Middle Age (32 page)

“Samantha? Is that—Samantha?” Augusta called. She would have stepped into the house except the harried-looking woman in sweatshirt and jeans, quick as a girl athlete, blocked her way.

“I’m sorry. Whoever you are. You’d better leave.”

“Let me talk to your daughter, please? For just a minute.”

“I said I’m sorry. No.”

“It would mean so much to her, I think,” Augusta said, “not now so much as in the future? When she’s older, and thinks back? You will allow her to—think back, won’t you? You will keep Adam’s memory alive—

won’t you?”

In an angry shaking voice the younger woman said, “I said go away!

You’re not welcome here! Upsetting us! I’m going to call the police if you don’t go away. This is a private home, you’re not welcome here, we’ve been through all this,
no more!
”

Augusta drew breath to protest, but the door was shut in her face.

“How can you! He died for—for your family! Your well-being, your selfish happiness!”

It was an absurd melodramatic scene. Afterward, Augusta would but dimly remember except to think
Was that me? That desperate woman
.

Of course she retreated, she returned to Salthill and the refuge of her home. She’d had a final impression of the little blond girl staring in her direction, listening.
It will matter to her
.
Someday
. There was that solace, of which she was certain.

No one in Salthill would ever know. She’d had no close confidante except Adam. But now the madness had touched her, ah! she was
alive
.

Departing
. There was a woman of Junoesque beauty, fifty-two years old.

She announced to her husband, “I’m quitting.” Their children were grown and departed, they lived alone together in a six-bedroom French Normandy house on Pheasant Run, in a semirural neighborhood of similarly large, expensive homes a few miles west of Salthill-on-Hudson, New York. “Whatever this is, this mausoleum, I’m quitting.” Since early childhood she’d had magical dreams of flying along the surface of the earth,
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leaping into the sky, breaking into a strange beautiful singing speech all would hear and admire, and none would comprehend. Sometimes in her dreams she was splendidly naked, defiant and unafraid. “Because I can’t breathe. And I must breathe, to live.” It was true, the air in the Cutlers’

house was sometimes unnourishing. You could breathe deeply, yet not get enough oxygen. Ascending even a brief flight of stairs, you might feel light-headed, dazed as a time-traveler.
What is this place, why am I here?

The house was surrounded by tall elegant trees, Scots pine and blue cedar, their fragrant piercing needles entered her sleep and caused her to cry aloud. “Yes, dear? What?” Her husband smiled his vague distracted smile.

He was reading the
New York Times
business section. He had heard his wife’s voice, but not her words. Often in the night, when they shared the same bed, when Augusta poked him awake because he was snoring loudly, or turning restlessly, Owen would say, “Just a minute, dear,” and he said this now, frowning at something in the paper, “Just a minute, dear. Yes?” It was an epoch of magical transformations, the onset of the twenty-first century. It was an epoch of abrupt stops and starts. Of acquisitions, merg-ers, blunt and irremediable disappearances. You might have your old frayed face peeled away, and a new, tender face sculpted in its place. You might have your very vision redesigned by laser. The husband frowned, glancing over his reading glasses. In the eyes of some, Owen Cutler was still a handsome man; in the eyes of others, he appeared unnervingly puffy, parboiled. Another Salthill man of integrity. Yet romance dwelt in his heart, often in public he was observed gazing at his wife with a sort of appalled admiration. “Gussie? What did you say just now?” How fierce, how invigorated Augusta felt, having made her decision! The one-eyed man had entered her soul, he had forced her to see her life without illusion. And the Thwaite woman, shutting a door in her face. Yes, it was time. “How long have we been married, Owen?” Though she already knew the answer yet she counted on the fingers of both hands, twice, three times. Before coming downstairs on this breezy Sunday morning in late October she’d washed her face in very cold water. Her eyes were dilated, blazing like Christmas lights. Fifty-two years old, which is not young, yet not old. This man did not know her, knew but the shell, the husk of her, the feminine mannerisms, the makeup and clothes, the inexhaustible spring of emotion. Her grown children did not know her, certainly her friends did not know her. Only the one-eyed man had known her soul. For what was Augusta but a swath of brilliant sunshine breaking through

