Pay the Piper (20 page)

She looked out from a window on the landing; the town had such a sense of normality. The large white Congregational Church opposite seemed to stare back at her. Stores had window boxes full of late-blooming flowers, overflowing impatiens. Laurel hated being the self she was, going upstairs with pink bunny-rabbit tails bobbing at her heels, keeping Peds from slipping into her tennis shoes.

Time-wise
, she wrote Hal.
That's the way people here talk. Time-wise, I had to see this lawyer in my tennis dress. Right away, Mr. Cohen told me he could not get Rick for me at his age. A judge would ask him who he wanted to live with
. With me, Laurel thought. Only what about moving south? On their first meeting, she decided not to tell Mr. Cohen her future plans. He asked for a retainer, and she thought again about the expense of running one's life alone.

Things continued to be different from when she was an ordinary housewife in Soundport. Now she had a tiny key to a long slit of mailbox, in a nest of them at the post office. Daily she turned that key with a stealthy air. Suppose an acquaintance appeared asking what she was doing with Box 56 or, worse, suppose someone asked William why his wife had what seemed an unusual possession for a suburban matron? Who were all the other people opening boxes? Secret lovers too? Even business people had an air of suspicion attached to them. Box holders had shady natures. She was stunned by the smut mail that arrived for her box number: solicitations for dirty books and films with explicit pictures of sex acts. She sent them along to Hal through Buddy.
Might as well give all the men in the cage a thrill
, she wrote. She felt herself a traitor to her sturdy aluminum box at home, its faithful red flag ready to go up or down, a traitor to a Grandma Moses scene along her road of apple trees, as if she were a rotten apple hiding among perfect red ones on Grandma's round trees.

When she set out for the beauty parlor, William asked why she was going on a Saturday afternoon. “We ought to do something together then.” She wanted to tell him, William, it's fifteen years too late for you to be saying that. Yet there was an implication of future companionship she ought to consider. William used to spend all his leisure time with Rick. Now Rick had his own pursuits. He confided, too, that he left home to avoid his dad's list of chores attached to the refrigerator. She might tell William, but she did not want to get Rick in trouble, or herself for meddling. William's words, however, made her sad for him. “Let's practice my backhand when I come home,” she said. Then in the shop she wrote:
I'm in the stupid beauty parlor with heat blowing all around my ears, but since I'm unable to hear anything, I feel a little alone with you
.

When hunting season began, cars and trucks streamed past the prison on their way to the woods. Hal wrote about the scene longingly, but kept his humor.
Huh
? he replied.

You can't understand how a friend was allowed to drive in and deposit two bucks at my camp? They just let him come on in. It was nice to get that close to the woods again. I used to live for fall and winter, when I could spend time in the woods and be with animals. Some of the times I've been least lonely were when I was alone there. Another person might not understand what I mean, Laurel. But I think you do.

The sergeant was a little nonplussed about the deer, until Hal promised him venison. Fortunately, a cage mate knew how to butcher, too, and helped him.

The sergeant wants to know if I'll take his boys rabbit hunting later on. I said sure. Can Jubal learn to track deer? I can't wait to share these things with Rick. You'll be amazed, baby, at how patient I can be in bringing about the sort of relationship I want with him. I can last a long time and take anything in the way of rejection. In the end I'll make him see and feel my love. It's so hard to explain that I did love Greg and wouldn't have deliberately hurt him anymore than I would have if he were my own son. You are pulling me out of a maze I'd never have found my way out of alone.

Having chastised him for his jealousy, it was her turn to feel it.

Guess who came by my office when she was visiting a free-world friend here? The little nurse, Rosalie, who sat up all night with me at the hospital.

The one who knitted him
socks
, Laurel sneered.

She wanted me to kiss her goodbye. I said I couldn't. I didn't mention you. Rosalie said she was just so lonesome. Aren't we lucky all that loneliness is over for us, angel? Yes, I did call Sallie “baby.” And, all right, I didn't mean it, if you say so. But “angel” is my own word for you. I've never called another woman that. Or said to another woman before that I adored her.

