Riggs Park Part 19

"I have my laptop. The motel is cheap this time of year. I meant what I said, Barbara. Take as long as you like."

"Have you been wearing that shirt every day?" I asked.

"I took advantage of the sale at Redix." Redix was a store just east of the drawbridge, which carried everything from fishing gear to fine clothing, and had excellent sales at the end of every season. Knowing how much Jon hated to shop, I couldn't help the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth.

"If you need anything, call me. I mean it. Errands you need to run. Groceries-" He stopped. We'd always gone to the supermarket together on Thursdays. "Anything."

I remembered then what we were about. "I won't need anything," I told him.

But that night my bed felt deserted. I felt sorry for myself. In a way, I even felt sorry for Jon. When Penny had told him about his father, how horrified he must have been. Had his first reaction been disgust? Repugnance? Shock? Surely shock. He'd been away at camp when Penny had been molested at age fourteen and hadn't returned for a month. He had no reason not to believe the story about the laborer. If he'd had s.e.x with Penny all those years later, while he was still stunned with the horror of his father's perversion, he'd also had the decency to part from Penny full of self-loathing, believing his behavior was a mirror of his father's, knowing that in some vile way, he would never escape the taint of being Murray Wishner's son.

No wonder he hadn't told me. No wonder he'd fled.

But still.

What I didn't forgive was that he'd left in order to keep his secret, and in the process robbed me of half my life.

I tossed in the bed, unable to get comfortable with so much empty s.p.a.ce beside me. Had he really robbed me of half my life? Too melodramatic. I had had a life. After Jon's desertion, I'd suffered grandly for a year, creeping through days dry and featureless as a slab of concrete. Then I'd discovered that the young body is a hungry, fickle beast, yearning so urgently for pleasure and joy that it usually gets it. A year after Jon left, I put my youthful angst aside and fell in love with Wells. A dentist, no less! A man out to repair the teeth of the world! Tikkun Olam. A son-in-law even Ida would approve! The navy had paid his way through dental school, so he owed them eight years. Amazingly, he was never sent to Vietnam, only all around the States: Carlsbad, California, where our apartment looked out to the Pacific Ocean; Tucson, Arizona, where the sharp desert air was always too hot or too cold, the sun a bright white fire; Pensacola, Florida, near the lush, humid, semitropical Gulf.

I loved each new a.s.signment, until after Robin was born, and Wells decided to make the navy his career. By then we'd acquired so many things that moving began to seem a ch.o.r.e. I was tired of making friends and leaving them, getting established and moving on.

When Robin was ten, Wells returned from one of his six-month floats and I, throwing my arms around him in greeting, realized I was not glad to see him. And vice versa. Our life together had unraveled so gradually that neither of us noticed until it was too late.

We didn't get around to divorcing until Robin was a teenager. After a hard first year, I found single life exhilarating. I worked for a small research firm, then a larger one. Eventually I started my own business. By the time Robin was grown and gone, I realized I could live anywhere. One thing the navy had taught was that if I didn't go to the sea now and then, ill will would fill me and make me miserable. Walking by the ocean was the only cure. I found Wrightsville Beach and calculated I could afford a house in Wilmington, fifteen minutes away. I could breathe the sea air whenever I liked. Except for the loneliness that drifted through me now and then like a chilling shadow, I knew I'd come home.

How could I have thought, even for a minute, that Jon had robbed me of half my life?

I let the image of him go, sift out of my mind like dust. When finally I dozed off, there was nothing left. I dreamed instead of Penny, amnesiac and confused after the incident in Murray's shop, baffled by her growing fascination with men, in the bus station, pregnant...dead.

I couldn't be angry with her. I had loved her. I was only sad.

The next day, I was able to work again. In just over a week, my life had fallen back into some kind of routine. I could do without Jon. This proved it. Of course I could.

Then the garage in Richmond called to say my car was ready. Jon wanted to drive me up there to get it. I didn't really have a choice.

It was a beautiful day, crisp and clear and invigorating. We opened the windows and shouted to each other over the breeze. By the time we reached I-95, we'd closed the windows again and fallen back into our easy pattern of speech as if nothing had interrupted. I found myself telling Jon about my visit with Essie Berman (no matter that she was the source of our current troubles) and with Marcellus Johnson. "No kidding, Jon," I told him. "He's the only person I ever met who had a different set of grammar rules for every listener and every mood."

After that journey, Jon showed up at the house more frequently-to pick up his mail, to search for his files, to rummage through his clothes. He insisted he was fine working at the motel on his laptop, but he'd appear at least once a day, sometimes twice.

This went on for more than two weeks. Did he know his comings and goings kept me in a constant state of agitation, listening for his car in the driveway, his key in the lock? Was he keeping me off balance on purpose?

"This is insane, Marilyn," I finally said in one of our frequent phone calls.

"So? I don't see you doing anything to change it."

True enough.

"Get over it, then. It will resolve itself soon enough."

"I suppose." I didn't see how.

