Home Song (18 page)

Finally she gave up the needless task and toppled over on her side, her body bent around the wooden drawer, her forehead at its back panel while a high-pitched keening squeezed from her throat.

Ohh . . . ohhh . . . he didn't want to marry me . . . he didn't love meee . . .

She wanted him to come in and find her lying there in her misery, to witness what he'd reduced her to, because it was genuine and shattering, this state of weeping lethargy.

On the other hand, she didn't want to face him yet because she didn't know what she would say to him, how she would even be able to look at him.

He stayed away, and she lay for an hour while dark fell and the streetlights came on. The air coming in the cracked window grew chilly and tapped the tieback against the window frame. Occasionally a car droned by, and once a motorcycle.

After a long time she heard the phone ring and picked it
up at the same moment Tom did on another extension. She held her breath and listened.

“Tom, it's Monica.”

“Is he back?”

“Yes.”

An unburdening sigh. “Thank God. And he's okay?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“I tried, but he wouldn't say much. He's still too hurt and angry.”

“I guess he's got a right to be, but I just wasn't expecting it. When he came charging in here he really threw me.”

“What did he say?”

“He called me an unscrupulous bastard who just screwed you and left without bothering to find out afterwards if you were pregnant.”

“Oh, Tom, I'm sorry.”

“But he's right. I should have at least given you a call.”

“Or I should have given you a call.”

“Oh, Monica, hell. . .” Another exhausted sigh. “Who knows what we should have done.”

During the following silence Claire imagined the two of them clinging to their separate receivers. She wondered what Monica Arens looked like, what her house looked like, and what part of it he had seen.

“I imagine this is pure hell on your family.” Her voice held great empathy.

“It's killing them. It's . . . oh, shit.” He sounded too emotional to go on.

“Tom, I'm sorry. So much of the blame is mine.” She sounded as if she cared very deeply about him. “Is it going to work out, do you think?”

“I don't know, Monica. Right now I really don't know.”

“How did your wife take it?”

“She cried. She got angry. She hit me. Now nobody in the place is talking.”

“Oh, Tom.”

Claire listened to the two of them breathe for a while, then Tom cleared his throat and spoke hoarsely.

“I guess Claire said it best. She said, ‘Oh, God, what a mess.' ”

“I don't know what I can do at this point, but if there's anything . . .”

“Just try to get Kent to talk, and if you see any danger signs, call me. You know what to look for—depression, withdrawal, if he starts to smoke or drink, break curfew. I'll watch him from this end and keep an eye on his grades.”

“All right. And Tom?”

“Yes?”

“You can call me too, you know. Anytime.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, I guess I'd better go.”

“Sure. Me too.”

“Well, goodbye then. Good luck.”

“Yeah, you too.”

When they'd hung up, so did Claire, to lie on her bed with her heartbeat jarring her entire body. I should not have listened, she thought, because now she's real. Now I've heard the care in her voice for Tom. I've heard them speak with pauses as poignant as dialogue. I've been silent witness to the fact that Kent truly is their son, and I can never deny it: there will always be that tie between them.

And now I know this is not the last conversation they'll have.

She waited for him to come to her and tell her about the call. When he didn't, she grew certain there were feelings
between him and Monica. How could there not be, she reasoned, when they were going though all this together?

A long time later another car went by, forcing her from her lethargy. She propped herself up and sat there feeling shaky, her hip against the dresser drawer, her cap fallen off, reading the aqua blue digits on the bedside clock. Not even nine. Too early for bed yet, but she would not impose herself into his half of the house, risk encountering him someplace out there and having to make decisions about how to act.

She put the drawer back into the dresser by the clock light, took off her shoes and jeans but left her anklets and shirt on. Lacking all energy to find and change into proper sleepwear, she crawled under the covers and curled into a ball, tucking her hands between her knees, facing away from Tom's side of the bed.

A while later she heard him rap quietly on the kids' doors—first one, then the other—going in to talk to each of them, his voice only a distant murmur before he opened their own bedroom door and came inside.

