A Small Indiscretion (32 page)

“That’s all right,” he said. “This thing has one built in. I can just blow it up if I need it.”

“All right,” I said. “If you insist.”

Then he said bitterly, “You know, it’s not as if I haven’t had opportunities over the years.”

O
N
S
ATURDAY, THE
night before the dinner that preceded your accident, your father lay down on the camping mat again, on the floor. I lay alone in the vastness of our bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. I could tell he wasn’t asleep from the sound of his breathing. I got out of bed and lay down next to him. He didn’t touch me at first. I didn’t touch him, either. Then, abruptly, he rolled over on top of me.

It was as far from making love as the act can be. His body over me seemed not so much hungry as violent. He never in fact hurt me, but I kept having the feeling he was not trying to possess me, or pleasure me, or even pleasure himself, so much as to violate me. He wasn’t tender, or conscientious, or accommodating, as he had always been before. He didn’t hold me afterward. But that night opened something between us that had not been opened before. And even though afterward he seemed not like my husband, but like a man I’d picked up in a bar who would never love me, I found myself wanting more of it. Wanting again that animal thing that had happened between us atop the camping mat, without speech and
without love, but that seemed to be trying to drag those things out of us.

There was no time for more, though, because the following day was the Sunday before Labor Day, and my mother arrived, and my father was delayed, and Emme came to dinner, and the store flooded and the car flipped.

T
HE
S
UNDAY BEFORE
L
ABOR
D
AY
—you don’t remember it, so I will fill in the details.

Emme had agreed to continue to manage the store for a week after I returned from London so I could spend time with the girls and have the holiday weekend to visit with my mother and—perhaps—my father. Sunday morning, I prepped the dinner. I marinated the steaks. My mother arrived in the afternoon. We took some trouble with the table setting. I wondered what my father would think of the house. If it had been eccentric when we bought it, it had become even more so over the years, as I’d swapped out the original lights with fixtures from the store. Anything that wouldn’t sell, or that I couldn’t part with, I brought home. The lamp with its base made of teacups and teapots. The milk-bottle chandelier. The sconces made from white birch twigs and tiny low-voltage teardrop bulbs. The jam-jar pendant lights, like the ones I’d first seen in the penthouse in Paris.

I tried to see it as my father, a stranger, might see it. When I looked at it that way, it seemed to me less a house than a museum of salvaged light. And of course there were Clara’s sketches, disembodied human parts patched together on the bulletin board like postmodern art.

You arrived at five. My mother hugged you. You said, casually, “Emme might stop by later. After dinner.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

You’d barely said a word to me about Emme that whole summer, and she had barely said a word to me about you. I hadn’t pressed either of you for information. I hadn’t wanted to pry. But I made a mental note to let you take me for a drive sometime soon. It was always in the car, during those sideways conversations, that you had told me important things when you were growing up. Maybe a drive would get you talking now.

You kissed Clara and Polly on the tops of their heads. You helped yourself to a beer and joined your father out back at the barbecue. The doorbell rang. I felt a constriction in my core as I walked to answer it, certain it would finally be my father.

But it was Emme, not “later,” but in the here and now, in time for a dinner to which she had not been invited.

I had grown accustomed to her getups, but I was taken aback that night in spite of myself. She wore gold fishnet tights beneath an obscenely short A-line cocktail dress constructed of sheer lace and sequined gold leaves that looked to me like drapery fabric. On her feet were red fur high-heeled ankle boots, and around her neck was what looked like the decorated mane of a lion, a necklace made of gold goose feathers and heavy beaded silver jewels. But the real shock was her hair. In the twelve days since I’d seen her last, she’d cut off her gorgeous blond waterfall of hair and dyed it a brown so dark it was almost black. It was barely shoulder-length and teased up into a wild fuzz around her face.

“You changed your hair,” I said.

“Yes!” She flicked her head from side to side like a model, then she stuck out her hip and struck a pose, smiling broadly, her face so changed inside its new frame as to be almost unrecognizable. All her
features were called out anew—the straight, narrow nose and round pink cheeks, the huge eyes beneath the long lashes, the plump red lips, the slender white neck choked by the goose-feather noose.

The girls had not seen her in a month. They circled around her as if she were a friendly alien, touching her dress with the tips of their fingers, touching her tights, her boots, her necklace, her hair, and then climbing into her lap when she flopped down on the couch and crossed her legs.

At least we had gone to a small bit of effort in our own appearances. I’d combed the girls’ hair and had them change their clothes, and to impress my father, perhaps, or to ingratiate myself upon your father by offering a small reminder of the body he’d ravaged the night before, I’d changed out of jeans into a sweater dress that clung to my waist, and I’d pulled on my high-heeled boots. My mother looked elegant in black pants and low black heels and a green wool sweater that called out the color of her eyes. She wore a pearl necklace my father had given her when they were still married.

I offered Emme a glass of wine, which she declined, announcing giddily that she couldn’t drink alcohol because it interfered with her medications. This was the first I’d heard of her “medications.” But how much did I really know about her? I never liked to become enmeshed with the people I was obliged to pay to be part of my life. It seemed mercurial or false, somehow, when there was always the chance the situation would turn. Not that I had any intention of firing Emme. As uncomfortable as she sometimes made me—with her mood swings and her clothing and her entanglement with the environmentally correct lingerie man next door, not to mention her relationship with you, whatever its nature—I had come to rely on her at the Salvaged Light. She could handle the store on her own. She was careful with the merchandise and the money, and she was exceptionally good with customers, especially the men. I had eased
off asking her to babysit the girls, because as much as they loved her, and as much as she appeared to be fond of them, I had decided she was not the model of young womanhood I wanted nesting inside their malleable frontal lobes.

