Middle Age (23 page)

touch-me-not? Adam never worried about weeds, so long as they’re green, he said. He—”

Jared interrupts. “That’s pretty crappy, Mom, that Mr. Berendt doesn’t have a
grave
. You guys should’ve paid for one, if he couldn’t.”

You guys
. Abigail is both touched and nettled by this remark. Is Jared now going to blame her for Adam’s death? She says, “Honey, Adam did have money. He wasn’t poor as people thought. In fact, I gather he had
Middle Age: A Romance

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quite a bit of money, in bonds, stocks, real estate, and of course his property, he has left to the township—”

Jared persists, an adolescent tracking down adult hypocrisy, trickery,

“You guys could’ve set up some kind of—memorial, monument. Like with some of his ashes?—in a vase?—in an actual cemetery, buried, in a plot?

Like normal people? So, if somebody wanted to visit the grave, he could.”

“Why do you say ‘you guys’ ?” Abigail protests, hurt. “We were—we are—Adam’s closest friends. He seems to have had no living relatives. He was just—Adam Berendt, of whom very little seems to be known. We did what he requested. You can visit the garden. When you come back from summer school, honey, we’ll go together! And maybe Apollo will be there, and—”

“Yeah. Cool.”

Jared is breathing hard, clearly unhappy. Abigail wonders what he’s thinking? And does he blame her, somehow?
For what? I am guiltless!
He has no idea she was spying on him that morning—does he?
Yes
.
He senses
it
.
Senses something
.
They all do
. When men desire Abigail Des Pres, she’s bored, even angry, with them; when men elude her, she’s fascinated, filled with yearning that isn’t—she is certain, after all she’s been neutralized—

sexual, but spiritual.

Adam often dropped by the house, and he and Jared went hiking together in the fields above Wheatsheaf Drive. Apollo trotting ahead. Abigail caught a glimpse of them from the road, the stocky middle-aged man and the lanky adolescent boy talking earnestly together, but when she asked Jared what they’d talked about he told her with an embarrassed shrug
Nothing
. “Jared, it can’t be ‘nothing,’ I saw you,” Abigail objected.

Jared said, “Mr. Berendt mostly lets me talk.” Abigail said, deeply wounded, “Lets you talk! You never talk to
me
.”

When Abigail asked Adam what he and Jared talked about, Adam refused to tell her. In that maddeningly reasonable way of his he said he’d never violate Jared’s confidence.

Jared’s
confidence. Abigail thought, what about
hers?

Adam was damned brave. A true friend. During the worst of the divorce wrangling, when Abigail was sick with despair and anxiety as with a flu, hid in bed twelve hours a day and spoke to virtually no one except Jared, Adam, and her attorney she’d come to despise, Adam went to New York to attempt to reason with Harrison. The men knew each other slightly from Salthill, and had seemed to like each other well enough, in

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J C O

that cautious way of men who meet in social circumstances who would never otherwise meet, and who have little fundamentally to say to one another. Adam had believed he might reason with Harrison Tierney, who was suing for complete custody of Jared on the grounds that Abigail was an unfit mother; a “disturbed, congenitally neurotic woman with no apti-tude for motherhood, or life”; the custody suit was futile, for no responsible judge would have ruled in Harrison’s favor, yet Harrison in his malevolent, blind way persisted, as if he must now defeat, demolish utterly, this woman for whom he’d once had a fatal weakness, and had loved, and married. Adam, the voice of reason, argued, “The only people to profit from this will be lawyers, you must know that.” Harrison said coarsely,

“Fuck what I know and don’t know, Berendt. I have to set my son an ex-ample. What’s worth fighting for is worth fighting for all the way.” Adam said, astonished, “But, Harry, you aren’t going to win full custody, your son doesn’t want it, the judge won’t rule that way, what’s the point? You’re punishing Abigail and yourself both.” Harrison said hotly, “Bullshit! The point is, Berendt, you and that neurotic bitch are screwing, you want her ass and you want her money, you can have her skinny ass, and all her money, but you’re not getting my ass, friend, you’re not getting a dime of my money, and my kid, my son, he comes with
me
.” There was a curious gloating crudeness in Harrison Tierney’s speech, as if, liberated from Salthill-on-Hudson, he was liberated from civility. The two men had met in a midtown bar. Adam, deeply offended, and possibly injured in his pride, that his role as intermediary was so rebuffed, stared at Harrison in silence, then excused himself, paid for his drink, and walked away.

