Separate Flights (7 page)

‘I'll do it. Forget it, I'll do it.'

‘Fine. Do that. That's one thing you can do. You can't help me with my other problem any more than I can help you with yours. See, I'm a big girl now and I knew what I was doing tonight and I don't know if I can very well say tomorrow—today—well gee Hank that was last night but this is now and gee I just don't want to anymore. I mean even you with all your progressive and liberal ideas will have to admit that even adultery has its morality, that one can cop out on that too. So I have things to figure out.'

‘Yes.' I started leaving the room. ‘Do what you can.'

‘Oh, that's good.' I stopped at the door but didn't look back. ‘That's what all my good existential friends say whenever I want advice: Just do what you can. Well, I will, Jack, I will.'

I went to the kitchen and drank an ale and when Terry was asleep I went to bed.

Next morning I woke first, alert and excited, though I had slept only four hours. Everything was quiet except birds. I got up and dressed, watching Terry asleep on her back, mouth open; I stepped over her clothes on the floor, and going through the living room picked up her beer can and brought it to the kitchen. In the silence I could feel the children sleeping upstairs, as if their breathing caressed me. I went outside: the morning was sun and blue and cool air. I drove to a small grocery store and bought a
Globe
and cigarettes. Then I drove to a service station with a pay phone and parked but didn't get out of the car. It was only five minutes of nine on a Sunday morning, and they would be asleep. Or certainly Hank would. But maybe she wouldn't, and I drove to their street: all the houses looked quiet, theirs did too, and I went past, then turned around in a driveway and started back, believing I would go on by; then I stopped and walked up their driveway to the back door and there she was in the dim kitchen away from the sun, surprised, turning to me in her short nightgown, a happy smile as she came to the door and pushed it gently so the latch was quiet. I stepped in and she was holding me tight, and I stroked her soft brushed hair and breathed her toothpaste and soap.

‘Are you all right now?'

‘The fever's gone. Was it fun last night?'

‘They made love.'

She moved her head back to look at me and say, ‘Really?'; then she was at my cheek again. ‘She told you?'

‘She didn't want to, but I knew, I had waked up. They went to the bronze angel.'

‘Are you jealous?'

‘No.' She was holding me, rubbing her cheek on my chest. Her kitchen was clean. ‘They might see each other today. If they do, we can get together.'

‘We'll have the kids and they'll have the cars.'

‘Shit.'

Water started boiling; she let me go and turned off the fire. Then she was back.

‘How are you?' I said.

‘Still weak, that's all. I told you the fever's gone.'

‘I mean about them.'

‘Fine. I think it's fine. He'll be asleep for a long time.'

‘He might wake up.'

‘We'd hear him, we'd be right under the bedroom. He always goes to the bathroom first.'

‘Sharon,' I said.

‘She'll sleep too.'

We started for the door; she stopped and put instant coffee in two cups and poured water. Then we crept through the house to the guest room.

When I left, after drinking the coffee that was still warm enough, Sharon was coming downstairs. Before getting into the car I squinted up at the bedroom where Hank slept.

At home I didn't go in; I sat on the back steps to read the sports page. I could smell Terry's cigarette, then I heard her moving and she came outside in her robe, hair uncombed, and sat beside me and put a hand on my shoulder. I nearly flinched.

‘I was scared,' she said. ‘When I woke up and you weren't there. I thought you had left.'

‘I did. To get cigarettes and a paper.'

‘What took so long?'

‘Driving around looking at the bright new morning.'

‘Is it?'

I looked up from the paper and waved a hand at the trees and rooftops and sky.

‘Blink your eyes and look at it.'

‘Your beard's beautiful in the sun. It has some blond and red in it.'

‘I got that from you and the kids.'

‘I thought you had left me.'

‘Why should I?'

‘What I said.'

‘That's night talk.'

‘I know it. Just as long as you know it. I was being defensive because I was scared and when I'm scared I get vicious.'

‘Why were you scared?'

