He had thought that having her there would calm him, but instead a restless energy began to surge through his body. The heat of her body pressed against his stomach and thighs, stirring a faint pulsation that traveled the length of his spine and down his legs. He put his arms around her and she responded by adjusting herself against him, finding the hollow places in his own shape that she could fill with her warmth.
It had been a long time since he’d touched someone like this. The last time with Maida, perhaps a month before her death, hadn’t been quite the full sexual experience. There had been tenderness, but also laziness and indecision, because they had both been drinking and weren’t sure whether they had enough energy.
He knew before he touched Adele’s breasts they would be good, nothing like the tubes of flesh you saw on some older women at the beach. He felt her breasts through her shirt and her flesh rolled into his hand, giving itself to him. The pulse within him that had been faint began to quicken.
She sat up abruptly.
In the darkened room, where her face wasn’t visible, he didn’t know what this meant. He was afraid he’d offended her, afraid she was going to tell him to stop.
But all she did was pull her shirt off over her head and unhook her bra and toss it to the floor.
12.
WITHOUT WARNING HIS life entered a new period of happiness. Adele continued to cook and clean for him, they continued to have their lighthearted conversations, and now there was the welcome development of their physical intimacy.
At first he wouldn’t allow himself to look at her in her full nakedness, because then he would be aware of what he was doing, which was looking greedily at a naked woman who wasn’t his wife. Somehow he could convince himself that his hands answered to some bestial power outside his responsibility and control, but there was no deceiving himself about his eyes, which he attempted to keep downcast as he undressed her. Her feet, which were nothing special, were connected to her legs, which were connected to the recess of warmth between them, and when he had gotten this far something else took over. His heart summited in his body. His legs felt the impossibility of holding still. Everything about this bodily call-and-response told him that if he was going to continue living, there was no choice but to heed it.
In the beginning he worried he wouldn’t know what to do with her body. Early in his marriage Maida had trained him to pleasure her with his mouth and his hands, but there were long stretches when her enthusiasm for these intimacies waned, and without them her climax was never reliable. It didn’t bother her but it bothered him considerably, and as he got older his own pleasure depended more on hers. At times when they were entwined he found himself doing a kind of backward math in his head, trying to figure out if an earlier conversation about whether there was enough money in the checking account or if they should change the brand of garbage bags was to blame for a bland lovemaking session. He had read once that the way to keep sex exciting was to be continually open to introducing new elements, and he wondered who these people were, the ones who after long days of working at jobs and caring for children still had the energy and creativity to show off in the bedroom. It touched on an insecurity of his to be told that such people were not fantastical but that they existed—and were perhaps in every other regard completely ordinary. Then he would remind himself it was only natural to imagine other people’s sexual lives as more interesting and satisfying than your own. It was just the cry of the threatened primordial brain, and he could recognize it without automatically accepting it as truth.
Learning a new body was thrilling and surprisingly intuitive except when his mind interfered and tried to assess it: Was this time with Adele as good as the last time? Was being with Adele better than, or just different from, being with Maida? Then, sensing the dispersion of his mind, Adele would pull away from him and ask what was wrong. He was reluctant to tell her, afraid that she would mistake his preoccupation for a complaint. And it was a kind of complaint—at some barely perceptible level he was angry with her for so easily capturing a part of him that had only ever belonged to Maida. If she asked him again what was wrong, he ignored her and flipped her over and held her bottom in his hands and when he came he thought, This. Is. Her. Ass.
His understanding of women’s emotions had led him to expect there might be occasional scenes and outbursts connected to the undefined nature of their relationship. But he saw nothing to indicate Adele was harboring a grievance. What was between them seemed to exist beyond mental maintenance. It was physical, unspoken, unburdened with meaning. There was no need to define it. Their source of pleasure was in each other and they could be matter-of-fact about this without a temptation to become sentimental. That he wouldn’t be required to love Adele, or to support her, or to anticipate her needs—he experienced this as an utterly shocking freedom.
Sometimes he would catch himself in his contentment and wonder what had happened to his liver-eating grief. Where had it gone? Somehow it had pivoted from its quality of midnight emergency, with all the corresponding alarms, to a dull background ache he could ignore if what was before him was exciting enough. The grief he thought of himself as having wasn’t the grief he seemed to have anymore. Sometimes he almost wanted the old grief back because of the way it had made his wife everywhere and near. Then he would remember its unbearable devouring quality and feel a relief at its absence that was too awful to admit. Recalling that old grief was like running into a stranger he had an affinity for. There was recognition, there was mutual regard, but the stranger and he had separate destinies to fulfill.
