On the afternoon before the party, Lydia had the whiskey out when he came home from work. She’d left the catalog early, telling Banner she had a dentist’s appointment, and when she got home she sat in the old wing chair by the window, waiting for her husband like a faithful dog, watching the changing light, her thoughts roaming and wandering with the heady tension of their past. It was a beautiful day, the trees lush with early autumn, yellow leaves spinning and floating through the air. The sight of his car coming over the hill always filled her with a feeling of anticipation, at once exciting and frightening, and she handed him the drink when he walked in the door and his eyes danced lightly across her face as if he were pleased. Her husband rarely refused a drink, and he swallowed it up instantly, and then she refilled the glass and snuck some for herself and he started playing with her feet, tugging off her socks, stroking her calves. He wanted more, of course, the selfish bastard always wanted more, and she allowed him to handle her like a valuable object, she did not refuse him as she normally would, and they ended up on the floor in the kitchen with the chairs toppled over and the ice spilling out across the linoleum and him thrusting away inside her, hurting her, always hurting her. She knew that Jesus made it painful for her because of the awful things she’d done in the past, but it was a pain she had learned to tolerate, a pain she could make her husband interpret as ecstasy. Afterward, she simply said, “I’m going with you.” He glanced at her deferentially, as though he were seeing her in a new way. “All right, Lydia,” he said, “but don’t embarrass me.”
They took his old Porsche. Lydia liked the car, content to just sit there beside her husband the way other women did when they rode in nice cars, looking out the window at the crooked old houses and leaning barns, her thighs still damp and tingling, the wild taste of freedom rushing through her. She felt a sudden impulse to open the door and bolt and never look back, but then the fear of doing that, the terror of it, overtook her completely. Where would she go? Without Simon, she’d be lost. He’d taught her everything and nothing. He was all she had.
Although they’d lived in High Meadow for nearly six years, Lydia had visited the Spaulls’ home only once. Simon had known Jack as a boy. They’d grown up in the city together. Jack was older, and Simon had looked up to him. It had been Jack who’d arranged Simon’s position at the college, a gift they were both grateful for. Times had been hard in their young marriage. They’d been driving around the country for months, living on canned beans and whiskey. They’d pull into one town or another and Simon would try to paint something. The backseat was full of unfinished canvases. Simon drank throughout the day; he was lost, he told her, kneeling before her in a motel room, his face wet with tears. They were driving up the Taconic into the deep countryside when he came up with the idea to find Jack, to ask him for help. Jack was like a brother to him, Simon told her. They’d played stickball in the street together and kissed the same girls. Jack was the only person who really knew him. Jack was a man who could be trusted. Simon had grown a beard and his hair was long and he had a wild look in his eyes, of seething determination. They’d been driving in hard rain for hours and his whiskey had run out. He’d gotten disoriented on the long dark roads. He pulled over into a field and wept with the engine running and the rain pounding down while Lydia just sat there, doing nothing. After a while she got tired of listening to him and shoved him over and got in behind the wheel. He’d never taught her to drive, and it was raining miserably, and he was drunk and yelling at her, telling her she was stupid. “You’re the one,” he kept saying, “you’re the one who brought me down.” Well, she’d learned to drive that night anyway, around and around in a lumpy wet field, little frogs jumping up in her headlights. She’d pulled into a shopping center and Simon had staggered into a phone booth, flipping dizzily through the pages of the phone book to find the number. Like thieves, they’d tracked Jack down, banging on his door at three o’clock in the morning, with the rain pounding down and Olivia, Jack’s nervous wife, coming through the dark in her long nightclothes, like a ghost. They’d been invited inside, dripping on the Oriental rugs, and Simon kept mumbling over and over like a chant, “I’ve hit bottom, old man, I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally gone and done it.”
Two weeks later Simon was teaching at the college. He’d given Jack and Olivia a painting in return for their help, and Simon had told Lydia it was worth a lot of money. Lydia hoped they hadn’t hung it because the painting was of her.
18
ANNIE LIKED TO THINK of herself as an honorable person. She’d been raised that way, to do the right thing, and she was highly critical of herself and, yes, of others, too. Her mother often accused her of being judgmental, and thinking about it now she supposed she was. Not that she was sanctimonious, no, God forbid. Yet with all her introspection, she could still find reasonable ways to rationalize her behavior on the rare occasion when she acted disreputably. Simon Haas, for example. When he’d kissed her that night in the rain, they’d been stoned. Why, then, she wondered, had she thought of little else since?
Several hours before Jack’s party, Annie paged Michael at the hospital. It was Hannah Bingham who called her back. “He’s in the middle of something, Annie,” she said with a shopworn cheerfulness.
“I’m just calling to remind him about tonight. We have a party. It’s just a faculty party, but we shouldn’t be late.”
“Didn’t he tell you? He’s on call tonight.”
“I guess it slipped his mind.”
