American Appetites (18 page)

Mornings, Glynnis's absence took on a different quality. Ian dressed as quickly as he could, avoiding mirrors, out of a fear of seeing his wife's reflection behind him. In his bathroom, running water or showering, he heard, or believed he heard, her voice on the other side of the door; it was a habit of Glynnis's to speak to him at such times, when he could not properly hear her.

Whether he had slept fitfully or had not slept at all, he got up each morning at 6
A.M.
; he was eager, even hopeful, to begin the day. Unless it was raining hard he went for a run of some two or three miles along the unpaved residential roads and in the woods down behind Pearce Drive, desperate to get in motion, to work off the wire-tight tension in his limbs. Like an aging athlete he prepared for the long, the incalculably long and dangerous day, in which anything might happen for the simple reason that it could not be prevented from happening.

On the morning of May 12 he rose at his usual time, and put on the soiled clothes he'd worn the morning before, and went out to run along the route he'd run the morning before: filling his lungs with air; working his heart up into a fast percussive beat; taking no interest in where he ran, or over what familiar scene his eyes passed; aware of, but indifferent to, the pains darting through his feet, calves, thighs, back, and the taste of something black and tarry at the back of his mouth. Once he began his run nothing mattered but the beat: keeping to the beat, making no allowance for pain or shortness of breath. He recalled the tragic case, for so it was locally called, of a younger Institute colleague, an urban studies specialist, who, in the habit of jogging for an hour each morning on the Institute grounds, and seemingly in excellent physical condition, was found dead one morning a few years ago on the reservoir embankment. Probable cause of death was cardiac failure, coronary thrombosis: a shock to the community, since the victim had been no more than forty years old.

In a fairy tale, Ian thought, he might be allowed to exchange his life for Glynnis's. But the somber logic of this world held no such recourse.

That morning he ran a little farther than usual, drawn, in fact, to the grassy, uneven path that circled the reservoir, though running here was tricky, hard on one's feet and ankles. The water's surface was placid, as always, mirroring a cloudy, mottled sky, that look of density in a single flat plane; Ian stared at it, willing himself to be consoled, transformed. When Glynnis was recovered . . . he would be a better man. When Glynnis came home from the hospital . . . when she was recovered . . . they would travel, to Italy perhaps. It was a decade at least since they had taken a trip not related to—indeed, centered upon—a professional commitment of Ian's.

He left the reservoir, headed home, running up the long slow incline back to Pearce Drive, the rhythm of his stride slightly broken, his back and sides drenched with sweat. Midway along a narrow curving street called Lombardy one of Ian's neighbors drove by and might have waved a tentative hand in greeting, but Ian stared resolutely at the ground before him and did not acknowledge it.

It gave him pain to remember, as, at such times, he could not help remembering, that their neighbors the Dewalds had called the police . . . and that the entire neighborhood must know. All of Hazelton must know. Glynnis would be furious, her pride greatly wounded. How dare the Dewalds, who were not even friends of theirs, poke their noses into a private quarrel; how dare they go so far as to telephone the police? Glynnis had always distrusted Audrey Dewald's intermittent attempts at friendship: the way, uninvited, the woman dropped by the house at an inconvenient hour with a question for Glynnis or a favor to beg of her; it maddened Glynnis that she borrowed cookbooks and was careless about returning them. Jackson Dewald, her husband, a man of Ian's approximate age, was a highly successful stock market analyst who seemed to have taken an obscure offense at a casual remark of Ian's made at a cocktail party years ago, to the effect that Ian hadn't time to think about money; he hardly even had time to think about things that
mattered
. Really, Dewald had said stiffly, it must be lovely to be so superior to us all. Ian had laughed, taking the exchange as a joke, and said, Why, yes, it
is
.

Ian's heart beat hard in dislike. Goddamn them: I will never forgive them.

IT HAD BEEN
eighteen days thus far; today would be the nineteenth.

At the house he would shower, shave, dress, make coffee—not fresh, of course: that was Glynnis's province—unless Bianca had already done so. He would get in the Honda and drive the familiar route to the hospital and park in the familiar high-rise garage and take his place at Glynnis's bedside and resume his vigil. How long can you keep this up? one of the nurses had asked, meaning, Ian was sure, no harm, but Ian was stung and said curtly, As long as my wife needs me.