The only time he wasn’t happy was when Adele was leaving. He came to despise Fridays at three o’clock, which in addition to being the hour of her departure was also when she expected to be paid. At the end of the first week they had spent as lovers, some part of him hoped they would have a real goodbye full of ardor and affection, and later he would figure out how to get a check to her, if a check was still what she wanted. But Adele reminded him he needed to pay her, and he lied and told her he had misplaced his checkbook. It was an idiotic thing to say to the person who kept your belongings organized. She knew exactly where his checkbook was and went off to retrieve it. And when he wrote her the check, her gratitude was genuine. It was the genuineness of it, more than anything, that made him ashamed.
After that he was determined to find a way to free their time together from the taint of money. Since Dary was reimbursing him anyway, it occurred to him she could pay Adele directly, and this was something it turned out she was happy to do.
Then in December Dary bought tickets for her and Annie to visit for two weeks at Christmas, and for three miserable days he and Adele talked of ending their liaison. They agreed it would be difficult for them to continue seeing each other when his family was visiting, and he almost convinced himself this was the natural end point of the affair.
It was a sensible proposition, but his body rebelled against it. His body hadn’t forgotten the moment she had touched his face while cutting his hair, the ripple of shock it had sent along his nerves, reminding him of his isolation from other people. He would jeopardize virtually everything in his life not to experience that misery again. Of course he wouldn’t give her up.
He still didn’t know what he would tell Dary about the relationship. There was a part of him that wanted to tell her and believed that telling her would usher them into a closeness they’d never had before. And there was another part of him that foresaw it would be too painful to mention anything, because it would shame him to stake intimacy with his daughter on behavior she might consider a betrayal. A betrayal of her effort to do something straightforward and practical to improve his life—or worse, a betrayal of her mother.
He asked Adele what she thought he should tell Dary. It seemed appropriate, since it concerned both of them.
“Wait and see what it’s like when she gets here,” Adele said.
“But I want to know what you think,” he said.
“Wait an
d see, that’s what I think.”
He was perplexed by how little invested she was in what was said about her, and he felt himself frowning in a paternal, disapproving way before he could stop himself.
She frowned back, a clownish mirror of his face.
He said, “Someday you’ll meet my daughter and you’ll know what I mean about her. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
13.
THE ARRIVING FLIGHT discharged its passengers and the hall swelled with swiftly dispersing humans. Gene waited for the moment when from the sea of faces bobbing up and down two of them would cohere and become the distinct faces of his daughter and granddaughter. When he saw them he waved his hands above his head like a ground controller guiding a taxiing plane: Here I am; here I am.
He drew Annie into a burly hug, and as they parted, he clasped the skinniness of her upper arms. “How did this happen?” he said. “Don’t they feed you anything at that fancy school of yours?” His daughter he embraced lightly, patting her in the center of her back. They looked each other over, assessing the wear of the intervening months. Small wrinkles crouched around Dary’s eyes and mouth. Most of them probably had been there the last time he saw her, but sometimes there seemed to be new ones and more of them, and it never failed to shock him to rediscover he was old enough to have a child with wrinkles.
“There you are!” a voice called out across the terminal. A man waved and began making his way toward them through the crowd. He was wearing cowboy boots, a belt with a glinty silver buckle. “Dale Elverson,” the man said, sticking out his hand to Gene. “I had the good fortune of being seated next to these two special ladies on the flight.”
Dale wasn’t at all bad-looking. He had a wheaty shock of brown hair and his build was fit. In the chitchat that ensued he mentioned he was the owner of two houses, one in the city where he was a partner at a law firm (Gene had actually heard the name before), and another in the country, where he joked he was paying “an arm and a leg for everything to be inconvenient.” Gene laughed at this, not because he knew anything about this particular feeling but because he could see Dale was just trying to be friendly.
As the talk wound down, Dale took out his card and suggested Dary call him sometime.
“The thing is—” Dary said, a weary note in her voice. “I’m not here for very long.”
“Well, the next time, then,” Dale said, continuing to extend his card.
“The thing is,” she said, “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m interested when I’m not.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that,” Dale said in an upbeat tone, and looked to Gene, appearing confident that Gene would share his opinion.
“Why not take the card?” Gene said to Dary.
“See?” Dale said. “You don’t know what you’re missing. You could be making a big mistake.”
Gene waited for Dary to say something that would save Dale from rejection, but she only shouldered her bag and draped her arm over Annie and, in that same weary tone, said she was ready to go home. And because Gene couldn’t let Dale go on like that, waiting for a better answer, Gene took his card and thanked him and invited him to drop in on them in Colton sometime.
In the car on the way home, Annie fell asleep in the back seat, and Gene struggled to keep afloat a conversation with Dary. Whatever he asked her about—the food on the flight, the weather in California, the arrangements for Hoolie—she obliged him with a response, but then allowed the conversation to die out. There was something vaguely punitive about her silence, as if she expected him to intuit why she was feeling sour.
