How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (32 page)

Ginny closes the magazine and looks up at the television. Then she looks at me. “Do you think in this day and age it's possible to win an alienation of affection suit?”

“I believe it's very difficult,” I say. “But I'm afraid it's not my area.” I wish I could tell her something encouraging, save the farm, stay the execution. I imagine myself flat on my back while a hostile jury piles stones on the beam across my chest. I went into law school with a vague notion of righting wrongs. “I don't know much about divorce law,” I say. “Corporate marriages are my field. But I could look into it for you.”

“No, that's okay. I've got a lawyer. I shouldn't be bothering you for advice.” She reaches over and pats my hand. “It's good to have you here. I'm so pleased that Tory has someone like you to take care of her. You're great together.” She lights up a cigarette. “Carol—I'm just relieved that she's not in jail or the nuthouse. If Jesus is what it takes, fine. Although I must say having those two around makes me want to curse and smoke and drink just out of spite.” She looks at her watch.

“How about a drink, Ginny? I picked up a bottle of vodka.”

“Well, I suppose, since it's the weekend. …”

“It's an occasion,” I say. “I think we're well within our rights here.” I fix the drinks. We were pleased to discover, last night, that we both like vodka on the rocks with a splash. Tory, less pleased, thinks her mother drinks too much.

“I'm so glad you're a sinner,” Ginny says. “I can't tell you what a relief it is. Carol and Jim were here for two days before you arrived, and it felt like two weeks. Cheers.”

The phone rings. Ginny jumps up and catches it on the second ring. She says hello three times and hangs up. “That could've been one of three people,” she says after she's back at the table. She raises her hand and holds up a finger. “It could've been my husband, calling to see if I was out so he could sneak over and steal the silver. He tried one afternoon, but Bunny came home and caught him.” She lifts a second finger. “It could've been Bill, Bunny's aging lover. He hangs up if I answer, because he knows I won't let him talk to Bunny. Can you tell me what a young girl would want with a fifty-five-year-old man? And he's married. He keeps telling her he's going to divorce his wife, but he certainly hasn't told the wife yet. Although she knows all about it.” Ginny raises a third finger. “Bill's wife is the other mystery-phone-call candidate. She calls sometimes when she doesn't know where her husband is, to see if Bunny's home. She disguises her voice when she asks for Bunny.”

Ginny takes a long sip of her drink. “You know, I almost feel relieved when I think of Mary drinking beer with boys her own age.”

While I freshen our drinks, Ginny starts dinner. Mary calls to say she's having dinner at Laura's house. I wonder if Ginny knows about Heavy Chevy Billy. I feel uneasy, vaguely responsible for her. What if she's in an accident tonight? Lily cautiously enters the kitchen, without parents, self-conscious and pleased when Ginny and I compliment her on her new dress. She tells us her mommy made it. “Your
mommy
made it?” Ginny says.

Lily nods.

“Christ really does work miracles,” Ginny says.

Tory comes down. “Why didn't you wake me up?” she says.

“For what?”

“I don't know. What have you been doing?”

“Saying bad things about you,” Ginny says. “Want a drink?”

I can tell Tory's looking her mother over to see how much she's had. “I'll have a beer.”

The phone rings again and Ginny grabs it. She says hello several times. Then she says, “I know it's you,” and hangs up.

“Who?” Tory says.

“Who knows,” Ginny responds.

Supper is chicken Kiev, cranberry muffins and asparagus. Carol and Jim take turns scolding Lily for her table manners. He seems very uncertain of his surroundings, and his discomfort makes me feel more at home. Although he has been here two days longer, I feel he's the outsider, the rude interloper. I hate his clothes and his mustache. I also hate the way he snaps at Lily. She's not even his kid. I wink at her across the table. Bunny announces she isn't going to eat anything and makes good on her threat, though she filled her plate to stop the argument. She's upset because her mother yelled at her about the phone calls. The news is on TV. A group in Boston is in front of a hospital, protesting abortion.

“Jim and I belong to a right-to-life group back home,” Carol says.

“A woman should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body,” Bunny says.

“No one has the right to murder the unborn.”

I find it annoying how everyone bandies around the concept of
rights
.

“It would be nice,” Bunny says, “if you people were as concerned with living women as you are with fetuses.”

“Murder,” Carol says. “That's what you're talking about.”

“Is this dinner-table conversation?” Ginny asks.

