Reginald turned to David. “In your works, too, I always see the moral underpinnings of Christianity. In your Thackeray for instance. How are we to understand what you say about his loyalty to his crazy wife except in terms of Christian responsibility? Everything you say about Thackeray comes down to his fidelity or lack of fidelity to fundamental moral principles. It’s a profoundly Christian book. And so is your book on Crane. Am I not right?”
David was stunned. He sipped his wine and tried to summon a response but before he could get his thoughts straight, Claire leaped in.
“Never mind him,” Claire said. “What about you? I’ve never read any of your books—though I will, I promise—but are they born-again books? I mean, can you read them even if you’re not a Christian?”
“My books are philosophical books rather than Christian per se.” He leaned back, professorial, and adjusted his glasses. “I argue the great questions of life, like Mann and Proust and Murdoch. That may sound self-important but you have to remember that even the little people sometimes have deep thoughts.”
“Well, shut my mouth!” Claire said. “Little people. Deep thoughts. You sound like somebody who was brought up on Sartre or Camus. ‘The little people of Paris.’ Jacques Brel is alive and well.”
“Sartre and Camus are irrelevant to what I do. Your father knows what I’m talking about, don’t you, David?”
“It’s all too deep for me,” David said. “I watch Law and Order on TV.” The truth was that he watched Judge Judy but he felt safer in admitting to Law and Order.
“Could you pass the wine, Poop?”
David poured the last few drops of wine into Claire’s juice glass.
“Well, this has been lovely,” Maggie said, and shifted in her chair as if ready to go.
“But there’s dessert,” Helen said.
And so they sat through dessert—canned fruit cocktail—with more pointless, contrary talk between Claire and Reginald while despair settled over Maggie and David.
“Just lovely,” Maggie said, and at last they were through the door and out into the cool, clean air of Northern California.
* * *
—
THEY WALKED HOME in silence, Maggie and David consumed with ancient notions of treachery and betrayal.
Claire, however, was exultant.
Claire had plans.
4.
The next day Claire and Reginald started their affair. It began briefly and messily, as if it were a minor skirmish before the real battle, and that is what it turned out to be.
They went to bed together in the early afternoon, while Helen was working at Walmart and Iris was at school, and after their brisk and feverish encounter Claire left Palo Alto for her planned reunion with Willow and her work at the antique lightboard for Willow’s Baltimore New Repertory Theatre.
Claire and Reginald would not take up with each other again until more than a year had passed and the real battle had begun.
* * *
—
DAVID AND MAGGIE had a major quarrel on the night of the Parkers’ dinner party, and the feeling of betrayal would continue to trouble each of them.
“I don’t care about the money,” David said. “It’s not the money at all. It’s the idea that he would ask you to loan him two hundred dollars and you wouldn’t think to let me know about it. As if I might disapprove. It’s as if the Sedgwick money was none of my business.”
Maggie protested, as she always did at such times, that the Sedgwick money was theirs, not hers, and it was unfair of him after all these years to make that kind of accusation. What was the matter with him? Was he getting senile? Why, if you want to get picky about it, did he not mention the food basket he had sent to Reginald? Did he think the Holliss money had nothing to do with her? And on and on. Ancient rage. Ancient betrayal.
“It’s not the same.”
“It is the same. It’s the same. It’s the same. It’s the same.”
Blah, blah, blah.
Dickens, depressed, curled up under the kitchen table, where he was out of the way but available, if called upon, to help change the mood.
The quarrel went on for a good part of the night.
* * *
—
BY NOON THE NEXT DAY, when their rage had cooled and they had accepted the small duplicities each was guilty of, Maggie and David settled down to discuss the Parkers.
“What are we to make of the put-upon Helen?” Maggie said. “She seems catatonic, poor woman. Do you think she’s aware that he’s a fake?”
“You think he’s a fake? I do, too,” David said. “All that crap about the great questions of life and even little people having deep thoughts. What kind of novel can that mentality produce?”
“Does he even have a job? Does he teach? How do they manage to live?”
“And she’s working at Walmart.”
They began to deflect their anger at each other onto Walmart and the unworthy Reginald Parker.
“Have you ever been to Walmart?” David offered this in the interest of truth. “It’s wonderful.”
“When were you in Walmart?”
“Ages ago. I used to go there sometimes after I had my stroke, the first one, and get over-the-counter sleeping pills. They have fantastic bargains.”
“Well, it’s one thing to go there and another to have to work there.”
“She has no health benefits.”
“How do they live?”
“Maybe he’s inherited money. Some people do.”
Maggie gave him a suspicious look.
“I’m just saying.”
“The child is sweet. Iris. Though she looks as put-upon as the catatonic mother. I don’t know how women allow this kind of thing to happen to them. It’s bad enough to be a faculty wife, where it’s presumed your opinions are really your husband’s and you’re lucky to be married to an intellectual powerhouse. But to have to work at Walmart to support your husband while he goes for morning walks and pretends to write novels in the afternoon and, for all I know, sleeps around indiscriminately, well, I think that’s just intolerable.”
