Valley of Ashes (34 page)

He’d written her the night after I’d taken him to the dentist for a root canal four weeks ago. I’d had to help him upstairs to bed because he was so unsteady on his feet from the anesthesia.

I remembered how heavy his arm had been, across my shoulders, as I pulled him up each step. I’d tucked him in, brought him a cup of
tea from downstairs, smoothed his hair back from his forehead gently until I thought he’d fallen safely asleep.

“I spent the whole afternoon in bed,” he’d written to her that night, “gliding along on opiate wings, thinking of nothing but how beautiful and sweet and perfect you are. How much I wanted to be with you, then and there. Kissing every inch of your silken belly.”

Silken. Belly.

Those words Dean’s fist, splitting my flesh starburst-ragged, smashing through the vulnerable skin-muscle-organs exposed just beneath the apex of my sternum’s gothic arch and straight on back to my spine.

The slight force of a sob was enough to topple me forward, cheek against my knees, arms reaching tight around my legs.

I could never match Setsuko’s perfection. She was exotic, a long-limbed Weston nude draped graceful across the snowy pasture of some expensive hotel’s bed linen.

Excruciating detail: soft hank of my husband’s wheat-blond hair falling forward, soft against her skin as the tip of his tongue limned her golden curves, her concavities.

I stood up and walked slowly through the dining room.

I had always been less lightning rod for entropy than child of diaspora—translucent and porous, eminently discardable.

I curled up in the dark on our sofa, watching yellow headlights slow-dance across the ceiling.

A car pulled up out front, some time afterward. Its engine coughed out and a tinny door-slam echoed through the night. The rhythm of my husband’s footsteps coming up our snowy front walk was reluctant, defeated.

Pure delusion on my part, having held so much as the slenderest belief that this marriage could sustain my fragile purchase on thin air.

In truth I’d crashed out of the sky a good twenty years before Dean and I first met.

I could still hear my escaping father’s wing-strokes, his steady cadence unperturbed as I shot headlong toward the wine-dark Icarian Sea, trailing feathers and wax.

“Bunny?” Dean stepped softly into the darkened living room.

He’s been crying
.

“Here,” I said from the sofa, still on my side, curled fetal. “Come sit?”

He lowered himself to the floor, resting a hand on the cushion’s edge beside my head. “I’m so sorry.”

Kissing every inch of your silken belly.

The perfumed concubine—burnished, cosseted, flawless.

I couldn’t stand my own exhausted belly in the mirror: the baby-slack skin, stretched and stretched by the girls until it had been crosshatched permanently pink.

I closed my eyes. “How long?”

“The whole—” His voice caught.

I held my breath.

He covered his face with his hands. “Before we even left New York. Just… talking on the phone. We knew.”

And of course only that first “we” meant Dean and me.

I remembered Cary calling me from the office on Valentine’s Day, saying Dean was crushed because I’d winced when he kissed me that morning. The girls had been up all night in shifts. I’d shrugged him off, bitching, so tired my skin hurt.

And Cary had been so gentle with me on the phone, so patient: “You really need to call him, okay? I’m serious.”

He’d known. He’d tried to protect me that morning and it made me miss him more than ever.

And that’s what lay behind his declaration to me in the car, the day Dean had been such a pig at lunch. Cary hadn’t been railing against that specific incident, Dean’s little tantrum… he’d taken up arms on my behalf because he knew the whole of it, the ocean of betrayal I hadn’t yet known I was drowning in.

He’d made Dean read my article that afternoon, confronted him about who-knows-what else, stood up for me—even though I’d begged him not to.

And it had worked. What seemed like our new beginning, Dean’s and mine, had started that night.

Tears started leaking down my face again. “Dean?”

“What, Bunny?” His voice so soft, his fingertips brushing so lightly against my hair.

“Is this why you want the job in Boston?”

He dropped his head. “Yeah.”

I unfurled my legs and reached for him, pulling him onto the sofa beside me.

We curled up in each other’s arms.

I felt his mouth against my ear. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m so glad you didn’t leave us,” I whispered back.

I had no idea what else to say. It was all I could think of, at that moment.

