My Dearest Friend (3 page)

“Babies don’t drink beer,” Carey Ann said sweetly. She tried to distract her daughter. “Here, want a bite of salami? Lexi
like
salami.”

“That!”
Lexi cried. Her peaches-and-cream face scrunched up and turned rosy with anger.

“I don’t suppose it could hurt her to give her a little sip, do you?” Carey Ann asked, looking at Jack.

He could see blue circles under his wife’s eyes. “Probably not,” he said. Then he grinned conspiratorially. “Actually, it might make her a little sleepy.”

“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann said, but grinned back. She squatted down and held the bottle to her daughter’s lips. Alexandra took a big suck, her eyes widened, and she spat.

“Yucky!”

“Thank God,” Carey Ann said under her breath, wiping the spit off the mouth of her bottle. “Now I can have it for myself. Here, Alexandra, here’s
your
bottle.”

They spread their feast out on the paper wrappers on the dining-room table. Thirty feet away, at the other end of the room, the great wall of window glowed with early-autumn
light, green leaves just turning gold, blue sky. It was after six, but still bright.

“So?” Carey Ann said eagerly. “How did it go?”

“Great,” Jack said, smiling. It both amused and pleased him that Carey Ann was so awed by his work, as if teaching freshman English and neoclassic literature required the bravery and courage of an astronaut. She couldn’t imagine how she’d keep a class of twenty-five young people quiet and interested for an hour. As he spoke of students and schedules, she listened intently, shaking her head in admiration. Jack was thirty-one, Carey Ann twenty-four, but she seemed so much younger. Sometimes she seemed so terribly young. (And sometimes that was good, and sometimes not.) “The composition classes will be fun, and easy—I can do that with my eyes closed, it’s what I did at UMKC. But the neoclassic class—God, it’s such dull stuff I’m still worried about how to get the students interested. But hey, I forgot to tell you—we’re invited to a party next Friday night.”

“Oh,” Carey Ann said, looking down. She began to busy herself with Alexandra, who for once was silent, lying in her mother’s lap, content with her bottle. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, we’d need a baby-sitter for Lexi, and I don’t know anyone yet …” Were those tears in her eyelashes? She kept looking down.

Jack stared at his wife. She didn’t raise her head.
Here we go again,
he thought, then with a burst of self-controlled energy jumped up from his chair. “I’m going to run up to the bedroom and change out of these clothes.” He took the stairs two at a time, needing to burn up the anger that had burst inside him.
What
would make that woman happy? She’d been afraid to leave Kansas because she didn’t know anyone back east and didn’t have any friends in the Westhampton area, and she was a woman who loved being with friends, but here was a chance for her to meet people and she acted as if he’d just suggested a visit to the dentist.

In a frenzy he stripped off his clothes and hung them up neatly, trekking into the bathroom to put his socks in the hamper; Carey Ann sure wouldn’t be able to say he had left the room a mess, had left his socks for her to pick up. Turning, he caught sight of his face in the bathroom mirror. Boy, did he look grim. He sighed and put the toilet lid down and sat there a moment in his Jockey shorts, trying to calm down.

He didn’t want an instant replay of last night. Last night had been terrible. He had driven home from the college through a sun-dappled September day, as brilliant as any day he had ever known, and, arms laden with briefcase and groceries, had burst into his
beautiful and overwarm house to find his wife and child seated in front of the TV.

“TV?” he had yelled. “Hey, you guys, what are you doing in front of the TV on a beautiful day like this?”

It had been a spontaneous outburst, purely curious. He had meant no criticism and had thought there was nothing but enthusiasm in his voice.

But, “What’s wrong with watching TV?” Carey Ann had said, bursting into tears immediately. “Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know anyone to go visit. There isn’t a neighborhood around here. We’re stuck out in the old country! What am I supposed to do with a toddler? Do you have any idea how hard it is to follow a little kid around all day? It’s backbreaking. Besides, I like watching TV! It makes me feel better to see all those people whose lives are worse than mine!”

“Worse than yours? But, Carey Ann! What is so bad about your life?” Jack had asked, amazed. Again, he had meant only a question, not criticism.

But Carey Ann had shaken her head and turned away. “Oh,
you
can’t understand!”

She had sunk onto the sofa, head in hands, and cried. Alexandra had watched a few moments, enthralled, then, looking up at her father, had burst into confused tears herself, and there Jack had stood, in his splendid new home, with two of the most beautiful blondes the world had ever seen, bawling their eyes out.

