Bound (13 page)

CHAPTER 10

O
LIVER PROMISED HE
WOULD GO
to the nursing home every day, but surely the day that Catherine drove away didn’t count? Who would ever find out? Nobody paid any attention to the guest registry; Grace Harding couldn’t speak. Moreover, she didn’t like him well enough to complain even if she could.

So the day his wife went to Houston, Oliver hosted the Sweetheart at his house. He was sensitive to the first-person plural and didn’t use it. “My dogs,” he said. All but one of his windows could be covered. But through that one, should somebody choose to crawl across the garden and fight away the prickly pyracantha to glimpse, his reckless indiscretion would be on display. Oliver could not deny the heedless thrill of such a thing. He peeled from her sweating body the Sweetheart’s running clothes as if that, too, were part of her exercise routine, on a clock, cardiovascular.

“Your dogs are watching us,” she said, beneath him, cheek pressed to the floor, ponytail wound round his fist.

“They’re very discreet.”

For a second he imagined the possibility of Catherine’s not coming home. Her dedication to the mystery of the strange girl—both the one from the past, who had died, and the one in some possible future—seemed nearly providential. In a flash he relocated the Sweetheart to this house, saw her sleeping head beside his, felt her bare feet on his calves. Another chapter. A new life. He could fall back upon this fantasy at any moment, spool it out beneath his real life like an ongoing film or dream in which he played the lead. How was it that anyone could be satisfied with only one story? With the surface, and nothing beneath it? With the familiar and repetitive, routine equaling the death of any plausible adventure?

It was still daylight when the Sweetheart left, so Oliver decided to fulfill his promise to Catherine. He brought with him to the nursing home a new computer; he’d already ascertained building-wide Internet access. This was a kindness. It was also a project with a tangible series of time-killing steps, and an outcome he could report to his wife. Proof of many things about himself that he felt he needed to prove in maintaining his nonfantasy life.

“You’re the one who said I should gather information,” Catherine told him as she packed for her trip. “You’re the one who said find out all the facts.” True, but he hadn’t said she should go to Houston.

“I hate ‘you’re the one’ prologues. And I can’t be responsible for another child,” he added. Pathetic.

Catherine had stared at him calmly. “But I can’t just ignore her, can I? I mean, really?” It was while she was arranging her toiletries that she added, “And how responsible, actually, are you for those other two?” Touché, Oliver supposed. Hauling Miriam’s trashy companion out of her life hardly qualified as parental triumph.

Moreover, he was arguing against the trip only because he relished the freedom it provided him.

“Is this your brother perhaps?” pandered the Haitian nurse at the home. Her teeth were blindingly white. “Come to see you, Miss Grace?” Neither Oliver nor his mother-in-law corrected her; the question wasn’t the sort that either of them bothered acknowledging, tedious noise meant to be flattering. And how difficult it had always been for Professor Harding to say those words “son-in-law,” even when she could speak.

Not friends, not strangers, not blood relations. Yet also not mere acquaintances. What did you name this thing they shared? She might be his enemy, Oliver decided, another one like his first wife YaYa, an adversary so entrenched he nearly could respect her. Nearly.

His mother-in-law’s room held various pieces of her old life: a desk, bookcase, reading chair, lamp, and on the walls, where others would have hung studio photos of grandchildren and weddings and pets, Dr. Harding had hung her academic degrees. B.A., M.A., Ph.D.: all from institutions far away and highly celebrated. “It’s like she’s criticizing me,” Catherine would lament. “Me, with just my lousy old one degree.” Her bachelor’s was from the local institution where her mother had taught; Catherine claimed that her mother was saying something to her without saying anything. But Oliver could understand wanting to display her pedigree. She’d been unusual, for her time. Minus the bed, the room would have looked a lot like Dr. Harding’s old office at the university. As if she still held office hours.