Ian turned up the graveled drive to his house, running rather sluggishly now, his legs aching and eyes stinging with sweat. He had gone out at 6:10 and was returning at 6:55, slower than yesterday's time: an ordeal to no specific purpose, like so many, now, in his life, but one that must be done. He saw Bianca waiting for him, in the driveway, and knew that something was wrong. Standing there, barefoot, in the gravel, in jeans pulled up over her nightgown (it appeared) and a shirt carelessly buttoned. Something was wrong, for why otherwise would the girl's hair be so disheveled, and tears shine on her face, with a look of anger?

1.

B
ianca wept in a fury of hurt: “I didn't say goodbye to her, Daddy! I didn't say goodbye to her!”

As if, she seemed to be thinking, he had. There came then the logic of what must be done, and what would be done, whether he wished it to be done or not, whether he was capable of doing it himself or not. And of course Ian McCullough was capable: assuming the role in their household that would in ordinary circumstances be Glynnis's . . . dealing with an emergency situation that required numerous telephone calls, and calm in the face of others' emotion, and decisions made without much, or any, deliberation; for there was no time for such a luxury now. The old habit of deliberation, of Ian McCullough's former life.

A. J. Braun & Sons, Funeral Directors, came highly recommended by those friends who knew about such things, and so Ian telephoned A. J. Braun & Sons and made the preliminary arrangements. (A $300 deposit would be sufficient, payable by check.) Then there was the task of securing a plot in the Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, which abutted on the fifty-acre Institute woods. (Another modest deposit was required, and, yes, Ian readily agreed, it would be practical to buy a family-sized plot of course.) Next he located the “last will and testament” of Glynnis McCullough, crammed inside a bloated file labeled, in Glynnis's precise hand,
HOUSEHOLD RECORDS—
that somber document Glynnis confessed to having signed without reading thoroughly. (Yet it was Ian's will that depressed her more. She could not bear to think that she would probably outlive him and end her life as a widow—“Isn't that the usual story? the statistically fated story?”—remembering their happiness together, and even their bouts of unhappiness, as the absolute core of her life, her life's very meaning.)

Friend after friend spoke of arranging for a memorial service for Glynnis, and of course Ian agreed, bemused at how immediately that prospect, so communal, so celebratory, came to the fore, as if to deflect them from the rawness of grief; as if a memorial service, weeks after the funeral, had the power of keeping Glynnis from completely dying, or from being declared dead.

(Roberta Grinnell and June Oliver volunteered to make the arrangements, with, of course, Ian's approval. This meant a consultation about dates, not unlike the circle's frequent consultation about dates for social occasions, and Ian found himself, as Ian often did, staring at the much-annotated calendar tacked to Glynnis's bulletin board in the kitchen. This document unnerved Ian with its suggestion of countless future commitments, its appearance, which the most superficial glance could not fail to absorb, of being a domestic variant of spinoza's fully determined universe, in which free will could not possibly exist, even as a speculative luxury. Though Glynnis's accident had occurred before the month had even begun, the majority of its days were taken, some with two- and even three-tiered obligations: mornings, afternoons, evenings, initials and abbreviations, some notations in ballpoint ink, others in pencil, with question marks; the final weekend was marked, simply,
BETTER HOMES & GARDENS—
the deadline, Ian assumed, for one of Glynnis's food articles. His instinct was to tell Roberta and June that there was no room in Glynnis's schedule for the memorial service, but he caught himself in time. The thirtieth, he said, looked fine.)

IT WAS NOT
Ian McCullough's own grief that frightened him but his daughter's.

His own, secreted inside him like a tumorous growth, he believed he could contain; there would be time for the thing to take root, to flourish, to dig down deep into the marrow of his bone, to seed itself throughout him: plenty of time. But Bianca's emotion was so immediate, so violent, so frenzied—she oscillated between periods of relative calm and sudden manic outbursts that seemed to take her, no less than her father, by surprise: throwing herself around the room, screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs,
No no no no no
, pounding at her thighs with her fists, tearing at her hair, at her clothes,
No no no no no!
Ian had to constrain her, hug her tight, tight, tight; he would not have thought he had more tears but tears sprang nonetheless from his eyes, and his face contorted, like Bianca's, in the rage of infantile grief:
No no no no no
.

