Real Life (21 page)

“Dorrie—what kid with someone like your brother to put up with wouldn't have fantasies of doing away with him? You know you wouldn't actually have done it. I hope you're not blaming yourself for it.”

She shook her head. It wasn't that; it was the suddenness and vividness of the memory that had jolted her. “I'm just overcome with remembering it,” she told him. “I really don't think about Phinny much anymore. I forget how much I used to hate him.”

They left the museum, and walked to a place near the Fenway for dinner. In the dark bar, two young men played a noisy video game, laughing, baiting each other. Their language was violent, profane, casually filthy. Instantly, they reminded her of Phinny. “He was trash, Alex,” she said. “He made no one happy, ever. He ruined my childhood; he ruined my parents' lives.” She thought about it: no, that wasn't quite it. He should have ruined her parents' lives. He somehow didn't. She remembered their incomprehensible ability to bounce back, to keep forgiving him. That must be what it was to be a parent. She wondered if she would have been capable of it, if Daniel, Eleanor, Jane had been realities instead of dreams. If they did become realities, ever. The thought of Hugo glanced through her mind but didn't stay.

“He was a human being, Dorrie,” Alex said. “He must have had some redeeming qualities.”

“No,” she said. “None. Nothing. He was trash.”

The boys playing the video game shouted and called each other names: “ass-hole,” “shit,” “fucker.” She remembered Phinny calling his own parents those things; she remembered seeing him dragged by two policemen into a patrol car; she remembered the time he had pushed her father into the kitchen wall, the sound of her father's head hitting it, how her father had moaned: “Oh, Phinny, Phinny, my boy, my boy.” Tears came to her eyes. Alex said, “Dorrie,” and she picked up her glass and drank.

“Let's forget it,” she said.

“It must have torn you up when he died.”

“It would have if I had let it,” she said. “I do my best not to think about my brother.”

“I can understand that.”

“I know the unexamined life is not worth living and all that, but there are some things that if you examined them too closely would make life—I don't know.” She pressed her fingers, cold from the glass, to her aching head. How unfair it was that those hard-forgotten things could be brought back so easily. “‘Unbearable' is probably too strong a word, but you know what I mean.”

She dried her eyes, sipped her drink, nibbled peanuts. She was beginning to feel irritable now, more than anything, as if she were getting better after an illness. Crabby. Needing to be pampered. She wanted to forget Phinny. She would have liked to think instead about the possibility of Daniel, Eleanor, Jane. She looked at Alex, trying to imagine a baby with his face. It wasn't too late. The seconds were ticking by, but it wasn't too late if they hustled. Let's go back to your apartment, she wanted to say. Let's make love without my diaphragm.

The waiter came and took their order. “I don't care,” she said. “I'm not hungry. Anything. Chicken. Fish.” She let Alex order for her.

“Dorrie,” he said when the waiter had gone. He took her hand again and held it tight. “Talk to me about him some more if you want to—your brother. Everyone has something in their lives like that, some unresolved bit of hostility, some long grudge. It helps sometimes to talk it over and get it straight, even if it's unbearable. It's easier to bear with someone else.”

She closed her eyes, and opened them again to see Alex sitting across from her, looking concerned. “Oh, God, I'm so glad I met you,” she said. He smiled his sad-eyed smile. “I just want to forget Phinny, Alex. At least for now. I promise that if I ever need to talk about him I'll let you know, I'll talk to you.”

Afterward, she thought it might have been his own secret grudges he wanted to talk over and get straight—all the simmering parts of his life he hadn't told her about. When dinner was over and they returned to his apartment she was unable to say what she wanted to say—about time running out, about her mythical children. She didn't know why she couldn't speak; she had resolved to lay it all before him. It was Phinny, she half thought, coming between them. Or Alex's own unexamined life. Something. Whatever it was, they made love, as usual, with the diaphragm in place, while the red seconds flashed by on Alex's digital clock.

