Acts of Love (15 page)

“It was an accident.”

“I know. But no one's going to forget that you were the one holding the gun when it went off.”

Ted sat back and ran his hands through his hair. “I can't forget it myself.” He leaned forward, both elbows on the desk. “Look, I'll leave if you want. Take my name off the door. I understand.”

“No,” Carl said quietly, thoughtfully, so that it was clear he had already considered this. “No, we're not going to do that.” For a moment there was only sympathy, just that, how could there not be, he would ask Alice later, how could there not be? But she would only shake her head and leave the room.

“Thanks.”

Carl nodded.

Ted looked out the window at the parking lot, and the rear of the pharmacy beyond, with cardboard boxes stacked in towers by the door. “We were going to get back together…” His voice drifted off.

“Maybe if the jury…”

“Yeah, right,” Ted snapped, then softened. “Sorry. I should go. Is there anything I can do? Any work I can take home?”

“You just concentrate on cleaning this whole thing up.”

Carl stood, put his arm around Ted, and walked him to the door. He did not see, as he patted him on the back, that Ted's eyes had a wet and feverish glow, with anger or remorse or grief he wouldn't have been able to tell.

 

F
ACT
: When Ted bought groceries that afternoon at the Dairy Farms convenience store, the cashier, recognizing him, refused to package his purchases, leaving him at the end of the counter surrounded by a jumble of cans and boxes, the bags just out of his reach.

Fact: Frank DiCello, one of Ted's Tuesday-night poker partners, called him up to say, “Just wanted you to know I'm with you. One hundred percent. So are Joe and Robby. Terry, well, Terry won't come—that is, if you, you know, if you do. But not to worry, we can always find a fifth. And if not, who the fuck cares? Do you know, offhand, if you're coming? I wouldn't think you'd want to. I wouldn't, if I were you. I mean, I'm sure it's not, what would you call it, appropriate. Under the circumstances.”

Fact: His telephone rang four, five times a night, but whenever he picked it up, there was only breathing, then a violent hang-up. He considered getting an unlisted number but didn't, worried that if Ali or Julia ever decided to call, they would be unable to reach him.

Facts, jumbled like stones in his pocket, to be sorted out and arranged later, not now, not yet, though he could not help feeling their weight, banging against his leg.

 

H
E SAT ON THE SMALL BALCONY
that jutted from his living room, his heels on the railing, drink in hand, watching the dusk settle onto the back streets that spun weblike from the Royalton's gates. He had risen only twice in the past three hours, first to refresh his drink and pee, and then to get a blanket once the sun had disappeared and his thin suede jacket was no longer sufficient. Somehow he hadn't considered when they let him out that the corridor of waiting—for what, precisely, he wasn't sure, though it was clearly what he was doing, waiting—would remain as inviolable, all the usual portals of entry still shut.

He thought of the last vacation he and Ann had taken together last year to the Gulf Coast of Florida. It was January, and they left the girls home with Sandy to care for them. It was a sudden decision, the kind they were grabbing at then, both overcome with the seduction of a new locale that would throw them into relief, make the outlines clear again. If nothing else, at least it would give them a new landscape to comment on.

They stayed at a motel on the beach in Saint Petersburg run by an aging hippie named Hank who offered them pot with their room key and broadcast fuzzy bootleg videos into the rooms at the guests' request. The courtyard, rimmed with palmettos and hibiscus amid the parched, overgrown grass, featured a pirate statue overlooking a minuscule pool. People said that during World War II, the place had been a bordello.

The room itself had a large round bed covered in black fake fur, a purple kitchenette, and a backgammon board built into a high table with a stool on either side. The walls were the same dusty pink stucco as the exterior.

Each morning they rose early, walked through the motel's ancient grilled gate, its iron curlicues sagging asymmetrically from the weight of years and years of salt, and crossed the road to the beach. They wandered past stooped people looking for sharks' teeth or gold with spindly divining rods, all bundled in sweaters against the unusual cold front that had moved in, past the useless old docks, on for miles, picking up stray shells, discarding them. Sometimes in the afternoon they played miniature golf, dutifully recording their progress through the windmills and moats with a stubby pencil on a score sheet. During the few warm hours, they lay by the uninviting pool on plastic chairs with missing slats, strips of their flesh sinking through, and watched chameleons scuttling over the draped stone breeches of the pirate statue into the grass, turning from gray to green.

They were polite, deftly consulting each other about where to have lunch, whether to barbecue dinner in the motel's courtyard. They bought a book on backgammon and taught themselves how to play, perched on stools in the dark, shuttered room that smelled of cobwebs and the sea. And in the evenings, they lay bundled beneath blankets, drinking fresh grapefruit juice and vodka, and watched the pelicans diving and rising against the neon-orange sunset. But he knew that she had not made up her mind about him, about staying, and his own heartfelt but clumsy efforts at courtship began to seem inane to him. He knew, too, that he would soon resent her in that particular way that he always resented any witness to a past embarrassment or show of vulnerability.

