She put the drawer back into the dresser by the clock light, took off her shoes and jeans but left her anklets and shirt on. Lacking all energy to find and change into proper sleepwear, she crawled under the covers and curled into a ball, tucking her hands between her knees, facing away from Tom’s side of the bed.
A while later she heard him rap quietly on the kids’ doors—first one, then the other—going in to talk to each of them, his voice only a distant murmur before he opened their own bedroom door and came inside.
He, too, undressed in the dark, then stretched out on his back without touching her, as if slipping into a pew beside someone who is deep in prayer.
Once again came the absolute stillness, the inexplicable necessity to lie motionless and pretend the other wasn’t there, even when bone and muscle seemed to begin humming with the need to move.
All the crying had given Claire a headache, but she stared at the clock, watching numbers change until finally her eyelids grew heavy.
Sometime in the night she awakened to the feeling of his hand on her arm, imploring, trying to turn her over. But she knocked it off and withdrew tighter onto her side of the bed.
“Don’t,” she said.
Nothing more.
Nine
Claire awakened in the post-dawn haze of an eight o’clock Sunday morning. Outside, fog was shredding and lifting, leaving behind leaves polished by moisture. The sun was up, bathing the yard in coppery light. Behind her. Tom got out of bed and moved quietly across the carpet to the bathroom, closing the door.
She listened to water run, to life resuming, deadened by the events of the previous day. She replayed the dialogues of yesterday, and midway through the rehashing, felt anger seeping in to replace her lassitude. Each drip coming through the bathroom door spurred that anger as she pictured Tom moving about at his morning ablutions. He was carrying forth as if nothing had changed.
It had.
Within the wife who had been wholly committed to her marriage in every healthy way possible, a stranger reared her ugly head, a stubborn, hurt, vindictive woman where a kind, forgiving one had been before. She wanted to hurt him as deeply as he’d hurt her.
He came out of the bathroom and moved to the closet, where the soft rustle of cotton was punctuated by the ting of metal hangers as he selected a shirt and put it on. She followed his routine as he moved around the room, lying with her eyes open and her cheek to the pillow while his figure glanced across her peripheral vision.
He came to the bedside trouserless, knotting his tie. “Better get up. It’s eight twenty-five already. We’ll be late for church.”
“I’m not going.”
“Come on, Claire, don’t start that. The kids need to see a united front here.”
“I’m not going, I said!” She threw back the covers and stormed out of bed. “My face looks like hell and I’m not in the mood. You take them and go without me.”
A conflagration of anger burst out of nowhere, surprising even him. “Look, I said I was sorry.” He grabbed her arm as she flew past toward the bathroom. “Now, I think it’s important that we keep up appearances until we settle this thing.”
“I said, don’t touch me!” She jerked free violently. The expression in her eyes shocked him as greatly as the slap she’d delivered yesterday. It warned him not to make a molehill out of this mountain. He stood faced off with her, his heart clamoring as he witnessed a stubborn and aggressive side of her nature that had lain dormant till now.
“Claire,” he pleaded to her back, experiencing a small stab of fear. The bathroom door slammed. Through it, he said, “What should I tell them?”
“You don’t have to tell them anything. I’ll do my own talking.”
She came out a minute later, belting a robe, and left their bedroom, still in her fat, white stockings, which by now were bulged like gourds. Whatever she said to the children he didn’t hear. When they got in the car he could tell their night had been as troubled as his own, and that they were thrown into a state of fearful confusion by their mother’s unlikely balking at a time when she had always been with them before.
“Why didn’t Mom come with us?” Chelsea asked.
“I don’t know. What did she tell you?”
“That she wasn’t emotionally prepared to go out this morning, and that I shouldn’t worry. What does that mean, ‘not emotionally prepared’? Did you two have a fight last night?”
“We talked at the park. The rest you heard. After that, nothing more happened.”
“She looked awful.”
“She always looks awful after she cries.”
“But, Dad, she always goes to church. Is she going to stop doing things with us just because she’s mad at you?”
“I don’t know, Chelsea. I hope not. She’s very hurt right now. I think we have to give her time.”
A knot seemed to be gathering around Tom’s heart as he saw how, overnight, his children had been affected by his past indiscretion. Chelsea was the one asking the questions, but Robby wore a distressed look, riding in uneasy silence. Chelsea asked, “You still love her, don’t you, Dad?” She had no idea how her question wrenched his heart. He reached over to squeeze her hand reassuringly. “Of course I do, honey. And we’ll get this thing worked through, don’t worry. I’m not going to let anything happen to Mom and me.”
After church Claire had breakfast waiting. She was showered, dressed, and made up, moving around the kitchen using snappy efficiency as both shield and weapon. She forced some smiles for the children’s benefit “Hungry? Sit down.” But their eyes lingered on her to watch what would happen between her and their father. Like an insect around repellent, he kept his distance, buzzing only so close to her before pulling back, conscious of how she pointedly ignored him while pouring juice and coffee, taking warm muffins from the oven. She found a bowl and a spatula for the scrambled eggs. He went to take them out of her hands, his heart racing as he neared her. “Here, I’ll do that.” She flinched away, avoiding contact with any part of him as he commandeered the utensils. Her aversion to him was so obvious it threw a pall over the entire meal. She spoke to the children, asking questions—how was church, what were they going to do today, did they have any homework to finish? They answered dutifully, wanting only that she look at their father, speak to him, smile at him as she had before yesterday.
