Fortunate Lives (25 page)

“You see what you would have been doing if you’d added anything to her picture, don’t you? It would have been an invasion
of her imagination, which is so fragile at this stage. She’s just beginning to understand what’s real and what’s imagined.”
David looked down at Netta. “I mean, I know you would never have intended anything like that, it’s just that… oh, well. But
you should have thought about the damage you could have done,” she said, glancing up at him to see if she had made her point.

David bent down and kissed her before he even realized what he was doing, and eventually they moved to the futon. Netta left
him for a moment to check and see that Anna Tyson was asleep, and then came back to the living room wearing only her white
cotton bikini panties and bringing with her a foil-wrapped condom, which she handed him with a little shrug of embarrassment.
They
made love uncomfortably on the narrow futon, and it didn’t occur to David to compare Netta and Christie in any way, except
that when the thought of Christie crossed his mind he felt guilty. He fell briefly asleep, balanced precariously on the edge
of the hard couch, and he came abruptly awake with Netta’s arm draped limply around his neck, his chin balanced against the
top of her head. He felt relaxed and unanxious.

When he and Christie made love—even though she was taking birth-control pills and he always used a condom—she became uneasy
and nervous almost immediately afterward. And because of her anxiety, they were edgy toward each other until her period started.
Twice she had driven to Bradford to buy a pregnancy test kit at a drugstore where she wouldn’t see anyone she knew, but each
time she had doubted the results. David was pleased to think that Netta wouldn’t worry about any of this. He was pleased with
everything at the moment. He relished his inclusion in Netta’s chaotic household; he could imagine himself leading a comfortable
life in such a haven.

When he got home that night at 10:30, his father was making popcorn in the kitchen. “I didn’t know you’d be home so early,”
Martin said. “The Red Sox are tied in the bottom of the seventh.” He raised his eyebrows in an invitation to David to join
him.

“I’m really tired,” David said, and passed by his father on his way to his room. Martin watched the popcorn fill the plastic
dome of the popcorn popper, and worried about what might be happening between his son and Christie, wondering if he ought
to follow David upstairs and ask him about it. But when Martin heard the roar of the water in the pipes as David turned on
the shower, he decided to leave things alone for the time being.

Netta lived two doors away from The Whole Grain Elevator, where almost everyone in town shopped for nice vegetables and fresh
fish. Her apartment was half of the
upstairs of a large house right off Carriage Street, along an unmarked, graveled lane called Marchand’s Drive that had become
a shortcut to River Road. Only a few people in town still remembered the Marchand family, who had occupied the large house
in the lane and had owned the thirty-five, acres behind it. Their drive had been extended long after they were gone from West
Bradford. They had sold the house and much of the acreage to the college and a few home builders. Netta’s apartment was fashioned
out of the bedroom and study and dressing room of L. J. Marchand, who had come back to West Bradford after World War II.

Saturday morning Nat Kaplan, an older colleague of Martin’s, had picked up the
Times
at the news room and was glancing over the headlines as he made his way to The Whole Grain Elevator to pick up two loaves
of bread and to see if there was any fresh asparagus. His wife, Moira, was hoping to serve it to their guests for dinner that
evening. When he reached the curb of Marchand’s Drive, he folded the paper and tucked it under his arm and looked up at the
house. For a while L. J. and Amelia Marchand had been great friends of his and Moira’s.

When he and Moira had first moved to West Bradford, they had been delighted with and in awe of L.J.’s and Amelia’s sophistication.
Amelia, who was British, was amused at everything American. She was delighted at what she perceived as a quality of uncritical
innocence, and all her new friends played up to her expectations. The Marchands had been almost fifteen years older than the
Kaplans, and yet Nat and Moira had been adopted by them more or less. L.J. doted on his wife, not only commending her humor
but recounting incidents that illustrated her discriminating and meticulous sense of the ludicrous, her remarkable intelligence.
These were things that Nat admired in his own wife, and it often seemed to him that he learned from L.J. the reasons and all
the ways in which he loved Moira.

