Thank You for the Music (10 page)

I remember the red leaves flying beyond the window that night, my son trying not to glare at his father, while Jude leaned in toward Berna, to hear more about her homeland, his eyes warm. She told us of her father, an old fisherman who wrote poetry and was living now in a hut by a lake. A man who coaxed the sweetest carrots out of bad soil. Berna tried to talk to all of us, but really she was speaking to Jude, responding to his own sudden interest. When Jude's interested, it's like he gets a lasso out and ropes the person in.

“We usually hit the hay about now,” Griffin finally said that night, because his father and Berna were still talking about Nova Scotia, and some great, irrational fear in him was taking over all his better impulses. He was imagining the object of his desire running off with his father, of course. He was imagining they looked good together. I remembered being in that kind of love, where everyone's a threat. I was far enough away from such pain to envy its intensity.

“Griffin,” I whispered in his ear as we were leaving, “relax, she loves you. Nobody is going to take her away. Most certainly not
him
.”

His body stiffened at this intrusive intimacy. He had to pretend he was fearless with me. And yet, as we were pulling out of the driveway, he came out onto the stoop and waved, and I felt the wave as an offering of his thanks.

In those early months we had many evenings like this, with Berna, in her silken, dusky, calming voice, telling us stories of her family, or stories involving her work, and my son listening, marveling at this articulate, strange wonder of a wife, and watching us closely, usually. After a while he'd relax, forget to be vigilant, and we'd see his own charm as he told his own story. We'd see his youth, his thoughtful eyes, his wild energy for life, his mind, unhinged from worrying about the opinions of others (except maybe ours) and we'd understand how Berna had fallen for him.

How do I say this? Six months after I first met Berna, I became involved with a thirty-year-old groundskeeper named Abraham. Perhaps it's predictable that a mother whose son is married to someone so old would feel she's been granted a kind of license? Many would say it's Freudian, but that's too easy. I only know that after we began to accept the marriage as real, after we had seen them countless times in their Murphy bed in their eccentric pajamas, bizarre but beautiful really, with their animals and radiant regard for each other, after we had spent several Sunday afternoons walking in the woods behind Berna's house, and nights under stars she, like Jude, could name, after all that I felt a kind of penetrating amusement, a profound sort of humor infecting the whole world, and a newfound belief in surprises. I was waiting to be surprised. I was open. I wasn't walking around looking for a younger man—that sort of literal answer wouldn't have appealed to me at all. And yet, the day I visited my friend Noreen in her old home near the graveyard, I knew that when she pointed out the window at a certain groundskeeper named Abraham and said, “Isn't he adorable?” that this certain Abraham was meaningful to me, somehow. He wasn't, for me, adorable, but rather a man, and I liked his name and how he looked in the gray light, with his black eyes and his faded red hooded sweatshirt, and while it's true that I wouldn't have moved beyond a whimsical admiration of the young man had I not known Berna, I stood at the window beside Noreen and felt absolutely fired with lust for a moment. I may have blushed when she told me I shouldn't stare at children that way.

“Speaking of that,” Noreen said, “how's Griffin doing with the old lady? Bernadette?”

“Berna,” I said. “She's really not that old. She's younger than we are, Noreen, in a way. I mean, her spirit is roughly Griffin's age. And she's got hardly a line in her face.” This part wasn't true and I was embarrassed to find myself lying. “And she moves so gracefully. I understand now, I think.”

“God!” Noreen said. “I hate how everyone ends up understanding everything! It's weird, completely weird, and now you think it's normal.”

I could have said, “Noreen, look at you, in this lovely old house that you keep so nice, you who fears the water and chooses to get seasick every other weekend so your husband can have his boat and eat it too, you who spends a fortune getting your hair bleached twice a month because you're terrified of looking old, look at all that and then we can talk about normal.”

