Good Intentions (37 page)

“You have that kind
of anger.”

“And I shouldn’t?”

“It’s not healthy.”

“So what you’re saying is that whatever happens tonight is my responsibility.”

“Yes, it will be, if you go any farther.”

“Good,” Renee said evenly. “It’s about time I assumed some responsibility for my life, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d say it’s time you got some sleep. See how you feel in the morning.” Again he turned, about to leave.

“Don’t you take another step,” she called after him, her voice rising.

“Lower your voice.” He indicated Debbie’s room with his eyes.

“You’ll stay here in this room until I’ve finished what I have to say. I warn you, if you try to leave, I’ll follow you. I’ll follow you from room to room, and if you leave this apartment, I’ll follow you down the hall and into the lobby. Past the doorman. That’ll give him something else to talk about. I’ll even follow you into the street. I’ll chase your car, if I have to. Naked, if I have to.” The reference to his first wife was deliberate and could not be missed. For the first time, Renee understood the utter desperation that could drive a woman to such an act.

Philip turned to her and smiled derisively. “That would be a sight,” he said cruelly, walking slowly back into the center of the room. “Go ahead, Renee. The thought of you running naked into the night screaming is enough to daunt any man. Say what you have to say. Wipe out all that stands in your way. To hell with the consequences.”

“To hell with you!” Renee shot back. “It wasn’t bad enough that you had to sleep with every Alicia Henderson who crossed your path. That wasn’t enough for you. You had to sleep with my sister!”

“All right, so I slept with your sister! It was nothing. It didn’t mean anything.”

“Oh God.”

“Happy now that I said it? Make you feel better?”

Renee collapsed onto the sofa. “How could you? How could you do that to me? To her? You knew how fragile she was.”

“Your sister was not the innocent victim you make her out to be.”

“My sister turned to you for help. Her husband was dead. She felt guilty and lonely and confused. She didn’t know which end was up.”

“You underestimate her. She knew exactly which end was up. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

“My sister almost killed herself tonight, and you have the nerve to tell me that she knew what she was doing. Do you feel no responsibility at all for what happened?”

“I won’t accept the blame for your sister’s actions.”

“I don’t care whether you accept it or not,” Renee shouted. “What kind of doctor are you? What kind of person are you?”

“What’s going on?” Debbie asked, appearing in the doorway, wiping the sleep out of her eyes. “What’s all the yelling about? Did you find Kathryn?”

Renee stared at the innocent-looking face of the stepdaughter she had tried for six years to befriend, recalling Debbie’s earlier questions. “How much more are you going to stand for?” she had demanded. “Why don’t you just tell him to go to hell? Why don’t you tell
me
to go to hell?”

Suddenly Renee smiled. “Go to hell,” she said.

“Renee, for Christ’s sake,” Philip started.

“Get back into your room, Debbie, and stay there,” Renee told the surprised girl.

Debbie automatically took several steps back. Philip’s eyes moved from his wife to his daughter, slowly, carefully, as if he was afraid to make any sudden moves. “Go
back to your room, Debbie,” Philip told her. “Kathryn is all right. Renee’s just a bit upset.”

“A bit …” Debbie’s voice was incredulous.

“Go to your room, Debbie,” Philip instructed forcefully.

“What’d
I
do?” Debbie asked, closing her bedroom door behind her.

“Don’t ever talk to my daughter that way again,” Philip warned.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“You want to talk to me that way, that’s between us, but I won’t tolerate your talking to Debbie that way.”

“You won’t have to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m leaving.” Renee heard the words escape her mouth before she realized she had even been thinking them. Surely they were too awful to think about. Surely she hadn’t said them.

“You don’t mean that.”

“You sleep with half the women in this town, including my sister, and I’m just supposed to ignore it because it doesn’t mean anything. You have spent six years undermining my success and my self-confidence and I’m supposed to sit here like a good little girl and thank you for it. I have no friends and no relationship with my partners, and I’m supposed to be thankful because you’ve chosen to stay with me. I’ve eaten myself into emotional oblivion, as your darling daughter would say, and I’m supposed to keep eating my chocolates and growing fat, and actually feel grateful for my own demise.” Renee looked at her husband, clearly astonished at what she was saying. Then she ran from the room.

