Adultery & Other Choices (19 page)

And stopped again. She saw fire, explosions, a parachute failing to open and someone unreal—it wasn't Joe, it
wasn't
—falling down and down without cease, as in a dream. Then she was underwater and a plane was sinking past her, descending slowly and without hope, and she had to get to it and open it somehow but she couldn't breathe—

‘Is it Joe?' she said.

He nodded and stepped forward but before he could touch her she said: ‘In the water?'

He said: ‘No, Olympic Peninsula,' then grabbed her as she fell toward him; she gave all her weight to his locked arms and pressed her face against his coarse Navy topcoat, not breathing; then finally she did: a deep dry audible breath, and she said: ‘He didn't get out?'

She felt his head shaking against her own, heard him whisper: ‘Nobody did,' and as if on some strangely distant part of her body she felt his hand patting her back, and she suddenly knew she hadn't conceived, it could never work out that way, nothing ever could, he was gone and she would have a period soon, her womb's dark red weeping. How could he be gone? It was the last day of the year and he was gone, the year was over, and he was over; but he was turning at the plane to wave; then she was crying heavily, but still she heard or felt Posy behind her, and she spun around. Posy was holding two logs across her chest, and her face and ears were red from the cold. Then her lips began to quiver and she dropped the logs. Ellen went to her knees and pressed Posy to her breast, crying: ‘Oh, Pete! She knew too! She knew too!'

And she hugged Posy even more tightly, as if for all time.

PART THREE

Adultery

…
love is a direction and not a state of the soul
.
Simone Weil,
Waiting on God

to Gina Berriault

W
HEN THEY
have finished eating Edith tells Sharon to clear the table then brush her teeth and put on her pajamas; she brings Hank his coffee, then decides she can have a cup too, that it won't keep her awake because there is a long evening ahead, and she pours a cup for herself and returns to the table. When Sharon has gone upstairs Edith says: ‘I'm going to see Joe.'

Hank nods, sips his coffee, and looks at his watch. They have been silent during most of the meal but after her saying she is going to see Joe the silence is uncomfortable.

‘Do you have to work tonight?' she says.

‘I have to grade a few papers and read one story. But I'll read to Sharon first.'

Edith looks with muted longing at his handlebar moustache, his wide neck, and thick wrists. She is lighting a cigarette when Sharon comes downstairs in pajamas.

‘Daddy quit,' Sharon says, ‘Why don't you quit?'

Edith smiles at her, and shrugs.

‘I'm going out for awhile,' she says. ‘To see a friend.'

Sharon's face straightens with quick disappointment that borders on an angry sense of betrayal.

‘What friend?'

‘Terry,' Edith says.

‘Why can't she come here?'

‘Because Daddy has work to do and we want to talk.'

‘I'll read to you,' Hank says.

Sharon's face brightens.

‘What will you read?'

‘Kipling.'

‘“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”?'

‘Yes: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”'

She is eight and Edith wonders how long it will be before Sharon senses and understands that other presence or absence that Edith feels so often when the family is together. She leaves the table, puts the dishes and pots in the dishwasher, and turns it on. She is small and slender and she is conscious of her size as she puts on her heavy coat. She goes to the living room and kisses Hank and Sharon, but she does not leave through the front door. She goes to the kitchen and takes from the refrigerator the shrimp wrapped in white paper; she goes out the back door, into the dark. A light snow has started to fall.

It is seven-thirty. She has told Joe not to eat until she gets there, because she wants to cook shrimp scampi for him. She likes cooking for Joe, and she does it as often as she can. Wreathed in the smells of cooking she feels again what she once felt as a wife: that her certain hands are preparing a gift. But there were times, in Joe's kitchen, when this sense of giving was anchored in vengeful images of Hank, and then she stood in the uncertainty and loss of meaningless steam and smells. But that doesn't happen anymore. Since Joe started to die, she has been certain about everything she does with him. She has not felt that way about anyone, even Sharon, for a long time.

