Up Island (7 page)

“Fear of what?” I said in my flat new voice that was as heavy as my body, my steps, my heart. Heavy and flaccid. I could not seem to shake off an endless, level white fatigue.

“Fear of it happening to them. Fear that if they get too close to you they’ll catch some kind of virus and their husbands will walk out with some toots from the
52 / Anne Rivers Siddons

steno pool. Do they still have steno pools? Drink your coffee.

You look like death.”

“No, they have legal departments now,” I said, sipping my coffee. The unstirred Hennessy puckered my mouth, but it did warm me a little, going down. In the middle of an unpre-cedented early heat wave, I could not seem to get warm.

“Listen, I want you to come over and stay with me for a while,” Livvy said. “Caleb’s going out again this weekend, and that way I’ll be around if you want to start talking this out. I won’t push you, I promise. But at least there’ll be somebody around in your corner. You can spend the whole time sleeping if you want to. Just do it at my house, okay?”

“Oh, Livvy…Teddy’s in my corner. Caroline is. My parents are…”

“Yeah, I can just hear your mother’s tender words of sympathy and support now,” she said and snorted. Livvy and my mother had disliked each other viscerally and instantly. “And I’ve already heard Teddy’s. ‘Goddamn you all’…It must have been a real Martha Stewart moment.”

“He was devastated,” I said defensively. “He’s been a love ever since.”

And so he had, my tall son, still white-faced and mute with misery and anger, but sticking to my side like a burr. Not literally…he did not dog me, or pressure me to talk. We did not talk much at all, in fact; had not, since he ran from the library the night of All That Stuff. But he was always in the house. School was out, and ordinarily Teddy would have vanished like a curl of smoke until September, but he did not go to the club to swim or play tennis, he did not go to band practice, and he spent little time on the telephone.

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The latter was the most alarming of all. Teddy’s crowd, sprawling like puppies in the sun of approval and privilege since birth, checked in with one or another many times a day. The silent phone was ominous to me, and not only because Tee’s call to say he was coming over to talk still had not happened. I hated the thought that my new contagion might spill out over Teddy. It seemed to me, drifting in my silent house, that nothing would or could happen until the telephone rang.

“Well, I’m sure he has, but you can hardly say what you think about Tee to him; it’s the father-son thing,” Livvy said.

“You need to be with me. Whatever you want to say about the sonofabitch, I’ll agree with you. Oh, shit, Molly, I’m just so
mad
at Tee Redwine! What a complete and utter asshole; I truly never thought it of him. And I’m just as mad at Caleb, and that whole little crowd of Coke princelings. They’ll close ranks around him like the bunch of goats they are; see if they don’t. Even while they’re shaking their heads and doing the

‘Aw, jeez’ thing, they’ll be covering his butt. I don’t think anybody over there likes that bitch; did you know they call her the Eel Woman? Caleb says she’s as slick and cold as a lamprey. But it ain’t Tee who’ll be cut out of the herd, oh no. Testosterone is thicker than blood or water.”

I smiled at her passion, painfully but gratefully.

“You sound like you might have had a few words with Caleb about it.”

“Only about five hours’ worth,” she said.

“Oh, Liv. I’m sorry…”

“Don’t apologize! Don’t you ever apologize for any of this,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you
dare
buy into that crap, that ‘Somehow it must have been my fault,
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how did I fail him’ shit. This is
Tee’s
fault. This is Tee’s shit.

As it is, you’ll end up paying the freight on it…”

“How? Why? Why should I pay for…whatever it is?”

“Oh, Molly,” she said in exasperation. “You know as well as I do what happens in our crowd when a guy leaves his wife for a new toy. Haven’t you seen it? For a little while it’s all, ‘Oh, poor thing, we must rally around her, what are friends for,’ and then, after a while, after everybody gets used to him being part of a new couple, they’ll begin to ask them back for dinner and little parties. You know, ‘Well, of course she’s awful, but after all, it’s Tee!’ And then it’s like they don’t remember who you are. Two or three times a year they’ll maybe have you for the big Christmas open house—different hours from them, of course—maybe take you to the club with another of their divorced girlfriends…but for the big stuff, the fabric of their little lives, you’re out of the loop. And she’s in. They may never like her, and they’ll probably despise the Eel Woman, but she’ll be part of them because Tee is. This is his crowd, just like it’s Caleb’s now.