“It is. Intolerable.”
Thus, by slow increments, they healed their marital rift.
* * *
—
MAGGIE WAS FOND OF presenting herself as a faculty spouse, that unacknowledged, abused species. This was a flaw in her character and she sometimes reflected on what it said about her. In her wilder moments she compared herself to the ballet dancer who, among her closest friends, exhibits her crushed toes and her cruelly malformed feet, proof of her dedication to art. But this, she recognized, was self-dramatization and not true of her at all. Being a faculty spouse was not high art—no White Swan for her—nor had she sacrificed herself in playing the role of wife. In fact she enjoyed it, and it came easily to her, since like so many other faculty spouses she was more naturally intelligent and more socially aware than her husband.
Maggie had been lucky in inheriting money and lucky again in her choice of husband. The troubles that came along with occasional ill health were made easier by having money in the bank, and the troubles that came along with three independent and unruly children were made manageable by a husband whose natural authority they respected. Moreover he was a university professor at a time when that still meant something and his position helped their kids out of the jams they repeatedly got themselves into. Maggie, then, was left free to be—as she was convinced she was—the loving, understanding, and always dependable mom. This was one of the few things about herself in which she was deceived. Her dependability varied with the needs of her husband. She was—and had more than once shown herself to be—capable of loving her children and ignoring them at the same time.
Dealing with an English faculty at a major university, Maggie had developed a keen eye for hypocrisy and an infallible ear for self-delusion. Thus sh
e was aware that she wanted people to know she was a Sedgwick—she owed that much to the family—but at the same time she wanted them to realize that being a Sedgwick didn’t matter to her at all. In the same way she was able to register the degrees of imbalance in the Parker family and, with a clarity of vision that would have disconcerted a lesser woman, in her own family as well.
For Maggie the Parkers presented a simple case of love and dependence. Helen loved Reginald to the exclusion of her own needs, and Reginald loved Reginald. Helen saw him as her superior in every respect. She felt fortunate to have been chosen by him to be the mother of his children and the provider of family security. He loved Helen, Maggie supposed, in his way. Iris, too, was drawn into this unquestioning worship of Reginald and it was undoubtedly in his own interest that he kept them walking in the way of the Lord. Reginald himself remained something of a mystery. Was it possible that he had some of the abundant talent that he felt justified in both his devotion to his art and his lack of interest in gainful labor? And then, too, there was the surprising boldness and generosity of his throwing himself in front of the UPS truck to save Dickens. A man who would do that for a stranger’s dog could not be altogether bad. He was selfish, no doubt, but not bad. Thus far her reading of the Parker Situation.
Maggie knew selfishness when she saw it, even and especially in her own family. She worried often about Claire and her irresponsibility in abandoning her son Gaius to the Oregon commune and then later expecting Maggie and David to pay for his very expensive Princeton education. Maggie had no idea what Claire’s life with Willow had been like but she imagined it had foundered on the rock of the usual: Claire comes first and good luck to whoever comes after. And now they were back together again. Did anyone ever learn anything? Claire maintained that she was a lesbian by choice because, quite simply, she had never had a good relationship with a man or a bad one with a woman. Perhaps Claire was not a real, committed lesbian. Now that Maggie thought of it, Claire showed every sign of being sexually attracted to Reginald Parker. All that hostility, that visceral need for confrontation. Maggie would worry about her if that dinner performance had been something new, but she had seen it all before and she was convinced that anyone as innocently selfish as Claire could not be hurt. Claire was indestructible. If a romantic encounter with Claire and Reginald should ever occur, Maggie figured, Reginald was the one who would come to grief.
Where, as a matter of fact, had Claire gone this afternoon?
Maggie turned these thoughts over in her mind as she brushed Dickens’s coat to a lustrous shine. Selfishness, she said to herself, and thought of Sedge and Will. She wondered if, in her unquestioned devotion to David, she was the most selfish of them all. And what about her pride in being a Sedgwick? What nonsense. She was walking in the way of the Lord. Well, stumbling.
“Good boy,” she said, and gave Dickens a gentle smack on his rump. “Time for walkies!”
* * *
—
MAGGIE AND DAVID drove Claire to the airport, each of them in varying states of good humor. Claire was in excellent spirits, full of talk about what fun the dinner with the Parkers had been and how lucky they were in their old age to have young friends, so unlike the old coots that Poop had taught with all these years. Reginald was interesting as a man, she said, even though she doubted he was an interesting novelist. And Helen was interesting, too, an anomaly really, since she was a faculty spouse—a nonperson—without actually being married to a professor. And the child, Iris, was adorable. Claire shifted in her seat with excitement. She couldn’t wait to read What Is Not Being Said, though she doubted if it would ever be published in her lifetime. But she liked the idea of it.
