Elizabeth and After (22 page)

“Walk me back to the school,” she asked on the way out. And then, a block away from the restaurant, she said in a low voice, “You might as well know he’s yours.”

Adam kept walking.

“Did you hear me?”

“I hope so.”

“Well?”

Adam turned. Elizabeth was smiling wistfully. She was someone out of a life he could never have imagined. “I’m very happy,” he said.

Mysteries begin with the body but sometimes the mystery is not death but love. There is so much to love. Cats. Bits of dust caught in the light. Colours. Unexpected waterfalls. And of course: the body. Warm skin on cool sheets. The blood’s night hum. Summer heat seeping through damp moss. The raw smell of an oak tree opened in winter. A long-missed voice over the telephone. So much to love that life should be made out of loving, so many ways of loving that all stories should be love stories. This one is about a man and a woman. Adam and Elizabeth. They’re on a library committee and on their way to buy cut-rate cookies for a fundraising tea. It’s the winter after she told him about Carl.

The car is dark green, freshly waxed and polished to a gleam that sends the slate grey February sky flickering back into itself as the car pulls off the highway and into the shopping centre parking lot.

“You know,” Elizabeth says, “I have a crazy idea.”

This is a long time ago. It is 1972. Elizabeth is in her late thirties. Creamy skin with a slight cast, high cheekbones, a thick fall of chestnut hair that curves suggestively over the shoulders of her black wool coat, hazy blue eyes she turns inquiringly towards Adam. A beautiful woman: almost elegant and almost exotic, a woman difficult to place. A woman from
somewhere else who is beautiful and used to being thought beautiful but who finds the question of her physical appearance, all things considered, uninteresting.

Adam takes the key out of the ignition and slowly strips off his gloves. He has big hands that go with his height, long white fingers, soft.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes. You said you had a crazy idea. What is it?”

“I thought that instead of buying cookies we could go to a motel.”

Adam looks down at his gloves, his hands, the key. He sets the gloves on the seat between himself and Elizabeth, slides the key into the ignition. Very slowly, very carefully, he backs the car out of its parking place, drives out of the lot and eases onto the highway.

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Elizabeth says. Though of course she knows he wants to, she has only to look at his face, normally as pale, as cool, as transparent as his eyes. Her own skin is also flushed. She can feel her earlobes tingling, the corners of her mouth.

They pass two sets of traffic lights and come to the first cluster of motels at the edge of town. “We’d better keep going for a while,” Adam says, “if keeping things secret is part of it.”

Then he does something exceptional in the extreme: he lifts his right hand from the wheel and puts it on Elizabeth’s sleeve. She undoes her seatbelt, moves closer to him, takes his hand, slides it under her black wool coat, squeezes her thighs together until he can feel her nylons digging into his skin.

“Don’t wait too long,” she says and settles down to watch the road.

About a month later she called him at night.

“Take Anna Karenina,” she said.

“Who?”

“Used to be my favourite cow. Before she ruined her life over a man who wasn’t worth it. Some people would say that’s a mistake. What do you think?”

Adam was at home. He had never
read Anna Karenina
but knew his mother had. The book was in the walnut case upstairs, the one with the glass doors, beside
War and Peace
. They were in matching leatherbound editions, thin paper with gilt edges. He could picture the faded chocolate-pebbled leather, the raised ridges across the spine.

“You wouldn’t want to ruin your life,” Adam said. Nor he supposed would he have wanted to ruin his. Although it was a dilemma—him ruining his own or others’ lives—that had occupied him for the past several years. Without conclusion.

“You disappoint me,” Elizabeth said. He strained to understand.

“You mean she wanted to ruin her life and ruining it over a man was the only available way?”

“Almost but not really,” she said. “Because a man was the only available way, ruining her life was all she could do. There was nothing else.”

