Middle Age (28 page)

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J C O

mock-brotherhood—the women sought in one another, as in magical reflecting surfaces, some measure of their immortality. They were bright shimmering petals floating upon the lightless, depthless chaos beneath Salthill which reached to the very molten center of Earth. Roger shuddered, and eased away from Harry Tierney’s hand. Harry said, “It means so much to them, doesn’t it?” Roger said, “What? Friendship?” “
Is
it

‘friendship’?” Harry seemed to consider this for a moment, then dismissed it. “I don’t know what ‘friendship’ is. Call it ‘social life.’ Like pond algae. Tiny organisms locked together in the most intense intimacy, sym-biotic and ‘synergistic’ and yet—it’s only just, in the end, pond algae.”

Roger, who valued friendship, or wanted to think that he did, as well as love for Lee Ann and his daughter, said, “Harry, come on. You’re hosting this terrific party tonight. You come to all our parties.” Harry laughed.

He had the ease of a killer for hire, he couldn’t be touched, himself. “It wouldn’t matter in the slightest if I never saw anyone in Salthill again.

And you feel the same way, Cavanagh.” Roger said stiffly, “I do? Thanks for the insight.” “No need to thank,” Harry said, punching at Roger’s shoulder as if they were high school kids, “it’s gratis.”

Through Vermont and New York State countryside of surpassing beauty, Roger drove Abigail Des Pres back home to Salthill. He’d dealt with the car rental agency. He’d arranged for his client to pay a stiff fine for charges of DWI and reckless driving. Abigail’s driver’s license would be suspended for six months. He did not ask her pointedly about the absence of skid marks on the road, but after some time, roused from her lethargy, examining her bruised and lacerated face in a compact mirror, Abigail began to speak of having been “under a spell” and unable to act at the time of the accident. She was always such a careful, cautious driver; such a timid driver; but something had forced her to drive fast that evening, though she wasn’t familiar with the Lexus, and didn’t know the road. She had not been actually intoxicated, she insisted. She’d experienced everything with a terrible clarity. “It was as if a hand turned the wheel. Turned the wheel to the right. To take us off the road. A demon-hand.” Roger said casually, “A ‘demon-hand’?” Abigail said, “Yes. It had the power to turn the wheel to kill us but it wasn’t, I don’t think,
actual
. I mean,
physical
.” She hadn’t told the Middlebury authorities about this demon-hand because it would have seemed like an accusation of Jared, that Jared had reached over to twist the wheel, and Jared had not, Jared too was innocent; she hadn’t dared tell them for fear of being considered
Middle Age: A Romance

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mad. She would not tell anyone except Roger, and begged him not to tell any of their friends for word would spread everywhere in Salthill—“I’d be so ashamed!” Roger questioned her about the “demon-hand” and Abigail conceded, possibly it had been a force rather than an actual hand. But it took the shape of a hand. She’d seen it! Certainly, she’d felt it. “As soon as the hand took hold of the steering wheel, I became paralyzed, I couldn’t react. I could no more have brought the car out of the skid, turned the wheel the other way, put on the brakes, than”—she paused, breathing quickly, her anxious bruised eyes on Roger—“I could perform these actions now, in this car. With you in opposition.” Roger laughed uneasily.

Abigail was joking? Or—Abigail wasn’t joking? “Jared refuses to speak with me now. He says I tried to kill us both.
And I did not, Roger
. You believe me, don’t you?” Roger said, “Abigail, of course. I’m your attorney.” He laughed, it was a joke. “Hey, no. I’m your friend.”

As they crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge high above the Hudson River, Abigail began to speak resignedly of having lost Jared, so soon after having lost Adam. “It was fated, I guess.” Roger objected, “ ‘Fated’? Hardly.”

But Abigail, picking at the bandages on her face, squinting into her compact mirror, said, sighing, “I feel it, you know. My age.” “Your age?” Roger laughed. “You’re the youngest of us all.” “No. Marina Troy is the youngest.” Roger went quiet, wondering what Abigail knew of him and Marina. In Salthill, that pond of teeming algae, everyone seemed to know everyone else’s affairs despite the greatest efforts to maintain secrecy. As if she could read Roger’s thoughts, delicately Abigail brought up the subject of the letters and cards she’d sent to Adam, had Roger come across them amid Adam’s papers?

“No. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Loving.” Abigail peeled off one of the smaller bandages, lifting her chin. Her face resembled an exquisite vase that has been mysteriously smudged, cracked. “Even when you’re not loved in return.”

