Blessing in Disguise (16 page)

She found him in his room, lying on his bed with one arm flung over his eyes as if even the anemic glow from around the edges of the closed Levolors was too much light. Stepping over a crumpled heap of clothes, a slew of audio cassettes, a plate littered with sandwich crusts, she gave the volume knob on the stereo a hard wrench.

The noise ended with a dying squeal, and Chris bolted upright as if he’d been stuck with a pin. “Hey!”

Grace sat down on his bed, her ears ringing, anger making her heart thud. She opened her mouth to light into him; then something stopped her. As if she’d stepped outside of herself, and a kinder, wiser twin were taking over.

She took a deep breath.

“Chris,” she said gently. “Let’s go. Come on, get your jacket.”

“Where?” His eyes narrowed.

“Out.”

“Mom, I have
homework,”
he protested.

She started to say something about how you only have
homework
when you’ve attended
school,
but she managed, just barely, to keep her mouth shut.

“I’ll help you with it later on. Come on, it’s a beautiful day out there, and it’s just going to waste.”

He looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “What about you? How come you’re not working?”

Was that how Chris saw her? Always too busy to spend time with him? And now, with Jack, even more unavailable. Grace felt a swift jab, like a hypodermic needle piercing her. A syringe filled with something more powerful than any drug: the truth.

“I
am
working,” she told him, attempting to drag his limp form off the bed. “If you don’t call hauling a hundred and twenty pounds of dead weight work, I don’t know what is.”

Chris cracked a tiny smile. He swung his legs over the side of the mattress, and his sneakers landed with a thump on the scuffed floor beside the bed.

“Does this have something to do with Jack?” he asked, a suspicious look dawning on his pale, thin face.

“Jack who?”

“Mom, get real.”

“I am. You’re the only man I want to spend the afternoon with.” He didn’t have to be told that Jack was coming over for dinner tonight; that was still hours away.

“You’re acting goofy. Where are we going?” It seemed to dawn on him that her unexpected behavior might have something to do with his cutting school, because she saw him flush suddenly, streaks of color shooting up from the collar of his rumpled blue jersey.

Grace took his limp hand in hers, and squeezed it. His gray-blue eyes regarded her with a new expression, one of wariness mingled with yearning. “The circus,” she told him.

Grace, poised on a narrow steel platform high above the circus ring, thought about the imprisoned writers in China they’d be raising money for at this benefit and wondered if it wouldn’t have been wiser simply to give a large donation. But right now she was trembling so hard she couldn’t have written a check if she’d tried.

Looking down, she could just make out the slim, athletic figure dropping into the seat next to Chris in the front row below. Even from this distance, she recognized the loose-limbed elegance with which he sat, the way the light shone against his thatch of golden hair. Win. What was
he
doing here? How had he even known about this dress rehearsal?

Her nervousness about her trapeze act faded as another kind of anxiety took hold. What did he want? And why, when he could have just picked up the phone to reach her, had he bothered to come uptown to Lincoln Center? On a weekday, no less, when he was always buried in meetings, court appearances, briefs, depositions, every billable minute crammed with work.

It had to be about Chris—Win planning to sweet-talk her into letting Chris spend Christmas with him.

She felt her breath coming in short bursts, her anger rising. Chris had spent
last
Christmas with his dad and grandparents in Macon. This year it was her turn. Of course he’d be
sorry,
he’d say he hadn’t meant to spoil anything. Mr. Who-Me?-I’m-Completely-Innocent. So typical of him, never meaning any harm, never aware of when he
did
hurt people.

Like last May, when she’d told him she was getting Chris a skateboard for his birthday, and Win had gone out and bought him a damn
bicycle.
Of course, once he laid eyes on that Raleigh ten-speed, Chris hardly even
looked
at his skateboard.

To hell with Win,
she thought.

Grace tore her gaze away from her ex-husband and tightened her grip on the trapeze bar. Win, Chris—everything dissolved as she took a deep breath and prepared to swing out, her heart hammering, the muscles in her arms and legs so tight they were almost cramping. Though she’d practiced this move dozens of times, she felt her armpits, her whole body, go sticky with panic. But she’d be damned if she’d let Win see how scared she felt.