Tory stands up and excuses herself, then leaves the room.

“That was lovely, girls,” Ginny says. “Tory's going into the hospital on Monday.”

“Excuse me,” I say. “I'll go see if she's all right.”

Tory's in her room, lying facedown on the bed. I sit beside her and stroke her hair. “It's going to be all right.”

She flips over to face me. “All right for you. You don't want children. You're glad about all of this.”

“That's not fair.”

“I wouldn't even be having these problems if it weren't for you. I'd be a mother already if it weren't for you.”

“We weren't ready yet. It would've been a mistake.”

“Carol is right. It's murder.”

“You don't believe that.”

Carol's inside the room before she knocks on the open door, then stands right beside the bed. “I don't mean to barge in,” she says. “But I thought maybe I could be of help.” She lowers her ponderous form onto the mattress. “None of us is strong enough to bear his burden alone.”

“All of us,” Tory says, “are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.”

“Jesus wants to lighten your load. All you have to do is ask.” Carol stretches out her hand to Tory, who examines it and its owner with mild distaste. “Do you love Jesus, Tory?”

“Do I look like a necrophiliac to you?”

I expect Carol to be shocked, but her smile is indelible. “You can run from Jesus, but you can't hide.”

Tory says, “But can you get a restraining order, is what I want to know.”

The evening passes in the kitchen in front of the TV. The women are skilled at dividing their attention between the television and one another, so while never seeming to watch, they will suddenly comment on the action on the screen. The conversation has a casual, intimate rhythm. I listen from outside the circle, a privileged observer. I enjoy studying Tory on her home ground, and am eager to pick up the family lore. I feel a renewed interest, seeing her in this context. More than bone structure and habits of speech, I can see aspects of character I was never quite able to bring into focus suddenly illuminated and framed in their genetic setting. I feel like someone whose appreciation of an artist has been based on a single painting but who then is suddenly admitted to his studio.

My role of licensed connoisseur is compromised by the presence of Jim. Awkward and out of place, he butts into the conversation to ask who or what. He looks resentful, worried that a joke is being perpetrated at his expense. Mercifully, he heads up early after yawning pointedly at his wife. She tells him she'll be up soon. Bunny is up and down. At one point she disappears for most of a sitcom. I find myself sharing Ginny's anger at the old bastard who's stealing her youth.

Ginny keeps saying how nice it is to have everyone home, until, with her fourth drink, she begins to foresee the end of the reunion and slips into sullenness. “Mary's been out every night since she got her license,” she complains to Carol and Tory. “She's no company. She doesn't have time to sit down with her old mom. She's always coming or going, and everything's a big secret. She doesn't tell me anything. And then Bunny. She hates me because I don't want her to throw her life away.”

“She doesn't hate you,” Tory says impatiently.

“Of course she doesn't,” Carol says. “She
loves
you. We
all love
you.”

Ginny looks at Carol through tears and says, “Spare me this indiscriminate love. The trouble with you religious types is that you're promiscuous. Love, love, love. But then, you always
were
a cheap date.”

“Stop it,” Tory says. “That's no way to talk to your daughter.”

“That's all right, Tory,” Carol says. “I understand Mom's anger.”

“No, you don't,” Ginny says, slapping her palm down on the table. “You can't begin to understand my anger.”

I feel I should leave, but right now that would only make my presence more blatant.

“Between your sloppy L-U-V and Tory's Ice Queen judgment, I'm dying for a little daughterly affection.” She shakes her head. “What a brood. And Bunny. As if I need to be reminded about old letches and young bimbos.”

Ginny lights a cigarette. “And where the hell is Mary? She's supposed to be in at eleven o'clock.” We all turn to the clock above the range: It reads 10:40. “All right,” Ginny says, “so she's got twenty minutes.” They all laugh at the same moment, like synchronized swimmers executing an abrupt, graceful maneuver, their anger dispersed.

“Do you think she's still a virgin?” Ginny asks suddenly.

“Of course she is,” Tory says.

“Mary's a sensible girl,” Carol says. “She's not going to let herself be talked into anything.”

I remember Tory told me that Carol had her first abortion when she was fifteen.

“She's only sixteen,” Tory says.

“She's so cute,” Carol says.

“She is,” Ginny says.

Tory turns to me and says, “Isn't she a cutie?”

I could get very inspired on this subject. Instead, I just say, “She sure is.”

