Carthage (55 page)

“What do you mean, ‘in a dream, you can’t read’?”

“If you dream of holding a book or a newspaper, and trying to read the words, you can’t. Your eyes just don’t focus.”

“Who says this?”

“Nobody says it!” Arlette laughed, with something of her old, fond exasperation. “I think it must be a common experience.”

Zeno was skeptical. He’d email a professor-friend of his at Cornell whose specialty was cognitive psychology, to ask for an expert opinion.

“Next time you dream, Zeno, see if you can make yourself ‘read.’ Look at a paper or a book. You’ll see that the letters are all blurred.”

Zeno laughed, this seemed to him so fanciful. Not that it might not be true but that his dear wife Arlette, who knew little of psychology, still less of the human brain, should think so.

AND YET:
Zeno was himself becoming ever more irrational, superstitious. In the particular way of a defiantly rational, ego-centered male of late middle age, confronted with a crumbling, collapsing facade beyond the reach of his will to mend. As a local politician Zeno Mayfield had been
the man to see, to get things done;
mostly, his presence had been a beneficent one, and even political adversaries had liked him, as a man; but now, years out of office and losing interest in maintaining his old Carthage contacts, he had nothing to occupy his time, his seething churning thoughts like tires spinning in mud, that
mattered.

He’d have made his wife’s cancer a campaign, if only!

Saying to Juliet
Why didn’t your mother let me help her? Didn’t she know that I loved—love—her?

And Juliet replied
Yes Daddy, Mom knows. But this is her new life, now.

THEY COULDN’T BEAR
to sell the house.

The beautiful old sprawling Colonial on Cumberland Avenue on a three-acre lot dense with tall oak and cedar trees, in the high, hilly neighborhood close by the Episcopal cemetery—
they could not.

Though Arlette had moved out. And Zeno could not bear to live alone in so large a house like a beetle—(he said)—rattling inside a beetle-trap.

For two weeks, Arlette had visited with Juliet in Averill Park, ostensibly to help out with the children. And when she’d returned she moved out, for it was a time of renewal, she said.

Not a time to resume the old.

She told Zeno of her plans. She told Zeno of plans already in place. His wife who’d rarely made any major decision of her own for nearly three decades, explaining to him now what she’d done, and what she would be doing, of her own volition and singly.

Zeno protested he’d had no idea. Had not guessed. Though of course he’d known, must have guessed—those weeks and months of subtle and then not-so-subtle estrangement in the house on Cumberland Avenue.

Weeks, months of drinking. Solitary, and with others.

Late-afternoon naps from which he woke sodden and dazed at 8
P.M.
not knowing if it was dusk or dawn; if he was alone in the house or if Arlette patiently awaited him downstairs with a meal he couldn’t bring himself to eat.

Ever more frequently, Arlette wasn’t awaiting.

Excluding me from your life it’s like my life hemorrhaging from me how can you when I love you.

Too proud to protest and certainly too proud to beg the woman to stay with him.

Getting high
he called it. Never
getting drunk.

“High” had a hippie-innocence to it. “Drunk” had no innocence.

Yet he was stone-cold sober or nearly, when Arlette came to him to explain.

Taking his hands, his big-bear paw-hands, in hers. To explain.

She was moving eight miles away to Mount Olive, she said. She would be sharing a house with a woman attorney named Alisandra Raoul who was a co-director of a battered women’s shelter there and she would be working at the shelter more or less full-time.

Zeno had been hearing about this—
shelter
. Hadn’t been paying enough attention it seemed.

But—“ ‘Alisandra Raoul’? Who?”

“Zeno, I’ve told you. I’ve spoken of Alisandra many times.”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve never heard the name before, you know how good I am at remembering names.”

Still, they would not sell the house. Juliet had begged them not to sell it and if Cressida were alive—(
if Cressida were alive
was Zeno’s mangled logic)—she’d have begged them, too.

Neither could have quite explained: the marriage could be reclaimed at any time but the house, once sold, would not be reclaimed but would pass into the hands of strangers.

Neither could have quite explained: if their missing daughter were to return home, yes improbably, yes of course impossibly, still what a further shock for the daughter, to discover strangers living in her family home.

