Middle Age (46 page)

Dogs don’t judge
.
Dogs love
. Kevin was saying petulantly he’d better come home to see “what in hell Dad’s up to.” He complained to Camille that he’d been sending Lionel e-mail (“on a private, professional subject”) but that Lionel hadn’t replied.
Was
he in New York? In the apartment?

Camille murmured she assumed so. She too called Lionel, and he was



J C O

slow to call back. Kevin said despairingly, “Just don’t let Dad sell the house, Mom. It’s jointly owned, I assume? All your property, investments, savings are jointly owned? Don’t let Dad cheat you out of anything. Don’t let him sell our
home
.” Camille, stroking the dogs’ hard-boned heads, felt a stab of longing for her son; as a child Kevin had been prone to accidents, and tears; stymied by life rather than angered by it, like his sister; if they were together, Camille would have hugged him, and the two might have wept together. But Kevin was far away, and breathing harshly into the receiver. “Oh, no, Kevin! Your father would never be that cruel, to sell this house. In fact, I expect him to be home by—Christmas. When this madness has run its course.”

W   Camille received a postcard from Lionel, from Barbados. He’d taken five days off, he said. He would be contacting her soon about
future plans
. He suggested she begin to think about
legal representation
. He apologized for being incommunicado with only the excuse that his life had become
mysterious and new again,
and
glorious beyond belief
.

I   , cautionary tale of a left-behind Salthill wife.

Beatrice Archer, her eyes brimming with tears, would say: “I knew. As soon as I parked in the Hoffmanns’ driveway and saw Camille’s gorgeous mum plants blown over and some of the clay pots broken, that something was terribly wrong.”

That day, in early December, Beatrice boldly came to visit Camille Hoffmann. She hadn’t been invited. She’d several times called Camille, and Camille had never returned her calls. “But we can’t just abandon Camille, as Lionel has done. The poor woman is in a state of shock.”

Beatrice Archer was a handsome woman of youthful middle age, the wife of a prominent Salthill internist, with fair gold-glinting hair that fell in sculpted wings about her perfect face and a forward-thrusting manner like the prow of a ship. She was a woman to care deeply about her friends especially now that her children were grown and gone. She was a woman of strong neo-Christian convictions. She’d urged her husband Avery to contact Lionel Hoffmann in New York and to arrange to see him if possible.

“To talk some sense into that man. Lionel, of all people! He must know this is
demeaning
.” (But Avery complained that Lionel never returned his
Middle Age: A Romance



calls. At Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., Lionel’s secretary curtly informed him that Mr. Hoffmann was “unavailable at the present time.”) Beatrice decided one morning simply to drive over to Old Mill Way, which intersected with Old Dutch Road where the Archers lived in a beautifully restored neo-Georgian house on three prime, wooded acres; it was Beatrice’s reasoning that Camille would have no choice but to let her into the house.

“How many times, after all, we’d visited in each other’s homes . . .”

But there were the unsightly mum plants, disturbing to a fastidious home owner like Beatrice Archer. And blinds drawn on a number of the windows of the many-windowed Colonial house. And the dogs that unexpectedly rushed out of nowhere to circle Beatrice as she approached the front door, and rang the doorbell with a trembling forefinger. She recognized Apollo, Adam’s much-loved dog she hadn’t seen since Adam’s death.

Fortunately, Apollo seemed to recognize her. “Apollo? You know me: Adam’s friend Beatrice. Apollo, good dog!” The mixed-breed German shepherd wagged his tail as he barked, though not so briskly as Beatrice would have wished. More worrisome was the smaller, more antic dog, a disfigured black mongrel-Labrador with three legs and watery eyes, that Beatrice had never seen before. Did these dogs both live with Camille? Or was the black dog a stray? Its bark was like fingernails drawn across a blackboard, and it was behaving belligerently. “I was terrified the creature would bite me, or tear my clothes, before Camille opened the door. Its hackles were raised, and it was growling. And so misshapen! An ugly little demon of a dog.” By the time Camille came breathless to open the door, in a soiled coverall, her unkempt graying hair brushed back severely from her face, both dogs were poking their noses against Beatrice, and rudely sniffing. Camille called them off apologetically and explained that the dogs weren’t used to visitors. “Not that they’re dangerous, of course. Apollo and Shadow are both very gentle dogs.”