(“Wanting to punch the bastard in the face, but then hell, I’d only be arrested, and sued.”) Harrison called loudly after him, “Good luck, friend.

You’re going to need it.”

The identical error his hero Socrates made, in his dealings with mankind
.

That all men are, and wish to be, rational!
Abigail Des Pres knows better.

Saying now to her glaring son, with the air of one confessing a crime,

“You know, honey—Adam and I were not lovers. We were very close friends. I loved Adam, and I—I think he loved me; but not in
that way
.

I’m sorry, honey.”

Jared’s cheeks flame. His crazy mom!

“Whatever some people have thought. Whatever your father has said.”

Abigail persists, humbly.

Jared mumbles what sounds like
O
.
K., Mom
.

“Now he’s dead, and—well, he’s
dead
. It’s the end of that story.”

Middle Age: A Romance

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Jared says, a wild edge to his voice, “Death sucks! And it’s bor-ing.”

“Oh, honey. Don’t be upset. I’m sorry.”

“The thing about death is,” Jared says, stammering, “—I don’t give a fuck about it. As far as I’m concerned we’re just, like, algae on a pond. Our fucking scummy pond out back of the house! That Dad was always pissed at, it looked stagnant! Well, it was stagnant. Fucking green scum. Like the algae thinks it’s a big deal, we think we’re a big deal, but we’re
not
. Death is just a big nothing—like cyberspace if the last computer went down, and the last memory went out. No big deal. Adam—Mr. Berendt—knew this, for sure, but he wouldn’t say so ’cause he was too, too—” Jared searches for the right word, his forehead creasing like an adult man’s, can’t find the word, fuck it, “—he wanted just to accept things, like in the universe, and get along with people. He’d say, ‘Don’t wound anybody, but don’t get wounded, either.’ He’d say, ‘Hang in there, kid.’ But the fact is, Mom, it—

it’s all
bullshit
.”

“ ‘Bullshit’—what? I thought it was pond algae.”

Jared laughs, a harsh barking noise. “Same thing.”

Abigail laughs. “Long as you’re not smoking, sweetie. Remember, you gave your word. To both Adam, and me.”

(Did he? Jared stares, guilty-eyed.)

Saying with childlike sincerity, “I’m sure
not,
Mom. I see those bill-boards about cancer . . .”

Abigail drains the last of the wine, immediately she’s drunk. She’ll pay for it in the morning but what a good cozy snug feeling now. “
I
believe in life-before-death,” she says, wriggling her bare toes in the plush carpet.

“And any kind of bullshit that’s attractive and, I don’t know, tender.” She is still wearing the Italian import cream-colored silk shift, hiking up her thighs. The little jacket has long since been tossed aside. The thin straps keep falling over her naked shoulders. Inside the bodice, the tops of her loose, very pale breasts are just visible. Her smoke-colored hair is disheveled and her dark dreamy eyes are dilated.
What do I want, Adam?
—
I
want my son to be happy
.
I want to be happy, too
.
With him
.
Forever
. Feeling giddy, Abigail alarms Jared by lurching to her feet and pirouetting in his direction, “Honey, it’s so damn good to
see you
. So damn lonely
back home
.”

Wetly kissing Jared’s burning forehead, his burning earlobe, just missing his abashed mouth as he turns, ducks his head, deeply embarrassed. “Jesus, Mom!” Close up, the boy’s beautiful smooth contorted face is magnified as in binocular lenses.

Breasts loose and unencumbered inside the silk shift, Abigail smells of

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J C O

her favorite scent
l’Heure bleu
and this is in fact the blue hour, that hour of imminent night and of unquenchable thirst.

