Skylight Confessions

  Once John got outside, the fresh air was a jolt. Blessed air; blessed escape. There was a field behind the house, overrun with black-eyed Susans, tall grass, and weeds. In daylight, the cottage had very little charm; it was horrible, really. Someone had added on a dormer and an unattractive side entrance. The paint was a flat steamship gray. Disgraceful what some people thought of as architecture.

  John prayed his car would start. As soon as it did, he made a U-turn and headed back to the ferry, counting to a hundred over and over again, the way men who avoid close calls often do. One, get me out of here. Two, I beg of you. Three, I swear I will never stray again. And so on, until he was safely on board the ferry, miles and leagues away, a safe and comfortable distance from a future of love and ruin.

  When Arlyn woke all she heard was the silence. It was a while before she realized he was truly gone. She looked through the empty rooms, then sat on the porch, thinking maybe he’d gone to the coffee shop to fetch them breakfast, or to the florist for a dozen roses. No sight of him. No sound. At noon she walked down to the harbor, where Charlotte Pell in the ticket office was quick to recall the man Arlyn described. He had taken the nine-thirty ferry to Bridgeport. He’d been in such a hurry, he hadn’t even waited for his change.

  It took two weeks for Arlyn to think the situation through. Another woman might have cried, but Arlyn had cried enough to last a lifetime during her father’s illness. She believed a bargain was a bargain and that things happened for a reason. She was a planner and a doer, just as John Moody had suspected from the size of her feet. She found out where he lived by calling the Yale housing office and saying she was a shipping service ordered to deliver a basket of fruit. It was not a lie exactly; she planned to bring pears with her. John had said she tasted like pears, and she imagined just the mention of that fruit was now meaningful to them both.

  Arlyn was not a liar by nature, but she was a dreamer. She believed there was an ending to all stories, a right and proper last page. Her walk back from the ferry ticket office was not the ending. Not yet.

  It took two weeks to settle matters. She cleaned out the attic and the basement, selling odds and ends at a yard sale, then put the house on the market in order to pay off her father’s outstanding medical bills. In the end she had very little: a thousand dollars and so few belongings she could pack them into a single suitcase. Her neighbors threw her a good-bye party at the coffee shop across from the ferry terminal. Those same neighbors who had imagined she had no prospects were happy to drink to Arlyn’s new life. She was a good girl, after all, and everyone deserved a chance, even Arlie. Over a lunch of oysters and macaroni and cheese and egg-salad sandwiches the neighbors all wished her luck. Exactly where she was going, no one asked. That was the way the future worked. People often disappeared right into it and all anyone could do was hope for the best.

  ARLYN TOOK THE FERRY TO BRIDGEPORT, THEN THE TRAIN to New Haven. She felt sure of herself at the start of her travels, anxious by the time she reached the university. When she got out of the taxi, she went behind some rhododendrons and vomited twice, then quickly put a mint in her mouth so that her kiss would be fresh. There was nothing to go back to, really, so being nervous wasn’t an option.

  John Moody was studying for exams. He had the feeling Arlyn might track him down and he’d had the jitters long before his roommate Nathaniel came to tell him he had a red-haired visitor. Ever since John had returned from Long Island he’d been dreaming. That in itself was a bad sign. He couldn’t get rid of his nightmares; therefore, he refused to allow himself to sleep. He was flat-out exhausted; if he wasn’t careful he’d ruin his grade-point average. His dreams were filled with disasters, wrong turns, and mistakes. Now one had come knocking at his door.

  “Tell her I’m not here,” he said to Nathaniel.

  “You tell her. She’s waiting in the hall.”

  John closed his books and went downstairs, and there she was, shockingly real, flesh and blood, nervous, freckled, carrying a basket of fruit.

  “John,” she said.

  He took her arm and led her away. They stood in the hallway, near the mailboxes. “Look, I’ve got exams. I don’t know if you understand how difficult my courses are.”

  “But I’m here. I took the ferry.”