It did not happen.
Her aloofness pervaded the thirty minutes they spent at the table. And when she said to the children, “I thought I’d go to a movie this afternoon. Either of you want to go with me?” they glanced up from their plates with gaunt expressions and made excuses, then slinked off to their bedrooms the minute the breakfast dishes were cleaned up.
It was amazing to Tom how facilely she could avoid all contact with him. She spoke to him when the need arose, answered his questions when he asked them, but he understood as he never had before how simple it was for this woman to slip into a role and stay in character. She was playing the part of the wounded woman, extending civilities only for her children’s sake, and she was playing it with Academy Award-winning prowess.
Around one in the afternoon he found her in the living room with student papers stacked on the sofa around her and Streisand singing softly on the stereo. She was wearing a pair of half-glasses on the tip of her nose, reading a composition and making occasional comments in the margin. The autumn sun filtered through the sheer curtains and threw an obelisk of cinnamon across the carpet near her feet. She wore a French terry jogging suit and thin white canvas shoes. Her knees were crossed, one toe pointing at the floor. He’d always admired the line of her foot when she sat that way, how the forefoot angled down more sharply than other women’s and gave the arch a pronounced curve.
He paused in the doorway, rebuffed by her so many times this morning that he hadn’t the fortitude to place himself anywhere near her and risk being cold-shouldered again. With his hands in his pockets he watched her.
“Could we talk?” he asked.
She finished reading a paragraph, circled a word, and said, “I don’t think so,” without flicking an eyelash his way.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
He sighed and tried to keep from getting angry. This woman seemed a stranger to him, and it was terrifying that he suddenly didn’t like her very much.
“I thought you were going to a movie.”
“At three.”
“May I go along?”
There might have been a quarter beat when her eyes stopped roving over the paper, just before her eyebrows rose haughtily, her gaze still trimmed on the sheet in her hand. “No, Tom, I don’t think so.”
He tried even harder to keep from getting angry. “So how long are you going to treat me as if I’m not in the room?”
“I’ve spoken to you, haven’t I?”
He snorted derisively and twisted his head as if water were in his ear. “Is that what you call it?”
She flapped a pair of stapled sheets into order, laid them aside, and picked up another set.
“The kids are scared,” he said, “can’t you see that? They need to know that you and I are at least trying to work this out.”
Her eyes stopped scanning the composition, but she deigned not to lift them to him.
“They’re not the only ones,” she said.
He risked it, pulling forward from his position in the doorway to go to her, sitting down on the edge of the sofa, separated from her by a stack of student papers.
“Then let’s talk about it,” he urged. “I’m scared too, so that makes all four of us, but if you won’t meet me halfway I can’t do it all by myself.”
With the red pen crooked in her finger she picked up a batch of papers and tamped them on her knee. Over her glasses she leveled him with a gaze of faint disdain.
“I need some time. Can you understand that?”
“Time to do what? Perfect your acting technique? You’re at it again, you know, but you’d better be careful, Claire, because this is real life and there’s a whole family hurting.”
“How dare you!” she snapped. “You betrayed me, and then accuse me of pretending to be hurt when—”
“I didn’t mean it that way—”
“—I’m the one who had to hear that my husband didn’t want to marry me—”
“—I never meant that I didn’t want to marry you—”
“—and that you were screwing another woman. You try getting a slap in the face like that and see how you react!”
“Claire, keep your voice down.”
“Don’t tell me what to do! I’ll shout if I want to, and I’ll hurt if I want to, and I’ll go to the movie by myself, because right now I cannot bear to be in the same room with you, so get out and let me lick my wounds the way I please!”
The children were still in their rooms and he didn’t want them to hear any more, so he left, stung afresh by Claire’s tirade. He had made things worse. All he’d meant to do was warn her that they needed to talk things out, not accuse her of having no grounds for hurt. She had grounds, all right, but her stubbornness was wearing thin, and no matter what she said, she was indulging in some role-playing. Always before, whenever they disagreed, they’d discussed it sensibly, right away. Disagreeing with respect was what had made their relationship endure. What had gotten into her? Slapping him, shunning him, refusing to communicate, then bursting into a rage and throwing him out.
Claire?
He still found himself stunned by this reaction he had not expected from a woman he thought he knew, so stunned that he had to talk to somebody about it.
*****
His dad’s log cabin looked like something straight out of the Smoky Mountains. The walls were the color of sorghum, the chimney stone and the front porch unscreened.
Wesley’s voice came around the corner as Tom opened his car door.
“Who’s comin’?” he yelled.
“It’s me, Dad.”
