miss his father?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Are they in touch?”

  “No.”

  “But he must have some feelings regarding—”

  “He doesn’t, okay?”

  She headed back into the house. She heard him follow.

  “Gwen…”

  She stopped halfway across the pantry. He was a few feet away. Once again he seemed to occupy her entire scope of vision. “I hear Tess,” she said.

  “No, you don’t.” He placed a hand on her upper arm and slid it down to her wrist.

  She stared at him, heard his breathing, smelled the chlorine on his skin.

  He’s trouble and you’re the baby-sitter.

  “Don’t make me have to leave Penaquoit,” she said. “Tess has been through enough.”

  “Leave?”

  She nodded and stepped back. His hand fell to his side.

  “Maybe it’s being here, in my house,” he said, speaking quickly. “As my employee.” He sounded more curious than plaintive, as if he was genuinely fascinated, in a rather clinical way, by her reluctance. Was he so unaccustomed to being turned down? Yet he wanted her. She felt his desire in the warmth his hand had left on her arm.

  “Maybe if we went somewhere else,” he was saying, “just the two of us. Mrs. Piacevic could watch—”

  “Please?” Her voice splintered on the word. She turned and left the room.

  Later, as Gwen was changing Tess, Rosa Piacevic made a rare appearance in the nursery.

  “How is my zamer this day?” She peered closely at Tess’s face.

  “She’s fine. Why?”

  “No reason.” Rosa started to leave, then stopped and turned. “She waked up last night, from all the screaming. Mr. Lawrence called me to come be with her. She couldn’t fall back to sleep. And why should she sleep, the father red and sweated like that, and the grandfather shouting like a crazy man?”

  Rosa crossed to the changing table and straightened one of the socks Gwen had just struggled to put on Tess.

  “What were they arguing about?” Gwen asked.

  “I heared only the end,” Rosa said as she put on Tess’s shoes. “Mr. Cunningham has a detective. This detective, he find out something.”

  “About Mr. Lawrence?”

  Rosa nodded and picked up Tess’s silver hairbrush.

  “Mr. Nick, before coming to this place, had trouble with the police in New York City.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “This I didn’t hear too good. Maybe drugs was involved. Medicines, you know? I heared Mr. Cunningham mention a doctor, but I didn’t get his name.”

  She brushed Tess’s short hair with quick, gentle strokes.

  “Was he arrested?”

  “I don’t think so. But Mr. Cunningham, he say that if Mr. Nick ever make trouble, if he ever take Tess away from here, he will take him to court.”

  Rosa stepped back to appraise Tess’s coif, made a few more quick dabs with the brush, then handed her to Gwen with a look of deep regret.

  “She fall asleep on my shoulder in that chair,” Rosa said, nodding toward the rocker in the corner. “But after what I heared, such anger, I didn’t sleep all night, not for one minute. They hate each other, those two. This is no place for a child.” She looked despairingly at Tess, shook her head, and left the room.

  Jimmy had been begging for weeks to sleep over at his friend Andrew Hillman’s house. Gwen had made excuse after excuse. What if he woke up in the middle of the night, homesick? What if he had a bed-wetting accident (an admittedly rare event)? The truth was, she didn’t want to spend the night in the house by herself. Jimmy was the reason she’d moved to Sohegan, Jimmy was the reason she got up and went to work five mornings a week, Jimmy’s was the sleeping face she kissed every night before retiring to her own room. And she was frightened of being alone, with everything that was going on—not that she’d ever mention this to him.

  On Saturday, she ran out of excuses. And patience.

  “Maybe in a few weeks,” she told Jimmy.

  “No, tonight.”

  “We’ll discuss it in a few weeks. That’s final.”

  His eyes narrowed and darkened. Barry’s eyes. “I hate you!” he said as he ran from the kitchen. “I hate you!”

  She followed him up the stairs. “No, you don’t,” she said.

  “Yes, I do!” He slammed the door to his room.

  She knocked twice and opened it. “Let’s discuss this calmly, okay?”

  Martha Hillman met her at the front door of her split-level. “Hello,” she said without smiling as Jimmy ran past her into the house. She did not invite Gwen in.

  Gwen resolved to remain cordial for Jimmy’s sake.

  “Thanks so much for having him.” She glanced behind Martha Hillman, looking for Jimmy. “I just want to say good-bye.”

  “That’s all right,” she said, as if absolving Gwen from a chore. She made no effort to unblock the doorway.

  “What time should I pick him up tomorrow?”

  “We have church at eleven,” Martha Hillman said, a touch reprovingly, Gwen thought.

  “I’ll come by before then.”

  Martha Hillman nodded and shut the door.

  Driving home, she reflected on her status as a Sohegan pariah. Martha Hillman and her helmet-haired ilk didn’t bother her, but she did worry about Jimmy sometimes. Not only was his mother’s one local friend the town lesbian, but Gwen had been involved in the most sensational crime ever to hit town. She’d been jumpy ever since their house was broken into, and a virtual basket case since the Devil’s Ravine incident. It seemed inevitable that Jimmy feel the heat.

