Circle of Three (11 page)

“Jess.”

“I wanted to show her. Show you, too. And all I did was ruin
my
mother’s pretty little farmhouse. Don’t you think that’s funny?” He came closer. “Hey, Carrie. Don’t cry. I didn’t tell you that to make you sad.”

Where was the bitterness, why wasn’t he angry? “Sorry—I cry at everything. Ruth’s back,” I whispered, hearing the car on the hill. “I don’t know what to say to you. Give me some time, Jess. To think of something besides ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m so sick of telling you I’m sorry.” I found my coat and went outside to meet Ruth.

What would I do with this new knowledge? He was right,
it was funny. And so sad. I wished he hadn’t told me—and yet I always knew it. In the car, Ruth thought I was weeping for Stephen. She tried her best to comfort me. The twin absurdities almost did me in: Jess spoiling his house for my mother’s sake, me finding consolation in the lyrics of Belle, formerly of the Storm Sewer Troupers. Oh, my heart could melt with tenderness sometimes. Even when I was drowning, going down for the last time, the people I loved saved me from touching bottom. And lately, thin streaks of happiness had been scoring the dark at lengthy intervals, zigzag spurts of hope in the black sky, reminding me that I was getting better. I was.

This is what happened.

Ruth had just turned five, the sweetest, brightest little girl, the reason for my life. For Stephen and me, the best was ending, if best meant the time for believing your life was a rising line, everything gradually improving, enlarging, like a stock market graphic in good times. My expectations had begun to diminish in the early years after Ruth was born, a time that coincided with Stephen’s retreat, the start of his metamorphosis into the subdued, closed-off man he would be until he died. It’s ironic that what attracted me in the beginning was what repelled me in the end, and that was no one’s fault but mine. I profoundly misunderstood him. So—the best was over, but I didn’t
know
it was over because I was living in it, I was in the distraught but hopeful stage, when repairing our married lives still seemed possible, if only because the alternative was unthinkable. Leave my baby fatherless? Not if I could help it. And I still had energy then, a sense of myself as an actor, a doer. A person who could change.

We’d left Washington the same year Ruth was born, moved to Chicago for Stephen’s new teaching appointment. That he wasn’t going to set the math world on fire, either as a theorist or a teacher, was another dawning downer around that time, and I didn’t appreciate until too late how much his
professional failures demoralized him. I should have, but I’d made another wrong presumption—that wife and child were the main ingredients in a happy man’s life. Not in Stephen’s. But his childhood was awful, one loss after another; how could he not be a sad man, a careful, withholding, brittle man?

We’d been planning for weeks to go home for a long weekend—my home, Clayborne—to see my parents, and to go to my fifteen-year high school reunion. A day or two before, we had an argument. I don’t remember what provoked it, just that it was worse than usual because for once Stephen participated in it. Whatever started it, soon enough we were blaming each other for our unhappiness, dredging up old resentments and unveiling new ones, saying hurtful things for no reason except that they were true. When it was over, it seemed that for a change a destination might have been reached, a place where the road might actually fork. We were barely speaking. He refused to go home with me—and that may have been his goal all along, it occurred to me later, since he hated that kind of thing, obligatory social occasions at which, as
husband of
, he was even more peripheral than he wanted to be. In the end Ruth and I went by ourselves, and stayed in my old room in my parents’ house (now the guest room, all traces of young Carrie long since swept away during one of my mother’s remodeling binges). Stephen had to go to a last-minute math conference, I told Mama, and she believed me.

They had the reunion at the Madison Hotel, downtown Clayborne’s finest. What happened seems inevitable now, but at the time, every minute unfolded like a slow surprise, the revelation of a complicated secret. Jess and I hadn’t kept in touch, no Christmas cards, no wedding congratulations; when he and Bonnie divorced, I wrote him a very short note saying I was sorry, but then I tore it up. We hadn’t seen each other since the year after our high school graduation.

