Kevin P. Keating
Safe and Familiar Faces
Having finished breakfast an hour ago, we were now on to the second part of our daily routine, walking along a shaded pathway in the park and talking in a way that, despite everything, still had an undertone of reticence and timidity about it.
"People should only get married after they reach forty," I said. "There should be a law. I mean, there's a certain amount of wisdom you need before taking the wedding vows, certain kinds of experiences you must have, awful experiences, something to harden the soul before a long winter."
Grace, who wasn't used to the way I framed every topic of conversation as an argument, paused to consider my premise with care. "But if people got married that late in life there'd be very few children in this world."
"Ah, yes. Well, Nature played a cruel joke on us, didn't she? If Nature had any brains at all she would have made us fertile in middle age, not before. It would solve so many problems."
Grace laughed, and I didn't know if she thought I was joking or being serious. I consider myself a serious person; it's just that I have a funny delivery. I dealt with this affliction by finishing most of my statements with, "I'm being totally serious" to which she continued smiling because she wasn't sure if this final remark was also a joke. In the end she never seemed exactly sure of what I meant.
"When they were only twenty-four years old my parents got married," I told her. "They describe themselves as old fashioned. But if I'd come to them at that age and told them I wanted to get married they would have thrown a fit. Of course they would have been justified in doing so. Jesus, at twenty-four you're still a child, and children shouldn't make big decisions like that, life-long decisions."
Grace nodded. "But men and women still have a need for one another. They just live together these days."
"Oh, my parents frowned upon this, too. Living in sin they called it. Sin was a palpable thing to them. They could taste it in their breakfast cereal. First thing in the morning, a healthy serving of sin and skim milk."
We continued walking along the trail, gazing up at the oaks and elms, the ashes and maples, sometimes spotting an occasional cardinal or bluejay darting through the branches. Grace's daughters, Casey and Beth, followed close behind us on their bicycles, and like two old maid chaperones they continually interrupted our conversation with the demands of the cranky and incontinent. "I'm thirsty." "I want some juice." "I'm tired." "I want to go home now."
I pulled Charlie, my son, in his little red wagon, and he eyed me quizzically, sometimes repeating, in his broken English, my sentences with an ironic flatness. He was my pride and joy, Charlie was. He was also my warden and inquisitor. Parenthood, I secretly believed, was a sort of indefinite prison sentence, one in which adults, as a rule, spend most of their time in solitary confinement, sequestered from other adults. This may sound cynical but I'm speaking from first-hand experience. I was a stay-at-home dad, at least temporarily, and the high-pitched, explosive, and largely unpredictable tantrums of my son made me desperate to hear the voice of another rational human being. Grace also yearned for a conversation about something other than Popsicles and Band-aids and Pixi Stixs, and so even though we had very little in common -- I was a professor of comparative religion on a year-long sabbatical and she a former manicurist and hairdresser -- the two of us formed a sort of miniature support group.
"Steve should be coming home next month," she told me. "He'll stay from early July to late October. So things won't be all that bad although he always feels the need to remind me that he's on vacation. He'll watch the kids for a little while, an hour or two, but he'll never take them for the day."
"Not even to the zoo or the beach?"
"Out of the question."
Steve was a merchant marine who worked eight months out of the year on the big iron ore ships on the Great Lakes, sailing from the Port of Cleveland to Mackinac Island to the remote Canadian outposts dotted along Lake Superior, and while he was away Grace was trapped in their suburban cape cod, raising their two daughters on her own. She had no family in town to help her, and during the bleak winter months she managed to escape her house less than a dozen times.
Although there was something almost perverse about it, I couldn't help but wonder if Steve hit her, slapped her, twisted her arm. In July, when everyone else in the neighborhood wore T-shirts, she wore long sleeves. Once I thought I glimpsed a bruise on her arm, the purple indentation of fingers pressed hard into the flesh, but I never looked too closely. It wasn't so much that I felt sorry for her (although I did), I just wanted to know what kind of people my neighbors were, what their relationship was like. If he did beat her, I reasoned, then Nora and I had sunk another notch in the socio-economic ladder, that despite our upper middle class airs my wife and I were just another anonymous working class couple like everyone else in this slightly shabby quarter of the city. It made me anxious.