In the front lawn a Realtor’s sign, bright brash yellow-and-black
FOR RENT/LEASE
. After the first windstorm the sign was left slanted just slightly askew.

Arlette had gone to live in Mount Olive and heartless and distracted by her new, busy and so-fascinating life did not return to Cumberland Avenue. Zeno living in a condominium in downtown Carthage in a riverfront area newly gentrified, now prime real estate, drove often to the house to check it, seeing such vigilance as a husband’s duty.

Heartbreak: the smell of an abandoned house.

Unmistakable: the smell of an abandoned house.

Untenanted, the house still had electricity, gas, water. Those services had not been discontinued. Most of the furniture remained in the rooms intact. Even a television set, in what had been the basement family room, remained intact.

Yet when the real estate woman called Zeno with “good news”—offers from clients if the monthly rental price could be reduced just slightly—Zeno was adamant
No.

And if the real estate woman called Mrs. Mayfield to reason with her, Arlette would say with an apologetic little laugh
Oh no! The real estate is Zeno’s territory, I would never interfere.

In this way, the house on Cumberland Avenue remained untenanted.

IN HILLY MOUNT OLIVE
Arlette lived in an older residential neighborhood of large old Victorian houses renovated and refashioned as office buildings for young lawyers, architects, dentists; gift shops, herbal-medicine shops, Beechum County Ecological Engineers. The battered-women’s shelter WomanSpaceInc. which held thirty-five beds was housed in a large red-brick building that had been a girls’ Catholic school, set back in a grassy lot behind a wrought-iron fence.

At night, the property was lit with bright lights and monitored by surveillance cameras with alarms connected to the Mount Olive Police Department. When the battered-women’s shelter had first been established in Mount Olive volunteers had been rudely treated by neighbors and disdained by local law enforcement authorities; but since a changeover in the police department, the small police force was now supportive of WomanSpaceInc. in their aim to “reduce domestic violence”—“reduce violence in the world by beginning at home.” (It did not fail to help that a lieutenant in the Mount Olive P.D. was the brother of one of the founders and that the formerly all-male P.D. now had a female police officer.)

Posters designed by local woman artists called for volunteers and donations—
VIOLENCE BEGINS IN THE HOME. TAKE CARE.
Arlette had appropriated one of Cressida’s early, pre-Escher pen-and-ink drawings, in which childlike figures played together with animals in a floating oasis of green, as the background artwork for a Woman Space poster.

Zeno who’d often been offended by Arlette’s appropriation of their daughter’s art was touched by this. The charming drawing had belonged to a time in Cressida’s life when she’d been less inward and difficult, happier.

On lonely afternoons Zeno drove to Mount Olive as if sensing that Arlette might be thinking of him. Calling him to her.

He knew where she lived: 18 Cross Patch Lane.

Cross Patch Lane!
An address out of a children’s storybook.

And the old rebuilt shingle board house painted bright green with a tidy little front lawn and coral-colored front walk on a cul-de-sac lane of similar houses rebuilt and painted magenta, peacock-blue, cream—Zeno would cruise slowly past knowing that Arlette wouldn’t be home, nor would her house-mate Alisandra be home, not during the day, for the women were at the battered-women’s shelter, the women were working, only Zeno Mayfield was cast adrift.

He might have taught a course at Beechum Community College, he’d taught in the past—“American Originals: Tom Paine to Woody Guthrie.” He might have spent time at Home Front Alliance where adult-male volunteers were particularly needed. There was much he could do but not much he wanted to do.

He drove past WomanSpaceInc. Here were warning signs
PRIVATE PROPERTY DO NOT TRESPASS
. A six-foot wrought iron fence and behind it the austere red-brick building converted into a dormitory for desperate women and their children. When he’d been mayor of Carthage he’d learned a good deal about domestic violence and he’d done what he could to provide aid for women who’d had to flee their domestic arrangements. Some of them were terribly beaten, in terror of their lives. Yet, it was a frequent irony, the battered women changed their minds and refused to press charges against their men.

Maybe times had changed. Maybe in Mount Olive, at Woman SpaceInc., the desperate women were more resolute. Their rescuers, like Arlette Mayfield, would be their protectors.

