Middle Age (52 page)

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has lost his moral authority in that household.” Beatrice pauses, her smile now radiant. “He walks with a cane. He’s become quite gray. It doesn’t seem likely that he’ll return to his CEO position, even after the spinal surgery. Avery has heard that Lionel’s replacement is an aggressive younger man with plans to expand into the Internet and to start a line of popular medical and self-help manuals in foreign languages. Camille has more responsibilities than she’s had in years, but she seems to be thriving. She’s donating tons of flowers to the Festival, as always. ‘I wouldn’t surrender Lionel for my dogs, so why should I surrender my dogs for Lionel?’

Camille said to me. ‘They all need me equally.’ ”

Abigail is sensitive enough to recall her subtle, shameful hurt that Adam’s dog Apollo preferred Camille Hoffmann to her. The few times Apollo came to her door, bringing an old shirt or sweater of his master’s, Abigail had coaxed him inside, but he’d never stayed long. Restless as his master had been, in Abigail’s house! She has never spoken of this hurt to anyone. Yet how unfair it is, that Camille, a plain, thick-waisted woman with no clothes sense, should not only have her husband returned to her, but be mistress of Adam Berendt’s beloved dog; the more unfair, since Abigail had been a closer, more intimate friend of Adam Berendt’s than Camille had ever been.
If he loved any woman, it was ME
. “And does Camille still speak of Adam as if he’s alive?” Abigail half-shuts her eyes, asking.

Beatrice shivers. “Yes! It’s the only subject I don’t dare bring up with Camille. If you speak of Adam in the past tense, she becomes upset. She’s quite emphatic on the subject.”

“Where is Adam now?” Abigail asks casually. “I’m just curious.”

“He’s traveling to Benares, India. It’s a Hindu sacred city, Camille says.”

“India! I thought Adam was in the Mediterranean.”

“Well. Camille now ‘sees’ him headed east.”

“How does Camille know?” Abigail feels a moment’s jealousy. Has Adam been sending Camille postcards?

Beatrice laughs, as if Abigail has said something witty. “I wouldn’t have thought that Camille, of all people, who’s so sort of peasant-earthy, like a hausfrau by Brueghel, would be such a fantasist, would you?”

Abigail, resenting Camille, feels the need to defend her. “We all deal with death in different ways, Beatrice. I’m sure we are all fantasists, while thinking ourselves ‘realists.’ I only wish I had Camille’s faith—in Adam, in

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her dogs, in nursing her wreck of a husband who’d betrayed her.” Abigail swallows dry white wine and half-shuts her eyes, seeing a wicked vision of sixteen-year-old Jared, limping from a mountain-climbing accident, or in a wheelchair, delivered over to his mother. Permanently.

“Oh, and sinusitis. A terrible bout of it!” Beatrice says suddenly, as if she’s just thought of it.

“ ‘Sinusitis’? What?”

“Lionel is also suffering from that. He’s allergic to dogs, it seems.”

The women begin to laugh. Tears sparkle in their carefully mascaraed eyes.

Their lunch would end on this jovial note, except, even as Beatrice calls for the check, insisting upon paying for both meals, their waiter approaches the table bringing them two tall glasses of—is it champagne?

“Compliments of the gentleman at the corner table, ladies. With his warm regards, he says.” The women glance around, startled, and see it’s their friend Owen Cutler. Poor Owen, having lunch alone at The Lemon Tree, on a weekday! Owen has removed his glasses and smiles bravely at the women, but even at a distance they can sense his eagerness to be invited to join them. Beatrice murmurs, “Oh, my God. Owen is so
lonely,
and I don’t feel quite up to hearing him lament over Gussie another time.” Abigail shudders in agreement. Since his wife disappeared from Salthill, Owen has called Abigail intermittently, sometimes very late in the evening, wanting to talk; wanting to take her out to dinner; wanting (unless Abigail is imagining this?) to be comforted by her, if not sexually (it’s difficult for Abigail to envision Owen Cutler as a sexual partner of hers) then romantically. A glass of champagne is exactly what Abigail would love, and would never order for herself, so quickly she protests, “Waiter, please take these glasses away. My friend and I are not
whores
.” Abigail speaks with such deadpan sincerity, both the waiter and Beatrice stare at her, appalled.