But I said nothing. I was not an aggressive person. I hated to hurt anyone, so avoided challenging conversation. And I was, perhaps, already planning how to talk to Abraham. I'd known Noreen for twenty-six years. We'd pushed children in strollers together. Nothing I could say would make her able to understand what I was feeling about life. She was a dear friend, but all the limits I had to respect with her made me lonely.

Abraham sat in his truck listening to music and eating a piece of bread. I walked up to the truck and said, “How long had you been a landscaper?” I was nervous, and said
had,
rather than
have,
and felt the tips of my ears grow hot.

“A landscaper?” Abraham said, “Is that what I am?”

He looked bored, at first.

“If not that, then what? What do you call yourself?”

“Abraham Horell. And you? What do you call yourself?” The boredom in his face had given way to a kind of bemused smile. It was a windy spring day, with gray light and silence surrounding us. I was aware that I'd relive this moment in memory.

“I haven't come up with a word for myself yet. Don't know
what
to call myself.”

“Oh,” he said, flatly, and I worried I'd been too odd.

“My name is Patricia,” I said. “Some call me Trisha.”

“Trisha,” he said. “Nice name.”

He got out of his truck. He was tall, in loose khakis. He left the music on. Miles Davis. He asked me why I was standing there at the edge of Noreen's yard. Did I know her?

“She's an old friend.”

“Do you know the old man?”

“Not as well as I know Noreen.”

“The old man takes her for granted. That's my opinion. And I've only been around him three times. My father would've called him a horse's ass.”

That was all I needed. It was fuel. If he could see that much, he could see a lot of things.

I looked toward the massive garden he had planted, the rich soil dark as his hair.

“You do good work,” I said. And I stepped closer to him. I looked at his face. My heart was pounding because I knew that even this subtle gesture might look as wildly transparent as it felt.

“Thank you,” he said, and I saw he wore a tiny star of an earring on one ear. “If you come back later, you can see the whole garden, the whole thing, finished.”

“I think I will,” I said. And I tried to imagine that the final look we exchanged demolished any innocence between us.

It didn't. I did come back later, and he walked me around the garden, like a proud boy with a curious parent. My heart sank as I told him how lovely it all was. I came back twice that week, and it wasn't until I brought him coffee the following week that he understood. I could tell by the way he took the coffee, brushed hair out of my eyes, lowered his chin to his chest, and held my gaze.

Later that same day Abraham and I went to a place called Ruby's Luncheonette. And I got to hear all about the sweet young man who had dropped out of med school five years ago, who was divorced, who had a child named Zoe Clare, whose ex-wife was “remarried to a rich dude” but still demanding child support, whose father, whom he'd adored, had recently died.

Abraham spoke with ease, fueled by the bad, strong coffee of the luncheonette. His legs moved back and forth under the table, knocking against each other. I didn't particularly like his style of conversation—it had that windblown quality, where you feel the person could be talking to anyone, but I didn't admit this to myself at the time.

As it turned out, we were there because Abraham lived upstairs, in a room.

After coffee, and rice pudding, and saltines, and water, up we went. My head felt full of blood. My eyes watered. I bit down on the lipstick I'd applied hours before, then wiped it off on a tissue.

You could stand at the window of his book-lined room and look down on the little main street, the unspeakably mundane workaday world, and the view gave me more reason to be there. He came up behind me, a kiss on my neck, which felt too cold, too wet, but I was relieved not to have to talk anymore, and relieved that the room was dusky, so that both my body and the pictures of his child framed on the dresser, a girl in a red hat jumping rope, were slightly muted.

“Are you on the pill?” he whispered, and I told him I was, but he should use a condom anyway—diseases, I whispered. I hadn't been on the pill for years, and the truth was, it had been two years since I'd needed to worry about any of it. The change, as they called it, was something I'd walked through as if it were a simple doorway. What change? I'd wanted to ask someone.

