It took five rings before he picked up, and then a full two seconds before his first utterance. He cleared his throat and answered groggily, “Hullo?”
“Tom?”
A long pause, then, “Claire?”—hopefully, but with a voice still off duty.
“I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been thinking.”
He waited.
“We’ve got to make that appointment with the counselor right away.”
“All right. Which one?”
“Not any of them from school. I don’t want them to hear all of the sordid details of our troubles.”
“I’ve got a list of clinics at school.”
“Then pick one. Any one.”
“Do you think we should go together the first time, or separately?”
“I don’t know.”
“Together,” he decided.
“I don’t know. Maybe the counselor will recommend what’s best.”
“Or I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t I come over there right now and crawl into bed with you, and in the morning we won’t need any counselors.”
“Oh, Tom, can’t you see that’s not going to solve this?”
“Then why did you call me in the middle of the night?”
“Because I miss you, damn it!”
“Claire, are you crying?”
“Yes, I’m crying!”
His pulse raced at her admission. “Please let me come over there, please, Claire.”
“Tom, I’m so scared. I don’t ... I don’t know the me I’ve become.”
He hunkered on the Naugahyde footstool on top of his mother’s piano music, gripping an old-fashioned black telephone receiver in one hand and his forehead in the other. “Claire, do you love me?”
“Yes!” Exasperated.
“And I love you. So why are we going through this?”
“Because I haven’t forgiven you and I’m not sure I ever can, and don’t you see that I’ll hold it against you until I do forgive you? Oh, God, I don’t know ...” She sounded beyond exhaustion. “I did something tonight that ...”
He bristled and his elbows came off his knees.
“What did you do?”
“See? You’re mad at me already and I haven’t even told you what it is.”
“You were with Handelman, weren’t you?”
“Just get the counselor lined up, the sooner the better.”
“What did you do with him!”
“Tom, I don’t want to get into it now. It’s almost two o’clock and I’ve got ten hours of conferences to get through tomorrow.”
“Damn it, Claire! You call me up at two in the morning and tell me you were with another man and then you say you don’t want to get into it now!”
Wesley came shambling out of his bedroom in the dark and mumbled, “What’s all the shouting about?”
“Go back to bed, Dad!”
“You talking to Claire?”
“Yes, now go back to bed!”
Wesley did. And closed his door.
Claire said, “Oh, hell, now we woke up your dad.”
“This is really playing dirty, you know that, Claire? All right, so I had a fling eighteen years ago, but you’re just twisting the knife, and you know it.” His anger grew ripe, his yelling unbridled. “You want to go to a counselor, you make your own goddamned appointment! And look for John Handelman’s balls on your lunch tray tomorrow!” He slammed down the receiver and rocketed to his feet, stood like a samurai staring down at the dark lake, stood for all of thirty-seven seconds before marching into his bedroom and scrabbling through his briefcase for the phone number of John Handelman. He left the bedroom light on and marched back to the phone, growing additionally pissed off because his dad still had a rotary albatross that seemed to take fifteen minutes to dial! Why the hell couldn’t the old fart keep up with the times and get himself a Touch-Tone phone?
Handelman answered on the seventh ring.
“Handelman? This is Tom Gardner! You keep your slimy hands off my wife or I’ll have you out of this school district so goddamned fast that you’ll need a nose cone to reenter. You got that?”
Handelman took a moment to wake up to what was happening. “Well,” he finally replied, unruffled, “that didn’t take long.”
“You hear me, Handelman?”
“I hear you.”
“And you keep away from her door between classes, you got that too?”
“I got that too. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Stick to play practice instead of practicing plays on my wife! If you’re hard up for a woman, go get one of your own!”
Tom slammed the receiver down so hard it jumped off and clattered to the tabletop. He slammed it down even harder. Then he sat a long time on the plastic ottoman, gripping his head while the ridge around the legs of his briefs began to dig into his buns, and his thighs stuck to the plastic. He pulled himself up in slow motion, peeling his skin free with a sound like rattling paper.
