Red Hook Road (32 page)

“You planning on staying up all night?” He gave a nervous smile, revealing purple-stained teeth.

“Close your mouth. No, no, I’m hoping to sleep tonight. But considering the way things are going, I might get to the jam and still have a few hours to put up the first of the tomatoes. Where’ve you been?”

Matt slid his plate away and leaned back, hand on his belly, in a show that he was too stuffed to eat any more.

“Finish your food,” Jane said.

There was a pause, and for one instant defiance flared in his eyes. Then he took up his fork again. As he shoveled up the rest of the pie she repeated, “Where have you been?”

“Driving around,” he said, with his mouth full.

She licked her finger and dabbed at some sugar that had spilled on the table. Then she put her finger in her mouth, wincing slightly at the sweetness. “Driving by the Neptune, by the stink of it. What is it you think you’re doing, son?”

He sighed, and pushed away his plate. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Uh-huh.”

Surely the boy knew her well enough to know that she was not the kind of mother to be satisfied with that kind of answer. “You’re sleeping with that girl, I don’t call that nothing. And let’s not even talk about what you’ve gone and done to John’s boat.”

Matt pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

“You’ll sit your narrow behind down. We’re going to talk about this. You don’t want to be seeing Ruthie, Matt. You know you don’t.”

Matt braced his hands on the back of the kitchen chair, digging the pads of his fingers into the vinyl-covered upholstery. He rocked the chair back and forth a few times. “Why not?”

“Why not?” Surely he didn’t need her to explain to him what was wrong with what he was doing. Jane’s head started to hurt, a dull throb that began at the base of her skull and crept over the top of her head.

“Yeah, why not? I like her. I like being with her. She gets me, you know? She feels the same kinds of things I do. We’re alike.”

If he’d finished college, if he had gotten his degree, gone on to study marine biology like he had always said he was going to, then he might have had something in common with that girl. But now he was nothing more than a dropout working down at the boatyard. He wasn’t even a designer, like his brother had been. “She’s nothing like you, boy.”

“You’re just saying that because you have a chip on your shoulder about her parents. But you need to get over that, Mum. Look what they’re doing for Samantha. Ruthie’s mom gave her a fucking
violin
! The old man is giving her free lessons. Do you even
get
who he is? He was one of the most famous violinists of his time. He played for, like, JFK. He even played for the fucking queen of
England
! Do you know how much he would charge for lessons, if he even gives them anymore? Like, I don’t know, a hundred bucks an hour!”

Jane slapped her hands down on the table, making the pie tin and forks jump. “Watch your language! I’ve known Mr. Kimmelbrod for forty years. You don’t need to tell me who he is. Samantha doesn’t have anything to do with this. What’s going on between Samantha and Mr. Kimmelbrod is a whole nother problem. This is about you and that girl.”

“Why is what’s going on with Samantha a problem? She’s
lucky
. If it weren’t for Iris and Mr. Kimmelbrod, we never would have even known Samantha
had
talent.”

“I knew.”

“Oh, yeah, right. You knew. Before the Copakens came along, the kid was playing on some little toy Barbie piano. Now she’s studying violin with a world-famous virtuoso.”

Jane didn’t need Matt to tell her that Mr. Kimmelbrod was giving Samantha a tremendous gift, that if not for him, Samantha’s talent would have been little more than a party trick. Jane was, in fact, keenly aware of how much she owed the old man and his daughter, of the depth of the emotional and financial hock she was in to the Copaken family. The lessons, and before that the burial plot, and before that the wedding. She could never repay them, even if they would allow her the dignity of trying.

Jane said, “We’re not talking about that now. The problem we’re dealing with right here and now is you and that girl. I want it to stop.”

Matt raised his voice. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“That’s not a good enough reason.” Saliva sprayed from his mouth, and with a rough swipe he passed the back of his hand over his lips.

“While you live under my roof that is the best reason there is.”

Matt pushed the chair into the table with a bang. “I’m going to bed.”

Jane stood up, braced her hands on the edge of the table, and leaned forward until her face was close to Matt’s. “We’re not done,” she said. Her scowl operated on him as it always had. It froze him in place.

For a long minute they faced each other across the expanse of the pockmarked old table, neither one of them moving. The room was silent but for the airplane drone of the cicadas, the occasional booming of a toad, and the hum of the electric clock above the stove.

Finally, Matt said softly, “I’m not sixteen anymore. You can’t tell me who I can and can’t date. I’m a man.” Matt’s eyes were wet and Jane was afraid that he was going to cry. Instead, he turned away and walked out of the room. In the doorway he stopped. Without turning to look at her, he said, “I’m sorry, Mum.”

“Don’t be sorry. Do the right thing.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and left her alone in the dark kitchen.

As she listened to his heavy tread on the stairs, Jane sat down, put her head in her hands, and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. She missed John. If he were here she could have thrown up her hands and said,
“I have no idea how to get through to that boy. You deal with him,”
just as she used to whenever Matt would sink into one of his adolescent sulks. Then John would have smiled, given her shoulder a squeeze, and teased her for getting so upset. “Take it easy, Mum,” he would have said. “You’re going to give yourself a stroke.” Then he would have gone to Matt’s room, shut the door, and within minutes the two of them would be listening to their music and laughing like fools.

In a life that had of late been composed of vast swaths of solitude, Jane had never felt so completely alone. She pulled the pie over to her, picked up the fork, and took a large bite. She ate the whole thing, and if there had been a second pie, she would have eaten that one, too.

