A Private Sorcery (20 page)

Betty said she never throws anything out, just stores it in the attic, and she'll get Donny to bring down the boxes of photos she keeps up there and she'll look through to see what she has. I gave her your address and she said she'd send you whatever she finds.

I have a new boss—a woman! She has a little boy, five years old, and she's always asking me questions about did this happen or that happen with you or Gene. It's so strange, I tell her, but I can hardly remember what it was like then. It seems like such a long time ago.

You should see my garden. I've added some fancy stuff—pineapple lilies and this vine called Spanish flag. There's a Chinese
man across the street who planted his entire backyard with snow peas. Everyone talked behind his back about what a stupid thing that was. Yesterday, he told me he's made four thousand dollars so far this summer selling snow peas to restaurants in Chinatown!

It was good to talk with you. Are you making any progress figuring out what you want to do now that you've left your political consulting job?

Love to Saul.

A string of X's and O's follows, and then her mother's loose, loopy
Eleanor/Mom
.

During Eleanor's only trip east, when she'd come to take Gene back to California after his three years with Rena, they'd gone to Staten Island to visit Betty and Donny. It was the first time Rena or Gene had met their grandfather, living by then with Betty and Donny, too ill with Alzheimer's for there really to be anyone to meet. On the ferry ride over, Eleanor had tried to prepare Rena: “Your aunt, she's very dramatic. Sarah Bernhardt, my mother used to call her. When we were girls, she would attract busloads of boys with her gorgeous red hair and her tight sweaters. Donny was the sexiest boy in the neighborhood. After they got married, he went to work in my father and uncle's fish market on Fulton Street. Betty couldn't bear staying home alone with the baby, so she'd bring him into the store and she and my mother would trade off watching him. Really, my mother would mostly watch him. Betty would be out front in the store, flirting madly with anyone who had hair on his chin. Then she'd see Donny smile at a female customer and she'd go nuts. Twice she chased him out onto the street with a fish knife, threatening to cut off his you-know-what.”

Donny, a big man with a full head of unnaturally black hair and a friendly, impersonal smile (the same display of bleached teeth directed at the other descending passengers as at his sister-in-law), met them at the ferry. He surveyed Eleanor—slender and pert in her navy slacks
and taupe blouse, her hair cut in a way that accentuated her round brown eyes—and grinned. “My God, El, you look like the day you left. Now don't let your jaw fall out of your face when you see Betty.” He rearranged the chains on his neck and made a whistling sound. “She's gotten pretty big.”

They drove in Donny's maroon Ford down streets of clapboard houses, each with a porch and a driveway and a large tree and a flower bed in front. “Betty's been cooking and cleaning up a storm, waiting for you to come. She still had her manicotti on the stove's why she sent me to get you.”

Donny pulled up at a house with a cupid fountain set in the lawn. “We got a pool, an above-ground back from when the kids still lived home. And a barbecue pit, we call it Donny's kitchen.” He led them inside to a room with a white shag rug and white leather couches covered with plastic and a wall hung with pieces of mirrors mounted in a diamond pattern. Betty appeared in a haze of red: red hair, red lips, red nails. A pink apron swaddled her girth. Flowered leggings covered legs as thick as telephone poles.

Donny videotaped Betty hugging Eleanor, narrating all the while that this was the historic meeting of the Peretti girls. Betty kept putting her hand out to block the camera, which she addressed in a stage whisper: “I'm not really this fat, it's just the video that makes me look this way.”

Betty showed them the backyard, where an old man in a ratty blue cardigan sat slumped in a lawn chair. Saliva ran down a gully etched between the corner of his mouth and the bottom of his chin. Gene splashed around in the pool while Betty tried to get her father to recall his youngest daughter: “You remember, Dad. Eleanor, Elly, the one who moved out west.”

The old man kept his eyes on the lawn, Betty repeating herself more and more loudly as though the problem were one of audition until finally Donny, grilling clams on the barbecue, called out, “Christ Almighty, Bet. Give it up. He clearly don't remember.”