She gave a little nod to Emilio, who stood poised on the opposite platform alongside his brother—the two of them, both so swarthy and hairy-chested, they might have been twins. Then she pushed off with the balls of her ballet-slippered feet.

It was as if she were being catapulted into the sun ... blinding spotlights rushing at her, the net below a rippling meridian. At the highest point of the arc made by her swooping body, she seemed to halt in mid-air, suspended motionless for a single heart-stopping moment before Emilio, hanging by his knees from his trapeze bar, reached up to snare her ankles.

And then she was upside down and flying backward with only those hands, like steel manacles encircling her ankles, preventing her from plunging downward. Blood bucketed into her face with the suddenness of a slap, and she felt her spine contracting against the sharp yank of gravity, the ends of her hair whipping up to sting her cheeks. The dense, yeasty odor of animal dung and sawdust swelled up at her like an incoming tide.

Then a second pair of viselike hands caught hold of her and steadied her as she landed on the opposite platform.

Grace felt hot lights on the back of her neck, and looked down at the net suspended not more than a dozen feet above the ring. Would it really have supported her if she’d fallen? And what had made her think that the ease with which she’d tumbled and spun and flipped as a high-school and college gymnast would carry her through into middle age?

All at once, she
felt
every day of her thirty-seven years. Her knees buckled. Tiny white fireflies swarmed at the periphery of her vision. She clutched Emilio’s brother, Ramón, who seemed as relaxed as a cat.

“Much better that time,” he told her. “Not so ... like wood.” He made a swift chopping gesture with his right hand, then smiled so brilliantly she could see the reflection of the spotlights twinkling on his perfect teeth.

She found her gaze wandering downward, looking to see if Win was still watching her.

He was. Stretched comfortably in the first row, an expensive calfskin loafer balanced atop his opposite knee, smiling as if the thought of anything bad happening was the furthest thing from his mind. That was Win. Phi Beta, crew captain at Harvard, top 10 percent at Columbia Law, partner at Horowith, Aikens & Fine after only five years. He
expected
good things to come his way, and he was seldom disappointed.

Maybe he
had
loved her, she thought. As much as he’d been capable of loving. And despite everything, she’d certainly loved him—blindly, naïvely, stupidly believing he would never hurt her.

But that was all ancient history, she told herself firmly.

A ladder plumbed straight down off the platform, and now Grace was backing down it, her feet easily finding the rungs. Below her, a crew of workmen was assembling some sort of elaborate seesaw, and the sounds of electric drills and hammering ricocheted in the vast, tented space. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of an older, heavyset man in a rumpled gray sweatsuit trying desperately to hold his balance atop a rolling seesaw. Norman Mailer? She turned and waved at him, relieved that she wasn’t the only author crazy enough to go out on a limb for the sake of PEN.

Moments later, blessedly earthbound, she found the opening in the shallow wooden barrier that enclosed the ring, and made her way over to Win.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” she greeted him, feeling an odd, spiraling dizziness not unlike the vertigo she’d experienced up on the trapeze.

Her former husband rose to greet her, a tentative smile making him look hardly older than Chris himself—a fair-haired boy hoping to wrangle a special favor from his teacher. He even looked like a collegiate—gray worsted slacks, starched button-down shirt open at the collar, a Fair Isle vest of subtle, overlapping shades of blue.

“I spotted your name in the
Times
among the list of luminaries performing for the PEN benefit. When I called, someone told me about this dress rehearsal.” He smiled. “I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing you in action.”

“You mean, you’re not here about Chris? I thought—” Then she looked around, discovering their son was nowhere in sight. “Where
is
Chris?”

“He said he wanted to have a peek backstage, but I think he was aiming to give us some time alone. Do you have a minute?” Win’s voice, with its faint Southern overtones, soothed her like a remembered melody ... and at the same time alarmed her, because it always seemed to promise more than she knew Win was capable of delivering.

She paused, just long enough to let him know his wish wasn’t necessarily her command, then said, “Sure. Okay. Just let me throw something on.”

“Here.” He snatched up the charcoal cashmere blazer that had been folded over the arm of his seat, offering it to her with a little shrug no doubt meant to disarm her.

