A Parallel Life (3 page)

“That's not true,” he said. “Not believing in God doesn't mean I don't believe in prayer.” He pulled me into the hollows of his curled-up body. He held me, his arms crossed in front of my chest to protect me. His kindness and optimism were enormous.

A fact that never ceased to fascinate me is that Bill suspected nothing about my other men. He had never once
asked me to account for my time away from him. He'd had one affair. I knew he'd been with someone else the moment he began to make love to me after getting home from the convention. There was a new sort of exactness to his caress—tentative, almost pedantic—as if he'd just learned a new formula and was anxious to apply it. I found the strangeness exciting. I also knew that he'd tell me about her. He did. A month later. She lived in Los Angeles and she'd just gotten divorced. He'd had too much to drink, and so on. She told him that she'd been so lonely she'd put an ad in the personals.

I never understood why people needed the personals in the newspaper. Jack and I had found each other in the library without any help from the Dewey decimal system. We could have been wearing cards.
Married. Unfaithful but discreet
. I'd never had a problem locating lovers. People like Jack and me form a substantial underground—a fellowship like the Masons or the Elks. And we don't even need a special handshake or meetings to recognize one another. When Jack asked me for lunch, I'd known what would follow. Bill did not belong to that fellowship. His affair was an accident, a freak. He didn't even know the fellowship existed.

I'd already had half a dozen lovers by Bill's first affair, and the fact that I became aware at once of his affair made me wonder why he'd never appeared to notice when I'd been with someone else. Perhaps he told himself that my occasional requests for something new, for a variation on the immutability of our routine, was the result of research—something I'd come across at the reference desk. It never occurred to Bill that I might be who I was. It had never occurred to Bill that I might have a parallel life.

I woke up in the middle of that night to a vision of my
mother on her knees in front of the dark television set pulling the beads one by one through her long pale fingers. I saw the brown-speckled backs of her hands. I saw the cross swaying like a pendulum as her fingers rubbed the faceted crystal surfaces, releasing from the fastness of each set of stones its store of devotion to the terrible—the agony, the scourging, the thorns, the burden, the crucifixion and death. My heart pounded and my mouth went dry. Bill lay beside me sucking air in ragged gulps between snores.

My split shift was restored to me. Amy's bone knit. Bill began to jog in the mornings before work. Mandy acquired a boyfriend who collected stamps. She asked me to bring home books on stamps so she could know what to talk to him about. We got record rainfall.

When, after a couple of weeks, Jack called and asked if I wanted to see him, I said yes. Jack's friend had had the walls of his rooms painted a pale, hard gray. According to Jack, his friend now had a girlfriend and she was redecorating for him. There was a new black-leather sofa, a chrome-and-glass table with chrome-and-leather chairs. We now made love on gray-and-red plaid designer sheets. Jack's friend hadn't told his girlfriend about our using the place. We were pleased by that. As we drained the champagne from a bottle in the refrigerator and finished the Brie, we smiled. The chance to assume the role of interlopers honed a new edge on the afternoon.

The days away from Jack had given me time to want him again. On the night before Jack called, I'd made love to Bill for the first time in weeks—and it had been astonishingly good. Missing Jack allowed me to succumb to Bill's tenderness, and Bill's tenderness had made me wake up hungry for Jack's urgency, for Jack's ability to
forget I was there—so that I could get lost too—so that I could savor sex without a relationship attached to it.

Jack's friend's girlfriend had left a hair dryer on the bathroom counter, so I washed my hair in the shower. When I came back into the bedroom, Jack was still in bed. He'd turned on the television and was watching a soap. There's something too quiet about soaps. There's almost no modulation in the voices even though dreadful things are supposed to be happening to the characters.

“These shows make me uneasy,” I said, pushing aside a heart-shaped box of chocolates. It was Valentine's Day and Jack had presented me with the box right before we began making love. I'd laughed. It had seemed a sweet and slightly campy thing for him to do. We'd eaten chocolates, swapping fillings as we kissed. Now I put the lid on the box and slipped on my blouse.