‘Because I have a lover.'

‘Is that what you've decided?'

‘I haven't decided anything. I made love with Hank so I have a lover, no matter what I do about it. You really don't care?'

She had the right word: care. So I must get her away from that. The way to hunt a deer is not to let him know you're alive.

‘I care about you. It's monogamy I don't care about.'

‘You've said that for years. I've waked up with that whispering to me for years. But a long time ago you weren't that way.'

‘A long time ago I wasn't a lot of ways.'

‘I couldn't let you do what I'm doing.'

‘Are you doing anything?'

‘I don't know yet.'

‘But you want to.'

‘If I knew that I'd know something.'

‘Why don't you know it? I know it.'

‘How?'

Her hand was still on my arm; I was scanning box scores.

‘You stayed out there with him because you wanted to and I think you came home planning to see him today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but when you found out I knew about it then it got too sticky. Just too bloody sticky. To all in one night leave monogamy and then have to carry it out with your husband knowing about it, staying with the kids while you—'

‘Oh stop,' her voice pleading, her fingers tightening on my shoulder. ‘Shhh, stop.'

‘Isn't that so?'

‘I don't know. I mean, sure I wanted to, and I like Hank very much; in a way I love him, and I love you and nothing's changed that, what's with Hank is—' she squeezed my shoulder again and looking at the paper I heard the fake smile in her voice ‘—it's friendly lust, that's all. But it might not be marriage, living like this.'

‘We're married. You and I are married. So it has to be marriage.'

‘It might not be for long.'

‘I wish Boston were a National League town. You mean you're afraid you'll run off with him?'

‘No. My
God
no. There are all sorts of ways for a marriage not to be a marriage.'

‘You're just afraid because it's new.'

‘If I kept on with Hank you'd want a girl. You'd feel justified then. Maybe even with Edith, and wouldn't that be a horror.'

‘Seems strange to me that while you're deciding whether or not to make love with a man you call your lover, you're thinking most about what
I'll
do.'

‘That's not strange. You're my husband.'

‘It is strange, and it's beneath you. This is between you and Hank, not me.'

She took a pack of cigarettes from the carton I'd bought and sat smoking while I read.

‘Are you hungry?' she said.

‘Yes.'

‘Pancakes and eggs?'

‘Buckwheat. Are the kids up?'

‘No. I think I'll take them to the beach today. Do you want to go?'

‘I want to watch the game.'

‘I think I'll tell him no.'

‘Is that what you want?'

‘I don't know. I'm just scared.'

‘Because I know about it?'

‘Because there's something to know.'

She went inside. I read the batting averages and pitching records, then the rest of the paper, listening to her washing last night's pots and dishes. Then she started cooking bacon and I sat waiting, smelling and listening to the bacon, until I heard Natasha and Sean coming downstairs. We ate for a long time, then Terry lit a cigarette and said, ‘Well,' and went to the bedroom and shut both doors. I could hear her voice, but that was all. Natasha and Sean were upstairs getting dressed; when Terry came back to the kitchen she went to the foot of the stairs and called them and said to put on bathing suits. ‘We're going to the beach!'

‘The beach!' they said. ‘The beach!'

‘How did you get it done?' I said.

‘He answered. He'd said he would. I asked how Edith was and he told me.'

‘That was the signal?'

‘Yes.'

‘Poor Hank. And what if you had decided to see him?'

‘I wouldn't have called.'

She had been smoking a lot all morning. Now she started making a Bloody Mary.

‘Do you want one?'

‘No. How's Edith?'

‘All right. Her fever's gone.'

