“HOW IS SHE?” Tom asked. He had stopped in at the Ash Avenue house to deliver a suitcase of Fay’s clothes.
“Terrible. She’s asleep at the moment, but she didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“I miss you terribly.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Do you?”
“You know I do.” She put her arms around him. In his heavy wool overcoat his body held the freshness of nourishing reality. And he wore a brown cloth cap she had never seen before, which made him seem like a visitor from an old-fashioned world of simplicity and privilege. “You’re cold,” she said. She was moved to do something kind for him but couldn’t think what. “Your face is freezing.”
“You’re warm.” He rubbed her upper arms with his hands. “You feel wonderful.”
She held on to him. “It’s been a misery, sleeping alone up there in that little twin bed. I feel so – ” She stopped, shook her head.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maidenly and responsible. It’s all so heavy. And I can hear her crying. Hour after hour.”
“Ah, Fay.” He held her close.
“Do you know what I did last night?” she said.
“What?”
“It was strange. In the middle of the night I had this terrible longing to hear your voice. I was all of a sudden dying for it. And then I remembered that I could. I could just switch you on. With a flick of the dial I could have what I wanted.”
“And?”
“I kept it on low. You were doing your Paul Anka shtik. Oh, you were lovely. Corny but lovely.”
“Look, are you sure you don’t want me to stay here, too? Just temporarily. I could easily – ”
“It would be wonderful. But she can’t bear to have anyone in the house who isn’t family. Not yet, anyway. She’s got this idea – ”
“What?”
“That she doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“That he’s left?”
“She’s made us all promise not to tell a soul. She’s even sworn Dr. Plette to secrecy. Not that we trust him for five minutes.”
“People are bound to know sooner or later.” He bit his lower lip. “In a city this size.”
“If they don’t already.”
He paused. “It really isn’t reasonable.”
“I know, I know. But she’s not reasonable. Not rational, I mean. She’s suffering. If you saw her, Tom – it’s heartbreaking.”
“Does she think he might come back?”
“She doesn’t say so in so many words.”
“What do you think?”
“I think she’s expecting him to come home any minute. Every time the phone rings she freezes. She thinks he’s calling to say it was all a misunderstanding. Or temporary insanity or something.”
“It is possible, isn’t it? Temporary insanity? Maybe he’s having some kind of breakdown? In the first year of retirement people often do.”
“She never dreamed anything like this could happen. Well, none of us did. I guess we’re all still in shock.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“There is one thing, Tom.”
“What?”
“I wonder if you’d phone Iris Jaffe for me. About the shower she’s giving for me Thursday night.”
“What about the shower?”
“Can you make some excuse, say I’m terribly sick or something. Maybe she can postpone it.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“I couldn’t face it. All those old friends. All that joviality.”
“What I meant was, don’t you think you ought to take Iris into your confidence? She won’t believe me for a minute, that you’re sick, I mean.”
“Maybe you can think of something else.”
“I don’t know, Fay. It would be a whole lot simpler if you just told her what’s happened.”
She stared at him. His expression seemed for a moment closed, not unkind but carrying a kind of willed incomprehension. “Tom, I just can’t bring myself to talk about it yet. I can hardly talk about it even to Bibbi or Clyde. Iris will ask me why.”
“Why he’s left?”
“I keep thinking there’s a missing piece here. Something we’re not taking into consideration.”
“But what did he say to your mother when he left?”
“She doesn’t know, she’s terribly confused about it. He felt crowded, she says, he couldn’t breathe. Something like that.”
“But couldn’t you – ask him?”
“I don’t know.”
“I gather you haven’t talked to him yet?”
“No.”
“Not even on the phone?”
“No, not yet.”
“What about Clyde? Or Bibbi?”
“They haven’t talked to him, either. We’re just trying to – ”
“What?”
“Catch our breath, I guess. And figure out our strategy.”
He picked up her hand in both of his and stared at it for a minute. “When are you planning to see him?”
