If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (14 page)

“I’m thinking we should put in… granite counters,” said the beautiful young decorator—Lani De Rosso—as though it were a novel idea. “What do you think of that?” she asked the owners.

“I think it’s obvious, Lani,” Cliff said. “I think it’s what you always say. I think you should consider something new.”

T
hey ate at the maple kitchen table, Cliff at one end, his wife and daughter on either side. Dinner was roasted chicken pieces, cooked and delivered by Nancy Lewis, a neighbor from down the road. She had long pitched in now and then, but had become a regular and a confidante since the stroke. Jean added a last-second can of baby peas, snatched from the back of the pantry. Brooke opened it. By themselves, they rarely ate side dishes, but that was one more expediency of old age best kept from the children.

Brooke cut Jean’s chicken for her. “As long as I’m here, you might as well let me.”

She gave no explanation for her sudden appearance. It wasn’t Jean’s way to push, and Cliff was long past knowing if her visit was sudden or if he’d just forgotten it was coming up. In a sense, everything was sudden for him.

They talked a little about Ian and the children, just details from the morning, email making it unnecessary to catch up on any real news. Hannah had been agitating to drive herself to school. Connor dreading the frog dissection on his schedule. Poor, sniffly Ian thinking he might be allergic to the cat—if one could develop allergies at forty-four. Brooke told a story about the pharmaceutical company where she worked, a ridiculous ad campaign scrapped, a proposed slogan that would have made them a laughingstock. Cliff talked about his shows.

“The new thing is to paint every wall brown. Jeanie, did we ever, in forty-plus years, paint a wall brown?” She shook her head. “Turns out, we were supposed to.” He frowned, shook his head. “You never do know.”

“You weren’t supposed to then,” Jean said, as though
then
covered their entire married life. “Brown was still ugly then.”

As they spoke, Brooke picked at her nail polish, an old habit, though Jean hadn’t seen her do it in years. As a girl, she used to leave little piles of tiny pink and red bits around the house, like fancy-dress pencil shavings.

When Brooke volunteered to do the dishes—“As long as I’m here, you might as well let me,” she said again—Jean mentioned the mice.

“I know it’s odd that they’re inside in June,” she said, almost as though apologizing. “It’s possible I haven’t been as tidy since…” She caught herself. “It’s possible I’m slipping in my old age. Anyway, be sure to clean any crumbs.”

“I will clean all crumbs,” Brooke said. She brushed the pile of red polish shards into her palm. “They’ll never know we were here.”

T
he squeal and groan of the stairs woke Jean during the night, but the low gurgle of her daughter’s laugh pinned her to her bed. Five hours later, bleaching the kitchen counters once again, she would wonder why she had been so certain there was another person there. It could have been a phone call, a middle-of-the-night exchange of anecdotes with Ian, one of the children doing something amusing, or even Brooke laughing at her parents and their tiny world of Mute buttons and home makeover reveals. But lying in the dark Jean had no doubt, no doubt that there was another person there, no doubt that this person and her daughter were lovers, no doubt at all—like glancing at the back cover of a book and inadvertently, irretrievably knowing too much.

B
rooke appeared in the kitchen just before ten, wearing a light green sundress and shiny, strappy sandals, her hair still wet from the shower, her nails repolished smooth, and announced—when had she too become an announcer?—that she was walking the mile into town. She might see if there was a movie playing. She hadn’t gone to a movie in months. They shouldn’t keep lunch for her. They wouldn’t, Jean said, then told her daughter that the movie always started at one o’clock. “Around here,” she said, “people like that kind of thing. A regular schedule, I mean.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” From the living room, the television blared. “I really don’t know how you stand that,” Brooke said, and in the moments after she left, Jean wondered exactly what choice her daughter thought she had.

I
n the old days, of course, she would have told Cliff. Parenting is a conspiracy. But these were other days, so she left him to his shows.

The wooden staircase, with its steep treads and its audible objections and the slight curve toward the top, had lain in wait for some years now, a sleeping serpent stretched in their home, ready to snap. It had been something like love, something like the myopia of romance that had blinded them to the inevitable collusion between a staircase and time. It was a miracle Cliff could still manage it.

One unexpected revelation of old age was the degree to which death solved certain logistical problems—a feeble justification for its heartlessness, but a notion oddly present in one’s thoughts. Short of death, the plan was to convert the living room into a bedroom. “When my knees go,” Cliff had said, speaking in euphemism, the language of the unthinkable.

