Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (39 page)

What he could see was what her actions would have meant in his own life, that keeping secrets was a hostile act creating, preserving distance. He wasn't going to be angry with her—he had seen the consequences of that— but he wasn't going to understand. He couldn't.

They were in his Chevy now, its convertible top up because of the rain. The air inside the car felt humid and close. The low canvas roof seemed to be pushing down on them.

"Tell me again," he said, "about these rights and options."

She did, explaining everything—how Cass had taken out an option and then had kept renewing it for years and years. As she spoke, she heard how it must sound, that Cass was planning on profiting from the cover-up. When everyone had forgotten about Bix's secret script, he would film it, calling it his own.

No, no, that couldn't be. If there had been a cover-up, Cass would have been an unwilling participant. What could he have done? He couldn't have kept the cut footage; it was the studio's property.

Frantic for comfort, Jill fumbled for Doug's hand. His was cool. She searched his eyes. They weren't angry, but there was a blankness to them, a numbness, a distance. This was what he must have looked like during his final days at Maryland Tech.

In the hours, in the days that followed, that look never left his eyes. Jill didn't understand it. Something was slipping away from her, something precious, infinitely dear. She was powerless to stop it; it was like the tide slipping back down the beach. At least she understood the tide and the gravitational pull of the moon. This she couldn't understand. Some dark gravity was pulling the laughter out of Doug's shining eyes.

What had happened to this relationship she thought was going to be so easy? There was no open conflict; there was nothing to have open conflict about. For seven days life went on. They continued to go to the 7-Eleven with Randy each morning. They continued to work on
Weary Hearts,
now interviewing all the people who had been extras. They even continued to have sex.

But it wasn't like before. Especially the sex.

As physically exhilarating as sex with Doug had been from the beginning, Jill had not been entirely comfortable. It had felt a little too intense, a little too intimate.

"Too intimate?" He had stared at her, bewildered, the one time they had talked about it. "I don't get it. How can sex be too intimate? I thought intimacy was what it was all about. What do you mean? Be specific."

That had been hard. "Well... you look at me." She had winced, knowing how lame that had sounded.

"Who the hell am I supposed to look at?"

Jill hadn't said, but some men didn't look at anyone. They buried their faces in the pillow toward the end and everyone attended to his or her business in privacy.

She had given up. This was Doug's style: Huck Finn in bed. He couldn't picture the alternative: a discreet, pleasant meeting of the genitals in darkened rooms with laundered sheets and the low hum of an air conditioner. He wasn't likely to change... and did she really want him to?

That had been before she had told Charles about Payne. Now she could hear the rattle and click of the electric fan over the sound of his breathing.

She had trained him well.

One afternoon she was in the kitchen, unhappily cleaning vegetables for dinner, when she heard the men at the back door. Randy blew her a breezy kiss and disappeared into the bathroom for his shower. Doug stood at the door, surprised.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he said.

"Why not?" she was instantly defensive. "Where else would I be?" Did he want her to go? She said she would stay until they both wanted her to leave. Was he ready for that?

"It's Tuesday."

Tuesday. Tuesday was group day. She had forgotten to go. Oh, God, she had forgotten to go. How could she?

Sick, she looked at the clock. There was no point in calling Bill, the therapist. He would be in another session. But she had to talk to someone, she had to say something. Trembling, she dialed the studio.

People missed group, she told herself as she waited for Cathy to come on the line. It happened at least once a month that someone was not there for one reason or another.

But they always told everyone in advance, or if there was a sudden emergency, they left a message for Bill, and he would say immediately, "June had to go to a funeral" or "Rob's boss is sick, he had to go to a sales conference." Never once in the year Jill had been a member had anyone simply not appeared.

Until now.

Cathy came on the line.

"Cathy, it's Jill." She could hear how urgent her voice sounded, how distraught.

"What happened?" Cathy's voice was flurried too. "Are you all right? Jill, I was worried... those little planes..."

