Wasted Beauty (28 page)

RICK IS AT RENA’S. HE’S TOLD LAURA THAT HE’S COVERING
for someone at the ER tonight. They’ve ordered in sushi. They make love, Rick holds her in his arms. Rena’s clean again. She’s been working. They’ve seen each other once a week for the past month.

“Rena, I have to tell you something.”

“No. Don’t tell me anything, Rick.”

“It’s not about us.”

“No?”

“It’s about something you should know about. Something I did.”

“You can tell me anything, you know that.”

“Maybe not this.”

“Did you kill somebody?”

“I fucked my assistant.”

“You fired your assistant?”

“Zoe. The girl who works for me. I slept with her.”

“When?”

“When you were…gone.”

“Oh.”

“I missed you. I was horny. She’s always teasing me. Things happen.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“I know you.”

“I told you I’m not a nice guy.”

“Are you still seeing her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard to say.”

“I don’t understand. Rick, why are you lying to me?”

“I sleep with Laura and you don’t mind.”

“She’s your wife.”

“I’d understand if you slept with someone else. Barry, for instance. Whoever he is.”

“You’re making this up.”

“I can call Zoe right now if you don’t believe me.” Rick takes out his cell phone.

“No. Stop.”

“I love you, Rena.”

“Yeah? You love Zoe, too?”

“Look, I’m a man. I have needs.”

“Wow.”

“I told you you wouldn’t like it. I’m just being honest. That’s our deal, right? Honesty?” Rena stares at him. “You’re not going to start using drugs again, are you?”

“I don’t think I can have this conversation right now. I don’t think…I think…I think you have to go, Rick.”

“Go?”

“I don’t feel well. I’m tired. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah. OK?”

“Rena. I’m sorry. Things happen.”

“No. I understand, I do. And I’m not angry. You slept with her. No big deal. We’re all grown-ups. But I gotta get some sleep.”

Rick leaves. Later he stands outside her building and watches until he sees her lights go out. Like a scalpel in my heart, he thinks.

THAT ENDED IT. SHE CALLED ME THE NEXT DAY AND
suggested we take a break. I didn’t give in to temptation. I didn’t call her. Of course I pored over every one of Laura’s magazines for pictures of her. But except for an old print ad she’d had running for months, she disappeared from sight.

About two months later, in a moment of weakness, I called her cell phone. It was disconnected. So was her apartment. I went by. Her name was no longer over the buzzer. I called the agency and they informed me that they no longer represented her.

I thought about hiring a detective, but to what end? I let the days pass. I was making a decision by doing nothing. She wasn’t going to call me, wherever she was. And I was pretty much back in the fold with Laura. Ironically, Zoe gave notice as if our fictional affair weighed on her mind.

Every day, a sliver of memory would prickle like an unexpected spine on a thistle. I wished I could talk to her one more time and relive those nights we spent together.

I had begun to see old friends. I’d get together with a bunch of guys from school and we’d play dollar ante poker and smoke cigars. Bunch of assholes. I thought, this is my life now. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I thought I had forgotten about her, but in fact, I was always thinking of her.

The kids were growing fast. Henry and I developed this habit of taking long walks together. He was almost ten and he wanted to talk about life. He said some kids at school had “girlfriends” and wanted to know what I thought about that.

A kind of normalcy reigned and I didn’t mind it.

Then one early spring night, I was driving down the West Side toward the tunnel. I had lost about eighty bucks in the poker game, I’d had three drinks and knew I’d get to bed too late. I was low. But in this post-Rena state of mind, it didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me.

The cold rain fell in sheets, slashing my windshield, whipping the pavement. I tried to focus through the blur into the oncoming headlights of traffic. Didn’t want to fishtail and broadside the furious cab flying next to me.

Up ahead a melted red dot of a traffic light floated in the black. On the roadway a slick overcoat of water reflected the glare of the street lamps. I carefully brought the car to a stop. The light turned green and as I was about to pull away a wheelchair rolled up beside my door. In the chair sat a drenched beggar. The light changed, and with guilt I punched the accelerator. I kept watch on the hunched figure through the rear windshield. She almost got hit by the flow of traffic behind me.

As I was about to enter the tunnel to Jersey, I thought, that was Rena back there in that wheelchair. I tried to shake the idea, but the certainty held me like a leg trap. She’s a drug addict. She’s returned to drugs. She’s broke. She’s sick. That was her back there, sick, needing me, finding me. I made a U turn and sped back to the spot where the beggar had rolled up to the car. The shiny streets were empty. I could feel her presence as surely as I could feel my own.