  John thought she really wasn’t very bright. And she had a suitcase with her. John picked up the suitcase and signaled to Arlyn. She followed him outside, around to the rear of the dormitory, so no one would see. The fact that she wasn’t angry with him made him feel he was the one who actually had a right to profess some injury. If you looked at the situation from a certain point of view, he was the wronged party. Who the hell did she think she was, appearing this way? Screwing up his study hour?

  “I haven’t got time for this,” John said, as though speaking to a cat that had strayed into the yard. “Go home, Arlyn. You have no business being here.”

  “We’re supposed to be together.” Arlyn tilted her face up. She had such a serious expression. She hadn’t yet turned eighteen. There was hope all over her; she smelled of it.

  “Oh, really? How did you come up with that one?”

  In the shadows of the rhododendrons John could barely see how freckled her skin was. She was so young, after all, and it was flattering that she’d come after him this way. She’d chased him down, hadn’t she? She had that lovelorn look on her face. He couldn’t remember ever having seen such certainty.

  “Only until tomorrow,” he said. “Then you have to go home.”

  She picked up the suitcase and followed him back inside. She didn’t tell him she had sold her father’s house and everything in it. She didn’t announce that all of her belongings had been packed into that one suitcase. All right, John didn’t seem as happy about their future together as Arlyn had thought he’d be, not yet. But he wasn’t the sort to be rushed into anything.

  Once in his room, he did let her sit in the easy chair and watch while he studied. She understood he needed quiet; she even went out to get him some supper, a corned-beef sandwich and some hot, black coffee. When he was through with his books, she was there for him in bed, so sweet, so much like a dream. He gave in to it one last time. A good-bye to her, that’s what it was. The sex was even hotter; he was in a fever, he was acting like a man in love. But as soon as he fell asleep there were those nightmares again, houses falling down, broken windows, streets that never ended, women who held on and refused to let go. Nothing good could come of this. John got out of bed and quickly dressed, though it was dark, hours before his classes. He didn’t care whether or not his socks matched. The basket of fruit on his desk smelled overripe, rotten. He left a note on his desk — Gone to take exam. Have a good trip home.

  Frankly, when he did go to class later in the morning, he did terribly on his Italian exam. He could not think of the word for water or book or bowl. His heart started pounding again — the heart-attack feeling he’d had the last time he was with Arlyn. Maybe it was panic. He simply had to get away. He was afraid she would be waiting for him, there in his bed, and that somehow he’d be mesmerized into wanting her again. Because of this he never went back to the dorm. He went straight from class to his car. He stopped at a bar on the way out of town and had some beers; his hands were shaking. He’d made an error in judgment, nothing more. Nothing he had to pay for for all eternity. He got back into the Saab and headed toward his parents’ house, outside Madison, counting all the way: One, no one will find me. Two, I am free. Three, I owe her nothing. Four, it will all disappear like a dream.

  The roommate, Nathaniel, was the one who told Arlyn that John often went home on the weekends. Nathaniel had found Arlyn back in the hall, late in the day, her suitcase beside her, in tears when she realized John had disappeared. Arlyn explained that she’d sold her father’s house and had nowhere to go. Nathaniel had never liked John Moody, he thought of him as a selfish, spoiled prick, so it was a pleasure to give Arlyn a ride to John’s family’s house. In fact, they made such good time takin
g back roads that Arlyn was dropped off in the driveway half an hour before John Moody arrived, a bit more drunk than he’d thought.

  Arlyn was in the kitchen with his mother, chatting and cutting up carrots for the salad. John spotted her as he walked across the lawn. It was just the way he had dreamed it. The glass house. The woman who wouldn’t let go. He felt as though everything that was now happening had already happened in some dark and dreamy otherworld over which he had no control. There were thirty windows in the kitchen and all he could see of Arlyn was her red hair. He thought of pears and he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten all day. Just those beers. He was tired. He’d been working too hard and thinking too much and he’d hardly slept. Perhaps there was such a thing as fate. Perhaps this was all part of the natural order of things, the rightness of the future, a grid of devotion and certainty. He went around the back, just as he had when he was a little boy, in through the kitchen door, shoes clattering on the tile floor, shouting out, “Anyone home? I’m starving.”

