Carthage

  Zeno who’d often been offended by Arlette’s appropriation of their daughter’s art was touched by this. The charming drawing had belonged to a time in Cressida’s life when she’d been less inward and difficult, happier.

  On lonely afternoons Zeno drove to Mount Olive as if sensing that Arlette might be thinking of him. Calling him to her.

  He knew where she lived: 18 Cross Patch Lane.

  Cross Patch Lane! An address out of a children’s storybook.

  And the old rebuilt shingle board house painted bright green with a tidy little front lawn and coral-colored front walk on a cul-de-sac lane of similar houses rebuilt and painted magenta, peacock-blue, cream—Zeno would cruise slowly past knowing that Arlette wouldn’t be home, nor would her house-mate Alisandra be home, not during the day, for the women were at the battered-women’s shelter, the women were working, only Zeno Mayfield was cast adrift.

  He might have taught a course at Beechum Community College, he’d taught in the past—“American Originals: Tom Paine to Woody Guthrie.” He might have spent time at Home Front Alliance where adult-male volunteers were particularly needed. There was much he could do but not much he wanted to do.

  He drove past WomanSpaceInc. Here were warning signs PRIVATE PROPERTY DO NOT TRESPASS. A six-foot wrought iron fence and behind it the austere red-brick building converted into a dormitory for desperate women and their children. When he’d been mayor of Carthage he’d learned a good deal about domestic violence and he’d done what he could to provide aid for women who’d had to flee their domestic arrangements. Some of them were terribly beaten, in terror of their lives. Yet, it was a frequent irony, the battered women changed their minds and refused to press charges against their men.

  Maybe times had changed. Maybe in Mount Olive, at Woman SpaceInc., the desperate women were more resolute. Their rescuers, like Arlette Mayfield, would be their protectors.

  Once at WomanSpaceInc. he saw Arlette walking with two other women, to a vehicle parked in the driveway. It was a bright windy day: Arlette had tied a scarf around her new hair, that gave her a blithe girlish look though she was very thin still, and did look like a woman in recovery. He’d wanted to call her attention to him, waving out a window, tapping his horn—but no, better not. The property of WomanSpace was off-limit to the male species with the exception of the mailman, delivery men and boys younger than twelve in the company of their mothers. There must be a “safe house” for women where no man can come, Arlette said, as passionately as if she were a woman hunted by men herself.

  Though Zeno hadn’t attended such meetings, which would have been too painful for him, he knew through intermediaries that Arlette was outspoken in front of audiences telling of how she’d lost her daughter to “male violence”—“male violence exacerbated by alcohol.” She didn’t, she claimed, blame the young man, an Iraq War veteran, so much as she blamed the “sick, violent, cruel and heartless consumer culture” in which young girls were used as advertising commodities, to sell products. It was a shock to Zeno to realize that if he wanted to, he could not approach WomanSpaceInc.: he wouldn’t be allowed inside the fortress-like residence even to speak with his wife.

  How many violent men, seeking their fleeing wives, claimed to want only to “speak” with them.

  HE SAW ARLETTE for dinner sometimes in Mount Olive. But they did not speak of Cressida now.

  They did talk about Arlette’s health: for this was good news, on the whole. The chemotherapy seemed to be working, the cancer had not spread.

  On her head Arlette wore a human-hair wig, dark-blond, wavy, very like her own hair except that it was thicker and more lustrous than her own hair had been for years. A woman-friend had counseled Arlette to have a wig in readiness for when her hair began to fall out in clumps during chemotherapy—“Having a double mastectomy wasn’t as awful as being bald. I know that sounds ridiculous but it happens to be true for lots of women including me.”

  Zeno winced, hearing this reported to him secondhand. Double mastectomy sounded too much like double testectomy.

  Arlette hadn’t had a double mastectomy, or even a single mastectomy. Her persimmon-seed had been caught early. And so, Arlette believed herself very lucky, and would not ever complain about the chemical-infusion treatments that left her dazed and exhausted and nauseated. It was a curiosity of Arlette’s new life that she never seemed to complain about anything.

