Monday, Monday: A Novel (29 page)

Andy had recently divorced. “It was my fault,” he told Shelly when Madeline brought him home to meet her. “I had an affair. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I was twenty-three years old and didn’t know any better.” He was only twenty-six now.

He talked about his job. “Corporations hire me to help with the climate in their workplaces. Basically it’s all about team building and conflict resolution. It involves a lot of brainstorming and strategic planning so employees can learn how to feel safe with each other and work productively together. And of course there’s a lot of travel.”

Shelly didn’t know what to make of him. He was disarmingly forthcoming, self-deprecating in some ways but almost a braggart in others, with what seemed to be a high level of confidence combined with a delight in owning up to his failures. “What a dope I was,” he said about his infidelity. “Let’s hope it was just immaturity and not some deficiency in my character.” To Shelly, it seemed as if his confidence masked some kind of vulnerability, and yet he was personable and likable, and obviously smitten with Madeline.

“What do you think?” Madeline asked her later.

“Well, what do you think?” Shelly asked.

Madeline was defensive. “Obviously I like him, or I wouldn’t have brought him over here. What do you not like about him?”

“There’s nothing I don’t like. I can’t say I have a real sense of him yet, but—”

“Really? He’s like an open book. It’s a good thing, Mom. He’s enthusiastic, and that’s refreshing. It’s a nice balance for me since I get too cautious. Did I tell you he speaks four languages?”

“Four?”

“Fluently. Including some Hebrew—his mother’s Jewish. He grew up in Louisville. His dad was an alcoholic and his older brother killed himself when Andy was just thirteen. I think it’s pretty miraculous how he’s managed to keep his faith in human nature. Frankly, the fact that he’s so optimistic makes me happy. It makes me feel safe.”

When he was traveling for work, he often called Madeline at night, and she fell asleep with the phone pressed to her ear. He told her about his first marriage and the guilt he felt for betraying his wife with another woman. Madeline told him about her father’s death and her mother’s loneliness. She talked about a dark desire to visit Devil’s Sinkhole, and a feeling that she had abandoned her father to that place. The sheriff had taken her away from there, and she had not seen her father’s body when it was lifted out. She had not seen it at all. Sometimes she dreamed that it was still down there. Her last memory of him was his face in the yellow beam of the flashlight, and how he had said, “Nice and slow,” and “Madeline, honey? Do this,” and how she had pressed her foot on the gas to keep from stalling, shifted from neutral to second, felt the truck lurch.

She married Andy not long after she met him, choosing a honeymoon in Hawaii over a wedding reception in Austin. They spent what little savings they had on a down payment for a small, picturesque two-story house in the quiet old Clarksville neighborhood, not far from Shelly.

The next year, in 1999, they had a baby whom they named Nicholas. When the baby was two, a distraught Andy came home from work one night and confessed to Madeline that he had slept with another woman. He swore he didn’t love the woman—he had known her, he said, for years. He didn’t know why he had done this and swore he would never do it again. It was clear he believed this promise.

Disillusioned and devastated, Madeline lifted Nicholas out of his bed, put him into the car, and drove to her mother’s house, where Shelly put the child into her own bed and sang him back to sleep.

Madeline cried in Shelly’s arms as she had not done since her father’s death, her tear-stained face pressed into Shelly’s neck, her thin shoulders heaving with uncontrolled sobs.

Shelly had difficulty controlling her sense of outrage. Andy had coaxed Madeline out of her grief over Dan’s death, and now had shattered that sense of safety that he had given her. The fact that he had done it so carelessly and casually only increased the cruelty. It wasn’t lost on Shelly how hypocritical she would be to condemn Andy outright, given the fact of her own past, but she also knew there was a difference between deep love and mere dalliance.

When Andy showed up at Shelly’s house after midnight, Madeline opened the door and told him to leave. A few minutes later, the phone rang. “Don’t answer it,” Madeline told Shelly. It rang and rang, until Madeline unplugged it from the wall.

Andy was at the door again at seven o’clock in the morning, unshowered and unshaven. Shelly was in the kitchen with Nicholas; she answered his knock. “I know Madeline won’t see me,” he said. “I want to talk to you. I can’t believe I’ve done this to her. I love her, Shelly. And I can’t believe I’ve hurt her this way. Can I please just come in?”

