Cursed Be the Child (17 page)

He felt good, damned good, better rested than in quite some time.

He raised his arm and glanced at his wristwatch. 9:50. He’d be late for his class. No, he wouldn’t. The hell with his class, the hell with teaching today.

Slowly, he sat up on the rec room sofa, still marveling at the way he felt.

No hangover, but damn it to hell, no blackout either. Last night replayed itself clearly—the fight with Vicki, then dragging his ultra-intoxicated ass down here and zonking out.

That was all of it, he was sure, but he double-checked, searching through his memory. Nothing else, he was certain, but what was there was pretty bad.

The fight had been a gem. He remembered every rotten, slashing word of it. Last night a long time festering boil went “pop,” spewing its poison all over his wife and his marriage.

He had to set things right, and he would.

Not only last night, but everything that was wrong, everything that had ever been wrong between Vicki and himself could be straightened out. He was confident of that. They had to…he had to make it work for Missy’s sake.

She needed him.

When he stood up, he felt something unusual—not unusual, but strange. He had the fleeting impression he was no longer himself.

He was…different. It was a subtle change, but somehow there’d been a delicate alteration in his perspective, in the way he viewed the world. There was a similar change, too, in the way he looked at himself.

Warren Barringer was neither pessimistic nor optimistic. He had a vague feeling of acceptance, as though from this point on, things would take care of themselves.

He scratched his head. Something had happened to him. A thought that seemed completely irrational flashed in his mind: Something was taken from me, something was cut out of me.

The idea disappeared like a bug snatched off a pond’s surface by a hungry fish.

Warren went to the bar and picked up the bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch. He unscrewed the top. “Johnny, we’ve had some good times together and some bad times, but I don’t need you. Not anymore. So long, pal.” He tipped the bottle, and a brown stream gurgled into the stainless steel sink to swirl down the drain. He ceremoniously emptied each bottle, bidding farewell to Smirnoff, to Seagram’s, to Gilby’s.

He went upstairs. In the kitchen, he opened the telephone directory and jotted down a number on the top sheet of a pad. Then he called North Central University. He wouldn’t be in today. No, he wasn’t sick. It was personal. He had things to do.

It was all right, Laura Morgan assured her when Vicki had come in. No need to apologize for Missy’s misbehavior in church. Kids, who could figure them? After all, her own Dorothy wasn’t exactly “sugar and spice and everything nice.”

Vicki was grateful that was all there was to it. She didn’t feel up to talking, not about anything that had happened yesterday, her personal Black Sunday. Sitting on the stool behind the counter, she flipped through the pages of Flower News, a trade magazine for florists. Every brightly colored photograph seemed drab, and she didn’t care to read about new styles in funeral arrangements.

Last night, the rug had been yanked away to reveal the huge mound of dirt that had been swept under it—Warren’s long repressed anger and her usually repressed guilt. Warren’s drunken tirade hurt, of course, but he had not said anything she’d not expected to hear years ago when she had confessed her affair with David Greenfield. It was, she thought, just about what she deserved. She’d kept Warren from their bed last night, but she had not slept alone. Her guilt had been with her.

“It’s not the church thing bothering you, is it?” Laura Morgan called from the back of the shop, where she worked on a wicker basket centerpiece.

“No, not really.”

Laura came over and put a hand on Vicki’s shoulder. “Sometimes it helps to share problems.”

“Thanks,” Vicki said. “I don’t think it’s that kind of problem.” Maybe her problem couldn’t be solved, she thought. Maybe the only solution, partial at that, would be to wear a scarlet “A” and proclaim her guilt to the public, as well as herself every time she looked in the mirror.

“Whatever you say, but remember, I’m around.” Laura went back to her arranging.

The bell above Blossom Time’s front door tinkled as Warren walked in. The late morning sunlight followed him, silhouetting him and blurring his outline. Of course Vicki recognized the familiar figure, but she had an incomprehensible feeling that sent chills shooting down her spine, as though Warren had cast off a disguise to reveal himself as a menacing phantom.

“Vicki,” he said, “we have to talk.”

He didn’t look the way she would have expected. His eyes were clear and not bloodshot; no trace of aches and pains was evident on his face.

“Not here,” Vicki said. “Not now.” Maybe never, she thought.

She’d been into the heaviest guilt trip she’d experienced in years, but, no matter what, she would not stay married to a drunk. She would not spend the rest of her life fearful of a drunk’s unpredictable rages. She would not allow Missy to grow up with a drunken father; better no father at all. She would not be a willing witness to the slow suicide of alcoholism, would not sit by the bed of a man dying of cirrhosis of the liver, a man who’d embalmed himself before his death.

Warren said, “Please,” and reached for her hand.

She pulled her hand back. “You ought to be at the university. I don’t want you here.”

Laura Morgan came to the counter. Standing alongside Vicki, she nodded, introducing herself. “You’re Warren.”

He said, “Vicki’s told me about you, Laura. You’re her good friend.”