"I forgot, Cathy. I just forgot."

"You forgot?" Cathy sounded blank, disbelieving. "How could you forget?"

"I don't know." Jill was truly miserable. "Did anyone say anything?"

Of course they had. She could picture the scene, people wondering where she was, glancing at the door, not quite sure whether to start.

"If you want the truth, Jill, everyone was furious. They were tremendously angry."

"Angry?" Jill's voice cracked. "At me?"

She hated anger. There was nothing she hated more. She remembered her parents before their divorce. Her mother had trembled when angry, her face pale, her hand shaking as she reached for the pills. Her father had withdrawn, tense, white-lipped, sucking the flames inward, a fire burning so hot that it could not blaze, there being no air for flame. Nothing had frightened her more.

And now her group had gotten angry with her. "What did Bill say? Did he—"

"He let it happen. Jill, he's not an idiot. He knows what terrible patients you and I have been, how we've been withholding. He's been waiting for the group to sense it. They've been repressing it, denying it, because everyone wants so much to have your approval... but when you didn't come, it hit. They felt so betrayed."

Jill didn't betray people. That was her strength, she was a perfect friend.

"I've been just as remiss as you," Cathy was saying. "I was honest with everyone about that. And I'm determined to do better. We need to talk this through in group, with everyone, not by ourselves."

But Jill didn't think she could go back to group. She couldn't face the anger, the hurt. Not right now, not when things were so bad with Doug. Why did this have to happen now?

That was why it had happened now. If she hadn't felt estranged from him, she never would have forgotten to go.

Heartsick, she tried to wrap her misery in around her, folding it like the wings of a black opera cape, but the satin was too heavy; she couldn't manage it, she couldn't move. Alice had taught Henry how to move in the heavy ducal robes he would have to wear at the next coronation, but Jill was American. Her burden was emotion, not tradition, and Alice had been no help.

What could she do? Who could she talk to? Not Doug. This was about him. In ways she didn't understand, this was about him.

Without being conscious of deciding, she watched her fingers dialing her mother's number.
Be there, Mother. Please be there. I need you.

"Hello."

The voice was so musical, so low that, for a moment, Jill thought it was the answering machine. When the greeting, now faintly puzzled, was repeated, Jill choked, unable to talk.

"Is anyone there?"

"Oh, Mother..."

"Jill, dearest, my baby—what's wrong?"

It all flooded out: Jill's misery inchoate, muddled, the desperate feeling that she was losing Doug, and she had no idea why.

This was what Melody had always longed for, and she listened and listened, murmuring soft words of warmth and comfort until Jill pleaded for help. "Mother, what can I do? I love him so much."

"Darling, maybe there's nothing to do. I know this is hard to hear, but this may have nothing to do with you. It's his problem."

"He doesn't have any problems. He's the strongest, sanest person I know."

"Everyone has problems," Melody said gently, her voice as feathery as her thick down comforters. "That it seems like he doesn't suggests that he's denying something."

"I don't know... what's he denying?"

"That he's hurt about losing his job."

"Oh, that."

"He probably needs to grieve about his job. He's lost his reputation, his career, his direction. No wonder he's marching in place. He needs to mourn that before he can move on."

Jill knew the theory behind this, but she listened as her mother repeated it, speaking with the insight of someone who had been, if not right there, in some place just as hard. Elizabeth Kubla-Ross had traced the stages a dying person goes through. A person first denies what is happening, then is angry, and later tries to bargain his way out of it. This is followed by depression and finally by acceptance. People going through any kind of loss go through a similar process, and Doug had lost something indeed.

He was still at the first step, entrenched in denial. There could be no question about that. He could joke about what had happened, but he couldn't talk seriously about it. He probably didn't even think about it. He was refusing to make plans, refusing to even admit that he needed to make any.

