The Uninnocent (29 page)

And he did so throughout the winter, bringing me brochures from various florist shops and other little presents from time to time. He even got a gig downtown playing backup in some club. My lung and the half dozen ribs that had punctured it were healing more quickly than the doctors predicted, as were my broken leg and wrist. What wasn't going as well as they'd hoped was, to use their lingo, the series of surgical reconstructive procedures on my face. I'd flown into the windshield hard, hadn't fastened the seatbelt which was an insane oversight but there it was, and I paid for it with a long gash on my forehead and another on my cheek, as well as a shattered chin. A surgeon in Cooperstown did most of the work and while I usually loved it when Martin was around, during the months they kept regrafting and revising, and my face went from scarred to swollen-and-scarred to misshapen-and-scarred, I was just as happy when he called saying this weekend or that wasn't good for him to get upstate, he had a crucial stint here or was obligated to finish a five-nighter there, that he loved me and missed me and would come next week for sure. God knows I wasn't used to what I saw in the mirror, and even when girlfriends I'd known since the days of those daffodil plantings came over to keep the invalid company I felt ashamed not merely because my face was a devastated distortion, at least in my eyes, but because this didn't need to have happened. Margaret need not have been drunk, sure, but her responsibility was hers to govern and I had no say in the matter and she already paid big-time for her lack of judgment. For me, my head was a kaleidoscope of moving plans and thoughts of marriage and jostling flowers and wondering if I could get off early to see Martin about some damn thing I've forgotten what possibly it could have been that mattered so much I got distracted, blew through a stop sign and hit that sheet of heartless ice. She was plastered; I was in a rush. Now I live with my mother, and Margaret's husband lives by himself. As for Martin and me, I knew where we were headed by the time April showers brought inevitable May flowers
.

I proposed on Christmas, the same day Margot discovered she was pregnant. To celebrate both blessings we had corned beef sandwiches and Dom Pérignon. When she called her mother to tell her our news, the woman asked her daughter how went it with the freelancing—though her graphic design commissions had been slowed by the move, she had a few faithful clients and lived modestly on savings between jobs—when would she finally get to meet the famous James and how was the not-drinking going? My fiancée said work was fine, promised we'd drive to Vermont sometime soon for a long weekend, but failed to answer the last question. Still, Margot knew she would have to cut back because of the baby. I poured her from a second, cheaper bottle of champagne and phoned my sister in Philadelphia. Both my parents were dead, one of stomach cancer, the other of heart disease, so there wasn't really anybody else for me to share the news with. Margot seldom mentioned her dad except to say she didn't like him, and if she didn't neither did I. I'd always remember thinking that day how my future bride and I had grown inseparable, like the espaliered pears that grew together, latticelike, over at the inn where we first met. We set the wedding for Valentine's Day so the baby, due late April, wouldn't be born out of wedlock.

Sobriety wasn't Margot's calling but with my moral support, I who reminded her it was only a matter of a few lousy dry months, she disciplined herself to stay off the hard stuff, drinking wine and the occasional port. I guess I took up the slack by drinking for both of us, but seldom in her presence. Some good souls I'd known over the years, whenever I bothered to venture out into local bars before I met my wife, became happy-hour companions—companions insofar as we drank in the same room. From my stool at the far end of the bar I assumed they no more wanted to chat, emote, sermonize, argue, or in any real way engage than I did. Truth was, I missed drinking with Margot, but now that she and I had moved in together—my place because of the catboat—I felt it important not to bedevil my poor darling by hammering right under her nose. When she worried she was becoming fat because of the pregnancy, and that I would meet some beauty at the bar, I could only scoff. She knew as well as I did that bars were for one thing only, especially now that I was living with the mother of my child-to-be.

Her miscarriage in January brought these concerns to an end, and together we went on our first extended bender. When I phoned in to work with the tragic news they generously gave me the week off, which I spent behind locked doors with Margot in a fluctuating state of alcoholic philosophizing and comatose despair. Her mother pled to come help see us through our grieving but her daughter told her truthfully we were in no condition to see anyone. My sister sent a magnificent blooming amaryllis, which Margot dropped on the floor, breaking the clay pot and scattering soil and bulbs. We never got around to opening the envelope with her sympathy card. Instead of waiting for Valentine's Day, we pulled ourselves together toward the end of that black week and flew to Reno. We'd later have a good laugh when my sister said Reno was where you went for the quick divorce, not a wedding, but the knot was tied and we were again, after our own fashion, happy.