The Marchands had been his example of how it was possible to live a married life, although a few years after they had arrived
in West Bradford it turned out, to everyone’s surprise, that they weren’t much good at it themselves. They had divorced amid
surprising rumors of violent brawls between the two of them, one spilling out onto the lawn of their house and being broken
up by their dinner guests. Suddenly stories had abounded of L.J.’s indiscriminate and particularly inelegant affairs, and
there had been a good deal of speculation about Amelia’s involvement with various other men. All this gossip had been very
satisfying to those friends of theirs who had been confronted with their own failures in the face of the Marchands’ smug unity.
But it had saddened and disappointed Nat, although their breakup hadn’t disillusioned him. The model he had perceived when
observing the Marchands at the best of times was valid, even if its practitioners had failed. He had learned much about the
strengths of his own marriage, which had left him and Moira estranged for years from his Jewish family and her Catholic one.

After the divorce, Amelia had gone back to England, and Moira and she had kept up a brief correspondence before eventually
losing touch. L.J. had moved away almost three decades ago to Connecticut, where he had remarried, and Nat had come across
his obituary in the
Times
about seven years ago.

Nat Kaplan was unaware that every time he passed that way he glanced up at the profile of the house, now laced with exterior
wooden staircases after being turned into four units of college housing. Saturday morning, when Nat looked in that direction,
Netta Breckenridge and David Howells were standing on the little porch at the top of her staircase. Netta leaned forward and
ran her hands from David’s shoulders to his waist, resting the tips of her fingers just above his hips. She was apparently
instructing him in
some way, because he nodded and turned and hurried down the steps.

Nat looked away, embarrassed not to have been minding his own business. But two nights later, when he and Moira were crossing
the street on their way to the seven o’clock show at the movie theater, Nat noticed Netta once again under her porch light,
this time with Owen Croft, who was lounging against the railing. When Nat stepped up on the curb and turned to give Moira
his arm, he saw Owen reach forward and pull Netta toward him so that she disappeared entirely from Nat’s sight, since Owen’s
back was to him. Nat was bothered and distracted by the scene all during the movie. He considered the unhappy connection between
David Howells and Owen Croft, and he didn’t like what appeared to be their mutual association with Netta Breckenridge. That
night, before he went to sleep, he mentioned both incidents to Moira.

“Oh, I don’t see how that could mean anything. I think David Howells is only a junior or senior in high school,” Moira said.
“I think he’s going with Meg Cramer or that Douglas girl. Netta Breckenridge must be ten years older than he is. He was probably
helping her with something or doing an errand for her. She has a little girl, you know. He might have been baby-sitting.”
But both Moira and Nat thought about David Howells and Netta Breckenridge and Owen Croft now and then over the next several
days. They remembered the terrible years the Howellses had endured after the death of their second child, and they were both
uneasy.

When Moira and Ellen Hofstatter were sorting through boxes of donated books Tuesday evening for the library’s annual used-book
sale, Moira grasped the opportunity to mention the possible situation lightly to Ellen, as though it were Moira’s own foolishness
even to imagine there was any significance to the little tale. But Ellen’s face puckered in thought as she listened, and she
didn’t respond except to
sigh and tuck one wing of her extravagant hair behind her ear.

When Ellen got home she was brutal in her fury at David and Netta when she told Vic what was going on. “Netta’s just spooky,
but I’m crazy about David. He’s acting like an absolute fool, though, and he’s making Dinah miserable! I don’t know whether
to say anything to Dinah or not. I mean about David and Netta. But I think you’d better warn Martin. The whole thing could
turn into a real mess since Owen’s involved.”

Vic did tell Martin the next day, when they were alone in
The Review
office, and Martin gazed blankly at him for a moment. “Ah, shit. Christ!” And he passed his hands over his temples and into
his hair, swinging his chair away slightly at an angle to Vic. Neither of them said any more about it.

Shortly after David had received his letter of acceptance from Harvard this past spring, he had also received a booklet called
Living in Freshmen Dorms
. He had put it aside, but Dinah had read it thoroughly and had made detailed lists of things he would need: 3 wool blankets;
extra-long twin bed sheets; 1 trash can; 1 chair; 2 lamps, desk & standing; 8 towels and washcloths. It was suggested that
he bring an umbrella. A raincoat. Dinah reeled through all the images she could summon and couldn’t recall ever having seen
a Bradford and Welbern student wearing a raincoat. Sometimes they used umbrellas, especially the girls, but she was certain
she had never seen a single person on campus under the age of twenty-one in anything she would have called a raincoat.

