The Time of Her Life (5 page)

If she threw herself over him now, with her gown hiked up around her waist, he would have to reach his hands around her and
stroke her thighs. His cautious separation from her in their own bed made her angry. She lay quite still while Avery talked.
She knew what he was saying. She knew all about him. In fact, as far as personal knowledge went—her subjective perception
of a thing—he might be the sum total of hers. She had expanded all her senses in comprehension of Avery.

When they were growing up in Mississippi, in the summer afternoons, there hadn’t been any turbulent weather. The heat and
heavy scent of flowers were a condition of life. In Mississippi in the summer afternoons, there always used to be girls sitting
on porches waiting in the dusk. At Claudia’s house they sat and watched the boys in Avery’s driveway playing basketball until
the game was given up, and some of those boys drifted over and sat down, sweaty, beside a girl and perhaps touched her arm
so that at her age, in high school, and in the soft-edged muted surroundings, a sensation as riveting as an electric current
would pass through her, galvanizing her to the moment. The girls Claudia had known, and she herself, had been more persistent
in their young lust than the boys. It was ever with them, the idea of it, in classrooms, when they were in gym playing volleyball,
away at summer camp. Those girls wouldn’t have chosen to put aside that overwhelming absorption for a quick game of pickup
basketball.

Claudia and her friends had become ill with desire
about age twelve. They were, most of them, obsessed with the need to be kissed and caressed and touched and fondled, and by
necessity they spent a great deal of their time consumed with interest in all the games and contests of the compellingly awkward
teenaged boys. But not one of those girls cared much one way or another about the contests; they simply longed for proximity
to those male bodies hot and damp from football practice or a baseball game. And those girls grew disheartened when they became
sadly aware of the peculiar nature of the lust of those same boys. That intoxicating, lovely, and longed-for male interest
turned out to be not much more than a flashlight beam falling over them in a darkened room. A narrow illumination might linger
on them for a while but was then diverted to another object with the very same concentration—basketball, tennis, golf, poker.
It was then that the girls began channeling their own passion in other directions, but the nature of society in that town
would have been quite different if the girls had not had to adapt so absolutely to the customs of men. It was the beginning
of their anger, because this was the difference: Those Mississippi boys were genuinely interested in other abstractions and
brutalities of everyday life, while for the girls their social diversions and intellectual devotions were first born of frustration
and, in the beginning of their adolescence, were a second-best concern.

One afternoon when a group of girls collected on Claudia’s porch with glasses of Coke, Annie Dobbs, who was going with Avery
that year, had suddenly let out a little laugh. “I don’t know,” she said, “I hope I don’t end up still in love with Avery.”
They were all a little in love with Avery no matter whom he singled out. “He’s
not ever going to be all that easy to get along with. You know what I mean?”

Claudia liked Annie Dobbs, who was a year older than she was, but she already had known, anyway, who was going to end up with
Avery. In fact, she ended up with him every weekend after he had taken Annie home. He came drunkenly across the backyard and
through a window into her bedroom on the first floor. Upstairs Claudia’s father lay partially paralyzed and perhaps oblivious
since his stroke, and her mother lay in her separate bedroom sedated into sleep.

The first night he had appeared at her window she had been undressing from her own date, and she had gone over to unlatch
the screen wearing just her slip and bra and pants. He had stumbled in and lain down beside her on the bed fully dressed,
too drunk to go home to his parents, who were still up and about. The following weekend she came home early from a party out
on the Natchez Trace, leaving her date behind and catching a ride with another couple. She put on a pretty cotton nightgown.
Once again, though, Avery just lay down beside her, cupping her shoulders companionably toward him until he got up to go several
hours later. The next Saturday, not at all sure what she was doing, she had fumbled with his clothes while he lay there next
to her, coming out of an alcoholic haze. At last he had turned to face her and then moved over her and they had made love
briefly, and she had lost her virginity with no regrets.

