“Well, yes, money and everything that went with it.” Luke pressed on, even as he started to suspect the weakness of his case. “His worldliness and sophistication, all the trappings of the good life.”
“I think those were the things you admired him for, sweetie. Why else did you follow in his footsteps, all the way to Deerfield and Williams. Even into banking, for God’s sake. I always thought that was a little ironic, Luke, because he hated the bank.”
Of course she was right. Duck had always been an attractive alternative to his distant, pious father—even after Luke had discovered their secret. Perhaps especially afterward. It occurred to him, not quite for the first time, that he had wanted to be like the man she loved, but apparently he had chosen the wrong qualities to emulate.
“I might have found those things appealing, though I don’t think I loved him until I realized he didn’t really care all that much about them.”
The horses were restless, shifting positions and shaking their heads in some primitive power struggle, snorting, eyeing each other warily. Billy suddenly thrust his head forward and nipped at the mare’s flank. Luke yanked on the reins as Scheherazade wheeled away, whinnying in protest.
“The law of the jungle,” his mother said, “is so much simpler.” She started her mare down the other side of the ridge, into the hollow, glancing back over her shoulder. “Let’s have our breakfast down by the stream.”
They tied the horses at the edge of the clearing, a wedge of moss and grass in the woods, which the deer had grazed short, and walked down to the bank where the water tumbled six feet over a ledge of shale into a pool just large enough to submerge a midsize car. A nest of fresh Budweiser cans in the crotch of a cedar beside the bank completed the pastoral scene.
Nora sat down on the carpet of yellow-green moss and fished a pair of sausage biscuits from her pockets and handed him one—a ritual almost as old as he was.
“You must have come here with him,” he said, pitching a stone into the pool.
“Not at first,” she said. “I saved this spot. I always thought of it as our place, yours and mine.”
“That’s okay.” He nodded at the beer cans, sitting down beside her and unwrapping his biscuit. “I think it’s been discovered.”
“It was a long time before I realized I’d fallen in love, and when I did, I tried to break it off. But it wasn’t so easy. The ironic thing is that I’d never really had a big sexual appetite. Your father used to complain about it, but I never really got it. Never felt it. I was raised to think that sex was something a woman endured. It was the fifties. I was a virgin when I married your father. I saw From Here to Eternity that year and didn’t even suspect Deborah Kerr was a prostitute, because I didn’t know what a prostitute was. Your father wasn’t exactly a prude, but he did believe in chastity. We never got any further than what was then known as making out until our wedding night. And I can’t say I saw any fireworks go off that night. I put up with it because I loved him, because it was part of the deal. My primary impression was blood, sweat, and pain.” She paused. “I’m sorry, is this more than you want to hear?”
“Jesus, I don’t know,” Luke said. “I’m kind of morbidly riveted.”
“And then, I don’t know, news of the sexual revolution reached us here, about five years after the rest of the country, and Jolene formed that women’s consciousness-raising group. How ironic was that? Jolene encouraging me to get in touch with my body and my womanly needs. And suddenly one day, I did. My body called me, and for the first time it seemed like a local call.”
The familiar and soothing sound of the water was like distant background conversation—the higher voices of the shallow riffles, the deeper murmur of the stream plunging from the ledge into the pool.
“It was as if I woke up and understood what all the fuss was about. Maybe it was just a natural process. I was thirty-three or -four, just the age that the books Jolene was lending me said a woman comes into her sexual maturity. Well, I was ready to roll, but your father seemed to have lost interest. Maybe it was his bypass operation. Maybe it was age. Maybe it’s impossible to really maintain desire for the same person after a certain number of years. At any rate, it wasn’t happening. But Duck had been waiting all those years. And conveniently, I suppose, I was already in love with him.” She paused, stood up, and walked down to the bank, rinsing her hands in the water. “So. How’s the sex with Corrine?”
Even in the context of the current conversation, this question, coming from his mother, was shocking. “Who said we’d had sex? Or that I’d want to discuss it with my mother if we had?”
“Oh, come on. We’re both adults. Hell, I’m an old woman. I don’t have time for decorum. I wish I’d had less of it over the years. Funny—that’s one of the things I used to like about the South. The sense of decorum, the exquisite formality of the social code. So much sugar on everything. I thought it was all just lovely. But in the end, you realize you’re all alone in a double bed, where a little more sincerity might’ve served you better. Your father and I—there were so many things we should have said to each other. At the end of the day, I’d like to feel I didn’t make the same mistake with you.”
“I don’t really know how to describe it.”
“Well, try.”
“Fireworks.”
“Better than Sasha?”
“I don’t think I want to do a comparative analysis. It’s just different.”
“I always imagined Sasha was great in bed.”
“I’m not even thinking of dignifying that with a reply.”
“After all these years—still the southern gentleman.”
“You’re my mother, for Christ’s sake.”
She turned to face him. “That must be one of the things she loves about you. It was a big part of what attracted me to your father. The accent, of course. And those wise, sleepy eyes. But his courtliness, his old-fashioned sense of family. That sense of knowing where he came from, and honoring it.”
“But it obviously wasn’t enough,” he said, standing up and walking down to her.
