Acts of Love (30 page)

“Your mother,” Jonathon told Sandy as he followed her out of the room and cornered her in the hallway, “is a rice-paper house of emotion, but I love her more than life itself.”

She burrowed deeper beneath the scuttled layers of clothes still on the bed, the sheets worn thin, almost translucent, shut her eyes, and let the shadows of the late afternoon filter across her lids.

 

T
HERE WAS ONE
who called her “sugar” and taught her to forget all about dependability and devotion—there were other things, and, Lord, what things; and there was a green-eyed Western boy who she thought was It, really It, but he soon grew bored with all of her questions; and there was a tall, dark, manic-depressive whose mother had died drunk in a bathtub and who tried to jump out a window when Sandy refused to marry him, dislocating his shoulder when a friend dragged him in; and there was one with the biggest cock she'd ever seen, who was obsessed with Lyndon Johnson's domestic record, and there were more; and no one, no one had ever stroked her fingers as if they were precious jewels, recounting the reasons of love.

 

S
ANDY LEFT THE HOUSE
as it was and gave the real estate agent some cash to have professional cleaners come in and take care of it.

When the house was sold two months later, she scrupulously divided the proceeds in two, making allowance for the cash she had laid out.

With her share, Ann opened up the first bank account she had ever had that was solely hers. She did not offer to put Ted's name on it.

“What are you going to do with yours?” she asked Sandy.

“Is that all you care about, money?” Sandy retorted.

 

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS
, Sandy once more grew fearful of the act of going to sleep, of falling asleep. Once again, her breath shortened dangerously—falling, falling.

They were across the street, walking toward her, she never went to meet them. They were across the street, walking toward her…

She was walking down Main Street on her way to lunch with a new co-worker, they were looking in a bookshop window, she never went to greet them, never went to them…

She sat up, reached for the phone, and called Ann. Though it was past midnight, the need for shared confession, for absolution, was overwhelming.

“Every night when I lie in bed, I replay that moment,” she said quietly. “Jonathon's loopy stooped gait, Estelle's falling ember hair, coming toward me, again and again. Each time I try to force myself to cross the street, to say hello to them, to introduce them to this woman. But no matter how hard I try, I never do.”

Ann was calm, had no need herself for confession and absolution, had done the right thing when they were alive, and now, as she said, she was free.

Sandy lay back in the tangle of her sheets, shut her eyes, and finally drifted off.

They were crash dummies, stuffed, bald, featureless, with invisible seams holding together the rosy cloth of their sausage arms and torsos.

Only on impact, with chunks of metal and glass ripping into the fabric of their faces and arms and chest, did they suddenly become Jonathon and Estelle, pierced, gashed, open-eyed, bloodied.

She bolted upright in a cold sweat.

She got up at two in the morning, found the Moroccan-leather folder in the recesses of her closet, took it downstairs, and emptied the transcripts into the fireplace. She lit the pyramid with a kitchen match and pushed the papers into the flames, the acrid smoke filling her eyes as she stared at it.

 

L
ATER
, she would try to find the beginning, a strict demarcation, this is where it began, this is the exact time and place, here. This is how. She was, from the onset, explaining, citing incident to a court in her own mind. But in her heart, she found no specifics of initiation, only a subterranean force that had always been there, unacknowledged perhaps, not acted upon, but there. And if she didn't start it, could she be held accountable?

She sat in the bar after work, putting off the moment of going home. Though it had been two months since Jonathon and Estelle's death, she was still rootless, insomniac. She had taken on extra work at the
Chronicle
but had had to stop when she was accused of hoarding bylines. She had gone home every night for a week with a dentist from Handley she had met at a party, but he had a habit of washing his hands so frequently that the white, antiseptic skin on his narrow, hairless fingers came to repulse her. She nursed her vodka, swirling the ice about in the clear liquid.

“You alone?”

She looked up and found Ted standing by her stool.

“Yup.”

“What's the matter, you get stood up?”

“Did it ever occur to you that all a woman might want is to have a drink after work, just like you?”

“What makes you so sure that's all I want?”

She frowned.

He laughed. “Just kidding.” He sat down on the stool next to her and motioned to the bartender to bring them another round. “I drove by the house on Rafferty Street last night,” he said. “There was a new car in the driveway. A station wagon, of all things. Who knows, maybe the perfect American family moved in, collie and swing set and inflatable pool. You're a fast worker, Sandy.”

“Are you trying to make me feel lousy, or does it just happen naturally?” she asked.

“Sorry,” he answered with an unexpected sincerity that threw her off-guard.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and then went back to her drink. “What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be home with Ann?”

“She won't notice.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He took another sip of his Scotch.

“What's going on with you two, anyway?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it doesn't take a genius to see that you two aren't exactly the happy loving couple these days.”

“Has Ann said anything to you?” he asked, regarding her closely.

“No.”

“I thought women talked to each other. I thought that was what they did best.”

“Funny, and I thought husbands and wives were supposed to talk to each other.”

“I guess she's just having a hard time with Jonathon and Estelle's death.” The reflection in his tone, unmarred by irony or barb, was alien and intimate and uncomfortable.

