The Time of Her Life (3 page)

“I didn’t laugh, Avery,” she said to him. “Evan’s your friend.” Claudia always tried to explain herself whenever Avery began
wondering how he could live with her. Always, at that point, her irritation became a soft fear that would arouse her own defensive
anger. “You wanted to go. I hate those parties.” Her own voice rose, although he was holding her arms very tightly and shaking
her when he spoke so that she was swayed from side to side.

Avery had let her go and turned aside, arching slightly over himself in a protective and sorrowful attitude. He was quiet
with his own woefulness for a moment, but then he arrowed straight up again and pounded the wall once more in frustration
and to keep her attention directed at himself. “Shit!” he said. “Holy shit!”

She never understood that there was nothing at all that he wanted to hear her say. She never understood that she was only
incidental to these moods of existential and profoundly insightful despair that swept over him because of all the things he
believed he knew and
his experience in the world. He was passionately agonized. He smashed his fist again against the wall, and it went right through
the thin Sheetrock. Upon impact tiny particles of paperboard and insulation exploded into the room, powdering his face into
a sandy look of less ferocity. Claudia and Avery stood there motionless a moment until finally Claudia laughed at him, but
Jane was standing in the center of the room tense and pale in her seersucker pajamas with happy panda bears printed in rows
upon the faded blue cloth.

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she said over and over until Avery perceived the noise she was making and where it was coming
from and turned to her, enraged.

“Don’t you ever get out of bed this late at night and interrupt your mother and me when we’re discussing something. You aren’t
supposed to be out of bed, are you?” His voice was not loud so much as it was suddenly voluminous with rage. “None of this
is your business. You don’t have any idea about our privacy. You seem to think that you’re an awfully grown-up little girl.
You seem to think you can do just about anything you want to, don’t you? Maybe it never occurred to you that your mother and
I have something to talk about. By ourselves! Just go back to bed!” He started to move in her direction for two or three steps,
but he had never touched Jane when he was angry, and she stood her ground right where she was, shaking her clenched fists
by her sides with each word.

“No, I said stop it! Stop! Just stop it!” And she wasn’t quiet until Avery left the house in a fury, slamming the door and
roaring out of the driveway at two-thirty in the morning.

Now, the next morning, in the kitchen and the sunlight,
sitting across from Jane, Claudia undid the buttons at her wrists and pushed back her full sleeves. She held out her arms
to see that, in fact, they were smudged with bruises where Avery had held onto her. She turned her hands palm up and studied
the marks on the pale white underside of her arms with curiosity.

“Oh, well,” she said to Jane with vague irritation, “I just don’t think that should have happened! Look at my arms! Damn!
That just shouldn’t have happened.” Jane was looking out the window again, and Claudia was mostly musing to herself in any
case. She rested her elbow on the table, settling her chin into her hand, and gazed and gazed at nothing. One corner of her
mouth twitched downward in an expression of distaste. With this first dissipation of her slippery morning expectancy, disappointment
grew apparent in all her movements, especially in the subtle hooding of her large, wide eyes. Her appearance was as susceptible
to disillusionment as a morning glory that wilts with fragile translucency when the light fades.

Jane had moved to the counter to make herself more toast when her father came in, and Claudia was still leaning into her hand,
absorbed in her own thoughts; she didn’t look up right away. Jane put two more pieces of bread in the four-slice toaster and
poured another glass of juice to give to her father.

Avery was disheveled. Even in his handsome green robe and still crisply creased pajamas he had an air of being askew, and
he was not quite sober from the night before. But he was not uncivil. He was hesitant and quiet; he came into the room as
though he might immediately back out of it. Avery was a man, this morning, to be pitied, and he wouldn’t shun pity. That was
how he looked. He carried his injury with him. It defined him for this day, although it didn’t make him less pitiful; it only
made his abjection less savory. He didn’t have much to say when he sat down at the table; he gave only a halfhearted nod of
greeting. When Jane put some toast and juice down in front of him, he was careful to thank her with elaborate courtesy.