This is guy stuff. This is the South. This is the Coke family.

You think Coke is going to give a happy rat’s ass about you?

They’re not even going to remember your name.”

“They ought to fire her…”

“Fire her! Oh, right! What they did was promote her. Took her off Tee’s team, of course; can’t seem to outright condone the stuff, you know, but they transferred her to community outreach and gave her a raise. And as for Tee, I hear he’s in line for Paris or London in a year or two, if he wants it. Real hardship duty.”

Paris or London…we had talked about it. How UP ISLAND / 55

many times? It had been something Tee was working toward, but we thought it would be much farther along, perhaps the last significant thing he did for Coke. I had loved the thought of the two of us in the blue hour, sitting on some gargoyled city terrace while the lights of Paris came on at our feet, or gardening in the long green twilight at a country house somewhere a few miles and hundreds of years out of London.

Maybe, I thought, an insane giggle beginning to bubble up in my chest, they could bike in together every day in their matching latex shorts.

I snorted and Livvy looked at me.

“You don’t think it’s going to happen, do you?” she said slowly.

“Well, of course not,” I said. “All that’s if there should be a divorce, and there’s not going to be any divorce. How can there be? He’s…Livvy, we…Teddy and Caroline and I…we’re what he
has.
We’re what all those years have added up to for him. He can play around with having something else for a while; I mean, I hate it, of course, but in the end it’s not going to matter because we’re what he
has.
His whole life has been spent making what we add up to. And he’s what
we
have. What would we have if…well, he’s what we have, that’s all. He’s the sum of all those years and all that talk and all that laughter and all the trouble and the hard times and the…the…ordinary times, the thousands of times we brushed our teeth and…and rented a video, and talked on the phone to each other. All the things we’ve done together and planned and thought and worked for and seen happen, all the clothes that hang in our closets and the furniture we’ve always had…everything that we remember…who would all that belong to if we…didn’t stay together?

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There’s just not going to be any divorce. Let him wear bike shorts and screw her in a midtown condo; it doesn’t touch who he is or who we are together. He knows that as well as I do.”

“Oh, honey,” she said softly.

“Why, does Caleb think Tee’s…going to be with her now?”

“Moll…Tee told him that he was. He told him that back in March or April. He just didn’t get around to telling you.”

“Because he knows it’s not going to happen,” I said, and got up. “I do think Caleb might have told you, though. It would have saved all of us a lot of pain.”

“No it wouldn’t, love. It just would have gotten it over sooner. But you’re right, he should have told me. That’s one reason I’m so goddamn mad at him. Okay, enough about it.

You’re not ready to deal with it yet, and that’s okay. It’s probably too early. But I still wish you’d come stay with me next week. Teddy’s old enough to be on his own; you don’t want to hang on to him. Who knows, you might even have fun with me. You know what we could do? We could do four or five days at a spa, Canyon Ranch, maybe, get a complete overhaul, do some serious shopping…”

“And get our hair bleached, and maybe even a little liposuction, a little nip and tuck? God, Livvy, I never thought I’d hear it from you. The classic woman-scorned, feel-good routine. Such a cliché.”

“Maybe that’s because it works,” Livvy said matter-of-factly.

“Well, then, we’ll watch old movies and eat pizza for six days, or get drunk, or whatever you want to do. Will you come?”

“Not right now. But I love you for thinking of it, UP ISLAND / 57

and I may take you up on it later. Right now there’s stuff that has to be settled, and it can’t get done until I talk to Tee.”

“Call him, then.”

“It’s his call to make. He’ll have to do it sooner or later.

He can’t just pretend nothing’s happened; he owes Teddy more than that, and Caroline. But it’s his call.”

“It’s your call, of course, but I’m out of here for now,” she said, getting up and hugging me. For a moment I stood loosely in her arms, feeling the strength and warmth of them, luxuriating in the simple human touch that meant love, and then I drew back and slapped her on the fanny and she turned to go. Then she looked back.

“How’s your butt, by the way?” she said.

