Middle Age (27 page)

At halftime Roger made his way to the Ryecroft side to wave to Robin, say hello, and saw to his shock that the tall adroit pony-tailed girl wasn’t his daughter! There was Robin in fact, shorter, with a thicker frame, her hair a darker brown, frizzed and damp from perspiration; Roger waved at her, caught her eye, and Robin smiled a restrained smile, lifted her fist in a gesture of victory, which Roger mimicked in return. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Love ya, honey!” Robin didn’t appear especially elated to see her dad, playing it cool perhaps, of course she’d been disappointed to get his phone message, he hadn’t been able to make it before the game as they’d planned, or maybe she was simply distracted by the game, the pressure and excitement. Team sports: Roger knew the intoxica-tion, the almost unspeakable animal-joy that runs through a pack of young people united in a single, finite effort. He knew, and halfway envied Robin.

The referee’s whistle, and play resumed. Roger had found an empty seat in the third tier of bleachers. He was drawn into the game, began to care about the game, wanting the green-clad team to beat the blue-clad team, willing his girl Robin to excel. (The fact was, Robin had never been a graceful loser even as a little girl. Even playing kiddie games with her dad she’d needed to
win
. He dreaded her sulking through another dinner, this time at the three-star Hanover Inn in Baltimore he’d reserved for them that evening. And beyond that was Washington, D.C., a father-daughter weekend together.) Roger was often on his feet, squinting to see Robin, trying to follow the action. Shouting with other supporters until his throat was hoarse.

A game, any game is any game, a game like any other game, indistinguish-able
.
Except if you’re on the playing field, then each game is unique
.
It’s your life
.

In high school, Roger had been on the track team for a while, and on the swimming team for a while. He’d been quick and clever and fairly well-coordinated but, shorter than most of the guys on teams, he hadn’t
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the stamina required for competitive sports, maybe he hadn’t had the necessary will, the drive to win at mere games. In college, he hadn’t gone out for sports at all. Sports seemed to him an idiotic squandering of time, energy, talent. Student athletes revered by others seemed to him frankly deluded about the world. Victory isn’t to the swiftest of body but to the swiftest of mind. Roger Cavanagh would cultivate not his body, though he liked his body well enough, but his mind.
And this too, a game
.
You have no
choice but to play
.

Ryecroft scored a goal, the game was tied. Then the other team scored two goals. In the final quarter, the teams were tied again. Tension! Sus-pense! Roger stood and shouted with the others, trying to keep his girl in sight. But kept losing her. And kept losing the thread of why he was here.

Look, Robin: you know I love you, don’t you?
But he kept thinking of Marina Troy. Wondering where she’d gone, and without telling him. For they were co-conspirators. They’d committed a misdemeanor together. Especially, such a violation of law could have serious consequences for Roger Cavanagh, attorney-at-law. Yes, but he was concentrating on Robin’s game.

Yes, he understood that his yearning for Marina Troy was absurd, and beyond that it was futile. He did care about the ferocious Ryecroft girls, these Amazon warriors thundering up and down the field, up and down the field, brandishing their scythe-like hockey sticks. The ball might have been a human head. No, too small. Male genitals? Maybe sometime in history, anthropologists would know, morbid research, what it unearths about mankind’s playful customs, decorum, civilization itself. Adam Berendt had seemed to view their suburban-Salthill world as if he’d drifted into it from another planet, a place of cooler, drier air, clear-sightedness, that single staring eye, yet he’d seemed to forgive them, too; he’d seemed to like them as, mysteriously, they had not always been able to like or even tolerate themselves.

Cave
-
dwellers
.
Dwellers among shadows
.
How to escape? But—escape to
what?

Good athletes become better athletes under duress, less-good athletes begin to falter. Roger felt pain seeing that his daughter was being out-played by the blue-clad wing as the game continued, she’d become flush-faced and surly and clumsy. (In all fairness to Robin, she wasn’t the only girl whose playing had visibly deteriorated, as that of two or three star athletes was becoming spectacular.) But there, determined, dogged, Robin galloped on her powerful legs, swung her stick, colliding with other

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J C O

equally determined and dogged girls. Roger recalled his daughter in a bathing suit, the previous summer, those thick fatty-muscled thighs, amazing, sturdier than his own, far larger than Lee Ann’s; not that Robin was heavyset exactly, but big-boned, a girl who could never be slender.

