Middle Age (20 page)

Like a sparrow’s heartbeat
.

The artery in Abigail’s throat, he suddenly pressed his big thumb against where it throbbed. Alarming her who had not been prepared for the sudden intimate gesture.

She didn’t recoil from him, she gripped his hand and pressed it tighter against her throat.
Oh! Adam
.



J C O

Why so intense, Abigail? You’ll burn yourself out
.

To this reasonable question, which Adam Berendt would ask her, in varying ways, many times, Abigail has no answer even now.

That evening. After the divorce. Jared was gone, at boarding school.

She invited Adam for dinner, nervously she prepared dinner for just the two of them, the telephone off the hook. They were not—yet—lovers.

They were very good friends. Though sometimes reckless Abigail would press herself against the man as a hostess has the privilege of doing, greeting a guest who’s a dear friend, saying goodnight to a departing friend who has been a guest, smiling dreamily, yes perhaps seductively; yet playfully, too; for Abigail Des Pres is a playful seductive unaggressive female, willowy, hot-skinned despite her pallor, the kind of divorcée who mocks her loneliness even as she presents it, as one might present a heart, torn bleeding from its breast, on the palms of one’s trembling hands.
See? Mine
.

But, hey
—
you can ignore it!

Adam was rummaging through the deep frayed pockets of his sand-colored camel’s hair coat (purchased at the Trinity Church secondhand fair for forty-five bucks, as Adam boasted) looking for his gloves, and pulled out a handful of vouchers from Caesars Palace, Las Vegas; which Abigail flirtatiously snatched from his fingers, saying she hadn’t known he was a gambler, he patronized casinos, was this his secret life?—and Adam hesitated a moment before saying yes, he gambled sometimes, he had a weakness for craps in particular: “To see, not if you will win, but if you have luck; and if you don’t have luck, how far the absence of ‘luck’

will take you, and do to you.” Adam spoke so strangely, with such an air of vulnerability, Abigail could only ignore his enigmatic words; she played almost exclusively to the man’s exuberant side, not the other, the brooding and philosophical, saying, “Take me with you, Adam? Next time? Vegas? I’ve never been. But I love to gamble—I think!” (Was this true? Half of what sprang from Abigail’s lips surprised her utterly.) But Adam merely laughed, his face warm, his single sighted eye narrowed in a wink.

He snatched the vouchers back from Abigail and slowly, thoughtfully tore them into pieces.

Like a sparrow’s heartbeat beat beat
.

Such yearning.

Middle Age: A Romance



A growing boy needs a
. . .

. . .
a second penis, a giant Daddy-penis, in the household
.

Shaving? A fifteen-year-old boy shaves, how often who knows, it’s a small enough secret, a touching small secret; but a secret from Mother.

Among other secrets. For instance how much Harrison allows Jared each month on his credit card. (Under the custody arrangement, Harry is in charge of their son’s allowance but, of course, Abigail, who has money of her own and has, with dignity, refused to ask her ex-husband for money, can’t resist contributing, too. And buying the boy things directly.) Like how much Harry spends on the skiing trips, backpacking trips, mountain-hiking trips calculated to win back their son’s love. Excursions to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Alaska (Mount McKinley). One memorable Christmas break, to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, a world away. (When Abigail was weak with grief, and flu, mourning her mother’s death.) And how much Harry has paid for his condominium in New York City, on Beekman Place; and for his new country house in Cornwall, Connecticut; and what Harry and the new wife, the glamorous twenty-nine-year-old stepmother, say of Abigail Des Pres that isn’t meant to be repeated to her.

Abigail persists in querying Jared—“What do they say of me, Jared? Is it cruel? It it accurate? Do they laugh? Do you all laugh?” Provoking Jared to laugh, and blush, and shrug his neck in that way of his when Mom asks such uncool questions. As if he’s got a crick in his neck. “Oh, jeez, Mom.”

“ ‘Oh, jeez, Mom’—what?”

“They never say a thing about you. We never do.”

