Acts of God (28 page)

Bruno sat across from me at the kitchen table, pondering my slightest change in facial expression. “Bruno, this is fascinating. It really is very interesting.” It seemed that Bruno had decided he could not write his doctoral dissertation without my help. So he brought to me page after page, note after note. Every word he wrote he ran by me.

He smiled at me, the smile of a child who has done something to please his parents. “Tell me. What do you like about it?”

“Oh, I don't know. I like the way it tells a story and that somehow the story it tells helps you understand the man.” Bruno blinked, brushing his sandy hair out of his eyes. His hand trembled as it moved past his face. He seemed genuinely thrilled. I really didn't know what I liked about it until I said that to him. No one had asked me to read his doctoral dissertation before, and in a way it seemed rather boring, but interesting at the same time. “I like the way these events shaped this man's life. That's interesting.”

He nodded, hanging on my every word.

I paused. “You must keep going,” I told him. “I think it is very good.”

“Oh, it means so much to me. That you like it. You know, Tess, I feel such an affinity for this man. In some ways our lives have been similar. I grew up in the East and didn't do very well in school—”

“And were you ever almost struck by lightning?” With a laugh Bruno shook his head no. “But you did have a falling-out with your family?” I asked a bit more gently for I could see where this conversation was heading.

Bruno nodded. “Yes, you know, my father was a minister and we didn't always see things eye to eye. I was seeing this girl, she was older. Anyway, my mother hated her and my father went along. When I moved in with the girl, we stopped talking. I felt they never approved of anything I did. We didn't talk for almost four years.”

“How old are you now?”

“I'm twenty-six.”

“So you must have been young when you had your falling-out.”

“We only patched it up last year, but now we're good friends again.”

“So are you writing this dissertation to find your father?”

Bruno thought about this for a moment, then shook his head. “To find myself,” he said. “What about you, Tess? I don't know anything about you or your family.”

“My mother lives in Chicago. My father died nine or ten years ago.” Bruno gave me an odd look which I didn't understand at the time, but I know he was surprised that I couldn't recall the exact number of years. “He was an insurance salesman, on the road a fair amount. I have two brothers. We were an ordinary family. There was hardly anything unusual about us at all.”

*   *   *

Nick phoned every day. It wasn't always easy with the time difference. Often he called collect from pay phones. He didn't want the calls to be on any of his accounts or on his calling card. But dutifully each week he sent me fifty dollars, which was what he assumed the calls were costing me. I was starting to think how we could live together, dividing our time between Illinois and the Coast, the best of both worlds. I started to have dreams of the future again.

Otherwise my life went as usual. Someone trashed the seashell house and Shana was beside herself. Vandals had gotten in during a few days when the house wasn't occupied and smashed the cowrie-shell mirror, shattered the scallop coffee table.

I had to deal with the owners, who threatened to sue us. I convinced them that it was an act of vandals and that the house was unoccupied at the time, but still there was much to do to straighten out the mess. During that time I became surrogate mother for a few weeks to two orphaned sea otter pups. And the National Registry of Historic Houses sent an inspector to look at the house.

I'd actually forgotten that I'd mailed in my application, but a very tall, thin woman knocked on my door one day and said she had come to inspect the house for the registry. She didn't say a word to me as she poked through rooms, stood across the street from the house, taking its picture. She wrote notes on a pad and after about an hour, she told me I'd receive a letter in a few months and that she thought it was a nice house, but she could not say if she would recommend it for the registry. I told her I wouldn't get my hopes up.

A few weeks later Ted returned with a story to tell—not a terribly pretty one. Sabe was into drugs and Ted had gotten out of there. Soon both of my children became aware of the fact that I was accepting collect calls from gas stations and phone booths in the Midwest and they each asked me what I had going on. I told them what they had often told me. That it was my business and if and when I was ready to share it with them, I would.

