Blame: A Novel (26 page)

•

Patsy hoped to keep this conversation going alongside her marriage forever. Not at the same high pitch, of course. The novelty would dim, their fervor would cool, Lewis would probably fall in love with someone at some point, but why couldn’t their steady, voluble friendship continue?

As if in preparation, they told the stories of their friends and friendships, discussed the odd and unexpected arrangements people made for happiness.

He had been lovers with Libby, the fiddle player, before her marriage to his sponsor. In fact, there had been a love triangle between Lewis, his sponsor, and Libby. I lost out, Lewis said, and I deserved to.

But he and Libby had ended up very close—family, he said.

•

Sarah’s feelings for her Asian studies guy had quieted to workable levels within two years; the two still drew together at school get-togethers, still fluffed up in each other’s company, but Sarah’s pain and longing had bled off—and this de-escalation was accomplished without a single declaration or kiss. After riding the whole wild arc, Sarah had landed safely within her marriage, her daughters blessedly ignorant. And what had thin-lipped Henry Croft even noticed? He’d replaced their back lawn with grapevines and was learning to make wine.

Margaret’s young poli-sci major had proved immature and dull; the infatuation died in six months, the whole of it conducted and concluded with only a few inadvertent hand brushes, the great swells of Margaret’s passion having been adroitly redirected to her unsuspecting Sam.

•

Well well well, said Cal. What brought this on?

Accustomed to initiating, he was possibly disconcerted. But he warmed up, and his long, smooth, pale legs nudged hers apart.

He was seventy-six, calm and thorough. He now made a soft, popping noise when he kissed. The same noise her grandfather had made when she was little. An old man’s kiss.

His new doctor, a men’s health specialist, had said that Cal’s testosterone levels were remarkably high. I can tell by the blueness and clarity of his eyes, the doctor told Patsy, and also his mental acuity.

Lewis’s eyes were brown.

•

Is there a reason you’ve never invited me to your house?

Yes, she said. I don’t want to see you of all people go gaga over Cal. And you will. He’s got that AA charisma, like your old sponsor had. He has groupies by the dozen. I don’t want to see you join their ranks.

His laugh was always surprised, as if the world had found yet another way to catch him off guard. I may not be as susceptible as you think, he said.

I’m not taking any chances, she said.

A few weeks later they were in his office, a reconditioned janitor’s closet assigned to the rotating adjuncts. Bookshelves lined the long walls, leaving room for a desk and two plain chairs, but Lewis and Patsy were standing, discussing where they should have dinner.

So why is it you’ve never taken me to the Ponderosa?

I told you. I want to keep you for myself.

How seriously do you mean that?

I mean it, Patsy said, but catching a new seriousness in his tone, she waved her hand. If you really want to, we could go tonight. I think Haydee made carne asada today. But remember—I’m not sharing you with Cal.

And what if I don’t want to share you with him? Lewis said in a low voice. In the pitiless fluorescent light, his face was white with fear.

Don’t! she said. Stop. Time to change the subject! Ding!

He caught her wrist. This is love, Patsy, he said. In case you didn’t know.

•

She had not said what was on the tip of her tongue: I’d never leave Cal for you. She held back because she wanted the moment to last, she wasn’t ready for it all to be over just like that.

Oh, she said. Oh god.

Didn’t Lewis know that she wasn’t a person to act on grand passions or inflict gratuitous pain? That she was still working off a backlog of guilt?

He said, We have to be together, Patsy.

She shook her head. Not like that, she said.

Like what, then? Like I’m your brother or your pet? No!

He caught himself and, bowing his head, gave his scalp a good scratch. He seemed calmer when he looked up. At least think about it, Patsy. Let’s not make a decision now. Let’s just go get something to eat.

But she couldn’t. She was sweating and shaking, and had to get away.

What made him think there was a decision?

I can’t, she said. I have to go.

It was mid-February, cold and freshly dark. The first stars were pink and overlarge. She was nauseous and elated and furious. If he’d only kept his mouth shut, they could’ve ridden it out to a lower key and gone on for years.

She hadn’t driven far when she thought, Well, why not leave Cal? His kids—well, at least March—still considered their marriage unseemly. Her family probably did too, but they were too guarded and polite to say so. Of course, in AA she and Cal were regarded as royalty. No harm in popping that bubble.

