The End of the Pier (26 page)

S
ome of the guests were leaving the party in twos and fours, and Maud was getting anxious. It was only two in the morning, and she knew how long those parties could go on; still, the ones who were going down to the dock signaled that at some point the lights would go out. It was Labor Day right now, she thought. And Labor Day marked the end of things. The house over there would be winterized; Raoul and Evita would go back to Manhattan; and Chad would be back at the university. His last year. Sam wasn't allowed to say it, but she must have said it a dozen times a day to herself.

She could feel an anxiety attack coming on. “Panic” was a better word. She wished to God Dr. Hooper were here. Yes, this would be one of those things only Dr. Hooper could handle. Usually the panic hit her when she was just about to either go to sleep or wake up. And that was probably because her defenses were down. She could feel the onset, a slight whirring noise and a rush of wind. Soon it engulfed her completely; her hearing went, her eyes started to cloud over. Unable to move, unable to latch onto anything, not the arm of the chair, not the lamp; there was nothing to hold her down, to hold her onto the pier. Maud could hear nothing outside this alien space, where the distant whirring grew until all she could hear was the beating of huge wings.

It was horrible. It was horrible. It was like being in the eye of the storm—worse probably, because at least a tornado was a natural disaster.

The only person she had told about this was Sam. He said he'd like to think about it for a while, that it reminded him of something
he'd read. A few days later he'd come into the Rainbow and given her a book that had to do with life after death.

“I don't believe in life after death,” she had said with some rancor in her voice. “I don't believe in death.”

“Interesting,” Sam said.

“Not for me, at least, or Chad.”

“Then how do you account for the money Sonny Stuck makes at that big funeral home? The best-looking building in La Porte?”

She wiped the counter hard with a dish rag, frowning. “I don't know. It's a trick or something. But I guess that's not the point. What does the book say?”

“Read it,” Sam had said, and then left.

It was surprising. There were countless other people who had felt a rushing wind of wings. It made her feel better to know she wasn't alone. It made her feel worse when she read that this was one, usually the first, of several steps towards an out-of-body experience. Maud sometimes felt that something was trying to drag her off the pier. Like some people during an operation could float above the table and watch the doctors and nurses hacking the hell out of what was left. No, thanks. Then a brilliant light was reported by all of them. That was usually the last step. Or at least the last step before the first step you took into the land of the dead.

If she just stuck it out, she knew the panic would end; and it did. The pier was firm beneath her feet, and everything was as it should be. Except she was sure she was dying. Oh, not in that stupid soul-leaving-the-body sense. There would be no bright light, no sight of the dead whom she had loved.

She was now thinking about Dr. Hooper's son. She had seen a snapshot of him and thought him very handsome; he looked just like his mother. Maud wished suddenly that she'd invited Dr. Hooper down to the pier tonight. Well, that was a stupid thought; imagine asking someone like Dr. Hooper, “Hey, would you like to come down to the pier for a drink?” Really.

Dr. Hooper stayed overnight sometimes at Stucks' place, or “the
Brandywine,” as they liked to call it. Perhaps she'd gone out to dinner at one of the places the lake people frequented, such as the Silver Pear, a restaurant that specialized in quaint. It was quaint and expensive, and she and Chad disliked it intensely. Dr. Hooper probably would dislike it too, although she could easily afford to eat there instead of the Rainbow Café. You could tell she did very well in her profession just from her clothes. Or maybe she'd just stayed at the Brandywine and gone to bed; she probably didn't feel like being among people any more than Maud herself did. Yet Dr. Hooper could at least look forward to four or five more years of seeing her son on weekends and vacations, since he was only in the second year of prep school.

Maud lit a cigarette and envied Dr. Hooper. No, she didn't, for on the minus side was that the boy lived with his father. Lived with his father and might even
like
his father better, for hadn't his own mother given up on him?

