My Dearest Friend (26 page)

His mother-in-law answered the phone. “Jack? What’s the matter?” she asked immediately, alarm in her voice.

“Nothing’s the matter.” Jack laughed.

“But it’s prime time! Why are you calling?” Her voice was stern. Maternal.
Protective. Sensible.

Jack felt his mother-in-law’s voice reduce his love to the impulses of a horny adolescent.

“I just wanted to talk with Carey Ann,” he said. “And with Alexandra. I, um, have appointments all day and just wanted to see how she is.”

“Well, she’s asleep,” his mother-in-law said. “She was up late last night with her old high-school friends. They had such a good time, it was like old times. She didn’t get to bed till after two, I’m sure. I’d hate to wake her up now. Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

Frustration welled up in Jack. He was not a violent person, but now he felt a strong urge to punch something. If there had been a button at hand, courtesy of the Twilight Zone, that would have disposed of his mother-in-law forever, he would have pushed it.

“No, no, nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Don’t wake her. Just tell her I called. Hey, what about Lexi? Surely she’s up by now.”

“Oh, Beulah has her. She’s already dressed her and taken her out for a walk. So Carey Ann can have her sleep.”

“Well, tell Alexandra hello for me too,” Jack said. He wanted to say “give her a kiss for me,” but was afraid it would make him sound … what? … weak? … in his mother-in-law’s ever-mistrusting judgment.

Determined not to be gloomy, Jack jumped from his bed, did twenty deep knee bends and twenty sit-ups, then took a long invigorating shower. He cooked himself a mammoth breakfast with Prince’s
Purple Rain
album playing at full volume on the stereo. The stand-up cutout of Prince and his motorcycle was in his study closet, the only place in the house Jack could find for it. After breakfast he took it out and brought it into the living room. He placed it next to the fireplace, right by a chair, so that he could sit on the sofa and look at the fire and have someone to talk to. Prince, savage, untamable, all purple and black, seemed to glare with disgust at Jack.

“Man,” Jack said aloud, Prince speaking to Jack, “you should be ashamed of yourself. What are you, pussy-whipped? You are pathetic, man. You are boring! Get out and
live
!”

“Look,” he said to the Prince cutout, “I love my wife. I love my daughter. I don’t really want to be wild. I want to be happily married, bourgeois, faithful. I’m the man all
those women in
Newsweek
and
Ms.
are looking for. Phil Donahue isn’t any better than I am. And where’s my wife? Where’s my child?”

Prince didn’t answer, so Jack went off into his study and sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate on his essay. He had gotten a good start; it should have been easy to get back into. But his mind kept going back to Carey Ann.

Now he knew what men meant with their jokes about women always changing their minds. They weren’t talking about the frivolous things that men joked about—women changing their dresses at the last moment, or their hair or the restaurant they wanted to go to. Carey Ann’s changes were major. Jack was sure that in the few years he had been with her, before marriage and after, he had remained basically the same person. He had always told her the truth about what he wanted in life, and he had stuck by that. But now here they were beginning just their fourth year of marriage, and Carey Ann had already changed three times. At least. Major changes. First she had wanted—she had passionately affirmed that she really wanted—to be a wife and mother. She had loved Jack before their marriage and in the early months with a passion that made Jack certain that no one else on earth had or ever would have any love better than theirs. Then the baby had come and she had changed. She had gotten all mopey. She had gotten emotional, strung-out, extreme, weak, and weepy. She had been depressed about everything, and then, what was worse, she had been
brave
about their life together. She had been a martyr, leaving her home and family and friends so that he could teach. Now she had changed again, all of a sudden, into this person who wanted seriously to pursue a degree in childhood education, who didn’t even want to take time to put up a Christmas tree. What next? What would she change into next?

It wasn’t fair. Jack shoved his desk chair back and stalked from the room. Prince was still standing against the fireplace wall, looking cool.

“It really isn’t fair, you know?” he said to Prince. “I’m keeping my end of the bargain, I’ve always kept my end.
I
haven’t changed. I’m the same person she married. I haven’t decided to … oh, go to medical school or drop out and smoke dope.”

Prince stared at Jack from his purple motorcycle. His gaze said clearly: I always knew you were a fool.

