Separate Flights (21 page)

He asks for the children and she says she'll get them, she leaves the phone and he listens to her calling them, he strains to hear every sound in the house, and now he is listening for smells and colors too, for warmth and light, he is listening for joy and sorrow and everything he doesn't know, and now Kathi is on one phone and David on another, and Peter's voice is warm and cheerful: ‘I liked your letters and your pictures. How are you?'

‘Fine.'

‘Fine; how are you?'

‘Good. What were you doing?'

‘When?'

‘Just now. When I called.'

‘Watching
TV
.'

‘Cartoons,' Kathi says. ‘It's snowing.'

‘Is it a good snow?'

‘Yeah!' David says. ‘We didn't go to school.' ‘So we get three days off,' Kathi says. ‘'Cept tomorrow we're supposed to have skiing lessons. But maybe we won't.'

‘Skiing lessons? Both of you?'

‘Yeah,' David says. ‘We're in the same group too.' ‘It's hard to walk on them.'

‘Do you like it?'

‘It's neat!' David says.

‘Do you like it, Kathi?'

‘Maybe so. I'll see.'

‘Good. You learn to ski, and then it'll be spring and then in summer we'll go to the beach every sunny day, I'm getting bunk beds to go in my living room—'

‘Bunk beds?' David says. ‘Neat!'

‘I want the top,' Kathi says.

‘We'll work it out, and I'm going to try to work mornings from six to ten instead of afternoons so we'll have the rest of the day for the beach, I'm pretty sure I can swing it, and we'll get brown as old wet driftwood—' then they are all talking about summer coming, and flying to Boston, they are talking about the beach, David wants boiled lobsters at the cheap screened picnic table restaurant near the sea, Kathi hates school, she wants summer, David doesn't mind school, he says Kathi won't make friends, that's why she doesn't like it, and when she assents with her silence (Peter can feel that silence: it is hot-faced while a chill creeps like fog over her heart) his own heart breaks, his arms yearn to hold her, to protect her, to do anything that will take her happily through her days, realizing at once that this is true and not true, for he will do anything for Kathi except submit to the death of living with and trying once more after the long killing pain to love her mother, and all he can say is, ‘Try, Kathi; I was shy too; you have to try, no one will come to you, people aren't like that, they go their own ways, you give it a try, you hear.' Knowing he is saying nothing, and now they are all saying I love you, they are all smacking kisses into the three phones, his closed eyes see Kathi and David, then they start over again I love you I love you I love you and kisses and kisses over the wires, through his clear night and their late afternoon snow, and when he hangs up he does not cradle the receiver, demons move in from the walls, he reaches over and depresses the button and then he calls Jo. As always her voice is guarded, as though she were a fugitive. He asks her to dinner. Her voice doesn't change, but she accepts. Then he takes off the records, turns on the radio so he will not come home to silence, leaves on the lights, and flees his apartment.

Some people divorce because they hope for resurrection and afterwards you can see in them a new energy, a new strength. But Peter believes Jo did it with her last effort, like a suicide stepping onto the chair and ducking her head into the noose.

‘It's been so long since I've had a good meal,' she says.

‘What do you eat?'

‘Frozen things. Things in cans. Pizza. It's rotten to do it to the girls. Sometimes I feel guilty and I cook something and eat it with them.'

They have brandy and they have pulled their chairs near the fireplace, where two logs are burning. In the restaurant she smoked a lot and talked a lot, and she ate a large meal, oysters on the half-shell, broiled scallops, and Peter, his back tingling like a nervous gunfighter's (for the demons followed him into his car, and in the chatter behind him they stalked among tables), savored his shrimp broiled on a stick with tomato and bacon and resting on a nest of spinach, he sipped Chablis, putting a stake on the good meal, the bottle of wine, and Jo was good to be with, better than eating alone; but she has not laughed since dinner, her smile is forced, and in her voice and dark eyes her ache is bitter, it is defiant, and he feels they are not at a hearth but are huddled at a campfire in a dangerous forest.

