Middle Age (18 page)

Though when he’d come to bed he’d been exhausted and depressed, now he felt exhilarated, inspired.
The broken halves of my life
.
I must make
one!
Determining that Camille was safely asleep, Lionel slipped from bed.

Barefoot in pajama bottoms and T-shirt, both damp with perspiration, he made his way quietly out of the bedroom, along the darkened corridor to the rear stairs. Like the eye of a benign god, faint moonlight guided his way. In his study, he shut the door behind him. Smiled. Sighed! By the digital clock on his desk, it was : ..
Call anytime, darling
.
By magic I
will know it is you
. Lionel held his breath as he punched out the memorized number, his fingers moving swiftly and unerringly. Miles away in the third-floor walk-up loft on West th Street a telephone rang, and rang; and at last the receiver was lifted. Her soft shy tentative lightly accented voice—“Yes? Who is it?” Lionel cupped his hand over the receiver and said in a rush of words, “Siri, darling, it’s me. Something terrible, and wonderful, has happened.”

F      , exhilarated, swaying like a drunken man, Lionel was leaving his darkened study to return to bed when to his surprise the stairway light was switched on, and there stood Camille frightened, staring, a dressing gown hastily pulled over her nightclothes, at the top of the stairs. “Lionel, what’s wrong? Why are you
here?
” When Lionel stood stunned, unmoving, Camille quickly descended the stairs, her plump breasts quivering, her anxious face crosshatched with shadowlike spiderwebs. She came to Lionel, a short, soft-bodied, anxious woman, laying her hand on his arm. “Lionel? Darling, what is it? You look—

stricken.” Lionel stammered he was too restless to sleep, couldn’t get that ghastly visit to Nyack out of his head, he was sorry he’d disturbed her.

Camille hugged him, pushing into his arms and laying her head against his chest. He stood unmoving, trapped. He could not resist. Camille was shivering, and smelled of sweet, stale talcum. “Oh, Lionel! I know. I’m so afraid. Hold me!” Lionel dutifully closed his arms around his wife. Thank God, she couldn’t see his guilty, flushed face! “You do love me, Lionel, don’t you?” Camille asked wistfully. Lionel stroked her soft, boneless shoulders, her fine disheveled hair, murmuring, “Of course I love you, darling. You know that. Always.” Lionel had regained much of his composure
Middle Age: A Romance



and took strength in comforting the trembling woman. Next morning he would tell her. Next evening. He would tell her about Siri. He would bring the broken halves of his life together.

Camille stiffened suddenly. “What’s that?”

“What?”

“That—sound.”

They listened, huddled together at the foot of the stairs. A noise as of desperate scratching? sticks being rubbed together, raked against wood?

“It must be an animal,” Lionel whispered. The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred. Hand in hand the Hoffmanns made their fearful way through the shadowy house to the kitchen, where Lionel boldly switched on an outside light. Camille crept to a window to look out. Camille cried,

“Oh, Lionel! Come see.”

There, in the sudden ellipsis of light on the walk, dragging a wounded hind leg and his eyes brimming with sorrow, was Adam’s lost Apollo.

T M   R



I  ’ the face of an adolescent boy leaps at her.
So beautiful!

Eleven days after Adam Berendt’s death.

She tells herself she is not violating the terms of the agreement. She is not in
personal contact
with her son Jared.

Jared Tierney. Abigail Des Pres’s fifteen-year-old son who bears his father’s name, not hers.
Her
son, named for her enemy.

Through the binoculars’ magnified, slightly distorted lenses she stares.

She isn’t accustomed to the heavy, clumsy instrument, her hands with their guilty tremor grip it tight, pressing it against the bridge of her nose.

Already the sensitive bridge of her nose has begun to chafe.
Is
Abigail Des Pres so sensitive? A pervert posing as a concerned mother. No, a mother in strenuous denial she’s a pervert.

In actual life, Abigail could not stare at her son so avidly. So without shame. He’d be deeply uncomfortable, even disgusted; he’d slam out of the room. But this isn’t actual life, this is something else.
Since Adam’s death, all
is unreal. A thin covering like sparkly cellophane wrap over oblivion
. Abigail bites her lower lip, hard. Contemplating the boy’s cheekbones, the curve of his jaw, a dimple in his right chin like a tiny incision; the thick eyebrows darker than the chestnut-brown hair. The eyes she knows are steely-blue though she can’t see their color, at this distance. Steely-blue, seeing too much.



