Middle Age (45 page)

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T    who many times awoke in the morning to realize that her pillow was damp, her face was wet with tears, for she’d been weeping in her sleep.

How many times. Linen pillowcases embossed with satin floral orna-mentation. Dampened, soiled by sorrow. In the late autumn of this year of sorrow. In the late autumn—or was it already early winter?—of Camille Hoffmann’s life.

Yes. Already it was December, the darkest month. He’d moved away in October.

My shame
.
How to bear it
.
But I love him, I forgive him!

He must know, I forgive him
.
And I will always love him
.

Yet: there was solace. For Apollo and Shadow slept each night on the floor at the foot of their mistress’s bed. Apollo to the left, Shadow to the

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J C O

right. Like sculpted dogs of Egyptian antiquity guarding the funerary image of their entombed mummy-mistress.

During the night if Camille stirred in distress, moaned or sobbed in her sleep, both dogs awoke at once, rising onto their haunches, alert to danger.

They
would never desert her.

A    and astonishing departure from the house on Old Mill Way, and his removal to the apartment on East st Street in Manhattan, Lionel Hoffmann had made some attempt to “keep in contact” with Camille; he meant to behave “fairly, and justly”; through mid-November they spoke daily on the phone. Then, for some reason unknown to Camille, her husband began to be “unavailable” when she called his office; when she called the apartment, no one ever picked up the receiver, when she left a message Lionel often failed to return her calls. And when he did, he spoke in a vague distracted manner as if (but this couldn’t be possible, could it!) he was having difficulty remembering who she was.

Once, during one of these awkward exchanges, Camille believed she could hear whispering at the other end of the line. And muffled giggling.

And Lionel muttering, or groaning.

These distractions Camille courteously ignored.

Repeatedly in the weeks following their separation, like a soldier making a vow, Lionel had assured Camille, yes, he loved her, and respected her; he would always love her, as he loved Marcy and Kevin. But he was not, it seemed, at the present time,
in love
with her.

There was that crucial distinction. Those whom we
love,
we are rarely
in love with
.

Quickly Camille said, “Oh yes. I see, Lionel. I . . . understand.”

“It isn’t personal, Camille. You must understand.”

“Oh, I can understand!”

“When lightning strikes, it is never personal.”

“Not at all.”

Do you know, darling
,
how I forgive you? Always, I will love you
.
And the
house we’ve been so happy in, awaits you
.

“Camille? I must hang up now.”

“Oh, yes! Thank you for calling, Lionel.”

“Camille, you called me.”

Middle Age: A Romance

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“Well! Thank you for—”

“Good-bye!”

Though they had many things to discuss. Their jointly owned properties, investments, finances; the future of their marriage. (The ugly word

“divorce” had not yet been uttered.) Their children’s reactions to this wholly unexpected, jarring news. (“But surely Marcy and Kevin are not

‘children’ any longer, Camille, are they?” Lionel rather coolly said.) Never did they speak of the woman, no doubt a very beautiful younger woman, with whom, it seemed, Lionel had fallen
in love,
though Camille was eager and open and even, to a degree, sympathetic.

Once, at the conclusion of a brief, extremely disjointed telephone conversation, Lionel murmured, as if in pain, that he would never, never wish to hurt her, deliberately.

“How kind of you, Lionel! How thoughtful.”

After she hung up, Camille laughed. With the palms of both hands rubbing her raw, reddened eyes. Her laughter was high-pitched, and brief.

Apollo and Shadow came running.

H - A, dwelling in the house on Old Mill Way in Adam’s absence. Apollo, a noble mixture of German shepherd and husky, fiercely loyal, intelligent, whom Adam had entrusted to Camille, his closest woman friend. Apollo who was perhaps six years old, in his late-middle years, with soulful excitable eyes, silver-tipped fur grown thick and sleek with the vitamin-enriched dog food Camille bought, and her careful grooming, and unstinting love. And the smaller, less distinctive Shadow, a mongrel-Labrador, with melancholy rheumy eyes and a narrow fox face, battered ears, coarse dull-black wavy fur, discolored teeth; an oldish-young dog, in some ways still a puppy, immature and (fortunately, Lionel wasn’t here to know!) insufficiently housetrained, in other ways aged, badly crippled with a twisted spine and a partly amputated left hind leg; poor Shadow who quivered at the slightest noise outside, or the telephone ringing; who had to be disciplined repeatedly not to bark inside the house; but who was insatiably loving, devoted to his new mistress. When Camille glimpsed in Shadow’s watery eyes a veiled memory of terror, in the midst of whatever she was doing she immediately squatted to embrace and console him. “Shadow! Good dog! You’re safe now, with me. Forever.”