He, too, undressed in the dark, then stretched out on his back without touching her, as if slipping into a pew beside someone who is deep in prayer.

Once again came the absolute stillness, the inexplicable necessity to lie motionless and pretend the other wasn't there, even when bone and muscle seemed to begin humming with the need to move.

All the crying had given Claire a headache, but she stared at the clock, watching numbers change until finally her eyelids grew heavy.

Sometime in the night she awakened to the feeling of his hand on her arm, imploring, trying to turn her over. But
she knocked it off and withdrew tighter onto her side of the bed.

“Don't,” she said.

Nothing more.

C
LAIRE
awakened in the post-dawn haze of an eight o'clock Sunday morning. Outside, fog was shredding and lifting, leaving behind leaves polished by moisture. The sun was up, bathing the yard in coppery light. Behind her, Tom got out of bed and moved quietly across the carpet to the bathroom, closing the door.

She listened to water run, to life resuming, deadened by the events of the previous day. She replayed the dialogues of yesterday, and midway through the rehashing, felt anger seeping in to replace her lassitude. Each drip coming through the bathroom door spurred that anger as she pictured Tom moving about at his morning ablutions. He was carrying forth as if nothing had changed.

It had.

Within the wife who had been wholly committed to her marriage in every healthy way possible, a stranger reared her ugly head, a stubborn, hurt, vindictive woman where a kind, forgiving one had been before. She wanted to hurt him as deeply as he'd hurt her.

He came out of the bathroom and moved to the closet,
where the soft rustle of cotton was punctuated by the ting of metal hangers as he selected a shirt and put it on. She followed his routine as he moved around the room, lying with her eyes open and her cheek to the pillow while his figure glanced across her peripheral vision.

He came to the bedside trouserless, knotting his tie. “Better get up. It's eight twenty-five already. We'll be late for church.”

“I'm not going.”

“Come on, Claire, don't start that. The kids need to see a united front here.”

“I'm not going, I said!” She threw back the covers and stormed out of bed. “My face looks like hell and I'm not in the mood. You take them and go without me.”

A conflagration of anger burst out of nowhere, surprising even him. “Look, I said I was sorry.” He grabbed her arm as she flew past toward the bathroom. “Now, I think it's important that we keep up appearances until we settle this thing.”

“I said, don't touch me!” She jerked free violently. The expression in her eyes shocked him as greatly as the slap she'd delivered yesterday. It warned him not to make a molehill out of this mountain. He stood faced off with her, his heart clamoring as he witnessed a stubborn and aggressive side of her nature that had lain dormant till now.

“Claire,” he pleaded to her back, experiencing a small stab of fear. The bathroom door slammed. Through it, he said, “What should I tell them?”

“You don't have to tell them anything. I'll do my own talking.”

She came out a minute later, belting a robe, and left their bedroom, still in her fat, white anklets, which by now were bulged like gourds. Whatever she said to the children he
didn't hear. When they got in the car he could tell their night had been as troubled as his own, and that they were thrown into a state of fearful confusion by their mother's unlikely balking at a time when she had always been with them before.

“Why didn't Mom come with us?” Chelsea asked.

“I don't know. What did she tell you?”

“That she wasn't emotionally prepared to go out this morning, and that I shouldn't worry. What does that mean, ‘not emotionally prepared'? Did you two have a fight last night?”

“We talked at the park. The rest you heard. After that, nothing more happened.”

“She looked awful.”

“She always looks awful after she cries.”

“But, Dad, she always goes to church. Is she going to stop doing things with us just because she's mad at you?”

“I don't know, Chelsea. I hope not. She's very hurt right now. I think we have to give her time.”

A knot seemed to be gathering around Tom's heart as he saw how, overnight, his children had been affected by his past indiscretion. Chelsea was the one asking the questions, but Robby wore a distressed look, riding in uneasy silence.

Chelsea asked, “You still love her, don't you, Dad?”

She had no idea how her question wrenched his heart. He reached over to squeeze her hand reassuringly. “Of course I do, honey. And we'll get this thing worked through, don't worry. I'm not going to let anything happen to Mom and me.”