  “I feel as if we’re all passengers on a plane that has entered a patch of ‘turbulence’—we should be grateful we haven’t crashed yet.”

  Arlette laughed, almost gaily. Zeno winced.

  He was seeing other women now. Or rather, other women were seeing him: calling to invite him to dinner, to accompany them to social gatherings. As nature abhors a vacuum so Zeno Mayfield was wryly discovering that a solitary man is a kind of vacuum, to whom solitary women are irresistibly drawn.

  None of his encounters were very real to him. None of the women lingered in his memory. He was still in love with his elusive and unfathomable wife.

  The Mount Olive restaurants were likely to be in refashioned wood frame houses, with candlelit tables crowded close together, organic-food menus, no alcohol served. Shrewd Zeno knew to call beforehand to inquire about a liquor license; he knew to bring his own wine.

  “Won’t you have a little, Arlette? Just a half-glass.”

  “Thanks, Zeno. But no. I’m on call.”

  “ ‘On call’—how?”

  “At the shelter. We’re terribly understaffed, we’re more or less always on call.”

  Arlette smiled happily. To be always on call! Zeno envied her.

  Whether he was drinking or not he was beginning to feel that many things were unreal and unnatural. To be having dinner with his wife in the candlelit front room of a stately old Colonial house with a bare plank floor and to know that he would have to go away without his wife, in a separate vehicle, was deeply strange to him like knowing that, when he stood, one of his legs would buckle beneath him.

  Life is a dream a little less consistent.

  (Who’d said that? Centuries ago? Pascal?)

  (Who’d also said When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated.)

  The estranged husband imagines himself re-encountering his wife, courting and winning her a second time. If she’d fallen in love with him once, why not a second time? So Zeno imagined. So Zeno plotted. Daring to brush his fingers across Arlette’s slender hand as if accidentally even as he could not fail to see that Arlette was distracted while speaking with him, or rather listening to him; too often, her cell phone rang during their meal.

  “I’m so sorry, Zeno! I have to answer.”

  Where once he’d have been furious, his wife cared so little for him as to answer her cell phone at dinner, the very sort of rude behavior neither Zeno nor Arlette would have allowed in their daughters, now Zeno was touched that Arlette felt the need to apologize. She still loves me. If I need her, she will come back to me.

  To Juliet he’d pleaded, in frequent phone calls: Why has your mother left our marriage? Why has she moved out? He’d never asked Juliet why her mother had ceased loving him for he could not truly believe that this was so.

  Embarrassed, Juliet had told Zeno she didn’t know.

  Often in one or another of the small ethnic restaurants in Mount Olive where they had dinner together Arlette had to leave early with a flutter of apologies and a brush of her lips against Zeno’s cheek. Alone then the abandoned husband sat finishing a glass of wine, brooding.

  (The temptation was to finish the entire bottle, which he’d brought.)

  He’d insisted upon paying the bill of course. He knew that Arlette didn’t have much money though she seemed incapable of asking him for money.

  If the house on Cumberland Avenue were to be sold, Zeno and Arlette would each receive half of the sale price. But that would make their break irrevocable. The very prospect was unnerving to Zeno.

  The estranged husband imagines his wife
bound to him by need—a need for money, if nothing more. In her zeal for community volunteer-work Arlette seemed to have little need of her own.

  Next time they met for dinner Zeno surprised Arlette by handing her a check.

  “Oh Zeno! What is—?”

  A check for three thousand dollars made out to WomanSpaceInc.

  “Oh Zeno. Thank you.”

  She stood, came to him and hugged him, and kissed his stubbly cheek. Might’ve been Zeno’s imagination, her tears wetted his face.

  IN A WEAK-MAUDLIN mood half-drunk descending bumpy Potsdam Street. And there, the Kincaid house or what remained of it—peeling wood frame, set close to the sidewalk, shades pulled at all the windows and a litter of old newspapers and flyers accumulated by the front stoop like ancient bones.

  No one lived here now. Ethel Kincaid had departed Carthage.

