Darling? (28 page)

It became awful to look at the world: every glimpse of beauty was a rebuke, to a man who couldn’t create it. Ned Fisk now seemed to Warren nearly visionary, the only one of his professors who had seen through to the empty heart of his ambition—he’d have turned himself inside out to please the man if he’d only understood what he wanted. But no—and he gave up, spent days playing solitaire on the computer and calling Beth far too often; watching his hand punch her number into the phone, he thought of an alcoholic reflexively pouring a drink. The ground went out from under him the minute she answered, and his voice would go soft and needful like a child’s; it filled him with shame.

So, like a child, he had to come home. He told himself he wouldn’t call Beth anymore, but as soon as he heard his father get into the shower, he went to the phone. Her voice was quiet and soothing; he’d have preferred bitterness, anger,
something
that showed she missed him too. He heard himself telling her how much he wanted to give up, to die. Carefully, implacably, she kept him on the line, and hearing her familiar exhortations, the things she’d memorized for his sake—Van Gogh
never
sold a painting, the very nature of originality meant it was hard to recognize—he felt a calm come over him. As they talked he heard the church bell across her street ring three and four and five, then the 5:47 train from Presque Isle that had always acted as their alarm. He thought of her, moaning, pulling up the quilt to turn over, the warm luxury of her smell … “Beth,” he said, but he couldn’t bring himself to it, the admission that he loved her.

It was his thirtieth birthday, two weeks until the new semester. By then, his mother insisted, the pills would be working, he’d be fine. Yes, he owed a term paper—he’d sit down and write it out, one sentence at a time. She took his hand. “I’m a nurse, honey, I know,” she said, the way she used to cajole him when he was in second grade. He might have been listening underwater for all he understood, but that afternoon he sat down and to his own amazement began to draw, in deep, rich pastels, feeling he was pulling the far-flung pieces of himself together stroke by stroke. Yes, art was still there, and at nightfall when the usual terror descended, he imagined he saw a path through it, beyond.

His mother had invited the family for dinner. Warren marveled at Martha’s capacity to forgive, to let go. Here was Emerson, who’d abandoned her, with Noreen; and on her other side, Drew, who’d lived with them for years after Emerson left, with Cecile, the young woman he’d left her for. Martha smiled over them all, matriarchally proud. Across the table, Warren’s older brother, Tim, put a hand to his wife’s flushed cheek as if to cool it—she was pregnant, a living talisman: it was hard to keep from touching her.

Warren smiled until his face ached, to repay them for coming, for pretending all was well. Cecile tried to draw him out, earnest as if she belonged here, though Warren thought with irritation that, since Drew had never married Martha, never officially been his stepfather, even he was an interloper. And Cecile was barely older than Warren: when she came to dinner that first night, years ago, he’d thought to walk her home and see what might follow, but Drew volunteered first. That was that, Drew was gone, Martha and her sons were left alone. Now, with her hair falling smooth over her shoulders, Cecile fixed on Warren, asked who he liked among the moderns, with a smile of quiet condescension, he thought, as if she was saying, “See, I’ve joined the adults, you’re still just a boy.”

It was true—he’d waited for one of these fathers to reach out, pull him up into manhood, but they had all averted their eyes.

“What’s the year-round population of Spinnaker these days?” he asked Emerson, feeling pleased with himself for once—this evaded Cecile and had a real, conversational ring.

“’Bout thirty-five,” Emerson said. His voice was so deep it seemed only to express ironies or matters of fact, and this seemed to be the former so Warren laughed.

“Hundred. Thirty-five hundred,” his father corrected, with irritation. “Though they never get the full count,” he said to himself, and Warren thought of the basement Emerson had lived in when he was drinking. Martha used to bring the boys to visit there until Tim, who knew when to cut his losses, refused to go anymore.

“The past is past,” Martha was saying, with a little wave of her hand. Her eyes shone—Warren’s life was reconstituted here, and that was what mattered, she insisted: the whole. “Isn’t this delicious!” she said, of the flounder, and everyone agreed, almost tearily.

“Is it lemon, in the sauce?” Warren asked.

