Villages Page 27

  Phyllis laid the numerical printout on the table, adding a little dismissive brushing motion with the back of her hand, as if to shoo it on its way. “Thanks for this,” she said, “I guess. He seems awfully hung up on details.”

  He guessed she meant Halloran. “So does Davis,” he admitted.

  “I feel as though we’re being processed.”

  “We are, sweetie. They’re selling us down the river and want to get the going rate.” He felt this didn’t come across as a joke, and clarified, “They’re auctioneers who have to make way for the next slaves on the block.”

  “Mine,” she said, after thought, “can’t quite understand why. Why we’re doing it.” The way she turned her face from his, gazing down at the corner of the maple table, was familiar to him, as was the accompanying gesture of tucking a strand of hair behind her ear; it was her manner of saying something important. She had agreed to marry him in the same slant style.

  “The simplest, oldest reason in the world,” he told her swiftly. “Another woman.” He must be blunt. He must cut through this haze of many-layered sentiment, her old smoky allure, projected through diffidence.

  “It’s hard for me,” she haltingly confessed, “to believe in Julia. She seems so fake.”

  “She’s not fake, not in what matters to me.”

  “In bed, you mean? A minister’s wife?”

  He said nothing, wondering if it was that simple, and if life accordingly wasn’t too simple.

  Phyllis went on, having waited for a reply, “Sorry if I let you down there. You seemed to expect alarmingly much. Of something that is, after all, just one of the things people do. I suppose I got stagefright.”

  “You were and are beautiful,” he stated, in attempted farewell. “When you bothered to give it a try.”

  She took this in silence and resumed speaking of Halloran. “He says we seem so fond of each other. The children say the same thing, and they’ve lived with us.”

  “Please,” he begged. “Haven’t we said all this? For over a year we’ve been saying it.”

  “I know, I’m being a bore. And a poor sport. But it bothers me that you, the creator of DigitEyes, can’t see what everybody in town can see, that she’s a con artist.” She laughed one soft syllable, retracted with an intake of breath as if before weeping. “A con artist, you tell me,” she said.

  He had to smile at the pun—he was flattered she gave him credit for enough French to get it—but protested, “Everybody in town, as you call them, has their own stake, their own habits and arrangements to preserve. They like us as we are, we’re part of their furniture. But I don’t like us as we are. I don’t like what the marriage is doing to you.”

  “Your ladies on the side, you mean? I know Faye wasn’t the end. But I took them as punishment for my inadequacies—my refusals, you would call them—and, this is horrible to admit, didn’t blame myself that much. I figured some of it was just male nature.”

  “Quite right,” he hurried to assure her, seeing on her gleaming cheeks that there were tears, and hating to have her blame herself for anything, she who had been so above it all. “You’re always right.”

  “No I’m not, that’s a copout to say that. But one of your charms, Owen, is that you’ve never quite grown up. You were so clever you didn’t have to. You could remain adolescent and still perform as an adult. Until lately, Ed says.”

  He ignored the mention of Ed. She had angered him, or he wanted to be angry. “O.K., if you say so, if you’re so clear in your mind where an adolescent ends and an adult begins. But I’m trying to grow up. I’m trying to get out of this phase we’re stuck in. For your sake as well as mine. You can’t see it, but my not quite loving you, my loving everybody else instead more or less, is grinding you down, sweetie. You can’t figure it out and it’s too simple to explain.”

  “I never,” she said, to herself but letting Owen eavesdrop, “should have told you I didn’t love you yet.”

  “Did that ever change, by the way? You never told me if it did.”

  “I tried to show that it did.”

  This fetched his tears. “Don’t,” he said, his voice scraping his throat. “Let’s just do this. There are the figures Halloran wants. I’ve told Davis to agree to most anything the other guy suggests. I’ll be generous, you know that. The children are mostly raised, and we’ll get the younger two through together. Just don’t try to talk me out of this any more. I had to have you, and now I have to have her. Then I’ll stop wanting; I’ll have had my quota.”

  “Vanessa says Larson keeps offering to take her back. And find another parish, of course.”

  “Vanessa! I wouldn’t trust her. She should have been a man. She wants to manage everything.”

  “She lives in the real world, in a way you and I never have. If you want to know what I think of Julia, she reminds me of my mother,” Phyllis went on, skipping from woman to woman. Her cheekbones burned. “The professor’s wife, the minister’s wife, everything for show. It offends me intellectually, to be honest, that you can’t see it.”

  “I see plenty,” he told her, relieved they had come to combat. “But seeing leads to paralysis, if you let it. Look, Phyllis. It’s now or never. You’re still young enough, still healthy and gorgeous—”

  “Only you ever thought I was gorgeous. Jake Lowenthal thought I was a stiff Wasp stick. He laughed at me—my detachment, my inhibitions.”

  “Let’s not worry at this point about Jake Lowenthal.”

