Riggs Park (2 page)

And not just because of the sex. There was also the luscious sense, after tossing alone in the world for far too long, of being once again mated. I’d been divorced nearly twenty years; Jon had been married only briefly. We reveled in the long-lost pleasure of touching shoulders as we passed in the hallway, of worrying together about the dripping sink, of reaching at the same moment to switch off the radio, of having someone always available for dinner, a movie, a visit with friends. Coupled and comfortable, we even went sometimes to Friday-night services at the Temple of Israel in downtown Wilmington, where I loved being regarded as half of just another ordinary middle-aged pair.

From his office, Jon’s fingers clicked on his keyboard, then stilled, stopped. I held my breath, waiting for the comfort of renewed sound, activity, ongoing life. Out on the beach, two late-season tourists splashed in the shallows, bumping hips, laughing so easily that my eyes welled with sadness and envy. For weeks, I’d been trying to pinpoint the moment when Jon and I had lost that sweetness, when we had begun to feel ragged and old.

Certainly it was after Labor Day. We’d eaten breakfast on the deck that holiday morning, Jon in shorts and a blue golf shirt, me teasing him about the curly white hairs peeking out of his open collar. “Oh, you think it’s an imperfection!” Jon had joked, and I’d replied, “Yes, terrible! Like a chest wig to show your masculinity,” to which Jon had huffed, “Huh! I’ll show you masculinity!” and had chased me into the house. On Labor Day—no question about it—we’d still been happy.

So…when? Later that week, my daughter Robin had called to say she was coming to Wilmington for a film shoot, and I’d been happy then, too. A first assistant director, Robin worked at Wilmington’s film studio once or twice a year. This time, I’d been especially glad to hear from her because she’d recently separated from her husband and seemed truly distraught.

“Most of the crew is staying in one of those cute bed-and-breakfasts downtown,” Robin said on the phone, “but, Mom, the thought of hanging around with them right now gives me the willies. Think you could put me up?”

“Of course! Do you even have to ask? We’d love it!”

“I’ll only be there two weeks before we leave for location.”

“Robin, stop apologizing! I’ll even do your laundry. This is wonderful!”

And Jon had seemed pleased, had sounded cordial—although the very fact of Robin’s existence, I sometimes thought, made him sad. His short marriage had produced no offspring, and he regretted never having been a father. Much as he seemed to like Robin—and I was sure they genuinely enjoyed each other—I sensed she reminded him of what he had missed.

Yet the offer he made two days later puzzled and disturbed me. “I have some interviews to do out of town,” he said. “The logical thing seems to be to schedule them during Robin’s visit.”

“Oh, honey. It’s your house as much as mine. Robin knows we’re a couple.”

“Yes, but she’s never stayed with us before.”

“Only because she thought she and Bob would put us out. Now that she’s alone—”

“As I recall,” Jon said with a wink, “she told you she didn’t want to disturb ‘your little love nest.’” And then, seriously, “I think I make her nervous. I think she’ll be happier if I go.”

“Don’t be silly. She doesn’t want to stay with the crew because she’s afraid they’ll feel sorry for her now that Bob’s gone. That’s what makes her nervous.”

“With me working here, you won’t have any privacy at all.”

“Robin won’t care. She works six days a week until God knows what time. We’ll hardly see her.” I tried to quell the note of irritation in my voice. “On Sundays all she’ll want is sleep.”

“She’s young. She won’t sleep that much.” Impatiently, Jon fiddled with a pencil he’d tucked behind his ear. “I have to do those interviews sometime. This will give you time together.”

“You make me feel like I’m kicking you out.”

“Of course not.”

“Maybe you’re looking for an excuse to get away.” I meant it as a joke, but my voice shrilled in my ears.

“Don’t be paranoid, Barbara.”

“Paranoid!”

“What else would you call it?”

“Oh, fine. Now I’m the loony little woman.”

“Listen to yourself!”

“Listen to
you.
”

Stunned into silence, the two of us stood face-to-face and numb, aware that in our two years together, this was the closest we’d come to a fight. I wanted to pluck my words out of the air; I watched Jon’s eyes grow dark with sorrow. “I’m sorry,” we both mumbled.

