Middle Age (53 page)

American would bring perspective to my life
.
He wouldn’t have to be a lover
,
only a friend
.
He could be a she! I am dying of a lack of perspective
.

Already Abigail is feeling a little better. To isolate a problem is to begin to solve it.

She’s conscious of being in the midst of a powerful, if not youthful, gathering of citizens. For years, since the booming sixties, Salthill has been in a combative “patriotic” mood. Unlike other, less affluent American suburban communities, Salthill-on-Hudson has been able to afford costly litigation to preserve its heritage; to block developers’ efforts to break zoning codes. There are local lawyers who have made fortunes successfully bringing suits against the federal and state and county governments, blocking interstate connections and the widening and improvement of state highways; blocking subsidized housing units; senior citizens’ units; a mega-million-dollar biotech research park (“Germ warfare experiments in our midst”), new sewers, paved country roads, medical clinics, a branch of
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the state university; additional public schools; even new nature trails with facilities for the handicapped. The enemy is change, the enemy is

“progress”—“profit.” At least, within the township. Adam laughed at Salthill paranoia, yet left money to the Historic Society; he’d deeded Deppe House to the township. Abigail realizes it must have been guilt Adam was assuaging.

Guilt for what, she has no idea.

Guilt is always to be assumed, maybe? Once you’re an adult.

The architect, whose name is something harsh and improbable, Gus-tave, Garrick, Gerhardt?—Oldt, or Ault—has been speaking for a half-hour, and shows no signs of slowing down. What a strange, ugly face: both boyish and vulpine, with a long beak-nose and prominent nostrils and gnarled eyebrows over deep-socketed melancholy eyes. His chin is long and narrow, yet receding. His teeth glimmer wetly as he speaks, smiling often, with a nervous excitement. He’s in his late forties, perhaps.

He wears a dark tweed winter jacket that fits him loosely in the shoulders, and may be missing a button, like an item of secondhand clothing Adam Berendt might have purchased. But he lacks Adam’s poise, and he lacks Adam’s confidence. He has not an ounce of Adam’s playful sexual swagger. As he speaks he gestures excitedly. His hair has grown too long around his ears, his necktie is partly unknotted, and twisted. Still, Abigail feels a stirring of interest. Almost, she can convince herself it’s sexual.

Oldt, or Ault, is a man of intelligence, and fiery principles. His eyes move restlessly about the room (where some of his listeners are attentive-seeming as Abigail, and others, mostly men, are nodding off to sleep) yet return repeatedly to her. He seems to be asking Abigail, pleading with Abigail. “Why do images of the future hold so little attraction for us? So little human appeal? Because we have not yet lived in the future. We have lived, through our ancestors, solely in the past. The past is a country we know, or believe we know. Our mission then is to preserve the past intelligently—and to preserve our own souls.” But Oldt, or Ault, is so ugly.

You simply could not kiss a man with such nostrils, even with tight-shut eyes.

The parlor lights are being dimmed, the architect is preparing to show slides. A relief, Abigail won’t have to stare at his face.

Is it true?—the past is a country we know, a country worth preserving?

Abigail wonders. In recent weeks, since brooding upon her death, she’s been haunted by the careless words Jared had uttered in the Middlebury

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hotel room.
We’re just, like, algae on a pond
.
Fucking green scum
. Jared’s contemptuous eyes, the twist of his beautiful mouth. Abigail feels a sting of hurt, remembering. Why hadn’t she gone to her son, to embrace him?

Why had she been so—stupidly shy? Jared was needing her, the kid was brokenhearted, Abigail should have hugged him, wept with him.
No, no,
no
.
We are not pond algae
.
We are HUMAN, we have SOULS
.

Abigail wipes at her eyes, distraught. She has failed as a mother. Not in trying to kill her son but in not knowing how to teach him to live.

Slides of regional landmarks. “Before” and “after” restoration. Abigail recognizes some of these. The architect Oldt, or Ault, is head of a firm that specializes in the preservation and restoration of historic sites; it seems that he’s been very successful, and his work has won prestigious awards. In the semidark, the man exudes authority, even charisma.
If I
could love him
.
Someone like him
. There’s the old stone Griswold House (68) in the nearby village Galilee-on-Hudson. There’s the Old Post Office () of Bethel-on-Hudson. The Union Cliff House (8), once a stagecoach stop on the River Road, not far from Adam’s Deppe House.