  “Young enough to catch another husband, is that what you started to say? Who? Who in this claustrophobic town? Ed? He must weigh three hundred pounds by now. He doesn’t need a woman. Stacey told me that. He just likes to eat and sit at his machines and make money. The only way she could get him interested in sex—”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. O.K., not Ed. Not anybody if you prefer it. I can’t live the rest of your life for you. I’m just trying to live mine.”

  “Your, you, you—listen to the only child! There are more people than you in the world. There’s me and the children, for starters. No, Owen! I don’t want to go through with this, I just don’t. It doesn’t feel right. I won’t let you make such an idiot of yourself with that little con artist, with that cute little double chin you no doubt like to—what did people in the Middle Ages like to do?—chuck. Chuck her under.” Her father with his antique erudition was trying to rise from the dead and speak through her. They stood there hip-deep in ghosts.

  Owen painfully explained, “Phyllis, I’m trying to reform. Julia wants to save me—”

  He stopped himself. He shouldn’t have said that. Her eyes flared; her pale lips lost that frozen, immobile quality; she straightened to her full height in her navy-blue lawyer-seeing suit. “Save you!”

  “She doesn’t put it like that,” he said hastily. “She says it’s as if you’re my mother and I’m defying you by—”

  “Oh, spare me the amateur psychoanalysis; I can hear her voice, that pious little singsong. I’ll do the saving today, Owen. I’m going to drive right over to Hartford and tell Halloran to stop coöperating. I’m forty-four years old and sick of being everybody’s patsy. I’m not going to give you this divorce. I’ve invested too much misery in this marriage, too much humiliation.”

  “You shouldn’t feel humiliated, the other women were jealous of you, how loyal I was to you, even when I wasn’t exactly faithful—”

  She screamed, or made a shrilling mindless noise as close to a scream as she could come.

  “Like I said,” he went on, “you didn’t seem that interested—”

  “It was your job to make it interesting. You didn’t.”

  “Look, Phyllis, O.K., O.K., no argument, all my fault, I’m a stupid klutz, but it takes two to tango—”

  “No! I won’t do it! You and she can go straight to hell! You can tango there and not a minute sooner!”

  Her fury was in part a relief for him. Having Julia as his wife—that compact, finely shaped silky b
ody, those clear undoubting eyes, so striking that sometimes she made a gesture of covering them with a hand, like a lush woman trying to minimize her breasts—had always seemed a bit too good to be true. And he was flattered by Phyllis’s wanting to fight for him; he couldn’t remember a comparable show of passion. But he was in too deep. Julia was already there, on the far side of the Red Sea, high and dry, free, in Old Lyme, where it was getting colder and the children were enrolled in new schools, and he still was thrashing around in his old kitchen under the glassy stares of his photographed children. “It’s gone too far,” he said weakly, while chill autumn sunshine drenched the world outside, in the wake of last night’s rain. He heard a fit of querulous birdsong and the swish of a car passing on the winding road.

  Phyllis came gently to his side; her breath was hot, like a crazy woman’s. “You don’t want to go through with it,” she told him. “I can hear it in your voice. You got trapped, Owen. It wasn’t your fault, it’s just the way you are. You’re too nice to people. I’ll get you out of it, I promise. Don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine. You just sit tight. Maybe you should go away for a while.”

  “No!” it was his turn to cry, his vision of a tidy, orthodox, normally sensual future swallowed up by this tall sandy-haired woman’s crazy confidence, not incorrect, that she was uniquely real to him. “I want a divorce. I really do.”

  “She wants you to want a divorce. That’s not the same thing,” she said, with the complacence of a Q.E.D. Her light smile, that steady certainty in her level gray eyes—did his memory supply them in retrospect, or were they truly there that fresh morning? He had grown unused to looking at his wife; the same veil had come down that had hidden his mother’s nakedness. “I’m off, baby,” Phyllis said. “I’m late, by the time I find a parking space.” She forced a wet kiss on him, a deepening kiss that seemed to come from her innards, to his innards, the slimy red works we hide from all but surgeons. Pleased with herself, uncharacteristically efficient, Phyllis backed off and deftly wiped the evidence of her weeping from below her eyes. She checked her purse for keys, wallet, Kleenex, lipstick. “You sit tight and don’t worry,” she told Owen. “We’ll get you out of it. Don’t bother to lock the house. Leave Daisy in, she’s been chasing cars.”

  She was out the kitchen door and her footsteps pattered off the side porch before he noticed that she had left his sheets of financial figures on the table. The Falcon door slammed; the gravel on the driveway spurted under her tires. Owen was dazed by the way she seemed to take his prospects and his troubles out of the house with her. The terrible metallic soulless taste of fatality, which had entered his mouth the day at this same table when Floyd had innocently imparted his school gossip, felt diluted. She’ll be fine. You just sit tight. The cats sneaked back to rub again against his ankles. He readjusted the position of the papers on the table and thought of scribbling a note to go with them but decided that their insistent presence there said enough. Instead of leaving at once, he wandered through the pantry, the living room, and the front hall to see what changes Phyllis had made lately, as a single woman. He could see very few—just the extra furniture, and the gaps in the bookshelves where she had let him have some volumes. He thought of stealing Finnegans Wake but decided against it. It would be a kind of flirting, misleading her. He tried to imagine returning to all this and couldn’t, quite. Houses you’ve left get too small to re-enter: a trick of perspective. He let himself out by the front door. In Pennsylvania, he remembered too late, it had been considered bad luck to enter by one door and leave by another. It was a pretty house, he thought, once outside, looking back at its clapboarded white sides, its shingled dormers, its black shutters and sinuous wisteria vine; but he had so long experienced the place as a confinement, a shell back into which he scuttled after a betrayal of its domestic pretense, that he felt the gaze of its windows as reproachful, like that of a forsaken pet.

