Middle Age (76 page)

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J C O

Gerhardt, the carnivore! Abigail teases him, his face mottles with pleasure. How long has it been, Abigail wonders, since anyone has teased this poor deprived man?

Tamar eats lightly, you mustn’t try to force food upon her. Abigail, who’s had her own flirtations with anorexia well into adulthood, knows this. But Tamar will eat some of what Abigail prepares, and always says politely that it’s “delicious.”

Abigail and Gerhardt Ault are going to be married in January, in a small ceremony in the Salthill Episcopal Church. Abigail’s numerous friends are eager to celebrate the couple with parties and dinners, but Abigail has declined, with thanks—“I don’t want Gerhardt to be overwhelmed. He isn’t very ‘social,’ by our standards.” Abigail is charmed by Gerhardt, who loves her as no other man has ever quite loved her; it’s truly flattering to be, at the age of forty-three, unabashedly adored. Abigail wishes she could introduce Gerhardt to Adam Berendt, and nudge Adam in the ribs—“See? This guy has fallen for me hard. Not like you, you selfish bastard.” (Only joking!) But Abigail intends never to introduce Gerhardt to Harry Tierney, a genuine bastard capable of murmuring in Abigail’s ear, in Gerhardt’s very presence, “What a sweet sap! Congratula-tions at last, Abby.”

No, Abigail has no plans for Gerhardt and Harry to meet. She has no plans for Gerhardt and Jared to meet.

You gave me up. Now another has taken me
.

The previous Sunday, Gerhardt took Abigail and Tamar to visit one of his renovation projects, a Roman Catholic church built in , in Pater-son, New Jersey. The church was massive, ugly, decaying, its exterior walls sooty with grime, its interior damp and dim as a mausoleum. Abigail couldn’t keep from shuddering. “Yes, it is ugly,” Gerhardt conceded, “but it’s of historic significance and should be preserved.” Abigail found this cheering—
Nothing is ugly that is of historic significance
.

Gerhardt works long hours, and when he’s home talks tirelessly of his work. Abigail, a born listener, knows the right questions to ask. If at dinner Tamar seems receptive, Abigail will ask her gently about school, or her music lesson, and Tamar will reply in carefully chosen words, with a shy, fleeting smile.
She wants to trust me. Maybe, someday!

My life is saved. At last
.

Middle Age: A Romance

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A , Abigail tells Tamar, “This next ballet! I first saw it when I was fourteen. I loved it. I wanted so badly to be a dancer. There’s such beauty in dance, and a kind of innocence you don’t find elsewhere. Of course, for me, it was sheerly romance.” Tamar, reading program notes, glances up briefly as Abigail speaks, with a polite, veiled expression; her eyes return to the program as Abigail continues, “I’ve told you, I guess?—

I’d started dance lessons when I was eight. But—” Abigail pauses, embarrassed suddenly that she’s confiding, confessing, too much. Tamar would prefer to read the program notes.

During the next ballet, which is less familiar to Abigail than she would have anticipated, Abigail is aware of Tamar’s intense involvement in the music. The pulse, beat, throb, soaring of the music. Abigail tries to listen with Tamar, and through Tamar. In this way the ballet is doubly enhanced for her. Abigail has come to love Gerhardt Ault, to a degree—she has even managed to make love with him, tenderly if not very passionately—but Gerhardt is a known, finite quantity to her, while Tamar remains elusive, mysterious.
The girl in the red beret
. Covertly Abigail watches Tamar’s small-boned, delicate face, the smooth pale perfect skin, the long-lashed somber eyes. To Abigail, Tamar is like the lead ballerina in this ballet: as male dancers reach for her, she leaps away; always, she eludes them; she isn’t to be embraced, or captured; the music signals laughter, effervescence.

The stage is bathed in a liquidy golden light. What appear to be fireflies—

hundreds of fireflies!—emerge out of shadows as the dancers leap and glide through them. There’s a witty, brisk pas de deux as a finale. Abigail takes pleasure in Tamar’s rapt attention. She wishes she dared reach over to squeeze Tamar’s hand as she might have done with her own daughter.

Lovely, isn’t it?
But she’s shy of touching Tamar too often, she dreads the first rebuff.

The final dance is a Tchaikovsky suite based on themes from Mozart.

Abigail knows the ballet, and finds it consoling in its classic familiarity.

