The Language of Secrets (10 page)

He remembered the rush: the twisting surge of desire shooting through him when, at the end of the evening, she had kissed him with an open, upraised mouth that was clean and cool and soft. He had wondered what it would be like to revel in such willingness and uncomplicated predictability. He wondered if not being humbled would bring him an erotic freedom that sex with Caroline had never allowed. She was too complicated, too fragile.

He remembered leaving the woman standing, disappointed, at the door of her hotel room. He’d gone back to his own room and called Caroline to tell her he loved her and would always love her. He had wanted to make her believe it—because it was the truth.

It was during that phone call that Caroline had told him about Mitch being in town. The news had filled Robert with jealousy. He
knew that Caroline, in their college years, had desired Mitch. And Robert believed, on some level, she had never stopped desiring him.

“Robert, is everything all right?” It was Mrs. Marston calling out from the kitchen. He didn’t answer. He moved across the hall into Justin’s room. Moonlight was streaming through the window, brightly illuminating the indentation on its sill—the mark that his children called “the clown face.” To Robert, it was, and would always be, a mocking condemnation: tangible evidence that his kind of manhood was second-rate.

The mark had been made when Robert was sixteen, during spring break. He had been working in the garage all day, shaping a new surfboard. He had come upstairs to take a shower, assuming the house was empty, but as he was walking toward his bedroom, he realized his brother, Tom, was there.

Tom, stripped to the waist and with his jeans opened and pushed down on his hips, was with Robert’s girlfriend, a girl named Claire. Tom was slipping his hand between her legs, asking if she wanted him to stop, and Claire was saying no. Robert, watching from the doorway, was miserable and sick. Tom positioned himself behind Claire and she turned toward the window, and he entered her.

In their excitement, Tom and Claire cried out in unison, and it had sounded like music. Claire spread her arms to steady herself and whispered: “Oh God, I’ve been going out with the wrong brother!”

As she gripped the uprights at the sides of the window frame, her body being pushed against the crosspiece at its base, one of the round copper buttons on her denim jacket was leaving an imprint in the wood—a mark that vaguely resembled the smiling face of a clown.

By the time that Tom and Claire had finished, Robert was gone. He’d heard his mother’s car pulling into the driveway and had run out of the house to intercept her and cajole her. He had needed to keep her from discovering the humiliating truth about his brother, and about his girlfriend, and about himself.

“Robert, what is going on with you? I want you to tell me. Now.” It was Mrs. Marston again. She had come into the room and was standing just behind Robert—so close that he could feel her breath on his neck.

Mrs. Marston had helped usher him into the world and had been his mother’s closest friend. Robert wanted to deal with her honestly and gently, but he was out of control. His rage at Caroline was what he threw at her.

“You want to know what’s going on with me?” he said. “I’ve spent my life eating everybody else’s shit. And I’m sick of it.”

Mrs. Marston’s gaze was as tranquil as her tone. “I don’t appreciate the language, Robert. But I understand the sentiment.” She touched his arm and turned him toward her. “At one time or another, we’ve all had that feeling, but has it occurred to you that over the years other people may have eaten their share of your shit?”

Her words and the calmness of them infuriated Robert. “Mrs. Marston, you’ve been here from the beginning. You know I got stuck with a life I never asked for. I got screwed over. By my parents. And by my brother. Don’t try to convince me to lie down like a good little boy while my wife takes her turn at it!”

Robert had screamed at her, loudly enough to make Mrs. Marston take a few steps back. Her voice was low as she said: “I don’t know what has happened between you and Caroline. But I can tell you that it was your choice to come back here after your father’s heart attack. You could’ve said no. We don’t just land on
the squares where we take up residence. We play our part in choosing them. Haven’t you figured that out, Robert?”

He’d wanted tenderness from her. Instead, she’d bitten him. “Shove the platitudes, Mrs. Marston.”

“I’m ashamed of you, Robert,” she said. “I thought you would turn out better than this.”