And she was easily flummoxed. In the midst of a protracted play, as the ball flew by her, she turned desperately, lunged with her stick, swung and missed and at a clumsy angle, the ball was taken from the Ryecroft girls and went flying down the field for an easy goal, and—where was Robin?

Fallen to the ground.

But immediately on her feet. Before anyone could help her.

Still, she was limping. Time was called, the coach removed her from the game.
God damn, just our luck
.
Oh, honey
. She was his little girl again, in need of her dad.

B R , with a bright plucky smile, that she was all right, she’d only just made a mistake and slipped—“Or maybe she elbowed me. But it was my mistake.”

She was trying not to cry. A big-boned flush-faced girl who smelled of exertion, hair plastered to her forehead and her breath still quickened.

After the game, which in the last few minutes of playing the Ryecroft team narrowly won, she gave her anxious dad a quick, hot kiss, twisting away from him even as she pressed against him even as he meant to hug her. Since the divorce there was a physical awkwardness between them.

Roger said, “Honey, you were great. You all played wonderfully. I was watching every—”

Robin cut him off, embarrassed. “Sure, Dad.”

Somewhat flippantly, though possibly with pride, since Roger was still a reasonably youthful, attractive man, Robin introduced him to several of her elated teammates who smiled shyly and called him “Mr. Cavanagh.”

Then she went off, trying not to limp, with the team to shower and change, and would meet Roger at her residence hall in about an hour.

Roger watched the girls walk away. Their mood was rowdy and jubilant, they’d won by a single goal, and that had been a fluke—the most delicious kind of victory. The kind you don’t really deserve.

He was grateful for the free hour. He went for a drink at the town’s single hotel, a Hyatt Regency with a cocktail lounge behind a waterfall.

God, how shaken he was! He hadn’t realized. The excitement of the game,
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the shock he’d felt seeing Robin down. The strain to the heart in being somebody’s dad. Did you ever get used to it?

A double Scotch, with water.

Madonna of the Rocks
. She’d told him about the painting in the Frick. She couldn’t recall the artist’s name.
Mother love gone wrong
.

She called Roger often when they were both in Salthill, to invite him for dinner. Sometimes with friends, and he’d accept; sometimes alone, and he’d decline. He knew what might happen if he and Abigail Des Pres were alone together in her house. That beautiful lonely-echoing Cape Cod on Wheatsheaf Drive in which the tragic divorcée continued to live, out of inertia perhaps. Like a princess under a spell. Sleeping Beauty.
But
I’m not the prince to wake her with a kiss
. Abigail Des Pres was a lovely appealing woman, and not in need of money, but she was one of those women who adored Adam Berendt even after his death, and Roger wasn’t going to compete with a dead man. Adam had been formidable enough when alive.

Still, he saw Abigail occasionally. They were romantic friends. They shared certain secrets. Abigail had been a friend of Lee Ann’s for much of the Cavanaghs’ marriage and believed, with Roger, that he’d been unfairly treated by Lee Ann. “If a man isn’t absolutely ‘faithful’ to his wife it should be discounted, to a degree. But when a woman . . .” Abigail’s voice trailed off in disapproving silence. Roger said, annoyed, “I was not unfaithful to Lee Ann. That’s one of her stories.” Abigail listened gravely. “Yes. I suppose.”

He and Abigail were like brother and sister. Their relationship had become, since their mutual divorces, subtly incestuous. They even resembled each other, dark-haired, intense, inclined to suspicion and paranoia.

Where Abigail’s laughter was high-pitched like glass shattering, Roger’s laughter was low-pitched, like gravel being shaken. Abigail was a woman who eroticized her friendships with men, even the husbands of her women friends, out of a nervous desire to please, not out of actual desire; Roger believed that, like many beautiful women of her class, Abigail had been raised to feel no physical desire for anything, not sex, not food or drink. Like one of those exquisitely overbred greyhounds so taut with nerves you can see them trembling. Where Marina was all will, steely and remote, Abigail was without will, soft, yielding, unresisting as water to

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the touch. Roger knew he could be Abigail’s lover if he wished. Sink and sink in the woman, finding no bottom.

In July, shortly after Roger had helped spread Adam’s ashes in his garden, Abigail telephoned Roger in distress. She called him at his law office and insisted to his secretary that he speak with her at once, though he was in a meeting—“This is an emergency. It can’t wait.” When Roger came on the line, Abigail burst into tears. He had difficulty understanding her.

