Somebody Else's Daughter (29 page)

Later, in the car on her way home, she felt a little better. The sun was sinking below Mount Greylock and she told herself that in time things would improve. It was not unusual for her to be upset, but it was important to keep things in perspective. They were off track, she realized. It happened sometimes, in marriage. But she would make Jack see that he still loved her. She would. She would do whatever it took. And Jack would love her again, and he'd want to make love to her like he had when they were young, patiently and gently instead of the way he touched her now, like an old suitcase that had been tossed around, buckled and unbuckled and buckled again.

What she'd told herself had been a mishap—an accident—was something else, something ugly and deep. It was
private!
They had tried to put it behind them, he'd
promised her,
but now she could see it was happening again.

The week crawled by. She focused on her work, she stayed out of Jack's way. She had nothing to say to him. She couldn't bring herself to meet his eyes. On Friday, as she was leaving work, she discovered another envelope on her windshield, firmly secured under the wiper blade. It was the exact same envelope as before, carefully sealed, but this time her initials had been written on the front in clunky black crayon, in what looked like a small child's hand. Maggie snatched the envelope and got into her car. She sat there a moment. Most of the students had gone home for the day, or were on the playing fields. It was dreary and overcast and the air stunk of rain. Maggie placed the unopened envelope on the seat beside her and drove out of the school lot. On impulse, she drove into Lenox and parked in the Loeb's parking lot. She sat there for several minutes with the envelope on the seat beside her. An older couple brought their cart over to the car next to hers, an old gray Cadillac. They were slow-moving, quarreling as they unloaded their bundles into the trunk. There was a little dog in their car, a Chihuahua, yapping. Maggie held the envelope in her hands as she watched them. She felt almost weary with grief. The old man had liverwurst skin. His body swam inside his coat. His wife wore a blue scarf tied under her chin. Her skin was very white, with two blotches of blush on her cheekbones, and her lipstick had been applied with a wobbly hand, like a child's coloring book drawing that has gone outside the lines.

Maggie opened the envelope carefully, retrieving a single sheet of paper, neatly folded. With some degree of trepidation, she unfolded the paper and saw the phrase
Everyone Knows
written menacingly in black crayon. Her hand began to shake, the words throbbed with affirmation. The sun glinted off the cars. It shone in her eyes and they began to tear. She would confront him, she decided. Tonight, after dinner when Ada was upstairs doing her homework. It was the only reasonable thing to do.
Innocent until proven guilty,
she defended him.

She got out of the car and went into the market and yanked free a cart and jerked it through the narrow aisles, carelessly, bumping into things. She chose items randomly, letting them tumble into the cart. She'd cook him a meal, she thought.

At home, she cleaned the house. On her hands and knees she washed the floor. In her rubber gloves, she scoured the bathrooms. The smell of Clorox made her brain sing.

When he came home that night, she poured him a drink. He took it into his study, as he did every night, and she heard him on the phone. She went to the door and stood and listened. “I have to go now,” she heard him say. “My wife is waiting for me.”

He opened the door and found her standing there. “Dinner's ready,” she said.

“Then let's eat.”

Everything about him annoyed her. His twinkly eyes, his smile, his clumsy hands. She'd made his favorite: meatloaf and lima beans, a meal he'd grown up on in army-base mess halls. They ate in silence. She watched him as he chewed, the lump of food passing down his throat. When they finished, Ada went up to do her homework as predicted. She gave Jack a bowl of strawberry Jell-O and he sat there and ate it with the intent concentration of a five-year-old boy, while she cleared the table.

“I think you should know something, Jack,” she said, furiously scrubbing the dishes.

His spoon clanked the bottom of the bowl. “What should I know, Maggie?”

The plate slipped from her hands into the sink. It cracked in two, but she didn't tell him. She stood there for a moment with the water rushing down. She'd cut her finger, it was bleeding. She watched the blood streaming down into the drain. It made her a little dizzy. Still, she didn't tell him about that either. She took a towel and wrapped it around her finger. Then she turned off the faucet.

“These notes,” she said. “Someone is leaving them in my car.”

“Notes? What notes?”

