Corrine was shocked at the sudden trickle of tears rolling down his face.
“I just hope,” he continued, “we all remember to try to make our lives count, and appreciate what we have together, our friends and our families.” He looked across the table at Corrine. “I realize now how easy it is to take your blessings for granted. I’ve been careless, some of you know… not proud to say I’ve made some careless mistakes along the way. Corrine knows. But I hope I’ve learned, hope I won’t forget how goddamn lucky I am, how precious and fragile our time together really is… how goddamn blessed we are. I hope we’ll all be together for many, many years to come.”
A ragged tattoo of clapping filled in the silence that followed this speech as Russell slumped to his seat and Judy tearfully embraced him.
Corrine was stunned; even allowing for his intoxication, she hadn’t seen him this emotional in years, not in the black days of September, not even in the days following the revelation of his sordid little affair, when he’d begged her forgiveness on pain of death, and she couldn’t help feeling, guiltily, that the outburst had been triggered by a sudden intimation of impending loss.
Precariously attaining verticality, Judy stood, holding her fully refreshed glass aloft. “I just want to say you guys, Russell and Corrine, you guys are like family to me.”
Corrine looked down at the table, at her plate with its opalescent slick of congealing gravy, embarrassed by this effusive exaggeration. She looked over at Jerry, wincing apologetically.
“It’s been an awful time,” Judy said, “a terrible, terrible…” She sobbed, struggling to regain some semblance of composure. “But I feel like I’m where Jim would want me to be. I know he’s looking down on us.” She glanced up at the ceiling and took a deft step backward, recovering her balance. “All of you…” She looked around, her eyes, glassy with emotion and booze, coming into focus on Hilary. “Even Hilary, who I know… You know what I know; I won’t say it in front of the children….”
Corrine instinctively checked the landscape… the kids all comatose in front of the television.
“But it’s okay, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve learned how to forgive. And… I don’t know. I just wanted to say I love you all.”
“Now I remember,” Washington whispered in Corrine’s ear, “why I quit drinking.”
Judy was the last to leave, strewing declarations of love and fealty as her children stood wide-eyed, holding hands with the stoic au pair. Corrine felt terrible about Jerry, the first to leave, whom she’d barely had a moment to talk to. Russell opened another bottle of zinfandel, the ninth by her count, on top of the two bottles of champagne. The presence of the children circumscribed communication between the host and hostess as they cleaned up the physical wreckage. Corrine swept up the remnants of the glass from the wineglass Judy had dropped, while Russell loaded the dishwasher.
At 8:30, she announced, as if to a large audience, that she was going to put the kids down. She read Madeline for Storey and Captain Underpants for Jeremy. No matter that she had tried to raise them according to good feminist principles—from the start, they’d seemed determined to represent the most primitive of gender stereotypes.
“Why did Dylan’s mommy fall down?” Storey asked after Corrine had turned out the bedside light.
“She was drunk,” Jeremy said.
“Well, maybe she had a little too much to drink. But you have to understand, she misses her husband, Dylan’s daddy. Sometimes she just gets sad.”
“Because her husband died in the big fire,” Storey said.
“That’s right.”
“Is Daddy sad?”
“I suppose so. Of course he’s sad. Dylan’s daddy was his best friend and he misses him.”
“I’m glad Dad didn’t fall down,” Jeremy said.
“Is Daddy drunk?”
“Daddy doesn’t get drunk,” Jeremy said loyally.
“He gets happy,” Storey said.
“Daddy’s fine. Now go to sleep.”
After performing her ablutions, Corrine slipped into the bed, grateful for the sound of the television in the main room. If she were lucky, he might pass out on the couch and the reckoning could be postponed for another day.
She was almost asleep when he climbed into bed and rolled over to lie against her, his sour breath—brandy now, atop the wine—rancid in her nostrils, hand stroking her thigh.
She pushed it away. “Russell, it’s been a long day and you know I don’t like to do it when you’re drunk.”
“You don’t like to do it, period.” He thrust a dry, rasping tongue in her ear.
“Russell, please.”
He took hold of her left breast and squeezed it. “Are you getting it somewhere else—from someone else? Is that it?”
“Don’t turn this on me,” she said, trying again to dislodge his hand as he tried to force her legs apart. “You know why I haven’t been sleeping with you.”
“Are you saying there’s no one else? That it?”
“Ow, Russell, you’re hurting me.”
He removed his hand and licked it ostentatiously.
“Stop it! We’ll talk about this when you’re sober.”
“We’ve talked enough.”
She tried to turn away as he rubbed his hand across her mons and probed roughly with his middle finger, thrusting his other hand beneath her ass and turning her toward him.
“Are you saving yourself for someone else?”
That was exactly what she’d been doing for almost two months now, though she hadn’t admitted this to herself before now. But at the moment, she was protecting something far more basic. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Struggling against him in earnest now, she was amazed by how strong he was, how ineffectual her own strength in comparison.