Well, this was certainly the way to go mad. Stand around in the morning talking to a cardboard figure. Jack pulled on his parka and gloves and slammed out of the house. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he would do
something.

He drove into Westhampton, which was as quiet as a stage set. As beautiful, too, with its sloping snow-covered lawns and quadrangle, the old stone buildings decorated with icicles. There was some action on the main street, cars and people passing now and then, but the students were gone, and that was what made everything seem so bare. Jack took the stairs to the third floor English/History offices three at a time. The heat was on, and a few lights here and there, but most of the offices were dark and no one else was around. It was spooky and depressing. He sat in his office with the door open in case someone passed by, and did some paper shuffling. He looked out his window at the campus spread in all its winter glory beneath him. Everything was as lonely and cold as the moon.

He locked his office and walked over to the student union, which was open for the faculty and staff today, and ate a cheeseburger and french fries while pretending to read a book that had come in the mail, a new study of the works of Jonathan Swift. It was so boring he read the same paragraph three times. What an awful mood he was in! Usually he would relish this peace, usually he begged for it; he needed this kind of solitude in order to get his work done. But something had turned against him now. Or gone sour.

Crumpling his paper napkin, Jack finished his gloomy cheeseburger and dutifully rose to dump his garbage in the bin and put his tray on the used stack. From behind his back came the sound of familiar laughter, and he turned to see Daphne walking into the cafeteria with Pauline White. Jack thought:
Snow White
—for Daphne’s short thick hair was as black as a raven’s wing, her skin was as white as snow, and her lips and cheeks were as red as blood. And there was about Daphne a resonance, a glow, a vitality, that was almost mythological. She always seemed to mean more than she was, at least to Jack, or she brought a dimension to his life that expanded the way he saw and felt about the world. He felt drawn toward her. It was amazing to him that she was always laughing, always with other people, her friends. He felt shy.

But he approached the table where Pauline and Daphne were seating themselves, busy now taking off their winter paraphernalia and piling coats, mittens, mufflers, purses, on the chairs beside them.

“Oh, hi!” Daphne said, looking up and seeing Jack. “How nice to see you! How are you?”

“Oh, fine,” he said. “Carey Ann and Alexandra are gone, you know. For two weeks.” He turned to address Pauline, a tenured member of his department, and also a
very nice woman. “Visiting her parents,” he explained. “In Kansas City.”

“So,” Pauline replied, “are you relishing your solitude or hating it?”

“Both,” Jack said, and everyone laughed.

“Well, join us for lunch,” Daphne told him, gesturing at a chair next to her, and for one flash of a moment Jack almost did. He almost pretended that he hadn’t eaten yet (but what if the old broad in the cafeteria line made some crack about his having two lunches within thirty minutes?); but then he shrugged.

“I’ve already eaten,” he said. “Just finished. And I should get back to work.”

“Well, sit down a minute and have a cup of coffee with us. I want to know how your Christmas was. Lexi must have been in heaven.”

“Yeah, well, all right, I will have a cup of coffee,” Jack said.

As they went through the line and settled down at the table and talked about the Christmas just past, Jack became uncomfortably aware of powerful and bizarre sensations tumbling around inside him. He kept looking at Pauline, addressing his remarks to her, because he was terrified that the two women might notice how he felt when he looked at Daphne. There could no longer be any doubt about it: he had a crush on her, a violent, irrational, fierce adolescent crush. She was wearing a pair of gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a long red cardigan, hardly an outfit to drive a man wild with desire, but he was wild with desire. The red of her sweater and earrings was as bright as apples or cherries; he was hungry, he wanted to bite into her; and everything about her was so bright, so intense. Her eyes really sparkled. Daphne’s breasts were so large they swelled outward like a shelf, and when she moved, the neckline of her button-down shirt shifted, revealing pale freckled skin.

He had to keep looking away. He knew his throat and cheeks were red from blushing. He had to leave, he had to get back to work, but he was as entranced as a man in a magic spell.

“Listen,” Pauline was saying, “what are you doing tonight?”

“Well …” Jack hesitated.

“A whole gang of us are going into Greenfield to the new Chinese restaurant and then we’re going to see the late show of
Lady-Killer,
” Pauline told him.