Neither of them liked this answer. Jade asked me to go to lunch with her, where she pressed for details. She looked different than she had before going away. Her features were softer, her hair longer, no more purple spikes, though now she had a small gold nose ring. I confided in her as one might in a friend that I was seeing a man I'd known for almost my entire life, that his marriage was breaking up, and we hoped to find a way to be together.

Jade's jaw dropped when I told her this. “You aren't serious? That is so cool.”

“I am serious,” I said.

She gave me a little sock in the arm. “That's great, Mom.”

They both got jobs. It was the law I laid down before I'd let either of them back in the house. Jade left her part-time position and went to work as a manager at a coffee-roasting factory. She came home smelling like the hills of Java. Ted got hooked up with an on-line company that sold space on the Web. He actually had a knack for this and began designing Web sites.

Then in the middle of the summer Nick called and said he could come out for a few days. He said to book us a room somewhere I liked to go and we'd have our first romantic getaway. I hesitated and he asked me what was wrong. “I can't do this,” I told him. “Not while you're still living with her. Not while she doesn't know. I just can't do it behind her back.”

“Tessie, I'm leaving her. Look, I was planning to tell her. I wanted her to know before I saw you, but she seems so fragile. Unstable, really. I don't know what it is, but it's as if she's transparent. She's not really there. She stares into space. Maybe she's on drugs. I feel as if I am living with a ghost, but I have to think of Danielle. I want to come and see you, and once I know what I'm going to do and when, then I'll tell her.”

“It just doesn't seem right.”

“Tess, she's going to know soon. Let me come and see you. I want to talk to you about it. Then we'll decide.”

*   *   *

Along the coast the road dips and turns. Below Monterey the real cliffs begin. From the rocky points you can see terrifying vistas, the sea crashing against the shore. Nick had never seen this part of the coast and so I picked the Mermaid Inn down at Big Sur, though it was expensive. He said he didn't care what it cost. He just wanted to be with me. He flew into San Jose, where I picked him up, and we drove straight to the coast. He was stunned as the road curved and we followed the rocky coast down.

The Mermaid had a wooden mermaid over its entranceway. Our cabin had its own redwood hot tub with a special eucalyptus soap you could bathe in, a steambath, long paths lined with ice plants that led down to the ocean. First we took a long walk, climbing down the craggy pathways until we stood on a small, solitary beach. Seals and a pair of sea otters frolicked in the surf. Nick stood in the sand in his bare feet, just breathing in the air. “You're lucky, Tess,” he told me, his arm firmly around my shoulder. “You got away.”

“You've said that before. I know you think I did but I'm not really sure,” I told him, “but, anyway, you could too.”

“I'm going to.” He squeezed my neck. “Just watch me.”

When we got back to the room, Nick wanted to take a Jacuzzi bath. While the bath was getting ready, we ordered dinner in our room—seafood, salad, a bottle of California Chardonnay. Easing his way into the hot tub, Nick took a washcloth, dipped it in the eucalyptus suds, and began to wash me. He scrubbed the back of my neck and behind my ears. He let the washcloth dip under my arms, down my back. He brought it around in front of me, massaging beneath my breasts, along the ridges of my face. He covered me with suds and I lay back as the hot jets and the smell of eucalyptus and the motion of his hand on my skin made me drowsy.

I dropped my head against his chest as he reached down to my belly. I opened my thighs and he rubbed me between my legs. He moved his hand up and down, letting the washcloth reach farther and farther, coming back up slowly. Then he dipped back down again, rubbing me as I drifted, the air filled with the smell of redwood and eucalyptus.

Then we both got out, wrapped ourselves in the big terry-cloth robes, and made love slowly on the bed until we fell asleep. We woke when there was a knock at the door and a young waiter discreetly brought our dinner tray in, leaving it in the entranceway. Over dinner, we talked about Margaret and what we were going to do. “When are you going to tell her?” I asked.

“When I get back. We aren't even sleeping in the same room. We're hardly together.”

