A Small Indiscretion Page 5

  Seven

  IN FEBRUARY OF THIS YEAR, the girls spent their first weekend with your father in Gold Hill. I drove them from the city and dropped them off on Friday afternoon. Jonathan didn’t invite me in, exactly, but I came in anyway. I stood in the foyer. I looked out the picture windows at the view of open space, green hills turning to deeper green mountains against a pristine blue sky.

  He stood in the doorway between the hallway and the kitchen. He had a dish towel over his shoulder.

  “There’s a trampoline next door,” he said to Clara and Polly. “The neighbors said you can come over and use it anytime.”

  They ran outside to peer through the fence.

  “I hope there’s a net,” I said.

  He took the dish towel off his shoulder and tossed it on the kitchen counter. I was struck by the physicality of the gesture, struck, anew, by his raw athleticism. Every movement he made was masculine and energetic and graceful. I had loved that in the beginning. I could not decide whether I loved it now. I was putting all such assessments on hold until I knew whether or not we were going to remain married.

  “Of course there’s a net,” he said. “Give me a little credit.”

  “I was only asking,” I said. “Just because we’re separated doesn’t mean I’m obliged to stop being a parent.”

  He looked at me as if considering me for the very first time, but he said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound so brittle. Do you like it here?”

  “I do.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Everything.”

  “But what, specifically?”

  “I like the view, and the space, and the neighborhood. I like that there’s no traffic. I like the paths that connect the streets. I like the people. And I love the backyard.”

  “The dogs would love the backyard, too.”

  “I was going to ask you about that, actually. I was thinking they could come along when the girls visit.”

  “They’re your dogs more than anybody else’s. You can have them when you want them.”

  “They’re not my dogs. They’re … they were … our dogs.”

  “Do you miss the city?”

  He laughed. “I’ve wanted to get out of that city for years, Annie.”

  “You never said so.”

  “Sure I did. I hinted, anyway.”

  “Why did we stay so long, then?”

  “Because you seemed happy there. With the store and everything. And I wanted you to be happy.”

  “At the expense of your own happiness?”

  “Yes,” he said resolutely. “But I didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand just how many decisions I made at the expense of my own happiness.”

  He picked up the dish towel and started wiping down the counters. I noticed his hand, and I felt my heart pound faster in my chest.

  “You’re not wearing your wedding ring.”

  “No, I took it off,” he said, without looking at me. But I could see from the color creeping into the back of his neck that he was embarrassed.

  I DROVE AROUND the neighborhood after I’d said goodbye to the girls. I stopped at a realtor’s open house. I wandered through the uninspiring living room, with its aluminum-framed windows and carpeted floor and cheap fluorescent lights. I picked up the flyer and studied the binder on the kitchen counter. I made a show of reviewing the inspections and the property lines and the floor plan. I ate a home-baked cookie and chatted with the selling agent. She told me she lived in the neighborhood. She gave me a bit of its history. A lower subdivision was built in the fifties, a planned community for university professors and staff. A second tract was added in the seventies. Tree-shaded paths connect one street to the next. A community center sits in the middle, with a pool, a tennis court, a soccer field and a bocce-ball court inside a grove of evergreens.

  But of course you know all this. You were there, Robbie, two months before the accident. I don’t know how much of Gold Hill you took in that day. In your memory, that Fourth of July must be marked only as the day you first met Emme. She made quite an impression, splayed out on a chaise, one elegant knee breaking through the barrier of her red cover-up to draw the sun.

  “Do you live in the area?” the realtor asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I live in the city. My husband is house-sitting here. Temporarily.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is your husband Jonathan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess I didn’t realize he was married.”

  “He’s married,” I said. “I mean, we’re married.”

  I looked at her left hand. There was no ring there, either.

  A few other realtors wandered through, dropping their cards on the counter. Two or three neighbor women stopped in. The selling agent seemed to know them all. They wore khaki pants and loafers, like she did, or exercise pants and tennis shoes. It was the same uniform I’d seen women on the sidewalks wearing as they waited for the yellow school bus to deliver their children home. I studied their faces as they chatted with the real estate agent. I watched them smile, then laugh. I felt the old contempt for the monotony of suburbia, but I found that contempt was trumped, now, by envy.

  JONATHAN DROVE THE girls back to the city two days later. He didn’t come in. He walked them to the door and turned around and left.

  Polly threw herself into my arms. Clara hovered, wanting a hug but not wanting to appear as if she did. I noticed their painted nails right away. Clara’s nails were a rather raucous purple, and Polly’s were a bright pink. There were flowered decals on their thumbs. What person had had the patience to paint those twenty tiny nails? Not your father, certainly. Not any man. The nails were in direct contrast to Polly’s hair, which clearly had not been brushed that day, or perhaps the day before, either.

  “Make sure Daddy brushes Polly’s hair when you stay with him,” I said to Clara, later.

  “I can brush it for her,” Clara said, unwilling to pin anything on her father.

  I caught myself, and retreated. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your job to talk to Daddy about it, or to brush Polly’s hair.”

  Polly came and stood next to me.

