Crooked Little Heart (35 page)

She called Rae.

“Can we go for a walk?” she asked. “Do you have plans for today?”

“Well,” said Rae, “I have to finish a couple of weavings by the end of next week.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. Her voice quavered slightly, and she cleared her throat to steady it.

“Come over!” said Rae. “We can talk while I weave.”

But Elizabeth said no, no. Rae needed to work. And she had work to do in the garden.

T
HE
fog rolled in. Elizabeth was glad for the thick mist, through which only a weak and distant light shone. Most people thought of sunshine as being great weather, but sunshine was pitiless. You could see every pore. Fog, though, was a cloak for the psyche. The poor old mind had so much to do all day, all its machinations and things to remember, its fear, the incessant juggling; God, it was so great to stop.

She began to pull the weeds that grew around the roses. Once she looked up at the window of James’s study and saw that he was watching her solemnly. Then he smiled and waved. She waved back. He bent his head, as if in prayer, returning to his keyboard. She studied her succulents, with their leathery purple-black leaves. They looked like something you’d find in an S-and-M fern bar. She noticed a little purple guy who seemed a bit dry, and as if pouring an old ancient mariner another rye at the bar, she gave him a little water, imagined him closing his eyes and inhaling deeply with relief.

A
LL
that day and the next, Elizabeth guarded the words that had recently flowed so freely. Her voice got tight first, and then James’s followed, although life went on; the cooking continued, the serving, eating, cleaning. She had learned over the years that you didn’t mess with the surface when things were like this, because that was all that was left. So there was no more yelling. All the fluidity that was their life
together had hardened; if one of them yelled it might crack them both, leaving shards on the floor to step on. They needed a mutuality, anything that might bring them back into the same world, onto the same side, something to bat around together. But Rosie went off with Simone to the sectionals in Palo Alto, and the heartbeat of the house was more and more arrhythmic.

A belly laugh could have rerhythmed the house. But there wasn’t one. The absence of what was supposed to be happening filled the house. They kept skirting this absence, which sat in the middle of the living room floor under a drop cloth; they gave it as wide a berth as possible.

R
OSIE
checked in from Palo Alto. She had lost in the quarterfinals of the singles to someone ranked higher than she, and she had played great. She and Simone had won their quarterfinal doubles match. This was the first tournament in which Simone had played since her miscarriage scare; her doctor had said it was fine to play, and she was playing beautifully. “How are you?” Rosie asked.

“Fine, darling,” said Elizabeth.

But Rosie did not believe her. She could hear something in her mother’s voice, a nervousness, but she didn’t press because she didn’t want to come home. She was having too much fun. She hated herself for feeling this.

E
LIZABETH
stood at the phone for a moment before hanging it up, and then she walked toward James’s study, wanting to reach out and give him some affection. But when she stepped inside, he barely looked up, even though he said, “Hello,” nicely. She looked at his back for a minute.

“Whatcha doing?” she said.

He cleared his throat and did not look at her. “Working.”

“I’m just missing everyone, James. I feel so lonely tonight.”

He began to shuffle things around on his desk, shoving a stack of notes over to one side, gathering loose paper clips together with a cupped hand.

“I’m sorry about what I said. About Mel and New York.”

“You know what?” he said, his face pinched and rather cold. “We
live together and we’re close, and yet you say these things that really undermine me.” James shook his head. “I want to talk about this,” he said. “But I need to press on right now. I need to get this work done.”

It was very scary. She felt once again how fragile their relationship was. There was such fear in not knowing how, when a retreat starts, it will ever end or ever reverse itself. And the hole was so huge, the hole of their discontinuity. Their marriage was a glass mountain, and here they had slid to the bottom, and she wanted to start climbing back up, with him climbing back on the other side, and they would check on each other’s progress, and there would be the very gradual getting back together. But no one took the first step uphill. She believed this would happen, because it always had, but two days later they were still sleeping on opposite edges of the bed.

S
IMONE
was over for dinner after the girls got back from Palo Alto. Rosie looked into her mother’s face and tried to feel connected but her mother just looked kind, maybe a little sad. The eggs her mother was serving them from a platter were speckled black with bacon grease.