On their way out of The Lemon Tree, the women dutifully stop by Owen’s table to thank him for his thoughtfulness, but don’t accept his plea that they sit with him. “I’ve had such dreams lately,” Owen says, clutching at their hands, “that Gussie has died. And I am to blame.” The women slip from Owen’s chilly grasp with assurances that Gussie is certainly alive, and will return to him, soon. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant Beatrice says, after a moment’s hesitation, that she has been hearing an ugly rumor that possibly Augusta isn’t any longer living—“And Owen
is
to blame.”

Abigail, who has heard the same ugly rumor, shivers visibly as she puts on
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her dark designer sunglasses. She says, in a playful rebuke to her friend,

“Beatrice, that’s ridiculous! No Salthill husband would murder his wife
literally
.”

What does it feel like, losing my son? Like an abortion performed without an
anesthetic
.

C P S  in the direction in which the girl in the red beret had been walking two hours before. “Adam, I know. It’s ridiculous. But I’m not harming anyone, am I?”

Silence. This means disapproval.

“I wouldn’t actually speak to her. I wouldn’t alarm her. It’s just that, if she should need a, an adult to . . . consult. If she should turn her ankle, let’s say. And need a ride home.”

Each time Abigail returns to the house on Wheatsheaf Drive it’s with the forlorn hope that Jared would have called in her absence. His voice on the answering tape. Or he might have sent an e-mail message.
Hey Mom!

How’s it going?

Jared used to send her such messages, not frequently of course—“But more frequently than fucking
never
.”

Since the accident. Since the
demon hand
. Since the emergency room, and Jared’s refusal to see his mother. His own mother! To Abigail’s mortification he’d denounced her to Roger Cavanagh. To Abigail’s shame he’d insisted that Harrison be called, to take him home. By the fall he’d recovered sufficiently to travel to Kenya “on safari” with his father and his father’s new young beautiful wife, and to Tanzania on a guided hiking tour up Mount Kilimanjaro. And he hadn’t said good-bye to his mother before leaving the North American continent, nor had he sent a postcard from Africa. “And he might have died there! What if he’d died.” Useless to think of these things. Saying a rosary of pain. Abigail knows! Yet, entering the house from which all life has fled, even a ghost-echo of a memory of Jared’s boyhood voice, Jared’s boyhood laughter, Abigail can’t stop herself.

Roger had consoled her, not very tactfully. “Jared will realize what a bastard Harry is, eventually, and make up with you.”

Abigail laughed. “When Jared realizes what a bastard Harry is, his mother may appear minimally better to him? That’s something to live for.”

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Roger, who disliked being challenged, even in a spirit of flirtation, said irritably, “Look, my daughter, Robin, won’t have shit to do with me. And I didn’t try to kill her.”

Abigail said, hurt, “Roger, I didn’t try to kill Jared. What are you suggesting?”

“This
demon hand
fantasy. Come on, honey.”

Honey!
Abigail stared at her friend. He’d been a marvelous lawyer on her behalf, he’d persuaded a Middlebury traffic court judge to feel sympathy for her. Clearly he was attracted to her.
The least I can do is make love
with Roger
.
Maybe we should be married
. . . But Roger continued, crudely,

“You aren’t conscious of having tried to kill Jared, of course. Under the law, I’m sure you wouldn’t have been guilty of anything more than involuntary manslaughter. And I could have gotten you off that. But your actions suggest an unconscious intention, as you must know.”

Abigail’s hand leapt out, slapping Roger’s face. The act of a hysterical woman in a movie except Abigail wasn’t hysterical, and this was no movie.

Roger, shocked, lurched away from her, tears flooding his eyes. Abigail was no less shocked. She whispered, “Roger, forgive me.” Roger seized Abigail’s slender shoulders and kissed her, hard, as an adder might bite.

There was no affection in the kiss, only anger and contempt. For hours afterward Abigail’s shoulders and her tender mouth ached. She held ice cubes against her mouth, and melting water ran down her arms.

This sorry episode occurred in January, in Abigail’s house. It was at least as embarrassing as the couple’s thwarted attempt at lovemaking, in October, when Apollo interrupted them by scratching noisily at the back door. Now, lately, Abigail has been hearing from numerous sources the disquieting rumor that Roger is in love—not with Marina Troy?—but with a woman lawyer whom no one in Salthill knows, an allegedly “very young” woman, and that Roger is “fathering” a baby with her. Abigail has become sulky as a spurned adolescent girl.