“Renee, where are you going? You know none of that is
true. You just acknowledged that those affairs meant nothing to me.”

“What
does
mean anything to you?” Renee asked, running into the kitchen. “Does
anything?”

“You do,” he said simply.

“Bullshit!”

Renee tore open the refrigerator door, rummaging through the bottom shelf. She quickly located the two large bags of miniature chocolate bars at the back of the fridge, and carried them to the sink, tearing open the first bag and watching the chocolate bars tumble one by one into the garburator. Then she turned on the water and flicked on the switch, listening as the machine ground the bars into mush.

“Renee, you’ll break the damn thing …”

“Look at me!” she screamed, emptying the bag and running her hands down the length of her dark green shirt and pants. “I’m a mess!”

“And I suppose I’m responsible for that too?”

“No, you’re not responsible. I’m the one. I did it,” Renee shouted, pouring the contents of the second bag into the garburator. “I did it all by myself. I tried for six years to get you to love me, the same way I’ve tried all my life with my father, and this is where it got me.”

“Don’t compare me to your father.”

“Why not? You’re just like him. I’ve been a damn fool. What makes him so great that I have to beg him to love me? Am I so awful? Is he so wonderful? Are you?”

“Renee, I love you. I know you’re too angry to see that now …”

“No, you don’t love me. What you love is your power over me! You love it that you can turn a smart, capable
woman into a quivering bowl of jelly every time she sees you. Listen to me! Everything I say is food-related.”

Renee stared at her husband helplessly, even now hoping that he would somehow be able to reach into his magic bag of tricks and find the correct combination of words to release them all from this horrible spell, that he could somehow come up with the words that would make everything all right again.

Had they ever been all right? Did he really have this kind of power over her that even now she was waiting for him to make things right again simply because that’s the way he said it should be?

“I think I’ve heard enough,” he said instead. “I’ve told you how I feel. It obviously isn’t enough for you. You said you were leaving; you made a decision. Now stick to it. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

She recognized the tactic. He was calling her bluff, telling her that if she wanted him back now, she would have to backtrack, to apologize, to admit she was wrong. Was she prepared to go that far? Could she really walk out? If only she were prepared to try harder, maybe she could still make it work. She was unloved because she was unlovable. She was nothing without him. Hadn’t he just told her he loved her? What more did she want?

“Is it what
you
want?” she asked. Even now. Even now!

“What
I
want isn’t important. It never has been.”

“That’s not true. It’s been everything.” Convince me I’m wrong. Convince me I can make it right. Don’t let me leave. I take it back. I take everything back.

“By your own confession, you turned yourself into a chocolate-guzzling mess,” he continued, seizing control of the conversation. “Was that designed to make me happy?
How do you think I felt going places with you? How do you think I felt knowing that everyone was snickering at me because my wife, the psychiatrist’s wife, couldn’t control as simple a thing as her appetite? Can you really blame me for looking elsewhere?” he asked, knowing instinctively that she had asked herself that question many times in the past. Not content with her capitulation, he was seeking no less than her total humiliation. He wanted her to beg. Would she? she wondered. “The woman I married wasn’t a fat slob. She was slim and pretty and took care of her appearance. She had some pride, some self-respect. She didn’t blame everyone else for her inadequacies. Well, what do you think of that assessment?”

“I think …” she began, then faltered under the threat of tears. “I think …”

“Face it, Renee, you haven’t had a coherent thought in years.”

“I think …”

“You
feel
…” he corrected, interrupting her again.

“I
think,”
she said again, “that it gives you some sort of twisted pleasure to see me brought to my knees.”

“Where you’ve always done your best work, I’ll give you that.” His face narrowed, as if he were a reflection in a fun-house mirror.

“I think that …”

“You
feel,”
he insisted again.