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J C O

Shadow had a naughty habit of leaping at Camille, whimpering, barking, licking and kissing her, shimmying his twisted buttocks and his stump of a tail; sometimes, in his excitement, he nipped at her, even bit her, with surprisingly sharp teeth; broke her skin, and caused bleeding. “No,
no
.

Shadow, that’s
bad
.” At such times Apollo came running, jealous, or eager to be included in the hugging; he rushed at Camille and Shadow, circled them, nudging and whining and covering Camille’s face with lavish kisses.

“Apollo! Mind your manners.” Camille laughed excited as a girl, awkwardly balanced on her heels; sometimes she toppled over onto the floor; the dogs kissed and licked her face leaving swaths of acidic wet on her skin that, drying, felt like fleeting, fading sunshine.

“ M,  
serious?
Tell me you’re
joking!
”

Camille winced. How little her daughter Marcy knew her, to imagine Camille could joke of such a thing.

“Daddy has moved
out?
Out of our
house?
To New
York?
What in God’s name is
going on?
Mot
her!
”

What to tell the children! What words, discreet yet matter-of-fact and unhysterical, to carefully compose, to tell Marcy and Kevin? The private hurt and social shame of being a
left
-
behind wife
were perhaps exceeded by a mother’s sense of having failed to keep her family together. And the responsibility of explaining to Marcy and Kevin fell to Camille, of course.

It was cruel and inaccurate of Lionel to say that their daughter and son, though well into their twenties, were adults. As if “adults” were invulnerable to hurt and disappointment. Camille understood how attached both the children were to the house on Old Mill Way, how they’d revised, in memory, their somewhat disputatious adolescences, recalling idyllic years where in fact they’d professed to hate Salthill at the time, and to be utterly bored, like all of their friends, with “Caucasian-affluent suburbia.”

They’d come of age in the most competitive, materialist epoch in American history, excepting perhaps the last decade of the nineteenth century, and were of that generation of young Americans who were made to realize that they probably could not, by their own efforts, achieve the degree of success and prosperity their parents had had. Though Marcy had a liberal arts degree from New York University, she was working in Seattle for the online magazine
Slate
in a capacity so undefined, her parents understood it was hardly more than clerical. Kevin, with degrees from Harvard College
Middle Age: A Romance

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and Harvard Business School, had yet failed to distinguish himself amid his brilliant rivals; he too had a vaguely defined job in cyberspace, logging in a frantic sixty-hour week in Boston for TechInvest.com; already he was beginning to lose his hair and suffered from spastic colon as a consequence of stress; as Lionel had done at his age, he was resisting joining the family business out of a hope, or a delusion, that he might make a career for himself independently. (Lionel’s strategy was not to press his son.

“When Kevin is ready to work with me, he will know it, and I will know it.” Long familiar with her husband’s tactics of gentlemanly evasion and duplicity, Camille took this to mean that Lionel secretly distrusted their son’s business ability and didn’t want him to join Hoffmann Publishing, Inc.)

Distraught and deeply ashamed, Camille had postponed calling Marcy and Kevin for weeks. Ten days before Thanksgiving she realized she must call, for Marcy and Kevin would naturally assume there would be a lavish family Thanksgiving as usual, prepared by Camille; a table of at least twenty-five guests, relatives from both sides of the family and a few local friends like Adam Berendt. (Camille couldn’t bear to think that Adam would never again be a guest at her table, perhaps the wisest solution was simply to never again give a dinner party?) Neither Marcy nor Kevin ever expressed much enthusiasm about coming home for Thanksgiving, but usually they came, out of a sense of duty, or lacking other invitations; but when Camille apologetically informed them that there would be no Thanksgiving this year, both were shocked and distressed, and Marcy reacted with anger. Camille hadn’t any choice but to stammer out the confession that she and Lionel seemed to be having “marital difficulties”—

Lionel had “moved away to New York, temporarily.” With Marcy, the conversation quickly took a downward turn. Marcy said cuttingly, “He’s found another woman, hasn’t he? I knew it. Mot
her!
You’ve drifted along in a dream, you’ve let yourself go for
years
. Daddy is a handsome man, and Daddy is not exactly an impoverished man, couldn’t you
see?
” As her out-raged daughter scolded her from across the continent, Camille began to feel faint. One of the dogs nudged her knees with his big head, and licked encouragingly at her hands: Apollo. The smaller, more wiry Shadow approached her from the side, whimpering almost inaudibly and pressing his warm furry weight against her, to comfort her. “Marcy, it isn’t personal.

