Middle Age (54 page)

So Adam once said. Oh, why hadn’t Abigail embraced Jared, to commiserate with him over Adam’s death? Why had she been so reluctant to speak to him, frankly?



J C O

Because you were pandering to him
.
His adolescent angst
.
You were flirting
with him
.
Your own son!

S? It might be a mistake. (A terrible mistake!) Since Abigail’s estate would go almost exclusively to Jared, her only child; Jared is a minor; so, Harry Tierney, that world-class bastard, would control it.
My mortal
enemy
.
I’ve got to outlive him!

N  at precisely ten o’clock the telephone rings and Abigail hesitantly answers it—“Yes?”—resisting the shameful hope this might be Jared (for of course it won’t be Jared, never will it be Jared), and there’s an adenoidal voice stammering in her ear, “M-Miss Des Pres? Abigail?

Hello.” Politely Abigail says, “Do I know you?” The caller says, “We met last night? At the Salthill Historic Society.” A blurred vision of the architect’s homely face rises before her, the melancholy eyes and enormous nostrils and that eager grimace of a smile. Oh God, why had she touched him. Why does Abigail do such things. How cruel she feels in her quilted Laura Ashley robe, barefoot, staring through a window at an edge of a sloping lawn that rises like a sharp green headache out of sight. “My name is Gerhardt Ault? We spoke briefly.”

“Yes, of course. You were very—inspiring.”

“I was? Thank you!”

Abigail shuts her eyes. Why say such things! As if her mouth, like the decapitated chicken head, must have its own way.

“I try, you know. I believe so—fervently. In what my associates and I are doing. Not just the buildings, you know, but—the environmental sites.

Sometimes we look at the landscape first. Where, in the past, the landscape architect would be the last to be called in, and often there wasn’t any money to properly—”

Abigail presses her face against a windowpane. She’s in one of the many, too many, rooms of the Cape Cod mausoleum. She’s exhausted by living alone.
Alone, you think too much
.
The brain never clicks off till bedtime
.

God damn, when Roger Cavanagh kissed her, in this very room, she should have kissed him back, slid her arms around his neck and kissed, kissed. She might’ve brushed against his groin. That baby Roger is fathering might have been
hers
.

Middle Age: A Romance



“Would you be free to have d-dinner with me? Tonight?”

“Tonight? Certainly not.” Abigail has to think for a moment, to whom she’s speaking.

“T-Tomorrow night?”

“I have another engagement. I’m sorry.”

How cruel she’s feeling. An Amazon, one of her breasts sawed off so that she can fire her arrows more expertly. She understands Camille Hoffmann’s weakness for dogs. Doggy-eyes, yearning-panting, crawling to your feet.

“What about—Sunday?”

Abigail sighs. She wants to laugh incredulously. The caller, seemingly shy, tongue-tied Ault, is breathing down her neck! Abigail has to hold the receiver away from her ear.

“Sunday. I suppose so. Thank you. Good-bye!”

It’s the only way to escape. Abigail hangs up the phone, and hurries from the room even as, almost immediately, it begins to ring again.

“Harry. Just tell me—how Jared is.”

A pause. Harry is obviously shocked to hear her voice.

Or maybe he’s trying to place the voice? So many women have passed through his life, sticky for a while, but ephemeral, like pond algae.

“We don’t need to talk, otherwise. Just tell me how he
is
.”

Harry swallows, hard. This, Abigail can hear.

“Abigail, it wasn’t my idea, Jared living with me. But I had to accede to his wishes, you know.”

Abigail says nothing. She grips the telephone receiver hard to keep it from trembling as her entire body is trembling.

“He did claim—you know. You tried to kill him.”

Abigail shuts her eyes.
Not I! The demon hand
.

“Whether true or not”—Harry is being gracious, this is a surprise—

“he seems to believe it. Or to wish to believe it.”

“Harry, please. Will you please just simply tell me how Jared
is
.”

“He isn’t e-mailing you? I thought he was.”

Like hell, you thought
.

“You mean he isn’t? Like—never?”

Abigail makes a faint, fading sound of acquiescence. The last peep of a decapitated chicken.

“That kid! Well, he’s a
kid
.”



J C O

“Harrison, don’t make me beg. It always comes to this: I crawl, I beg.

Just tell me how my son is, is he well?”

