Object of Your Love (15 page)

“The judge
said,
” Anne cuts in impatiently, slapping her hand down flat on the counter while glaring at Eric, “six months before you see the girls. I think that's a good stretch for you to get your act together. Also, it gives them time to get over your little drama. I was crazy to let you come up here today, but you got Jade so worked up I had no choice. You shouldn't have phoned her. That was against the rules too. Don't pretend you don't know it. My lawyer would have my head if he knew you were here. I hope you're going to behave yourself today.”

“I promise I'll be a good boy,” says Eric somewhat mockingly and Anne gives him a stony look.

“What's Lance doing here, anyway?” Anne asks. “And your mother? I don't remember inviting them. I'm not sure there's enough cake now.”

“They wanted to see Jade. They wanted to see
you.
”

“Sure they did.”

“Mom was driving downtown the other day and she saw you on the street dressed in one of your business suits, carrying your briefcase and all. She was impressed as hell.”

“She's sure got old and sour,” observes Anne. This is the first she's seen of Mrs. King in a year. The last time was when Eric was admitted to the hospital after swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.

“It wasn't a genuine suicide attempt,” Anne, who'd responded reluctantly to a phone call, told Mrs. King at the hospital. They were standing beside Eric's bed in the psychiatric ward. He was sleeping, under sedation. Anne looked down at him, unmoved. “He's just trying to get attention,” she told Mrs. King. “He's trying to get back at me. If he'd really been serious about killing himself, he would have blown his brains out. It's not as if he didn't have enough guns handy to do it with.”

“He was the best father he knew how to be,” said Mrs. King. “He had nobody to teach him.”

“He never learned how to love,” Anne told her. “He may not have had a decent father but you could have taught him that much, at least. But I guess you have to know how to love before you can teach someone how.”

Then Mrs. King had started to weep. “I'll never forgive you for saying such a thing,” she told Anne.

“I don't want your forgiveness,” Anne told her. “I got your son and that was more than I could stand.”

A few months ago, Eric turned up unexpectedly at the house one Sunday afternoon, saying he wanted to talk to Anne and the girls. He got them to sit in a row on the couch and he sat down in an armchair opposite them and pulled a revolver out of his pocket. He held it to his temple and said that if any of them moved or spoke, he'd blow his head off. Then he told them the whole story of his pathetic life, about how his father had pickled his liver and beat Mrs. King and the boys before finally kicking the can when Eric was only ten. About what a failure he was at school. About a series of close scrapes with the law during his teen years. About hating his job until he found unemployment was even worse than working. About living alone in a sterile apartment and missing them all, especially the girls, and still loving Anne with all his heart and feeling now like he wasn't worth two cents, and the only thing that kept him every day from jumping off his apartment balcony was hope. Hope that Anne would take him back. It took an hour to get all this out, during which time the girls, frozen in their seats, wept and trembled and came close to throwing up.

Anne heard him out and then said, “Well, I've got better things to do than sit around here listening to this garbage. I've got vacuuming, and if you want to pull the trigger, be my guest, it's your stupid life.” She got up, went down the back hall and pulled the vacuum out of a closet. She plugged it into a wall socket in the hall and roared into her bedroom with it. There, she picked up the phone and dialled 911. “There's a madman loose in my house with a gun,” she said into the receiver. The police arrived within minutes and took Eric away in handcuffs.

Now Eric is seeing a psychiatrist, on a court order. Before the separation, Anne had asked him to see an analyst, but he'd just laughed at her. “Shrinks are for nuts,” he'd said. Now his shrink is all he can talk about. “I'm sick,” he tells people unabashedly, slightly boastful, scratching the back of his head. My shrink says this and my shrink says that. “My shrink wants me to take these pills, for a while anyway.” And, “My shrink says it all goes back to my father.”

“Don't think having a lousy father absolves you of responsibility,” Anne told him.

*   *   *

“If there isn't enough cake, I don't have to have any,” says Eric, full of self-sacrifice. He has insisted on carrying the paper plates, napkins and plastic forks down to the patio, though Anne says to him, “Why lift a finger now when you never did before?” Anne follows him down to the river, bearing the cake, flaming with candles.