Oliver set down the computer he’d brought; it was as advertised: light and portable as a notebook. Grace’s PC was an antique; she’d worked on it for so long there were rubbed-away letters on the keyboard. Oliver had mastered technology as a hedge against growing obsolescent himself. On only one previous occasion had he tried to convince his mother-in-law that she would enjoy the Internet, information-hound that she was. This was before the stroke; loudly she’d disdained the Internet as faddish, yet another juvenile gesture that Oliver himself would, soon enough, get over. Her attitude toward him had always been like that: scornful of, vaguely superior to, the old man trying to be young. The lech, the vain person who required a pedestal, not unlike a few of her male university colleagues, those men who left women their own age in favor of younger, simpler girls, students and acolytes. She looked at him as if to shake a scolding finger:
You ought to know better
. Sometimes at holiday gatherings she would reference the decades that preceded her daughter. “You’ll remember this,” she’d begin, addressing Oliver.

Their first president had been FDR. Catherine’s was JFK.

Catherine’s father had been much more polite and forgiving than his wife. It was as if he were embarrassed for being Oliver’s age, instead of expecting Oliver to suffer the awkwardness. Had it been he, and not Grace Harding, who had ended up at Green Acres, Oliver could imagine stopping by regularly, gladly. They would do what any father- and son-in-law did, sit in companionable silence watching sports on television. That, or take long drives into the country to look for wildlife. Catherine’s father had enjoyed doing that, and Kansas was surprisingly full of creatures.

“That nurse is the type to always be telling you to smile, isn’t she?” he said now.

Grace lifted her head, a weary nod.

He explained what he was doing as he did it, moving aside her monstrosity of a machine to unfold the new laptop, using terminology as a weapon, a foreign language to her ears, and his agility as a way of separating himself from her enfeeblement. She and he finally sat beside one another at her desk, the screen brightening before them.

“Voilà!”

What he did not bargain for was her inability to operate a mouse. How had he not anticipated that? Her signature gesture these days was lifting one hand with the other, right with left. She was competent on the keyboard—in a one-handed sort of way—but she’d never had reason to figure out a mouse, let alone learn it now with her wrong hand. Clearly she enjoyed seeing what Oliver made pop open before her eyes on the monitor, but also clearly she would never manage to make this happen by herself. Well, he would settle for less, then. They would sit like this during his visits, he guiding the cursor to sites she might be interested in, waiting for a nod, him reading aloud or enlarging as she indicated. He took her, like a child, to Houston, Texas, on Google Earth, so that she could imagine Catherine there. Then, when they were back in outer space, looking down at the blue planet and breathing in disconcerting tandem, she typed in
Italy
. And then
Rome
.

Professor Harding’s first sabbatical. Rome in 1968. Except Oliver had only ever heard about it from Catherine, whose memories were a child’s. She was seven that year; everything she could recall were set pieces: her at the local pizzeria amusing the employees by nonsensically chanting
si
or
no
to their questions; Catherine raising a goldfish in the sink of the apartment’s second bath; Catherine wandering the ship deck either crossing over or coming home, thrilled by the monkeys on Gibraltar; Catherine at the Trevi Fountain, wishing she could toss off her shoes and splash around with the local urchins for the tourist coins. “Like in
La Dolce Vita
,” Oliver had commented, and she’d looked at him blankly:
Huh?

His mother-in-law typed in a street name, and then a number. The image pulled short at about a hundred feet above it. She stared intently at the screen. The shadows of pedestrians could be seen from the air. Oliver asked, “Do you recognize the roof?”

She turned to him. It was as near to her as he had been since dancing with her at his wedding reception eighteen years ago (waltzing: they’d grown up having had lessons, unlike his young wife, who simply hung limp on his shoulders, the slow dance of disco-era prom). Grace’s pale blue eyes were filled with tears. Affirmation, he supposed; this was the place.