I did not like his kissing—too pointed, almost mock-aggressive. I kept turning my face. But soon after, when he entered me, speaking to me gently, saying, “It's okay, it's okay,” and I whispered back, “I know it's okay,” I did not expect to be weeping with the odd shock of joy that was simply intense sexual pleasure. I clung to him with misplaced emotion, as if he were someone I'd fallen in love with. And since no real love was anywhere in that room, save for in the face of that jump-roping little girl on the dresser, the pleasure ended in embarrassment for me.

For Abraham, I'm not sure. He may have been used to these things. He ran down to the luncheonette and brought me up a Coke and a plate of fries. We ate them together in silence, and I kept my eyes wide on the window, and listened to the sound of my own chewing as if it could protect me from thinking things like
Here I am, a middle-aged slut!

As I sat there dipping fries into ketchup, Jude's face, Jude's voice, broke through like a light. I was gratified to feel I missed him. Missed my husband, whoever he was.

I had four more late afternoons just like this one, and put an end to them because I understood how quickly they would put an end to themselves. Abraham's last words to me were so ironic they provoke my laughter even now. “You're wild,” he'd said. How unknown I felt, but not as foolish as you might imagine.

I saw Abraham only one other time—two months later, driving through a blue day in his truck, with a dog, and a young woman, whose yellow hair streamed out the window. I honked my horn and waved, in spite of myself, and then he was gone.

“Jude,” I said one night in the dark. It was raining, and we'd just watched a bad movie on television, both of us enduring insomnia. “I had an affair, you know.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“He was very young. He worked on Noreen's yard. It ended up meaning very little to me, but I thought I'd tell you. You've always been open with me.”

“Have I?”

“As I recall, a girl you loved once ate dinner with us. She loved my cooking.”

“True. True enough.”

“Jude, where are you? I can't feel your reaction.”

“I can't either.”

“Excuse me?”

“Maybe I'm relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“That you're outside the shell of this marriage when I've been outside it for years.”

He sat up and put his head in his hands. I felt that he wanted to weep, but had no tears.

“Jude?” My face was red; why had I told him?

“Just don't say you're sorry.”

“I won't.”

“Because I've been terribly unfaithful. More than once, you know. More than twice. You probably know this. Do you know this?” I didn't say a word, but felt alone now, when I had imagined I'd already been alone. Does loneliness have floors like an endless skyscraper, and you keep descending?

“Four times. Four affairs. The last one ended last year. I've been dying to tell you.”

“Really? Why don't we go downstairs and have us a drink, Jude. And you can tell me the story of our lives. You know, the one you forgot to tell me for the past twenty years or so. I'm such a good listener but you'll need to give me some details.” I was on this new cold floor in the same old skyscraper and it seemed I had a new voice to go with it, a lower, more detached sort of voice, which was the very opposite of what I felt in the dead center of my heart. It was terror I felt. Because he'd stolen my sense of our past, and I had nothing to replace it with yet.

I got all their names. Besides Anita there was Lisa, the same Lisa again a year later, Savannah, and Lily.

I sat and wrote the names down on a yellow tablet. I wrote them in a list, while Jude sat and rubbed his eyes. “Oh,” he said, “Patty, I forgot Patty. She was manic-depressive.”

“No, Jude, not yet, I don't want the stories yet. Just the names.”

“If you count one-nighters there was also Rhonda Jean.”

“Rhonda Jean,” I murmured, writing it down. “Rhonda Jean! Was she a country-and-western singer, Jude? Was that the year you were always listening to Tanya Tucker?” I held the list up so he could see. “Does that look like all of them?”

He nodded. “You're stooping pretty low with this.”

“Just meeting you on your own ground, Jude.”

“Certainly. But it's ground well beneath you. You'll probably leave me, too, and that's understandable.”

“Is that your hope? That I'll leave you?”

“No, no, of course not.” He yawned, and I thought tears filled his eyes. He looked down at his own hands.

I was not ready to baby him. I took it girl by girl. I made columns for the following categories: duration of affair, age, hair color, height, weight, breast size, intelligence, family background, hobbies. This
was
beneath me, embarrassing even at the time. I was driven by an old fury finally coming to life.