Rena helped Betty bring the food out to the picnic table while her
mother sat quietly stroking the old man's hand, her face set in a way that made it impossible to guess what she was feeling. The old man refused to touch the clams but ate some of the manicotti after Betty leaned over and cut it into small pieces. Then, in the middle of dessert, he looked up at Eleanor. “You're that actress, the one in that movie.”

Betty started to cry. “Look at this hair,” she said, pulling at the top. “Every week, I sit in that goddamn beauty parlor under that burning dryer. Look at these nails.” She thrust her long red nails, each with a gold stripe running diagonally across, toward Eleanor. “I wash him, I do his stinking laundry, I clip his toenails, and you're the one he thinks looks like a movie star.”

Mascara ran down Betty's cheeks. The old man kept his eyes fixed on Eleanor. Gene stared at Betty.

“Goddamnit, Betty,” Donny hollered, “you start in on this jealousy shit and I'm out the door,” and Eleanor looked horrified and then helplessly at Rena, who quickly gathered up Gene's wet clothes and their bags and sweaters, mumbling all the while, no, no, they really had to go.

T
HE LAST WEEKEND
in September, Beersden and his band have a gig in the Hamptons. He books a room at a motel in Montauk, far enough away that it's unlikely he'll bump into anyone he knows. On Thursday, it turns hot. Against her better judgment, Rena agrees to come. She leaves work early, takes a cab home and sleeps for a few hours before getting up to pack an overnight bag.

At noon, an hour late, he calls. There's a tension in his voice she's not heard before. “Sorry. I'm just walking to the garage. I had some things I had to deal with before I could leave.”

It's nearly one when Pedro buzzes to say that Mr. Beersden is here. Downstairs, she looks for him; she's not seen his car before. Across the street is a blue station wagon. He's leaning back with his eyes closed. Behind him are two children's car seats.

Rena opens the rear door and puts her bag at the foot of one of the seats. He opens the passenger door. It's daylight. They've never been out
in daylight. He reaches a hand across the front seat, out of sight from the street, to touch her leg.

“Sorry,” he says again. “Sherry threw a fit about having the twins to herself this weekend even though her parents are coming in.” Rena watches the contortions in his face: the wish to reassure her that he wants to be here with her. The inability to rid himself of his concern for his wife.

They drive largely in silence. She imagines Sherry on her hands and knees with the minivac cleaning up crumbs, the girls hot and whiny in the cramped, toy-strewn apartment.

As they reach the Long Island Expressway, her lids grow heavy. She yawns.

“Get some sleep.”

She rests her head against the door and dozes. When he pulls off the highway for gas, she keeps her eyes closed.

H
E PARKS BEHIND
the motel. “I'll register,” he says, and she knows to let him carry their bags up the outside stairs and to wait until he's drawn the drapes across the sliding doors with their view of the parking lot before going up the stairs herself.

She lets herself in. He's lying on the bed, surveying the orange and brown room. Using the bedside switch, he flips the lights on and then off. “Pretty awful,” he says.

“It's fine.” She sits next to him. “The beach is right across the street.” He doubles a pillow under his neck and strokes her knee. Don't worry, she wants to say, ashamed that her days with Ascher have left her a pro. I know how to do this. You just stay out of restaurants, go to the 7-Eleven for breakfast, take sandwiches to the beach for lunch, have a picnic on the floor for dinner.

She changes into a bathing suit and packs her tote. Beersden has crawled under the covers, the bedspread pulled to his chin.

“I'm going to the beach,” she whispers.

He nods. “Twenty minutes' shut-eye and I'll be fine.”

She crosses the road and climbs down the wooden ramp that leads
over the dunes. The sun is hidden under the clouds, turning sea, driftwood and sand all the same dove. She spreads out the towel and slathers herself with sunblock. Like an eerie déjà vu, not of a scene but of a mood, she recalls the last time she was at a beach with Saul. Then, too, she'd walked alone to the water's edge, his teacher Sylvia's house hovering above.