  She’d left the city she so hated, her rented house filled—(so it had been reported in the media)—with trash of all kinds including raw garbage and decaying rodent-carcasses, the woman’s final gesture of outrage. No one had been informed where Ethel had gone though there were reports initially that she’d moved to the village of Dannemora to live near her incarcerated son.

  This turned out to be unfounded. Ethel Kincaid was not living in Dannemora but with relatives in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo. She had broken off all relations with Carthage. She had even ceased giving angry interviews—or rather, it may have been that the tabloid media had tired of the vet’s grieving mother.

  Staring at the abandoned and derelict house Zeno recalled the anxious hope with which he’d hurried to the door, on that morning in July 2005.

  Already then, his daughter had vanished. His daughter was no more.

  And yet, as he’d knocked on Ethel Kincaid’s door he had not known that melancholy fact. His brain had been in such a tumult of hope, almost now he could envy that old, lost father-Zeno, imagining that, through bravado and belligerence of his own, he might find his missing Cressida.

  Asking the astonished Ethel Kincaid to let him into her house. To let him into Brett Kincaid’s room. The wild thought like a fragile rope he was pulling to save his life that his daughter might be there, with Brett Kincaid: the most unlikely of lovers.

  And Ethel had sent him away jeering.

  And Ethel had sent him away with a curse flung at the head of all the Mayfields of the world, those who dwell on Cumberland Avenue and not on steep-shabby Potsdam Street My son hates all of you.

  The woman had come into his life to drink with him.

  To shore him up, to listen to his rants and laugh at his jokes. To love him.

  “Zeno? Maybe you could come for dinner sometime? I’d love to make us dinner.”

  He’d hesitated. What was this? The first stumbling step of his new life? His life-after-Arlette? Or was this the first, stumbling step of a sequence of blunders?

  Her name was Genevieve. He hadn’t heard the last name clearly.

  They’d met at a gathering in Carthage, in January 2012. He’d known her husband—hadn’t he?—but couldn’t inquire for he failed to recall the husband’s name.

  He’d smiled. He’d hesitated. He’d had a drink in hand, one of those fragile plastic cups his big fingers were at risk for cracking.

  Told her thank you! Gentlemanly regret: See honey, I’m a burnt-out case. Run for your life.

  Yet, she’d prevailed. Smiling woman waiting for Zeno by the coat room.

  No choice but he’d had to invite her across the street for a drink at least. A drink to erase the sour taste of the cheap white wine at the reception.

  It was flattering—unless it was disturbing, sad—that, at the reception in Carnegie House, in celebration of the retirement of the director of the Carnegie Arts Foundation, Zeno Mayfield had been one of the centers of conversation, as in the old, lost days. For everyone in Carthage who was likely to be invited to this social event knew Zeno Mayfield: wanted to warm themselves with his good humor, laughter, sagacity and audacity, affability. Possibly Zeno was drinking too much lately, possibly since the departure of his wife from their marriage he was indeed becoming a burnt-out case, but amid the cheering din of voices and laughter who could tell? Who could care?

  “Genevieve—is that your name? To be frank I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  He’d been apologetic, stumbling. He had left his eloquence back at the brightly-lit reception.

  She’d looked no more than thirty-five years old. He’d looked older than his age which was—never mind.

  “Just dinner? What can be such a risk, a simple dinner? You know we live in the same building, don’t you? You’re on the penthouse floor, I’m on the fifth.”

  He’d heard: something had gone terribly wrong in this woman’s life. The husband, a teenaged son. He wouldn’t inquire. He didn’t want to provoke tears. He didn’t want to provoke sympathy. Like hemorrhaging it was, this sort of sympathy. He saw that there were several rings on her attractive hands but no wedding band, a danger signal.

  Zeno’s wedding band had grown into his fatty finger, most likely. A Celtic design, silver. Arlette’s fingers had grown too thin, she’d had to remove all her rings.

  The smiling woman was saying, “We each have losses. I understand. Yours may be deeper and more tragic than mine, but . . .”

  Zeno resisted the impulse to touch her hand. Take her hand. He would not. Instead, lifted his glass.