"Rich husbands beat their rich wives, too," Nora assured me as if this was supposed to make me feel better about our financial situation. "You might be right," I said, "but you have to admit that people without money are far more likely to be abusive. Let's face facts. Our neighbors are not well off. Their goddamn house is falling apart. Look at those windows. They're cracked. And the roof. The shingles are peeling off. I'm surprised the city hasn't condemned it." Nora rolled her eyes. "Oh, for god's sake, their house isn't that bad. And besides, Grace is all alone, poor woman. When Steve gets back he'll fix the place up. You can't expect her to do it on her own." My wife was right, of course, and although I held my tongue I wanted to say, "Why would Steve want to come back to the pandemonium waiting for him here?"
Grace must have sensed my skepticism, and as we made our way toward the fountain she said, "I have a whole list of projects waiting for Steve when he gets home." The girls splashed their hands in the water and made wishes with the pennies we'd handed them. "He likes to keep the house in order. By the end of the summer you won't recognize the place."
I said nothing but I knew, we both knew, that Steve wouldn't budge from the couch once he was home. Why she married such a man perplexed me, but then she'd only been twenty-four when she married Steve who, perhaps not incidentally, was ten years her senior, and like most twenty-four year-olds she hadn't thought the situation through. Now as her thirtieth birthday neared, she panicked a little, believing the last of her youth was being squandered on motherhood, a myth that disguised the grim realities of child rearing.
We went to the playground, pushed the kids on the swings, had a little picnic in the grass, and then packed the kids into her white minivan and went to the library. Sometimes it felt like we were an old married couple, but we made sure not to walk too close together, not to brush up against or look each other directly in the eye. Discretion was important. The neighbors must have wondered about the two of us.
We went back to my house and put the kids down for their afternoon naps, and when we were sure they were sleeping we rushed hand in hand to the bedroom and made love. If we were lucky and the children slept late, we would lounge in bed for an hour or more, talking, smoking, fondling one another beneath the sweat-soaked sheets. Grace and I had an understanding. There was no threat of commitment between us, and I attributed our affair to the obvious. She was lonely, plain and simple, and after ten years of marriage, of sharing a bed with the same woman, I was desperate for some eroticism and spontaneity. My wife and I rarely made love anymore, and when we did the act was perfunctory, business-like, a bodily function like any other.
"Your thirtieth birthday is tomorrow," I said, still panting, watching the ceiling fan whir above the bed. "I made reservations for eight o'clock at Mallorca. Mediterranean cuisine. Best in the city."
She sat up, her small breasts looking lovely and delicious. "What are you talking about?"
I kissed her stomach, navel, thighs. "I want to take you to dinner."
She squirmed beneath my lips. "That sounds nice but how?"
"Oh, I told Nora that you wanted to go out with some of your friends and she agreed to watch the kids. She's only too happy to do it. And I told her that I was going bowling with the boys. So. What do you say?"
"I don't know," she murmured softly.
"You deserve a night out. Some wine and candlelight. Some peace and quiet. It's not like we're doing anything criminal."
After a bit of cajoling on my part she consented to the plan, and we resumed our afternoon of passion.
The following night I waited outside the restaurant, sipping a cabernet, watching the cars race by, keeping an eye out for her white minivan. The streets teemed with young couples, many in their early twenties, and I felt a bit out of place. An hour passed and an apologetic maitre d' told me he had to invalidate our reservations. Anger swelled inside me. I waited another thirty minutes, looking like a fool, a jilted lover, and then I went back to my car where I changed out of my suit and tie and put on my jeans and bowling shirt. Maybe this was a ridiculous idea after all. Maybe it just wasn't worth the trouble. Grace had sensed this. Women were always better at detecting stupidity, selfishness, depravity.
When I arrived home I found my wife sobbing at the kitchen table, and my heart sank. So I was found out. I could only surmise that Grace, overwhelmed by guilt, had confessed everything to her. Now my life was ruined. I envisioned a million scenes of misery, saw myself sleeping on a friend's couch for the next month, living out of a suitcase, renting a rundown studio apartment, consulting an affordable attorney with a bad comb-over, standing before a judge whose eyes were glazed over with boredom, the hundredth divorce or disillusionment he'd heard that day, and worst of all I saw the plaintive and confused look on my son's face when I tried to explain the concept of divorce.
"Nora," I whispered.
She choked.
"Listen, Nora."
She shook her head. "It's so senseless."
"Nora, calm down. Try to breathe. Here. Let me get you some water."
Her hands shook so badly that she couldn't hold the glass. I sat down beside her and she clung to me, shuddering and weeping loudly into my shoulder.
I stroked her head. "We'll get through this thing, honey."
Nora looked at me with astonishment. "What about the girls? What about Steve? What are they going to do? Those girls, they're just babies. They need their mother."
