Acts of Love (14 page)

“I don't know,” she said softly. “I've thought about it a lot, and I just don't know. That's what's so troubling.”

“Well, if it matters, I think you'd be a great managing editor.”

“Thanks.”

He paused. “And you're doing a fine job with the girls, too.”

“Would you stop being so nice to me? It's making me nervous.”

“I know. Maybe when you stop needing an explanation for staying in Hardison, you'll stop needing an explanation for me.”

She looked at him curiously, as she always did when he surprised her with an acuity she did not automatically credit beneath his sheen of equanimity and his insistence on getting a good night's sleep. “You want to hear something stupid? I still keep having to stop myself from dialing Ann's number and asking her advice.”

“Sandy, all you have to do is love them. And you do a pretty good job of that.”

“Yeah, well, love was a lot easier from across town.”

He smiled and pulled her to him. “I don't know about that.”

 

J
ULIA AND
A
LI LAY SIDE BY SIDE
in the double bed, knees touching. They'd had separate bedrooms in the house on Sycamore Street—one of the few things that Ann was truly adamant about, the importance of division, though not without some aftertaste of sadness when she thought of the room she and Sandy had shared, their breath, their smells intermingled, indistinguishable. Ali breathed more rapidly than Julia, almost two to one, as she stared at the ominous mass of shadows on the wall.

“Julia?”

“Yes?”

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Mommy is in heaven?”

“I don't know.”

“I do. I think she is.”

All the past year, Ali had had a growing obsession with placement, with tangible locale. She would make babysitters call the hospital to make certain her mother was there, and then again to find out what floor she was on, and again to be sure she hadn't moved. She memorized the phone number of Ted's new apartment, the street, the floor.

“Julia?”

“What?”

“Can she see us? Do you think she knows where we are?”

They were in the living room, the four of them, the three of them, they were in the living room in Julia's mind, again and again, forever in the living room, the gun catching the light and fading. “I don't know where she is, Ali.” Julia turned her head to the wall so Ali would not see that tears had formed in the corners of her eyes, formed there sometimes in her sleep now, so that she was uncertain of whether she had dreamt of herself crying or actually had cried in the night, when there was no one else to see.

 

J
ULIA'S LESSON THAT NIGHT
: Memory is a cloudy and fluid affair, remember, remember, you saw what I saw, remember harder, remember again, remember right.

 

W
HEN
A
LI'S BREATHING
had fallen into soft and steady waves, and the voices outside the door had long since subsided, Julia slipped carefully out of the bed and tiptoed across the room.

Sandy had left a light on in case the girls had to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, but Julia still ran her hands along the wall as if for guidance as she padded softly down the hall. She stopped outside the closed door of Sandy's bedroom and listened, hearing only a man's muted snoring.

She turned the knob gently, testing for locks, for creaks, and then opened the door just far enough to allow her to slide inside.

Sandy's head was an inch from John's, nose to crown, their bodies, beneath a puffy blue quilt, curved. Her hand was flung carelessly across his chest, as if it had not required thought, planning, to put it there, keep it there. They slept on, did not stir.

Julia stepped closer, until she could almost feel the warm gust of their breath.

He turned once, knocking into Sandy, and she wriggled to accommodate him. All without waking.

Julia turned slowly and faced Sandy's dresser. She opened the top-right-hand drawer, which was clumped with bras, stockings, panties. With two fingers, she extricated a black lace bikini panty, sheer and netted. She closed the drawer, knotted the confection in her palm, and left the room.

 

A
T DAWN
, Sandy led John on tiptoes down the stairs. The first gray morning light fell on them, highlighting creases and crevices. John, fully dressed, followed reluctantly, groaning as he went, his hand in hers, warm and soggy with sleep.

“Ssshhh,” Sandy warned.

“I can't believe you're making me do this.”

“What would the girls think?”

“Probably exactly what they're thinking now. They're not blind, you know.”

“I just don't want them to find you here in the morning, okay?”

“Since when did you care about things like that? You're becoming a regular little hypocrite, you know?”

“I know,” she answered grimly. “It seems to be part of my new job description.” In fact, her flouting of convention in all the minutiae of her life, her clothes, her language, had never been solely natural, but was a conscious intellectual choice, one that she made each day on principle—a principle she still believed in, but one that was, despite herself, becoming curiously hazier with the omnipresence of children. “Now, will you get out of here?”

“Marry me.”

“Not now.”

“Not now you won't marry me, or not now you won't answer me?”

“Just not now. Don't you have to go jogging or something?”

She leaned over, kissed him, and pushed him firmly out the door.

 

T
ED SAT ON A HIGH
stool at the counter that separated the open kitchen from the living room in his third-floor apartment in the Royalton Oaks complex, a configuration of white-walled, brown-roofed buildings at the base of Tyler Street filled with the newly divorced, the widowed, the singles just past the line of expectation, a way station of solitude. His living room was immaculate, unmarred, the gray couch that folded out for the girls' visits, the gray carpeting, the silverware and the lamps, the bedding and the plates, all bought in a single weekend. Every now and then, he still came across a price tag that he had neglected to remove, usually on some item—a garlic press, a lint remover—he had thought a home might need but that his, at least, didn't, and that weekend would come back to him in all its frenzied, scientific determination. The fresh start, he realized, is a flawed concept.