He was still here, with me and the girls. He wanted to leave Colorado, which meant leaving Setsuko. He’d already put the end of things with her in motion.

Even though he’d had dinner with her father. The three of them, laughing and drinking, treating themselves to whatever they wanted. And my husband had had the gall to call me from the fucking restaurant so he could crow about how great the Kobe beef was. The same day Cary was killed.

The images I couldn’t help but conjure forth ripped me open, laid me bare and ugly and cold. Do you agree to meet the father of the woman you’re about to abandon? Do you write a fucking thank-you note, telling her what a marvelous fucking time you had?

He hasn’t left you. Not yet.

Was his recent kindness nothing more than the death throes of my husband’s sense of duty? Not to a lover, but to the ruined, shabby vessel who’d borne his children? I was not the beloved, just the obligation to which he considered himself beholden.

I pulled myself up off the sofa and ran for the bathroom, sickened by the image of myself as I imagined he saw me.

There was still so much bile in my soul, so much acid. Maybe that’s all I had
ever
been made of. Maybe that’s why no one had ever wanted to stay. Dad through Dean—every stepfather, then every lover I’d had myself between the bookending pair of them: father-and-husband.

What did you expect? You’ve never been worth sticking around for, Madeline, and you never will be.

Dean fell asleep easily in our bed.

I lay awake, trying to cleanse my mind of his dalliances with Setsuko. Tried instead to think of us, to cast back through our years together for some evidence this outcome
wasn’t
inevitable, or at least hadn’t always been.

When I think back to that night, now—many years later—I wonder if a woman who thought
anything
of herself would have shared his bed that night.

Even though I know the answer:
No fucking way.

But at the time I was as terrified that he’d slip away from me as I was repulsed by the depth of his unkindness.

I wanted my best friend back. But he was lost somewhere in the body of this person who’d just about finished me off, on top of everything else.

I stared up at the ceiling, watching tree-branch shadows shift, then grow still.

I tried to remember what it felt like, before this. At the beginning.

And all I could recall was that it had just felt like sanity, at the start—compared with the way my parents lived.

Now, as a parent myself, I could see that
they’d
been absolute children. Married when they were ten years younger than I was that night: people who’d never been prepared for the world they’d actually have to inhabit, even before the ground dropped out from under their feet in the late sixties.

When I met Dean he just seemed solid, dependable, kind. No game-playing, no jerking my heart around.

He met my father and sister on our third date: a Dare family gathering Dad had driven east to attend.

We ended up sitting on the bed in the back of my father’s van—me and Pagan, Dad and Dean—smoking some wicked sinsemilla of Dad’s and getting so fucking stoned we were all pretty much paralyzed.

Then Dad whipped out
another
joint and said, “Okay, that was Brand X, and now you have to smoke some of this Brand Y, because it’s the antidote,” and meanwhile his seven surviving siblings were doing their various Brahmin-Lockjaw-Social-Register insanity dances around the place.

But Dean just rolled with it, that whole long weekend. He observed, he took us in with gentle but wry humor, he shared some fine insights about the whole spectacle with me—but most of all, he had my back.

I had a fine, tall, upstanding young man as my ally. For the first time ever, I’d achieved gravity within my own paternal family. A foothold.
Meaning
.

I had shown up with someone who commanded their respect. Which meant they had to rethink
me
. They couldn’t exclude me from the clan’s constellation, couldn’t write me off as poor relation, abandoned child, unwanted daughter, un-dowried exemplar of the chattel gender.

It had always seemed to me that my family was like some too-closely-bred line of show dogs, neurasthenic and plagued with iron-poor blood, a tribe composed entirely of Northern-Puritan Tennessee Williams characters with double the crazy and none of the sultry charm.

Then along came this young strapping guy with the vitality of a line on the upswing. And I hoped he was someone who wouldn’t leave me broke with kids and no protection by the side of the road somewhere—because I knew full well that in that situation I wouldn’t have a shred of my mom’s surprisingly feral toughness; that in her shoes I’d flame out entirely.