She felt for Dr. Hooper's son. And she wondered if he'd forgiven his mother. To Maud she seemed such a wonderful woman—calm, quiet, intelligent. Sweet—yes, sweet. Sam had said that. Maud thought about that movie with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman in it, where Meryl Streep had left the husband and the little boy. She remembered how eloquently Meryl had pled her case at the end, and she was sure Dr. Hooper could too, if she'd wanted.

She herself could never in a million years have left Chad like that, but she did not at all think this a point in her favor. She did not think that Meryl Streep and Dr. Hooper had loved their children any less. They had simply been able at some point to imagine themselves as existing separately from them. Maud couldn't.

Well, the father might well be the favored one with the Hoopers' son. But what right did
Ned
have after he'd run off with the Toyota saleswoman to come trooping back into their lives and pick up almost as if he'd never left? Achieving, she thought sometimes, for Chad, almost a certain glamour. The Prodigal Dad. He who should
be favored over old stay-at-home Mom, the lady who was always boringly there . . .

Oh, Christ, don't be ridiculous. Still, she stayed on the alert for signs of Chad's switching his affections.

She squinted across the lake. There came another couple away from the party down to the dock.

After all, Chad didn't know why his father had gone off, and occasionally he hinted around that maybe it was her fault. It was an idea Maud knew he liked to toy with, seeing how he could divvy up the blame. She had never told him his father had run away with another woman. It wasn't because she was noble. She was just saving that particular little morsel in case Chad showed signs of bolting, of going over to the enemy camp.

Maud chewed the skin around her thumbnail. Well, maybe that wasn't precisely the reason she hadn't told Chad. Actually, it embarrassed her that she hadn't really cared that much when Ned had taken off with that saleswoman at the Toyota dealership, the one who'd sold them their last car. Maud remembered her as wearing draped and silky dresses of the sort that Velda favored, with big belts and shoulder pads. Maud couldn't recall whether she'd looked like Velda—probably not, since Velda was a fashion model. Maud never did know where Ned had met Velda, or what had happened to the Toyota saleswoman.

Maud much preferred the way Dr. Hooper wore her clothes. That blue dress she'd been wearing today was perfectly plain linen, cut on the bias, and probably cost a fortune. Maud could tell; she used to sew. Maud wondered again if Dr. Hooper had gone out to one of the lake restaurants for dinner. Maybe the Silver Pear.

At the Silver Pear you didn't simply eat, you had a “dining experience.” It was one of those restaurants that offered large promises and small portions. Chad had needed another basket of bread just to fill up. It was in an old Victorian house about a mile farther up the lake. The owners were Gaby and Julian (restaurateurs,
Maud had noticed, always had names like that, never “Mary” and “Bob”), and they'd carefully kept to the original structure, turning the several downstairs parlors into separate small dining rooms. Between the fireplaces and the candles in hurricane lamps, the rooms were masses of flickering shadows, an effect that pricy restaurants often strove for. Besides the glass-enclosed candle, each table seemed littered with the detritus of some New York designer's notion of rustic splendor. Chad had taken her there two years ago on her birthday. All through dinner she had moved things around—vase, little silver basket of potpourri, silver-painted pear (one on every table)—trying to get to the silver salt and pepper shakers, also pear-shaped. It was like maneuvering through a tiny silver-plated orchard.

•  •  •

The argument had been over Chad's Christmas vacation and where he was going to spend it. Ned and Velda wanted him to go to Vail in Colorado. Even though Maud knew it wasn't them Chad wanted to cozy up to, that it was the blazing fireplace in some swanky lodge in Vail where they would be Christmasing (Velda's word; in constant motion, all her nouns were verbs). Chad had never skied in his life, but what difference did that make when there were all of those blond girls in ski boots and heavy sweaters with reindeer designs sitting by the fire with drinks,
après
-ski-ing?

Maud knew she'd lose, she knew she'd have to agree; still, there must be room for negotiation. “Well, all right—but not the
last
half of the vacation.”

Oh, what a trial, his sigh had said. “Mom, that's when they'll
be
there.”

“And I'm supposed to Christmas without you?” She was shoving the poached salmon around her plate, appetite gone. Then she worried the silver pear, moving it here and there, imagining the silver orchard, trying to remember that fairy tale that silver pear trees figured in . . .