“I’m on the front porch! Come on around here!” Wesley had never put in a driveway. Just the two tire ruts leading up to the back door and beyond to an old shack near the water, where he stored his boat and motor in the winter. Neither did he bother to mow his lot very often. Two or three times a year if he felt like it. Clover and dandelions thrived in the sunny stretch out front, between lofty white pines whose carpet of needles was so thick the earth beneath them rolled like sand dunes. They gave off a dry pungency that Tom associated with his youth, those days when his dad had first put a cane pole in his hands and said, “This one’s for you, Tommy. All your own. When it starts looking bleached out, you give it a couple coats of spar varnish, and it’ll catch you fish for years.”
It was one of Wesley Gardner’s peculiarities that he could live an entire life surrounded by a weedy lawn, a muddy driveway, and clothing that could have used changing a lot more regularly, but he kept his fishing equipment in mint condition, lavishing hours of care on it and on his boat and motor.
Tom found him at it when he came around the end of the porch, where Wesley sat working on a rod and reel with an open tackle box at his feet.
“Well, look who’s here.”
“Hi, Dad.” Tom climbed the wide front steps.
“Pull up a chair.”
Tom settled into an ancient Adirondack chair to which paint was only a memory. It creaked, taking his weight.
Wesley sat in a matching one, a fiberglass rod between his knees, transferring monofilament line from one reel to another, applying line-cleaning fluid with a dab of cotton, and checking the line for kinks and irregularities. He held the cotton with his left thumb and worked the take-up reel with his right hand. It hissed quietly while the oily smell of the fluid mixed with the fishy one from his clothing. The legs of his plumber-green pants were wide enough to hold three men’s legs, short enough to show most of his socks. On his head lolled the ever-present soiled blue fishing cap.
“Whatever brings you out here, it ain’t no good,” Wesley said, eyeing his son askance. “I can tell that already.”
“Nope. No good at all.”
“Well, I never knew a problem didn’t get a little less serious out here on this porch with that lake out there smiling at a person.”
Tom looked at it, silver-blue and twinkling: this might be one time his dad was wrong.
Wesley refolded his cotton ball and tipped more cleaner onto it. The reel sang once again.
“Dad,” Tom said, “could I ask you something?”
“Asking don’t hurt.”
“You ever step out on Mom?”
“Nope.” Wesley didn’t miss a beat, cranking the reel. “Didn’t need to. She gave me all and plenty of what a man needs. Did it with a smile, too.”
That was the thing Tom liked about his dad: Tom could sit here dropping lead-ins all afternoon and Wesley wouldn’t ask. He was a person so comfortable in his own skin that he didn’t need to be scratching that of others to see what was below the surface.
“Never, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Me either. But we’ve got a situation at home that stems from way back when I was engaged to Claire. Mind if I talk to you about it?”
“I got all day.”
“Well, this is how it is: I did step out on her then, one time, and it seems—you’d better prepare yourself, Dad, because this one’s a shocker—seems like you’ve got a grandson you never knew about before. He’s seventeen years old and he’s going to my school.”
Wesley stopped cranking the reel. He whipped a look over at Tom, then let his weight sink back against the chair. After half a minute or so, he set down the reel and said, “You know, son, I think we need a beer here.”
He pushed out of the deep, slatted chair and went inside, curled forward a little like a fishing line in the middle of a long cast. The warped wooden screen door banged behind him. He came back out with four cans of Schlitz, gave two to Tom, and sat down, bearing his weight on the creaking arms of the chair before lowering
himself into it.
They popped open their first cans.
Heard the twin hisses.
Tipped back their heads.
Wesley wiped his mouth with knuckles like old walnuts. “Well now ... that’s something,” he said.
“I just found out the week before school started. I told Claire last night. She’s pretty broken up about it.”
“I don’t doubt it. This old heart of mine might’ve taken a couple of good licks itself when you told me.”
“She’s hurtin’, man, I mean, really hurtin’.” Tom squinted out at the lake. “She won’t let me touch her. Hell, she won’t even look at me.”
“Well, you’ve got to give her a little time, son. This is some backlash you’ve thrown.”
Tom took two swallows of beer and rested the can on the flat arm of his chair. “I’m scared, Dad. I’ve never seen her like this before. She slapped me yesterday, and an hour ago she asked me to leave, said she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me. I mean, for God’s sake, Dad, we don’t treat each other that way! We never have!”
“I don’t suppose you deserved it.”
“Well, I did. I know I did. I said some things that really hurt her, but I had to be truthful, didn’t I? And you know how it is between Claire and me. We’ve worked so damned hard to have the kind of marriage where we respect each other. Through thick and thin, respect is our byword. Now she won’t even sit down and talk.”
Wesley took a beat to compose his opinion. “Women are fragile creatures. Changeable.”
“Whoa! ... You can say that again. Only I’m just learning it!”
“Well, son, you’ve put her in a ticklish position. Two boys born the same year ...”
“The other woman was nothing to me, ever. When she showed up at school registering Kent she didn’t even ring a bell at first. I wouldn’t have given her a second glance if it weren’t for the boy. Only Claire doesn’t believe that, I don’t think.”