The Hudson Hotel (88) of Hastings-on-Hudson, a Victorian extrava-ganza nearly razed by a rapacious developer but saved by the efforts of preservationists. Abigail sees these heraldic images through a shimmer of tears. Even ugly buildings are beautiful, redeemed by History. The Swan’s Ferry Quaker Meeting House (8), once a near-ruin and now a branch of the Rockland County Public Library; the Palisades Battle Memorial Bell Tower (); the classic-revival bank on Main Street, Salthill (), owned now by a real estate agent; the Rialto, the art-deco movie house (), also on Main Street, restored and reopened as a theater showing art films. Next, the architect shows slides of deteriorated regional buildings and sites badly in need of salvation. His conclusion is passionate: “The next decade, our first in this new century, will be the most crucial of all our decades. We hope you will give us your support. History is everyone’s business.”

Abigail thinks
Restore me! I’m in ruins
.

The lights come up. There’s a reception. Abigail blinks, a little dazed.

Her first impulse is to escape, and return home: to the safety of the mausoleum. Her second impulse is to remain. She’s here for a purpose. (But what purpose?) She’s being greeted by Salthill acquaintances and neighbors, her hand is being shaken, ritual kisses bestowed upon her cheeks.

We’re just, like, algae on a pond
.
Fucking green scum
. These good decent dull
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people she’s known for years. “Abigail Tierney! It’s been ages.” Abigail has a set response to such remarks, she’s pert as a high school cheerleader—

“I’m no longer Mrs. Tierney, I’ve reverted to ‘Ms. Des Pres.’ Harry and I have divorced.” Abigail takes care to pronounce the absurd “Ms.” like an ingenue in a situation comedy, signaling her listener not to wince on her account but to smile as Abigail is smiling. She hates it that the automatic response to her declaration is
Oh! I’m sorry to hear that
and has prepared another pert reply: “
I’m
not sorry, so you shouldn’t be, either.”

Now can we change the fucking subject, please!

Abigail Des Pres, Salthill’s fabled neurotic divorcée, by far the most attractive woman in Pryce House tonight, as she’s the youngest, finds herself the center of much masculine attention. Too much. Like a soccer ball shouted-after, and kicked. Men compete for her vacant startled smile. Her Old Mill neighbor, eighty-year-old B— in his motorized wheelchair. And there is S—, the distinguished federal judge she’d once dated, wearing beneath his dark pin-striped suit a colostomy bag; now nudging against Abigail in a way both intimate and intimidating. S— kisses her porcelain cheek and murmurs in reproach, “Abigail, where have you been keeping yourself? You seem never to be home when I call, and you never call me back.” There are several men this evening who brandish the tokens of a lost, lamented manhood, two of them unwrapped cigars, the other an unlit pipe. One of the men, trying to engage Abigail in conversation, strokes the crinkly paper of his cigar as it nestles in his coat pocket; the other, smiling edgily, unable to push into Abigail’s presence, is fondling his cigar, openly, clenching and clutching at it with subdued violence. And there is an old acquaintance, P—, whom Abigail might have loved a very long time ago, meditatively sucking as he often does on such occasions an unlit pipe. Smoking has been forbidden these men, you needn’t ask why.

“Abigail! You’re looking lovely as usual.”

Abigail is stunned with disappointment. The dark-haired gentleman she’d fantasized might be Asian-American turns out to be just another Salthill acquaintance; a junk-bond millionaire and a former golfing partner of Harry’s; G— swarms upon Abigail, outweighing her by one hundred pounds, kissing her cheek though she gives the man no encouragement. G— has had some sort of facial restoration and looks “young”; his hair is boldly black, raven’s wing black, and suspiciously thick; beneath his expensive cologne there’s a whiff of something very black, like shoe polish. G— peers at Abigail’s mouth when she speaks. Their

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conversation is awkward, disjointed. At another time, Adam would have drifted by to rescue her. Oh, where is Adam! G— is telling Abigail with a smirk that he’s been meaning to call her for a long time—years!—“to commiserate”—“to share memories of that world-class bastard H.T. who treated you, frankly, excuse my language, a lady like you, like
shit
.” How’d Abigail like to slip away from Pryce House and get a drink at the Inn?