In the middle of the night Adam woke up. Or realized that he hadn’t yet slept. He put on his dressing gown, a threadbare once-turquoise satin fantasy with a tasselled belt that had belonged to his father and went to the bookcase to find
Anna Karenina
. It was so many decades since anyone had taken it off the shelf that it had stuck to
War and Peace
. They came apart with a sad dry popping sound. He brought
Anna Karenina
down to the kitchen and set it on the old pine breakfast table he always ate on—the dining-room table and most of the chairs
were permanently mounded with papers and bills—and heated himself a pot of milk. He mixed his chocolate the old-fashioned way: two teaspoons stirred into a few drops of cold water to make a smooth paste, adding the hot milk just after it began to bubble at the edges. As he poured, it scalded on the lip of the pot and the familiar smell soothed him right away.

Adam opened the book to the first page. “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…” And suddenly he could hear Flora reading those words to him. He was back on the gold-brocaded couch, long gone, wedged into the corner formed by the arm with the woollen doily and the back cushion that bulged, his feet tangled with his mother’s. She was lying down, her head on the other arm, and after she read those words she repeated them. She continued: “Everything was upset in the Oblonsky house.” Unlike their own where nothing was ever upset. Now, after a gap of merely thirty years, he understood what she was trying to tell him. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the Oblonsky house “everything was upset.” But his mother’s unhappiness, an issue he had never previously considered, expressed itself by being covered over. By the smooth seamless surface of the everyday. Unexpected: to be sitting in your kitchen in the middle of the night when you are thirty-nine years old and what you are thinking about is whether or not your mother was unhappy.

But of course she had been unhappy. Her husband at war, no job, only a few friends and a bizarre child that tied her to this life of waiting. He was sitting there, sipping his hot chocolate and feeling guilty about having been that bizarre child that tied his mother to her unhappy life when a completely different question, equally obvious, arrived: all those happy families that “resemble each other”—what are they like? But
of course he knew: they are like something seen from outside—a light-strung Christmas tree glimpsed through a curtained window; a bicycle carelessly abandoned on a lawn; a group standing around a barbecue, sunburned, beers in hand, children tugging at them. The happy families are always seen from a distance because when you get close the illusion melts.

Then Adam thought about his own family, himself and his secrets, those huge rocks that the passage of time and a certain amount of Scotch had worn down to something smooth and almost bearable. There was Carl—now six—who at various moments he was able to believe might be his. There was Maureen whom, in the end, he couldn’t decide to sacrifice. There was Elizabeth for whom he was the sacrifice, constantly offered. Or then again, perhaps he had no family at all, just a few people he wished he could call his own.

The next afternoon Elizabeth telephoned again. “You wouldn’t happen to be free…,” she began. He looked out his office door to the showroom, pale blue eyes locked as he calculated how many minutes it would take to make a necessary deposit at the bank. He had no idea what Elizabeth had in mind: some library emergency he supposed, or perhaps something about Carl. “It would be better if we went in separate cars this time. You could meet me at the shopping centre where we went before, pick me up in the parking lot,” she suggested.

It was four weeks since that first trip to the motel and they hadn’t spoken of it since. Like that first New Year’s Eve it simply stood as an event, completely unique, beyond anything else he’d ever known, impossible to judge or evaluate. They’d gone, they’d done, they’d bought cookies. Afterwards they’d driven home, hardly touching but for their hands, which stayed locked together the whole time, fingers constantly
stroking, caressing, turning on each other in a last continuing echo. He’d brought her to the school where her car was parked and after slowly drawing her hand from his, she’d got out. She hadn’t offered a kiss, a goodbye. She’d just climbed out of his car and walked away, her shoulders ever-so-slightly hunched with shame or regret—or was he only imagining that, the way he might have imagined her eyes burning for McKelvey? He’d waited for a moment to make sure her car started before driving back to his house, free to think whatever he wanted. The possibly imagined set of her shoulders had discouraged him from the idea that it might happen a second time. Now his face glowed its lighthouse red. He stood up and closed his office door, returned to the phone.

“I have to go to the bank,” he said. “I could meet you in an hour.”

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.” She had a teasing note in her voice that he was coming to recognize. How it could have taken him so long, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he felt
eager
. To please, to be pleased. That was a novelty he suddenly knew he could count on: being pleased by Elizabeth.