I pulled over. After months of hollow numbness, I was drowning in emotion. I had done something so wrong. I had abandoned her. I had thrown her back into her private hell of loneliness and addiction.

She hadn’t conveniently disappeared. She had been swallowed into the rancid gut of the city. She was out there now, in the night, anonymous and dying. It was a one in a million chance that that had been Rena back there. But it didn’t matter, did it? If I didn’t know where she was, then she could be anywhere, suffering, dying.

My sorrow became surreal. Whether that was her on the highway or not, she was out there somewhere. This was the truth and I had to deal with it. She wasn’t gone. She would never be gone. That would have been so convenient for me and for my conscience. How tidy it all would have been, if she simply had shown up in my life and then vanished just as abruptly. She would have been for all intents and purposes locked into my soul where I could mourn her secretly forever the same way I mourned every lost opportunity in my life.

I swung like a pendulum arcing from deep, self-pitying feelings of loss to gratitude for dodging a chaotic divorce. With the self-pity came reverie. I would lie on the couch dreaming about her skin. With the gratitude came remorse. I contemplated suicide. I watched Laura carefully as she went about her business, trying to detect any suspicion. Whether she was aware of it or not, I had damaged our marriage. How could I ever make it up to her? I reasoned to myself that had I been caught and wanted to come back to Laura I would have made a hundred promises. I would have dropped to my knees and begged her to forgive me. And so in my mind I did this, and in my mind I committed myself to renewing our weakened marriage. Laura didn’t have to know, it was simply a private penance I had to carry out.

I didn’t commit suicide, of course, but something in me did die. Was dying. I had known when I chased Rena away that this would happen. Because to embrace Rena was to embrace life as I had always known it. To embrace lunacy and fear. To stay with Laura and the children was to accept sanity in my life, to not be afraid and take what I really wanted. For this I would receive a kind of grace, but I would also kill the devil in me. And the devil doesn’t die easy.

I returned to therapy with Edith. I carefully retraced every moment of the affair. I was honest and Edith seemed very interested in the minutiae. She recommended Prozac. I tried it. Things still didn’t make sense, but now I didn’t mind. I assumed a reflective posture regarding the whole thing.

One afternoon I told Edith that I had finally figured it all out. It hadn’t been love. I had been obsessed. It was obvious to me now that Rena and I could never have made it as a couple. I told Edith that I was happier now, the dust had settled. I was even happier than I had been before. Things had improved between Laura and myself, perhaps simply because the kids weren’t getting up as much in the middle of the night. Laura and I had begun to discuss what we would do when the kids were all grown up and we retired. We planned a trip to Australia. I told Edith that everything was OK again.

Edith said, “I don’t believe you.” After that I couldn’t go see Edith anymore.

TWO YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE I HAD LAST SEEN RENA
and there was one place I hadn’t looked for her. The town wasn’t that hard to find. The family name was still in the old phone books, so was the address. It took an afternoon, but I found the place on a country road with no name, only a three-digit route number. As I rolled up I remembered that Rena had mentioned a gravel drive. A “For Sale” sign was tacked to a post.

The house wasn’t what I’d expected. I guess I had some image of an 1840s farmhouse with a rust red barn and silo. This was a plain, two-story frame house sitting on a short bluff off the two-lane. A dry lawn stretched out around it, and a dilapidated chicken coop stood off to one side. Everything seemed trimmed up and in order but without life.

The house was locked so I took a walk into the field that lay behind it. In five minutes I had found the orchard. The trees were much larger than I had imagined. Kind of monstrous. And there were apples all over the place, small, wormy, but lots of them. I picked one and bit into it and the flavor was unlike any apple I’d ever tasted. As if every apple I’d ever known were in there somewhere.

Swallows swooped overhead, wasps buzzed, something rustled in the scrub nearby. The landscape all around me was inhabited, as if by spirits.

I heard someone shouting, in distress, then I realized I was being called. A man was walking toward me from the house. I dropped the apple and turned toward him.

“Hey, hey there.”

“Afternoon.” I tried to assume my best country-folk tone of voice.

He shielded his eyes as he spoke, “Driving past, saw the car.”

“There’s a
FOR SALE
sign out on the road,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He came closer, avoiding the brambles.

“You the owner?”

