Good to a Fault (31 page)

S
o she did not need to ask Paul if she could stay at his house. And now she had to stay in hers.

She left a message on his machine at the church, saying that she was going to Davina for a few days. He would not know that she could not drive out to Davina, as she might if she was in trouble, because nobody was there—and because of the amazing betrayal of Moreland giving them the duplex. She put the painting of Pearce in the kitchen junk drawer, turned the ringer off on her phone, and didn’t answer the door. When Moreland and Grace called from Hawaii she did not answer; she did not listen to her messages. She lay in bed, not knowing how to get up, and gradually slept herself out of the worst of it.

Mrs. Zenko called twice from London. The only time Clary answered the phone was when it was a Vancouver number, 604.

“How you doing?” Darwin asked her. The line was crackly, a cell phone, it sounded like.

“Not too good,” she said.

“It’s hard,” he said, then silence; was that the whole sentence?

“How could you do it? How could you let Fern?” It was a bad connection,
she couldn’t tell if he wasn’t speaking, or if the phone was cutting out. “Are you there?”

Silence, then a phrase, “…you always…” Always what?

He faded in again: “…Moreland to have a turn…” Then empty air.

“Darwin?”

After a minute she tried again. “How could you leave?”

She didn’t even know if he could hear her, if he would answer. She babbled into the phone, “I miss them too much, I can’t remember how to function without anybody. I couldn’t say goodbye or tell them what was happening, they didn’t let me! The house is empty—I can’t eat, or sleep—it’s too hard, missing them.”

She stopped. Was he hearing? There was no answer.

“I thought she was my
friend!
” What a babyish thing to say, how exposed, and how exactly honest. There was half of the hurt, right there.

Nothing but air replied. Then after a moment, faintly, “…miss you…”

“Oh, I miss you too, and Fern, and—” She couldn’t say the rest of them.

“…back,” he said. He seemed to say.

When the truck she had forgotten to cancel came, she had the movers take the packed boxes to the storage space anyway. They’d be out of the way until she arranged for the appraisal, when she was ready to work her way out of the financial hole she’d dug, this wasted year.

She got the movers to dismantle the bunk beds and deliver them to the right-hand blue duplex, 1008 or 1006, she couldn’t remember which. One of Moreland’s nice duplexes, spacious enough, two bedrooms on the main and a couple of extra rooms finished in the basement. Clary knew them well, she had often helped Grace clean them before new tenants. Blindly she bundled up the bedding, and at the last moment added the curtains from the children’s room.

After the men had left she realized that she had forgotten Pearce’s crib, in her bedroom. She took it apart herself and put the pieces in the children’s room closet, and shut their door.

Once the box mess was out of the living room, and nobody could know
what a fool she had been, trying to give away her house, she called Paul. She did not want to, because his presence brought their absence too near, but it was not Paul’s fault that they were gone and she could not punish him for it, now that she had regained her balance. He came over immediately, out of loneliness or out of duty, she could not tell.

He had been to see the Gages, had arrived as they were moving into their new place.

“They should not have shut you out,” he said. “I can’t understand why they would find it necessary to cut the children off from you, from your help.”

From him, too, Clary saw, because he was associated with her, even though he could pretend to be on a parish visit.

“The man from Swingline was there, helping with the move. And his wife, she seemed very involved. She told me they’re very fond of Clayton.” Paul’s tone had an edge to it, the first time Clary had heard him like that; as if he thought the wife was a bit too fond of Clayton. It satisfied her in an ugly way, to think of the wife being foolish, and to imagine Lorraine seeing it too. She had a bad taste in her mouth, but of course she did. How long since she had eaten anything but toast?

They went out for dinner, but it was an unhappy evening. Paul took her back to her house. They’d been apart for more than a week, and found themselves making love without consciously deciding to, and continued because it was better than talking, better than thinking.

Lying beside Clary in the dark, Paul said, “
…the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…
”

Clary turned her head and looked at his barely visible profile.

“Everything you say to me is a poem. You never speak to me yourself.”

“I—”

“I—You—” She waited.

“I say what I can.”

“Not enough.”

He said nothing.

I am alone, she thought. No point in saying that out loud.

“God talks to you in poems, does he?” she finally asked him.

That was true, he thought. But God also talked to him in the world. Maybe he should talk to Clary in the world. He was too tired to think. But he was remembering poetry, poor Ted Hughes, or poor Sylvia Plath:
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs, In their dreams their brains took each other hostage, In the morning they wore each other’s face.

On Saturday night they went to a movie, because they had to do something. Afterwards they went to Paul’s house, since it was clear that Clary did not want to return to hers. But Paul’s house was empty too. Luckily it had been a late movie; it was late enough to go to bed. Paul turned off lights, opening the fridge for a last drink of milk. “Nothing,” Clary said. They climbed the stairs in single file and went into the bedroom, and took off their clothes without any haste or disorder.

Clary hung up her skirt in the almost-empty closet. Leaning in to shake out its folds, she caught a scent—Lisanne. She carefully smoothed her hands down the material, not breathing. She could fold it on the chair instead. She left it.

“Do you miss her?” she asked Paul. He was setting the alarm.

“Yes,” he said.

They made love anyway, and it was as it was. They knew what they were doing by now, it was almost ordinary. They were tired. He came, shuddering, sighing as he came, and kissed her, and slept; she lay with dry eyes open for a long time. They were too alike: hesitant, lacking in ordinary gumption, disconnected from other people and the world, taking refuge in elevated language. It was all a waste anyway.

Paul could not button the last four buttons on his cassock. He sat for a moment to recruit himself. March 3rd, First Sunday in Lent: “We must not embrace the deprivation and humiliation of Lent without remembering God’s unconditional love.” A way of making even the penitential season equalized and mediocre, now that he thought about it. After the long time of Lent, it would be Easter, and then all those Pentecosts, twenty-four of them this year, until it could come around to Advent again.

