Dark Rooms (27 page)

“You were in love with him,” I say instinctively.

Mom's mouth turns down at the corners. “I never said that.”

“You were, though, right?”

She's looking at me, the expression on her face an old one, as old as my memory. It's telling me that, once again, I've disappointed her, have said something wrong, something nobody else would wish to have said, have failed, in the most fundamental of ways, to get it.

“Love's such an imprecise term,” she says, tipping her head to the ceiling, releasing a moody tendril of smoke. “Which love do you mean? What kind? Tenderness? Sentiment? Longing? Lust? Obsession?”

I return her look. No way is she going to pull her cool number on me, shame me into muteness, make me too self-conscious to ask her to elaborate. Not this time. “Were you in love with him? Yes or no?”

She shakes her head like she's amused. “Oh, Grace. You're still such a child.”

“Answer.”

“All right, yes,” she says, annoyed. “Yes, I was; I was in love with him.”

“So what was the problem? He wasn't in love with you?”

“No, he was.”

“But he was in love with Mrs. Amory too?”

A scornful laugh. “In love with her money.”

“I thought Mr. Amory was already wealthy. I mean, already rich,” I say, correcting myself without thinking, without even realizing. Mom hates euphemisms. Thinks they're frumpy beyond belief—middle class putting on airs. I feel that way about them too now, of course.

Mom, catching both the error and the revision, smiles.

Swallowing back my irritation with myself, I say, “Well?”

“His family used to be but they weren't by the time he came along. There was enough to get him through Chandler and Princeton and that was it. When I met him, his J. Press shirts were frayed at the collar and he was living at home while he studied for the bar.”

“I didn't know he was a lawyer.”

“Trained as one but never practiced. Never had any intentions of practicing, is my guess.”

“An aristocrat,” I say.

“That's right.”

“And yet he was still willing to leave his loaded soon-to-be wife for you. Why didn't he?'

“She got pregnant.”

“And you got dumped?”

Mom smiles, but she's angry. A stranger wouldn't be able to see it. I can tell, though, by the way her eyes grow long at the corners. She doesn't like the way I'm talking to her. So what. “That's the short version,” she says.

“Were you upset?”

She doesn't respond. Just taps ash into her saucer.

“You were devastated,” I say. “Then what happened?”

“Your father offered to cook me dinner. It was a couple months after it had ended with James, but I still wasn't myself. Otherwise, I never would have said yes. It wasn't that he was bad looking. His features were nice enough. There was something blurry about his face, though. You couldn't remember what it looked like if it wasn't right in front of you. I used to catch him staring at me all the time at school. I thought he was sweet.” The contempt she lets touch her voice when she says this last word is, I know, as much to hurt me as to insult him.

I don't react. Just say, “Well, the date must have gone all right.”

“I showed up at his place, lonely and depressed, got drunk on bad wine and pregnant on even worse sex. That was the date.”

“Jesus, Mom.”

“You're the one who wanted to know the truth.”

“If that's how you felt, why didn't you get an abortion?”

“I was going to. I'd scheduled an appointment at the local clinic. I just told your father as”—turning up the hand that isn't holding the cigarette—“I don't know why I told him, actually. Courtesy, I suppose. He dropped to his knee, proposed on the spot. He knew I didn't have feelings for him, that I was still hung up on James, but he said he loved me enough for both of us and wanted the baby. The thing is, I knew I was in no state to be making life-and-death decisions. I was still walking around with a black cloud over my head. So I let him talk me into skipping that first appointment. I meant to make another one but I never did.”

And there you have it. Not only am I the product of a pity fuck, I was this close to getting sucked into some doctor's vacuum besides. I'd always known that Mom didn't love Dad the way he loved her. I'd done the math, though. I was born just six months after the two of them got married. I figured that meant there was genuine passion between them at one point, even if, for Mom, it had faded. I feel sad for myself, sadder for Dad. “What next?” I say. “Not happily ever after obviously.”

