Middle Age (30 page)

“ ‘Antiuniverses’? What are we talking about?”

“We’re not talking about Mr. Berendt per se, Dad. You don’t need to look so sick, or—guiltylike, whatever. We’re talking about
what if
. Like in logic. The antiuniverse.’ ”

“What kind of nonsense is that?”

“You can’t prove that an antiuniverse doesn’t exist, and as rightfully as our own.” Robin spoke in triumph; Roger could hear the echo of a preen-ing adult here, impressing and confusing his young students. He wanted to bang some heads together.

But he said, reasonably, “What can’t be disproved isn’t scientifically valid as a proposition. It’s bad logic, too. Like fairy tales.”



J C O

“Our math teacher says—”

“Tell him,” Roger said, hanging the wire hanger in the closet with such force that the handle bent, “he’s full of shit.”

“
Her
. It’s a
her
.” Robin was elated that Dad should fall into such a trap.

She said mockingly, “O.K., I’ll tell her: ‘Miss Ringler, my dad, a hot-shit lawyer, says to tell you you’re full of shit. Too.’ ” She laughed uproariously.

Roger backed off, not trusting himself to respond. He disappeared into the bathroom. He would shower, shave for the second time that day. He would cleanse himself of the filth this angry child had dumped onto him as, a naughty little girl, she’d taken fiendish delight in overturning her food onto the kitchen floor for a red-faced nanny to clean up.

O   cryptic e-mail exchanges between DEARDEADDAD

and NIBOR of the previous summer, which Roger had more or less forgotten until now, was:

Why did you & mom get married, it seems like it was such a mistake.

N.

*

*

*

We married for the obvious reason: we fell in love. We were very happy together for many years. It WAS NOT a mistake. There’s—YOU.

D.

*

*

*

EXACTLY!!!

N.



A truce
. At dinner in the Inn, soothed by tiny flickering candles like votive lights, Roger and his daughter behaved cordially with each other. They were polite, they were smiling. They were patient with each other; Dad merely laughed at Daughter who kept changing her mind about her en-tree. Daughter had even washed her flamey face, made a gesture toward combing her disheveled hair, removed the offensive flannel shirt and replaced it, over the T-shirt, with a handsome cable-knit black sweater.

She’d dabbed lipstick on her mouth, Roger hoped not in mockery, and was looking, in the flattering light, rather striking, exotic. Smiling at her,
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

Roger wondered if there might be Native American blood in his or Lee Ann’s family? Eskimo, or Inuit?

They would not speak again of Uncle Adam. No more hypotheses.

Roger had been shaken by the exchange upstairs but consoled himself thinking,
She’s angry
.
Not at Adam but at you
.
Yes?
He would have to accept it, though he believed her anger was unjust. He understood that, this evening, having pushed a little too far up in the room, Robin was now relenting, respectful and wary of Dad. Maybe her own coarse, cruel words had shocked her.

When her food came, Robin ate hungrily. Such a big, growing girl: appetite raged inside her, a fire that had to be fed. A porterhouse steak, french fries, hard rolls with butter. She ate Roger’s french fries, drenched in catsup. Roger laughed and joked with her. She was a funny, quick-witted girl, mimicking her teachers, yes, even the revered Miss Ringler was slyly mocked, all adults seemed to her subjects for laughter, so self-regarding, pretentious. Roger couldn’t disagree. He was charmed by her.

He wanted to be charmed by her. He ordered a second carafe of red wine.

He was feeling mildly depressed. No: he was feeling optimistic.
This is going well
.
You saw her play hockey
.
She doesn’t hate you.
Because they were laughing, and running out of things to laugh about, Roger told Robin about Abigail’s misadventure in Middlebury, Vermont. Robin had known Jared Tierney in the Salthill Middle School. “Jared’s lucky to be alive, huh?” Robin laughed. “
You
wouldn’t try to kill me, Dad, would you?”

“Robin,” Roger said, wincing, though he knew she was joking, “that isn’t funny.”

“No. I was just kidding, Dad.”

“Well. I know, honey.”

Eating dessert, pecan pie with a double scoop of vanilla ice cream, Robin said, “You’re a pretty close friend of Mrs. Tierney’s, I guess, to drive up to Vermont to help her?” She squinted across the booth at Roger, as if she’d only just thought of this.