Carol says, “Remember that time she stuck the key in the electrical socket?”

At eleven o'clock, Tory announces she's tired. “You don't have to come to bed yet,” she says to me. I would like to stay up with the others, to sit quietly and listen to three women talk, but I say I'll go up with her. Ginny lets us share a room. Everyone kisses good night. Bunny, who has come back down, presses close enough for me to feel her breasts as she kisses me. Carol's breath smells chemically sweetened. Ginny folds me in a long motherly hug. She says she's going up, too.

After she takes off her shirt, Tory points to the small protuberance on her left side. It is the size of a BB, only slightly darker than the surrounding skin. “Do you know that this would have been enough evidence to convict me of witchcraft in the seventeenth century?” she says.

I do know, because she has told me several times, but I say, “Really?”

“It's what they call an ‘auxiliary nipple.’ A devil's teat. Proof that I've been suckling demons.”

“Rules of evidence have advanced a little since then,” I say cheerfully.

“Wouldn't it be strange if in former lives you were a prosecutor at the witch trials and I was a witch?”

“I'm on your side, Tory,” I say, putting my arms around her. As her face disappears against my chest, I see that she is looking not at me but at some region inside herself. “Everything will be all right,” I say. I can still see the sadness in her eyes and mouth. “We'll have children together.” Maybe I say it because I want to sleep with her sisters and I feel guilty about it, or because she thinks that, like her father, I'll leave and I'm afraid she's right.

Lying there after Tory has fallen asleep, I conjure up the image of Bunny and Tory sleeping side by side on this same bed, and think about how I felt then, how I wanted to crawl between them and have both. What I really imagined, seeing these two women who look so much alike, was a single woman who was Tory leavened with Bunny's careless grace. As I drift toward sleep, I superimpose Mary's face, which in the liquor-store parking lot seemed fearless and flushed with sexual anticipation, and to that I add Carol's womb. Then I see Ginny alone in the bed in which the four of them had been conceived. And I think of my own mother, who is dead, and my father, whom I haven't seen in eight months, and imagine myself as a pinprick of life, floating whole in the dark, before all of these divisions and divorces and separations.

1986

Putting Daisy Down

Life was good. It was one of those April mornings when the warmth of the sun on your skin seems miraculous after the deep freeze of winter and you can almost feel the hair on your arms turning golden, the vivid physicality heightened by the lingering trace of a hangover. Bryce was two over par and he'd just hit the green on thirteen with his six iron. The super-naturally verdant fairway was fringed with cheerful yellow forsythia, some of which concealed the ball Tom McGinty had just hooked with his five wood.

Bryce was playing with the big boys—Tom, Bruce Pickwell and Jeff Weiss. That night, at the club dance, they would share a table with their wives, and after dinner Bryce would be officially welcomed as a member of the club, something he'd been working toward for the past two years.

“What the hell?” Tom said, shading his eyes, looking back down the fairway at the cart barreling toward them.

Bruce removed his finger from his nose and crossed his arms over his chest, girding for confrontation. “Looks like—”

“My wife,” Bryce said as the cart bounced ever closer, the baked skin on his arms tingling with a sudden chill. Even from a distance there was something in her posture, and the speed she was traveling, that spelled trouble.

“Carly,” Tom said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Ignoring the greeting, she jumped out of the cart and marched over to Bryce, holding a lavender envelope in one hand, the other clutching her swelling belly, just visible beneath her pink warm-up suit. Glaring at him, she held the envelope at arm's length, between thumb and forefinger, until he took it from her. Her stony visage told the story, even if he hadn't recognized the stationery and the handwriting, the ropy loops spelling out his wife's name and their home address.

Without a word, she turned and drove away. The men watched silently until the cart finally disappeared behind the rise of the thirteenth tee, and then resumed their play, Bryce's partners respectfully somber, their fraternal compassion compounded in equal parts of selfish relief and empathetic dread. Their goodwill seemed only to increase as his game fell apart.

“That's a bitch,” Jeff said, patting his back, when Bryce missed a three-footer for par on fourteen.

Bryce drove to Julie's apartment on the Upper West Side directly from the course. He was fond of her, and might even have convinced himself he loved her at one point, but she'd just committed an unpardonable offense, and for the first time in months, underneath the anger swelling into rage as he raced down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he felt a welcome sense of moral clarity. His righteousness was only bolstered by the miraculous parking space a few spots down from the entrance to her building on Ninety-sixth Street. He couldn't believe she would actually write a letter to his wife. Was she out of her mind? he wondered as he held down the buzzer for 4F.