She opened her mouth. What came out was a shameful whimper of sound.
“When, Fay?”
“Tomorrow. Tomorrow for sure.”
IN MOMENTS of great or sudden emotion people utter strange words.
“Daughter,” Richard McLeod said to Fay when he opened the door and saw her standing there. It was three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Six days since he’d left home.
He’d rarely addressed her in this formal way. Daughter, like a tag of dialogue out of an Elizabethan play. His tone was mild, deliberately so, it seemed to Fay.
“Won’t you come in?” he said, and opened the door wider.
He had found himself a small furnished apartment on the top floor of a building in the west side of the city, a flat-roofed, ugly low-rise block put up in the fifties or sixties.
The afternoon sky was brushed with pink and purple. Clumps of gray snow clung to the misshapen shrubbery that flanked the entrance, and wet tracked slush made the floor of the small lobby dangerous. The walls were painted a shiny tan. Fay had never seen this building before, had never, in fact, driven down this particular street. One of the doorbells was marked “R. McLeod.” She rang, and a buzzer let her in. Her own father, R. McLeod, lived in this bland brick building; the realization made her stumble slightly on the slippery tile, and she was assailed by a potent mix of belief and disbelief. R. McLeod of Ash Avenue, retired dry-cleaning executive, husband of Peggy McLeod, father of Fay, Clyde, and Bibbi McLeod, this man now occupied an apartment in an anonymous flat-roofed building off Berry Road, out by the airport; he resided here, was domiciled here.
The tiny elevator, bewilderingly lined on three sides with mirrored squares, swayed slightly as it ascended, and the single-panel door opened with a jerk. Gravy smells pervaded the long hallway, and a different smell, a sharp chemical odor, emanated from the hard, tufted, fire-resistant carpet and from the hardware on the apartment doors. Number 510 was at the far end. Her father stood there waiting, the door partly open.
What struck Fay most forcibly was the fact that he looked exactly as he always did.
Her father. She observed him as she might a stranger: an elderly, slightly stooped gentleman in a green buttoned cardigan and soft gray trousers. His white hair sat lazily on his head. He looked comfortable, amiable, self-possessed, mildly paternal; he looked, to her surprise, sane. His eyes blinked once or twice seeing her, but with his usual lively and familiar blue-toned sanity.
“I suppose,” his fatherly voice was saying, “that you’ve come to save me from myself.”
Fay considered. Those were not the words she had planned to use. She glanced at the miniature hallway, just big enough to swing a cat – as her mother always described such mean spaces. “Well, yes,” she said finally.
“Then you’ve come in vain, I’m afraid.” He spoke sadly.
“Look can’t we go somewhere and talk?”
He paused for a second
. “Why not right here?”
A quaver in his voice, yes, definitely a quaver, and Fay took this as a hopeful sign. “All right,” she said.
He led her into a dimly lit living room.
What made it so dark? She looked around and observed that everything in the room – the chairs, the curtains, the carpets – was some shade of brown. Even the view from the ugly double window was brown, a brown sky, the color of cocoa, midafternoon on a dark November day. She saw a newspaper spread on a beige chair. Her father’s reading glasses were folded on a rather spindly lamp table. Those two artifacts, his glasses, his newspaper, seemed to her to be ringed with dull light.
“Your coat,” he said, remembering himself. “Can I take your coat?”
“I think I’ll leave it on.” She said this primly, surprised at herself.
“Sit down, at least.”
“Just for a minute.”
He lowered himself into a chair. “I suppose you think I’ve taken leave of my senses.”
She settled herself on the edge of an ottoman which was mouse-colored, rough-textured, not particularly clean. “Yes,” she said at last, repeating his words and even catching his tone. “We think you’ve taken leave of your senses.”
He sighed loudly, so loudly that she suspected him of being deliberately dramatic. “I suppose in a way I have.”
“In a way!” Fay exclaimed, unable to help herself.
