Bodies and Souls (35 page)

Peter had managed one more conversation with his son since the discussion with the principal of the high school, and that conversation had been pretty much of a deadlock. No, Michael was not planning to go to college. Yes, his decision was absolute, final; he had given it much thought. Yes, he intended to finish high school, he supposed, if only to keep his mother from being upset. No, he didn’t know what kind of work he’d do after high school. Did it matter? He just wanted something that would give him enough money to move out of his parents’ home and live in his own apartment. No, he wasn’t taking drugs. No, he wasn’t depressed. Yes, he was sorry to cause such pain, especially to his mother, but the honest truth was that he just didn’t want to go to college. He didn’t like studying. There were other things he’d rather do. Oh—work with the landscape contractor. Or with Chet Elliott down at the garage. He was pretty good with his hands and liked that kind of work.

During this conversation Peter sat still, vowing to remain calm in spite of his
amazement. He couldn’t have been more dismayed if Michael had suddenly begun speaking a foreign language.

“Well, son,” he said finally. “I guess you know I’m deeply disappointed by all this.”

“I know,” Michael said, and his voice was flat. As he spoke he did not in any way expose his feelings, neither distress nor triumph at hurting his parents in this way.

“I hope at least you’ll finish high school,” Peter said after a pause. “Your mother and I really want you to bring your grades up so that you can graduate.”

“I know you do,” Michael said, and proceeded, in silence, to stare his father down.

Peter did not know what to do. He spent his nights pacing his study and his days attempting to appear normal, as if that would make things fall into their normal places. But life was suddenly weighted. Everything resonated.

Just last night the family had been gathered around the dining room table for dinner, and it was a comfortable enough dinner. Lucy and Will filled the air with gossip and laughter and minor complaints about homework and ice skates. Patricia had served a thick fish stew with homemade bread and a green salad, and after the meal all five Taylors leaned back in their chairs for a moment, enjoying a full and agreeable silence. Then the children rose to clear the table while Patricia brought in homemade apple pie and ice cream for dessert. Peter watched Patricia cutting and serving the pie, handing the plates around to her family, and the three children talked, and the moment seemed calm.

“Hey, I heard a joke,” Michael said. “Jesus is crucified and goes to heaven, see, and he walks through the Pearly Gates and goes up to God. He says, ‘Hi, God!’ But God is looking real sad, so Jesus says, ‘Hey, God, what’s the matter? You sure do look sad.’ God says, ‘I am sad. I’ve made a son. I created him with my own hands. And now he’s dead.’ Jesus says, ‘Hey, God, you’re wrong.
I’m
your son, and I’m not dead!’ God looks at him. Jesus holds out his arms and says,
‘Father!’
And God holds out his arms and says, ‘Pinocchio!’ ”

Everybody laughed. Will, who was thirteen, even went into one of the laughing fits which had come on him at adolescence; he laughed so hard that tears streamed down his face and he had to be pounded on the back. Peter laughed, too, amused at the joke and wondering immediately if he could somehow work it into a sermon, when he was struck by a fresh doubt: had Michael been trying to tell him something? Was Michael saying
that fathers, even God, were incapable of recognizing their sons? Did Michael mean that Peter would prefer a wooden marionette to him? It was exhausting. Everything was fraught with significance.

Last night, for the fifth night in a row, Peter had waited until his house was dark and silent, then he rose from his bed, took up his robe, and went downstairs to his study. He could see by the moonlight that his study held peace. The afghan was folded neatly over the back of the leather sofa, his papers lay in neat piles at right angles to one another on his desk, and in the center of his desk, on the leather-rimmed blotter, lay his sermon, typed and corrected and waiting for Sunday morning. Peter stood for a moment, surveying this domain, his domain, his ordered sanctuary of a room which sat in the middle of his house like a staunch desert isle set down in a turbulent sea. He crossed to the window, and looked out at the world, and wondered if he was growing old. Why else should it calm him to be awake at night, when the house was silent and everything inside and out all muted into shades of gray? He had begun to appreciate the world at night, and in the winter, when snow made the world white, and in the summer, when everything was green. He liked seeing the world all of a piece, unified by color, unfurling away from him in a banner of visible unity. This flashy season, fall, disturbed him. In the daylight he could see the fields around Londonton stretching away from the town like a rumpled patchwork quilt: here a block of green, there a block of bronze, over there a forest of deciduous trees brandishing branches of crimson, scarlet, orange—colors of warning, colors of alarm. This fall did not make Peter feel nostalgic, nor did it make him feel chilled at the thought of the coming winter, the symbolic season of death. It made him think instead of how variegated the world was, how myriad and uncontrollable were the possibilities of life. How dangerous life was. He wanted to tuck away his family, all of them, into his house, and surround the house with snow so that they were all shut in, warm and safe. He wanted nothing golden glinting in the distance, beckoning his son away so soon. But surely these were an old man’s thoughts?