“Yes, I am.” After a lengthy pause, Laura said, “Sometimes good friends butt into each other’s business. I guess that’s what I’m doing. I think you and your wife have something to talk over.”

“We do.”

Laura looked at Vicki. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but if you want to take off the rest of the day, I’m sure I’d be able to manage.”

“No,” Vicki said, eyes down, “that’s all right.”

“Vicki, please.” It was how he said, “please” that got to her. She peered at him, studied him, and saw or thought she saw desperation, an emotion which he’d never shown—at least not to her. “I’m asking you to come with me. We can work it out, Vicki. Talk with me.”

She made up her mind. “I’ll be in Saturday then, Laura,” she said.

“That’ll be fine.”

She walked home with her husband. Work it out? she thought. No, she feared that was impossible, not this time. It was over. All they might have had together, all that they once might have been, was no more.

It’s time for an ending, she said to herself, even as she hoped she was wrong.

— | — | —

Twenty

“You’re angry and you’re hurt,” Warren said. They sat on the living room sofa, the middle cushion separating them. Looking at her folded hands in her lap, Vicki said, “Go on.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Warren said. “I’m a writer. I teach English. Words are important to me. Sometimes you can say it all with words, but other times, words are so damned inadequate.” He got up, stood before her, head hanging. “Vicki, I’m so sorry.”

The corner of her mouth twitched up in what was not a smile. “I’ve heard that before, Warren. I’ve believed it before.”

“I know. But this time is different.”

“I’ve heard that before, too.”

“No, I mean it. Liquor is a problem for me. I’ve never admitted it, not to you, not to myself, but now it’s time. Drinking is a real problem, and there’s only one way I can handle it. No more alcohol, period.” He smiled hopefully. “That’s something I haven’t said before.”

“No, you haven’t, but now I have to ask if you mean it.”

He told her he’d dumped all the liquor, and that was that. He thought he’d be able to stay sober on his own. He meant to try, anyway. He reached into his wallet. “If not,” he said, flourishing a scrap of paper as if it were a winning lottery ticket, “this is the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. This goes with me from now on.”

Then he did the last thing on earth she could have predicted. Warren was proud, sometimes proud to the point of arrogance, but he slowly sank to his knees. It was so flamboyantly melodramatic that she questioned the act’s sincerity even as she was touched by it.

But she couldn’t question his tears or the sobs that choked his words as he said, “I am sorry, so sorry. Forgive me for hurting you. Forgive me for hurting our marriage and our life together. Love me, Vicki, and let’s start again.”

Her own tears blinded her. She didn’t know if she was convinced because she wanted to be convinced, but she could not doubt Warren was definitely trying to change.

She loved him. That’s what she told him, crying, on her knees, too, holding him, their hot, wet faces touching. A new start, that’s what she wanted, what they needed. But she had to talk to him, really talk to him at long, long last.

“…about what happened with David Greenfield.”

“No, there’s no need,” Warren said

“It’s something I have to explain, if we’re to make a new start.”

“All right, then, but let’s move to the couch. My knees are getting calloused,” Warren said.

Vicki gave the feeble joke a louder laugh than it merited, a laugh of release. She needed to confess so Warren would understand and forgive her. No, not only Warren. She had to get it all out if she was ever to pardon herself.

She fetched a box of tissues from the bathroom, and they both blew their noses. It was funny, she thought. Life’s most serious, heartfelt moments summon up tears—and the rudely comic noise of blowing noses!

She sat down, and when Warren put his arm around her, she leaned against him, assuringly aware of the gently shifting solidity of his body as he breathed.

“It was a bad time for me,” she began, then corrected herself. “It was a bad time for us.”

“Yes,” Warren said.

Missy had been 18 months old, but plunging into the discover-touch-break everything “terrible twos” without regard for the calendar. Warren, teaching at Laurel Valley College, a small school in southern Indiana, had been directly told not to plan on being a member of Laurel Valley’s faculty in the future.

That was, Warren maintained, because he had been asked to read the manuscript of a novel. The English department chairman, the book’s author, sought Warren’s advice because, “Ah, uhm, it’s possible there are some minor flaws in the work that are preventing its publication,” the book having been rejected by 43 publishers in nine years. Warren found only one flaw—the book was garbage. He could have been more diplomatic in rendering that verdict, but he was still young enough to believe writers were obliged to be honest.

Warren was working on his new novel, the book that eventually became
The Endurance of Lyn Tomer.
It was not going well. How could he write? Jesus, here he was on a frantic job hunt, sending out resumes and coming up zilch. And here was the kid, always screaming when he needed peace and quiet. And here was Vicki, always getting on his case with her pathetic bleating. “I’m your wife. I’m alive, I’m here. Will you please pay attention to me?”

Goddamnit, didn’t she understand? He needed to write the book. The book would save their asses. It would take care of money. Universities would come courting him, wanting him as a status symbol writer-in-residence. Granted, his first novel,
Fishing with Live Bait,
hadn’t made it big. There were reviews calling him “promising” and all that shit, but no sales. The first printing was 5,000 copies and only 312 sold.