Dream Lover (11 page)

“Was the stuff for Katherine delivered yet? What’d she say?” He was as excited as if he were the schoolgirl getting gifts. He just liked doing things like that for her. Katherine would greet him with a big slobbery kiss when he would get to the house. If I was still at work, he would pick me up and we would drive up together. I never worried about Katherine coming home before I did. From the time she was little, I always had good childcare for her, thanks to Jack.

The woman I worked for, Evelyn, used to shake her head. “It doesn’t make any sense for that man to pay for those fancy agencies. Why doesn’t he just pay you to stay home with your kid instead of working in this dump?” I knew Jack felt that people should work. His wife never did, to my knowledge, but that wasn’t my business. Everyone else in his family did. He could have afforded to support us all, but we went to work every day. Katherine had the best healthcare, the most trustworthy childcare, physical and speech therapy—you name it.

When we first met, I told him that I had a child. “I can’t meet you for coffee,” I said. “I have a child with brain damage.” He looked shocked. I don’t think Jack had ever been exposed to anyone who wasn’t perfect. It was like he was visiting a Third World country. “My sitter will only watch her for the hours I work, so I have to get right home.” I was clearing his breakfast dishes that morning so long ago.

“I’ll come to your house, then. I want to meet your child. It’s a girl, correct? You said ‘she’.” He seemed suddenly emotional. I was torn between compromising the safety of my house by allowing this man to see where I lived and shaking him up by allowing him to meet my daughter. Katherine, who was only two, had a rare, genetic, birth defect that made her face appear almost as though it were two separate halves. Her eyes were far apart, and she had a cleft palate which, although it had been repaired, made talking come slowly for her. Other than that, she had a normal body. Her hair was flaming red, gorgeously thick and curly. I decided to let him come. It might drive him away to see someone who wasn’t born absolutely perfect. Jack surely wouldn’t allow imperfection in his life. But I was wrong. He was taken with Katherine. He came into my house, which by his standards was probably modest to the extreme, and the sitter was holding Katherine. She broke into a huge misshapen grin when she saw Jack for the first time, reaching out for him.

“Da! Da!” she hollered. I laughed and took her from the sitter. She was struggling to get at him.

“Can I hold her?” he asked. I could see he was choked up, really having a difficult time holding it together. She had that effect on people, Katherine did. She was so innocent, so loving, that you were able to overlook her unfortunate face and see something deeper, something ethereal. I nodded my head to him and he reached out for her. If toddlers could fly, she almost did into his arms. She put her little arms around his neck and repeated her odd sounding
Da Da.
He turned his back to me while I paid the sitter. He patted her head and was humming something, some rock song, something from the eighties, totally inappropriate for a child, but she loved it. She would not be taken from him, either. Every time I reached for her, she screamed bloody murder. I fixed the three of us dinner and he didn’t mind holding her. She sat on his lap while he fed her, making a mess of his expensive suit until I thought of placing a towel around him, although by that time it was too late.

We would remember the next time, though. He would come again and again to see Katherine. He slowly fell in love with her. I saw Jack cry over her when she had another surgery to correct some of her oral anomalies. She was in pain and he couldn’t stand it. Rather than running, as my husband had done, Jack insisted on talking to the doctor. Katherine was never in pain again if they could help it. She always had a private room and private-duty nursing care when she was hospitalized.

Then Friday would come and we wouldn’t see him for the weekend. That was difficult. I knew he was going home. I appreciated it that Jack told me that he went to his beach house on the weekends. But not being able to contact him, even in an emergency for Katherine, helped me to keep my perspective about the importance of us in his life. We were only important as long as it didn’t interfere with his real family. He never, ever mentioned his perfect children or wife; it was only after his death that I came to understand something of what his family was—wealthy, successful, beautiful—and of Jack’s ego. Of course, it was a smokescreen. We know that now.

I spent last night tossing and turning, unable to come to terms with my own stupidity, my own inability to see my worth. When he first started coming around here, I should have demanded to get what we needed. He probably never would have come back. What I learned about Jack in the past weeks is that he might have been generous with things he could buy, but with his time, he only had so much because he was spread so thinly. How he managed to see so many women and still make the load of cash he made is a mystery. The only one of us who knows more of the story is Melissa. She’s giving me the dirt because I think she feels sorry for Katherine. Maybe if I know the truth, I’ll be able to keep going because I won’t blame myself for everything that has happened.

The middle of the night is not a good time to make plans. For one thing, pain is magnified—tripled and quadrupled in the darkness.
Weeping may endure into the night, but joy commeth in the morning;
a psalm from my childhood Bible reading. I lay in bed for hours, determined to find a way to get restitution for the years I put into the relationship. I don’t want to be acknowledged, but I do want to be taken care of as he promised. There is no way I can survive without help, from either his family or his estate. I saw a lawyer about being paid from Katherine’s trust, and that is not going to happen. It is only there for her after I die. I am worth more to her dead. It is almost as if Jack did that on purpose so I would keep working. I’m almost sixty years old! I am tired of working, tired of juggling Katherine’s care and a job. It’s true that millions of people do it every day, but I can’t find a job now! I just don’t qualify for anything.

I’m going to Babylon. I just decided it. I’m going to confront Jack’s wife. She needs to know that her highly thought-of husband had what is, for all intents and purposes, another family—a family that he visited several time a week for years, albeit only an hour at a time. Still, it was no easy trip up here.

Melissa called me yesterday morning and wanted to come over. She wanted to talk. I thought it would be great to have someone to talk to who knew him, with whom I could be honest. It’s so hard to grieve alone. And then, her real purpose was revealed to me as she sat in the same chair Jack sat in, the chair no one else had sat in for almost twenty years. From that chair, I heard the words from Melissa, “Jack was HIV positive. You better get tested.”