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J C O

thunderhead clouds, ah! she was
alive
. “Thirty-one years. By the end of this week, thirty-two. That’s enough.” The husband’s face was of a porous, florid hue. The mouth was strangely small, pointed like a beak. Over the tops of his half-moon glasses he regarded his wife, an emotional woman, a woman dear to him in her very excesses, with something like astonishment. He was fifty-five years old, he took a powerful medication to control high blood pressure. His genitals drooped like skinned organs, somewhat shrunken, inconsequent, in his boxer shorts, hidden by his clothes; always, he was aware of them, without knowing why. So strange to think that his once-hot seed had engendered children:
his
. These were long since grown and departed but sometimes in the quiet house you could hear their jarring footfalls, their quarrels, the echoes of raised child-voices. “Gussie, what? What is
enough?
” For thirty-one years she’d been held hostage by her children, no one could have guessed how bitterly she resented it, as she resented her wifehood, her motherhood, her very comfort as the wife of Owen Cutler, her diminished soul beating against its confinement like a bird trapped in a chimney. “Gussie, you’re feverish.

Your hair in your face, no shoes on your feet, you’re
unwell
.” The husband had no idea how she’d loved Adam Berendt, he had no idea of her passionate inner life. He would not know. With his partners he owned medical facilities in Rockland County and upstate. His investments were narrow but carefully chosen. He, too, was a dreamer since childhood, he had magical dreams! dreams of intense happiness! that dissolved tragically when he opened his eyes. In Salthill he was a prominent citizen, everywhere he went his hand was warmly shaken. It astonished him, that no one had yet guessed that Owen Cutler was a froth of bubbles floating upon a void. It filled him with wonder, both guilt and gratitude, that others should shake his hand, that women should teeter on the toes of their expensive shoes, to graze their lips against his cheek, as if he were as real as they. “Gussie? What?” He saw his wife’s mouth moving but could not comprehend her words. Suddenly, she seemed to be speaking foreign words, distasteful gibberish-words. And her mouth that was always made up lusciously red-gleaming as a work of art was raw and pale, thin-lipped.

At the age of nineteen Augusta Fitzgerald had been the most gorgeous and the most “vivacious” of that season’s crop of debutantes in Atlanta, Georgia, she’d quickly fled north to escape her fate. Yet here was her fate, a man rising to his feet, approaching her to claim her. “Don’t! Don’t touch me. I’ve told you
all this is over
.” A thin cold autumn wind had been
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blowing through the night, the sky had been washed clean. Like isolated thoughts through the night evergreen needles fell on the slate roofs. The husband saw the dangerous feral-flash of his wife’s eyes yet dared to touch her. He wanted merely to calm her, he dreaded a hysterical woman. “No!

Never again.” Wildly she slapped at him. He could not believe the strength in her soft fleshy body. “Gussie, please! You
are
feverish. You
are
unwell.” It was an epoch of diminished souls and yet an epoch of thrilling public romance. The President and the Girl Intern. These were Jove and Io, inflamed by passion. Both were blundering, clumsy, bovine yet handsome creatures. No mortals could presume to judge them. The childlike exultation in the face of the Girl Intern in the fetching beret as she leans forward to be publicly hugged, kissed, raised to stardom by the boyishly grinning President. And there was the tragic romance of the Black Athlete and the Blond Beauty, his former wife and the mother of his children.

All of America had thrilled to their story. The Black Athlete was a handsome hot-blooded man in the prime of life who’d loved the Blond Beauty so much he’d had to murder her. His passion was such, he’d nearly severed her head from her body with a butcher knife. This was a manly passion lesser individuals might thrill to, and envy. Owen Cutler accepted it that he was no longer moved by passion, yet still in his heart there remained romance, or the memory of romance. His own beautiful girl-bride in her lacy dazzling-white bridal gown. The love of his youth. Now, this middle-aged woman who denounced him. “Owen, we’ve lost all mystery for each other. We’re corpses embalmed together, this is our mausoleum. I can’t bear it any longer.” She began at last to weep. But when he tried sensibly to restrain her, she raked her nails down the side of his face, slapped and kicked at him like a maddened cat. “Augusta! God damn you.” He was a man who rarely cursed, and now the woman had goaded him into cursing her. She ran from him. She fled upstairs. He was quaking with shock and fury, he would not pursue her. How he dreaded, despised, loathed hysterical women! These Salthill women. They were keening harpies mourning the death of the one-eyed man. A rogue, that Berendt. A suspicious character. In death, yet more suspicious. He, Owen Cutler, scarcely gave death a thought. If queried, he would have boasted that he was indifferent, stoic.