The snow is not heavy but she drives slowly, cautiously, through town. It is a small town on the Merrimack River, and tonight there are few cars on the road. Leaving town she enters the two-lane country road that will take her to Joe. She tightens her seat belt, turns on the radio, lights a cigarette, and knows that none of these measures will slow the tempo of her heart. The road curves through pale meadows and dark trees and she is alone on it. Then there are houses again, distanced from each other by hills and fields, and at the third one, its front porch lighted, she turns into the driveway. She turns on the interior light, looks at her face in the rearview mirror, then goes up the shovelled walk, her face lowered from the snow, and for a moment she sees herself as Joe will see her coming inside with cheeks flushed and droplets in her long black hair. Seeing herself that way, she feels loved. She is thirty years old.

When Joe opens the door she feels the awkward futility of the shrimp in her hand. She knows he will not be able to eat tonight. He has lost thirty pounds since the night last summer when they got drunk and the next day he was sick and the day after and the day after, so that finally he could not blame it on gin and he went to a doctor and then to the hospital where a week later they removed one kidney with its envelope of cancer that had already spread upward. During the X-ray treatments in the fall, five days a week for five weeks, with the square drawn in purple marker on his chest so the technician would know where to aim, he was always nauseated. But when the treatments were finished there were nights when he could drink and eat as he used to. Other nights he could not. Tonight is one of those: above his black turtleneck the pallor of his face is sharpened; looking from that flesh his pale blue eyes seem brighter than she knows they are. His forehead is moist; he is forty years old, and his hair has been grey since his mid-thirties. He holds her, but even as he squeezes her to him, she feels him pulling his body back from the embrace, so she knows there is pain too. Yet still he holds her tightly so his pulling away causes only a stiffening of his torso while his chest presses against her. She remembers the purple square and is glad it is gone now. She kisses him.

‘I'm sorry about the shrimp,' he says. ‘I don't think I can eat them.'

‘It's all right; they'll keep.'

‘Maybe tomorrow.'

‘Maybe so.'

The apartment is small, half of the first floor of a small two-story house, and it is the place of a man who since his boyhood has not lived with a woman except housekeepers in rectories. The front room where they are standing, holding each other lightly now like dancers, is functional and, in a masculine disorderly way, orderly; it is also dirty. Fluffs of dust have accumulated on the floor. Edith decides to bring over her vacuum cleaner tomorrow. She puts her coat on a chair and moves through the room and down the short hall toward the kitchen; as she passes his bedroom she glances at the bed to see if he rested before she came; if he did, he has concealed it: the spread is smooth. She wonders how he spent his day, but she is afraid to ask. The college is still paying him, though someone else is teaching his philosophy courses that he started in the fall and had to quit after three days. She puts the shrimp in the refrigerator; always, since they were first lovers, when she looks in his refrigerator she feels a tenderness whose edges touch both amusement and pathos. The refrigerator is clean, it has four ice trays, and it holds only the makings of breakfast and cocktail hour. Behind her he is talking: this afternoon he took a short walk in the woods; he sat on a log and watched a cock pheasant walking across a clearing, its feathers fluffed against the cold. The land is posted and pheasants live there all winter. After the walk he tried to read Unamuno but finally he listened to Rachmaninoff and watched the sun setting behind the trees.

While he gets ice and pours bourbon she looks around the kitchen for signs. In the dish drainer are a bowl, a glass, and a spoon and she hopes they are from lunch, soup and milk, but she thinks they are from breakfast. He gives her the drink and opens a can of beer for himself. When he feels well he drinks gin; once he told her he'd always loved gin and that's why he'd never been a whiskey priest.

‘Have you eaten since breakfast?'

‘No,' he says, and his eyes look like those of a liar. Yet he and Edith never lie to each other. It is simply that they avoid the words cancer and death and time, and when they speak of his symptoms they are looking at the real words like a ghost between them. At the beginning she saw it only in his eyes: while he joked and smiled his eyes saw the ghost and she did too, and she felt isolated by her health and hope. But gradually, as she forced herself to look at his eyes, the ghost became hers too. It filled his apartment: she looked through it at the food she cooked and they ate; she looked through it at the drinks she took from his hand; it was between them when they made love in the dark of the bedroom and afterward when she lay beside him and her eyes adjusted to the dark and discerned the outlines and shapes of the chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed and, hanging above it, the long black crucifix, long enough to hang in the classroom of a parochial school, making her believe Joe had taken with him from the priesthood a crucifix whose size would assert itself on his nights. When they went to restaurants and bars she looked through the ghost at other couples; it delineated these people, froze their gestures in time. One night, looking in his bathroom mirror, she saw that it was in her own eyes. She wondered what Joe's eyes saw when they were closed, in sleep.

