Dancing After Hours (18 page)

“Then you know what? I had one clear thought: What’s the difference between stopping now and going through with it? And it seemed right. Not the question, but the answer that was already in the question. There’s no difference; that’s what I felt, this great pull just to kiss him and get it done. We were still breathing hard. I said: ‘I have to go.’ He said: ‘I understand.’ He looked like he wanted to kiss me good night, hug me, maybe just a little kiss; I shook my head. He got out and shut the door and lowered his face to the window. I said: ‘I’ll see you Thursday.’ He nodded, and I said: ‘I’ll see you carefully.’ ‘I won’t bother you,’ he said. Some of them think you’re dormant till they kiss you. I said: ‘I know.’ I buckled the seat belt and started the car. He said: ‘Good night, LuAnn.’ He said it sweetly. I said: ‘Good night’ while I was shifting gears; then I drove. I looked in the mirror. He was standing by the road, watching. I stuck my arm out and waved. He waved. The road curved and I couldn’t see him anymore and I drove home.”

“Intact.”

The path turned and LuAnn looked at the light on the river, then the trees on her right, and shadows on the ground beneath them and sunlight on fallen brown leaves. Then she looked ahead, at the stadium and the park.

“I guess so.” She looked at Marsha. “Would you say intact?”

“Yes. That’s what the struggle was about.”

“It’s still going on.”

“No smoking in the car.”

“No.”

In the stadium the music was joyful and LuAnn walked to its beat. They passed the boys playing basketball, and she said: “I’ll go to confession today.”

“Really?”

“It’s at four on Saturdays.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Not much.”

“Do you think you need to?”

“Yes.”

“To be forgiven?”

“No. I’m always being forgiven. But I’ll get strength from it. We do it face-to-face now. I’ll just go sit with the priest and tell him.”

“If you tell him like you told me, you’ll have another struggle on your hands.”

“It’s a very simple language. I’ll say I placed myself in the occasion of sin, and I nearly committed adultery, and I don’t want that to happen, ever.”

“So you rehearse it?”

“I did, driving home Thursday night.”

They came to the parking lot and slowed their pace, then stopped and turned around and stood watching the boys play. Marsha said: “That’s it? What will the priest say?”

“Not much. Tell me to do something, and absolve me.”

“Penance?”

“Not on my knees for hours. He’ll probably tell me to spend a few minutes with God, asking for help. I’ll be talking to you, too.”

Marsha held LuAnn’s shoulder, looked at her eyes.

“Do not
ever
tell Ted.”

“No. It wasn’t him in the car. And why ever tell him there was a time when there wasn’t him? There wasn’t even Julia and Elizabeth and Sam; there was just me. It was the jeans that saved me. If I had been wearing a skirt I could’ve just pulled up. There wouldn’t have been those seconds when I was only touching my own skin. And you can’t be saved by jeans. So it was God, grace; and I don’t think of Him with eyes, glancing away from all the horror and seeing what I was doing and stopping me before He turned away again to look aghast at the world. I don’t know how it happens.”

Marsha lowered her hand and smiled.

“Some people would just say you were being good.”

“What I was being was hot. If I take all the credit for getting out of it, I have to take all the blame for getting into it, too. That’s too simple, and too unbearable. My job is to try, and to be vigilant, and keep hoping. I need my jacket, and some water.”

They turned and walked to the car.

S
HE ALWAYS KNEW SHE WOULD BE A WIDOW;
why, even before she was a bride, when she was engaged, she knew, in moments when she imagined herself very old, saw herself slow and lined and gray in a house alone, with photographs of children and grandchildren on a mantel over the fire. It was what women did, and she glimpsed it, over the years, as she glimpsed her own death. She had the children and the grandchildren, and some of the grandchildren moved to other states, but most of them stayed, and all her children did, close enough to visit by car, and they came to her, too, and filled her little house. The photographs hung in the bedroom and in the hall, and were on the mantel above the fireplace.

She was seventy-seven and her husband was, too,
and by now she had buried her parents and his, and a sister, and two of his brothers, and so many friends; and that had begun in her thirties, burying friends who were taken young. So she knew death was inside of her, inside him, too; something in her body would change—would stumble and fall, or stop, or let go; and something in his would. She did not want to lie helpless in bed for a long time, in pain, and she did not want him to, but she knew it was the way: you went to a doctor because of some trouble your body couldn’t leave behind; then you were in the hospital; then you came home and took medicine and died.

