The Good Life (13 page)

Lili snorted despite the pain radiating from Ron's thumbs on either side of her spine. “What are you imagining—Dr. Connor casting us out with the fiery sword? You heard George. There's more than one beautiful place in the world.”

“But this is the one we love.”

“I can imagine loving other places.” Lili's voice was unsteady. Outside, pearly predawn light seemed to arise from the ice-coated bushes and snowbanks, a landscape made out of crystal. “People do it all the time. When you wake up from one dream, you go back to sleep and have another one.”

“I don't,” Ron said. “I get more and more awake, trying to make the first dream come back.”

“You know it doesn't work that way.”

“Lousy system,” he said softly. His thumbs dug into her, and the tears that had been gathering at the bottom of her eyes spilled over. He said, “I want to see the copper beeches we planted get to be twenty feet tall. I want to see if the geese come back. I want to carry firewood without feeling my arms shake.”

“They're not going to start shaking less,” she said.

“You think I don't know that?” Using his knuckles, he kneaded the back of her neck. “But I can't stand it.”

“No,” she murmured. She couldn't stop the excited rhythm of her heart, the relief that ran like new water. She supposed they would have to get to Aruba before he felt the relief, or would admit it. Then they could quarrel about something else. “Ron, honey, stop—I've got to sit down.”

Her feet were cold from the open doorway, and her swollen arm hung at her side like a club. Perhaps from the fall, her entire side felt swollen now, strange and slow. She'd been foolish to ignore it last night; Brian's father might have been able to make a bandage, tie a makeshift sling, dispense one of his pills. Now she shuffled to a chair, hearing the sudden alarm in Ron's voice.

“Lili, what's going on?”

When she looked out the window, the valley walls shone like beaten silver, almost too brilliant to look at. More than they'd asked for. More than they deserved. “Can you go wake up Dr. Connor?” she said. “I think he should see this.”

 

 

 

O
FFICIALLY
, the grocery store was called Weber's Shop All Rite, but everybody called it the Talk All Nite. Set at the dead center of the Long Acre subdivision, the store was poorly stocked but convenient, and most locals wound up passing through two or three times a week. Around the urn of complimentary coffee, news was exchanged—more interesting news than ever wound up in the upbeat columns of Long Acre's newspaper. It was at the Talk All Nite that Janice first heard about Ben Lund's affair with his office manager, and ever since, when she saw Ben, she remembered the coppery taste of sour coffee.

Now Ben was about to turn fifty, sixteen years younger than Janice, which seemed impossible. She was shopping for his party, a potluck supper thrown by his wife, long-suffering Lou. The event had been much discussed at the Talk All Nite, with Janice joining those wives who would rather give a government audit than a party to a husband who had bought a palomino for his equestrian girlfriend.

As soon as she rattled her cart into produce, Janice spotted Alicia Kelso with Saralynn and Chloe Becker. Standing beside the oranges, their carts pushed aside and their faces nosed together, the women whispered and shushed and nodded, touching one another's wrists, their faces gleaming. Later Janice could tell Jack that they looked like an old woodcut illustrating Gossip. For now, she hurried over. “Let me guess: Ben told Lou that he's having another midlife crisis. He's out of money, though, so this girl gets a mule.”

Saralynn, eighty years old, actually jerked back. A blush patched across her pleated cheeks and throat. Chloe steadied her sister, then said to Janice, “You shouldn't sneak up like that. At our age we can't take the shock.”

“Since when? Usually you can take a thousand volts,” Janice said. Chloe usually scorned the ditzy-old-gal routine. Now she was avoiding Janice's gaze, rearranging the lettuce and grapes in her cart.

“So I was just saying—I'm bringing my same chicken salad tomorrow night,” Alicia said. “By now you'd think the ingredients could jump into the mixing bowls by themselves.” Pushing the shiny dark wing of hair back from her face, she chattered as if she were picking up the dropped skein of conversation, but the words the women had snatched back were practically visible in the air, even if Janice was too hurt now to try to read them.

“Well,” she said. “Looks like you're busy.”

