Middle Age (25 page)

After the divorce, furious with Adam for having been sympathetic
Middle Age: A Romance



with Roger as well as with her, Lee Ann refused to speak with Adam, ever again. She left Salthill to remarry, took Robin with her, and lived now with her investment banker husband in Rye, New York. Much of the summer they spent in Aspen, Colorado, and it was the Aspen number Roger called to inform Lee Ann and Robin of Adam’s death. It was Robin who picked up the phone. “Oh, hi—Dad?
You?
” Robin pretended at first not to recognize her father’s voice. Her manner with her father (whom she saw not very frequently) had become archly flirtatious in the past two years.

Roger never knew how to respond to her, and usually played it straight.

He was somber now, trying not to sound agitated. He asked Robin if her mother could come to the phone and Robin said quickly, with an air of satisfaction, that her mother and George (Robin’s stepfather) were out, and she didn’t know when they’d be back. Roger said, “I’m afraid I have upsetting news, Robin.” Always quick at repartee with her father, Robin said, “Upsetting for who, Dad? You, or us?” Roger said severely, “All of us.”

With a sharp, girlish laugh Robin said, “Then don’t tell me, Dad. Tell Mom.
She
can deal with it. You know old armor-plated
Lee Ann
.” Roger winced at the girl’s juvenile sarcasm. He tried to envision her plain-pretty face, her hazel eyes so like his own, but could not.
Look, honey
.
I didn’t
want the divorce, I didn’t want to leave you
.
Your mother wanted me gone
. He told Robin to tell her mother that he’d call back that evening; he knew that Lee Ann would never call him; if Roger Cavanagh lay on his deathbed, Lee Ann would never call him. But when he called back that evening, Lee Ann picked up the receiver, and said in her cool, languid former-wife’s voice, “Yes? What do you want, Roger?”—as she might speak to a telemarketer. Roger told her about Adam’s sudden death, and Lee Ann murmured, “Oh! Oh, God.” For a long moment she was silent though in the background (was Lee Ann out-of-doors? speaking on a cel-lular phone?) there were raised excited voices, it sounded like a tennis game, Roger had a blurred image of the flashing of a white ball, tanned legs and swinging arms, his daughter’s face screwed up in concentration, but who was Robin playing?—the stepfather?—and Lee Ann said, sadly, sighing, “Adam! But he was always overweight, and didn’t take care of himself. It doesn’t surprise me. Heart failure! What can you expect, at his age, if you don’t take care of yourself? Remember,” Lee Ann said, in that impassioned breathy way of hers, building a case against the victim, “how Adam postponed seeing a dentist?—for so long? He was superstitious about his health, so many men are, even intelligent men, and he absolutely



J C O

hated to spend money, and when finally he went he had to have all that root canal work, poor Adam, remember . . .” Roger listened to this, and to the tennis players in the background, and at first Roger was shocked, and then Roger was disgusted. “That’s all you have to say, Lee Ann? I call to tell you that Adam Berendt is dead, in his early fifties, and you’re blaming him for his
teeth?
” Lee Ann said sharply, “Adam was your friend, Roger, not mine. He chose you.” “Fuck that shit, Lee Ann. Just fuck it!” “And don’t use your obscene language with me, I’m not one of your hookers.”

Before Roger could protest, Lee Ann hung up.

Hookers! It was a tale Lee Ann had wanted to believe, she’d told it so many times she had come at last to believe it.



No one else has the power
.
No one! The lethal power of the ex-spouse
.

Roger stopped at a Big Boy on I-8 for black coffee. To bring the fist-banging sensation in his chest under control. The mere thought of Lee Ann and that disgraceful three-minute call left him shaken. Flooded with adrenaline! He sipped steaming-hot bitter-black coffee from a plastic cup. Fuck it, if he burnt his mouth. A red-haired woman seated in a nearby booth distracted him, that freckled pallor, skimpy eyebrows and lashes, but a bloodred juicy mouth, this one was nothing like the Troy woman, the woman he guessed he was in love with, if
in love with
wasn’t a lurid joke at this point in his life; this one had two small fretting children and a good-looking linebacker husband, woman of about twenty-eight, normal-seeming, at ease in her female body, not-crazy, with that translucent redhead skin that drew Roger’s rapt attention, a virtual kick in the groin . . . “Not her. Don’t think of
her
.” He was pondering the time: he had about ninety miles to the Ryecroft School, most of it on I-8, which was fairly clear, but then he had to exit on 6 West and from 6 he’d have to drive north to Nicodemus on a busy state highway, and on Friday afternoon . . . Before leaving his law office he’d called Robin, left a message on her answering machine, wincing at the girl’s flat dismissive voice.
Hi
.
I’m not here, I guess! Leave a message at the sound of the beep if
you think it’s worth it
. A mirthless giggle.
Your message, I mean
. He left a message explaining he was a little late starting out, Dad was going to be a little late but Dad was definitely coming to see her play field hockey, wouldn’t miss it for the world, don’t wait for him in her residence but go
Middle Age: A Romance



