Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (14 page)

“Ohio is a no-fault state,” his attorney had told him, “but when it comes to the division of property and the custody of minor children, who is at fault still matters to judges and jury panels.” Adrian had said as much in his note, which he paper-clipped to the photos and the check.

Over and over he had read the portions from the Gospel of Matthew—in the fifth chapter and the nineteenth—which held, “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, committeth adultery.” He read the same text in a different translation which replaced “fornication” with “marital infidelity.” He had, he assured himself, the perfect right to put Clare away, to save his children from her craziness, to free himself from this overwhelming pain.

In the end, of course, she moved out, not because of his threats but because of himself, and the dull life with him she no longer wanted and could no longer endure. She moved out because that’s exactly what she wanted to do and Clare could be counted on to do what she wanted.

When Adrian and Damien and Sarah came home that Tuesday in the middle of June, to the house they had all shared on the corner of South Cory Street and Lima Avenue, some blocks south of the river that flowed through Findlay, Clare and her things were unmistakably gone. She had moved out, into an apartment on the other side of Findlay. She told the children she would always love them and would be coming back for them as soon as she got herself established.

“Everything is going to be really terrific! You’re going to love New York! There’s so much to see and do there. Not like ‘
Finally
, Ohio’—wait and see!” She’d come back for the last bits and pieces of her things. The white Toyota van was idling at the curb with the back doors open for Clare to pitch garbage bags full of her clothes and linens.

They kept nodding and smiling and weeping and hugging her, their little hands and faces holding and searching and wondering why this was all happening and why couldn’t she stay with them and be their mother and she would always be their mother no matter what and someday she was sure they’d understand and Adrian went into the house and vomited, because he felt so helpless, so totally lost in the tears of things, so angry and heart-rent and utterly helpless, and their mother’s voice trailing off as she left them on the porch waving and sobbing and jumped in the van with her lover and drove off into the future. Adrian stood looking out the screen door at the small figures of his children on the porch—all of this happening in slow motion now—as the van disembarked, and they raised their little hands and waved, and waved, and waved.

No remembrance of these events was free of the guilt Adrian still felt for the damage done his son and daughter, his complicity in its infliction.

Now what he could remember was the creak of the spring on the screen door as he pushed it open, and held it open and said, Come in now, and how the two of them turned, limp from the waving and weeping, and how Damien took his sister Sarah’s hand and brought her back inside their suddenly and terribly broken home.

This was the moment, these many years since, that Adrian Littlefield could never forgive himself for—for failing his dar
ling son and precious daughter so profoundly, for doing them such unspeakable damage by failing to keep their mother home, the marriage together, the household intact, life as they had come to know it safe and warm and blessed with abundant love. He couldn’t protect his children from this hurt. His wife, their mother, had just driven off with her new lover, in a white van, leaving them all fixed and wriggling in the here and now without a clue as to what the future would hold. And as much as his heart hurt for his children’s damage, standing at the kitchen counter buttering bread to make them grilled cheese sandwiches, and pouring out three matching glasses of milk, and cutting up a green apple into six little wedges, and placing this meal before them, and holding their tiny hands saying “Let us pray,” and hearing their little voices give out with the accustomed grace, to wit: “God is great, God is good…” some corner of his broken, brooding heart quickened with the hope that his own life and times might just have gotten better, easier, simpler, saner somehow. Good riddance, he did not say out loud, while they ate their sandwiches wordlessly, but he said it nonetheless, good riddance, indeed.

That night he tucked them into bed and said their prayers with them, including the part about God blessing “Mommy and Daddy and Gramma and Grandpa and all the children in the world who don’t have homes” and promised that everything was going to be all right and they’d go tomorrow for Vacation Bible Camp. Then he sat out on the porch watching the darkness tighten around the neighborhood and the bats circling out of the trees up and down the street and sipped from a tumbler of whiskey he’d taken to pouring himself, at the suggestion of the same church elder who’d loaned him money. “It’ll help you sleep,” is what he’d said.

And as often happened then and now, something out of Scriptures came to mind.
May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love. Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress?
Adrian remembered this reading from their wedding. He had chosen it from Proverbs, Chapter 5, as a reminder of the gifts of fidelity. Of course, he chose it as a caution against mannish misconduct—the biblical and still-conventional wisdom which assigned to men brute passions and moral weakness and more or less assumed that he would stray while she, the “loving doe” and “graceful deer” would remain true and unblemished by temptation. Now he read it as a cruel twist of his cuckolding, that even the Scriptures seemed to mock him. He had been happy enough, satisfied, captivated by her love, such as he’d known it, captivated by an adulteress, after all.