“Roger! I need your help. Something terrible has happened.”

Roger would recall: something
has happened
. Not
I am to blame
.
I nearly
killed my son and myself
.

Roger drove at once to Middlebury, Vermont, to bring Abigail home.

The rental car had been wrecked, Abigail and her fifteen-year-old son Jared had been treated for minor injuries in a local hospital. Abigail’s face was bruised and lacerated, one of her eyes blackened. When Roger came into the room she seized his hands and wept with gratitude—“Roger! I will never forget this.” Later she would say, “I should have died. It was meant to be.” Roger told her not to be ridiculous, she’d only just had an accident. But when he spoke with Jared, separately, the boy was furious, hostile. He too had a battered face, a swollen jaw, cracked ribs and a badly sprained forearm. “Keep her away from me, Mr. Cavanagh! I hate her. I never want to see her again.” The boy’s father, Harrison Tierney, whom Roger had never much liked, was en route to Middlebury to deal with the crisis.

Roger identified himself to Middlebury authorities as Abigail Des Pres’s attorney. Charges against Abigail were serious. It seemed Abigail had been drinking, the alcohol level in her blood was beyond Vermont’s legal limit. She’d been speeding along a narrow country road, lost control of her vehicle going into a turn, crashed through a low guardrail, through a ditch, and into a stand of trees. The front of the Lexus had collapsed like an accordion. There were no skid marks on the road. It was purely luck that neither Abigail nor Jared had been seriously injured or killed. Jared hadn’t buckled his safety belt, he might have been thrown headfirst through the windshield.

No skid marks
.
No attempt to brake the car?

Roger told authorities that his client was by nature a gentle, loving mother who since a difficult divorce had been under “severe mental strain.” He told authorities that the boy was emotional, and what he might be telling police (that his mother was crazy, had tried to kill them) should not be taken altogether seriously.

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Roger would not intervene between Abigail and Jared. The boy refused to see Abigail no matter how she pleaded. He was rude to Roger, whom he called, with obvious contempt, “Mr. Cavanagh.” He wanted to quit summer school, he wanted to go home with his father for the rest of the month, then to Africa—on a safari?—mountain-climbing?—if he was sufficiently recovered?—and never see his mother again. Nor did Roger want to meet with Harrison Tierney. In Salthill he’d played doubles tennis with Harry a few times, the man was vicious. Alone among the Salthill men, Harry was known to cheat at tennis. And at golf, and squash. Other Salthill men were gentlemen and would not contest Tierney’s claims. Roger had disapproved of Harry, found him personally abrasive but had to admire the man’s air of bravado. He seemed always to be having a good time. “Harry doesn’t care what we think of him,” Lee Ann said, “that’s why we think of him.” “Don’t tell me you find him attractive?” Roger asked incredulously, and Lee Ann said with her thin infuriating smile, “Of course. Women are masochists, haven’t you noticed?

It’s the unspoken cornerstone of marriage.” Roger recalled an evening at the Tierneys’ house some years ago, one of those large dinner parties that mean so passionately much to women, and which are mostly tolerated and endured by men. Harry joined Roger where he was leaning in a doorway after dinner, smoking a cigarette, for it was a time before cigarette smoking had been completely banished from such occasions. Harry was the evening’s host and might have been expected to behave like a host, except he nudged Roger in the ribs, said laughingly, “What’s it all about, eh? Some riddle, is it? Chr-ist.” Roger smiled, confused. His lawyer-training kept him vigilant at all times. The men were watching a ring of Salthill wives, Harry’s wife Abigail, Roger’s wife Lee Ann, Beatrice Archer, and one or two other women talking together excitedly, their faces shining like fresh-opened flowers. Candlelight made these women, in their late thirties, strangely beautiful. There was an uncanny innocence and simplicity to their beauty, as if it had never been tested; as if none of these women had ever screamed in the agony of childbirth, writhed and groaned in orgasm, sweated, defecated. As if beneath their expensive clothes their bodies were sleek in perfection as expensive dolls. They floated in that state of party-euphoria when they needed to touch one another, their praise of one another’s hair, skin, clothing, beauty was extravagant. Of course, these women were all friends, they’d known one another for years. They were sisters, hatched from the same great egg. It was as if—Roger saw, with Harry’s hand on his shoulder in