Last night, Laurel, I lay on my bed loving you hour after hour. I finished at three in the morning and had to cram the sheet in my mouth to keep from crying out in my agony. I feel that prison has reduced me to so much degradation. A grown man has no business behaving like that.

Rosalie was certainly forward, Laurel thought. After all, on her second visit to the prison, she only asked if they could have a baby. With William I never felt we made a baby out of love, or started one either. Aside from thinking of Matagorda, she thought Rick would be wooed there more easily if there was a sibling.

There was a price to pay for Hal's confiding in the chaplain, for enlisting his help in kiting out letters. The chaplain also let him phone sometimes on his
WATS
line, the way Buddy did. Or let him call from a public phone when they were away from the prison. In return for these favors, Hal had to agree to be on the chaplain's speaking team. He had been asked before and refused. Unlike the time when he was out with Buddy, he had to stand up before strangers and bare his soul about why he was in prison.

I've been once, Laurel—right after we missed our chance in Greenwood. Today in my unhappiness I looked back, trying to figure out why fate would play such a cruel trick. Maybe this is the aspect of prison where society gets paid off. I wondered if God might think I was becoming too complacent because I had you, and that I needed more punishment. But that can't be because you are punished too. I do believe in God. I depended on Him when there was absolutely no way out, and I made it. And after all, He must have sent you.

With the speaking team, I stood on a dais before a youth group. No words would come out of my mouth. Such sorrow welled up inside me about our missed chance, and images of you as I'd thought to know you. When I began talking, my voice wavered. Soon there was not a dry eye in the house; even the chaplain had tears. He put his arms around me and said no other prisoner on his team had ever made such an impact. I felt guilty that I suffered, not over transgressions already committed but over one I longed to commit. You won't stop loving me?

She suffered over his demeaning himself to help them, and loved him more.

The only way I could stop loving you, Hal, is to cut out my heart, my soul, my marrow, the essence of myself. We'll have to forgive God the hurricane that kept us apart.

Always when Hal grew morose, she tried to lighten his mood.

Who was going to pay the whore in that little town if you'd gone to one? Nobody offered to pay me. Got any baubles, beads, or a little corn to barter?

They went over and over their missed chance.

Darling, when you wrote about the fight breaking out in the bus on your way back from the Gulf Coast, and how the walls were covered with blood, I went cold. Suppose something does happen to you! How will I know? Now Mr. Grady is talking about buying an airplane to fly in important visitors and wants you to be the pilot? How much else must I worry about? I wish you didn't know how to fly. But you could keep going and fly to Connecticut. That place is insane. They let a visitor land in his two-seater and take his trusty friend up for a flight over the camp!

Hal, I can imagine what it was like for you that day being driven across those tracks in a bus, looking out and expecting to see me driving in. You are right: If our eyes had met it would have been like some old movie. Also you are right that I've got to let Mr. Cohen actually start this divorce. I must tell William. Then if you get a two-day pass in November, I could certainly come down. I'm sorry I missed the rodeo. No matter what happens, Hal, I've got to come down there soon. I'm dying, as much as you are. What do you mean, you refuse to plant flowers around a red house for me, like the other guys? Don't you love me? I'm glad your turkey and fixings were good last year, even if you had to eat them with a spoon.

“… birthday,” William had said. She stared up from the breakfast table, thinking of Hal. What had William said? He could not afford to buy her a birthday present this year? “That's all right,” she said. Not one inexpensive thing after fifteen years? He had been talking about something before that. A new roof. She shrugged away the importance of a present. She was glad not to have lived the way Hal confessed he and Sallie had lived, always in debt. He bought two airplanes he couldn't afford and used to do acrobatics—and yes, he wrote, wearing Snoopy goggles and helmet and scarf—landing in fields near the pools of friends at parties, to their delight. He had been a card. Till the day he suddenly decided he could kill himself, and he quit. She was of two minds about Hal's life. He should have been past all that at his age, industriously working to save money the way she and William had been, always with goals in mind. On the other hand, admittedly she was intrigued by the high-flying Delta social life, by all the partying and drinking, and felt she had missed out on something. There was a recklessness in her nature that longed for Hal's past life. How could William be so short of money?

