Ordinary Love and Good Will (10 page)

Jerry, leaning forward on his elbows, says, “Wow. Did you take any pictures?”

“Well, it was too big to take pictures. I didn’t have good equipment, not even a wide-angle lens, and it was fucking cold, too. So I thought, Shit, I’m never going to forget this anyway.”

“I can’t tell you how envious I feel right this minute.”

Me, too.

Michael tips back his chair and looks at the ceiling, then says to Jerry, “I wonder if you should. I mean, yeah, I saw it, and it was astonishing and unforgettable, just like the whole trip. But I feel too spread out now, like I’ve been rolled out with a rolling pin and I can’t gather myself in to focus on anything. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve just figured it out. I want to go everywhere now—Japan, New Zealand, Antarctica, for God’s sake—but when you go to those places, you’re just this little pinpoint sort of pushing through them, and when you visualize them in your mind, it’s like you’re a balloon, inflating and thinning out so you can hold it all. Everything is frustrating. You can’t be there completely enough when you’re there, and when you’ve understood
sort of what it’s like to be there, you aren’t there any more. I think humans are genetically programmed to stay in one place all their lives. I think one place is exactly what you can understand.”

Ellen says, “Then why is the history of mankind the history of travel? It seems to me that humans organize their societies in two ways—either as nomadic ones, where everyone walks thousands of miles in his lifetime, or as settlements that everyone flees and then returns to. I think humans are genetically programmed to go. Simply to go until the batteries are dead.”

“It’s the eyes,” says Joe from his corner. “Your eyes make you think that you are somewhere where you really aren’t. I mean, think about it. A man is walking down the stairs. At the bottom is the front door. He sees the front door, and his car outside, and because he sees them, in his mind he is already there, he has already walked down the stairs, even though he is still walking down them. A piece of carpet is loose. His foot, which is exactly where it is in time and space, catches on the carpet and he falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. He has been fatally deceived by the illusion that your eyes always cast over you, which is that
THERE
is more important than
HERE
, and, since time and space are the same thing, the future is more important than now.”

Jerry says, “I would still like to see it.”

Me, too.

I say, “Would you prefer not to have seen it?” Michael looks at me for a long time—not at me, really, but at his own thought. We all look at him, waiting. He says, “I would prefer not to be shaped by experiences. I would like to just have them, not to incorporate them.” He sighs.

“You’d like to be a computer, then,” says Joe.

It turns out that Jennifer spends the night, although she spent the night last night. When Ellen calls her mother, the woman says, “Oh, fine.”

And now it is after nine. We are sitting on the back deck. Joe and Michael, between whom I can still see a stiffness, and Jerry and Ellen, ditto, are drinking beer. I am having another glass of wine, and no one has spoken for about five minutes. There is no light except the ambient light of the city spread out above us. I can see their figures, rather bluish, distributed around me, and hear their movements. Ellen says, idly, “Okay, Mom, why did you grin in the kitchen?”

I admit I am startled. This conversation seems more appropriate to the kitchen, to just Ellen and myself. Except, of course, that she doesn’t know what I was grimacing about, and she thinks this is a way to twit me, maybe, something she likes to do. I can’t say I don’t know. I can say something general—about desire, maybe, about how if a person wants something enough there is always room for it. She knows I think desire is the only motivation. Or I could make up a story about someone at work, some woman with a job and a bunch of kids and a husband and a lover on the side. She goes without lunch, she goes without noontime aerobics, she picks up her kids half an hour later at the day-care center. She is rigidly alert, the way I was. I could make her live, make them laugh at her, the way Joe and Michael laughed at the Shoe Man. She’s dressed a little better every day than she used to be, wearing a little more makeup, so focused and attentive that her work is not only always done, her desk is always neat. She straightens it compulsively, doesn’t she? A new life is coursing through her unlike any previous life—this time she is married, and what she feels is compounded equally of terror and desire. I could say she knows what I know but didn’t know twenty years ago, that both the terror and the desire will be fulfilled, and equally. This woman is suddenly so real to me that thinking of her here in the dark has an odd effect. I think, why not? Why not tell them? They are grown up now, have had
passions of their own. I’ve never told anyone what it was like with Ed, and what happened to it. Ellen is right. Though honest, I have also always been secretive. Or, no, I have not always been secretive. I used to be reserved, and then, twenty years ago, I became secretive.

