How It Ended Part 25

Tory comes down. "Why didn't you wake me up?" she says.

"For what?"

"I don't know. What have you been doing?"

"Saying bad things about you," Ginny says. "Want a drink?"

I can tell Tory's looking her mother over to see how much she's had. "I'll have a beer."

The phone rings again and Ginny grabs it. She says h.e.l.lo several times. Then she says, "I know it's you," and hangs up.

"Who?" Tory says.

"Who knows," Ginny responds.

Supper is chicken Kiev, cranberry m.u.f.fins and asparagus. Carol and Jim take turns scolding Lily for her table manners. He seems very uncertain of his surroundings, and his discomfort makes me feel more at home. Although he has been here two days longer, I feel he's the outsider, the rude interloper. I hate his clothes and his mustache. I also hate the way he snaps at Lily. She's not even his kid. I wink at her across the table. Bunny announces she isn't going to eat anything and makes good on her threat, though she filled her plate to stop the argument. She's upset because her mother yelled at her about the phone calls. The news is on TV. A group in Boston is in front of a hospital, protesting abortion.

"Jim and I belong to a right-to-life group back home," Carol says.

"A woman should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body," Bunny says.

"No one has the right to murder the unborn."

I find it annoying how everyone bandies around the concept of rights rights.

"It would be nice," Bunny says, "if you people were as concerned with living women as you are with fetuses."

"Murder," Carol says. "That's what you're talking about."

"Is this dinner-table conversation?" Ginny asks.

Tory stands up and excuses herself, then leaves the room.

"That was lovely, girls," Ginny says. "Tory's going into the hospital on Monday."

"Excuse me," I say. "I'll go see if she's all right."

Tory's in her room, lying facedown on the bed. I sit beside her and stroke her hair. "It's going to be all right."

She flips over to face me. "All right for you. You don't want children. You're glad about all of this."

"That's not fair."

"I wouldn't even be having these problems if it weren't for you. I'd be a mother already if it weren't for you."

"We weren't ready yet. It would've been a mistake."

"Carol is right. It's murder."

"You don't believe that."

Carol's inside the room before she knocks on the open door, then stands right beside the bed. "I don't mean to barge in," she says. "But I thought maybe I could be of help." She lowers her ponderous form onto the mattress. "None of us is strong enough to bear his burden alone."

"All of us," Tory says, "are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others."

"Jesus wants to lighten your load. All you have to do is ask." Carol stretches out her hand to Tory, who examines it and its owner with mild distaste. "Do you love Jesus, Tory?"

"Do I look like a necrophiliac to you?"

I expect Carol to be shocked, but her smile is indelible. "You can run from Jesus, but you can't hide."

Tory says, "But can you get a restraining order, is what I want to know."

The evening pa.s.ses in the kitchen in front of the TV. The women are skilled at dividing their attention between the television and one another, so while never seeming to watch, they will suddenly comment on the action on the screen. The conversation has a casual, intimate rhythm. I listen from outside the circle, a privileged observer. I enjoy studying Tory on her home ground, and am eager to pick up the family lore. I feel a renewed interest, seeing her in this context. More than bone structure and habits of speech, I can see aspects of character I was never quite able to bring into focus suddenly illuminated and framed in their genetic setting. I feel like someone whose appreciation of an artist has been based on a single painting but who then is suddenly admitted to his studio.

My role of licensed connoisseur is compromised by the presence of Jim. Awkward and out of place, he b.u.t.ts into the conversation to ask who or what. He looks resentful, worried that a joke is being perpetrated at his expense. Mercifully, he heads up early after yawning pointedly at his wife. She tells him she'll be up soon. Bunny is up and down. At one point she disappears for most of a sitcom. I find myself sharing Ginny's anger at the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d who's stealing her youth.

Ginny keeps saying how nice it is to have everyone home, until, with her fourth drink, she begins to foresee the end of the reunion and slips into sullenness. "Mary's been out every night since she got her license," she complains to Carol and Tory. "She's no company. She doesn't have time to sit down with her old mom. She's always coming or going, and everything's a big secret. She doesn't tell me anything. And then Bunny. She hates me because I don't want her to throw her life away."

"She doesn't hate you," Tory says impatiently.

"Of course she doesn't," Carol says. "She loves loves you. We you. We all love all love you." you."

Ginny looks at Carol through tears and says, "Spare me this indiscriminate love. The trouble with you religious types is that you're promiscuous. Love, love, love. But then, you always were were a cheap date." a cheap date."

"Stop it," Tory says. "That's no way to talk to your daughter."

"That's all right, Tory," Carol says. "I understand Mom's anger."

"No, you don't," Ginny says, slapping her palm down on the table. "You can't begin to understand my anger."

I feel I should leave, but right now that would only make my presence more blatant.