“Andy, she’s still asleep—”

“Daddy!” Nicholas yelled with delight, and went running to him.

“Hey, little buddy!” Andy scooped him up in his arms.

“I been sleeping with Nana!” Nicholas told him excitedly. “Having breakfast with Nana!”

“Wonderful!” Andy exclaimed, tousling his hair. To Shelly he said, “I hope you believe me, that I’d never intentionally do anything to—”

“I believe that, Andy. But this isn’t the time to talk.”

Andy agreed that it wasn’t. He took Nicholas on a walk so he wouldn’t be too upset that his father was leaving so soon. When he brought Nicholas back, he told Shelly he would go home and wait for Madeline to call. “Tell her I’ll do anything.”

Madeline came out of her bedroom after he left, and settled Nicholas in front of the television. “What should I do?” she asked Shelly. “He loves me—I know that. But I’m starting to see that it comes from weakness, not strength.”

“I wish I knew what to tell you, honey, but it’s not clear to me what you should do. I think he’s sincere, and I think that matters. And I know he loves you. I understand that you don’t trust him now. Whatever you do, think of Nicholas.”

They talked throughout the day. Shelly took Nicholas to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. In the evening, Madeline loaded him into the car and drove back home to Andy.

32

THE LOVELY PAINTING

Shortly before Christmas two years later, on a freezing night in South Texas, Aileen died at the Beeville hospital where Shelly had given birth to Carlotta almost thirty-four years before. Shelly had been sitting beside the hospital bed all day, but she had gone to Aileen’s house to sleep, when Aileen began to go very quickly in the middle of the night. Shelly responded to the call from the nurses’ station and arrived at the hospital in time to hold the thin little hand and watch the pulse become faint and then still.

Aileen’s body was rolled away on a stretcher at daylight, and Shelly returned to the house. She called her mother, who was home nursing her father through a bout of the flu, and broke the news that Aileen had died. Afterward she called Madeline, whose voice grew tight with sadness; she had loved Aileen since she was a small girl hiding out with the portrait she had thought was a fairy godmother in the quiet closet of Aileen’s house. She said Andy could take care of Nicholas and that she would start for Beeville right away.

Shelly sat in Aileen’s kitchen and looked at the place on the floor where she had stood squeezing oranges onto a juicer when her water had broken and formed a pale pink puddle. She didn’t know what to think about Aileen’s life or about the sorrows around which she and Aileen had built their love for each other.

After a while she got up and went into Raymond’s bedroom, where she had slept those months when she was pregnant with Carlotta. Entering the room, she felt the winter chill. The vents had been shut off. No one came here anymore. For all these years, Aileen had waited for Raymond to return, hoping the phone would ring and his voice would be at the other end, or that he would appear at the door. Her fear that he was dead had evolved, mysteriously, over the decades, into belief that he was alive somewhere, even while the chance of that had faded.

Shelly knew that the portrait was stored in the closet of this sad room. She had not thought of it very often in recent years. She opened the closet door and looked at the outdated clothes—the shirts and slacks, a striped cardigan sweater, moth-eaten. The shoes. Three belts hanging from a nail stuck in the wall. It would all have to be packed up and disposed of, but she felt sad and false-hearted at the thought of tossing out Aileen’s son’s clothes.

She would need boxes. She had seen a few in the garage, but they were dirty, littered with mouse droppings. Not that it mattered: No one would want the clothes after she boxed them up. She wouldn’t be carting them off to Goodwill, she would be hauling them out to the trash.

Turning away from the closet, she saw her face in the mirror over the dresser and stopped. She had been so young when she used to look in this mirror. Now, in 2003, she was fifty-six years old, and her hair was turning gray. She remembered how she had stood on the bed to look at her pregnant belly, and how she had dreamed that Wyatt would walk through the door, and how she had wished he would send her a letter, even though he didn’t know where she was. He had remained as missing as Aileen’s son, in spite of all her pitiful, young desire. The two of them had been ghost men haunting this room.