Simone began flinging herself around in conversation, the way she used to fling her body around. She ate like a horse, like a big fat peasant housewife in the Renaissance, and Rosie sneaked a glance down at her protruding belly, at the baby who was growing inside like a barnacle.

Simone reached for another piece of toast and spread an enormous amount of jam on it with elaborate care, in a back and forth motion like a carpenter spreading cement onto bricks. Taking a bite, she complimented Elizabeth for making such great toast, Rosie for having played so well that day, James for being such a famous writer.

Rosie was grateful for all that energy, which was filling the silences that had erupted in her parents’ lives like craters on the moon.

Simone pointed a crisp strip of bacon at James. “It must be fun to be famous,” Simone was saying to him, and Rosie saw that he was pleased, although it made him feel shy. “I have dreams of being famous myself,” she said. “For being an actress. I would love to win an Oscar. I’m not sure what I would say in my speech,” she said. “Because I’m not exactly sure what would move people most.

“I’m going to always make sure I’m not too selfish,” she continued, fluttering her eyelashes with indignation at the very thought, and James and Elizabeth exchanged a look of pleasure. Hope or something like it
flickered like electricity inside Rosie—oh, they were loving each other again right that moment.

She turned to James and opened her mouth to speak, but Simone spoke first. “If you’re an actress, you usually have to marry a slime-ball.”

James turned to Simone. “Do you really imagine yourself married to a slimeball?”

“I think it goes with the territory, to tell you the truth, James. He’s rich, probably, let’s say, but he has affairs and he’ll beat me.”

In her mind Rosie suddenly saw a man raise his fist to strike Simone, and she cried out, “No!” But Simone studied the candle flame, mesmerized. “Nice people don’t marry actresses,” she said. “They marry housewives.”

T
HAT
night after dinner, when Simone had gone home and Rosie was up in her room, she listened to her parents through the wall connecting them.

“I’m not in the mood, Elizabeth. I’m tired,” said James. “I just want to get some sleep.”

Here we go again, thought Rosie, lying on her bed with the door open, listening. She picked at her already ragged cuticles, at the tiny bumps on her face, then clasped her hands behind her neck so that her elbows covered her ears.

“So what’s wrong with that?” she heard James ask, sometime later. “He’s my goddamn
employer!
”

“What’s wrong is that Mel’s a monster. He’s Klaus Barbie. You get blackmailed by him and then you kiss his ass …”

Their voices were rising and rising, sliding around the walls into her brain.

“I do not kiss his ass. I just try to get him to let me know if the piece is going to run or not.”

“Then why do you always feel disgusting afterward?”

“How do you know I feel disgusting after?”

“Because you always go in and eat too much for the rest of that day. And you always want to have sex—or else refuse my advances—every night until you hear.”

“Stop it!” Rosie finally screamed. “Stop it!”

The house was quiet again. “God,” Rosie muttered. She scanned her room until her eyes rested on the photograph of her daddy, in the crummy old chair outside, smiling, gentle. He would never have yelled in such a pathetic way. He was always so dignified. Of course, maybe if he had lived to see her as a teenager …

She began to cry.

After a few minutes, she sniffled and picked up the book she was reading. It was about a beautiful old dog who’d gotten rabies. She wanted to go in and ask her mother if they’d ever had a dog; her dad had liked dogs, hadn’t he? But she knew better than to go into the bedroom now. She looked back at the photo of Andrew.

R
AE
called the next morning with desperation in her voice, and it bailed Elizabeth out, gave her something to do.

“Come over and garden with me,” Elizabeth insisted.

“I can’t,” said Rae. “I’ve discovered this little barbecue place that delivers, although unfortunately they won’t come more than three times a day.”

“Oh, honey. What’s the matter?”

“I called Mike.”

“Oh, no, no. What did he say?”

“He said he thought about me every day, that he’d been going crazy.”

“And what did you say?”

“I asked him to come over for dinner tonight. He said he could come tomorrow.”

