For her and for Tom, basically decent people, the course would be different. Her impulse was to help. His was to try and then try harder. His perfidy was enthusiasm. Her indifference was patience. But eventually all the enthusiasm would be used up, all the patience. Possibilities would diminish. Life would cease to be an open, flat plain upon which you walked with a chosen other, and become instead cluttered, impassable. Tom had said it: life became a confinement in which everything got in everything else’s way. And what you finally sought became not a new, clearer path, but a way out. Their own son no doubt foresaw life that way, as something that should be easy. Though it seemed peculiar—now that he was away—to think they even had a son. She and Tom seemed more like each other’s parents.
But, best just to advance now toward what she wanted, even if it didn’t include Tom, even if she didn’t know how to want what didn’t include Tom. And even if it meant she was the kind of person who did things, said things, then rethought, even regretted their consequences later. Tom wasn’t, after all, trying to improve life for her, no matter what he thought. Only his. And there was no use talking people out of things that improved their lives. He had wishes. He had fears. He was a good-enough man. Life shouldn’t be always trying, trying, trying. You should live most of it without trying so hard. He would agree that was authentic.
Inside the enclosed room a strange, otherworldly golden glow seemed to fall on everything now. On Tom. On her own hands and arms. On the bed. All through the static air, like a fog. It was beautiful, and for a moment she wanted to speak to Tom, to wake him, to tell him that something or other would be all right, just as he’d hoped; to be enthusiastic in some hopeful and time-proven way. But she didn’t, and then the golden fog disappeared, and for an instant she seemed to understand slightly better the person she was—though she lacked a proper word for it, and knew only that the time for saying so many things was over.
Outside, the child’s voice was shouting. “Oh, I love it. I love it so much.” When Nancy pulled back the curtain, the softer light fell across the chair back, and she could see that the wheelchair man had his kite up and flying, the fiberglass fishing rod upward in one hand while he urged his chair down the sloping lawn. The bare-legged child was hopping from one bare foot to the other, a smashing smile on her long, adult’s face, which was turned up toward the sky.
Nancy stood and snapped on the desk lamp beside Tom’s open suitcase. One bright, intact, shrink-wrapped Wagner dog and one white Maine Lighthouse were tucked among his shirts and shaving kit and socks. Here was also his medal for valor in a blue cloth case, and the small automatic pistol he habitually carried in case of attack. She plucked up only the Wagner dog, returned the room to its shadows, and stepped out the back door onto the lawn.
Here, on the outside, the air was fresh and cool and only slightly breezy, the sky now full of quilty clouds as though rain were expected. A miniature concrete patio with blue plastic-strand chairs was attached to each room. The kite, its slant-eyed face smiling down, was dancing and tricking and had gained altitude as the wheelchair man rolled farther away down the lawn toward the bay.
“Look at our kite,” the little girl shouted, shading her eyes toward Nancy and pointing delightedly at the diminishing kite face.
“It’s sensational,” Nancy said, shading her own eyes to gaze upward. The kite made her smile.
The wheelchair man turned his head to view her. He was large, with thick shoulders and smooth rounded arms she could see under his red singlet. His head was round, his thick hair buzzed short, his eyes small and dark and fierce and unfriendly. She smiled at him and for no reason shook her head as though the kite amazed her. An ex-jock, she thought. A shallow-end diving accident, or some football collision that left him flying his kite from a metal chair. A pity.
The man said nothing, just looked at her without gesture, his expression so intent he seemed unwilling to be bothered. She, though, felt the pleasure to be had from only watching, of having to make no comment. The cool breeze, the nice expansive water view to Islesboro, a kite standing aloft were quite enough.
