Unlovely (38 page)

In the third picture Susan was on the
beach, holding up a crab with a look of mock horror. Perhaps it was real
horror. Maybe she was truly afraid of crabs. Either way, it was lame.

The fourth picture, though, was a
bonanza. It was a copy of what appeared to be last year's Christmas card. The
photo was surrounded by a border of holly berries, with the words "Merry
Christmas from Mark, Susan and the boys!" written across the top and the
date written across the bottom. The picture showed Mark and Susan dressed in
jeans and matching red sweaters, sitting in front of a decorated tree and
flanked by a pair of golden retrievers wearing Santa hats. It was a tacky
tableau, undoubtedly designed by Susan, but at the moment Claudia could
overlook the vulgarity while she celebrated the wonderful information implied:
unless Mark and Susan were the only parents in the world who would sit with
their pets for a Christmas portrait and ignore their kids entirely, the Adams
marriage had produced no children.

Claudia was exuberant. This news alone –
the fruitlessness of Mark's marriage – gave her hope. The door was open a
crack. Whether the door could be kicked wide open and she could stride through
and back into Mark's arms was yet to be seen, but there was hope.

Claudia opened the notebook she kept
next to the computer on her desk and turned to a fresh page. She wrote the date
across the top and the words: "Why no kids?"

Were they postponing? No, that was
unlikely. It might have made sense if they were in their twenties, perhaps, but
Susan looked well into her thirties. With those aging ovaries, postponing would
be foolishness. Susan might be an idiot, but Mark certainly wasn't.

Perhaps Mark and Susan had made a joint
decision not to have any children at all. Claudia could understand abjuring
parenthood – she wasn't a big fan of it herself – but knowing Mark as she did,
she didn't think that was it. Mark had brothers and, if she remembered
correctly, a sister, and he'd spoken about his family warmly. He just seemed
like the sort of man who would want a couple of kids.

No. If there were no children by choice,
then logic would have it that the decision was Susan's, and that would be
astonishingly selfish, given that her husband would have liked to have had a
family. That kind of selfishness would necessarily be damaging to a marriage.
Very good.

On the other hand, perhaps both of them
wanted to have children but they were infertile. Maybe Susan was unable to
conceive or carry a child. Poor Mark. He would want to stay by his wife's side
despite the disappointment, of course. He wouldn't dump her because she was
barren. That would be cruel. But it would eventually eat away at him; he would
grow to resent her. He might already be at that stage, for all Claudia knew.

Then again, maybe Mark was unable to
father a child. Would Susan have the sensitivity to deal with such a delicate
matter? The evidence suggested no: she referred to a couple of dogs as
"the boys" on a Christmas card! She was flippant. Maybe Mark laughed
it off, but it would have hurt him, nonetheless. Naturally, it would be
difficult for Susan to look in the mirror and see the tracks of passing years
on her face, knowing that her eggs were growing stale, and her window for
fertility was closing. Knowing she would never feel a heart beating beneath her
own because her husband couldn't get the job
done.
She
might find little ways to hurt him every day, like she did with that card.
Little stings. Nastiness.

Of course, there was one remaining
reason why Mark and Susan might not have children, one that Claudia especially
liked: they were not having sex at all. Theirs was a marriage between
companions, not lovers. Maybe they had met at a point where both had despaired
of ever really falling in love (or, in Mark's case, falling in love
again
?),
and decided to be family for one another, despite having no sexual attraction
between them.

After years and years together, it would
only be natural for a romance that once burned hot to mellow into a warm,
comfortable friendship, but a marriage that starts out that way has nowhere to
go but down the road to soul-killing boredom. No one dreams of marrying for
friendship.

Claudia shut down her computer, walked to
the kitchenette and prepared herself a cup of tea. She had to think about what
to do next.

The primary thing was to be absolutely,
unflinchingly honest with herself, no matter how difficult it might be. The
events of the past forty-eight hours had made that clear. When she wasn't
strictly honest with herself and her intentions, she was subject to emotional
upheaval and self-destructive behavior.

The way Claudia saw it, her main
responsibility in this world was to look out for herself and her interests.
Absolutely. As yet, there was no one else who would do it. It was time for her
to grow up, to stop dilly-dallying and to think about what she really wanted
out of life. Then she had to start doing something about getting it. Yes. No
more dilly-dallying. It did her no good.

So, what did she want? She'd been
telling herself that some sort of one-sided emotional reconnection with Mark
would be enough, and that she was just looking to satisfy her curiosity about a
lost love, but the events of the past couple of days had put the lie to that.
She wanted Mark back. She wanted another shot at a relationship with him after
all these years.

Was it possible? Yesterday, she'd
thought not. She had allowed herself to become negative and depressed because
she'd been dishonest with herself, instead of confronting the situation
truthfully and rationally. But now it was time to look this thing squarely in
the face. Think rationally. Be logical. Take this step by step.

Had there ever been something powerful
between Claudia and Mark? Unquestionably, yes. Two people don't make love
within hours of meeting (not two intelligent, decent people, at least) unless
there is an inescapable attraction there that would compel them to act so
impulsively. And then there had been the argument, then the resolution, and
then the transformation of something that had started as very base and animal
into something transcendent and fine. He hadn't met her friends, true, but she
had met his and they'd gotten along well, too. Claudia fit into his world.

Why had they broken up? It was as simple
as timing. He had been given a marvelous opportunity to study abroad, and he'd
accepted it before Claudia and he had even met one another. Who knows? If they
had met months earlier, perhaps he wouldn't have even gone to Russia, or
perhaps he would have, but there would have been enough history accumulated
between them to sustain them through the lengthy separation.