"Between your sloppy L-U-V and Tory's Ice Queen judgment, I'm dying for a little daughterly affection." She shakes her head. "What a brood. And Bunny. As if I need to be reminded about old letches and young bimbos."

Ginny lights a cigarette. "And where the h.e.l.l is Mary? She's supposed to be in at eleven o'clock." We all turn to the clock above the range: It reads 10:40. "All right," Ginny says, "so she's got twenty minutes." They all laugh at the same moment, like synchronized swimmers executing an abrupt, graceful maneuver, their anger dispersed.

"Do you think she's still a virgin?" Ginny asks suddenly.

"Of course she is," Tory says.

"Mary's a sensible girl," Carol says. "She's not going to let herself be talked into anything."

I remember Tory told me that Carol had her first abortion when she was fifteen.

"She's only sixteen," Tory says.

"She's so cute," Carol says.

"She is," Ginny says.

Tory turns to me and says, "Isn't she a cutie?"

I could get very inspired on this subject. Instead, I just say, "She sure is."

Carol says, "Remember that time she stuck the key in the electrical socket?"

At eleven o'clock, Tory announces she's tired. "You don't have to come to bed yet," she says to me. I would like to stay up with the others, to sit quietly and listen to three women talk, but I say I'll go up with her. Ginny lets us share a room. Everyone kisses good night. Bunny, who has come back down, presses close enough for me to feel her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she kisses me. Carol's breath smells chemically sweetened. Ginny folds me in a long motherly hug. She says she's going up, too.

After she takes off her shirt, Tory points to the small protuberance on her left side. It is the size of a BB, only slightly darker than the surrounding skin. "Do you know that this would have been enough evidence to convict me of witchcraft in the seventeenth century?" she says.

I do know, because she has told me several times, but I say, "Really?"

"It's what they call an 'auxiliary nipple.' A devil's teat. Proof that I've been suckling demons."

"Rules of evidence have advanced a little since then," I say cheerfully.

"Wouldn't it be strange if in former lives you were a prosecutor at the witch trials and I was a witch?"

"I'm on your side, Tory," I say, putting my arms around her. As her face disappears against my chest, I see that she is looking not at me but at some region inside herself. "Everything will be all right," I say. I can still see the sadness in her eyes and mouth. "We'll have children together." Maybe I say it because I want to sleep with her sisters and I feel guilty about it, or because she thinks that, like her father, I'll leave and I'm afraid she's right.

Lying there after Tory has fallen asleep, I conjure up the image of Bunny and Tory sleeping side by side on this same bed, and think about how I felt then, how I wanted to crawl between them and have both. What I really imagined, seeing these two women who look so much alike, was a single woman who was Tory leavened with Bunny's careless grace. As I drift toward sleep, I superimpose Mary's face, which in the liquor-store parking lot seemed fearless and flushed with s.e.xual antic.i.p.ation, and to that I add Carol's womb. Then I see Ginny alone in the bed in which the four of them had been conceived. And I think of my own mother, who is dead, and my father, whom I haven't seen in eight months, and imagine myself as a pinp.r.i.c.k of life, floating whole in the dark, before all of these divisions and divorces and separations.

1986.

Putting Daisy Down Life was good. It was one of those April mornings when the warmth of the sun on your skin seems miraculous after the deep freeze of winter and you can almost feel the hair on your arms turning golden, the vivid physicality heightened by the lingering trace of a hangover. Bryce was two over par and he'd just hit the green on thirteen with his six iron. The super-naturally verdant fairway was fringed with cheerful yellow forsythia, some of which concealed the ball Tom McGinty had just hooked with his five wood.

Bryce was playing with the big boys-Tom, Bruce Pickwell and Jeff Weiss. That night, at the club dance, they would share a table with their wives, and after dinner Bryce would be officially welcomed as a member of the club, something he'd been working toward for the past two years.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Tom said, shading his eyes, looking back down the fairway at the cart barreling toward them.

Bruce removed his finger from his nose and crossed his arms over his chest, girding for confrontation. "Looks like-"

"My wife," Bryce said as the cart bounced ever closer, the baked skin on his arms tingling with a sudden chill. Even from a distance there was something in her posture, and the speed she was traveling, that spelled trouble.

"Carly," Tom said. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

Ignoring the greeting, she jumped out of the cart and marched over to Bryce, holding a lavender envelope in one hand, the other clutching her swelling belly, just visible beneath her pink warm-up suit. Glaring at him, she held the envelope at arm's length, between thumb and forefinger, until he took it from her. Her stony visage told the story, even if he hadn't recognized the stationery and the handwriting, the ropy loops spelling out his wife's name and their home address.

