My Dearest Friend (8 page)

“Oh, honey,” Daphne began. For she had said all that, but she had meant it differently than Cynthia was taking it, she had meant it as praise, as help.

“And I’m not even as smart as you were! I couldn’t even
get into
grad school! My science grades suck this term. My spelling is dragging down my English grades. And I can’t be a concert pianist. I can’t be anything!”

“Cynthia, you’re thirteen years old,” Daphne said. “Give yourself time. No one expects you to be anything yet. And the time will come when you will find your special talent, your special quality. But I’ll love you no matter what—even if you become a … a gas-station attendant.” Desperate, Daphne flashed on an article she had read recently about unusual jobs. “Even if you become a worm farmer.”

“A worm farmer?” Cynthia asked, her curiosity caught. So then it was all right. They were on the other side of the argument. Cynthia calmed down, Daphne soothed her, and they became friends again.

But not constantly. After that night, which seemed to have been some kind of watershed in their lives, so that everything could be measured as “before” and “after,” Daphne knew that Cynthia had moved beyond the bounds of her control. And what had happened was what always had to happen in life: Cynthia moved into the wider world where her mother could not arrange complete happiness. So of course she took her unhappinesses out on Daphne—whom else
could
she take them out on? Daphne watched as her child became more and more successful in her life: she was very popular, invited to all the right parties, she had several close girlfriends, and eventually a few handsome
and awkwardly polite and endearing boyfriends. She was always lovely to look at, she was on the honor roll (but not high honors, because of her spelling). She was forever being asked to baby-sit, because children and parents alike adored her—and then, at fourteen, she started acting, in school productions and in the local theater productions, and it was obvious that so early in her life she had found her talent. To the outside world she looked like a golden girl, enviable, with everything, and she walked through that outside world radiating confidence. But when she was inside, in her own home, she was overcome with doubts and self-hatred and self-criticism, and because she was so young still, she couldn’t seem to understand how hard she was being on herself.

Perhaps the problem had been that Cynthia had never had her father around to dote on her. Perhaps it had been a deep and tangled Freudian thing. Now Daphne shifted on her bed in her dim bedroom, where the sound of rain was lessening, coming in gentle patters as if little frogs were hopping against the house and windows. Cynthia had left in late June, as soon as school was out. Daphne still expected her to appear any moment, asking something like, “What’s that word that means it doesn’t last, passing away quickly, oh,
you
know. I need it for my homework.” “Transience?” Daphne would offer. “Oh, yeah, right,” Cynthia would respond, wandering back to her room.

But Cynthia had no room in this house. Cynthia was in California with her father, and Daphne didn’t know when she would ever see her daughter again.

Jack had had a rotten day. Hudson Jennings, the head of the English department, Jack’s former professor, now his boss, had dropped by Jack’s office to see how he was settling in.

“What is
that
?” Hudson had said.

Jack knew what Hudson was asking about—an almost life-size cardboard stand-up of Prince and his purple motorcycle. Jack had a friend who ran a record store and got stuff like this as publicity gimmicks; the friend knew how Jack felt about Prince and had given him the stand-up. It wasn’t obscene or even provocative (well, maybe provocative); Prince had all his clothes on for once, in fact he had on elaborate clothes, a purple satin suit, thigh-high black boots, an Edwardian white shirt, and white lace gloves. Very fine. He looked dangerous and ready to break all the rules, and his motorcycle was three times
as big as he was, and that was the wonderful thing about Prince, who was, after all, a little man, even a tiny man. He swaggered and flaunted and wouldn’t let
anything
make him look small.

“It’s a stand-up of Prince. The musician,” Jack said.

“Oh, yes. I know who he is,” Hudson said. “But what is it doing in your office?”

“My wife won’t let me keep it at home.” Jack caught his boss’s expression. “Just kidding.”

“I must say it occurs to me to wonder whether the office of a professor of English literature is the place for it.”

Jack swallowed. He couldn’t believe this. Was this Russia? “Well, I thought it might make me more … accessible to the students.”

“I believe the point of college is to raise the students to our level, not to sink to theirs,” Hudson said.