His fountain seemed blighted, the wife of his youth banished. The loving doe and graceful deer she’d seemed for years, now seemed a snarling bitch; her breasts gone dry, now satisfying David Eason, the silly fuck, captivated by an adulteress with stretch marks, hemorrhoids, more wear and tear than he might’ve imagined. Adrian gulped the bourbon. It made his eyes water. The taste of it, deliciously sinful for a Methodist, burned his tongue and the back of his throat and made him feel suddenly wonderful, capable, incredibly released, as if the whole of this disaster might be managed. But at night he wept.

WHEN HE
woke in the morning, dry-mouthed, slightly hungover, but the children alive and sleeping soundly and himself alive and the sky remarkably not fallen, it seemed to Adrian
they might all survive, the wife of his youth’s departure notwithstanding. He pulled the photos DiBardino had given him from out of the large manila envelope marked confidential and carefully tore them all to shreds, all but the one of Anderson’s Ferry, its paddle wheels flanking its barge of cars, its fog lights beaming from above the pilot’s cabin—
Boone No. 7 Port of Cincinnati
—easing out from shore into the crosscurrents of the river, its masts and antennae turning and tuned in, the dense fog lifting off the water. That one Adrian Littlefield kept.

III

W
HEN BLOCK
Island came into view, he could see the tall sand cliffs, the green headlands, and the litter of sailing boats. From the dock in Old Harbor, Block Island seemed to Adrian like a postcard of the upmarket Yankee resort—huge painted Victorian hotels overlooking the harbor with red, white, and blue buntings hanging from their broad verandas, sloops and schooners and power yachts scattered around the seafront, brightly painted shop fronts done up for the season, and an abundance of cedar-shingled housing, graying but not particularly aged. Everywhere there were tanned and happy people in shorts and sandals and designer eyewear going about no particular business. There were bicycles and mopeds and cars for hire. The dockside was busy with day-trippers and courtesy vans from the various hotels meeting their guests. There were grandparents there to welcome their visiting families and the predictable vignettes of arrival and
departure that are all the business of ports of call. Adrian Littlefield waited while the other passengers disembarked. The organizer from the National Association of Family Law Attorneys, holding her clipboard and smiling widely, was reminding the attorneys to “be back for the four o’clock ferry! We have the installation of officers ball tonight at Foxwoods!” This gave the group five hours to tour the island, maybe take a swim, maybe browse the shops for souvenirs. Adrian waited for the rest to leave. He wanted to do his tour alone. He walked up the town, looking over the offerings in store windows, admiring the lithe bodies of women in beachwear, looking into the faces of men. At the top of the Main Street where the road turned sharply left, he came to the National Hotel. It looked familiar to him. He climbed the front steps and took a seat on the long porch where lunch was being served. He ordered iced tea and, from the list of appetizers, steamers in drawn butter, a cup of seafood chowder, and bruschetta. A little taste of everything, he thought. He had a good view of the harbor and the foot traffic coming and going along the Main Street front.

There were fathers with cell phones, their teenagers on holidays with their noncustodial parents—subversive daughters being courted by their new stepmothers, young boys bristling at the new men in their mother’s lives. There were young couples traveling
en famille
, with toddlers and infants and bored preteens.

He could see in the faces of the young husbands the fear he had felt in himself at that age, that he’d be overwhelmed at any minute by the duties and expenses and decisions.

He could see in the faces of their wives the worry and regret and second-guessing. How, they seemed to be asking themselves, had they gotten themselves into this predicament? They
had been young and footloose and passionate and now they were homebound and bored and fatigued by motherhood and family life. They had been creative and well-read and interesting. Now they were dull, bored, vexed by the daylong needs of their off spring.

Adrian tried to reckon the ones who would make it and the ones who wouldn’t. He tried to guess, by something in the way they walked or interacted, which of the children for whom this would be the last real family vacation. In the future there would be other configurations of adults and siblings in their lives. Partners, companions, significant others, spousal equivalents, stepparents, stepsisters, half brothers. But for many this would be the last vacation where mother and father shared the same time of their lives.

He was aware of a kind of psychic wince that always registered wrongly as a smile on his face whenever he looked at children and thought of his own children’s pain, courageously borne in the years after their mother left. Of course, there was nothing he could do. Still he suffered a kind of survivor’s guilt that what had been the best change in his life and the lightning rod of his success had hobbled his son and daughter somehow, in ways he sensed but could not measure. He had been a good parent and a good provider but he had not loved their mother. And now, in their young adulthood, he could see in the lives of his son and daughter that essential mistrust of their own hearts, a wariness about the love of others that made it difficult for them to form intimate attachments. He looked for early signals of such things in the manner and conduct of the children passing by.

