A Perfect Life (19 page)

Thirty-two degrees, the surface of the road both water and ice. That was the kind of thing I liked to think about, how a substance could be a liquid and a solid simultaneously, not whether I should be in love with the man I was in love with. It was the first Friday in November. Willie and I were driving to Mule's Neck for our parents' wedding. The heater blew stale, gassy air. Passing trucks splattered slush. He rubbed a circle of fog from the windshield, hunched forward, and drove at forty miles an hour. I was glad he had to concentrate. Otherwise he might want to talk, and what was there to talk about, really? After we had gotten back from Spinsters Island, I had waited in the hope he might call or show up. Finally, I called him. The answering machine clicked on. I left a message; he didn't return it. I tried to reach him from the lab, but he was never in his office. Or he guessed who was calling and refused to pick up.

Eventually, I came to think he had slipped on the ice or axed his leg. Maybe he was dying and couldn't crawl to his desk to answer. I was about to borrow Maureen's van and drive to New Hampshire, but I gave him one last try. This
time he picked up. I could tell from the way he spoke that he had been drinking.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I should have called. We shouldn't . . . I mean, I shouldn't have . . .”

If he hadn't been crying, I might have killed him. How could he have fallen in love with me and convinced me not to calculate the risk of loving him back, then decided he was wrong and start drinking again?

“I just had a few beers,” he said. His voice sounded as if it had crawled through the wires from New Hampshire. “I've just . . . I've had a lot of thinking to do. Believe me, the last thing you need to worry about is my drinking. I'll be all right for the wedding. I promise.”

I had hung up but I hadn't cried. If I had started crying, I might have thrown things. I might have climbed into bed and never climbed out. It was two in the morning, but I strapped on my helmet, wondering why they couldn't manufacture helmets for hearts, then I biked to the lab and ran more gels. In those weeks before the wedding, I barely left my bench. Then Willie called and picked me up. I opened the door to the Jeep and thought:
He isn't even handsome. He's too flabby. Too pale. He's just another person.

“Hey,” he said meekly. The temperature shifted one-tenth of one degree, some bond between us crystallized, and all I wanted to do was lean against him and press my lips to his fleshy neck.

We drove all the way to Lenox without making more than perfunctory comments about the slick roads and strong wind. For our parents' sake, I hoped the next day would be warmer. My father's house was on a hill and if
this weather didn't let up, the guests would need to park their cars at the bottom, strap cleats to their shoes, and hike to the top. Honey and my father planned to be married in the house. The reception would follow at King's Hong Kong Chinese. It had the only hall in town that could hold so many guests. But I couldn't figure out why Honey had agreed to hold her reception at a restaurant with red vinyl booths. Maybe the tackiness would be outweighed by the chance this would give her friends to drive by one of the department stores that bore her new name. They would see her new house. “Our country place,” she called it.

Not that Honey was a snob. She just couldn't believe that her ability to pay the rent no longer depended on whether she looked good in a skimpy costume and could kick her legs above her head. Her wedding to my father would be a lot more glamorous than her wedding to her first husband. “Oh, Janie,” she had confided to me late one night on the phone, “when I married Dusty, he was still something of a cowboy. He absolutely loathed churches. We were married by some awful justice of the peace in Oklahoma. He and Dusty got drunk and took turns shooting chickens from the porch. Who could have imagined that I would have the wedding of my dreams at such a late age?”

A gust of wind hit the Jeep. Willie closed his eyes, and the Jeep spun lazily in a circle. One corner of the hood narrowly missed a trailer in which a horse flicked its tail. Around and around we spun, the seconds moving so slowly that time seemed to be a liquid like water that froze. The Jeep came to rest facing the wrong way on the grass be
tween the lanes. Willie pressed his fists against the roof. I tried to stop trembling. We could have been killed. By a gust of wind. A horse.

“You weren't even trying,” I said. “You let the wind take us.”

