Practical Jean (17 page)

But after a while, and another glass of wine, Jean felt that she had done her very best. Adele lay dreamy and languorous on the pillow beside her, and the air they breathed seemed to glow.

“Are you happy?” Jean asked.

“Oh, yes,” Adele groaned.

“Good. Do you know what I'd like to do now?”

“What?”

“I'd like to give you a back rub.”

“Really? On top of everything else? You don't have to do that.”

“I want to,” said Jean. “You just get comfortable on your stomach and I'll do the rest.”

She slid out of bed and padded naked to the living room where her overnight bag lay. On her feet, moving amid the apartment's hard edges and monochrome palette, Jean felt a little fatter, less in proportion, than she had in bed, more awkwardly aware of her townish self. But as she took up the hard, leather handle of her overnight bag she saw again the Virginia chain ferns. She knew now that Adele had bought them as a way of keeping her close, and she felt surer than ever that she was doing the right thing. To Jean, the affection she felt for Adele in that moment, a deeper bond than she had ever thought possible, would be rendered sham and disgraceful, a contemptible hoax, if she walked away now. If she condemned her elegant friend to the crass blatancies of a painful, unlovely end.

In the bedroom, she caressed Adele's legs, eliciting a quiet purr, then climbed onto her back, straddling her like a palomino, and opened her bag beside her. She rooted around for her nail file and laid it on the bed beside her. She plucked out the vinyl gloves, thin as plastic wrap, and pulled them on.

“What are those for?” said Adele, watching with one eye.

“Oh, I'm going to use something on your back and it's gooey,” said Jean. “But anyway you shouldn't be peeking. Turn your head.” She made a twirling motion with her gloved finger and waited until Adele obeyed. Then she pulled out the first Fentanyl patch.

“What are you doing back there?” said Adele.

“You're supposed to be relaxing. Clear your mind.”

Jean used the nail file to poke a hole right through the seal of the patch and the membrane underneath. She squeezed out the drug into a glassy blob in her hand and held it out over Adele's shoulder blades.

“This might be cold,” said Jean. “Or hot. I'm not sure.”

“You haven't used it before?”

“Just shush.” She smeared it on quickly as Adele shivered, then she poked through the second and third patches, squeezed out the contents, and spread the gel with both hands over the whole of Adele's back.

“That stuff smells weird,” said Adele. “But it feels warm already.”

“You're enjoying it?”

“Mmmm. Why don't you lie on top of me? Squish around.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Is that menthol or something? It's really going to my head.” She paused as if to catch her breath. “Come on, lie down.”

“Just relax.” Jean tried to make the strokes of her back rub more forceful.

“Please?” Adele reached back and grabbed Jean's wrist, trying to pull her down onto her glistening skin.

“Stop it, silly!” Jean resisted for a moment and then didn't so much pull her forearm out of Adele's grip as find it released, and Adele's arm settled down at her side. In the bedside lamp's soft light Jean could see that the skin of her back no longer shone; the gel was soaking in quickly. She drew her gloved hands once more down Adele's back and rested them lightly on her shoulder blades, feeling the ebb of their rise and fall. Then she leaned down close to Adele's cheek, kissed her, and whispered into her ear, “Are you still happy?”

In reply, Adele gave a distant, ethereal whimper.

“I'm so glad.”

Then Jean opened and smeared on the gel from the fourth patch, just to make sure.

Chapter 12

I
t was early Saturday morning, and so the bus that took Jean back to Kotemee was only a third full, a ragged crop of heads, mostly middle-aged tourists, day-trippers, a few mothers with toddlers half-crazed for a splash in a lake. Her overnight bag on the seat beside her, Jean sat looking out an east-facing window, letting the city outskirts, the scrublands, the farmers' fields earmarked for development all blur past her eyes, and the memories of her times with Adele run together like watercolors. She had tidied the apartment, washed and put away the wineglasses, pulled a duvet over Adele's clay-cool back. More than once, when they'd lived together during that year of art college, she'd done precisely the same thing after a late, wine-soaked night.