Even as Jared squirms away from her without precisely wrenching away, and without shoving her, as he’d like, Abigail thinks calmly that there is a rational, pure, impersonal self inside her; inside even Abigail Des Pres. Beyond her despairing love for Jared there is a place in her that is no one’s mother, and loves no one. As Adam has said we are all asleep in the outer self. The self that is perishable, passing. And the boy, her son Jared—in him, there is this identical impersonal self, a being she doesn’t know, who loves no one. Swaying, almost losing her balance—“Jeez, Mom!” Jared mutters, keeping her from falling—she feels a thrill of certainty, almost defiance. From now on, she will love both Jared and Adam less.

Time to drive Jared back to the dormitory? Or will he be staying the night?

There’s the king-sized bed in the bedroom, and, in the sitting room, this cushiony sofa. In the morning, a room service breakfast?

“Mom, I better go. O.K.?”

Jared backs off, goes to use the bathroom. Abigail, pressing a glass of melted ice water against her heated cheeks, manages to breathe calmly.
Yes
yes yes yes
. Or is it
No no no no
. Abigail briskly dials room service to please have the sullied things taken away, there’s a food-smell permeating the room. She frowns at herself in a mirror, adjusts the straps that keep slipping over her shoulders, smooths her wild-looking hair, yes she’s a beautiful woman, if deranged, and neurotic; hot-skinned, though frigid.
Apollo
scratching at my door?
What’s it mean? Adam never stayed the night, either.

She’s drunk. Or this must be funnier than it is? Or, maybe—she isn’t drunk, and it isn’t funny? “Oh, hell, it
is
.”

Jared emerges from the bathroom, his young face freshly washed, hair flattened, and his steely-blue eyes brave, defiant, fixed upon her. His mom.

Abigail sees his mouth moving before she hears his terrible words.
What
what what what?
A breathless little speech he has obviously rehearsed. His dad wants to take him to Kenya in August, to visit a wild animal sanctuary

“on safari”; and to Tanzania, to hike as far up Mount Kilimanjaro as they can. Jared says, licking his lips, “I’d really like to go, Mom! If it’s O.K. with you? Dad says it has to be next month, because—”

No no no no no
.

Middle Age: A Romance

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But Abigail hears herself say calmly, “Oh, of course, Jared. If that’s—

what you want, that’s what I want, too. Of course.”

“It’s O.K., Mom? You’re not, like, mad?”

“Oh, Jared. Of course not.”

“Jeez, Mom!
Cool
.”

Breaking into a wild radiant smile. The first Abigail has seen from Jared on this visit.

I know, I love him too much
.
But I am his mother, Adam!

Abigail, the boy knows you love him
.
But he’ll tear himself apart, and you, if
he can’t love you as much in return
.

T     safely locked in the trunk of the Lexus, Jared will never know.

Driving Jared back to Middlebury. To his dorm.

As Jared chatters excitedly about Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, the new camcorder Harrison has bought for their mutual use, Abigail finds herself thinking of the last time she saw Adam. Of course, not knowing
This is the
last time;
just as, when Jared leaves her, to travel to Africa with his father and glamorous stepmother (“Kim is crazy about backpacking, too”) it may be the last time she will see her son. The words
The last time
echo in her head that feels empty in the way that old public lavatories with filthy cracked tile floors and peeling walls can be empty, and prone to dull echoes.

The last time
.
Like this?

The last time with Adam, she hadn’t known. But she’d known the first time. Years ago. How much younger, less wounded Abigail was then.

Abigail Tierney. Mrs. Harrison Tierney. A rich man’s rich wife. Attractive couple, in the striking Cape Cod on Wheatsheaf Drive. It was before Abigail heard of this man Adam Berendt, before she saw his witty junk-sculptures around town, or signed up for his course in figure drawing and sculpting, in the Salthill night school. Before she’d fallen in love with him, or imagined it was love.
But how can you love me, Abigail, if you don’t know
me? C’mon! We’ve never even slept together
.
Maybe I’d disgust you, naked
.
God
knows, sometimes I sure disgust myself
.

He’d never given her a chance, God damn it. To be disgusted by him.

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J C O

She’d felt his aroused penis through his trousers, more than once. It had felt fine, in good operating condition. “God damn
you
.”

Jared, chattering happily, doesn’t hear Abigail muttering to herself.

The Yankees cap is now visor-forward, at a cocky angle on his head. If he turned to look at her, his eyes would be hidden.

That first time, a man not-Adam. For she had not known him.