I consider myself a typical male and therefore an emotional illiterate, unable to pick up on subtle cues, even obvious ones, and I was about to tell Nora that there was no need to get the children involved in this thing, that an act of infidelity between two adults had nothing to do with them, but then it dawned on me that something had happened to Grace.
I held my wife's face in my hands and spoke slowly. "Nora, tell me what's happened."
A breathless stream of facts poured out of her. The police. They came to Grace's house. Nora went over to see if she could be of help, but they only wanted to speak to a family member. Nora explained Grace's situation to them, told them Steve was away. The police stared at the ground, said there'd been a terrible accident on the interstate, a white minivan smashed against the median, overturned, crushed under the weight of the two tractor-trailers. Nora leaned toward me with a manic look in her eyes. "They need to speak to the next of kin. That's what they told me. It was probably a mistake, letting that little phrase slip, stupid cops, next of kin."
I couldn't comprehend what she was saying. I wanted to shake her, shout, "What the hell are you talking about? Start making sense!" But before I could say anything Nora pressed her face against my bowling shirt and let out a muffled scream.
A funeral for a young person is a nasty affair made even nastier when the grieving spouse insists upon an open casket. During the wake, Steve stood beside his wife's body and sobbed relentlessly. It was my understanding that a distraught windower eventually cries himself out, that he becomes too emotionally exhausted to shed another tear, but not Steve. Each time a familiar face entered the funeral parlor the tears started up all over again. When Nora and I came to pay our respects, Steve grabbed me by the shoulders with his giant hands and pressed me to his chest. I smelled something low and sour, knew he hadn't showered since the accident, but for a fleeting instant I thought the pestilential odor wafted from the corpse. I inadvertently shifted my eyes to the coffin, but the thing I saw there, shattered and twisted and caked with makeup, was not the woman I'd made love to for these past months. A small strangling sound escaped my lips.
"If there's anything we can do for you and the girls, anything at all..." Nora murmured, the usual things one says, and then we moved on.
That had been a terrible moment for me, but the worst of it had come the night of the accident. Grace's daughters slept upstairs in our guest room, blissfully unaware of their situation, and for a long time I sat alone in my study, paging through my books of philosophy and religion and mythology -- The Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao Te Ching, Ovid's Metamorphoses -- but as I searched in vain for some kind of divine revelation, the words became indecipherable, the meanings obscure. It had fallen on me to contact Steve and I was trying to prepare myself. Grace kept the spare key under a rock in the flower bed, even though there were no flowers there now but only weeds. I entered the house through the back door and rifled through the disorder of papers on the kitchen counter until I found the number. "In case of emergency" -- I stared at the small pad of yellow paper and whispered, "God help me, god help me, god help me." That's when I did most of my crying, away from my wife; I dropped to my knees, curled over on the floor and bawled like one of the children, a wretched, inconsolable wail, a delirium beyond the confines of time and space. I had no idea how long I lie prone on the floor, alternately begging and cursing the silent forces that controlled our miserable lives, but when I came out of my daze I wiped away my tears and picked up the phone. My voice, quiet and unwavering, reached the iron ore ship five hundred miles away on Lake Michigan. "Steve, you need to call the police station right away."
How Steve coped with this incomprehensible loss I do not know. I can only speak of my own experiences. Through the rest of that summer I found myself hugging my wife and son almost compulsively, grateful for every moment we spent together, and I vowed to work harder at my marriage. At night, after Charlie had gone to bed and Nora sat down to watch TV, I lost myself in my work, a study of Neo-Babylonian myths and their influence on Christian gnosticism, consulting my voluminous notes, scanning the marginalia scribbled there over the years. Above the restful chirping of crickets I occasionally heard noises next door, a door creaking open, footsteps, the flick of a lighter. Through the blinds I glimpsed Steve sitting on a foldout chair in his backyard, smoking a cigarette, staring into space, and when he finished smoking he went back inside. He'd sent the girls to live with an aunt in Chicago for an indefinite time, and so he must have felt free to make as much noise as he wanted. I cringed at the sound of smashing glass, at the wailing and blubbering.
This routine continued for the entire month of July. Then one night in August a knock came at the door, three dull thuds that resonated with meaning. Steve stood outside wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing for a month -- a filthy T-shirt, boxer shorts, steel-toed boots covered with soot.
"I'm out of cigarettes," he rasped. "You got any?"
I stammered. "I, uh...oh, sure, Steve, sure."
"I'll wait out here," he murmured.
I wasn't a smoker but sometimes, after making love to Grace, I had one with her. She always brought them over to the house, menthols, and she'd left a pack on the nightstand the day she died. Luckily I'd spotted them before Nora came home from work and stuffed them into the back of my desk drawer.