Listening to her daughter go on this way, Maggie concluded, Yes, God help us all, Claire has gone to bed with Reginald Parker. She was relieved to drop her off at the San Francisco airport with their customary goodbyes.
“Love you, Misery. Love you, Poop.”
“Love you,” David said.
“Love you,” Maggie said.
“She is now in the hands of Weeping Willow,” Maggie said to David, and was ashamed to find herself thinking, And good riddance, good riddance.
* * *
—
CLAIRE WENT TO the little cocktail lounge for a glass of wine while she waited for her flight and, to make the time go by, she tipped open her laptop intending to see what Wikipedia had to say about Iris Murdoch. She was annoyed to see the little pig with a letter in its mouth reminding her that she had mail. Willow, she thought, and stuck out her square jaw. This had better not be trouble. She was surprised, and surprisingly pleased, to see it was a note from Reginald Parker. It was brief and unsigned.
Thinking of you, Chiara, as I try to concentrate on my novel of ideas. I have a few ideas of my own. You?
Claire smiled. He had remembered her story about being born in Italy and misnamed Chiara. Was he one of those men who actually listen? Even in bed? She fired back a note at once.
Dear Reg: All men are pigs. Claire.
She thought about the message for a minute or two, wondering if he might take it the wrong way, and decided to sign off not as Claire but as Chiara. She hit the Send button. What larks! This might be the start of an affair. She felt not the least twinge of guilt. She couldn’t wait to tell Willow.
But Reg sent her a second email while she sat there with her wine. She had not closed her laptop. Was she hoping he would respond, and at once?
Cara Chiara: You are absolutely right about men, as you are about everything. It has been an honour (spelling sic; I favour the British spelling) to sport with you in my sty, even though the memory keeps me from work on my novel. Yours, Reg.
Claire lingered over this. She still had twenty minutes before boarding time, and it was tempting to respond. She was surprised once again at how pleased she was to be courted, even mock-courted if that’s what was going on. Was it mockery? she wondered. This was an unworthy thought and it merely flickered across her brain and she dismissed it at once. After all, he had confided to her at length about his novel. Such sincerity canceled out any chance of mockery. She sipped the last of her wine and made her decision.
Sir, you are a married man and you’re writing to a woman who was almost a nun. How do you reconcile your behavior with walking in the way of the Lord?
She looked at this message for a while, considering its tone and what Reginald might make of it and decided, What the hell, and sent it. Unsigned.
She left the lounge and went to catch her flight, feeling unusually attractive.
Reginald had left several emails on her laptop by the time she reached Baltimore but by then she was in Willow territory and she ignored them. He was a married man and she was here in Baltimore to give another try at building a life with Willow. What she wanted out of this life was a relationship like Misery and Poop’s, but when she considered their marriage in all its aspects she realized it required a selfishness she was not sure she had in her.
Meanwhile Reginald continued to write her friendly, noncommittal, and occasionally obscene emails. It would be only a matter of a week before they became fervent correspondents.
5.
Maggie and David gradually recovered from the dinner party and, less gradually, from the damages of Claire’s visit.
“It really was the dinner from hell,” Maggie said. “Why did he invite us in the first place?” This was three days after the party.
“Because you gave him money,” David said.
“Loaned.”
“Loaned him money. And because I, like an idiot, sent a lavish picnic basket to a man who doesn’t drink. Charles Heidsieck 1995!”
“It’s not right.”
“Hold that thought.”
“I suspect he smokes. I ran into him once with Dickens and he seemed high to me. Like Sedge in the old days.”
“I could have s
ent him marijuana for a lot less than I paid for that damned food basket. Charles Heidsieck!”
“I’ve never felt so unwelcome anywhere.”
“I didn’t want to go in the first place.”
“Well, it’s in the past now and we can forget about it.”
“I’ve forgotten it already.”
“I have, too. However . . .”
* * *
—
A WEEK AFTER the party they were out walking Dickens and of course they ran into Reginald. It was a cool, clear September day with the promise of a light breeze toward afternoon and the Hollisses were enjoying the California feeling that everything would turn out all right, even the stock market, even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Dickens! My old doggy friend! How’s this good boy? What a great old dog you are.”
Dickens allowed himself to be scratched and pummeled. Dickens had been a puppy when Reginald first met him those years ago but he was getting on in age now and was more sedate about receiving homage.
“We’ve never thanked you for that lovely dinner party,” Maggie said.
Reginald looked puzzled. “You sent us that beautiful note.”
“But we haven’t thanked you in person. Or your lovely wife. It was so lovely to meet her. And your lovely Iris.”
“Well, you’re welcome,” Reginald said. “We must do it again, soon.”
They were silent for a moment with nothing more to say.
At this point Dickens did his part by tugging at the leash.
“Off to the park,” David said. “Dickens is getting impatient.”
They said goodbye. As soon as they were a few feet away, David said to Maggie, “Promise me, promise me now and forever, that there will be no return engagement for that dinner!”
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