“I am very enthusiastic,” he said. “My enthusiasm is without limit.”

“That’s better.”

At the bank he stood in line twitching nervously, hardly able to speak even about the weather. His business accomplished, he drove too fast, worrying the whole way that she would crash or change her mind or get a flat tire. The sky was brilliantly clear, the sun a shivering yellow splash on his shining roof. He stopped at the liquor store to buy a bottle of white wine and a corkscrew but still arrived at the shopping centre fifteen minutes early. He got out of his car, paced around nervously thinking she might be parked in a different
section. In this unimpeded sunlight his hands looked whiter than usual. And even though he’d done nothing but replay in his mind the two hours of that first forbidden afternoon, he now remembered something different: the sight of his long white hand on her ribs, the way with the heel of his hand resting against her hip bone, the tips of his fingers landed just beneath her breast. How bizarre it had seemed that so many diverse and various landscapes of her kingdom—hip, belly, ribs, breast—could be encompassed by something so insignificant as his hand. To satisfy himself this memory was real he twisted to place the heel of his hand on his own hip, just to see how far his fingers would stretch. He was doubled over sideways, trying to estimate the exact necessary compensation for the fact that she was much shorter than him, when a car pulled up.

Two women got out, looked at him oddly, started off towards the supermarket.

It was another half-hour before Elizabeth arrived. By this time he was back in his car, drenched with sweat, reading a newspaper he’d bought from the coin box. She came towards him, running, her coat open, purse slung over her shoulder, a blue and red kerchief knotted around her neck; and he thought nothing in the world could be more desirable than her throat.

Later, her head thrust back, that throat flushed and corded, arched up to his waiting mouth. He slid his quivering tongue along the swollen arteries that ran up from her collarbone to beneath her ears, surrounded a throbbing blue vein with his teeth. Squeezed to feel the thick blood resisting.

“Go ahead, vampire,” she whispered.

A sudden image of his teeth slicing in, the blood showering as it pumped from the heart now covered with his hand.
He shifted downwards, put his mouth over her heart. Then further down until his lips touched her salt, until his mouth filled with her moist heat his tongue began to tremble and swell and her thighs closed about his ears his skull filled with the numb hot buzz of his own breathing the silent cry of the voices once again released.

Elizabeth was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her nightgown tucked beneath her knees. If there was one person in the world to whom she felt loyal, aside from Carl, it was Adam. Somehow, without meaning to, she’d taken up his cause, become his flag-bearer, got into his corner. She believed in him in a way she had never believed in McKelvey, was cheering for him the way she cheered for Carl. She wanted Adam to get what he wanted—but what he wanted was her.

Earlier that evening she had been reading Carl a story while he sat on her lap. He had one arm around her neck and his head pressed against her chin. “I want to stay here for ever,” Carl said as he often did. And she replied, this was always her line, “Good, because you
are
staying here for ever; I’m never going to let you go so you’d better arrange to have your meals delivered.” Then she wrapped her arms around him and locked her hands while he wriggled and squirmed and pried at her fingers. Eventually, and as he always did, he broke her grip—which was her cue to say, “Lucky you,” after which he came back to her lap and she continued the story.

Later on, looking into his room as he slept, she knew nothing that happened to her body—no pleasure, no pain, no danger—could possibly affect her compared with the possibility of Carl’s world being endangered. Yet nothing could be more dangerous to Carl than her desire to be with Adam.

“Adam,” she was going to have to say, “life is too small.”
The very last time Adam Goldsmith saw Elizabeth was also a New Year’s party. That was 1986, the last Richardson bash. When he was ready to go he said goodbye—nothing inspired—and then went home. He stayed up drinking coffee, packing his suitcases, writing the necessary letters. It was almost seven in the morning when the telephone rang. “I’m sorry to have this news for you, Adam,” Luke began and Adam knew it was going to be bad but of course he had no idea. None. He just hung on to the telephone while Luke gave the details. “I know this has to be hard for you, Adam,” Luke ended up. “You come over today whenever you want to. We’re hoping to see you.”