The Doctor's Wife (19 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
“Please, Simon, your wife is right inside.”
“Yes, I know. I couldn’t help myself.”
“It’s inappropriate, don’t you think?” She said it more out of obligation than distaste. The truth was, she hadn’t minded his kiss at all.
“Yes, it is inappropriate.” He looked at her deeply. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I seem awkward.”
“You don’t.”
“It’s just that I . . . my wife and I . . .”
“You don’t have to explain.” Now she just wanted to go home; she should have left a long time ago. It was her own damn fault. She got into the car and started the engine, her heart beating hard and fast. A guilty pressure roiled her belly. She’d been kissed by Simon Haas! He gave a little wave and went to the door. Annie’s eyes went after him, an unconscious reflex, and she caught the flutter of the curtain in the window. Lydia Haas was standing there; she was looking right at her.
16
SIMON HAD HIS CAR TOWED to the service station and the next morning his wife drove him to the college. His wife didn’t seem right; he wondered if she’d taken her medication. The way her face looked, raw and beady-eyed, as if she hadn’t slept. Often she would not sleep and he would find her next morning on the couch, the floor below scattered with the pages of torn-up magazines. Ever since he’d known her, she’d vacillated between states of extreme contentment and vicious depression. This morning she’d combed her yellow hair and put on makeup. She was dressed for work in gray slacks and a black turtleneck. She was concentrating terribly hard on the road, gnawing on her bottom lip. He shuffled his students’ papers on his lap and began correcting them.
“I gather those are for your morning class?”
He squinted at her. “Yes.”
“You really amaze me,” she said. “And they actually worship you, don’t they?”
“Yes, Lydia, they think I’m a genius.”
“One of these days somebody’s going to figure you out.”
“And you already have, haven’t you?”
She winced and looked as if she might start crying, which he hated. He hated it when she cried because it often became difficult to get her to stop.
“You don’t love me anymore,” she said.
“Let’s not start that again, Lydia. You know it’s not productive.” He tugged a handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to her. “I will always love you, you know that.”
Gulping, swatting at her face, she pulled up the campus driveway to the art complex. He hoped nobody he knew would see them.
The truth was, he had never really loved her and by now she knew it.
He got out and slammed the door—a bit ungenerous of him, he admitted, but it would give her something to stew about all day long when she sat at the telephone at work. He hurried across the black path to the art studios and dumped his belongings in his office. He got the coffee going, then glanced at himself in the little cracked mirror over the sink. He saw his father staring back, old and ugly. Lighting his first cigarette, he surveyed the room for items that would make an interesting still life: a slender blue apothecary bottle, a squat green dish, a jar of buttons, and a hunting knife with a keen silver blade.
Later that afternoon, with the low sun glimmering in the windows of the cathedral, Simon crossed the quad to the South Cottage. He had thought of little else but Annie Knowles all day. The door to her office was ajar and he glimpsed the young professor talking with a student. The student was an overweight girl with a punk haircut, and Annie was listening to her intently. She had her feet up on her desk, contemplatively fondling her crystal beads. Her eyes were dark and shining, her lips painted a deep persimmon. Had she thought about him even once? he wondered. Something told him she had not. He rapped on the door and poked his head in, catching a whiff of her perfume. “Can I talk to you a second?”
She got up without smiling and walked toward him. “You’ll have to wait.” She closed the door in his face.
He waited over an hour, feeling like a fool. Finally, the student wandered out, looking elated. “She said you can go in now, Professor Haas.”
Simon met Annie’s eyes across the worn Moroccan rug. A bright glare poured in through the window. “Sit down,” she said.
He fixated on his hands for a few minutes, then looked at her. “I just wanted you to know I’m sorry about that kiss. It was, as you said, inappropriate. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Apology accepted.”
“You’re not mad?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not mad. But I don’t think we should do it again.”
“I agree. Absolutely.”
“For one thing, it’s completely unprofessional.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“And for another, I’m a married woman—we’re both married, for God’s sake. It’s not that I don’t find you attractive,” she told him softly. “But I couldn’t live with myself. My children. I wouldn’t be able to look at them.”
“I understand completely,” he said wryly, and he went out. He had planned to ask her for a ride to his mechanic, but now he thought better of it and decided to walk. It was only three or so miles; the air would do him good. He walked down to the road in the high wind with his hands in his pockets and the leaves spinning down like origami birds. He went over their conversation in his mind, the way her face looked, the way her hands flew about when she spoke. He wanted her so badly his stomach ached, but he could do nothing about it. Nothing except wait. Wait for her to change her mind. And unlike his other conquests, he was not at all certain that she would.
Mal, his mechanic, brought his car around from behind the garage and handed Simon the keys. “She’s starting to show her age, Mr. Haas.”