They leapt at it, all talking at once. Fascinated, they were, giddy with the mysterious resonance of lemon in a sauce.… What
was
it about lemon—? Because, if he’d noticed the lemon, noticed it and spoken of it, and in a perfectly ordinary, conversational way, then he must be getting well! Circumstances bound them together, they were no less than kin, a frail band rappelling down a cliff together: if Warren fell, he would take them with him, so they must go carefully, help him set each foot. This, more than the wine, took hold of them … and here came the cake with its thick soft frosting, the candle flames blowing into each other. Someone held the phone out, saying, Warren thought, “It’s Beth,” but as he reached up, Tim took it.

“Dr. Betts!” It was their obstetrician, with the results of the amnio: a healthy, perfect boy.

“I’ll call you, and we’ll go do something, eh?—a movie?” Drew said, slipping Cecile’s coat over her arms, and Warren recognized suddenly how false it all was. His mother might smile now, but he remembered how she’d wept, until he thought she would dissolve. And Drew, asking him to the movies! Drew had only contempt for movies, their empty prettiness, the liberties they take with the truth. It reminded him somehow of Ned Fisk, and the humiliation went through him again like poison.

“A movie,” he said. “Great.”

*   *   *

When Warren got back to his father’s, he took one look at the afternoon’s drawings and decided Ned Fisk had been kind. He stuffed them into the trash, but fearing Noreen would see them there, tied up the bag and carried it out to the shed. There, leaning against the wall with the broom, was Emerson’s rifle. A household implement, ordinary, reassuring. He kept it with him through the night, and in the morning, as soon as he heard his father in the shower, braced the butt against the mattress and took the barrel in his mouth. He only meant to remind himself there was a sure way out, but the iron tasted of blood, hope, and he felt himself drifting toward death as toward love or sleep, giving himself up to it, letting it have him. A little wan sunlight came in through Noreen’s curtains, over the braided rug. There was no beauty, no refuge here. He put his thumb to the trigger, just to see if he could work it: it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world.

*   *   *

The force of the bullet knocked him back into the corner, so Emerson found his body propped against the bureau. He took him under the arms, thinking to maneuver him toward the bed, but the full weight fell against him and pinned him to the wall. It took all Emerson’s strength to push him up onto his feet, and then immediately Warren flopped sideways and Emerson had to struggle fiercely to right him. In the chaos of the moment he thought only how shameful it would be if he let his boy fall, so he stood there swaying under his son’s weight, thinking of nothing so much as the dance in the dark auditorium the night Warren was conceived. He had come into the world as the mother’s lever, to pry open the father’s heart—and failed. Now Emerson felt a well of pity as if he had been not only the stony father but also the pursuing son, and unthinking went to stroke the boy’s head and put his hand in the mess of the brain.

*   *   *

“I’ve got some—sort of bad news,” he began. Cecile had answered the phone at Drew’s, and hearing her voice Emerson felt suddenly relieved. Men’s instincts seem always to lead in the wrong direction, while women are naturally decisive—feeling wells up in them and becomes action before the thoughts and counterthoughts take hold. In the awful times, that stream of feeling can be relied on, to carry a man through.

“No,” she said, with such certainty that for a minute Emerson questioned the thing himself. “No, that can’t be.”

Because what could be
sort of
bad about that? If Warren had shot himself, Emerson would certainly have said
ghastly
or
sickening,
not
sort of bad.
Therefore, Warren was alive. In fact the day before Cecile and Drew had gone into Boston, because Martha had wanted Drew to speak to the psychiatrist with her. She never missed a chance to drag Drew back into the family circle, Cecile thought, skimming the magazines in the waiting room. And they came out of the consulting room arm in arm.

The doctor had shaken Martha’s hand, smiling with tender amusement, patting her shoulder. Lost loves, failed ambitions: these are the materials of life! If only he were still young enough to partake of such things. A few weeks for the antidepressant to take effect, and they’d see, it would all turn around.

Therefore,
Warren was alive!
Driving home Drew and Cecile had talked about him as if he was their own son, playing at parenthood, safe together in the overheated car and united by a common purpose—really married, Cecile had felt, as they’d never been before.

“He’s so young,” Drew said. “This will pass and be forgotten. Martha’s a brilliant mother, she won’t let those kids go down. She worries too much, that’s all.”