The first time he came over to see me I was three weeks out of my fifth reconstructive and was for a change not feeling all that bad about myself. I'd taken to gardening in the back yard, wearing a huge floppy straw hat because the sun was apparently detrimental to the healing scars, and was tilling soil for a bed of peonies when my mother came out back and told me James Chatham was on the line asking if he could visit. Always protective, especially now that Martin and I were no more, she shook her head no while covering the receiver of the cordless with her palm, as if he could hear her gesture somehow. I told her he was more than welcome. Time had come for us to meet face-to-face and talk. After all, who had suffered more from the accident (his wife aside, whose suffering was over forever) than he and I? It was right that we finally meet, or meet again really since during my months of nights I'd had an abundance of time to think about things, everything imaginable, and during the hours spent wandering the often frustratingly vague halls of memory I remembered him, recalled having known him better than I initially thought in those first confusing days after the collision when I was nothing more than an anesthetized dreamer who kept herself alive by picturing different roses and assigning them their names, Coral Creeper and Applejack and Marie Bugnet with its pure white tousled petals and a fragrance that would make the cloven-hoofed devil himself swoon
.

Whiskey sours and daiquiris, mint juleps and sloe gin fizzes, the flagrant highball days and even the dull ones of dry Bordeaux having receded into the mist, we settled that spring and summer into the spirits that worked best for us. Margot drank gin on the rocks, her preference being Tanqueray; I became a Scotch man, and while I liked fancy single malts—Oban, Glenfiddich, so forth—my poison of choice was Johnnie Walker.
Johnnie walked me where I needed to go
, I said, a fatuous joke that never failed to make Margot smile.
Johnnie be good
. We had things under control. Back at her computer Margot was someone to watch in the graphic design world—uneven, yes, but when she was on her game just brilliant. As for myself, I was reliable, got the job done, worked slow and steady as Aesop's dusty tortoise. Binges were masqueraded as the flu, a leveling allergy attack, a sudden family emergency that called us away for a few days.

After we sank our catboat in shallow water, a heavy October wind having pushed the wide-beamed oak-and-cedar craft into a rock mere wading distance from the shore, I quit drinking Scotch. The debacle was without question my fault and I'd been through a fifth of Johnnie when I lost control of the
Margot
, as I'd rechristened her the year we were married. To Margaret's respectful bewilderment, I seemed to get away not just from the whiskey but all booze for a few weird months after the accident—that I only drank beer she found both inspiring and frightening. We even managed during this period of remission to take the train down to visit the Met and indulge in hot dogs and root beer in Central Park. Margot pointed out a little flock of birds chirping crazily and flailing about in the top of a cherry tree, telling me they were drunk, which made me laugh. No, really, she said, she'd read about this in one of her bird behavior books—they loved consuming berries fermented by the sun in the highest branches. Soused sparrows, go figure. Soon after that I came over to Tanqueray, if only because it made shopping for the liquor much easier and saved money since we bought by the case.

Evenings eventually witnessed a new routine in which rather than always drinking together we spent some quality time alone, me retiring with a bottle downstairs, where the catboat was dry-docked, to work on repairing its ruined hull; Margot curled up on the sofa with a magazine, smoking in front of the television. We spoke about having another try at parenthood, and although our lovemaking was sporadic, Margot did get pregnant again, and once more miscarried. As depressing as she'd found her prior failure to carry our child—I already had names in mind, Margaret if it was a girl, Dylan if a boy—she now descended into an inconsolable depression of weeping day and night, bingeing until her speech was too garbled to understand, though I knew the gist of what she might be trying to say. Third time was not going to be the charm in the years that winged by, day by blurry day, since our love evolved into a sibling companionship rather than what in the beginning was something else. I remained beautiful in my wife's eyes despite my puffiness and bloating, while Margot grew gaunt and angular, her skin transparent and long hair now shimmeringly more white than brown, which I frankly adored. We leaned on each other more and more, reflecting one another like the facing mirrors in a García Lorca poem Margaret memorized when she first moved up here, and sometimes recited.
Woodcutter, cut down my shadow
.

