Before You Know Kindness (7 page)

“Why didn’t you clean them off then? Or ask her to?”

“I did clean them. I didn’t disinfect them. It never crossed my mind they’d have to share close quarters with my clothes.”

“Fine, I’ll put them in a plastic bag in my suitcase. You take the helmet.”

And so he had removed his shirts and his pants—khakis and shorts and even a pair of golf slacks—from his suitcase, stuffed the helmet with his underwear and socks, and then wedged everything back inside his very well-traveled American Tourister twenty-inch Cabin Carry-On. It wasn’t nearly as neat as it had been, and so he’d spent the rest of the morning seething—more at himself than at her because he knew he had overreacted. But the end result was the same: a tense and wearisome silence. He retreated into the quiet of their two cats, pulling a dining room chair over to the living room couch on which they were dozing in the sun and noiselessly running his fingers over their fur. Then he reread for the third time the note they would be leaving for the teenage girl on their floor who was going to feed the animals and change their litter box. It was a complicated set of instructions, because it wasn’t easy to keep a cat vegan.

There was no dog in their life and he wished that there were. Unfortunately, once in a mood of self-righteous obstinacy, he’d proclaimed their apartment was too small for one. He’d insisted it would be cruel to coop one up for a whole day there. He no longer believed that (had he ever?), but he was, he knew, disablingly—perhaps self-destructively—stubborn.

Now on the plane he resolved he would behave better. He reached across the aisle to feel (at once so like and unlike that of a cat) the soft down on Catherine’s wrist and her arm, bare even in the chill of this claustrophobic passenger cabin. Lightly he stroked the skin just above her thumb and along the back of her hand. Though the house in New Hampshire belonged to Mrs. Seton, he had been coming here for two decades, and it was as close to a familial motherland as he had: a place with memories and roots that transcended the itinerant nature of his own suburban upbringing. He loved the house, he believed, more than did his wife and his brother-in-law, who had known it their entire lives and now took it for granted, and at least as much as his mother-in-law, who slipped into a life there each summer with the same blissful sigh she’d exhale when she’d plunge into the crisp waters of Echo Lake.

He gave Catherine’s hand a small squeeze, but she continued to read. She was still angry with him. Once they were on the ground and he wouldn’t have to shout, he would apologize to her for being a . . . a jerk. Yes, that was right. A jerk.

From the intercom speaker above them he heard a series of scratchy, incomprehensible prerecorded syllables—there was no flight attendant on this route—and he knew it was the message reminding them to have their tray tables locked in their upright positions and their seats fully forward, because they were about to land.

AT THE RENT-A-CAR COUNTER,
while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half—a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs—Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother’s answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o’clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up.

Spencer had apologized and she was grateful. But only to an extent. She still wasn’t exactly sure what she should say because she was filled with a nauseating, almost debilitating sense of dread that her marriage was . . . winding down. And she was scared. She could no longer see anything behind Spencer’s eyes but annoyance—and Lord knows how she hated this word—
issues.
She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word—
issues
—as a euphemism for both actual crises and petty discontents. Instead of
challenge,
a word that Catherine knew other consultants depended upon as their substitute for weakness—as in “We have myriad strengths and a couple of small challenges to address”—this trainer savored the businesslike spitefulness of
issue
. Like
agenda,
it was a word that purported to sound neutral, but in truth was two syllables with inherently negative connotations: There really was no such thing as a
good
issue. It gave the woman the conversational upper hand with the school’s teachers and administrators, implying at once that the faculty and staff had problems, while suggesting that she would never approach them in a manner that was overtly condescending. Patronizing? Yes. Condescending? Only if you thought for a moment about what the doctrinaire pedant really was saying.

Well, clearly, she and Spencer had
issues,
and they had only gotten worse since Charlotte had left for her grandmother’s house in the country. Catherine had expected the time alone would give the two of them a chance to reconnect. They’d go to movies and dinner together, just the two of them, and perhaps he would relax and they would talk about . . . about everything. What demons were driving his temper. Why he could be as confrontational with his wife and daughter as he was with associations of big game hunters. Why he had become so focused on work that he could practically ignore Charlotte for weeks: He would jet to Washington (a presentation on the evils of biomedical animal research to the minions of some Senate committee) or Omaha (a press conference about the practices of a company that specialized in mail-order steak) or Sarasota (something about the treatment of circus animals) and then talk to his daughter when he returned home with about the same conversational involvement that he demonstrated with telemarketers. What happened to the days when he would whisk Charlotte off to a concert or museum or one of the Broadway shows that she loved? Patiently help her use the Internet to research school papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, the dolphin’s glorious brain, or the reasons why we have seasons?

Likewise, he was neglecting her, too. His wife. In the two weeks that Charlotte had been in the country, Catherine had barely seen her husband before eight or eight thirty at night, an hour that felt particularly late because she was through with work until the middle of August, when she would begin preparing her classroom in earnest for the fall. She saw friends and she played tennis and she read on the grass in Central Park. But she didn’t see much of her husband.

Sometimes she found herself flirting. She would flirt with Hank Rechter, the fifty-five-year-old headmaster of a school on the West Side—not, thank God, Brearley—when she would see him jogging near Belvedere Castle late in the afternoon. It was an amiable flirtation because he was a neighbor in their building who was as happily married as everyone supposed she was, because his smooth business suits fit his wondrous shoulders like slipcovers, because he never seemed to sweat when he ran. Because he always found a way to touch her with his fingertips that was at once chummy and rakishly inappropriate. Sometimes when he would see her in the park he would sit down on the grass beside her, and she sensed that she was speaking to this man in the sort of breathless, whispery voice her husband no longer heard.