Middle Age: A Romance



But Jared can’t see her now. Walking with his friends beneath tall trees, through spangled sunshine, talking and laughing and oblivious of his mother’s transfixed eyes upon him. A man once pressed his thick stumpy thumb against an artery beating in her throat and that artery is beating now, hot and urgent.
Jared! Jared
.
I want you
.

It’s nearly noon of a bright summer day. In a northerly place: Vermont?

Why has Jared gone so far away from home, to summer school? But it was necessary, Abigail concedes. She understands. Jared had a difficult year at the Preston Academy, emotional pressure exerted by both his parents, he’d received a D in English, an outright F in math, he’d been resentful at the prospect of going away for six weeks to summer school yet now he looks very happy, even relaxed, and Abigail his mother concedes yes, that’s a good thing—isn’t it? You do want your only child to be happy even if, clearly, you are not the agent of his happiness.

For a fleeting moment Abigail thinks that Jared might see her. The way he’s lifting his head, frowning. His desperate mother-in-disguise at a distance of about forty feet, hidden inside a parked car. If he sights her, if he discovers her, she’ll drop the incriminating binoculars and throw herself on the boy’s mercy.
Jared, forgive me! I didn’t realize what I was doing
.
I didn’t realize the lenses would actually magnify
.
I didn’t realize that boy was—you
.

Maybe he’d laugh? Shake his head in adolescent dismay at her, and laugh?

Maybe not.

Yet the painful fact is, Abigail Des Pres, forty-two-year-old divorcée, former debutante, former beauty, a reasonably intelligent and educated woman, not an intellectual, but endowed with common sense, a moral woman, a decent woman, a woman-with-a-sense-of-humor, a moderately active participant in such civic-minded organizations as Planned Parenthood, Literacy Volunteers of America, Friends of the Salthill Trust, is stalking her own son.

The painful fact is, Abigail Des Pres is doing exactly what she’s been forbidden.

It’s different now, Adam is gone
.
I have no one now
.

And Jared will never know
.

She doesn’t plan to stay another night in Middlebury. She will be leaving that afternoon. Returning to Salthill.
She vows
.

And Jared isn’t aware of her, in any case. Not Jared nor the boys he’s walking with. Abigail Des Pres, the former Mrs. Harrison Tierney,



J C O

crouched behind an olive-tinted window of a rented luxury Lexus; frowning and squinting through a pair of binoculars; the Lexus was chosen for its discreetly darkened windows, it’s a rental because Abigail doesn’t want her own car to be recognized by her son. She has thought this through, hasn’t she? Not impulse but premeditation. Shameless, unconscionable.

She knows. She has parked the Lexus inconspicuously with other vehicles on a residential street in a metered place for which she has paid, a quarter for a precious hour. Abigail has a pocketful of quarters, clinking like pi-rate’s gold! She’s been willing to wait all morning here at the edge of the Middlebury campus, to sight her son whom she has not seen, has not touched, has not kissed in nearly two weeks.

She’d telephoned Jared when the terrible news came. Jared had always liked Adam, he’d been close to Adam for some months during the worst of the divorce siege, but Jared didn’t return Abigail’s calls for a day and a half, and then on the phone he sounded remote, detached, sullen.
Oh,
honey, isn’t this terrible tragic news,
Abigail wept.
I can’t believe he’s gone,
honey, can you? Oh, my God
. Far away in Vermont the boy said quietly,
Yeah, it’s real sad, Mr
.
Berendt was O
.
K
.
You better get hold of yourself, Mom,
y’know? I’m not coming home
.

Abigail was shocked, she’d had no idea of taking Jared out of summer school.

It’s fascinating, it’s dangerous, to watch Jared like this, without his knowing. And be invisible herself. When Abigail stares at him through the powerful lenses, he’s unnervingly close; when she lowers the lenses, his figure leaps back, his face becomes a miniature, she might not recognize him. He’s safely distant.
She’s
safely distant.

