Suddenly (19 page)

A need Angie hadn’t filled. She felt grossly inadequate for the hundredth time in a week, such that it wasn’t quite as shocking as it had been at first. She couldn’t do everything, be everything. She was coming to accept that.

Ben leaned against the wall with his arms folded and his ankles crossed, studying his deck shoes. In a weary voice he said, “I always go to the library to read the periodicals. She was there. We became friends.”

“When did it become more?”

“I don’t know.”

Angie waited.

Finally he said, “We probably knew each other a year before it happened.”

“Where do you go? Her house?”

“Angie, this isn’t—”

“It is,” she said, but quietly, sadly. “This is a small town. I know most of the people in it. I see many of them professionally. It matters to me how many of them know.”

“Your image.”

“It’s more than that. My self-confidence has been shot to threads around here. You tell me I’ve been wrong. Dougie tells me I’ve been wrong. I want to know if I can leave here and pretend that I can still do something right.”

“You do plenty right. Let’s not get overdramatic.”

She shot up from her chair. “Overdramatic? I’m the
last
person to get overdramatic. I’ve been walking around for days like nothing’s wrong.” She sank back down and, quietly again, added, “I’m feeling my way through this. It’s new to me. I’m doing my best, but if I ask something that you think is inappropriate, bear with me. You’re not seeing things from my perspective.” She sighed. “All I want to know is if everyone else in town knew about this before I did.”

“No one knows. We’ve been careful.”

“Are you still? Now that I know?” It was an oblique way of asking that other, more frightening question.

“I haven’t been with her since you found out. Not that way, at least.”

“But you’ve talked.”

“She’s my best friend.”

“I always thought I was that.”

“You used to be. Then you got so that you didn’t have time for me. I was like a piece of furniture. Once I was put in place, all I needed was a little dusting once in a while, a little fluffing up, a shifting one way or another to suit my surroundings. The original buy was the only critical part. After that”—he made a disparaging sound—“habit set in.”

“Is this a midlife crisis?” she asked, half hoping it was. Midlife crises passed.

He shook his head. “It’s more fundamental than that.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Are we breaking up?”

He was a long time in answering, a time of staring at the floor and frowning. Finally, in a quiet voice and with a wary look, he said, “I don’t know. Is that what you want?”

At least it hadn’t been an outright “no.” She had been worried about that. Belatedly she started to tremble. “I don’t want it, no. I like our marriage—”

“Like you like our goose-down comforter?”

There it was, the bitterness again. Given its depth, it amazed her that he had been able to hide it for so long. Unless he hadn’t hidden it at all, and she had just been oblivious, which was his contention. She couldn’t believe she had failed to see or hear something so strong. “You’re very angry.”

“Yes, I am. I’m angry that you weren’t more attentive. I’m angry that your work is so important to you. I’m angry that you put Dougie before me. I’m angry that I was put in the position of needing something so badly that I had to betray you to get it.”

“I am not the bad guy,” she insisted softly. “I didn’t intend to do any of that. If you had spoken up sooner—really spoken up, like you are now, instead of just dropping vague suggestions—we might have avoided all this. Eight years is a long time for you to be feeling bad about something without saying a word.”

He lifted a shoulder. “It’s done. Water over the dam.”

“So what do we do now?” They were back where they started.

He realized it, too. She could see it in the slump of his shoulders. She remembered when she used to massage those shoulders, when as a couple they were younger, more dependent on each other, and yes, best of friends. At the earliest months of their marriage, she had loved touching him. Then time had become scarce, and she had lost the knack.

She wondered if she could get it back, wondered if she wanted to. But before she could give the problem the thought it deserved, she was diverted.

“We start,” Ben was saying in delayed response to the question she had asked, “by letting Dougie board. It can be for a trial semester, with the understanding that if at any point it doesn’t work out, he’ll come back home.”

Angie was fighting a losing battle. She was on the short end, two against one. “I’m very uncomfortable with this.”