Mrs. Marston walked out and closed the door behind her. Robert listened as she went down the stairs and out of the house. He could feel the soft thing at his core—the thing that had been bred into him in this place—being cauterized and already in the process of hardening. He could feel it turning to stone.

*

Early the next morning, Caroline came home. When she entered the house, Robert was on the stairs—his expression cold and unreadable.

“Where have you been?” she said. “Why did you leave the hospital and not come back? You didn’t even tell me where you were going.”

“I came home to be with my children.”

The statement fell between them like a sheet of ice.

There was a brief, deathly hush: the silence before the lowering of the executioner’s blade.

Robert said: “He’s not mine, is he?”

The question paralyzed Caroline.

“It happened that Halloween when Mitch was in town, didn’t it?” Robert delivered this as a statement, nonnegotiable.

“Yes, but …”

Before she could continue, Robert shouted: “Stop! I’ve swallowed my last piece of crap, Caroline. It’s over.”

She scrambled up the stairs, reaching for him. “Robert,
please.” He pushed her away with savage force, slamming her against the stair rail. Her words came out thin and choked: “Robert, I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

She was clutching at him now, begging, feeling the house tearing itself open around her—preparing to hurl her children into the broken place from which she had been running all her life. “I’ll do anything.” She was crying and desperate. “Just please stay. For our children. Don’t go. Don’t leave them.”

Robert’s response was unnervingly cool. “I’m not the one who’s going.”

Caroline couldn’t make sense of what she’d just heard. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Justin,” Robert said. “I’m telling you that you’re going to pay for what you’ve done, Caroline.”

Justin was in the midst of chaos.

In the garage, subterranean pumps were straining against a rising flood. Above the house, a cannonade of rain was rushing out of the night sky, hammering down onto the roof. And in the living room, the five o’clock news was flowing with a litany of crisis.

Justin was sitting in semidarkness; his only light was the glow of the television and the flickering of the fireplace. As he listened to the roar of the rain and the drone of the newscast, he was aware the phone was ringing, but he made no move to answer it.

He remained on the sofa, mesmerized: South of Santa Barbara, a mountainside was giving way and burying most of a small town; in the Hollywood Hills, a monumental mud flow was flattening a house while neighbors desperately tried to reach a family trapped inside; to the east of Los Angeles, a woman, pregnant with her first child, was being swept to her death by a flash flood; to the north, a four-year-old boy was drowning in the foaming waters of a rain-swollen river while a rescue helicopter fluttered helplessly above him.

Somewhere in the course of the newscast, Justin felt Amy slide onto the sofa and nestle beside him. She was wearing a satin robe, and her hair was pinned up and damp. He could smell the scent of fragrant bath oil on her skin. Under normal circumstances, Justin would have gone to the spot where her robe closed across her breasts and he would’ve kissed that spot and gently pulled the robe open. They would have made love with a leisurely elegance, then wandered into the kitchen and done what they often did after Sunday-night sex—treat themselves to something sweet and delicious. Since it was now winter, the treat would have been hot cider. In the summer, it would be a cold frothy egg cream made from a recipe Amy had gotten from a New York deli owner a long time ago.

But these were not normal circumstances. Towns were being crushed by mountains. Children were drowning in rivers. And Justin was being tormented by the image of a woman with red hair, pale skin, and sloping shoulders.

He watched as Amy took the remote and muted the sound on the television, leaving only the picture available. “That was Daddy on the phone,” she said. “He needs to know if we want him to fly Rosa to Hawaii with us to help with Zack.” She waited for Justin to acknowledge what she’d just said. When he didn’t, she told him: “I’m thinking that we don’t really need a nanny. I mean, Daddy’s rented this incredible villa, so it won’t be like Zack will be cooped up in a hotel room. He’ll have a whole house to roam around in. And you know how my mother loves to be with him. I’m sure if you and I go do something on our own, she’ll want to watch him anyway, so—”

Justin cut her off in mid-sentence with a cynical laugh. “For Christ’s sake, Ames, when do we ever get time to ourselves on one of your father’s forced marches?”

“A villa in Maui is hardly a forced march, Justin.”