Milt, annoyingly, wasn't answering when she called at eight-thirty, so, slipping her phone back into her purse, she abandoned the idea of having him pick her up at the station. Then she had to give herself a little mental kick because, of course, the car wasn't available at all. It was sitting in a garage waiting for parts.

Hardly a cloud. And not too hot. Today would be a good day to be in the studio; the sidewalks would be filled with strollers from the city looking for ways to commemorate their trek into the hinterlands, something to show off to their friends, an artifact from that quaint little town. They'd rattle the bell of Jean's Expressions, look around with their noses up, and conduct their interrogations.
How long have you lived here? How do you pronounce it? Do you ever wish you were closer to the city? Is there any place to get a decent sandwich? Why just leaves? Don't you have anything with animals?

Jean decided she could do without that today. She was, admittedly, a little hungover. And she was wistful about Adele. About leaving her there in the city, that place of noise and smoke and garbage and gangs. Living her whole life in the quiet of Kotemee, the city had always seemed to Jean to be a place where death—startling, violent, inexplicable death—happened every day, just one of the common transactions of a tumultuous urban existence. She wondered whether, in that savage swirl of mayhem, anyone would really notice that Adele Farbridge had ceased to be. There was a part of Jean that couldn't bear that thought. Another part was fine with it, admittedly, because the longer Adele went undiscovered the better it would be for Jean, and for the rest of her friends. But overall, she was wistful. Adele had shown her what true sacrifice for a friend looked like, and Jean knew that she had so much work to do to match her example. For Natalie and Louise and Cheryl . . . especially Cheryl. She had an awful lot to make up for there.

At a quarter to ten, with the sun in her eyes, Jean was carrying her overnight bag up the hill of Conmore Avenue from the bus station, crunching along the gritty shoulder in her gold sandals, wondering what she'd been thinking not to pack a proper pair of shoes. Three cars drove past her the wrong way carrying people she knew. They all waved a friendly hello and looked perplexed as to why she was walking.
My husband
. . . she wanted to tell them . . .
crashed our car
.

As she was coming to the brow of the hill she heard the sound of a vehicle slowing behind her and turned to see—what else?—Fran Knubel's Cadillac SUV. It had obviously just been washed, was still dripping sequins from the wheel wells, and it came to a stop right beside her. Fran, in the driver's seat, remotely lowered the passenger-side window.

“Need a lift, there?” said Fran from the cool, dark hollows of her monstrosity. “I wasn't going this way, but when I was coming out of the car wash I saw you getting off the bus and I figured you'd be getting tired.”

Getting tired. In other words, thought Jean, Fran had waited until she'd covered four blocks in her sandals before offering her a ride, and also—and
worse
—Fran was of the opinion that four blocks was just about all the walking Jean could handle. Getting tired. As if Fran Knubel herself was an Olympian with an opal brooch. Jean regretted ever having apologized for what she'd said in the bookstore.

“No thanks!” She showed her a big wide smile. “I'm doing great!”

“Suit yourself,” said Fran. A hidden motor whined as the passenger window climbed and then she started off up the road, the fat tires kicking up fans of roadside grit.

Within ten minutes Jean was home and launching her sandals across the foyer. She ripped the bolero jacket off her sweaty back and sent it halfway to the dining room, and for a moment she just stood in the front hall letting her chest heave and her temperature cool. Then she called out for Milt, and got no response. She limped a bit to the foot of the stairs.

“Milt!”

In the kitchen, she found unwashed dishes from what looked like the night before, including a pot with the remnants of chili caked into a hard tomato glaze. Upstairs, the bedroom looked tidy, except for a pair of Milt's beige socks on the floor. The flowered curtains were drawn and the bed made.

Jean let her green rayon dress fall around her feet, stripped off her underwear and unhooked her bra, and then stepped into the tub for the hottest, longest shower she could remember having in years. She leaned against the tiles with her eyes closed and let the spray do its worst, until she was pummeled numb on one side and turned around to let it have at the other.

