Real Life (23 page)

“We really get along very well, Rachel,” Dorrie said, smiling to herself at the understatement. Their ecstatic times in bed, their long conversations and companionable silences, their jokes and shared tastes, their delight in the mere act of looking at each other across a table: all this was summed up, correctly but inadequately, in “getting along very well.”

“He's had an awfully messy marriage and divorce,” Rachel went on. Whenever Rachel made one of her negative remarks about Alex and his past, Dorrie was tempted to ask her for details: what exactly had the mess consisted of? But she didn't want Rachel to know that Alex didn't discuss it with her. His failure to do so hurt her. She thought, When he tells me what went wrong with his marriage—but it was a thought she never finished.

“I think he's recovered nicely,” she said to Rachel. She dug happily into her quiche in a manner that she recognized as smug.

“It's just hard to imagine Alex Willick settling down again.”

“I told you—nobody's talking about settling down.” Dorrie heard her voice—snappish, dismissive, scared—and changed the subject to Rachel's wedding.

Rachel and Leon were getting married at the end of October. Rachel had revealed no more doubts, and Dorrie didn't like to ask, but over coffee, in case Rachel's pessimism about Alex was a signal that she had troubles of her own she wished to spill, she asked, “I assume you've worked everything out?”

Rachel's reply was ambiguous: “It's worked itself out,” but she smiled as she said it and, in fact, she had been smiling often, and seemed perfectly content, so that Dorrie had to conclude that either Rachel was, after all, marrying for love, or she didn't want Dorrie to suspect otherwise. Either way, Dorrie kept the conversation at the practical level of wedding, honeymoon, and housekeeping arrangements. The wedding would be simple, the reception lavish; they were traveling to the south of France afterward; Rachel was giving up her apartment and moving into Leon's condominium. “I can't believe I'm finally getting out of that Strangler apartment,” she said. “Now I'll really be erasing William from my life, at last. God, second marriages are wonderful. Everyone should have a second marriage. Too bad you have to go through a first marriage to get there.”

“All this blithe talk of marriages,” Dorrie said. She felt, suddenly, full of resentment. Here was Rachel, on her way to a second husband, cautioning Dorrie away from her first. “What about me, Rachel? Why shouldn't I have a chance at it—to make my own mistakes, if nothing else?”

Rachel looked at her woefully and said, “Oh, Dorrie, you do want to marry him, I was afraid you did. I've said all the wrong things. God knows, I'm not to be listened to. Look at the swamps I've gotten myself into over the years.” She put down her coffee cup and touched Dorrie's sleeve. “Go for it, Dor. If that's what you want. Good Christ, you deserve whatever happiness you can snitch.”

Dorrie burst out laughing. “You sound like you're recommending that I start robbing banks. And I meant it when I said I don't think Alex and I will ever go so far as to get married. Believe it or not, I'm managing to snitch quite a bit of happiness just having an affair with him.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I mean, if nothing else, we do have a terrific time in bed, Rachel.”

Rachel looked shocked, then—what? envious? before she laughed and said, “Really, Dorrie!”

Rachel's book came out not long before the wedding. The reviews were ecstatic. Alex sat in Dorrie's kitchen one Sunday morning, with the kitten on his lap, gloomily reading aloud the
Times
review. “Listen to this,” he said. “‘Rachel Nye may have a surer ear for the rhythms of American speech than any other writer since Hemingway. In her own very different way, in her own milieu, that of the sophisticated young urban eccentric, she is every bit as pungent as Hemingway, every bit as true, every bit as valuable a contributor to the excellence of the American short-story tradition.' Holy Jesus Christ and all his saints.” Alex put the paper down. “I'm very glad that your friend Rachel is having some success,” he said. “She works hard; she's an intelligent, sensitive person. But to compare her trivial, cold, precious little stories with Hemingway's is like comparing rabbit turds with the Taj Mahal. And I don't even like Hemingway.”