We shook hands cordially in a group of people shaking hands the same way. Chameleons, we were, blending right
in. We did it so well, even
I
didn’t suspect us. For half the night we did a dance of separating and coming together, parting and finding, until at last we just stayed put—for me, a matter of giving up pretending I wanted to be anywhere else.

It wasn’t that we picked up where we’d left off, as if the intervening fifteen years had never happened. For one thing, Jess had changed. Obviously—he was thirty-three, not eighteen—but it was more than that. His house wasn’t the only thing he’d toned down, I see now; he’d done it to himself, too—tried to. He’d moderated himself, conventionalized himself—those aren’t the right words, I can’t describe the new phenomenon of Jess. Anyway, the important thing is that it didn’t matter, because it didn’t work. I saw through his dark suit and paisley tie then, his side-parted hair and his sober, diffident manner, and I still do.

We talked. I told him everything I could about my life except that I wasn’t happy. Which meant I had to leave out a lot. He did the same, scrupulously avoiding all but the most general references to his ex-wife. We never danced, never touched. We stayed to the end, through the toasts and jokes and speeches and prizes. He walked me to my car and we said good-bye. “’Bye, Jess.” “Good night, Carrie.” We touched hands, and he said, “Or you could come home with me,” and I said, “All right,” and we got in his car and drove to his house.

It was a soft June night, heat lightning in the distance, I remember, and no moon but a skyful of stars. If that matters. One looks for culprits in retrospect, villains to blame, even inanimate ones, anything to spread the blame around. When it was over, I remember wishing I’d had too much to drink so I could add alcohol to my litany of motivations. But no luck: I was sober and clearheaded, and everything I did was deliberate and on purpose. There. Mea culpa can’t be any more ecumenical than that.

I hope I haven’t passed any of this sexual guilt down to Ruth. I don’t even know where it comes from. Litany, meaculpa,
ecumenical—I’m not even a Catholic! And what about this—the only consolation I found in the aftermath of sleeping with Jess came from knowing that at least I hadn’t enjoyed it. At least it wasn’t a transcendent experience for either of us. The night ended in awkwardness and sorrow, and I suffered for it long after with regret and depression and guilt. My mother didn’t teach me this, did she? I’m accustomed to blaming her for most of my flaws, in particular my failures of courage; but if she’s in here, it’s not as a towering moral figure. Maybe a social one. The goddess of snobbery, observing a tawdry one-nighter.

We never made it upstairs. Looking back, I wondered if Jess had been afraid from the beginning it wouldn’t work, and had made love with me on the couch in his living room to give me less time to think. If so, that broke my heart, because it was so unlike him. Neither of us pretended we’d come to his house to talk. We were kissing before we were all the way through the door, deep, passionate kisses that felt like the past and present coming together, as if the years in between didn’t exist. We hardly talked at all—how could we? Everything depended on no words being spoken. In the end, though, it was our guilty, unnatural silence that helped break the spell. I disengaged; went cold. It wasn’t a return to sanity; more a gathering hopelessness, like a dark, dirty fog blearing a prospect that had been bright and sharp seconds ago. This couldn’t work, it hurt too many people. The deeper we went, the more irredeemable it felt. I started to cry before it was over.

Jess stopped, put his clothes on, told me he would drive me back to my car. Before that, I have no idea what it meant to him. Did he like it, did he think we were good together? I don’t think so. It was too full of shadows, and too frantic at the end. I remember the kissing more than the sex. I think my brain shut down when he came inside me, I think it was just too much. Too much. Now I can say it happened too soon, that I was still involved in my marriage, that by no means had I severed emotional ties to Stephen, that I wasn’t
ready for another man, even Jess, especially Jess. But at the time, it only felt like a calamity.