Grace hesitated, not wanting to take it. But wouldn’t that make it seem as if she
cared?

She put it on.

Custom-tailored to fit Win’s six-foot frame, it came halfway down to her knees, and smelled endearingly of the Old Spice he’d worn since they were in college together. For some reason, she felt vaguely annoyed by his courtesy, and by the way his eyes kept stopping just north of her collarbone. Too much of a gentleman to gape at her next-to-nakedness, she supposed. Or had her body lost all its appeal as far as he was concerned?

Damn him. Weren’t ex-husbands supposed to be bastards? Well, sure, he was ... only a well-bred one.

“Look, if this is about Christmas,” she blurted, “I don’t think you should have made plans before talking to me.”

“Chris told you that?” Win pushed a hand through his hair—thick, ripely golden, as if he had spent all last summer on a yacht.

Grace was swept with an odd sort of longing ... only she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be
with
Win, or simply
be
him, eternally young and golden and charmed. So effortlessly was he clearing the hurdle of this unexpected—and uncalled-for—appearance that she found it hard to mind the ease with which he was dodging her question now.

“Hey, I’m really sorry, Grace. It was nothing definite. We just talked about it, that’s all. I thought I’d made it clear to him I’d have to speak with you first.” He gave her that ingratiatingly boyish half-smile that had once melted her heart.

“I think he wanted to get back at me.” She sighed, letting her guard down an inch or so. “God only knows why. All I do these days is look at him and I rub him the wrong way.”

“I know what you mean,” Win said with a wry laugh.

But, damnit, he
didn’t
know. ...

It was like when they were married, his being so cavalier about their vows, as if the rules and conventions of others didn’t apply to him.

It all came rushing back to her. Two years ago, that writers’ conference in New Orleans. She’d been so damned eager to get home to Win and Chris, she’d grabbed an earlier flight back to La Guardia, skipping the Paul Prudhomme faculty banquet. Hadn’t even thought to call Win, let him know she was on her way. As she crawled along the Long Island Expressway in a cab with a caved-in seat, all she could think of was how she needed to be with Win, and that all the idiotic things they’d been arguing about lately—like his forever standing her up at the very last minute, claiming too much work at the office and leaving her with an extra ticket, or a canceled dinner reservation—weren’t really so important. They’d work it out somehow, take a long vacation, get counseling, something.

And then home, dashing up three flights rather than waiting for the elevator to appear, which, like everything about their Central Park West prewar, was prone to breakdowns. To someone else it would have seemed funny, like something out of a Feydeau farce, her bursting in, breathless, calling out, “Win! Chris! I’m home! Where is everybody?” ... and Win appearing at the door to their bedroom, ashen-faced, frantically clutching his bathrobe about him, stammering a strained greeting.

It took a moment to hit her. Even while she could see quite clearly, through the partially open bedroom door, a flurry of blond hair, white panties, clothes being thrown over pale limbs, she remembered thinking quite calmly.
It’s awfully early for him to be in bed, not quite nine. He must be really wiped out from this Hashimoto case. ...

Then suddenly she thought:
Nancy.
There could be no mistaking her, the woman she’d half-glimpsed through the bedroom door. Her dear friend, Nancy Jerace, wife of Sam Jerace—their next-door neighbor from way back when she and Win had lived in that dreadful sixth-floor walk-up on East Seventy-eighth. Nancy had been the matron of honor at her wedding (much to Sissy’s annoyance); Grace and Win had been named godparents of Nancy and Sam’s firstborn, Jess. And every August since Chris’s birth, they’d rented the same beach house on Fire Island, sharing each other’s kids, washing each other’s sandy clothes, taking turns riding their bikes to the market. ...

The pain had come crashing in. Fierce, pitiless, slamming down on her head, her chest, so she had to grab hold of a table to keep from losing balance.
Oh, God ... oh God oh God ...

A cheap one-nighter, that she might have been able to forgive. A brief affair with one of the long-legged, narrow-hipped secretaries that seemed to populate Win’s offices. But Nancy? All at once she’d been struck by the enormity of it, the intricacy, the lies piled one atop another, months’, maybe even years’ worth.