And maybe they could have dinner together sometime soon? Abigail is desperate to escape G— but the man has backed her into a corner. Continuing to stare, avidly, at her mouth. (Is he going to kiss her? In this public place? Abigail is fluttered and panicky as a thirteen-year-old.) G—

maneuvers Abigail beneath a light, explaining, in an undertone, that he’s become a little deaf in both ears—“But I read lips.” Unconsciously, G—

smacks his lips. Abigail blushes and manages to slip away, somehow. A cocktail reception is very like a soccer game, you must keep in motion.

“M-Miss Des Pres? Hel-
lo
.” It’s the architect with the vulpine-boyish face.

During the architect’s presentation Abigail had become mildly uneasy, noticing how his eyes repeatedly drifted onto her, but she’d told herself maybe she was imagining it. Now the man is quite intent upon speaking to her. His name is “Gerhardt Ault”—it turns out that he was a friend of Adam Berendt. “Though not a close friend, as I know you were, Miss Des Pres. But I admired Adam enormously. He was a true American original.” Abigail frowns. She isn’t at all certain she likes Adam characterized as an
American original,
like a stunted folk figure in a painting by the primitive artist Edward Hicks. Reluctantly she shakes hands with Ault, whose grip is moist and overly eager. The man might be fifteen, not an adult of reputation and accomplishment. He wears no cologne. He exudes sweaty-clammy unease, a whitish odor like slightly rancid oysters.

Close up, his nose is not only large but large-pored; the nostrils are cavernous. He has a faint stammer. Yet he’s boyish, almost charming. Abigail smiles in her “feminine” way; Ault is a man after all, if an ugly man, and

“feminine” behavior is a reflex with Abigail as with most women of her class, as a decapitated chicken is said to totter about comically while blood spurts from its throat, and just possibly the decapitated head flutters its eyelashes and attempts a coquettish smile with its beak preparatory to extinction. Gerhardt Ault has been talking of Adam Berendt’s sculpted works, which he “much admires”; he seems to be under the mis-apprehension that Abigail is a “sculptress”; Abigail, who’d taken art
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classes with Adam a decade ago, and had no patience for the discipline of sculpting, is too annoyed to set Ault straight.
Is that what he sees in me:
sculptress?
As he speaks, a strange animation suffuses Ault. He reminds her of—not Adam Berendt exactly; but Adam as he might have been, younger, not so stocky in build, with a narrow and not a broad face; less certain of himself, uneasy with women. Adam if he’d had two functioning eyes, and these eyes were deep-socketed, melancholy. Adam with a long beaky nose. What sense does this make? There are flecks of lint, or dan-druff, on Ault’s tweedy shoulders. The man is scarcely taller than Abigail in her high heels. And his necktie, a dull striped affair, is twisted about, its torn label exposed. Macy’s! Absentmindedly, Abigail reaches out to straighten the tie. An instinctive wifely gesture. As she might have done, scarcely thinking, with Adam. The effect upon Gerhardt Ault is electric.

A warm dazed flush envelops his cheeks. His nostrils widen alarmingly, like staring eyes. And his eyes flood with emotion.
As if I’ve touched his
cock
.
Have I touched his cock? Oh, God
. Ault begins to speak, stammering, and Abigail says quickly, blushing, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ault! I don’t know what made me do—that.” Ault says, “Miss Des Pres, thank you. Obviously I’m—disheveled.”

He laughs shrilly. Clearly his teeth haven’t been capped. He would say more, but Abigail excuses herself, and gracefully escapes.

Algae on a pond
.
Fucking green scum
.

Abigail sits up, late. Thinking: Jared’s generation is being educated to ecological interrelatedness and yet there is, for them, no higher, sacred vision. (How could Abigail fairly bring her son into the Episcopal church, in which she didn’t believe? And Harrison Tierney liked to boast he’d been a “confirmed atheist” in the womb.) But “ecology” might be hardly more than cyberspace, to American kids. A video game. Fantasy. Nature consumes all, and defines all. Is there nothing beyond Nature?

No wonder Jared and his friends have no interest, not a scintilla of interest, in History. What’s History but old, dead things done by old, dead people.

Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, man has memory
.