The Good Life (15 page)

Jack met her at the door when she came in and watched her arrange the cream horns on a plate, powdered sugar rising like dust. “I have been reading an article about the stock market,” he said. “I have not looked up secret files.”

She held out the plate. “Snack.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You will be later. I thought we could go upstairs and get a little exercise.”

His shudder was just a quick jerk, barely a tremor. She had expected as much. What she did not expect was the tiny, hot tears that instantly dotted her eyes.

“That might be a little beyond my reach,” he was saying.

“Try.”

His face was a soft mask of misery, as if he were the only miserable one in the room. He was coming to knowledge so late, and that was her fault. She had accommodated him, anticipated him, delayed his comprehension of marriage's ruthless economy. Even now, she understood the balance sheet better than he and could tell him his every debit—and hers, too, though they were fewer. She loved him so much, she could hardly bear to look at him.

“You have the right to ask,” he said.

“Good Lord, Jack. This isn't a legal proceeding.” She added, “Will it help to pretend?”

“No.” His slow gaze traveled up the wall and rested on the door beside her head. One night, before they were married, his gaze had traveled up her like that, and she had thought she might dissolve in the sweet heat. He said, “Yes. Is this more punishment?”

“No,” she said. “Yes. Do I have to say who's being punished?”

“I can't tell you what I'm pretending about,” he said after a pause.

“That's okay,” she said. “I can't tell you, either.”

 

She had intended to start accompanying Jack on his walks, but in the end she didn't have the heart. Jack's face had taken on a hunted, twitchy quality. Janice didn't miss his earlier dimness, but she worried about stress. Hearts gave out at this age.

She also put away the idea of a welcome-the-puppy party, even though the notion had charmed her. Spanky was a gregarious thing, given to parading around the living room with a washcloth in his mouth. Janice had already taught him to bark when he wanted a treat. Now, as Jack pointed out, he barked all the time.

But he didn't bark the afternoon the back doorbell rang—he must have been sleeping, probably with Jack. Janice automatically blocked the kitchen door with her ankle. How quickly the new habits came. Preoccupied with her thoughts, she was startled to see Flinn Merchant on the mat, the shadows of her cheekbones sharp in the late afternoon sun. “Am I disturbing you?”

“Well, sure.” Janice made a half-smile. “No offense.”

“No offense. I'm coming as a friend.”

“That should be interesting.” The hospitable smell of fresh coffee filled the doorway, a fact Janice regretted. Flinn said, “You always have coffee on.”

“Bad habit.”

Flinn shrugged. “What's wrong with coffee?”

Janice shrugged back, let her in, put out milk and sugar. She couldn't think of one word to say to this angular woman, her wrists like slim tubes at the ends of her sleeves.

Seated at the kitchen table, Flinn said, “I'm here because I owe you an apology. I said things that I shouldn't have.”

“Didn't you tell me the truth?”

“Not every truth needs to be told,” Flinn said.

“And you a lawyer. That's a hell of an attitude.”

The woman permitted herself a dry smile. “I'm off the clock.” Then she said, “Look, I've caused you trouble, and I didn't mean to do that.”

Janice glanced around the kitchen. “No trouble here.”

“Trouble between you and Jack. I'm not a home wrecker. At least, I don't want to be.”

“You're safe,” Janice murmured, making a quick list: Lou would have brought Flinn cookies, Alicia taken her out to lunch. Chloe would have patted her dog. Flinn should be thanking Janice, not apologizing. “Nothing's been wrecked. You might have done me a favor.”

“You don't ask for much, if that was a favor,” Flinn said.

Janice couldn't get herself to stop shrugging. “If you want to stay married, you take what you can get.”

“Do you mind if I tell you something? I used to be in family law. I saw a lot of couples.” Flinn leaned forward, and Janice wondered how often she had produced this frank, confiding smile at contract negotiations. “Nothing is ever final. The rules get reestablished all the time. In the good marriages, people knew that.”