Milt was still not home and Jean's skin was still sore as she propped a foot on the edge of the tub and dried off. Buffing her back and her legs with a fluffy cream towel, she decided to take advantage of the uncommon luxury of an empty house to call Cheryl. She dressed, and from her everyday purse she pulled out the sheet Welland had given her, with Cheryl's address in Bier Ridge and her phone number.

She lifted the receiver from the kitchen wall phone and punched the number in.

It rang once, twice . . . it rang five times as Jean's anxiety and anticipation steadily mounted. Then the rings stopped and she heard the click of the receiver being lifted and she was ready to burst.
Cheryl!
she opened her mouth to say.
Cheryl, it's me, Jean!
But there came a hollow clunk on the end of the line, the sound of the receiver being dropped, and after that a repeating percussive thud as she imagined it being dragged over a series of obstacles, or being used as a weapon to fend off an attacker, though she could hear no voices, no cries of anguish, just the dull
cunk
,
cunk
of the receiver meeting one hard surface after another, and in the background a strange whistling noise.

And then one word. It came out muddy and distant, low and dark enough to have been the voice of a man, but Jean was sure it had come from a woman. She was sure that it was Cheryl. “Busy,” said the voice. Except that it didn't sound like that. It sounded drawn out, angry, forced through clenched teeth. It sounded like
Buuussssssyyy
. And then the person on the end of the line hung up.

Jean didn't know what to think. She didn't know what to do. Cheryl had been right there, within reach of her voice. She dialed the number again and let the phone ring eight times. But this time no one answered.

The day was thickening with the sort of heat and humidity that foretold a thunderstorm. Jean sat for a long time at the dining room table in her empty house, sipping iced tea and thinking about Cheryl, wondering if she should call her again. She hated to be a pest with the telephone, but if the situation required she could punch numbers as relentlessly as any machine. The one thing she could not do, which she wanted to do desperately, was get into her car that instant and drive the seven hours to Bier Ridge. And she could not do that because of Milt.

She ruled out renting a car because there was no way of knowing how long she would be in Bier Ridge. It might be a day, a week, or a month, depending on . . . well, Jean didn't know what it depended on. There was nothing yet to know. All Jean had to hold on to were her unshakeable beliefs. That everyone, especially her dear friends, deserved a moment of transcendent joy in life before that life ended. That after all these years she yearned for the chance to prove to Cheryl that she was one of those friends. And that not being able to go to Cheryl right now, this minute, was Milt's fault.

Jean leafed through a copy of
Martha Stewart Living
, getting angrier at Milt with each recipe and clever decorating tip. The morning became noon and Jean suffered her fury at Milt and the rising heat of the day in equal measure. When Milt finally walked in the front door at nearly one o'clock, it was sweltering and Jean stood perspiring at the sink, soaping his unwashed dishes. As her husband wandered into the kitchen she gave him a look over her shoulder.

“Milt,” she said, her voice quavering, “I'm so mad at you right now I could spit.”

“Oh?” said Milt. Something about what Jean had said, or the way she'd said it, pressed him half a step backward, as if her voice had delivered the force of a small, contained gale. “Well . . . is it the dishes? I'm sorry. That was a mistake.”

“It's not the dishes I'm mad about.”

“Okay,” said Milt. “All right, then . . .” His voice took on a measured calm. He set every word down gently as if it were made of ash. “I know I should have been home earlier—”

“And I'm not just mad,” said Jean, cutting him off, “I'm
furious
.” She was speaking now to the dish suds. “And you know very well why.”

For a moment, silence filled the space behind Jean. “How . . . ?” started Milt. “How did you . . . ?”

As Jean took a scrub brush to the chili pot she looked around. “How did I what?” she said. But she'd barely gotten the words out when she knew something was wrong. Standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, Milt looked stricken. He looked crushed. His face slack, his eyes full of torment and wonder, he looked like a condemned man. It was not the visage of a husband whose wife was furious with him over a mishap with the car.

“Milt?” said Jean. She let the chili pot slide from her hands into the suds. It hit the sink bottom with a sonorous thud.