He met her in the early fall, before Miranda. She is one of his listeners, one of the women he talks to on weekday afternoons, the only one he really knows. In the fall the station had a contest with one hundred winners: the wives who wrote the best letters telling why they should leave their husbands at home and go to a New England Patriot football game.
All my life I've been watching men, she wrote. When I was a very little girl I watched boys throwing rocks and beating each other up and racing across the schoolyard after school. When I was a teen-ager I watched them playing football and basketball, and at home they played street hockey and when the ponds froze they played ice hockey across the street from my window. I watched them drive off in cars, I watched them hitchhike to Florida, I watched them go into the service and I watched them come home strutting and winking about their adventures. I always believed when I got married it would be my turn. My husband would watch me. He doesn't. He watches football on television. If I'm going to spend my life watching men who aren't watching me, then at least once it should be fun, and I should be able to dress up and go out to do it. Maybe my husband will see me on television and then he can watch me watching
.

Peter sat with her at the game, she told him about her letter, she was pleased that he remembered it. During the game he watched her. She was excited, she was having fun, but there was a desperate quality about her fun, as though she had just been released from prison. It was the same that night, after the studio party where they drank enough to impassion their intent: in the motel she made love with a fury, but he knew it was forced, that her tightening arms, her bucking hips were turned against the fetters which clanked at her heart. The affair was short because that clanking never went away. It was in her voice: when she was pretending—and nearly always she pretended—her voice was low and flat, as if she had just waked from a deep sleep; but most of the time her voice was high and brittle with cheer, her laughter was forced and shrill, and he could hear in it the borders of hysteria. Like most unfaithful wives she was remorseless: she felt she deserved a lover. Yet it did her no good. Her heart was surrounded by obdurate concentric circles of disappointment and bitterness; she could not break through, so Peter couldn't either, and finally they broke it off and both pretended that aversion to the deceptions and stolen time of adultery was the reason.

‘You always liked to eat,' Peter says.

‘I know.'

‘What else don't you like anymore?'

‘It's not that I don't like things.'

‘You can't, is that it?'

‘Yes. Sometimes I take pills.'

‘To cheer you up?'

‘They're not
that
good. He keeps calling, he doesn't want me to go through with the divorce, he wants me to take him back. Sometimes I think I ought to. It's not worth it.'

‘What's not worth it?'

She shrugs. Peter is angry, he wants to tell her that for years he hasn't thought about sin, hasn't believed in sin, hasn't used the word sin, but now he is thinking depression is a sin, perhaps the only one that many people can commit. But he takes their glasses to the kitchen for more brandy. Her house is clean; he knows that unhappy women often lapse into disorder and dirt, and walking back to the living room he feels affection for Jo, he thinks of her dusting furniture as his voice comes over the radio. He sits beside her and tells her funny stories, he clowns for her, and it is like the stage again, he is not Peter Jackman, he is a changing face, a cracking voice, he is a field of laughter, and she laughs and sometimes succeeds in really laughing, and when she does this she reaches across the short distance between their chairs and grips his arm or hand, and he regrets but cannot ignore the current in her fingers and without a word he accepts. Still he rises, hoping to leave, but when they kiss her tongue is a desperate cry on his, so he follows her creeping up the stairs past her daughters' rooms and into her bed where with a heart like packed snow he makes love and then lies stroking her face as though with a cool cloth against fever. When she is sleepy he gets up and dresses in the moonlight and she says very quietly: ‘Peter? Will you come back sometime?'

He tells her he will, and he goes out into the night.

‘I want you to care,' he says.

‘I can't,' Miranda says.

She is sitting on the orange couch; at another time he would be sitting beside her, but his (and her) Saturday night has riven them, though he is the only one who knows it; or he believes he is the only one who knows it. So he faces her from a basket chair across the narrow room. She is sipping tea, and she is tired. She is smoking Marlboros, one after the other. Like many girls her age, she smokes almost continually. A part of Peter admires this; he sees it as insouciance toward death. Another part of him sees it as insouciance toward life.