She’d had three kids in total with her first two husbands, then taken in a pal of ours as a foster child. No alimony, no child support after I’d turned eight, but she’d kept a roof over our heads and food on the table and gotten all four of us into college.

Dean twitched in his sleep, beside me. Falling through some dream.

I thought about the first time he’d come to see me in Williamstown. I’d been crashing on Ellis’s dorm room floor since just after
Christmas, that year, but it was spring break and she was in LA and the college locked up all the buildings over vacations.

A barroom pal of ours had paid four weeks’ rent on an unfurnished room in this wretched boardinghouse for old drunk men, across the street from the Women’s Exchange thrift store on the scariest street in the entire Berkshires, but he couldn’t stand it after two nights and offered it up to me.

I didn’t have a phone, and I was working for a construction crew—sanding Sheetrock all day in these condos on the edge of town. Four bucks an hour.

Dean called me on the condo’s office phone Friday morning, saying he planned to leave East Syracuse on his Harley around one. We’d figured it would take him four hours to reach me, but there was a blizzard.

The crew’s boss knew how much I’d been looking forward to Dean’s visit all week, and he felt awful for me, sure there was no way a guy on a motorcycle could make it through that weather in early March.

So the boss told me he’d buy me a lobster dinner to cheer me up. He was a very sweet older man, avuncular (though he was also the coke wholesaler for half the county, driving in big counts from the Cape every other week).

I thanked him and said I’d take him up on it if Dean didn’t show, but that I had to go back to my scuzzy room with the single bare bulb hanging from its ceiling just in case my beau managed to slog through.

So I went back to the boardinghouse and sat on my single mattress on the floor and waited.

The room was tall, its hideous wallpaper browned and peeling. The only furniture in it was six wire milk crates I’d stolen from Price Chopper to use as a bureau, an old silk-lined leather makeup case with a mirror inside its lid, and the aforementioned mattress.

No one in their right mind would dare piss in the shared bathroom down the hall, much less look behind its shower stall’s rancid curtain.

The whole place smelled sharply of mildew, raw bourbon, and the
two-weeks-abandoned fried egg shriveling on a tin plate just outside my door, in the communal kitchenette’s sink.

I’d bought a vanilla-scented Air Wick to combat the stench, and to this day the slightest whiff of that fakey-sweet fragrance makes me break out in a pulp-novel death-row-inmate sweat.

I spent a lot of time thinking about my prospects as I waited, staring at the bare bulb’s entirely too noose-like shadow on the wall across from me.

I was twenty-two years old, had left college three credits shy of graduation, and wasn’t welcome in my mother’s boyfriend’s waterfront nine-acre estate on the Gold Coast of Long Island, or the VW camper in which my father had slept for the last thirteen years in the wild brown canyons north of Malibu.

Other than the mattress and the milk crates, I owned somebody’s father’s discarded tweed overcoat, a shitload of secondhand books, some crappy clothes, a rusting orange 1976 Volkswagen Rabbit, and your basic cheap seat at the lip of the abyss.

I’d failed at everything, even school, and now I was going to work at minimum-wage jobs forever.

But Dean did slog through that storm. It took him nine hours. He was soaked through to the skin, shaking from cold, blue-lipped and starting to get feverish.

I peeled his frigid sodden clothes off, layer by layer: motorcycle boots, quilted Carhartt coveralls, flannel-lined jeans, two insulated plaid work shirts, long underwear, and three pairs of white socks.

I toweled him off and made him get under the covers of my pallet on the floor, hung his clothes carefully over the spitting radiator, and climbed into bed beside him to twine my legs and arms tight as I could around his trembling body.

And so that night in Williamstown I also had Dean, to whom I mattered enough that nine hours of fishtailing through snowy, sleeting darkness had proved no obstacle.

Maybe I’d survived all the crazy and things were going to turn out okay, you know?

We didn’t have a grand unsettling passion but something even better: A union we both took pride in. The commencement of our actual lives.

I heard a car drive slowly by out on Mapleton Street. One of the girls cooed down the hall, but settled back into quiet.

Dean turned over again in his sleep, murmuring something I was terrified to hear. Setsuko’s name? A paean to her loveliness? To her lips around his cock?