The Widower's Tale (21 page)

He went to his desk, turned on the computer. He groaned. Three e-mails from Clara. He read the last one first.

Oh sweet cat, I don't know where you are, and I'm going out of my
mind. I've tried your cell a jillion times and you're not picking up. Please, please forgive me. I acted like a lunatic, a crazy-jealous-hysterical GIRL. I want us to be strong, Robert. I can't go to bed till you call. PLEASE call; I don't care how late. I love you I love you I love you I love you
.

Clara wrote e-mails like she wrote her papers, everything tidy and grammatical. The torrent of
I love you
's was something akin to radical.

Turo, Robert, and Tamara had left their phones behind when they went on their "mission." According to Turo, this was part of the preordained M.O. Robert picked up the phone from his night table. He flipped it open. Thirteen messages. Clara Clara Clara Clara ...

Robert's freshman-year roommate had been a jock Neanderthal, straight from central casting. Huge and blond, a true golden boy, a virtual Viking, Sam was a lacrosse player from northern Minnesota who aspired to become "an economic player in D.C." Robert had liked the guy at first--different was good, right?--but the farm-country charm wore thin when he'd sampled the sexual wares of a dozen girls by Christmas break, most of the merchandise poked and prodded in their way-too-small room at all hours of the day and night. Sam saw himself as a genius stud and loved to spout advice to Robert, whom he saw, by contrast, as hopelessly challenged on the mating frontier. Robert came to think of Sam as the Pillager, and while he could have blamed the guy's hyperactive sex life for inhibiting his own, he actually found it perversely distracting--a guilty form of entertainment. That spring, Robert finally hooked up with a few girls, including a classmate from Newton South, but no one sparked him until Clara, whom he met in statistics the fall of sophomore year. By then, he was rooming with Turo, and the Pillager was just another dorm mate he'd greet with a "Hey, how's it hanging?" as they lined up for lunch.

But now, as sleep refused to bless Robert with a respite from his bifurcated guilt, a stray bon mot from Sam flashed past: "The minute they offer to do your laundry, it is definitely severance time."

Not that Clara had never done Robert's laundry before. A washer-dryer combo in the kitchen was one of the perks in his apartment; since Clara still lived in a dorm, Robert was happy to let her use it, and if his dirty stuff filled out a wash or two, then so much the better for him.

But Wednesday (just yesterday?) was the first time she'd put his clothes away, which she did without asking him--and which, really, shouldn't have been a big deal. She decided to surprise him by "neatening up" the contents of his dresser, emptying out and rearranging everything from his tennis socks to the cummerbund and tie Granddad had given him to wear to his prom.

What happened was this. Robert came back from the library to find Clara reading on his bed. She gave him a secretive smile. "
Hey
, bobcat," she said. "I think I found something I wasn't supposed to find."

"Yeah? Well, then probably I wasn't supposed to find it, either." He thought of Turo, who by then had begun to disclose the details of his midnight escapades.

Clara was straightforward--she was practically a guy in this respect, which was cool--so instead of going through some big, coy guessing game, she just reached over to the side table and held out a small red box. Robert didn't recognize it, not at first.

"Okay," he said. "So I'm still in the dark, Clara."

She opened the box and held up the ring. "It fits perfectly ... here." She slipped it onto her left pinkie.

"Oh that! That's the ring Aunt Clo gave me.
Years
ago. I had this major crush on her when I was a kid. She gave it to me as a consolation prize. I guess the only reason I haven't lost it is that I never really wore it."

"Oh." Clara's smile dimmed a bit. "That's so sweet."

"Yes. It was." Robert remained standing. Why was he pissed that she'd put on the ring? "So. You just happened to be, like, rifling through my drawers?"

Clara explained about the laundry. "Wait till you see your T-shirt drawer," she said proudly.

"Color coded?" he joked. "Wouldn't want the reds to compromise the blues. Too much at stake." Still, he did not sit beside her on the bed. Pointedly, he emptied books from his backpack onto his desk. He turned around and said, "I'm hungry. Want some soup?"

"You," she said. "That's what I want. You."