“Just talking,” Saralynn murmured.

“We'll see you tomorrow, right?” Alicia said. “You and Jack?”

“Naturally. We're the life of the party.” Janice made sure her words sounded light.

“We were just saying so,” Chloe said.

At the checkout counter with her five-pound can of Folgers, Janice stared at the armload of parsley belonging to the woman ahead of her. Maybe this would be a good party to sit out. She and Jack rarely missed one. Maybe they had become a neighborhood joke, the nice old couple whose only social life came from block parties. Maybe they were the reason
for
the parties.

Catching herself, she shook her head. She really was losing perspective if she thought the Talk All Nite was keeping track of her and Jack's social life. Still, when she got home and Jack didn't bestir himself, she slammed cupboard doors and dropped the coffee. After ten minutes he finally roamed out of the den, his slippers making a
shff, shff
sound on the linoleum. His eyes wore the slightly unfocused look they took on after a session with the computer. “His highness emerges,” she said.

“Jay-nice,” he said. “Be nice.”

“Didn't you hear me come home?”

“I was in the middle of something,” he said. “You usually yell if you need me. Was there a lot to bring in?”

“No. I just wanted to be grouchy.”

“Finished now?”

“Maybe.”

He sat down on a kitchen chair and drew Janice onto his lap, where she squirmed for a minute, then sat still. He tended to let her go quicker when she didn't move. “Jay-nice. Nice girl. But when you're not nice”—he touched his finger to the end of her nose—“you're naughty. Aren't you?”

“Jack.”

“Aren't you naughty? Let's play pretend. Then you can be as naughty as you want.”

She glanced at the windows and the back door, even though no one could possibly hear them. Then she stood up and pulled him, hard, into the bedroom, where nothing would happen.

 

“Brace yourself,” her sister had warned. She'd been through it with her own husband's retirement: no work to do, no projects or promotions on his mind. He would be after her constantly.

Constant pursuit sounded pretty good to Janice. Over the years, her intimate time with Jack had dwindled to parched, efficient encounters—fifteen minutes, twice a month. Two weeks before Jack's retirement dinner from the office-supply company where he was vice president, Janice lightened her hair.

But her sister was wrong. Janice kept the same habits she always had, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, present in every room in the house. She was all set to meet Jack in any of them. But once he faced long days with his wife, Jack's appetites shrank, and his eyes grew shy. He skirted her in the hall, and before they went to sleep he gave her fond, grandfatherly pats. Twice a month stretched into once a month, then less.

Instead of reaching out to touch her, he seemed to want to
glimpse
her. He dawdled in the bedroom while she was getting dressed, and she sometimes looked up from her pantyhose just in time to see him glancing away. She stepped out of the shower and saw his eyes fixed on her heavy breasts before he slipped out the door. Janice shivered. His behavior didn't make her feel desired so much as scrutinized—selected, at age sixty-six, to act out Jack's personal peepshow. Lately she'd been forcing him to the bedroom when the glassy look came over his eyes and he started in on the naughty talk. She would tug his shirt up while he tugged it back down again. “I'm not a youngster anymore. But thanks for your faith in me.”

“You looked young a minute ago.”

“Things change.” His gaze would slide away from hers, fleeing back to the comfortable gray zone he had dwelled in since he'd stopped going to work. Lurking in his den for hours, he read or hunted up Web sites for Boston terriers. He'd had one as a boy and still liked to look at their cheerful, pugnacious faces. Sometimes Janice heard his little TV go on, then off again. Sometimes over dinner he related local stories about robberies or domestic assault, stories she didn't know because he kept the paper until five o'clock, when he took his daily walk. “I honestly don't know where the time goes,” he said, and fear wrapped a tendril around Janice's heart. This kind of vagueness was for old men. Jack was only sixty-eight.

Two weeks ago she had brought in the mail and found him sitting unoccupied in the easy chair, hands empty and face slack. She stared at him for better than a minute before murmuring, “You will start to reawaken, and you will remember none of what we have done here.”