“Adam loved you, Abigail.”

“Did he?”

“In his way.”

“Did he ever—talk about me with you?”

“You know Adam had too much tact for that.”

“Yes, but—did he ever talk about women with you?”

“Not really.”

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J C O

“Do you know if he was married, ever?”

Abigail spoke anxiously. Roger was annoyed, this should mean so much to her even now! “No. I doubt it.”

“You do?” Abigail considered this. “But Adam was a man you would swear must be a father. He should have been a father. He loved children, and he loved—well, life. But—he hadn’t had children? This rumor about grown children of his coming forward to make claims on his estate—”

“There’s no truth to that,” Roger said, irritably. “We can’t locate any heirs.”

“It’s still early, isn’t it? Heirs may show up.”

“Yes. But somehow, I doubt it.”

“Why would a man like Adam, such a good man, not have children; and a man like Harry Tierney, who isn’t at all a good man, and frankly hates life, have a child?—a son? And want so badly to hang on to him?”

Abigail shook her head, sighing. “It seems wrong.”

“It is illogical,” Roger said. “Adam would have agreed.”

After a while Abigail said, as if unable to resist, “Adam was a gambler, you know. I mean sometimes. In Vegas.”

“Was he?”

“One year,  I think, he ‘earned’ eleven thousand dollars. He had to report it to the IRS!”

In fact, Roger knew this. And he knew more. But he said only, admiringly, “That’s a lot of money, he must’ve been serious. I suppose—

poker?”

“I guess. He wouldn’t talk about it much. He did seem ashamed. Or maybe he pretended to be ashamed, to keep it to himself. Gambling was some kind of experimenting with him, he said; with, like, the universe, and its ‘intersection’ with his own mind. He didn’t seem to be serious about anything,” Abigail said, thoughtfully, “that was only just, you know, an action.” What a strange, unexpected thing for this woman to say! Roger was impressed that, since the accident, so very recently, Abigail Des Pres was becoming a more thoughtful person; unless it was since Adam’s death.

“To be serious about any action, if it’s only just an ‘action,’ is to commit yourself to some principle it represents, assuming some kind of future, and this, I think, Adam never did. No, he wasn’t serious about gambling because it was just making money, business, in another guise. He despised all that. He was only serious about life, and that’s something you can’t talk about.”

Middle Age: A Romance

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“He sought the truth. Like Socrates.”

“Socrates!” Abigail sounded uncertain. “He’s a character invented by—

is it Plato? Or are they two separate people?”

Roger had to think. “It’s believed they were two people. But, who knows—it was a long time ago.”

“How long? A thousand years?”

“More like two thousand.”

“Two thousand! And we live so briefly.” Abigail sighed, and touched her tender skin with her fingertips. In the corner of his eye Roger saw her glittering rings, which somehow assured him. No woman can be profound whose fingers glitter with expensive rings. “Strange that Adam would care so much, isn’t it? About those long-ago people. He didn’t believe in time, maybe? That human beings change much? That we ‘progress.’ ”

“No. But he didn’t believe in the reverse, either. What about you?”

“Me?”
Abigail laughed, showing her perfect white teeth like another accessory. “What does it matter what I think? A cast-off wife, and now a cast-off mother. I’m”—she wiped at her eyes with a carefully folded tissue—“pond scum.”

Roger laughed, in that instant disliking the woman. Abigail Des Pres was still Harry Tierney’s wife. “Well. So are we all, I suppose.”

“But we try to be more, don’t we?” Abigail pleaded. She touched Roger’s wrist, sensing she was losing his sympathy. And she was a woman whose nourishment was sympathy. “Some of us try so very hard.”

“Yes. I suppose.”

Roger drove the rest of the way to Salthill in silence.

In Abigail’s darkened house, Roger set her suitcase down in the vestibule and would have quickly departed except Abigail seized both his hands in hers. “Roger! I’m afraid, I can’t be alone. Not just yet.” If he’d been vigilant enough, and forceful enough, he might have escaped; but a perverse inertia gripped him, like quicksand. Soft and yielding as water, yet possessed of a childlike will, Abigail stepped into his arms and held him; her own arms were thin, trembling, but strong. “We have so much in common, Roger. I’ve been watching you for years. We’ve both been wounded. And we have children the same age. Like brother and sister they are. That does link us, doesn’t it?” She spoke wistfully, raising her face to his. Roger felt a thrill of panic, and a razor-sharp stab of sexual longing.
I am so physically lonely
.
God help me
. The woman’s luminous bruised face, her luridly blackened eye excited him; as if he were the

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J C O

cause of her hurt, himself. “I’ll never see Adam again. I’ll never see Jared again, I know it.” She spoke almost calmly, she was resigned. As if in fact she’d killed her own son, and there was a bitter satisfaction in this, as there would be in Roger if Robin ceased to love him, and joined with her mother in despising him, there would be a bitter satisfaction. “Love me?

