Middle Age (51 page)

That day last autumn Abigail tried not to be conspicuous watching as the child in the red beret managed to make her way through the rowdy group, too shy to speak, her face waxy-pale and masklike and her beautiful Asian eyes deep-set and solemn, downlooking, amid the giddy gaiety of her classmates. Abigail thought fiercely,
She is superior to them all
.
They
must know it!
Though in fact the white Salthill kids took no evident notice of her at all. Now Abigail sits behind the wheel of her BMW, watching the same child passing within a foot of the car, carrying her cello case, and she feels again a stab of affection, a wish to protect. There’s a melancholy precocity about this girl. An old soul, in a young body. Is that possible?

And yes, the girl is beautiful, in Abigail’s eyes, though harsher eyes might consider her plain. It’s the pure young-girl innocence that quickens Abigail’s scarred heart.
Why did I never have a daughter! What a blunder
. In fact, Harrison hadn’t much wanted the first baby, who at least turned out to be a boy. A little DNA-carrier with a miniature penis, and Harry’s moaning thrashing tantrum ways. The prospect of a second baby, meaning a bloat-bellied wheezing wife instead of a debutante beauty, and a season of stinking diapers and disinfectant and another “ethnic minority” nanny in the household—
No thanks!
Abigail sighs. Watching as the child in the red beret walks away, oblivious of the Caucasian woman in the designer dark glasses, behind the wheel of a ghost-colored BMW, gazing with such interest after her. Wondering who the child’s mother is. What a lucky woman! Surely the girl is a model of the mother, those delicate features, the shining black hair, the self-effacing way in which she carries herself, but she’ll become, by degrees, Americanized, and break the mother’s heart.
Still, it’s worth it
.
They give us a few years of happiness, it’s selfish to
ask for more
. The thought occurs to Abigail: maybe she should marry an Asian-American man? Are there any Asian-American bachelors over



J C O

forty? She has a vague idea that Asian-Americans don’t divorce frequently; they marry young, and remain faithful; if they have adulterous affairs, surely it’s within their race and class; as her ex-husband Harry Tierney used to say, after business trips to Tokyo and Taiwan, Asians
are
inscrutable—“On purpose. To make us look like lumbering assholes.”

Abigail seems to think that, if she could inveigle an Asian-American man into loving her, and marrying her, this might be the solution to her problems? There’s a small Asian-American population in Salthill and its affluent environs, but there are, strangely, no Asian-Americans in Abigail’s immediate social circle, as, equally strangely, since Salthill is such a liberal-Democrat community, there are no blacks or Hispanics either. (“We try!

We try constantly!” Salthill hostesses claim, quite sincerely. “We invite them, but they don’t come to our parties. Or, if they do, they come only once, and we never hear from them again.”) Abigail knows—her brain is awash with affable cultural clichés, like a washing machine churning laundry—that Asian-American children are “top performers” academically, and that Asian-Americans have “strong family ties.” Each year there are more Asian-American faces in Salthill and Abigail thinks this is a good thing, on principle. She supposes that the child in the red beret is the beloved daughter of one of the new families, her father an investment banker, or a doctor, or a biotech executive, some of whom have bought million-dollar homes in new subdivisions with names like Lincoln Green, Pheasant Hollow, Liberty Vale.

Abigail is wakened from her trance by a horn lightly tapped behind her (this is Salthill, not New York City) and quickly she drives through the intersection. Where she’s headed, she isn’t certain, but knows it isn’t important, since it’s where Abigail Des Pres is headed; like her suicide, it can be deflected. Instead she takes a left onto Quaker Street, and another onto Front, with the intention of circling back to Pearl. (What is she doing?) (Her excuse might be, it’s an overcast spring day, mean-looking storm clouds and gusts of wind spitting rain, if the child in the red beret gets caught in a downpour . . . ) But, bad luck, Abigail is slowed down in Salthill’s narrow streets, caught in slow, clogged traffic, waiting with mounting impatience as women shoppers (acquaintances of hers, Abigail can’t honk rudely) struggle to insert their luxury vehicles into parking places, like hefty women inserting themselves into corsets. By the time she returns to Pearl and Ferry, and cruises along Pearl for several futile blocks, the child in the red beret is nowhere in sight.