“I know how you feel,” Dorrie said. “It's hard enough for me. I never know what to say to her about her stories. I'm usually reduced to telling her I love the way she describes what her characters eat, or asking her where she ever got the idea for somebody's weird name. Or sometimes I can tell her I recognize a bit of someone I know, somebody from our adolescent past—or William, of course. She's always putting William in. It's difficult. But for you it must be torture.” She reached across the table to touch him. “I mean, you're a real writer, Alex.”

He took her hand and stroked it thoughtfully, nodding. One of the things about him that made her happy was the renewal of his belief in his talent. “I suppose I am,” he said. “I just wish I knew whether what I feel is a real writer's regret for the bad influence she's having on literature or plain old sour grapes.”

“No, you don't. That's the last thing you wish.”

He grinned at her. “You're right. Let's wait and see what I say when my new book comes out and they compare me to Henry James.”

“You'll say, ‘Aw shucks, I owe it all to my muse.'”

“Damn right,” he said, and pressed his lips to the palm of her hand. “So how about my staying over tonight?”

She wished he wouldn't ask. She knew that without her he suffered from insomnia and his old plague of nightmares, but when he stayed with her on Sunday nights Monday was usually lost, and his version of coming for the weekend was to show up for lunch on Friday. A three-day week, she kept trying to explain to him, was not enough for a full-time potter who needed to support herself, not to mention a ravenous, rapidly growing teen-age nephew. If she gave in, she felt guilty and desperate about the bills coming in; if she didn't give in, she worried about Alex. “It would make life so much easier if we just stuck to our agreement—if you didn't keep putting temptation in my path.”

“I'll leave first thing in the morning. Before dawn,” he promised extravagantly. “I'll slip away like a shadow while you're still lying there dreaming about making soup bowls.”

“It's just too complicated, with Hugo getting up for school and everything.”

“Everything—what's everything? So he gets up, pees out the garage window even though you've told him a hundred times not to, puts on the same filthy shirt and jeans he wore all last week, wolfs down a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, and trots up the road to get the bus. Where's the problem? Or do you have your auntie-nephew chats at seven
A.M.
on Monday mornings?”

“We're still not having auntie-nephew chats at all. Alex, I don't know what to do. Things aren't improving. And I keep remembering how Phinny never talked to anyone, just slammed out of the house and disappeared for hours and hours, getting into trouble.” She thought again of the Cézanne painting, her murder plot, all the petty hates she had revealed to Alex. Would she, perhaps, at age eleven, have murdered Phinny for real if she had known he was destined to reproduce himself and put her through it all again? “I'm trying hard to love him and to be understanding. My God, Alex, I don't want him to turn out like Phinny.”

“Tell him to try out for the soccer team. It would do him good to get outside and run around and quit brooding about whatever he broods about and, incidentally, lose some of the baby fat.”

She stayed silent and angry for a minute. Why was she sitting here, lingering over coffee with a man who didn't understand a thing about her? She had a kiln to unload, pots to glaze, the movie star's tea set to pack up in a box. She had a nephew to worry about—where was he now, for instance? Out in the garage loft or rowing up and down the cold October pond. She looked out the window: no Hugo, just the autumn morning mist on the water. She imagined him alone in the dim loft, doing nothing, lying on his mattress. “Don't make fun of him, Alex,” she said.

“I'm not, damn it.” He slapped his palm down on the table, on top of Rachel's review. The kitten jumped down and began to wash herself. “Every time I make a constructive criticism of that kid you accuse me of being hard on him or making jokes. I mean it, Dorrie. He needs to get out and do something, for God's sake. It's not natural for boys that age to sit around all the time.”

Don't mention your wretched sons, she thought. Don't tell me again about those hard-faced all-American boys. “He rows,” she said.

“He rows. Oh, great. Send him to Oxford.”

She stood up and began to clear the table. Daisy trotted ahead of her, hoping for scraps, and Dorrie crumbled up a piece of cold bacon for her. “I've got work to do,” she said to Alex.

“Dorrie.” He came over to where she stood by the sink and, with any encouragement, would have taken her in his arms. She stood scraping toast crusts into the wastebasket. “Don't think I don't sympathize,” he said. “I'm sorry I get so impatient with the kid. It's because he gets in the way of us, our being together.”

