The Widower's Tale (25 page)

In this scheme, Poppy now stood so much farther behind me, genuinely lost to me once and for all, out of sight beyond a dozen bends in the road. To be alone with myself whenever I faced this loss was nigh unbearable. At such moments, I welcomed the incursion of the cleaning squads or the mothers babbling beneath my back porch or the teachers emptying the tree house for winter, waving coyly through the window in my study as they relayed little chairs and tables down the ladder and off to the barn.

"I dreamed that I married a Muslim cabdriver. He had very bad teeth but a beautiful smile. He told me he could make a wonderful lamb stew. And then we were in his house, and he was making it, and it was in fact amazing. I can almost remember the taste."

"Please tell me this qualifies as a nightmare," I said.

We were sharing a shower, as we always did after a rare overnight visit. I stood behind Sarah, soaping her lovely back. Her wet hair enveloped her shoulders like a slippery pelt. It smelled of grapefruit, the scent of the shampoo she kept in my bathroom.

"No, not at all. I had this generalized happy feeling about the guy, even though I was also thinking that maybe he wasn't too literate--that did worry me, vaguely--and there was this nagging sense I had about a complication I couldn't put my finger on."

"Which would be me."

"No. Rico."

The sun angling through the bathroom window had spotlit the line of mildew where the edge of the tub met the tile wall. The disadvantage to having my first floor stripped and polished to a fare-thee-well was that the second floor now looked horrendously grimy. A well-greased slope, this business of renewal. I was thinking idly and self-righteously about the parallels to plastic surgery as I slipped my arms beneath Sarah's and began to soap her breasts. She giggled and bent slightly forward, but she did not turn around or pull my hands away.

How I loved, even obsessed over, Sarah's breasts. Poppy, against the prevailing trend of our time, had nursed both daughters. I'd suffered no anxieties--no "hang-ups" as we liked to say back then--about sharing, though one male friend, after a few drinks, confided that I would feel differently if my babies had been boys. Indeed, I loved Poppy's breasts more than ever after she weaned Clover. I loved the purple veins newly and sharply etched on her fair skin and would trace them with the tip of my tongue. Her breasts seemed fuller to me, more welcoming, as if they were live beings that took their own pleasures separately from those I wanted to lavish on my wife. But the second round of nursing, Trudy's turn (so soon after Clover's), left them depleted. They felt, to my hands and mouth, as if they'd been hollowed out, paid their biological dues.

Sarah's breasts, like the rest of her body, felt unvanquished, almost virginal in their resilience. Privately, I thought of her breasts as warrior breasts. I was careful never to hint at any comparisons, though I wonder if she knew how inevitable they were, even as they began to obscure my memories of Poppy.

As I savored them there in the shower, she was silent for a moment. Then she said, "It must be the residue of a cab ride I had in Boston yesterday." She pressed her bottom into the alcove beneath my stubborn belly. "Sometimes I think dreams come from a place in your brain like that filter in the dryer. Fuzz from your day accumulates there. Because now I remember looking at this guy's mug shot on his license. He was handsome in this wind-beaten way, but he must've been twenty years younger, because when I looked in the rearview mirror, the face I saw was so much more ... collapsed. His hair gone gray. Oh my God, I thought, he's been doing this job for his whole adult life, probably for his kids. I tried to guess his nationality from his name. Lots of consonants,
z
's and
y
's." She knew she was teasing me with her casual monologue, that the more words she doled out as she pressed against me, the fewer I'd have at my service.

I was speechless, but not because of my desire. As my left hand kneaded and stroked the corresponding side of her marvelous chest, I felt a distinct knot, separate from her nipple. A small, discrete ... what? A stray bit of cartilage?

I was about to search for a parallel form in her other breast when she turned around, still in my arms. "I have to pick up Rico in an hour," she said, "but if we're quick ..." She turned off the water and, looking me square in the eye, pulled me close. Noticing that I was no longer aroused, she kissed me, more tender than amorous, and stepped through the shower curtain. This was one of her many virtues: that she changed course as necessary, sensed the faintest alteration in the mood or impulse of those around her.