‘What does that mean, you can't? Do you mean you can't feel anything because you just aren't able to, or do you mean you can't because you're not supposed to?'

‘I'm not supposed to.'

‘But did you feel anything when I told you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you like it?'

‘No.'

‘Then you're not free. And I'm not either. But I already know that. It's you that has to know it. We both made love with other people last night. We're sup
pos
ed to care. If we can't, then we're trapped in something else.'

‘I'm tired,' she says.

She puts out her cigarette and lights another. In the past few minutes he has built a cage around her and behind it her face is confused and frightened. He knows she would like to put on music and smoke dope and quietly merge with the beats and rhythms from her record player. It is late Sunday night, Miranda has an hour ago returned from Connecticut and submitted to his pleas on the phone—he had been phoning every half hour since six o'clock—and has let him come over for a drink. He is drinking bourbon, though he knows he shouldn't, for it will oil his tongue and he will talk and one of his rules with Miranda, one of the rules which allows him to keep her, is not to talk too much of how he feels, for if she knows how much he loves her (she knows), how much he needs her (she knows), she will bolt under the pressure. She doesn't actually bolt: she doesn't send him away, she doesn't walk out on him. She simply goes away inside herself, while she turns to him a smile, gives to him a hand; and that makes him more lonely than any escape by any woman he's ever known. So daily with her he lives with songs he will never sing and screams he will never scream. But tonight he is drinking, and in a fearful moment of release he decides to go to the kitchen and pour himself another, knowing as he watches it pour that he too will be pouring soon, and within his relief there is a core of anger, the contradictions tangled like barbed wire in him again, for what he feels is love and he wants to tell it to Miranda, yet at the same time he is angry because she has managed them so that he can't tell her, and now, going back to the living room with his bourbon, he wants with all his heart to carry her away and make her his wife, yet he also would like to grab her by the shoulders and shake her till she cries.

At the door to the living room he stops. He looks at her quiet and lovely profile: she sips the tea, wipes her lips with the back of her cigarette hand, the lips shaping a kiss as they press themselves dry, then she draws on the cigarette, exhales, and begins again with the tea. She knows now that he is at the door but she doesn't know he is stopping to watch her, and in that moment, when she is drying tea from her lips, he is struck with a purifying love which he knows, if he could sustain it, would save him. He sees a sad young girl who is trying to live as well as she can; who does not hurt him out of spite or malice but only so she can survive; who gives him as much of herself as she is able to and only balks when he demands more; and who has gotten him through many nights. He could not help falling in love with her; what he could have helped was what happened afterward, and he had chosen to make love with a woman who wore an engagement ring; and standing in the doorway he is about to simply say I love you, and kiss her goodnight, and then go home and let her sleep. But now, though she doesn't look at him, she is aware that he is watching her and looking at her profile he knows this and the distance of the moment is broken and he makes a final choice: he crosses the room and settles into the chair.

‘Talk to me,' he says.

Her eyes raise to his, then she looks down at her hands with the cigarette and tea, and then she sips and smokes.

‘You have to tell me what's happening in you. Do you think it's me you love, is that it? Are you waiting to be sure? Talk to me, Miranda. Why are you making love with me? You can tell me that, can't you? Don't you know it's painful for me when you go off for a weekend and we pretend you didn't? If we could at least talk about it maybe it wouldn't be so bad. If you'd say anything at all about what you feel, even if you'd say you loved him and you were just doing some humbug with me, even that, even if I had that definition of what I am, but you won't even say that much, you just sit there and look at your hands. And there's death in you. With your dope and your silence and your two lovers. You erase yourself. Well, you're not going to erase me too. And that's what happens when I'm lonely and I end up with Jo. And I'm not going to do that anymore. I've
been
there. Jesus, I've
been
there, Miranda—'