“Hell no, owners are dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yup.”

“And you have something to do with them?”

“I’m their banker.”

So this was Frank standing right in front of me. Not a big guy, maybe five foot ten, shorter than me by a couple of inches. Dark, neither good-looking nor plain. The sort of man you don’t notice. In his mid to late thirties, probably. Anonymous in every way, except for his eyes. Dark, angry. A fissure between his eyebrows, permanent. He was sizing me up.

“Do you think I could take a look? You have a key?”

We went inside and walked around. If I thought I was going to find any more evidence of Rena or Billy, I was mistaken. The place had been cleaned out and repainted, only one piece of furniture remained, the table in the center of the kitchen. I thought, Billy sat right there.

“What happened to the owners?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I’m curious.”

“Cancer got ’em both, left behind two grown-up orphan children. Boy lost his mind, shot himself in the head.”

“God.”

“Tragic.”

“You said there were two children?”

“Girl moved to the city. Got herself in trouble down there.”

“She died, too?”

“Oh hell no. She lives down South now. The girls at the bank keep in touch with her. She’s the one I’m selling the house for. Actually…” Frank rummaged around in his suit jacket and did a miraculous thing. He pulled out a crumpled envelope. In it were some receipts, folded bits of paper, and a snapshot. He tossed the snapshot onto the kitchen table.

“That’s her. They say she did some modeling for a while. Pretty girl. Kinda full of herself, though.”

I picked up the photo.

Wherever the picture had been taken, it was very sunny. A palm tree in the background, a very blue sky and a thin young woman crouched on a freshly clipped lawn, squinting into the bright sunshine, smiling a weak smile. Before her she held, barely upright, a toddler. Sun on both their faces, deepening the pockets of shadow. It’s hard to see them clearly. But of course, I know Rena when I see her. Rena and a child.

Frank’s cell phone rang. He stepped out onto the porch to gain some privacy. While he was talking, I took a last look around and strolled out. I passed him on the porch and from my car I waved and said, “Thanks a lot.” And I drove off.

That night, after Laura went to bed, I pulled out the stolen photograph. No way was I going to leave that behind with him. I studied it for half an hour. Would I be able to find her? I could go back to the bank and talk to “the girls.” I could go down to Florida or wherever she was and meet up with her. And what would we talk about?

I locked the door of my study and snapped on the computer. I began to write.

I stopped. No words. What was there to say? I had made my choice, she was right. She had inhabited me now for almost three years, and yet I still didn’t know how I felt about her. All that mattered was that she was out there somewhere.

I looked at the snapshot again. Two people, a woman and a child. Somewhere. What did they have to do with me? The world is filled with billions of women and children. All strangers. Like these two. They only mean something if I want them to mean something.

Of course, I’d love to be in her arms again. To return to that drugged place. The place of no time, of forgetting. To smell her, to run my hand along her smooth, warm ribs. To trace the insides of her knees, her perfect ear. She was the embodiment of beauty, of grace. Like an absolute of a philosopher.

But if love is what we do when we live together, live on this earth, put one day after another, raise children, eat our meals, nurse one another, lumber through our days—then I did not, and do not love her. I could die with her, but I could not live with her. It’s true she was a flower. But a flower that thrives in the wrong place is a weed. She was a weed with roots wrapped round my heart, strangling it.

Time insists on momentum, of all the things, small and great. No one can change that, no matter how hard he tries. My life with Laura and my children is not a bottled elixir, a dreamy warm bath, but a living thing made of love and event and passion and fear. Especially fear. Without fear of the greatest loss, there can be no joy. Death chases life forward.

In Florida or wherever she is (does it make a difference?), with her child, with her moment-to-moment life, she is also a mere mortal now, no longer a spirit defying gravity. She was someone who was created by the pictures taken of her. But in the last picture I have, she’s lost the numinous gaze of passion and love and healing and all the rest of it that I thought she possessed. No more angel. Human. That’s the way it works, you either become mortal or you die.

She had stepped over a threshold, the old Rena died and became reborn. And so had I. I got to visit a world where everything was as I had dreamed it, the magnetic north pole of passion. The thing about a pole is, once you’re there, you can’t go any farther. You either head south, or freeze to death.

I placed the photograph in my secret desk drawer and locked it. Then I returned to the calm, still bedroom where my beautiful wife lay dreaming. My love. My soul mate. I crawled in beside her, drew her close to me and fell asleep.