A Small Indiscretion (24 page)

F
RIDAY
. Two more days until the girls are finally home from their week away with your father. I checked the weather in Wisconsin this morning. It snowed there last night. Here, on the other hand, it has turned unseasonably hot—hotter than it ever was last summer.

Last summer. That’s where I’ve been this morning, in my mind. It’s where I always seem to be when I am not explicitly somewhere else. Today I am inside an evening in mid-August, three weeks before your accident. It’s a small evening, a small memory—more a memory of sound and touch than of images—one I could have captured even if my eyes had been closed.

I was in the kitchen with the girls. Dinner was in the oven. Clara was at the table making pencil drawings. I’d given her a good sketch pad and a set of pencils when she turned nine, and she’d been drawing all summer, making a study of photographs of people she found online, not their whole bodies, but individual elements. Knees and ankles. Chins and necks and elbows. Knuckles and noses. Braided hair. Eyes with precisely drawn lashes. Mouths full of surprisingly realistic teeth. Tacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen, the drawings were accumulating into a disembodied collage that was both
bizarre and beautiful. Later, when you were in the hospital, Clara made a sketch of a human kidney she copied from the book your father published on the subject. It’s still pinned up in the kitchen, not a piece of you, but a reminder of the piece you were missing.

I did not sketch humans, or their parts, when I was Clara’s age—she must have inherited her fascination with the intricacies of the human body from your father—but I did like to draw. I drew the plain objects I found around me: teapots, vases, tables, bottles, a stack of dinner plates needing to be washed, a tin garbage can waiting to be dragged to the curb. I sketched labels for our jars of honey and our pickled vegetables and my father’s home-brewed beer, and later, of course, I sketched lights.

That evening last August, Polly sat on the floor listening to a book on tape. I kept asking her to turn the volume down, but she kept complaining she couldn’t hear, and turning it up again. She wanted to use earbuds, but I’d read they caused hearing damage in children, and I wouldn’t let her.

I didn’t hear your car, Robbie. I didn’t hear the door open, but I heard the squeak of the piano bench as you sat down to play. I stood in the doorway of the living room. I hadn’t heard you play the piano in years, and I listened for a long time before you knew I was there. I could see the top of your dark head, and though I could not see your hands, I knew what they looked like—I knew the precise way they curved when you played, and I knew how long your fingers were, and how well trained to transform the room with music, as you were doing now.

You stopped playing finally, and looked up.

“What was that?” I asked you.

“Nothing. Just fooling around.”

“You were improvising?”

“I guess you could call it that,” you said. “There’s a piano in the house in Berkeley. I’ve just been messing around.”

“It was nice.”

“It was nothing complicated, but thanks.”

“What brings you to the city?”

“I swam laps at the Y. I had a couple of hours to kill. I hope it’s okay I came by.”

“Of course it’s okay.”

Polly came in and climbed into your lap on the piano bench. “Teach me,” she said.

You placed Polly’s thumb on middle C. I heard your father’s car pull into the driveway. The dogs heard, too, and leapt to the front door to greet him. He stepped inside, ignoring the dogs until they sat, as he had trained them to do. Their tails thumped wildly on the floor while he patted them hello.

When you were three and we got our first dogs, I thought the training regimen your father imposed on the poor puppies was crazy. I thought it was your father’s way of exerting absolute control over an element of our household—which fell by then mostly under my jurisdiction. But in time, I understood that well-trained dogs simply made him happy. Dogs he could walk on a city sidewalk without a leash. Dogs who would automatically sit at every crosswalk, and heel without ever being given a command. The elegance of it pleased him, the magic of shaping behavior with patience, and consistency, and gentle but unwavering discipline. It worked with you, to a certain extent, when you were small.

Your father had no real model for fatherhood. He had been raised by his mother in the seventies, and her philosophy had been that discipline ought to be shrugged off along with everything else her generation had deemed limiting. He’d spent much of his time with the family who owned the adjacent farm, breeding and training dogs. Dogs came naturally to him, as did very young children. Crying did not ruffle him. Tantrums did not deter him. He stayed the course. He taught you to follow the rules, and usually you did. Then
you grew up. When you turned eleven, obeying your father ceased to make you happy, and our household was thrown into disarray. That was a difficult year. Then Clara was born, and Polly, and we were outnumbered, and your father softened. Or maybe it was only that Clara and Polly were girls.

Your father smiled at you and Polly now, and at Clara, who had set her sketch pad aside and joined you at the piano. He walked toward me, his wing tips making the sound they always did on the hardwood floor—the contented thud of another workday ending, and another evening in the life of our family beginning. He laid his lips on mine, and they made the smallish sound of a perfunctory kiss. If the kiss was perfunctory, though, the hug was not. He opened his arms and enveloped me. He crushed me against his barrel chest until the rest of the world was silenced. He always held me that way a little longer than he needed to, offering certain evidence that after the day apart, I was still loved. I closed my eyes and felt the coolness of his cheek against mine. I had dreamt again, the night before, of Patrick. I had felt the old stab of helpless longing. The longing had visited me on and off through the day, and it was only now, in your father’s arms, that it finally departed.

Your father released me. Polly played another note. Clara took over at the piano and started to play chopsticks. You stood up.

“Are you staying for dinner?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got plans,” you said.

“Anything exciting?”

“I’m meeting Emme for dinner in the Mission,” you said, with the studied nonchalance you first perfected in high school.

I paused. She hadn’t mentioned it to me that morning at the store. She had barely mentioned you all summer, though I knew you two had become friends of some kind. A tick of worry set off in my head, steady and even as a metronome. But I suppose I chose not to hear
it. Because who was I to question you? It was not as if you were married, or being indiscreet. It was not as if you were living with one person and wanting another.

