Middle Age (21 page)

Jared, at five feet eleven, will loom over her. Abigail wears the shift with no bra beneath, and the jacket loosely buttoned. She brushes her smoke-colored, wavy, very fine hair until it rises and floats about her head, and she makes up her face with care, porcelain-pale, black-edged eyes, long lashes, a pale opalescent mouth. Gold hoop earrings, platinum wristwatch and rings. But no wedding ring. Though knowing that Jared will be wearing his usual baggy clothes, filthy Nikes, and baseball cap and that he will react to her with a sneer or, worse, a chill stony stare; but it’s true, Abigail can’t help it. Every quiver of her eyelids is a plea.
Only love me!
Eager and anxious as a young bride she drives to the idyllic college, parks the rented black Lexus and crosses a quadrangle in the direction of Jared’s residence

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hall, it isn’t yet dusk, still a balmy summer day, Abigail has put on dark-tinted designer glasses and a floppy-brimmed straw hat; the campus is populated with young people, in shorts, jeans, tank-tops, and many of them barefoot playing Frisbee on the lawn. Abigail seems to move in her own element. Gliding, glimmering. Among the noisy Frisbee players is her son, Jared, who sights his mother by way of others who are staring at her as if trying to place her. A model? A TV personality? Maybe there’s filming on the Middlebury campus? Jared, his face darkening with blood, tosses the Frisbee back to his friends and mumbles, “Got to go now. It’s my mom.” He comes quickly to meet her, to head her off, no need to introduce her to his companions, and there’s a painful moment when it looks as if Jared’s anxious mom is going to grab him, kiss him wetly, burst into happy tears, as sometimes she has done, as if they were survivors of a cataclysm, only just finding each other; but, thank God, Abigail is restrained, though clearly anxious, trembling, squeezing Jared’s hand and lightly kissing his cheek. Her greeting is a breathless sigh—“Hello, honey!

You washed your hair?”

Together, but not touching, they cross the quadrangle to the rental car.

Jared hates it, though he’s excited too, that his mother is so conspicuous; imagining herself shy, in fact she’s fantastically vain; strangers’ eyes tracking her don’t seem to upset her, like a performer blinded by stage lights, earnestly playing to a fellow actor. “Jared! It’s so—such a relief—to see you! You seem well?”

“Sure, Mom.”

“And this is all right—isn’t it? Coming up to see you?” Her voice is wistful, and willful. “It was just so damned lonely back home.”

When Abigail wants to link herself with Jared, a co-conspirator, a fellow adolescent, she will slip in a mild profanity. Jared is unmoved. “Sure, Mom.”

Abigail looks around, smiling blindly. “It’s—lovely here. It seems so—”

She pauses, unable to think of the appropriate word. “Do you—like it?

Are you happy here?”

“It’s O.K.”

“Only ‘O.K.’?”

Jared shrugs. “It’s summer school, Mom. It’s just what I’m doing.”

“And this,” Abigail says gaily, squeezing her son’s surprisingly brawny forearm, “is what I’m doing.”

If Jared is surprised at the unfamiliar car, he tries not to show it. He
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has become accustomed to his mother’s impulsive, irrational surges.

Throwing out “old” china, potted plants, furniture—redesigning rooms of the house, even the gardens and lawn—with such fervor, you’d think it meant something, had some purpose. Possibly Jared’s mother has totaled the white Acura, and has no car of her own to drive; he isn’t going to inquire. The wrong question, she’ll burst into tears. Almost, Jared wouldn’t be surprised if she has been driven up to Middlebury by someone, a man, whom he won’t meet: but it can’t be Mr. Berendt, her friend who
has died
.

Jared understands that his mother, though middle-aged, terribly old in his eyes, embarrassingly old, somewhere beyond forty (he doesn’t want to know how far beyond, but he knows that his dad is even older) is a seductive woman, a woman to whom adult men are attracted, and this is infuriating to him, unspeakable. He hates it, he refuses to think about it. He’s made anxious by the fact, and resentful, though possibly excited, too. Guys saying to him
Jeez, Jared, that’s your mom?
The looks in his male teachers’

faces.
Jared! Say hello to your mother for me, will you? Next time you speak to
her
. And the Preston headmaster casually inquiring
Will your mother be
visiting us anytime soon?