Secrets. Abigail told Adam, her chief adviser through the crisis of the divorce, and the depressive aftermath, that the
fatal split
between her and her son began when Jared was about eighteen months old. Baby’s first attempt at obfuscation. Baby’s first untruth! Trying to make Mommy believe he has eaten his pureed beets when in fact he has cleverly sloughed the mess off his plate and onto the floor. In that futile but somehow noble little gesture Baby set himself in opposition to Mommy, like a mutinous cherub against an omnipotent God. Following this, Abigail makes an entertaining anecdote of it, a Mother’s Fable, a flood of untruths followed; in time, once Baby could actually speak, these became outright lies.

Abigail and Harrison, who were still in love at the time, young parents, laughed at Baby’s awkward deceptions, not alarmed but delighted. Jared



J C O

was normal. Telling transparent baby-lies is funny—isn’t it? Abigail mused, “Gosh! I wonder if all our lies are so obvious, even as adults?”

Harry said in his evasive mumble, “Yes. I wonder.” Now in weak moments, which seem to be ever more frequent, soaking in a hot bath, sipping whiskey, sleeping this drugged delirium-sleep in an air-conditioned hotel room, Abigail recalls with a stab of pleasure that once-upon-a-time when there were no secrets, absolutely none, between mother and son.

When Baby was still in the womb, for instance. (She’d expected to be sick through the pregnancy, all Des Pres women are, her neurasthenic mother warned her, but in fact Abigail had been surprisingly healthy, and in good spirits, happy and thriving and taking for granted that her boy-baby would be perfect.) Nor were there secrets during Jared’s infancy. Tenderly she’d presided over nursing, which she quite liked, and which seemed to her (almost!) better than sex, and tenderly she’d presided over the diaper-ritual, which Jared’s fastidious father couldn’t bear (Abigail was required to virtually scrub herself down after a diaper-changing session, before she could again approach Harry); tenderly she’d presided over bathing the baby, an exuberant kicking baby, at times a fretful willful baby, shampooing his thin fawn-colored hair, rinsing his head, his skull delicate as an eggshell it seemed to her, and gently washing his penis, that tiny appendage, smooth as a snail, hardly snail-sized, silken-smooth and so much nicer, Abigail couldn’t help thinking, than anything adult-male. In awe Abigail held the tiny sac in her fingers, in the warm bathwater.

How to foresee the rage that would one day quiver through her beautiful son’s body. His contorted face. His boy-maleness. During the worst insomniac months of the divorce siege when Jared was thirteen, likely to break into furious tears shouting—“I hate you, see? Hate both of you! He’s a bastard fucker and you’re a, a—what you
are!
Why don’t you both die!”

And Abigail, struggling to remain calm, stoic, conceded yes Jared was right, he was right to be so angry, none of this was his fault—“Only mine, and your father’s.”

(But mostly the father’s fault. Yes?)

Secrets. Bound up with that tiny penis-snail, silken-smooth and perfect, that would grow inevitably into an adolescent boy’s penis, hidden inside his clothes; of which Abigail,
who is not an incestuous mother,
refuses to think. Of course there must be secrets in a fifteen-year-old boy’s personal life. There will be ever more secrets, a rush of secrets, mostly sex-secrets, to be kept from Mother.
For my own good
.
He wouldn’t want
Middle Age: A Romance



to shock or disgust me
.
His seed welling up in him frantic to spill
.
Oh God
I know
.

At least Abigail Des Pres has never behaved like the obsessive mothers of prized adolescent boys in certain Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries who check their sons’ bedsheets every morning to determine if . . .

“Never!”

Abigail, sleeping fitfully amid damp twisted bedsheets, wakes suddenly, in revulsion.



H  . The bedside phone has failed to ring. She is a woman floating on the surface of a now disheveled bed like a cluster of rotting water lilies on the surface of a stagnant pond. Yet swallows down defeat, that sour but familiar taste. Swings her slender sword-legs off the bed, sits up smiling and hopeful and dials his number another time.

The telephone rings in Jared’s room in the residence hall on the Middlebury campus two miles away. Abigail has seen this dormitory beneath tall oaks, built of solid-looking brick, from a discreet distance earlier today; she now sees a boy’s hand hovering over the receiver, hesitating—and lifting it. But no one speaks. Abigail says softly, “Hello? Jared?” In the background, there are voices, rap music. After a pause, a boy says guardedly, “H’lo?” It isn’t Jared. One of his suitemates. Abigail identifies herself and asks to speak to Jared and the boy says vaguely, in that appealing, adenoidal way of a lying boy, “Jared isn’t here right now, Mrs. Tierney.