“If we’d made love that day, that baby might be
mine
.”

A    for romance. But Abigail is yet hopeful.

And so this evening, in Pryce House (), a tediously restored faded-brick Colonial townhouse on Shaker Square, home of the Salthill Historic Society, Abigail Des Pres is listening, in a pose of softly feminine attentiveness, to a local architect of youthful middle-age speaking on a vision-Middle Age: A Romance

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ary subject—“Whither Salthill? The Next Crucial Decade, and Beyond.”

How passionate the architect is, and how dull! The most striking thing about the man is his nostrils, enormous cavities in his beakish nose, that contract in shudders as he inhales, and expand as he exhales. Abigail listens intently, hands folded quietly in her lap and her torso pushed forward at about the angle of the Pisan tower, yet even as she hears each of the architect’s words she forgets it, as if her consciousness is a TV screen surfed by a restless teenaged boy with a remote control. Like most of her social circle, Abigail has been a supporter of the Historic Society for years, but rarely has she attended meetings and evening programs; she’s here this evening as an alternative to swallowing thirty-one pills with vodka, and with the hope of “meeting” an eligible man. And her conscience has been pricked by the revelation that Adam Berendt not only left $, to the Society, to aid in its preservation of historic local buildings and environments, but had been actively involved in some of its plans. (Yet had Adam attended meetings? Abigail doubts this.)

It’s a misty-rainy May evening. An evening for romance. Abigail is glad she isn’t dead! Driving into the village from her house on Wheatsheaf Drive, she passed through a shimmering-green Monet landscape of fields, hillsides, flowering trees and shrubs; a landscape of large, single-family homes with lighted windows, their inhabitants hidden from view, yet tan-talizingly present. It seems to her a lifetime ago that she was Mrs. Harrison Tierney and that, when she entered any room in which her young son, Jared, happened to be, the child would rush at her headlong and embrace her legs and cry, “Mom-my! I love you!”

How simple life was. Jared so young. A child knows that love is all.

Abigail is sitting in the second row of folding chairs in the rather dim, dusty-smelling parlor of the Pryce House. She’s one of the younger women (that is, under fifty) in the gathering: and, though suicidal, she’s looking radiant as usual, if rather too luminously made up. For the occasion, she’s wearing a new spring Armani suit of a dove-gray-lilac linen, with subtly padded shoulders and a long narrow waist; her smoky hair has been “highlighted” only that afternoon, and floats beguilingly about her head. Her mouth is a rich ripe glossy plum any healthy man might wish to bite into, her eyes are vacantly shining. Her heart, the size of a toddler’s fist, beats hard with hope! (And with caffeine. Abigail, trying not to drink alcohol, has become a caffeine junkie.) As the architect with the cavity-nostrils speaks earnestly of the “spiritual need” to preserve not only the

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region’s precious historic sites but their “ecological environments” as well, Abigail glances surreptitiously about the room. Unconsciously she’s looking (always, she’s looking!) for Adam Berendt. Consciously she’s looking for Eligible Men. Asian-American? In fact there are relatively few men here this evening, no more than fifteen in all, and most of these are what you’d call older gentlemen; the great majority of Historic Society members are older Caucasian females, some quite elderly and infirm. (What a gold mine Salthill is, for fund-raisers! Many of the citizens are not only rich, but elderly-rich, which is the very best kind of rich. The dowager Florence Ferris has recently died, aged ninety-three, leaving an estate of over $

million to be divided among her favored local charities, including the Historic Society.)

On the far side of the parlor, beneath a faded oil painting of Vice-President Aaron Burr shooting down General Alexander Hamilton in their notorious duel of July 8 in nearby Weehawken, New Jersey, there’s a stranger with thick, dark hair who might be Asian-American; his profile suggests a rather flat face, and he sits without fidgeting, as if listening as intently as Abigail. (But why would an Asian-American care about Salthill history? How shallow all of “American history” must seem to individuals from civilizations ancient and vast as the Chinese and Japanese, in which millennia, not mere centuries, are the norm of measurement; and in which billions of human beings have lived, died, and been forgotten, of no more consequence than fireflies.) Abigail thinks naively
An Asian
-