Running the Bulls (4 page)

“Give Patty and Eliot a hug for me,” Howard said at last. Then he shook hands with John, loaded his brown suitcase into the Probe, and wheeled away in the direction of Patterson Street.

***

Their hydrangea bush would be flowering soon, Howard noticed. And there was Ellen's little gray Celica, in its usual space in the big two-car garage. For years he had pulled into the garage and parked next to whatever car was Ellen's at that moment in time. But now, he braked sharply in the drive. He left the suitcase on the floor of the car, in the backseat, where it couldn't be seen. Then, he strolled cautiously to his own front door. He couldn't remember ever ringing his own doorbell, and as he did so the sound of it from
outside
his house was so alien to his ears that he stood entranced, listening, knowing how it must be sounding to Ellen's ears, that
inside
sound.

It would be impossible to know if Ellen had dressed especially for the dinner date with her husband. In all their years of married life, Howard had never seen her look less than beautiful. She was the kind of woman who could throw on one of his old flannel shirts, a pair of faded jeans, stuff her hair beneath a bandanna, and still be as alluring as if she'd meant it, had worked laboriously at it. When she opened their front door, she was wearing a black skirt and a green sweater, one he'd seen her wear before, but now it seemed even more green and fluffy. And the wearing of it had turned her blue-green eyes full green. She smiled.

“You rang the doorbell?”

Howard nodded.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Come on in, Howie. For heaven sakes, this is your
home
.”

He said nothing, at least not yet. He had said quite enough that morning, had called her a
whore,
a word that stung her so in the hearing of it that he was almost sorry. Almost, but not quite. Instead, seeing the damage and hurt that could come from one single word, he'd said it again, and again, and again, until she told him she would not leave. “
You
leave,” she had said. “This is my home. It's where I belong.” And that's what he had done. He had taken his battered suitcase and, sockless, he had gone to John and Patty's house in his blue lemon.

Howard stepped past her and headed to the bar. He found himself a bottle of Bacardi and was pouring a healthy serving into his glass when Ellen appeared in the doorway.

“You're not having your usual Tom Collins?” she asked. Howard shook his head. He was surprised at how quickly anger was fighting to replace the nostalgia he had felt earlier—a slice of Eisenhower's
peace
and
prosperity
pie—while the hot strings of water beat away at him in the shower.

“I won't have my usual Tom Collins,” he told her, “since you're not having your usual
Ben
Collins.” This shocked Ellen. She stood for a few explosive seconds, staring at him, wondering what she should do.

Then she said, “The chicken cacciatore is ready. We'll eat in the kitchen.”

Howard followed her into the kitchen, instantly sorry. His whole psyche was a mixture of anger and love, sorrow and nostalgia. And hatred, hatred for Ben Collins and his rugged looks, that perfect Jack Nicklaus swing.
The
bastard.
He sat at his usual place, at the head of the table, as Ellen poured them each a glass of red wine. Then she brought lovely salads, with artichoke hearts and Greek olives, knowing he favored them.

“I baked fresh bread,” she said, and produced a basket of warm, homemade bread. Howard's mouth watered, but he maintained a certain dignity, at least regarding the artichokes and olives and bread. He could tell Ellen was tired. She had most likely not slept since she awoke that morning before dawn and decided to tell him the truth. Well, let her be tired. Cheating was a demanding pastime. More so than the making of ancient clay pots. More demanding than ballet lessons.

Ellen sat at her own place at the table and lifted her glass of wine. She tilted it at him, toasting.

“I hope this will be a new beginning,” she said.

Howard had brought his Bacardi to the table and he drank from it instead, ignoring the wine before him, in one of Ellen's best crystal glasses. He knew this would sting her, for she liked things to be just so at special dinners. Bacardi and chicken cacciatore was not how she'd planned it. He took another gulp of the Bacardi, then put his glass down with a thud. He had wanted to bite into the salad and bread, relish those artichoke hearts and huge Greek olives, but something kept him from it, something primitive, maybe, something
male.

