Middle Age (70 page)

plastic dishes on the floor, like a blessing, or a playful chastising.

“Gussie! You don’t have to wait on my dogs, for Christ’s sake.”

“But it’s so warm today. Their water . . .”

What was she saying? Why was it important? She stared at Adam Berendt thinking
But who are you? Tell me!

Gaily Augusta kissed Adam on both cheeks, for that was her style. She drew back from him before he drew back from her. Perfume wafted about them.
Noli me tangere!
—
touch me not!
—was Adam Berendt’s sexual pecca-dillo. The man’s fetish. (Did Augusta mind, really? If they’d been lovers, wouldn’t their friendship have ended, inevitably?) That afternoon as many times afterward Augusta would come close to asking Adam, “Who is

‘Francis Xavier Brady’? It’s you, isn’t it?” But she had not the courage. She couldn’t risk offending him. For there were things you might say to Adam freely, and things you could not. Any challenge of his integrity. Any persistent probing of his past. Adam’s face took on a flushed, savage expression, his good eye glared. No, Augusta wasn’t going to ask about “Francis Xavier Brady.”

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But Augusta was clearly excited, elated. It was impossible for her to speak in an ordinary voice. She admired Adam’s crude, curious works-in-progress—so much! She yearned to extract from him his most precious wisdom, if she couldn’t extract from him his love. Adam listened to her, bemused. “When I see works of art, I want to know: does the artist
believe?
”

“Believe in what, Gussie?”

“Just—
believe
. In God, maybe.”

“What kind of ‘God’? A personality, or a principle?”

“Just God. The God of tradition.”

“Whose tradition?”

“Adam, don’t be perverse. Our tradition.”

“But what is this ‘our’? How can you be so confident we share a tradition? Because we share a language,” Adam said playfully, “doesn’t mean we share its meanings.”

Augusta threw up her hands in exasperation. How stubborn the man was. Everyone knew what “God” meant, why did Adam play games?

He said, “I don’t believe in God, no. Not a God with a personality, the petulant self-regarding God of the Bible. But I find it interesting that others believe.”

“And what of an afterlife, Adam?”

“Not very likely.”

“The wicked aren’t punished for their sins?”

Augusta spoke with conquettish wistfulness. She was one who so wanted the wicked to be punished, that she might be warned off from being wicked herself.

“The wicked may be punished, like all of us, but not for their sins.”

“We aren’t punished for our pasts? Our pasts don’t ‘catch up with us’ as it’s said?”

This was a risky thing to say. To Adam whose past was a question. He glanced at Augusta, and away, and squatted before one of his sculpted pieces, running his hands over its clumsy shape as if blindly. Augusta persisted, “If we aren’t punished for things we’ve done in the past, still we want to hide our pasts? Sometimes? Why is that?” She spoke naively, provocatively.

“There is such a thing as regret, after all,” Adam said finally. “There is such a thing as shame.”

The dogs had come into Adam’s studio, toenails clattering against

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the paint-splattered floorboards. Apollo, the younger and more vigorous, licked Adam’s hands, and managed to lie on the floor in such a way that his head was at Adam’s feet and his twitchy tail fell across Augusta’s cork shoes. It was a quiet, domestic moment, as close to an intimate moment as Adam would allow.

It was time for Augusta to leave. Yet Augusta was reluctant to leave.

Adam walked with her outside, to her car. It was a handsome expensive sleeky black new-model European car, rather out of place in Adam’s weed-edged cinder drive, and Augusta never slipped into its leathery interior without thinking
All that I’ve given up, to drive this car, is it worth it?

Maybe!
Adam was in a subdued mood, for which Augusta blamed herself.

She said, “What do you believe in, then, Adam?” and he said, “I believe in grace.” “Grace!” Augusta smiled uncertainly. “I believe in grace, too.

Though I’ve never been certain what it is.” Adam said:

“Grace is a moment of insight. A moment of beauty, and purity.

Though it could be a moment of supreme ugliness, I suppose. A sudden swift aerial view. We’re lifted up out of ourselves, like out of clay pots, and we
see
. In an instant, we
know
.”

“But, Adam—what do we know?”

Augusta spoke sincerely, anxiously. Wanting to take Adam’s big-knuckled hands in hers and grip them against her heart.