“Yes. I suppose I am.”

“She wasn’t one of the women Mom was saying—what she said?”

Roger’s jaws tightened. “No, Robin.”

“Are you in love with her, now?” The question was playful, almost mocking. But Roger understood the ferocity beneath.

“No. I am not.”

“With Abigail Tierney, you
are not?
”



J C O

Roger loathed having to answer. When Lee Ann had interrogated him like this, in their bedroom, often as he was undressing for bed and therefore vulnerable, exposed, resenting his wife and yet not wanting to antago-nize her, for he knew how she longed to lacerate both his flesh and her own, how she longed to be hurt, devastated, humiliated—he’d behaved stoically, calmly. He’d thought,
I can’t let it begin
. Now he told Robin what was simply the truth: “No, honey. If it’s any of your business. I’m not in love with Abigail.” He paused. “She’s Des Pres, now. Since the divorce.”

Dogged as on the hockey field, trailing after faster players, Robin said,

“But. You were in Vermont with her.”

“Robin, I wasn’t ‘with’ her. I drove up to help her and Jared. It was a pretty desperate situation. I’m Abigail’s attorney.”

“Since when?”

“Since a while.”

“Is that what you are!—her
attorney
.” Robin pronounced the word as you might pronounce the name of a rare disease.

Roger smiled. A sudden dark fury rose in him. He was watching his daughter spoon ice cream into her mouth, twisting the spoon in a way repulsive to him. “Look, Robin. My work, my profession, my life—you have no right to scorn. My income—”

Robin continued to lick the spoon. Calmly she said, “Sure, Dad. I know.”

“The law is an honorable profession. The law is certainly not an easy profession. But my income has—”

“Dad, cool! I know.”

Roger’s lips were numbed as by novocaine. He could not believe he was uttering, to this sardonic, beetle-browed daughter of his, such empty banal self-condemning words.

They sat for a while in silence. Roger’s eardrums throbbed. He’d have liked to give his daughter a hard shaking. She was so maddening, as a small child is maddening, without skill or finesse; without seeming to know what she wanted.
Like her mother
.
Wanting to hurt
. Lee Ann’s taunting of Roger had sometimes ended in lovemaking; a hard swift unsentimental lovemaking; the kind of lovemaking that, in marriage, signals the onset of the end of marriage; for marriage isn’t passion but tenderness, pure sentiment. But with Robin, Roger felt a physical animosity, repugnance. He wanted simply to knock the smirk off her childish face.

Still Robin persisted. “Basically, Dad, you defend white-collar criminals. What’s to be proud of?”

Middle Age: A Romance

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“Criminals? That’s ridiculous.”

“Aren’t they?”

Roger wondered if his daughter was truly so uninformed about his work. His life. Or whether this was part of her tormenting of Dad. He said, “Most of my work is contracts, wills. Legal agreements. More and more our firm works with corporations, not individuals. We rarely go near a courtroom. What gave you the idea your father is a defense trial lawyer?”

“I thought you were. Sometimes?”

“Rarely.”

“You don’t actually help people, do you? Poor people—”

“ ‘Poor people’ are not the only people who require the help of the law.”

Roger spoke calmly, though the pulse was hammering in his head. “I think you must have a very narrow concept of the law.”

“Nothing you do is a matter of
life and death,
” Robin said, with an air of exasperation, “—it doesn’t
matter!
Not really.”

Roger tried to smile, an affable dad, though steeped in corruption. He said, “Most actions in our lives don’t ‘matter’—ultimately. Yet—they matter to us. My clients wouldn’t agree with you, honey.”

Calling this beetle-browed disdainful young person, hair hanging in her face, jaws chewing pecan pie with mechanical precision,
honey!
Dad was trying, trying pitifully hard. It would be noted that Dad was trying pitifully hard. But Robin dismissed this ploy with a wave of her fist.

“What’s the law
for,
Dad? Basically to make money for lawyers, isn’t it? I mean, basically.”

“Law is—” Roger faltered, a man on the edge of an abyss, “—the cornerstone of civilization. Without law—”

“What’s civilization,” Robin interrupted vehemently, “just a power structure, isn’t it? A
hegemony,
it’s called. To keep the masses, and women, in subjugation? Sure, people like you love ‘law,’ the ‘law’ is always on your side.”

