Consenting Adult (12 page)

“This flashback,” Helena Ludwig finally said. “Are you still trying to figure out some way I can avoid it altogether, or just trying to explain how I could make it work better?”

“Oh, Helena, I’m so sorry.” The office suddenly seemed overheated and close. “I wasn’t even thinking about the flashback. I was suddenly caught up in a private train of thought, it has nothing to do with your scene at all, and I do apologize to you.”

“But the scene must be wrong or you wouldn’t have had that private train of thought.”

“In general that’s right, but not this one time.” She looked contrite and felt contrite. Such a lapse of attention would upset any author, especially a young author like Helena Ludwig, who had too much uncertainty about her own work as it was.

“Then how could I rewrite it, do you think?” Helena liked Theresa Lynn, liked working with her on this her second novel, and had never before seen her this tense. It had never occurred to her that Mrs. Lynn might have private tensions, the same kind that she, Helena, so often had, the kind that drove her to the catharsis of writing. Or if not the same kind, then another kind, yet related. All pain was cousin to all other pain, all unhappiness cousin to all other unhappiness. She glanced again at the editor. Tessa Lynn must be in her middle forties, what with her married children, yet she looked years younger. She was pretty but Helena was pretty herself—no envy there. What she did envy was Tessa Lynn’s being so small and being so slim. To anybody like herself, five-eleven in height, thirty pounds overweight, Tessa Lynn was a living rebuke, yet from their first meeting they had been drawn to each other like good workmen on a hard project.

“Should we put this off till you feel better, Mrs. Lynn?” she asked. “We could make another date. You mustn’t feel forced to go on.”

“I’d rather we went on. The point I was raising here, before that detour of mine, was that it’s such a central scene that I wondered why you wanted it in flashback, a week after it happens in time. I think it would be even stronger if it happened
for
the reader, you know, if you showed it as it actually happened.”

“I don’t know why I did it the other way,” Helena said. She picked up two or three pages of her manuscript and began to read. Suddenly she squeezed her eyelids shut and turned away, so that she no longer faced Tessa. “Maybe it’s easier for me to look back on it, even in the book, than to relive it, as if it were freshly happening.”

“Yes, it could be that”

“Not that it’s exactly autobiographical. But it always is partly, isn’t it? Maybe I just couldn’t manage it face to face, even at the typewriter.”

“I think that’s very perceptive,” Tessa said quietly. “I have things like that too, everybody does, not only novelists. Maybe this scene should stay the way it is.”

“I’d like to think about it. I want this part to be right.”

“Think about it for a few days, or better yet, don’t think about it, let it get thought about in your unconscious; that’s where you do your best work, after all. Maybe you’ll want to try it another way, maybe you’ll say, ‘Stet,’ and tell me to go jump.”

“You know the way I usually rush to make any change you suggest.”

“Someday you won’t rush to, and that will mean progress on all fronts.” Tessa consulted a sheet of notes on her desk. There’s one more scene, here it is, the opening of Part Two, page 184.”

“I’m worried about that too,” Helena put in nervously. “It must be way off if both of us think there’s something the matter with it.”

“But I don’t I find it so good that I wondered if you might stay with it a little longer, expand the way Paul faces the fact that love can be a tyranny as well as a blessing.”

“How marvelous that you like it. I worried about it so much and rewrote it so often, I’ve gone dead on it. At the beginning I did think it was a good scene, but then I, well, you know the way doubt hits you. Hits
me.”

“Hits me too.” She thought of Ken and added, “Most of us, in fact.” Ken still remained largely silent about Jeff, as if he were filled with doubt about how she would receive any words and feelings he might offer. She made several attempts to talk about Jeff, but once he had congealed with unwillingness, and on another occasion had only said, “Please, let’s leave it.”

Aloud she said to Helena, “If you’ve already rewritten Paul a lot, it could be the old diminishing returns to go at it once again.”

“I’ll think and not think.” Helena sounded relieved, even happy, and the rest of the session was a concentrate of concern for the manuscript, so that by the time she rose to go, she was confident again, sure that she could make the changes she meant to make.