Goddamn it, he thought, shuffling off to bed like an old man. Goddamn it all to hell. When was she going to come to her senses?
*****
He slept terribly after that and awakened in the morning with a headache. To top it off, he turned on the shower to discover that his father’s creaky old water system had a burned-out heater. He showered in the river of ice water and arrived at school still shivering, and in a vile temper prompted by the Claire/Handelman incident, wondering about its particulars.
The teachers had a one-hour prep time before conferences started, so he poured himself a mug of steaming coffee and took it to her room.
When he entered, she was standing at a worktable with her back to him, stuffing manila folders into a marbleized cardboard box. Only when he closed the door did she glance over her shoulder.
“Open the door.”
“You said you didn’t want the whole school to know the sordid details of our fights.”
“Not in the school building, Tom! Now, open that door!”
“I want to know what you did with him.”
“Tom ... not now!”
“You call me in the middle of the night and—”
She spun and faced him angrily. “Look! I have three days of solid meetings with parents ahead of me, and so help me, if you make me start crying and ruin my makeup,
I’ll do something with John Handelman’s balls that you won’t be too happy about when I find them on my lunch tray! Now get out of here!”
“Claire, you’re still my wife!”
She pointed the way with one trembling finger. Her voice turned menacing. “Get ... out ... of ... here!”
She was right. Their workplace was totally inappropriate for carrying on their row. He spun in place, yanked open the door, and stormed out.
*****
The way conferences were handled at HHH, all the teachers were stationed at tables set up around the perimeter of the gym, and parents ranged freely, seeking the shortest lines, until they’d spoken to all the teachers they needed to see. There were lulls, short stretches when some teachers had no lines at all, but for the most part the center of the gym remained an arena of motion with parents crossing, searching the name placards taped to the gym walls, stopping to visit with other parents before moving on and forming lines that snaked into the crowd four and five deep.
It was shortly before noon of the first day when Claire hit a lull, pushed back, and stretched. The stretch abruptly ended when she saw Tom standing just inside the gym doors talking to Monica Arens.
The blood seemed to push at Claire’s neck and face. Try as she might, she could not tear her eyes away. Monica had changed her hairstyle to something much more flattering. She was dressed in an attractive sienna-brown suit with a gold pin on the lapel that matched her earrings. Someone had once told Claire that when people start having an affair they suddenly start taking pride in their appearance.
Claire couldn’t stop staring.
Tom started out in his principal’s stance, arms crosse
d, feet flat, knees locked, leaning back from the waist. Monica said something and he chuckled, pushed back his unbuttoned suit jacket, caught his hands on his hips, dropped his chin, and relaxed his knees. He looked back up into Monica’s face and said something. They both laughed.
Laughed!
Then they sobered as one and exchanged a gaze that Claire couldn’t see on Tom’s face, only on Monica’s. If she wasn’t a woman in love, Claire would eat everything on her next lunch tray!
Suddenly Monica’s eyes swung Claire’s way, and Claire bent to appear busy, digging through the materials in the box on the floor.
She came up with Kent’s folder, opened it on her lap, and studied its contents, aware that Monica Arens was moving toward her through the crowd.
Her presence overwhelmed Claire with threat, this woman who had carnal knowledge of her husband, who had lain with him one week before his wedding, whose body had accepted his seed while Claire was already pregnant with his baby, and who only a moment ago had stood across this gym laughing with him.
“Hello,” a voice said, and Claire feared looking up. When finally she did, she found the woman standing before her poised and seemingly undaunted by this meeting. “I’m Monica Arens, Kent’s mother.” She extended her hand, looking more attractive than Claire remembered. She had applied makeup that added a curve to her mouth and size to her eyes. Her hair lifted at the crown and wisped forward in a deceptively simple shag that cupped her face without ever quite touching it, like a fading blossom of Queen Anne’s lace. Her suit was expensive and draped exquisitely upon her frame, her jewelry tastefully simple.