The rest is an embarrassing blur. I kept apologizing—he got quieter and quieter. I promised never to hurt him again—he said that wasn’t possible. I cried some more. Understandably, he didn’t want to prolong the conversation. He made me get out of his car and into mine, but I kept stalling. I wanted to comfort him and I wanted him to forgive me. Stupid, selfish, impossible.

For years I thought,
What a drip I was
. What a
drip
. I wished Jess had gotten angry, or
shown
it if he was angry, because at least that would’ve sharpened the squishy, drippy edges, given us something
meaty
to look back on, something to sink our teeth into. Really I wanted it all ways—for it not to have happened, for it to have happened and been wonderful, or for it to have happened and been awful, but with dignity. Instead I got the worst of all the possibilities.

I never told Stephen. He already knew about Jess; my “high school sweetheart,” I’d called him, and once I’d gone so far as to say, “I guess I was in love with him.” He took my casualness at face value, never questioned it or probed deeper. I would have. If Stephen had loved someone before me, I’d have wanted to know everything. What was she like, why did you like her, how did it end? His disinterest in the details of Jess was typical, though; one might even say emblematic.

On the airplane ride home, I made a decision to rededicate myself to making my marriage work. Something good might still come from the debacle with Jess, I reasoned, and besides, I owed it to Ruth—good as gold, chattering to herself as she turned the pages of a book, her feet sticking straight out in the patent leather Mary Janes her grandmother had bought her. The thought that I might have jeopardized my baby’s safe, stable world froze me with horror. Anything, anything I had to do to keep the family together was worth it. No sinner ever embraced her penance more willingly.

I saw a therapist, who told me I was depressed and prescribed
pills. I started to feel better. A time came, when Ruth was about eight, when Stephen made the supreme sacrifice and went with me to couples counseling. For four months, after which he declared our marriage “cured” and gave me an emerald ring for our anniversary. And that was the end of that.

Jess is still my one and only…what is the word…indiscretion. I hated it that I had been unfaithful, that I could never again claim fidelity and truthfulness as virtues of mine. But over the years my harsh judgment faded, as those things do, and I forgave myself, pretty much. Then all that was left was loss.

Deep down, though, I was always glad it was him. I’ve been drawn to other men from time to time, but I never gave in to the attraction. Self-serving, I know, but I do think, if you’re going to cheat on your husband, you should at least have the decency to do it with a man you’ve loved all your life.

I
F
, G
OD FORBID,
you had to go in a nursing home, Cedar Hill was probably as good as most. At least it was new; I could stop worrying about sticking George (or him sticking me) in Pacific Acres, the depressing, decaying, god-awful excuse for a rest home out on Route 15, Clayborne’s best about forty years ago. Cedar Hill was like a funeral home—it looked a lot nicer than its neighbors. I guess they were trying for a luxurious estate look with all the gray stone and the wood shingles, but it didn’t work. The wheelchair ramps gave it away, and the black rubber floor mats and the automatic sliding doors. And all that mulch—my Lord, to have the mulch concession at Cedar Hill. In six months you could retire and move to Florida.

Helen Mintz’s room was on the third floor of A wing. Birdie and I signed in at the front desk as usual, where there was a new girl on who didn’t recognize us. “Why would a pretty young girl like that want to work in a place like this?” Birdie said as we went down the two-wheelchair-wide, mauve-carpeted corridor.

“Why would anybody.” I lowered my voice at the elevator bank, where four or five old ladies in wheelchairs or on walkers waited in silence. Like cows, I thought unkindly, patient and dumb. “Thank God
somebody
wants to,” I said
close to Birdie’s ear. “I couldn’t do it, I’m too mean. They’re better than we are, Bird, that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed automatically. But come to think of it, Birdie would make a pretty good caretaker of the old and dotty, whose needs couldn’t be that complicated—bathing, feeding, changing, medicating. I could see her doing all that with a lot of quick movements, a lot of wasted nervous energy. And all the time she did it, she’d never stop talking.