“Then let him be a five-day boarder. He can come home on weekends.”

That didn’t sound quite so bad—still bad, just less so. “Will he agree to it?”

“If that’s the only option we give him.”

But there were drawbacks to that, too. She could think of them all and would have blurted them out, if she didn’t have a sudden attack of unsureness. Once, she had known almost everything there was to know, and where knowledge left off, intuition picked up. Lately—first with Mara, now with Ben and even Dougie—she was way off the mark.

“What?” Ben prodded impatiently.

She shook her head.

“I’d rather you say what’s on your mind now,” he said, “than hit me with an ‘I told you so’ later.”

She was half-tempted to do just that. He wanted to let Dougie board; she could go along with it and then let him take the blame if things went wrong.

The only problem was that this was Dougie’s life they were talking about. She didn’t want things to go wrong for him, not ever, which was one of the very reasons she was hesitant to let him board at Mount Court. Okay, so she could hear Ben’s arguments in favor of it; she could even give them some credence. Still, there was this other.

“It has to do with timing,” she began hesitantly. “If we send him off to live at school now, he’s apt to think it’s because we want him out of the house so that we can either fight or get a divorce. He’s apt to worry more there than he will here.”

Ben thought about that in silence. In the past Angie might have filled that silence with more of her thoughts. Now she remained still.

Finally Ben said, “He’ll do fine, if we handle it right.”

Angie waited for him to go on. She was anxious to hear what he was going to say, because it went to the heart of the matter.

Incredibly, he looked to her for help, but she kept her mouth shut.

Finally he said, “We can tell him that we’re letting him do this because he wants it so badly.”

Which didn’t address the issue at all. Angie remained silent, but her expression must have said something—either that or Ben’s conscience had—because, snappishly, he said, “We can tell him that we’ll both be here waiting for him to come home each weekend.”

“Will we?”

“I will,” Ben said. “I wouldn’t let him down by not being here.”

Which said nothing about what he wanted to do with, for, or about their marriage.

“What about you?” he asked when she didn’t respond.

“This is my home. I have nowhere to go. But we’re avoiding the issue, I think.”

He drew himself up and glanced at his watch. “I’ll go pick him up. It’s time. I won’t mention this until dinner. We can discuss it with him then.”

Swinging back out the door, he left her alone and more troubled than ever.

Peter was similarly alone and troubled when he left the Tavern. He hadn’t stayed long, just for a beer. With no one to talk to, all he could think about were the pictures drying in his darkroom.

He had spent hours on them the night before. He had found just the right negative this time—or so he had thought—and had made every sort of print imaginable. Then he had gone through a day of seeing patients, of talking to parents and suggesting solutions to ailments, all the while feeling extra good about himself because he had been so sure that he had it. Back home, in the light of day, he had seen that none was right. None captured the feeling he wanted. None did her justice.

The beer hadn’t eased his disappointment at all. It had only made him aware that he was alone while everyone else was paired up, and that he would have been with Lacey if Lacey hadn’t gone holier-than-thou on him.

Taking his camera with him, he walked to the end of the block and turned onto Main Street. The sun was lowering in the sky, creating shadows to give depth to the stores there. He took a head-on shot of the bookstore, extended his zoom lens for a shot of the church at the end of the street, retracted the zoom, and took a shot of the whole of the three blocks that made up the center of town. The amber stone looked more golden in the sunset, the signs more authentically antique, the window displays more quaint.

He parked himself against a trash receptacle, opposite the block that held the drugstore, the card store, the package store, and Reels, and extended the zoom for shots of the latter. Mount Court kids were in town; he could see them through the store window. They were gathered in groups, some actually searching through the videos for one to rent, some simply talking to each other, some sitting on stools at the back of the store where the soda fountain stood.

He caught sight of Julie Engel. Her head was bent over a videocassette. She read it, replaced it, and picked up another. He crossed the street, stopping where the cars were parked diagonally, and snapped several shots of her through the glass. If striking when she had her hair pulled back and her skin bare, she was even more striking now. Her long hair was shiny and gently waved; her makeup was light but put focus on her eyes; her clothing was demure in ways that suggested the opposite.