If Iris had not woken up so early, in all likelihood she would have assumed that he had gone into town to wait in the café at the co-op for the
New York Times
to arrive. That was, after all, what he had done nearly every summer morning for more than twenty years. But she had slept fitfully, and he woke her when he got out of bed. She tried for a few minutes to fall back asleep, but when she could not, she went down to the kitchen. She found him standing at the sink drinking a cup of coffee. He was wearing sweatpants and a torn T-shirt, and his gym bag hung from his shoulder. She looked at the gym bag and crossed her arms over her chest.

“It’s a stress reliever, Iris,” Daniel said. “It makes me feel good. I need it.”

“You need your stress relieved? You can run,” Iris said. “Lift weights. I don’t know. But you can’t go getting yourself beaten up. It’s ridiculous for a man of your age to think he can box. It’s
embarrassing
.”

“It was just a little sparring,” he muttered, like a recalcitrant child. “And if you hadn’t come in and distracted me I never would have gone down.”

“Give me a break, Daniel. It’s been days and your face still looks like a side of beef. I won’t have you boxing anymore.”

“You’re not my mother, Iris. You’re my wife,” Daniel said. “You don’t get to tell me what you’ll have and what you won’t have. I’m going to do what I want to do. For once.”

Determined not to lose her cool, Iris crossed the kitchen, took a coffee mug from the drain board, and went to fill it, passing next to Daniel on her way to the coffeepot. When her arm brushed against his, he flinched. She was seized by an urge to press herself up against him, to force him to feel her body, her skin, her flesh. She wanted to slap him across the face, to
hurt him for making her feel that her touch repulsed him. He never stroked her hair, or kissed her cheek, or held her hand anymore. And they had not made love since the week after Becca and John died.

Before the accident, while not frequent, their lovemaking was regular. If not passionate, it was certainly comfortable, and occurred at least a couple of times a month.

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, for reasons neither of them understood, they had made furious love nearly every night. It began the night after the funeral. First to bed, Iris lay curled on her side between the chilled sheets, shaking. When Daniel slipped into the bed, he spooned himself around her and they lay like that for a while, warming each other. Suddenly Iris was conscious of his penis shifting against her, growing hard. She pressed herself against him, and Daniel groaned.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t help it.”

“It’s okay,” Iris said, turning around so they faced each other. She wrapped her arm around his neck, knotting her fingers in his hair and pulling it, harder than she had intended. They drove their tongues into each other’s mouths, biting and sucking as if they were trying to consume each other. With his mouth still pressed to hers, he thrust inside her. He ground his hips against her and she arched her back. It was as if they were trying, at fifty years old, to pound another child into existence to replace the one they had lost. Or as if they were taking out on each other’s bodies the rage that had no other obvious target. Soon they were bathed in sweat, their bodies slipping on the sheets. For traction, Daniel grabbed the headboard with one hand. The other he clamped over her mouth to muffle her screams.

They never spoke about it, they never planned it, but for nearly a week they fucked every night, always with the same intensity. When he came Daniel cried, his tears and sweat raining down on Iris’s face. Then, suddenly, as inexplicably as it had begun, it stopped. Nearly two years had passed since then, and they had not made love once.

Remembering those nights, Iris could not deny that the violence of their lovemaking had not been an accident. The brutality had been the
point
. Tenderness could follow only because of the aggression, even the pain, that preceded it. She had accepted it then. Even, if she was honest
with herself, took a kind of grim pleasure in it. But now, two years later, when he no longer touched her, she could not bear the idea of him finding satisfaction in the ring.

“Please. Daniel,” she said. “Please promise me you won’t do it anymore. You’ll get hurt, and I don’t honestly think I can handle that. Not now.”

Before he could answer, they heard the tapping of Mr. Kimmelbrod’s walker as he made his way down the long hall from the guest bedroom where he was living this summer, having finally conceded that he could no longer manage in the Peter’s Point Road cottage on his own. As they waited for him to arrive in the kitchen, they exchanged a long, fraught glance, at the end of which Daniel shrugged the gym bag off his shoulder and tossed it into a corner of the room.

Iris set about preparing the single slice of toast and soft-boiled egg on which Mr. Kimmelbrod breakfasted every morning. After she served it, she called up to Ruthie. By the time the girl was sitting at the table wiping the sleep from her bleary eyes, Iris was sliding a neatly pleated tomato-and-cheese omelet as snug as a love letter onto her plate. She put a pot of Earl Grey tea and two cups on the table and sat next to her daughter. She poured herself a cup of tea and offered one to Ruthie, who shook her head. Daniel presented Ruthie with a cup of coffee. She poured in a splash of milk and drank.

“I’m surprised Oxford didn’t turn you into a tea drinker,” Iris said. “It certainly did me. I used to drink dozens of cups a day, just to keep warm.”

“There are Starbucks all over Oxford now. And, like, twenty other cafés.”

“That’s a shame,” Iris said.

“Why?” Ruthie said, poking at her omelet. “Oxford’s no different than anywhere else.”

“I don’t know,” Iris said. “I thought it was pretty special. Although I suppose it’s true that the world has experienced a creeping homogeneity since I was a student. Don’t you like your omelet?”

Ruthie sighed and pushed away her plate. “Mom, Dad. And Grandpa, too. I have something to tell you.”

Iris wrapped her hands around her mug, steeling herself for what could, with that introduction, only be bad news.

“I think I want to take a break from school.”

“A break?” Iris said.

“A year off. I’m not quitting the program.”

“Of course you’re not,” Daniel said.

“Just a hiatus. It’s very common for people to do that.”

“Is it?” Iris said.

“Yes. At least, at Oxford it is. It’s called a gap year. People do it to sort of clear their heads. So they can make sure they’re certain about their courses of study.”

Iris said, “I was under the impression that a gap year was something young people did before they even began university, not something graduate students did in the middle of their degree programs. I can’t imagine it’s something Fulbright Fellows do.”