Tessa escorted her out to the bank of elevators, something she had never done before with Helena, and as she returned alone down the long corridor to her office she thought, That was penance.

As the days fell away toward Thanksgiving, her anxiety grew, tethered and balked while she was actively at work, but always there, crouched and waiting for release, ready to pounce on her mind the moment it idled.

On Friday preceding the holiday week, she turned to Ken as soon as he came in from the office. “We have to talk about next Thursday. There’s just no way to ignore it any longer.”

He fixed himself a drink and flung himself into a large armchair. The loose sprawl of his long legs reminded her of Jeff; she had never noted before how alike father and son were in this gesture. It touched her. Her voice softened and she said, “I think so often, Ken, of what you’ve been going through.”

He lowered his head, eyes closed, his palm raised to stop her. He was tired, bereft of energy. For all the boyish sprawl, he looked old, as if he could no longer summon up the vigor and strength to combat this assailant, knowledge.

She went to the bar table, poured dry vermouth over ice cubes in a wide squat glass, and made circles with the glass to chill the drink. The sound of the ice against the crystal—how lighthearted it was. This was the sound of friends and laughter, of people at a party, of people in love and privacy. A nameless yearning awoke in her, to be happy again, to be eager for an evening, to be raising a glass in a moment of congratulation or joy. “Let’s find our own way to feel more cheerful, darling,” she said without looking at him. “Let’s both of us try to.”

He looked up. “You know I’d like that.”

“Maybe we could declare a moratorium for a little while. On everything serious.”

“If people could declare respite at will, they’d be lucky.”

“Yes, they would.” She thought of Jeff stretched out on that couch she had seen in Dr. Dudley’s office, saw his fair head on that stuffed bolster at the end of it, saw him talking up at the ceiling, talking of his young misery and fear. Jeff couldn’t declare any moratorium, not yet, not for now, not for a long time, perhaps for a terrible stretch of time. If there were to be any respite for him, surely his own father and mother ought to be the ones to offer it. Aloud she said, “Let’s try it, Ken? For a few days over the holiday?”

He leaned forward, toward her, his face taut. “Don’t you realize I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving too? I’ve been knocking myself out, just thinking. The minute I turn my light out at night, it starts, the damn thinking and thinking and thinking.”

“I know.”

“It’s not only at night. Every time somebody says the word ‘fag’ I want to hit him.”

“I know,” she repeated. “I can’t bear the word either.” She sounded equable, but thought, Imagine what happens to Jeff when he hears it. And someday when Don knows, when Margie knows, imagine how it will hit at them when they hear “fag” and “fairy” and “queer” and “nance,” and think of their brother.

“So when I think of Jeff here for four days,” Ken went on, “I wonder if I can make a go of it, and that’s the long and short of it.” He sounded almost gentle and she thought, He is adapting a little even though he doesn’t know it. Don’t insist, don’t crowd him. Talk about him and you, not Jeff. It’s easier for him when you don’t talk about Jeff. My God, she thought, here I am, editing my own dialogue with my own husband in a scene about our son. She thought of Helena Ludwig and thought, She’s not the only one who isn’t sure.

“Anyway,” Ken said then, “what makes you think he’ll let it be a moratorium?”

“Maybe he won’t. But I thought I might drive up this Sunday and ask him to try.”

Ken said nothing and she wondered how best to put it to Jeff. There was need for care with him also. It’s more than editing, she thought; it’s all turned into diplomacy. We used to be a family, with the easy give-and-take of a family, but now it’s as if each of us were negotiating on the most delicate of treaties, weighing each word.

She went to her own room to call Jeff, admonishing herself, Not a word about his not writing, not calling.

“It’s me,” she began, “with a good idea.”

“What good idea?”

“I’d like to drive up to the Yellow Barn on Sunday, just me, and treat you to one of their big country dinners.”

There was a moment when he did not speak. Then he said carefully, “You want to talk about am I coming home for Thursday.”

“But not in any you-ought-to way. Nobody’s going to get jammed up over this.”

“Fat chance.”

“A good chance. I mean it.”

“Well, sure, I’ll meet you at the Bam. What time do you think?”

“Around two, unless traffic is too rotten. And, Jeff, I really was leveling with you about not making any big deal about Thursday.”