"Food first." Robert leaned over to kiss her, but quickly. He left the room to go to the kitchen. He wasn't really hungry. He wanted her to put back the ring without having to ask her. But in the kitchen, there she was again, sitting at the table, wearing the ring, polishing the stone with a corner of a sleeve. When had he last even looked at it, taken it out of the box? It was silver, the traditional clasped hands (Amish or something, Clover had told him), but between them nestled a small triangular garnet rather than a heart. It hadn't occurred to the lovelorn young Robert, when he accepted the ring, that it was meant for a girl. For a week or two, he'd carried it on a key chain, deep in a pocket, because it was too large for his fingers, but he'd put it away when he decided that he didn't want to risk losing it. He had also feared that his mother would find it, that she might tease him about it, that she might learn his secret.

He pulled a wax carton of soup from the fridge and poured some into a saucepan. He put it on the stove to heat. When he turned around, there was Clara, twirling the ring on her finger, her smile self-conscious and bland.

"So," she said. "What if I wear it? Would you let me wear it? Just to borrow? Or am I being presumptuous?"

"Well, yeah, if you want the truth, sort of." He laughed, a pose.

"Sort of what?"

"Presumptuous. Your word, Clara. I mean, it's this irrationally sentimental thing, okay?"

"This is new. Your sentimental side."

"Well there you have it." He turned around to stir the soup. "We should still be capable of surprising each other, right?"

"It bothers you. That I found this ring and thought it was for me. Like I assume something about us you don't."

Tiny bubbles encircled the soup where it met the edge of the pan. Robert stirred again.

"Answer me, bobcat."

Robert looked at his girlfriend. It was one of those rare moments when, alone with her, he didn't like what he was looking at. "This is so weird," he said. "Like you find this old ring in my drawer and you think I've got some kind of ... proposal in mind?"

She gasped. "That is so unfair. I did not think anything of the kind."

"But so, then what? Like, if you wore this ring, we'd be ... going steady? Like that?"

Clara removed the ring, slow motion, meticulous, and set it down in the center of the kitchen table. "Wow, do you ever sound slippery right now." She grimaced dramatically and folded her slender arms.

As if to upstage her gesture, Robert spread his arms wide--but not with the intention of wrapping them around her. He ignored the soup that dripped from the wooden spoon in his right hand onto the linoleum floor. "I am yours, Clara. I'm not hooking up with random people. I'm not prowling online, friending the universe on frigging Facebook. I'm--wow, I'm defending myself! Why is that? I'm defending myself because you did an inventory of the stuff in my dresser? Does this make sense to you?"

" 'Inventory'?" She whistled. "Okay, let's inventory this. How you've spent so much of your free time out at your grandfather's place building a tree house for a nursery school. I mean, you never even asked if I might like to help."

"You wanted to help? Come on, Clara." But she had his number, in a way. The truth was, he'd enjoyed the time with Turo and Celestino--whom he was going to interview for his immigration paper--and even Ira, with his queeny wit. The four of them had laughed a lot, and they'd built this phenomenal thing together. The work, the energy, even the exhaustion--all of it had rocked. Clara hadn't really crossed his mind while he was up that tree.

And of course, if she
had
been with him, Robert would have had to deal with Granddad's bizarre, inexplicable aversion to her, the way he acted like she was practically invisible.

She said, "You've stood me up for that lecture series three times now."

"I didn't stand you up. I called and said I couldn't make it."

"Oh. Right. For
give
me."

Robert heard the hiss of soup boiling onto the stovetop. He turned around quickly and took the pot off the burner. He stirred it and poured some into a bowl. Joining Clara at the table, he knew he ought to reach across and take her hand, but he picked up his spoon and ate. Why didn't he feel like making peace?

The door had opened just then. Turo carried a large black plastic bucket, not books. He looked startled.
"Hola,"
he said, which was what he said by way of greeting whenever something or someone made him nervous.

He took the bucket into his room and then joined them. Clara and Robert were silent. Turo went to the stove and asked if he could have the rest of the soup. Only when he sat down at the table did he catch their vibe.

"Uh oh," he said. "Have I landed in the dead zone?"

"That's not funny, Turo," said Clara.