There was some congestion on the interstate, inexplicable sections where cars that had been going seventy miles an hour slowed abruptly and then seemed to progress only by nudging one another forward. “Do you ever wonder where all these people are going?” he said, trying yet again. He turned his head to glance at the person in the neighboring car and asked Dary where she thought the man was going.
“Dad—” she said. “You’re making me nervous. Would you please watch the road?”
“I am.”
“Exclusively,” she said.
“Then you look at him.”
She twisted in her seat. After a moment she said, “On his way to visit his girlfriend in prison.”
“No.”
“Okay, wow. To pick out a kitten? Is that better?”
“Does he look nice?” Gene said.
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You get a feel for these things.”
“Maybe you do.”
“Just try.”
“Look, if this is some kind of test—”
“Who’s he getting the kitten for?”
“I don’t know. His mother.”
“Why her? Why not—”
“Because his mother accepts him. Everyone else thinks he has to be improved, but his mother just loves him.”
Gene paused, unsure of how to respond to this. “All right,” he said finally. “Does he get the kitten?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s hardly plutonium.”
“Look, anything could happen. C’mon. For the next minute you have perfect vision into the future.”
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly.
“Yes you do. It’s up to you.”
There was a long pause.
“Dary?”
“Please,” she said. “Please let’s stop.”
“Why can’t we ever have a little fun?” he said. “Why are you so opposed to fun?”
He pulled off for gas in Newburyport. As he filled the tank he observed her sitting motionless in the front seat. A car trembling with bass pulled up on the other side of the pump and two young couples spilled out of it with the restless energy of people who have been confined for too long. Despite the chill in the air the young women were bare-armed, and as they waited for the tank to fill, they warmed themselves by wrapping the arms of their boyfriends around them, as if the young men had been put on earth precisely for this consolation. For an instant his daughter’s unhappiness surged in her face. He wondered then if she was one of those people who subsist on misery. Usually such people thought they had suffered worse than anyone else—they clung to a wretched childhood, they hardened it into a story of deprivation they could live over and over again. But Dary’s childhood hadn’t been anything like that.
How had she become this person? And why was she so difficult to understand? His whole life he had been waiting for them to like each other. When she was a child, he thought for certain it would happen when she became an adult. When she was an adult, he thought for certain it would happen when she became a parent. But it hadn’t happened, at least not in the way he had imagined it would.
And the longer it took, the more he disbelieved in the possibility, until he’d become somewhat irritable about this wasted opportunity. Someone might even call him an irritable old man. But the smug young people who casually threw that phrase around didn’t stop to consider that maybe there was a good reason to be irritable toward the end of your life, having withstood a measure of disappointment that was not really fathomable to people who believed they still had enough time to reverse events that didn’t favor them. When you thought about it, it was amazing that everyone over seventy wasn’t perpetually irritated. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to sense that possibility itself was limited. And it was especially not pleasant when you harbored a perhaps silly but nonetheless honest delusion that once in a while loving someone should be enough to get what you want. Of course love was not enough—it was never enough—but now it was too late for him to adopt a new delusion. He had no choice but to go on feeling everything contained in the warped bundle above his heart: sorrow, fear, regret, diminished hope, irritation, disappointment. Maybe disappointment most of all.
What was it Esther had written?
I assumed you of all people would know.
14.
WHEN PEO
PLE SAID that Christmas was a special time of year, he agreed with them, and not just out of politeness but because he sincerely believed it. He understood that some people (including the Donnellys in years past) viewed the holidays as a time to escape someplace warm, where they could avoid the winter fervor that made otherwise normal people spend a month’s salary on colored lights for the front of the house or three days baking and delivering goody bags filled with angel-shaped cookies. But this shameless enthusiasm was the very thing that made him love the people who were swept up by it. Why go to Puerto Rico and miss the one time of year when people everywhere embraced silly, timeworn rituals? For a brief moment, you could pretend kindness was universal and generosity contagious.
He didn’t particularly care what their own family traditions were, as long as they stuck with them. It was the sticking-with-it that seemed to be the antidote to seasonal despair—the whole point was familial togetherness. It didn’t matter if one year you were in the mood and another you weren’t.
Every year when Dary was young, he would take her to the White Mountains to cut down a tree, a daylong excursion that involved the novelty of eating all of their meals out of the house. The Ashes also made a ritual of wrapping presents in misleading packages, elaborate ruses that might involve padding mounds of newspaper around a cassette-tape player and girding the newspaper with masking tape, so that the finished package looked more like a papier-mâché basketball than an electronic device. After the presents were laid out under the tree and the bounty had been documented, he took Dary to the Three Hearths Inn for peppermint hot chocolate, where they sat in a cozy room with other children dressed up for the special occasion, little boys in flannel vests and church loafers and little girls in ruffle-edged dresses and patent leather Mary Janes.
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