by Maile Meloy
Peter was left with Teddy, who said, “Yvette liked that poem because dying was just a romantic idea to her.”
Peter nodded, but Teddy was looking at his own hands on the table.
“I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “Sometimes I feel how close it is, and when there are troubles here, I think, Well, I can leave soon. That might be a cowardly thing to say.”
“I don’t think so,” Peter said.
“I know where the door is, you see. I’m close enough now.”
Yvette came in, drying her hands on a checkered towel. “What door?”
“The one that goes out.” Teddy made a little motion of escape with his hand.
Yvette eyed him. “Teddy.”
“Yes?” He blinked innocently, teasing her.
Yvette turned to Peter. “I used to think when I was younger that I couldn’t live without a man,” she said. “So if Teddy died, I was going to have to find someone else. But I don’t feel that way anymore. So he’d better live.” She pointed her finger at him. “You’d better live, honey.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s the deal.”
67
SAFFRON WAS PUT on bed rest, in danger of preterm labor, and had never been so miserable. What had she been thinking, wanting a baby? It had just been a weird hormonal surge, a temporary madness designed by evolution. Now she didn’t want a baby at all. She nurtured a deep and bitter resentment toward Martin for getting her into this mess.
She was bad about bed rest. She kept getting up, and then she started bleeding, so they put her in the hospital. There she asked the doctors what would happen if she just went home. Secretly she thought she might lose the baby, which wouldn’t be so bad. But the doctors told her she might bleed to death.
“Childbirth is still a dangerous business,” the handsomest one, Dr. Davies, said.
“Are you just saying that to make me stay here?”
“No,” he said.
Saffron couldn’t stand that her relationship with the handsome doctor consisted of lying in a bed getting fat while he stood close to her, nonchalant and oblivious, flipping through charts. She had dreams about him. No one had ever told her that being pregnant made you have such intense sex dreams. Crazy dreams, with changing acts and participants, but mostly just a kind of pink haze that the dreams moved through, and a feeling that was like the moment before coming. She finally asked a nurse about it, and the nurse said there was a lot more blood concentrated down there, when you were pregnant, and blood was part of orgasm, just like it was for men.
“Gross,” Saffron said.
“You asked.”
Every month there had been something new. For the first three, she had thrown up. She had gone through a bulimic stage in high school and didn’t think puking was so bad. But she had forgotten that when you weren’t making yourself do it, there was actual nausea involved. The nausea didn’t go away, and she was exhausted all the time. She had decided not to tell anyone about the baby yet, so she had no sympathetic attention—she had only the constitutionally unsympathetic Martin—and it was hard to pretend she wasn’t feeling so vile.
In the fourth month, she started to feel like her bones were being pulled apart, like her hips were being pulled away from each other, each to one side. At night, when Martin was asleep, she wept silently into her pillow, not about the pain but about her prospects when it was over. She had liked her body and her life, and she had traded them for a child she didn’t even know. There might be something horribly wrong with it, that they couldn’t detect in any of the tests. Or it might just be an unpleasant human being: it might have her temperament, and Martin’s detachment.
And then when was the payoff? There would be a year of sleep deprivation, even with a baby nurse, and then many years of killing boredom: conversations with a toddler, potty training, picture books, deadly birthday parties. Then maybe, if she was lucky, there would be a year of sweetness at nine or ten, just when she was starting to feel really old, and then the child would be a hateful adolescent who wanted nothing to do with her. Then it would be a college student joking about Saffron, and then a neurotic adult crying in a shrink’s office. Even as the slim and glamorous and busy and popular (and also warm and nurturing) mother she intended to be, she might still be harboring a person who would feel about her exactly the way she had felt about Josephine.
Then, as if in punishment for her negative thoughts, there came the bed rest, and then she was in the hospital with the handsome Dr. Davies and the sex dreams and the boredom and frustration. Martin brought her magazines— Vogueand W and InStyle —but there were too many interruptions to read a book, unless it was a particularly gossipy book with very short chapters. She tried to keep herself from looking too much like a hospital patient, and she thought Dr. Davies must have taken a Hippocratic oath not to even want to fuck her. But then she would remember that she was six months pregnant with someone else’s child.
Dr. Davies stopped by one day when Martin was visiting. He said a cheery hello to Martin, looked at her charts, and left whistling as Saffron blushed.
“Poor Saffron,” Martin said thoughtfully from his chair by her bedside. “What an inconvenient time to be smitten.”
“I’m not smitten,” she said.
“I know what it looks like by now.”
“No, you don’t. He’s my doctor.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “So’s the old gray-haired guy with the limp. I don’t see you batting your lashes at him.”
“Don’t tease me.”
“Have you made any progress?”
“No!” she wailed, and she burst into tears, surprising herself.
“I’m so unattractive! I’ll never be pretty again!”
He handed her a Kleenex. “The runny nose doesn’t help.”
Saffron blew her nose loudly and scowled at him.
“Everyone says you’ll feel different when the baby’s here,” he said.
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’m just reminding you.”
