Middle Age (19 page)

Jared is the hot, beating core of Abigail’s life. As if her very heart stands outside her, raw and vulnerable, suffused with its own mysterious unknowable life.

At an intersection of paths Jared and his friends pause to talk with other boys. Boys smoking cigarettes! All wear baseball caps reversed on their heads, all wear backpacks. Baggy T-shirts bearing inscrutable codes and logos of rock bands, slipping-down shorts, bare brawny down-covered legs, bare feet inside unlaced running shoes. A herd of them. Patiently Abigail waits as tall loutish strangers obscure her vision of Jared. Hulking boys who are the precious sons of other mothers; mere blurs here beside the upright flame of her son. The Preston summer session is composed mostly of students like Jared who have failed or done poorly during the academic year and whose parents are becoming anxious they won’t be admitted into first-rate universities, and Abigail wonders if Jared is one of these, an average low-achieving teenaged boy amid the herd, or whether he’s in disguise as such a boy.

Abigail watches in dismay as Jared takes a cigarette offered him, and lights up. “Oh, honey. No.” Though she isn’t truly surprised. (She’d several times smelled smoke in his room, in his hair and clothes this past year. No matter Jared denied it. Rolling his eyes and informing her she was being paranoid. Later claiming he possibly smoked now and then for his nerves.

No big deal, Mom
.)

Middle Age: A Romance

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Jared and his friends move on. Jared exhales smoke as he shakes his head to flick hair out of his eyes. What ease in his most ordinary motions: so long as he doesn’t know he’s being observed. Someone tosses a Frisbee in his direction and Jared leaps to catch it, leaps like a dolphin, his cigarette clamped between his teeth, and with a twist of his wrist sends the Day-Glo orange object skimming back. So quick, so graceful, Abigail is dazed. It’s as if the boy has shaken out a bolt of silk in the sun, a banner of shimmering light, silk that is his own soul, and a second later lets it drop.

Through splotched sunshine the boys move. They pass girls in tank tops and shorts, slightly older girls, Middlebury College students probably, no exchange between the groups of young people, and as they walk on Jared and his friends mutter slyly to one another and erupt into laughter.

Abigail can’t hear the laughter at this distance, the car windows rolled up tight, but she flinches, knowing it’s crude. And what crude words spring effortlessly from Jared’s beautiful mouth?

Abigail Des Pres who has many times (inadvertently!) overheard her son with his prep school friends, visiting their home in Salthill, feels a blush rise into her face.

Oh, Jared, honey
,
must you and your friends use such
—
language?

Fuck, Mom, you spying on me again?

Jared! I am not spying, this is my house
.
I’m asking you why
—
such words?

Don’t listen, Mom
.
Then it won’t upset you, O.K.?

This exchange they’d had earlier in the summer. Jared hadn’t been angry or defensive, really. There’s a peculiar sweet reasonableness about him at such times. As years before he’d wanted to know why
nigger
was a nasty word, but if you said the
n
-
word
like on TV, it was all right?

A good question. All children’s questions are good. But how to answer? Abigail can’t any longer kiss her little boy’s frowning forehead with the serenity of a Botticelli madonna and murmur
Why? ’Cause Mommy
says so
.

Jared and his friends have been approaching the street where the Lexus is parked, not head-on but slantwise. They appear to be heading not for a dormitory or dining hall but in the direction of a small commercial area, a block of stores and restaurants. Abigail stares greedily, she has only these few snatched minutes before she loses Jared. (She isn’t going to telephone him from her hotel, she’ll be leaving in a few hours.
She is not going to
contact him
.) Her eyes feel bloodshot. Her heart is beating like a gong.

