Safe from the Neighbors (28 page)

It was after six o’clock, and then I remembered promising my father that I’d drop by. I dreaded the conversation we’d need to have, though I already understood it would come as no surprise. For all I knew, the whole town was already talking, and while it was hard to imagine anybody calling to say his son was screwing around, he’d certainly found out somehow.

I backed out of Maggie’s driveway and headed for town. At Loring Avenue I almost took a left, to go to my house and beg Jennifer to forgive me and let me try to start over. But that argument, if I was going to make it, wasn’t likely to succeed tonight. And my sense of things was that the time to start over had come in August, when our daughters left home. Instead of doing it with her, I’d done it with someone else.

All the lights at my parents’ place were off. It seemed unlikely
they’d gone to bed this early, so I called and the phone rang ten times before I gave up. So I got out of the car, walked over to the house and rang the bell. When nothing happened, I pounded on the door for a minute or two, again with no result. By that point I was concerned. Absurdly, I whipped out my cell phone and started to call Jennifer, to ask what she thought I should do, though I managed to press the red button and stop the call before the phone rang on her end. I know it didn’t go through because she told me so the next morning.

I fumbled with my key ring until I found the one for their front door and unlocked it, only to discover that the chain was still on. So I backed up about three feet and threw my shoulder against it, which accomplished nothing except giving me a stinger. When the pain eased off a little, I reared up again and this time performed my best approximation of a karate kick, and the door splintered and smashed into the Sheetrock.

“Dad?” I hollered. “Hey, Dad?”

But he never answered, and down the dark hallway I heard my mother groan.

T
HERE WAS A GUY
who used to hang around the history department when I was at Ole Miss, a tall, slope-shouldered man with thin silver hair who always wore a maroon Harvard Windbreaker, no matter what the weather. You’d see him sitting on a couch near the elevators in Bishop Hall, his legs crossed above a few inches of hairy ankles, since he never seemed to wear socks. He’d be reading something rarefied like the
New York Review of Books
or the
Times Literary Supplement
, often reaching down to break a piece off the gigantic Hershey bar invariably lying in his lap.

At first we thought he must be a latter-day grad student, a guy who’d retired from his job and come back to pursue some degree he’d probably never use. But then a professor told one of my friends the real story.

This gentleman didn’t need a graduate degree because he already had one, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Eastern European history, and he’d written two books I soon found in the library. The first dealt with an event called the “Miracle on the Vistula,” when the Polish army, commanded by Field Marshal Pilsudski, repulsed the Russians in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920, and the second examined the liquidation of a Czech village after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. One day in 1972 he’d been summoned from his classroom and informed
that his son had been murdered after exiting a subway station in Queens. A couple months later, his wife, an economist, told him she’d fallen in love with a woman and was going to leave him. His response was to drink a bottle of Scotch and try to hack off his arm with a butcher knife. He’d been in and out of institutions ever since, and was at Ole Miss only because his best friend, the chairman of our department, had actually given him a room in his house.

I couldn’t understand why he’d done any of this. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d caused his son’s death. As for his wife, well, she’d figured out her sexual nature was different from what she’d thought. Sometimes, I reasoned, things just happen, and as long as you’re not at fault, why blame yourself? At the age of twenty, I failed to grasp the difference between guilt, which can almost always be atoned for, and grief, which can only be borne.

On the day my father was buried, I stood at the edge of the grave, flanked by my daughters and my wife. Ellis was there, too, as were quite a few of my colleagues and several students from my honors class. Selina and Ramsey came, my boss doing his best to conceal his displeasure. I didn’t yet know it, but Maggie had e-mailed him from North Carolina the day before, saying that teaching wasn’t for her and she’d decided to go back home. That must’ve confirmed the rumors he’d been hearing for several weeks, that she and I had become more than friends. He hadn’t said anything to me about it, given the circumstances, but earlier, at the memorial service, I’d noticed him studying me and my family, shaking his head as if he couldn’t fathom why an otherwise intelligent man would do something so stupid. I didn’t understand it myself.

We’d invited a few people over to our house for a lunch catered by our faux French café—leek tarts, duck with cranberry
mustard, that sort of stuff—but I couldn’t eat a thing. Jennifer had told me that once everybody left, she wanted me to talk to Candace and Trish and let them know, before they went back to school, that I’d be moving out. I had the distinct impression she was eager to get on with her life.

The Colemans were among the last to say goodbye. Ramsey asked if I planned on coming to work the following week, and when I nodded he said, “Well, take your time. But when you do get back in the saddle, come by the office and let’s chat, all right?” So then I knew I had at least two conversations to dread, not just one.

The caterers cleared away their trays, and Jennifer announced that she was going to walk Ellis home, leaving the three of us alone. I asked if they’d like a glass of wine. Trish, who hadn’t cried at the funeral home or the cemetery, said sure, but Candace shook her head, wiped her eyes again and stood there as if she were in the dock, waiting for her sentence to be pronounced.