Once at WomanSpaceInc. he saw Arlette walking with two other women, to a vehicle parked in the driveway. It was a bright windy day: Arlette had tied a scarf around her new hair, that gave her a blithe girlish look though she was very thin still, and did look like a woman in recovery. He’d wanted to call her attention to him, waving out a window, tapping his horn—but no, better not. The property of WomanSpace was off-limit to the male species with the exception of the mailman, delivery men and boys younger than twelve in the company of their mothers. There must be a “safe house” for women where no man can come, Arlette said, as passionately as if she were a woman hunted by men herself.

Though Zeno hadn’t attended such meetings, which would have been too painful for him, he knew through intermediaries that Arlette was outspoken in front of audiences telling of how she’d lost her daughter to “male violence”—“male violence exacerbated by alcohol.” She didn’t, she claimed, blame the young man, an Iraq War veteran, so much as she blamed the “sick, violent, cruel and heartless consumer culture” in which young girls were used as advertising commodities, to sell products. It was a shock to Zeno to realize that if he wanted to, he could not approach WomanSpaceInc.: he wouldn’t be allowed inside the fortress-like residence even to speak with his wife.

How many violent men, seeking their fleeing wives, claimed to want only to “speak” with them.

HE SAW ARLETTE
for dinner sometimes in Mount Olive. But they did not speak of Cressida now.

They did talk about Arlette’s health: for this was good news, on the whole. The chemotherapy seemed to be working, the cancer had not spread.

On her head Arlette wore a human-hair wig, dark-blond, wavy, very like her own hair except that it was thicker and more lustrous than her own hair had been for years. A woman-friend had counseled Arlette to have a wig in readiness for when her hair began to fall out in clumps during chemotherapy—“Having a double mastectomy wasn’t as awful as being bald. I know that sounds ridiculous but it happens to be true for lots of women including me.”

Zeno winced, hearing this reported to him secondhand.
Double mastectomy
sounded too much like
double testectomy
.

Arlette hadn’t had a double mastectomy, or even a single mastectomy. Her
persimmon-seed
had been caught early. And so, Arlette believed herself very lucky, and would not ever complain about the chemical-infusion treatments that left her dazed and exhausted and nauseated. It was a curiosity of Arlette’s new life that she never seemed to complain about anything.

“I feel as if we’re all passengers on a plane that has entered a patch of ‘turbulence’—we should be grateful we haven’t crashed yet.”

Arlette laughed, almost gaily. Zeno winced.

He was seeing other women now. Or rather, other women were seeing him: calling to invite him to dinner, to accompany them to social gatherings. As nature abhors a vacuum so Zeno Mayfield was wryly discovering that a solitary man is a kind of vacuum, to whom solitary women are irresistibly drawn.

None of his encounters were very real to him. None of the women lingered in his memory. He was still in love with his elusive and unfathomable wife.

The Mount Olive restaurants were likely to be in refashioned wood frame houses, with candlelit tables crowded close together, organic-food menus, no alcohol served. Shrewd Zeno knew to call beforehand to inquire about a liquor license; he knew to bring his own wine.

“Won’t you have a little, Arlette? Just a half-glass.”

“Thanks, Zeno. But no. I’m on call.”

“ ‘On call’—how?”

“At the shelter. We’re terribly understaffed, we’re more or less always on call.”

Arlette smiled happily. To be always
on call
! Zeno envied her.

Whether he was drinking or not he was beginning to feel that many things were unreal and unnatural. To be having dinner with his wife in the candlelit front room of a stately old Colonial house with a bare plank floor and to know that he would have to go away without his wife, in a separate vehicle, was deeply strange to him like knowing that, when he stood, one of his legs would buckle beneath him.

Life is a dream a little less consistent.

(Who’d said that? Centuries ago? Pascal?)

(Who’d also said When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated.)

The estranged husband imagines himself re-encountering his wife, courting and winning her a second time. If she’d fallen in love with him once, why not a second time? So Zeno imagined. So Zeno plotted. Daring to brush his fingers across Arlette’s slender hand as if accidentally even as he could not fail to see that Arlette was distracted while speaking with him, or rather listening to him; too often, her cell phone rang during their meal.