Beatrice, mindful that she hadn’t been invited, and that her friend Camille was clearly not herself, warmly embraced Camille and kissed her cheek. Tears of genuine compassion gathered in her meticulously made-up, large and luminous eyes. “Camille, it’s such a relief to see you! We’ve all been terribly worried about you, not returning our calls, missing the Planned Parenthood fund-raiser, living out here alone. You’ve hurt your friends’ feelings, Camille, and why?” It was like Beatrice Archer to express compassion in the form of reproach. Blushing fiercely, Camille could think of no reply and invited Beatrice inside, again apologizing, as the



J C O

dogs trotted with them, continuing to nudge and sniff at Beatrice’s legs.

Beatrice would afterward recount how distressed she’d been, such an odor of dogs in that beautiful house; and stacks of unopened mail on a cherry-wood table in the foyer. “As if the owners of the house had died and someone was doing the bare minimum, bringing the mail inside but not opening it.”

The awkward visit lasted less than an hour. The women sat in Camille’s spacious but badly cluttered country kitchen, which was flooded with winter light. On the windowsills were wilting African violets, on the floor in a corner were dogs’ red and yellow plastic bowls, set on stained newspaper. Beatrice had the impression that much of the house had been shut off, to prevent dog-damage probably. She had the impression that an air of emergency prevailed, as if Camille were expecting something to happen; or something had already happened, and this was the aftermath.

She would report that Camille hadn’t been rude to her exactly, for poor Camille was incapable of rudeness. “She offered me coffee but never gave me any. She simply forgot, I guess!” Beatrice was disturbed and intrigued by her friend’s altered appearance. It was less than two months since Lionel’s departure but already Camille was letting her fine wavy fair-brown hair grow in gray. She wasn’t wearing makeup and her skin looked ruddy and rather coarse as if she’d been outside in a cold wind. She was smiling nervously. Her lashless eyes blinked. She seemed to be staring at Beatrice as if trying to follow a conversation in another language, in which, in a strange halting way, she was participating. Beatrice noted the denim coverall that fitted Camille’s wide soft hips snugly, dirtied at the thighs as if by dogs’ muddy paws. She noted Camille’s broken, dirt-edged fingernails.

What a sign of female defeat, such fingernails! Almost, Beatrice would have liked to manicure Camille’s nails for her. “But I didn’t want to upset Camille, of course. I didn’t want to seem to be intruding. I wanted her to realize that her Salthill friends care about her. I told her that Abigail Des Pres wanted badly to see her, to offer Camille ‘spiritual commiseration’

and ‘good practical legal advice,’ for Abigail of course had had something of the same problem a few years before, with Harry—but Camille interrupted me, and said, in this almost-angry stammering voice, ‘That isn’t necessary. I won’t be needing a lawyer. You can thank Abigail, but our situations aren’t at all similar. My husband will probably return by Christmas. We speak often on the phone. He loves me very much. He loves his children, and this house. We are both very attached to this house. We
Middle Age: A Romance



would never sell
this house
.’ It was a sudden rush of words! Camille’s cheeks were flaming. I thought we might cry together, it was such a—

moment! I held her hands that were icy-cold and trembling and I told her of course that was so, that Avery had said, when he first heard the news,

‘Lionel will be back.’ And Camille said, brightening, ‘Avery said that, Beatrice, really? Lionel will be
back?
’”

Following this, Camille began to speak more openly, if disjointedly.

She interrupted herself frequently to laugh and to wipe at her eyes. With childlike trust she confided in Beatrice that it was Marcy and Kevin, not her, who’d been most upset by their father’s strange behavior—“They so look up to Lionel, you know. He’s a model of moral intregrity to them. As he is to me!” She confided in Beatrice a remarkable story of emptying the liquor cabinet of every bottle, whiskey, Scotch, bourbon, gin, that had already been opened, a few days after Lionel had moved out; packing the bottles in boxes and taking them to the county dump so she wouldn’t be tempted to drink—“The unopened bottles, and everything in Lionel’s wine cellar, I wouldn’t know how to open—so I’m safe.” She and Beatrice laughed together at this revelation. How prudent of Camille, whom a single glass of white wine made light-headed; how wise. Beatrice, who was susceptible, too, to alcohol, and who avoided drinking except upon social occasions, and then sparingly, would have liked to think she might have equivalent sense if Avery ever left her. (But Beatrice could no more imagine her devoted husband leaving her than she could imagine her own death, except as an intellectual possibility.) Camille showed Beatrice a postcard from Barbados, which it seemed Lionel had recently sent her; the glossy picture was of a resort hotel and a wide white beach—“The Barbados Hilton where Lionel and I have stayed. So it must mean he’s thinking of his marriage, yes? Of our happy memories? Otherwise Lionel wouldn’t have sent such a card. It would be cruel, and Lionel is not a cruel man.”