Jack looked at Hudson. Hudson looked levelly back at Jack. When Jack had been an undergraduate at Westhampton in the seventies, he had admired the hell out of Hudson. No, he had worshiped Hudson. He had wanted to
be
Hudson. One of the main reasons he had wanted to teach at Westhampton College was Hudson Jennings.

“Would you like me to remove it?” Jack asked, letting his bafflement show on his face, trying to say in that way: I didn’t realize you’d gotten so inflexible.

“I think so, yes,” Hudson said, smiling now. (Was he amused by Jack?) “By the way, I dropped by to tell you that we hope we’ll see you and your charming wife at the faculty picnic next Friday evening. At the faculty club. It will be a cookout unless it rains.”

“Great!” Jack said. “We’ll be there. I know Carey Ann’s eager to meet some of the other wives.”

Hudson went on down the hall then, and now here Jack was, driving home with Prince and his motorcycle jammed in the backseat of his car. He felt that Hudson had been uptight and dictatorial and that he himself had been a wimp. Prince wouldn’t have given in to Hudson so fast. But what could he have done? Jumped up and poured out his soul? “Well, you see, sir, I think this big stand-up of Prince that few other people have kind of helps out my
image;
it’s sort of like my mascot, especially now that I have to teach this neoclassic crap, which is so cut-and-dried. Jesus Christ, Alexander Pope! Prince has more
poetry
in his left sideburn than all of the neoclassicists put together. But
you’ve hired me to teach the stuff, and I will, and I’ll do a good job of it. I’ll lie about it and pretend I like it, but God, at least let me let my students know that I’m not like that, that I’m modern, alive, I don’t like a cold, closed, rigid literature.”

Well, of course he couldn’t have said all that. But perhaps he should have tried harder. Not given in so easily. Saying what? “If you’ll look closely, sir, you’ll see that Prince’s clothing is not unlike the clothing of the lords and bards of the neoclassic age. My instincts are that when my students see this cutout, they will
subconsciously
become more receptive to the work of the eighteenth century because it will be linked in their minds with this ‘poet’ of the twentieth century.” That would have been good, that sounded pretty reasonable, he should have tried that. After all, what if Hudson had only been testing him to see how much of a yes-man he was, or if he had the guts to stand up for what was right?

He was getting paranoid. Hudson wasn’t doing that. Hudson hated that stand-up of Prince; it was as simple as that. Now Jack didn’t know where he’d put it. He wanted it somewhere visible to him daily, as an antidote to his life, which was so bound up by rules.

Oh, God, how awful, to be thirty-one and already as stuck in life as if both feet were sunk in cement! He couldn’t change now, he couldn’t take risks now; he had a family to support. Although that was not fair, not fair to Carey Ann and Alexandra; he hadn’t been an adventurer before marriage; he’d never been an adventurer at all. He had always been so
careful
that, looking back, he saw that he had been just short of cowardly. It was his parents’ fault, probably (he loved both his parents and knew if he accused them of this, they’d agree): they had been happy, in a mundane way (although, a voice in the back of his mind argued, don’t you know enough by now to know that happiness is never mundane?). They were both college professors in Boston—his father taught English literature, his mother taught in the history department. They had married just out of college and had two children, a boy and a girl, and their lives had been neatly packaged and scheduled by the college’s calendar, and really it had been a very fine way to live. And so
safe.
The parents taught during the day and the children went to school (until they went off to prep school, which was also scheduled and safe). The parents read or worked on their courses in the evenings and the children did their homework. The entire family went together to the college’s celebrations of Christmas and graduation and then for two weeks in the summer to the same rented wooden seaside house on Cape Cod; oh, they
had lived a repetitive life of harmony and balance and serenity—my God, Alexander Pope would have loved it. Jack had lived a neoclassic life!