As she dried herself, she talked about the remainder of her weekend. She was--and she blamed me--falling behind on the commission she'd received to render a willow tree in a large panel that would fill a window at the turn of a grand staircase. The client was a radio host on Boston's NPR station; Sarah had heard that he entertained a great deal, that she could hope this window would win her admirers with money to burn. She dreamed of the day she could give up her job at The Great Outdoorsman, spend a normal workday preoccupied by art alone. I did not share with her my view that such a life is rare indeed, especially if there are children to support.

As for my Saturday, I would face the tricky, less creative task of sitting down with Clover and telling her about the counsel I'd received--hardly encouraging--from an old affiliate at the law school, a professor for whom I'd once researched the topic of divorce as represented in nineteenth-century British fiction. Yet divorce and stained-glass willows and gadabout NPR celebrities were relegated to the virtual lint filter of my consciousness as I focused on the lump I'd felt in Sarah's breast.

Sarah hurried about my bedroom, pulling on her skirt, searching the floor for her socks, buckling the wristband of her watch.

"Please stop a minute," I said, fearing she would dash downstairs and out the door. In our reunions and partings, we no longer stood on ceremony. Often, she was running late.

"Percy?" She stood still, smiling sweetly. "I can stop for two seconds, but not a minute."

"Sarah, your breast. Your left breast."

Her right hand reached for it, as if she were about to say the pledge of allegiance. "My breast?"

"I felt something there."

"That would be my heart. Which is yours." But ever so slightly, she frowned.

"What I felt was ..." How difficult can one word be? I pushed it forward. "A lump." I felt as if I'd shoved a knuckle in her eye.

Yet she was smiling when she crossed the room. She touched my cheek with the hand that had occupied her breast. "Percy, I have ... well, I'm lumpy by nature. I have cystic breasts. It's nothing to worry about."

I watched her return to the bed and pull her thick sweater over her head, retrieve her damp hair from inside the cabled collar, smooth it with her fingers.

"Oh," I said. "Well, good then. Good to know." From my experience, admittedly scant, women take a superior attitude not just toward knowing their bodies but even, sometimes, toward knowing ours. By default, we men are biological dolts.

She paused to squeeze my arm as she passed me to leave the room. She whispered, close to my ear, "I'll see you Monday morning."

I stood there, still clad in nothing but my towel, shivering.

I offered her my handkerchief. This was what I had feared.

"I can't believe what a mess this is," she said, wiping her eyes. She hadn't touched her tuna sandwich. I had polished off mine, ravenous after my night with Sarah, and had to resist the urge to reach across and help myself to Clover's.

"Daughter," I said. "Sweetheart. I'm afraid that you would only squander thousands of dollars"--in all likelihood mine, I did not add--"to put yourself in an even more antagonistic position with Todd. Gerald told me that you would have to move back to New York, realistically, to approach winning even a shared custody arrangement."

Gerald had quizzed me over lunch at the Faculty Club, plates laden with the obscene bounty of the daily buffet, and the more I disclosed to him about Clover's situation, the harder it became for him to remain his sanguine self.

"Well, Percy," he said at last, "is there any reason to believe the children would
choose
to be with their mother instead?"

I felt myself redden as I told him that I had a feeling they would not. But how would I know the answer to this? I felt ashamed of myself. Clover had recently blurted out to me that part of what drove her away was a conversation in which Todd had told her he might be
gay
. Having subsequently forced Trudy's hand on the subject, I now believe Clover's story may have been true, but my knee-jerk reaction to her confession had been one of despair more than empathy: that this was a childish delusion, a ruse of her fragile unconscious. I did not share this part of the saga with Gerald. (Should I have done so? Was there some dirty-pool legal precedent by which a husband's admission to a different so-called orientation might justify spousal breakdown or even render him unfit to father?)