Claudia had been young and, if she was being
brutally honest with herself, stupid. She had been the heartless one, the one
who had never responded to letters. The responsibility for the end of the
romance fell squarely on her shoulders and hers alone. Any suffering she went
through now was suffering she deserved.

What about the passage of time? They
hadn't seen one another for fifteen years. Would there still be an attraction
there? Claudia closed her eyes and tried to picture Mark's face exactly as
she'd last seen it. She remembered how his lips felt on hers, the pressure of
his arms around her. Then she thought of the picture she'd seen today on his
profile page: it was the same dear face smiling at her. She'd trembled when
she'd seen it. Her breath had caught. On her side, at least, the attraction
remained.

Would Mark still be drawn to Claudia?
She got up and stood in front of the full length mirror on the back of her
bedroom door. The years had been kind to her. She'd kept her figure. She didn't
look all that different than she had back in college. If he'd found her
irresistible then, there seemed a good chance he would again, especially once
he got over any feelings of disloyalty to his wife. Claudia went back over to
her desk and picked up her pen.

How could they make this work? What
about the actual logistics of the thing? After all, Claudia had an established
career here at the Jameson School, and Mark was a professor at a nice little
college a couple of hours away. They could travel back and forth, but a
commuter relationship in which they visited each other on weekends didn't
appeal to Claudia at all. If she were going to start a new life with Mark, she
wanted to jump in with both feet.

Claudia's professional life was
important to her. She knew one of the things Mark admired about her was her
keen intellect and her ambition. Nonetheless, she decided that she would be
willing to uproot herself and relocate. Claudia needed a change of career
anyway. Her routine was dull. Maybe she could find a position at Mark's
college. And frankly, since she was the one who'd complicated their
relationship by breaking up with Mark in the first place, it seemed only right
that she make this concession.

Naturally, things could get awkward for
Mark when he divorced his wife. Faculty wives can be very clique-y, and they
might persuade their husbands to shun Mark to punish him for hurting their
friend. Oh, well. They would just have to cross that bridge when they came to
it. Claudia felt pretty confident she could win the faculty and their wives
over if given the time and opportunity.

Of course all of this planning and
moving and switching careers presupposed that the situation with Susan would be
resolved. There lay the rub. What to do about the wife?

Mark and Susan were, in all likelihood,
stuck in a troubled, sterile marriage. Perhaps the re-emergence of Claudia
could be the catalyst to its destruction. This was a pleasing notion: she would
be performing a service. Susan was a like a flowering weed, like a dandelion on
a patch of bare ground. You look at it and if nothing else is growing nearby
you think, well, maybe I'll let that plant stick around. It looks okay, it
fills an empty space,
it
gives a little color. But
when you have the chance to have a real flower there – an iris, or a tulip
maybe – you realize that dandelion is doing nothing but sucking up sunshine and
nutrients. It's not beautiful. It's not special. It's just something you never
bothered to yank out.

Of course, sometimes you can't just pull
a dandelion. Optimally, it will just wither and fade away on its own, but you
can't count on that to happen. Sometimes you have to poison it.

Claudia got ready for bed. She changed
the bandage on her hand and examined her wounds. They didn't look too bad
anymore. There were no signs of infection. She brushed her teeth and climbed
between the sheets. What a difference in her mood from how she'd felt
twenty-four hours earlier. It just went to show you that you can't give up.
Life has a way of working out.

Tony came to the hospital to pick up Claudia on the day
of her discharge. She was waiting for him on a couch in the lobby, her suitcase
near her feet. She looked better than she had when she'd checked in, that was
for sure. An enormous young man was seated next to her. He didn't seem like a
resident, more like a fellow with some authority.

Claudia rose to greet her father when he
came in through the glass doors. Tony kissed her cheek, picked up the suitcase,
then stood back awkwardly as Claudia shook hands with the big fellow and
exchanged a few words of thanks. They left him and walked out into the warm
sunshine, the glass doors silently swooshing to behind them, then made their
way across the parking lot to the car. Tony tried to be warmly jocular, asking
about her day, her spirits,
her
health as he hoisted
the luggage into the trunk.

Coming around to open the passenger side
door, Tony felt the sweat forming in his armpits. This didn't feel like a
reunion with a beloved child; it was more like picking up a distant relative
from the airport. It troubled him that he should be so uncomfortable. He should
have been feeling paternal and protective, but instead he rather feared this
person who looked like Claudia but wasn't the daughter he knew. How should he
act with someone who had behaved so inexplicably? It was unlikely that a month
of treatment could untie the tangles in Claudia's brain.

Tony had, in fact, been dreading the day
of her release. He wasn't eager to have Claudia back in their midst again, and
they were sure to see plenty of her over the next year whether she lived with
them on Smith Street or not.

Life had already been painfully
disrupted. Sylvia had been a hellish companion these last few weeks. She was a
nervous wreck, questioning her mothering, his fathering. Were there some
genetic factors involved? Did Tony have mental illness in his family? She
checked out armloads of books about mental illness from the library, explaining
to the librarian (who, Tony was sure, couldn't care less) that she was planning
to get involved in a crisis center run through the church. Sylvia knew it was
wrong to lie, but in a situation like this she really had no choice. She
couldn't let word get out that her only child was certifiable.

The anguished parents had twice visited
Claudia at the hospital to attend counseling sessions, but both attempts had
ended badly. Sylvia wept inconsolably through the first visit. Their daughter
had reacted with irritation, and the doctor, seeing no progress could be made,
cut the session short. During the second session Claudia simply refused to
speak. Sylvia had made a list of everything she could think of that might have
contributed to her daughter's crack-up and had presented it to the doctor with
many verbal annotations. All in all, it had been a humiliating affair. Tony had
sat there with nothing to add, a quiet witness to his family's dissolution.