Of course she turned to him, leaned her head on his shoulder, hugged him hard, though she didn't feel comforted so much as appeased and stalled. “It's all too much for me.”

“It'll work out,” said Alex. His dismissive optimism only made her grouchier, but when Hugo came in soon after, silently got himself a glass of orange juice, and took it, the kitten, and his algebra book back out to the garage, Dorrie felt so lonely, so defeated by his hostility that she told Alex he could stay the night, after all.

Dorrie hadn't understood, until school had been in session several weeks, that Hugo was no longer seeing Nina. She suspected school wasn't going well, though Hugo was getting A's in everything. Dutifully, without comment, he showed her the tests and reports he got back, his biology lab book, his French
dictées
: A, A+, “Excellent work,” “
Magnifique
.” But it was obvious that his grades weren't making him happy. He was spending his evenings at home but when he finished his homework what he did was sit with Daisy on his lap, out on the deck, or, when it got too cold, up in his loft. Finally, by the chilly nights of early October, he occupied Dorrie's living room, doing nothing. Answering when he was spoken to. Petting the cat, who purred furiously and dug her little white claws into his leg. Dorrie assumed at first, optimistically, that these evenings with her and Daisy, instead of with Nina over at the Verranos', were meant to reestablish their old friendly relationship, but it eventually became obvious that this was not the case. He wouldn't talk, couldn't even be lured into a Scrabble game. She had the impression—from what source she couldn't have said—that he was waiting for something from her. She tried asking him questions—about everything, anything, hoping to hit on the problem, hoping to say the right thing.

“What happened to
Upton's Grove
?” she asked him one day.

He shrugged. “By the time I get home from school it's too late to go over to the Garners'.”

She sat down beside him on the sofa where he was sprawled with Daisy. The kitten's green eyes opened; she looked up at Dorrie with interest, closed her eyes again. Her purr intensified. Hugo kept his gaze on the cat, on his own hand stroking her black fur.

“Hugo? I have an idea. I thought I might get a television, and call the cable people. What do you think? For your birthday.” Any mindless TV show, she thought, would be better than this glassy-eyed idleness, but she tried to keep that idea out of her voice. “I have a feeling we're both missing some pretty good stuff on television. I'm always reading about things in the paper and wishing I'd seen them. And I hate to admit this, but it seems a shame for such a loyal
Upton's Grove
fan to have to miss it after all this time.”

He gave a weak half-smile, being polite. “Oh, thanks, but—well, I mean, not for me. If you want one for yourself don't let me stop you, but—you know—”

“No, I don't, actually, Hugo.” She clasped her hands and looked earnestly into his face, forcing him to meet her gaze. He did, but only for a moment. She saw that his eyes were wary, adult, infinitely sad; then he lowered them back to the cat. “I
don't
know,” she persisted. “Why won't you tell me? Whatever it is that's the matter. This may be hard to believe, but I might actually be able to help.” He was silent. “You don't see Nina anymore, do you?”

Another silence, then he said, heavily sarcastic, “We go to the same school, you know. We ride the same bus.”

“Yes, but—after school, you don't seem to—”

He changed his tone, polite again. “It's different when school starts. They really load on the homework.”

“Have you met any other kids you like? If you ever want to bring anyone home, you know, it's okay.”

“Oh. Sure.”

What did that mean? Sure, he'd met other kids, or sure, he knew it was okay to bring them home? She wasn't handling this right. She thought back to herself at that age, her gawky, dissatisfied adolescence. She too had been uncommunicative, different, in a state of perpetual resentment, bad at making friends. But it was an unfair comparison: she had had parents, a stable home, books to escape into. The complication of Phinny, but there had been Rachel to make up for it. And hadn't life been easier in the fifties? So it seemed now, though she knew the gloom she recalled from those days was a true memory. Damn it, at least Hugo knew what it was to be doted on. And wasn't she knocking herself out for him? Surely, whatever his miseries, she deserved better from him than this sullen cat petting.