A dark silence filled the air, hovering until I thought we'd lost our connection. "Marilyn, what's wrong?"

"That's just the trouble. Nothing's wrong. I feel good. I'm even starting to look good. My jowls are gone. My turkey neck is gone. I look better than I have in years."

"But that's wonderful."

"It means I have no excuse to delay my treatment," Marilyn said. "Then I'll probably feel like cow plop. I'm tired of feeling like c.r.a.p."

"Oh, Marilyn."

"Don't 'oh, Marilyn' me. People are always 'Oh, Marilyning me. Be glad all you have to worry about is kicking out some guy because he acted like an a.s.shole half a lifetime ago."

"Half a lifetime ago. You make it sound like-like nothing."

"Well? Isn't it?"

"Maybe by comparison, but I thought you'd-Why are you defending him?" A chill skittered across my collarbone, up my neck. "What's eating you, Marilyn?"

"Cancer. A numb face. All kinds of things. And you know what? You're not twenty-one anymore, either. You think this big dark secret is the worst thing that can happen? Fine. Kick Jon out for good. You're healthy right now, so why not? You figure you can have any life you want. But I'll tell you what-you're no spring chicken and neither is he. You don't know how many good years you've got left. Take it from the voice of experience. Why would either of you want to spend them alone?"

Why, exactly? Given a chance to love someone, to make a life together-rare enough-why would you run away? That was the question I'd posed to myself when I was twenty-one, and now again, the question of the moment.

I was healthy. I'd been happy. Could I run away because, as Marilyn put it, someone had treated me like c.r.a.p half a lifetime ago?

Yet in spite of all the reason I tried to put to it, there were moments when knowing Jon's secret still filled me with the same slicing anguish I'd felt at twenty-one when he'd first walked out on me. The same breathless, paralyzing anguish.

"Listen," Marilyn said. "I don't mean to pa.s.s judgment. It's just that-Betrayal can be a snaky, easy kind of thing. Sometimes it's over even before you realize what you've done."

"As in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Penny?"

"Yes. But also-the wretched way he stomped away and disappeared without explaining anything. And you were stubborn, too. You probably could have found him and made him confess. But you didn't. Not that I blame you. But it was-" She stopped. "It was a snaky, easy thing for both of you," she whispered.

I felt as if I'd been slapped. After all, I hadn't run after him. Too proud. Too hurt. Too stubborn. After all: Who had betrayed whom?

"And speaking of betrayal," she said, "if you're so angry at Jon, why aren't you angry with Penny, too? I'll tell you why. Because you see Penny as wounded. Not weak, but wounded. Why can't you see Jon that way, too?"

"Because I know better. And so did he."

"All right. Even so. You think you were betrayed? Everybody betrays you. Penny betrayed you whether you like it or not. Even your own body will betray you someday. I know all about it. But you don't abandon it. You try to make it well. Because you want to live there. Because it's your life."

I was taken off guard, floundering. "What's all this about, Marilyn? What's going on?"

She said nothing for a minute, then let out a long sigh. "I'm just out of sorts. Call me tomorrow. Okay?"

"Take care of yourself, Marilyn."

"You, too."

I hung up, shaken. I needed to see her, to touch her. I didn't trust what I could only hear from three hundred miles away. The next morning, when the phone rang just as I was brushing my teeth, I knew there must have been a crisis. At that early hour, who else but Marilyn could it be? I almost tripped over a throw rug as I bolted across the bedroom to answer "Barbara? Phyllis Levy here." The smoky voice belonged to a woman I'd met at the Temple of Israel, where Jon and I occasionally went to services. "I called to remind you about the oneg tonight."

"The oneg?" My stomach twisted into a knot. Months ago, I'd signed up to provide refreshments for the social hour after the Friday-night service. I had completely forgotten. It was too late to back out.

Three hours later, Jon showed up with coffee and found me in the kitchen, making a pumpkin roll to serve. "I'll go with you."

I whirled around, flailing floured hands. "You knew!"

"I remembered when I saw you baking."

"Jon, this makes no sense. You moved out, but you're here every day. We're trying to resolve things, but nothing is resolved."

He handed me a roll of paper towels. "For me it is," he said softly. "For me, everything was resolved the day I got off the plane in Wilmington."

"Jon, don't." I couldn't stand another dose of his charm. "Exactly what is this going to accomplish-your going to temple with me? Are you trying to keep up appearances?"

"No, I enjoy it." How could I argue? He did enjoy it. His one marriage, five years in his early thirties to a woman named Denise, had broken up after a long haggling about whether they would go to church or synagogue with the children they ultimately never had.

Driving into town that night, Jon sat at the wheel looking upbeat and sporty in a tweedy gray jacket and bright tie, and I sat beside him with the pumpkin roll on my lap, too unsettled even to make small talk.

During the service there was, finally, no need for us to look at each other, talk, pretend. The familiar prayers still calmed me, soothed me the way the tunes from Peter and the Wolf had once soothed me when my mother tested her reeds at bedtime. Not a very religious notion, I supposed, but for me prayers and music had always been, equally, lullabies for the soul.

