The Uninnocent (28 page)

Like my wife, I never much liked not being high. It seemed to me a cruel waste of time not to be drinking. We'd gotten together on that premise in the first place, met for a drink, though at the time she had been dry for one brave month. That a lifelong romance would enter the scene—love at first sight, we both confessed later—was an unexpected blessing; perhaps less so her freefall off the wagon. She'd left the city the year before, moved a couple of hours north, telling herself she would take the riverside train down often to visit galleries, or go to museums, things she seldom got around to even when living right there in the midst of so much culture. New York, she said, exhausted her. She was too young for the silver that had begun to streak her chestnut hair, the oily skiffs under her large eyes, the fidgety hands, night sweats, the delicate flesh that shrank on its already slim frame. Nothing and nobody held her, so she took the chance and rusticated up the Hudson, convinced it would offer a healthy alternative to the habits she worried were consuming her. Clean air, birds, the changing seasons—these, Margaret hoped, would reawaken a lightness of heart, an enchantment with life that had come so easily when she was a girl, but got lost somehow. She would quit smoking. Would take long walks every day. Follow a dietary regime. Read one good book each week. Garden in summer and learn to cross-country in winter. Above all, she'd stop this overdrinking business. As she told her mother, she needed to drain the swamp.

Margot did in fact memorize the names of birds that came to her feeder. Junco, goldfinch, black-capped chickadee. She stopped with the cigarettes, and after a tough, edgy, migrainous two weeks of hacking, began to breathe more evenly and notice subtle scents in the rural air, the rich aroma of the soil around her tiny rented house after a rain shower, the salt smell of butter on her bread and the rye itself.
Middlemarch
and
Madame Bovary
she read with confused pleasure. She planted a small patch of zucchini, Swiss chard, basil. Through a mutual friend of all things—we had few friends—she set the date to meet me, just a guy who worked at a small law firm mostly involved with real estate closings, divorces, and wills. Despite the reasonable argument she'd admit she made with herself against such a slip, she bought cigarettes on her way to the tavern where we agreed to rendezvous, a cozy, dark, wainscoted cocktail lounge in the nice historic local inn. No doubt chastising herself while making a silent promise she'd again quit the next morning, she smiled as I lit her up and we entered on a dialogue that transformed our night, all our nights from that one forward.

She would later tell me that not only did she think I was smart and open and wryly funny—my deluded Margot—but were she asked to describe the face she would most love to look at for the rest of her life, mine was that face. She loved, she would later say, my brown hair, which lapsed over my forehead when I laughed, and how I combed it back with strong but delicate fingers, fingers of a pianist—Eros again at his confectionery, given a less musical man never existed. My hazel eyes, she said, sweetly sad perhaps. My furrowed brow and a mouth whose lips were maybe paler than those of any other man she'd met but sharply drawn. She even liked my name, James Chatham, and said it had an honest ring to it. How love colors everything.

When I ordered another tequila neat I wanted to know was she sure she wouldn't have something besides club soda. Well, she said, she hadn't been drinking much these days … but seeing me shrug in such an understanding, empathetic way, she thought why not. She'd have what I was having. Tomorrow would be a new day of abstinence. No smoking, no drinking; she'd been so good, she had earned tonight.

I remember asking her about herself, what coaxed her away from the city, a place I professed to love though I never got down there much, in fact deeply feared it. The need for fresh air, she told me, a fresh perspective. Her favorite museum? The Met, of course. How was it possible I'd never been to the Met? She'd love to go through the Met with me sometime. The Egyptian gallery. The wing with the dugout canoes, painted masks, and shields from New Guinea. Sure, another, she answered the bartender and told me about how this fellow Michael Rockefeller, former governor Nelson's son, assembled the New Guinea collection before he disappeared, murdered and eaten apparently by the very tribe in Irian Jaya he'd been observing. I told her I thought of studying anthropology when I was in college, but maybe it's better I never pursued it. No, she laughed, her face gone nicely numb with that third drink, a nostalgic warmth I could see rising through her like sap in a spring tree. She hadn't felt so radiantly alive since she moved here, she told me as much, taking the hand I offered her on the varnished rail. The bartender stood us a round as it was an otherwise slow evening.

