Mercury (12 page)

“The only Robert I know is at work,” I said, reaching for the strawberries. “He has no business in my dreams.” Between one breath and the next I vowed not to sleep with him again, not to risk the sweetness I had with you.

You told me then about your Robert, how you still felt bad about not answering his letters. “I didn't want to tell him I wasn't coming back,” you said.

“Because he'd be mad at you? Or because it would have made it real?”

Behind your elegant glasses your eyes grew thoughtful. “Because I'd have lied,” you said, “and promised to see him soon.”

“Isn't it better to lie than to hurt someone?”

“I suppose, but I hate that messy middle ground.” You lined up the strawberries on your plate, largest to smallest, and said something I've thought of often since Edward died. “When I see trouble coming, I tend to hide. I hope I never hide from you, Viv.”

A month later you announced you were going to be tested for HIV; there was no way I couldn't do the same. As the phlebotomist released the tourniquet, the room began to spin. Remembering my shoe in the subway, I insisted on taking a taxi home. I spent the rest of the day in bed, fingering the little bandage on my arm. One of two possible futures was already running
through my veins, but I could only picture the worst. I couldn't tell you about my fears, and I didn't tell you what happened when I phoned for the results. A young man's voice, cool and cocky, said, “Cambridge morgue. You kill 'em, we chill 'em.” I was not the first person to have misdialed.

After I stopped shaking, I called the correct number. A woman answered. She said the lovely word “negative,” a word that led to your not using a condom and to my getting pregnant.

At that time I had only one close friend with a baby. Lucy was already living in Duxbury. When I visited, I enjoyed playing with Leo, but really what I wanted was to talk to her. At Yale we had stayed up late, arguing about William James's theory of the scapegoat and the Iran-Contra affair. Now, even after he was in bed, Leo was her main topic. Had all our studying been in order to discuss why he didn't like his sippy cup?

I hadn't faced a choice while I waited for the HIV results. This time I did. My life could continue with work, riding, you, friends. Or it could change radically. I knew you'd be pleased. You'd already suggested we live together, and when we visited Lucy, you devoted yourself to Leo. But did I want to be colonized by a small, helpless being? Was this my second life? After a long evening in a bar with Claudia, I called Planned Parenthood.

The Monday before my appointment I arrived at the office to find Gabe and Nathan deep in conversation. They changed the subject, but not before I understood that a deal I'd worked on, fruitlessly, months before, was going through. Nathan was in the next cubicle, and Gabe and I often shared meals. I had thought they were my friends, not each other's. Why had they cut me out? Had I drunk too many margaritas one Friday? Or revealed a shocking ignorance of South American politics?

That evening I walked over to the vet's office. Claudia lent me a white coat, and I helped her feed the cats and dogs and two tremulous angora rabbits. As we ladled out pellets, refilled water containers, I told her what had happened.

“But Viv,” she said, “there must be dozens of times when you've made people feel left out.”

She was watching me, but I kept my gaze on the beagle we were feeding. “It's not about popularity,” I said, stroking his silky ears. “It's about not being the best.”

“Of course you're the best. Look how much they pay you.”

I tried to explain—good enough to head a team, run a company—but she didn't understand. My world was too different from hers. And I was too different. She didn't believe she was destined for greatness; she didn't have the hunger, the ambition.

That night I dreamed I was sitting by a river, the river where I'd ridden Nutmeg, and a little boy, dark haired, blue eyed, with a rosebud mouth, was sitting beside me. He took my hand, and we played in the warm, shallow water. The next morning I told Claudia I'd changed my mind. “Can I be godmother?” she said. My lingering doubts were banished by your delight. And you were still delighted when I persuaded you we didn't need to get married. Being a mother was already overwhelming; I didn't want to be a wife as well.

But even Margaret Fuller finally succumbed. When I got pregnant for the second time, something shifted, and I was ready. Once again we got blood tests and went to city hall. Beforehand I told myself it was just a formality—I already loved you and Marcus—but when the justice of the peace asked us to stand, my heart leaped. In bed on our wedding night, I remember holding up my hand with my new gold ring. “I'll never take it off,” I said.