Janice stared at Flinn's mouth. “Are you telling me I have a good marriage?”

“I didn't come over here to insult you,” Flinn said.

“But you did come to judge.”

The woman stayed for a glass of water and two more apologies before Janice could get her out of the house with assurances of lunch soon, yes, of course—the ritual Laurel Avenue goodbye. Soon Flinn would be a Talk All Nite regular.

Jack, reading in his den with the puppy on his lap, looked up at the sound of her step, his expression giving away nothing. “Flinn was here,” Janice said. “She's awfully sorry. She never should have said those things at the party and would like us all to begin again.”

“So I guess everything is dandy now.”

“I'll bet Lou Lund wrote the speech for her,” Janice said.

“From what I hear, Lou's listening for some other speeches.” He smirked, and she smirked back. When the puppy stirred, Jack stroked the tiny shell-like ear. “You and I are finished fighting now, aren't we? What's done is done.”

“I wouldn't use those words.” Her spirits were singing. “We're a story. Ongoing, like Ben Lund and his girlfriend. What's done is only started.”

He was quiet, either holding back a comment or trying to form one; it was always hard to tell with him. He was not glib, she had told her sister, her mother, friends across the years. What he said, he had thought about. She would miss being able to say that.

“I can't live like this,” he said. “You—everybody—sitting there like a spider, waiting for me to make the wrong step. I can't live waiting for you to kill me.” He glanced at the computer on his desk. “I've looked into apartments.”

Janice could feel her mouth go soft, that ugly shape between laughter and fear. A lifetime spent studying the man, and still he could shock her.

“Not now,” she said. “Not when you're about to get a whole new life. Do you know how lucky you are?”

“Huh. When do I start feeling lucky?” His voice was merely neutral. It could have been worse.

Her hands were shaking, and she thought briefly about how despair and thrill felt so very much alike. When she rested her hands on his shoulders, she felt them stiffen, then loosen. The first night he had ever held her, in the back seat of a Plymouth that smelled like cut grass and cigarettes, he said, “I'll do anything you ask.”

“Better watch out. I'll ask for a lot,” she'd said.

He'd smoothed her hair. “You don't know how.”

Nearly fifty years later, his shoulders could still be the shoulders of that handsome boy. If she closed her eyes, he was in front of her. “Now,” she said. “Right now.”

 

 

 

A
WEEK BEFORE MY FLIGHT
back to my parents' house for Christmas, my suitcases were already packed. I knew packing early was an unproductive habit that discouraged me from living in the moment, but by three o'clock one sleepless morning my self-control had ebbed, and I hauled out the suitcases for the plain relief of doing something.

It was December 12, and since September I had been focusing the meetings of Standing Tall, my support group for survivors of difficult childhoods, on the holidays. We talked about battle strategies, and I developed metaphors. “You're going to be on the frontlines. How will you defend yourselves when the choppers start coming in?” I suggested that they take home one another's telephone numbers as well as talismans to carry or wear. Myself, I packed two books of affirmations, the cassettes from the seminars I had led the summer before, and my favorite button, the one I liked to wear to workshops. It showed a stick figure tugging at a huge barbell, and it said
LIGHTEN UP
.

Thinking about what lay ahead, I pinned the button to my coat. My mother, who insisted on going to daily mass, had just broken her ankle on a slick spot outside the church, so she would be bedridden—
helpless
was her word—for three months. When I talked to my father on the phone, he told me she was making the whole ordeal worse than it had to be. “She won't use the crutches. She talks like nobody's ever been in pain before.” I fought down my impulse to tell him to honor her pain, which he wouldn't have paid any attention to. I was thirty-three years old, living in my own apartment and attending to my own life. Her pain was their issue, not mine.

After I finished packing, I wandered into the kitchen and flicked open the freezer. I could catalogue every item in it, including the mousse cake left over from dinner with Jon in November. Binge eating in the middle of the night was another behavior I tried to avoid; it channeled into every old complex that had wrecked my twenties. I thought about this, then fished out the cake and went to the cupboard for peanut butter and bread.

