Acts of Love (8 page)

Ann agreed, but she never showed up for her appointment.

Instead, she learned to hide and cloak and dissemble the too-muchness of her care until all that was evident was a slightly puzzled look lodged permanently in her eyes. Cynthia Neary watched her closely.

 

T
ED FOUND A NEW JOB
a year later. Now he had to fly every second week to various destinations all over the Northeast, assessing properties for potential building projects. It gave him at least the semblance of authority. He took the architecture-school catalogues along to read on the plane.

Ann packed his suitcase for him every Sunday night, sneaking those little love notes between his shirts and his underwear to protect him, and at 5:30 Monday morning she drove him through the inky predawn chill to the airport. She sat in the car, watching the plane take off, convinced each time that she would never see him again. That it had been a fluke after all, her being with him, a slipshod error of fate that would doubtlessly be corrected. Never before religious, she crossed herself three times and prayed for his return.

Ted became well versed in hotel rooms in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland. The first thing he did in each was to fish out Ann's note and put it by his bed—at least initially, when novelty still ran rampant through their lives. Later, when traveling had become just another chore, he often forgot until Tuesday, Wednesday, even Thursday to look for her note, or, once found, to open the envelope. It was always the same, “I love you more each day,” though he had only the dimmest idea that the strict repetition was part of the fabric of her overriding superstitions and not just a failure of imagination. He worked hard, began to read the Russians, slept well, grew tired of hotel food.

 

A
NN HAD NEVER BEEN ALONE BEFORE
, had always found the boundaries of her own body in how it managed to fit into and around others, and she wandered uneasily about the empty house that seemed bloated now with too many hours, too much space, space that, despite her best efforts at keeping busy, filled inexorably with the fears and obsessions that her energetic domesticity with Ted held at bay. She came to dread going to bed alone, dread the night and its dreams and the sweat that soaked the back of her neck when she woke with a start deep in the middle of so much darkness. David Lowenshon beckoning her to follow him, Come, come. And Estelle, always Estelle.

During the day, she studied different forms of madness, under the pretense that it was work-related. But what she really wanted to know, had always wanted to know, was if it could be inherited. Estelle's angels, Estelle's spells. She wondered if Sandy feared it, too. Though she had wanted to, she had never been able to ask, worried that a negative reply would only underscore Ann's own susceptibilities.

Only when Ted was with her did she forget to look for symptoms.

 

O
NE
F
RIDAY
, before Ted's return, Ann spent the afternoon cooking chicken Tetrazzini and a rum cream pie. Each week she tried a different recipe, always something rich and heavy, and set the table with candles and the Portuguese rooster-patterned plates that Sandy had given them as a wedding present. She began calling the airport an hour before his flight was to arrive, and kept a close watch over the weather. She had recently discovered the existence of wind shears.

Ted got a ride in from the airport with the new man the company had assigned to work with him. David Hopson, bespectacled, black-haired, wearing a tan golf jacket, jumped out of the car when it pulled up in front of the house and jogged around to open the door for Ted before Ted could stop him.

“Did you see that?” Ted asked Ann disgustedly as he stood in the entranceway, his suitcase at his feet.

Ann nodded vaguely.

“He's been pulling that kind of shit all week. I had to have three meals a day with this jerk. ‘Where do
you
want to go? What do
you
want to eat?' It's embarrassing to see a grown man grovel like that. Then he looks twice if I take an extra five minutes for coffee. It's like traveling with a Chihuahua on amphetamines.” The dry, stale odor of the airplane filled Ann's nostrils as she kissed him an inch below his ear, as far as she could reach without his bending to meet her.

“Dinner's almost ready,” she said, smiling, easing him into the house.

Ted nodded distractedly. “All day he's yipping at my feet, second-guessing everything I say. I've never met anyone so nervous in my life. This guy actually calls every waiter in every two-bit diner we eat in ‘sir.' And means it. But turn your back on him and you're in big trouble. He's so worried what they're going to think back at the office he can't piss straight.” Ted paced the living room, going right up to the wall on each side, as if he would break through it if he could. There were times lately when his restless energy seemed to butt up against constraints only he could see, and the helpful but uncomprehending look on Ann's face only quickened his stride. They had begun to speak of moving, though there was no convincing need.

Ann brought the food to the table and spread it before him with some modicum of pride, but his restlessness came with him, and he tapped his foot anxiously against the bare floor as he began to eat, cutting, chewing, swallowing in silence while she watched. She began to pick at her own food, waiting for what she still hoped would be inevitable, that he would pick up the language of home, of them. But the silence only thickened.

“Is something the matter?” she asked finally.

“No. Why?”

“Well, you haven't said anything.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. She pushed a piece of chicken in circles through the pale sauce. “Did I tell you about the new resident we got this week?” she asked, brightening, rushing. “We call him the baby resident because he looks so young. Anyway, the other day he came into the ICU and…” She teetered on the ledge of her own words, stopped. “Are you sure nothing's bothering you?”

“Goddamn it, Ann, I told you, everything's fine. Okay?”

She cringed, and seeing this, seeing the hurt splayed across her face, he pushed his chair angrily from the table. “I have to make small talk all week. The last thing in the world I want to do is have to come home and make small talk here, too.” Her forced conviviality, the unspoken questions that constantly rimmed her eyes—Are you okay? Are we okay?—strangling, suffocating him. He grunted in frustration. “Why do you always make me feel like I'm disappointing you?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You never
say
it. Christ, sometimes I wish you would.”