Upstairs, the guest bedroom door was closed, and for a moment Jean paused as though she might knock, but then she turned the small brass doorknob.

She felt ridiculous the moment she did. For the second day running, she was doing something absurd in this room. The bed was slept in, of course, though tidied. At its foot, a white nightgown draped over the milky-blue wooden chest. A red glass bottle, maybe perfume, sat on the windowsill. A battered pair of sneakers poked their toes out from under the dresser.

After only a very few moments, she closed the door, irritated with herself. What had she been planning to do in there? Sniff the sheets? She scurried downstairs, quickly, and then outside.

L
ate June, the garden was still more beautiful than demanding. By August, the weeds would win out. Heat and weeks of battling them would have beaten Jean. But now they were still almost courteous in their arrival, a weed here, a weed there. She could manage most of it on her feet, leaning over to yank one every couple of steps. In three weeks, she knew, she would be on her knees.

Jean had always been convinced that the price of the cottage had been for the structure itself, with the six acres of old farmland thrown in. It was Cliff’s view that they were paying for the acreage, and the cottage had been more or less free. Either way, every year, Jean’s cultivated garden encroached a tiny bit more on land long ago reclaimed by its own untended tendencies. Each April she hired a local boy to dig a new plot—as though the house were a tossed pebble and these long, curved beds the ripples that it caused. This spring it was roses, bare roots shipped up from Texas, tangled all together in a cardboard box.

She planted them at the end of April, six all the same variety, Winchester roses, white, double petals. It had seemed unimaginable that these thorn-speckled sticks might somehow—how?—explode into rosebushes. They would have to turn themselves inside out—a magician’s trick.

April 27. The afternoon of her stroke. She’d been standing there with the boy, Nancy’s son, Tyler Lewis from down the road, questioning him on whether the bushes seemed evenly spaced, and he’d been saying you couldn’t really call them bushes, could you, when they looked so much like kindling. She was rubbing her left hand as they spoke, not thinking it through, just sensing that it had gone asleep while she’d been patting the topsoil over the roots. She was trying to get the blood flowing, waiting for the pins and needles to begin, when gradually her thoughts turned from the bushes to that heavy, numb sensation. She wanted to lift the hand, just to look at it, but realized she could not. It hung there limp, covered in dirt, as though it were already dead and had been dug from the ground.

Tyler drove her to the hospital in his tin can car. His mother stayed with Cliff, and then with them both, for many days, seeming to enjoy Jean’s deception, giving Cliff and anyone else who called detailed, fictional accounts of her recovery from her bronchial woes.

The sticks suited Jean’s mood those first few weeks. Having planted roses, she was reaping thorns, the perfect bouquet for her solitary martyrdom. But then even they seemed to stop caring, caught up as they were in themselves, sprouting red nubs like potato eyes, spinning out into green stems, five-leaf clusters, buds in a hurry to exist, in a hurry to bloom, pink-tinged white, blushing at their own exposure, insistently, ludicrously beautiful. Five of them anyway, a single one remaining bare—which looked peculiar, but turned out not to be.

They could be temperamental, she read online. It wasn’t a sure thing they would wake from dormancy on command. What looked dead might actually be. After all, nature didn’t make promises. On the other hand, mail-order plants were guaranteed. Shipping season was over for the year, the Texan supplier told her, but Jean’s name would go on a list. First thing next spring, they would send her a new Winchester. Though the bushes did sometimes wake up, the woman said, even after taking twice as long as the others. “They’re
jest
funny things. They have their moods.
Jest
like all the rest of us. Sometimes, they’re
jest
playing dead.”

And sure enough, right after Brooke left for town, a full seven weeks after Jean had planted them, she saw a tiny reddish bump, the unmistakable beginning of what would become unfurling leaves and bursting blooms—as though the last of her commiserating friends were moving on.

W
hen Brooke returned just before dinner, she was as unruffled as her bedroom had been. All but her hair, which was a mess. She disappeared upstairs for a few minutes, returning with the whole auburn mass twisted into an elegant knot, for whose benefit Jean couldn’t imagine.

As they sat again around the table, neither she nor Brooke spoke very much, leaving Cliff, always happier speaking than trying to catch others’ words, to recount the many transformations he had witnessed that day.

T
he noises didn’t wake her; she was awake when she heard Brooke’s door open, then Brooke on the stairs, the front door, the distant hum of a car growing louder, the front door again, the stairs, the click of Brooke’s door.