“I got tired,” he said. “I haven't had a beer since Tuesday. My mind was on something else. It was on Ted. It would have been a whole lot worse if I'd jumped on the brakes.” It turned out that Ted was hitching from Montana, where he had been working on a ranch. He told his father he wanted to “live for a while” before he went to college, as if he equated learning with death.

We got back on the turnpike just long enough to reach the next exit. The town of Malvern Hill was a row of darkened souvenir shops, a taxidermist, a diner, and a movie theater that was closed until the following spring. Willie parked beside the theater. The posters advertised an aging Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in
The Misfits
and Dusty Land addressing a mob of disgruntled townspeople from a mule in
Farmer Sinclair
. He was the same age as Willie, with the same cleft chin and broad cheeks. The actor on that mule could have been Willie with a crew cut.

“That's what it's like to be famous,” he said. At first, I thought he meant fame kept a person's memory alive. Then I noticed that some wise guy had traced
FUCK
in the grime across Willie's father's face.

I asked if he ever watched his father's movies.

“I used to,” he said. “The late show. Or revivals in theaters like this. After the curtains closed I'd sit there a
long time, like maybe he was going to change into regular clothes and come out.” He threw his voice so the poster seemed to twang in a musical drawl:
“‘Hey, kid, how you doin'? Heard you pluckin' that guitar in your room, didn't sound half bad. Now, about that girl in your art class. The one you took a shine to. What's her name? Denise? Here's how you go about gettin' her attention . . .
'” Willie snorted. “Then I got older, and all I wanted to do was go up there and punch a hole in the screen. Here I was asking him all this important stuff, and all he could do was say those same lousy lines from
Farmer Sinclair: ‘Don't wait up for me, son. I'm goin' down to Washington to fix what needs fixin'
.'” He used his parka to wipe the glass. “This hard for you?” he asked. “Your dad remarrying and all?”

It was. And it wasn't. I was happy that my father would have a new companion. But wives weren't interchangeable. Surely mothers weren't. “She was so beautiful,” I said. “People used to think she was an actress.” A few dried leaves scraped across the mosaic at our feet. “One time, I went to see this movie at the old Orson Welles Theater. In Cambridge, you know? Before it burned down? Anyway, that woman came on, the woman who holds the torch for Columbia Pictures? That's who my mother reminded me of. She had that faraway look, as if maybe she was thinking . . . I'll never know what she was thinking.” My throat knotted. “The woman with the torch never stayed on the screen for very long. You would blink and she'd be gone.”

He put his arms around me. The damp feathers in his parka made me think of the poultry farms around Mule's
Neck. “Maybe we shouldn't have stopped here,” he said. “Maybe we should get back on the road.”

“No,” I said. “I'm hungry. I've got to eat.” I dried my nose on his sleeve.

“You been skipping meals again?”

“No,” I said. And I hadn't. I devoured two-sandwich lunches at the deli, then lingered over rice pudding and hot cocoa to delay returning to the lab. One Saturday, I had cooked a slab of London broil for my weekly dinner with Maureen, only to remember that Maureen had gone to Maine, after which I ate both portions myself.

“We might as well eat an early dinner,” he said. “Maybe the sleet will let up.”

The Malvern Diner was larger than the Drurys' trailer, although with each gust of wind it threatened to break loose from its foundation. I ordered the chicken parmigiana, salad, and a side dish of macaroni and cheese. Willie ordered a chocolate frappé. For dessert, I ate apple pie with ice cream.

“So.” He slurped the frappé. “I'm not sorry about what we did. It's just, when we got back from that place, I couldn't stop thinking about what it would really be like if both of us came down with the disease. Or if we had a kid who was even more likely than Ted to get it.”

This was crazy, I thought. He had given me something wonderful, then taken it back, then given it again, then taken it back. And now? What was I supposed to do—turn all his old arguments against him?