She put a few peanuts beneath a counter. “I wish I could see the little guy,” Rick said, shrugging into a heavy sweater. “You will,” she said like a promise. He had turned loose his three chipmunks in the house and they ran about, hiding at will, until they escaped outdoors. One had begun to return, finding its way in from behind the stove. She looked up from reading, quiet afternoons in the house, and the tiny thing sat on its haunches staring at her, sharing moments in a way she would not have thought possible. When she lay still, it climbed all over her. William, in wool, went by in a whiff of mothballs. She should have aired out things better from the attic.

When the house emptied, she sat in her housewife's silence, near tears. Because someday the chipmunk would simply not appear anymore and someday she would not sit in this house again either. It seemed so difficult to think of leaving.

In the houses where they lived, William kindly gave her the extra room for her writing, saying it was only fair since he had an office in New York. He did not keep much business at home. In the top of his closet there was a box with things filed for income tax time. Laurel walked the box off the shelf with her fingertips. It had a folder with numerous receipts for dinners for two at Trader Vic's. She got a chair to replace the box exactly in its dust marks. William could see up that high without help.

Dearest Hal,

There are so many kids here in the afternoons, I drove my mother to a nearby cemetery to talk. I told her about new evidence. She said, “Maybe I shouldn't have talked you out of a divorce before. William's a sexual deviate.” I told her, “Only in the sense he needs the excitement of a chase. He's not turned on by sleeping with his housekeeper, which is what a wife is.”

“He's a cock-chaser,” she said.

I nearly fell over. “Mother, that's not a term I'm familiar with,” I said.

“I just know a lot more than you think I do,” she said. “I heard your daddy and his friends talk nasty all those years.”

“I believe the word you want is cunt,” I said. A nice ladies' conversation.

She said, “Listen, I can't stay in this cemetery any longer. I've got to pee.”

“You mean piss,” I said.

My mother and I are being brought closer together.

Then I had to tell her. “Mother, wait. There's something else.…”

“What!” she screamed. “Throw your life away on somebody who's never drawn a sober breath? A mur—” but she couldn't go on with that. I said alcohol was available in prison and you'd never taken a drink in a year. Then she said, “Oh. If he hasn't had a drink in a year, then he can quit.”

There you have it from the horse's mouth: she did. “Bah,” she said. “Two years. Anything can happen. Period.”

Her opinion is Sallie will never let you go, and that Rick will never move south. She would not either, she said. She wasn't going to move in with me when I was a poor divorcée. I wouldn't have thought of asking her; but up here is so expensive. The cleaning lady asked me for a raise. Forty dollars for two days and she leaves at two thirty! I remember your being surprised by that term, but I can't switch now to cleaning woman.

After a glimmer of consolation, she began berating me for my whole life. How embarrassing I had been for her and how unstable. I wanted so much to ask her, didn't she realize how
her
drinking and
her
instability had affected me? But I lack that kind of courage. I like to spare hurt. The truth is only in the eye of each beholder. I see you as someone else from the way a lot of others see you. My mother said, once I was divorced I was nothing but a failure. I told that to my editor and he said quietly, “Most mothers would be very proud of you.”

As soon as she sees a place to dig in, she's going to; now she sees a flaw in William. Why had I picked him? I wanted to laugh; always before she's been so proud of my marrying into such a family and someone like William so devoted to his son. Though she simply accepts infidelity as part of the male character; having grown up with that idea, I do too. It's the degree we're talking about, and neglect. If only William had slept with me too we wouldn't be in this mess.

She said I was vindictive, that I always had to get back at people and was getting a divorce to get back at William; that I'd done it to her by making her an alcoholic in my last novel. I muttered under my breath, “You
were
one.”