Claudia did not acknowledge him at all except to raise one eyebrow in an expression that Jane had often practiced in the mirror.
Her mother didn’t aim this expression at her father; it was a comment she was making strictly to herself. Disdain. It was
superb disdain, and only a light sigh accompanied that look as she very deliberately cleared her place and rinsed her cup
and saucer. She swirled her robe out of the way—flicking it to one side or the other with a twitch of her hand—to avoid catching
it on Avery’s chair, which was in the way now that he had drawn it out from the table to sit down. She even wiped the residue
of jam and sugar from the counters and shook out her place mat, making a swipe beneath it with a cloth to clean the table.

“I’m going to get dressed,” she said out into the room with no inflection. Perhaps it was a bit of information just meant
to float upon the air, and she left the room with a final sweep of her robe and impressive urgency. Finally Jane went to get
dressed, too, while Avery remained at the table, solemnly eating a piece of toast.

Avery was writing a book, and he took a second cup of coffee into his study and sat down at his long bleached oak table, so
spare and functional, which was laden with neat piles of research notes across its surface. He turned on his draftsman’s lamp
and sipped his coffee and
studied the tidy stacks of paper. He needed to bring all his wits to bear on this book in order to make it interesting. He
had grasped hold of an idea that was just beginning to be tossed around with great seriousness now that discussions of the
greenhouse effect had finally filtered down to the cocktail party level. His book would be an investigation of the notion
that the more civilized a culture, the less adaptable it is to environmental and climactic changes. He knew so much to say
about it. He would reexamine the ancient cultures—the Anasazi Indians in particular—and bring the narrative forward to encompass
humankind in the space age. And he knew how to string his words together in pages full of wit and grace so that the message
unfolded with an ease that assured him of a large audience. It would require great concentration to get the arrangement of
information just right.

He swiveled his chair to one side and looked out the tall window that flanked his table on the left. There was nothing there
to see except the long slope of the hill above the house and the autumn trees wound around with trumpet vine. He missed their
orange flowers, which he had looked out upon through the summer. He turned from his window to his papers and then to the window
again. He moved some notes from one pile to another, and he thought about this and that. He sat still and quiet and now and
then picked up a pencil and twirled it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, occasionally leaning over to jot a note
to himself on his legal pad. And what he had decided by late morning was to make some of his homemade chili for lunch. He
left his study, still dressed in his pajamas and robe, and called up the stairs to Claudia and Jane.

“I think I’ll make some chili for lunch. Hot, this time. Hey, I’m going to make some chili for lunch.”

In the kitchen he was very busy, and Claudia and Jane hovered about. It was irresistible; they came in and out. It was quite
a production when Avery made chili. Jane opened and drained and rinsed the beans, and Claudia leaned over a counter where
the chessboard had been set up and studied the chess puzzle taped to the wall above it. Avery opened a beer and sipped it
from the can while he stirred and seasoned the meat, and then he joined Claudia and they argued about the solution to the
chess problem. Avery put forward only gentle disagreements, while Claudia was adamant and went to find the book that had the
answer.

Jane saved the chili every time. She stirred the meat up from the bottom whenever she smelled it beginning to scorch. Her
parents were absorbed, now, in their board game. Avery opened another beer, and Claudia looked around the kitchen for the
pack of cigarettes she had hidden from herself the day before so she wouldn’t be tempted.

“Now, look, if you’ll just think about it, Avery,” she said when she came back to the board, “you’ll see what I mean.” She
bent over to peer at the little chess pieces, and she pushed her hair straight back from her forehead in exasperation, holding
it there abstractedly, so that her chin was aimed like a pencil point at the game laid out in front of her. There was nothing
coy about Claudia; she was intense at every moment.

Jane added the beans and tomatoes to the chili but then turned the heat down under it and left it to simmer. She went out
of the kitchen to her own room to read a book. She had a book report due Monday, and
Claudia and Avery were still peacefully debating some point of chess.

Avery drank some red wine with his chili and poured a glass for Claudia, too, and they sat at the table to eat with the chessboard
between them and the puzzle Claudia had taken down from the wall and laid out to one side. Jane didn’t join them for lunch,
and they didn’t notice. The Parks never worried much about meals; as far as eating went, it was mostly catch as catch can.