Steve and I sat together on the patio, smoking in silence. The air was oppressive, thick and heavy with humidity. Perspiration dripped from my forehead, stinging my eyes. When his cigarette was down to the filter he crushed it under the heel of one boot and then, without saying goodbye, went back to his house. That night there came no crash of plates and bottles.
Steve made this his evening ritual. He came over every evening and in silence we smoked cigarettes and stared at the fireflies. In September his girls returned home. Nora had them over for dinner most nights, but Steve never joined us. The girls looked like a couple of street urchins most of the time, their hair greasy and knotted, their clothes wrinkled and stained with juice and chocolate, their pretty little features hidden under a week's worth of grime. After they returned to their gloomy wreck of a house, Nora said, "I realize that Steve isn't over this yet, he'll probably never get over this, but he has two little girls to think about. Those girls need at least one loving parent. Right now they're like two orphans being shuttled from one house to the next." I grunted, shook my head, and said, "I wish there was something we could do."
October. The weather turned cooler, and now Steve brought a bottle of scotch over with him. He was usually drunk when he showed up on my patio, and in his characteristic silence poured a shot into a dirty glass and handed it to me. In unison we lit our cigarettes, then he turned to me and, for the first time in months, actually spoke. "There's just one thing I don't understand." His voice was low, his throat sounded raw. "When they pulled her from the wreck..." He paused, tried to gain control of his wavering voice. "She was wearing her best dress, the 'black number,' I called it. She wore it whenever we went to a wedding reception or a New Year's Eve party." He took a swig from the bottle. "I just don't know what to make of it."
I focused on the leaves twirling at my feet, stared at each one, brown, brittle, lifeless.
"She was lonely," he said. "I know that." He breathed deeply. Then he stood up, almost falling back into the chair. "Well."
I almost reached out, grabbed his arm, but I just sat there and watched him stagger back to his house.
Winter came. I couldn't concentrate on my work. Steve's distinctive knock, like the tolls of a funerary bell, always rattled my nerves and made me jump out of my chair. This was unfair. I wanted to move on with my life, wanted to enjoy the holidays in peace with my family. A feeling of bitterness crept into my heart, and I often found myself gazing at the houses in the neighborhood, believing that every Christmas tree looked like a burning bush, as if each potbellied, middle-aged, American man was Moses, and in order to receive a daily dose of divine revelation he need only step through the front door, remove his shoes, and shout, "Here I am!"
On Christmas Eve, just before midnight, as if on cue, there came that familiar knock.
"I need to talk to you."
Steve seemed sober, looked clean shaven, wore fresh clothes and a heavy wool coat. We stood in the cold and smoked. The air was crisp and still and his voice came to me with a strange kind of clarity.
"I'm leaving after the first of the year," he said. "I'm going back to work on the ships. I already have twenty-two years in. Three more to go and I can put in for my retirement." He looked at me. "I don't want to send the girls back to Chicago. I want them to stay here, go to school with their friends. Things have been hard enough for them." He laughed. "I guess I wasn't much help. I was on a helluva drunk there for a while, wasn't I? But I feel better now. Better." He stamped out the cigarette. There must have been a dozen butts scattered on the ground. I never bothered to sweep them up. "I don't know how to ask this so I'll just come right out and ask. Would you and Nora be willing to take the girls? You're such good people and the girls love you. They love Charlie, too, almost like a brother."
I lit another cigarette, the last one in the pack, and inhaled deeply. It was stale, tasted bitter in my mouth, and I wished Steve had brought that bottle of scotch over with him, wished he'd forced a drink into my hand before asking this favor of me.
"Well, think about it for a day or two," he said. "Talk to Nora. I don't ship out for another week." He gripped my shoulder. "The girls feel safe here."
Steve walked away, and I stared at his footprints in the snow, and the longer I stared the more I thought I saw another set of prints beside his, suspected that Grace had been standing there next to him, listening to him speak, maybe even making him say the words, her arms crossed, a scowl on her face, warning me with her eyes that if I did not accept her children into my home I would be haunted for the rest of my days. As a gust of icy air swirled out of the darkness and crept into my bones it occurred to me, without remorse, without regret, without a shred of sentimentality, that I had exorcised all memory of her, had obliterated every last detail of our affair, but now I felt her presence, felt that she had me in her clutches, and I shuddered a little in the cold before tossing my cigarette into the wind and trudging back inside to join my wife and son in the warmth of our house.
©2004 by Kevin P. Keating