She showed him one and a little blood got on it.

He snatched the paper out of her hand. His eyes opened wide. “What the hell is this?”

“Somebody left it on the car.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On the car, Jack. Someone left it there.”

“What?” It was as if she were speaking a foreign language. “What the hell?”

“Are you having an affair, Jack?”

Deliberately, he put down his spoon. He looked up at her face and for a minute she thought he was going to tell her that, yes, he was having an affair and he was terribly sorry about it, but he didn't. He stood up and took her hand. “Why would I do a thing like that, Mag?” His eyes began to water. “What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

She shook her head, tears springing to her eyes. “I didn't think . . .”

But he wouldn't let her finish; he wasn't listening. He was already down the hall, leaving her in his cold wake. A moment later she heard the door to his study firmly close.

26

On Yom Kippur, his wife refused to go to services. She claimed she wasn't well, her eyes grim.
I'm not guilty like you,
her eyes proclaimed.

Maybe she wasn't well, he decided. Truthfully, he didn't mind going without her. He preferred it. He wanted to stand there in the presence of God and repent. He wanted to stand there in his Armani suit that had suddenly become too snug, begging the highest power for forgiveness.

The sky was dark, it was going to rain. The weather suited his mood, the darkness of it, the longing of the heavy clouds. On this holiest of days, they deserved a good storm.

He woke Willa and they dressed and together they drove to the synagogue. “Your mother isn't herself,” he explained as the rain started to fall. There was a turtle in the road. They had to stop, and Willa got out and moved it onto the grass, a line of cars waiting without complaint. People had more patience when it came to animals than they did humans, he thought. More than once, when he'd gone running on this very same road, he'd nearly been run down, people cursing him for being in their way.
Get out of the road, asshole!
But for a turtle, they had all the time in the world. Willa got back into the car with raindrops dripping down her face, smiling at him, victorious. “Your mitzvah for the day,” he told her.

In temple, they were seated up front. For once, they'd arrived on time. Along with the usual choir, there was a cellist and a violinist. Whenever he heard the violin in temple, something seemed to dislodge inside of him and he felt his connection to all the Jews who had come before, their history as a people, the suffering they had endured. He took out his handkerchief. He felt weary, moved. Just being in the synagogue among his fellow congregants was a symbol of survival, of continuing, moving forward, whatever forward meant, no matter the consequence. And the prayers, the Hebrew, whatever the hell it all meant, came down to simply that.
Continuing.
The music was mournful, soulful. In his regular life, he rarely used the word
soul,
it felt pretentious and didactic, but here it was what mattered most. He tried to imagine what his soul looked like and a picture came into his head: his heart on a platter, being eaten by rats.

He had been a Jew from birth, it was all he knew.
I am Your humble servant,
he thought, glancing toward the heavens. In the last election, his Jewish friends had persuaded him to reelect the president, who had promised to protect the interests of Israel. Israel was important to him, and that alone had bought his vote. But, as it turned out, the enticing carrot had been coated with poison, and he regretted the decision, as if, somehow, he was in collusion with an administration he now distrusted. Admittedly, living in the Berkshires had removed him from the chaos of the larger world. The grim news in the papers made him anxious, paranoid. Over the years, his ability to trust people—close friends and strangers alike—had become a test of judgment, and his confidence was so compromised that he was not certain that he could trust his own. He felt disconnected from his own country, let alone Israel and the Middle East, and he longed to feel connected, right here, right now, with the people around him, people like him, who on this Day of Judgment, had shown up to be redeemed.

Rabbi Zimmerman said, “Everything can be found in the Torah. There's every possible story here, of good people and bad people, the wretched and the beautiful, the deceptive and the generous. You can read the Torah and know our world, it's all right here. It's all here for you.” The rabbi looked up and met Joe's eyes, as if she were speaking directly to him, as if the words had been especially chosen for him, and he felt a chill all the way down to his feet. The moment lasted only a matter of seconds, but it was meaningful to him. It occurred to him that life was, quite simply, a quest for meaning, in any possible shape or form, and he sensed that, somehow, he might find it here—today—a small piece of meaning that could sustain him. Without religion—the belief in God—people had no hope, no reason to dream. Without God, there was no future. It was very simple, he realized. People needed to believe in some higher power, the possibility that there was a larger presence that could overrule an awful or even mediocre destiny. People could not bear the idea that their fate was strictly in their own hands and neither could he. Joe shut his eyes and prayed fervently for mercy.
Inscribe us for a blessing in the book of life!

