Ordinary Love and Good Will (12 page)

“The deepest,” I say.

“Here we are,” he says, turning in the driveway. “We survived, Mom,” he says.

“What?” I say.

“What?”

“What did we survive?”

Michael opens his door and the overhead light goes on, revealing Joe turned in his seat, looking at me. He says, “Everything so far.” His smile is lovely and rueful.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Michael. He closes the door and the light goes off. I can see Joe’s profile, his gaze intent upon his twin. All I can see of Michael is the back of his head framed in the windshield, his right hand stroking the wheel for a moment, then dropping.

“What?” says Joe, a single, tender syllable.

Michael clears his throat. “You knew I got engaged.” Joe nods. “Then she broke it off.” Joe nods again.

“I didn’t know that,” I exclaim.

Michael looks at me.

“I thought Joe would tell you, Mom. I kept meaning to write and tell you about Margaret, who is Scottish, very—” He glances around the car, hunting for the words, I think, then stares at me for a second before saying, “She’s perky. No, she’s dauntless, and sort of legendarily good. Anyway, there was another part. I don’t think I mentioned,
um, Lucie, even to Joe. She was the school director’s wife. She’s French, about thirty-five. They have four children.” He turns and looks at me. “Nothing about this was pretty, Mom.”

“Probably not.”

“As soon as Margaret and I announced our engagement, Lucie began to flirt with me.” He coughs. “She was seductive and experienced and all that, but the fact was that she was also quite fragile, and I knew it. She hated India, and I knew it. There was something about Margaret she didn’t like. But, however much she wanted to try me out, or to put Margaret down, or to have fun, about a million times more than that, I wanted her. Every time I was with Margaret, and we had a happy, rollicking time, joking, talking, eating, laughing in bed, all these good things that I’ve been looking for for years, I couldn’t wait to find Lucie. What I wanted to do with Lucie was to penetrate her beyond the possibility of penetration. I wanted to penetrate her organs and cells and atoms. She wanted that, too, after she saw what was possible. We had this pity for what we were doing to each other that was so piercing. We cried a lot. Margaret started crying, too, when she found out, but I always thought, She’ll take care of herself. There was no way that Margaret, whom I loved, could pierce me, and no way that Lucie, whom I didn’t love, could fail to pierce me. I asked Margaret to give me a month. I thought I could teach myself to flip the switch. On would be Margaret. Off would be Lucie. I would just drill myself into it. I would get things right, and then we would follow our plan to leave and travel and just be together. But Lucie turned out to be pregnant. She hadn’t slept with her husband in a long time, so it looked like there would be quite a scandal. Margaret broke off with me.”

“Well,” says Joe.

“How long ago was this?” I say.

“Not very.”

“What about the baby?”

“Lucie had an abortion. Margaret took her, since she was the only person who knew about the baby besides me.”

“When was that?” says Joe.

“About ten days ago.”

“Oh, boy,” says Joe.

I realize as he speaks that I have sensed something beyond his fatigue and disorientation that obviously must be grief. But beyond that, like mountains beyond mountains, I recognize the settled darkness of expectation that grows from such desperate events. I recognize a possession of mine that I’d hoped my children would never claim.

In the kitchen Joe makes another pot of coffee. Michael pulls out one of those little cigars tied with red thread and begins to smoke it, standing next to the screen door, and letting the smoke waft out into the night. He leans against the jamb, his knee bent, his foot on the wall, like a man against a lamppost, and the beam of the single light above the sink drenches him with just that loneliness. Joe is taking cups out of the cabinet. Two. His hand pauses for an instant before reaching for the third one. I say, “I’ve been up since five myself. I guess I should go to bed.” I am happy enough to vacate at this late hour, and there is undoubtedly some brotherly, twinly, comfort or companionship that only Joe can offer. Surely that is what an identical twin is for, after all. My own mood is suspended, floating.

I turn and go out of the room, but, I admit it, I pause in the dark hallway, where they can’t see me, and watch them. Joe sets the cups down beside the coffeemaker and starts to pour the coffee. Michael pinches the end of the cigar, then tosses it out the door. Everything about his demeanor contrasts with Joe’s. I can’t believe I haven’t recognized it before
now. He did use to share Joe’s nervousness, but now he is hard and knowing. Composed in spite of his utter weariness. His head swings round and he regards his brother.

He opens his mouth to speak, but just then Joe looks up and smiles, and he says nothing. What he wants to say is something that he can’t say while Joe is looking at him. He licks his lips. Joe goes to the refrigerator for the milk. When he disappears behind the door, Michael says, “Before I left India, I signed a contract to go to Korea. Another two-year contract, teaching math.” I step just the littlest bit farther out of their range—Michael’s tone is as intimate as a lover’s and as full of the knowledge that he is giving more pain than he is feeling. Joe closes the refrigerator and stands up without the milk. He looks at Michael. Michael continues, “The thing is, the school year starts in early September. The tenth.”

It strikes me that my mother must have seen this composure in me, too, just before she died, when I knew where the children were but didn’t know if I was ever going to see them again. I wonder if, as I am now, she was stricken, yet distantly relieved that her child had attained the end of inexperience.

“Is that the tenth our time?” says Joe.

“No, that’s the ninth our time.”

“Just tell me when you signed it.”

“End of May.”

“Our time?”

“Our time.”