There’s a long pause. Abigail is feeling anxious. At the other end of the line, background noises (the gorgeous young second-wife Kim, scolding a maid?) are suddenly silenced, as Harry has possibly (Abigail used to wince at such maneuvers) kicked a door shut.

“He’s a kid. He’s fucked-up like his friends. He’s sixteen. You’re asking is he ‘well’?”

“How is he—‘fucked-up’?” Abigail feels, despite her best maternal instinct, a surge of hope. Jared misses his mom! Jared is going through a phase, and will soon be reconciled with his mom.

Harry laughs irritably. “Let me count the ways. Academic, social, familial, psychological. His feet stink.”

“It’s the shoes. The running shoes. Without socks.”

“Jared’s feet stink without the benefit of running shoes,” Harry says.

Abigail sees him, her ex-husband, running his fingers through his thinning hair; screwing up his face like a gargoyle. That look that signaled intense disgust, or the very brink of orgasm. “Though, I grant you, they stink worse with the shoes around.” Harry pauses, and now Abigail sees his nose twitch. Harry was always a fastidious man, nauseated by the faintest whiff of baby shit. And Abigail, a young besotted mother, grateful for the excuse to forgo designer clothes, tight-fitting Italian shoes and weekly trips to the hairdresser, had reveled in baby-mess. Even baby shit was fine since it indicated, didn’t it, that the gastrointestinal machinery was working right?

“It’s just that I get so lonely. I miss Jared.”

Another pause. Sudden frank emotion embarrasses Harry Tierney, if he can’t turn it into a joke. “Sure. But you two were always fighting, the kid says.”

“We were not always fighting!”

“
I
know that, but Jared . . . What does a kid know.”

“Has something happened between you and Jared, Harry?”

Harry sighs. Again Abigail feels an absurd little pinprick of hope. “He says you were always nagging him. About smoking. And he says he isn’t smoking.”

“Harry, I’ve seen him smoking.”

“There’re worse things.”

“Is he—doing drugs? Is Jared—?”

Middle Age: A Romance



“He’s sixteen. He’s at boarding school. When he’s technically home, he’s in Manhattan. What can I say?”

“Is that it? Drugs? What—kind of drugs?”

Abigail can see Harry screw up his face again, as with a bad smell. She recalls now that he’d come to be bored with her
maternalizing,
as he called it. She’d overheard Harry joke crudely with male friends.
When is a cunt
not a cunt? When you call it Mom
. Abigail’s face smarts, she wishes she were in her ex-husband’s presence so she could claw at his smug-sour fattish face.

Abigail says, pleading, “I didn’t nag Jared, truly. But I may have hugged him.”
Nag, hug
. You could see how the two, so very different, actions might be confused by a teenaged boy.

“Well. There you are.”

Abigail knows that this conversation will leave her exhausted and wounded, like one who has run naked through briars, but she seems incapable of breaking it off. She says, “I didn’t try to kill Jared, Harry. You know that—don’t you?”

A long pause. “I don’t believe you deliberately wanted to kill Jared, or yourself. You aren’t a deliberate woman.”

Abigail laughs, annoyed. “What am I then, an instinctive woman? A primitive woman?” She has a flash of aboriginal females living in some desperate place like the outback of Australia, swollen with pregnancy, tubular breasts—“dugs”—drooping to their crotches.

“You’re a very feminine woman.”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning you don’t always anticipate the consequences of your actions. You act, then you reflect.”

“And you never reflect at all.”

Harry laughs. “Only in reflection do we feel regret. So why?”

Abigail thinks, you can never get the better of Harrison Tierney. He’s one to agree with the most extreme interpretations of his motives, always he eludes you.

“ ‘There are no accidents,’ the kid says. Some crap he got from your buddy Berendt.”

Abigail will let this pass. She reveres Adam Berendt too much to drag him into her old quarrel with Harry Tierney.

Harry laughs. “Except the kid nearly killed me, his dad. I’m limping from it.”



J C O

“Harry, what happened?”

“We were skiing, in Aspen. Somehow, don’t ask how, Jared loses control of his skis and sort of fishtails and slams into me, going down a pretty steep hill, and I’m down and skidding into Kim’s skis on my stomach and next I know, I’m waking in an ambulance. Two bad breaks, I mean bad breaks, in my right femur. But at least I don’t have a plate in my skull, eh?”

Abigail thinks quickly, he’s going to blame her. This is what it will come to.