Before Robert could remove it from the table, Turo saw the ring and picked it up. "Now this is a juicy clue."

Clara stood and stared at Robert, ignoring Turo. Robert only felt her stare; he focused on his soup, blowing on spoonfuls, drinking them down one by one.

"You are such an asshole," she said. But still she waited.

"Hey, I'm sorry about what I said," said Turo. He, too, stood.

Clara told Turo to sit. Robert looked at neither of them. He continued eating his soup. He was a robotic consumer of soup. He thought, weirdly, of that saying
Cat got your tongue?
No, he thought, cat got nothing of mine.

He heard her sob of dismay as she slammed the apartment door behind her.

Turo said, "You going after her, man?"

"No," said Robert. "Story?"

"Not now."

Turo drank his soup, set down the bowl, and went to the refrigerator. He pulled out containers of this and that. Did Robert want to share a salad? Fine, said Robert. He would now become a robotic consumer of salad. On top of being an asshole. She was right. But sometimes being an asshole had a kind of inevitability. He felt relieved of something. Guilty but relieved.

Turo made their dinner with an antsy hip-hop glee. He left Robert to himself, reading at the table. After setting down bowls of salad and a plate of sliced bread, he pulled a copy of the
Crimson
from the recycling bin. They ate, and they read. Robert found childish comfort in the sound of their forks, their chewing and swallowing, the clunk of their glasses on the table, even the whisper of pages turning. But once Turo finished his food, he shoved the paper aside. "You are tied up in knots, my friend." He waved a hand in front of Robert's face. Robert looked up from his textbook. "And I have got just the solution."

How Robert had let himself be talked into driving out to Ledgely that night was, and wasn't, a mystery to him. Mostly it had to do with the way he saw Turo, the way Turo's passions drove him crazy yet held him in awe.

Turo's mother, unlike Robert's, lived on the other side of the planet. Robert had never met her--or any of Turo's four half siblings, all much older, also living distant lives unconnected to his. The story Turo had told, matter-of-factly, was this: His dad had owned several coffee plantations in Guatemala and Honduras. Turo confessed that there had once been rumors his father was involved in the drug trade as well; but if so, he'd never been caught. At seventy-four, the man had slipped silently away as he slept beside Turo's mother, his second wife.

Turo's four half-siblings were the offspring of his father's long, contentious marriage to a wealthy Guatemalan woman who had died of ovarian cancer when her husband was in his sixties. He had apparently mourned very little, said Turo, since he'd promptly set about to marry a good, pretty, docile woman, one who would say very little and never oppose his wishes. By this point, he traveled a great deal--between his properties for work, to Europe and South America for pleasure--and had no need for a wife with demands on his time or person. "Dude, you are looking at the son of a mail-order bride," Turo had said over coffee (fair trade) at the Gato.

Turo was nine when his mostly benevolent but mostly absent father had died. For all those years plus one, his mother had done her good, pretty, docile duty, as expected, yet she had also learned the language she was not to speak too often and, not incidentally, had secured the friendship of an excellent lawyer who spoke it far better than she and knew, furthermore, how to use it in matters of delicate family finance. So Turo's mom, Maria Doria, did not need to be greedy (i.e., piss off the adult heirs from
matrimonio numero uno)
to claim a sizable settlement and leave the plantations behind her. She joined her sister, who'd married in similar fashion, way up north in Chicago. There, Maria Doria found a job selling jewelry in a store that catered to wealthy Latinas. She proved herself indispensable to the business while studying (and paying) her way to legal citizenship. She and Turo lived in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Turo did well in school and won a scholarship to Exeter. Every Christmas, Maria Doria took her son and her sister to Manila, where she paid for her parents and siblings to share part of a very nice hotel.

When Turo left Chicago for his final year of school in New Hampshire, his mother felt confident enough in her son's future to sell the apartment and return to her country for good. According to Turo, she had a kindly older boyfriend and played a lot of golf. In the Philippines, she could live like a queen yet soothe her conscience by spreading the wealth. Her share of his father's coffee fortune went a long way toward supporting relatives who hadn't made a canny bargain like hers.