Dancers in white, lithe young girls on their toes, the astonishing feet of dancers who never (visibly) tremble or feel pain. Or perspire. Abigail thinks of the ancient Chinese custom of foot-binding for women. Foot-binding! To make of a female, of a certain class, a virtual cripple. For life.

The tiny crushed foot. A malformed female genital? There must be some symbolism here, but Abigail doesn’t want to pursue it.

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J C O

Tamar is reported to have been born in a rural area near Canton, on February , . Gerhardt has said the date is probably an approxima-tion, Tamar might be older, or younger. Abigail wonders uneasily who Tamar’s mother was, or is? How old was she at the time of Tamar’s birth?

Does this woman ever think of Tamar, her given-away daughter, or was the baby’s birth of little consequence to her? The Christian adoption organization surely saved Tamar’s life. For female life is notoriously cheap in China, India. Female infanticide is common, pragmatic. Abigail shivers to think how Tamar, whom she adores, would not be adored universally. As a newborn she might have been brutally extinguished, tossed away like garbage.

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

Adam was an idealist, for all his earthy good humor and lack of pretense. An idealist, who would not have wished to acknowledge the desperation of mankind, the cruelty. To rise above such desperation, you must rise above poverty. Civilization is this rise, this ascent. Abigail knows she doesn’t deserve her privileged white-skinned American life, still less her paradisical Salthill life. But she means to live it, and to wring every drop of happiness from it, she can.

Abigail has noticed how, when they’re in public together, people glance at her and Tamar. You can read their thoughts—
Adopted?
She both resents this and feels a tinge of pride. She hopes that Tamar doesn’t notice. (Of course, Tamar notices.) Uneasily Abigail wonders if, one day soon, Tamar will tire of being so seen, identified.
An adopted Chinese orphan?
Maybe, one day, Tamar will repudiate the well-meaning Caucasians who adopted her. Abigail vows that she will support Tamar in whatever Tamar wishes.

Only good for her. Happiness!

What Abigail wishes: she might hide from Tamar the brutality, evil, ugliness of the world. That week she’d hidden from Tamar those local newspapers with photographs of Lionel Hoffmann on their front pages, above lurid headlines—   ,  

. What a horror! Abigail couldn’t bear to read of the attack herself.

To think that Lionel Hoffmann died in such a way, and only a few miles from Abigail’s house . . . Abigail wonders if Tamar’s classmates talked of it. But maybe Tamar didn’t hear? Abigail said nothing to Tamar about the appalling incident, and she and Gerhardt haven’t had the opportunity to discuss it. Gerhardt asked, “Didn’t you know this poor man, Abigail?” and Abigail said quickly, “Yes. But not well, no one did.” Feeling then guilty, as
Middle Age: A Romance

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if she’d denied Lionel’s humanity; in fact, Abigail had always liked Lionel Hoffmann, Lionel was one of the nicer Salthill husbands; she’d danced with him numerous times over the years, and felt the man’s stiff, yearning fingers at the small of her back, and his unarticulated desire—as Abigail’s was unarticulated—to embrace tightly, in impulsive passion, and push away again. Abigail told Gerhardt, with a shudder, “I knew Camille much better. The poor woman, the dogs were
hers
.”

Abigail called Camille several times, and was relieved when no one answered. Beatrice Archer assured her that Camille’s family had come to be with her. Had Abigail known that Camille had seven dogs?
Seven?
“Only three were involved in the attack, though.” Abigail asked when the funeral would be, and was surprised to learn that there would be none, only just cremation. “Cremation? Where?” Abigail asked. “A private ceremony,”

Beatrice said, “at that place in Nyack. Remember Mr. Shad?”

T ! Abigail tries to concentrate. She’s dangerously close to tears.
Adam has been dead, has been gone more than a year. Adam has never
seen Tamar
.

If not for Adam’s death, Abigail would never have seen Tamar.

The girl in the red beret would have been invisible to her.

Where, then, would Abigail be, at this moment?

Trying to concentrate on the dance, the intricate music. The ballet is the very emblem of civilization. Not-real. Sheer beauty. Romance. Tamar is drawn into it, frowning in concentration. As when Tamar practices her cello there’s that look in her face of ardent concentration, and when Abigail has glimpsed her at her computer . . . (Tamar’s computer! Abigail has vowed never to snoop. Never to enter the girl’s room uninvited, when she is Mrs. Gerhardt Ault. Never will she search among Tamar’s things, her e-mail and files. Abigail respects Tamar’s privacy. And she is fearful of what she might discover that could destroy her idealization of the girl.)
Romance!
Not-knowing what you might know.