“I want some answers,” he said. And he looked into Ellen's eyes for the first time since early that morning. He saw that they were red and puffy. Did she ever love Ben Collins? Was she grieving for him now?

“What do you want to know?” Ellen said wearily. She put her glass of wine back in its place near her plate.

“Did you love him?” asked Howard.

Ellen didn't answer right away. She picked up her glass again, and this time, instead of drinking from it, she swirled the wine around.

“Looking back on it, from a sensible perspective,” she said finally, “the answer is definitely no. But when it was happening there was a certain excitement, I suppose, that I might have misinterpreted as love. It was the year I turned forty, and I don't know if maybe—”

“Oh
please
,” said Howard. “Spare me the psychology.” He hated her for her blasted honesty! Ellen O'Malley Woods needed to study public relations with the Ford Motor Company if she intended to stay in business as Howard's wife.

“Why don't you eat your salad?” Ellen asked him. “The chicken is almost ready.” Howard picked up his fork, as if by rote, then remembered and thunked it back down by his plate. He looked over at her, her lovely Irish American face rising above the green sweater, as though the sweater were a field of billowing shamrocks from the old country. Her eyes so green they seemed unreal. He wished he could hold her without feeling like a—what was that word from the Middle English, Shakespeare's and Chaucer's word?—
cuckold.
But he couldn't. He could not.

“Did you tell him you loved him?”

“A few times,” she said, quickly, as though she might lie if she thought her answer through. And he could tell by Ellen's face that she was determined to speak the truth, get it over with.

“The bastard!” said Howard.

“It didn't mean anything. Ben loved his wife. And he knew I loved you. I guess we were just acting like silly teenagers. We were wrong, Howie. I knew it then, and I know it even more now.”

“Bastard,” Howard said again. “How did you find out he died? And lucky for him that he did.” He pointed dramatically upward, at the tiny light fixture over their heads, as though it were a symbol for heaven, a stopover pad. Ellen frowned, but she didn't reprimand him. This was part of that new role of power that Howard Woods had stumbled into, and finally. Maybe the day would come when he would thank Ben Collins, visit his grave with a potted geranium or something, but he doubted it. If he found out where Ben Collins was to be interred, Howard Woods was more likely to go there with a black Magic Marker and write
bastard
all over his headstone.

“Molly told me,” Ellen said. “She read his obituary in the Portland paper and she called me.” Ah, yes, Molly, her new soul mate. Howard had never known if he should like Molly or not. In the fifteen years since she had moved to Bixley from Portland, and had taken up teaching art at the college, Molly had been Ellen's best friend. But he had always felt a certain reserve toward her. Now he knew why: Molly had been in on the illicitness.

“Molly knew?” he asked, his teeth clamping down, top to bottom, in sheer tension. Ellen nodded.

“Not at the time,” she said. “I didn't know her then. But a couple years after we became friends I confided in her. I guess I needed someone to talk to, to bare my soul to. I wanted to talk to
you,
but I was afraid you'd, well, I was afraid you'd do exactly what you're doing now.” He felt like slapping her, for the first time in all the years of his knowing her. She had told Molly. She was playing tennis with Molly. She was taking ballet with Molly. She was making goddamned Incan pots with Molly. And he, her husband, was left to flutter alone in the winds of retirement.

“I hate you,” he said to her, and he saw the tears rush instantly to her eyes. He didn't feel sorrow this time. Not this time.
Molly
knew.

“Who else knew?” he asked, his teeth barely unlocking to form the words.

“No one,” Ellen said. “I swear to you, Howie, not even Mother, that time I visited her for a week. She never found out.”

Howard pulled his thoughts away from pottery and Ben's rugged looks, and Molly's smugness each time he met her, to concentrate on this statement. Ellen's mother? Her mother lived in Buffalo. Why would her mother know anyway? Ellen and her mother were never close, not emotionally, not in that
Hey, Mom, guess what? I'm fucking Ben Collins!
way.

“Your mother?” Howard asked. His teeth had become veritable weapons in the cave of his mouth. Barbed stalactites. He feared he might bite Ellen if she said the wrong thing. But she did anyway.