In
Returning to the Body
I wrote a chapter called “Eating for Two” about this exact phenomenon. That chapter seized almost as much attention as the ones on sex, and for months after the book came out I fielded phone calls from readers who wanted to confess their late-night eating. One woman wept and admitted that she'd eaten a stick of butter like a candy bar. We talked for half an hour, and before she hung up she gave me permission to use her story. I was already at work on my next book, a follow-up that my publisher wanted to call
Into the Light
. My suitcases were stuffed with notes, a computer, and the transcripts of fifty workshops. I theorized that by writing while I was home, I could distance myself from my past and—a bonus—allow my parents to see the woman I had become.

Thinking this, I tucked another book of affirmations in my purse. Trips home always courted danger. One step into my mother's kitchen made my whole new life start to waver and float. I'd found it useful to talk at Standing Tall about my recurrent dream about home—how a dark, underwater current pulled me farther and farther from shore. When I described it, every head in the room nodded.

After finishing the cake, I crossed my legs, relaxed my shoulders, and closed my eyes. First: inhale to the count of five. Second: begin that day's affirmation.
Today I will acknowledge that healing is a lengthy process, and I will give myself all the time I need
.

I took thirty deep breaths and shifted on the couch, easing my pants at the waist where they bit. This was the fifth night in a row I had dipped into the Skippy. Peanut butter was itself a danger sign—hadn't I counseled clients to purge their cupboards before Thanksgiving?—but my resolve was shrinking, and a dull recklessness had set in. I was sleeping through the alarm in the mornings, skipping exercise classes, and not telling Jon about any of it. He was fond of reminding me that as an adult I had choices.
He
wasn't the one going to visit his parents. “We've learned to avoid the holidays,” he said when I asked him. “Damage containment.”

 

After the flight landed in Los Angeles and I shuffled to the terminal behind a grim man carrying an enormous plush kangaroo, the first thing I saw was my father, waving hugely, grinning and hooting like a Texan. Usually it was my mother who stood leaning against the low restraining gate. She was nearsighted but never could find glasses that pleased her, so she would crane over the gate and peer at every passenger until she found me. Dad would be waiting in the car outside, avoiding the parking lot where, my mother had once read, over a hundred muggings occurred every year. But now here was my father, whooping at me, calling my nickname, which only my family used.

“Tracy. Tracybug. Hey, sight for sore eyes,” he said, trying to grab me with one arm, my bag with the other.

“Hi, Dad,” I said into his shoulder. “Hey, yourself.”

“You don't know how glad I am to see you,” he said, letting me step back so he could look at me. He was beaming.

“It's funny to see you here without Mom.”

“Everything's going to feel different,” he said. “We've had McDonald's for dinner the last four nights.”

“What, you forgot how to scramble eggs?”

“Your mother won't let me in the kitchen. She thinks I'll ruin her frying pans. But now that you're home, we've got her over a barrel. What say salmon steaks tonight?”

“Mom doesn't like fish,” I said.

“I know,” Dad said, wiggling his eyebrows. “But I do.” He threw his arm around me again and squeezed. “It's good to have you home, Trace. You look good. Corn fed.”

“I've been very busy,” I said. I started down the corridor toward baggage claim—it was time to get moving, and Dad looked as if he was ready to stand there all day. “You can't imagine all the conferences and then small group work. And my publisher wants the new book by June.”

“Don't count on having much of your own life. This is your mother we're talking about.”

He was holding his mouth in a sour smirk, watching me. Usually it took a little longer before he started coaxing me to join in the chorus of his gripes. “You need to be generous with her now,” I said. “This sort of challenge can be a good thing—a time of real growth. She's just discovering her own new needs.”

“Me too,” Dad said. “My need is to get her to quit complaining. When Monsignor called last night, she talked to him as if her leg had fallen off. After she hung up, she cried and reminded me that faith can move mountains.”