“Naughty boy,” Hannah chirped. “Needless to say, with the way things have been going around here, I don’t imagine he’ll be joining you.”
Annie hung up, annoyed. Weeks before, when she’d told Michael about the party, he’d promised to arrange for coverage. The fact that he hadn’t was insulting. She was always going to his things, hospital fund-raisers, the annual Red Cross Ball, various cocktail parties where she stood around making idle conversation with the wives of other doctors, the names of whom she could never seem to remember. Annie’s cup of tea sat on the table, cold now, next to a stack of papers she had yet to correct. The kitchen had been massacred by the children and their friends that afternoon—divide and conquer, that was their motto—and still smelled of burnt oatmeal cookies, a disastrous event, the spoils of which were now in Molly’s stomach. Christina had taken them outside, and for the moment the house was quiet. She sat down and got to work, marking papers with caustic abandon, scribbling indecipherable comments in the margins simply because she could. Two hours later, when the sun had dropped like a peach into the basket of trees, Annie heard Michael’s car pulling in, and she felt a tingle of excitement thinking that perhaps he could come with her after all. But the moment she saw his glum expression, she knew he’d be spending his evening at the hospital.
“I have three women in labor,” he explained sheepishly, avoiding her punitive stare.
“Sounds like a party.”
His beeper went off. “I’m getting killed.”
“Poor baby.”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
He shrugged. “I’m going up. I need a shower.”
And he left her standing there.
Annie stood at the window, watching the children playing out in the yard, throwing a Frisbee for Molly. Their faces were flushed in the crisp air, their eyes shining with happiness. At least she and Michael had given them this much, she thought, this open space, this good life in the country.
Organizing the kitchen, Annie noticed a book Christina had left on the table. It was a children’s picture book called The Path of Our Lord. Annie wondered if the girl planned on reading it to her kids. She knew Christina’s parents were born-again. They had four daughters; the youngest child had Down’s syndrome, and they were all homeschooled. Christina was the first of the children to go to college. Annie knew they struggled financially, and Christina put all her babysitting money toward school. Annie flipped through the book. It looked harmless. So what if she d
id read it to the kids.
She climbed the worn wood planks of the staircase. Sunlight quivered in the panes of the transom window. She could hear Michael on the telephone in the bedroom. He was sitting on the bed speaking in a tone of plodding arrogance. One of the residents, she surmised. He could be nasty when it came to the house staff; the residents lived in fear of him. She had to admit, he’d gone through the same thing when he was a resident. “I’ll forgive you this time, Bernstein, but you’d better get your shit together before I show up.” He hung up.
“Ooh, you’re tough.”
“Those lazy fucks. They don’t know what work is.” He glanced up at her wearily. He looked worn out, his face a blur of exhaustion. She didn’t know how he kept going. She didn’t know how he held it together. It was hard to be mad at him when he worked so hard.
“They must hate you.”
“I don’t give a shit if they hate me.”
The shower had been running full blast for several minutes—he was marvelously good at wasting water—and the bathroom had filled with enough steam for a small tropical country. Michael took off his scrubs, splattered with something dubious, and left them on the floor, where they would remain until she decided to pick them up. His beeper went off again. “Fuck.” Naked, he went to the phone and called in.
Annie undressed in the open doorway, hoping to inspire a bit of carnal interest in her husband, but he was too involved now in the telephone, joking around with the person on the other end and ignoring her completely. She stepped into the shower and a moment later he joined her, sheepishly dealing out excuses like a cardsharp. He always seemed to be apologizing for the choices he made; apparently there was nothing he could do about them.
Out of the shower, they went about their business, aloof as statues in a park. Standing naked at the mirror, she found herself thinking about Simon Haas. She wondered if he would be at the party.
Annie opened her closet and tried to decide what to wear. She didn’t want to look too stylish. Some of the stodgier females on the faculty actually wore kilts and cable-knit sweaters with patched elbows; she hadn’t owned a kilt since high school, when she’d played field hockey. She chose a black skirt and a black cotton sweater, and draped a strand of pearls around her neck. The outfit, a predictable choice in her case, projected a serious, unadorned beauty. It was an image she’d been cultivating for years.
“You look nice,” Michael offered, pulling on fresh scrubs.
“Too bad you’re not coming.”
“If I get finished, I’ll come by, okay?” He kissed her cheek and hurried out—the daring hero off to the battlefield. A moment later she heard his car roaring down the driveway. She knew he liked driving fast and having a reason to do so. And she also knew, no matter how much he complained, that he loved the casualties of the ER, being in the trenches with the people who came in off the street. He loved being the one they all needed most.
Annie felt a little sad just then, remembering the way she’d been in her twenties, the saucy journalist, back in the days when they were crazy with love, when the world seemed wild with possibilities. When his wanting to become a doctor had turned her on, his fascination with the body and all that went on inside of it, his tireless determination to help people. What had once been shared now divided them. Like a lover, his work had stolen his heart. Now their lives were complicated like some elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and it was hard to sort out all the pieces. There was work, the mortgage, the children, the rigorous monitoring of the day’s routine, and a mood of indifference that had drifted into their marriage like a noxious gas.