For the next hour they watched videos on YouTube of home movies and political footage, art shows and tourist ads, any- and everything late-sixties Italian. Eventually Grace retrieved a photo album from her bookcase and showed Oliver pictures of the family in Rome that year. He had not seen these photos before. In them, Grace Harding was the slender young woman in the chic clothing, and Catherine was a little girl. Here was Catherine, sitting on an Italian street curb, eating a gelato with her legs heedlessly splayed, while her modish mother stood behind in a striped dress and sunglasses, smiling condescendingly. An Italian man, caught on the photo’s edge, was giving Grace an appreciative once-over while striding by. Mr. Harding must have enjoyed that, his stylish intellectual wife, his cute daughter. Oliver would have given the woman the same look, he was sure; the little girl he would have ignored, if he’d noticed her at all. He’d have noted and approved the woman’s keeping her figure, post-childbirth.

Maybe that’s all Grace Harding had ever wanted: to have turned Oliver’s head. Her misgivings concerning him might be more interestingly messy than he’d previously believed.

“I was in Rome not too long before this,” he told her. “Nineteen sixty-one.” He and YaYa. Their daughter Mary had probably been conceived there, YaYa somehow neglecting to pack birth control. YaYa who’d hauled two laundry baskets full of clothing to the airport because she couldn’t decide what to pack until the last possible minute. They’d fought the whole two weeks they were abroad, YaYa unhappier than usual when out of a familiar element. She thought the Italians were talking about her and expected Oliver to know what to do about it. To this day, he could not imagine what that would have been: Pick fights? Suddenly, magically, understand Italian? She had been an impossible woman.

“Did I ever tell you about my first wife?” he asked Grace now. When she shook her head, he told her all about YaYa. He hadn’t seen her in more than a decade; she, like him, was only a few years younger than Grace. The only time they had contact was when they exchanged paintings every January. From his daughter Mary, that child conceived accidentally in Rome, he heard nothing. He told Grace that, as well. He Googled his daughter in order to display her work, three galleries’ worth of the massive abstract canvases, their prices astonishingly high.

To whom could he ever fully explain his pride in her, the strange intimacy he felt with this daughter who seemed closest to him precisely because she’d declined to remain attached? He said to his mother-in-law, “I don’t really know her, but when I see her paintings, it seems like we’re in touch.”

While he talked and clicked and scrolled, he realized he was inviting, or perhaps merely allowing, his mother-in-law to pity him. This was not his usual tack—not with her, not with anyone. Catherine always said it was easier, ironically enough, to be with her mother now that she couldn’t speak. She wouldn’t have wished this disability on her, this one or any other, but an element of strain had lifted from their relationship. Oliver was grateful today for that same feeling. Perhaps he should be quiet more often himself; into his mother-in-law’s attentive silence he poured a narrative he had not spoken in many years, maybe ever, illustrated by artwork that only heightened the mystery. They sometimes frightened him, he told Grace. “I might have lost her anyway,” he speculated aloud. “But it didn’t help to divorce her mother just when she was hitting high school. I’ve done that twice, you know. I always thought it was better to stick around until they were through being little kids, but I’m not sure that’s kind.”

Grace still had the Italy photo book open on her lap, her left hand clutching one side, her limp right hand inert as a paperweight on the other. Catherine with sunglasses. Catherine standing dwarfed by the Colosseum. Catherine at a sidewalk café, scowling at a plate of food. But always her more striking mother in the foreground, the true subject of the photos, Catherine as afterthought. That’s how Oliver had felt about his wives and children, when he loved one and tolerated the other. It was last generation’s regard of offspring: better seen than heard. And perhaps only from the point of view of the person taking the photograph, in this instance: the husband.

If Oliver and Catherine had had a child, if they’d produced yet another in the line of daughters, she could be the adolescent age he described. It would be just about time for him to move on.

And there would be the Sweetheart, waiting in the wings.

“I have to go,” he told his mother-in-law abruptly. “I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll check out France, how about that? Or maybe Turkey.” Her mouth hinged open in surprise, but she swiftly clamped it shut.

Outside in the parking lot he sat for a few minutes, staring at the ugly building he’d just left. Originally, he had planned to meet up with the Sweetheart again, this time at her grandparents’ house. She’d said he could bring the dogs; a sleepover, a dive into his fantasy life while his other one ran steadily forward in his absence. But he did not open the glove box to consult his secret cell phone. He would invent something that had detained him; he was a very adroit liar.