MARY AND O'NEIL (22 page)

That night they did as the doctor suggested and split a bottle of Chardonnay. It cost eleven dollars, was as sugary as a candy bar, and by the time they were finished they were both tipsy and babbling like toddlers. Struggling out of his jeans, O’Neil stumbled on the corner of the bedroom rug and watched as one of the finial posts on the bed frame rose toward his face, slowly and then quickly, like the bow of an ocean liner bursting from a bank of fog. In her robe Mary led him to the bathroom, sat him down on the toilet, and held a Ziploc bag of ice cubes to his nose.

“There’s always adoption,” O’Neil said through his thickening nose.

“We’re too old,” Mary said hopelessly, and began to cry. “Who would adopt us?”

In early January they returned to the doctor, who once again did nothing even remotely medical, apart from taking Mary’s temperature. Her questions seemed arbitrary. Did they sleep with the windows open or closed? Did they bathe, or take showers? Was O’Neil still jogging in the cold? The doctor listened to their answers, nodding and clicking her pen. Perhaps, she concluded, they might take a trip together, to take their minds off getting pregnant.

“I’ve found there’s something about a hotel that can be helpful for couples with this problem,” she said.

“This problem?” Mary repeated.

“Try one with movies in the rooms,” the doctor said.

It seemed silly; nevertheless, they decided to do it. All they had was the weekend, so they planned to drive north to see the town where O’Neil had grown up. In all their time together Mary had never actually been to Glenn’s Mills. The drive to upstate New York from Philadelphia took five hours, the last of these on country highways through scenes of such heartbreaking rural poverty that all they could do was marvel. But Glenn’s Mills itself had obviously been discovered. In winter twilight, fidgety from so many hours in the car, they drove down the town’s main street, past boutiques and antique shops, tearooms and craft studios. Though Christmas was long gone, pine boughs still hung from the streetlamps, which were ornately Victorian, like something from the set of a play. They half expected to see men out walking in capes and top hats, but most of the people on the street were wrapped in heavy parkas with scarves pulled up to their chins, hurrying somewhere, their heads tipped against the cold.

“None of this was here when I was a kid,” O’Neil explained. They glided past an herbal shop called the Witchery, then a corner Mobil station with a sign in the window that said: We Have Cappuccino!

O’Neil waved a sorry hand. “Who drinks all this espresso? This was always a boiled-coffee kind of town.”

At the Mobil station they bought turkey sandwiches, taco chips, and a six-pack of beer, and found their motel. It was clean and new, two stories tall, and bathed in a fluorescent glow. They ate their picnic on the bed, then put on their pajamas and climbed beneath the stiff covers. A folded card waited on the nightstand with the names of the movies they could order in their room. The usual fare, and then they came to the ones they were looking for:
Up and Coming, Hot Housewives,
and
Pillow Talk II: Debutantes After Dark
.

O’Neil voted for the third. “I liked the original. Is Doris Day in this one?”

Mary shook her head and continued to read. “‘The sexy adventures of a rich girl in Europe.’ It stars somebody named Chandra Loveman, though I don’t suppose that’s her real name.” She wrinkled her nose and peered at O’Neil with her head tipped to one side. “It doesn’t seem like enough to go on, really.”

“I’m not familiar with Ms. Loveman’s oeuvre,” O’Neil said, “but I would be willing to learn.”

They picked the first movie, because Mary, who had done graduate work in poststructuralism, liked the pun in the title. The movie was very dark, and there was a great deal of moaning in the shadows, and a soundtrack that pulsed tumescently whenever the sexy parts came along, which was nearly all the time. The plot was thin, but actually more than either of them had expected. A beautiful young man, orphaned by a tornado that destroys his family’s farm, moves from Iowa to California to find work in the movie industry. No sooner does he step off the bus than he is beset by unscrupulous female casting agents and producers, all seeking his favors. They are determined to corrupt him, but he outsmarts them; his past is gone, his gentle life in Iowa smashed by the four winds, and what is there for him now, but to give himself wholly to his gifts? It was all straight out of Balzac, and vaguely interesting, but the story would never last for very long, and then the music would resume, and the moaning. Sometimes the camera zoomed in so close that neither of them could tell what they were seeing.