On their last day, they drove twenty miles to a state park and embarked on a two-mile hike through the land preserved for endangered ospreys. The narrow dirt path had a cathedral ceiling of palmettos and ferns, green lace that barely any light managed to infiltrate. The air was still, fetid with the odor of mosquitoes, gnats, the constant revving of crickets. The area had once been called Snake Island, but the town council, thinking this appellation might be contributing to the general desertion they were experiencing, had recently passed an ordinance renaming it Honeymoon Island. Nevertheless, Ted and Ann saw only one other person, going in the opposite direction, a sprightly elderly woman with large binoculars hanging from her neck. They nodded as they passed each other.

At the end of the two miles the path came to the ocean, and they lay on the sand behind rocks that sheltered them from the wind. The sun, rallying, beat against their faces.

Her eyes shut, face offered straight up to the sky. “Don't you wish,” she said, “that someone would just tell you what's possible and what isn't?” He propped himself up on his elbow, looked at her. “I mean, wouldn't it be better just to know? What if this is it, the best we can do? Then there would be no reason to torment ourselves. But if it isn't, well…Don't you wish we just knew?” She opened her eyes slowly, turned to him.

He clenched handfuls of sand and let it filter through his fingers. She had never spoken to him this way, never intimated verbally that she might possess a dissatisfaction equal to his own, and though he had suspected it, he was startled to hear it given voice so simply, stripped of the blame and antagonism that he would at least have known how to counter.

“It's the not knowing,” she said quietly.

“We'd better start back before it gets dark,” he said gruffly, rising.

When they pulled into the motel's parking lot, he reached over and opened her door. “Why don't you get out? I'm just going to go for a short drive. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

Forty minutes later, after circling the two-lane road along the coast, the radio on, his arm hanging out the window, he returned to find her sitting in Hank's room, drinking oolong tea and smoking pot. He heard her laughter from the open door, a clear rebellious imitation of joy that he did not recognize.

They went back to their room and she sat cross-legged on the black fake-fur throw, watching him as he began to pack, her eyes red, a sardonic smile on her lips. He put down the shirt he was folding, joined her on the bed, roughly, fiercely.

Her face when she came, her back reared to him, her eyes shut, mouth open, resigned to her own pleasure.

 

T
HE FAINT SLIVER OF THE NEW MOON
gave off little light. Ted leaned against the dry bark of the old oak tree that half hid his body as he watched the house across the street. The light was on in the kitchen, the window a bright rectangular screen against the shaded walls. They passed on and off it, the four of them, having their dinner. Julia putting her fork down, lifting her napkin. Ali's mouth, flexing with words he could not hear. Sandy's hand. And John's. He took another step, closer to the curb, but quickly withdrew when he saw oncoming headlights. He ground out his cigarette against the thick knotted roots of the oak, watched as they finished dessert, cleared their plates, disappeared from view, watched then the empty yellow screen across the street, biding his time.

T
HE LUNAR GLOW
of the television flickered through the darkened bedroom. Ann watched the back of Ted's head as he stared at the screen. “Not this again,” he said, turning only partly around, one eye still on the talk show.

“But don't you think,” she insisted, leaning forward, “that you'd be missing something? Don't you think you'd regret it later?”

“No,” he answered simply.

The word lay between them, fat and heavy.

He pressed the mute button on the remote control, turned to her, touched her foot. “Look,” he said calmly, “I just don't see what's so desirable about propagating the species. It's not like either of us had such a great childhood.” He paused. “I don't know. Maybe if they dropped kids out of helicopters. Maybe if we could adopt some kid who really needs help I'd feel differently.”

“So what you're saying is, it's not the idea of having children you object to. It's the idea of actually making one with me.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I don't know.”

“The funny thing is, that's exactly why I want one.”

“Let's just drop it,” he said, and turned the sound back on the television.

 

W
HILE
T
ED WAS AT WORK
the next day, Ann punctured her diaphragm in four places with a sewing needle. The rubber was tougher than she had expected, and she had to stretch it with both hands. Even then, the holes were minute, seemed to disappear when the rubber was relaxed. She put it back in its tan plastic case and shut the night table drawer.