“Me too.” He swung his legs over the edge and sat hands on knees. “I don't know why I turned it on.”

“To watch adultery being sanctified by the networks.”

He didn't seem to hear but kept his eyes on the screen. Two women, both blondes, looked back at us as if seeing us in the haze of a crystal ball. “My wife went to the doctor yesterday,” he said after a moment. “She found a lump in her left breast.”

I felt as if he'd hit me. “They're mostly benign,” I said, catching my breath. “We just got a new report on breast lumps last week.”

“She had a mammogram. There's something there. She's going in for a biopsy tomorrow.”

“The prognosis for a cure with an early discovery is excellent,” I said. I felt dizzy. “I keep up on it. We get so many calls.”

“I guess you do.” He sighed and stood and put on his shirt. “I'm trying not to worry.”

“She'll be fine,” I said as I tucked in my blouse. I wondered if I sounded convincing.

He walked around the bed and stood in front of me, his flaccid penis hanging between the tails of his open shirt. I placed my hand on his thigh, gently, non-erotically, the first stage of a pat. He bent and kissed the top of my head. “Thank you,” he said.

“I'm sorry, Jack.”

“I haven't touched her breasts in months,” he said and turned, giving me his rear, and stepped into his shorts.

The public library is right downtown. Walnut Grove is a moderate-sized California city in a coastal valley. A few years ago to counter the bloom of shopping centers on the outskirts, the city fathers redeveloped this part of town, which meant tearing down a lot of fine buildings and turning the old courthouse into the kind of mall where pricey little stores sell things that I can only imagine buying as wedding presents for someone I hardly know. But then I'm not a shopper. The former lawyers' offices and coffee shops are now restaurants and antiques stores. The winos who recently roamed this section had disappeared—rounded up and shot, for all I know.

After work, I had decided to walk to a candy store to buy Bill a box of chocolates. He'd be pleased, touched even. On my way I passed a bar that had once been the place where reporters hung out. Now the old plaster had
been sandblasted away and the place was all rose-colored brick, brass, and indirect lighting. Its current owner staged a weekly lingerie show during happy hour. As I passed by the doors, the lingerie show had ended and people were leaving. Some stood, glowing with alcohol, just outside in the mild February evening.

Two men bracketed a woman beside the door. I saw her face, a flash of pink, between the backs of the men as I came closer and I could tell from the postures exactly what was going on. Each of the men was trying to win the woman for the rest of the evening. Seen from the rear, one of the two men struck me as a slightly taller and older version of Jack. He wore the same sort of sports coat Jack would choose, the same cut of slacks, the same kind of shoes, and he had the same expansive gestures and the same confiding hunch of the shoulders. As the man turned enough so that I could see his profile, I realized with a start that it was my father.

I veered and crossed the street, skirting a car backing into a parking space. I hadn't seen my father since Christmas eve when he'd come for dinner—my mother always came on Christmas day—bringing his latest girlfriend, a listless woman, younger than me, who was a secretary at the Chrysler dealership where he was in his own evaluation “the top man on the floor.” My father is shameless and I didn't want to have to run into him on the street and endure is glib patter intended to disguise the fact that I had come upon him outside a bar trying to score.

He left us when I was ten and my sister, Maureen, was twelve. I know that he would say that he didn't leave us, that he left our mother, but Maureen and I had a hard time not feeling that we shared our mother's fate—which
seemed not like a fate then but a punishment. All three of us had done something wrong and all three of us were being banished for misdeeds—only we stayed and he was the one who was gone.

Not that he'd ever been around all that often. Even then he was “in sales” and a traveler. But when he was home, he was unmistakably there—a presence, a force—making jokes, flirting with me and Maureen, calling us his sweethearts, his true loves and then plunging into a sulk because no one appreciated him. During these times he would refuse to talk and my mother, as if he were deaf not dumb, would raise the pitch of everything she said, banging pots and pans onto the table for punctuation.