“But still, I'd feel better—”

“It's not like you're taking me away from her. In most ways, except for Danielle, I'm already gone.” I kissed him on the lips, and he kissed me back. “All right, if you'd feel better, I'll do it in a few weeks when the time seems right. Then we can be together.”

“Yes, we can be together.”

Then he lay back, staring at the ceiling. “You know, I've never done anything for myself. Everything has always been what other people—mainly my father—wanted me to do. Of course, he didn't want me to marry Margaret. He thought she was trash. Maybe I just did it to get back at him. Because I thought it was the way to have my own life. Anyway, it didn't work.” He leaned over and pulled me to him. “I want something that's mine. My house, my work. Not what other people want me to have. Do you understand that, Tess?”

“Yes, I do understand.”

“I know you do.” He rested his face in my hair. “I know.” In bed at night we made our plans. In October he would move out. He'd take a small apartment in town to be near Danielle. Then we'd decide what we were going to do. We'd figure out a way to divide our time. He'd help me refinance the Eagger house. I'd spend as much time in Illinois as I could. It all seemed fitting somehow. That after all these years I could finally go home.

“I've got this idea,” he said. “We should plan to meet somewhere in town. At Starbucks or the bookstore. Run into one another as if we'd just met.”

“Oh, we could do it in front of the Italian cookbooks.”

“That's good,” Nick said with a laugh, “I'll be working on my cooking anyway.”

“People will see us; they'll think we've just met. So when we start to see one another, it won't be such a big deal.”

“Yes, let's do that,” he said. “Until then it will be our secret.”

“Yes,” I said, kissing him on the nose.

That night there was an angry storm at sea. Lightning forks shattered around us, thunder rolled like in some B-grade horror film. “I think a monster's going to walk in the door,” I told him. Nick held me, stroking my hair. I told him about the little boy who got out of bed one night to go to the bathroom and lightning burned a “Z” over his bed. Like Zorro, I told him.

“What happened to the boy?” Nick wanted to know.

“He became a poet; I live in his house.”

When we drove back up to my place the next day, the kids had made a dinner of spaghetti with broccoli and a green salad from our vegetable patch, which they'd neatly tended while I was away. They'd uncorked a wine bottle and set the table. I can't remember when they'd last done those things. Ted was dressed in a polo shirt and he shook Nick's hand. Jade did the same, looking him up and down the way she can do. But if I'd brought home a Martian, they would have approved. “Well, it's nice to meet you,” Jade said so politely I almost didn't recognize her. “We've heard so much about you.”

Over dinner Nick kept telling them how lucky they were to have me as their mother. He told them how in grammar school and high school I'd been such a popular girl. Their eyes widened in disbelief. I don't remember being that popular, but it was nice of him to tell the children that this was how he remembered me.

That night after we made love, I could just make out his face, those deep blue eyes. The house was quiet, only the katydids sang outside. They'd been brought out in the storm. From my bed we listened to the rise and fall of their song.

37

When early fall came, I
was called back to Illinois in part because of my mother. Art told me she had left Post-its all over the apartment with our names, phone numbers, and birthdays written on them. But I was also drawn back, not only by Nick, but by something deeper in me than I can name. Even from California I could almost smell the crispness in the air, the scent of burning leaves. It had been so long since I'd seen the leaves turn, the seasons change.

If there is a place on the earth from where my life springs it is this place. This lake and this land, the golden light shining through the leaves as they turn, the hint of winter in the air, or the wetness of trails, the pull of the ground sucking down on your shoes and spitting you back again whole. I felt the pull of what I had known and what I had left behind. If longing has a tug, it is like that wet Illinois earth sucking on the soles of your feet.

I hopped into a cab at O'Hare and the driver, a West Indian man, asked me where I wanted to go. I hesitated because I wanted to go to Winonah, to find Nick and take him away with me. But we had both agreed that we had to be patient. We had to wait. He was sorting out what he needed to do with his marriage and Danielle. And I was still not about to rush into anything. Besides, my mother needed looking after.