Independence Day (42 page)

This is not the first time I’ve heard about the
Pennysaver
etc. And Vicki Arcenault was far from a bimbo. “We could’ve gotten remarried again anytime,” I say. “And I wasn’t having the time of my life. You divorced
me
, if you can remember precisely. We could’ve moved back in together. All kinds of things could’ve happened instead of what did.” Possibly I’m about to hear that the most difficult milieu adjustment of my adult life didn’t really have to be made (if only I’d been clairvoyant). It’s the worst news anyone could hear, and for a nickel I’d pop Ann right in the chops.

“I didn’t want to marry you.” She keeps shaking her head, though less forcefully. “I just should’ve left, that’s all. Do you even think you know why you and I got unmarried?” She takes a brief, angling look at me—uncomfortably like Sally’s look. I’d rather not be delving into the past now, but into the future or at least the present, where I’m most at home. It’s all my fault, though, for rashly bringing up the queasy matter of—or at least the word—marriage.

“I’m on record,” I say, to answer her fair and square, “as believing our son died and you and I tried to cope with it but couldn’t. Then I left home for a time and had some girlfriends, and you filed for divorce because you wanted me gone.” I look at her haltingly, as if in describing that time in our life I’d as much as stated a Goya could’ve easily been painted by a grandmother in Des Moines. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

Ann is nodding as if she’s trying to get my view straight in her head. “I divorced you,” she says slowly and meticulously, “because I didn’t like you. And I didn’t like you because I didn’t trust you. Do you think you ever told me the truth once, the whole truth?” She taps her fingers on her bare thigh, not looking my way. (This is the perpetual theme of her life: the search for truth, and truth’s defeat by the forces of contingency, most frequently represented by yours truly.)

“Tell the truth about what?” I say.

“Anything,” she says, gone rigid.

“I told you I loved you. That was true. I told you I didn’t want to get divorced. That was true too. What else was there?”

“There were important things that weren’t being admitted by you. There’s no use going into it now.” She nods some more as if to ratify this. Though there is in her voice unexpected sadness and even a tremor of remorse, which makes my heart swell and my air passage stiffen, so that for one long festering moment I’m unable to speak. (I’ve been badly slipped up on here: she is distraught and dejected, and I cannot answer.)

“For a time,” she continues, very, very softly and carefully, having slightly recovered herself, “for a long time, really, I knew we weren’t all the way
to
the truth with each other. But that was okay, because we were trying to get there together. But suddenly I just felt hopeless, and I saw that truth didn’t really exist to you. Though you got it from me the whole time.”

Ann was forever suspecting other people were happier than she was, that other husbands loved their wives more, achieved greater intimacy, on and on. It is probably not unusual in modern life, though untrue of ours. But this is the final, belated, judgment on our ancient history: why love failed, why life broke into this many pieces and made this pattern, who at long last is to blame. Me. (Why now, I don’t know. I still, in fact, don’t know with any clarity what she’s talking about.) And yet I so suddenly want to put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her that I do—I put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her. God knows how I can.

“Can’t you tell me something specific?” I say gently. “Women? Or something I thought? Or something you thought I thought? Just some way you felt about me?”

“It wasn’t something specific,” she says painstakingly. Then stops. “Let’s just talk about buying and selling houses now. Okay? You’re very good at that.” She turns an unpleasant and estimating eye on me. She doesn’t bother to remove my warm and clammy hand from her smooth knee. “I wanted somebody with a true heart, that’s all. That wasn’t you.”

“Goddamn it, I have a true heart,” I say. Shocked. “And I
am
better. You can
get
better. You wouldn’t know anyway.”

“I came to realize,” she says, uninterested in me, “that you were never entirely there. And this was long before Ralph died, but also after.”