The battle apparently excited him, his erection growing and hardening against her thigh. She thrashed and tried to scratch at his face, but he pinned her arms back against the bed as he pulled himself on top of her. He could, she realized, overpower her. And if he did, she would never be able to forgive him. If he—she could hardly bring herself to think the word—if he raped her, she would have no choice but to leave him.
As she considered this, she suddenly stopped struggling. Yielding up her body, she tried to empty her mind so as to preserve two irreconcilable ideas—that she was surrendering of her own will, and that in resisting up to that point, she had remained true to Luke. She choked back her tears as he thrust his pelvis at her, probing with his cock between her legs, thrusting himself half an inch into her ass before he retreated and probed again.
The act itself took less time than its violent prologue, and when he rolled away from her, she lay rigid, determined not to move or to speak, imagining his postcoital remorse, calculating her moral advantage, contemplating the stark vista of her new freedom. Whatever she decided now, her decision would be unclouded by guilt or sympathy for Russell.
After twenty years of cohabitation, they had become experienced at ignoring elephants in the loft, and parenthood had only refined their skills at concealing resentments beneath the surface of domestic routine. A casual observer might have discerned a certain sheepishness in Russell’s demeanor—something more than the chagrin of a hangover—when he finally staggered into the living area that morning, and a distinct chill in his wife’s manner. The children, with their acute sensitivity to parental relations, responded to the tension with ostentatious displays of cuteness.
Corrine, for her part, was scrupulously correct with her husband, almost solicitous of his hangover. She even offered to cook eggs for him. The fact that Russell accepted her offer was a sign of abject contrition; Russell was absurdly prissy in his epicurism, and it was an old joke between them that she was unable to coddle eggs.
She had decided it would be easier to get through the holidays in a state of truce. It was surprisingly easy, she found, to be nice to him—much, much easier than she’d feared it might in the three hours that she waited for
him to wake—now that it didn’t really matter, now that she’d decided to leave him.
29
They traipsed out into the dewy pasture in the flat light of morning to catch the horses, tacked and trailered them, and set out for a farm down the road, as they had done so often before he’d left home.
“I think I’m in love,” Luke said as he turned the Suburban out into the pike, taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket, knowing she would disapprove. He wanted to prevent himself from succumbing to the easy sentimentality of the occasion and to dilute her maternal sympathy, hoping to avail himself of a more objective vein of understanding and wisdom.
Predictably, she plucked the cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the open window, smiling at her own audacity. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me about her. I guess we can assume she’s a damn smoker.”
“You’d like her. In fact, I think that’s one of the things I liked about her, imagining your reaction.”
“I always used to think you liked Sasha for the opposite reason.”
“That’s quite possible. She’s kind of the opposite of Sasha.”
“Good with children and animals, doesn’t like to shop?”
This sudden burst of candor surprised him. “All of the above.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Corrine.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow what?”
“The way you say her name.”
He found himself pleased by this observation. So much, he thought, for playing to her objectivity.
“We met at the soup kitchen. No, actually, I met her before that, on September twelfth. I walked out of the smoking ruins and there she was. I can’t tell you what it was like that day. It was like the world had come to an end. You can’t believe some of what I saw down there. There was a woman with her face burned off. And suddenly there was this new face. It was like seeing Botticelli’s Venus in the Uffizi, like the reinvention of the world. I actually thought, in my delirium, she might have been an angel. That sounds idiotic, I know, love at first sight, but everything since then has confirmed that flash of intuition, made me feel as if I’ve never really been in love before. And I can’t go on living the way I’ve been living.”
“Sounds like you’ve definitely made up your mind. Does she love you?”
“I think so.” He contemplated another cigarette. “But it’s not that easy. She’s married—with two kids.” He turned and looked across the seat to gauge her reaction—a slight pursing of the lips.
“I don’t know what I could tell you, Luke, that you don’t already know yourself.”
He glanced back at the road. “You could tell me about you and Duck.”
He was almost afraid to look across at her, so long had he saved the question, to the point he was almost convinced that he’d forgotten all about it. When he finally turned to look at her, she was nodding her head thoughtfully, looking straight ahead at the road.
“I suppose I’m glad you finally asked,” she said as he turned into the service road to the farm, and the conversation was postponed until they backed the horses out of the trailer and mounted up.
“Let’s follow the fence line out to the trail along the ridge,” she said, pulling her hair back from her face and clipping it behind her. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I think it’s time.”
“Don’t let Billy do that,” she said when his horse leaned over to chew the top of the fence rail. “He’s a cribber.”
He wrestled the gelding’s head away from the fence. “If you’d been as much of a disciplinarian with me as you are with horses, I might’ve turned out better.”
“You turned out fine,” she said impatiently, as if she were accustomed to defending him, and tired of having to do so. “Your father and I thought so. I’m sure Corrine would agree.”
He liked the sound of her name on his mother’s lips, which seemed to confirm his instinct that they would approve of each other.
