Acts of Love (18 page)

“Brown,” she said.

She got up to make them tea, and brought it back to bed.

“Aren't you angry?” she asked him.

“You'd be surprised at how many things you thought you couldn't live without that turn out to be completely dispensable,” he told her.

 

A
NN WAS CAREFUL
not to alter her behavior around Ted, not to need him less, or more, and, in fact, she didn't. She felt no guilt. It was as if Mark, his apartment, existed in a separate corner of time, with a door Ted would never find. They were like children playing hide-and-seek who, covering their eyes, assume they are invisible because they can no longer see you.

 

O
NCE, SHE PICKED
M
ARK UP
in the morning and they drove twenty miles to the Cineplex in Handley. There were only a handful of other people in the theater, and they sat near the back, surrounded by empty seats.

In between the dialogue, Ann whispered to him what was happening, her eyes on the screen, her cheek almost touching his, feeling him lean into her, soaking up the information, nodding impatiently, more, his rapt attentiveness as novel to her as the assuredness in her own voice, a low, steady hum in the flickering darkness.

During one of her discourses, a man in a wool cap five rows ahead of them turned and gave her a dirty look, but she only glared back without a break in her description.

There was no time for anything else that afternoon, and she dropped him off and watched his progress, steady, stiff, to his front door. He turned once before entering, scanning the air for her, and she wanted only, in that instant, to run from the car and enter the dim apartment with him, but she remained still, watched him turn slowly back, disappear, before she hurried to get home before the girls.

 

T
HE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING
as she entered the house.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this the residence of Ann Leder Waring?”

The officiousness put her immediately on guard.

“Who is this?”

“Sergeant Thomasis. State police, ma'am. Are you the daughter of Jonathon and Estelle Leder?”

“Yes?”

“Ma'am. I have, uh, I'm afraid I have some distressing news for you. There's been an accident.”

“Where are they?”

“They're deceased.”

After that, facts, geography, data. Bodies.

The voice and its insane ramblings droned on and on.

Ann must have hung up, called Sandy, agreed that it would be best if Sandy went to identify the bodies.

But all she remembered was a vast and stunning silence and that one word—bodies.

Bodies, again and again, until she would do anything to drown it out, to stop it.

 

T
HE FUNERAL WAS POORLY ATTENDED
. The brother of the other driver involved, a young woman with only a badly fractured leg, drove up but couldn't make himself get out of the car. The gathering was too sparse and unadorned. He watched from a distance, then drove away.

Throughout the ceremony and its aftermath, the only thing Ann wondered was this: When the two cars collided, did they see each other's eyes? Were they fragmented by the spider's web of shattered glass so that there were a thousand of them, a trillion of them, fat, horrified death eyes as big as the white empty moon? Was there an instant, however brief, when they knew that this was it?

Or perhaps Jonathon and Estelle had looked only at each other. Yes, that was likely.

 

S
ANDY AND
A
NN MET A WEEK LATER
at the gray house on Rafferty Street and started to go through Jonathon and Estelle's bog of possessions. The familiar smell of rotting food and aged grease hung in the air. On the stained black-and-white-linoleum floor there were two garbage bags lying belly-up, spilling their moldy entrails across the floor. A couple of once-frozen TV dinners sat in a puddle on the counter.

Ann crouched, wiping yolk from the egg that had fallen onto her suede shoe when she opened the refrigerator door.

“Ozzie and Harriet strike again?” Sandy asked, coming in.

Ann nodded, straightening up. Half-gallons of milk and enormous plastic bottles of soda, three more cartons of eggs, all far too much for two people to consume but undoubtedly bought at irresistible bargain prices, were jammed into a cubistic pattern in the refrigerator. She walked into the living room and ran her hands over one object and the next, yellowing newspapers, dank towels, two nylon jackets hanging from a lamp. “What do we do with all this stuff?”

“I'd vote for hiring a Dumpster,” Sandy answered caustically, cautiously. Ann had never had a sense of humor about Jonathon and Estelle.

But Ann laughed, and when Sandy looked questioningly at her, she just shrugged and walked away.

Ann wandered back to the bathroom and picked up a tin of henna. What color was Estelle's hair that night? Was there blood in the blood-red of her hair?

Sandy found her sitting on the cold floor. “Are you okay?”

Ann nodded. “You know, it's funny, but I haven't been able to cry. Not once. Not even a trickle. You know what I feel, Sandy? You want to know what I really feel?”

“What?”

“Free.”

 

O
NE NIGHT A FEW WEEKS LATER
, Sandy called past midnight, her voice soft and tentative and sad. “There's something I want to tell you.”

“What?”

“The last time I saw Jonathon and Estelle, I was walking down Main Street on my way to the Ginger Box for lunch with this woman the paper had just hired as a copy editor. Anyway, I saw them on the other side of the street, half a block away. Estelle was in a long orange skirt and one of Jonathon's sweaters, and Jonathon was just loping along with that stooped gait of his, his hand in his beard. They looked like immigrants from the moon. I don't know, Ann, maybe I was just kind of startled to see them so unexpectedly. I just didn't want them to meet this woman, you know? I mean, she didn't know about them, about us. They were lost in conversation, and when they stopped to look in the bookstore window, I hurried her past them.”

For a moment, there was only Sandy's breathing.