Claudia had suffered a good bit, though, during the rest of the years in high school when so many pretty, gluttonous girls
were available to Avery. He went on to Tulane, and two years later Claudia followed him to New
Orleans and went to Sophie Newcomb. They were married by the time Avery began graduate school at Chapel Hill. Claudia had
been immensely relieved when they moved to Lunsbury and finally settled right in the middle of the country, where there was
such blustery weather but an atmosphere that didn’t weigh so heavily on the senses.

But this morning Avery’s sobriety intruded on Claudia’s expectations, which, lately, were only that the three of them who
made up her family would get up that day and lead a regular life. She had begun to covet a small degree of boredom. She had
begun to hope that if nothing else, their three lives would take on the calm, carefully planned pattern of the house Avery
had designed for them. But Avery was going too far. His sober self was alarming in its determination, and Claudia realized
that Jane was becoming more and more like him.

Claudia wasn’t ever apt to make up her mind entirely. From any one formulated idea that might be an opinion she had, there
trailed little wisps of “maybes.” Qualifications drifted around the things Claudia was almost sure of, the way the plastic
grass had straggled out of Jane’s basket on the Easter mornings when she was very young. Her daughter was steadfast. Once
she had a grudge or could place the blame it was a thing done, an emotion made, and Avery was like that, too, when he was
sober. Claudia lay in bed and didn’t say anything at all. She had the sudden illusion that any word she spoke would start
the doleful cranking out of all the minutes in the time ahead of her.

“I can’t live with you anymore. We’re coming to pieces,” Avery said. “This time we’ve really got to do it. I’ve rented one
of those unfurnished apartments near
campus. We have the two cars.” He was talking out loud in the same puzzling way as the tree that falls in the forest when
no one is there to hear it; maybe his words didn’t exist, so little did Claudia show any reaction. He talked on, with his
arm still half covering his face to shield the world from the full force of his meaning, and Claudia knew that his efforts
at rationalization were meant to convince her that his leaving was not to be taken personally. She also realized that she
had been waiting for some time for the moment when he would decide to go, although her senses were leaden with the knowledge
that they had once again come to this terrifying state of departure from the other. Always before, however, Avery had stayed
in hotels or with friends, places designed solely for temporary inhabitance, so that the very circumstances forced him to
come home.

She traced her hand along the pattern of the bedspread and was surprised by a brief, secret surge of anticipation. Whatever
else this was, it was at least a new development, a dramatic variation of their days. But it was a truant sensation, because
she was also so sad that it was as if she had fallen flat and knocked her breath out. She had always been with Avery, and
he with her. They would be orphans in the world without the other; she knew that, and she was struck through with trepidation.
Nevertheless, an initial gleefulness overtook her for a moment. Even while Avery was speaking, she felt that same excitement,
that same fugitive upswing of the spirit, that she had felt for a second as a child when her mother had told her that her
father had died after he had been sick for so long. She felt that momentary exhilaration because so many new possibilities
lay ahead.
Although even upon that very instant of curious elation, Claudia became despondently reflective once again. She knew that
it was shameful to be so passive in her own life.

Claudia’s tendency in the mornings to get on with the time ahead was irrepressible, so that she felt a peculiar responsibility
for Avery’s success at getting said what he was saying, at getting done what he was doing. She wanted to know what quality
his absence would have when she and Jane were left behind. He should have gone before they built their clever little house.

“Annie Dobbs said one time that you would be hard to end up with,” Claudia said mildly, stopping Avery in mid-sentence. He
turned for a moment to stare at her and then went on explaining. Claudia was wishing they were still in the first house they
had bought when they moved to Lunsbury, when Jane was still an infant. Each house along that street had had a different façade,
but inside there were the same three split levels, the same efficient plumbing at the core, the same three bedrooms replicated
in all the other houses—two windows to each room. Those rooms were designed to accommodate transience, and she thought that
it would have been an easier thing to be left behind there, because that had never been a house that would bespeak loss, and
she had enjoyed the homogenized neighborhood. Now they lived in what had become an intellectual ghetto. Their nearest neighbors
were the Tunbridges, who were a mile away across the meadows and at least three miles around along the unpaved, rural roads.
She had never admitted that she preferred living in their middle-class suburban tract house.