“If you can help it.”

“I’ll help it.”

“Well, see you.”

I’ll have to help it, she thought as she hung up. Ken will have to help it too, when the time comes. If he’s going to go on banishing Jeff from sight, he will end up by exiling him permanently. The word “exile” pierced her with dread. The one grief she could never absorb was the loss of a child and exile was loss as death was loss. Her brother Will and Amy had lost their son Roddy, a boy of twelve, drowned in a hideous vacation accident on the Colorado River, and though eight years had passed since then, she had never seen Will or Amy since without thinking, They’re not over it yet. They would never be over it; all the remaining years of living would not be enough to heal them. So would it be for her, Tessa Lynn, if ever she were to lose one of her children. If Will and Amy, she suddenly thought, were given their choice, of having Roddy back but homosexual, how they would leap at the chance. Life was all, life was central, everything else was tangential. Pain was tangential, regret, grief, remorse, fear. One’s heart might fill with longing that such and such were not so, but if life continued despite it, one was still a victor. She imagined herself trying to confide in her brother about Jeff, heard how her voice would falter and thicken over the syllables of “homosexual,” but she knew that Will’s face would show only envy. But he’s alive.

Just before she turned off the highway for Placquette, the gray of November skies lifted and the sun came out. She didn’t believe in omens but her spirits lightened. The highways leading from the city were no longer ablaze with the brightness that she loved, a precarious brightness, for the first smashing November rain would hurl the gold and red and amber to the earth and strip the larches and maples and oaks to the ashy tones of early winter. But now as the sun came out, a fresh high wind swept the sky clear of cloud, and a piercing blue replaced it, a celebration of swift change and hope.

As she approached the country-house setting of the Yellow Barn, she saw Jeff striding forward to meet her, and her heart spun with love and longing. This tall beautiful youth, this boy, this young man, was not doomed forever to suffer, he could not be foredoomed to anything. They called out in greeting and he played traffic cop, waving her around the wide front lawn to the vacant property at the side that had been turned into a parking lot

“Jeff, you look grand.”

“That’s the way to talk. How was driving?”

“Easy. Almost no traffic.” She looked at him and laughed again, wondering again if he could have grown taller. Impossible in five weeks, but he did look bigger. Despite the tweed jacket and proper tie prescribed for restaurant appearances, an athlete’s muscularity was there, the fitness of a man in strict training, and a deeper resonance sounded in his voice, almost an authority. “Are you hungry?”

“You better believe it.”

As they ordered, she asked about yesterday’s game and with alacrity Jeff told her all about it, but it was he who at last nudged them back to the accepted reason for her visit. “About Thanksgiving,” he said. “Let’s get into that high grass.”

He said this cheerfully, as if they were friends again, not problem solvers. He let a pause develop and then, without transition, said, “If I went to Yale next year, I wouldn’t have to transfer from old Dudley and start all over someplace else with some other guy.”

“Yale.” It sounded as if she had never heard of anything called Yale.

“Would it make any difference?”

“Of course not. You sound as if it were already decided that you’ll be continuing analysis past June.”

“It isn’t what you’d call ‘decided.’ But those things aren’t rush jobs.”

“I know they’re not, but next June would be eight months, and I had half an idea—”

“Better skip the half ideas.” He said it as if he were trying to ease it for her, but he wasn’t thinking of her. It was Hank and the station wagon that had first told him he was nowhere near ending the analysis. It had been hell telling Dr. Dudley about it, it was still hell to remember it. “It’s me who guesses it’s going to keep on longer than June. That is, if you’ll keep on too.”

“I’ll keep on, no matter how long it takes.”

“It just doesn’t go one, two, three, presto, change-o, you’re cured.”

“I know it doesn’t.” She thought about her next words. “Look, Jeff, you’ve helped me out about what to say about Thanksgiving and your coming home. Things don’t go presto, change-o, for parents either. If we only could all allow a little leeway, a recess from problems.”

“You mean leeway for Dad.”

“For me and Dad.”

“If he’s going to give me that silent treatment.”

“I’m asking you, Jeff, to make allowances for us, if we stumble around or—”