Every Day (8 page)

With Fowler, I like the whispering, the cajoling, the occasional cruel remark that requires emending. I like feeling flush in a new setting. Simon and I went to Club Med once, and I momentarily retrieved that business. But it’s been years since I felt at the mercy of whatever current is loose and looking for a conduit. Fowler’s postcard was all I needed to get plugged in. But I’m being ruthless now. I mustn’t compare them. Simon is devoted. Fowler left me in New York City when I was eighteen years old with an infant and no income. I couldn’t be sicker if I chose to run to Fowler over my husband.

Liselotte would say that the choice is not an issue, that one must be plain-speaking, true to oneself, not to others. Kirsten would shrug. “Tell me something I don’t know.” Gillette would say, “Fuck them all,” which she does.

I have become tame to the deadening point. It can’t be good for any of us.

Liselotte is under growing scrutiny for her outspokenness, for her noisy reservations about the Edict of Nantes. She has figured something out about her era and she’s up a creek because of it. I look up from the thick book. Headlights stream into the driveway. Doomed, I think, because she can’t handle what’s been handed her—socially, I mean. What do we know about marriage before we enter into it? That it’s difficult, admirable, treacherous, and not for the weak of heart. We hear these things and believe none of them and only learn as we go along, bucking the confines and wanting them at the same time.
The weak of heart.
This is where I put myself tonight, in a country with the weak of heart, although mine fills at the thought of nearly everyone I know.

Isaac’s triumphs abound. He was under par for every hole, the only one in the crowd. “We’re going for the real thing,” he says, breathless. “This weekend. Simon’s going to rent clubs.”

“That sounds good,” I say. I hear Simon in the kitchen, getting something to drink.

“I’m goin’ up,” my son says. “I’m really beat.”

“Sleep well.”

I had hoped for a few more minutes of him, of safety.

Simon gets a coaster for his soda can, chooses a chair, and sits, elbows on knees. “So?”

I still have the book in my lap. I close it, put it and my notebook and pen aside. This is what I summon from the miserable depths:

“On Saturday, Fowler called me. As you know, I’d had some warning of this. I met him in town. We had drinks, no food. He told me he has a year to live.”

“Why doesn’t that move me,” my husband says evenly.

“I don’t expect it to,” I say, in the same tone. “I’m telling you what you’ve asked to hear.” He can’t be the only strong one here.

“Go on.”

“We went to his apartment.”

“Even better.” He gets up, walks to the fireplace, puts a hand briefly on the mantelpiece. “I hope you’ll spare me the description of the apartment. Is there any particular reason you’ve done this? You still haven’t made a stab at an explanation.”

What comes to me now isn’t remorse, shame, or a desire to be someone else, in some other century. What comes to me instead is rage, rage at marriage, at what our love has done to us, at how people who begin as lovers become friends who can be enemies at the same time. What I’ve done seems predictable, reasonable, given what little attention we’ve been able to give to ourselves, each other, while we’ve devoted every breathing moment to the children.

“I don’t know,” I say shakily. Then, with more steam, “I guess I wanted to.”

We wait.

“What are your plans?” he asks. Like a bullet out of nowhere.

I thought I would have to narrate the sex. I thought he’d want to know, in that way people want to know the most gruesome details of murders.

“I haven’t made any.”

“You should.”

He rips a sheet of paper out of my spiral notebook, takes a pen to it, and scribbles. He holds it out to me, clenching it.

“This is where I’ll be for the remainder of the week, in case the children want to call. By the weekend I’ll expect some notice from you as to what arrangements you’ve made. I cannot live with a liar.”

He goes upstairs and is back, prepacked overnight bag in hand, before I’ve read the scrawl. He pockets wallet and keys and is gone. I hear the healthy igniting of our decent car, and listen to it until I can’t hear it anymore over the softer noises of night.

Essex House,
the paper says. Where we went for two nights after we were married. Both of us had to work the week following the ceremony. We had our honeymoon there. Salt in the wound I’ve brought on our house.