Her life ending worried her very little, for here she was each morning, with him; he was long retired from the post office, and they ate breakfast and went for a walk in good weather, sometimes even in the cold when one of their sons shoveled the driveway and the sidewalk and poured rock salt so they wouldn’t slip and fall and break a bone; and they went to the children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren came to them, and there was the house to keep, and the cooking, and their garden, and friends for a visit. They had plots in the cemetery and she knew everything that had to be done. She had four children, and when she called them with news, she started with the firstborn, then the next, and so on to the last; and this is how she planned to phone them, after she called the doctor, when whatever was coming to her husband came. Then she would watch as in the hospital bed and then in their bed he shrank and died, and near the end the family would all gather to see him alive. Then he would not be, and she would be alone in the house,
with the telephone and the car and the children coming to see her.

But on the summer night when he died while she slept, probably while he slept, too, she woke in the cool dark, the windows open and a pale light in the sky, and the birds singing, and she knew before she turned to him, and she did not think of her children, or of being alone. She rolled toward him and touched his face, and her love went out of her, into his cooling skin, and she wept for what it had done to him, crept up and taken him while he slept and dreamed. Maybe it came out of a dream and the dream became it. Wept, lying on her side, with her hand on his cheek, because he had been alone with it, surprised, maybe confused now as he wandered while the birds sang, seeing the birds, seeing her lying beside his flesh, touching his cheek, saying: “Oh hon—”

O
N A DARK WINTER MORNING, UPSTAIRS IN
her new home, LuAnn woke to classical piano on the clock radio; she was in her forty-fourth year, she had a few strands of gray in her long black hair, and this was her eighty-third day without smoking; before opening her eyes she remembered dreaming in the night of a red-and-white package of cigarettes. Then she looked at Ted limping naked to the closet. He was a big man; the sideburns of his brown beard were gray. His knee had been shattered and torn by shrapnel when he was nineteen in Vietnam, and it would not completely bend, and often it was painful. She turned off the radio, and in the silence she could feel her children sleeping; it was as though she heard their breath and saw their faces on pillows. She stood, wearing a
white gown, and started to make the bed, and Ted in his burgundy robe came to help, and she remembered last night’s lovemaking, and watched him smoothing the blue satin comforter. She said: “I dreamed of cigarettes last night.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“I’d love one now, with coffee.”

“So would I.”

“Great. Is that why I’m doing this? So eighteen years from now I’ll want to smoke?”

His blue eyes watched her. That is what he did most of the time, when she was angry or sad or frightened: watched her and listened. He had told her he stopped believing in advice years before he met her, or stopped believing people wanted advice; they wanted to be looked at and heard by someone who loved them. She said: “Nice night, Ted.”

“Yes.” He smiled. “Nice night, LuAnn.”

He went to the bathroom at the far end of the hall, and she went to the one she shared with Julia and Elizabeth. She put on makeup, and in the bedroom she dressed in jeans and a green turtleneck and high black boots. Then she went to the children’s rooms and woke them by placing a hand on their shoulders: Julia, her first child, who was ten, then Elizabeth, then Sam, lying among stuffed bears. She always woke them gently because she felt she was pulling them from childhood. They were dark-haired, sleepy, and slow to dress. She knew they were slow because they were reluctant, but there was something more, something she wanted to acquire; they were slow in summer, too, dressing for the beach. Hurry was imposed on them by adults; they had not lived long enough to see time as something they
should control, long enough to believe they could. LuAnn had taken maternity leave to give birth to Julia, and had not gone back to her job. She had been the publicity director of a small publisher in Boston. Two years later Elizabeth was born, and after another two Sam, and by then LuAnn knew what these children knew: they ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, and looked at the present with curiosity. She was trying to focus on the present now, as she went downstairs, aware of her breathing, her leg muscles, the smell of coffee, the electric light in the dining room and twilight in the living room; and wanting to smoke, then calling over her shoulder to the children to hurry.