Turns out we went to school together her husband and I, and though he's a year or two older I remember thinking he was such a nice guy, quiet and very gentle and unassuming, which he still is despite what people say about him and his dead wife being sots. Martin drinks and my father used to disappear into the likable haze of his evening preprandial as he called it but I never held that against either of them, everybody has problems and faults and things they like to do that other people don't. Like Kim Novak said about William Holden in that movie
Picnic,
We don't love people because they're perfect. Look at how supportive Martin was after the accident, and I know that if Dad were around he'd have been there for me too. Hard to believe it had been only a week before Martin and I were going to move to the city, where he could really have a chance with his career and I could apprentice with a Fifth Avenue florist, become expert in modern techniques of arrangement, move beyond all these crummy nosegay-style economy vases and dumb carnations and daisy poms and Red Rovers. Give me fresh orchids and phallic calla lilies and bonsai a hundred years old! was what I thought when Martin first broached the subject last summer of moving, taking the leap, giving life our best shot. Even my mother was all for it, though naturally she mentioned we ought to go ahead and get married before leaving the old burgh for Emerald City. I told her we'd try living together first and then if it worked—white long-stemmed roses for everyone! The world was looking up
.

My mother knew his family, Margaret's husband's family. His father was prominent here she says, a member of the town council for many years, hardworking, a skilled stonemason, and when the season came around quite the deerslayer. They owned the blue Victorian downtown that had been in their family for years, everybody believed it was haunted and that bad luck befell them because the ship captain who built it for his wife and children was lost at sea in a whaler and their spirits still hovered at the upper-story windows looking out toward the river awaiting his return from Cape Horn. I don't know much about ghosts but I do know that the Chathams never had an easy time despite their Presbyterianism and their reputable roots in the community and a work ethic that seemed part of the very fabric of the family. My mother said that while James's dad liked working with his hands he had the wits to make a good surgeon or artist or anything else he'd have set his mind to, even served in the last year of the Second World War as an ambulance driver in Italy. James went to Albany and got his law degree but rather than clearing out of this little backwater of ours to make his killing in a city where the pockets run deeper, he set himself up with a local firm. After his parents died, his sister married and moved to Philadelphia, and they sold the big house. End of an era
.

We awoke the next morning not knowing how we wound up at her place, but in truth we didn't care. Margaret offered me coffee, which I drank, reluctant to ask if she had any Irish Mist or brandy in the house, something that might keep the buzz on. That night she told me that after I'd dressed and gone off to work, she sat with her head in her hands looking up now and then to see what bird might be at the feeder, thanking God she'd left her unfinished pack of cigarettes at the tavern. Otherwise it would have been impossible not to have just one with her coffee. She almost made it to noon before getting in her car—the same one that would double as her temporary crypt those years later—and driving to the liquor store in town she had formerly passed, averting her gaze, many times since moving up here. Besides talking about anthropology, Flaubert, perennials, sailing the Hudson, which was an enthusiasm of mine, her work as a graphic designer, we engaged in an excited controversy about which were the best liqueurs, the most memorable wines, the craziest mixed drinks we'd ever tried. This was far and away a more candid almanac by which we might get to know each other, read one another's souls—a revelatory map of our personal geographies and histories, where we'd been and where we might be going.

The time I first tried retsina,
Hyméttos
, I remembered its name and the amazing bittersweet resinous stink of it, though I blacked out in Mykonos, then found myself robbed and more or less naked on the beach at Megáli Ámos. That once in her grandfather's house in Burlington, Vermont, when she was six or seven, Thanksgiving it was, she finished everybody's wineglasses, furtive in the kitchen after the dishes had been cleared and the family'd retired to the den to watch some game on the set. Yeah, yeah, I had one like that. The wedding trick all kids play, draining the flutes of flat bubbly the guests left behind, not giving a damn about the soggy butts you'd skim away first, if you happened to notice them. Her first Rob Roy. My brief infatuation with margaritas. Hers with Long Island iced tea. Pink squirrels, kamikazes, grasshoppers, Singapore slings, not to forget the sophomoric sophistication of dry vermouth on the rocks with a lemon twist—God in heaven, the hideous gaudy swill children are willing to irrigate themselves with, before we discover the mature world of manhattans or a dry Bombay martini.