The elevator finally came. It took forever to get all the old ladies on board, and it was a miracle nobody’s wheelchair got stuck on anybody else’s, but there were a lot of close calls. I caught Birdie’s eye after we finally got wedged in among all the canes and brittle hips and motorized chairs, and we had to look away. It’s not the humor, it’s the horror. I’m sorry, but what can you do but laugh?

Helen’s door was ajar. “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?” No answer, but that didn’t mean anything. Birdie pushed open the door to the tiny sitting room, overstuffed with furniture and reeking of air freshener. The TV was on without the sound. “Helen? Yoo-hoo!”

A weak voice from the bedroom, “Hello?”

We went in, and Birdie cried, “Hi! Well, don’t you look smart!”

“Hey, Helen, how are you?” I said with a great big smile. “Good, he’s not here,” I muttered, stripping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat. Hot, hot, it had to be eighty degrees in the room.

“Lord, yes,” Birdie muttered back, and advanced on the bed to give Helen a hug. “Hi, honey, how you doing? You look so pretty! Is that a new peignoir? We always said pink was your color. You look wonderful, I bet you just got your hair done. It’s nice, I like that shade of rinse.”

I leaned over from the other side of the bed. “Hey, Helen, it’s Dana.”

“Dana.” She blinked her thin-lashed eyes. Impossible to say if she knew me or not.

“Bird and I came to see you. It’s been about three weeks since we were here last time, remember?”

“Why, I surely do, I surely do. How have you been?” She was nothing but a china doll, frail and brittle against the fat pillows behind her. The bluish hair was a wig, I saw up close, prissy marcel waves stacked on either side of a low part, freakish-looking above the spotty, deep-grooved, canvas brown that Helen’s face has turned into.

She used to have long wavy chestnut hair, and she wore it down and loose until she turned fifty. Then, “I’m too old for long hair,” she announced one day at bridge club, and the next week she came back with it all cut off. It looked so cute and young, one by one we all got ours cut off, too. Oh, Helen used to be the style setter at the bridge club. Such a lady. Just last fall, she’d’ve played hostess from her steel bed, or more likely her wheelchair, seeing to it that we had chairs and mints and cans of Coca-Cola, taking the lead in the gay conversation. Today Birdie and I found seats on our own, and all the talk started with us. All poor Helen could manage was, “Oh, is that right. Well, you don’t
mean
it,” with a sweet-faced smile.

Birdie plunged in with all her news, then all the news about everybody else she could think of. She forgot about Eunice. “Eunice had a hysterectomy,” I mentioned when she paused to take a breath. Helen and Eunice Shavers had been bridge partners for thirty years—same as Birdie and me. “She said it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, Henry’s
still
not interested.”

Birdie cackled. Helen smiled and nodded. “Oh, is that
right
.”

“Dana’s running for president of the women’s club,” Birdie informed her next. “Nobody can talk her out of it.”

“Most people don’t want to talk me out of it.”

“Sensible people can’t talk her out of it.”

“Some people are just jealous.”

“Some people choose to go blind and deaf so they can’t see the handwriting on the wall. Pride goeth before a fall.”

“Oh, dry up.”

Helen smiled, eyes peacefully drifting back and forth between Birdie and me. I think she knew us then, just in that second. We had little spitting contests all the time, we were known for them at the bridge club. I think this one helped jog Helen’s mind and we finally registered on her:
Oh, it’s you two
.

She used to be sharp as a tack. She’d volunteer at the drop of a hat at the hospital, the cancer auction, hospice, the Red Cross. A real dynamo, even if it was just to get out of the house. Years ago the four of us, Helen, Eunice Shavers, Birdie, and I, went to Richmond for a couple of days, stayed at the Jefferson Hotel, went shopping, saw a show, a real ladies’weekend. Saturday night in the hotel bar, we were sitting around yakking, carrying on, enjoying ourselves. Feeling no pain. A man sidled up and started talking to Eunice by herself. Now Eunice is normally a levelheaded woman, but that night she was feeling even less pain than the rest of us. They carried on in private until it got late, time to go. She’ll deny it to her dying day, but she was ready to go off with that man. “We’re leaving,” we kept telling her, but she wouldn’t budge.

