She Poured Out Her Heart (31 page)

But she thought he was right about some things, from time to time, namely, that the heart often tagged along in inconvenient ways.

S
he and Jane headed back to the Aviary, where Eric and the children were waiting for them, ready to move on. Everyone seemed to have gotten a second wind. Jane too looked visibly cheered up. She reached out to smooth Grace's hair, while Robbie asked his mother if he could get a pet snake since they never did get a dog, and snakes were easier than dogs anyway. Jane said that they would think about it. Robbie said that what she really meant was no, and Jane said that if Robbie found out everything that was needed to know about snakes, they would seriously consider it. Eric said he was pretty sure once Robbie did his research on snakes, he would not want one, and Robbie said he would too, and the four of them enjoyed a little moment then, teasing each other about the snake they knew very well would never take up residence, still believing, some of them, in the possibility of a dog, a wonderful, big-hearted, handsome dog who would love each of them uncritically and forever.

Bonnie knew each of them so well. Perhaps better than she ought to. They were the family she'd chosen, as opposed to the damaged one she'd been born into. She was the closest thing they had to a dog. Or no, that was ludicrous. She might be the closest thing they had to a snake.

Watching them now, she felt that she was not theirs, nor they hers, not really. She might try, in ways both innocent and less so, to attach herself to them, but she was only fooling herself. She was alone, alone, alone, and that never changed.

And then, just as Bonnie was in the middle of these pitiful thoughts, Eric cruised up behind her and lightly cupped her shoulder with one hand, drawing her back in, making her a part of things once more, setting off small star-shaped explosions beneath her skin, and everything was all right, at least for this moment, this precarious balance of happiness.

They visited the reptiles, or rather, Eric and Robbie and Bonnie did so, since Grace was not a big fan of scaly, slithering things, and elected to sit this one out with Jane. They got distant and disappointing glimpses of some of the big cats, lions and snow leopards, since it was too hot for them to leave the shady spots of their enclosures. They watched the polar bears diving into their rocky pools and emerging slicked down and untidy. They took a quick tour of the fornicating monkeys. They viewed giraffes and zebras and, from underwater viewing stations, the sociable bottle-nosed dolphins.

Finally they finished up at one of the cafes, eating hot dogs and pizza slices and french fries, all the things that Jane did not usually allow the children, and this was a big hit. The children were tired but not distressed. The day had been a success. Bonnie said good-bye to them in the parking lot. “See?” she said to Jane. “You did it. Fun happened.” She told the kids they were her sweethearts, she waved and said Adios to Eric, keeping everything jaunty and carefree, although it had exhausted her to do so, and she drove home wanting nothing more than a margarita and a spell of oblivion.

But when she turned onto her block, she saw a police cruiser's revolving blue lights, and an ambulance pulled up in the drive. Neighbors, those she did and did not know, stood around in witnessing clumps.

Bonnie parked on the street and made her way over to the group
containing Mr. Hopkins the retired bus driver, the Dumplings, who looked more than ever as if they had begun their existence as a single cell, and a few other people she might have nodded to here and there. “What happened?” she asked, although she thought she already knew.

“Mrs. Popek passed away,” said Mr. Hopkins, in a tone that managed to be both respectful and avid. “The daughter found her.” He nodded at a middle-aged woman with a sturdy blond hairdo, talking to one of the cops. Bonnie thought she recognized the cop from one of her training sessions, but she didn't feel inclined to go butt in.

“What did she die of?” Bonnie asked. The others didn't know.

“She was old,” offered Fern Dumpling. She and her husband wore boy and girl versions of the same khaki shorts, which extended down to their unlovely knees.

“Really old,” said Ed Dumpling. “Eighty something. Anything can happen at that age.”

“Well now,” said Mr. Hopkins, “as a senior citizen myself I can tell you, you don't take it that casual.”

“Oh nobody's talking about you, Don,” said a man Bonnie didn't know. She thought he lived across the street in the house with the front yard of green-painted cement.

“You're indestructible,” a woman, perhaps his wife, added.

“Oh am I,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Good to know. Thanks.”

“Sad, her dying alone like that,” Fern said. “Just her and that awful Polish radio.”

“She did like that radio,” said Mr. Hopkins. “A good deal more than I liked hearing it.”

Fern seemed energized by Mrs. Popek's dying. Already she'd made more conversation than Bonnie had ever heard from her. Now she said, “At least she had the daughter to check on her. Some don't even have that much.”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Hopkins said. “I'm going to go have a word.” He
walked over to the daughter, who was still in conversation with the cop, and touched her elbow. The daughter turned toward him and listened as he spoke, then folded her arms and seemed to crumple into herself.

“Now why did you say that?” Ed Dumpling asked his wife. “You know the guy doesn't have any family, anything like that.” As he spoke he seemed to become aware that Bonnie too might take offense. “She didn't mean you,” Ed told Bonnie. “You're not even close to old.”

“Plus you do have company stopping by,” Fern said.

“I'm heading inside now,” Bonnie said, turning her back on them and walking away so that Fern could gossip about her.

She sat at her dining room table with the bottle of premixed margaritas, drinking them out of a water glass. She heard feet on the stairs and, overhead, someone moving from room to room, doing those things you did when someone died. The Dumplings' door opened and closed as they shut themselves in to process the day's excitement. The ambulance pulled away, and the police car, and finally everything was quiet, and the next time she thought to look outside it was dark.

Bonnie didn't call Eric the next day, or the day after, nor did he call her, which was not unheard of but not their usual pattern. He did call her the next day after work on his drive home, and that had a sense of duty and excuse about it as he detailed all of the impossible pressures and urgencies of his work life. The maddening hospital routines and shortcomings that interfered with the thing you most wanted to do, which was care for your patients. They deserved better than the hurry-up, aggravated, pressurized self he brought to appointments and bedsides. He was going to make a real effort to get on top of this. Focus. Remind himself of all those things he already knew.

