A Private Sorcery (23 page)

T
HERE ARE FOUR DOORS TO
be locked and unlocked. Free again, she does not want to leave. She feels like one big ball of failure. First the marriage, now even the ending.

Back in the prison lobby, she lifts the receiver for the automatic line installed by the local cab company. Waiting, her jaw trembles. This cannot be it, she thinks. That raised eyebrow. No more words. No meaning squeezed out of it all.

By the time the cab arrives, she has decided to return in the morning.

“Is there a motel nearby?” she asks the driver.

“Depends on what you want.”

“Something not too expensive. Close by.”

“Sounds like the Motel Six. Not that they're still six dollars, but prices aren't too bad, people say.” He yanks his cap so it's pulled low on his head, turns left at the end of the prison driveway. They pass a stretch of scrappy woods and then a strip mall with a pet store, bakery and sewing supplies outlet tucked amid boarded-up fronts. At the light, Rena watches a group of teenagers in the parking lot, the girls with long, stringy hair and tight jeans, the boys in bowling jackets, the slouchy boredom of nowhere to go other than the Taco Bell.

Five minutes later, the driver stops in front of a motel with a sign flashing
VACANCY
. A kid, sullen with acne, leads Rena to a room with two twin beds and laminate furniture. He flips on the lights, shows her where she can adjust the heat, lingering at the door until she realizes—she'd not thought of it, having no luggage—that he's waiting for a tip. She finds two dollars in her wallet and then asks if there's anywhere to eat within walking distance.

“Mildred's Ice Cream Parlor. Make a right, maybe a quarter-mile.
They got sandwiches, things like that.”

She washes her hands and face. In the mirror, she examines her face. She looks gaunt. Her jeans, well-fitting last fall, hang from her hipbones. Outside, she walks opposite the traffic so the headlights shine on her, the cars and the drivers' faces looming large on the approach and then disappearing in an instant. Mildred's Ice Cream Parlor has red-and-white striped curtains and pictures of men with big waxed mustaches. She orders soup and a dish of chocolate ice cream. After fifteen mintutes, the food is gone and she feels like she should leave. It's only seven-thirty when she gets back to the motel. She draws the drapes and locks the door. The sheets are thin and slightly sticky, the residue of soap not fully rinsed.

Once, early in the morning, her eyes open and she sees a sliver of light that has slipped in through the crack between the drapes. The sheets, the smells, like any of the dozen motels where she and Ascher had stayed. The early morning light, his fingers roaming her hair, his words at this parting hour, always the same:
I love you more than the moon, the earth and the stars.
Syllables more hypnotic than any drug.

Not until they were married did Rena recognize Saul's kind of danger—the risk he posed to her self. Although Saul had never said it, he'd wanted her to be the doctor's wife to his doctor. Not in the silly Junior League way in which Klara had been raised where the doctor's wife and the minister's wife were expected to lead the other women in their seasonal projects: the Sadie Hawkins Dance, the Chrysanthemum Fest, the midnight hayride, the canned goods drive. What Saul had wanted was more demanding. He'd wanted her to enter into his world of ideas, to read with him, to be his helpmeet in thinking through the endless vine of questions and paradoxes and dilemmas his work posed every day. But she hadn't wanted to do it, to be his intellectual handmaiden.

Of course, she'd never said this; instead, what she said was, “You're lucky, you have your father to talk with about these things.” A look of pain darted across Saul's face. He'd taken her remark to be the barometer she could now see it, in fact, to have been: that never had she
wanted to fully immerse herself in him.

I
N THE MORNING
, she returns to Mildred's Ice Cream Parlor for tea and a roll. She has the same waitress:
LINDA HERE TO SERVE YOU
. Thin arms and legs, a little potbelly below her flat chest.

Linda looks at her curiously. “You were here last night. Chicken rice soup, one scoop chocolate in a dish.”

“Good memory.”

“A curse. Someone who hasn't been here in eight months, I'd still remember what they ordered the last time.” She opens the napkin dispenser and puts a wad of napkins inside. “You staying at the motel?”