“No, that’s not true. You’re old enough by now to know that love isn’t so simple, that you can love more than one person. Certainly you can desire more than one. You seem to forget that I stayed with your father. I thought about leaving him, but in the end, I chose to stay. And I know I made the right choice.”
“Would Duck have left his family for you?”
She hesitated. “He wanted to, yes.”
“So it was your decision.”
She nodded.
“Because of us.”
“Oh, God, there were so many reasons, Luke. I’m not sure I can sort it out after all these years.”
“And you don’t regret it?” He was looking for some lesson he might apply to his own life.
“A part of me has missed him every day since. I miss the romance, the passion, the intensity of feeling so alive. But that would’ve faded. It always does. But there’s something else, something your father understood. He asked me flat out once if I wanted to leave, and told me he’d still love me if I chose to go. Loving isn’t the same as wanting, Luke. And it’s certainly not the same as having. It’s not about desire and self-fulfillment. In the end, it’s about wanting what’s best for the other person. It’s about giving and even, sometimes, letting go. Sometimes I think love is more about renunciation than possession.”
His dissatisfaction must’ve been visible to her, because she quickly added, “I’m just saying, if you love her, and the choice is yours to make, try to do what you think is best for her.”
Then she looked at her watch—a plastic thing, black and white, the sight of which made him self-conscious about the expensive piece of hardware on his own wrist, a Rolex Yachtmaster, which he had once imagined to be a tasteful and masculine accessory. “I’ve got a session at eleven,” she said. “We’d better get going.”
The little girl arrived with her mother as they were unloading the horses.
/> The dogs, previously engaged with barking and harrying the horses, rushed off to greet the white Suburban crunching up the driveway.
“That will be Celeste,” Nora said. “I don’t think you’ve ever met her. She’s five, though you’d never guess it. Subdural hematoma at birth. She has some movement in her arms. Talk about your angels. I don’t know if she’ll ever walk, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she just up and flies someday.” Nora delivered this fantastic prediction in a dry and clinical tone. Whatever modicum of sentimentality she’d been apportioned in the beginning had been worn away over her years of working with the handicapped, like the fuzz from a peach, without eroding the firm core of hope and human sympathy.
Luke carried the tack back to the barn while his mother went out to greet the visitors. In equine therapy, Nora had found her calling. If she was more attuned to the horsey world than the human, as her family sometimes suspected, she’d discovered this perfect point of intersection between the two when she read an article about the Feldenkrais Method and immediately started working with a paraplegic niece. The idea that there might be a sympathetic communion between the bodies of a horse and its rider struck her as tautological. After a year, her young patient took her first step on crutches and word spread across the state. The local hospital began referring parents, who knocked on the door, carrying damaged children, like pilgrims searching out the rumor of a rural saint.
Emerging from the tack room, he watched them approach across the pasture, the young mother with an unearthly child in her arms, the girl’s body proportioned like that of an infant, her torso and frail limbs dangling like an afterthought from the skull, with its wispy halo of hair.
“Celeste, Ronnie? This is my son Luke.”
With her hand cradling the girl’s head, the mother directed her daughter’s gaze at Luke. In contrast to the helpless body, her eyes were animated with vivid curiosity.
“Hello, Celeste.”
She worked her shiny lips, calling forth cheerful, birdlike syllables of greeting.
“Celeste is riding Little Jimmy Dickens,” Nora explained.
The very name evoked a squeal of recognition from Celeste.
“May I watch?” Luke asked.
Another seemingly happy response. “She’d love to perform for you,” her mother said, interpreting her daughter’s response.
He was sitting on the fence along the side pasture, watching as Nora walked her on the shaggy pony, when Ashley, groggy and stiff from her teenage slumber, climbed up on the railing beside him. Grateful for her company, he decided not to tax it with speech.
Basking in the late-fall sunlight, he risked slipping an arm around her waist. She adjusted her position and laid her head against his shoulder. When he glanced over at her, he saw that she was crying. He pulled her closer.
She sniffled and buried her head in his shoulder. “Oh, Dad, I feel like such a loser.”
“We all do, honey.”
“How can you say that? You have everything.” She freed herself from his arm and slipped over the back side of the fence.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said, jumping down beside her.
She nodded tearfully. “That little girl,” she said.
“I know.”
The horses in the back pasture raised their heads to observe their approach as they walked out behind the barn.
“I don’t want to be a selfish bitch,” she said. “I want to be a good person, like Gran.”
“You’ve got her blood in your veins. And you are a good person.”
“I don’t know how you can—”
“I can say it because I believe it. Of course I’m biased. The thing you might not realize is that I’ll still love you, no matter what you do. Although I hope you won’t push that proposition to the limit.”
“You could really forgive me?”
“I already have.”
She buried herself beneath his arm. He held her and looked out across the brown fields, watching a hawk circle the pasture beyond the fence line.
“You know,” she said finally, when they started walking again, “I thought it was pretty cool that you quit your job.”
“I thought you were annoyed to have me hanging around the house all the time.”
“Yeah, well, I was.” She kicked at a steaming pile of manure wreathed in a cloud of tiny flies. “I want to stay here,” she said.