For some years now I have been spiritually allergic to the words husband and wife. When I read or hear husband I see a grimly serene man in a station wagon; he is driving his loud family on a Sunday afternoon. They will end with ice cream, sticky car seats, weariness, and ill tempers. In his youth he had the virtues of madness: rage and passion and generosity. Now he gets a damp sponge from the kitchen and wipes dried ice cream from his seat covers. He longs for the company of loud and ribald men, he would like to drink bourbon and fight in a bar, steal a pretty young girl and love her through the night. When someone says wife I see the confident, possessive, and amused face of a woman in her kitchen; among bright curtains and walls and the smell of hot grease she offers her husband a kiss as he returns from the day sober, paunchy, on his way to some nebulous goal that began as love, changed through marriage to affluence, is now changing to respectable survival. She is wearing a new dress. From her scheming heart his balls hang like a trophy taken in battle from a young hero long dead.

I wheezed again with this allergy as I stood on the lawn and watched Terry and Natasha and Sean drive off to Plum Island. They had a picnic basket, a Styrofoam cooler of soft drinks and beer, a beach bag of cigarettes and towels, and a blanket. They left in a car that needed replacing. This morning's lovely air was now rent apart by the sounds of power mowers. One was across the street, two blocks down to the right; the man behind it wore a T-shirt and shorts and was bald. The one to the left was on my side of the street, behind shrubs, and I only saw him when he got to the very front of his lawn, turned, and started back. I sat on the grass and chewed a blade of it and watched the bald man. I wondered what he was thinking. Then I thought he must be thinking nothing at all. For if he thought, he might cut off the engine that was mowing his lawn and go into the garage and jam the garden shears into his throat.

Yet once in a while you saw them: they sat in restaurants, these old couples of twenty and twenty-five and thirty years, and looked at each other with affection, and above all they talked. They were always a wonder to see, and when I saw them I tried to hear what they said. Usually it was pleasant small talk: aging sailors speaking in signals and a language they have understood forever. If I looked at most couples with scorn and despair, I watched these others as mystified as if I had come across a happy tiger in a zoo; and I watched them with envy.
It can be faked
, Hank said once. We were in a bar. The afternoon bartender had just finished work for the day, his wife was waiting for him in a booth, and they had two drinks and talked; once they laughed aloud.
There are two kinds of people
, Hank said.
The unhappy ones who look it and the unhappy ones who don't
.

Now I went inside and upstairs and turned on the ball game. Hank's marriage wasn't a grave because Hank wasn't dead; he used his marriage as a center and he moved out from it on azimuths of madness and when he was tired he came back. While Edith held to the center she had been hurt, and for a few days when she started guessing that Hank was not faithful I didn't like being with them: you could smell the poison on their breaths, feel the tiny arrows flying between them. Now she had a separate life too and she came home and they sat in the kitchen with their secrets that were keeping them alive, and they were friendly and teasing again. It was as simple as that and all it required was to rid both people of jealousy and of the conviction that being friendly parents and being lovers were the same. Hank and Edith knew it, and I knew it. I had waked happy, believing Terry knew it too, and now after her one night she was at the beach with the children, and we were husband and wife again. I sat watching the game. Far off, as though from the streets behind the black and white ball park, I could hear the power mowers.

After dinner Terry came to the living room where I was reading on the couch. Upstairs the children were watching television.

‘Hank came to the beach.'

‘He found you? On a hot Sunday at Plum Island? My God, the man's in love.'

‘He says he is.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh, I know it's just talk, it's just a line—he wants to see me tonight.' She was smoking. ‘I wish I hadn't last night. But I did and it doesn't seem really right to say yes and then next morning say no, I mean it's not like I was drunk or something, I knew what I was doing. But I'm scared, Jack.' She sat on the couch; I moved to make room, and she took my hand. ‘Look at me. What do you
really
think? Or really feel. You're not scared of this? People screwing other people?'

‘No, I'm not scared.'

‘Then why am I? When I'm the one who—Jesus.'

‘What did you feel at the beach?'

‘Guilty. Watching my children and talking to him.'

‘Did you tell him you'd meet him?'

She lowered her eyes and said, ‘Yes.'

‘And now you don't feel like it because it's embarrassing to leave the house when I know where you're going. If I didn't know, you'd have got out with some excuse. Does Hank know that I know?'