Renee felt the threat of tears suddenly vanish. The image in the fun-house mirror disappeared. Her husband stood before her, tall and dark and handsome, just the way the storybooks had promised. “What I
feel
is anger,” she said succinctly. “What I
think
is that you are a cold-hearted, manipulative son of a bitch.”

There was a moment’s stunned silence before he spoke. “That’s very good, Renee. I never realized before what advanced vocabularies you lawyers have. Is there anything else you want to say? Because if you’re quite through, then I’d like to go to bed.”

“There’s something else,” Renee said steadily.

He cocked his head, waiting.

“Go to hell,” she said triumphantly, and walked out of their life together.

G
ary arrived at the house on Saturday morning at nine o’clock sharp to pick up his children for the weekend. Lynn ushered him inside the front door, looking at her husband as if he were a pleasant acquaintance of fairly long-standing, but someone she didn’t really know. She was surprised to discover that her primary feeling toward him wasn’t anger, but rather indifference, and perhaps a mild curiosity, of the sort one might feel toward a stranger. Still, he was the father of her children, even though she understood he was no longer a part of her daily life.

“The kids aren’t packed yet,” she told him, knowing they were waiting anxiously behind their bedroom doors. “They wanted to make sure they were really going this time.” Lynn broke off, seeing him flinch. She hadn’t meant to reproach him. Obviously, she would still have to be very careful about choosing her words around Gary. She had no desire to hurt him any further. They had hurt each other enough.

“I thought we’d go to Disney World,” Gary called out loudly, smiling broadly when he heard his children’s
joyful hoots. Nicholas ran into the room, grabbed his father around the waist, and squeezed tightly before running back to his room to pack. Gary laughed, his eyes drifting back toward Lynn’s. “So, how are things?” he asked, tentatively, and Lynn could see he was still wrestling with his demons, not sure whether to be friends or foes.

“Things are fine.” She motioned toward the living room. “Do you want to sit down?” He nodded, and she followed him into the green-and-white room, thinking that perhaps it was time to redecorate. Maybe she would redo the room in soft shades of peach and gray, the colors she had seen in Renee’s office. She wondered briefly how Renee and Kathryn were doing. Renee had accompanied her sister back to New York the day before, after announcing that she had left Philip—left everything, including her white Mercedes—and was giving serious consideration to transferring her practice up North, a move she had always wanted to make. “You could take him for every cent he’s got,” Lynn had told her. “At least take what’s rightfully yours.” But Renee had smiled an enigmatic little half-grin and told her that sometimes it was worth anything just to be rid of them.

Renee’s announcement had propelled Lynn into a few surprise moves of her own. After twelve years of front-line work for the Department of Social Services in Delray Beach, Lynn decided it was high time for a change. She submitted her resignation to an astonished Carl McVee, gave one month’s notice, and accepted the job she had been offered with the Palm Beach County Board of Education. That done, she notified the child welfare agency in Sarasota and apprised them of her concerns
regarding one of Sarasota’s newest residents, one Keith Foster, vice president of Data Base International.

“I want to apologize,” Gary was saying, staring into his lap. “It was a rotten thing I did, hauling you into your lawyer’s office, threatening you with custody, reneging on our agreement.”

“I’m not too proud of myself either,” Lynn told him truthfully.

“Divorce brings out the best in people, I guess.” He laughed bitterly. “I’m really sorry I hurt you, Lynn.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you too.”

They sat for several moments in silence, two well-meaning people who for a time had meant only to hurt each other.

“Are you still seeing Marc Cameron?” he asked.

“Does it matter?”

He shook his head. “Just curious.” Lynn smiled at the word. “It would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If things worked out between you and Marc while they fell apart between me and Suzette?”

Lynn studied his face, trying to remember the way she used to feel when she looked into his eyes. But the face, while handsome, almost kind, held no further allure for her. There was nothing behind it she wanted to see. “I’m sure things will work out between you and Suzette,” she said.

Again he shook his head. “Maybe. At any rate, we’ve decided to cool it for a while. Take a break. Sort things out.” He looked toward the picture window, at the silver-framed photograph of the family he had left. “She lied to me,” he whispered, almost to himself. “I guess that’s what hurts the most.”