She might lock herself in her bathroom, she might lock herself in her bedroom, or, repentant, apologize for “going crazy—I just don't know what comes over me.” She might drift about the house, or wash her hair, or stand in Glynnis's closet burying her face in Glynnis's things, or open a can of beer and swig it out of the can like a man, or run the vacuum cleaner until Ian's teeth grated, or make a quick telephone call to one of her friends, speaking in a low rapid undertone Ian had no urge to overhear. After one of her worst bouts of hysteria, when Ian feared she too might go crashing through a plate-glass window, the telephone rang and Bianca volunteered to answer it, panting, swollenfaced, disheveled, yet with enough presence of mind to speak clearly and even courteously—in Glynnis's very voice, in fact. “Yes, thank you. . . . Yes, we are, and yes, that's right, it's set for tomorrow morning, eleven o'clock . . . the Unitarian church on South Main, just past the square. . . . Yes, that's the one.”

IAN DRESSED HIMSELF
with slow dreamy fingers in his old pinstriped suit, the darkest suit he owned: Glynnis's choice and once quite handsome, though now the lapels were of an unfashionable width and the shoulder pads were bulkier than he recalled. A long-sleeved white cotton shirt that required cuff links, a dull darkly shiny tie; and as he stood before the mirror trying to knot the tie he saw Glynnis's shadowy figure behind him and steeled himself for her voice, raised more in surprise than in censure: Ian, are you serious? Why on earth are you wearing
that?

Her death was now publicly official: an obituary had appeared that morning in
The New York Times
, accompanied by a photograph Ian did not immediately recognize. Glynnis Ann McCullough, writer of popular cookbooks. Cause of death, complications following surgery. Married to the political scientist Ian J. McCullough, of the Institute for Independent Research in the Social Sciences, Hazelton-on-Hudson, New York. Survived by husband, daughter, sister.

Bianca carefully clipped the obituary. She said, with her short breathless laugh, “Mommy looks so beautiful here, doesn't she? Thank God.”

There had been nothing in the
Times
about a police investigation, which did not mean of course that there was no investigation, or would be none, only that the information had not been given. Ian thought, They will arrest me in the cemetery; that's the proper place.

Bianca's mourning costume, as she called it, consisted of a black silk shell and a matching jacket, quilted, with slightly puffed sleeves and tight cuffs, and a skirt of many ambiguous layers, black cotton, not altogether free of wrinkles, that fell unevenly to midcalf. The silk had belonged to Glynnis; the cotton was Bianca's own. She had brushed her long hair so harshly and flatly against her head it seemed devoid of color, and fastened it behind her ears with gold clips that struck Ian as familiar—hadn't he bought them for Glynnis, many years ago, when Glynnis had worn her hair to the waist? Marching in student antiwar demonstrations, picketing Dow Chemical? Bianca said, “What are you staring at, Daddy? Is something wrong?” Then, with a shift of direction very like her mother's, she said, “Daddy, what's that on your jaw? Did you cut yourself shaving?”

He had, he had. Tiny nicks in the flesh that emitted a few drops of blood and merely stung.

He went away and dabbed at his face with a wadded tissue, and when he returned some minutes later Bianca was still at the mirror in the front hall, still regarding herself critically. Her face was carefully made up, powdered, with a pale oysterish powder, and her eyes were outlined in black; her lips seemed fuller than usual, and thicker, an eerie frosted scarlet. Ian was startled, as he so often was, by what the popular press might call the miracle of cosmetics, strategically applied: no one could guess how his daughter had looked only the night before, red-eyed, puffy-faced, defiantly ugly. She had transformed herself into a good-looking, if rather hard-looking, woman in her early thirties.

As soon as Ian reappeared she said loudly, “One thing about a funeral in the morning—the rest of the day is likely to improve.” She laughed and leaned closer to the mirror, running a finger along the lower rim of an eye. If she caught her father's disapproving gaze, his look of hurt, she gave no sign; she wasn't that sort of daughter.