“Hello,” Claire replied, keeping her hand intentionally limp while touching her nemesis. Monica sat and said nothing further.
Claire cleared her throat and placed Kent’s folder on the table. “Well ...” She had been a speech teacher at one time, a drama teacher another, and she included a unit on extemporaneous speaking every year in her senior honors class. How many times had she instructed her students never to open any dialogue with the word well? Yet here she sat doing it, like a stagestruck idiot. She cleared her throat and repeated her mistake. “Well ... Kent is certainly a good student ... um ...”
They proceeded along this bumpy road, one of them rambling on nervously, the other listening attentively, asking occasional intuitive, bright questions.
Nobody ever said, My son is going through emotional hell since he found out who his father is.
Or, Your son tried to lecture me about saving my marriage.
Or, My son met his grandfather and cousins last weekend.
Or, My family is falling apart because of you.
They merely conferred—a teacher, a parent at conferences, like two supportive fakes.
But at the end of their discussion, they didn’t shake hands. And when Monica rose and paused beside her metal folding chair, tension skewered her there for a moment. She drew breath as if to speak, and Claire waited expectantly. The silence grew uncomfortable, and finally Claire said, “Well ...” yet again, thinking to herself, Oh, you silver-tongued devil, you.
The spell had broken and Monica retreated one step, caught her purse beneath an arm, and said, “Goodbye. Thank you.”
“Yes ... goodbye.”
Two other parents were waiting for Claire, but even as they seated themselves, she watched Monica moving away through the crowd, then swung her gaze to Tom, still standing by the entrance to the gym. He’d been watching them intently.
When their gazes caught, he started moving toward Claire, but whatever denial he had planned could be waylaid: She turned her attention to greeting the new set of parents who had taken Monica’s place.
Tom came forward anyway, taking the liberty of walking around behind the table where his wife was seated. “Excuse me,” he said, and placing one hand on the tabletop, the other on the back of Claire’s chair, he leaned down right in front of her, his shoulder forming a barrier between her and the parents.
“Friday next week, five o’clock at Family Networking. The counselor’s name is Mr. Gaintner.”
“I thought you said I could line up the counselor myself.” She kept her expression deliberately flat. His face was nearer than it had been in weeks. She wanted to spread a hand on it and push him onto his trim little ass on the floor.
“I changed my mind. You’re busy today. I thought I might as well do it.”
“Couldn’t you get an appointment sooner than that?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? The world’s a screwed-up place. Lots of people doing lots of things to mess up their lives.”
His flippancy burned her. “Does he want to see both of us?”
Tom nodded, dragged himself upright like James Dean, and went away.
He had consulted a man! Damn his manipulative hide—a man! He knew perfectly well she preferred women counselors after all the discussions they’d had on the subject! Women were better counselors than men any day. Men couldn’t let themselves get teary-eyed. They held their distance instead of hugging, though even Claire had to admit that men had just cause to worry about accusations of sexual misconduct, given today’s litigious climate. Every male educator she knew was terrified of touching girl students, even on the shoulder. Nevertheless, Tom knew Claire liked women counselors.
But he’d consulted a man.
She was angry and distracted for the rest of the afternoon and evening, while she watched the clock creep toward nine p.m. and sucked throat lozenges and felt her voice growing hoarser from all the talk, talk, talk. Their esteemed principal had warned them that no teacher was to leave her assigned table until the tick of nine, and far be it from Claire Gardner to seek his royal highness’s retribution!
At nine she slammed the cover on her storage box, scooped it beneath her arm, and ran to find Joan Berlatsky before Joan left the building. She caught her in her office as Joan was slipping on her coat.
“Joan, can you spare one minute, please?”
Joan glanced at the clock and restrained a sigh. “Sure.” She dropped into her chair with a sigh.
“I don’t mean to take advantage of you, but I need some advice.”
“Do you want to shut the door?” They both knew Tom could very well walk past at any moment on his way to his own office.
Claire closed the door and perched on the edge of a visitors’ chair. “I assume you know that Tom and I are apart and why.”