Jared is beginning to loom in the binocular lenses like a cinematic image

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J C O

in close-up. His smooth taut tanned skin is slightly blemished, there’s a scattering of pimples at his hairline it looks as if he’s been scratching. His hair sticks out in taffy-like tufts beneath the soiled Yankees cap, it has grown long on his neck and looks stiff with grease. Almost certainly, Jared isn’t clean. Two-minute showers, a few rough swipes with a bar of soap, soiled mangled towels tossed to the floor. What can you do? During the long months of separation and divorce, when Harrison moved out to live in New York City with a new woman said to resemble a younger Abigail, one of the forms Jared’s deep unhappiness took was a refusal to wash thoroughly; a reaction that mostly amused her ex-husband Harry, but upset Abigail. Yet—what can a parent do? It was a custody compromise that, instead of living part time with each parent, Jared would board at the Preston Academy, near Springfield, Massachusetts; during the summer, he would mostly live with Abigail, but spend some time with Harry; they would alternate, or somehow share, school breaks and holidays. The Preston Academy was a respected, and very expensive private school for students not quite good enough for Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Lawrence-ville; it was reputed to be less drug-infested than most, and no student had ever killed him- or herself on its premises. (Though as Jared pointed out, this pristine record didn’t include Preston students who’d “offed themselves off-campus.”) At Preston, Jared has shared a suite with boys no more disposed to keeping themselves clean than he,
what can you do?

Abigail isn’t one of those mothers obsessed with dirt, dirtiness. A nag of a mom. A TV mom. No, she wishes only that she could monitor her son without his knowing. By remote control, for instance, like an expensive electronic toy.

A faint moustache on Jared’s upper lip! Or maybe just a shadow. Jared has begun to shave, Abigail believes. How many times a week, she has no idea. This she knows not from Jared (who would die before telling his mother such an intimate fact about himself ) but from the ex-husband Harrison, who can’t resist telling Abigail about things he believes might roil her, unsettle her; any stray fact to suggest how the stability she so yearns for is going to be denied her. In one of their few recent phone conversations Harry allowed Abigail to know that he’d lent Jared a razor one weekend when Jared was visiting, and so Jared’s lifetime of shaving has begun. It was like Harry, sly and cruel and charming when he wished, to worm his way back into their son’s emotional life after years of indifference.
A growing boy needs a father
.
Not just a mother
.
Even you, Abigail, must
Middle Age: A Romance

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know this
. Abigail responded with dignity, thank God it was a phone conversation and her ex-husband couldn’t see the sick, beaten look in her face.

Yes, she did concede the point, yes, she knew.
A boy needs a father
.
Not you
.

Since the divorce there have been men romantically interested in Abigail, but Abigail can force herself to feel no interest for them. No more!

She has become sexually anesthetized—neutralized—and intends to remain in that state. So it isn’t likely she will be remarrying soon, it isn’t likely that Jared the growing boy will be living with a stepfather soon.

Had Adam Berendt loved Abigail? Yes. But not in
that way
.

(Abigail’s tender ears still ring with the cruelty of Harrison’s
just a
mother,
as one might say
just a minor head cold,
or
just a side order of coleslaw,
please
. And the insulting
even you, Abigail
.) By this time Jared and the other boys are striding away, in the direction of a McDonald’s. As if hypnotized, Abigail continues to stare at the back of Jared’s head, the reversed cap, the narrow shoulders in the baggy black T-shirt, the downy glint of his swinging arms and legs. It cheers her to see, or to imagine she sees, Jared tossing his cigarette into a gutter. “Honey, take care. I love you.” Now what? She’s both relieved he didn’t see her, and acutely disappointed. Now nothing remains for her except the long drive back to Salthill, to that lonely house. Before leaving for Middlebury, Jared suggested that she spend a month on Nantucket, she had old, very rich friends with an enormous house on the ocean, but no, Abigail hadn’t wanted to leave Salthill, for there was Adam, her dear friend Adam . . .

The other morning, very early, she’d been wakened from her sedated sleep by a frantic scratching below her window, and a high keening sound, and looked out to discover Adam’s silver-haired Apollo, heartbroken Apollo, at the back door, an old gardening glove of Adam’s in his jaws.

She fed Apollo, petted and stroked his coarse hair, and wept over him.

Two of a kind, they were. Lost souls of Hades.

Though Jared has nearly disappeared from view, Abigail continues to hold the binoculars to her eyes, hurting the delicate bones above her nose.

Now she’s leaning forward, her elbows over the steering wheel. There’s a sudden rapping on the windshield. Abigail lowers the binoculars, and sees to her horror that a uniformed man is peering into the car at her. “Ma’am?

Will you open this door, please?”

A nightmare!