“Good God,” Jack said, “why are you going to see that? It’s supposed to be grisly.”

“That’s just the point,” Daphne said. “We’ve all decided we need something to
offset all this good cheer and goodwill.”

“It’s supposed to be a first-class horror film,” Pauline went on. “The reviews have been raves. It’s an excellent body-slasher movie.”

“Sounds like a contradiction in terms.” Jack grinned.

“Come on,” Daphne urged. “It will be good for you. Get you away from your books for a while.”

“Douglas is coming, and Marcia Johannsen and her husband, and I think Hank and Ellie Petrie. It’ll be fun!” Pauline said. “Then you can drive Daphne and we won’t worry about her driving alone on country roads at night.”

Jack looked at Pauline. Are you blind?, he thought. Have you no eyes? Do you know what you’re doing?

He looked at Daphne. He was dazzled.

“All right,” he said as casually as he could. “That’ll be great. I’ll go. What time shall I pick you up, Daphne?” He felt a hot flush of blood rise up his neck and face, the source of which was surging powerfully at the base of his torso, so that he felt like a volcano rumbling and welling, ready to burst, and his skin was tense and sensitive with the pressure of holding him back.

After Christmas seventeen years ago, Laura had taken Hanno with her to Germany, where Otto was finishing his sabbatical year and having his affair with Sonya. That year while working at the University of Hamburg, he had lived in his parents’ home, the sensible thing to do because he was on half-pay from the college in Massachusetts and had to support his wife and child, to keep up the mortgage payments on their American house. Someday he would, perhaps, make money from the German-American textbook he was working on, but he had not received a large advance on it. Someday he would, absolutely, receive a lot of money from his mother’s estate—at least a million dollars, although the German death taxes would take their own lion’s share. Still, he could afford to be a poor college professor for a while, and it was in keeping with that role that he lived in his parents’ home while on sabbatical.

If his father, that unloving tyrant, were alive, Otto probably would have stayed elsewhere. But his father had died three years ago, and now his mother was weakening with her age and her loss: with her domineering husband gone, she was like an outline of a woman, the substance and color drained away. She did not know what to do with herself. Her life had been in every way ruled by her husband’s needs and wishes and demands. She did not say: “All I can do now is die,” but that was what she was trying to do. She slept, or sat, listless, through the days.

The Kraft family house in Hamburg was large, brick, with a splendid walled garden. There were many entrances, and Otto was a man now, so he came and went as he pleased. Once there had been live-in help, but now old Mrs. Kraft and Otto managed to get along with only one dough-armed middle-aged apple-cheeked woman coming in every day to clean and to cook a large hearty meal for the evening. Sometimes Otto came home to share a dinner with his mother, sometimes not. Mrs. Kraft livened up with her son around, and listened with respect if not with comprehension to his dutiful dinnertime conversation about his work, his text, current events, what was good on television, politics. She sat, old, curved, white-haired, trying to die, nodding with pleasure just to hear her son speak, not ever once thinking of agreeing or disagreeing with any one thing he had to say.

Of course she did not know about Otto’s lover, Sonya. If she had, she would not have been surprised. She would not have been even upset, for this happened, this was how men were. It had happened to her, it had happened to all her friends, it was life. And she wanted her son to be happy. Perhaps she suspected: many nights, especially in late November and early December, Otto did not come home to sleep in his old room in the corner of the second floor. Perhaps she suspected, perhaps not. What she thought didn’t matter, not even to Mrs. Kraft.

Laura did not tell Otto that she was going to come with their son to Germany. She was too smart for that. She was not a cipher like her mother-in-law. She drove Otto to the airport after their dreadful Christmas holiday and said a cool good-bye. Otto was addled by then, desperate only to get back to bed with his mistress. He had another semester of his sabbatical—another five months in Germany in Sonya’s bed—and he could not see beyond that. So he got on the plane, blind with love, unsuspecting, and Laura went home to pack. Three days after Otto arrived in Germany, Laura arrived, with Hanno in her arms and trunks and suitcases spilling out of the taxi. Mrs. Kraft, opening her front door, was so surprised she almost didn’t recognize her daughter-in-law, and when she saw her grandson, so blond and chubby and beautiful, she began to cry.