  He drove the Mustang downtown and was at E-O earlier than usual. He let himself into the back stairwell and went directly to his private cell. He needed to meditate. He wondered if he should call Julia in Old Lyme and describe Phyllis’s new mood. But, no, it would just distress her, and her efforts to combat this new development might do him more harm than good. There were enough energies at work; things had a way of working out, like his finding his glasses that time in the dew-soaked empty lot, or his discovering, as he was devising the algorithms for DigitEyes 2.1, that no matter how many 3D transforms have been nested, one branching from the other, the last coördinate space can be specified in terms of the first, with no more than a displacement vector and three basis vectors—a mere twelve scalars to be crunched. The intermediate steps can be consigned to the void. He was struck less by the possible impediment to the legal proceedings—Phyllis was basically too rational, she would give in, with an improvement in terms that Halloran would wheedle from Davis—than by the passion for him she had belatedly displayed. Or was it a passion merely for her old, carelessly bright and lovely self, of whose memory he had become the curator, now that her parents were no longer alive to bear witness? Not that they, or her kid brother, could have seen what her contemporaries saw—that flashing, loaded impression we make on those with whom we might mate. Her passion had not centered, he felt, on him. Wounded pride, threatened security, fears for the children had activated her. The old question remained unsolved, why do women go along with men? Perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets.

  His locked door rapped, more loudly than Karen had ever rapped before. Owen called out, “Go away, Karen. It’s over.”

  But a male voice said, “It’s Ed, O. You better open. We got trouble.”

  Ed looked more than startled, he looked frightened when the sticky gray steel door revealed him in a rumpled business suit, his swollen flesh as colorless as a slug’s. He was breathing as if poisoned. “A phone call came for you at the company number. The cops. Your house didn’t answer and neither did your new digs. I said I doubted you were here but, son of a bitch, here you are. Let’s go. We better go together.”

  “Go where, Ed?”

  “Upper Falls. Old County Road. She was headed in the Hartford direction.”

  “Who’s she?” But he knew.

  Ed nodded, pushing ahead through the door leading down the stairs to the street, the secret stairs now thundering with Ed’s heavy feet.

  “What’s happened? How bad?” Owen asked, gulping, his palms and arms tingling, his body meeting resistance in this new medium of circumstance. This time he couldn’t just close his eyes and roll over and go back to sleep. His mother and father weren’t in the next room.

  Ed, hurrying ahead, shook his head as if the question were a bee or horsefly buzzing at his ears. “They didn’t say. You know how cops are, they hide their stupidity by clamming up. They said an accident, and they wanted you there.”

  They arrived at Ed’s car, a new bronze-colored Mercedes, in its numbered space on the asphalt factory lot. Ed had always been the one to act the role of company head; he had a mental image of the rewards and responsibilities. Owen had tried to shrug it all off, driving a red Corvette like a kid. The inside of the Mercedes, though, smelled of pizza and onion-laden takeout, along with fresh leather and assembly glue.

  Owen’s face felt hot, as if looking into an oven. He said, “I just saw her, twenty minutes ago. She had an appointment in Hartford; she was late.”

  “With that Irish lawyer?”

  He knew he was Irish. Phyllis told Ed everything, or most everything, and Owen couldn’t resent it. “Yes.” Ed was loyal, Ed was big. Phyllis’s hands had flown apart, describing her lost boyfriend Hank as “enormous.” Owen hadn’t been quite big enough.

  Ed was saying, “She hated that guy. One of these Mick fast talkers, she felt he was trying to con her. Micks’re all male chauvinists.” He drove with speed, but carefully; the car’s sheer weight made it seem a placid ride, four miles in less than ten minute
s. The twisting back road, a short-cut to Hartford for those that knew it, was puddled with wet leaves knocked down by last night’s rain. The coruscating blue lights of several police cars were visible well ahead; a young cop controlling traffic through the remaining lane waved them through, until Ed talked to him, in words Owen couldn’t hear. There was a drumming in his head. He had already spotted the Falcon station wagon next to the woods beyond the shoulder, upside down.

  His heartbeat had become so rapid it pushed him across events, missing whole sequences. He wasn’t aware of Ed’s steering and braking, only that the Mercedes was stopped. For the longest time he couldn’t figure out how to open the door: the handle was smaller and higher than in the cars he was used to. He saw that a door of the upside-down Falcon had been pried open and a gray blanket covered something long next to it.