American Wife (19 page)

He seemed surprised, but in a faintly amused way, to find me standing there. “Alice Lindgren,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

Although I was nervous, I was angry, too, and my anger guided me. “How could you?” I blurted out.

He actually smiled, which infuriated me more. He was wearing a white tank top, cutoff jeans, and flip-flops, and he had grown a dark, dense beard and gained perhaps forty pounds since I’d seen him last. (Once, getting milk shakes at Tatty’s with Betty Bridges when I was home from college, I’d spotted him across the restaurant, sitting at the counter with his back to us, and I had hardly moved or spoken until he left half an hour later. Other than that, I had not laid eyes on him in nearly fourteen years.)

He ambled to the couch where it seemed he’d been sitting before—the television beside me was on, showing
The Price Is Right
(Pete Imhof watched
The Price Is Right
?), and on the coffee table in front of the couch was an incomplete
Riley Citizen
crossword puzzle with an uncapped pen lying sideways atop it and an ashtray, the smoke still rising from a just-stubbed cigarette. Only after he’d lit a fresh one, inhaled, and released smoke through his nostrils did he say, “Business deals go south all the time.”

“Pete, it was clearly a scam!”

“Since when are you an expert on asset management?” He looked indignant, and for the first time, it occurred to me that this hadn’t been intentional. He had gone to my mother because, presumably, he’d heard my father had died, he’d guessed she’d have received an inheritance, and he’d been trying to raise money for this scheme. But he really might have thought it would turn out to be profitable. Perhaps it hadn’t been just to spite me.

“Whatever it was,” I said, “you don’t involve vulnerable people in a risky venture. My mother needs that money to live off, and to support my eighty-two-year-old grandmother.”

“Alice, I lost out, too. Thirty-five grand, in fact, which is a lot more than anyone else.”

“You need to repay my mother.” I tried to sound firm and persuasive.

He snorted. “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

“Then find some other way to fix the situation.”

“If I hear of an opportunity in the future she might be interested in—”

“Don’t even think about contacting her again.”

“You seem to be having trouble making up your mind.” I glared at him, and he added, “Why don’t you relax?” He extended the pack of cigarettes to me—they were Camels—and I shook my head. “If you’d prefer a beer, I’ve got plenty,” he said. “It’s early in the day, but I don’t judge.”

I folded my arms in front of my chest.

“Hey, I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. “You still single?”

I stared at him, and my rage was like a storm inside me, a hurricane of fury. I thought of him calling me a whore that day at his family’s house; it was a memory I’d never forgotten but one I tried to store as far back in my mind as possible.

“I can think of something that might take the edge off.” He was smirking. “Be fun for both of us.”

“You’re repulsive,” I said.

“That’s not what you used to think.” He smiled, and when I didn’t return the smile, his expression grew sour. “Forget about the money, Alice. Your mother’s a grown woman, married her whole life to a banker, for Christ’s sake. That deal had a lot of potential, but not enough people came on board, and we had to cut our losses.”

“That isn’t satisfactory,” I said.

We looked unpleasantly at each other, and he shook his head. “You have some nerve, I gotta say. What are you really accusing me of here, fucking over your family? When you of all people should understand that mistakes happen.”

It was his ace card. And hadn’t I, in my way, forced it? Because then the situation could, at core, be my fault instead of his, and I could feel guilt instead of anger. And wasn’t guilt much more ladylike, didn’t it fit me far more comfortably? Yes, no matter what Pete Imhof did or said, no matter how manipulative or crude, I would always have done worse. This knowledge was what prevented me from upending his coffee table, from throwing his ashtray across the room or clawing his face. As I left his apartment, all I said was “Never come near any of us.”

I MADE IT
a few blocks before I began to cry, and I was so worried about being seen by someone I knew that I immediately ducked into the narrow alley between two houses; presumably, I was trespassing. I stood there, leaning against one house’s white aluminum siding, and my shoulders shook, and I was grateful for the blasting noise of an airconditioning unit above my head. It wasn’t even that I believed I didn’t deserve to be punished; sure, I deserved it. Almost fourteen years had passed since the evening I’d slammed my car into Andrew Imhof’s—the dread that gathered in me every late August, as September approached, would come in a few weeks, as reliable in its annual arrival as dogwood blossoms or fireflies—and Andrew would still be dead, and I would still be shocked by the enormity of my mistake. Andrew would always be dead, and I would always be shocked. It never went away.

