The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (11 page)

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A green diamond glittered on Art’s pinkie. “The ring makes you look like a gangster,” Veronica said.

“Too much?” he asked, waggling his fingers.

“A colored stone can be very chic,” said a blond saleswoman with total sincerity, a bracelet of keys jingling on her wrist. Veronica nodded politely, then peered into the cabinet while Art consulted his phone, scrolling through his e-mail.

“I think Ines likes simpler things—maybe this eternity band,” Veronica said, slipping into the saleswoman’s vocabulary. She pointed at a small platinum band ringed with tiny diamonds. The woman nodded with approval and placed it on a blue velvet tray. “Holy shit,” Art said, staring at the phone in his palm.

“What?” Veronica asked.

“Nothing. A work thing.”

Art slipped various rings onto Veronica’s fingers, shoving them too roughly over her knuckles.

“Ouch!” she said.

“Sorry.”

“How are
you
doing,” she asked, “about the funny test result?”

“I’m optimistic. I’m sure it’s an error,” he said, but he looked worried.

“That’s what John would probably say.”

“Have you
heard
from John today?” he asked, relinquishing an entire tray back to the saleswoman.

“He gets very wrapped up with Muriel, talking about Evan and going through stuff in the garage. We’re playing phone tag.” Art wandered away to a different counter. “Do you see anything you like?” she asked, catching up with him.

He wiped some imaginary drip from his nose with his thumb and moved to yet another counter, so she found herself following him.

“Why are you moving so fast? You’re not even looking.”

“Okay, let’s focus,” he said.

“You look like you’re holding your breath or something.”

“Maybe we should take some pictures of these.” Art crouched down to look into a glass cabinet of emerald rings. Veronica checked her watch while Art started to snap photos. Hopefully Clara had had enough of the special formula to get her to this moment, which was eleven-forty. A voice asked her if anything
grabbed her fancy
.

“They’re all lovely,” she said, growing impatient with Art.

He popped up and walked away again. They stared down at rings made to look like they were from antiquity. Amulets, Roman twists, and braids of gold. Veronica said, “Remember, today you’re just seeing what’s out there. You’re not buying anything. She’ll love whatever you get.”

“No she won’t. Ines?”

Veronica sighed. “Well, what are you gravitating toward, Art? What do
you
like?”

“I have to borrow money from the furrier for this ring. I want her to love it.” Art called his father, Larry Greene, “the furrier,” because he was one.

“You have time,” she said. Once again, she did not; she had no time. The expansive moment in the shower was an illusion. She was walking around in the vessel that was her body, carrying her various parts—the necessary liver and the unnecessary appendix. Even if she left now, she was probably going to miss the twelve o’clock train.

Art waved his hand like an old pro. “By the time I get the image over to Abe in the diamond district and he copies it—you never want to buy retail, Veronica.”

“Aren’t you the expert all of a sudden. Who’s Abe?”

“Abe Zelnick—he’s an old friend of my dad. A jeweler. I’m going today. He’s on Forty-seventh. Can you come?”

“I’m helping you now. I’m trying to catch a train. I don’t have time.” Her scar seemed to tighten and then release.

“John will be fine without you,” Art said, as he studied a large diamond he could never afford. “The four C’s,” he murmured. “Color, cut, carat, and—
hell,
what was the last one?”

“John will be fine without me?” The carpeted ground shifted beneath her. Where was John? Art’s eyes dodged around the glass case. They had to be back from Dobbs Ferry by now.

“I meant, taking care of the baby. But you know what, pumpkin—”

“I’m not your pumpkin, Art.”

People around them hushed and stepped away, clearing a berth for their argument.

“Jeez, John was right, you know that?”

“He was right?”

“Forget it.”

“You know, I don’t even want to hear it,” she said, striding ahead of him.

“Wait!”

She faced him. “Why should I wait? I have very little time. Do you understand that? You couldn’t possibly. I’m doing you a favor. This is the first Saturday—” She stopped herself. He stared up at her—he was
that
short—his stocky arms folded across his chest. His slightly imperious smile made her continue. “You two get together and gripe about your wives, about all your deprivations. You poor, poor things. It’s unbelievable! I don’t know what he told you, but it’s none of your business, Art!” She trembled slightly, her heart racing.