Your father is anxious that we all understand that.” “Not ‘personal,’ what does that mean? I can’t believe this conversation!” “Lionel has said it—it’s

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like lightning striking, it has nothing to do with—” “Daddy has done the striking, for God’s sake, Mot
her
. Take your head out of the
sand
. Daddy is the
fucking lightning!
” “Marcy, please—” “I’m going to call him! I have a thing or two to say to good old
Dad
.” “Oh, Marcy, I wish you wouldn’t, dear, please. I’m sure this is just a temporary aberration and Lionel will be back home by Christmas. He has never done anything remotely like this before, and—” “In fact, I did call Dad last week, at the office, and was told

‘Mr. Hoffmann isn’t available right now.’ And he never called me back,”

Marcy said. “He’s afraid to speak with me!” “Marcy, I’m sure your father intends to call you very soon. You and—” “Don’t tell me Daddy has a girlfriend, at his age. That’s it, isn’t it?” “Marcy, I—” “This is just the most shitty, shitty news I’ve had this week, and let me tell you, Mom, it has been a
shitty week
.” Marcy was sobbing with indignation. Camille dreaded her daughter slamming down the receiver, as she’d done on more than one previous occasion, with less provocation; at the same time, Camille rather hoped Marcy would slam down the receiver. Marcy said furiously, “I’ll get to the bottom of this! I might have to fly home, Thanksgiving or no Thanksgiving! Everybody’s father is getting divorced and marrying girls my age and God damn it isn’t going to happen in the Hoffmann family, not without a prenuptial contract Kevin and I see beforehand! Fuck, Mot
her
! You’ve put on twenty-five pounds at least, just since I left home.”

Camille shut her eyes against these blows. She knew they were deserved, but that didn’t lessen the hurt. She was forced to recall how, when Marcy was in seventh grade at the Salthill Country Day School, Marcy had been the plumpest girl in her circle, and had become obsessed with dieting; she’d detested her “boneless” face which so resembled her mother’s, and once, when Camille had gently chided her for trying to starve herself, Marcy turned in fury on her, saying these words Camille would never forget, “Leave me alone, Mother! I’d rather die than be fat like
you
.” At the time, Camille had perhaps been eight pounds overweight.

She’d never told Lionel about that scene. She’d started to tell Adam Berendt but stopped, out of a sense that Adam, too, would pity her, and the last thing she wanted from Adam was pity.

As if sensing her mother’s distress, Marcy began to relent a little. “Hey, Mom? You still there? Look, I’m sorry. I guess your heart is, like, broken?”

When Camille, wiping at her eyes, didn’t trust herself to reply, Marcy asked again if there was another woman, so far as Camille knew; and Camille said, with as much dignity as she could summon, “Marcy, you must ask your father. Only he knows.”

Middle Age: A Romance

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Exhausted and demoralized by this exchange, Camille would have liked to lie down on the sofa, but she knew she had to call Kevin immediately, before Marcy in her fury contacted him. By a fluke, Kevin was in, and picking up his phone. He, too, was stunned to hear the news. “Dad has moved
out?
Of our
home?
Is he
crazy?
What’s going on there, Mom?”

Camille said carefully, “It’s only just temporary, Kevin. I called your sister and explained, too. Lionel is—” “Wait. Let’s get this straight, Mom. Dad has moved
out?
To New
York?
Since
when?
Why wasn’t I told? When did you tell Marcy? Hey, is there—someone else involved?
Mom?
” Kevin’s voice was that of an anguished adolescent, so very different from his usual bemused, mildly cynical drawl. Camille stammered, “I—truly don’t know, Kevin. He may have said—he might have mentioned—it was all so confusing to me, I’m not sure I understood.” In fact, Camille didn’t quite remember. Had Lionel actually uttered the ominous words
woman
—
have
become involved
—
since last November
—or had Camille imagined them, as in a cruel self-punishing dream? It seemed to her frankly unlikely that Lionel could have been involved with a woman, whatever exactly that meant, for a full year, and she, his wife, remained ignorant. Kevin who’d always been one to defend Camille, perceiving in his parents’ marriage an unjust imbalance of power, and perhaps in Camille his only ally against his powerful father, said incredulously, “There
is!
God damn. You’d think, Dad’s age, over fifty at least, he’d be
ashamed
.” Kevin began to laugh derisively as if the very idea of Lionel Hoffmann committing adultery, a rene-gade lover, was hilarious. Out of nervous sympathy Camille found herself laughing with him. Half-heartedly she pushed the dogs away, in their zeal to comfort their mistress they were licking her hands frantically, and pleading with anxious dog-eyes, she couldn’t concentrate, oh! she was tired, since Shadow had come into her life (like grace, unbidden) she’d been so grateful to the Rockland County Homeless Animal Shelter she’d signed up as a volunteer, helping out two afternoons a week. Kevin too was incensed that there’d be “no Thanksgiving” this year and speculated in a young, sullen voice if maybe there’d be “no Christmas either.” Camille remained silent. Her head ached. She wondered why, if one might live with dogs, one would have wished to live with children, and a husband?