Once they had settled down into their affair—a remarkably quick process—Dorrie began to worry about Hugo. She knew she was neglecting him. Even when Alex was at her place (and he was there more and more; his apartment was so hot, and he claimed he couldn't work well without the sight of her), she didn't see much of Hugo. He was spending most of his time with Nina, down at the Verranos' house. Nina's sister and her husband were back from Europe, but both of them worked all day, and Hugo and Nina seemed to have made the place their headquarters. What they did there Dorrie hated to think, but she had met, formally, Susan and Peter Verrano as well as Nina's parents, the Slaughters. “We're so delighted that Nina has a nice friend like Hugo,” Mrs. Slaughter said. She was a chain smoker, and her voice was fast and nervous with a lot of laughter in it. Her husband hovered behind her, frowning, short and frizzy-haired like Nina.

“It's good for her to be outside too,” he said. “Out at your place in the country. Sunshine, fresh air…” He gestured vaguely, looking unconvinced. The two of them made Dorrie think that the reason Nina hung around with Hugo so much, and spent all her time at her sister's, was a simple desire to get away from her parents. And she wondered what Nina's other friends were like, that her parents should be so glad about Hugo. But they were good reliable people, Dorrie thought. A nice family. Behind this perception was the hopeful idea that whatever the kids were up to it probably wasn't drugs or crime or anything more degenerate than excessive television watching—though in her worst moments, she imagined Nina getting pregnant and Hugo being hit with a paternity suit.

“Hugo?” Alex chuckled when she told him her fear. “Be realistic, Dorrie. Babies can't make babies.”

“He's fourteen.”

“He's the most immature fourteen-year-old on earth.”

“He's in love with that girl.”

“Puppy love. And puppies can't make babies, either.”

If Hugo and Nina worried her, Hugo and Alex worried her more. Alex treated the boy like a troublesome pest—like, in fact, a puppy no one wanted. He told her that Hugo was the wimpiest kid he had ever seen. “If you don't do something about him, he's going to grow up to be the kind of guy who goes around with a plastic pen holder in his shirt pocket. The kind of guy whose idea of heaven is going to his company's annual convention in Chicago. The kind who puts an ‘America Number One' license plate on the front of his car.”

“He's not like that at all, Alex,” she told him. It was the only time he angered her, when he made fun of Hugo. The worst was when he contrasted Hugo with his own sons—two California teen-agers who played soccer and basketball and had just taken up windsurfing. He kept their photographs squirreled away in a drawer but he took them out once to show her: Jeffrey and Jeremy, dark-haired boys with similar smart, handsome faces. They resembled his wife, Alex said, keeping his voice expressionless; Dorrie thought they looked arrogant, but didn't say so. She wondered if his wife had winged, smugly lifted eyebrows like Jeffrey's, the same ironic curl to her lips that Jeremy had. Alex told her Hugo should go out to California and spend a couple of weeks with them; they were normal, noisy, exuberant kids who didn't sit around and brood all the time: they would straighten Hugo out. It made her furious, not only that he criticized Hugo but that he stuck up for his sons' way of life only, it seemed, as a reproach to Hugo's. Alex was not normally a man who thought much of things like ball games and windsurfing. If Hugo had been a jock, Alex would have laughed at him and called him a meathead.

She wondered too what would happen if she took Alex up on his idea to send Hugo out to Santa Barbara to be reformed by Jeffrey and Jeremy. She suspected that the terms Alex was on with Beth didn't include much contact with the boys; the photographs were slightly out of date, and he didn't seem to know as many details of their lives as a doting father should. And they were spending their summer vacation at soccer camp instead of in Boston with Alex. She could be cruel: she could say, “What a marvelous idea, I'm sure Hugo would love a trip to California, let's call up and arrange it.” She didn't, of course, and she asked nothing about his sons; the untold details, she knew, were painful. She merely requested him to lay off Hugo.

“If you got better acquainted with him you'd have a higher opinion of him,” she said. “I admit he needs to grow up a little, but he has a lot to offer. Play Scrabble with him some time,” she suggested with a wicked smile.

“And have the little bastard gloat over his victory? No thanks.”

“He doesn't gloat, Alex. He's really a very good kid.” She remembered the day he'd cleaned the garage, how hard he had worked. She thought of all his silly
Upton's Grove
jokes.