In the kitchen, Ted stood with his cane, pouring coffee; he wore his blue double-breasted suit and a red tie with a pale blue shirt. He was flying to Baltimore to take a deposition and would stay there for the night. He had brought in the newspaper from the box at the end of their long driveway that curved downhill through trees. He put a spoon of sugar and some hot milk from a pot in her coffee, then handed it to her. He stood resting on his cane as she took her first sip; then with a finger he touched her knuckles at the handle of the cup, and bent down and gave her a quick kiss; his throat and his cheeks above his beard smelled of aftershave lotion, and she breathed that with the aroma of coffee and said: “You’re not bad, Ted Briggs.”

“Neither are you, Ms. Arceneaux.”

She went through the mudroom, where boots were on benches and coats hung on pegs, and stepped outside, and smelled snow in the air. The evergreens were still black and the sky was dark gray. She breathed
deeply into her stomach and looked up at the sky and raised her arms. She went back into the light of the kitchen; upstairs the children’s steps were slow but steady, so she did not call to them. Ted was making sandwiches at the counter. She took three grapefruit from the refrigerator and stood beside him and sliced the grapefruit in halves, then cut their sections from the rind. She drank coffee and poured measuring cups of water into a pot. Until eighty-three days ago she had waked herself each morning for twenty-six years with coffee and cigarettes. Her flesh could not remember what it had felt, waking without wanting those. She stepped to the sink and poured out her coffee, then spread butter on eight slices of bread, and margarine on two. Ted’s cholesterol was high, and she obeyed the rules about that, and imposed them on him; she ate what she wanted to, and she did not give margarine to the children because she did not trust it, suspecting that decades from now it would attack them in ways no one had predicted. She sprinkled brown sugar on the bread, then cinnamon, and looked at Ted’s profile and said: “You could cheat tonight, you know. Have yourself a great dinner.”

“I plan to.”

She wondered if she had really been talking about food, then knew that she was, and it had reminded her of adultery. Once she had nearly cheated, and she had learned how simple and even negligible it could be, making love with someone else while loving your husband; and since then she had known it could happen to Ted, as easily as a tire blowing out, or a bluefish striking his hook. She had told none of this to him; she had
told Marsha and had confessed to a priest that in her heart she had been unfaithful, though not with her body.

He sliced the sandwiches in triangular halves, wrapped them in waxed paper, and placed them in the three lunch boxes. They were red, blue, yellow. He wrapped cookies and put in each box an apple and a tangerine. She imagined him tonight eating pâté and duck, and herself in the living room, after the children were asleep, smoking cigarettes. She looked at the clock and was about to call the children, knowing her voice would be high and tense, but then she heard them on the stairs. They came into the dining room, Julia and Elizabeth murmuring, Sam gazing, seeing something in his mind that was nowhere in the room. She quietly marveled at these little people: they were dressed; they wore shoes; their hair was brushed. Probably their beds were made. She sat with them and Ted and ate grapefruit. Then she boiled the water in the pot, measured oatmeal into it, and watched it boil again, then lowered the flame. She slid the pan of cinnamon bread into the oven, left the door partially open, and turned on the broiler.

Her mind was eluding her: it was living the day ahead of her; it was in the aisle of the supermarket, it was bringing the groceries into the house and putting them away; it was driving to the gym for aerobics and weight training; it was home eating lunch, then taking clothes to the dry cleaners and getting the clothes that were there, and driving home before three-forty when the school bus brought the children to the driveway; it was lighting charcoal in the grill on the sundeck. Maybe snow would be falling then; she loved cooking
in the snow. She had a housekeeper three days a week and she liked running the household. None of it absorbed her fully enough to imprison her mind, as some work in school and some at the publishing house had. So freedom was both her challenge and her vocation: she was free on most days and nights to concentrate fully on the moment at hand, and this was far more difficult than performing work she had been assigned as a student for sixteen years, and a worker for eleven. She had told Ted she must learn to be five again, before time began to mean what one could produce in its passing; or to be like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew so young that the essence of life was in the simplest of tasks, and in kindness to the people in your life. Watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about snow, she told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical form that love assumed in this moment, as last night’s lovemaking was, as most of her actions were. When she was able to remember this and concentrate on it, she knew the significance of what she was doing; as now, using a pot holder, she drew the pan from the oven, then spooned oatmeal into bowls her family came from the dining room to receive from her hands.