“I care about you, Jane. I care about you a lot. But we're going to be part of the same family. We're going to be step
brother and stepsister. Think of all those times we'll be sitting across from each other at some big table with a turkey on it. My mother didn't even want me to marry Peg. She was furious that we had a kid. She's terrified, just terrified, that Ted's going to come down with it. That he'll have to go through what she watched Dusty go through. So, maybe you could tell me that you won't hold this against me. At least not forever.”

I wanted to say I would. But how could I pretend that he was no more to me than a stepbrother when every time I looked at him I would remember what we had done on that island? “I'll forgive you,” I said. “Someday. But not right now.”

“All right.” He slapped the table. “You ready to hit the road?”

We crossed the Hudson at five. The bridge was narrow and high and glazed with ice. The wind kept threatening to snatch the Jeep and toss it in the river. I thought of Henry Hudson pitching on those waves, sailing up that nameless river without a map.

The directions to Mule's Neck became more complex.
Take that right. Turn left past that barn.
It came to me how easily I could have been born somewhere else, born to other parents. Although, if I had been, I wouldn't have been aware of the fate I had been spared.

“That's the exit,” I said, and even at twenty miles an hour, Willie needed to pump the brakes to keep from skidding. I had heard talk that the ramp there curved so sharply
because my father had bribed the governor to run the exit past his store. For years, I had been intending to confront my father with this charge, but I had never gotten around to it. I could imagine his defense: the engineers could have found a way to build the ramp safely, or they could have built the ramp farther north. No matter where the exit went, my father would have given money to whatever numskull ran for governor on the Democratic ticket. I told myself that my father's work for the Valentine's foundation would benefit far more people than his road had injured, although it also seemed true that, like most people's children, I would be the only person who would carry out such a detailed accounting of his good and bad deeds.

We pulled into the lot for Weiss's, which seemed fuller than I remembered. Since the early seventies, my father's stores had been losing business to the trendier malls near Albany. He had tried to keep up, but he had never really meant to run that kind of store. When he had come home from the war, it was all he could do to buy the old bait-shop that stood on this site and fill it with watch caps, rubber boots, and knives he bought cheap from Uncle Sam. By the late 1950s, he was able to knock down the bait shop and build this cinder-block bunker with an escalator up
,
although he never built one down
.
“Anyone too lazy to walk down a flight of stairs, I can do without their business,” he used to say.

I was well past the line of registers before I began to notice all the changes. Someone had put in a new mint-green carpet and chrome-and-glass counters with sliding doors. The clerks stood behind those counters looking stunned
by all the light, ill at ease among the mannequins who struck poses on their pedestals with sneering mouths and cocked hips.

“It looks like a whorehouse,” I said.

Willie's head brushed an inflatable candy cane that was the closest Weiss's Supply had ever come to Christmas decorations. “It's my mom,” he said. “She changes everything she gets her hands on. And if your father knows what's good for him, he'll do what she says to do. If my dad hadn't met her, he'd have ended up a dime-a-dozen alkie cowpoke.” Caught by his reflection in a three-way mirror, he bent and tied his shoe. “How do you think I stopped boozing? There I was in that godforsaken cabin, pissing and moaning because my wife went off and took my son, the snow's halfway up the door, and my mom gets through like the friggin' Mounties. She's got on these pointy leather boots, hat not worth a damn, nothing in her purse but an airline ticket with my name on it, one-way to Japan. Why Japan? Who knows. She must have thought Asians don't drink. Which they don't. Much. Or rather they do, but it's hard for a foreigner to figure out how to ask for beer. And that sake stuff—I never was much for drinking my booze warm.” All four Willies—the real one and the three reflections—shook their heads. “I'm in this garden in Kyoto, I'm staring at this rock, this little stream, and that's it, I stopped
wanting.
I can't explain it, Jane. You would laugh if I tried. All I'll say is, I knew that if only I would stop worrying about so many things, I wouldn't have anything left to worry about. I spent nine months at that temple. Then I scrounged enough money for a ticket home
and never touched another beer. Well, mostly I didn't. Just some nights, when Ted had gone back to Long Island.”