He could see as well the older men eyeing the younger women and felt a quiet kinship with them. Adrian had counted
it among the blessings of age that the abundance of women he found attractive was ever broadening even as his sexual prowess began to falter. The older he got the more and younger women there were to look at. Their beauty, at every age, took more of his breath away than it had when he was a much younger man.

He’d quit begrudging Clare her infidelities. The sense of sexual betrayal had been replaced by an understanding of it as a failure of honesty. Not that she’d had sex with Ben or David or whomever else, but that she’d not been forthright with Adrian. He could forgive her giving into an urgency of desire, but did not forgive her hiding it from him. Nor could he much blame Ben for taking advantage of the situation. They were the necessary precipitators or necessary events—an evolution, a natural elaboration of an order whereby the universe of love and attachment purges itself of anomalies. A man of fifty-something—as Adrian was now, as Ben had been then—could not easily resist the proffered affections of a woman twenty years his junior. Nor could a woman unhappy in her home life, tired of small towns and small children, bored by her husband’s regular and routine affections, worried over the pressing and passage of time, be expected to travel in the off-season with a handsome artist to a distant island, to sail and walk deserted beaches and talk over dinner, idling away the remains of the day, and not offer her body to him. Especially when he had made a fuss over her as a girl. It was only natural for a woman at loose ends and a man in his fifties to fall into a fitful consortium should the occasion arise.

Adrian Littlefield had himself made a habit of confirming this in the years since, every chance he got, which was mostly at conventions such as the one he was currently hired to hold
forth to. Attended as they always were by more than a few of the recently divorced, or recently traded in for a younger, fresher model, or recently disappointed in love or perennially discontented with life, these professional conferences provided cover for those occasions when the sexually rejected might reconfirm their sexiness. Chief among the obligations—Adrian knew this from his own experience—of every newly divorced man and woman was to demonstrate that it was not a sexual dysfunction that occasioned the breakup. As the keynoter and visiting expert at these confabs and conventions, Adrian was often the focus of much of the free-floating, unattached, ready, willing, and able sexual energy of the registrants, a number of whom, it never failed, would make known in the usual ways to Adrian, their availability for more intimate conversations on related themes. He was possessed, after all, of a certain celebrity in these circles. He was famously single, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-paid, and the center of an hour or two hours’ attention during which he would motivate, inspire, entertain, inform, and uplift his listeners. To be gracious, charming, self-effacing was easier after a standing ovation, handsome payment, and a line of supplicants waiting for a signature on a book that bore his face and name on the cover. He had no less an appetite for a stranger’s affections than any man or woman did. And while he sometimes missed the predictable lovemaking of the married life, he found it hard to count as anything but good fortune that the years since the dissolution of his marriage had been characterized by sexual encounters more abundant if more distant, more passionate if less precise, hungrier if less often sated, more memorable if often nameless. If each partner in these arrangements felt a little “used,” it was, to him and to no few of the women he had had sex
with, still pleasant enough. That bodies could pleasure and could be pleasured, free of social, emotional, or intellectual encumbrances, seemed to Adrian a good and wholesome thing. And he made it his mission to attend to his partner in ways that would overwhelm whatever residual regret she might otherwise attach to the “one-night stand.” With several of these women he had maintained an ongoing correspondence, some of which had ended sooner, some later, and some of which remained pleasant and unpredictable addendums to his professional life. Sometimes he would invite one of them to join him on an extended speaking tour. They would spend a week, or maybe two weeks, together. They’d begin to behave like real companions. He’d remember how she drank her coffee and order room service accordingly. She’d pack and unpack his things between hotels. Each would pretend an intimacy they both knew did not, and likely would never, really exist. They would tell each other secrets over dinner. It warmed something in Adrian he could never quite identify. Getting to know someone after having sex with them was a reversal of the usual arrangement by which the business of intimacy was in the main conducted, but for a variety of reasons, it appealed to him. The flesh, Adrian sometimes pointed out in his workshops, is far less particular than the heart or the mind when it came to finding “suitable” partners. Sex between people who might not otherwise find anything to admire about one another could be quite, well, satisfactory, especially on a time-fixed basis. Whereas, he would likewise observe, there were people who could be attracted in every possible way, intimate in all ways in the conduct of their lives together, but sexually uninspired. These were but a few among the many mysteries his programs dealt with. And Adrian had seen in the faces of
the registrants at Foxwoods, in the small talk of the NAFLA conferees, in the body language of their pairings and couplings and comminglings at the welcome reception the night before, chitchatting with wines and finger foods, the men in their best business-casual attire, the women wanting to look professional but sexy—he had seen it all—the whole register of human want and willingness and desire.