“See? It’s never, never what or when you want. You want to see him tonight? Well, forget it. He needs to be in control.”

“But it was such short notice.”

“I’m coming to get you. There’s thirty-six hours until tomorrow night. And you need to really think about this.”

“I just really want to see him.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“J
AMES
,” said Elizabeth, in the doorway of his study, “Rae called Mike.”

“Was he home?” James asked. Elizabeth nodded. “Oh, shit. What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to go keep her company. Maybe we’ll go for a walk.”

“Okay. Tell her to hold out for cherish.” It was their code phrase for Rae. His eyes met hers.

“Okay. I’ll tell her.”

“I cherish you, Elizabeth.”

“I know you do.”

“It’s just that I have a bad personality.”

She came over to the desk and bent down to kiss the back of his head, and he reached behind him to pull her closer so that her nose was buried in his neck, and she smelled the faint scent of sweat, of James. She noticed him sneak a look at the page before him, but she didn’t pull away. The smell of his neck soothed her.

“I’m scared there’s something wrong with me, James.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Elizabeth. There’s nothing that wouldn’t get a great deal better if I wasn’t such a total asshole.”

E
LIZABETH
and Rae walked on the beach in the fog. Rae would have walked hand and hand if Elizabeth had let her. Neither of them said anything.

“The pain of being alone is so big sometimes,” said Rae. “It’s oceanic. Sometimes it’s dull and doesn’t command much attention. But right now it’s acute. I feel flayed.”

“I know.”

“But you don’t. You’ve had two great husbands.”

“Yeah, and one died violently, and one is a writer. But I never found a career. You’ve had this wonderful artistic life and lots of success. Everyone loves you, and they love your work. I envy that so much.”

“Oh, Elizabeth. I’m just dying. I want Mike to hold me.”

Farther down the beach, walkers turned into dream figures, shadowy and insubstantial.

“Let’s look at Mike for a second, okay, Rae? He always looked like he was about to become a giver, right? I mean, that’s what he does for a living. Of course, Mike as a professional giver and healer is like Richard Nixon as a Quaker.”

Rae laughed quietly.

“You’re a moth to the flame, though. Like Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football. Because that kind of inconsistency is always going to remind you in some really complicated way of your childhood. You get to hear ‘Home, Home on the Range’ playing softly in the background.”

“It’s better than being empty-handed.”

“Rae. It’s the call to the grave.”

“Maybe so,” said Rae. “But it also sounds like the dinner bell.” They trudged along the wet sand, the fog protecting them, masking them, as if it were trying to keep them in a dream.

R
OSIE
got on her bike that foggy afternoon and started off down the road not knowing where she was headed. She was dressed all in black, from her black high-top sneakers to James’s Giants cap. She thought about going to the club, but it was no fun when Peter wasn’t around. He would be back in a week or so, and she fantasized about their reunion. She pedaled aimlessly along the sidewalks of her neighborhood, waving to acquaintances and to people she knew even less well, people she knew by sight but not by name.

Peter always gave her a bear hug when he’d been gone, then stepped back to size her up and see if she’d grown, even if it had just been a couple of weeks. It was one of their little jokes, something a father who traveled a lot would do. She smiled on the bike, peering up into his beautiful baby blue eyes, grinning with shyness and with being glad to see him. But he was glowering back, and she caught her breath. God, what if there was a message waiting for him on his answering machine? “Someone should tell you that one of your students
cheats
,” the message would say. “Rosie Ferguson cheats, she cheated against my kid. You shouldn’t be the last to know.” She pedaled faster and imagined steering the bike in front of an oncoming car, imagined the squeal of brakes, the crash. If she were in the hospital in traction, maybe he would know—maybe everyone would know—that she was sorry.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, hard, the Telltale Heart, and she pedaled faster, riding almost out of control; she still did not know where she was headed. But suddenly Simone’s face was on her mind, Simone who’d done something this summer that was maybe even worse than cheating. Rosie slowed her bike down, pedaled along for a
moment, then turned in the direction of Simone’s house, practicing what she would say, silvery on the inside with panic.