HIV. Human immunodeficiency virus. Does his wife know? I asked Melissa. “She was the one who told me,” Melissa replied.

Pam Smith had called this tattooed freak of nature on the phone and invited her to the Most Holy of Holies, and told her she had been exposed to HIV by her late husband, Jack. Those exact words had gone from Pam’s mouth to Melissa’s ear.

12

Melissa

I’
ve made arrangements to go to Maryanne’s house. Maryanne was with Jack longer than anyone was, almost as long as he was with Pam. Jack had two perfect kids and a perfect wife, and when he met Maryanne, he discovered that not everyone has a perfect life. Some people struggle, some people are poor, some people are born differently. I decided that Maryanne was the only one whom I cared a goddamn about and only then because of her kid. Jack loved that kid. By the time I met him and started dating him, or whatever it was called that we did, she was a teenager. The other women I knew about, well I would think about warning them. Right now, I could only deal with Maryanne. She was the redhead my students and I saw Jack with on campus, the one on whom I had based my decision to stop seeing him romantically. Out of respect for her and for myself, I did that. So we had that connection, too.

Maryanne’s house was a shock. I thought of my wonderful brownstone and wondered why I deserved it when he had allowed someone who he had been with for almost half of his life to live like a pig? The cab turned onto her street and all I could think was,
Please God, don’t let that dump be my destination.
And of course, the cab stopped right in front of it. She had the lower floor of a dilapidated brick brownstone, a rarity on that gentrified street. The owners hadn’t repointed the brick, or replaced the windows, or taken care of the granite stoop and the wrought iron, so that you took your life in your hands walking up and down the steps. There was trash all over the little front garden, the fencing long gone. I could smell ancient cooking odors when I opened the door to the hallway.

Maryanne’s door was the first one on the right. A staircase led up to the second floor. So she would have the sound of walking above her, on top of everything else. The street was quiet enough; the only positive in a sea of negative. She answered the door right away. I could smell pine oil cleaner, thank God. At least she was clean. The room was narrow but long; a kitchen table and chairs from the 1940s was in the bay window. There was a bookcase on the wall opposite the door, and I could see stacks of jigsaw puzzles and a couple of sets of old books; the complete Dickens and an even older set of Goethe. I found myself wondering who this waitress from the Bronx was.

That may have been a glimmer of what attracted Jack. Because it sure wasn’t her appearance. I had only seen her from a distance that one time, and she had looked lovely then—bright red hair and a willowy build. But now she was haggard and skeletal with an inch of gray roots showing, and horrid red-orange lipstick. So this was Maryanne. She seemed surprised by my appearance, too. I had on a wife-beater and my tattooed body was on display. I almost didn’t get a cab because of it. I had my hair in the usual braid down my back, although I had been considering getting it cut boy-short. I don’t like the androgynous look, though. It isn’t the way I feel about myself at all. I put out my hand to shake hers.

“I’m Melissa. I have seen you once; I doubt if Jack told you about that,” I said to her. She looked at me, surprised again.

“I don’t remember meeting you,” she said, but she did take my hand. “I may have been having a rough day, so please forgive me.”

“No, we didn’t meet. I teach at the community college and I saw you and Jack together on the campus.” Her eyes glazed over as she was attempting to remember being on the campus.

“How long ago? I must be in a fog.” She hadn’t let go of my hand yet and the heat from her was starting to make me uncomfortable. I gently extricated myself from her grasp and walked over to the shelves, pretending to look at the puzzles.

“It must have been about two years go,” I told her. “It’s no big deal.”

“I can’t believe I forgot meeting Jack somewhere else besides Gwen’s. Katherine went to a summer program there one year, maybe three years ago. That could have been when you saw me. He would meet me from time to time for lunch when I was off during the week. I wonder why he met me there.”

The poor woman was clearly confused, while I saw the situation with crystal clarity. Jack had wanted me to see him with another woman. It was too much of a coincidence that he chose to embrace her within view of my classroom window. I hoped it was so I would stop being intimate with him for my own good. I would never know. I was free to imagine whatever I wanted to about any situation, so I chose to develop scenarios that were only beneficial to me.

“Have a seat,” she said, pulling out the chair closest to the door. I had a feeling it was a special chair because it had a new seat cushion on it. “This was Jack’s chair,” she said, answering my question. “He sat here every time he visited—for the past twenty years. Well, almost twenty. I am confused about dates right now. Please forgive me.” She turned to the stove to get a freshly made pitcher of tea. “Want some tea?” she asked. Her voice had changed, it was softer, almost disconnected. I thought I might have hurt her, which I didn’t want to do. The hurt was yet to come.

“Okay. No sugar, please.” She opened the top door of the old refrigerator and got out a metal ice tray. I saw a similar one at a flea market downtown once. She popped the handle and the ice cubes came out easily. The glasses that she pulled out of the cabinet matched the tea pitcher. They were covered with painted slices of oranges and lemons. “I like your tea set,” I told her, trying to bring her back to earth, to engage her. “Are you okay? I mean, apart from Jack dying.”

She gave me that blank stare again. “No, actually I am not. I lost my job and am having a devil of a time trying to pull myself together. If Jack was alive, I know he would help me out.”

She had said it simply, as though it were factual. I thought that maybe he wouldn’t have helped her by giving her money; he would have known to whom to go for unemployment, or for another job. But a handout? No. I think it was then that I realized why he was so generous with me and not with Maryanne. And I only say this in the most apologetic way, not judging her at all, only as a way to explain the slanted view that was Jack’s. Because I had worked so hard putting myself through college and was working, and continued to go to school to get a Ph.D., I think he may have felt I was worthy of his help, or his gifts or charity, whatever you call it.