“Look. I don’t want to fight about this. I already told you, I’ve got too many things on my plate right now. This isn’t the time for a trip.”

“How can anybody not be up for a free week in Hawaii?”

Justin took the remote from Amy and idly flicked through the channels. “I have a lot on my mind. Leave it at that.”

Amy went to the television, shut it off, and then stood in front of it, blocking Justin’s view. “This is my father’s birthday we’re talking about. If we don’t go, do you have any idea how disappointed he’s going to be?”

Each of Justin’s words was laced with sarcasm. “You know what your father should do to commemorate all the command performances … the birthday trips, the rafting trips, the Let’s Go to Europe for No Good Goddamn Reason trips? He should get roadie jackets made up. They could all say the same thing. Another Don Heitmann Punishment Tour.” Justin got up and walked out of the dimness of the living room into the brightly lit kitchen.

He opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of soda. With an angry twist, he removed the cap and let it drop onto the floor.

Amy was already coming through the doorway. It was clear she was ready to fight. “You’re telling me lounging around in the lap of luxury is ‘punishment,’ Justin? Why are you being such a shit about this?”

Amy and Justin had been arguing about this trip for a week, and he knew that if she kept pushing him about it, he would explode. He was struggling to keep calm as he said: “Amy, did your father ask you if it was convenient for you to go to fucking Maui next week? Did he ask me? No. That’s because it isn’t an invitation. It’s a demand. We’re being ordered to sit in his villa, eat
his food, see places he wants to see, and listen to him rap about his monster cash flow and how it gives him the big fat swinging dick the rest of us should get down on our knees and pray to.”

Amy’s voice was rasping with outrage. “You’re being a monumental asshole, Justin. All my father is trying to do is give us family time together in a place where we can make some great memories. This trip is as much for us, and for Zack, as it is for him.” She seemed to be fighting tears as she said: “He’s just trying to give us a present.”

Her impending tears, genuine or not, irritated Justin—he had no interest in buying what she was attempting to sell. He’d allowed himself to be sold too many times before. Without looking at her, he went back into the living room—back to the numbing comfort of the semidarkness, and the television.

As he was reaching for the remote, Amy appeared in the doorway, looking contrite. She took a deliberate, expectant breath, as if she was about to plunge into the deep end of a swimming pool. “When I was upstairs in the shower,” she said, “I had a thought … about all this craziness.”

Justin kept his gaze fixed on the television. “The craziness that’s going on in the rest of the world, or the stuff going on in my head?”

“Both, I think.” Amy moved out of the doorway and came to sit beside him. “But as far as you’re concerned, I was thinking that you don’t have to be any crazier than you want to be … that whoever, whatever the red-haired woman reminded you of, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s in the past, her and that person TJ. Maybe they had something to do with you once, but they’re gone now.” She moved closer to him. Her lips were brushing his shoulder as she said: “Can’t you just decide to put them away, put them back wherever they’ve been all these years? Can’t you just go back to
being my Justin? A guy who’s willing to spend a week on Maui making his wife really happy?”

Justin wanted nothing more than to make Amy happy. But on the day he had returned to the house on Lima Street, something changed in him, and it was making him increasingly intolerant of the silver spoon that Don Heitmann had jammed down his throat.

“I’m sorry, Ames,” he said. “I’m not going. No Maui.”

“Why?” Amy looked genuinely puzzled. “Why is my father’s generosity such a problem for you?”

Justin realized that if someone sitting next to him at a ball game or an airport had asked him that question, he would have no problem saying: “I have a rich father-in-law who treats me and my wife and child like we’re a wholly owned subsidiary. I went along with it because I wanted my wife to be happy. But now for some reason, I can’t do it anymore. I need to find my own place in the world. And I’ll never be able to do that if I’m always letting another man buy me out of it.”

It was a simple truth he could have told to any stranger. But he couldn’t tell it to Amy, because he knew every inch of her, every curve, every smooth plane, every secret place from which silky blond hairs sprang. Because they shared a child, and a home, and a bed. Because she was his woman. Because she was the love of his life.