Helen saved the day. I can still see her herding that man away from Eunice, butting in between them like a sheepdog, chest out, chin up. He was a slick-looking character with silvery hair and a green cashmere sport coat; he sold golf equipment, I remember. He and Helen had words. We never knew what she said to him; afterward, she’d only say, “I called on his better instincts.” But it did the trick—Mr. Green Jacket paid the tab for everybody, kissed Eunice on the hand, and said good night. And that was Helen for you, efficient as hell but always a lady. I always wished I had that combination.

Already she was slipping back into her own world. “Carrie’s working for Brian Wright now,” I told her in a loud voice. “You remember him, he runs that adult education program
where we took the cooking class. You and Maxine Stubbs and I, about two years ago?”

“Yes, oh, yes.”

“Doesn’t pay much, but Brian’s such a go-getter, I’ve got high hopes for Carrie’s advancement. That job could take her anywhere. You know she lost her husband,” I reminded Helen, who smiled and said, “Oh, is that
right
.” “And Ruth’s working at a health food store,” I went on determinedly, “that Palace of something or other on Remington Avenue. Loves it. She’s learning to drive. Worries Carrie to death. It all comes around, doesn’t it? I was a nervous wreck when
she
was fifteen and learning. Ruth’s fine, though, and at least she doesn’t smoke.”

“That you know of,” Birdie said.

“That I know of.”

Birdie’s daughter’s oldest boy, Jason, took dope and who knows what else before getting thrown out of his fancy prep school in Minneapolis, three or four years ago now. I guess he’s straightened out since then, but Birdie was still touchy when it came to other people’s grandchildren’s wholesome accomplishments. I tried to be sensitive, but every once in a while I couldn’t resist bragging about Ruth. The perfect teenager. How she turned out so well considering how permissive Carrie can be—well, that’s a mystery. But a good one, so I don’t examine it too closely. Wouldn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Birdie said, “What do you hear from Raymond, Helen?”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake.” I should’ve seen that coming, should’ve followed her train of thought and headed it off.

“What? What did I say? Oh.” Birdie saw Helen’s eyes fill with tears, and sent me a look of distress. Old fool. Anybody knew the surest way to make Helen cry was to mention her son Raymond’s name. He lived in Florida now, Key West or one of those places where gays congregate; he never visited, and as far as I knew he never even called. Or if he did call, his poor mama was in no shape to remember it.

“Helen, honey?” Birdie got up and hovered over her, patting her fluttering hands. “There, now. There, now, sweetheart.” The tears kept coming, but by now Helen probably didn’t even know what she was crying about, she just knew she was sad. Dear God, I thought, give me the strength to kill myself. Don’t let me get this way, I swear I’ll blow my brains out first. Not a very Christian prayer, but I didn’t mean it anyway. I used to say things like that all the time—“I’ll swallow weed killer before I’ll end up senile and in a diaper.” Funny, though, the older you get, the more you lose interest in disposing of yourself. It ought to work the other way around.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

Calvin Mintz filled the doorway with his wide, plaid-shirted bulk. A man that age ought to’ve started to shrink by now, but if Cal had lost an inch or a pound in the last twenty years, I couldn’t see it. Old age hadn’t sweetened his temper any, either. He looked mad as a bear.

“Why, hello, Calvin,” Birdie chirped. “Helen’s fine, she’s just fine. Aren’t you, honey? Look who’s here to see you, it’s Calvin.”