  THEY LIVED IN AN APARTMENT ON TWENTY-THIRD STREET, in a large studio with a sleeping alcove five floors above the street. The baby’s crib was in a corner of the living room/ dining room; a double bed filled up the entirety of the tiny ell of the alcove. It was never fully dark, which was probably just as well. Arlyn was up at all hours, feeding the baby, walking back and forth with him so as not to wake John, who was in graduate school at Columbia, and so she noticed things other people might not. Dark things, sleepwalker things, things that kept you up at night even if there happened to be a few moments of quiet. Two in the morning on Twenty-third Street was dark blue, filled with shadows. Arlyn had once seen a terrible fight between lovers while she nursed the baby. The baby hiccuped as he fed, as though Arlyn’s milk was tainted with someone else’s misery. The man and woman were in a doorway across the street, slugging each other with closed fists. The blood on the sidewalk looked like splatters of oil. When the police came roaring up, the couple had suddenly united and turned their venom on the officers, each swearing the other hadn’t done anything wrong, each willing to fight to the death for the partner who had moments ago been cursed and abused.

  Arlyn’s baby, Sam, had dark hair and gray eyes like John. He was perfect. Small perfect nose and not a single freckle. He had a calm disposition and rarely cried. It wasn’t easy living in such close quarters when John had so much studying to do, but they managed. Hush little baby, Arlyn whispered to her son, and he seemed to understand her. He stared at her with his big gray eyes, her darling boy, and was silent.

  John’s parents, William and Diana, were discriminating and somewhat reserved, but Diana was thrilled with her grandson; because of this the elder Moodys came to accept Arlyn. She wasn’t the daughter-in-law of their dreams — no college degree, no talents to speak of — but she was sweet and she loved their son and, of course, she’d given them Sam. Diana took Arlyn shopping and bought so many outfits for Sam he outgrew most of them before he ever managed to wear them; Arlie had to stack them on the topmost shelf of the closet, still in their wrappers.

  No matter how good the baby was, John had little patience for him. Diana assured Arlie that the men in their family were all like that when it came to children. That would change when Sam could throw a baseball, when he was old enough to be a son rather than a baby. Arlyn was easily convinced of things that she wanted to believe and her mother-in-law was so sure of herself that Arlyn assumed John’s attitude would indeed change. But as Sam grew, John seemed even more annoyed by his presence. When the baby came down with chicken pox in his eighth month, for instance, John moved into a hotel. He could not bear to hear the whimpering, and he himself was at risk, having never had the disease. He stayed away for two weeks, phoning once a day, so distant he might have been millions of miles away rather than thirty blocks uptown.

  It was then, alone in the darkened apartment, bathing the fretting baby in the kitchen sink with oatmeal and Aveeno to soothe his red, burning skin, that the bad thought first occurred to Arlyn. Maybe she’d made a mistake. Was it possible that on the night of her father’s funeral she should have waited to see who was the next person to come down the street? She felt guilty and disloyal for thinking this, but once it had been imagined — this other man, this other life — she couldn’t stop. At the park, on the street, she looked at men and thought, Maybe it should have been him. Maybe I have made a terrible error.

  By the time Sam was two, she was quite sure she had. Her fate was out there somewhere, and she had wrongly stumbled into another woman’s marriage, another woman’s life. John was finished with graduate school and now worked at his father’s firm, complaining about being the low man despite his talent, a junior partner called upon to do everyone’s dirty work, never given the freedom to truly create. He was often gone, commuting in reverse, back and forth to the office in Connecticut, staying overnight at an old friend’s in New Haven.