Cecile bristled—he praised Martha for her motherhood while refusing Cecile her own child.

“They’re hardly kids,” she said. “Warren’s just my age.”

He looked startled for a minute—Tim and Warren were still children in his mind’s eye, and Cecile, she was his wife, if anything she seemed older than he was. “Apples and oranges,” he said.

“He’s not a kid who’s doing badly in school,” Cecile said. “He’s a man in despair.”

“Despair is probably the central feature of life,” Drew said. “Everyone has to struggle with it alone.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why can’t people struggle with it together?” He was as old as her father, he ought to have answers, a firmament of knowledge against which she could brace herself and build.

“Because that’s not the way it works…,” he said, irritated. Why didn’t she understand even the most basic things?

“But
why
not?” she asked. They drove on in silence until she felt she’d won, and she reached over to stroke his hair: it reminded her how they’d loved each other, before they came to hate each other so.

“Don’t you see, Drew, how it would be if we had a baby?” The conversational equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade, but instead of flashing angry for once he’d looked only sad, and they left the subject, grateful that it hadn’t come between them, and talked back and forth about Warren, Cecile imagining a child, lulled by their voices, asleep in the back.

“We could struggle together, you and Warren and me,” she’d said. But all the time they were talking, and earlier, while they sat with Dr. Schiffenhaus, while he explained it with such patience and optimism … Warren had been dead all that time.

*   *   *

They found Martha in the eye of it, unearthly peaceful, greeting the dumbfounded visitors who climbed the narrow stairway to her apartment with a kind of devastated élan.

“Cecile,”
she said, with great emphasis and open arms, embracing her as a sister. She was small, plump, and cozy-looking—pretty, one might have said—but now a fierce beauty had come over her. All the trouble we go to, Cecile thought, to keep from looking death in the eye—so the first true sight of it, the leviathan bursting up through the old imaginings, is almost an exhilaration. She felt something like envy toward Martha, who was standing so close. To be childless was to spend one’s life jostling and peering over people’s shoulders for a glimpse of the essential things.

When Drew came in, though, she saw an awful hope rise and burst in Martha’s eyes: no, Warren wasn’t with him, and her face collapsed, and she became an old woman.

“Drew,” she said, “Drew, he.…” Her arms went around Drew’s neck and she hung there, though he held her without conviction. Cecile stood behind her, trying to gesture to him, mouthing
tighter,
but he never really saw the point in an embrace.

“Did he … did he
say
anything, to you, Drew?” Martha asked. Cecile sat down—she couldn’t bear to hear the answer—and found herself beside Emerson.

“I, I’m so sorry…,” she began—how on earth could one encompass this? It seemed that even to mention it would harm them. And the words that sprang to her mind were not condolence but reproach. They were his parents—they ought to have saved him.

“It’s done,” Emerson said, waving the thing away, his jaw set, eyes focused straight ahead.

Martha was still holding tight to Drew, saying, “I didn’t think…”; “I didn’t believe…” The door downstairs banged and there were more voices and steps on the stairs. Nathan Polchikov, proprietor of L’Hermitage Café down the street, came in carrying a platter of tarts heaped with raspberries, and gave a slight bow as if it was his privilege to be among them.

“I came the minute I heard,” he said. “It’s like I have a sixth sense. Just today I thought—as I was walking down this street—I had the feeling … My father killed himself, you know.”

Martha sat him on the couch and listened carefully, with a pride Cecile understood—it was a gift, this womanly endurance; to bend toward someone else with a tender expression, when your own son was … was …

“Dress shirts. Dress shirts my father made,” Polchikov said, shaking his head slowly and looking past Martha as if his father stood behind her. “It’s one thing to get the phone call, another to really see…,” he continued, “… as I did…”

“I told him to give the gun away, throw it off the wharf…,” Tim said when his father left the room. “He
knew
how Warren was.” To hear him speak, you’d think Warren was a five-year-old who’d broken something Emerson left on a low shelf. There was always a shrug in Tim’s voice, when they talked about Emerson’s disappearance or Drew’s leaving the family for Cecile. These things happen, one has to take them lightly. But the effort had seemed to bleed him pale.