“You have gone completely…” He paused and then murmured, “Bitch,” under his breath.

“
Gone bitch
? Who says that? Since when is
gone bitch
an expression?”

“Excuse me, you’ve changed, okay?
You have changed
.”

She looked up at the ceiling, where small halogen lights were embedded in the coffered wood. Little rainbow prisms danced about the rafters; there was still beauty. She could find it. She could see it again. But stones kept filling her throat, little pebbles, like something raw and undigested. She felt Art’s thick hand on her elbow and flicked it off.

“What do you expect? I had a child.” The blond saleswoman with the bracelet of keys walked by and lowered her eyes. “But it’s good, the change. You know what Clara does?” Veronica improvised. “She makes everything perfectly clear; she breeds conviction and shows me what’s true. The false stands out in high relief. Like you right now.”

A box of tissues appeared on the counter near her elbow, and she took one, out of habit. Absently, she separated the two layers. After, she got angry this new way. These flashes of total conviction almost felt good. It was true: Clara set the priorities. There was
nothing
that meant more than her.

As Veronica walked toward the elevator, Art scuttled behind her, trying to catch up. It looked like a lover’s quarrel. They were having the fight that she and John had avoided for the past six months.

A group of Japanese tourists stood and watched the elevator dial move. A woman in a pink sweater set peered through a handheld camera and recorded the moving dial. They were happy tourists, enamored of everything. In your own city you were stuck with yourself. And John? John’s life, swirling and changeable—his life was going on in Irvington without her.

That was all. Was it so bad? Was this the stony dam that a marriage got to, the place where it faltered, at a simple juncture like a trip to your mother’s during which you just
don’t
miss your wife?

John and Muriel might be hunched over photos of Evan in the Peace Corps as Clara slept. Evan, the great liberal. John was swept up by him all over again. Art stood silently beside her. The elevator was taking forever.

“V, sorry, okay?” Art said. “I didn’t mean anything about John.” He was panting a little and completely sweaty. “I really need your help this afternoon.”

“I’ve already helped you,” she said, trying to be remain icy, but the familiar, cold cloak of
after
was parting, lifting at the seams. “I came here, I pointed you toward the more-subtle rings that I thought Ines would like.” She picked up her phone and looked at it. It was noon, and, unbelievably, there was no call from John. The word HI flitted across her screen, from Damon. She smiled but deleted the greeting and looked up; the woman in pink was now filming another tourist who was filming that elevator dial. She and Art exchanged a brief look and then a smile. Art began to laugh and then quake silently, which made Veronica laugh. He erupted audibly, and then she did too. They were still recovering as they entered the silent elevator. She would try to call John on the street.

She wanted John’s voice,
his
solicitousness. Her renewed desire for her husband was like the tip of something delicious that she couldn’t get enough of, the pointed bottom of an ice cream cone. But she considered John’s eerily complete silence. She wouldn’t go just yet. She needed to stop thinking. She turned to Art. “Do you want to get some lunch? Before I get the train, I mean?” She wouldn’t go just yet. She pictured the condensation on a glass of cold white wine. Neither Ines nor John ever drank during the day. It made Ines too sleepy, she said. John claimed he had a surplus of intense feelings and didn’t need to have any more. He was happy enough, he said, and didn’t need to become happier. But Veronica always needed to be happier, and Art always said yes.

7

Saturday

John

“What kind of name is
Glittering Sands
, anyway?” John asked Derek as they drove away.

“Hey, it’s your club, man.”

“Clearly it is
not
my club. I mean,
Glittering Sands
? They might as well call it dreamland, fucking dreamland.” Derek’s silent rejoinder was a resounding affirmation. It was dreamland. It was totally unreal; the hotel was a white plastic cutout, a turreted fluffy wedding cake pasted onto the turquoise sea. Clara was a writhing mass on his chest, her very existence mind-blowing. Veronica was a specter, a thing called a wife. He had failed to get back in touch with the office. Even his job was beginning to feel imaginary. All of it, his whole life, was vanishing.

He was falling into this vortex; what had he done? He pictured yesterday’s meeting. John could see Lloyd Miller flipping through John’s scant report on Lancelot Drugs, fuming; a company Miller had discovered, a very attractive potential investment, postponed by a lazy and absentee stringer.