The phone rang, and my mother answered. It was my father. They spoke briefly. She put her hand over the receiver and said that he wanted to speak to me, but I could not bear to hear his excuse—a flat tire, a change of plan, an emergency back in Maine—for what I was certain was, in fact, plain cowardice. I shook my head.

“Don’t even tell me,” I said, when she’d hung up.

“It’s all right. He’s still coming. He got on the Pacific Coast Highway below Eureka and it took longer than he thought, then the car broke down.”

“Of course it did.”

“He’s in Bodega Bay, wherever that is. It’s the alternator, apparently. With the holiday weekend, it’s been hard to find a garage with the parts and the manpower, but he’s found a mechanic in Petaluma who will do the job tomorrow. He says he’ll sleep in the car tonight, and get it fixed in the morning, and see us sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“And he’s calling us now?”

“Well, you know your father.”

“And of course he had to take the scenic route. He couldn’t stay on 101 like a normal person.”

My mother shrugged. “We didn’t exactly tell him we’d planned a big dinner tonight.”

“But he promised he’d be here this afternoon,” I said.

I decided, for the thousandth time, that until he was standing on my doorstep, I had no intention of believing I was ever going to see him again.

Jonathan had come into the house and was watching the exchange. How I wished he would take me in his arms, as he would
have two weeks before. I could sense, in his face, the battle raging inside him, and I could see the moment that his pride, or hurt, or anger, or simple pain won out—who could blame him?—and he turned away to tend to the grilling of the steaks.

We sat down to eat. Emme was, that evening, as I’d never seen her before, almost dancing as she walked, or hopping, darting here and there, talking very fast about I don’t remember what, picking the girls up and swinging them around, touching Jonathan’s shoulder—flirtatiously, I thought—when he brought in the steaks, and practically hanging on you. She took for herself the seat I had set for my father, between you and Polly. My mother was directly across from her, next to Clara. Jonathan and I faced each other at opposite ends. I drank too much wine. Not like me. Not like me, at all, to overindulge for the second time in two weeks. I was not myself, I suppose, and in that I was not alone. I did not drink so much that I failed to keep track of the drinks of others—namely, yours, since your plan was to drive back across the bridge that night, and the city was, as usual, swamped in fog. You had four beers in four hours. Inside the legal limit, perhaps, but outside my comfort zone.

I myself had three and a half glasses of wine. The vehemence the wine unleashed in me set off a domino effect as devastating as if I had been not only drunk, but the one behind the wheel of Emme’s car. It was not the predictable, linear sort of effect one gets with actual dominoes. It was more like the elaborate constructions you used to make out of blocks and marbles and plastic tubes and pulleys and levers and ramps when you were young. Rube Goldberg machines, I think they’re called. Architectural masterpieces that required every single curved and straight block, every groove, every angle and turn to be placed so precisely, the ball would roll smoothly on its intricate journey each time, finally coming to rest with a satisfied thud.

That Labor Day weekend dinner was an architectural masterpiece
of its own—a tragic chain reaction of wine and words and chemistry and history and madness that sent the car flying down the Pacific Coast Highway sometime in the night with you in the passenger seat and Emme at the wheel. It must have been my angry mention, over dinner, of my father choosing that route, instead of the more practical 101, that put the idea in Emme’s head. My anger and my righteousness became essential connecting pieces that nudged Emme’s hand, later, toward the faucet of the tub in the loft of the store, ultimately overflowing the tub and sending it through the ceiling, smashing the diamond lights below. And that nudged her hand again, however unintentionally, on the steering wheel of the Volvo, hurling the car over the side of the road and nearly sending you into oblivion.

What had set her off?

We had eaten dessert. My mother had taken the girls upstairs to get them ready for bed. You and Emme and your father and I were alone at the table, still lingering over the pie, and in my case, wine. I referred again to my father having the gall to take the Pacific Coast Highway when he must have known it would double the time of the journey and make him late. I went on with my ancient complaints. His selfishness. His narcissism. His habitual tardiness. His lack of interest in the people who mattered most—my three children, his own flesh and blood, who had gathered around this very table in his honor. In my mind I was contrasting him to Jonathan, who sat at the other end of the table, clearly uncomfortable with my rant. Jonathan was as reliable and unselfish as I believed my father was not, but he was also inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt until they proved him wrong.

“Why don’t we wait to throw the book at him until he’s here to defend himself?” Jonathan said.

“I’m not convinced he’s going to be here,” I said. “Ever.”

I meant that when I said it. I really believed I might never see my father again. That he would vanish somewhere between Petaluma and the Golden Gate Bridge. When he did arrive the next day, I wasn’t there. I was at the hospital, then the Mermaid Inn. So he was greeted by my mother. Did they embrace? Was it as easy for her to have him there as it was for me, when I finally did come home? Was it as if they had never been apart?

You and Emme sat quietly at the table through my rant about my father, but Emme stood up abruptly when I stopped speaking, knocking over your half-full beer. Her eyes were suddenly blazing, and she was leaning toward me with both hands open, as if she intended to strangle me.

“You bloody fucking cunt,” she said. “At least your bloody fucking parents are bloody fucking alive.”

The three of us were shocked into silence, and instinctively I put my hands up to defend myself. Emme pulled back and stood upright again at her place. She was gripping the edge of the table with her hands, and for a terrifying second I thought she was going to overturn it. I wish she had. There was nobody on the other side. The wine, the beer, the dessert plates, the forks and knives and candles would have been pitched onto the hardwood floor, and that mess might have been enough for us to recognize the extent of her mania and detain her until we could get help.