“Every night when I lie in bed, I replay that moment. Jonathon's loopy stooped gait, Estelle's falling amber hair, coming toward me, again and again. Each time I try to force myself to cross the street, to say hello to them, to introduce them to this woman. But no matter how hard I try, I never do.”

She didn't say anything else, and neither did Ann. They hung up in exactly the same instant, and there was suddenly only the blanket of night across the town between them, and her words like one more leftover piece to a long-lost puzzle.

 

T
HE NEXT TIME SHE SAW
A
NN
, Sandy said, “Well, it was always easier for you, wasn't it? Love and things like that.”

 

A
NN HADN'T GONE
to the hospital to read for a number of weeks, calling in sick and finally giving notice, all without speaking to Mark herself. Each Tuesday and Thursday, she imagined him walking through the warren of glass cubicles, and finding only her replacement. She had dialed his number at least a dozen times, but always hung up before the call went through.

Finally, one morning after she had put the girls on the school bus, she got in her car and drove across town. He was just getting out of the shower when she rang his bell, and beneath the crisp white shirt, the black pants, his skin had a moist and soapy film. In his surprise at her presence, he forgot to turn on the lights for her, and they sat side by side in the dark.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have called.”

“I've been worried. They said you were sick.”

“No, it wasn't that.”

“Did something happen?”

“No. Yes. Not really. I needed time to think.”

“About us?”

She saw his body tensing, prepped, alert, all those lessons in self-defense.

“We can't go on this way, Mark. At least I can't. At some point, it becomes cheating. It wasn't at first. It didn't feel like it, anyway. But it would. Not Ted, I don't feel exactly like I'm cheating Ted, whatever that means. But cheating doesn't have to have an object, does it?”

“I always thought it did,” he replied coldly. He made no move to touch her, to sway her. “So tell me, was I just an experiment for you? A project? Charity?”

“Don't do that. Please.”

“Something for the bored housewife? Noblesse oblige?”

“You know it wasn't like that.”

“I'm not sure what I know.”

She tried to touch his face, but he jerked away. “No one has ever listened to me the way you do,” she said quietly.

“It's one of the things we blind people do,” he retorted. “We don't have a choice.”

“Excuse me,” she replied. “I thought it was because I might have actually interested you.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I'm married,” she said softly.

He nodded, took a breath, rose. “I think you'd better go.”

“But…”

“Please. None of this ‘can't we just be friends' shit, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Please. Just leave.” He walked around the couch and down the hallway, out of view. He strode, in his own home, with none of the hesitation, none of the acknowledgment of risk, that marked his steps outside its boundaries.

Ann stood for a minute in the dark room and then left, closing the door loudly behind her so that he would know she was gone, that it was safe for him to come out.

 

T
HERE WAS THAT ONE EPHEMERAL MOMENT
each morning when she first opened her eyes, and the day masqueraded as fresh. But then it began again, picked up where it had left off. At first, Ted assumed that Ann's silence, her withdrawal, was due to Jonathon and Estelle's death. He thought it was something he would outwait, something that would pass. But it only continued, thickened, and gradually, beneath the stillness, he could hear her carefully untying knots, loosening herself from him. For the first time, he knew the frustration of being shut out, not only of knocking on a closed door, but the uncertainty of whether there was even someone behind it. She no longer questioned or even acknowledged his lateness, his moods. She no longer fought against or tried to placate him. Ted, growing increasingly fearful, increasingly desirous of any reaction at all, tried staying away more, and when that didn't work, didn't make her ask for him, he tried being what she had always wanted, ever-present, helpful, inquisitive. But neither route returned her to him.

One night, he came home from work early and, finding her cooking a chicken stew in the kitchen, opened a beer and leaned against the refrigerator. The girls were upstairs, supposedly finishing their homework, though he could hear the television.

“I thought the rule was no television before dinner,” he said.

Ann shrugged. She went to the sink to rinse some string beans in a colander. When she turned to go back to the stove, she saw Ted stirring her stew, then reaching for the saltshaker and pouring.

“What are you doing?”

“You never add enough salt.”

“If I had wanted to add salt, I would have.”

“You may not have noticed this recently,” he quipped, “but there are other people in this house besides you.”

She glared at him, then picked up the saltshaker, unscrewed the top, and poured the entire contents into the stew. He stared at her, red in her eyes, in his, and stormed out.

When she heard his car tear from the driveway, she calmly made three tuna-fish sandwiches, put them on plates, and, leaving the stew still simmering, brought them upstairs to where the girls were watching reruns of “I Love Lucy.”

“Dinner is served,” she said, smiling, as she sat on the floor between them.

“Where's Daddy?” Julia asked suspiciously.

“He had to go back to the office. Here. I bought some of the potato chips you like. The barbecue kind.”

The girls ate slowly, glancing over at their mother between bites, thinking that if they looked hard enough, they would find the timetables and the rules, the attention, that had lately disappeared. In its absence, they had been oddly disoriented, dancing in a void.

It was past ten o'clock when Ted returned. He sat down on the corner of the bed, where Ann lay smothered in quilts.

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly. “I love you. I don't know what's going on, but I love you.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you remember a long time ago when you told me that you thought love could exist without expectations? You said that was the kind of love you had. Remember? And I got so angry?”