Her intention at the liquor store was simply to stock a kitchen cabinet with some things for me to drink, when I came by next. For her part, she had to stay dry now, having had her little holiday from abstinence. None of the bottles she bought, however, remained capped or corked for long, partly because I dropped over that same night, as excited to carry on with our dialogue as she was, and partly because after I called in the afternoon to tell her how much I loved our night together and asked if I could see her, she needed something to calm her nerves. By the time I arrived with a quaint bouquet of fresh tulips in hand, Margaret was well along in her cups. I noticed, even though I'd had a few stiff courage builders at a roadside on the way over myself. We were too fatigued from the night before to match the extravagant buoyancy of that first encounter, but this evening brought another kind of gift. Yes, we drank and drank, the chardonnay first, then on to cognac, which had always been one of Margaret's Achilles' heels, but even more than simply wanting to drink, we wanted to drink together. Sworn solitary boozers, forever before preferring that no one stand in judgment of our innocent habit, this was new for both of us. What a breakthrough, we both thought to ourselves. Later, after our love affair fully blossomed, in the depths one night of a liquory confession, we'd disclose this fact and only fall more deeply in love in the aftermath. We were seldom found apart the rest of August and into autumn. I took my beer out into Margot's narrow, shaded yard and helped her weed the unyielding garden. She packed Rose's lime juice and Absolut in an ice chest to mix gimlets out on the water, sailing the Hudson in my old catboat, a single-masted wooden affair, my pride and joy. To toast her first visit to my apartment over a gatehouse garage where I dry-docked the sailboat, I brought out a sixteen-year-old Laphroaig, which we finished as the harvest moon poured pale grenadine light through the window. I tried to teach her how to pronounce the name, an old Saxon carbuncle of a word.
Lah-fragge
, I said. Accent's on the second syllable. But there aren't any syllables, or else way too many, she laughed, then tried, Lap-fro-age? No,
Lah-fragge
, I said.
Lah-prfo-agge?

They say your fate is hidden in your name and while that probably isn't true for everyone it happens to be so for me. My last name, Meredith, never meant much other than it sometimes caused some of us in my circle to laugh because Meredith was my best friend's first name, but I always liked my own first name, Ivy, because ivy is such a magical plant. Oh, the poison ivy jokes were inevitable but ivy is like a green flower and can grow in the shade and poor soil and climb trees and endure climates as different as those of Africa and the Azores, Japan and Russia, and can live, as Lord Byron wrote in one of his poems, for two thousand years
—
well, three hundred anyway, discounting poetic license. Birds like ivy for nesting in and butterflies lay their eggs there. The Greeks believed that ivy was a preventative for drunkenness and the best cure for a hangover. It's in Pliny, trust me
.

So being Ivy it made some sense that I always wanted to be a florist and loved flowers from as far back as kindergarten when we planted a drift of yellow daffodils in the schoolyard. None of us kids believed in our hearts that the bleak little brown bulbs we'd buried in the October ground would survive the winter and burst into bloom next spring. When they did, that was it for me, and to this day a daffodil bulb is more bewitching and baffling than just about anything in this world. Fly to the big bright moon, map the human genome, do what you will, there is no greater miracle than a drab bulb stuck in the dirt and buried under winter snow that blossoms out of the mud year after year. I remember when I saw those daffodils bloom in the mucky grounds at school, I told my mother I wanted to plant ivy in our yard and so we did back by the toolshed and it grows there even now. I could see it from the window where I sat day in and out during the first months of my recovery. I know it's just a wall of vines with fluttering green leaves, my namesake, but it gave me moments of comfort just the same, especially after I agreed with Martin that maybe he ought to go ahead to the city and find us an apartment, get things set up so that I could follow as soon as I was ready. He promised to phone every day and visit every weekend
.