No! No time soon.

Jared has told himself he’s profoundly relieved that his mother and father have finally worked out a custody agreement, removing him from Salthill for most of the year, and allowing him to board at the Preston Academy, on neutral territory. There are other kids at Preston in exactly the same situation. Divorce and custody suits, embittered former spouses who now hate each other’s guts. Mostly, the mothers are the left-behind, pathetic ones. Losers. The fathers have new, young wives, why not? It’s a free country. Times have changed. God is dead. One of Jared’s Preston suitemates asked him didn’t he get lonely, and Jared replied contemptu-ously—“Lonely? I wish I knew how.”

Maybe he is lonely, sometimes. Sure. But he prefers
lonely
to the other.

It’s ironic that men are attracted to Abigail Des Pres, with one notable exception: Jared’s dad. In a memorable phrase that man once confided in Jared he’d “had it” with Jared’s mother.

Had it
. This might sum up both a man’s desire for Abigail, and a man’s desire for Woman. Jared is contemplating both.

Inside the car, Abigail can’t resist hugging Jared. “C’mon, a real hug.

A hug-hug!” And a wet kiss on his cheek, narrowly missing his twisty mouth. She tugs off the ridiculous baseball cap, runs her fingers through

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his springy fawn-colored hair, comments that it needs trimming—“Just a little. By your ears. Maybe tomorrow morning?”—and smiles happily, joyously, at him. The baggy black T-shirt with  prominent on the front, hip-hugging jeans, smelly Nikes worn without socks.
My Jared
.
My
love
. Jared submits to this with a reluctant smile. It isn’t actually so awful, once nobody’s watching. He likes his mom O.K. And he’s hungry.

Driving out of town Abigail says in her throaty, co-conspirator voice,

“I did miss you, honey. Gosh! And this is just for tonight, I promise.”

“It’s O.K., Mom. I won’t tell him.”

What do you want from your son
,
Abigail?

Adam, what a question!

Well
.
Answer it
.

I want
—
him to be happy
.

And—?

I want
—
well, I want to be happy, too. With him
.
Forever
.



A   Mountain View Inn, Abigail has arranged for them to have dinner alone together in her suite. In a bay window overlooking the sloping lawn of the Inn and, miles away, a dreamy postcard-view of the sun melting behind shadowy mountains. “You’re certain this is all right, Jared? We could go somewhere else if—” “This is O.K.” “I thought, just the two of us—” Abigail sees Jared hesitating. Possibly he is going to say yes he’d rather go out to eat, anywhere, a real restaurant, with other people, not here, not in such intimate quarters, but since the collapse of his childhood a few years ago he’s become a tactful, even stoic boy. He curls his lip at the ornate tassled menu but orders a T-bone steak. With french fries. And a double Coke.

He is dreading something
.
What?

With a flourish a waiter wheels a cart into the room. White linen table-cloth and napkins, a single red rose quivering in a vase, steaming hot dinners, steak for Jared and fillet of sole for Abigail, beneath silver covers; and a bottle of burgundy wine for Abigail. “Isn’t this—festive? Like something in a movie. In the south of France?” Why is Abigail saying such inane things: what does Jared know, or care, about the south of France? The most
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profound adventure of his young life has been a treacherous white-water rafting trip his father took him on the previous summer in the Grand Canyon region, no matter if Jared sprained his ankle in an upset, and another rafter was nearly killed. Abigail sips wine, and asks Jared careful questions. Unlike his father she will not inquire closely into his summer session courses; she would never bluntly ask what his grades have been so far;
she is not spying on him,
she isn’t the one who obsesses that Jared will be

“sloughed off ” from his generation when his generation advances to the next hurdle of the American meritocracy, college. (Not Abigail Des Pres: who studied “arts” at Bennington in the late seventies and graduated with honors knowing less math, science, and history than she’d known when she graduated from high school, with a further handicap of not knowing how to think or write except “creatively”—“spontaneously.”) So she takes care to ask Jared questions he can answer without shifting his shoulders edgily inside the black T-shirt and avoiding her gaze.

