Private affairs : a novel (4 page)

"Today the chorus," Peter intoned. "Tomorrow the Broadway stage. You'll be as famous as Mom's television star who's coming here in a few weeks to be friendly."

"Tony?" Holly cried. "When is he coming? Maybe he'll interview me; he said he would, someday."

"He was making fun of you," Peter scoffed. "Nobody in this family is famous or notorious enough for his show."

"How do you know? I'm going to be famous and maybe he'll want me because of that."

"I doubt it, Holly," Elizabeth said. "Tony only wants celebrities. He doesn't make people famous; he interviews them when they're already famous."

"But he said it!"

"He may have thought he meant it at the time. But you shouldn't take him seriously." She paused, thinking how difficult it was to explain Tony to anyone who didn't know what he was like beneath the actor's pose. "He doesn't want people to understand him. He thinks he's more interesting if he's dramatic and mysterious."

"I think so, too," Holly said.

"Maybe so," Elizabeth said dismissively. "Now tell us more about the auditions—"

The telephone rang and Peter picked it up. "Dad," he said to Elizabeth. "Still at work."

"Matt?" Elizabeth said into the telephone. "Did something happen? You said you'd be home early."

"I got waylaid." His voice was tight and Elizabeth knew he was holding his temper. He gets angry more often than he used to; something else that's changed since Zachary died. "Simon got drunk last night. Staggered in at noon and created havoc for half an hour before I sent him home. That left two of us to get out the brochures for the Crownpoint Rug Auction. I'm sorry, Elizabeth; I'll be there within an hour. Can you change the reservation?"

"If not, we'll go somewhere else. Rancho de Chimayo isn't the only restaurant around."

"But it was the one you wanted." The first place we went, Matt thought, when we moved here and needed a special place to splurge and pretend everything was fine. Now we're pretending again. "See what you can do; I'll get out of here as soon as I can. Would you rather I called them?"

"No, I'll do it."

"See you soon, then." Matt hung up slowly and stood at his desk, absently watching his pressman stack brochures for the post office. Anger and frustration knotted his stomach and he breathed deeply, trying to loosen up so he could finish and get the hell out of there. Too much was happening at once, one crisis after another; there was no chance to sort things out. Ever since Zachary died, time had speeded up, the days whirling around him and then away, like dust in a windstorm. Men should be prepared to lose their fathers, and he'd known for sixteen years,

through three strokes that left Zachary progressively weaker, that he would lose his. But Zachary had insisted on working until almost the end, so in a way Matt was unprepared, and when he woke one day to the full realization that he would never see his father again, talk to him and laugh at his tall tales, the pain had struck him with a fierceness he had not expected.

"Matt?" His pressman was pulling on his jacket. "All done. I'll drop them off at the post office on my way home. Unless you have something else you want me to do . . . ?"

"No, you've gone way beyond the call of duty. Thanks for staying."

"You sure there's nothing else I can do? Buy you a drink? Buy you two?"

"Frank," Matt said, "are you doing what you want to do?"

"At the moment or generally?"

"Both."

"At the moment, I'm going home, which is what I want to do. Generally ... I guess so. I don't think about it much."

"Why not? Did you always want to be a pressman or did you ever want something else? Don't you wonder what might have happened if you'd gone a different direction when you were starting out?"

Frank looked him up and down. "This your birthday or something, Matt? Is that why you're thinking deep thoughts?"

Matt hesitated, then chuckled. "Okay, Frank. Sorry I asked. The end of a very long day is no time for philosophy. Go on home; I'll close up. I'll take you up on that drink some other time."

"Hey, look, I wasn't poking fun. I just didn't know what to say. I really don't think about it much. You know, you get busy, you have good days and bad days, the kids are a pain in the ass or they do good in school and then you feel proud, like you're a good parent . . . Shit, Matt, I don't think about it." There was a long pause. "I wanted to be a baseball player. Outfield. I liked looking up at the sky, you know, and watching those long fly balls float right down into my glove, and if it was the third out I'd hear the cheers and run across the field to the dugout like I was king of the world." He turned to go. "I never found out if I was good enough. My girl was pregnant, so we got married and I got this job with your dad and that was that. I still like her, though, the wife, that is; that's one good thing. Be a real crock if we split after I gave up the outfield for her. Good night, Matt; see you tomorrow. I hope you feel better."