“You’ve written me five letters and never told me any of this.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“All that time I was writing about looking for an apartment for you and Margaret.”

“Yeah.”

“Before I sent you that course catalogue.”

“I told you I wasn’t that interested in graduate school. That’s much more up your alley.”

“Well, I guess I don’t know what’s up your alley anymore, do I?”

Michael inhales deeply and tips his head back against the wall.

Finally, Joe says, “Do you
WANT
to go?”

“Yeah.”

Joe’s voice rises a little. “Do you want to fall in love with some Korean woman, and have kids, and live there forever? That’s what you’re going to do, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, I know. Yeah, I do. I do want to.” They stare at each other. Michael says, “Hey, I’m going outside, all right? Just for some air. All right?”

“Who’s stopping you?”

Michael pivots out the door and it slaps behind him. Joe pulls out a chair and sits at the table, staring fixedly at the door. Maybe it is the talk of Ed, the thoughts of Pat, many people leaving, many people left, but I know exactly what he is feeling, as if no time at all had passed, as if shock and pain could rush out of the memory as well as into it, scarify the nerves all over again. It is as if, in our family, the one necessary presence that each of us fixes on is the one presence each of us cannot have.

I back away, toward the stairway, as silently as possible. If Joe cries I don’t want to know it.

Pat loved dinnertime. Although he didn’t believe in God, he always said the Catholic grace, all the way down to “May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.” Then he took a deep breath, grinned, and surveyed the table—five stair-step heads, me wiping my hands on a dish towel as I sat down, the dogs, shiny black and alert, watching the spoon in his hand as he dished up
the food. If there were relatives visiting, so much the better. If, temporarily, we had household help, they would be sitting at the table with us. If I was pregnant, he would call out to the unborn child, “Green beans tonight! You’re going to like green beans someday! And here’s corn on the cob!” He was such a young man, so handsome and smart. His enthusiasm for family life was the passion, I see now, of a true egomaniac, whose wife and children and dogs are the limbs of his own body. “Rachel?” he would say. “Rachel, are you listening? Ellen, tell her again.” His eyes would probe mine until I couldn’t return his gaze. Looking back, it is hard to sort out what I knew then from what I learned later. Certainly I had no intentions, only appetites.

He wanted a response, but I couldn’t speak, knowing how acutely he would hear me, how clearly he would know from whatever I was saying what I was thinking. After a while, I couldn’t even hear, although I tried to listen. I was a slow-burning fuse, but a fuse nonetheless, who could not fail to blow up the little gathering around the table. Aloft we went, spinning head over heels. There is no getting over it, for me or for them; there is only, I suppose, adding to it. With luck, balancing it. However my life looks to others, what it looks like to me is a child’s tower of blocks, built in ignorance and without a plan.

I wonder if my father and uncles recognized their desires, or if they only recognized their duties: when desire expressed itself, in the form of my aunt, they contained it by force and made sure it never expressed itself again. Their lives always frightened me—wordless and monolithic, as if my uncles were not men but mere features of their own flat landscape. And so I guided myself by the light of my desires, as Pat, too, did, and from us our children have learned the same thing. Even so, we have not always known what we wanted, or not often known what we wanted, or not
EVER
known what we wanted, only that we wanted.

I think of Joe’s smile as he told me that we had survived everything so far. I don’t like to make too much of this. As Joe would say, children are starving and all that. He will survive this. Michael will survive this disaster as well as whatever drives him away and deadens him inside as he goes. Ellen will stay married or be drawn to divorce, the thing she loathes the most and can’t get out of her mind. Whatever she does, she will survive it.

Even so, as I sit on my bed and pull off my stockings and rub my fifty-two-year-old toes, I think that I, too, have done the thing I least wanted to do, that I have given my children the two cruelest gifts I had to give, which are these, the experience of perfect family happiness, and the certain knowledge that it could not last.

GOOD WILL

1.
August

During the first part of the interview, when we are sitting on the porch looking down the valley, I try for exactitude more than anything—$343.67. She is impressed, which pleases me, makes me impressed with myself, and then ashamed, so I say, “And seventy-four cents of that I found, so I really made only $342.93. I suppose there might be a few more pennies somewhere, in a pocket or something.” She writes it down with a kind of self-conscious flourish of her pen—a Bic “round stic,” ten for ninety-nine cents, plus tax, if you buy them at the beginning of the school year—and I can see that momentary pause while she inventories all the things about her that she couldn’t have if her income for last year were, like mine, $343.67. The view at the far end of the valley, the scattered houses of Moreton against the west face of Snowy Top, clears suddenly of August haze, and a minute later I feel a strong southwesterly breeze. Rain by mid-afternoon.

The other subjects in her book, some Seed-Save people, a tree-fruits fanatic, a raised-bed specialist, a guy who’s breeding field corn back to its prehistoric varieties, all of them are going to be included for innovative gardening. Me I don’t think she would have used if I’d had an outside job, or if Liz, my wife, had a job. We are no more up-to-date
than Rodale, and she, that is, Tina, the interviewer, will know my methods from looking at the beds. But the money. That gets her. I say, “Before Tommy was born, our income usually hovered around a hundred and fifty dollars a year. But you simply can’t raise a kid on a hundred and fifty dollars a year.” A kid likes to have nice school supplies, for example. In September I expect to go to K-mart and spend six dollars or so on school supplies. Tommy likes the trip. He chooses very carefully.