“Just last night.”

“A war bride, huh? You got an old man up there in the dungeon on the hill?”

“How did you know?”

“Takes one to know one.”

The woman reminds her of Sammy—the way she lets people feel she's making room for them. “Your husband's there, too?”

“Four years in January. Two more to go. After a year of dragging my baby back and forth on the bus, I said screw this and we moved here. It turned out just fine. My little girl's in school now, and she likes it a lot.” She tops off Rena's water glass. “I'd eat more than that,” she says. “The food in that cafeteria is foul. You got kids?”

“No.”

“Most of the wives who don't have kids are goners after the first year.”

Rena puts down her cup. She's had enough. She could leave now, gather her things, head to the register, but, in fact, it's a comfort to talk without a cost. Even with Ruth and Maggie, the confidences threaten a balance between them in which at bottom they each aim to keep their troubles in their own corral.

What she wants to ask Linda is: Did your husband lie to you? Over and over again? Were you able to forgive him? Will you ever be able to trust him again? Instead, she says, “I came here to tell him I want a
divorce.”

Linda whistles. “I can see why you're not up for eating.” “Actually, I already told him. I wanted to have some more time to talk with him.”

“Well, good for you, honey. A lot of them don't even show up to deliver the news.”

“I thought about it. Sending a letter. Only I thought it would haunt me, not knowing how he reacted.”

“How'd he take it?”

“It's hard to say. He didn't really say anything.”

“He must've known.”

“What do you mean?”

“They know. It's amazing what these guys know. It's like there's a brotherhood among them. There was a customer here, about a year back, a little guy with a squeaky voice, pushing forty and still living with his mother. Talking about her, too, all the time. He was sweet on me in this harmless way, giving me moonie eyes, always asking to be seated at my station, leaving a dollar tip on a cup of coffee. Probably just needed somebody to think about when he jerked off in the shower. Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but you know what I mean. Nothing more than that. Never so much as asked me for my phone number. Somehow my old man, he knew.”

“You're kidding.”

“I swear to God. One week I notice I haven't seen Squeaky here in a couple of days, and next thing I know, someone tells me he got beat up in the driveway of his house. A stocking face came after him with a crowbar and broke his nose. Told him this was just the hors d'oeuvre to what would happen if he showed up here again.” She wipes her hands on her apron. “I felt awful. I wanted to go visit him, but I was afraid it would make it worse.”

Rena picks at her roll. She thinks about Saul's raised eyebrow. “How did your husband find out?”

“Beats me. Maybe someone who used to be up there was in here and saw Squeaky staring at me. My old man wouldn't say. That's the other
thing. They're close-lipped as the Masons.”

“D
ID YOU KNOW?
” she asks after Saul sits down. They're in a different room today. There's a larger table with a heart etched into the surface:
RICKY AND JONI FUCKIN FOREVER
.

“Know what?”

She's not sure what she means—did he know about Beersden or did he know that she'd decided to ask him for a divorce. If he knows about Beersden, she wants to reassure him that it's over, that Beersden has nothing to do with it. But if he doesn't know, she doesn't want to tell him.

He looks at her frankly and she sees he is shedding his boyish dreaminess, his love affair with ideas. It's the first time she has ever felt a sharpness to him, a challenging edge, and it embarrasses her to discover that she finds it exciting.

“That you were planning to ditch me?” he says.

She starts to cry. It appalls her that it is she, not he, with the tears. “I'm sorry. That was uncalled for.” He reaches out and wipes her eyes with his sleeve. “Listen to me. It's my fault. I'm not saying that masochistically. Just realistically. I betrayed you. You have every right to leave now.”

Her chest feels unbearably heavy, as if an enormous piece of furniture—an armoire or a breakfront, something laden with silver and crystal and years of use—has been set on top. For the first time in a long while, she feels the stirrings of the love she'd had for him. Not in a way that suggests she's making a mistake but rather to remind her of the life that has passed between them.