He’s—” But there’s another pause, and an exchange of voices. Abigail can envision the receiver snatched from the boy, in fury and dismay.

“Yeah? Hello?” It’s Jared, sounding as if he’s been running.

“Jared! It’s me, did you get my message?”

“Sure.” Jared speaks in his flat voice. Abigail can see his deadpan expression. “I got your message.”

“I’ll—pick you up at the residence hall? Is seven-thirty good?”

“Six-thirty is better, I have work to do tomorrow.”

“Six-thirty! I’ll be there.”

“O.K., Mom. Sure.”

“And, Jared—”

The line is dead. Jared has departed.



J C O

I  , Abigail turns her smiling face into the warm spray and tries not to think of
whatever it is: a death, a departure
. She understands that Jared is angry with her for violating the terms of the agreement with his father (not a legal agreement, nothing truly binding), and for putting him in the difficult position, which Jared is frequently in, of needing to protect one parent from knowledge of the other.
He won’t inform on me,
I can trust him
. At the same time, Abigail would be devastated if Jared protected his father from her; if, for instance, Harry had violated the terms of the agreement himself and driven up to see Jared.
But Jared would tell me! I
can trust him
.

Abigail’s too-thin body, streaming water. Her knobby vertebrae, ribs and collarbone and wrists; the smooth, creamy pallor of her skin, which gives her the look, as Adam once remarked, of an Italian Renaissance madonna.

Abigail’s face, at least.

Her body is no longer a maternal body. She’s been sexually neutralized.

Her breasts have shrunken. The incision in the left breast (she touches it gingerly with her fingers, never looks) has mostly healed, the scimitar-shaped scar faded.

“Proof of my good luck! So far.”

Six years ago, Abigail was made to realize that Harrison no longer cared for her, still less loved her sexually, when he’d become upset and angry after a routine mammogram showed up a pea-sized cyst in her left breast. Abigail’s Salthill gynecologist scheduled her for surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, a biopsy that might, if necessary, be followed by a mastectomy if the cyst was malignant, and Harrison warned her not to tell anyone. “I don’t want this getting out. I don’t want other men pitying me.” Abigail wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Pitying
you?
”

“That’s right.” “Because you have a wife with—cancer?” “No. With a missing breast.” A moment later Harry added, as if only just hearing what he’d said, “I mean, honey, I’m not ashamed of cancer. Anyone’s cancer. It happens. I just don’t want people around here feeling sorry for us. Discussing us. You know Salthill, Abigail.” Quietly Abigail said, “Yes. I know Salthill.”
And I know you
. The fact was, Harry hadn’t hugged her. Hadn’t even touched her.
Already I am flawed to you
.
Yes?

In fact, Abigail had already told several women friends about the cyst.

Middle Age: A Romance



Of course! They’d been immediately sympathetic, supportive. They’d told her of similar scares, and biopsy experiences; each woman offered, independent of the others, to accompany Abigail into the city if Harrison was out of town.

Later, Abigail would realize that her friends knew, or guessed, what she hadn’t: Harrison was unfaithful to her, and Harrison would likely be

“out of town” when she needed him.

The pea-sized cyst turned out to be benign. The healthy breast was not removed. Subsequent mammograms turned out negative. Harry chided her for taking a “morbid attitude.” Still, Abigail is in the habit of crying. In the shower, where no one can hear her. As she is crying now, shyly stroking the subtly scarred breast.

Always buy designer clothes, Abigail
.
Understated, never showy
.
That way, you
will be unassailable
. This was Abigail’s mother’s most profound advice, but it has turned out to be worthless.

Still, Abigail dresses with care. It’s become a ritual with her, like saying the rosary for Catholics, by rote, without thinking; a talisman for good luck. Though she knows that in Salthill, among even the protective friends of her circle, Abigail Des Pres has a reputation for vanity; her diffi-dence and insecurity misinterpreted as a kind of arrogance.
Look, I can’t
help it
.
If I’m not beautiful
—
what am I?
For this illicit visit to Middlebury, Abigail has brought with her several changes of clothing, and is wearing, for this evening with her son, an Italian import, a cream-colored silk shift with spaghetti straps, a fitted jacket and a skirt that just skims her slender knees; and a pair of cream-colored kidskin pumps with medium heels.