And the problems that had arisen for me in the last forty-eight hours, my mother losing twenty thousand dollars while I unexpectedly found myself drawn to a man Dena was interested in—what right did I have to complain about either situation? On the whole, I was far more lucky than unlucky. But it was hard not to wonder what I could have done differently, how I could have prevented this sequence of events. I went out of my way to be considerate and responsible; it wasn’t as if I didn’t care what people thought or how they felt.

Don’t,
I told myself.
Don’t be self-pitying. You’re fine.
The tears had begun drying up—really, the older I got, the less I cried in either frequency or duration.
Be practical. Think of which steps you need to take, address each problem on its own without lumping them together. You have not committed a new wrong toward Andrew; it is only the same wrong arising again. You can’t undo anything; you have to live your life forward, trying not to cause additional unhappiness.
Immediately, it was clear to me that I couldn’t go through with my purchase of the house on McKinley and that even if Charlie did call, I couldn’t see him again; there were my solutions, and they hadn’t been remotely difficult to figure out.

I swallowed, wiped my eyes with a tissue from my purse, and stepped out from between the houses. Long ago, I had become my own confidante.

I HADN’T DECIDED
ahead of time to do so—I’d had the dim notion that I’d go to a store that sold estate jewelry—but on 94 heading into Madison, after I’d passed the third billboard for the same pawnshop, I pulled off. It surprised me that the proprietor was a woman or that, at any rate, it was a woman behind the counter that afternoon. The aisles were cramped with television sets and stereos, with motorcycles and leather jackets and, on a shelf behind glass, a large jade Buddha.

My mother had given me the brooch by itself, not even wrapped in brown paper, and as I passed it to the woman, I immediately wished I’d waited and put it first in one of the three or four small velvet jewelry boxes I’d acquired over the years (they always seemed too nice to throw away). That surely would have given the brooch a classier aura.

“I’d like to sell this,” I said. I thought it best to speak as little as possible, lest I reveal my ignorance of pawn lingo. I was the only customer in the shop, so at least I didn’t have an audience.

The woman was about my mother’s age, wearing several bracelets and rings (her nails were long and dark red) and a large silver cross on a silver chain. Her hair was a brassy shade, short but voluminous, and her voice was deep and friendly. “Hot as blazes out there, huh?” she said as she inspected the brooch.

“Wisconsin in July,” I said agreeably.
Please,
I thought.
Please, please, please.

She was peering at the brooch through a magnifying glass. “I’m taking my granddaughter swimming this evening, I bet you the beach is packed. I’ll give you ninety bucks for it.”

I blinked. She looked up, and I tried to compose my face in a normal way.

“Really, you don’t think—” I paused. “I’m pretty sure it’s Victorian.” Standing there next to an oversize television set, I sounded ridiculous even to myself.

“Ninety bucks,” the woman repeated, and she seemed a degree less friendly. Surely she had heard countless stories of financial woe; flintiness was a quality that would serve her well.

I took back the brooch. “I’d like to think about it.”

“Offer’s good till eight tonight. After that, bring it in, and it gets reappraised.”

“Thank you for your help.” And then, because I didn’t want to seem desperate or resentful, because I didn’t want to
be
desperate or resentful, I added before I stepped outside again, “Enjoy swimming.”

I CALLED NADINE
from my kitchen, and when I’d identified myself, she said, “How’s tricks?”

“I feel terrible doing this,” I began. “I’m so sorry, especially after how hard you worked to help me find the right house, but can we retract the bid? We can, right? That’s legal? And the seller just keeps the earnest money?” I had put down five hundred dollars for this—not nothing, but a good deal less than a down payment and a monthly mortgage would be.

“Are you pulling my leg?” Nadine asked.

What I felt most aware of in this moment, far more than the loss of the house, was the social awkwardness of reneging on a person who’d been good to me. Equally powerfully, I felt a fear that I wouldn’t be able to renege, that it was already too late.