Without a word, she turned and drove away. The men watched silently until the cart finally disappeared behind the rise of the thirteenth tee, and then resumed their play, Bryce's partners respectfully somber, their fraternal compa.s.sion compounded in equal parts of selfish relief and empathetic dread. Their goodwill seemed only to increase as his game fell apart.

"That's a b.i.t.c.h," Jeff said, patting his back, when Bryce missed a three-footer for par on fourteen.

Bryce drove to Julie's apartment on the Upper West Side directly from the course. He was fond of her, and might even have convinced himself he loved her at one point, but she'd just committed an unpardonable offense, and for the first time in months, underneath the anger swelling into rage as he raced down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he felt a welcome sense of moral clarity. His righteousness was only bolstered by the miraculous parking s.p.a.ce a few spots down from the entrance to her building on Ninety-sixth Street. He couldn't believe she would actually write a letter to his wife. Was she out of her mind? he wondered as he held down the buzzer for 4F.

Her voice over the intercom sounded tentative. "Who is it?"

"It's me," he said, his hand clutching the doork.n.o.b.

"Come on up," she said in what seemed to him a false singsongy tone, buzzing him in.

Julie could see that her gambit had backfired as soon as she opened the door. He ignored Cocoa, her longhaired dachshund, who swirled affectionately around his ankles.

"How dare you?" he said.

She claimed that she'd done it as much for him as for herself, that she knew he wasn't happy with the status quo.

" I I was perfectly happy with the status quo," he said, no longer needing to maintain the fiction that he was trapped in his marriage and desperate to be with his mistress. He no longer had to pretend that only fear of his wife's unpredictable behavior and compa.s.sion for her precarious emotional state kept him from leaving her. Not that Carly couldn't be unpredictable and volatile, but he'd never really intended to leave her. He could see that clearly now. He was about to have a baby with her. was perfectly happy with the status quo," he said, no longer needing to maintain the fiction that he was trapped in his marriage and desperate to be with his mistress. He no longer had to pretend that only fear of his wife's unpredictable behavior and compa.s.sion for her precarious emotional state kept him from leaving her. Not that Carly couldn't be unpredictable and volatile, but he'd never really intended to leave her. He could see that clearly now. He was about to have a baby with her.

"But you said-"

"I said a lot of s.h.i.t. I said what you wanted to hear."

It had been more than this, of course; but she had broken the rules, had violated the sanct.i.ty of his marriage, and now he wanted to hurt her.

She appealed for compa.s.sion and forgiveness, but all her justifications and her tears failed to move him. Her mascara ran, collecting in the little wrinkles and crow's-feet around her eyes, lines that he'd never noticed before. Looking away from her, he was confronted with the evidence of his folly, framed pictures of the two of them-in front of the Rodin Museum in Paris, on the beach in Montauk and in this very apartment, standing amid the bronze Buddhas, ceramic dragons, hexagonal shards of quartz and amethyst. Incense was burning in a little bronze urn on the coffee table. Julie was a believer in meditation, pyramids and crystals, whereas Bryce was feeling very Catholic at this moment. With all the zeal of a newly reformed sinner, he rejected her pleas for forgiveness. Strangely, he felt most sorry for Cocoa, who couldn't possibly understand why his old friend was giving him the cold shoulder. He was genuinely moved by the dog's doleful expression.

His confidence and his clarity ebbed as he approached his own driveway. If only Carly were the screaming and crying type, he might be able to imagine an eventual diminution of the crisis. But as it was, he had no idea what to expect.

Daisy greeted him at the door, rubbing her head against his shin. He crouched down and rubbed her head, scratched behind her ears. Daisy thrummed with appreciation and followed him as he reconnoitered the first floor. Carly was sitting in the sunroom, looking out over the back lawn. The fact that she was neither reading nor knitting didn't seem like a good sign.

He knelt down before her, took her hand in his, and laid his head on her rounded belly. "I don't know what to say-except that it's over. I'm so sorry." As he waited for a response, his head on her taut tummy, he felt Daisy ma.s.saging herself on his calf.

"This can't go on," she said.

"It's done," he said.

"She's got to go."

"I've taken care of it."

"I can't have this in the house."

"It was never in the-"

"Not in my condition."

Confused now, he looked up at her, at the lips drawn so thin and tight across her face that it was hard to believe they'd ever kissed his, and then followed her gaze down to the floor, to the dead robin on the carpet.

He could hardly contain his relief as he jumped to his feet, ready to deal with this discrete and tangible problem. He'd picked up dozens of dead birds in his long a.s.sociation with Daisy, whom he'd discovered as a kitten in the garbage room of his building on Ninth Street seven or eight years ago, when he was living in his first apartment in the city. It was the work of a moment to pick up the robin by its tail feathers, swing open the French door and fling the thing out into the yard.

Turning back to his wife, he found her regarding him with a distaste bordering on horror. "You picked it up with your bare hands," she said.