Her voice over the intercom sounded tentative. “Who is it?”

“It's me,” he said, his hand clutching the doorknob.

“Come on up,” she said in what seemed to him a false singsongy tone, buzzing him in.

Julie could see that her gambit had backfired as soon as she opened the door. He ignored Cocoa, her longhaired dachshund, who swirled affectionately around his ankles.

“How dare you?” he said.

She claimed that she'd done it as much for him as for herself, that she knew he wasn't happy with the status quo.

“
I
was perfectly happy with the status quo,” he said, no longer needing to maintain the fiction that he was trapped in his marriage and desperate to be with his mistress. He no longer had to pretend that only fear of his wife's unpredictable behavior and compassion for her precarious emotional state kept him from leaving her. Not that Carly couldn't be unpredictable and volatile, but he'd never really intended to leave her. He could see that clearly now. He was about to have a baby with her.

“But you said—”

“I said a lot of shit. I said what you wanted to hear.”

It had been more than this, of course; but she had broken the rules, had violated the sanctity of his marriage, and now he wanted to hurt her.

She appealed for compassion and forgiveness, but all her justifications and her tears failed to move him. Her mascara ran, collecting in the little wrinkles and crow's-feet around her eyes, lines that he'd never noticed before. Looking away from her, he was confronted with the evidence of his folly, framed pictures of the two of them—in front of the Rodin Museum in Paris, on the beach in Montauk and in this very apartment, standing amid the bronze Buddhas, ceramic dragons, hexagonal shards of quartz and amethyst. Incense was burning in a little bronze urn on the coffee table. Julie was a believer in meditation, pyramids and crystals, whereas Bryce was feeling very Catholic at this moment. With all the zeal of a newly reformed sinner, he rejected her pleas for forgiveness. Strangely, he felt most sorry for Cocoa, who couldn't possibly understand why his old friend was giving him the cold shoulder. He was genuinely moved by the dog's doleful expression.

His confidence and his clarity ebbed as he approached his own driveway. If only Carly were the screaming and crying type, he might be able to imagine an eventual diminution of the crisis. But as it was, he had no idea what to expect.

Daisy greeted him at the door, rubbing her head against his shin. He crouched down and rubbed her head, scratched behind her ears. Daisy thrummed with appreciation and followed him as he reconnoitered the first floor. Carly was sitting in the sunroom, looking out over the back lawn. The fact that she was neither reading nor knitting didn't seem like a good sign.

He knelt down before her, took her hand in his, and laid his head on her rounded belly. “I don't know what to say—except that it's over. I'm so sorry.” As he waited for a response, his head on her taut tummy, he felt Daisy massaging herself on his calf.

“This can't go on,” she said.

“It's done,” he said.

“She's got to go.”

“I've taken care of it.”

“I can't have this in the house.”

“It was never in the—”

“Not in my condition.”

Confused now, he looked up at her, at the lips drawn so thin and tight across her face that it was hard to believe they'd ever kissed his, and then followed her gaze down to the floor, to the dead robin on the carpet.

He could hardly contain his relief as he jumped to his feet, ready to deal with this discrete and tangible problem. He'd picked up dozens of dead birds in his long association with Daisy, whom he'd discovered as a kitten in the garbage room of his building on Ninth Street seven or eight years ago, when he was living in his first apartment in the city. It was the work of a moment to pick up the robin by its tail feathers, swing open the French door and fling the thing out into the yard.

Turning back to his wife, he found her regarding him with a distaste bordering on horror. “You picked it up with your bare hands,” she said.

“I can wash them.”

“I can't believe you picked it up with your bare hands. Don't imagine for a minute you're going to touch me with those hands.”

“I was just about to—”

“I can't have this. I simply can't. I won't live with this.”

“She's just being a cat.”

“It's unsanitary. It's a health risk for the baby.”

“After I wash my hands, I'll shampoo the rug.”

“That won't help,” she sobbed, lifting her hands to her face. “It's not enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“It's your cat,” she said. “You figure it out.” She lifted herself from the couch with that new, slightly labored motion he had noticed of late, an exaggerated series of pushes and lifts whereby she seemed to be anticipating a larger and more pregnant future, cradling her tummy to support it, although in this case the gesture seemed not only protective but also defensive, as if he constituted a possible threat to the fetus.

