She flipped the wall switch that turned out the overhead light, went out, and shut the door behind her.
Sometime after dawn, which was late at that season, Henry, with feet like ice trays, slipped into bed with Rue and put his arms around her. She had been too miserable to sleep soundly, and instead was floating in a slightly lurid half-sleep, missing him, and apologizing to him, and feeling that he was unreasonable and completely wrong, or else that she was, but wishing he would just come back.
“I had a terrible dream,” Henry whispered.
“Did you, sweetheart?” She turned and put her arms around him so that she could feel him all the way down to his cold feet. He hugged her as if he was amazed to discover he still had that option.
“I dreamed I was marrying somebody else. I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me, and you were right there, and I knew you were the love of my life, but you didn’t do anything to stop me, and I had to go on even though I knew it was a terrible mistake.”
Rue stroked his hair and pulled the covers up to his chin.
“Did you know her? The one you married?”
“I don’t think so. She was young and built like a fireplug. It was terrible. And I knew that for the rest of my life, instead of her understanding me, I would have to explain my life to her. And even if she listened, even if she understood, then she’d start explaining her life to me. I’d have to go spend Christmas with her, in places like Texas, and meet her family, and they wouldn’t care anything about The Pickwick Papers. It was really terrible.”
“It sounds terrible,” she said. They held each other.
“I woke up and couldn’t figure out where you were.”
“I know,” she said.
That was enough to say for the moment. They held each other, and presently felt finally warm again for the first time in many hours, and then slept again.
A little later, Henry was up, showered, and dressed for work, before Rue realized he was gone. He sat on the edge of the bed with a present wrapped in Santa Claus paper in his hand. Rue sat up.
“I was so mad at you last night I forgot to give you your present.”
“I thought the fancy Screwpull was my present.”
“No.” He handed her the package and watched her open it.
In it were the cassettes he had secretly been recording for her all fall. They were carefully labeled Ovid’s Metamorphoses read by Henry Shaw. They both looked at the title and started to laugh. Rue kissed him, and they clung to each other.
“Henry—I love you,” she said.
“I know.”
Georgia left them on December twenty-ninth, a week before they expected her to go. She wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with Jonah.
Henry and Rue had scarcely known a happy moment since Christmas Day. Rue had come to understand that a strong source of pain to Henry was that his little one, two years shy of her legal majority, was going to leave the dorm, pack her duffel bags, and move into some sort of slum flat with a hairy man. She was going to put her socks and underwear into his drawers. She was going to cook for him, or maybe he was going to cook for her. They were going to treat each other as if they were a couple, as he and Rue were a couple. It caused Henry a piercing sorrow, and he and Rue had somehow managed to keep that aspect of his distress completely out of the conversation. He knew it wasn’t rational or especially noble, but that didn’t mean the pain wasn’t real.
They had learned a good deal more about Jonah in the awkward days since Georgia’s announcement. He was twenty-three, which sounded old to be a college senior. He had a lot of hair, they gathered, and was more than ordinarily pierced, though when Henry wanted to know exactly what was meant by that, Georgia laughed.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Why do you want to know? You’ll just start in about ritual self-mutilation, and scarification.”
“Well, isn’t that what it is?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“Daddy, why do you even ask? You’re not going to understand.”
She was right. He wasn’t. And yet, he felt terribly hurt and balked, like a person standing at a door that has always opened at a touch, and hearing someone on the other side turn the latch to lock it. He couldn’t understand if she didn’t even try to explain, could he? Could he? So why wouldn’t she try?
The answer was painfully obvious.
“Doesn’t it hurt her too?” Henry asked Rue. “Why does she seem to take pleasure in telling us she’s going where we can’t follow her?”
“Think of all the times when she was little we closed doors to her, understood things she couldn’t, and went places without her, leaving her behind.”
“But we didn’t do it in order to hurt her.”
“We did it.”
Henry and Rue spent some time talking about their own rages at their parents when they were Georgia’s age. “That was different. Our parents were horrors,” said Henry.
“I grant you. But maybe we are too.”
They learned that Jonah’s parents had been divorced when he was twelve, and that he had been an emancipated minor since he was fifteen. He had left Brooklyn and lived over a classmate’s garage in New Jersey. He went to high school in New Jersey and turned the friend’s garage into a recording studio. In an odd detail, Georgia informed them that he had made quite a good living performing as a magician. There were two expensive restaurants in New York that let him go from table to table performing sleight of hand for the customers. He collected tips.
“And that was it? His parents didn’t support him?”
“I think his dad helped a little, sometimes.”
So. Jonah, widely thought to be a genius, was as well a magician. It figured.
When they asked if he was handsome, she’d say, “Sort of,” and laugh. Clearly, wildly attractive to her. They gathered he didn’t read much. He was extremely streetwise, she said, which seemed like a good thing to be if you were a kid running wild in New York.
He had never lived in the dorms at Juilliard. Too expensive. He had an apartment in the East Village, above a head shop. Henry was appalled to learn that such things still existed. Jonah did not drink at all, Georgia said, but she conceded some marijuana.