As they pulled into the drive at Laura Simpson’s antiques shop, there was solidity again. He identified Derek’s girlfriend, Monika, right away; she was the blond, pregnant one, playing with a rough little dog the color of a Triscuit on the crab grass. There were several women in front of the shop, but John knew instinctively which was the girlfriend. Her legs were muscular, and there was something blanched and stripped about her face—too much sun at one point in her life and spotty dental work. They were having some kind of tea or shower for Monika, and the other women—both white and black—drifted away, saying goodbye. Monika smiled when she found Derek, and they embraced while her gargantuan belly pointed to one side. John watched them kiss, then turned away when she caught his eye.

“Hey, don’t hit Daddy,” she said in a Bajan accent, because Clara had started a game, swatting at John’s face as they walked from the car. “She’s adorable, hi,” Monika said, extending her hand to shake his.

John’s voice cracked as he introduced himself. For years with Veronica, he hadn’t really noticed other women; lately he’d begun to again—a strand of golden hair that grazed a jawline, fine-boned ankles—though he was guilty only of looking. When they’d returned from the hospital, his wife’s strangeness terrified him. She’d remained huge but was deflated, fine gray hairs had begun to colonize her temples, and a layer of dank white flesh shone over the top of her maternity jeans. She was bloated and fogged and AMA, as they’d said in the hospital—of advanced maternal age. She was a piece of a demographic, and he was too. To think, they’d once imagined they were unique! They were ordinary, wholly defined by their circumstances.

Looking at Monika, he was outside any category. Monika’s pink complexion and open expression were so unsuspecting of her own future.

Something flickered in Derek’s gaze as he noticed John, a shell of pain or recognition, and he let go of Monika’s hand. “John needs goat milk, and I had a feeling you or your mum would know where to get some,” he told her.

“Sure. There’s this little health-food store in Bridgetown that probably has it.” She looked down. With the toe of her sandal, she nudged some pebbles around the base of a red-flowering tree.

“There are these herbs that go with it,” John said to no one in particular, as Laura—
Mum
—emerged. A large, freckled woman, she burst out of a lush but messy garden set up in a corner of the yard, which abutted a wide, flat field. She had Monika’s pink skin tone and overbleached hair. She wore an enormous, slightly transparent blue muumuu, which ruffled in the breeze. Brambles stuck to the muumuu and crackled behind her as she moved forward. They were wonderful, Monika and Laura. “She hit she dad?” Laura said, as she approached and casually took the baby away from John. Clara grew anxious and twisted toward her father and was handed back to him. Ordinarily, Clara’s default holder was Veronica. Things had been easy for John. He pictured Veronica here, perching on the arm of a mahogany overseer’s chair in the shade while she sipped a piña colada. For the first time since he’d landed, he was aware of missing her. “She wants a look in the shop,” Laura said, as she led them into her store. Several mangy dogs lay in their path, on the cool concrete steps and trampled gardenias. “Her mum is here too?” Laura asked.

“She’s actually not here,” he said, jostling the baby.

“Sorry to hear it,” Laura said in a mournful tone, as if Veronica had died. She draped a fat arm around his shoulder very briefly as she ushered him inside. He didn’t correct her. As he crossed the dusty threshold of the store, he didn’t tell her that Veronica was alive. His own morbidity chilled him. As Derek explained to Laura that they were heading to the health-food store, John couldn’t stop his eyes from roving again and again to Monika’s belly.

Laura said, “Maybe you can bring something back for her.”

“For who?” John said, adjusting Clara as she started to whimper and twist. Clara then arched her back stiffly, pulling away from him as if to catapult herself out of his arms.
You can hold ’em and not hold ’em, like a bar of soap!
Rosemary would have said before whisking her away. But now there was no one to help him, and nothing could soothe Clara.

“A present for her mum,” Laura replied, easily speaking over Clara’s crying. He was relieved; it was as if Laura had just told him that Veronica was not dead. Laura produced a cornflower-blue-and-white ceramic statuette of a cherubic toddler cuddling a dog with dopey eyes. “These are from Spain. They happen to be collector’s items. They’re fine bone china.” John examined the object briefly, as if he were considering buying it. A calmness pervaded as he fondled the blue glazed ear of the dog: No one, except for perhaps Clara, thought Veronica was permanently gone.