“Really? I thought she was having an amazingly easy time with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She told me she felt freed.” Here. The first betrayal, small, almost unnoticeable, and yet. She took a large sip of her drink.

“She said that?”

“Yes.”

“Free from what? Me?”

“No. I don't know. Maybe she feels free from always trying to fix things.”

“What things?”

“Estelle, for one.”

They had never had a serious talk before, just the two of them, and they were both momentarily embarrassed. Ted looked over at a heavy-set man in a plaid flannel shirt punching numbers into the jukebox. Sandy made twirling patterns with the salty remains in the bowl of peanuts.

“And us,” Ted added. “She no longer seems interested in fixing us.”

“Do you need fixing?”

“We need something, but…”

“How does that line go?” she interrupted. “‘They were each too busy saving themselves.' Something like that.”

He looked over at her. “Huh?”

“
Tender Is the Night.
Fitzgerald. You know, F. Scott Fitzgerald?”

“Never heard of the guy. What was he, some radio talk-show host?” Ted grinned, suddenly back in familiar territory of push me–pull you. “I wish you'd stop thinking of me as a Neanderthal, Sandy,” he said. “As a matter of fact, that's the only Fitzgerald book I haven't read.” He paused, smiled slightly. “You know, I used to think I could be like Gatsby.”

Sandy looked over at him and laughed abruptly.

Ted, wounded, became defensive. “I don't mean the mansions and the silk shirts.” He tapped his fingers once lightly against the scratched wooden bar. “But the idea of completely reinventing yourself. Springing whole from your own mind. It seemed admirable to me. Actually, it always seemed the only approach that was admirable. Or, at least, it seemed like the only viable option.”

“Used to?”

He shrugged. “Let's just say it didn't prove as easy as I thought it would be. Frankly, just getting by seems like quite a victory these days.”

Sandy took another sip of her drink. “This is embarrassing. We sound like a couple of college sophomores. That's really the only time it's excusable to sit in a bar and talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald characters as if they mattered.”

“I wouldn't know,” Ted said.

They both finished off their drinks.

“Do you have a copy?” he asked.

“Of what?”

“Tender Is the Night.”

“Sure.”

“I'd like to borrow it.”

“Okay. I'll bring it over next time I come.”

He nodded, smiled. “Well, I should return to home and hearth. Are you going to stay here and try to get lucky, or shall I walk you to your car?”

“Seeing you is all the luck I can handle in one night,” she countered.

They split the bill and left.

 

W
HEN
S
ANDY TALKED TO
A
NN
the next day, she didn't mention that she had seen Ted. There was no reason not to, no reason at all, and yet she didn't.

So maybe it was there. The beginning.

 

S
HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURPRISED
when he stopped by two nights later on his way home from work, but she wasn't. It seemed natural, expected. In fact, she had dug the book off the shelf, dusted it, readied it for him, had wondered if he would read too much meaning into the adultery and the dissolution, or if he would think it a cliché. She laughed; this was the first time she had ever worried what Ted thought of her intellect. Anyway, the book was waiting for him when he came in, though she pretended that it wasn't, that she had to go hunt for it.

“Do you mind?” he asked. “I never seem to have the time to get to the library anymore.”

“Of course not.” He stood on the edge of her living room, lit by a single glass lamp, taking in its clutterless details, the neat stack of magazines, the half-drunk glass of white wine, while she went to get it. They listened to each other's stillness.

She came back, handed him the book, and in the act of her handing it over, his taking it, their fingers brushed.

There. That could be the beginning. Right there.

He shifted the book quickly to the other hand. “I'll bring it back as soon as I finish it.”

“No rush.”

“Thanks.”

He lingered in the doorway for an awkward moment, then turned and left.

 

I
MPLICIT IN THE SEARCH
for strictly delineated beginnings, of course, is the belief that if only you can locate it, locate it definitively, you can go back, start again, un-start, alter what followed. This was the moment. If I had just acted differently
here,
in this precise interlude. But they didn't. She would have said they couldn't. Though she had always, until then, believed in free will.

She wondered if he had told Ann where he had gotten the book, wondered, as she sat in her bed, her knees propped up, holding a tome on the role of churches in small-town America she was reading for an article, if he was turning a page at this very instant.

 

H
E BROUGHT THE BOOK BACK FOUR DAYS
later. It was a rainy Monday evening, and the winds and water were hastening the autumn leaves to the ground, where they lay in brown and orange puddles and stuck to the soles of his shoes. His hair was wet from the trip from his car to her door, falling in his eyes. One droplet of water dangled from the tip of his nose. She laughed when she saw him. “Come in.” She took his coat and hung it to dry in the kitchen.

“I brought you the book back.”

“That was fast.”

He nodded.

He pulled the book from his back pocket, warm and wet, and handed it to her. “Here.”

The book, warm and wet, his hand, hers.

“What did you think of it?” she asked.

“It was okay. I tend not to care too much about the problems of rich people. I don't know. It was well written, of course. But his overwhelming need to be liked…” He shook his head. “I just don't get it.”