Silhouetted against the silver of the house, Joe tips up his beer and takes the last drops. All summer he has been after me to fill in blanks for him, but only certain blanks. He does think that I am sexless, in that motherish way, and he dismisses me for it, the way men always dismiss women whom they don’t imagine to be objects of desire. Well, I have let him, haven’t I? Pat remarried a beautiful young woman, produced more young children in his forties. But my great passion was buying a house, and I acted as if Simon were primarily a handyman and never kissed him in front of the children. And Ellen. Our comfort together, our sense of kinship, is made up of children, cooking, gossip about the bookstore and the office, but never this. I know she assumes that our parting was Pat’s fault. I say, in a voice as idle as Ellen’s, “My experience is that you make room for anything you want, if you want it enough. Even an inconvenient man.”

Ellen’s head turns, and she says, “Yeah?” but the men do not move. Her eyes are dark, and I can’t tell if they say “Go on” or if they say “Don’t.” I go on. I say, “I made room for Ed.”

Joe says, “Who was Ed? I don’t remember an Ed.”

“Ed was the third point of the triangle that ended my marriage with your father. He lived down the road, in the old farmhouse that had been on the property before it was subdivided.”

“In the country?” says Joe. He speaks of the country, as always, in golden, longing tones.

“Yes. I met him because he had an old horse that he used
to ride bareback up and down the lane. I used to ride bareback in Nebraska, so once we got to talking about horses. He was a writer, though. Edward Stackhouse.”

Ellen says, “I’ve heard of him.”

“Mmm,” I say. “It was an old horse, very swaybacked. Came with the farmhouse. He used to stop when Michael and Joe and I were walking down the lane, and put Michael up in front of him. Joe didn’t want to, ever.”

Joe says, “Was it a white horse?”

“Very light dappled gray, yes. Ed used to laugh at everything I said. He would stop, and I would stop what I was doing, and we would talk. Then we talked longer. His eyes were a strange color, kind of a Federal blue. He’d been everywhere, even though he was still in his twenties. His wife had left him, so I think we made a lovely picture for him, twins, remodeling, lawns and gardens, dinner at seven, very Kennedyesque. He made a lovely picture, too. Austere, solitary, artistic. He’d worked for some of Kennedy’s speech writers, and now he was working on some sort of White House book. I couldn’t stay away from him.”

At this, there is an assortment of little noises—a laugh from Michael, a grunt from Joe. From Ellen, a little exhalation, sharp but nearly inaudible. As I speak, I remember more. Nothing can stop me now.

“All he ever had in the house was coffee. I didn’t drink coffee before or after that, but I always did with him. He made it for me, very creamy and sweet.”

“Where were we?” says Michael.

“At first you were always with me, but then the summer came, and your father put the older kids in day camp and you into nursery school three mornings a week. I was never really sure he would be glad to see me if I came without you, so, even when we were sleeping together and our meetings were regular, I would make up some little excuse for coming down the lane. That part was crazy.”

“That part?” says Ellen.

“Well, yes. I mean, I knew I was expected, but even so I always had to bring something, some flowers or a loaf of bread, like a hostess gift, and then, when we began to undress one another, I always had to pretend to myself that I hadn’t been thinking of that, or that this body that was appearing out of my clothes was a big surprise to me.”

“Sounds like love, Ma,” says Michael.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t excitement like that. It felt most like some fixed, inconsolable longing. It was constant, even when I was at his place. I would go over there, and it would stop the moment I saw him, but only that moment. After that there was so much that he was holding back from me that I was as filled with longing when I was with him as when I wasn’t. After we made love, he would sleep and I would lie there wondering what you kids were doing at camp and nursery school.”

Joe says, “Sounds upbeat, Ma. Sounds life-affirming.” His voice is subdued.

“Did Daddy have the place under surveillance?” says Ellen. “Were you being followed by two German men in a black van?”