He could not find the strength to call on God. Was it the Baal Shem Tov who kissed his wife and children farewell every morning before he went
off to the temple, because what if he called on God and was killed before he could ask for His mercy? That was not him, though. He was weaker, stupider, less faithful. He could not find the energy or willingness to carry God into the church for all those people, or the emptiness to become the vessel. He heard Frank Rich tolling the bell and felt nothing but a faint annoyance that it should be expected of him. He must be getting the flu. He ran the stole through his hands, skin catching rough on the Lenten purple satin.

Inside the church Clary sat at the back. When Paul came in she caught herself despising the way he stood, his defeated posture; she insisted to herself that she respect him. He was tired. But his self-effacement—she could shake him! How arrogant he had been in his moral stance when she wanted to get the children back.

She considered herself, her position in the church. She came for Paul now, for her mother before, bracketing that brief period when she was there for the children. Now there was no pleasure, no help, only hypocrisy. She had no business being there.

After the service Clary drove to Paul’s house. She was waiting on the porch for him when he arrived home from coffee hour.

“We should stop this,” she told him, the moment his foot hit the top step. If she waited any longer she might lose her determination, and the whole sad business would drag on. He stared at her as if surprised, but she knew he could not be. He sagged under the weight of her disappointment, her selfish inability to get over this. She could see it in his body and his face.

“We—I—created a false idea,” she said. “A lie. I knew it was too soon for you, after Lisanne. I was fooling myself that we could make a kind of family.”

He looked at her still. He could stop looking at her, she thought.

She looked away herself, since he would not. “I don’t want to do it any longer,” she said. “I’m sorry that I led you into it in the first place.”

Paul’s hand went automatically to the door, as if to let her in.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I think I’ll go home, instead.”

Although it was easier this way, she was perversely hurt that he did not speak, say something about it being good while it lasted, or having enjoyed her company—she shook her head violently, hurting her neck. She did not want him to say any of those stupid things. Silence was better.

She did not look back to see if he was still standing there. She drove down the street, talking to herself furiously.
I loved them too much. God is punishing me for loving people the way I should love God.
Something was wrong there, too, that God would punish her, but she could not be bothered to think it through, because she was tired of God. Demand, demand, demand, and never any good to come of it except loneliness and despair, it was all—

Enough. She’d had enough of all this. She would have revenge. She would go to movies by herself again, and go out for dinner wherever she wanted, and she would have a tidy house and a little job.

She had to have groceries. In the grocery store on Thursday she ran into Mat from Gilman-Stott, who asked how her family was doing. She said they’d moved on, the mother had recovered, wonderful. She could say it lightly, by then, without wanting to lie on the tiles of the grocery store and weep.

The next morning Barrett phoned. He was desperate, the Biggar woman had not worked out, would she come back? Had she come to her senses?

By then she could laugh, although she hated the sound, throaty and phony. “Good sense has been forced upon me,” she said. “Won’t this make the paperwork difficult?”

Nothing could be simpler. Nothing would make head office happier. Barrett was effusive.

To occupy the weekend, Clary cleaned the garage. Finding the stack of sanctimonious soul-searching self-betterment books she’d stuck out there when they first came, she took pleasure in tossing them in the trash, Thich Nhat Hanh and all. She tackled her closet after seven months of neglect; it was a shambles, and she hated everything in it. She weeded half the business clothes, even with the prospect of going back to work.

On the top shelves, her eye lit on the document box where Dolly had found her marriage certificate and shown it to that sad little Ann Hayter.
That
could go. The box was full of old photos and papers from her few other attachments: three letters from Harvey Reimer, the last one with a picture of the new baby, the one that had saved his marriage, who must be nearly nine by now. A snapshot of Gary, with a sleeve of photos from that shoddy place in Cancun. Everything else in the box was school stuff, report cards and photos.
Her BA graduation picture, holding the sheaf of red roses they had handed to each girl in turn.

What a waste of a life. Not even a letter from Paul, or photos of the children. She carried the box to the back yard, took the grill off the hibachi, and piled the letters and photos in the coal-ash. She lit one corner of the marriage certificate with the long-handled lighter. It burned up into a little triangular flame, then caught properly, brown curling to black, backwards toward her fingers until she had to drop it into the other papers. Smoke rose up, the photos rusted and lost definition—they were gone. She put the grill back in place and left everything tidy there too. Then she went to the movies by herself. Two in a row. From time to time, like windshield wipers, she passed her hand over her face to clear her eyes.

In the morning she got up at seven, showered and dressed, made herself a poached egg, and left the house perfectly neat behind her. Her keys were exactly where she’d put them. Nobody else’s boots were tangled on the mat in the hall closet. She did not look back, because no one was waving to her, pulling the living room curtains too far along the track, getting hand-marks on the window.

Mat said, “You’re back in your same desk.”

Evie said, “You’re back! In your same desk!”

Barrett was not in. His sciatica was acting up again—that was the only thing that made the day bearable. For three days Clary sat at her desk or in the staff room at Gilman-Stott, chit-chatting. Wondering how could she have borne to wear stockings every day, to bring her shoes with her in a little draw-string bag; how she could have led this empty life, examining disasters but Olympian above them, clean of any smudge of reality. She wanted a lightning strike, an Act of God.

On Thursday Barrett came back, using a cane, very courtly. He ushered her into his office in the afternoon, pulled the chair out for her, and said in her ear, leaning down, “It should really be you and me, you know.”

She reared her head back from his.

“Oh, come, Clara,” he said, his boiled-onion eye still too close. “Don’t be coy. You know we have always had a special rapport.”