  Arlyn was teaching Sam his ABCs. He was a quick learner. He studied her mouth as she made the letter sounds and didn’t try himself until he could repeat each letter perfectly. Sam clung to Arlyn, never wanting to play with the other children in the park. When his father came home, Sam refused to speak; he wouldn’t show off his ABCs, wouldn’t sing his little songs, wouldn’t answer when John called his name. John had begun to wonder if they should have him looked at by a doctor. Something was wrong with the boy. Maybe he had a problem with his hearing or his vision. But Arlyn knew John was mistaken. That wasn’t the problem. She and Sam were in the wrong place with the wrong man; she knew it now, but how could she say it out loud? The wrongness of things had grown from a notion to the major fact of her life. She should have waited. She should have stayed where she was until she was truly sure of the future. She shouldn’t have been so foolish, so hopeful, so young, so damn sure.

  Every month or so, Arlyn took Sam on the train out to Long Island. Sam was refusing to eat anything but peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, so Arlie always made several to bring along. Sam loved the train; he made choochoo noises and chattered all the way. Arlyn thought about recording him, and presenting John with the tape, saying, So there! There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s all you! But she had the strange feeling that if John reversed his opinion and discovered that his son wasn’t worthless, he might try to steal him in some way and cut her out of Sam’s life, so Arlie never made that tape. She never encouraged John to spend more time with Sam. She kept her one bit of joy to herself.

  When the train reached their station, they walked down the hill until the harbor and the ferry were in sight. On windy days there were whitecaps and the water hit against the wooden pilings. On clear days everything looked like glass, the blue sky and even bluer sound, and the hazy outline of Connecticut, so far away. There was another family living in Arlyn’s old house. She and Sam would often stand on the corner and watch the new children play. A boy and a girl. They played kickball in the street and climbed up the maple tree and picked azalea buds when they bloomed and stuck the red and pink blossoms in their hair.

  Sometimes the children’s mother called them in for dinner. When she came out to the porch, she would notice a red-haired woman and a toddler staring. The new owner of the house would then hurry her children inside; she’d stand behind the curtain, watching, making sure nothing funny was going on. A stalker or a kidnapper or something like that. But no, the strangers just stood there on the corner, even on cold, windy days. The red-haired woman wore an overcoat she’d had for years, thick, gray wool, very unstylish. The child was quiet, not one of those squirming, yowling types. A dark-haired serious boy and his loving mother. Sometimes they’d be there for over an hour, the woman pointing out the catalpa trees, the sparrows, the streetlights, the porch, the little boy repeating the words. They laughed as though everything were a marvel in this run-down neighborhood. All common objects no normal person would bother to take note of, unless she was a woman who thought she’d made a terrible mistake, someone who came back again and again, hoping that if she
just walked down the same street fate would whirl her backward in time until she was once more seventeen, when the future was something she had not yet stepped into, when it was just an idea, a moment, something that had not disappointed her yet.

  MAY IN CONNECTICUT WAS LUSCIOUS, SO GREEN IT WAS like a waking dream. Oriole, mockingbird, mock orange, birdsong. In a glass house the green was everywhere. There was no need for carpets, only bare ash floors; no curtains, only the lilacs, the rhododendrons, and yard after yard of boxwood, a hedge of nubby velvet. They had come to live in the Glass Slipper after John’s father had had a second heart attack and the older Moodys had moved to Florida. When William Moody passed, Diana stayed on there; the warm weather was better for her arthritis.

  How odd that nearly two years later Arlyn still missed her mother-in-law. Someone who cared about her child. Someone who understood that a person living in a glass house could easily become obsessed with the oddest things: stones, birds mistaking windows for thin air, deer running into the sliding doors, hail, windstorms. Glass needed constant care, after all. Rain splatters, sticky sap, falling leaves, pollen. John had hired a service to wash the windows once a week. Arlyn always did it wrong, at least in John’s opinion. There were smudges when she did the cleaning herself; she could not reach the tops of some windows even when she dragged out the longest ladder from the garage.

  The window cleaner came in a truck marked Snow Brothers. Arlyn often watched — it was always the same man, short, stocky, serious about his work. She could not help wondering what had happened to the other Snow brother, if he’d died, or run away.