Just a little? Please.” She was kissing him avidly, and Roger found himself kissing her, in the shadowy cathedral-ceilinged living room of the house, the scene of so many parties. As if those years of parties were a prelude solely to this, an exquisite consummation. Roger and Abigail staggered to a silk-upholstered sofa and fell clumsily together. They were excited, breathless, fumbling as adolescents. Abigail’s breath was fierce as licorice. “I love you, oh, I love you, love you.” Roger supposed she no longer had any idea who he was, she’d lost his name. And he was forgetting her name, and where they were. In haste, pushing aside, knocking to the floor, what were they?—small but bulky silk-covered pillows. God damn! They began to make love, how quickly and easily it was happening, the woman’s slender thighs, the woman’s suddenly bared, very warm belly, a soft-curly swath of pubic hair like down, as if their eager ferretlike bodies had taken control, their personalities were nulled, obliterated. A woman’s fleshy, ravenous mouth against Roger’s mouth, it might be any woman’s mouth, or any mouth, Roger was immensely happy suddenly, knowing that the pressure in his groin would soon be relieved, would explode in a delirium of brainless pleasure. “Do you love me? A little?” the woman was pleading, “—say you do. You can lie to me. Oh, please!” Boldly she was pulling open his shirt, her fingers worked at his trousers, Roger pushed them away to open his trousers himself, his penis lifting hard, hot as a boy’s, and the woman was guiding him into her, shimmering as a pool of water, except suddenly an agitated sound interrupted them. “What? What was that?” Tense as drawn bows they lay together, listening. A strand of the woman’s hair was caught in Roger’s mouth. Her narrow rib cage, beneath his, rose and fell anxiously. At first, the sound seemed to be in the room with them, in a darkened corner—or in the fireplace perhaps? Then, it was evident that the sound came from outside, a frenzied scratching at the front door.

Apollo?

Middle Age: A Romance

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T  R limping and thudding down the stairs.

Seeing him staring at her, she said, teasing, an angry flush rising into her face, “Guess I’ve grown some, huh, Dad, since you saw me last year?”

His first surprise, no, it was frank shock and disappointment, and it must have shown in his face: Robin had dressed for dinner in baggy un-clean pants, a parrot-green Ryecroft hockey T-shirt with a flannel shirt partway buttoned over it, straining against her big, broad breasts, and filthy running shoes. Her hair, damp from the shower, hung lank and limp about her round childish face; her skin shone coarsely, as if she’d rubbed it with a washcloth. Amid the prettier, more girllike, more attractively dressed Ryecroft girls Roger had been observing in the residence hall, Robin stood out as defiant, conspicuous. Seeing her dad trying to smile at her she laughed outright at him. A quick cruel smile tightened her jaws.

Roger’s face burned, he would let the remark pass. The implication that Roger hadn’t seen her since the previous year when in fact he’d seen her more recently, and she knew it. The implication that he might be dis-comfited—disturbed—by her maturing body, her sizable breasts and hips.

Roger said, trying to sound neither severe nor pleading, “This inn we’re going to, it’s a nice place, honey. I was expecting you to dress a little more—”

Robin laughed. “ ‘Nice’? You’re dressed ‘nice’ enough for us both.”

Her duffel bag was slung over her back, Robin refused to carry her things in a suitcase. When Roger offered to take the bag from her, she resisted. “It’s how I build my muscle, Dad.” Roger recalled Lee Ann saying that their daughter had become, in the past year, obsessed with hockey, and with other sports at her school. He felt dismay: was this antagonistic young person
his daughter,
a plain homely chunky girl with dangerously bright eyes, watching him defiantly, daring him to criticize her? For a half hour Roger had been waiting for her in the visitors’ lounge of the residence hall, having to observe other girls, not wanting to compare his daughter with these girls yet unable not to think, with a sinking heart,
What a crapshoot, fatherhood
.
I played, and fucked it
.