Willa took his hand and squeezed it and she smiled at him.
Such a beauty!
On the day they'd adopted her, he'd made a promise to himself that he'd never leave his wife. It didn't seem right to adopt a baby then get divorced—looking back on it he saw the delicate intricacy of such a promise, and now he'd come to a point in his life where he questioned his ability to keep it. Regular people got divorced all the time, he told himself. Just because they'd adopted a child didn't mean they loved her any more or less—and it didn't mean they were any better than the next person—or worse for that matter. People were flawed, that was all there was to it, and
he
was flawed too. He could fuck up just as supremely as the son of a bitch sitting next to him.

But his wife had become a stranger to him. He'd done what he could for her, to make her happy, yet none of it seemed to matter. Whatever she wanted was hers, all she had to do was ask—and it was his pleasure to give it to her. She had wanted a pool, he'd had one built. She wanted this horse or that one, this piece of jewelry—he deprived her of nothing. They had the cook, the trainer, a full-time housekeeper. Whatever her heart desired. Sometimes he'd find her in the house, staring out the windows, and he'd think to himself:
What could she possibly want now?
Did he love her? Had he ever really loved her? Yes, yes, of course he had. At the time, when they'd met and begun dating, she saw him for who he really was, a poor boy from Queens who'd lost his father, who dreamed of making real movies; not some asshole in the porn business.

He thought:
I will give away all of my money; I will walk in the streets in torn clothes; I will take my meals at a soup kitchen; I will show God. I will show Him!

Was it so wrong, what he did for a living?

His stomach grumbled; he was already hungry. In an attempt to appear particularly repentant, he'd been determined to fast. For not only had he and his brother made more money than ever by exploiting the God-given wonders of the female anatomy, he had betrayed his wife—not with a stranger, which he had done numerous times before—but with a woman from the community, a
friend.
But today all would be forgiven! He would sit there all day and repent, crammed in with the other guilty Jews, repeating the prayers, unanimously asking the Lord for forgiveness.
Forgive me for being a total schmuck! Forgive me for lying for convenience. Forgive me for giving stingy Christmas bonuses. Forgive me for my indifference. Forgive me for not totally believing in You.

Joe imagined God deliberating the severity of his guilt, holding his grizzly white chin in his hand, nodding with understanding or shaking his head in judgment.
You will suffer the consequences, Joe Golding!
He imagined the Great Ruler shaking his finger at him.

He was suddenly desperate for a cigar. The rabbi motioned for them to rise. They were about to do the mourner's kaddish—he didn't know anyone who had died—it was a good time to take a break. Shaping his face into a solemn expression, he excused himself and shuffled out of the pew.
Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba.
The words rang in his ears as he walked outside.

The air was crisp. He walked around to the back of the temple and saw a group of kids talking in a circle. He recognized some of them as Willa's friends and he nodded at them cordially, lighting his cigar, then walked toward the parking lot and took out his cell phone, wanting to give the impression of having some important business to attend to when in truth it was just an excuse to smoke. He loved a good cigar. It was something that still made him feel like a man. A
ruthless
man in some ways, yes, but you had to be in his business— and what was so wrong with that? He had a broad chest covered with hair and he was proud of his swarthy Hungarian face, his dark eyes, and he knew how to make love to a woman—and Claire Squire had loved every minute of it! He thought of their argument and felt a fresh burn of anger. Then he thought of her breasts, her gorgeous ass, and felt a twinge of remorse.
Fuck her! Fuck Claire and the high horse she rode in on. And fuck all of those full of shit fundamentalists.
He'd had it up to here with the antiporn people—he refused to take the blame for their hypocrisy. Fucking liars! Lying to Jesus with a straight face— as if He didn't know! If that didn't take you straight to hell, he didn't know what did.