I have railed in my heart against his foresight, his belief that all can be at the ready. And now I’ve punished him for it. And he’s punished me for that. Still, scores cannot be settled. I go in search of food. I eat cold noodles, on the kitchen floor, with my hands. They’re wonderful, pasty and filling. I need them. I can’t get enough of them. Even when I hear my son’s heavy tred, sense his approach, feel him standing above me, I eat. Endlessly, it seems, I eat.

“Mom,” he says, his cracking voice my home, “what are you doing?”

I douse him with assurance that I’m all right, that Simon’s all right, that sometimes people just need some space so they go somewhere for a while or they get incredibly hungry so
they eat like pigs, which is what has happened to the two of us, respectively.

“It’s not something with Grandma Jean, is it?” Isaac hedges.

I almost laugh, his concern is so darling, so unearned. Jean is a horse. She blares into our life twice a year from Florida and once weekly by phone. She’s always “up to her ears” in something, visitors, bills, classes, game plans for vacations, hers and ours. She’s the least absent absentee member of our family. The idea of anything taking her before she’d good and ready is totally absurd.

“No, duck. It’s nothing like that.”

“Okay. Good. I’ll see you in the morning. Wake me up, okay?”

“Of course.” I breathe. I won’t be able to put this off. Tomorrow morning I’ll have to say something.

I go up and run myself yet another bath. I think about fucking. Fucking isn’t even interesting enough to be a goal, I think. Not even a means to an end. Fucking is just something one does when one can, if one feels like it. Fucking Simon. Fucking Fowler. Fucking anyone. It’s unreasonable to think of it as meaningful. Fucking makes so little difference, except when it leads to pregnancy. Adequate descriptions of fucking do exist, mind you, but they don’t differ much, one to the next. If memory serves, marriages don’t fail because of fucking or nonfucking. They fail because something else gets lost. Simon and I have lost something along our busy way. A tenderness, time to devote to each other that doesn’t feel like duty. It isn’t our fault. In this loss, we’re blameless, just like everybody else.

“Mom?” Isaac again, whispering from the hall this time.

I jump, a roar of water threatening tub’s rim.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?”

It terrifies, how much they need me, how much they depend on the structure I’ve set up and lost faith in.

“Yes, lovey. Get your rest. You’ll need it for another day of monster control.”

“You got it,” he says, not sounding at all gratified, just faint, at the end of something.

•   •   •

The next morning, I get out Froot Loops for the lot of them, and our oversize Portuguese bowls. I’ll give them what they want to eat while I tell them what they won’t accept. By seven-thirty they’re assembled, perched, hungry, cheerful from a good night’s sleep. This is what I tell them:

“Dad has business in Brooklyn the rest of the week and the hours are strenuous, so he’s staying in the city instead of driving two hours home. He’ll call us each night to speak to everyone and he’ll be back on Friday.” I bring my face up in a smile of sorts, the kind Fowler’s specialist might have displayed after relating the desperate news. What I’ve related is a partial truth, i.e., a lie. Having related same, I fulfill my role as the liar Simon accused me of being.

This is what they tell me:

Isaac: “Good deal.”

Jane: “God, Mom, why do you have to be so serious? It’s to cringe.”

Daisy: “Da. Da-eee.”

We pass on to other matters, the pickup arrangements, postcamp entertainments, the dinner issue. Then last-minute gatherings and into the car to camp.

It’s a brilliant day, not hot, just clear and breezy. My husband has left me, I’m sure of it. I’m afraid. We travel crisp suburban roads to the parkway, get on, fly. There’s so much cheer in our car. Even Jane’s incisive summing up of Isaac’s faults and his sleepy dismissal of her as subhuman are refreshing.

“You probably
like
that gay guy. All your friends have dirty hair.”

“Dog meat.”

“Moose breath.”

“At least people can see my teeth.”

This last Jane doesn’t need. The day her braces were put on, the world ended. After a night of roaming the house, looking out for the dawn, and drinking more wine than is good for anyone, I come to Jane’s rescue and tell Isaac, “When you’re not ripping your sister to pieces with them.”

•   •   •

When I let them off, Jane doesn’t even ask me to walk her to her group’s meeting place in front of the high school cafeteria.

“You should take a nap when Daisy takes a nap, Mom,” she decides. “You look
really
tired.”