On occasions, she knew, she had flirted that spring as well with Chip Kinnell, the widower father of her fourteen-year-old Brontë scholar, Lindy Kinnell, stretching out their parent-teacher conferences and their visits in the hallways on those mornings he would bring his daughter to school. Kinnell was a rarity in the arbitrage circles in which he traveled: He read fiction that didn’t have spies and submarines in it and could talk with Catherine—abstractedly fingering a purple Hermes tie patterned with, of all things, baby ducks—about the books he was reading now and the books he had read aloud to his wife while she was dying.

At least once, she feared, Charlotte had watched her in a conversation with Chip and grown suspicious. But suspicious of what? She was doing nothing wrong. One afternoon Charlotte had eavesdropped on a discussion she was having with Eric Miller, another English teacher (a
younger
English teacher; Catherine was almost certain that Eric hadn’t hit thirty yet) at Brearley, and it was clear that her daughter hadn’t understood that sometimes a harmless flirtation only enhances a friendship. Deepens the camaraderie.

It was, however, completely innocuous. All of it. All of them. At least that’s what she told herself.

And she couldn’t help but believe that if Spencer hadn’t become so damn mercurial, she wouldn’t have begun taking small comforts from the attention that Hank Rechter, Chip Kinnell, or Eric Miller paid her. She wouldn’t have paid so much attention to them. She wouldn’t have talked to them about . . . meat. Yes indeed, Hank and Eric and Chip were carnivores, and they knew what her husband did (everyone knew what her husband did) and they would tease her about it. They would make jokes about souvlaki and shish kebab, and Eric would try to interest her in the Sabrett hot dogs that were sold from a cart outside on the street.

She hoped this coming vacation would offer a meaningful reconciliation with Spencer, though she had to wonder how you could reconcile with somebody who didn’t even know you were apart. Earlier this week she had imagined that with Spencer away from work in Sugar Hill—in a corner of the world that he loved—she would be able to talk to him. Perhaps he would talk to her. Perhaps they would finally work through their . . . issues. Now, however, she doubted that would happen, at least in quite the way she had supposed. Now she guessed if they talked about anything, it would be because she had chosen this week to see if dread could be transformed into something like relief when she broke the news to him that she simply could not continue any longer as she was—as they were—and she wanted change. Counseling, perhaps, though even counseling was a capitulation, a collapse of her adolescent imaginings of what her marriage would be. And maybe she wanted something more than counseling or change. Maybe she wanted out. Yes, that was it, all right. At the moment, at least, after his appalling behavior when they were packing this morning—the clock, the coffee, his retreat to their cats—she absolutely could not stand what their marriage had become and she wanted out.

Reflexively she picked her tennis racket up off the top of her suitcase so she would have something to do with her hands now that she had stowed her cell phone away, and much to her surprise she found herself volleying in slow motion. She’d played a lot of tennis that summer with her friends who were women, and she realized that she was looking forward to playing now with her brother and—if they were speaking—with Spencer. She was looking forward to playing with men. When she’d been younger she’d been an exceptional player: a high school standout in New York, ranked in Massachusetts when she was at college. She’d learned to play summers as a child at that goofy club her own grandfather had helped found near their country home in Sugar Hill, hitting balls for hours at a time with the different young adults who would parade through there year after year masquerading as tennis pros. Most of them were college students—and, she knew now, mediocre tennis players at best—but to a nine-year-old they seemed the height of glamour and sophistication and talent, and she had only fond memories of her afternoons on the clay courts in her shorts.

Her first summer here with Spencer, when the two of them were working at area restaurants, she’d destroy him on those very courts at least every other day before they’d go to work in the late afternoon, and the fact that he never seemed to mind endeared him to her. He could volley with her to help her keep her stroke in shape, but he rarely took more than a game from her each set they played, and she didn’t believe that he ever once broke her serve.

It was funny: The man could not bear to lose an argument—
would not lose an argument
—but he was perfectly content losing to her at tennis. To his brother-in-law at golf, to his mother-in-law at badminton. Suddenly, she found this athletic acquiescence of his disturbing. Suddenly, she found all of him physically less attractive than she once had. He seemed wide-faced these days, especially now that his hair had rolled back to the top of his head, and his ears looked like uncooked Chinese dumplings. He was heavier than in college (but weren’t all men?), and sometimes she thought the dark hair that once had fallen across his forehead had migrated to his back, his shoulders, and the insides of his ears. She knew he was fierce at work—spirited with politicians, feisty with the press—and though all too often he brought that fierceness home with him, he never brought it to the tennis court.

A thought came to her: She did things with Spencer that didn’t interest her—such as that vegetable garden—for the sad reason that it was easier to do things she disliked than to bicker. This couldn’t be healthy, and it struck her as yet another indication that her marriage might be over. It was possible, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s what happened to some marriages: They just ran out of energy and forward momentum, and both halves of the equation no longer saw the future as any more promising than the present. This notion made her even more queasy, and she tried to tell herself that she was wrong, that she didn’t really want out, that this was all just a bad patch. All marriages had them. Still, she wondered if Spencer’s motivation for playing tennis was similar to her involvement in his vegetable garden: He did it despite little enthusiasm because playing was easier than arguing.

No, that couldn’t be right. Tennis for Spencer was an element of the world of Sugar Hill, an important component of the spell the place held for him. She knew he associated it with their first summers there together, his introduction to New Hampshire.

Maybe, she decided, focusing now with real effort on the week and a half before her instead of on the bigger problems posed by her marriage, if her brother and sister-in-law were willing to drive back to the club after dinner, she and Spencer could squeeze in an hour of doubles tonight—or, perhaps, they could even get in a game before dinner if she could catch John and Sara before they left the pool for the day. Maybe on vacation Spencer would find it within himself to care about something other than the plight of a bullhook-pricked circus elephant and actually play to win for a change.