Middle Age: A Romance

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Now what the fuck are you doing, Mom! Stalking somebody else’s kid! You
are one SICKO mom, Mom
.

“ N, I ’  that Jared and I rarely speak these days. But I hear his voice often. He’s always in my thoughts. I feel that I keep in contact with him, somehow.”

A D P  
not stalking
anyone, let alone an innocent child of eleven! Observe how she proceeds dutifully to The Lemon Tree to have lunch with the co-chair of the Flower Festival. (Though it has crossed her mind that she could contact each of the music teachers in Salthill, there can’t be very many, and inquire discreetly after a Chinese girl of about eleven who wears a red beret and studies cello . . . But what would she say next? That’s tricky.) Abigail finds herself the brunette half of a pair of beautifully dressed, impeccably groomed Salthill women lunching at Salthill’s most popular new restaurant, The Lemon Tree. Amid a bustle of white-uniformed young waiters and a clatter of gleaming cutlery and what sounds like an endlessly repeating Bach harpsichord tape and a buzz and murmur like the coursing of blood in one’s ears. Before each woman is a plate profusely heaped with gourmet salad greens, vinaigrette on the side.

“The Sunday following Easter, yesterday, seemed like a good idea. But I missed it.”

“A good idea for what, Abigail?”

For killing myself
. “For rethinking my life. Housecleaning, sorting through my wardrobe and throwing away clothes I haven’t worn in the past year. Girl things.”

“Excuse me? ‘Gull things’? It’s so noisy in here.”

“Girl, gull.” Abigail laughs almost too heartily. “I won’t contest the point.”

To her chagrin Abigail finds that she’s drinking white wine after all.

Since when? She’d promised herself
Never again!
And in fact she promised Roger Cavanagh, who’d gallantly saved her ass up in Middlebury, Vermont.
No more alcohol, ever!
Abigail’s luncheon companion, Beatrice Archer, is a bronze-highlighted blond beauty of a mysterious age, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, in a splendid wide-brimmed straw hat like a character in a Merchant-Ivory film, and she’s sipping red wine, and



J C O

talking enthusiastically of the upcoming Friends of the Salthill Medical Center Festival of Flowers, a massive annual fund-raiser scheduled for later in May, for which Abigail has volunteered, reasoning that she can’t kill herself until the Festival is over, nor even succumb to the luxury of a nervous collapse. In fact it was Beatrice, a co-chair of the Festival, who telephoned Abigail the day before, interrupting her suicide plans to remind Abigail of their luncheon date, and of the crucial work they have yet to do, telephoning volunteers, coordinating public relations, finalizing arrangements with the Salthill Inn, where the lavish luncheon will be held, tickets one hundred fifty dollars apiece. Members of the Friends are donating flowers, local florists and nurseries are donating flowers, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (male, Irish-American, “romantic”) has been engaged to read to the luncheon guests. Beatrice’s wine-stained lips part in a glossy, happy smile.

Lean across the table and kiss Beatrice! Maybe you’re a lesbian, that has been
the secret of your sexual malaise
.

“. . .   -, - , -eight . . . thirty. Thirty-
one
.”

On a spotless kitchen counter she’d lined up barbiturate tablets, miscellaneous painkillers, and nine remaining Prozac capsules. She’d located some of Harry’s pills dating back to 8. “You can assume you’ve lived too long in one house,” Abigail sagely observed, to the invisible surveillance camera overhead, which was blurred in her mind with her lost friend Adam Berendt, “when your prescriptions date back to previous presiden-tial administrations.” Abigail took out the bottle of Absolut Vodka and set it before her as on an altar. She was starting to tremble, but maybe that was a good sign?
I am serious
.
I am determined
. If she wasn’t going to go through with this, she’d be calm, wouldn’t she? But maybe she could simply drink herself to death, ingest alcohol by slow steady increments until her flimsy heart fibrillated, and burst? In that way, “Salthill can say, ‘Poor Abigail! She was drinking to chase away the blues, it was an accident.’ ”

Thirty-one pills swallowed within the space of a few minutes, washed down with vodka, was a more incriminating tale.