“But I loved you,” I say, suddenly just angry as hell. “I wanted to go on being your husband. What else from the land of truth did you want? I didn’t have anything else to tell you.
That
was the truth. There’s plenty about anybody you can’t know and are better off not to, for Christ sake. Not that I even know what they are. There’s plenty about you, stuff that doesn’t even matter. Plus, where the hell was I if I wasn’t there?”

“I don’t know. Where you still are. Down in Haddam. I just wanted things to be clear and certain.”

“I do have a true heart,” I shout, and I’m tempted again to give her a whack, though only on the knee. “You’re one of those people who think God’s
only
in the details, but then if they aren’t the precise right details, life’s all fucked up. You invent things that don’t exist, then you worry about being denied whatever they are. And then you miss the things that
do
exist. Maybe it’s you, you know? Maybe some truths don’t even have words, or maybe the truth was what you wanted least, or maybe you’re a woman of damn little faith. Or low self-esteem, or something.”

I take my hand off her knee, unwilling now to be her consoler.

“We don’t really need to go into this.”

“You started it! You started it last night, about being and seeming, as if you were the world’s expert on being. You just wanted something else, that’s all. Something beyond what there is.” She’s right, of course, that we shouldn’t go on with this, since this is an argument any two humans can have, could have, have had, no doubt are having at this moment all over the country to properly inaugurate the holiday. It really has nothing to do with the two of us. In a sense, we don’t even exist, taken together.

I look around at the long porch, the great blue house on its big lawn, the shimmering windows behind which my two children are imprisoned, possibly lost to me. Charley has not come out onto his little porch again. What I’d thought he was doing—eating his ethical lunch in the ethical sunshine while we two battered at each other far above and out of earshot—is probably all wrong. I know nothing about him and should be kinder.

Ann just shakes her head again, without words accompanying. She eases herself down off the porch rail, lifts her chin, runs one finger from her temple back through her hair, and takes a quick look at the mirror window as if she saw someone coming—which she does: our son, Paul. Finally.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I drove you crazy when we were married. If I’d known I was going to, I wouldn’t ever have married you. You’re probably right, I rely on how I make things seem. It’s my problem.”

“I thought you thought how I thought,” she says softly. “Maybe that’s mine.”

“I tried. I should’ve. I loved you very much all the time.”

“Some things just can’t be fixed later, can they?” she says.

“No, not later,” I say. “Not later they can’t.”

And that is essentially and finally that.

W
hy the long face?” Paul says to his mother and also to me. He has arrived, smirking, onto the porch looking far too much like the murder boy from Ridgefield last midnight, as committed to bad luck as a death row convict. And to my surprise he’s even pudgier and somehow taller, with thick, adult eyebrows even more like his mom’s, but with a bad, pasty complexion—nothing like he looked as recently as a month ago, and not enough anymore (or ever) like the small, gullible boy who kept pigeons at his home in Haddam. (How do these things change so fast?) His hair has been cut in some new, dopey, skint-sided, buzzed-up way, so that his busted ear is evident in its bloody little bandage. Plus, his gait is a new big-shoe, pigeon-toed, heel-scrape, shoulder-slump sidle by which he seems to give human shape to the abstract concept of condescending disapproval for everything in sight (the effects of stress, no doubt). He simply stands before us now—his parents—doing nothing. “I thought of a good homonym while I was getting dressed,” he says slyly to either or both of us. “‘Meatier’ and ‘meteor.’ Only they mean the same thing.” He smirks, wishing to do nothing out here more than present himself in a way we won’t like, someone who’s lost IQ points or might be considering it.

“We were just discussing you,” I say. I’d meant to mention something about Dr. Rection, to speak to him via private code, but I don’t. I am in fact sorry to see him.