“Nor will I,” you said. Then you said some very un-Scottish things.

F
ROM OUR THIRD DATE
it was clear that your parents would play a large part in our lives, and mine a small one. It wasn't that I disapproved of Dad's bubbly new Californian wife, or Mom's violinist boyfriend, but, seeing them only once a year—New Year in San Diego, Memorial Day in Ann Arbor—I scarcely knew them. Whereas your parents invited us to meals and movies, took an interest in my work, and babysat often. Edward in those early years was so gentle and witty, it was easy to forget he was ill. Then, soon after Trina was born, he grew worse.

I knew you were stretched thin, but I didn't know how thin until that afternoon we went for a walk in the park. As we passed the playground, you told me that on Friday you'd had to cancel two patients. Then you got home late and made Marcus cry.

At the top of the park we sat down on the bench overlooking the track. A man and a girl were jogging. The man's tracksuit was the same purple as that of my savior in the subway. While they circled the track, you laid out your argument: we should move closer to your parents, and you should start your own business so that you could help them and still be a good father. “And husband,” you added.

I came last, but I still thought I had a choice. Hadn't we promised each other never to live in the suburbs, where Republicans and ax murderers roamed the streets? You listened quietly to my arguments. When you spoke again, your words came from far away. A few days before, operating on a young man, you'd almost made a fatal mistake. “I'm not sure I believe in nervous breakdowns,” you said, “but I may be having one anyway.”

The next Sunday, Scott whisked us through six houses and then, turning to me, said, “Tell me why all of those are wrong?”

“They're wrong because I don't want to live in the suburbs,” I said.

“So we must find a place that doesn't feel like the suburbs. Make a list of the things that will make you happy to move here.”

He went to get coffee, and we both began to laugh. “He should be a therapist,” I said. “Or a politician,” you said. But I started on my list.

In one of those odd coincidences—what Edward used to call serendipity—Claudia phoned a few days later, her voice brimming with excitement, and begged me to meet her for a drink. At the bar near our old apartment, she had two margaritas waiting. Helen had asked her to manage the stables.

“It's the best thing that's ever happened to me,” she said, “but I hate that there'll be no more last-minute dinners, no more babysitting.”

The floor of the bar was sticky with beer. I pulled my feet free, first one then the other, and told her our news. “Maybe you won't be farther away,” I said.

It helped that Scott found a house we liked, and it helped that Marcus and Trina, after a shaky first week, begged to go to day care each morning. It helped that your business flourished and that Edward responded to treatment. But I had become someone I'd hoped never to be: a commuter. Despite the World Trade Center, despite Iraq, new markets were opening up. Nathan, Gabe, almost everyone who'd been at the office when I arrived, had moved on. I wanted to follow them, but a new job would have meant even longer hours.

Most of the mothers on our street didn't work, or worked part-time. They helped out when you had another crisis with
Edward, but I was the one who paid back the favors. “You're so busy,” they said, and I caught the criticism beneath their smiles. When Marcus threw a tantrum, when Trina kept rearranging her books, I worried my work was warping my children. Meanwhile my colleagues complained that I missed late meetings and was slow to respond to e-mail. Those weekend mornings I spent at the stables were the only times I felt like myself. Do you remember how I cried over the film
Seabiscuit
? Those were tears of rage because I only got to ride once a week.

But as Jack used to say, we don't step in the same river twice. Suddenly Edward's balance was worse again. Marcus went through that phase of bad dreams and bedwetting. I started going to work even earlier so I could be home earlier. There was no end in sight. Or to be exact, the only end was the one you dreaded. Then Helen needed her first hip replacement, and Stu quit to move back to Donegal.