After church Claire had breakfast waiting. She was showered, dressed, and made up, moving around the kitchen using snappy efficiency as both shield and weapon. She forced some smiles for the children's benefit. “Hungry? Sit down.”
But their eyes lingered on her to watch what would happen between her and their father. Like an insect around repellent, he kept his distance, buzzing only so close to her before pulling back, conscious of how she pointedly ignored him while pouring juice and coffee, taking warm muffins from the oven. She found a bowl and a spatula for the scrambled eggs. He went to take them out of her hands, his heart racing as he neared her. “Here, I'll do that.” She flinched away, avoiding contact with any part of him as he commandeered the utensils. Her aversion to him was so obvious it threw a pall over the entire meal. She spoke to the children, asking questions—how was church, what were they going to do today, did they have any homework to finish? They answered dutifully, wanting only that she look at their father, speak to him, smile at him as she had before yesterday.

It did not happen.

Her aloofness pervaded the thirty minutes they spent at the table. And when she said to the children, “I thought I'd go to a movie this afternoon. Either of you want to go with me?” they glanced up from their plates with gaunt expressions and made excuses, then slinked off to their bedrooms the minute the breakfast dishes were cleaned up.

It was amazing to Tom how facilely she could avoid all contact with him. She spoke to him when the need arose, answered his questions when he asked them, but he understood as he never had before how simple it was for this woman to slip into a role and stay in character. She was playing the part of the wounded woman, extending civilities only for her children's sake, and she was playing it with Academy Award–winning prowess.

Around one in the afternoon he found her in the living room with student papers stacked on the sofa around her and Streisand singing softly on the stereo. She was wearing
a pair of half-glasses on the tip of her nose, reading a composition and making occasional comments in the margin. The autumn sun filtered through the sheer curtains and threw an obelisk of cinnamon across the carpet near her feet. She wore a French terry jogging suit and thin white canvas shoes. Her knees were crossed, one toe pointing at the floor. He'd always admired the line of her foot when she sat that way, how the forefoot angled down more sharply than other women's and gave the arch a pronounced curve.

He paused in the doorway, rebuffed by her so many times this morning that he hadn't the fortitude to place himself anywhere near her and risk being cold-shouldered again. With his hands in his pockets he watched her.

“Could we talk?” he asked.

She finished reading a paragraph, circled a word, and said, “I don't think so,” without flicking an eyelash his way.

“When?”

“I don't know.”

He sighed and tried to keep from getting angry. This woman seemed a stranger to him, and it was terrifying that he suddenly didn't like her very much.

“I thought you were going to a movie.”

“At three.”

“May I go along?”

There might have been a quarter beat when her eyes stopped roving over the paper, just before her eyebrows rose haughtily, her gaze still trimmed on the sheet in her hand. “No, Tom, I don't think so.”

He tried even harder to keep from getting angry. “So how long are you going to treat me as if I'm not in the room?”

“I've spoken to you, haven't I?”

He snorted derisively and twisted his head as if water were in his ear. “Is that what you call it?”

She flapped a pair of stapled sheets into order, laid them aside, and picked up another set.

“The kids are scared,” he said, “can't you see that? They need to know that you and I are at least
trying
to work this out.”

Her eyes stopped scanning the composition, but she deigned not to lift them to him.

“They're not the only ones,” she said.

He risked it, pulling forward from his position in the doorway to go to her, sitting down on the edge of the sofa, separated from her by a stack of student papers.

“Then let's talk about it,” he urged. “I'm scared too, so that makes all four of us, but if you won't meet me halfway I can't do it all by myself.”

With the red pen crooked in her finger she picked up a batch of papers and tamped them on her knee. Over her glasses she leveled him with a gaze of faint disdain.

“I need some time. Can you understand that?”

“Time to do what? Perfect your acting technique? You're at it again, you know, but you'd better be careful, Claire, because this is real life and there's a whole family hurting.”