  At least he’d made one good friend in Sohegan. But he’d been so insistent about sleeping over at Andrew’s. Was he really that desperate to get away from his own house, from her?

  She got home, made a pot of coffee, and considered calling Sheila. No, she’d tough it out on her own, get a foretaste of life without Jimmy, a kind of inoculation against future separations. She drank the last of the coffee at four o’clock and switched to scotch.

  Five hours and several drinks later, the doorbell rang. Gwen grabbed the portable phone, clicked on the dial tone, prepared to dial 911, and pushed aside the curtain on the narrow window next to the front door. Nick Lawrence, hands clasped in front of him, idly surveyed the front of her house. She unlocked the door and opened it.

  “Are you on the phone?” he said.

  She clicked it off and placed it on the hall table.

  “May I come in?” His tone and expression implied that her response was not in doubt, and for a moment she was tempted to deny him entry, just to see what disappointment would look like on that face.

  But she let him in and closed the door, wondering for a second if his showing up on the one night she was alone was a coincidence. He walked directly into the living room, the only part of the house with a light on. Wearing a white shirt, white pants, and tan loafers,
he looked elegant in a completely uncontrived way; his clothes always seemed to work for him, never the reverse. Glancing in the hallway mirror, she frowned at her black tank top, briefly considered covering up with a sweater, and joined him in the living room.

  “There’s something I want you to hear,” he said. “Where is your stereo?”

  She pointed to the system that had come with the house, an old receiver, tape deck, and two large speakers at either end of the room.

  “Perfect. I brought a tape and a CD.”

  He crouched before the stereo, turned on the receiver, and inserted the tape.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she said.

  “No, no,” he answered quickly, and she realized that she’d never seen him have so much as a beer. It would be interesting to see the effect of alcohol on his impervious self-possession.

  He turned to face her, and a tiny alarm tripped inside her, for she’d never seen him look that way, his poise still evident, but laced with anxiety, as if much depended on what happened next.

  He crossed the room and switched off the lamp. The only illumination came from the moon, which glowed warmly through the front window.

  “Please, sit,” he said, gesturing toward the sofa. Her sofa.

  She felt irritated at being dispossessed in her own house. And something else, a scary pleasure at ceding control. She sat at the end of the sofa and watched him flick on the tape player. Then he sat on the couch, just a couple of inches from her.

  “Nick, I don’t—”

  He put a finger to her lips. “Just listen,” he whispered. “Beethoven, Fourth Piano Concerto. A new recording, the Vienna Philharmonic.”

  Music filled the darkened room, an orchestra first, then the solo piano.

  She turned to him, wondering why he hadn’t mentioned the pianist. He was facing forward, eyes fixed.

  “To start so…gently,” he whispered, “like the entrance to a dream.”

  She might have laughed if he weren’t dead serious, and if the music weren’t in fact hypnotic. Suddenly the room exploded as a full orchestra weighed in on a series of thunderous chords. His lips curled into a half smile as the piano returned with a lovely ballad.

  So many questions: Why had he come? Why this piece? What next? But his rapt expression invited no inquiries. He seemed immersed in the music, every sense shut down except hearing. She settled into the sofa, hands clasped safely on her lap, and focused on the music.

  Which wasn’t difficult—it really was a magnificent piece, light, almost delirious, yet still quite romantic. Before Jimmy was born she’d often listened to classical music, but she’d rarely strayed much beyond Mozart’s symphonies and violin concertos, and anything by Bach. Beethoven and the other romantics had always seemed so much more demanding, too insistent, pulling her away from books, chores, bill paying.

  “The most romantic piece of music ever written,” he said. “First, this delirious ode to love, then the second movement, which is about to start—almost unbearably melancholy. And in the third, the rondo, a wedding march!” He smiled and shook his head. “Romantic love in a nutshell: joy, loss, recovery.”

  A brief pause in the music. He placed a hand on her lap. You bastard, she wanted to say, you knew how frightened I’ve been. You set this whole scene up, you composed it.

  The second movement was slow and unexpectedly somber. She soon forgot the hand on her lap.

  “Can you hear the sense of loss?” he whispered. “The piano”—he raised his right hand and made a spiraling gesture—“it swirls across the air, never touching earth.”

  The mood in the third movement brightened, and some bit of her evaporated in response, that part of her mind that stood outside looking in, weighing consequences, assessing outcomes. He put his arm around her shoulder and gently pulled her to him. “You have to really attack this movement,” he said softly but with great fervor. “Listen!”

  She tried, but felt only the weight of his arm on her shoulders, the warmth of his leg pressing against hers, the tensing of his biceps as the piano and orchestra charged to the finale.

  Then silence. It seemed to suck the air from the room, precluding speech. She felt him all around her, and she was certain that if she moved one muscle he’d engulf her and she’d be…gone. So she sat there, frozen, hardly daring to breathe, and waited for her life to change, as she knew it would.