So far as Jared knows (and Abigail doesn’t flatter herself he’s actually thinking of her) his mother is at their Salthill home, the spacious lonely Cape Cod on the more rural stretch of Wheatsheaf Drive,  miles to the south; while Jared is in leafy Middlebury, Vermont, where the Preston Academy, for a hefty fee, holds its six-week summer session. So far as Jared knows, there is nothing to know, nor to suspect.
Of course you’re not
coming home,
Abigail told him, hurt.
I just thought you’d want to know about
Adam.

Maybe, after they hung up, Jared broke down in tears? Is that possible?

Jared might be in mourning, he’s wearing the baggy black T-shirt Abigail especially dislikes, though in fact he may own several of these T-shirts bearing a cryptic codified message no adult can decipher (the word 

Middle Age: A Romance



in lurid red prominence on his chest) and oversized khaki shorts falling down his hips; the filthy Nike running shoes that must have some mysterious sentimental value to him, he refuses to give them up, and unlaced laces, and of course, no socks. No socks! Which is why (Abigail’s nostrils pinch at the memory) her son’s feet smell like damp-rot fungus. But the other boys are sockless, too. Maybe their smells compose a singular smell, the statement of an American generation born in the mid-8s? Commingled with boy-hormones?

Desperate-mother humor. The shameful fact is, Abigail Des Pres adores her son exactly as she’d adored him when he was a baby, when he was a toddler, fitting not only uncomplainingly but very happily into her arms. Maybe more, now her marriage is over, and her emotional life a wreck. Gladly would she live among the smells of Jared’s size-ten feet in those running shoes, greasy-hair smells, armpit- and crotch-smells, if only Jared would adore his mother half as much as she adores him. A kernel, a crumb, a nanosecond of adoration!

If Jared would meet her gaze unflinchingly. And say he loves her, and his love
is not pity
. He loves her
and respects her
. In her ceaseless and exhausting struggle with the ex-husband who happens to be Jared’s father, Jared sympathizes with
her,
his mother.
Hey, Mom, it’s O
.
K
.
I’m on your
side
.

Abigail, if caught, can’t claim this is an impulsive act. Spying on her son. After all she’d driven deliberately to Middlebury, Vermont. She’d gone to the gigantic nightmare Nyack Mall to purchase the binoculars, also known as spy-glasses, in a sporting goods store. Coolly she’d identified herself as a novice bird-watcher with myopia, she’d needed a high-powered instrument and price was no object.

“Adam, don’t judge me harshly! I tried. But Jared is gone for six weeks, and now you. Gone forever.”

Since the ghastly morning of Adam’s cremation, Abigail has lapsed into the habit of murmuring aloud. Since that morning when, sedated, swaying on her feet and her eyes seared from continuous crying, she’d glanced innocently skyward . . . As smoke lifted in bland powdery puffs and tendrils bearing away the spirit of the only man she’d ever truly, purely loved; the only man, in her long embattled life after childhood, who’d seemed to her worthy of an intelligent woman’s adoration. “Now turned to ashes, smoke? A jar of
waste?
”

And then, the scattering of ashes. Abigail had refused to attend. She’d



J C O

been called, by both Marina Troy and Roger Cavanagh, but she’d declined. They planned to rake Adam’s ashes into Adam’s garden above the river, as Adam had requested. On the phone Abigail was suddenly rude, abrupt. “I can’t! No more! I want to remember Adam as a man, for God’s sake. Not fertilizer.”

Abigail sits crouched behind the wheel of the rented Lexus, pressing the heavy clumsy binoculars against the delicate bridge of her nose, where they’ll leave a mark. Since the death, Abigail’s skin is sensitive, hurtful.

Her moist mouth falls open. In contemplation of the remarkable boy who is
her son
. (She’s hoping her breasts won’t leak sweet warm milk inside the black silk Shanghai Tang tunic top.) Spying on him like this, yes, it’s con-temptible, yes, she’s ashamed, but Jared wouldn’t allow her to look at him like this, ever. He hates her looking at him at all, with her dark somber heavy-lidded erotic gaze. He’s too normal, he’s fiercely normal.
He wants
to be average
. The American boy not as Michelangelo’s blandly perfect
David
but as Bernini’s
David
, with a furrowed brow and mutinous stance.