get ready for the game, he’d be there for the game, absolutely. Now, since it was past two .., and the game began at four .., it looked as if he wouldn’t make the start of the game, but—“God damn,
I will be there
.”

Lee Ann had told Roger, via e-mail, their preferred means of correspondence now, that she was “concerned” about Robin. She was concerned that Robin “obsessed” about field hockey, and was neglecting her studies, and seemed to have few friends, and never, “repeat: never” spoke of him to her and George, which, Lee Ann said, “I’m sure you’ll agree is not a healthy thing. For after all, you are the girl’s father.”

Doubtful about the wisdom of calling the baby girl
Robin
. So close to
Roger
. “Robin”—“Roger.”
He
hadn’t made the decision, Lee Ann had.

He
hadn’t remarried within eighteen months, Lee Ann had.

He
was the wounded one, not Lee Ann.

“Never.” Meaning, he’d never remarry. Never again.

He wasn’t in love with Marina Troy, the thought was absurd. Their single bungled attempt at lovemaking . . . on the gritty floor of Adam’s studio. (In Roger’s furious imagination, someone or something was watching them. The damned dog?)

Half-consciously Roger was watching the red-haired woman in the booth. If her beefy husband was aware of him, Roger didn’t notice. Lost in a dream. But it was a caffeine-dream, the beat of a heavy pulse. The woman half-carried a fussing round-faced toddler into the women’s lavatory, kissing and scolding, and Roger, turning to stare after them, felt a faint, sick sensation. The truth was: he’d loved Robin so much, as a baby; he’d loved Lee Ann so much, as his young, high-spirited wife; he’d even loved, to a degree, the young man he’d been.
Yes, we were happy
.
And not
deluded
. Was disillusion inevitable with middle age? Or was it just a fact that, with the passage of time, things fracture, break, split into pieces?

From the age of thirty-one to the age of forty-three he’d been married, and his daughter Robin, his only child, had been born in the second year of that marriage. That long-ago time. Twelve years married! Now, it felt like an amputated limb.

He would marry again, sometime. He was a man of fierce passions and appetites and he would love a woman again, he had to believe this would happen.

Pathetic asshole
.
Even as a lawyer you’re mediocre
.

Roger bought a second steaming cup of coffee to take with him in the car. Since his friend’s death he’d become acutely conscious of his



J C O

heart: if it was going to beat oddly, he wanted to know the cause was caffeine. Yet still he lingered in the restaurant. Gazing toward the door of the women’s rest room, which was continually being pushed open, swinging shut, pushed open and swinging shut and at last the red-haired young woman emerged with the toddler, and Roger saw to his disappointment that she wasn’t so attractive as he’d believed, she really looked nothing like Marina Troy. The young woman glanced up quizzically at him as if wondering should she know this man, this sharky-looking guy in his mid- or late forties with a narrow dark calculating face and graying dark hair receding from his forehead, and in the same instant Roger sighted a tall figure approaching in the corner of his eye, the woman’s linebacker husband, no thanks! Clamping the lid tight on the cup, Roger fled the Big Boy.

Not wanting to hear the exchange.

That guy, he’s somebody you know?

Him? No
.

The way he was looking at you
.

So? Let him look
.

Ashes
. Quietly she’d murmured, in that low throaty voice that seemed deliberately to provoke him, and the corners of her mouth twitching, “It isn’t a dead man’s ashes you spread, is it? It’s the dead man himself.” This bizarre statement was made as Roger, with a strained smile, conscious of eyes upon him, carried the urn into the garden. Thinking
Jesus Christ! Let
us not fuck this up, too
. At least it was a still, windless day. An opaque pale sky through which sunlight penetrated like the beginning of a migraine.

Adam’s ashes dumped from the urn, mostly bone chunks and powdery grit would at least not be blown back into their faces.