  “Your nails look pretty,” I said to both of them.

  They flashed their hands around proudly.

  “Was there anyone else at the house with Daddy?” I asked, as offhandedly as I could.

  “What do you mean?” Clara said.

  “I mean, was there anyone over for dinner or anything like that?”

  “Nope,” Clara replied. “But there was a puppy. From next door.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  “He put his teeth on my finger, but it didn’t hurt,” Polly said.

  “That’s good,” I said. Then I couldn’t help myself. “Who painted your nails?”

  “A lady,” Polly said. “She didn’t tell us her name. It took a long, long, long, long time.”

  “But it was worth it,” Clara said importantly. “Because you never paint our nails.”

  “I have a secret,” Polly said suddenly.

  “Oh?” I said. “What’s your secret?”

  I was sure it was another woman, the woman who had painted their nails. The realtor, perhaps. Or a neighborhood widow or divorcée. I was certain, even though it seemed implausible. It was womanhood Jonathan was trying to get away from, after all—the treachery of hidden machinery, the probability of betrayal, the dangerous seduction of bodily parts.

  Polly put her lips close to my ear. “If a bird’s heart beats too fast, it could die.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she whispered solemnly.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “On PBS.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  She ran off to her room, and the interview was over. I wondered, later, if what was true for birds might also be true for humans. Or I wondered, at least, if the worry
over a broken marriage, or a lost child, even a nearly grown one, could make your heart beat so fast it could break.

  Eight

  THE JOURNEY to confront my father about the money took three days. The Greyhound got me as far as Bangor, then I caught a shuttle to the town of Northeast Harbor. I found a mail boat to take me across the sound to Little Cranberry Island and drop me at the dock in Islesford. There was a tiny museum where I stalled and looked around. On one wall was a photograph from 1923, the year the water froze from the Cranberry Isles to the mainland. The photo showed a man riding an old-fashioned motorcycle on the ice in front of the dock. The man was my own grandfather, but I didn’t know that yet.

  I walked the half-mile to the house. The drive was flanked by fir trees and undergrowth, opening to a wide lawn that surrounded a pretty green house with white trim, shingled flower boxes and a veranda. The sky was changing color, and the color of the ocean beyond the house was changing, too, deepening as night came on. Walking up the drive, I tried to fend off all that voluptuous beauty. I tried to rehearse what I was going to say. I could not really imagine pronouncing the word money. It would be like bringing up my father’s leaving, or his drinking; it would be the intervention all over again.

  I saw her before I saw him—the wide white face and the thin brown hair beneath the straw hat. I saw her overalls, and under them a white sleeveless shirt—a man’s undershirt, presumably my father’s. The straps of her bra were exposed, cutting into her sunburned shoulders, straining under the weight of her heavy breasts. She was tall and heavy all the way around, not exactly fat, but big-boned and generous. That was what most shocked me, that the woman for whom my father had forsaken his family and traded his future was not even thin. My mother told me later he had known Veronica Cox all his life. She had apparently always been in love with him. She had never gotten married. She had been waiting for him all this time.

  She was holding something in her hand. A piece of wood, and in the other hand a little shovel, and she had on gardening gloves. This was what they did, then, on a Thursday in September as evening came on and the sky filled with color and the harbor turned from blue to black and the lobster boats hauled the day’s catch onto the dock: They gardened.

  I stood behind a redwood tree and watched as Veronica Cox began to dig with the little shovel in a clearing beyond the house. My father appeared, carrying in his arms a black dog, its legs stiffened and its head hanging back on its neck. It took me a minute to realize the dog was dead.

  Not gardening, then. A burial. I had happened upon them as they were burying Veronica Cox’s dog.

  My father laid the dog down and took over the digging. He lifted the dog’s body into the hole and covered it with dirt. He placed one hand on the small of Veronica Cox’s back and the other in her hair and held her to him. I could not tear my eyes away, though I was sickened watching them.

  Finally, I stepped from behind the tree.

  My father saw me. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  I stood still. He came toward me and opened his arms so wide there seemed no other place for me to fall but into them.

  WE ATE A dinner of beef stroganoff. There were tomatoes from the garden, and homemade egg noodles over which Veronica Cox poured the stew. My father set out three wineglasses. This surprised me. Not only a glass being set for me, but that they would drink in front of me. My father poured wine for Veronica and for himself, then held the bottle over my glass and looked at me. I nodded. I don’t know why. Because it was easier than refusing, I suppose.

  I drank the wine. I got quite drunk, in fact, for the first time.

  For dessert, there was a tart made from cranberries that grew wild on the island. A bottle of port appeared, and there was more drinking. The wine made me bold—it dropped a curtain that left me on one side and my inhibitions and doubts on the other. At some point I asked for the money. He said he didn’t have it and that he didn’t know when he would. I stood up from the table and walked resolutely out of the house. In the dark, I stumbled down a grassy slope to the water. There was a boat tied up at a dock, a small aluminum dingy. I got in and rowed around. My father called to me from the shore but I wouldn’t come in. He swam out to get me but when he reached the boat, I dived off the other side.