  Better a wineglass than the damned cheap plastic cups.

  He saw her lips move. Earnestly she was speaking. Better this dim-lit interior than the over-bright Carnegie House.

  “I’ve ‘lost’ my son though he’s still—he’s living. He’s twenty-four years old and I haven’t seen him in almost two years. I think that people who have similar losses can understand and help each other though I don’t mean—I don’t mean dwelling upon the past . . . I mean—I think I mean—trying to live now.” Suddenly she laughed with unexpected gaiety, lifting her glass to touch Zeno’s.

  Much better wine in the Mercer Street Lounge, than at the crowded reception across the street.

  “Well. I’ll drink to that.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  They laughed. They drank, and laughed.

  What more precious than the opportunity to drink, laugh and drink.

  Telling Genevieve how furious he was with his wife for being so God-damned brave and God-damned good. God-damned stoic about her health making him feel like a quivering asshole, he’d been so scared for her.

  But mostly couldn’t forgive her for “forgiving” their daughter’s murderer.

  “Oh! Oh, Zeno.”

  Arlette had gone to visit him in prison. She had not ever told Zeno about the visits but—he knew. He’d found out.

  God damn her, her precious Christian soul. She had forgiven the unforgiveable, he hated her.

  Now, it was uttered. He’d sworn he would not ever talk in this way with any stranger nor even with well-intentioned relatives urging him to talk in this way yet now, he heard, shocked he heard his voice careening on like a runaway wheel down a steep incline.

  And for “forgiving” God—he hated her for that, too.

  “God damn fucking God.”

  Spoke so vehemently, customers at other tables glanced in their direction. Genevieve laughed.

  A sensible woman would have fled. Genevieve poured more wine into both their glasses and laughed.

  And how good it felt, laughed-at instead of cringed-at.

  “I’ve thought that too, Zeno. Many times. God damn fucking God.”

  He told her of the ancient Greeks. Blood-passion. Aeschylus, Oresteia. Some spring seemed to have been tripped in his brain like desiccated suet liquefied by heat. He’d always been an eloquent drunk but hadn’t had the opportunity lately.

  Saying how laws had been invented to stem the primitive passion for revenge but the feeling of outrage, the wish to exact blood-revenge, is not easily quelled.

  Told the woman lis
tening so intently to him, flatteringly-intently, about a documentary he’d seen on television the previous night, honor killings in Muslim families in the United States, some of the families solidly middle-class, even educated. Fathers in police custody weeping because they’d killed their “disobedient” daughters who’d “defiled” the family name. The grief in the face of one of the Muslim men, so like Zeno Mayfield they might have been brothers, though the act had been insane.

  The unbearable fact was, his daughter had been murdered—but he’d been too weak to take revenge.

  Of course: too civilized.

  “Officer of the court.”

  And now, he didn’t feel that he had any honor remaining. His soul had dried up, a husk.

  Now it had been years. More than six years. He carried it inside him like malignant marrow in his bones. In even the semi-dark you could see the malignancy inside him, luminous, lethal.

  The woman had said, “I can risk that.”

  Phone rang. Caller ID wasn’t Trachtman which was Genevieve’s name but Stedman which was Juliet’s married name.

  “Daddy? I had an upsetting call today.”

  What was today? Bleary-eyed seeing it had to be mid-March. On the calendar above his desk was March with a half-dozen dates feebly X’d out. But that was last week.

  Juliet was telling him of a “young-sounding voice” she’d heard that morning. A stranger—she thought—calling her claiming to be Cressida.

  Zeno gripped the receiver tighter not certain he’d heard correctly.

  “I mean—of course—it has to be a stranger—but”—Juliet paused; Zeno could imagine her quick confused smile—“it didn’t—she didn’t—sound anything like Cressida at all. I’m sure.”

  “Honey, wait. Someone called you?”

  “She said—I’m not sure what she said. I didn’t think for an instant that it was Cressida of course but only some kind of cruel prank. Then, the person called back and left a message and somehow, it got erased.”

  “The message is erased?”

  “I was upset, I guess—somehow, I erased it.”