Abigail, blushing, fumbles to open the door, which is heavy as lead.

The Middlebury cop, in dark-tinted aviator sunglasses, a crisply ironed

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J C O

short-sleeved blue shirt with a tin-looking badge, leather holster and smart polished pistol riding his hip, doesn’t help her with the door, but stares at her, frowning and bemused.

“Ma’am, what are you doing?”

“Officer! I—can explain.”

Abigail’s wrists are too weak to support the heavy binoculars, she lowers them to her lap. Her eyes that feel bursting with capillaries lift in soft female supplication. Her eyelids tremble. Her lips tremble. At such times Abigail Des Pres’s social poise can help. To a degree. Women in the Des Pres family have been bred through the generations to exude this softness, this pleading-for-understanding, in the face of masculine suspicion and hostility. In youthful middle-age Abigail is still a beautiful woman, if very thin; out of fearfulness she always dresses expensively, in good taste, and her hair, face, and nails are impeccably groomed. For this shameful expedition she’s wearing the elegant black silk Shanghai Tang tunic, matching trousers, open-toed Gucci sandals. The rings on her long thin fingers, the jewel-studded gold watch on her slender wrist; the rented Lexus with olive-tinted windows; Abigail’s French perfume—all these, the Middlebury cop, a flat-bellied man of about thirty-five, is taking in. Abigail says in a hoarse whisper, “Officer, I’ve been—watching over my son. That’s all.

At a distance. I don’t want him to know I’m here. He thinks I’m back home. His father and I are divorced. He’s only fifteen, he’s here for the Preston Academy summer session, I promised him I wouldn’t try to see him, but I—I couldn’t stay away. I was so lonely without him. Officer, I’m so embarrassed. Please don’t arrest me!” Abigail smiles plaintively, wiping at her eyes. She knows she isn’t going to be arrested.

And so she isn’t. The cop checks her driver’s license and the car registration. He notes she still has four minutes of meter time remaining. He says, with a half-smile that might be pitying, or flirtatious, or mildly contemptuous, “O.K., ma’am. Good luck.”

D   Mountain View Inn, giddy as a soaring balloon.

“I’m free! Not arrested.”

Abigail laughs, she isn’t remorseful in the slightest. Still less repentant.

She’s eager to get to her hotel room and move into the next phase of her strategy.

A beautiful, not inexpensive suite overlooking the fabled Green
Middle Age: A Romance

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Mountains. Will Jared be impressed? It takes a lot to impress a spoiled fifteen-year-old kid, but Abigail will try.

She calls the front desk to inform the management that she’ll be staying another night. She calls Jared’s number in the residence hall, which she has apparently memorized. No surprise—Jared isn’t in. In a warm, but not heated voice Abigail leaves a message: “Jared? It’s your mother. I’m in Vermont. I’m staying in an inn about two miles from the college. Don’t be alarmed, honey”—(here, Abigail’s voice is beginning to waver, she can envision Jared’s scowl)—“it isn’t an emergency. I just—became a little lonely, suddenly. Missing you. And—Adam. And the house is so empty . . .

Don’t be angry with me, please? This visit will be just between you and me, your father doesn’t have to know.” Abigail pauses, breathing quickly.

It’s a scene in a foreign film of another era, a murky tale of sexual obsession and impending doom. She sees her face, a pale floating petal, in a mirror across the room. Why are beautiful women so shallow, like cutouts?

Presented at the 6 International Debutante Ball, Waldorf-Astoria, New York City. Trying not to beg: “Call me when you can, Jared. I’ll be here waiting. We’ll have dinner tonight, that’s all. I promise! Just one night. My number is—”

Abigail gives the number and quickly hangs up. Too late, her fatal incriminating words can’t be revoked!

Exhausted suddenly. She removes the black silk tunic that has become unpleasantly damp beneath the arms and the silk trousers wrinkled and damp at the crotch, kicks off the elegant Gucci sandals and collapses in her underwear, ribs and collarbone pushing against her pale-pasty skin, onto the high, hard bed with the ruffled bolster to drift into a sleep of delicious delirium-oblivion. In that region where Adam Berendt is not yet dead, and her baby is not yet born but tight and warm and snug inside her where he’s safe.

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