“A raincoat, David. You’ll need a raincoat at Harvard.” She had followed David to his room and was standing in the doorway
while he was leafing through a stack of garden catalogues. “What kind of raincoat
are you going to get? I mean, I wouldn’t think you’d want the London Fog kind.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t need a raincoat.”

Dinah had left him alone, but she had continued to brood about it. It seemed unlikely to her that Harvard would bother to
print up this booklet and list things that David would
not
need.

The next morning at breakfast, she had urged Martin and David to bring Martin’s old trunk down from the attic and put it in
David’s room so that he could begin gathering together the things he would be taking to school in September. This was only
a small chore she asked them to do, a task that would take them perhaps ten minutes, yet it was a request that washed through
their house like a wave, receding and leaving behind the emotional detritus of a thousand other domestic disagreements, accommodations.

Although they did as she asked, both of them made it clear that they were irritated, each in his own way. David merely tightened
his expression, his eyebrows drawing down, his lips tightening against making any spoken objection. Martin had put his coffee
cup down and set aside his toast in pained resignation. “Dinah, the attic is filthy, and I’ve got an appointment with the
dean at ten,” he said. That morning neither David nor Martin had been gracious about being inconvenienced; they thought it
was unnecessary, before David had even graduated from high school, to wrestle the foot locker down the narrow, doglegged staircase
from the attic.

And neither one of them said aloud that he knew too well what Dinah’s air of urgency might portend. Unexecuted plans, lists
of tasks not done—any loose ends—were a torment to Dinah. Her husband and her son dreaded three whole months of her impatient
preparations. What
she
did not say was that David and Martin always made plans
in a slapdash fashion, and then made only desultory, un-thought-out forays into the practical world to do what was necessary
to carry them out.

She understood that David loathed the notion of
non
-spontaneity; he romanticized the idea of a kind of schoolyard, pickup existence. He seemed to be alarmed at taking the future
into account, and so, this past spring, Dinah never said to him that there was nothing less spontaneous than his careful garden.
When she passed by his room and saw him plotting his garden on graph paper, surrounded at his desk by a welter of books and
seed catalogues, she had hoped that this might be a project that would literally and figuratively ground him. As for Martin,
he simply went through life without great anxiety, sure that those things that needed to be done would get done.

And so it was she who, years ago, had found someone to substitute for her at the Artists’ Guild shop, and dashed out to drop
off David’s forgotten running shoes or soccer shorts, or to get the leather shoelaces for the hiking boots he had bought without
laces. It was she who frantically rinsed and arranged the dusty china coffee cups and saucers, and made both coffee and tea
to accompany a birthday cake that Martin had bought at the bakery to be a surprise for Nat Kaplan at an impromptu committee
meeting Martin had called for the same evening. It had not occurred to him that he couldn’t serve the cake with beer. The
loose ends she picked up were the unimportant ones; they earned her next to no gratitude, and the very fact that she continued
to do them maddened Ellen.

“Why do you do these things? It’s not fair to either David or Martin. They take it for granted. Leave them in the lurch a
few times, for God’s sake. They’ll learn to do these things for themselves. Why do you feel your time is less important than
theirs?”

Dinah had never been able to explain it to Ellen. Not for a moment did she believe her time was less valuable
than anyone else’s on earth. Dinah felt that she was, in fact, rather selfish, and that she rarely did anything she didn’t
choose to do. In Martin’s case Dinah knew he did his share; the two of them had settled into an equitable division of labor,
and she relied enormously on his wholehearted optimism and his good nature in taking care of the things that fell into his
domain within their marriage. She didn’t begrudge him any of her time. She found it comforting, in fact, to be attached to
the world by any activity that had a bearing on the real life she lived. She might ponder black holes, anguish over the extinction
of yet another species, the depletion of the ozone layer, the implacable movement of the universe, the inevitable chaos and
tragedy bearing down hard upon the tiny earth, but she also remembered to take all of their skis to Rudy’s Sporting Goods
to be tuned before Thanksgiving.