“Without law,” Roger said, gritting his teeth, “we’d be savages.”

“We’re not savages, now?”

“If we were, honey, you would know it.”

Robin regarded her father across the white linen table top. Across the soiled remains of plates, cutlery. Something was exposed in her for an instant, a dark raging knowledge between them, of how far Daughter might push, and how far Dad might consent to be pushed, before there was a catastrophe. But, how delicious the possibility of catastrophe! Roger saw in his daughter’s widened blinking eyes a look of spiteful innocence



J C O

that must have preceded the deliberate twisting of her ankle on the playing field.
I hate myself, why shouldn’t you hate me, too?

Quickly she looked down. Her heavy face darkened with blood. She pushed her dessert plate away, with just her fingertips, in a sudden fastidious gesture of repugnance. As if finally she had disgusted herself, and was frightened.



R      that night. In the bedroom that was his, ad-joining the bedroom that was his daughter’s. (Quietly she’d locked the door between the rooms. He’d heard her.) His eyes kept opening, he was disoriented, confused. His guts were writhing snakes. He could not envision what the weekend would be. The whole of Saturday and much of Sunday in Washington, in the company of his daughter.

Yes, but Roger was the girl’s father, he loved her.

Certainly, yes, he loved her.

He
had not wanted the divorce, only his pride kept him from begging.

Why are you unfaithful?

Why? Out of loneliness
.

Loneliness for who
,
for what?

Out of the fear of loneliness, maybe
.
Adam, I don’t know!

But to jeopardize your marriage, your family, for a reason you can’t explain?

If I could explain it, Adam, fuck it I wouldn’t have to do it, would I?

When he woke, his eyes stinging, tears of rage, disappointment, loss, he couldn’t remember where the hell he was. But he was alone, Adam had departed. He’d lost his best friend and what had he, instead?

He got up to use the bathroom. Quietly. Not wanting to wake Robin on the other side of the door.

He would have liked to talk with Adam. To talk and laugh together.

He had yet to tell Adam about the misadventure in Middlebury. Adam was the one to appreciate the pathos, and the grotesquerie.

This helpless yearning to come together with a woman: with the lost half of one’s soul. Lost half of something.

How he and Abigail Des Pres had scrambled from each other’s embrace like guilty children. Abigail went to open the door, why Abigail was compelled to open the door to that furious scratching Roger would have no idea, and in bounded Apollo, wolflike, tawny-eyed, burrs in his coarse
Middle Age: A Romance



silver-tipped coat. He was limping and panting. Though the dog must have been crouched outside the door it seemed, now the door was opening, that he’d been running, the force of crazed momentum carried him inside. He was ravenously hungry, Abigail fed him in the kitchen. Abigail and Roger watched the husky-shepherd eat. Politely then Abigail asked Roger, who’d adjusted his clothing, and more or less managed to regain his composure, if he would like to stay for dinner; but Roger coolly declined.

Was Roger Cavanagh no more—or maybe less!—than a dog, to be fed by this woman out of pity?

He went away, he wanted never to see her again. The very thought of her, the lurid soft mouth, the discolored eye and bruised face, the thin tremulous yearning body, was repugnant to him. It was an insult to his manhood, to be so treated! And the other woman, the red-haired woman, he would not think of, at all.

Still, Roger Cavanagh felt responsible for Abigail Des Pres, he worried about her, and found himself calling her; he wanted not to call her, and felt relief when she didn’t answer her phone, and no answering machine clicked on to take his message. Finally, a week or so after the Apollo episode, Roger drove out Wheatsheaf to Abigail’s house. In the circular driveway there was a lawn service truck, and Roger parked behind it. If Abigail was home, if Abigail would see him.
If this was meant to be, then it
was meant to be
. He would obliterate utterly his love for the red-haired woman, he would sink and sink in this woman, and make an end of it. If he made love to her just once, she would adore him, she would become his wife, he seemed to know. He did want to marry again, he was in horror of remaining alone much longer. But when he went to ring the front doorbell, the foreman of the lawn service crew told him, above the roar of motors so powerful that Roger’s skull vibrated, that Mrs. Tierney was gone for the rest of the summer—“To Nantucket.”