The afternoon is hot and humid. There is a pearly light over the sluggish water that distorts vision, giving the illusion that the river is wide, wider than it actually is, that they are standing in a dream, with the real world pushed back to a far, far shore. This is the kind of perfect, windless day that makes the sky seem deeper, the clouds more baroque, the daylight hours longer than anywhere else in the world. Anne wishes the river weren't such a picture because she knows it will fill Eric with a maudlin nostalgia.

Now she is bent over a low table, serving up the cake.

“Oh, Mom,” says Jade, mildly reproachful, teasing, “you're going to let Dad have a piece of
cake,
aren't you?” A lifetime up here in the country, beside the river, has turned her into a bronzed, athletic girl, with a healthy glow. Her crimped, strawberry-blonde hair measures to her elbow, and she has a fine, long nose and white, white teeth. Eric has told Anne that every time he sees Jade, he's shocked by her beauty.

“She hasn't made any mistakes with her life yet,” Anne said. “That's why she's still beautiful.”

Desiré and Cassandra, who have been swimming with Lance, come out of the river to get a piece of cake. They are fourteen and twelve, both of them with dark curls. Eric, now that he's not living with them any more, now that, as he says, he misses them like crazy, seems to be able to remember their names.

Jade, sitting on one of the patio chairs, is opening Eric's gift. He's bought her a compact disc player.

“How much did
that
cost?” asks Anne, who has been paying matrimonial support to Eric ever since they separated.

“It was on sale,” says Eric evasively.

“Aw, Dad, don't tell me
that,
” says Jade. “It spoils it.”

“
You're
spoiled,” says Eric, pleased with himself, as though he can take sole credit for it.

“It seems to me,” says Anne to Eric, “you could be less frivolous with my money.”

“These days, in a divorce,” says Mrs. King regretfully from a chair in a corner of the patio, “women have all the power.” Mrs. King suffered a mild stroke soon after Eric's suicide attempt. Although it didn't impair her speech or mobility, she has a blanched look now, as though she has seen her own ghost. She's not exactly fragile yet, but she seems to have lost physical mass, and moves carefully these days, gripping doorknobs and the arms of chairs whenever she can, as though her bones have become hollow and weightless and she fears she might float weightlessly up into the sky if she doesn't hold herself down.

Lance, water streaming from his swimsuit onto the patio, eats a piece of cake right out of his hand. He hasn't gotten thinner with time. His stomach is like a great, white balloon in danger of bursting. He is always boasting that he hasn't seen his toes in years. “Hey, you guys,” he reproaches Eric and Anne gently, grinning, icing on his face, “I thought this was supposed to be a party.”

“
Yeah,
Mom,” says Jade, scowling at Anne.

Eric's attention is caught by a movement up on the hill. “Well, lookee who's here,” he says without pleasure. They turn to see Reed round the corner of the house. For the past few years he's been working in the oil fields, at isolated camps in northern Alberta. The money is good in that business and his only complaint is that there are no women to be had. He comes back home once or twice a year, but, as far as they know, keeps pretty much to himself. Now he lopes down the hill toward them, long-legged, loose-jointed, wearing black skin-hugging jeans, a black shirt, cowboy boots and a Stetson.

“Looks like Palladin,” says Lance.

“What's
he
doing here?” asks Eric, narrowing his eyes at Anne. “Who invited
him?
”

“If the rest of you can come up here and park yourselves, why shouldn't
he?
” says Anne with a shrug.

“Who's Palladin?” asks Cassandra.

*   *   *

At five o'clock, Anne still hasn't been able to get rid of Eric and Mrs. King. Jade, dressed to go out, comes into the kitchen, where Anne is wiping the counter.

“Why don't you let Daddy stay for supper?” she asks. “He came all this way. The least you could do is feed him. All you've given him since he got here is one little piece of cake. He's been really sweet today, don't you think?”