“I’m not trying to be uncooperative,” Mary said after some time had passed, “but I have to say, this isn’t doing very much for me at all. What is that? Is that somebody’s leg?” She waved her beer at the screen. “Honestly, I haven’t a guess.”

“We could see what else is on.”

Mary traded her empty beer for a fresh one from the small ice-chest beside the bed. Under the blankets she was wearing a flannel nightgown and woolen socks. “It’s your six dollars,” she said.

They scanned through the other channels and selected a nature show about a family of bobcats. The mother had a pair of cubs; she taught them to hunt, and play in the dust. She brushed them clean with her long tongue.

Mary turned toward O’Neil in the dark room. The screen flickered blue across the small round lenses of his eyeglasses.

“You know, in this light there’s something about you. It’s very appealing somehow.”

“Is this the beer talking?” O’Neil asked.

Mary kissed his nose and settled down beside him. “I like this show much better.”

“Those are cute kittens,” O’Neil agreed.

For a while they watched without talking. The kittens grew; finally the day came when it was time for them to strike out on their own. Mary watched as the mother cat led them away from the den, on some pretense, then kept on walking. The show ended with the mother cat, on a rocky outcrop, looking over the arid valley where she had left her children behind.

“It must be hard for you to be here,” Mary said into O’Neil’s chest. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

“I’m all right,” O’Neil said, but in the dark, almost invisibly, she knew him to be weeping.

The next morning, cold and clear, they put on heavy coats and boots and walked around town while O’Neil pointed out the sights: the pharmacy where he had once shoplifted baseball cards, his father’s old law office on Main Street and the library where his mother had worked, the blue clapboard house where his sister, Kay, had taken piano lessons from a woman named “Mrs. Horsehead.” Whether this was her actual name, or a nickname made up by her students to be cruel, O’Neil could not recall. At a pottery gallery they looked at vases without buying any, and when the morning seemed over, they had lunch at a diner behind the town hall, called the Coffee Stop. The insides of the Coffee Stop were dim and smoky—it seemed to be an oasis of what the town once was—and the booths and counter stools were packed with large men in flannel work shirts whose dirty hands and nicotine-stained faces bespoke a life of ceaseless toil. Mary bought a copy of the local paper to read over her grilled cheese sandwich, and that was when she saw the article. She read it in its entirety, then passed O’Neil the paper, folded back to show the photo of the house—a large white four-square with black shutters that she recognized at once as O’Neil’s, from other photos she had seen. Even the paint job was the same.

“Boyhood home gets rave review,” she said.

O’Neil’s parents’ house had been turned into a restaurant, called Le Café. Beside the picture of the house there was a second photo of the restaurant’s owner, smiling and shaking hands with a woman O’Neil had gone to high school with, who was now the mayor of the town. The owner, who was also the chef, was a tall man, handsome and bald, with a neatly trimmed goatee. He had trained at Cordon Bleu, it said, “in Paris, France.” “It has always been my dream to open a country inn,” he told the reporter, “to return the finest cuisine to its source, such as one finds in the hills of Tuscany or Provence.” Before moving to Glenn’s Mills he had owned a successful restaurant in Manhattan.

O’Neil looked the article over then put the newspaper aside. “Unbelievable. A fucking restaurant.”

“I’m sure it’s a shock.”

“This place in Manhattan. How successful could it have been, if he ended up here?”

Mary dipped her grilled cheese into a small pool of ketchup. “What kind of food do they serve?”

O’Neil searched the article again. “It doesn’t say, not in so many words. Seriously, how would anyone around here know the difference?”