“I only wish it were possible to take leave of my senses without causing everyone so much pain. This is terribly awkward for you in particular, Fay, I know that, just before your own marriage, yours and Tom’s. I thought I would be able to hold on a little longer, but – well, I can’t tell you how much I regret causing so much anguish. Especially to your mother.”
She gave a low moan. “Then why are you doing this to her?” A long weak breath rose up from her chest. “And to us?”
“It was something that happened.” He laced his fingers together and leaned forward. “I didn’t will it.”
“When I think how her whole heart’s been devoted to you, everything she cares about. You do know that?”
“Yes, I do know that.”
“You’ve met someone else. You’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
“No.”
“Oh.” For the first time she felt she might cry.
“Your mother must have told you.”
“She’s tried. She’s not at all coherent, as you can imagine. And we didn’t – ”
“Didn’t what?”
“We didn’t believe her.”
“I tried and tried to make her understand. It isn’t easy.”
“You felt smothered. That’s what she said.”
“Yes.”
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“Just – smothered. There wasn’t any air.”
“Smothered with what? Love?”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“And now?” She gestured at the walls, the oppressively ugly ceiling tile, the pair of dreary windows with their stiff synthetic curtains “Now you can breathe?”
“Fay. Look at me. We’ve always been able to talk to each other. When I think of all the things we’ve talked about.”
“It seems as though – ” But the noise of a plane flying overhead drowned her out.
“As though what?”
“As though we never talked about you. We only talked about me, about my life, the things I needed.”
“I thought perhaps you might have some inkling of… of how things were. I thought that you, more than anyone else, might understand.”
“Couldn’t you have just – I don’t know – just gone off for a holiday or something. To think things through. This is all so … so – ”
“Drastic. Yes, I know, I know.”
She sat up straight. “I think you should see a doctor.”
“Because you think I’m sick, is that it? In fact, I have seen a doctor. I, too, thought I must be sick.”
“And?”
“It turns out I’m in acceptable health. For my age.”
“I meant a shrink. A psychiatrist.”
“That’s what I meant, too.”
For a minute they sat in silence. Fay could hear the wind gnawing at the window frame and, far below, the murmurous river of traffic. A second plane passed overhead, so noisy she shuddered. These cheap buildings had next to no insulation. She wondered how on earth he’d chosen such a terrible place, and if there’d been a measure of penance involved. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said finally, “that a man of sixty-six who leaves his wife after forty years of marriage is mentally balanced?”
He lifted his hands helplessly, shaping them around a circle of air, and she was struck by the frailty of the gesture.
“Don’t you feel anything for her at all? After all the years you’ve spent together?”
“Of course I do. Your mother is an astonishing woman, a warm, loving woman. I got lost, that’s all, in all that warmth and loving. It’s – ”
“What?”
“Complicated. For all concerned.”
“Are you living here” – Fay gestured again at the beige wallpaper – “alone?”
“Yes.” And then he added, “completely alone.”
“I see,” she said. The room was unbearably hot, but she felt, for some reason, determined to keep her coat buttoned up to the chin. The mocking tone of her voice surprised her. “So suddenly, after all these years, you’ve decided you want to live in a little furnished apartment all by yourself.”
He waved his wrists again, making irresolute arcs with his hands, and gazed at the window. A mottled light settled on his face. “It wasn’t really sudden.”
“Not” – she paused – “sudden?”
“No.”
“I see.” But she didn’t see.
“No, not at all sudden. I’ve thought about it for a long time.”
“There must be more to it than that.”
He lifted his hands again, feebly, and shook his head.
They fell then into a short silence, broken only when Fay reached out abruptly and took his hand. “Problems between people,” she began, her voice shaking with what she recognized as self-disgust, “can be resolved, you know that as well as I do. Even problems of long standing. It happens every day. People … people make new kinds of arrangements. They, well, they renegotiate.”
“Oh, yes, I know.”