“You raise horses to accept bondage and service. You raise children so they can eventually run free.”
This was such a generous notion, so genuine an expression of her beliefs, that he didn’t have the heart to parry it with the more sophisticated notion that children grew up to become slaves of the same imperatives that bound their parents. “Did you ever think about breaking free?” he said as they trotted along side by side.
“You mean did I ever consider leaving your father? Of course.”
“Did you love him?”
“Duck? Or your father?”
“Either. Both.”
“You surely know I loved your father. If nothing else, I’d hope you’re certain of that.” She regarded him with a censorious frown, as if he’d crossed a line—as if to say that flippancy has its limits.
“Did you love Duck?”
She seemed to consider this as they approached the back gate of the pasture. “Yes,” she said. “I did. I truly did. If I hadn’t, I never would have let it go so far.”
He dismounted to open the gate, pausing with his hand on the latch.
“It would take a long time to explain how that happened, how I let myself do that. I always wanted to tell you, but I felt that if I did, it would be betraying your father—further betraying him, I mean. And I’m not sure even now that I’m willing to do that. But I can tell you when it changed, when I decided that I couldn’t leave your father. Or rather, that I wouldn’t.”
“When?”
Her body seemed to deflate slightly, her posture to deteriorate. If she’d been standing beside him, on the nibbled-down pasture, rather than six feet above him on a horse, he would have made some physical gesture of comfort.
“You were in the house that day, weren’t you?”
A year or six months ago, he might have protested that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Yes,” he said. “I was.”
“In the bedroom?”
He nodded.
“I always hoped and prayed that I was wrong. I remember it as if it were yesterday, coming into the house after saying good-bye and finding the peanut butter and jelly on the counter, the glass of milk on the table. And then I remembered hearing something in the closet, earlier… thinking for a moment that someone was there. This is terrible, really….” She paused to wipe at the corner of her eye. “At that moment, I hoped it was Matthew. That he was the one. I prayed it wasn’t you, my firstborn. My favorite—there, I’ve said it. Everyone else was always saying it. It’s true, I suppose. But when you came down to dinner that night, I could tell. I so wanted to pretend that it wasn’t true, but we were so close, I could read you like a book. At least I could until that moment. And everything afterward confirmed that you’d… you’d seen us.”
She blushed, all these years later, at the memory. As if in sympathy, the mare whinnied and shook her head.
“And I was so mortified and so ashamed of myself. When I felt you turning away, I tried to convince myself that it was adolescence, a natural process, a boy pulling away from his mother. Wishful thinking, though I suppose it would’ve happened anyway, to some extent. We couldn’t have stayed that close. The ironic thing is, I wanted you to go north to prep school, to get out of this poky town and out of the South, to play and win on the big field. But I didn’t want you to do it because you wanted to get away from me.”
He lifted the latch and walked the gate backward, holding Billy’s reins, nudging the gelding’s wet snout—an operation that in its relative simplicity seemed to emphasize the complexity of processing and addressing this information. He looked up at his mother on the Arabian, silhouetted against the crisp blue sky, a tableau that was suddenly, achingly familiar. “The best days of my life,” he said, “were the days I pretended to be sick, and you pretended to believe me, and I’d stay in bed reading while you came up to check on me, until we agreed I’d somehow recovered enough to go out riding with you.”
“I thought you must’ve forgotten,” she said. br />
He dodged around behind Scheherazade and slapped her flank, urging her through the gate.
“Does she ride?” Nora asked.
“Does who ride?”
“The love of your life.”
“She used to be on the circuit, hunters and jumpers. She’s from the North Shore.”
Her face brightened at these simple phrases from her native dialect.
“Let’s see if you can still ride,” she said. “Race you to the ridge.”
“We used to come up here,” Nora said, halting at the top of the ridge ahead of him, looking down on the black ribbon of the pike bisecting the yellowing pastures and the tributary roads with their ganglia of housing developments and industrial parks. “The view was much prettier then, before all the building.”
“I remember.”
“That was one of the things that we had in common, loving this landscape, and trying to save it. It started innocently, like I suppose these things always do. Your dad and Jolene were happy not to be dragged outdoors over hill and dale. At first, I was able to talk to Duck because it seemed so… well, because he wasn’t my husband. And he was a good listener. I never really felt as if your father was entirely listening. He had everything worked out, all the great questions of life, God and sin and redemption, and I never felt I could contribute anything. And I certainly couldn’t tell him I didn’t share his faith, that I wasn’t even sure I believed in God, at least not the God he believed in. Duck had some of the same doubts and questions and he did seem to care what I had to say. The conversation went on for years. I loved that he didn’t care about his family’s money or Jolene’s social ambitions any more than I did. He told me he always wanted to be a teacher, either that or a vet.”
“I guess I always assumed you were swayed by his more obvious charms, the things Dad didn’t have.”
“You mean money?” She seemed vastly amused by this supposition. “Well, I’ll admit I loved watching him play polo.”