He’d been baptized in the Episcopal church and he believed in the immortality of the soul, to a degree. Not all souls, not mass-souls, the teeming populations of the under-earth, but the souls of civilized Western populations. He’d long ago made out his will. Signed, sealed, fully

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executed. Just another legal document among a lifetime of such documents. He would not indulge his hysterical wife, that was no good. The Salthill women fantasized about Adam Berendt because Berendt had been an old battered rogue elephant living at the edge of the clearing. He’d avoided marriage, domestic life. There was something infuriating about Berendt. Always, the one-eyed man was
right;
even in acknowledging he might be mistaken, he came across as
right;
the kind of man to put the rest of us in the
wrong;
when Owen heard of Berendt’s death, the first word that crossed his lips was “Good!” If he seriously believed that Augusta had been the one-eyed man’s lover . . . Her warm sensuous female body opened to that brute . . . If she’d been unfaithful to Owen . . . “No. Impossible.” Women fantasized, invented. To save their lives. Men had to understand, forgive. These women, still physically beautiful, desirable, retaining as if by magic their youth well into their fifties, and beyond, past childbirth, well into menopause—their penchant for romance and exaggeration had to be forgiven. Though of course it was a sickness. He refused to trot after Augusta like a trained dog. “Let her come to
me
.” He dabbed at his face with a tissue and was surprised to see how lightly it had bled. Thirty years ago, his and Augusta’s quarrels had risen swift as wild-fire, Augusta had sometimes struck at Owen and he’d grappled with her and they’d ended making love, panting and ecstatic. Now, no longer. All that was finished. Owen was glad that Berendt had died, and was gone from Salthill. Through one of the house’s exquisite leaded windows, Owen saw sunlight winking and jeering at him, that he took his bubble-life so seriously.

Upstairs, Augusta threw on clothes. She had money: in fact, she had wads of money, in large denominations: in secret she’d been making preparations for just such a flight. She would buy her ticket at the airport.

“But where? Where can I
go?
Adam, give me a sign.” Her eyes gleamed like the eyes of one deranged by a vision. She would not be deterred from her vision. The damned children had held her hostage, well into their twenties. The man downstairs had held her hostage. And yes, her “femininity” had held her hostage.
But no more
.

“Adam, this is the right thing to do, isn’t it? I must
breathe
.”

If only he’d allowed her to love him. As only Augusta knew how.

Gussie darling, no
.
We can’t
.

She’d said, laughing,
Bullshit!

Laughing at Adam who’d seemed just slightly shocked by her. Though
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they joked a good deal, and exchanged bawdy witticisms, he was a man you didn’t touch carelessly, or provocatively. Yet that side of Adam that was brooding and preoccupied with his sculptures and the pursuit of old dull things like philosophy and truth, Augusta ignored. Why didn’t he pay more attention to
her
, why didn’t he adore
her?
Augusta’s luscious female mouth that, in private, with uninhibited men not her husband, loved to utter profanities. And obscenities. Teasing
Why not fuck me just once, Adam,
give it a try? C’mon!
He’d laughed, turned away from her yes but Augusta could see he was flattered, and aroused.

You know it wouldn’t be just once, Gussie
.
And it wouldn’t be just a fuck
.

She knew! She shouldn’t be endangering their friendship. For this friendship with Adam Berendt had become the most valuable thing in Augusta’s life. Not even motherhood had meant so much to her.

It was in June, several weeks before Adam was to die, that he came to swim in the Cutlers’ pool, as often he came at Augusta’s invitation, and that afternoon only Augusta was present, and she saw another time the shiny burn scars on Adam’s chest beneath the grizzled hairs, and more fine, feathery scars on his back, and for the first time she dared speak of these scars, because she and Adam were alone together and it was a moment of possible intimacy, and in the pool she dared touch him, and felt him shiver at her touch.
Was this a childhood accident, Adam?