“What if I don’t feel different?” she said. “What if I have horrible postpartum depression and want to push the stroller into traffic?”
“Then we won’t let you have the stroller.”
“That happens, you know.”
“I know.”
“Anything could go wrong. What if it’s really funny-looking?”
“We’ll sell it to the circus and get rich.”
“I’m serious.”
“I think you’re going to feel differently when it comes,” he said.
She sniffed. “Dr. Davies told me the pediatricians have a code for the medical charts, when they don’t know what’s wrong with a child,” she said. “They write, ‘FLK,’ for ‘Funny-Looking Kid.’ And if it turns out the parents are funny-looking, too, and it probably comes from them, they write, ‘PS’ for ‘Parents Same.’ ”
Martin laughed. “So you’re making some time with the doc after all,” he said.
“I can’t tell you how uninterested he is.”
“Try,” Martin said.
“He’s so uninterested.”
“How uninterested?”
“His erection goes down when he sees me.”
“Really?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, probably.”
Martin took her hand in both of his. “Saff, you’re pregnant, and in the hospital,” he said. “This isn’t the height of your glory. But your glory has had some heights, and will again.”
“I’m hideous.”
“No, you’re just monogamous, for now,” he said. “I could get used to this. I might keep you pregnant all the time.”
“Just you try it,” Saffron said.
68
OWEN HADN’T SLEPT WELL or eaten real food since Margot left. He had never known how to make vegetables edible: Margot was in charge of all that. She was supposed to visit her parents for only a few days, but then she decided to stay.
He wasn’t alarmed right
away; he was busy with work and assumed she would be home to plan Thanksgiving. He came home late the next night, poured himself a bowl of cereal, and played a phone message from Margot, saying she was with another man.
Owen, sitting over his cereal bowl, was startled into tears. His Margot. Everyone’s standard for propriety, the woman who wrote thank-you notes for thank-you notes and hosted parties where even the drunks didn’t get surly, simply because Margot was in charge. People who lived to offend wouldn’t dream of offending her. He played the message again and tried not to have specific images come into his head. She hadn’t left a number.
He wiped his face and tried to remember the last time he had cried. At Danny’s birth, maybe. Sometimes the evening news or the illness of friends made him sad or angry, but not enough to cry. He felt like a man who has lain for years in bed and is suddenly forced to run a marathon. He wasn’t in shape for this; he didn’t have the right muscles or the training.
He wished he had faith. If there were a Catholic God, He surely wouldn’t want Margot to leave. Owen had done no wrong and deserved to have his old life back. But a just God wouldn’t waste His time plucking errant wives from Santa Barbara when there were earthquakes in Mexico, and wars in the Balkans, and starving children everywhere. A just God might even be reasonably annoyed at Owen, living alone now in a four-bedroom house with a stocked pantry, unable to make an omelet for dinner, feeling sorry for himself while people slept in the streets a mile away.
But again (Owen argued with himself at the kitchen counter), he was small potatoes compared to the real masters of greed. He was a charitable, taxpaying man, not a target for vengeance.
So clearly he was on his own here, God or no God. And to be honest, he leaned toward no God, not even the indifferent one.
He had stopped crying, and now he sat over his empty bowl looking at his reflection in the kitchen window. He looked sad and pathetic, with his shoulders slumped, and he didn’t bother to square them. He wondered how Danny and Bennett would take it. The image came back of his wife’s body, and then of a man on top of her, straining and sweating away, and Owen made himself stop. He stared down at the milky sheen in the bottom of the cereal bowl. He had never run a marathon, but he guessed he would need to start slowly, pace himself, focus on the steps he was actually taking, and not think about the distance.
He carried the dishes to the sink and washed them by hand, focusing on the spoon, the soap, the water, the sponge. He put them in the drying rack. One task done, and no thinking about Margot. But now what? He thought of reading, but couldn’t imagine the book that would keep his thoughts on the page.
He remembered a model airplane he had started with the boys, who had abandoned it when baseball practice began, and he found the box in a closet full of old sports gear. He brought it to the kitchen table and carefully spread the day’s newspaper to protect the wood finish. They had barely begun to assemble the plane, and all the old paints seemed to be usable. It was a Corsair, the kind Teddy had flown in both wars, which was why they had picked it out. Owen laid out all the pieces, and the tools, and the paints in a row, and set out for mile one.
69
FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, Dominick had considered his affair with Margot to be the pivotal event in his life, not counting his diabetic father’s death when he was two. His mother, a parish secretary, had raised him alone, and he had grown up inside a church. But Margot’s appearance and disappearance had changed his life completely. When she stopped seeing him he had prayed, because that was still his habit, and determined that the life of a Jesuit brother was not for him if he was lusting after married women.
But the Society of Jesus had dealt with illicit affairs before. His confessor, a gentle, white-haired old man named Father Gabriel, told him he should see the encounter as a gift, a challenge, a cause for meditation and reflection. They spent hours hashing it out. He understood that he craved the approval of his superiors because he lacked a father, but the understanding didn’t diminish the craving. When he finally won the argument and left his training, it was with a heavy feeling of grief that he had missed his chance not to disappoint.