“Yes, I do, Claire. I’m really sorry about it.”
“You know that Kent Arens is his son?”
Joan nodded.
“I have a confession to make. First of all, let me say in my own defense that I’m a good teacher. I care very much about my students and their welfare, but I did something tonight that I’ve never done before. I avoided talking about something that should have been discussed with a parent. You see, I had a conference with Kent’s mother.”
Joan had sat back in her chair and joined her hands. Her steepled fingers rested against her lips while she studied Claire with a faint frown.
“Tom suggested weeks ago that he put Kent in someone else’s English class, but I had the only honors class, so I stubbornly insisted he stay with me. Now ... well, now things have grown so complex and the relationships have changed between all of us. I can’t help thinking it’s affecting that boy much worse than he lets on. I should have talked about it honestly with his mother, but I just couldn’t. Kent’s grade has been a perfect four point oh, and I rationalized with myself that since his grades haven’t suffered, I didn’t need to bring up anything personal during the conference. I know it was cowardly of me, and I know I’m using you as a confessor here, but ... well... you see, I think ... that is, sometimes I think Tom is having an affair with her. There. God, I’ve said it. I’ve got it off my chest at last.”
Joan sat as before, thinking, frowning, tapping her fingertips against her mouth. Finally she asked a few pertinent questions, and the answers filled in the necessary past history.
“... an
d now he’s made an appointment with a male counselor. Joan, I know he did it to get a man on his side, and I wanted a woman!”
“Did you tell him that?”
“No, but he knows it!”
Joan did nothing more than change the position of her arms. It had been a long, grueling day for her too. She had been talking to stupid parents and recalcitrant teenagers since nine o’clock that morning. She had a headache from the buzz of the gym lights, and a heartache from some of the genuinely pitiful situations she’d handled today. She wanted to go home, flop into bed, and sleep into the next century. Along comes this normally well-balanced, kind, caring woman who was throwing away her marriage and wrecking her family because she couldn’t see through her own red haze of jealousy. Claire Gardner was a well-educated woman who’d had her share of psych classes, but a college education didn’t necessarily guarantee common sense, and sometimes Joan grew downright fed up with these teachers who ought to have more of it. Joan Berlatsky—bless her weary counselor’s heart—had had it!
“Claire, listen to yourself. How many times have you read and heard that the basis of most relationship problems is lack of communication? If you wanted a female counselor, you should have said so. You’re blaming Tom because you’re upset with him about something else entirely. Ask any divorce lawyer—this is how the big-time fights get up a head of steam. Do you want to save your marriage?”
Claire’s recoil said very clearly she hadn’t expected rebuttal of this sort.
“Yes,” she replied meekly. “At least I think I do.”
“Well, you’re surely not acting like it. I’ve known Tom for twelve years, and in that time I’ve never heard him do anything but praise you. I’m at meetings and on committees with him that you aren’t in. What he says behind your back would probably make you blush with joy. That man loves you, and he loves his children, and what you’re putting them all through gets no sympathy from me, because I don’t think you’ve got just cause. He made a mistake in judgment eighteen years ago, and he’s apologized and asked your forgiveness for it, and whatever you’re accusing him of now is all based on circumstantial evidence. I don’t think he’s having an affair because I know how he loves you. You’re embarrassed by having to face his son day after day while the whole school population knows who Kent is, but—hey, so what? So we know. Big deal. We accept it. The boy is our student, and we haven’t ostracized him, or Tom, for that matter. You’re the only one doing that. And in the process, you’re alienating your own family. I’m probably not sounding much like a counselor right now because I’m not. I’m turning down your request to talk to me about this any more because, quite frankly, this is one case where I’ve taken sides, and I’m not on yours. I’m squarely on Tom’s, because what I see ahead for you is a broken home and four unhappy people if you continue the way you have been. He’s miserable. Your children are miserable. Truthfully, I think you probably are too. Now I’m tired, I’ve been talking all day, and I want to go home to bed.”