Rarely did we argue, but when we did the fireworks blinded all measure of reason. The precipitating problem was always some little thing that, fueled by the gin, turned incendiary. Why couldn't she vacuum once in a blue moon? Instead of pretending to work on my ridiculous boat, which was never going to sail again, why didn't I fix the lock on the front door so someone wouldn't murder us in our sleep? Why was this chicken burnt? Did I keep coming home so late because I was having an affair? How was it she always accused me of having the affair when she was the one home alone all day, drinking herself blind? How dare I raise my voice about her drinking when I was going through two quarts a night? Violence would follow these words, never visited by one of us on the other, but as inevitable as our morning-after apologies. Margaret smashed crockery and threw books. I punched the wall and stumbled over furniture, breaking my toe and cutting my hands on sharp edges as well as dull. Ordinarily soft-spoken, we thundered and wailed and wept. Usually tender, we spat and raged. Chairs were overturned, bottles flew. I slammed the door, screaming I never wanted to see her again. She barricaded herself in the bathroom, threatening to slit her wrists. It wasn't until I tripped and fell into the old French doors that separated the living room from our bedroom, and opened up my forehead and cheek with the splintering glass, sending me in an ambulance to the hospital for surgery to remove fragments and getting stitches that would leave me scarred, that we finally sat down to talk.

Scars, I thought. His face was nothing like mine but his flesh had known the same kind of pain. And yes, I was right. I suspected we'd met before, back when we were young optimistic kids going to school thinking that the world was a place in which reversals of fortune happen to the oldsters but never to us, which in a way wasn't wrong since now we were people we'd have thought of as very old back then. Still, isn't it crazy how stupid young people are and how inevitable is the downfall, the comeuppance, how when we're young we know we're smart and when we're older we know we're not, and how there must be an instant when the transition takes place and how seldom any of us knows just when that moment was or why it happened. My curse and my blessing is that I do know, of course. But when my mother let James Chatham in and he and I shook hands and even tentatively gave each other a victims' hug, I remembered that hand and that same hesitant hug because years ago when we weren't such damaged goods we'd made this same gesture, kissed each other just like a girl and boy who don't know what they're doing do. It was the first time I was ever drunk, the ground whirling and sky spinning and my feet freezing cold, fireworks if I remember right so possibly the Fourth of July, I couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen but understood it was a rite of passage, which meant you had to suffer for a higher cause or something idiotic in that vein, but he did kiss me, my first kiss, and I never told a soul pretty much including myself since I erased the moment (it was under a tree, an ash, I think) from my mind until now. Crazy. We sat and talked about my injuries for a while and I asked him how he was getting along and though he said he was doing fine, as good as could be expected, I saw that his eyes were swimming, their rims red as wild poppy petals. I was sorry to see him go and when he asked if he could come back to visit from time to time I told him I wished he would, and he gave me his phone number. My mother and my friends didn't like him and thought it was unhealthy for me to spend any time with him given, as they saw it, his alkie spouse had maimed me for life, nearly killed me. What they didn't know and even James would never really know was the ineffable nature of the gaze his wife and I exchanged as we lay there not ten feet from each other in the snow that winter day, a contact so pure and even sublime I will never achieve it again, something so unspeakably marvelous it makes me feel only gratitude that I had it, held it, held her in my eyes, just as she held me in hers, dying. That James must have gazed into her eyes with a similar depth of compassion obsessed me for days after he came by to see me, and when my mother was out one afternoon I took the chance of calling him at work and asked if he'd like to get together again maybe away from my house somewhere. He took to the idea as if it had been his own and when I mentioned I was still shy about being seen in public he asked me if I'd ever been out on the river, and said my scars meant nothing to him if his meant nothing to me. To this day I find it hard to believe he can't remember that time we were kids drinking God knows what and kissed under a tree with not a flaw on either of our bodies nor many strikes against us yet. I suppose it's all just booze under the bridge
.