“We’ll just have to hope for the best,” Haas told him. “Thanks, Mal.” He took the keys and got into the car and started the engine. The Porsche responded with a lusty roar that filled Simon with hope. Although he’d never admitted it to anyone, he loved the damn car. He loved everything about it. The shiny black exterior, the red leather seats. The wood steering wheel. And he was glad he had it, even though it had been his father’s. Driving home he thought about his wife, how beautiful she’d been when they’d first met and how different she was now. The beauty had never sustained him, he realized. Sometimes, when he watched her sleep, when it didn’t matter who she was during the day, he could still believe he loved her. Her dedication to the church, her passion for it, bewildered him. After her father’s death she’d fallen into God’s arms and never looked back. It was her guilt, he realized, that kept her there.
He didn’t feel like going home to her now.
He stopped at Flo’s, ordered a glass of whiskey at the bar, and slid a few coins into the jukebox. He wanted to hear a woman’s voice, a raunchy expression of love. He wished he could paint his way out of his marriage. But he was in too deep for that. Lydia would never let him go. And his paintings weren’t selling anymore. Oh, one or two here and there, but in general people looked on with cool appraisal, having been told by the “experts” that he was no longer the painter he used to be. Facing all that was hard enough. Simon had gotten to the point where he could look at his work with the callous hands of a butcher. He could take a painting and hack it to shreds, soak his hands in the blood of his failure. He could study his work, which over the years had grown ugly and weak and bitter with promise, and he could stomach the rejection, the reality that he’d been ruthlessly abandoned by the people in art who mattered.
He had no one to blame but himself.
He ordered another drink and wandered back into the smoke, where everybody was shooting pool. He shot a rack with a Vietnam vet, then they split a pitcher of beer. The vet called himself Marrow, “as in Bone,” he said, and wore camouflage pants and a leather coat. He invited Simon back to his apartment to get stoned. Simon took him up on it and they walked together through the empty town with the dark storefronts, the wind blowing in their faces. Marrow rented an apartment over the post office, sparsely furnished. Just being there with the stranger getting stoned made Simon feel better. He felt inexplicably free and wished he could stay indefinitely. But then the vet’s wife came home and the mood changed. She had on a maroon waitressing uniform from Friendly’s. She had a snarl on her face, like an angry cat. Marrow said, “Hey, baby.” He was stretched out on the couch, staring at the TV. “Light us another joint.”
“Who’s that?”
“That’s the professor. Be nice to him.”
She stood in front of the TV, the colored light flashing across her ass, and stared at Simon. “Where’d you pick him up?”
This is the way I will paint you,
Simon thought.
In front of the TV, with your big ass full of the eleven o’clock news. I will paint the stains on your teeth, the worry in your face, the music that runs down your tits to your cunt.
Simon thought.
In front of the TV, with your big ass full of the eleven o’clock news. I will paint the stains on your teeth, the worry in your face, the music that runs down your tits to your cunt.
“Get out,” she said. “It’s too late for company.” She stood in the doorway, watching him with a kind of intense sexual hatred as he went down the stairs to the street.
Entering the keen silence of his own home he sensed his wife waiting up for him. He imagined her in their bed, stiff, alert, poised for attack. It made him feel like a prowler. He glanced around the kitchen, taking in the white bowls left to dry on the counter, luminous with moonlight, his wife’s red sweater curled on the chair like an extravagant animal. The soft plums scattered on the table. The wicked shadows that the tall pines had crosshatched across the walls. It came to him that he was thinking like a painter again, and it had been a long time, and it felt good. He knew it had something to do with Annie Knowles, and he found himself day-dreaming about her now.
He did not want to see his wife, nor did he have anything to say to her, but he found himself climbing the stairs to their room. She was sitting up in bed in her nightgown. Her face looked clean, glossy. He wondered if she’d been crying.
“What took you so long?”
“I had to get my car. I had to wait.”
She tossed her magazine off the bed and pushed her head onto the pillow. “I was worried,” she said. “You should have called me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I should have.”
“You stink of cigarettes.”
He began to get undressed. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands and face. He confronted his presence in the mirror. What had Annie felt when he’d kissed her, he wondered, imagining her blue lips in the rainy light. He wished he could call her, hear her voice. But he knew that was impossible. And the next time they saw each other it would be awkward; it would always be awkward.
“Are you coming to bed or not?” Lydia called.
“I’m coming,” he answered, “ready or not.”
17
FROM HER FIRST GLIMPSE of Annie Knowles, Lydia Haas knew that her husband would fall in love with her. Lydia had been waiting for someone like her to come along for years, and now here she was. Annie Knowles was just the type to unglue her husband. It wasn’t her looks that had Simon in such a horny pickle. After all, Lydia herself was the great beauty. It was the fact that Annie Knowles had a college-girl mind, what her husband so fondly described as an evolved sensibility. The fact that she wrote newspaper articles and walked around in sheer blouses—flopped around was more like it—and gazed at Simon like a rock-star groupie.
That’s why, when the invitation to Jack’s party came in the mail, Lydia insisted on going.
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