“That's a good idea,” Bonnie said. “Admirable.”

“What's wrong?” Eric said after a moment.

She didn't speak. She was crying stupid tears. “I wish you'd talk to me,” Eric said. “Hold on, I have to go to Bluetooth.”

That helped dry her up. She hated talking to him when he switched over to the car phone and his voice receded into a metallic echo chamber. “OK,” he said in his Martian car voice, “what's going on?”

“I guess I've just been reminding myself of all the things I already know.”

“What happened? What are you so upset about all of a sudden?”

“It's not all of a sudden,” Bonnie said, wondering if that was true. “Look, let's talk some other time, this phone drives me crazy.”

“This might be the best chance I have for a while.”

“Well that right there is a good reason,” Bonnie said, and waited through a space of his saying nothing. “Look, we can talk some other time if you want. It's not like I'm mad.”

She hadn't managed this very well and he was the one who was mad. He said, “So what are you, exactly? If you don't mind saying.”

“Tired, I guess.”

“What?”

“Tired,” she said loudly, but the connection scrambled and cut out.

So that was that, except of course it wasn't. It was only a tug at one end of the knot that drew the tangles into a worse snarl, and so a few days later Bonnie called Eric. She got his voice mail, as she expected she would, and left him a message saying that she was thinking of him and she hoped they'd talk soon. Eric waited a few days after that to call her back and she expected that too. He spoke as if attempting to come to terms with an exasperating child. “I don't understand, why now. What brought on this crisis of hurt feelings, if that's what it is. Because I've got no clue.”

He was the one with the hurt feelings, though it wouldn't have helped anything to say so. Bonnie said, “I guess you just reach a point where things aren't sustainable. You can't predict it. I'm sorry. It doesn't mean I'm mad at you or tired of you”—except that she was, a little—“it just means things don't work anymore. Too much dishonesty. Jane's my oldest friend, for God's sake. Where are you, anyway?”

“Me? I'm in my office. Why?”

“Just wondering.” He wasn't trying to fit her in during some errand run or commute, and she was glad for that. All you ever had to do for a man to take you more seriously was to up and leave.

“Can I say something that's going to sound really self-serving but it's true? I always thought it was . . . not all right, entirely, with you, but better—more genuine—than with somebody Jane didn't know. Because there's all this real feeling among the three of us. Because she loves you too.”

“Yes, that is self-serving,” Bonnie said.
What? What?
Was he declaring his love, was that one more advantage of ending an affair? On the way out the door you might hear the most amazing things from a man. “Look, let's leave this in some good place. Because you know we're going to see each other. We'll have to.”

“Yeah, we can go back to the zoo.” He sounded glum now, realizing that Bonnie might be serious and things between them had come to an end.

“Not the zoo, please.”

“Did I screw up? Did I do something then, something that made you think, ‘I can't stand this guy anymore'?”

“Eric.”

“You're taking yourself away from me and I know I'm not entitled to you or any part of you and there's nothing I can do about it. Don't expect me to be around if Jane invites you over for lunch or whatever, not for a good long while, because I can't do it.”

“Eric,” she said again, but he'd hung up.

One of the sad things, though one she certainly deserved, was that she couldn't talk to Jane about the end of the affair. Couldn't blab about this or that annoying or heartbreaking development, couldn't lament and complain as she'd been used to doing for the last twenty years. Well, it was a kid's stupid habit, all those too-personal disclosures. She should be beyond that by now. Grow up.

Still, she missed her time with Jane. Missed it every bit as much as she missed Eric.

She didn't want to be alone. She never had. But every wrongheaded choice she made seemed to funnel her into the alone zone.

Bonnie spent the next week keeping busy at work, cleaning her apartment, even attempting to cook meals. All the things you did when you'd had a breakup and needed to get used to the idea and move on. Eric didn't call and Bonnie didn't expect him to. She congratulated herself on not coming up with some necessary and unimpeachable reason for calling him. Like, having heart attack symptoms, needing a sudden surgical consultation. By Saturday night, lonesome and bored with herself, she drove to the bar where Patrick worked to see if he might cheer her up.

She didn't get there until after eleven, since the evening didn't take shape until then, and if there was some other girl Patrick was sniffing around, Bonnie would find something else to do. You couldn't get your hopes up, even if your hopes were not very elevated in the first place.

She found a good parking place, right across the street from the bar. The front windows were half-covered with wooden shutters and the light behind them was a convivial red and yellow. Bonnie tried to get herself into the mind-set of an adventure, an intrigue. A night out on the town, involving certain pleasant, rowdy possibilities. But she was tired of walking into places alone and trying to look like she enjoyed it or at least didn't mind, and she almost started the car up again and drove home. Instead she fluffed her hair, got out of the car, and headed across the street for the next good time.

Bonnie locked onto Patrick right away, one of three bartenders working a busy Saturday night. He was wearing a red T-shirt that might as well have had SEX printed across it in strobing letters.

She watched him even as she took in the room, making a quick decision about where to sit. Not at the bar, she decided. Not right away. There was room at the end of a long table with a group of people she knew well enough to join, and so she settled herself there and said her hellos. It was
a neighborhood place with a steady, older clientele, by which Bonnie meant, older than herself. On weekends it drew a younger, sassier crowd who pumped up the noise factor and were inclined to misbehave. Patrick's red shirt orbited in and out of her vision like a wayward erotic planet. You had to wonder how many other patrons, male and female both, were tracking him. He'd done so much lifting and other muscle work that his torso looked nearly anatomical. He did his chores behind the bar with ease and more than a bit of swagger, and Bonnie felt herself pulsing agreeably.