“How dare you!” she snapped. “
You
betrayed
me
, and then accuse me of pretending to be hurt when—”

“I didn't mean it that way—”

“—I'm the one who had to hear that my husband didn't want to marry me—”

“—I never meant that I didn't want to marry you—”

“—and that you were screwing another woman.
You
try getting a slap in the face like that and see how you react!”

“Claire, keep your voice down.”

“Don't tell me what to do! I'll shout if I want to, and I'll hurt if I want to, and I'll go to the movie by myself, because
right now I cannot bear to be in the same room with you, so get out and let me lick my wounds the way I please!”

The children were still in their rooms and he didn't want them to hear any more, so he left, stung afresh by Claire's tirade. He had made things worse. All he'd meant to do was warn her that they needed to talk things out, not accuse her of having no grounds for hurt. She had grounds, all right, but her stubbornness was wearing thin, and no matter what she said, she
was
indulging in some role-playing. Always before, whenever they disagreed, they'd discussed it sensibly, right away. Disagreeing with respect was what had made their relationship endure. What had gotten into her? Slapping him, shunning him, refusing to communicate, then bursting into a rage and throwing him out.

Claire?

He still found himself stunned by this reaction he had not expected from a woman he thought he knew, so stunned that he had to talk to somebody about it.

 

His dad's log cabin looked like something straight out of the Smoky Mountains. The walls were the color of sorghum, the chimney stone and the front porch unscreened.

Wesley's voice came around the corner as Tom opened his car door.

“Who's comin'?” he yelled.

“It's me, Dad.”

“I'm on the front porch! Come on around here!”

Wesley had never put in a driveway. Just the two tire ruts leading up to the back door and beyond to an old shack near the water, where he stored his boat and motor in the winter. Neither did he bother to mow his lot very often. Two or three times a year if he felt like it. Clover and dandelions thrived in the sunny stretch out front, between lofty white
pines whose carpet of needles was so thick the earth beneath them rolled like sand dunes. They gave off a dry pungency that Tom associated with his youth, those days when his dad had first put a cane pole in his hands and said, “This one's for you, Tommy. All your own. When it starts looking bleached out, you give it a couple coats of spar varnish, and it'll catch you fish for years.”

It was one of Wesley Gardner's peculiarities that he could live an entire life surrounded by a weedy lawn, a muddy driveway, and clothing that could have used changing a lot more regularly, but he kept his fishing equipment in mint condition, lavishing hours of care on it and on his boat and motor.

Tom found him at it when he came around the end of the porch, where Wesley sat working on a rod and reel with an open tackle box at his feet.

“Well, look who's here.”

“Hi, Dad.” Tom climbed the wide front steps.

“Pull up a chair.”

Tom settled into an ancient Adirondack chair to which paint was only a memory. It creaked, taking his weight.

Wesley sat in a matching one, a fiberglass rod between his knees, transferring monofilament line from one reel to another, applying line-cleaning fluid with a dab of cotton, and checking the line for kinks and irregularities. He held the cotton with his left thumb and worked the take-up reel with his right hand. It hissed quietly while the oily smell of the fluid mixed with the fishy one from his clothing. The legs of his plumber-green pants were wide enough to hold three men's legs, short enough to show most of his socks. On his head lolled the ever-present soiled blue fishing cap.

“Whatever brings you out here, it ain't no good,” Wesley said, eyeing his son askance. “I can tell that already.”

“Nope. No good at all.”

“Well, I never knew a problem didn't get a little less serious out here on this porch with that lake out there smiling at a person.”

Tom looked at it, silver-blue and twinkling: this might be one time his dad was wrong.

Wesley refolded his cotton ball and tipped more cleaner onto it. The reel sang once again.

“Dad,” Tom said, “could I ask you something?”

“Asking don't hurt.”

“You ever step out on Mom?”

“Nope.” Wesley didn't miss a beat, cranking the reel. “Didn't need to. She gave me all and plenty of what a man needs. Did it with a smile, too.”

That was the thing Tom liked about his dad: Tom could sit here dropping lead-ins all afternoon and Wesley wouldn't ask. He was a person so comfortable in his own skin that he didn't need to be scratching that of others to see what was below the surface.

“Never, huh?”

“Nope.”