 

W
HEN
A
NN FOUND OUT SHE WAS PREGNANT
, she waited three weeks before telling Ted, not out of apprehension, but because she feared that the telling, the publicizing of her newfound weightiness would somehow disperse and dissipate it. She monitored each wave of nausea as it gathered in her belly and rose to her throat, coating it with sourness, each evidence of swelling and soreness in her nipples, imagining that she would get so heavy, she would no longer feel in danger of floating away, a heaviness that would at last anchor them both.

Ted sat in the ocher living room, just home from work, second beer in hand, dutifully recounting the details of his day to Ann, though he doubted, despite her protestations, that she could be interested in lumber lots and biscuit joiners. She sat down beside him, waiting for him to finish (in truth, she did find these recitations numbing, though she was not yet ready to admit this to herself or to him).

“I'm pregnant,” she said when he stopped to take a swallow of his beer.

“You're what?”

“Pregnant.”

“Christ.” He squinted at her as if to be certain of the words and then fell back against the couch. “What do I know about being a father?” he asked angrily. “I hardly even remember my own father.”

“You used to say that was what was good about us, that we'd have to make it up, from scratch. Don't you remember? You said that because we had no examples worth following, we'd make up all the rules and definitions ourselves.”

“I said that?”

“Yes.”

“That must have been during that brief spell when I bought all those pop-psychology books at the Salvation Army. Talk about temporary insanity.”

He stood up, began to pace. “I just don't understand why you insist on seeing childhood as a good thing,” he exclaimed. “You of all people.”

“It wasn't so terrible,” she said. “Was yours? I mean, really?”

“All I remember about childhood was wanting to get out of it.” His eyes shone suddenly with the threat of tears. “I used to run away when I was eleven or twelve,” he continued quietly, leaning on the bookcase, his back to her, “break into other people's garages and sleep on their cold floors. Anything was better than staying home. After a few days, my mother would call the police, and they'd come find me and take me to juvenile hall for a few nights until she came to get me. Then when she started having babies again, she didn't even bother with that.”

“What does that have to do with us?”

“I don't know.” He turned to her, his eyes red and watery. “I don't know. Do you really want to do this?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her. “Kids are high-maintenance items, you know.”

“I know.” She walked over to him. “I think you'd be a wonderful father.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I mean it.”

He looked at her, earnest and sure, and suddenly he laughed, and in that moment, she knew it would be okay, that it was the deciding he was incapable of, but that once presented with the fact, he would accept it, as he did all facts, taking it as his own, making elaborate plans on how best to use it. He did not believe in the past, particularly his own, even the most immediate past. There was only what was next. “Christ,” he said again, and gently touched her stomach.

When they made love that night, there was a somber depth to her grappling, her sucking pulling holding in of him, as if she expected incense, incantation, and it terrified and moved him.

 

H
E LAY AWAKE
all through the night, listening to the soft rhythm of her breath, its edges just reaching his shoulder in fragile waves. A churning, faint at first, then stronger, had begun in his gut, the excited churning he felt at the point of embarkation for anything new, the thrill of potential itself. For instead of feeling boxed in, as he had thought he would, nailed, he saw the baby already as a separate entity entirely, not the exalted and magical union that Ann envisioned, but a disjointed presence, yanking him with newfound velocity into the future.

 

T
ED WAS FIRED
from his job exactly two months after that night. Because of his obvious skills, the company had put it off longer than it otherwise might have, but the complaints from his co-workers, particularly reports written in the tight, constipated hand of David Hopson, became too numerous to ignore. He was moody, unpredictable, arrogant. He didn't follow instructions or work well with others. Teamwork was everything.

“Fuck 'em,” Ted muttered, standing across from Ann in the kitchen. “I was thinking of quitting anyway.” Ann agreed with him that it was the best thing that could have happened and dug out the architecture-school catalogues that had become buried in the front hall closet beneath the ice skates they had bought two winters ago but hadn't used since, the
Gourmet
magazines she saved, and the Christmas decorations that she collected, dated, and lovingly rewrapped each year, instant heirlooms.

Each evening when she returned home from the hospital, she saw that the catalogues had moved from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room, and she grew hopeful that a step, any step, was imminent, but he never mentioned them, and she did not ask. She had always assumed that his determined ambition was a constant, and the fault lines in it she now suspected, the seeming paralysis, haunted her with an invidious doubt. He stayed home, collected unemployment insurance, and cleaned the house with a vigor and attention to detail that surpassed even her own, throwing out all the old sponges and mops and brooms and replacing them with more expensive models, better, more efficient, see?

He began, too, to build things for the baby's room, crafting a crib, a bureau, a changing table, in the simple, linear style he preferred over her penchant for scrolls and curlicues. He had just started on shelving when Ann, in her eighth month, left her job.