They’d invited only Adam Berendt’s closest friends to the ceremony.

Ten days after his death. Marina, who’d been keeping the urn in her house, said she couldn’t bear it any longer, they had to put Adam’s ashes
to rest
.

Roger agreed. No point in keeping Adam’s ashes in an urn on a mantel, if you knew Adam wanted to be raked into the soil of his garden.

(Except in fact would Adam now give a damn? That is, would Adam, if he could know, have seriously cared where he, or his ashes, ended up?

Not likely.)

Middle Age: A Romance



“Ceremonies! They mean nothing really, yet without them we sink into grief.”

Since the morning of their bungled lovemaking in Adam’s studio, of which neither Roger Cavanagh nor, he assumed, Marina Troy wished to think, the two were stricken with shyness, and a deep disgust and rage beneath, in each other’s presence. Roger was a man for whom impotence of any kind, especially sexual, was humiliating; if he’d been impotent once, very likely he’d be impotent again; it was the start of a curse, and Marina Troy was to blame. No, Adam Berendt was to blame. Marina Troy was the witness, the innocent victim. Incredibly, Marina Troy had
struck Roger
with her fists
. But it was Roger’s fault, he knew. He loathed himself, knowing. The woman scarcely looked at him now. There was still the powerful sexual attraction between them but it had turned spiteful, mocking. Roger was conscious of the woman’s heavy-lidded eyes, her gaze that brushed past him as if he were no more than a cloud of gnats, even as she spoke with him, and was obliged to speak with him, for they were connected through the dead man, and could not so easily avoid each other. Roger called Marina, and Marina never picked up the phone, even when Roger knew she was home; if he called the bookstore, Marina’s assistant claimed that Marina wasn’t in; even when Roger called from his car parked on Pedlar’s Lane, and knew absolutely that Marina was in the store; he thought,
This is how a man becomes a stalker, a criminal: he is driven to it by a
woman
. But no. This was absurd. Roger was not a man to force himself upon any woman, even in the interests of a third party. He would win over Marina Troy as he won the majority of his law cases, by the force of his seriousness, his integrity, his lawyerly cunning. He understood that Marina was afraid of him and that she resented him for being alive, while their friend was dead, and with this sentiment Roger sympathized.
But I am
alive, and Adam is dead
. He could not believe that Adam and Marina had been lovers, no matter what others believed. He seemed to know that Adam had resisted the Salthill women who adored him, perhaps he’d always resisted women who adored him, not for a moment had Roger supposed that the cache of letters and gifts Marina had discovered in Adam’s studio meant that Adam had been the lover of any of these women. He wanted to assure Marina of this, to console her, but of course, he could not speak to her of such things, she’d been too deeply wounded, made ashamed.
And I am her witness
.
No wonder she hates me!
Roger called Marina, and left messages on her answering service; she never failed to call



J C O

back, for she was a courteous, scrupulous person, but invariably she called when she knew that Roger wouldn’t be home, and her messages on his answering machine, which made him shiver, were almost inaudible, but precise; she sounded like someone speaking from a coffin buried in the earth.

Always when she returned Roger’s calls she identified herself as
Marina
Troy
. As if Roger might confuse her with another
Marina
of his acquaintance.

Both Roger and Marina had keys to Adam’s house on the River Road but if one saw the other’s car in the driveway, of course, that one drove quickly away.

Except, that morning. Spreading Adam’s ashes in his garden. It was to be a joint effort, this ceremony. Roger and Marina, and the others looking on.

(Abigail Des Pres had stayed away, she’d told Roger she was sick with grief, and anyway she hated ceremonies—“Any kind of ritual that’s impersonal, and phony.” And Camille Hoffmann had stayed away, her husband Lionel reported, with mild embarrassment, because it was too painful for Camille to acknowledge that Adam was dead—“She prefers to think that he’s alive, only just traveling and out of touch. Temporarily.” But there was Augusta Cutler, glamorous as a fashion mannequin in dark glasses, wide-brimmed straw hat, and a low-cut summer dress the color of poppies, staring avidly at Adam’s garden, at plants and wildflowers and weeds, as if all were sacred, and she meant to memorize it. A nymph ripened to middle age, yet unbelieving she was middle-aged and not rather young, younger even than her grown children; Roger could sympathize with Augusta, though she made him uneasy. Her sweet rich perfume wafted through the garden, overwhelming even the hearty, musky smell of the tomato plants.