One morning in that other house Avery had come
downstairs to find her watching the family across the street dismantle the columns on their front porch—their house was a
Southern Colonial—and then hose them off inside and out before reestablishing them beneath their second-floor balcony. Claudia
had been standing at the window, gazing across the street, watching their neighbor heft the hollow columns with one hand and
carry them around to the side of the house, one by one, where the hose was attached. His wife had detached the capitals and
immersed them in a dishpan of soapy water and worked at them with a cloth. Claudia had liked the look of the house without
its columns; it had taken on a guise of tough vulnerability, a Mae West posture, and she had stood for a long time leaning
against the windowsill and looking out, while Jane, who was just walking, hung around her knees and whined.

Avery had been beside himself. “Doesn’t it ever occur to you to be anything but curious? I mean, you’re interested! And that’s
it. That’s all you are. I mean, for God’s sake, those people think their house is beautiful! I don’t even know if you know
the difference. You look at everything as if it were in a museum.”

These nine years later she thought he might be right in thinking that her perception was trapped in an ingenuous misunderstanding
of the human condition. She had a hard time making the kind of distinctions he expected intelligent people to make, and she
was still trying to develop a correct sense of discernment. She was trying as hard as she could to learn how to be judgmental
in the right way.

Avery was still talking, telling her all his plans, and finally she said, “What about Jane?” But before he even answered she
got out of bed. Her question was only what
was expected, only a wistful kite tail trailing off beyond their reach. He didn’t know any more about Jane than she did. The
two of them loved their daughter unconditionally, but they loved her as the third person among the three of them, and they
loved her as the only one among them not complicated by sexuality. They didn’t know that it was not like the love of other
parents for their children; what Avery and Claudia felt for Jane was an extreme
regard.

Avery did tell her what he planned for Jane, though. When Claudia went to the kitchen to fix coffee, he followed right behind
her. Jane was old enough to go back and forth between them. He intended to follow through with her violin lessons. It was
he, after all, who had struggled along with her during the first year of her Suzuki class, and it was he who had discovered
Alice Jessup, her private teacher. Through all these words Claudia could not escape the fact that he had been thinking about
this for some time.

“You know, Claudia,” he said, “that the last thing I have in mind is to make you or Janie unhappy.”

Claudia believed that, but she didn’t believe it in the spirit in which it was said. She had her own idea of the shiny thing
that Avery sought. He needed to take some action that would translate into goodness and rightness and perfection and immediacy—a
reflection of his own life upon the earth. And, truly, in Claudia’s estimation that was a frivolous and childish desire, but
she had never said that to him when he was sober. In her mind it seemed reasonable to accept certain things as givens and
then to love the people you have to love and live out the life you have to live. One might
strive
for this
or that but never hope for it. Striving was what humans had come up with to pass the years.

Avery pulled back the kitchen curtains while he still had his head turned to talk to her, so she noticed before he did the
white light that filled the room in a way that made the surfaces glisten as though they were covered with cellophane. The
windows were glazed with ice so smooth that it was like old glass, only a little flawed and bubbled. Ice covered their road,
their driveway, the leaves on the trees, so that each one of them hung gleaming orange or red under a frozen crust.

They both stood at the window to look, and Claudia put her lips against the glass and slowly exhaled. The warmth of her breath
made the ice crack into a chrysanthemum of feathery splinters that crept outward across the pane from the round circle of
the most concentrated heat. She stepped back and observed the world through the pattern she had made. It was very much like
looking out through a kaleidoscope filled with clear crystals. When the wind blew, the ice was shaken from the trees in an
unnerving shower that rattled like buckshot onto the brittle lawn below.