The constant buzz of his band saw, the shrill whir of the drill press, tore up from the garage, and despite her apprehensions, she could not help being optimistic; he was so literally building for the future. Even when the racket continued late at night, keeping her from the sleep she so craved, she said nothing, fearful that the least criticism might make him abandon the projects that had become the sole purpose of his days, his evenings. She sat, her bare feet on the floor that vibrated with his efforts, fogged in and bound by the heaviness now, waiting.

 

J
ULIA WAS A COLICKY BABY
. Her flushed, veiny face, framed by a moist napping of black hair, contorted for hours on end in the piercing yowls that left all three of them sweaty and exhausted. Ted and Ann took turns walking her about the perimeters of the house, her soft, lumpy body hot and shaking with unhappiness, her fists balled and wrinkled and angry. Too worn down to speak to each other in anything other than the shorthand of practicalities—bottles and baths and doctors' consultations that provided no help—Ann and Ted lost all sense of time. Hours and days and nights blurred beneath the tyranny of the baby's fury.

Six weeks into what Ted had named “Julia's reign of terror,” he decided to take her with him on the short trip to the library so that Ann, who at two o'clock had still not managed to get out of her stained cotton bathrobe, would have the chance to shower. He balanced the books he was returning, two collections of Russian short novels, in one arm, the baby in the other, and loaded them all into the car, buckling Julia into the car seat that had been Sandy's present. He drove slower than usual, easing into stops from half a block away, starting up again so gradually that the cars behind him honked impatiently.

It did not occur to him until they had gone five blocks that something was missing—sound. He glanced over and saw that Julia's round, punch-drunk face had become placid; her eyelids drooped in relaxation as she watched the road slide by with a benevolent curiosity. Only when he parked, picked her up, and carried her into the hushed stone library did the screaming begin again, echoing through the stacks and tables. He smiled, embarrassed, at the eyes that turned to see what torture was occurring, and did not have the heart to pick out new books as he did with great care every second week.

Only the rhythm of the car soothed Julia, and after that afternoon, Ted got in the habit of buckling her into the seat and driving for hours through the back roads of Hardison.

“Give me five minutes to wash my face and I'll come with you,” Ann suggested.

“No. Why don't you stay here, have some time to yourself?” Ted said helpfully. In truth, he did not want Ann to join them, to intrude.

Dusk was just settling in after a sunless day, gray on gray, as he steered past the new middle school they were almost finished building and out into the hills that bordered town in low-pitched spheres. The narrow roads he favored were without light or sign, a maze of shadowy paths dipping and climbing through the woods. He reached over and daubed the bubbles that clustered in the corners of Julia's tiny scarlet mouth while she watched the road, grave and alert.

“What do you think, Jewel? What should the old man do?” He slowed down and peered up through the iron gates of an old estate that had recently been willed to a nearby nursing home for relocation. “I can't go back to school and keep you in diapers. Your mother seems to think that's a possibility, but your mother does not count realism among her many virtues.” He rapped his hands on the steering wheel. “Maybe it's not that. You're not going to remember this anyway, so I might as well tell you, I was never much good at the school thing.” He laughed. “One teacher I had once told me that ‘none of the above' was not an option in real life, so I'd better start learning to choose A, B, or C. The problem was, I never cared for their choices. And they never cared for mine. ‘He rushes in where angels fear to tread'—they actually wrote that on one of my report cards.” He held his breath as they passed a dead skunk by the road. “But you're going to be different, aren't you, Jewel?” he continued when the stench was gone. “I can see it in your eyes. A regular little scholar. You're going to college, maybe even graduate school.” Ted smiled. “You're going to wow them, kid.”

It was black now, the headlights pale white cylinders amid the lost distances. He backed into a dead end and turned around. A familiar sadness enveloped him, always enveloped him on the drive back, as if he had just realized that he would not be able to simply go on after all, on and on, the baby sleeping by his side, into all that open space just beyond his reach.

He could not help mourning a little when the colic ended—for the crying simply ceased one day, or, rather, never began—and Ann reclaimed the baby, the warm, sweet-and-sour smell that lurked in the rolls of her thighs, her arms, the very mound of her.

 

T
HE CONSTRUCTION FIRM
that had built the new middle school, Parsell Bros., subsequently won a number of jobs fabricating the interiors of the new malls that were arising in all of the surrounding counties, and Ted landed a position as supervisor of the mall in East Graydon, thirty miles away. He divided his time between the site itself, a vast white-and-chrome pancake nestled in the hills, and the Parsell office in Hardison, where he was given a choice desk and a secretary he shared with two other supervisors. There was a feeling in the offices, in the malls, in the town, of expansion, a tangible taking on of girth, and the town, patting its rounding belly proudly, smiled benevolently on those who laid the bricks. Ted became infected with the importance of pushing out, of optimism justified.