Avery carried his wine with him after lunch, and followed Claudia into the living room, where she pulled her chess books from
the shelves. She took down Byrne and Reshevsky, but she had stacked them beside her chair and was leafing through
Bobby Fischer’s Best Games
. She bent over the book and began making a diagram in the margin with her pencil, and Avery stretched out full length on
the sofa, in his robe and slippers. He was very pleased to have his wife there, his dog there. Five hours into the day he
could still think of his drinking as a tender undertaking, only enhancing the precision of his thoughts. And he dazzled Claudia
in the afternoon with his pleasant verbosity. He was so nice to look at, long and lean, with his features charmingly uneven.
Every day about this time Claudia let any sense of foreboding drift loose from the moment because for a little while Avery
was so pleased with the idea of his work, pleased with his house, glad to have her as his wife.

“Look at this dog’s head, Claudia! Look at Nellie’s head!” Nellie had curled up on the floor next to Avery on the couch. “Now,
I knew the first time I saw her that she was a good dog. An exceptional dog.” He put his wineglass down so that he could ruffle
Nellie’s collie coat all up and down her back, and the dog leaned into his
arm, fawning and arching her neck. “She has a wide forehead. You see that! Look at that head! They’ve bred the brains right
out of most collies. Christ! Have you seen those dogs? Heads like needles.” He paused to think this over and was satisfied
for a moment. “This Nellie is no needlehead!” It was a wonderful thought. “No needle is Nellie!”

Only when Avery became suddenly imperative like this did Claudia become the first little bit uneasy, and she was also cross
at Jane, who had finally come downstairs to get lunch after the kitchen had already been cleaned up. She came into the living
room, and she was restless and agitated, moving around the room from chair to chair, interrupting her father.

“Are you going to drive me to Diana’s, Dad? Will you fix me a cheese sandwich first? The chili’s almost gone. It really is
awfully spicy, too. Would you make me a sandwich? The kind you do in a skillet?”

Avery’s attention wandered over to her. He studied her serious face, and he planned carefully in his mind the cheese sandwich
he would fix for his daughter: rye bread with two slices of cheese and a piece of ham between. He was quiet while he considered
this sandwich. He would sauté it slowly on both sides until it was golden brown. A prize.

“Jane, for God’s sake,” Claudia said. “I can fix you a cheese sandwich. And there’s plenty of chili left, anyway.” She had
closed her book and had been enjoying Avery—his good humor. She liked watching him this afternoon.

Claudia didn’t think ahead; her day unfolded however it might and almost always in unexpected ways. And in fact, she was unaware
now that she had disturbed the
image Avery was constructing, because she had snatched away from him the delectable offering he was mentally preparing for
his own daughter, and a rather hazy irritation began brewing in his head.

He looked at his wife, who had moved over to the window and wasn’t even remembering that she had spoken. She was never turned
out exactly right, but her lack of style was a style unto itself. Her failure to have ever made a concentrated decision about
the way she would dress produced an effect that appeared to be studiously haphazard. Today she was wearing boots that Avery
thought must be intended for the outside since they turned down around the calf in a sheepskin cuff. She also wore a long
purple skirt and a wheat-colored sweater belted at the waist. The whole outfit was somehow a little off, and besides, it was
a style for which she was too full-blown, too buxom. Avery watched her profile against the light, the delineation of her waist
and full hips. He begrudged her every single thing, just then, in an almost sibling petulance. He resented the fact that in
the elegant room he had designed she was amazingly sexual, untidy, blatantly female.

“You could never do it,” he said. “You could never possibly make that sandwich the way I can. Your own daughter knows it.
It’s not an easy, simple sort of sandwich. That’s what Jane knows. It takes concentration!” He was quite angry. “The cheese
oozes out of a sandwich like that if you’re not careful. You would just burn it. It takes timing. How do you think you could
ever do that? You won’t even bother to buy the right kind of food. Not once—not
once
—have you ever come back from the store with anything but processed American cheese and that slick-tasting ham in little square
packages
that says ‘water added.’ Can’t you ever stop at the deli? Even Janie knows not to ask you to make her a sandwich, don’t you,
Janie?” He considered it all for a moment, a trifle calmer. “It’s a sensual sandwich,” he said, and he liked that phrase.