I
SIT DOWN
at the kitchen table now, and listen for the story to start up again in my head. One of the dogs whines in his sleep. The other thumps his tail, as if in sympathy. I begin to make my pen move across the page. I try to be again the girl I was some twenty years ago, falling in love with your father with the same heart that was breaking as I said goodbye to Patrick. I try to stand inside my boots that evening at the Bloody Stream when Patrick told me that Malcolm was dead.

He filled in the details of the morning Malcolm died. He told me that right after he’d written his note to me, when he was just about to leave the penthouse for the airport, the porter downstairs had delivered a message from Louise with the news that Malcolm was very, very ill, and with a request that Patrick collect Daisy from the train.

Patrick told me he’d tried to rouse me. He’d shaken me and talked directly into my ear, but I’d remained passed out cold. On his way out, he’d asked the porter to inform me of the news as soon as I came downstairs. But of course the porter never saw me, since I left through the back door. Patrick had tried to call the penthouse late that morning, when phone service was restored, but I never answered. That was the call that shocked the phone into life just as I was making my escape.

When there was nothing left to tell me, Patrick embraced me, then held me at arms’ length. He looked toward Jonathan who was sitting at the table taking it all in, and he embraced me again, long and hard, in a final farewell.

T
HAT NIGHT, AFTER
we returned to Dublin from Howth, I lay next to Jonathan in our shabby hotel room, listening to him sleep, feeling a thousand feelings, none that I could name. I slipped out of bed and dressed and crept down the stairs of the hotel, then walked the streets of Dublin alone.

I don’t know how long I walked. I know I went into a pub. I know I drank until the pub shut. Would I never learn that this was the way not to gain clarity but to obliterate it? In my daypack was a notebook with lined paper and my little address book. I sat at the bar and wrote Louise a letter. I don’t remember what I wrote, so I have no way to explain myself now. I can only speculate. I can only try to hurl myself back and ask what could possibly have possessed me to do such a thing. Maybe I stuffed in it all the feelings I couldn’t put anywhere else. I felt at the center of the tragedy. I felt responsible, and the only way to shed that burden was to share it, and the only person I could share it with was the one person who would have been better off not knowing the thing I had to confess. But did I confess it? Did I come right out and apologize to Louise for consummating the flirtation that had been going on between her husband and me for months? Did I write that he had told me, breathlessly, that he loved me? Did I say that I suspected, given what had happened, that the breathlessness was not about love at all, but the result of too much blood pumping through his veins and pooling at the base of his brain? Did I tell her that he’d cried out when he came, and that I wondered, now, whether it was not in ecstasy but in pain, as his body began the protest that would kill him?

Did I—God forgive me—tell her about Patrick and me? Did I feel the need to set her straight on that score, too?

I hope I never have to know.

I send myself back to the bar in Dublin. I fish an envelope from my backpack and scrawl out the address from my address book. I tell the bartender the whole story. He gives me two postage stamps he assures me will carry my letter to London. I walk purposefully out of the pub and stick the letter in the first mailbox I find. When I wake up in the morning next to your father, the incident is like one of your coma dreams last fall, a drama that felt very real but that I hoped, desperately, had played out only in my mind. I lay there trying to remember what message had seemed so urgent the night before, so pressing that I had to set it down and send it before Malcolm’s body began to turn to dust.

“It’s the last day of the year,” Jonathan announced.

The last day of the year, I thought to myself, and too late to get the letter back. Confessions. For whose benefit besides one’s own?

T
HE LAST DAY
of the year. The first day of heartbreak.

Not over Malcolm, I am ashamed to admit. I did not grieve for Malcolm on anyone’s behalf, because I could not get a purchase on the idea that he was dead; I kept forgetting it was true.

I claimed the heartbreak for myself—because I’d lost Patrick to Mary McShane.

I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half.

W
E TOOK A
train from Dublin that last day of December, then a ferry and another train to London. We arrived late, and spent what remained of New Year’s Eve at the boardinghouse in Victoria. We shared a bottle of champagne. We went for a walk at midnight. I did
not enjoy it, not even after the champagne. London was full of ghosts. Not just Malcolm’s, but Patrick’s, too. And even Louise’s. In the archeology of my history, it was time for the European period to be buried under rubble and dust. It was time to move on, and I did. The drama, the grief, the residue of those unions was tossed away in the name of migration and progress.

Or so I believed. Did I really believe it?

I really did.

J
ONATHAN HAD A
seat on a flight to Kathmandu. He wanted me to join him. So I went. Why not?

I did not want to go home. I could not stay in London. And I knew that it was only with Jonathan at my side that I might be able to fend off the ghosts and be happy. There was also by then a feeling between us, not a promise to stay together but the impossibility of imagining any circumstance that would allow us to part. I can’t explain it any better than that. I’d never experienced it before. He claimed he had not, either. The future had grabbed hold of us, whether we were ready for it or not—and we knew only the half of it.

I had saved money working for Malcolm, and I insisted on paying for my flight to Nepal. We packed up my things and shipped my boxes home to my mother. I called her to tell her to watch for them, and I dumped out the rest of my news. My boss had died of a stroke. I no longer had a job. I had met someone in Ireland—a doctor from Wisconsin—and I was going to do some traveling with him. We were flying to Nepal to go trekking, then taking a bus to India. I thought the fact that he was a doctor would be some compensation, a salve to the wound of worry I was opening by removing myself farther afield.