“Alice, everyone has second thoughts.” Nadine sounded upbeat. “Here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of your concerns, and we’ll go through them together and see if they check out. Buying a house is a big step, but I know you’ll be happy as a clam.”

“I can’t buy the house,” I said. “Something has come up.”

“Are you worried about the inspection?” Nadine asked.

“It’s not this house. I can’t buy any house.”

For a long, excruciating moment, Nadine was silent. Then she said, “You know, there are some nutso clients out there, but I never thought you were one of them.”

“I’m sincerely grateful for your help,” I said. I did not consider telling her the reason for my change of heart—it would have been a violation of my mother’s privacy—but I decided that later in the week, I would write Nadine a note. That would make the situation at least a little better. “I’m wondering if there’s a penalty besides the earnest money. Do I need to pay you any sort of fee?”

“Nope.” Her voice was cold in a way I had never heard. “You’re free to walk away. All you gave was your word.”

I WAS IN
my apartment working on Babar—he wore a papier-mâché green suit and red bow tie, a yellow papier-mâché crown—and I was delighted with how he’d turned out, except for the not insignificant problem that the weight of his trunk made his whole head fall forward, as if he were asleep. My solution was to attach a weight to a string around his neck; the weight, which in this trial run was a can of chicken noodle soup from my cupboard, would be hidden behind his back, but unfortunately, the string was still visible and looked like a very small noose. Maybe a better solution, I thought, would be to attach some sort of wire loop to the back of his head (I could set him against a wall so the children wouldn’t see it) and then to run a hook from the wall to the loop. As I considered all this, there unfolded in my mind a simultaneous consideration of Charlie Blackwell and how he hadn’t called yet and how, if he didn’t call at all, it would be insulting—it would show he hadn’t really been interested in me, he’d just been hoping to spend the night—but it would also make things far simpler; I wouldn’t have to explain to him why we couldn’t see each other again. Either way, I had decided not to say anything about him to Dena. To confess would be indulgent, an attempt to absolve myself more than to enlighten her. As my brain skipped among Babar and Charlie and Dena, the phone rang and my heart seized a little (
Charlie?
), but when I answered, it was Dena who said, “If you come over tonight, I’ll make ratatouille. I have an eggplant that’s about to turn against me.”

“What can I bring?” I asked.

“I never say no to a bottle of wine. Shit, I have a customer. Let me call you in a second.”

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Red goes better with ratatouille, right?” I said.

There was a pause, and then Charlie said, “Alice?”

I felt dual surges of pleasure and anxiety. “Sorry—I was expecting someone else.”

“Should I call you back?”

“No—no, I mean—” I paused. “I can talk now, if you can.”

“Well, I did call you.” He sounded amused.

There was a silence, and at the same time, he said, “What’s up?” and I said, “I’m working on Bab—” We both paused, to let the other reply first.

Finally, he said, “So I had a thought about our plans tonight.”

We had plans tonight? It
was
Tuesday, the night he’d first suggested, but hadn’t I declined that invitation, and hadn’t he neglected to offer another?

“I’m thinking the Gilded Rose,” he continued. “I have a speaking engagement up in Waupun, so if you don’t mind, let’s make it on the late side. Eight-thirty all right with you?”

The Gilded Rose was the fanciest restaurant in Madison, practically the only fancy restaurant, and I had never been; my friend Rita, who’d been taken there by her nephew and his wife, had told me they had a shrimp cocktail for five dollars. “Charlie, I can’t go out with you,” I said.

“Haven’t we been through this already?”

“I had a chance to think about it, and it’s not that you aren’t appealing or that I’m not—” I paused, but there wasn’t much reason not to be frank with him, especially if it would spare his feelings. “It’s not that I’m not attracted to you. But Dena is my best friend, and this would be unfair to her.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

I had expected him to agree, or at least to see this as an argument not worth having. I was making myself seem neurotic, and why would he persist with someone who showed her neuroses so quickly? But his utter dismissal of my concerns wasn’t insulting; on the contrary, it gave me a lift of happiness, a hope that he might be right. This hope ran against my certainty that he was not.