He hadn’t even fought very much with his sister. Diana was two years younger than he was and they had always been chums. Still were. He had always liked having Diana around with her stuffed animals and baby dolls and later with her nail polish and hair rollers, in the same way he had liked having Carey Ann around during the first year of their marriage: women seemed to be so much more optimistic about their control over the world than men. They seemed always so certain that they could arrange things to their satisfaction. If nature—fate—gave them straight hair, they could make it curly. If nature gave them curly hair, they could make it straight. They could paint their fingernails or not, and have babies or not, they could go into a room and put the furniture where they liked it and then they’d call friends on the phone to tell them what they’d just done or were planning to do and the entire world settled down and fit its bulging boisterous bulk into the delineated limits the women painted with their polish and their plans. Men were supposed to go out and fight the world, explore it, poke at it, but women got to soothe and tame and restrain it, and then sit down and relax in it. There was no use talking about “women’s lib,” “men’s lib”; that’s the way it really was. When it came right down to it, the truth of the matter was that Carey Ann was not responsible for getting the money that paid for the food and the mortgage and the heat. Jack was. The truth of the matter was that Carey Ann didn’t have to arrange her home to please anyone else, but Jack had to arrange his office to suit his boss, and he had to do it in the right way, so that he wouldn’t anger the man who had the power eventually to give him tenure or not. He could not have said some brilliant rebellious obscenity and stalked, Prince-like, out of the office and onto his motorcycle and off into the sunset, because he was responsible for his family. Although this was the life that, after all, he had chosen. Not only chosen, it was the life he had craved all through his childhood. He couldn’t help it, he was by nature, if not by fantasy, a family man.

When he pulled into the driveway of the A-frame, he noticed that Carey Ann’s white convertible was gone, and immediately a wave of pleasure swept over him—followed quickly by a seizure of guilt. But he so seldom had any time alone in his house, it was never quiet in his house, and he was really tired and still a little upset from the episode with Hudson.

He wrestled Prince into the house and into the anonymity of his study under the
stairs, then headed for the kitchen. He really needed a beer. Or a vodka and tonic. With some pretzels.

But when he opened the refrigerator, he found that there was no beer. Or tonic. He searched through the cupboards and then through the cardboard boxes (Carey Ann still hadn’t unpacked much). The refrigerator held some canned pears and half a gallon of whole milk and some Popsicles and some eggs, and that was all.

Perhaps Carey Ann had gone to the grocery store. He hoped so. He walked around the house, stepping over Alexandra’s toys. What a messy child she was. He stood a moment looking out the great glass window down at the valley. Now he wished Carey Ann were home. He was lonely. He really would have liked to sit down with his wife, to share a drink, to tell her in detail about his day, and about his episode with Hudson. He felt the need for some comfort, just the simple comfort of a friendly conversation with a person who was on his side. And a drink, a vodka tonic or a beer. He really could use one.

The more he thought about it, though, the more he guessed that when Carey Ann did get home, she might not be in the mood to sit down and listen to his woes. Then he remembered the woman down the road, the secretary from the history department. Daphne. He remembered the taste of the strong, rich, brewed coffee she had given him a few mornings ago. He remembered sitting on her concrete stoop, enclosed by a circle of woods that made her place seem cut off from the world and its problems. Well. Maybe she wouldn’t mind if he dropped by for a drink. At least he could ask her if he could borrow some tonic.

The road to her place was pure mud. He should have changed into his sneakers, but he was in such an obstinate mood that once he set out, and saw immediately that his loafers were getting rimmed with muck, he just kept on going. It was slippery; he tried to walk along the high ridges of the ruts, but kept almost sliding down into the channels between the ruts, which were full of brown water. Finally he climbed over to the shoulder of the road and picked his way through the high grasses, brambles, and goldenrod. It was hot now, and humid. Green steamed at him from the forest and ground; it was no longer raining, but occasionally a fat clear pendant of water would fall from a tree.

Jack was almost soaked by the time he reached Daphne’s house. What hadn’t hit him from above had gotten him from below as the tall wet grasses squeaked and slapped at his legs. The front door was open. He stepped up and knocked on the aluminum screen
door. “Hello?” he called. There was no answer. Damn, he thought, but she had to be home. There was an old dented, rather valiant-looking red Jeep parked at the side of the house. “Hello?” he called again.