He had calmed them down, and eventually, after dinner, they had all gone for a walk down their bumpy dirt road. Jack had tried to cheer Carey Ann up with descriptions of his day, his office, the other faculty members and the students, and thought he had been successful. But later, when they were climbing into bed, with Alexandra for once miraculously asleep in her crib, he had reached out for his wife, wanting to make love to her. But Carey Ann had pulled away and begun crying again.

“Oh, I’m too ugly for anyone to make love to.”

“Carey Ann!”

“Well, look. I guess I’m going to have this blubber on my stomach for the rest of my life.”

“Carey Ann, you’re beautiful. You don’t have any blubber. You’re perfect!”

“Oh, don’t you lie to me,” she had said, offended, pulling away from him to sit on the side of the bed. “I know. I know how you get to look at all those pretty young carefree flat-stomached coeds all day long, those girls who have nothing to think about
but getting dressed!”

“I think Westhampton College students have slightly higher intellectual concerns than that,” Jack had said, and all right, that had been stuffy, but it had just come out.

“Oh, right, and I don’t!” Carey Ann had snapped irrationally.

He had tried to charm her out of her sulks, but nothing he could do worked. “Just leave me alone, please,” Carey Ann had said. “I don’t want to make love. I’m tired.” She had curled up on her side of the bed and fallen asleep instantly, while Jack lay awake for long minutes, staring into the night.

How had he and his wife become so antagonistic? Were all marriages this way? He wished he had someone to talk to. He was getting the strangest feelings about his life, that it was
fouled up,
going the wrong way, that he was out of control, that he couldn’t do it right.

Wouldn’t Carey Ann’s old father back in Kansas be thrilled to hear of this? When Jack had formally asked for her hand in marriage, Mr. Skrags had said, “Jack, I have to tell you that I think I have a pretty good idea of what Carey Ann needs in life to make her happy, and when I look at you, I don’t see it.” Pompous old fart. He and his wife had spoiled Carey Ann terribly; they proudly admitted it. And even if she had married someone who made more money than he did—which would be just about anyone—she’d still have to learn how to boil water and keep house and take care of a baby:
she
was the one who wanted the baby. She was the one who wanted
lots
of babies. Not that he didn’t love Alexandra. He loved her more than his own life. But since her birth, just ten months after their marriage, everything had gotten so difficult. Carey Ann, who in her parents’ home had never made her own bed or done her own laundry, hadn’t been prepared to cope with a baby’s never-ending needs, the crying, the wetting, the fevers, the dirty clothes, the endless tending. Not that Carey Ann ever was anything but infinitely patient with their daughter. Still, Jack was beginning to think that she—they—were doing something wrong. These days Carey Ann found it impossible to do any kind of shopping for groceries with Alexandra along because the baby started screaming if she didn’t get what she wanted—cookies, candy, and so on—and yet Jack had seen mothers with babies Alexandra’s age riding along in the baskets of grocery carts, so
other
mothers must be able to do it. Why couldn’t Carey Ann? But if he tried to talk to her about it or offered to help, she grew furious or teary-eyed and ending up crying because her mother had always had help around the house. So maybe Mr. Skrags had been right after all: maybe it was
all Jack’s fault that his wife wasn’t happy.

He wanted to make her happy. He wanted that more than anything else in the world. Although he could see how she would think that wasn’t true. After all, he wouldn’t work for her father, and he had made her move here so that he could teach where he wanted. Raised and educated in the East, Jack had finished his Ph.D. at Yale and started his grown-up life with two dreams: to teach English at Westhampton College, where he’d been an undergraduate, and to write novels. He knew he had to save up some money before he could seriously try to write, but in his fantasy/plan for his life he didn’t think that would take him too long. Then, after he’d written a few novels and become famous, he’d be asked to teach creative writing and modern fiction at Westhampton. When he had been asked, right after finishing graduate school, to teach freshman composition at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, he knew his plan was starting to take shape. He’d never lived in the Midwest before, and he thought of it in terms of “vitality” and “brashness.” He thought he would find material there for his future books.

What he found there was Carey Ann. He hadn’t been prepared for this. Probably there wasn’t any way to be prepared for such a thing—for falling in love so fast. He had met Carey Ann at a party, and that was it. He fell in love with her at once, and fell more in love with her every moment he was with her. She was so beautiful, and so much fun. She was such a happy person, so spontaneous and loving and quick and eager. He had fallen in love with her fast and deep. He’d never stop loving her.