Distinctly irritated, she rolled onto her side.

When the children were teenagers, she had dealt with their sexual activities, those known to her at the time, by pretending ignorance. Some of it was her disinclination to have that conversation with them, and some of it was her sense that they were of reasonable ages, that if she wasn’t going to object on principle, then she wasn’t going to send them out of the house—or have Cliff send them, which is how it would have gone. No thinking parent was in a rush for their child to park out in the darkness somewhere. People had been known to get shot that way. Once in a while, some sound would escape from behind a closed door, a gasp or moan, a bawdy laugh, but those were somehow sanitized and neutralized as they registered in Jean’s consciousness. Whatever sex her children were having was no more real sex to her than the stuff in their diapers had been real shit. Our children exist in some not quite human realm, she’d long before decided. They aren’t exactly people to us.

So it wasn’t parental squeamishness that made her turn the TV on now. And it wasn’t a disinclination to hear evidence, further evidence, of her daughter’s infidelity. Something else was producing this feeling, this pebble in her shoe, this grain of sand between her teeth. It was possibly, simply, the presence of sex in her home, when for several years she had tried to forget it existed at all. An absurd, impossible task, maybe. But what choice did she have? What choice but to pretend there was no such thing?

It hadn’t been until their second spring at the cottage that Jean had let herself understand, could no longer prevent herself from understanding, how thoroughly what felt to her like her first home felt to Clifford like his last. How each room, each wall, each patch of grass, tree, pebble, shaft of light was defined for them in these ways. How this sensation of
not having to move
twisted and shifted in Cliff into the sensation of
not being able to move
, so what gave her joy hollowed him. These pleasures of hers, she knew, were indebted to his age, to the strength of his frailty, to the cessation of his restlessness. Finally, simply, to the proximity of his death.

They were in bed when she realized this or realized that she had known it all along. They were in bed together, with the television on, lying side by side, in a bedroom in which they had never made love, a bedroom in which, she had just admitted to herself, they never would.

If the idea that there would be an acknowledged final move had surprised her, the fact that there had been an unacknowledged last time making love was stunning. Some kind of bargain had been struck, somewhere, somehow. She had given things up to have other things. But she hadn’t been consulted. She hadn’t really bargained at all; life had preemptively done it for her, drawn up this deal.

So what choice did she have but to unbraid the different strands of love and learn devotion without desire again? Desire without devotion? Manage the business of sex as she had when a girl, by herself. Forget that she knew any other way. What choice but to accept this cottage’s chaste enchantment as being—as Cliff himself would say—part of the deal?

As she lay there, once again rehearsing all of this, a chord of two voices arced out into the air, over Cliff’s regular, raspy breaths, over the late-night banter of a television host and his guest, through the wall Jean had built, was continually rebuilding, between her desires and her life as it must be lived.

I
n the morning, agitated, resolute, Jean left Clifford sleeping on his side and frowned her way through the familiar rituals. Teeth, face, toilet, clothes, performing any number of two-handed tasks with one hand, only just remembering to slip the sling on as she headed for the stairs.

She found her daughter in the garden, vibrant in a dark purple dress, brassy hair blowing, staring out toward an ancient, long-abandoned row of apple trees. As they stood side by side, the splash of color cradling Jean’s arm looked as though it belonged to the other woman, as though some piece of Brooke had spilled onto Jean. They exchanged a few words about how beautiful the setting was. Much more so than anywhere they had ever lived as a family, Brooke said; and Jean responded that the bar hadn’t been set very high, but yes, it was beautiful. For a moment, her mind drifted toward thoughts of a connection between Cliff’s lifelong restlessness and Brooke’s restless romance, affair, whatever it was. It could be a causal link: they had moved around so frequently, Brooke had never learned to stay with something. Maybe a genetic one: she was her father’s daughter, after all; his restlessness might have taken this sexual turn in her. But none of it much mattered, Jean thought, spooling her musings back in. By and large, she had outlived her own interest in why things had happened the way they had, in cause, with its eternal backward glance. She put her right hand on her daughter’s shoulder. She had decided she would use the word
company
. She would say,
Brooke, I know you’ve been having company
. But before she did, Brooke herself said, “We have company coming for dinner tonight. I hope that’s okay. I’ll cook, of course. A friend of mine turns out to be up here too, so I asked him over,” and Jean, who had been knocked off script, found herself saying, “No. Of course. That’s fine. Of course that’s fine.” And retreating to the house.