Even Lewis had been incredulous: You’re married to Cal Sharp?

Yes, yes she was. And she did love Cal, for his goodness, his generosity to her, his unfettered acceptance.
Oh, he’s not so bad, he’s a good egg
—how many times had she heard him say that of one wretch or another? He’d say that about Lewis if he’d witnessed their last scene.

And how many lost souls and wounded birds, in the sway of Cal’s benignant goodwill, had pulled together a few meager strands of self to prove Cal’s assessment correct? Patsy herself had flourished in the great open field of her husband’s acceptance. He asked little of her except that she enjoy her life, accept his dry pop of a kiss, and be kind to his children. She might not have intense literary discussions with him or love his children and sponsees as much as she’d intended to; she and Cal might never engage in verbal thrusts and parries, but this had rarely bothered her before. They never conversed in depth, never had. She’d had her girlfriends, her colleagues for that.

She was driving in the neighborhood behind Hallen, up and down the hilly streets, half hoping to see Lewis, slouching and furious, searching for her. She went past the campus again, slowly by the parking lot. His funny little car, a 1969 BMW 2002 with an exhaust problem, was gone.

She couldn’t imagine nights without talking to him. He’d ruined her for Cal alone. Cal, who had almost no idea what she did, what concerned her, what occupied her day after day.

The previous week, she’d shown Cal the 1993 film
The Age of Innocence
, thinking the movie could give him at least some idea of what her next book was about. He said only that Madame Olenska reminded him of Audrey. When pressed for reasons why, it was because both had moved to Paris.

And later, in bed: That little girl? Cal said. The one Archer married? She would’ve been all right no matter what. She would’ve found someone else.

Otherwise, he’d had little patience for the plot, found Newland Archer’s struggles with convention unnecessary, overwrought.

Of course, Cal’s own life had become unconventional; he’d gone from urbane clubman of impressive inherited wealth to AA lion with dwindling fortunes and an ex-con wife.

And those fortunes had seriously dwindled.

The extravagant family vacations they’d taken had been paid for with capital, as had his children’s educations, everyone’s cars, the down payments on his children’s homes, his and Patsy’s twenty-thousand-dollar Morgan horses. He’d sacrificed the Lyster to stanch a cash-flow crisis. It had taken the shock of losing the Lyster for Patsy to realize Cal was actually profligate. He came from old money, scads of it, but had not mastered the art of preserving it. He would have squandered even more, Audrey told her, if his brothers and nephews hadn’t periodically intervened.

Even so, she and Cal were not poor. Not by a long shot. They had the Ponderosa, two six-unit apartment houses in Glendale, Cal’s income, and other family trickles, not to mention the very investment funds that, having tanked in ’91, were again picking up speed. Patsy was always able to give away as much of her salary as she wanted and had divided it between Burt’s kids and Martin Parnham, whose father, as a low-level civil engineer, could never have sent him through Flintridge Prep and Pepperdine without loans.

Cal had been reliably generous to her. He’d never burdened her with money worries, perhaps because he was insufficiently worried himself. What she’d expected of their marriage—security, mutual comfort, the
room and encouragement to do her own work—had been freely provided. Cal may never have been a voluble soul mate, but he had never given her any grounds to leave or cause him pain.

She could, apparently, cause Lewis pain. But he had forced her hand. Why did he have to speak out and name their predicament?

Once home at the Ponderosa, Patsy went straight to her office. She called Gloria, who said, Hoho, I saw this one coming from about a thousand miles off, ever since you brought Mr. Scruffy Sexy to the meeting some months back.

Love pain, Gloria went on, it’s the worst. It’s what people with ten, twenty, fifty years of sobriety drink over. So I’d stick close to the program, hit a meeting a day till you’re through this.

So Patsy went to a Thursday night meeting and to her home group on Friday. She did not share, she listened, gathering bits to arm herself for whichever loss was to come.

During the day, she shut herself up in her home office and lay on her couch and let herself imagine life in the orange groves in Lewis’s little house (which she had never seen) and farther flung locales. Lewis went to Paris and St. Petersburg each year and had been looking for something small to buy—a studio apartment, a maid’s room in the tenth arrondissement, or some wrecked dacha on the Volga.