The waitress, an old woman in a ruffled apron, came to their booth and refilled their coffee cups. O’Neil looked out the window at the snowy town.

“There ought to be a law against this sort of thing,” he remarked. “It’s like a desecration.”

Mary looked at her sandwich. “I do see your point. On the other hand, I would like to see your old house. And we could use a good meal.”

Mary stayed at the table while O’Neil went to call about a reservation. The waitress brought her the pie she had ordered—cherry, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream—and she decided not to wait for O’Neil to return to begin eating. The cherries, she could tell, were canned, but the crust was excellent—light and buttery and still warm from the microwave.

O’Neil returned, shaking his head. “They couldn’t take us until eight-thirty,” he said. He sat across from her, frowning. “I remember when everybody around here was in bed by then, if they weren’t beating their wives. That was always a problem in these parts.”

“Oh, idle threats,” Mary said, forking the last of the pie into her mouth.

After lunch they returned to their hotel, watched the second of the three movies, napped through the afternoon, and awoke to the disorienting early darkness of a winter evening. O’Neil went to get more beer while Mary showered, and returned to find her lying on the bed wrapped in a thick towel, reading from the Bible she had found in the bedside drawer. Her hair was wet and thick, and she had scrubbed her face so hard it looked dusty.

“Now here’s something,” she said, and began to read aloud from the Bible, squinting without her glasses at the tiny print. Her eyesight was very poor, and yet she often read this way. “‘When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business; but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.’” She lifted her blue eyes from the page. “It’s interesting to me that this is not a widely mentioned part of Scripture.”

O’Neil opened a beer and handed it to her. “I’m not sure dinner is such a hot idea.”

Mary closed the Bible. “Well. Tell me about that.”

He sat on the bed beside her; the cold of the outside still clung to the wool of his coat. “We could eat someplace else.”

“This is true.”

“I haven’t been back there in almost twenty years, not since we sold it.” He removed his coat and opened a beer of his own. “You know, when Kay and I got home after the accident, the first thing we found was a huge pile of mail in the front foyer. Our folks had been dead for a couple of days, but the mailman had been shoving it through the mail slot just the same. So there it was, this pile of letters and bills and magazines, all mailed to dead people.” He shook his head mournfully and took a long swig of beer. All day long, Mary realized, he had been thinking about this melancholy pile of mail. She understood this was unavoidable—the mind went where it wished—and yet, deep down, she believed such brooding was profitless. O’Neil sighed hopelessly, as if he had heard her thoughts. “Now lawyers from Albany are sitting around the living room, praising the pot stickers.”

“So you found out what kind of food they serve,” Mary said expectantly.

“Sino-French.” O’Neil sipped again and wiped his mouth. “The guy at the 7-Eleven told me. Apparently, the chef does something very nice with duck.”

At eight o’clock they left for the restaurant. Mary fully expected O’Neil to change his mind at the last minute, sending them out onto dark country lanes searching for something to eat, but he surprised her and drove straight there. They parked at the curb across from the house, and sitting in the cold car, O’Neil gave her the lay of the land. The house, set back from the street, was not immediately recognizable as a restaurant, and the sign by the front door was so small it would have been possible to miss it altogether—to pass the house by, thought Mary, without knowing it was in any way different or special. O’Neil spoke quietly, as if they might be overheard, as he pointed out the details: the stone walkway his father had laid one summer, the crabapple tree that had been a sapling when his parents died but now stood fifteen feet tall, the window on the second floor that had been his room, before he had gone off to college. He spoke only of the exterior; his mind, it seemed, did not want to go inside the house.

“We sold it to a couple with kids,” O’Neil said. “I think their name was McGeary. After that I just lost track.”

“How does it feel?” Mary asked, and took his hand.

O’Neil looked at the house once more, taking it in, and sighed through his nose. “Strange,” he said. “In most ways it’s just the same. But probably the inside is all different now.”