Jon opened his arms, swept me in, held me close. “You’re right,” he whispered. “If I go, it’ll send the wrong message. I don’t want her to feel unwelcome.”

He stroked my hair. I was convinced. But maybe—certainly—that was the beginning.

The day Robin arrived, I declined Jon’s offer to drive me to the airport. I always liked to be alone to relish the sight of my daughter after a long absence, to bask in what was a perennial surprise and delight: her large eyes and prominent nose; the ripe, wide mouth; the erect bearing that made Robin seem so regal. Yet when the plane arrived, I wished Jon were there to soften my shock at seeing the weary young woman who shuffled through the gate, face the color of talc, pale hair wiry and wild, clothes hanging on a spindly frame. Even with Robin’s divorce, I hadn’t imagined such all-pervasive wretchedness. I rushed forward blinking back tears, and closed my arms around my daughter’s knobby shoulders, feeling called once again to protective motherhood, yet helpless, too. What could a mother, herself long divorced and now living in what was once called “sin,” do for a grown but aching child?

“Can you believe I waited so long to get married and then got snookered?” Robin said wryly as we waited for her luggage. “Thirty years waiting for the right guy, and then to get left for an actress.”

“Stop kicking yourself, honey. You couldn’t have known it wouldn’t work out.”

“Huh!” Robin snorted, spotting her suitcases on the carousel and rushing to get them. In the car on the way to the beach, she slumped in her seat and gazed so aimlessly at the summer-weary landscape that I had to restrain myself from pulling over and taking her in my arms, which she would have hated. Like Wells, her father, Robin had always been embarrassed by what she termed “gushy shows of emotion.” Yet she’d always come to me when she was troubled. Not for hugs, not even for advice. Simply to nest, to be near a fixed point in her universe until her spinning stopped. I was glad she’d come to me now.

But I was horrified, over dinner that night, when she confessed to Jon and me that she’d been two months pregnant when Bob left and had miscarried, at home, alone, the morning after he moved out.

“Oh, Robin!” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t tell anybody,” she said woodenly. “I was—I don’t know. I felt like such a complete failure, I didn’t tell anyone.”

“But I’m your mother!”

“You should have come to us right away,” Jon added, his voice gruff and wounded.

Robin smiled sadly. “I’m a big girl.”

“You could have come to us,” Jon said.

Stricken, I shot Jon a glance of gratitude for taking her side. But the discussion didn’t end there. It went on and on, Jon sounding so troubled that finally even Robin seemed embarrassed. I raised my eyebrows at him quizzically. What was he trying to prove? On previous visits, he and Robin had talked about nothing more personal than movies and sports.

“Bastard,” he muttered when Robin left the room. “What a bastard.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“I hope so. We’ll see.”

A jab of irritation canceled out my concern. After wanting to go off to do his interviews, how much could he care? Much as he seemed to regret not having children, he’d never struck me as particularly fatherly, either. “You don’t know Robin,” I said. “She’s resilient. Amazingly so.”

“We’ll see.”

As if I didn’t know my own daughter! But, of course, I did. By midweek, Robin was immersed in the intense business of filmmaking, and by the weekend, she’d actually cheered up—not that we saw her enough to know what was going on in the depths of her soul. When after two weeks Robin left for location in the Pennsylvania mountains, her color was good, her appetite restored. It had been a stupid marriage in the first place, I reasoned. A relief to have it over with. Robin was on her way to recovery.

But Robin’s departure also ushered in those soggy days of waning summer when Jon began to retreat into the private corridor of sorrow I could neither understand nor penetrate. “When they’re at that age,” he said in a tone of immense weariness, “you wish you could somehow make it all right.”

“You can’t. Not when they’re grown. But it
is
all right. Or will be.”

“Yes, of course. I know that.”

But except for lip service, Jon stayed locked in his fortress of thinly masked grief. He took to wandering from his office to the kitchen for ice water, shambling back again, staring out the sliding glass doors at the ocean, so preoccupied that I began to dread working in the same space with him, even such a space as this, lovely and sprawling, with its view of the marshes and the sea. He was not ill-tempered, not inattentive. But a subtle, brooding quality crept into his manner, which he tried to hide with a false, jovial air that set my teeth on edge.