Mom stabs out her cigarette, drops it in her cup. “No, not happily ever after. You were only six weeks old. One day I was taking a walk with you in your baby carriage in Colt Park. James was doing the same with Jamie. All we did was look at each other and it was on again.”

“He treats you like shit and you take him back? Just like that?”

“I wouldn't have under normal circumstances, but, Gracie, picture my situation. I woke up one morning and I didn't recognize my own life. I was married to a man I barely knew, never mind liked, never mind loved. My dreams of becoming an artist, of bright lights big city, were circling the drain. I had this baby—you. And I loved you but you
were after me constantly. Crying for me, latching on to me with those tiny little lips, sucking me dry.” She shudders at the memory. “You just needed, needed, needed—it never stopped.”

“I was a baby, Mom. What did you expect? That I'd be able to discuss the influence of Rothko on the work of Nan Goldin with you? The difference between the Leica M6 and the Leica M7?”

She's silent, her eyes on the cigarette butt floating in her coffee.

Suddenly my energy's gone. I'm not even angry anymore. Just tired. Tired and depressed. All I want to do is go back to the car, drive home, fall into bed and never get out. “This conversation's over,” I say. “I've heard enough. You're right. I shouldn't be kicking over logs. I'm putting this one back, okay? I'm putting it back.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can answer the question of why Nica broke up with Jamie myself now. Somehow she found out about the affair that you and Mr. Amory were having and felt too weirded out to continue dating Jamie. That's why she never gave him a reason. She was protecting him. Didn't want to tell him his dad was a cheater.”

Mom's lips twitch, and I know that once again the dark scenario I've envisioned isn't quite dark enough. “What?” I whisper.

She rubs at a stain on the table with the flat of her thumb.

I clear my throat. “Mom, what?”

“James and I aren't having an affair. Not anymore. We haven't been together in more than seventeen years. It ended for good when I got pregnant and—”

“I thought you started up again
after
you got pregnant with me.”

“Not pregnant with you, baby,” she says, her voice gentle. “Pregnant with Nica.”

“Pregnant with Nica,” I repeat dumbly.

“I wanted him to leave his wife. He wouldn't do it. Said he couldn't risk losing his son. No mention of the daughter he'd be giving up.”

“So Mr. Amory is Nica's father,” I say, half thinking that this truth, too, will fall away, be denied or contradicted, exposed as false as so many truths have been today. But it doesn't. It stands between me and Mom, as dense and solid as a brick wall. “How can you possibly know for sure? You were married to Dad at the time. You slept in the same bed.”

She starts rubbing at the stain again. “Because I just know, all right? Without going into the gory details I—”

“Go into them.”

She exhales heavily, then says, “Your father and I were sleeping in the same bed, but that's all we were doing in it.”

“So Dad knew Nica wasn't his?”

“Well, presumably he knows where babies come from so how could he not?”

“Did he know whose she was?”

From the way Mom's looking at me I can tell that the question's never occurred to her.

“What about Nica?” I say.

“What about Nica what?”

“Did she have any idea that she was breaking the law, both legal and natural?”

“Oh, Grace, don't be so melodramatic.”

“Why not? It's a pretty melodramatic situation—two family members fucking. I mean, how creepy can you get?”

“All families are creepy in a way.”

I stare at her, not believing what I'm hearing. “You're quoting Diane Arbus to me right now?”

She shrugs.

“Or maybe you didn't see them as family. I mean, she was Nica, but she was also your daughter, right? An extension of you? And you weren't related to the Amorys, so she couldn't be.”

“I knew Nica and Jamie were related. But they didn't share a mother.”

“They did share a father, though.”

“Oh, please. Fathers don't count. You have one. You know.” Mom sighs. When she speaks again, her tone is softer. “Look, as soon as Nica and Jamie started dating, James and I discussed the situation. We decided the smartest thing to do would be to just stay out of it. If we interfered they'd just want to be together that much more. And they were only high school kids. It wasn't as if they were getting married. It was puppy love.”