Helen gave a tired smile, batting her eyes while Birdie wiped her cheeks with a hankie. I got up and gave Cal my side of the bed. He didn’t touch or kiss his wife. He stood over her, a hulking man with a fleshy face and invisible lips, small eyes as dark and quick as Birdie’s but much more purposeful. A mean face, I always thought. He came to see Helen every day, sat with her from morning to night. Such devotion. Such fidelity. What a shame he hadn’t exhibited either one of those fine traits back when she was sharp enough to appreciate them. I despised him, or any man who was so bottled up, so
stunted
he could only be kind to his wife after she’d lost the capacity to recognize him.

“It’s time for your arts and crafts class, Helen,” he said in a voice that shocked me—so gentle and solicitous, I barely recognized it. “Two o’clock, up and at ’em, that’s my girl.” He stretched his arm back and snapped his thick fingers.
“Oh!” Birdie peeped, realizing he wanted Helen’s bathrobe from the foot of the bed. Bastard—that was more like it. She handed the robe to him and moved around to help, but he turned his back on her and fumbled Helen’s bony, listless arms into it by himself. It was like watching a father dress his little girl.

I looked around for the folded wheelchair and opened it without asking. Cal lifted Helen off the bed and set her in it carefully, straightening her robe where the collar had twisted. “Move,” he said. I was in the way, I was blocking the path to the door, no question about it. His meanness helped me make a decision.

“We’ll come with you,” I said brightly, bending over to look Helen in the eyes. “Won’t that be fun? Birdie and I’ll come with you, honey. We’ll
all
play.”

“Play,” Helen said with happy surprise. She beamed. “Let’s all play.”

Calvin actually swore. Foul, foul man. Birdie looked confused. I spun around and led the way out of the room.

Arts and crafts was exactly as pathetic and depressing as I’d thought it would be.
Kill me, Lord
, I prayed with new energy.
Put me out of my misery before it comes to this.
Eight old ladies, seven in wheelchairs and one sprightly gal on a walker, sat at card tables and learned how to make valentines out of red construction paper and doilies from an eighteen-year-old cheerleader. Well, she might’ve been twenty-two, but not a day older. And “learned” was stretching it. Debbie, the cheerleader, went around making all the ladies’ valentines for them, leaning over their humped, arthritic shoulders with her strong, slender arms, crooning, “Isn’t that pretty? Who’s your valentine to? Bet you’ve got a lot of sweethearts, Margaret, don’t you? Bet you’re a real heartbreaker, aren’t you?” And Margaret would giggle, or Nancy Jo would look vacant, Rebecca would click her dentures.

Calvin wouldn’t let Debbie make Helen’s valentine, of course, no, he had to do it for her, cutting heart shapes out of white lacy doilies and pasting them on bigger, blood-red
paper heart shapes. It would’ve been touching, all that patience and gentleness, if you didn’t know what was what. If you hadn’t listened, off and on for the last thirty-five years, to a hundred stories about Calvin Mintz’s neglect, coldness, and meanness. If he missed his wife, it was because there was nobody around the house to bully anymore. No sympathy from me.
Wallow in it, you SOB
. Calvin and his like, domineering, abusive men, bring out the worst in me.

It was a stupid idea, coming to arts and crafts. Helen didn’t even know we were there. “Let’s go, Bird,” I said. I’d only wanted to yank Calvin’s chain. Mission accomplished, I guessed, although it hadn’t been very satisfying. “Bird?”

She looked up from the absorbing task of gluing half a dozen small red hearts on a big white lace heart. Her gray wool coat dwarfed her; she looked like a bag lady. She looked demented. “Thought I’d make one for Kenny.” That was her youngest grandson. She winked—and the little chill that had begun to steal into my chest melted away. Just for a second—but no, Birdie was okay, she had her faculties, or as many as she ever had. And she was frequently the world’s biggest pain in the you-know-what, but you couldn’t not love her. I didn’t like how she’d looked at that card table, though, squinting at her hearts, turning them around in her stiff fingers while she snipped them out with a pair of child’s scissors. She fit in too well. She looked right at home.