His elbows rested on the Formica counter as he swirled his drink, chewing on the last fragile sliver of ice. Through the thin walls, he could hear his neighbor playing the same Maria Callas recording of
Madama Butterfly
over and over again. He put down the empty tumbler (he had bought a set of twenty-four glasses for $66; he still could not help remembering what everything had cost, down to the last cent; nothing, after all, had been accumulated, there were no surprises in the drawers) and picked up the receiver of the telephone he had been staring at for the last five minutes, then put it down.

He fixed himself another drink, savored it. One night in jail, he had dreamt of whiskey, its color and its taste, and had actually gotten drunk in his dream, the foggy, distanced vision, at once so close and so remote, that whiskey gave him. He had not dreamt of Ann, not once. He kept waiting to, going to sleep each night sweaty with the dread of her appearance, but she did not come to him.

He put the drink down and dialed.

“Sandy? This is Ted. I think you and I should talk.”

Her temples pulsed. “I have nothing to talk to you about.”

“Oh no? Well, there are my daughters, for starters.”

“Your daughters don't want to see you.”

“I can just imagine what crap you've been filling their heads with.”

“I don't have to. You gave them all the evidence they need.”

“There is no evidence, Sandy.”

“Is there anything else, Ted?”

“Listen, this trial is going to be ugly. It's going to be ugly for everyone. Is that what you want?”

“What I want doesn't make a damned bit of difference, as far as I can see. I want my sister, that's what I want.”

“Let me see Julia. Just for ten minutes.”

“You know damn well there's a restraining order.”

“We don't have to tell anyone.”

“You're out of your mind.”

“Everyone's going to lose, Sandy. Even you.”

She clutched the receiver tightly in her fingers, and then silently put it back in its cradle.

Ted heard the click and put down the receiver. He wiped the beads of moisture from his glass, took another sip of his drink, and reached over to the silver-framed picture of Ann and the girls that sat on the counter. It had been taken two summers ago, over at Hopewell State Park. Ann was standing knee-deep in the lake, her long, rounded legs rising from the black water like majestic columns, her one-piece bathing suit smooth and slick, her hands on her hips. Her face, neither happy nor sad, was looking at the camera with quizzical patience—
Is this what you want? Is this it?
—while the girls lay like flatfish in the water near her. He stared at the snapshot without expression as he finished his drink.

 

H
E HAD PICTURED
, during his four days and nights in jail lying on the hard bed that emitted a rank, musty stench every time he moved, what he would be doing at each moment if he hadn't been locked away from his own life; at 10:30 Monday morning, at 5:45, at 9:00
A.M
. Tuesday, the phone calls, the lunches, the papers, even the bathroom; had pictured in precise detail his parallel self going about the parallel world just out of his reach, so that when he walked down the street now, when he pulled open the door that had “Waring and Freeman” inscribed on it in simple black letters, as he had done so many times before, he was not quite sure if he was picturing it or doing it. Time itself, gravity, had been left in that cell; it was a different time, a different gravity he found when he emerged, lighter, less substantial.

He pulled open the door, listened to his own steps on the linoleum. “Hi.”

Ruth Becker, the secretary, ostentatiously refused to meet his eyes, shuffling papers noisily in case he missed the point. Thirty pounds overweight, with bouffant hair dyed a shimmering gold, she was not a woman given to understatement. When he had first left Ann, Ruth would cut out newspaper articles with headlines like “Divorced Men Suffer Greater Risk of Heart Attack” and “Why Divorced Men Have a Higher Rate of Suicide,” and leave them on his desk in the morning, the key points highlighted in yellow. “How come people who've never been married always know so much more about marriage than people who have?” he teased her. Still, he had himself lost the scent of marriage, lost a feel for its boundaries and its attributes, and though he pretended to throw them away, he took the articles home and read them during the endless nights alone in the gray Royalton Oaks apartment. He shifted his feet and smiled; she could usually be teased out of her pouts. But she didn't budge, kept moving papers, paper clips. “Suit yourself,” Ted muttered, and headed back to Carl's office.

Ted pushed aside a stack of computerized building plans, the dimensions of walls and windows mapped out in pallid dots, and sat down across from his partner. “So, how bad is it?”

Carl Freeman leaned back. Wider, more florid than Ted, given to ornate silver belt buckles and expensive cowboy boots, he was nevertheless a far calmer man and had long ago devised a strategy for circumventing Ted's pointier edges by simply ignoring them. “Bad.”

“I know it's bad. Even old Ruth out there won't look me in the fucking eye. What I want to know is how bad.”

“We've lost four accounts. No one will touch you, Ted.”

“I'm not asking them to go to bed with me, I'm just asking them to let us build their goddamned houses. It's hard enough these days.” In fact, they had lately been clutching tenaciously at the tail of solvency, which just a few years ago had seemed assured—firing employees, taking on more renovations, which they earlier would have refused in favor of larger projects. “What about the Briars? Everything on schedule?”

“They're one of the four.”

“They can't just change builders two weeks before we're scheduled to break ground.”

“You shot your wife. Just what did you think was going to happen?” The exasperation, the weary anger in Carl's voice was rare, evidence of the strenuous efforts at damage control that had been eating through his days. He had not meant for it to show. He had decided early on that he believed Ted, would have to believe him, despite his wife, Alice, who, as she put it, “most certainly did not.” It had caused some tension in their kitchen, in their bedroom, this divide, and when he looked at Ted now, it was part of what he saw.