"Daddy, I can't leave this job. It's the best one I've ever had. Evelyn and I are a team."

"That's heartening news," I said.

"But this just isn't a fair choice!"

How many times had I, like the next parent, told my children about the dearth of justice in this world? Cornered, I said, "What does your therapist say?"

Clover sighed. "That I have got to stop fighting everything. That I have got to take a deep breath and be more ... humble." She covered her face with my handkerchief. I couldn't tell if she was crying or hiding.

She sat up straight and bared her face. She leveled at me a look of urgency. "Thanksgiving," she said. "When they're here for Thanksgiving, maybe you could talk with them. Or just Lee. He's old enough. Maybe you could ..." Her lips clamped shut. I had a feeling she wanted to issue the verb
persuade
or
uncover
or even
convince
.

"You've spoken to Douglas, haven't you?" I said. That I had a son-in-law who made a living sitting in a room with couples who'd already decided that nothing could induce them to remain together--or, rather, that he had gamely
chosen
this livelihood--never ceased to astonish me. At first I had wondered whether this vocation masked ulterior motives (to harvest material for novels, perhaps?), but eventually I realized that Trudy's husband was simply that rare male who loves constructing a peaceful compromise the way a painter loves filling a canvas or an athlete loves winning a game.

"Daddy, I don't want to lean on Douglas. Trudy just isn't ..."

"Isn't what?"

"She isn't really on my side these days."

"That's absurd. She's your sister. She's ... I admit she's a little intimidating, even to me," I said, "but for God's
sake
she loves you."

"Yes, she does, I believe that. But she has her own ideas about what that love means. Like, keeping me aware of what's 'good for me.' From her perspective as somebody totally worshiped by about a million women whose lives she's saved. Or that's how
they
see it."

I sighed. "That's a bit harsh."

A daunting silence ensued. "Ira," Clover said at last.

"Sweetheart?"

"Ira, the teacher, the wonderful teacher who built the tree house."

"Have you invited him to Thanksgiving, too?"

"No, no, Daddy." She smiled weakly. "He has a roommate, a lawyer who handles divorces and custody and ... that sort of thing."

A divorce lawyer with a roommate could hardly be a roaring success, I thought rather haughtily as I waited for her to unravel her next thoughts.

"I'm going to meet with him on Friday," Clover said. "Ira says he'll meet with me for nothing. Once, anyway. A consultation. I think I have to take this dilemma by the horns. Myself. That's part of the problem, right? That I didn't face up to my responsibilities on my own. That I ran back here, without stopping to think."

Amen
crossed my mind. I waited to hear more.

"So I'm going to do that. And I'll go from there." She picked up half of her sandwich and took a bite, then set it down and stood. "But thank you, Daddy. Thanks for trying," she said. And then, as Sarah had done two hours before, she kissed me on the cheek and left the room.

I ate the rest of her sandwich in a few speedy bites. In addition to pangs of esophageal distress, I was beset by an uncomfortable conflict of hopes: that my part in this particular drama was finished and that it would be better for all concerned if it were not.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: 28 days and counting!

Dear Percy,
I wager I'm as new to this technology as you are, but what a blessing it is as we approach the Big Day! Seven of the ten houses are ready to go--including mine, of course, but then I must be the shining example!--and the mailing has gone out as of Friday, not a moment too soon, so this is in part a warning shot across the bow that you may be approached at Wally's or the P.O. about your participation. I believe there's already quite a "buzz" in the autumn air. I've even had a call or two from people who feel slighted that they were not included; not entirely beneficial to the cause, but unavoidable. The *good* news is that tickets are selling briskly and we're already talking about the lineup for next year! We've got ourselves a town tradition in the making!!
What I'm wondering is if I could come by for a bit of a look-see sometime this week, to check if you need assistance with finishing touches. (How was Deirdre's work on those wonderful portraits? She really is the best!)
Any chance I could come tomorrow afternoon, once the E & F gridlock abates? Tuesday would work for me as well.