Frowning slightly, Matt washed his hands, put on his tie, locked the front door, set the burglar alarm, and left through the back. It was after the rush hour and traffic on Cerrillos Road was light; he could be home in

ten minutes. Speeding up, he thought of Frank, and the past three months since Zachary's death, and Elizabeth, who seemed to be having her own problems dealing with it, though they hadn't talked about it—actually, they weren't talking about very much these days; he couldn't remember when they'd last had a conversation about anything but the kids or the house or the printing company—and then he thought again about Frank, who'd wanted to play outfield, and that brought him back to Zachary.

My father died and left me. It was almost a joke. Sixteen years ago Zachary had begged Matt not to leave him, and Matt hadn't, and now Zachary had left him.

Sixteen years of guarding my father's dream, instead of my own.

And that's what was running around in his head. He loved his father, he missed him—but every time he thought of him, it was as if those sixteen years were a dead weight around his neck. Sixteen years. Where the hell had they gone? What had they left him with?

He thought of his wedding: all those predictions of a great future for Elizabeth and Matthew Lovell. Wrong. Instead, they'd put off their dreams—until Zachary was well enough to run the company again; until they had the money for a full-time manager to replace Matt; until Holly and Peter were older; until Holly and Peter were through college. And the years passed.

You have good days and you have bad days and you don't think about it much.

Sixteen years.

But they were good years, he thought. Don't forget that.

He didn't forget it. He had a wife he loved, two children, a home, his own business, friends, vacations . . . didn't he have everything he could want?

Turning onto the Paseo de Peralta, his tires squealed; he was going too fast. No, damn it. He didn't have the life he'd given up when he was twenty-three. Instead, he was here, driving the route his father had taken for twenty-five years and he himself had taken for sixteen, going to the house on Camino Rancheros his father had bought in 1962 and they had enlarged to make room for all of them.

Matthew Lovell was left without a father, but stuck in his father's dream.

How did I end up almost forty — and nowhere?

He barely slowed at the stop sign and turned onto Cordova Road, remembering again those predictions of success. He and Elizabeth had even won a prize. What was the name of it? He couldn't remember. And everyone said they could do anything they wanted.

And they'd done a lot. But inside him was all this anger, boiling up after Zachary died. He remembered when it started: he was watching a plasterer repair a crumbling wall and he'd wondered how long the house would last and how they could afford another one . . . and suddenly he'd seen himself sitting in that chair for the rest of his life and then dying, just like his father—

A horn blasted through his thoughts and he saw a car bearing down on his left in the instant he knew he'd run a stop sign. Goddamn it! A turmoil of shouts clanged through his head as his hands swung the wheel-hard to the right. Turn! Get over! Get away —/ The car passed, narrowly missing him, but he couldn't turn back fast enough; his car hit the curb and rode over it. He stood on his brake, but he was traveling too fast to stop; the car skidded along the sidewalk, then crashed into a light pole and bounced off into an adobe wall. Matt heard the explosion of steel against stucco and the shattering of glass; he felt a sudden excruciating pain, like a battering ram in his stomach. Then everything stopped. There was only the dark. And silence.

H A P T E R

L

'ast time we were here," said Holly, her voice small and wavering, "Grandpa died."

Awkwardly, Peter put his arm around her. In the waiting room of St. Vincent Hospital, eerily empty at four-thirty in the morning, he sat tense and rigid, with his arm around his sister, holding himself together, because he felt like he was going to burst. Everything inside him was screaming and yelling and scared; bitter stuff kept coming up in his throat and he swallowed hard to keep it down. Don't let me throw up, he pleaded silently; don't let me throw up all over the floor and make a mess and everybody would think I'm a baby and—DAD, DON'T DIE, PLEASE, PLEASE DAD, DON'T DIE—

"What are you thinking?" Holly whispered.

Peter tightened his muscles until they hurt. "Dad," he said, forcing the word through clenched teeth.

"Why doesn't Mother come back?" Holly wailed.