“Nothing happened,” said Milt. “I mean, not really.”

Jean took up a dishtowel to dry her hands. As she did that, and with her heart hammering, she turned fully around so she could look square at Milt, so that she could really see him, because now the infuriating business with the car was gone and forgotten, it was nothing, and what was important was standing right there in front of her. Still wearing the same checkered shirt he'd worn the day before. In front of her eyes Milt's shoulders sagged and his head tipped forward and he started to trudge out of the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

At first all Milt did was sigh. Halfway across the living room carpet and almost out of earshot, he finally said, “To sit down.”

Outside the window, in the middle of the street, the Craiglees' eleven-year-old and his friends practiced on their skateboards, making those terrible banging and cracking noises that to Jean sounded like gunshots as their jumps and twirls and spills caused the boards to strike against the asphalt. Sitting on the sofa, she had to listen past all this noise in order to concentrate on Milt's slow, sigh-filled confession. He had spent the night at Louise Draper's house, he explained. It wasn't the first time. While Jean was away taking care of her mother, Milt said, he had spent a few nights at Louise's. More than a few, actually. Probably about . . . fifteen. But no matter how many times it had been, he said, no sex had yet occurred, out of respect for Jean and Louise's own shy uncertainty. Still, there was obviously something “brewing” that couldn't be ignored, despite what he'd always claimed. And he knew, Milt said, that he was a bastard.

It was just about then, as Milt was proclaiming himself a bastard, that Jean suddenly fastened onto the image of a strawberry. She made a fist and bashed the arm of the sofa.

“Louise is the only person I know who drives out to a strawberry farm every summer,” she said. “We've got jars of her freezer jam down in the Frigidaire.”

“So?” said Milt.

“So I
knew
you would never think of picking strawberries on your own. Not in a million years.”

Looking at Milt, slumped at the other end of the sofa, Jean waited for a wave of outrage and betrayal to overwhelm her. She knew that outrage and betrayal were rightfully hers as a cheated-on spouse, that she could expect them to crash down upon her and wash her into an acid sea of despair. She waited for the wave and it didn't come.

What she felt instead was a greater sense of understanding. In a funny way, she thought, there was something inevitable about what was happening. It was as if years ago the two of them, she and Milt, had contracted an illness that had gone into remission, and then, in the course of things, it had come back.

And she saw, more clearly than before, that some people placed a greater value than others on the concept of friendship. And marital fidelity. And
forgiveness
. Because some people viewed forgiveness, being forgiven, as the gift of a second chance, a fresh opportunity for the transgressor to prove himself, or herself, worthy of trust. And other people, apparently, viewed forgiveness as a license to transgress again, to recommit whatever detestable act—
infidelity
, it was such a satisfyingly Edwardian word—had required the forgiveness in the first place. And it seemed that people who so easily dismissed forgiveness were willing to sacrifice a friendship in the process. Clearly friendship and fidelity and forgiveness were all woven together; they were of the same fragile thread. To damage one was to damage all. Some people understood that, and some people didn't. Those people could not be counted as friends.

After a long while of sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, with the skateboard racket from the street unrelenting, Jean asked Milt what his plans were. When he said he hadn't thought about it she told him he'd better; they weren't getting any younger and there was no sense in putting off important decisions. She decided not to tell him that his whole confession had been prompted by a misunderstanding. Milt was looking woeful, and she thought telling him about the misunderstanding would just make him more so. For the same reason, she decided not to tell him that she hadn't really been attracted to him for many years. Not since they'd attended the high school graduation of Andrew Jr.'s daughter, Marlee, as proud aunt and uncle. Milt had worn the nice gray suit that he'd bought when she'd encouraged him to get a full-time teaching position, and a blue-and-gold-striped tie, and his hair had been freshly cut, and Jean could still remember how much like a banker he'd looked that day. She didn't know why his looking like a banker had been such an attraction, but she could clearly recall coming home and stopping him in the act of loosening his tie, and how eager she'd been to have him push her down onto any handy horizontal surface. As a banker.