“Thank you, muffin,” I tell her. “I like it when you look out for me.”

Isaac sighs good-bye, taps the door after he shuts it. “I’ll get a ride home,” he says.

“No you won’t,” I say, my mind on Garland.

“You’re still a kid,” Jane taunts. “Even if you’re nine feet tall.” And she’s off, head down, all determination and purpose.

Isaac looks to the treetops in despair. “Later.”

Daisy wails for a while after this, over the sudden absence of her siblings, but I coax her into a stretch of calm with the song about the Beluga whale. She kicks her feet, pounding the car seat with her bare heels.

On the parkway I pass right by our exit and take us all the way into Manhattan, by which time Daisy is fast asleep. I park at a meter on Broadway and 70th Street, take out the collapsible stroller, put Daisy in it, and wheel down to Tower on 65th Street. They’re my last hope before Fowler as a source for
Jules and Jim.

Of
course
they have it, three copies, all in, and it’s no trouble to join, only a dollar for membership. Sometimes I could kick myself for having moved to the suburbs. I stick the
treasure in the diaper bag and head back to the car to feed the meter, to extend my escape and take advantage of Daisy’s timely exhaustion. The car will put Daisy out if there are no other distractions, no matter what the time of day. I don’t tell this to other mothers of one-year-olds. I don’t say, “Daisy’s a dream baby. You hardly know she’s there.” It just gets said to me.

I mull over visible diner opportunities, choosing 3 Guys, the cheapest. I get myself a
Times
and a window seat. Heaven. For now. I order one of the specials with eggs and try to pick out adulteresses from the passersby. I cannot tell who is one and who is not.

Nothing in the newspaper interests me. And how much coffee can one person drink, in the end?

How will we live? Who will stay and who will go? Other than the fact of his imminent death, Fowler is safe. He has only one mirror, and it doesn’t accuse. He has no one to answer to, no one but himself to disappoint. It has been said that there is nothing more treacherous than a family. I’ve been wrong to scoff at such profundity.

I eat my breakfast, wishing I could love Simon, could love Fowler, in the easy way I love eating this meal, knowing they’re good for me and are happy investments. I have loved Simon in this way, but I’m not so certain anymore. I leave the diner with my sleeping baby, the envy of several retirees who seem to have no place to go to after the morning meal, frightened out of my wits: I don’t know if I can call what I know of myself with men “love.” I don’t know if I have any basis for knowing what that is.

•   •   •

At home, I note that Catherine, of the film, hasn’t got a clue either, but she’s not stymied by this fact. She plows ahead, steering herself between Jules and Jim without remorse. “Catch me,” she tells Jim, to whom she isn’t married.

“She is a vision,” they each say.

“The three lunatics,” the villagers say.

“La femme est naturelle, donc abominable,”
says Baudelaire.

I watch instead of sleeping. Simon called tonight, sounding ragged. All force and certainty he was, on leaving Monday night. Now, like me, he sees where all that gets you. We miss our routine. I dare say we miss each other. I haven’t heard word one from Fowler, but that didn’t come up in our conversation. He spoke to each child, then asked me about each child. He needed to hear
me
talk about them. And I needed to tell him about them.

“So you’re all right then,” he said.

I told him no, as if I had a right, and that was the end of it.

“Maybe she can’t belong to just one man,” says Jim.

How dare I presume to compare myself to Catherine, to equate my level of looks to Jeanne Moreau’s?

She
presumes.

She dresses up like a man to rendezvous with two men.

She jumps into the Seine for effect.

She marries and has a child.

She wants the men alternately. And someone else as well. Albert somebody.

She fucks all three.

Granted, she drives off an unfinished bridge with one of them and kills herself, and him.

I don’t believe we’re meant to pity her, except in recognizing where her sort of honesty gets us, to the bottom of a river.

It’s another story. I’m not French, and I’m not wild. I’m watching a movie in a bedroom in New York. My children are sleeping. My husband is returning tomorrow evening to help sort things out so we don’t have to drive off a bridge.

He said, “I’ll be home tomorrow night. See you then.”

These are not the words of a man who accepts that his wife needs to leave him intermittently for the man who has fathered her first child.