The mirror was unframed, oval, beveled around the edges. It hung from a chain. The silvering was spotted, giving a speckled look to Shelly’s image. Her jawline had a small sag instead of the plump youthfulness of pregnancy that she had seen in this mirror before. As a girl, she had been pretty enough, and as a woman, the same. She didn’t expect to be beautiful. Still, the picture of that youthful girl lingered disconcertingly in the mirror.

She sighed—resigned, exhausted. The bed had sheets and a blanket, but she didn’t want to lie down where she had slept when she was pregnant with Carlotta. And she didn’t want to crawl back into Aileen’s bed where she had been sleeping hours ago when the nurse had called. With Aileen gone forever, Shelly felt like an interloper instead of a guest in the house.

In the kitchen she found plastic lawn bags under the sink and went to Aileen’s room to start the tedious job of packing things up. Aileen had told her to take whatever she wanted, to throw things away and give whatever was left to the Methodist church. But when Shelly opened Aileen’s closet and looked at the stale clothes and the shelf stuffed with socks and panty hose, she didn’t feel up to the effort. She walked back down to Raymond’s bedroom and started dragging shirts off the hangers and stuffing shoes into the bags.

There was nothing here to decide about; everything would go. Handling the baseball glove, she wondered briefly if she might give it to Nicholas as a family keepsake. But it was old and cracked, too large for his hand, and she was disturbed by the thought of her grandchild wearing a glove that belonged to a boy who had gone to war and never come home.

When she had finished emptying out the closet, nothing was left except the portrait. She leaned it against the wall, facing her, its frame thick with dust. Roaches had nibbled away at the green paint in one of the upper corners.

She eyed herself in the portrait. “You again.” The painting made her think of all the mistakes she had made—how she had slept with somebody else’s husband. How she had stood in front of him naked, posing for this portrait, and allowed herself to believe they would not make love. How young and utterly foolish she had been.

At times, she wondered how she would feel if she ever saw him or heard his voice again. Her life had seemed pointless when he had left her—she had needed him that much. But now she had lost her husband, and for Wyatt to drop his voice into that void would be like dropping a penny into the ocean. It wouldn’t create so much as a ripple.

She knew all she deserved to know about his present life. He taught in the Art Department at Columbia now. He and Elaine lived in New York but had a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine, where Wyatt painted. His paintings sold for tens of thousands, sometimes more. He had come to Austin a few times when his work was shown at galleries, but Shelly had never attended the showings. She wasn’t so much afraid of what would happen if she saw him, as what wouldn’t. A lackadaisical meeting would steal whatever legitimacy there had been to that relationship in the first place. The only excuse they had for what they had done was the strength of their need for each other. It had seemed too powerful to resist. And now—if they resisted it? If it proved to be meager and dismissable, what could she feel about their actions back then?

There was no reason to daydream about something so obviously over. Those memories were still painful. But looking at the painting now, she half-wished she could scrape away the blue smock and let the truth show, reveal her difficult secrets to anyone who wanted to see, and be done with hiding them. That might provide a kind of consolation. She could haul the painting out of the closet and take it home and hang it up on her wall.

Of course, she wouldn’t. And there remained the question of what to do with it. She didn’t want to linger here in this room, feeling nostalgic over a painting, when Aileen had just died. So she pried open a lawn bag for trash and stuffed the painting in it. She hoped for a sense of finality when she cinched the bag, but instead she felt desolate and depressed, as if she had thrown herself away. Leaning the bag upright against the wall beside other bags filled with shoes and clothing, she sat on the floor and looked at the lumpy outcasts.

Madeline arrived late in the afternoon and found her mother cleaning out drawers in Aileen’s bathroom, making piles of bobby pins and old curlers and tossing rancid creams and outdated medications into the trash can. She made a pot of coffee, brought two mugs into the bathroom, and sat with her mother, sorting through cans of hair spray and bottles of old perfumes. Shadows of naked tree limbs rocked back and forth across the windowsill while the women worked, and a feeling of quiet companionship settled.

“There’s one thing in the house I’d like to have if you don’t want it,” Madeline told her mother. “The painting of you that’s in the closet.”