She spots Beersden crossing the sand, a beach chair under each arm. From a distance, with his gray hair and his torso contracted to balance the weight of his load, he looks like an old man. He sets the chairs side by side so they both face the water. She's relieved not to sit face to face. She stares at the ocean, an oil tanker at the horizon, the pleasure boats. He flips through the paper, turning the pages at a rate that betrays that he's not really reading. He glances at her periodically in a humorless, forlorn way as if he knows she's counting the minutes until he'll leave to get ready for his gig and she can then be alone. She imagines staying until dark: reading her book in the canvas chair, swimming at the warm hour when the sun is low over the water, lying at the ocean's edge and watching the little holes that appear in the smooth wet sand with the retreat of each wave. Pulling on a sweatshirt as the air grows cool and letting her hair dry wild and salty.

When she was fifteen, she'd had her first boyfriend, a sixteen-year-old boy named Rusty who was in love with surfing. Every morning before school she'd driven with him to Stinson Beach. She'd sit wrapped in a blanket while Rusty put on his wet suit and carried his surfboard down to the breaking waves. Entering the water, he'd slip in sideways, his front arm petting the froth, the board lodged under the pit of his back arm. Had she been closer, she was certain, she would have heard him talking to the sea in a low steady voice, the way a person who knows dogs will approach a growling German shepherd. Never—not even the following spring after Gene was born and she missed five weeks of school and her best friend, Cheryl, told her that Rusty had twice been seen driving with MaryAnn, a cheerleader with auburn hair that fell in sleek bunches over her shoulders—had she regretted that Rusty had been the first person, the only person before Ascher, with
whom she'd taken off her clothes. A Sunday afternoon, his parents gone to a wedding, his first time, too, the awe of the moment expanded by his telling her so. They'd undressed each other, he her, then she him, talking and stroking one another's arms, and she'd thought as he moved closer and closer of the way he approached the water, so gradually you couldn't tell where his body cut the surface of the sea.

“What are you thinking about?” Beersden asks.

“Nothing much.”

He cocks his head, a careful gesture behind which she can sense his broiling hurt that she has closed herself with her response.

“Saul?”

“No. Actually, I was thinking about a beach I used to go to when I was in high school.”

She avoids his gaze. We're both just tired, she says to herself. The cheerless weather. Having not yet told Beersden about Saul's arrest, it hardly feels like the time to do so now. What she has told him is that they separated in February, that they talk every few weeks. That she is uncertain what will happen between them. Not a lie in it all, but not a piece of truth, either.

With Saul, she'd agreed that honesty in their marriage required what he called no untruths. After that, though, they had diverged, Saul arguing that withholding was itself a kind of lying. For years—that is, until Mitch, when everything fell apart—they'd debated what constituted withholding. Was there anything one could keep to oneself and not have it become a destructive kernel, a thing that grew fat on secrecy?

“How about if you're pleased as punch about a new tie you've bought and I think it's hideous?” Rena had asked. “Do I need to tell you that?”

“You don't like my new tie?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't say otherwise.”

He tickled her until she said, “Well, the tie is okay, it was the shirt you wore with it. Green-and-yellow paisley with a blue striped shirt?”

“You see. My point exactly. Had you not revealed your disapproval, our marriage could have foundered over a fashion faux pas.”

“How about if you think a woman who's sitting across from us on the subway is gorgeous and you have a sexual fantasy about her? Are you going to share that with me?”

“I've never had such a thought.”

“Bullshit,” and then it was she who pounced on him, tickling him in the tender spot just south of his armpits, and he said, “I confess, I confess. Last week at the movies there was a girl sitting next to me who had these plump legs and I had the thought of touching her thighs.”

“You louse. You held my hand while you were fantasizing about some girl's thighs?”

“Yes.”

“You watched that Lotte whatever her name is, up there on the screen unlacing whatever that thing was to wash her breasts, and all the while you were thinking about the girl sitting next to you?”

“Don't tell me you've not had fantasies about other men since we've been married.”

“You're evading my question.”

Saul raised a hand in mock solemnity. “I plead the Fifth.”

“Ditto.”

His tone shifted. “Rena, kidding aside, you can't claim to have never had sexual fantasies about anyone else since we've been together?”