The guys in his foursome didn't seem surprised by Carly's absence from the club that night, although they eagerly corroborated the alibi.

“You remember that first trimester, honey.”

“Kate was puking like a freshman pledge.”

“Don't remind me.”

“Actually,” Bruce's wife said, “I was lucky that way.”

“Still,” Bruce said, “it wasn't like you felt like going out every night and painting the town.”

“Speaking of which,” Jeff said, “let's get another round here.”

The windows of the master bedroom were dark when he pulled into the driveway. He congratulated himself on his stealth and silence when he stepped into the guest room, which is where he awoke the next morning, on top of the duvet, fully dressed. A baby bird was lying on his chest, Daisy sitting beside him on the bed, the proud huntress.

“Oh shit,” he said. He'd almost forgotten this hazard of the suburban springtime—the baby bird menace. Even with arthritis, she could still catch the fledglings. In his muddled state, he couldn't quite separate out the different components of the guilt that was oppressing him—about the affair, about Daisy's murderous habits, about having overindulged the previous night. Had he come on to anyone at the club? No, not really; he was clean on that score.

Bryce flushed the bird down the guest room's toilet, wondering if he hadn't closed the door the night before, or if Carly had opened it that morning. He showered in the guest bath and crept down the hall to their bedroom, where he fortified himself with four Advil and two Zantac, then dressed and girded himself for the inevitable confrontation.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.

“Good morning,” he said, sitting down across from her.

She stood up from the table, cradling her belly, and busied herself at the sink.

“You always try to sound bright and chipper when you're hungover. As if that will somehow fool me.”

He didn't feel quite bright and chipper enough to think of a response to this. On the other hand, he was happy to keep the focus on the lesser sin of drinking. “Kate and Serena send their love,” he said.

“That's ridiculous,” she said. “They don't even know me.”

“You met them at the Winter Frolic,” he said.

“The Winter
Frolic
.”

“Well, anyway.” It
was
a little weird, how everything at the country club sounded like high school. A few years ago, when he still lived in the city, he would've sneered at the previous night's event. The term
Winter Frolic
would have been a source of mirth. Everything about it would have aroused his urban cynicism.

“And I suppose last night was called the Spring
Fling.”

He was about to refute this charge before realizing he couldn't.

“Rather appropriately for you,” she said.

He went to the refrigerator in search of liquids.

It hadn't been his idea to move out of the city. At least not entirely. He'd been happy enough in the one-bedroom on Columbus. But Carly began complaining about the friction of urban life. First it was the dry cleaner's losing her Marc Jacobs top. Then the guy in the wine store who kept hitting on her, which was totally plausible—she was a beautiful woman, after all. Plus the garbage trucks at three in the morning and the homeless guy who followed her in the park. After the planes had crashed into the towers, she'd had nightmares for months. Wasn't that the sequence of events that had led to their finding themselves in the suburbs? The idea had already been raised before that day, inextricably related to the decision to have children. They would have needed to find a bigger place in the city anyway, as she'd pointed out. No, it definitely hadn't been his idea. But he had wanted to alleviate the anxiety and dissatisfaction that seemed to have taken hold of her even before that terrible day in September.

Somehow, three years before, they'd both believed that marriage would be the cure for a malaise they'd never named or spoken about, for the dark moods that descended upon her and the memories of childhood deprivations—most particularly her vanished father. Later, it seemed that graduate school would be just the thing. Moving to the suburbs was, as he saw it, the latest attempt to make her happy. If he hadn't discovered golf, he would have hated it out here, almost an hour from Grand Central. The pleasure he discovered in the game raised his tolerance for certain cultural clichés, although he maintained enough of his urban-hipster sensibility to forswear the kind of brown-and-white footwear that looked like saddle shoes, as well as certain shades of pink and green. And he was probably the only guy at the club with a Celtic cross tattooed on his left shoulder. And what would they think if they knew about Carly's tattoo? Even he had been a little shocked when she first proposed it.

Much as he would have loved to escape to the green refuge of the course that morning, he knew he had to cancel his game. The problem then became how to get through the rest of the day without a confrontation.

Carly went to the stove and returned with a plate, which she dropped on the place mat in front of him. “Your breakfast,” she said.

On the plate were two raw eggs, two strips of raw bacon and two pieces of white bread.