Jack opened his eyes, although his face remained loose. “I was just resting.”

“Most people rest after they've actually done something.”

“I've been doing something all my life.”

“Don't imagine you're finished yet.” She took another thorny breath. “The garage could stand to be swept. Up and at ‘em, Tiger.”

Since then she'd heard the brisk, convalescent-care tone come into her voice as she'd urged him to take a walk, get some air, for God's sake move his carcass out of the house. Maybe this was what Alicia and the Becker sisters had been whispering about so emphatically—
Such a steep decline. Used to be such a handsome man
. Stung, Janice wanted to call them up and say,
He is still handsome
.

That night, watching him wrap his spaghetti in neat packets around his fork, she said, “Did you find the Web site you were looking for?”

“It wasn't much. Fuzzy pictures of pups. Not worth the search.”

“A lot of work, just for pictures.”

“I like to look at them,” he said mildly.

“So why settle?” She propped her chin on her hands. “We could get a dog.” The idea would shock him, she knew. They had never thought of themselves as people who might have a dog, just as they had never been people with children. They had floated free of encumbrance, and only lately had Janice started to worry that, lacking ballast, they might simply float away.

“
Get
one?” he said.

“People do it, you know. All over America.”

“Well, this is a new idea.” He didn't look befuddled, as she had feared, didn't break into that expression she associated with dingy pajamas and the stinging smell of urine. His narrow eyes brightened. “You're sure you want to take this on? Dogs need attention. They have to be walked every day.”

“I think you could work that into your busy schedule.”

He stretched back in his chair and spread his hands. “I'll name it Lucky. After me.”

Janice snorted. Jack's fraternity brothers had called him Lucky Devil, when they weren't calling him Handsome Jack. The day he graduated, they gave him the mirror from the house bathroom. Janice said, “Give it a rest. You haven't been Lucky for forty years.”

“Are you kidding? I've been lucky every day of my life.”

She groaned happily and stood up to clear the table. He was alive after all, and she'd only needed a dog to find that out.

 

By ten o'clock the next morning Jack presented her with a printout of Boston terrier breeders in a three-state area. “I guess I put the nickel in you,” Janice said.

“Why wait? Here's a litter that's already four weeks old. Two females, two males. We want a male—they have the spunk.”

“Spunk. Oh, boy.” She watched Jack efficiently circle phone numbers and underline key phrases. He put two lines under
peppery
. This would be a fine topic for the party tonight—dog stories, puppy stories, advice about training and housebreaking. She and Jack could invite suggestions for dog names. After the first round of margaritas, the suggestions were bound to get fun.

She wore her happy mood all day, through the scrubbing of the coffeemaker and the rooting through cupboards for Styrofoam cups. When she was slipping into a gauzy cotton shift for the party, Jack wiggled his eyebrows and said, “Ooh, la la”—pleasant, normal, marital lechery, for which she lifted her skirt to give him a glimpse of thigh.

The party was in half swing when they arrived, a few kids already playing street hockey while Chloe and Saralynn fussed with the arrangement of dishes on the picnic table. Beside a pear tree's cloud of white blossoms Alicia was talking with Flinn Merchant, the newest neighbor. A recent transfer from St. Louis, Flinn worked downtown as a legal consultant and lived without husband or children—a rarity in Long Acre, where she said she'd come for the community, although neighbors scarcely saw her. The woman was always hurrying—probably to the gym. She had a full wardrobe of exercise clothes and a long, taut, expensive-looking body. Women with hollows on the inside of their thighs usually had a man somewhere, and Janice guessed Flinn's résumé included at least one divorce.

Now Flinn was talking fiercely to Alicia, gesturing in Janice's direction, and Janice felt embarrassed without knowing why. She had scarcely ever spoken to Flinn beyond “Welcome to the neighborhood; let us know if we can help.” But now the woman's furious stare scorched Janice's back as she slipped into the Beckers' kitchen door to fill up the coffeemaker. When she staggered out again—twenty cups of water—Flinn was waiting.

“Shouldn't your husband be helping you with that?”