“Yes, but puppy love leads to puppy sex. What if Nica got pregnant?”

“I gave you girls the safe sex lecture before you hit puberty. I had Nica on birth control at fourteen.”

“But people have accidents.”

“If she'd had an accident, we would have taken care of it.”

I look at her sitting there, legs crossed, hand draped over the top of her coffee cup, exuding self-assured feminine ease. If I could just smash open her skull, pick out the information I need, that's what I'd do. Anything would be better than talking to her. And then I say, “How did Nica find out?”

“James walked in on her and Jamie one afternoon. Turned out, he was okay with the two of them being together in theory but when it was right in front of his face he felt differently.”

“Not so much of an aristocrat after all, huh? Scandalized by incest. How bourgeois.”

She ignores the dig. “He told them to get dressed, asked Nica to join him in his study.”

“Just Nica?”

“James is very careful with Jamie. Doesn't want to upset him.”

“Why?”

“Apparently at his old school Jamie had a problem with drugs.”

“
Had,
past tense? Please, Jamie's the biggest pothead I know.”

“I can assure you,” Mom says dryly, “pot is not what James is concerned about.”

I want to ask what Mr. Amory is concerned about then—a few psychedelics, cans of beer?—but am afraid of getting sidetracked. Instead I ask, “What happened in the study?”

Mom's eyes narrow in recalled anger. “What happened? James let his hair down is what happened. He told Nica everything. Told her about us, about him being her real father, about the pact to keep it all a secret. Then he begged her not to repeat any of what he'd said to Jamie.”

“You heard this from Nica?”

“From James. He called the next morning to check up on her. Said when she'd left his house the night before she was positively beside herself, crying so hard he was worried about her driving. He also thought she'd stolen a bottle of whiskey from his liquor cabinet. I was furious with him. Not just for letting her drive when she'd been drinking, but for blabbing. Especially without warning me first, not even a . . .”

Mom's lips keep moving but I've ceased to hear the sounds they're making because the scene she's described has unleashed something, and, all at once, a memory is coming at me, looming above my head like a tidal wave, threatening to crash down on my life, break it open, wipe out every single trace of it.

A school night, close to the end but not quite. I was in bed, asleep. The door opened. Groggily I sat up, my irises aching from the sucker punch of light coming at me from the hall. I saw my sister's slim silhouette crossing the threshold. Then the door closed, and I was thrown back into darkness. She was at the foot of my bed, pacing. I looked for her face. I couldn't see it, though, so I lay back on my pillow, stared up at the ceiling, waited for my vision to adjust.

And then her breath came out of the black, hit my mouth, the scent sweet and alcoholic. I reached for the reading lamp above my head, but she blocked my hand. Made me turn on my side, and curved her body into mine, the buttons from her denim jacket pressing into my back. I could smell her perfume, the wintry air in her hair. She asked me if I was afraid. I said I wasn't, but that was a lie. It wasn't strange for her to sneak out with Jamie. It wasn't even strange for her to come home a little drunk. Not flat-out wasted, though. And definitely not flat-out wasted and upset. Had she been mugged? Attacked? Gotten in a car accident? Had Jamie? I asked her if it was any of these things, and she said, no, no, nothing like that.

Her trembling got worse, though, and she held me tighter, so tight it hurt. Then she turned me toward her. Took my hand, slipped it in the front of her coat. “My heart's going like crazy,” she said, and it was, I could feel it. And then something was dripping on my face. Tears. Mine? No, hers, wet and warm from the heat of her body, as wet and warm as blood. One slid from my cheek to my upper lip. As I licked it off, I began to tremble, too.

“What happened?” I said.

“I found something out. Something about who I really am.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm not sure I should say.”

Why I said what I said next I'll never know. I can run down the inventory of excuses and defenses: I was scared and confused, disoriented from having gone so abruptly from dead asleep to wide awake, dizzy and half drunk from the liquor fumes coming off her. All of which are true, none of which are adequate. “If you're not sure, then maybe you shouldn't.”