His mother, however, steps right up to him—essentially ignoring him and me—grips his chin with her strong golfer’s thumb and index finger, and turns his head to examine his split ear. (He is nearly her height.) Paul is carrying a black gym bag with
Paramount Pictures—Reach Your Peak
stenciled on its side in white (Stephanie’s stepfather is a studio exec, so I’m told) and is wearing big black-and-red clunker Reeboks with silver lightning bolts on the sides, long and baggy black shorts, and a long midnight-blue tee-shirt that has
Happiness Is Being Single
printed on the front below a painting of a bright-red Corvette. He is a boy you can read, though he also is someone you’d be sorry to encounter on a city street. Or in your home.

Ann asks him in a private voice if he has what he needs (he has), if he has money (he does), if he knows where to meet in Penn Station (yes), if he feels all right (no answer). He cuts his knifey eyes at me and screws up one side of his mouth as if we’re somehow in league against her. (We aren’t.)

Then Ann abruptly says, “So okay, you don’t look great, but go wait in the car, please. I want to have a word with your father.”

Paul wrinkles his mouth into a mirthless little all-knowing look of scorn having to do with the very notion of his mother talking to his father. He has become a smirker by nature. But how? When?

“What happened to your ear, by the way?” I say, knowing what happened.

“I punished it,” he says. “It heard a bunch of things I didn’t like.” He says this in a mechanistic monotone. I give him a little push in the direction he’s come from, back through the house and out toward the car. And so he goes.

I
’d appreciate it if you’d try to be careful with him,” Ann says. “I want him back in good shape for his court appearance Tuesday.” She has sought to lead me the way Paul has gone, “back through,” but I’m having no part of her sinister house beautiful, with its poisonous élan, spiffy lines and bloodless color scheme. I lead us (I’m still inexplicably limping) down the steps to the lawn and around via the safer grass and through the shrubberies to the pea-gravel driveway, just the way a yardman would. “I think he’s injury prone,” she says quietly, following me. “I had a dream about him having an accident.”

I step through the green-leafed, thick-smelling hydrangeas, blooming a vivid purple. “My dreams are always like the six o’clock news,” I say. “Everything happening to other people.” The sexual whir I experienced on seeing Ann is now long gone.

“That’s fine about your dreams,” she says, hands in pockets. “This one happened to be mine.”

I don’t wish to think about terrible injury. “He’s gotten fat,” I say. “Is he on mood stabilizers or neuroblockers or something?”

Paul and Clarissa are already conferring by my car. She is smaller and holding his left wrist in both her hands and trying to raise it to the top of her head in some kind of sisterly trick he’s not cooperating with. “Come
on!”
I hear her say. “You putz.”

Ann says, “He’s not on anything. He’s just growing up.” Across the gravel lot is a robust five-bay garage that matches the house in every loving detail, including the miniature copper weather vane milled into the shape of a squash racket. Two bay doors are open, and two Mercedeses with Constitution State plates are nosed into the shadows. I wonder where Paul’s station wagon is. “Dr. Stopler said he displays qualities of an only child, which is too bad in a way.”

“I was an only child. I liked it.”

“He’s just
not
one. Dr. Stopler also said”—she’s ignoring me, and why shouldn’t she?—“not to talk to him too much about current events. They cause anxiety.”

“I guess they do,” I say. I am ready to say something caustic about childhood to seal my proprietorship of this day—revive Wittgenstein about living in the present meaning to live forever, blah, blah, blah. But I simply call a halt. No good’s to come. All boats fall on a bitter tide—children know it better than anyone. “Do you think you know what’s making him worse, just all of a sudden?”

She shakes her head, grips her right wrist with her left hand, and twists the two together, then gives me a small bleak smile. “You and me, I guess. What else?”

“I guess I was wanting a more complicated answer.”

“Well, good for you.” She rubs her other wrist the same way. “I’m sure you’ll think of one.”

“Maybe I’ll have put on my tombstone ‘He expected a more complicated answer.’”

“Let’s quit talking about this, okay? We’ll be at the Yale Club just for tonight if you need to call.” She looks at me in a nose-wrinkled way and slouches a shoulder. She has not meant to be so harsh.