“You see how she drives me out of the house,” he'd say, putting on his hat and jacket in the open door while the wind off the ocean pushed the fog into the room.

We lived in San Francisco then in the Richmond district on the bottom floor of one of those countless pallid houses, proper and domestic, in which our kind of people lived. Jack Duggan had grown up not far away. Four years older than me, he'd gone to the same high school as my boy cousins, and this evening I'd thought of him when I'd seen my father's back.

My hand was shaking as I handed the woman in the tidy white dress the twenty-dollar bill and it shook as I took the red heart-shaped box from her in the shop smelling of chocolate. There was a crush of people. I wondered how many of those waiting on the black-and-white tiles for their numbers to be called were like me—like Jack Duggan. I wondered how many heart-shaped boxes my father had bought that day.

Bill sat on a stool in the kitchen watching basketball on the small television. He grinned when I pulled the box
of candy from the large canvas book sack I carry. Bill and I had made a pact a long time ago not to honor public holidays, and here I was breaking the rules. I could tell he was delighted. I let him kiss me, holding me against the refrigerator, tilting up my head, and sliding his tongue between my teeth. His lips went along my chin, down my neck. I felt his erection growing as he pressed against me and I wondered if my father had ever wanted to cry at times like this.

“The nets are too low,” I said.

“Ummmh?”

“Basketball.” I gently pushed him away. “I don't get basketball anymore.”

We drank vodka and orange juice at the round glass table overlooking the Jacuzzi, which overlooked the county administration center. We hadn't touched each other yet. Jack was pale. He mixed the first drink and swallowed it in the kitchen, then he mixed another for himself and one for me. I hadn't had lunch. I sliced through yesterday's French bread that sat on the table. Outside, the rain turned the mountains into smudges.

“The doctor went into her armpit and took a sample of the nodes there,” he said. “He found cancer in her lymph system. She's at what they call Stage Four. They're going to remove the breast tomorrow and then we'll see what the next treatments are.”

“It's really bad then?”

He finished the drink and got up and walked to the sliding glass door. “It's not good.” He banged his fist on the wall. “I don't know why the hell she waited so long.”

“She'd known it was there?”

“Yes.” He banged again. The framed Georgia O'Keeffe poster of the interior of a calla lily tilted over the leather couch. “Yes, yes, yes. She's not talking about it to me but she's known for a while. That's what the doctor told me when he called me at work. She'd been feeling it there for months, running her fingers over it—fondling it.”

“What would you like us to do?” I chewed the bread but it wouldn't go down my throat.

He turned to me, surprised, and didn't answer.

“I mean do you want to keep this up—what we're doing—seeing each other?” It was obvious that this hadn't occurred to him yet. It was as if I had become, like his job, another part of his life. My stomach knotted.

“Of course,” he said. “Sure.”

“Fine.” I went to the bedroom and took off my clothes and got under the sheets, but he didn't follow as he usually did. I waited, stretching under the sheets, lifting the comforter with my toes. The room seemed wet, as if the rain had found its way in. The sheets clung heavily, weighted with dampness. After a few moments, he came in and sat on the bed. “I can't right now,” he said. “I want to but I can't right now.”

“I understand.” I pulled the sheet up to my chin and lay like a mummy. I'd never felt so naked. He put his hand on my shoulder as if I were the one who was ill, as if I were Roxie. I wanted to shrug off his hand. I wanted him to go away. I wanted more than anything to get dressed alone and leave by myself.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, letting out a breath. “
I
don't even understand.” He gripped my shoulder harder. I pulled from his grip, turned back the sheet, and moved to make room for him. He lowered himself and lay down without
even taking off his shoes. Neither of us moved until the alarm that we set to remind us that we had lives to return to began to buzz.

He called me at work the next morning and said he wanted to see me at lunch. We met outside the condominium door. He had trouble getting the key in the lock. His distress made him desperate. As soon as we were inside the door, he began to pull up my skirt. We made love not in bed but on the carpet in the living room with the draperies open and the louvers that protected the balcony from the eyes at the administration center open as well.