“I didn't say he isn't a good kid. I just like him better when he's off with his girlfriend than when he's hanging around here.”

“When he's off with his girlfriend I worry about him.”

Alex sighed with exasperation. “You told me you used to worry that he didn't have any friends his own age. Now he's got one and you're still worrying. Leave the kid alone, Dorrie.”

“She's not his age. And he doesn't seem like himself since he's met her.”

“Maybe it was before that he wasn't acting like himself. How do you know? You barely knew him before he moved in with you.”

“He was never this distant,” she said. It was a Sunday evening. She and Alex were sitting on the deck having dinner. She had hoped Hugo would be home in time to eat with them, and she had grilled hamburgers outside just for him, because he used to complain that they never had real food like hamburgers and pork chops. “We just have snacks,” he said in the good-natured way she never took seriously. Maybe Nina supplied him with hamburgers and potato chips and unlimited cans of Coke; maybe that was the attraction. While the hamburgers cooked, she found herself hoping that the smell of meat would waft over to the Verranos' and draw him home. “I think that girl is turning him against me.”

Alex was thumbing through the phone book while he ate, searching for a name for a new character in his novel, but when she spoke he closed the book and stared over at her. “I'm not imagining it, Alex,” she said. “Hugo and I were getting along fine until he met this Nina person.”

“Don't you see what you're doing, Dorrie?” he said. He spoke hesitantly, reluctant to continue with a subject that made them bicker. If Hugo would only go away: she could imagine that idea always behind Alex's pained eyes.

“No. What am I doing, Alex?”

He set the phone book gently on the floor and leaned forward across the table. In the failing light, his delicate, angular face was full of purple shadows. His thin, light hair hung lank; his moustache drooped. He lay awake at night, he said, thinking of her, of his book, of his sons, of the threat of nuclear war, of his nightmares; only when she was there could he sleep properly. He said, “You've condensed the entire parent-child relationship into one summer. You go through postpartum depression when he arrives, and then you find that he's really a dear little fellow and you have lots of jolly fun together, and then he begins to leave the nest and you go into a panic and become all clingy and pathetic like someone who writes to Ann Landers because her baby is being stolen from her by a girlfriend who's not worthy of him.”

“I am not all clingy and pathetic!” She put down her hamburger; she wasn't hungry. “I'm trying to look out for his interests, and it happens to be true that he's become withdrawn and sullen and he's never home. I really don't think that's healthy behavior for a fourteen-year-old kid who never before showed any particular signs of alienation.” Or had he? Was rowing around the pond for hours an alienated activity? Or not finding any friends? Or refusing to read books? It seemed to her that she hadn't seen Hugo smile in weeks—that babyish grin that used to irritate her with its readiness. And hadn't she read somewhere that a sudden change in behavior was one of the danger signs for parents of adolescents to look out for: was he on drugs?

Alex put down the phone book and leaned over to take her hand. “If this seriously worries you, tell him, Dorrie. Have a talk with the little bastard. Even if he doesn't tell you a damn thing, you should be able to judge from his behavior if anything is wrong. At least, it'll set your mind at rest if you tell him what's bothering you.”

“I do feel responsible for him, Alex.” She was grateful for his about-face, and for his warm handclasp. She was grateful for everything, for his very presence on her backyard deck, at her table, and she believed that eventually he and Hugo would become friends. If she was very careful and did everything right, her life, and Hugo's, and Alex's, would stretch out luminous and winding and calm, like the road in the Cézanne painting—their lives would take on the kind of beauty and clarity she hadn't allowed herself to dream about in years—had never really, perhaps, thought possible. Alex had never thought it possible, either. Or Hugo. But she would achieve it for them. If she didn't allow Hugo to get away. She took a deep breath and let go Alex's hand to pick up her hamburger again. It was getting dark. The light on the pond made a path between the dark reflections of the trees. “He should be home any minute. I'll talk to him tonight.”

“I should probably be on my way.”

They looked at each other ruefully. “I guess I would like to get this straightened out with him. And it would be better if you weren't around.”