“That week I went to Buffalo to visit Mother,” Ellen said reluctantly, as if she knew aforethought what rewards her honesty would bring her. “That was the same summer you offered to fill in for Grady Mullins and couldn't go to Buffalo with me.” Howard realized that he was staring at her now with a steady vengeance, but he couldn't help himself. His whole heart and soul wanted her to be saying something else right then, wanted her to lie to him, to lie like a rug, to lie like Ford Motor Company. “So Ben came to Buffalo, too. We drove. I didn't use my airline ticket. He got a motel room. Mother never even suspected.”

Ellen stopped, her face white as ivory above her field-of-shamrocks sweater, her sad green eyes watching him the way she had watched those F-15 fighter planes, flying low over Baghdad, eyes afraid to lose someone they dearly loved. She had taken Ben Collins to Buffalo for a week! Howard remembered that summer well. Grady Mullins, a fellow instructor in the English department, had come down with cancer of the colon. Since Grady was clinging to the tapestry of life by a single thread, Good Samaritan Howard Woods had offered to teach the English comp class in his stead. By God, he, Howard Woods, had driven Ellen to the airport! Had
picked
her
up
from the airport!

“The airport,” Howard said, and Ellen nodded.

“I pretended I was going to fly,” she said. “Then, I waited until you had driven away. A week later, Ben dropped me off at the airport an hour before the flight was to arrive, so I'd be waiting there.”

Was she getting pleasure from this? If not, why the hell was she cleansing her entire soul to
him?
Do this to
Molly,
he wanted to shout at her. Share your dirty laundry with your goddamn tennis-playing, pirouetting, pot-making pal!

Instead of shouting, Howard felt his right arm rise up, like some kind of Las Vegas one-armed bandit, watched as it swept the wine and water glasses off the table in one fell swoop. Glass broke in a deafening crescendo.

“Howard!” Ellen screamed. “Stop this!”

Howard pushed his chair back from the table and stood, glaring down at her.

“You
are
a whore,” he said, his words barely audible.

“You wanted the truth,” Ellen shouted at him, “and that's what you're getting. I'm tired of deception.” Then, she put her face into her hands and began to weep. Howard grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look up at him. She did, tears now filling her eyes.

“Did you?” he shouted.

“Did I
what
?”

“Did you enjoy it, with
him
?”

Ellen pushed his hands away.

“Yes,” she said. “I did enjoy it.” He felt his arm rising again and realized that he might strike her this time. So he brought the strength of it down on the kitchen counter. He watched in fascination as a bowl of candies rose into the air, then dropped to the floor and scattered in a blend of chocolate kisses and shards of glass.

“You crazy fool,” Ellen whispered. She knelt down beside the broken wineglasses and began gathering the crystal pieces. The whole room seemed alive with smell and color: fresh bread, chicken, the potpourri of cinnamon sticks and cloves, the set of blue canisters under the cupboard. And there was sound, too, the music of Ellen's sobs mixed with the tinkle of broken glass as she collected it in her trembling hand. Howard wanted to remember them, those smells and sounds and colors of the kitchen he had known for so many years on Patterson Street, because it would be a cold day in hell—and speaking of hell, he hoped Ben was down there right at that very minute, trying to round up a decent game of golf—it would be a cold day in Hades before Howard Woods ever stepped a foot back into
Ellen's
house.

***

Lights had come on all over the neighborhood by the time Howard finally pulled back into John's drive and got out of the Probe, the wretched suitcase in his right hand. Feeling a great kinship to Quasimodo, he shuffled up the walk and rang the bell. John's doorbell sounded like Howard's did, to
outside
ears, anyway, and Howard imagined his son rising up from that favorite black recliner, his muscled arms reaching out for the doorknob. He wondered what John was going to say this time, but it was Patty who opened the door.

“Dad,” she said, and stepped back so that Howard could come in.

Eliot, who was in his pajamas, looked up from some show on television to see his grandfather standing in the room. They'd only had time for a short chat that morning, and Howard had promised Eliot that they would go canoeing the next weekend.