To escape his moods, I took long walks on the beach—not that they helped. Outside the air was hot and gummy. The exquisite clear sunshine of July and August had given way to a burning September, an unseasonably hot October. The warm Atlantic waters refused to cool; the autumn fish stayed away; the festive red gaillardias put on a second season of wild red bloom in the sand. How was it that fall had come to the entire country except the Carolina coast? I longed for crisp air and brisk nights. My lungs felt flaccid from too much humidity, my skin parched from too much sun. Why, I was nothing but a crone who’d faced the millennium with a closer view of sixty than fifty! What made me think I could still hold a man? I was healthy enough (at fifty-eight, I wasn’t
old
yet, was I?) but in the eyes of the world (Jon’s eyes?) I must be fading. For me, that autumn on the sweet coast of North Carolina held such a damp core of sadness that even on the days when the water turned velvety blue-green in the slanted light and made my throat ache just to look at it—even then melancholy persisted in the soft air and ruined everything.

One day I returned from my walk to find Jon staring at a picture I thought I’d thrown away, of me and my ex-husband, Wells, on a woodland hike early in our marriage. Jon looked up so guiltily that I might have found him with another woman.

“Regretting you didn’t claim me first, during your treacherous youth?” I asked, trying for levity.

Jon ran his hand up my arm, barely grazing the skin, and I was at once touched and annoyed by the physical effect he had on me, which seemed as out-of-season as the weather. “I’d give a lot to live my treacherous youth over again,” he said.

He lifted a finger to my face, traced the line of my cheekbone. I didn’t want think about lost youth; I was more worried about what we seemed to be losing now.

“Be serious, Jon. What’s bothering you?”

“You think I’m sulking, don’t you?”

“Well, aren’t you?” I asked, remembering his silent morning.

Deliberately dramatic, he flung the picture into a drawer, closed it with a flourish, turned to me with a manic grin. “I hope not.”

“Jon, don’t.”

He moved close, studied me. “You know how you make me feel?”

“How?”

“You make me feel lucky. I haven’t felt lucky in a long time.”

He kissed me on the forehead, leaving me disarmed, but none the wiser, and retreated into his office.

If I could have confided in Marilyn, I might at least have taken comfort in having an ally. But my troubles seemed too humiliating, somehow. I would work through them,
then
confess. In the meantime, I invented endless explanations for Jon’s moods. He was grumpy because he missed traveling. He preferred working alone but didn’t want to say. He was worried about his book.
That,
at least, was true enough. The book was massive, so different from writing short pieces that naturally it took its toll. I’d seen how engrossed he was, working on a chapter about swimmers who’d been denied their chance for greatness when Jimmy Carter had withdrawn from the 1980 Olympics. Caught powerless in a whirlwind of politics, some had put the disappointment behind them and gone on to other successes. Many had not. It must be hard to write, day after day, about such young promise being dashed. Jon had once been a fine athlete himself. A teenage mishap had ended his budding career. Maybe it grieved him to remember. Maybe the memory of his youthful disappointment spilled over to the collapse of Robin’s marriage: failure one generation later, still hard to watch. I was full of theories.

Or maybe it was just that he no longer loved me.

But no! I didn’t believe it. Not after we’d come this far.

Feeling exiled at the beach these last few weeks, breathing the sticky air, I’d vowed stubbornly to hang on to the vestiges of our new life. I would endure Jon’s silence, wait him out. Offer him, if nothing else, my presence. I had no right, just now, to be anywhere but in my own troubled household, in the flat heat of a muggy North Carolina autumn.

So how was it that, when Marilyn had called, I’d said I would go to Washington?

Because there was no choice.

Because stronger even than my feeling for Jon was the lesson only treachery and its consequences could teach: Life is not that long. You will love only a handful of people. When all is said and done, you will be able to count them on your fingers. It will not matter if they are worthy or deserving. Don’t take them lightly. Don’t let them down.

After more than fifty years of friendship, there was really no question who had the older, the greater claim.

Outside, the beach had emptied. Only the screeching, circling gulls and the brown pelicans remained, diving into the surf for their supper. Swallowing my apprehension, I strode into Jon’s office and announced that Marilyn’s cancer was back, that Marilyn wanted me to come.