“What about school?”
“I could go to the high school with Jackson and Davis. And it would just be for the rest of the school year. Next year, I’ll be at boarding school anyway, if I get accepted.”
“Well, your mom and I haven’t quite decided on that one.” This was a reflex. He realized as he said it that in his imagination he’d already taken up residence with a woman other than Ashley’s mother; his reluctance to send her to boarding school, as she and her mother wished, had been based on the myth of an intact family. But in the wake of this unexpected reconciliation with his daughter, he was reluctant to concede to this plan, even when it so blatantly served his selfish interests.
As if she could read his mind, she said, “I mean, come on, are you and Mom really going to stay together?”
He was surprised and grateful in equal measure that she had so casually broached the subject.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that. How would that make you feel if Mom and I weren’t together?”
“It’s not like half my friends’ parents aren’t divorced.”
“That’s not the same as your own parents divorcing.”
“I’ve heard them on the phone, Dad.”
“Heard whom?”
“Oh, come on. Who do you think? Mom and Bernie. It’s not just sex. He’s been giving her financial advice. I mean, sure, I wish things could be like they were a thousand years ago when I was a little kid and we used to come here for Christmas and Fourth of July and you guys still acted like you loved each other. But it’s not. That’s one of the reasons I want to stay here. I know you and Mom don’t think Uncle Matthew and Aunt Debbie are the most exciting people on the planet, but I like them and I like it here. The high school’s supposed to be one of the best in the state, and it’s just for the rest of the school year and I’d have Jackson and Davis to show me around.”
“Are you sure you could be happy here? Big-city girl like you?”
“It’s not so bad. Davis is in this speed-metal band and he says maybe I could do some singing. I could help Gran with her therapeutic work. She’s been showing me some stuff, and I really think it’s something I’d be good at. Not to mention that I’d be safer,” she said. “I mean, the drug scene isn’t exactly rampant here, and Franklin, Tennessee, has got to be pretty near the bottom of the hit list for the terrorists.”
“Is it because you feel ashamed to go back?”
She kicked at a clump of fescue. “It’s not just that.”
“What do you think your mother will say?”
“Speaking of being ashamed.”
“I don’t think you give her enough credit.”
“It’s nice that you’re a gentleman, Dad, but Jesus, don’t be a schmuck. Don’t you think she’ll be relieved to have me out of the way? I could visit her on weekends. And you could write here. Or do whatever. It’s not like you have any pressing reason to be in New York.”
Somehow, even as he’d been warming to this plan, he’d failed to fully consider his own part in it. “You’re going to have to follow through on your treatment,” he said.
“There’s a place in Nashville,” she said eagerly. “It’s supposed to be really good—all the country-music people swear by it. Johnny Cash used to go there. I could do outpatient therapy after school. Gran and I already looked into it. And I could help her out with the farm—work with the kids and the horses. I mean, don’t you think that’s a lot more useful than hanging out at Bethany’s house and Bungalow Eight?”
“When did you ever go to Bungalow Eight?”
“There’s a
lot you didn’t know, Dad.”
“I know.”
“Like the last time I went to Bungalow Eight, who do I run into but Mom. She’s with, like, Courtney Love and that English painter Damien Hirst. Great! Just when I’m getting old enough to go downtown. I got out of there before she spotted me. I was with Amber and this older guy—”
“Hohenlohe.”
“Yeah, Anton. I’m not even sure she would’ve minded all that much, but partying with my mom at the next booth isn’t my idea of a great time. And I’m thinking, Great, now that I’m finally getting out and having fun, my mom’s having some second childhood, so I have to, like, call up all the cool places in advance and see if she’s there before I go out every night. Talk about a small world. I mean, how am I supposed to feel when she’s like Ms. Social Queen and all the men act like they want to, you know, sleep with her? And she acts like that might be okay. I don’t know how you put up with it, actually. Except you weren’t really around enough to notice before. And now she’s—”
“Ashley,” he said. “I don’t want you to say anything else about your mother. You don’t need to. Let’s just leave it, okay?”
“Okay.”
“As you said, I wasn’t really around much before.”
“So here’s your chance,” she said.
30
The pre-Christmas lunch at “21” was a family tradition, one that Sasha was determined to observe this year, despite Ashley’s objections. The mother’s enthusiasm, like the daughter’s reluctance, was based on the public nature of the venue, “21” being a kind of clubhouse for the tribe. It was obvious to both Luke and Ashley that Sasha was eager to make a show of unity and concord. “It’s especially important this year,” she’d insisted when they discussed it on the phone before the two of them flew back from Tennessee.
“It’s so bogus,” Ashley concluded. “Like if you go through the motions, everybody’s supposed to pretend everything’s normal. We can all pretend I didn’t go to rehab and you and Mom are still the poster couple for W. It’s like Katie Cathcart’s mom’s big Fourth of July party in Southampton, remember? How she went ahead with the party and said Mr. Cathcart was in Europe, even though everybody knew that he’d tried to hang himself in the bathroom two days before the party and he was lying in a bed in Lenox Hill Hospital with rope burns after the maid cut him down.”