The Spaulls lived on the outskirts of town in a sprawling Federal painted a murky shade of apricot, with muddy brown shutters and window boxes full of strangled pansies. Pots of mums lined the stone path, and fat pumpkins sat on the front steps. Annie felt a bit anxious, wishing Michael had come with her, angry with him all over again because he hadn’t. The front door was ajar and an enticing odor of the evening meal encouraged her inside. She stepped into the empty foyer, hearing scales of laughter coming from the terrace. Through the large French doors at the end of the hall, she could see some of the guests, a string of multicolored Japanese lanterns bobbing over their heads. She took a moment to admire the house, peering down narrow meandering hallways that led into oddly shaped little rooms. There was a great deal of art all over the place, lovely old canvases in gold frames and primitive antiques and wonderful quilts. An enormous painting by Haas hung in the living room, covering nearly the entire wall. It was a strange, absorbing work, dense with mystery, that portrayed a bare-chested man in brown trousers, hunched in stature and solemn in expression, standing in the midst of a gray background that resembled the smoke of a dream. A young girl, naked but for a pair of underpants dappled with little rosebuds, sat on a chair, intently playing cat’s cradle. On the floor at her feet was a white box full of leather gloves, a pair of which the man struggled to pull over his enormous hands. The two figures shared the space but remained detached. The colors were muted, the faces drawn and withered. It was really a fabulous painting, Annie thought, but, still, it made her sad and a little angry because the girl in the painting, who might have been twelve or thirteen when he’d painted it, was now the painter’s wife, Lydia Haas.
Her host backed out of the swinging kitchen door holding a tray of hors d’oeuvres, the perennial cigarette balanced between his lips. Although he suffered from emphysema, Jack smoked Dorals with tireless enthusiasm and spoke in a breathless, ruined voice that gave him a kind of swarthy eloquence. “Well, hello there, Annie.” He removed the cigarette and kissed her cheek. “Where’s the hubby?”
“I’m sorry to say he’s on call tonight. Couldn’t switch his schedule.”
“Poor fellow—the last of the noble professions. Come on outside, I’ll get you a drink. We’re all out here. Olivia’s made mint juleps. Have you ever had one?”
“No, actually.”
“Come. It’s a beautiful evening to be out of doors.”
Spaull, at sixty, had a certain old-world elegance that Annie had come to know as a child, observing her parents’ friends during dinner parties through the posts in the banister on the second-floor landing. He was not a handsome man, yet he had a disarming presence. His yellow hair sprang from his scalp like the bleached grass of summer, and prominent cheekbones set off his rather small, dark eyes. He had on a rumpled seersucker suit that undulated around his gaunt frame, and scuffed penny loafers without socks, flattened at the heels like mules.
She followed him out through the French doors onto a stone terrace that overlooked several acres of lawn and the state forest beyond. It was a cool evening for late September and the air smelled of wood smoke and burning leaves. Several of the guests had convened around an old pine table laden with large platters of food and assorted bottles of alcohol. A pretty white pitcher sat in the center, full of tiger lilies. Most of the guests were from the English Department, but there were a few outsiders she recognized from Math and History. Miss Rose, the eccentric Latin professor, sat off by herself with her little white terrier on her lap, drinking her vodka contentedly and smoking a cigarette out of a swishy black holder. Across the field, the sun glowed behind the tall evergreens. Annie joined the group at the table, exchanging greetings and handshakes, accepting a glass of wine from a passing hand, everyone asking for Michael and frowning with pity when she admitted that he was still at work. There was a festive mood in the air, the exhilarating splendor of autumn, and they toasted Annie, the brilliant journalist, and she smiled and raised her glass and saluted them. Her colleagues were academic lifers and all shared the yellowed, malnourished pallor of the condemned: Joe Rank, professor of rhetoric, given to incomprehensible babbling about the mysteries of the written word, a man with bushy eyebrows and a spitball that consumed one’s attention and was the joke of the school (Joe was probably the most boring person Annie had ever encountered); Joe’s sour wife, Edna, boldly pregnant with their fifth or sixth chil
d—Annie wasn’t sure—who suffered from a slew of mysterious allergies that left her overwhelmed with oozing tissues; Felice Wendell, one of the few professors of color at the school, a renowned expert on twentieth-century African American literature; Dana Roach, a bustling authority on Virginia Woolf, rolling her cigarettes with fiendish alacrity; and Charlotte, the doomed department secretary, who sat at the end of the table with her pack of Pall Malls and a tidy roll of breath mints, observing the gathering with shrewd owl eyes and speaking to no one.
As it turned out, Simon Haas had been invited and predictably arrived late, but nobody had anticipated seeing his wife. “My, my,” Felice Wendell whispered when the notorious couple stepped out onto the terrace. “Look what the cat dragged in.”