“Adam! Here’s my predicament. I’m miserable alive, as you can see, but I don’t want to cause anyone misery, dead.”

Abigail, stop! You know I can’t hear you
.

“But I must know: if I commit suicide, should I acknowledge it as a
Middle Age: A Romance



conscious, rational act, an existential act; or should I simply—do it? And leave no note behind?”

Abigail, you’re being ridiculous
.
I told you I can’t hear you, I’ve ceased to
exist
.

“But Adam! You know how insecure I am. You know how I want to do the right thing, but—what
is
the right thing? I haven’t been very happy, you know. For a long time.”

So, who has? You think it’s a barrel of laughs, being dead?

“Well. I could join you, maybe.”

Scattered in my garden? Raked? Who’s going to do it?

“I miss you so, Adam.”

Silence.

“Adam! Are you angry with me? Please don’t be . . .”

Silence. Abigail could hear Adam sighing. There was a maddening way he had of rubbing his knuckles against his eyeballs, which made a muted, juicy sound, and this sound too she believed she could hear.

“Adam, don’t do that! That’s a terrible habit.”

I’m blind in one eye already, so what?

Abigail laughs, without mirth. “Adam, please. I need your advice. If I kill myself successfully, shall I leave a note behind? For instance—

Dearest Jared,

This is my choice, the wisest course for me. My heart is broken. I guess I’m a coward. But don’t feel guilty, darling, over
me
. Always know:

       ’ -

.

Anyway, I love you.

Love,

Mom

Even in death, see, Adam, I’m trying to impress Jared. A not-so-subtle form of flirtation. Using adolescent language like
fucked
-
up
which I’d never use in actual life. Adam, am I pathetic?”

A disapproving, sullen silence.

“Adam, please! Am I pathetic?”

Abigail, you’re a woman who has been wounded
.
But you’re a strong
woman, and you’ll heal
.

“I’m a strong woman, and I’ll heel. Is that what you said?”



J C O

Heal, Abigail
.
H
-
E
-
A
-
L
.

Abigail began to laugh gaily. “Adam, I spend all my time heeling.

Cringing and cowering. Tail between my legs. People stare at me and see an attractive woman, I guess. The worse I feel, the more ‘exotic’ I look. On the outside a purebred Afghan hound, on the inside a tremulous little mutt.”

A’     in The Lemon Tree is smiling at her, perplexed. “ ‘Smut’? Abigail, what are you saying?”

Has Abigail spoken aloud? She stares at the heaping greens on her plate that take on, for an unnerving moment, the configurations of little green oleaginous snakes in a cluster. She shuts her eyes. The fork slips from her fingers. The buzz and murmur of The Lemon Tree continues without her participation, as the universe will continue after the extinction of our kind.
I’m not capable of living without love
.
God forgive me, I’m not
strong enough
. Abigail makes an effort to dislodge Adam’s battered-homely-handsome face from her mind. Beatrice leans forward in a conspiratorial gesture, a necklace of golden coins gleaming around her neck; she tells Abigail of Lionel Hoffmann’s return, at last, to Camille—“Just in time! Poor Camille has been behaving so strangely. She’s taken in every stray dog in Rockland County, and that beautiful house smells like a
kennel
.”

Abigail says stiffly, “Camille has been lonely, Beatrice. I wouldn’t presume to judge her.”

“
I’m
not judging Camille,” Beatrice says quickly. “She’s an extraordinary woman. No one of us could have guessed how extraordinary! Now she’ll be nursing Lionel: he had to have emergency surgery for bleeding ulcers, and he’ll be having spinal surgery soon. And he’s had some kind of—Camille is very tactful in speaking of it—‘emotional collapse.’ ” Beatrice speaks gravely, a small smile tugging at a corner of her mouth. “The girl he was involved with, in New York, is young as their daughter Marcy, I’ve heard, and quite treacherous.”

Abigail, who has heard the same rumor, but also that Lionel had been introduced to the treacherous girl by Abigail’s ex-husband Harry, who was sexually involved with the girl too, says nothing. Beatrice continues:

“Camille is terribly relieved, and grateful, that Lionel has returned, but has refused to give up her dogs. Lionel wants her to, of course. But Lionel
Middle Age: A Romance