Peter tried to clear his throat but that made him feel like vomiting again, and he was silent.

"Peter? Do you think—if she's not here—?"

Private Affairs 35

"She's with Dad!" Peter blurted, and suddenly he was shaking all over, "In the"—he was almost gasping—"Intensive . . . Care . . . Unit."

At the sound of his strangled voice, Holly seemed to crumple. "You think Daddy's dead."

"He's not! People have car accidents all the time and they don't . . . die!"

"I hate this place," Holly said. "I feel sick." She burst into tears. "I don't want Daddy to die!"

At that, Peter let go too, sobs tearing through his body. He held Holly with both arms and felt hers around his back, and the two of them gripped each other, crying in the empty room.

Elizabeth found them that way a few minutes later when she came in, carrying three Styrofoam cups. "Oh, my God . . . Holly . . . Peter. ..." She put the cups down and knelt beside the couch, her arms around the little huddle they made. "He's going to be all right. Don't cry; he's going to be all right. I should have come back earlier, I'm so sorry, I just wanted to be sure—"

"He really is?" Peter demanded. He lifted his face from Holly's shoulder and glared through red eyes at his mother. "We're old enough—you can tell us the truth—"

"He's going to be all right!" Elizabeth stood up from her crouching position and handed them two of the cups. Her face was pale and drawn. "Cocoa. Drink it right away; it's not very hot. Now listen: I'm telling the truth. Daddy had a ruptured spleen and internal bleeding and he was in shock, but those things happen a lot after automobile accidents and doc-tors know what to do about them. I'll explain it later, but the main thing is, the operation went fine. He'll be in the hospital a couple of weeks and then we'll bring him home. And in another six or eight weeks he can go back to work."

"The same as ever?" Holly asked. She and Peter were sitting straight now, watching their mother for signs of evasiveness.

"The same as ever," Elizabeth repeated firmly. "It's not as if his brain was damaged. He won't be any different."

"Can we see him?" Peter asked, and just then broke into a huge yawn. "Sorry."

"You can't see him because he's sound asleep," Elizabeth said. "And you should be, too. There's nothing to do here until this afternoon; you can see him then for a little while. Right now I want you to go home; we'll get you a cab." She opened her purse and handed Peter a ten dollar bill. "You've been up all night and you're in no shape to go to school; get some sleep, then come back here and we'll have a bedside reunion."

"What about you?" Holly asked.

"They're putting a cot in Daddy's room; I'll lie down there. Then when he wakes up he won't be alone. Come on, now, finish your cocoa so we can get you a cab."

Holly shook her head. "Somebody has to take care of you. I'll stay here."

"There's no place for you in Daddy's room," Elizabeth said, becoming impatient. "Please, Holly, I want you to go home. Get a good sleep and come back this afternoon."

Stifling another yawn, Peter took his sister by the hand. "We'll go if you promise you're telling the truth."

"Peter, I told you—!"

"Okay, okay, I just had to make sure. And you'll call us if anything, uh, happens?"

"Yes. Now please — "

"We're going. Right now. Where do we get a cab?"

"I'll go with you."

When she had seen them off, Elizabeth went back to the waiting room and crumpled in a heap on the couch, no longer pretending to be calm and strong. She was shaking with fear and exhaustion, and a kind of superstitious refrain kept running through her head: You weren 't satisfied with your marriage; it wasn't exciting enough for you. And you almost lost it. You almost lost Matt. Almost lost —

"Mrs. Lovell?" The doctor stood in the doorway and Elizabeth shot up from the couch, forcing open her heavy eyes. "Mr. Lovell is asking for you; you can see him in the ICU for a few minutes. He's very restless," the doctor added as they walked down the corridor. "Talking about his father. Perhaps you can calm him down."

Matt's face was ashen, the skin pulled tight over his bones. His deep-set blue eyes looked even deeper, so dark they were almost black. "Competing with Dad," he whispered with grim humor when Elizabeth bent over him. "Couldn't let him be the only one to die."

Elizabeth kissed him and smoothed back his hair. She put her cheek to his, her lips close to his ear. "It's not a contest. He's gone, Matt; we're here. And we don't want to lose you."