“Would your friends like him?” Henry asked.
“Which friends?”
He named the girls and boys she had gone to Country with. Georgia conveyed that this was typical of parents in their dotage, to assume that your friends from your babyhood were your real friends because they belonged to the part of your life they had shared. But she deigned to answer. “Everyone likes Jonah, Daddy. Everyone.”
He asked if Jonah had ever been in trouble with the law. Rue expected Georgia to resent this question hotly, but she didn’t. She just said no.
They asked these questions and mulled over the answers, looking for clues that would make it all right. They wanted some sort of message from Georgia’s magician. Word that he loved Georgia, that he would protect her. No word came. It seemed as likely that Georgia was supposed to take care of him. Her ideas of what their housekeeping would be like were sketchy at best. Similarly, her grasp of what the bills would be, and who would pay them. They had an advance from the record company. Georgia herself hoped to get some session work.
“What’s that mean?”
“Recording sessions, Daddy. Commercials. Back-up vocals.” Spoken as if it were a chore to have to explain every last jot and tittle. Couldn’t they infer anything? Were they even trying to?
So, she wasn’t even asking them for money. She thought she could drop out of school, out of the ring of safety they had provided her all her life, and get along on magic. “Or on her own talent,” Rue pointed out halfheartedly. But she knew Georgia was leaving her in a way she had never expected. She stood up against Henry for Georgia’s right to choose, but she was doing herself no favors with Georgia. Georgia was going, no matter what they did. The more they tried to hold her, protect her, prepa
re her, remind her that she carried their hearts with her wherever she went, the more eager she was to be gone.
And then, much sooner than they expected, but not before they began to wonder how much more they could take, she was gone. She left them Jonah’s address; he didn’t have a phone. Henry asked if he could pay to have one put in, and Georgia just rolled her eyes.
Henry actually called Juilliard to ask about Jonah Wachtel, beginning to fear that he didn’t exist. How could a person with no telephone number be shown to exist? He did indeed, said the woman in the office. One semester shy of completing his degree, he was majoring in conducting and minoring in composition. Was he on scholarship, Henry had asked, knowing that there was no way on earth the woman should give him this information. But the woman was feeling chatty. The office was closed for vacation; she was just the bookkeeper, doing some overtime filing. As such, she was in a position to know that Jonah Wachtel paid all his fees himself, often in cash.
“Oh Christ,” said Henry to Rue, “he’s a drug dealer.”
Rue was so heartsick that she couldn’t think of anything to say. She and Henry had never been farther apart, not since the day they met. They couldn’t comfort each other, and they hadn’t made love in a week. She wanted to believe what Georgia believed. She wanted to believe she would be happy, that she was off on a great adventure, that she would be back soon full of tales and triumphs, and their house would be full of happiness again.
Henry saw Rue as delusional. And he believed that if she had seen this situation straight, that Georgia could not have held out against them. That she would have been angry perhaps, but she would have stayed in school until June, and by then, everything would have been different. His daughter would not be shacking up with a hairy much-pierced magician in some slum where they didn’t have telephones. What if he had to reach her? What if there were an emergency?
Chandler Kip and Terry Malko were having lunch at the Cafe on the Square, the fanciest restaurant in Seven Springs, at the table where Henry had once given Rue lunch on her birthday. They had each, in different ways, had a fairly upsetting Christmas.
Chandler’s mother, touchy and overtalkative, was not getting along well with Bobbi. She kept developing new food allergies and phobias, and no sooner did Bobbi catch up with them than she changed the rules and was unable to eat something else. So far there had been shellfish, chocolate, dairy products containing lactose, then all dairy products (“mucus-producing,” Mrs. Kip announced at the table, making Missy gag), anything with wheat or corn flour in it, and the flesh of animals raised on hormones. For the last week Bobbi had been driving into Santa Barbara where a health-food store sold venison, rabbit, and beefalo, frozen in gray brick-like lumps, that were range-raised and grass-fed. Missy said the venison tasted like fish and wouldn’t eat it. Mrs. Kip, triumphant, wouldn’t eat it either, saying Bobbi had cooked it wrong. Chandler had to gnaw away at it, smiling, and last night he had given up and swallowed a piece that was too tough to chew and nearly choked to death. Bobbi had to perform the Heimlich maneuver. It was humiliating, but thank god he had married a stewardess, who knew how to do these things.
Chandler had also had an unhappy encounter with his son, Randy. He’d gone to visit him at the gas station two days before Christmas, and taken him his presents. Randy was sullen. Chandler had asked if he was spending Christmas with his mother, and he said of course not, she was four hundred miles away.
“There are buses,” Chandler had said.
“I only have two days off. You know I work, Dad.”
“There are airplanes.”
“Are there airlines that give scholarships?” Randy asked rudely.
“I’d have paid for you to go,” Chandler protested. “All you had to do was ask.”
“Really? And how was I supposed to know that?”