I poured Trish a glass and another for myself, then said, “Let’s go into the living room and sit down.” Though they weren’t yet aware of it, my daughters were about to become revisionists who’d come to question every fact they thought they knew about the family they’d grown up in. Even the most innocuous actions—the peck on the cheek I’d given their mother after dinner before going back to school to work on lesson plans until midnight—would be reevaluated in the light of what they were about to hear.

So there we sat, the two girls and me, and I didn’t even know where to begin. Should I start with the day school opened, when I saw Maggie for the first time in forty-four years, or should I start on the afternoon I went to her house for the first time? Or should I reach even further back, to when she tripped me off the porch of that store? It’s a lot easier to say when something ended rather than when it began. Most of us can recognize the end
from a mile away, but the beginning always slips up on us, lulling us into thinking what we’re living through is yet another moment, in yet another day.

I knew that afternoon I was living through a moment like no other and wanted it to pass in fewer than sixty seconds. There was time neither for providing causal analysis nor for cloaking my failures as husband and father in a golden flowing narrative, in which I’d done
this
in
that
setting, entertaining
x
emotion before finally succumbing to
y
urge as rain pounded down and lightning flashed and wind shook pecans off the trees. There was nothing to do except reduce the truth to its essence, discarding all the surrounding data that would interest them even less than it did me.

No, there was nothing to do except say it, so I did. “Girls,” I told them, “I’m in trouble.”

L
IKE A POLITICIAN
who’s been hounded from office, I tried to stay out of the public eye, doing my grocery shopping in Greenville and keeping to myself as much as possible when not in the classroom, mostly just sitting around my parents’ house watching
The World at War
on the History Channel before falling asleep on the couch. I did drop by the nursing home every afternoon to look in on my mother, and sometimes I could tell Jennifer had been there. There would be a rose in a vase on the bedside table, or her hair would be freshly brushed, or she’d smell faintly of Jennifer’s perfume. I finally had my talk with Ramsey, who began by telling me we’d been friends for a long time and that he felt like he could come to me if he ever needed to, so why hadn’t I felt like I could come to him? Well, I said, I didn’t know I was in trouble until it was way too late for talking about it to do any good. He leaned back, locked his hands behind his head and, instead of issuing me the warning I expected, only said, “I can sure see how it could happen. If you’re going to ruin your life over a woman, you want it to be one like Maggie.”

As for the woman in question, she hadn’t answered any of my e-mails or voice-mails, though I’d left her so many that she could’ve accused me of being a stalker. A couple of times I went
by her house and peeked in the window, and the kitchen looked exactly as it had on the day my father died. Then, around the middle of November, a U-Haul truck was parked in the driveway next to a car with a Tishomingo County license plate. Somebody else was moving in. What they did with her stuff, I have no idea.

I kept calling her, though, leaving messages every few days, and finally, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, she answered. I was so shocked that I couldn’t speak.

“If you don’t say something, Luke,” she said, “I’m going to hang up. And I won’t ever answer again.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her.

“Then why did you call me?”

“I wanted to hear your voice.”

“I’m not a CD. You can’t just put me on and hit play.”

“I know that.”

“So what was it you wanted to say?”

I was standing in the kitchen, where a layer of grime coated everything. A lot of the stuff in the refrigerator was already out-of-date. I couldn’t remember if I’d taken a shower today, or even the day before. I’d be spending Thanksgiving with Ellis—at least he’d said I could. The girls would be at their mom’s. Candace, I knew, would have her boyfriend with her, the football player who’d gotten hurt, and I suddenly wanted more than anything in the world to be there with all of them. “Why did you leave?” I said, choking on my own words. “You come in here and stir everything up, then take off at the first sign of trouble.”

“
I
took off?” she said, her voice rising. “Yes, of course I did—out the back door, like some petty criminal. And you did what? Did you come looking for me? No, you sat there in your house all night. Watching a fucking ball game on TV.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“How do you think? I drove up and down your street. For
hours
. I could see you sitting there. You put me out of your mind, just like some inconvenient fact.”

“I tried calling you. Didn’t you have your cell?”

“I didn’t want to be called. I wanted to be
sought
. You made your choice that day, and I wasn’t it.”

I sat down, propping my elbow on the kitchen table and resting my jaw against my knuckles. I couldn’t quibble with her interpretation. Things were pretty much as she said. I’d made my choice, and it hadn’t been her. And like Jennifer she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d let you backtrack.

I knew we were speaking for the last time. She wouldn’t want to talk to me again, and I no longer had anything to say to her, having already said it with the actions she’d described. There was, however, one last question I needed to ask: “The night your mom got killed,” I said, “your dad and mine went to Oxford together. Did you know that?”

I thought at first that she was about to end the call. But finally her voice broke the silence. “Yes,” she said. “I’m the one who answered the phone when your father called.”

“Can you remember what he said?”

The distance between us could no longer be measured in the miles that stretched out between Mississippi and North Carolina or wherever she happened to be. “Yes,” she said, “I do. That and a whole lot more.”