Adam shrugged, and laughed. “We don’t. We never know. We make our way by faith, and we never know where in hell we’re going.”

I  , Augusta had flown to Atlanta. But she hadn’t taken another plane out of Atlanta. She’d checked into an airport hotel and slept. She was exhausted, she was deeply shaken, confused. She slept late and swam in the hotel pool, in slow measured luxuriant laps. No makeup, her skin glaring pale, and her hair brushed back flat. She exuded no sexual allure, she attracted the attention of no men. It was easy not to be seen: you simply stopped looking at others. It was easy to feel no guilt about leaving your husband and family: you simply stopped thinking of them.

Never had Augusta been so close to a murderous rage as she’d been at the Thwaites’ door, and she never wanted to feel such ugly emotion again.

“The girl Samantha will grow up without knowing anything of Adam, who saved her life. Of course. The parents won’t want to tell her, out of shame. It’s only natural. In their place I’d probably behave the same way.

Fuck them.” She hoped never to think of the Thwaites again.

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From Atlanta she moved in a southerly direction; it was November and beginning to be cold in the north. She rented a car and drove through Georgia, avoiding the interstate, staying in roadside motels. She knew that a “missing” person, an adult, would not be the object of a search by police, no matter how badly Owen Cutler wanted his wife back. Yet she half-surmised she might be discovered, if she drove on I-, and stayed in high-quality hotels of the kind she and Owen normally patronized. But several times she weakened, she came close to revealing herself: she telephoned her sons, her daughter. She did miss them. (Did she?) She did feel a tinge of guilt, for surely she’d upset them. (And why not? They’d upset her, plenty. Now it was Mother’s turn.) With slow fingers she dialed their memorized numbers preparing to say, “Hey, it’s me. Your ridiculous mother,” but somehow she could not utter these words. For these were false words. She didn’t feel ridiculous, she felt
genuine
. She could not say, with an apologetic little laugh, “Hello, darling! It’s me. I’m sorry to have worried you,” because in fact she wasn’t sorry.
She would never apologize to
her children again
.

Augusta continued in her southerly direction. There were relatives in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Palm Beach, girl cousins of hers, and her old, beloved college roommate, now divorced, lived in a luxurious residence in St. Petersburg. Vaguely Augusta had been assuming she would stay with one of these, she’d be welcome and her whereabouts kept secret, but she continued south past Jacksonville and the prospect of spending time in Palm Beach among people of the kind one meets in Palm Beach filled her with repugnance, and she showed no inclination to drive across the state to St. Petersburg, where, amid affection and gaiety and a good deal of drinking, she’d have been very welcome, and invited to stay through the winter.
I can’t
.
I can’t be Augusta any longer
. In resort towns along the eastern Florida coast she slept, walked on the windblown beach, fasted and

“did” yoga, and slept; she was neglecting to shave her underarms, and indifferent to her hair becoming shapeless and streaked with silver at the hairline. At malls she bought cheap, comfortable clothes: stretch-waist polyester slacks, pullovers in bright pastels, cotton knit sweaters. She was surprised to see how attracttive she was—not glamorous, not beautiful: attractive—without makeup. Freckles emerged on her fair skin, her eyes without mascara were the eyes of a sane, intelligent woman of youthful middle age. Still, she had relapses: a ravenous sexual appetite swept upon her, in a Fort Pierce cocktail lounge she picked up a forty-year-old ponytailed guitarist and brought him back to her beachside motel room with a

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supply of lavender condoms and a picnic basket of smoked salmon, crusty French bread, brie, grapes, and several bottles of good Italian wine. There were similar relapses in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Surfside. And then Augusta was in Miami Beach.

Here, her relapse took the form of checking into the luxury Loews on the beach. Openly she dined in the hotel’s opulent dining room instead of ordering room service. She had cocktails on the terrace overlooking the ocean. She had her hair “done,” a much-needed manicure and pedicure; she bought parrot-green silk trousers and a matching blouse low-cut to show the tops of her creamy breasts. She strolled along the beach, she shopped in boutiques, guilty in her old, absurd pleasures. (“But it won’t last, Adam. I swear!”) After a week in Miami Beach she began to notice a man covertly watching her, following her. Out of nowhere he’d appeared: in the hotel lobby, at the edge of the pool as she swam laps, in the cocktail lounge, on the beach. The man had a ravaged, but still handsome dark-tanned face and grizzled Indian-fighter hair that spilled from his bald pate onto his shoulders. Like few other men in Miami Beach he wore dark clothes, string ties, belts with oversized silver buckles.
My stalker
Augusta thought him. He was sexy and swaggering even as (Augusta, a woman of contradictions, could appreciate this) he was trying hard not to be noticed.