The first year at Windy Hill was exhilarating. I overhauled the business side. We had a dozen new students, and I bought three more barn horses. Every stall and paddock was filled. I was still busy but much more flexible. When Trina was sent home from school with suspected chickenpox, I was there in twenty minutes. But sometimes as I drove to and from the stables or helped a girl saddle a horse, I was plagued by the feeling I'd had in New York: Was this really my second life?

One day, after watching me ride Dow Jones, Helen told me I was holding the reins too wide. She started giving me lessons, and I started entering competitions. But it was hard to train a horse that other people were riding badly. We kept coming third or fourth. When we failed to place in a small local show, I gave up competing.

Then one fall afternoon I came home to find Anne looking after the children. You had taken Edward to the emergency room, again. “Shouldn't he be in a home?” she asked.

That night I asked you the same question. Your beautiful mouth tightened. “I hate to think of him being a patient, not a person,” you said.

“But he's been both for years. Think how stressful it is for him. He knows he might fall at any moment, and that Peggy can't lift him.”

You stared at your book and insisted that they were still figuring out the dosage of a new drug. When they got it right, his balance would be fine.

Finally I drove into Boston and took Peggy to lunch. I had barely uttered a sentence when she interrupted. “For years,” she said, “people have been telling me to put Edward in a home, and I've said over my dead body. But he and I have talked about it; the time has come.” For the rest of the meal we discussed solar panels.

Gradually we got used to visiting Edward in his small room overlooking a grove of birch trees and the parking lot. Or at least the children, Peggy, and I did. I'm not sure you ever did. When he died, I guessed the size of your distress from what you didn't do: you didn't phone me right away, you didn't take time off from work, you didn't want to deliver the eulogy. You listened stony-faced as your sister spoke about how Edward had negotiated with his illness rather than fought it, and how he had never stopped being interested in other people.

In bed that night, when I asked how you felt, you said, “Like an orphan, which is ridiculous for a man of my age.”

“Especially for a man whose incredible mother is very much a part of his life.”

As I fell asleep, I could feel you lying awake beside me, and when I woke, you were in exactly the same position. “I want the Simurg to carry me away,” you said. Then you told me about the Persian flying creature, very kind and so large that it could carry an elephant.

I knew I had to let you grieve in your own way. I tried to make sure you never missed a tennis game with Steve. I tried to make sure you did things with the children. But most of the time it was as if you were walking around in a large protective suit, your astronaut's suit. Was it protecting you from us, or us from you? When I told you my fears about Marcus, the information vanished between one layer and the next.

A few weeks after Marcus broke his leg, I ran into another mother at the school gates. She asked how he was doing. I said he was great. His crutches were like a new toy.

“They heal so quickly at that age,” she said. “Nick says the other boy was mostly to blame.”

“To blame for what?” Marcus had been vague about the accident. One minute he was fine; the next he had a broken leg.

“Charging around,” she said. “Chasing the little kids.”

Before she could say more, her son appeared.

“Everyone charges around in the playground,” you said when I described the exchange. “Especially ten-year-old boys.”

But I was worried that our son was becoming a bully. The following week, when Ivy and Lynn came over, I noticed how they avoided being alone with him. I began to listen to Anne's arguments about Greenfield: the fantastic teachers, the structure, the individual attention.

As for our new student at the stables, I didn't even try to tell you about her. Tiffany was thirteen, horse crazy, desperate
to improve. One day she had her lesson on one of our trickier horses. Mrs. Hardy kept nipping at the other mares. Afterward Tiffany's mother complained, and Claudia said how about half off for today.

“You shouldn't have done that,” I said when she told me. “It sets a terrible precedent.”

“I know, but she works in a 7-Eleven, and she was wearing that godawful sparkly sweater.”

We agreed I'd take Tiffany's next lesson and suggest she go on our budget plan. I had seen her ride before, but I was impressed by her seat, by how easily she posted. I explained about the plan: twelve lessons for the price of ten. Her mother said great. She'd bring a check next week.

After the next lesson, I again praised Tiffany and asked for payment. Her mother reminded me they were on the plan, and I reminded her about the check. Next week, she promised.