“Peter.”

Peter turned to see Patricia standing in the doorway in her blue cotton summer nightgown.

“Come in,” he said. “Join me. I can’t sleep.”

Patricia shut the door behind her. She crossed the shadowy room and stood at the other end of the long casement window. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

“The world,” Peter said. “I keep thinking how vast and dangerous it is. I’m afraid to let Michael wander out into it.”

Patricia laughed softly. “Peter,” she said, “Michael wants to get an apartment in town and work at a garage. I would hardly call that wandering out into the vast and dangerous world.”

“Why is he doing this to us?” Peter asked, and he softly hit the windowsill with his fist.

“He’s
not
doing this to
us
. He’s just doing it.”

“I want him to go to college.”

“I know you do. He knows you do. But it’s his life.”

“What does that mean—it’s
his life
? Who gave it to him? When did he gain control of it? Legally, I suppose it will be his life when he’s eighteen. Then he can get married, own land, be drafted. But I suppose if you want to get realistic about it, it was his life when he turned sixteen and got a driver’s license. Well, I guess if he has the right to go out and kill himself in a car at sixteen, he should have the right to ruin his life at seventeen.”

“If you’re going to look at it that way, Peter,” Patricia said, “then it was his life the day he learned to walk.”

She left the windowsill and crossed the room. “I think we both deserve a drink,” she said, and picked up the brandy decanter.

Peter was quiet for a moment, occupied with his thoughts, but he watched Patricia as she poured the brandy into glasses, and he could not help but notice how in the darkened room the light from the window caught and glinted off the cut glass, off the golden liquid, off Patricia’s pale and shining hair. Patricia brought him his glass, then went to the leather sofa and sank down in one corner of it, drawing her bare feet up under her, pulling the afghan down about her in a nest.

“It’s getting cold,” she said. “I’ll have to get out all our winter nightclothes. I need my good warm nightgowns.” She fussed about, wrapping the afghan over her shoulders, and it seemed to Peter as he watched that there was something ageless and endearing about his wife curled up like that with the afghan draped around her like a shawl. As she rearranged herself and the cover, her bare arms, neck, and feet shone smoothly, a wealthy substance, glossy against the muted leather and wool. She sat there smiling up at him, vivid, gleaming, real.

“It seems harder for me than for you,” Peter said. He sat down at the other end of the sofa, and sipped his brandy. What he wanted to do was believe that she was magic, eternal, that if he threw himself before his wife now and implored her, she could make things change.

“You expect more of him than I do,” Patricia said. “You want so desperately for us all to get things
right
.”

“What’s wrong with that? Of course I expect a lot. And I do all I can to provide every kind of assistance I know.”

“Yes, that’s true. You are wonderful that way. But do you think you might be a little limited in your views of what is right?”

Patricia smiled as she spoke, and she raised her glass to her lips. The afghan fell from one shoulder, exposing the bare flesh of her arm and neck and the soft blue cotton of her nightgown rode up a little, so that the smooth stretch of her leg gleamed.

Peter realized that he had not looked at his wife for a while. Their bodies were as familiar to each other as all the other daily things which dwelt where they belonged within their lives. And as he looked at Patricia, he saw how she had changed. She was forty-five, and still slim in her clothes, but her body had taken on a roundness and a soft solidity. He touched her knees carefully, then ran his hand up and down her leg for the warmth and the comfort.