My stalker
was a few years older than Augusta, with an eye for a woman of her ample figure. More than once, their eyes caught and a frisson of excitement passed between them. Augusta felt a quicksilver pang in her groin, desire like an electric shock. She turned away and would have left the terrace (it was twilight, cocktail hour) but turned back unexpectedly, to catch
my stalker
staring at her. She went to him, in a swath of perfume, furious and trembling and bold demanding, “Are you following me?
Why?
”

In this way Augusta Cutler met Elias West, the private investigator in her husband’s hire.

T    West’s face! Here was a cunning crafty man who carried a (registered, legal) handgun beneath his left armpit, like a “private eye’ in a Hollywood movie of the forties. Here was a man so skilled in subterfuge he could not clearly recall when he’d last uttered a word of unqualified un-varnished truth. And here was a man who’d been “involved” with so many women, for periods of time ranging from eleven years (an early wife) to eleven minutes (name unknown), it was his boast he was “totally immune”

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to sexual attraction. Yet, staring up astonished at Augusta Cutler, his rich employer’s wife, a tremulous rosy-skinned Renoir beauty in luminescent green, with a bosom remarkable in any woman, but extraordinary for a woman of her reputed age, West hadn’t been able to disguise his emotion.

He, Elias West, actually blushing, stammering—“Mrs. Cutler, I guess I am. You got me there.” A gentleman, West held out his hand to shake hers.

T      very well, Augusta and Elias. They were of the same indefinable rogue species. And there was the pleasure of the illicit, the betrayal of faith: making love, they were deceiving poor Owen Cutler back in Salthill-on-Hudson, who anxiously awaited news of any “leads”

the private investigator could supply him. “He must love you very much, Mrs. Cutler,” Elias West said, cupping Augusta’s large soft big-nippled breast in his hand with unusual gentleness, “he’s been distraught since you left him, and keeps assuring me ‘Money is no object.’ ” Augusta laughed at this, and poked her tongue into West’s hot, waxy ear, and West laughed, too, though he was slightly embarrassed: to so openly betray a client, in a situation that could backfire on him (if, for instance, Augusta returned to Owen, and confessed) was worrisome, indeed. But Augusta assured Elias West no, not very likely she’d confess—“This is too much fun.” With brusque practiced fingers gripping West’s semi-erect, slowly hardening penis. Like a woman shaking hands with a buddy.

The first time they were alone together, in Augusta’s room on the top floor of the hotel, still flushed from lovemaking, Augusta slapped down a wad of bills on a table beside Elias West and said, “I’d like to hire you to keep Owen uninformed of where I am. Is it a deal?” West said, “Augusta, I couldn’t take money from you under these circumstances. But I give my word, I’ll keep your husband uninformed.” He paused, frowning. “Though I may have to mislead him at some point, if I don’t want to be fired. He’ll be expecting to hear something.” “Maybe,” Augusta said wistfully, “I could be found dead? I mean—a body resembling me. Somewhere.” West said,

“That might happen, eventually. But probably not for a long time. And even if the body were badly decomposed, dental records can be checked, and identification made.” Augusta hid her face, for a moment overcome by emotion. “That’s horrible to think! I wish I hadn’t said it.” West said, taking her hands, “Darling, whoever it is who may be murdered, whenever it

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happens, and wherever—it will have nothing to do with you.” Augusta shuddered. “It was a strange thing to have said, and I wish I hadn’t said it.”

West said, “If we want to throw your husband off the scent, there are eas-ier ways.”

They went on to discuss Owen Cutler. Augusta was touched to hear that Owen was offering a $, reward for information leading to her return. “Poor Owen! I do love him, I suppose. But . . .” In an uncharacteristic gesture of remorse, or sentiment, Augusta wiped at her eyes. Elias West frowned. “If you love your husband, Augusta, why have you left him, and made him so miserable? He does seem to love you.”