“Of course not Christmas Day,” Chad was saying. “I'll be here
Christmas
Day.”
He was being eminently reasonable—couldn't she see that?

“But you'll be New Year's-ing there, is that what you mean?”

“Well, yeah . . . ‘New Year's-ing'?-What kind of word's that?”

Maud looked at him narrowly. She was growing increasingly suspicious. “So how long do you mean to hang around the slopes?”

Very casually, he said, “Oh. Well, we thought I could just fly back to school from Vail.”

The other diners, lake people who all appeared to wear white, probably flew back from Vail, or at least talked about flying back from Vail, all the time. “Vail” was falling just a little too trippingly off Chad's tongue, as if he'd been careening all over the slopes in his mind and it was hardly to be borne that he might have to return to La Porte. “Vail” grated on her ear. More important, her stomach felt hollow: Chad would be spending the last part of his vacation with Ned and Velda.

“Why can't you Christmas with them the
first
week of your vacation and New Year's with me?”

“For Christ's sake, Mom, stop talking like that. And I just said: how can I if they're going to be in Vail the second week, not the first?”

Of course it shouldn't make any difference; but it did, and he knew it. It was always harder to endure his absence at the end, for then she had nothing to look forward to. Nothing but absence.

Maud remembered gazing at the room, at the diners there, the couples and the foursomes, the women in pastels from which the firelight had drained the color, so that everyone seemed dressed in white, white attendants at yet another of her deathbeds. Every departure a death, so of course she had to negotiate: a few more days, please.

The couple at the next table, the man lighting cigarettes, then slipping the slim silver lighter into his white duck pocket: these summer people did things in smooth, single motions, like swimmers cutting seamlessly through water, or skiers slanting down
mountains, or players sliding across the court to make their perfect returns. Maud heard, in her mind's ear, tennis balls plop like pine cones in the snow.

And she thought: their lives must be soft like that, for they reeked of privilege. Their voices, their modulated laughter seemed to float toward Maud like mist rolling over the lake.

Did the four at that table by the window, the panes starry with reflected points of light—did they have children?

Yes, of course they did; but they were smooth, ornamental children, maintained for giving pleasure much like the little boats that slipped by on the water, or docked for the night, berthed along the water's edge. Maud could envision the children asleep now, floating in dreams, bobbing up and down to the rhythm of dream imagery.

And if they got divorced, there would be no predicament. Maud could see that woman in the filmy pastel dress back in New York, now separated from him, living her own life in her vast, museumlike Manhattan apartment, where she had a Life of Her Own as a painter or perhaps an editor with some literary sort of publisher. Maud could see the son shamble in, tan, cashmere-sweatered, plopping down in a soft armchair, breezily greeting his mother and saying he might be Christmasing with a few friends in Portofino; and then, here comes the daughter:
“Daddy wants me to Christmas in the Hamptons. It sounds super . . .”

And the mother, the woman with the pale hair, so absorbed in her paints and canvas or else her brilliant first novel, or an author she's discovered, barely hears this, for it barely matters, and thinks, “Ah, now I can Christmas with Kyle.” Or Robert. Whichever lover she feels is deserving of her Christmas company.

No, this beautiful painter-editor-with-lovers mother—she didn't need to strike bargains. But for Maud, it was always like that: the little trade-offs, negotiating and renegotiating.

Then she had started wondering about the birthday dinner itself: was it simply a sop, a way of getting her in a good mood so she
wouldn't give him a hard time about Vail? That was painful, not being sure.

“I've got to spend
some
time with them, for god's sake.”

“I didn't say not to. I'm just talking about
which
time, which part.”

She hated herself, felt ashamed for sounding like some haggling purveyor of beads and silks in a Baghdad bazaar, trying to raise the selling price a rupee at a time, just a little more, a little more. The argument had escalated, not in raised voices but in rancor and bitterness. He couldn't understand, or said he couldn't, why she had to make such an issue of it.