“Sloughed off ”—a cruel term. Abigail has heard her ex-husband use it numerous times. There’s a Darwinian-evolutionary sense to it, a ring of fatality.

As they talk, Abigail tries not to stare too avidly at Jared. Tries not to touch him too often. She’s well aware of the social decorum: a woman may lightly touch a man’s wrist while they speak, in harmless flirtation; a man, touching a woman in a similar way, is perhaps being aggressive.
But Jared
will never touch me
.
What choice do I have?

Abigail says, “When the session is over, I’ll drive up again to bring you home. You’re with me, you know, till school starts.” There’s a breathless pause here. Abigail tries not to watch Jared’s face. His eyes that seem suddenly heavy-lidded, his fleshy sullen mouth. He’s chewing steak, forehead creased in concentration. “I thought we might go to—Nantucket? Sailing.

You’ve always liked—sailing.”

Jared doesn’t reply, chewing and swallowing. He gulps down a large mouthful of his Coke. “O.K., Mom. Cool.”

“—the full month of August, through Labor Day. The Sorensons have offered us their guest house on the ocean—”

Abigail has abandoned her food but continues to drink, slowly. She isn’t one to drink alone, alcohol goes to her head, red wine especially gives her a heavy sodden headache. She hears her bright scintillate voice echoing in the handsomely furnished sitting room. She hears Jared’s monosyllabic replies and occasional forced laughter.
My mom has a sense of humor!
There

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is something unspoken between her and Jared. Always there is something unspoken between her and Jared. The constant weight of it pulls at her heart, though her heart is young she is becoming exhausted.
Look, I didn’t
even want to marry
.
Not that man
.
Not any man
.
I was just a girl
.
God damn,
I wanted to be a dancer! No, I was not pregnant at the time
.
I married for
—

love
. Suddenly she can’t remember who the man was whose love she’d accepted so passively, like one succumbing to the plague. The face—Harrison Tierney’s?—is a smear like the uneaten mashed potatoes on her plate.

Adam’s death. That must be it. Unspoken between them. But, Christ!

She’s afraid.

That rambling incoherent message she’d left on Jared’s answering machine, the night of Adam’s death. When Abigail was paralyzed with shock, grief. When Abigail got frankly drunk. (Roger Cavanagh had come over. To console her.
No, they had not slept together
though possibly that was Cavanagh’s intention.) Well, she shouldn’t have called Jared. He’s fifteen, just a boy. He must have been shocked, overwhelmed: he hadn’t answered Abigail’s call, or calls. And when she finally spoke with him he’d been taciturn, sullen-sounding.
I’m not coming home
. Abigail feels ashamed, and wonders how to bring up the subject of Adam’s death, now. She’s worried she might become emotional. The strain of this visit, and the glasses of burgundy. And the memory of Jared striding across the campus, talking and laughing with his friends, lighting up a forbidden cigarette, oblivious of her. For those minutes, magnified in the binocular’s lenses, Jared had seemed no one Abigail knew, or could claim. The memory frightens her.

But Jared must be feeling grief for Adam’s loss. Knowing he will never see Adam Berendt again. Yes. He must! During the worst times Adam had behaved “like a father” to Jared. He’d talked with Jared in private, and would never tell Abigail what they spoke of. He took Jared out walking, bicycling, to quick meals at McDonald’s and Burger King. Trying to explain to him, Abigail surmised, what divorce is, how common it has become, what his mother was going through, why she was so—“emotional”—“unpredictable.” And what Jared’s own natural feelings might be.

Abigail knows that Jared liked Adam very much for he always asked after him, as he never asks after Abigail’s other friends. But since Adam’s death, Jared has been virtually silent on the subject. Abigail sent him clippings from local newspapers— , ,     

. And   . , ,   

  . But Jared never responded to the clippings.

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In the boy’s hooded eyes she can see that he fears her. Perhaps he believes that Adam was her lover. That she has lost, another time, her love.

He’s deeply embarrassed by her. He pities her. He knew of the biopsy, after the fact; Abigail had wanted to spare him as long as possible.
Your
damaged mom
.
Don’t remember this breast, do you? I don’t use it anymore, anyway
. She feels her face tightening. A danger of laughing. And laughter is a hairsbreadth from hysteria.