This was why he seemed fine; his manner was composed, he was witty and self-depreciating, open-hearted and manly. That's why none of his family or friends were worried about him. He must have seemed like the old Doug to everyone.

But he wasn't fine. He shouldn't be unchanged by what had happened. He was beating himself into a mold to make it appear that he was. He needed to break out of that mold, out of his denial, and move through the other stages: anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Anger.

Jill stared down at the phone that she, a moment ago, had been using to speak to her mother. Anger.

That was what was next. That was what Doug needed. He needed to get angry with the miscreants who had arranged those students' false test scores; he needed to get angry with the alumni who had given recruits those cars; he needed to get angry with the professors who sold grades, with the athletic director who had gone back on his word, with the N.C.A.A. investigators who had been happy with the simple story. He needed to get rip-roaringly pissed off. He needed to curse and holler, stick his fist through a wall, kick the water cooler, whatever it was that angry people did.

But that wasn't going to happen, not around Jill. She had made that clear on his grandmother's front porch. Not only did you not get angry at Jill, you didn't get angry around her. No wonder his eyes had gone so blank. All summer, anger had been trying to crack through his shell, a healthy, healing anger, but every time he had threatened to express it, she had rushed in, soothing and forbidding, and he stopped being angry. But the price had been emotional retreat—this blank, polite relationship in which the electric fan made more noise than they did.

Jill could handle all the latter stages of the grieving process. During the bargaining she would listen to a partner, not judging, letting him realize on his own how irrational his bargains were. During depression she would neither blame nor pity; she would neither impatiently insist that he shape up nor treat him like a child. At acceptance she would accept too, not ringing in with foolish hopes. None of it would easy, but Jill would do far, far better than most people.

But anger?

Jill's goal in life was to get people to stop being angry. That's what she did, calm everyone down so that things could get done. But there was nothing Doug Ringling needed more right now than to get angry.

It didn't matter what the anger was about. It could start with anything—a woman who wanted to buy only yellow and pink flowers, the people covering up Bix's script, it didn't matter. Sooner or later the fury would boil over into his own life... at least it would have if Jill hadn't been such a vigilant little fire marshal.

There probably wasn't a woman on earth more wrong for him than she was.

She tried to explain this to him.

He looked at her blankly and said exactly what ninety-eight percent of all American males would have said. "You've been reading too many self-help books. That's not our problem."

"Then, what is our problem?" She could hear the sharp snap of exasperation in her voice. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have spoken like that. How would you define the situation?" At least he wasn't denying that there was a situation.

"That we're not leading a normal life. I mean, we eat breakfast at the 7-Eleven every morning. We're living with Randy. That's not normal, to be living with another guy."

Jill blinked. She had never expected that answer. What did Randy and the 7-Eleven have to do with anything? She could get up and make eggs, bacon, waffles, and hash browns every morning, and that wouldn't get them anywhere but on the road to Cholesterol City.

The irony was that this was the most normal routine she had ever shared with a man. She had never lived with anyone before. She had vacationed with, traveled with, slept with, but hadn't lived with.

Yet Doug did have a point. Randy was living here, too. He wasn't around much, but he was an issue, someone who could walk in at any moment. She and Doug were guaranteed privacy only in their bedroom, and even then, they could hear Randy slam the door as he came in, hear him whistle as he bounded up the steps.

Jill sat down on her side of the bed. Maybe having Randy around was important to her; maybe that was what made it possible for her to live with Doug. His presence forced onto the relationship a formality, a distance, a barrier, that she probably felt comfortable with. After all, she was a child raised by a governess. Alice had loved her, Jill truly believed that, but Alice had to draw lines to protect herself because Cass could have fired her at any moment. A bit of distance in a relationship felt normal to Jill; Randy allowed her to recreate the lines that Alice had always drawn.

Doug switched off the lamp on his side of the bed, and reluctantly Jill followed suit. Her hand dropped slowly, brushing against the leather traveling frame with the picture of her father.