Chandler was silent. He had certainly refused to help Randy with money at other times, when he thought he could force him into line that way or simply because he was angry at him and wanted his power acknowledged. He should have thought to ask Randy what his plans were. He felt rotten that he hadn’t.
“Is it too late?”
“Is Christmas Eve too late? I’d say so, Dad. I told Phil I’d mind the store since I didn’t have anywhere to go. He took his family to Hawaii.”
Chandler asked what Randy was going to do, and he said, “Oh, maybe I’ll put on my turquoise polyester suit and clean my fingernails and go to LA for a big Christmas dinner at the Beverly Hilton. Isn’t that what you’d expect a gas pump guy to do?”
Chandler didn’t answer. As he turned to leave, Randy said, “Hey Dad, look, I gave myself a present!” Chandler looked to see that on his knobby wrist his son was wearing an ID bracelet. It was engraved Randy Toogood.
“Very nice,” Chandler said, and left, feeling a soul-killing sense of failure he could discuss with no one.
Randy knew why he wasn’t invited to their house. He knew perfectly well. It didn’t make it any better. The boy was twenty years old. He had been alone on Christmas. Meanwhile, Terry was happily sharing his Christmas ordeal.
The Malkos’ Christmas had been noisy and expensive. Margee’s whole family came to stay with them, and Margee and her mother had a painful relationship. Nevertheless, Margee insisted that her parents have the master bedroom and that she and Terry sleep on the convertible in the TV room. Terry had spent the entire two weeks needing a different tie or a fresh pair of socks that he couldn’t get at, because Grammy or Grampy was taking a nap, or a bath, or “having a lie down.” Throughout the visit their son Glenn was impossible, acting smart with his grandparents. He spent half his time, it seemed, over at Kenny Lowen’s house. “I think the kid’s a juvenile delinquent,” Terry said. “It must be genetic. He’s like the leader of their Tong.”
“Can’t you keep them apart?”
“Are you kidding? They have bikes. They have money for the bus. The only way I could keep them apart would be to move to New York. Bradley and Corinne are completely clueless. I told them that two different times when Kenny had been at our house, the level in the gin bottle went down about three inches. One of those gallon bottles? You could see them look at me, like, poor guy, he doesn’t know his own son is stealing booze from him. But kindly explain to me why it only happens when Kenny’s been there?”
Chandler had had times like that with Randy—more than he cared to remember. Would Randy have turned out different if he’d gone to private school? Small point in asking now. Chandler’s first wife didn’t speak private school, nor had Chandler then.
“Wonderful food,” said Terry.
Chandler nodded. Terry was expertly boning his fish so that the spine and ribs came out all in one piece, like a xylophone. Chandler’s own plate looked as if his fish had been blown apart by a bomb. Every bite he took had slivers of bone in it. He felt that trying to eat it now expressed some sort of death wish, and he couldn’t face another choking episode within twenty-four hours.
“Speaking of trouble,” said Terry, “did you hear that Georgia Shaw is dropping out of Juilliard?”
“No,” said Chandler, putting down his knife and fork. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Margee heard it at Tagliarini’s. She’s dropping out to live with her hippie boyfriend and join his band.”
Chandler began to laugh. “Oh my god. You mean Our Leader, the perfect mother, is having trouble with the Perfect Child?”
Terry agreed this was unexpected; he knew Georgia fairly well and thought she was very nearly a perfect child. In fact, the way Georgia had turned out was one of the strongest reasons people had trusted Rue’s judgment so thoroughly when it came to their own children.
“Margee says that Rue is putting a good face on it. ‘Isn’t it perfect, the darling is moving to the East Village with some druggy bass player, what an adventure.’ But Henry has gone ballistic.”
“Well, no kidding,” said Chandler thoughtfully, abandoning his attempt to eat altogether. He thought about
the terrible moment in a marriage when you disagree about a kid. The pain. The way the fight turns into ego, the way I was brought up against the way you were brought up. He pictured screaming fights at the Shaw’s house, plates smashing. It didn’t make him any more sympathetic. It affected him as weakness always did: it made him want to kill her.
When Terry finished his fish and they’d ordered coffee, Chandler said, “I want to talk to you about this curriculum thing.” He gave him a version of Rue’s reaction to the decision of the Curriculum Committee. Terry listened and nodded.
“I’ll tell you frankly how I feel about it,” said Chandler. “Let me run this up the flagpole.”
The waiter brought their coffee and cream, and Terry sent him back for skim milk.
Chandler said, “The Lowens are fed up with Catherine Trainer, and so are a lot of people. I am. She’s an irrational ditz, and I wouldn’t want her teaching my kid, and that trick she pulled, accusing the Sales of child abuse, was the deal breaker as far as I’m concerned. In the meantime, the McCanns are upset with Charla Percy, and I don’t know what kind of excuse you can make for an ass like Blair Kunzelman. Now, that’s a lot of unhappy Board members. The fact is, and you know and I know it, that in business there comes a time when a person goes stale in the job. Anyone can see that a new head at Country would get rid of the dead wood on the faculty. Any new head would. So why won’t Rue Shaw?”