  And then he took a deep, sharp breath and placed his free hand under her knees, his other hand still behind her back, and stood up, lifting her. Then he was kissing her, covering her mouth with his lips. And then he carried her upstairs, moving quickly.

  Chapter 29

  Gwen awoke early the next morning. Sunlight warmed her face, heightening her sense of panic. She’d lost her mind, been seduced, broken every promise she’d ever made to herself. She felt betrayed and traitorous. Victim and victimizer.

  Nick slept peacefully on his stomach, arms flung across the double bed, the sheets bunched around his lower back. Even in sleep he looked self-possessed, invulnerable. She felt an escalating resentment and sat up, wishing her robe wasn’t all the way across the room, hanging behind the door. Last night she’d been scared, lonely—and why not, given what she’d been through? He’d taken advantage of that.

  As she stood he grabbed her waist and pulled her back down.

  “You need to learn how to ask,” she said.

  “And you have a pretty good sexual harassment case.” His voice was gravelly with sleep. “‘Employer forces his way into employee’s house…’”

  “Violates her.”

  “Several times,” he said. “An excellent case, but my cupboard’s bare, I’m afraid.”

  She sighed theatrically. “Just my luck to be harassed by a pauper.”

  He pulled her on top of him, wrapped his arms tightly around her back, and began humming, his lips so close to her head that she felt his warm breath vibrating on her skin. She recognized the Lebewohl Sonata.

  “More Beethoven,” she said. “Does he always work for you?”

  As he continued to hum the slow, sonorous melody, she became aware of his arousal, and then her own. But as his hands began ranging up and down her back, playing her, for God’s sake, she felt rising indignation. What about Jimmy? For all you know he’s waking up in the next room. He could burst in here any minute, wanting breakfast.

  Or did you know he wasn’t here?

  She pushed off him and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “What’s the matter?” He sounded more curious than alarmed.

  “I get the feeling you’re…just taking me, like I was this available product on a shelf.”

  “That’s not how I think of you at—”

  “I have a son, Nick. Did you ever consider what he might think, finding you in my bed?”

  “I’ll leave, then, before he wakes up.”

  “He’s not here,” she said quietly.

  “Then…”

  “But you never even bothered to ask.”

  Slowly he traced his fingers along her spine. “I waited until I thought he’d be asleep. I was thinking of him, Gwen.”

  She crossed her arms, covering her breasts, still not facing him. If only the goddamn robe weren’t all the way across the room.

  “Tell me about Jimmy,” he said. “Tell me why you ran from New York.”

  “That’s two different issues.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She snapped her head around. “But—”

  “You picked up and left your entire life behind. Jimmy’s the only person you’d do that for.”

  His eyes glimmered in the morning light.

  “Why do you want to know? Why now?”

  “Because I need to feel close to you,” he said. “And because I have basically laid bare my entire soul, and you’ve kept yours locked inside.”

  She looked away as his fingers played up and down her spine. If only men knew how incredibly seductive a few intimate questions could be, it would
put every florist on the planet out of business. Just then she’d do anything for him, at least in theory. But she didn’t want to tell him about Jimmy.

  “Maybe someday,” she said.

  His fingers stopped halfway down her back. “You had to rescue him. He was in danger.”

  She could only nod at his intuition.

  “He was in danger from your husband.”

  Yes.

  “And you saved him.”

  Yes.

  “What kind of danger, Gwen? What was your husband doing to him?”

  And then she told him, the words gushing from her like a long-held breath.

  It was an ordinary Wednesday. Since Barry’s contracting work had dried up, a direct result of his drinking, she’d had no choice but to fire the baby-sitter and let Barry take over. So that Wednesday, like every other weekday, he’d picked up Jimmy at school, brought him home, and watched him until six, when Gwen closed up the shop two blocks from the apartment and rushed home, praying that Barry had managed to hold off drinking until she got there.

  And, mostly, he had. Occasionally she’d catch him stumbling or slurring, but never severely enough to put Jimmy at risk. What choice had she had?

  “Jimmy was past the age when he could be dropped or…I don’t know, shaken.” Nick gave her the reassuring nod she needed before continuing.

  She’d known, of course, that the situation was untenable. But with Barry not working she couldn’t afford even a part-time sitter, and the store didn’t throw off enough cash to pay someone to run it for her. Letting Jimmy hang around with her in the afternoons was hazardous to him as well as the antiques. Next fall, she had promised herself, she’d find an after-school program for Jimmy. Or perhaps Barry wouldn’t be drinking by then. Or maybe she’d win the lottery.

  That Wednesday she came home to find Jimmy watching some cheesy cartoon on television. Barry fled, as usual, moments after she got in. She flicked off the TV and dragged Jimmy into the kitchen to keep her company while she made dinner. Where Barry went when he left them was a mystery she had no interest in solving. He gambled, she knew that much; by Tuesday or Wednesday he’d usually blown the meager amount of money she’d given him for household expenses.