“Why…fine. Smooth as a baby’s. Not a tingle for days,” I said, realizing only then that it was true.

“Butt knows best,” she said solemnly, and was out the door and gone.

T
EE DID NOT, AFTER ALL, come and talk to Teddy and me.

He faxed us.

That one thing infuriated my father more than any of the sorry flotsam and jetsam cast up by the separation. Most of the proceedings he watched with a sort of grim, detached sorrow, but when he heard about the fax he exploded.

“What kind of sorry jackass faxes his family that he doesn’t want to live with them anymore?” he shouted, throwing the
Atlanta Constitution
down on the floor of the screened-in porch.

“He may be a jackass, but he’s our jackass,” I said, hoping to divert him with humor. It usually worked, but not this time.

“No, he’s not,” my father said in a low, cold voice. “That’s just what he’s saying, only he’s not man enough to say it to your faces. Well, by God, he’ll say it to mine, or I’ll know the reason why.”

And he got up and strode toward the hall where the downstairs telephone sat. Cellular phones were not a part of my father’s ethos.

“No, wait,” I called. “In all fairness, Teddy told 58

UP ISLAND / 59

him to fax. He wouldn’t talk to Tee on the phone and he wouldn’t see him.”

“So what! Tee should have insisted; he should have just gone over there. This is his wife and son we’re talking about.

What’s he going to do, E-mail Caroline?”

I said nothing. In the clear light of my father’s rage, it did sound shabby and feckless. I don’t know why I had not thought so earlier.

Tee had called on Sunday afternoon, late, and said that he’d like to come by and talk to both of us. I said, “Fine,” as calmly and neutrally as I could, but my heart began the familiar galloping. If Tee didn’t come to his senses soon, I thought, I’d simply go into cardiac arrest.

“So, okay, we’ll be by in about an hour,” Tee said, and I heard Teddy’s voice on the upstairs extension. I had not realized he had picked up.

“What’s this ‘we’ shit?” Teddy said coldly.

“I’m coming, too,” a woman said. Her. It was her. I had imagined a silky, tongue-flickering purr, but the voice of my enemy was oddly flat and without resonance, with the nasal twang of the wire grass under it. It was, somehow, disarming.

Neither Teddy nor I said anything, and the voice went on:

“It may be harder for all of us now, but it’s not fair to let Tee carry this alone. I’m part of it, too. We need to know each other, you-all and I. We can build something honorable and lasting if we start out that way.”

She sat beside my husband, perhaps touching him, and spoke of honor. I could not draw a breath deep enough to get a word out.

“Eat a shit sandwich,” Teddy said. “If either of you’s got anything to say to us, fax it.”

60 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Teddy…” Tee began.

“You heard the kid,” I said, and hung up. Teddy did, too.

There was stillness, a silence from upstairs.

“You want to talk?” I yelled up into it.

“No,” he called back.

We did not speak of the call again. I retreated into my white fugue. The fax came that evening.

It was a long one, addressed to both of us and signed by both of them. Teddy read it and crumpled it up and threw it into his wastebasket.

“I need to see it, too,” I protested.

“No, you don’t,” he said, his back to me. “It’s two pages of New Age shit that ends up saying, essentially, that he’s leaving us and marrying her, and trying to make it sound like it’s some kind of cosmic wonderfulness that’s going to lift us all straight to heaven. He says he still loves us and will forever, and then she chimes in and says we can still be a family, a new kind of family. He says he’ll wait to hear from either or both of us. He can wait for me till hell freezes over.

You do what you want. I hate him. I hate that fucking bitch.”

He began to cry, the coarse, ragged sobs of a young man no longer a boy, and ran into the library and slammed the door.

I stood outside it, my heart wrung with pain. I could not bear the sound of his grief. But I knew that this time I could do nothing to assuage it. Only Tee could do that. Finally I went up to our bedroom—my bedroom now—and sat down to call Tee back. Then I realized I did not know his new number. And I knew that if I could help it, I never would.

I did not reply to the fax, either.

Caroline called late that night from Memphis. He UP ISLAND / 61

had just talked to her, he and Sheri, and she was furious, wounded nearly mortally, inconsolable.

“How could he do this to me? How could you let him?