Dominick moved to Santa Barbara to avoid the temptation of showing up on Margot’s doorstep: he would make a new life. He took a job at a law firm, where one day he was visited by a man from the local diocese, who seemed to know his history with the Jesuits. The man was an energetic Californian, persuasive and determined, and he talked about the interesting opportunities the Church could offer a smart young lawyer. He hoped Dominick would come to Mass on Sunday.
Dominick thanked him and then didn’t go, and after that felt he was being watched. He met a pretty girl who wanted to be an actress, and they were married with his mother in tearful attendance. The marriage created a beautifully distracting noise in his life until his mother, back in Louisiana, died of a brain aneurysm. He went home to bury her next to his father, astonished by the grief he felt. He was alone. His wife, with two living parents and four grandparents, thought he was overreacting. One morning as he dressed for work, he caught her watching him from their bed and then feigning sleep so she wouldn’t have to talk to him, and he realized she despised him. By the time they went to counseling, she was already sleeping with a director of television commercials, but Dominick didn’t know that yet, and his wife didn’t mention it while listing her grievances in the therapist’s office.
The therapist asked to see them separately, and suggested to Dominick alone that he needed more help than just marriage counseling. He had obsessive thoughts of his dead mother and his kindly confessor. He had dreams of being attacked by someone from Opus Dei for betraying the Church. When his wife finally left him for the director (and a part in a Pepsi ad), he stayed in bed for a week and then filled the prescription the therapist gave him.
The years passed, and he worked and became a partner and tried to contribute to the community, but the nightmares continued, and he never felt right. Eventually he met a young woman named Laurel, who worked in a dress shop and went to bed with him in a casual, cynically promiscuous way, and then introduced him to heroin that was very pure and could be sniffed, no dangerous needles. It was infinitely better than the pills. It took the nightmares away, and it felt so good : it was the obvious answer. He couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to find. Laurel insisted you could live a perfectly normal life with the occasional high; her shop sold eighty-dollar T-shirts and eight-hundred-dollar handbags, and she said Coco Chanel used to shoot up right through her little black dress. But Dominick didn’t have the fortitude of Coco Chanel, and his life quickly ceased to seem normal. There were some lost months, a lost year, nightclubs with kids half his age. A young resident who stitched up his hand one night told him he had chosen a good way to die and listed all the possible effects of heroin use. One was a diabeteslike inability to process glucose. Dominick wanted more details and told the resident that was what killed his father, but the irony was lost on the impatient young man.
In rehab, his roommate was an ex–pro surfer, Cordy Hays, who was three weeks ahead of him on the road to sobriety. Dominick, in withdrawal, had chills and cramps and diarrhea and wanted to die, but Cordy had a beatific way of talking about what would come next, and how it would get better, that made it seem possible to get through the hours. Finally the clinic sent Dominick back clean and HIV-tested to the world. His legal staff had moved on to more promising jobs, and his clients had moved on to more reliable lawyers. He set about getting one or two of the clients back and went to the gym to build up his strength. There was the little trouble of the rent and the fucking alimony, but he managed to keep the rent covered.
And then Margot showed up in his office, like a ghost, but she didn’t look like a ghost, and she didn’t feel like one when he managed to touch her. He couldn’t believe she had come to find him. He was tremendously moved.
He didn’t tell her the details of his troubles; he had an instinct to preserve the glamour for her. Adultery without glamour w
as going to sour quickly for a woman like Margot, who had thrived on her ordinary life for thirty years. The week she arrived, they saw a dance band setting up on the pier. Over Margot’s protests, he bought her an insanely expensive and very beautiful dress at Laurel’s old shop. Laurel had moved to New York, but the shop was still associated with temptation for him. At sunset they walked to the pier, which was strung with lights.
They had both grown up in the age of dance lessons, and the steps came back like a song from childhood. There were other couples their age, who danced covering their shyness with ironic smiles. And there were kids, twenty-year-olds in nineteen-fifties clothes. The girls wore poodle skirts, twisted-up hairstyles, and tattoos on their ankles and shoulders. They did the Lindy Hop, somersaulting through the air, their skirts flying. A skinny kid in a powder blue zoot suit turned the girls every direction, looking like he was thinking about something else.
Dominick didn’t turn Margot upside down, but he spun her around and brought her back in tight. She was a good follower and paid attention to where his hands were and what he wanted. The band played “Oye Como Va,” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” He lifted Margot’s hand above her head, and she smiled at him over her shoulder. The green skirt of her dress swung around her knees. The last years felt like nothing; time vanished. He hadn’t thought he would do anything this wholesome ever again.
They found an empty picnic table, and the hanging lights were soft on Margot’s face as she watched the dancers. The band was playing slow.
“It’s so strange that I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“This,” he said. “Do this.”
“I’ve thought of myself all my life as good,” she said. “A good daughter, a good student, a good wife, a good mother. I’ve lost everything, do you see? I’ve lost who I am.”