  The cold water was shocking, but not shocking enough to immediately sober me up. I tried to swim away from him but he was faster and stronger. Eventually he caught my arm and hauled me in to shore. He handed me a towel and showed me to bed, and neither of us ever spoke a word about the incident again. What lesson did I take away? Possibly that one could get very drunk and act stupidly and not have to account for oneself.

  In the morning, still a little drunk, I announced I’d be leaving that day for Europe. I had sixty dollars left, plus the two one-hundred-dollar bills my mother had given me. Not enough to buy a plane ticket to London, but somehow I believed I would get there anyway.

  Veronica Cox cooked me a meal of eggs and sausages and set it before me. While I sat alone in the kitchen eating, I could hear her talking quietly with my father in the living room. She disappeared down the hall and returned with an envelope.

  “It’s the best we can do for now,” she said. The “we” in that sentence pained and infuriated me, but I took the envelope. I didn’t open it in front of them. I simply nodded and shoved it in my daypack and managed to say thank you.

  They insisted on walking me to the dock. While we waited for the mail boat, we looked around the museum. I pretended I hadn’t already been inside. I pretended I hadn’t seen the photograph of the man on the motorcycle, the man my father explained was his own father, my grandfather, who had once owned much of Little Cranberry Island. It was an ancestral history that until then I’d known nothing about. I was saddened, and angered, that it had been kept from me. I imagine you will be saddened and angered that yours was kept from you, of course for different reasons.

  The mail boat never came. A lobster boat pulled up to the dock. Veronica Cox knew the old man driving it and arranged for me to ride in it back to Northeast Harbor. As I stepped onto the boat, my father grabbed my hand and said he would get me the rest of the money somehow. He said he would wire it to London as soon as he possibly could.

  Through a combination of buses and trains I made it to Boston. At the airport I slept on a bench and in the morning I paid for a flight to London with the cash from Veronica Cox. I had only the two hundred-dollar bills left after that. Enough to see me through, I reasoned, until the rest of the money arrived.

  Nine

  I TOOK A TRAIN from Heathrow to London and checked into a youth hostel at Earl’s Court, where I slept in the girls’ dorm. I went to the agency that had granted my work visa and flipped through index cards with job listings. I made phone calls and sent out letters. I worked on my typing speed on the typewriter at the agency. I ate bread and cheese on my bunk bed at the hostel, then went next door to the pub. Each night, I took enough money for only one pint, but there was always someone—some boy or man—willing to pay for more.

  I tried to moderate myself according to how much others were drinking, but the more I drank myself, the more difficult it was to remember to keep track. After the first drink I wanted a second, and after the second, I wanted a third, and after the third, I wanted to remain. I wanted all of us to remain—the Australian backpackers from the hostel, the bartenders, the businessmen who came into the pub after work. I wanted the pub not to close and the night never to end. I wanted that whole society frozen in revelry, and I wanted my feelings frozen, too. My life and all the things that had happened or might happen to me seemed distilled and poignant, and the evenings themselves timeless and meaningful. I was no longer self-conscious or afraid. I could say anything, and often did. I do not think I worried, at first, about ending up with a drinking problem like my father, though I have no idea now why not.

  I might have gone off with one of the Australian boys—back to the boys’ bunk room or the dark corner of the basement o
f the hostel, with its well-worn brown couch and its velvet curtain, officially known as “the lounge.” I might have done away with my virginity that very first fortnight in London. That was clearly the inspiration behind the hands on my knee, and on my neck, and all those free pints of beer. But I wanted an experience more promising than the one those boys were offering. I wanted money—I needed money—and if I could not get it the way it had been promised, in a wire from my father, which never did arrive in London, I would have to find it some other way. Not by trading my body, but by trading my skills. It seems to me now that what I wanted when I set off for Europe was not so much adventure as deliverance. What I wanted, more than anything, was an office job.

  THE WORK-STUDY AGENCY finally sent me on an interview. The man who opened the door was Malcolm Church.

  “You may as well leave your sweater on,” he said, after our first brief exchange. “I’ve got a meeting at the Isle of Dogs with colleagues from the London Docklands Development Corporation. You can come along and take the minutes if you like.”

  He took very fast steps on long legs, so that as we walked toward the tube I had to break into a trot to keep up with him. I began to worry about the money for the tube ride, but when we reached the station he bought me a six-month pass and stood in front of me and fitted the card into its red plastic holder. On the tube, and after we’d transferred to the Docklands Light Rail, he told me more about the historical redevelopment of the Docklands, and his affiliation with the London Docklands Development Corporation. He had worked for the firm that was granted the structural engineering contract for the initial Docklands Light Rail system. He himself had designed the station at Mudchute, just south of Canary Wharf. He was especially proud of Mudchute, which transported people to a wildlife habitat preserved during the redevelopment as an open-space park and city farm. Now he had struck out on his own and was preparing a bid to replace the small wayside station at Canary Wharf with a large one that could serve the needs of a thriving retail and commercial enterprise. The new station was to include six platforms serving three tracks and a large overall roof connected to the malls below the office towers.