‘You should eat,' she says.

‘Yes.'

‘Do you have something light I could fix?'

‘My body.' He pats his waist; he used to have a paunch; when he lost the weight he bought clothes and now all his slacks are new.

‘Your head will be light if you take walks and don't eat and then drink beer.'

He drinks and smiles at her.

‘Nag.'

‘Nagaina. She's the mother cobra. In ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.' Would you eat some soup?'

‘I would. I was wondering first—' (His eyes start to lower but he raises them again, looks at her) ‘—if you'd play trainer for a while. Then maybe I'd take some soup.'

‘Sure. Go lie down.'

She gets the heating ointment from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom; it lies beside the bottle of sleeping pills. On the shelf beneath these are his shaving cream, razor, after-shave lotion, and stick deodorant. The juxtaposition disturbs her, and for a moment she succumbs to the heavy weariness of depression. She looks at her hand holding the tube of ointment. The hand does not seem to be hers; or, if it is, it has no function, it is near atrophy, it can touch no one. She lowers the hand out of her vision, closes the cabinet door, and looks at herself in the mirror. She is pretty. The past three years show in her face, but still she is pretty and she sips her drink and thinks of Joe waiting and her fingers caress the tube.

In the bedroom Joe is lying on his back, with his shirt off. The bedside lamp is on. He rolls on his belly and turns his face on the pillow so he can watch her. She lights him a cigarette then swallows the last of her bourbon and feels it. Looking at his back she unscrews the cap from the tube; his flesh is pale and she wishes it were summer so she could take him to the beach and lie beside him and watch his skin assume a semblance of health. She squeezes ointment onto her fingers and gently rubs it into the flesh where his kidney used to be. She is overtaken by a romantic impulse which means nothing in the face of what they are facing: she wishes there were no cancer but that his other kidney was in danger and he needed hers and if only he had hers he would live. Her hands move higher on his back. He lies there and smokes, and they do not talk. The first time she rubbed his back they were silent because he had not wanted to ask her to but he had anyway; and she had not wanted to do it but she had, and her flesh had winced as she touched him, and he had known it and she had known that he did. After that, on nights when she sensed his pain, or when he told her about it, she rose from the bed and got the ointment and they were silent, absorbing the achieved intimacy of her flesh. Now his eyes are closed and she watches his face on the pillow and feels what she is heating with her anointed hands.

When she is done she warms a can of vegetable soup and toasts a slice of bread. As she stirs the soup she feels him watching from the table behind her. He belches and blames it on the beer and she turns to him and smiles. She brings him the bowl of soup, the toast, and a glass of milk. She puts ice in her glass and pours bourbon, pouring with a quick and angry turning of the wrist that is either defiant or despairing—she doesn't know which. She sits with him. She would like to smoke but she knows it bothers him while he is eating so she waits. But he does not finish the soup. He eats some of the toast and drinks some of the milk and pretends to wait for the soup to cool; under her eyes he eats most of the soup and finishes the toast and is lifting a spoonful to his mouth when his face is suffused with weariness and resignation which change as quickly to anger as he shakes his head and lowers the spoon, his eyes for a moment glaring at her (but she knows it isn't her he sees) before he pushes back from the table and moves fast out of the kitchen and down the hall. She follows and is with him when he reaches the toilet and standing behind him she holds his waist with one arm and his forehead with her hand. They are there for a long time and she doesn't ask but knows he was here after breakfast and perhaps later in the day. She thinks of him alone retching and quivering over the toilet. Still holding his waist she takes a washcloth from the towel rack and reaches to the lavatory and dampens it; she presses it against his forehead. When he is finished she walks with him to the bedroom, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulder, and she pulls back the covers while he undresses. The telephone is on the bedside table. He gets into bed and she covers him then turning her back to him she dials her home. When Hank answers she says: ‘I might stay a while.'