Then her mind flooded with predictable things. The crippled man’s shoes. You always thought of them. His were black and sockless, like bowling shoes, shoes that would never wear out. He would merely grow weary of seeing them, give them away to someone more unfortunate than himself. Was this infuriating to him? Did he speak about it? Was the wife, wherever she might be, terribly tired all the time? Did she get up at night and stand at the window staring out, wishing some quite specific things, then return to bed un-missed. Was pain involved? Did phantom pains even exist? Did he have dreams of painlessness? Of rising out of his chair and walking around laughing, of never knowing a chair? She thought about a dog with its hind parts attached to a little wheeled coaster, trotting along as if all was well. Did anything work down below, she wondered? Were there understandings, allowances? Did he think his predicament “interesting”? Had being crippled opened up new and important realms of awareness? What did he know that she didn’t?
Maybe being married to him, she thought, would be better than many other lives. Though you’d fast get to the bottom of things, begin to notice too much, start to regret it all. Perhaps while he was here flying a kite, the wife was in the hotel bar having a drink and a long talk with the bartender, speaking about her past, her father, her hometown, how she’d thought about things earlier in life, what had once made her laugh, who she’d voted for, what music she’d preferred, how she liked Maine, how authentic it seemed, when they thought they might head home again. How they wished they could stay and stay and stay. The thing she—Nancy—would not do.
“Do you want to fly our kite?” the man was saying to her, his voice trailing up at the end, almost like Tom’s. He was, for some reason, smiling now, his eyes bright, looking back over his hairy round shoulder with a new attitude. She noticed he was wearing glasses—surprising to miss that. The kite, its silky monofilament bellying upward in a long sweep, danced on the wind almost out of sight, a fleck upon the eye.
“Oh do, do,” the little girl called out. “It’ll be so good.” She had her arms spread wide and up over her head, as if measuring some huge and inconceivable wish. She was permanently smiling.
“Yes,” Nancy said, walking toward them. “Of course.”
“You can feel it pulling you,” the girl said. “It’s like you’re going to fly up to the stars.” She began to spin around and around in the grass then, like a little dervish. The wheelchair man looked to his daughter, smiling.
Nancy felt embarrassed. Seen. It was shocking. The spacious blue bay spread away from her down the hill, and off of it arose a freshened breeze. It was far from clear that she could hold the kite. It could take her up, pull her away, far and out of sight. It was unnerving. She held the toy Wagner to give to the child. That would have its fine effect. And then, she thought, coming to the two of them, smiling out of flattery, that she would take the kite—the rod, the string—yes, of course, and fly it, take the chance, be strong, unassailable, do everything she could to hold on.
Abyss
Two weeks before the Phoenix sales conference, Frances Bilandic and Howard Cameron drove from home—in Willamantic and Pawcatuck—met at the Olive Garden in Mystic and talked things over one more time, touching fingertips nervously across the Formica tabletop. Then each went to the rest room and made a private, lying cell phone call to account for their whereabouts during the next few hours. Then they drove across the access road to the Howard Johnson’s under the Interstate, registered in as a Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, and in five minutes had chained the door, turned up the air conditioning, pulled the curtains across the sunny window and abandoned themselves to the furious passions they’d been suppressing for the month since meeting at the awards banquet, where they were named Connecticut Residential Agents of the Year.
What had occurred between them at the awards banquet was something of a mystery to them both. Seated beside each other at the head ta
ble, they’d barely spoken before being presented with their agent-of-the-year citations. But after the first course, Howard had told a funny joke about Alzheimer’s disease to the person seated on his other side, and Frances had laughed. When Howard realized she thought he was funny, their eyes had met in a way Frances felt was shocking, but also undeniable, since, in her view, they’d each experienced (and fully acknowledged) a large, instinctual carnal attraction—the kind, she thought, animals probably felt all the time, and that made their lives much more bearable.
Within fifteen minutes, she and Howard Cameron had begun exchanging snickering asides about the other winners’ table manners, their indecipherable wardrobe choices and probable sales etiquette, and all the while avoiding the dull, realtor shop-talk about house closings, disastrous building inspection reports, and unbelievable arguments customers routinely waged inside their cars.