Carey Ann had fallen in love with him too; loved him still. He believed that, had to believe it to go on. She admitted early on that she, too, had been attracted to Jack for superficial reasons: he was handsome, and had such an elegant New England accent and all those prep-school manners. Then, too, his last name, Hamilton, had appealed to her. It seemed aristocratic and British, unlike the embarrassment of a last name she was stuck with. Even though her father owned a chain of posh department stores all over the Midwest, so that now that name had, if nothing else, a kind of power attached to it, still … Skrags—why, it sounded like a kind of disease a person got from sleeping around too much, Carey Ann had laughingly said.

And
Jack taught English literature. He was always quoting British writers. This just made Carey Ann swoon, for they had met the year that Prince Charles married Lady Di and a wave of Anglophilia swept the world. In her deepest heart, Carey Ann thought of herself and Jack as
sort of
like Prince Charles and Princess Diana. After all, Jack was
dark and handsome and she was fair and beautiful. Not that Carey Ann was a fool. She was just romantic. She was smart in many ways, and intuitive. She
listened
to Jack when he talked about his work, and she could be clever: once, when she was reading a little hands-on book to Alexandra, which involved rubbing a section of the book, then inhaling and getting a good strong whiff of peanut butter or bubble gum or peppermint, Carey Ann had grinned up at Jack and said, “Just think what kind of a scratch-and-sniff book Chaucer would have made!” When she was happy, she could make love like the Fourth of July. But what she was … well, what she really was was spoiled. She was her parents’ only child, and so pretty to look at that anyone would spoil her, but it helped that her father was so wealthy. She had gone to college in Kansas City but hadn’t been able to figure out what she wanted to do with her life except that she wanted to get married and have
lots
of children (another thing, Carey Ann said, that she shared with Princess Diana). After college she had moved back home into her parents’ vast house in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and she had worked at one of her father’s department stores on the Plaza, selling stuffed animals. It wasn’t what she wanted to do forever, but she enjoyed it, she was good at it, and no one could tell her she didn’t work, couldn’t hold a job.

Jack had “courted” her—that was how Carey Ann liked to think of it—for the first year he taught in Kansas City. When his contract was renewed, he had asked Carey Ann to marry him, and had been warned by her father that he could never make her happy. Not a college professor. Not someone who made so little money and lived such a prissy (Carey Ann’s father’s estimation) life.

But he had made her happy, that first year, when he taught at UMKC and she was pregnant. It was after Alexandra’s birth that things got difficult. Not that Lexi was a difficult baby, but any baby took a lot of care and work. And then Jack heard there was a position opening at Westhampton College and he’d applied for it and gotten it. Carey Ann didn’t want to leave Kansas City and her family and friends; the Skragses didn’t want her to leave, even though, in their own old-fashioned way, as they told Carey Ann, they believed a woman was obligated by marriage to follow her husband wherever his work took him. In the meantime, Jack had developed a depression of his own, over the realization that now that he had a child and wife to support he’d
never
be able to take a year off to write, at least not until he was in his eighties. His plan for his life was all turned around. But when he tried to tell Carey Ann that, she had burst into tears and said, “Well, all right, if that’s how you feel, let’s just get a divorce.” Which wasn’t what he
wanted at all. “No, no,” he’d said. “I’ve always wanted to teach at Westhampton.” And that was true. He just hadn’t expected it so soon. And not with a wife and child, on a tiny salary.

But together they had decided to make the move, and once the decision was made, they went toward their future optimistically. They almost had been happy again. But when they had come east that summer to look for a house, leaving Lexi with her grandparents, more problems had arisen. Westhampton had become such a resort area, with people flocking there in the summer for the cool mountain air and in the winter for skiing and winter sports, that the cost of real estate had skyrocketed. There was no way that young faculty, paid pittances to teach at Westhampton (but teaching there anyway, because of the prestige), could afford to buy a house. Carey Ann’s vision of herself as an American Princess Diana rapidly slipped away as she was confronted with the realistic view of a two-bedroom rental apartment with walls so thin they could hear the couple arguing next door, or a large rental house with windows that wouldn’t open, doors that wouldn’t close, mouse droppings in every room, and a kitchen with appliances that were rusty or moldy or broken or all three.