As he watched, she separated herself from the group and wandered idly toward the front of the store. Then she saw him. She smiled and waved. After turning to say something to her friends, she came outside.

“Hi, Dr. Grace.”

“How’re you doing, Julie?”

“Not bad.”

“Did you find something to rent?”

“Nah. I’ve seen everything good three times. It gets boring after a while.” She gestured toward his camera. “Are you taking pictures of anything special?”

He tossed his head back toward the street. “Just the town. The light’s right.”

“Take some of me?”

“Of you.”

“My stepmom’s birthday is next month. I’d love to send her something good. She thinks the worst of me most of the time. Wouldn’t it be nice if she could have something angelic?” She glanced toward the church, beside which was a small park. “We could go there,” she said, taking his arm and leading him off.

Peter felt a tiny qualm. Julie Engel was as wily as she was beautiful, if the stories he had heard were to be believed. He wasn’t sure her stepmother’s birthday was in October. He wasn’t sure she had a stepmother at all. And he could hear Mara’s voice, warning him against wily young women.

Then again, the park was beside the church, which was certainly safe ground.

“What about your friends?” he asked.

“It’ll be ages before they pick something and have a soda and maybe even an ice cream across the street. We don’t get ice cream at school anymore. Mr. Perrine thinks frozen yogurt is healthier.” She slipped her elbow through his. “He’s an incredible bore, don’t you think?”

Peter eased her arm from his. Tucker was a small place. People saw things; what they didn’t see, they imagined; and what they didn’t imagine their neighbor imagined for them. He didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea. He didn’t fool around with kids, never had, never would.

“To tell you the truth,” he said now, “the man seems fine to me. I like his rules.”

“That’s because you don’t have to live under them. You don’t have to be in a dormitory at ten on week nights and eleven on weekends—and that’s for the
seniors
. Let me tell you”—she scooped her hair back from her face—“it’s a bummer. I shouldn’t be restricted this way. I’m eighteen.”

Peter didn’t believe it for a minute. Seventeen, maybe. Maybe seventeen and a half. But not eighteen.

She ran ahead, stopping against the side of a tree on the edge of the park. The sun caught her hair and gave it life; Peter raised his camera and captured the image as he approached, then did it again from different angles close up. He was in the act of refocusing when she trotted deeper into the park, stopping this time on a long wooden bench. She sat there innocently, looking into the camera’s eye for one frame and away for the next.

“Lift your chin…. That’s it. Great. When did you say your stepmom’s birthday was?”

“November. There’s plenty of time to get a really good shot. I’ll pay you, of course. You’d be my official photographer.” She jumped off the bench. “How about there?” She pointed to a stand of birches. The sun’s final rays were snagged on bits of protruding bark, creating the hint of a conflagration in the works.

Peter, who had no intention of charging Julie for one print for her stepmother, whose birthday was in either October or November as the girl’s whim went, held her off while he photographed the trees. He had the camera to his eye when she moved in but lowered it when he saw what she had done.

“Julie,” he warned.

“Just a few,” she whispered, slipping off her shirt as she approached. “The light is great.”

“Put it back on.”

But she had tossed the shirt aside, and if she’d been wearing a bra, it too was gone.

Her breasts were high and full, fresh in the way of a young woman approaching the height of her physical appeal. She might have been eighteen, twenty-one, or twenty-five. But she was a patient, a student at the school of which he was the doctor of record, and trouble.

Peter deliberately threaded the camera over his shoulder. “I won’t take pictures of you nude.”

“I’m not nude,” she said, coming closer still. “I’m wearing pants.”

“Get dressed, Julie. Let me walk you back to your friends.”

She shook her head. With the confidence of one who knew her power, she held his eyes. “Touch me,” she whispered from inches away.

“Un-uh,” Peter said with a slow shake of his head.