“Harry, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m—”

“You’re smiling your dazzling-debutante smile. Every one of your beautiful teeth lit up.” Harry laughs. “Don’t bullshit
me
.”

It’s true, Abigail is smiling. Just her mouth, stretched and twisted.

“Was—Jared hurt?”

“Minor lacerations. You know the kid: unkillable.”

“I’m sure it was an accident, Harry. Jared would never deliberately hurt
you
.”

“Right.”

Abigail knows she should hang up the phone. Talking with Harry is psychic Ping-Pong. But her pulse is quickened, it’s impossible to resist.

Harry says, “You’ve heard about Roger Cavanagh?”

“He’s ‘fathering’ another child.”

“Fantastic! At his age.”

“Roger isn’t
old
.”

“None of us is old, Abigail. We just aren’t young.”

“Roger seems very happy. He—”

“He’s in a state of shock. Poor bastard.”

“Have you met the girl?”

“No, I have not,” Harry grunts. Pregnant women have no attraction for him. “Frankly, I was surprised. Roger had a thing for you, I’d always thought.”

Abigail lets this pass. She says, “You’ve heard that Lionel has come home? He and Camille are reconciled.”

“Lionel is home, yes I know. The poor asshole is a wreck. But he isn’t what you’d call ‘reconciled.’ ”

“This exotic mistress of his, the rumor is”—(why is Abigail saying such things, like bringing a lighted match to something flammable, she knows she’ll regret it)—“that you introduced her to Lionel. One of your

‘therapists.’ ”

Middle Age: A Romance



Harry laughs heartily. But doesn’t deny it.

Another of Harry Tierney’s stratagems. Don’t apologize, don’t explain.

Don’t deny. Abigail says slyly:

“A therapist who’s also a part-time hooker. A light-skinned ‘exotic’

from Jamaica.”

“Jamaica? Who the hell told you that?”

Abigail smiles. The look on Harry’s face! She can imagine. Few of his friends know that Harry Tierney is a closet racist.

“People. You know Salthill.”

“I know Salthill,” Harry says furiously, “which is why I moved away.”

“You didn’t know that Lionel’s girl was—is—a light-skinned black?”

There’s a pause. Abigail can hear her ex-husband breathing. She wonders if Kim, the replacement wife, has quietly picked up the receiver to eavesdrop on her husband’s conversation with his ex-wife; these intense, adrenaline-pumping sessions are a special sort of adultery, available only to the formerly married. Abigail wonders if Jared is anywhere near.

No, Jared would be away at school. On neutral territory, at a safe distance from both Dad and Mom.

Harry says, “Siri isn’t. She is not. What you’ve said—Siri
is not
.” Harry makes a grunting noise to indicate the subject had better be dropped.

Asking, in his own sly way, “And how the hell are
you,
Abby? I’ve heard things.”

Abby!
This translates into
you pathetic bitch
. “What sort of things?”

“Things.”

This will be like poking a comatose body with a stick. Abigail’s the body, Harry wields the stick. Not to torture, exactly. To see if the comatose can register pain.

Still, Abigail is alert, interested. Lacking an inner life, she requires knowing that others imagine a life for her.

“You ‘date’ a lot of men. Mostly cripples.”

Abigail laughs, stung. “Actually, I’m thinking of quitting.”

“Quitting what?”

“Dating a lot of men.” Abigail laughs again, a sound as of a small creature being strangled. She adds, almost inaudibly, “No. Life. Quitting fucking
life
.”

Silence at Harry’s end. Not a profound silence but an awkward fidgety silence. Here is a man who’d been embarrassed by a pea-sized growth in his wife’s breast. He’d been embarrassed, and annoyed, by his father’s



J C O

death, which had been prolonged, and in the end, to Harry, needing to travel abroad for business purposes, impractical and tedious. Then Harry manages to laugh, nervously. Abigail can imagine his cheeks flaming crimson. Quickly Abigail amends, “Hey. I don’t mean it, of course.”

Flatly Harry says, “I know you don’t,” and hangs up.

“ ‘ L.’ What we take for granted other people have a knack for.”

Abigail speaks aloud into the silence that surrounds her. She can’t recall if Adam originally made this gnomic remark, or if it’s her own discovery. “If Adam said it, it’s profound. If I, ‘Abby,’ have said it, it’s just another wistful little wounded-cunt remark.”