Jade and Anne do not see eye to eye on Eric. “I can't believe,” says Anne, “that you can be so easily sucked in by him. Don't you remember how he used to talk to you? He used to treat you like
shit.
”

“Well,” says Jade smugly, “I know how to forgive.”

“You can afford to forgive. You've got the rest of your life ahead of you. But be careful. People don't change. They pretend to change, but in the long run they don't. They just stay their same old rotten selves.”

Jade looks at her pityingly. “You're getting really cynical, you know that?” she says unhappily. “In fact, you've gotten to be a real
bitch.
”

“Have I?” says Anne lightly, with a cold smile. “Well, this bitch is clothing and feeding you.”

Jade picks up her purse angrily and strides out the front door.

“Happy birthday!” Anne calls after her, her voice full of irony.

A few minutes later, Eric comes in, wearing his bathing suit and drying the back of his neck with a towel. “Nice to get in the river after so long,” he says, but Anne ignores the remark. She has become adept at stepping around Eric's hints that he'd like to move back in with her. Mrs. King comes into the kitchen, too, and stands by the door. Ever since Anne's remark at the hospital, there has been a stone wall between them. Eric pulls a shirt on over his head. “Where'd Jade go? I saw somebody come and pick her up in a car.”

“She's gone out with her friends to celebrate.”

“Where to?”

“She never tells me,” says Anne. “They'll probably end up at the club later on.”

“That's no place for her,” says Eric.

“I've talked to her about birth control.”

“Birth control!” says Eric. “Christ! She's only sixteen!”

Anne smiles at him sweetly. “The shoe's on the other foot now, and it pinches, is that it?”

Eric suggests that he take Cassandra and Desiré out for a ride in the sailboat, but Anne tells him they've walked into the nearby town with Lance to see an early movie. Lance will stay overnight and catch a ride home into the city with Reed.

“Reed?” says Eric.

“Yes,” says Anne. “He's offered to stay over to work on those shed repairs you mentioned.”

Eric snorts, incredulous. “That's a good joke,” he says sarcastically. “He doesn't know the right end of a hammer.”

“I'm sure he'll manage,” says Anne. “I think it's time you left, Eric. You wouldn't want to overstay your welcome, would you?” she adds with sweet sarcasm.

In the bathroom, Eric changes from his bathing suit to his slacks and comes out to the kitchen again, his rolled-up towel under his arm. Passing Anne, who is picking over some fruit in a big wooden bowl, he says, “Your hospitality has been overwhelming,” and goes out the sliding-glass door.

Mrs. King picks up her purse. Anne notices how stooped she's become and how her dark lipstick bleeds like paint into the puckers around her mouth. Before turning to go out, Mrs. King looks at Anne sternly. “You can get the law to restrict Eric from coming here,” she said, “but you can't keep his heart away from this place.”

Anne stands there pressing the navel of a cantaloup experimentally with her thumbnail. She raises her eyebrows and says pleasantly, “That's odd. When he lived here with me, his heart always seemed to be somewhere else. All he wanted to do was get out. Why would that be? Maybe it was the recollection of you with a two-by-four in your hand.”

Mrs. King ignores the remark, as though the stroke damaged her hearing. “This house will always belong to the Kings, no matter who holds the mortgage,” she says. “It's ours and so is the river.”

Just then they hear shouting from outside. Anne drops the cantaloup on the counter and rushes out the door. Mrs. King follows slowly. Up on the hill behind the house, under the inky pines, Reed is sprawled backward across the hood of his car. Eric is standing back with a look of satisfaction, watching Reed cautiously and rubbing his knuckles.

Anne looks at them, her hands on her hips. “What the hell's going on?” she demands. “Who started it this time? I suppose it was you, Eric.” Eric does not look at her, but shoves his hands in his pockets. Reed is nursing a cut in a corner of his mouth.

“I must have been out of my mind to let you come up here,” says Anne to Eric. “It wasn't for me. It was for you and the girls, and this is the thanks I get for putting up with you all day. You can't get along with anybody, can you, even your own brother? You'll never grow up.”

“I saw Reed putting one of my best wrenches in the trunk of his car,” Eric says angrily. “He's got no business taking that.”