She fights the temptation to erase what she's said. To go back to the pretenses of the past months: things will change, time will heal what has happened if only she will endure. In his frank gaze, she detects his plea that she speak honestly with him, that if he is to survive the years here it must be without artifice. She gropes to gather her thoughts, to say what is most true. “It's not that, really. It's not that I want to be rid of you or to stop being involved with you.”

He is watching her intently.

“I can't sleep with you again. I can't carry on as though we're going to live together again and go forward and do all the things married people do.”

There is a slight tremor in his bottom lip. “So what do you want?” “I don't know. Remember when we first met? That first afternoon at Cafe Vivaldi, when you came with a copy of the op-ed piece I'd written all marked up with your questions and comments and we just talked? No flirting, no seduction games. Just talked. I was so exhilarated. I'd never talked with a man like that. I'd talked with Rebecca, but she was always so far ahead of me. With you, it was the pure pleasure of sharing ideas and spurring each other to think more.”

She traces the graffiti heart with a finger. “Please don't be hurt by this. But I think that's what we did best.”

“You mean sex was a bust.”

“Not a bust. You were the first man I ever really felt anything with. I can't call that a bust. But I realize now that it was because it was like sex without being sex.”

“You seemed so fragile. I held myself back. It was as much for me as for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was a convenient way not to face certain troubling parts of myself. I've been thinking a lot about it since I've been here. The way Marc and I divvied up the world. Or rather, being the older one, he grabbed certain things for himself and I was left to pick among the remains. He took all the machismo stuff: sports, girls, the aggressive career. I got the Talmudic approach, androgyny, these impossible ideals. He screwed fifteen girls in high school and collected football trophies. I spent the afternoons debating the philosphical underpinnings of psychoanalysis with my father.”

“Poor Saul. Then you get me, whom you have to treat like a convalescent. What you needed was a lusty girl with a nice bottom who would let you enjoy yourself.”

“You've got a nice bottom.” “Too bony.”

“But nice.”

They gaze at each other, and Rena feels astonished that this is happening, this warmth between them. “I just want to talk with you. I guess that's what it boils down to,” she says.

His eyes dampen. “That was the worst part about the drugs. Words became sounds employed for deceptions.” He pushes his hair off his forehead and she sees the fine physiognomy of his oval face, remembers a conversation once, shortly after they became lovers, when he'd talked about language as the most profound achievement of humanity, the ability to use the tongue and the palate to create a bridge between two minds. His voice softens, thins like a stream running into a silt plateau. “It's a relief for me, too.”

“How so?”

“Less pressure. Less guilt. I can't promise how I'll react if you say there's another man. I guess I'll have to handle that as it comes.”

“There's not another man.”

He looks at her steadily. This is the watershed, she thinks: if she can tell him about Beersden.

“There was for a few months, but it's over.”

Briefly, he covers his face.

“I'm sorry. Should I have not told you?”

“No. This won't work if you have to hide things.”

“Do you want to know more?”

“Do you want to tell me more?”

“He was married with two daughters. It was a built-in limit. Not that I was in love with him. I never fell in love with him.” She pauses. He's asking for the truth, she reminds herself. “The most significant thing was it made me realize I'd stopped feeling married. I felt like he was married, but not me.”

A tear cascades off Saul's cheek. She watches his chest rise and fall. “It's amazing, isn't it,” he says, “that there's no ceremonial way of dissolving a marriage. No reverse marriage rites. At least we're not Catholic. To end the marriage, we'd have to declare it had never existed.”

“This existed. I would never want to say our marriage did not exist.”

Saul takes her hands in his and, despite the prison injunctions, holds them—gently, like two injured birds. She closes her eyes to keep from weeping. She feels certain that their minds are on the same thing: how much simpler it would be to mourn a love destroyed than this, a love never fully formed. She feels his thumbs tracing the bones in her fingers, one by one, until they both startle with the rap of the guard on the glass.