“But you’re not willing to, is that it?”
“I wish,” he said, “I wish it didn’t have to be like this.” He withdrew his hand. “I want you to understand that I just couldn’t go on any longer.”
“Mother thinks …” The word “mother” caught in her throat and stopped her.
“Your mother thinks what?” he asked quietly.
“She thinks … you’ll be coming back. That this is some crazy phase or something you’re going through. She thinks you’ll change your mind, that whatever it is will blow over and you’ll be coming back to her.”
“Oh, Fay.”
“What?” She was crying openly now, rocking back and forth, holding on to the points of her elbows.
“I won’t be coming back. I can’t go back.”
She leaned toward him, feeling a racketing pity for him, and pity for herself, too. “Why not? Why?”
“Because there’s nothing left.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Love. There isn’t any love left.”
LOVE.
Sometimes, lying in bed, resting her face against the hollow in Tom’s chest, Fay feels trapped in the shallow rhetoric of Hollywood or of pop music. Everything she pronounces or thinks seems to come winking off a set of diluted song lyrics. I wanna hold you round the clock. Love is a merry-go-round. She feels the vapor of stale breath on her throat. I love you. Baby, baby. A numbing self-consciousness has made her doubt every word that leaps off her tongue. Not to mention every word that enters her ear. Love, love, how can we p
ossibly speak of love in the last decade of the twentieth century, a century that is, in any case, in tatters?
And hearing her father utter the word “love” was something else, something far worse. What he seemed to gesture toward when he said “love” was a metaphysical ruin. Something laughable and shaggy like the American buffalo, something antique and embarrassing and touching upon a kind of huffing greed. A selfish whim. Something he has no right to say. No right to expect at an age when he can make do perfectly well, as others do, with an ordering of dignity and comfort and the warm bath of memory. Lips, hands, genitals, feet, all fallen. Eyes grown opaque with disenchantment. What does he want, what does anyone want? Love in the wrong place, love at the wrong time. Excess. Wreckage. A black hole. Nothing there.
Save me, she wants to cry out to Tom, save me from all this.
∼ CHAPTER 32 ∼
It Groweth Cold
IT’S FRIDAY MORNING, AND HERE SPRAWLS TOM AT FAY’S KITCHEN table, shoveling in the Cheerios, honking down the Java. Yup. He’s reading the newspaper and trying to get his heart glad on sports scores. He’s all alone. Being alone is a big pain, that’s what he’s thinking, and inside the big pain crouches another, smaller, crescent-shaped pain. It’s fastened on to him, it’s taken hold. He’s trying to dissolve it with rinse after rinse of hot coffee, but it hangs in there, its little teeth brightened with caffeine, biting down mercilessly.
Tonight was supposed to be the night of Jeff and Jenny Waring’s buffet supper in honor of his and Fay’s forthcoming marriage. Jenny Waring’s been cooking up a storm for days, weeks. She’s made her famous Chicken Marbella. Forty guests or thereabouts have been invited – his friends, Fay’s friends. A coming together. Two rivers meeting, a symbolically charged wha’d’ya-call it? – a confluence. He’d been looking forward to it; it shames him how much he’d been looking forward to it, and now the whole party’s been scuppered.
It couldn’t be helped, given the situation, but he’s grieving, grieving.
“Of course I understand,” Jenny had said to him when he’d phoned last Tuesday night. “Really, I mean it. What I mean is, things do come up, things happen. Believe me, I know that. Do I ever! I’ll get busy right away and phone everyone and explain. And, listen, Tom, I’ve got all this Chicken Marbella in the freezer, ditto the chocolate torte, I’ll just keep it socked away and we’ll make it a postwedding bash, okay? Instead of a prewedding thing. When you get back from your honeymoon, you and Fa – ;South Carolina, isn’t it? We can talk about it later. Really, I do understand, honestly. I just hope, well, I just hope it isn’t anything serious, that’s all.”