By dessert, they were venturing into more sensitive areas—Frances’s junior college roommate Meredith, who’d died of brain cancer in June at thirty-four (Frances’s age); Howard’s father’s tachycardia and his unfulfilled wish to play Turnberry before he died. Napkins across their empty plates, they moved on to life’s brevity and the need to squeeze every second for all its worth. And by the time decaf arrived, they’d eased over onto the subject of sex, and how misunderstood a subject it was in the culture, and how it was all the Puritans’ fault that it even was a subject, since it should be completely natural and unstigmatized. They each spoke lovingly about their spouses, but not that much.
Seated at the long head table full of fellow award-winners and bosses, and directly in front of a Ramada Inn banquet room full of noisy, laughing people they didn’t know but who were occasionally casting narrow-eyed, flaming arrows of spite through the two of them, sex infiltrated their soft-spoken conversation like a dense, rich but explosive secret they, but only they, had decided to share. And once that happened, everything, everyone in the room, everything Frances and Howard planned to do later in the evening— drive home to their spouses, Ed in Willamantic, Mary in Pawcatuck, down dark and narrow, late-night Connecticut highways; the chance visits they might have with zany colleagues at the bar; voice mail they might check for after-hours client calls—any and all thoughts about this night being normal ended.
Most Americans don’t even begin to reach their sexual maturity until they’re not interested in it anymore, Frances observed. The Scandinavians, indeed, had the best attitude, with sex being no big deal—just a normal human response (like sleeping) that should be respected, not obsessed over.
Americans were too hung up on false conceptions of beauty and youth, Howard agreed, sagely folding his long arms. He was six-foot five, with big pie-plate hands and had played basketball at Western Connecticut. His father had been his high-school coach. Howard had dull gray, closely spaced eyes and still wore his hair in an old-fashioned buzzed-off crew cut that made him look older than twenty-nine. Orgasm was way overrated, he suggested, in contrast to true intimacy, which was way underrated.
Nothing in a marriage could ever be absolutely perfect, they agreed. Marriage shouldn’t be a prison cell. The best marriages were always the ones where both partners felt free to pursue their personal needs, though neither of them advocated the open marriage concept.
The word marriage, Frances said, actually derived from an Old Norse word, meaning the time after the onset of a fatal illness when the disease has you in its grip but you can still walk around pretty well. This was her father’s joke, though she didn’t mean it to sound like a sourpuss complaint. Just a yuck, like Howard’s Alzheimer’s story. She found she could joke with Howard Cameron, who was witty in the blunt-to-gross way nerdy ex-jocks who weren’t complete idiots could be funny. She was impressed she knew him well enough to relax, after only two hours. With Ed she hadn’t gotten that far in six years.
“I’m the fifth of five. All boys,” Howard said, watching the Mexican waiters collecting banquet dishes off the tables. Their own table had emptied, and the crowd was filing out through the back doors, leaving the two of them conspicuously alone behind the white-skirted dais table. People were saying goodbyes and telling lame jokes about spending the night in the car on the Interstate. The lights were turned up bright to move people out, and the room smelled of sour food. He was aware they were obviously lingering. Yet he felt intimacy with Frances Bilandic. “I’m sure my parents had a solid sex life until my dad had to go on the blood thinners,” Howard went on solemnly. “But then, well, I guess things changed.”
“Technology took over, right?” Frances said and smirked. She was spunky and had snapping blue eyes, an attractively mannish little blond haircut and a barely noticeable overbite that displayed the bottoms of her incisors. She was the only daughter of a Polish widower from Bridgeport, had performed the balance beam in high school, and was as hard as a little brickbat. She’d probably seen plenty. Though he knew he was getting serious too fast, and that could spook her. Only she had to know what was what. It was a game. “He went on the pill? Or the pump, right?” Frances made a little up-down pumping motion with her thumb, up-down, up-down, and a little “eee-eee-eee-eee” squeaky sound. “That works out better for older people, I guess.”
“He’s not the type,” Howard said. He thought then about his father standing sadly out in their broad, freshly mown back yard that sloped all the way to the shining Quinebaug River, in Pomfret. It was the late-spring day his father had come back from the hospital after having his veins surgically ballooned. Geese were flying over in a V. His father had been wearing faded madras shorts and stood barefoot in the cool grass, staring off. His legs were thin and pale. It was heartbreaking.