“It’s possible, you know,” Patricia said, smiling at him from the other end of the sofa, “that your father wanted certain things of you. Perhaps he wanted you to stay on the farm, to follow in his work. Perhaps he was puzzled when you went off so readily into the dangerous world. Perhaps he was hurt because you left the farm so easily. That beautiful, safe home.”

Peter listened to his wife, but now the words were less important than her hushed, beguiling tone. It was almost as if she were singing him a song. Absentmindedly, he ran his hand from slender ankle up the swell of calf, over a silken knee and up her thigh. Here, at the apex of her legs, was a concentration point of body heat, and as naturally as any animal moving toward warm comfort, he extended his arm just a little farther until his hand came to rest in the heated hollow between her legs. She was naked. The sweet surprise of this made his heart thump. He pushed his hand against the furry swell of her crotch, and pushed again.

“Hey,” Patricia said, so softly that it was more an exhalation of breath than a
word.

“Hey,” Peter replied, with equal softness.

They smiled at each other in silence, and suddenly there they were: just Peter and Patricia, who loved each other. In one sleek and generous second, everything else in life fell away, leaving them alone in all time and space. Peter put his brandy snifter on the floor, turned to Patricia, and carefully pulled her hips down toward him, moving at the same time so that he could kneel on the sofa between her legs. Patricia held her arms up to him and he unsnapped the waistband of his pajamas and slid them down his hips, then gently lowered himself down over her. They moved together, moist and murmuring, smiling at each other, looking in each other’s eyes, pleased, happy.

Finally Peter just lay there, curled between Patricia’s legs, his head on her breast, her arms wrapped around his back. She stroked his arms and shoulders and smoothed his hair.

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you,” she answered.

They fell asleep like that in the shadowy room. At some point in the night they shifted positions so that Patricia could cover them with the afghan, but they didn’t really wake up until the strong morning light brightened the room. Then they sat up, feeling cramped from the strange positions. Patricia’s shoulders were chilled, and so were Peter’s feet. But they were happy.

“Well,” Peter said, adjusting his pajamas and robe.

“Well, yourself,” Patricia said.

“I’ll make coffee.”

“I’ll go shower and dress, then come down and make breakfast. It’s only seven-thirty. There’s no rush.” Patricia rose and stretched. “Oh, my aching back,” she said. “I’m getting too old for this.”

“Oh, no you’re not,” Peter replied, and wanted to embrace her again, but did not, because he felt suddenly and strangely shy, and strangely smug.

He had moved through the kitchen this morning like a traveler who has come home after a long and arduous journey. Each pedestrian household thing shone cleanly, and he felt great gratitude toward his wife for putting their house and their lives together with such grace. He dug a measuring cup into the ground coffee beans like a man digging into a treasure, and when the coffee was brewed and the rich aroma filled the air, he just
stood in the kitchen, smiling at the toaster and the butter dish, a man happy with his life.

Patricia came into the kitchen, wearing a quilted robe, her hair freshly shampooed. She smelled of herbs and perfume.

“Ummm, coffee,” she said.

Peter took down two mugs, poured the coffee, handed a mug to his wife. “I think you seduced me last night,” he said.

Patricia smiled. “Why, Peter, what a thought!”

“Did you have any ulterior motive?”

Patricia measured a spoon of shimmering white sugar into her mug. “Well,” she said, smiling at him, “perhaps when I first came down to the study I did think of distracting you from your worries about Michael. There are three other people in this family who want your attention, you know. But believe me, my love, after a while I wasn’t thinking anything at all.”

Patricia set her mug down on the table and came over to wrap her arms around Peter. They stood there for a while, just nestling against each other.

Then Peter went upstairs to shower, and as he stood under the steaming water, he felt brisk and hearty and confident: he felt he had regained perspective on his life. He knew there could be no mother more fierce in her love and protection of her children than Patricia. He knew that the health and happiness of her family was her main concern. During the eighteen years of their marriage there had been times when they had argued and disagreed, and even weeks at a time when they had been too angry at each other to make it through with more than a pretense of civility. But they had always trusted each other. They had an honorable marriage.