Unexpectedly in Salthill, it’s a season of romance. There is Abigail Des Pres and Gerhardt Ault, and there is Roger Cavanagh and Marina Troy.

Roger and Marina are evasive about future plans, and they don’t appear to be living together, but everyone is charmed by their romance. First, there was Roger’s baby. Now, there’s Roger and Marina. The two look lovestruck, dazed by their good fortune. Marina came back from her year

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J C O

of exile, a sculptor. In a bold gesture, she cut off most of her remarkable winy-red hair. (Abigail thinks this hair-cutting was a mistake, now Marina looks almost ordinary.) “Do you love Marina?” Abigail asked Roger point-blank, for Roger had been rude enough once to ask if Abigail loved Gerhardt, as if that were any of Roger’s business, and Roger said, “I adore Marina! I always have. And you can see, she adores Adam.”

For a moment Abigail was confused. “ ‘Adam’ . . .”

“My son.”

The dance is ending. The final ballet. So soon! Shamelessly Abigail has been daydreaming. She hopes that Tamar hasn’t noticed.
What a hypocrite, my stepmom
. No, surely Tamar hasn’t noticed. Abigail claps loudly, claps until her hands ache; she feels a wave of elation, as the dancers take their bows, glancing shyly out into the enthusiastic audience; when the dancers exit the stage for the final time, Abigail feels a sudden loss, a let-down. She’s being expelled from paradise, back into life.

But now, in a display of unrestrained enthusiasm, Abigail does squeeze Tamar’s hand. “Oh, wasn’t it lovely, Tamar?” The girl surprises Abigail by frowning as if, for just a moment, she’s considering how to reply. Then she murmurs almost inaudibly, “Ye-es.” She hesitates as if she has more to say, but she says nothing more.

Abigail notices, Tamar leaves the program behind, fallen beneath the red plush seat.

E   . Into midtown Manhattan.

Returning to Abigail’s car which is parked in a lot on West th Street, Abigail and Tamar are abruptly set upon by several belligerent young men, in their late teens or early twenties, loud, drunk, leering—“Hey, lady!

Gimme gimme!” Abigail has a blurred impression of grinning mouths, bared teeth, swarthy rough skin, a soiled sweatshirt bearing the likeness of a TV wrestler; instinctively she steps between Tamar and the men. She will afterward recall how pedestrians stare at them, then look quickly away and hurry past. A half-block away on Broadway a uniformed police officer stands, not noticing, or indifferent. Abigail is being pushed, shoved, her handbag pulled from her, but she grips it tighter. “Go away! Leave us alone!” A shaved-head boy shrieks an obscenity into Abigail’s face, bounces his fist against the side of her head. Abigail should fall to the sidewalk, the blow makes her ears ring, but God damn she’s stubborn, she
Middle Age: A Romance

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refuses to fall, or to surrender her handbag, it’s expensive leather, Italian-made, she’s a wild woman screaming for help, she’s going to protect the girl, even trying (in her high-heeled sling-back shoes) to kick her as-sailants, who surround her, jabbing and poking, laughing, and suddenly they’re running across the street, jostling pedestrians, drumming their fists on the hood of a taxi. Like prankish-dangerous dogs they are, as swiftly as they swoop upon their prey, they’re gone.

Abigail is light-headed, adrenaline is coursing through her veins like liquid fire. She sees the girl close beside her, the girl who means so much to her, Tamar, her stepdaughter Tamar, staring at her with widened eyes as if seeing Abigail for the first time. “Abigail—?” The girl speaks urgently.

She has taken Abigail’s badly shaking hand, and Abigail hugs her, hard, sobbing in relief. “Oh, honey.”

Abigail and Tamar stand, trembling in their embrace, on the sidewalk on West th, and Abigail thinks
I have never been so happy
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T L,  N

“. . .    
married!
It seems so . . . belated.”

“ ‘Belated’? It’s happening at the perfect time.”

“We’ve known each other for years.”

“We’ve never known each other. We’d been misinformed of each other.”

“We’d been misinformed for years. Yes. And now to be married, doesn’t it seem to you . . .”

“Marina, what? This is almost insulting.”

“Everyone is married.”

“Aren’t we ‘everyone’? Are we ‘no one’?”

“. . . so conventional, somehow.”