But heartbreaking or not, Howard thought, it just showed that life had to be seized and squeezed before somebody came after you with a vein balloon. Marriage, kids—these were certainly ways you could squeeze it. His parents’ way. (Though maybe they weren’t so happy about that now.) But there were also alternatives, avenues that society or their employer the Weiboldt Company—red-and-white FOR SALE and SORRY YOU MISSED IT signs littering the seaboard from Cape May to Cape Ann—wouldn’t necessarily condone; and avenues you definitely wouldn’t start down every day of your life. Except of course those very avenues got chosen every day. Every second probably somebody somewhere was squeezing life on that alternative avenue. Probably in this very Ramada, while their banquet was ending, somebody was squeezing it. Why fight it?
“I hope I haven’t made light of a serious subject,” Frances said somberly referring to his parents. She was wearing a white pants suit with a green polka-dot blouse that did nothing, she knew, to show off her curves. But what she had wanted tonight, her special night of recognition, was to look drop-dead gorgeous, yet also to look like business. She, after all, had sold more real estate than anybody in her part of western Connecticut, and done it by working her tail off. And not by listing water-view contemporaries and Federalist mansions in Watch Hill, but by flogging attached row-houses in Guatemalan neighborhoods, four-room Capes, and buck-and-a-half condos downwind of the Willamantic landfill—units they buried you with in anybody else’s market. And she knew business didn’t take nights off, so you had to look the part. She thought of herself as a smart, tough cookie, a Polack go-getter, an early riser, a quick study who didn’t blink.
But that didn’t mean you couldn’t wander into some fun with a guy like this big Howard. A long, tall, galunky-jocky guy with some mischief in his eye, who could use some release from his own pressure cooker. Having an intense, private conversation with Howard Cameron was the reward for doing her job so fucking well.
“I’ll bet if we adjourned to a bar where there aren’t so many familiar faces, we wouldn’t have to be so solemn,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corners of her mouth. She liked the sound of her voice saying this.
Howard was already nodding. “Right. I’m sure you’re right.” He picked up the cheap fake-wood-framed certificate he’d gotten for selling huge amounts
of real estate and making everybody but himself rich. “I intend to hang this over the can at home,” he said. The certificate had a stick-on gold seal below his name, and the words In Hoc Signo Vinces embossed around the rim in Gothic-looking letters. He had no idea what this meant.
“I intend to lose mine someplace,” Frances said. He felt her hard-as-a-board little gymnast’s thigh (conceivably innocently) brush by his knee as she slid away from the long head table. “You find us a bar, okay? I’ll find you.” She placed her small hand onto his large one and squeezed. “I’m off to the whatever.” She started for the rear doors, leaving him alone at the table.
A Negro woman’s big round face had for a while been staring at them through the round porthole window in the kitchen door. The crew in there were wanting to go home. But when Howard caught the woman’s eye, she winked a big lewd wink which he didn’t appreciate.
This was how these things happened, he understood, fingering his chintzy agent-of-the-year plaque. He would see Frances Bilandic after tonight. No way it wouldn’t happen. He had no pre-vision about the circumstances or what the degree of risk would be—if they’d go straight to bed or just have lunch. But in the fervid yet strangely familiar way he knew sex could make a point-of-no-return out of the most unsuspecting and innocent human interaction, nothing now seemed to make any difference but the two of them having a drink and almost certainly giving serious thought to fucking each other senseless in the not too distant future. And she knew it. She was definitely up for whatever this would lead to—the little brush against his leg was no mistake. Women were all different now, he thought, working women especially. A blow job meant what a handshake used to. When he’d driven down the teeming, vacationer-swarmed corridor of I-95 tonight, he’d had no idea there was even a Frances Bilandic on the planet, or that she’d be waiting for him, and that in the time it took to get designated agent of the year, they’d be wandering off in search of a dark little bar for some dirty work. The world was full of wondrous surprises. And he was absolutely ready for this one, ready to find out all the mysteries and wonders it was ready to bring.