Patsy went to a women’s meeting on Saturday morning in a church near the Rose Bowl. Three newly sober young women in a row waxed hyperbolic about the glories of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bored and annoyed, Patsy left during the break and drove through Old Town Pasadena, thinking she’d get a coffee, but couldn’t find a parking place.

As was their custom, she went riding with Cal Saturday afternoon, a slow amble along the foothills and up the arroyo. It was true, she saw, that they barely spoke. They pointed out birds to each other; junco, redheaded sapsucker, rufous-sided towhee. They murmured to their own horses, siblings from different years, Zeno and Diotima, sure-footed bays with intelligent black eyes and pricked, shapely ears.

On Diotima, Patsy dawdled behind Cal through the glens of thin-trunked beech. His great talents had been in AA, but Cal was no longer universally adored there either. For years he’d eschewed psychiatry and even therapy, and had only recently started to come around on antidepressants, which he’d long classed with mood-altering street drugs. If a
man he sponsored had started on Prozac or Effexor, Cal told him to find another sponsor, one more knowledgeable about such things. Patsy periodically hid her own Zoloft in her office.

She’d probably be doing so again, shortly.

Up ahead, Cal pulled Zeno to a halt and pointed. Red-tailed hawk, he said.

•

She phoned Audrey in Paris and spilled the beans. I finally get what you meant about a peer, Patsy said.

Do you have to cut him entirely out of your life? said Audrey. Can’t you bring him home, have him be friends with both you and Cal?

Never, she said, already hoarding what they’d had.

And
une petite affaire
? said Audrey. Out of the question?

It wouldn’t be
petite
, said Patsy. And I couldn’t live with myself.

Well, that’s good, for my brother’s sake. I don’t know about yours.

That night, in bed beside Cal, guilt hit in a toxic black blast, for confiding in Audrey and betraying Cal even that much.

Her fourth meeting in as many days was another women’s meeting, this one on Sunday in a side room of a Lutheran church in Altadena. Patsy knew most of the women around the table, and one, Yvette Stevens, raised her hand to start the sharing.

Yvette was tall too, and willowy, and ten years older than Patsy. She wore her pale gray hair in a soft pageboy; her eyes were round and olive black and quick. She was a high-up administrator at the County Art Museum and moved with social ease between cranky artists and the city’s billionaires.

Yvette, it seemed, was facing a near replica of Patsy’s own dilemma, with a new curator, younger, full of fire, a soul mate if she’d ever met one. Things between them had heated up, Yvette said. And I know where they’re heading.

Patsy had met Yvette’s husband, a good-natured round-shouldered older man whose chin bumped out of a wide, fleshy neck. Buzz Stevens was not unhandsome, despite that neck, and he was very rich. He managed an exclusive mutual fund and made other people rich too. Patsy and Cal ran into them at the opera, at benefits and museum openings.

If I was drinking, I’d jump in headfirst, Yvette went on. And to hell with everyone else. My kids, his kids, our respective spouses.

Patsy admired Yvette for talking about her situation so openly, as she herself hadn’t spoken up once in four meetings.

But after twenty-one years of sobriety, Yvette continued, I might just step around this one. I don’t
have
to sacrifice my marriage, home, and kids to my own erotic impulses. I don’t even have to kick up a ruckus with my husband. I can choose to behave like an adult. A sober adult. Who knows? Renunciation may bring its own rewards.

Well, okay, Patsy thought, walking back to her car in the church lot, that’s that. No privileging my own erotic impulses over my husband’s well-being.

No kicking up a ruckus.

So that’s that, she thought again, driving home. Could it have been spelled out more clearly? Wasn’t that what she’d gone to meeting after meeting to hear? She’d thrown herself upon the program, and her higher power had spoken through the thin, prettily curving lips of elegant Yvette S.

Okay, she muttered, not without relief. If that’s the way it is.

She would not be Anna Karenina, or Emma Bovary, or the Lady with the Lapdog.

•

Lewis said not to come by his office, not to call, not to cross his path. Let’s not draw it out, he said. I’m an old hand at this. The cleaner, the better.