Camille’s voice trembled. Beatrice said quickly, “Certainly not! Lionel is very possibly the most gentlemanly, considerate man in Salthill. Much nicer than Avery.” Camille didn’t register the little joke, but was staring fixedly at the handwritten message on the postcard. Beatrice had to wonder if Lionel had slipped off to the Caribbean with his reported girlfriend, a gorgeous, exotic, very young physical therapist he’d met at a Manhattan clinic, but she would not have wished to ask.

Camille went on to apologize for having missed meetings of Planned Parenthood, Friends of the Salthill Free Public Library, Friends of the



J C O

Salthill Pro Musica, Friends of the Salthill Arts Council . . . She was limiting her volunteer time to the Rockland County Homeless Animal Shelter where they badly needed help, and donations. She told Beatrice of how, driving on West Axe Boulevard the very morning after Lionel had left, she’d seen a dog hit and left to die at the side of the road; she’d stopped, and brought the dog to the Rockland clinic, where emergency surgery saved his life. Recounting this, Camille became quite moved. “Shadow is one of us who has not been destroyed. I call him Shadow because he came like a shadow out of the sunlight that was blinding, I looked up and suddenly he was
there
.” The misshapen dog’s ears pricked up at the sound of his name. His rheumy eyes lightened. Beatrice, who felt a fastidious dislike for deformed or disfigured creatures, had a sudden sense of the dog’s inner life, if a dog might be said to have an inner life; she shuddered. “Camille, it’s so generous of you to take a strange dog in. An abandoned dog. And now a crippled dog. At such a—difficult time in your life.” Camille said reprovingly, “It’s the right time. I knew. There are no coincidences.” A thought came to Beatrice, suddenly. “Will you be taking in others? Dogs needing a home?” Camille said with an apologetic smile, “Oh, Beatrice, I’m afraid not! I wish I could, this house is absurdly large, but Apollo and Shadow are probably quite enough. Even if they spend most of their time outside, and sleep in the barn, Lionel is allergic to dog hairs, you know.”

Beatrice said helpfully, “How convenient for you, when the children were growing up. We had no such excuse, they nagged us constantly.” Camille said, as if unhearing, “Of course, Apollo isn’t with us permanently, you know.” Beatrice murmured, “Isn’t he!” Camille said, “Adam is traveling in Egypt now, I think.” Her eyelids fluttered shut as if to spare her seeing Beatrice’s embarrassment. “I’m not sure when he’s returning. After the New Year, I suppose.” Beatrice fumbled to open her purse to search for a tissue, suddenly preoccupied. Camille said, smiling, “I’ve been having such vivid dreams lately, Beatrice! I can recognize the Mediterranean, I think—

Lionel and I took a Greek cruise there, ten years ago. But also desert, pyr-amids, and this strange luminous river that must be the Nile, it’s so very old a river, its roots are in the beginning of Time. These sights Adam is seeing. I assume.” She laughed girlishly. “Isn’t it like Adam, not to send any of us postcards!”

Beatrice heard herself say haltingly, “Yes, it’s—not like Adam, to forget his friends. I mean—well, yes, I guess it is.”

At the name “Adam,” Apollo stirred uneasily. Both dogs had been
Middle Age: A Romance



lying on the kitchen floor, close behind Camille, as if guarding her.

Apollo’s ears pricked forward, his silvery club of a tail thumped a few times. But, Beatrice could see, Adam’s dog had not the faith in Adam’s existence that poor Camille had. The melancholy moment passed.

Soon after this exchange Beatrice kissed her friend good-bye and left the house on Old Mill Way. What a relief! The doggy depressing smell, and the somehow too intense atmosphere, as if everything uttered had a double meaning; one in which the dogs somehow shared. On the whole, however, Beatrice was pleased with the visit, and she believed that Camille was grateful for it. She’d extracted from Camille a wan promise to come to dinner that weekend at the Archers’, and to have lunch with her and Abigail Des Pres in the new Thai restaurant in Salthill the following week.