“He didn’t suspect until I told him. Maybe that was the most important thing about it.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I was seeing Ed and I didn’t want to stop. But I did stop. The relationship didn’t outlast the marriage.”

Michael says, “Why did you tell him?”

“Well, the whole affair was a terrible strain, for one thing.” They are staring at me, which makes this explanation seem trivial. I suppose all the explanations I’ve considered over the past twenty years seem trivial, in light of the consequences. I begin the self-justification—“I didn’t know what—I thought—” but I can’t bear it. I look from one to another.

Finally, I say, “I wanted him to know I wasn’t his.” Such a little thing, with them looking at me like this.

After a moment Jerry says, “So this Ed, what happened to him?”

“About a week after Pat took everyone to England, he said he wouldn’t see me or speak to me again. He was a very absolute sort of person. Sometimes I saw him around, but he kept to his word. He never spoke to me again.”

“Why?”

“I wrote and asked him that a couple of times. He didn’t answer. I thought then that he was just cruel, or that he hated me. I couldn’t explain it any other way. After that I thought that he must have been afraid of me and of what he’d done.”

Michael says, “How long did it take you to get over it?”

“I stopped loving Ed about a year later. Really stopped. Didn’t even recognize him at Kroger’s. But I don’t think I ever got over it. Every time I ever got interested in anyone after that, I felt such conflicting feelings of desire and defeat that it was too frightening. Even with Simon. I could have gotten closer to Simon, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let go beyond a certain point without wanting to kill myself.”

“Wanting to kill yourself?” Michael seems to assert some kind of primacy here, as if all of this is more his business than the others’. We trade a glance, and I am not sure what I see there, but it isn’t surprise. I say, “It wasn’t sadness, actually. It was the sense of having been drawn in and drawn in, encouraged to have trust, to open up. Ed loved to talk, for me to talk. That’s mostly what we did. And then it was suddenly gone. It was unaccountable. It was the mystery that made me want to kill myself, not exactly loss. That feeling of opening up got awfully entwined with the feeling of mysterious danger. But look at it—I let myself go, and then I got punished for it. By Ed, and by your father, too.
And I thought I deserved it. And I thought I might never see you all again. So, no, I never got over it. I never let go again, because I never wanted to want to kill myself again.” I look at Michael, but he is looking across the yard. I say, after a moment, “I don’t think I loved Ed the most. But it’s not necessarily the ones you love the most that have the most effect on you.”

“So,” says Ellen, “who did you love the most?”

“Oh, your father, I suppose.”

Now Ellen looks at me again, and says, “Come on, Mother, how could you?”

I say, “Well, it’s not because he was the first or anything, or even because I spent the most time with him. He was exciting. Besides, you’re not asking me to compare the feelings I have about him now with feelings I had about others then. You’re asking me to compare one delusion with another.” We all chuckle awkwardly. There is another long silence. I don’t know how the story has affected them, but having told it makes me hollow with fear. It is the way that I have contained it all these years that has given me strength, and now it seems to me that I have risked that. And then Ellen says, “I’ve got a story, too. You want to hear my story?”

Jerry, on the chaise longue, sits up and looks at us. He says, “Does this include a lover?”

“No,” says Ellen. “It includes Daddy, and you’ve heard it before, so why don’t you bring out some more beers?” Jerry gets up. Ellen is looking at me, and when Jerry turns on the kitchen light, I can see her face. Her look is neither confiding nor meditative, but calmly vengeful. Now it is my turn to think, Don’t, to realize that what she meant when she said, “How could you?” was how dare I say I loved Pat the most after all these years, after the abandonment, after the battles and the enmity. She meant, how could
I betray her loyalty to me at this late date. Something she is about to say will be my punishment, and I shrink from hearing it, but I am eager, too.

Michael says, “What’s your story?”

Ellen turns to him. “Do you remember Jenny? She was a Dutch girl, about twenty-five, that Daddy brought back with him to the States. She lived with us for about three months and then left?”

“Blonde?” says Michael.

“Yes. Very short. Not much taller than I was at eleven.”