Her lower lip quivered. He had no hope against all that gaping expectation, empty and open and waiting only for him. He rose suddenly, swiveled, and slammed his fist through the pleated paper lampshade on the brass stand by the table before storming out.

Ann sat, stunned, alone at the table, watching the shade unmoor bit by bit from its base and fall to the floor. She was still sitting there, completely still, when Ted returned, pausing to look at her from the doorway.

“I'm sorry,” he said gruffly, running his hands through his hair. “It's been a bad week.”

She nodded.

He sat down at the table and began to eat the cold, congealed chicken.

After they had cleared the dishes together, they mended the lampshade with gray electrical tape, but on humid days the tape always gave way and the lampshade would fall to the floor.

 

A
FTER
S
ANDY GRADUATED
from the State University at Binghamton, she returned to Hardison for the summer. Her plan was to send out résumés, collect her things, and leave as soon as possible. “I wouldn't stay here for anything in the world,” she told Ann.

Summer mornings, she would come to sit in Ann's kitchen, her small, muscular arms and legs tan in tied-up shirts and cutoff denims. “I'm going someplace where no one has the slightest idea of who our family is. Someplace where there's not always someone waiting to remind me of who I used to be. Why haven't you and Ted moved away?”

“Well, for starters, this is where our jobs are.”

“You can find jobs anywhere. Does Ted want to stay, or is it only you?”

“This is just where we are, Sandy. We haven't really talked about why.”

“What do you talk about?”

Ann put down the mail she had been absently flipping through. She knew that Sandy came these summer mornings in part to scavenge for further evidence of marriage. The only evidence she had was Jonathon and Estelle, and, like everything about them, that was skewed, insubstantial. But Ann, having entered the third year of her marriage, was just now sorting through the clues herself, and all she had to offer was a murky brew of doubts and desires. If she had trusted Sandy not to make a case of her confusion, she would have told her how surprised she was to find out that love was not a constant after all, as Jonathon and Estelle had made it seem, but that it ebbed and flowed, disappeared for days at a time, only to resurface with the skimpiest prodding—the way a pair of jeans fell in the back of his knees, the lock of hair on his forehead.

Ann laughed briefly and shrugged. “Sometimes I think that if something happened to me, Ted would be sad for a day or two, but then he would just go back to his life, you know? It wouldn't really change him in any essential way.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don't know. Nothing. It's just that we're still”—she looked down, then slowly back up—“
detachable.
Somehow, I wasn't expecting that.”

Sandy nodded.

As July dripped into August, Sandy spoke less and less of résumés and other towns, though when she first took the job as a reporter at the
Chronicle,
just after Labor Day, she insisted that it was only temporary, until she found something else, something better, something far away. “It's good for my résumé,” she said dismissively. She came less frequently to Ann's kitchen, whether because she had found what she was looking for or despaired of finding it, Ann didn't know.

Sometime in the fall, Sandy moved out of Jonathon and Estelle's house to a rented studio apartment in town, above Riley's liquor store. Ann knew that she visited Jonathon and Estelle, stopping in at odd hours on her way to some assignment, but there was never talk of anything as organized as a family dinner. Even Ann knew better than that.

And the questions about Ann's marriage, about Ted, subsided, too, consumed by their daily lives until they became just another facet of summer, like the weekend trips to Hopewell Lake, or the whiffs of charcoal down the street, that fades along with the heat.

 

A
NN CLIMBED OUT OF BED
, pulling her bathrobe along with her, tucking her arms into it as she rose. It was a rich brown in the bedroom; the only light came from the street lamp on the corner filtering through the drapes.

“Why do you always do that?” Ted asked, propping himself up, studying her.

“Do what?”

“Put your robe on the second you get up. Why are you afraid to be naked in front of me?”

“I'm not afraid. It's cold in here.”

He laughed. “You're so repressed,” he said, and fell back against the pillow, smiling.

She turned, came back to the bed, sat on the edge, and watched the smile that curved and quivered. “I am not repressed.”

“Yes you are.”

“What would you like me to do that I'm not doing?”

“I'd like,” he said, suddenly serious, grave, “for you to tell me one thing
you'd
like for a change.”

Her bare feet played with the fringes of the hooked rug, knotting them, releasing them, knotting them. “You mean sexually?”

“Yes. Sexually.”

“But I'm happy with our sex life.”

“Oh, c'mon, Ann, there must be one thing you wish we did.”

She was sure that he was right, but she couldn't just at the moment think what it might be. “What would
you
like?” she asked, though she didn't want to know, not really, didn't want to hear that he wanted anything but what they had.

Arabesques of opacity and light fell across his face. “One thing I'd like is for us to be able to masturbate in front of each other.”

She frowned. “But when you do that”—for he had tried—“it makes me feel inadequate, that I'm not doing it right. Why don't you just show me what you want, how you want to be touched?”

“That's not the point. I'd like for you to touch yourself in front of me, too.”

“But it feels better if you do it,” she said.

“Don't you think it would be the ultimate trust, the ultimate intimacy, for us to be able to do it in front of each other?” He reached for her knee, rested his fingers there; she flinched.