Then the service was over and I was downstairs in the social hall, setting out pumpkin roll, cookies, foam cups for coffee. As other congregants began to drift in from the sanctuary, I found myself greeting people, socializing, behaving as if the evening were perfectly normal. As I watched Jon talking to friends across the room, tears stung my eyes at the idea that our breakup would force us to leave behind not just each other, but also the braid of life we had begun to plait together, almost unaware.

I hurried to the kitchen on the pretext of getting more coffee creamer and stood clutching the cabinet door, trying to compose myself. Maybe this was why, for a whole month, I had done nothing. Marilyn was right. I was no spring chicken. Why would I leave Jon to face the coming darkness alone? But how could we live breathing the tainted air that now hung over our every common action-even this lively social hour with people we liked? Setting a jar of creamer on the counter, I thought bitterly of the false calm that had infused me just a few minutes ago during the service: all that illusive sense of peace. Did it solve anything? Not at all. We were still in limbo.

And then, the next day, in a white FedEx envelope bearing Marilyn's return address and marked for Sat.u.r.day delivery, came the tape.

CHAPTER 19.

Videotape I held the package in my hand for a long minute before ripping it open. If Marilyn hadn't mentioned it beforehand, and then spent the money to have it delivered on the weekend, I probably had every right to be scared. Inside, a note read, Don't call me. Watch this first. It was a gift from Essie. With shaking fingers, I closed the drapes and slid the tape into the VCR.

It was a short clip, less than a minute, meticulously edited so as not to give too much away. In the weight room of a high-school gym filled with bench presses and free weights, a female reporter was interviewing a boy who'd been named High School Athlete of the Week. The camera moved in close, no wide angle that might reveal a banner with the name of the school, an emblem, anything to suggest their whereabouts. Even the mikes were attached to their collars, not the handheld kind imprinted with the station's call letters. The boy was shy, the reporter poised as she presented him with his plaque. There was more to the segment, but the film editor had cut it short, let the tape revert to static and snow.

I pushed the rewind b.u.t.ton, played it again. By the third viewing, my heart had stopped slamming against my chest and my breathing was less ragged, but my mouth had turned to sandpaper. The reporter, of course, was Vera.

For the past few weeks, I'd been certain that, if I ever got a glimpse of Jon and Penny's child, even from a distance on an unfamiliar street, I would know her instantly. It wasn't so. The reporter was a mature woman rather than the girl I'd pictured, and not a clone of either parent. The high cheekbones might have come from anywhere; the bouncy hair, reddish but darker than her mother's, was closer to mahogany than auburn. Though Vera's complexion was fair, it was not as fair as Penny's, and there was no sign of Penny's trademark freckles. More telling, the crinkly lines around Vera's eyes were deep enough that even makeup didn't hide them, when Penny hadn't lived long enough for crows' feet. Older than her mother had ever been, Vera was a woman past thirty-five, probably a mother herself. And a sports reporter like her father.

Was her choice of a profession coincidence? Irony? Or somehow programmed into her genes?

I ran the tape a fourth time, a fifth. In Vera's short-cropped, carefully cut hair, I began to notice the suggestion of Penny's unruly mane; in her thick, dark eyebrows an echo of Jon's. The hints of her breeding were like occasional whiffs of familiar perfume: Penny's slightly backward thrust of shoulders, Jon's inflection of voice. Who would have thought a child would inherit that?

By the time I turned off the VCR and slipped the tape back into its jacket, my right leg was numb from sitting on it.

A sharp flame of anger leaped into the hollow of my gut. What was the point of this? If Essie had this tape, why give it to Marilyn rather than Jon or me? And what was Marilyn up to, sending it to me like this? I had had enough drama lately. When I called her, she answered on the first ring.

"I know. You're mad at me. I'm sorry. I just didn't know what else to do."

"You could have told me this was coming, for starters," I said.

"Oh, Barbara, I wanted to bring it to you in person. But Bernie and Steve said you'd need to show it to Jon and I'd just be in the way."

"If the point was to show it to Jon, why all the middlemen?"

"You know how high-handed Essie can be. I never even talked to her in person. She sent the tape to me via her personal messenger, Taneka. And then your friend Marcellus called to give me Essie's instructions."

"Instructions!"

"A whole list of them. She thinks it's time Jon met his daughter. She's arranging a meeting. She says Jon didn't know Penny very well, so it's up to you and me to fill Vera in about her mother. Steve should stay out of it since he isn't the father. And by the way, in case I die from cancer before all this comes to pa.s.s, it's mainly up to you."

This was exactly the sort of thing Essie would be brazen enough to say.

"She says she knows we cared about Penny," Marilyn said. "She knows we'll put her in the best possible light."

"The nerve! Never mind that Vera was conceived during an act of betrayal that changed my life!"

"Essie was always pretty shameless."

"But I, on the other hand, should be big enough to tutor Jon's child about Penny's merits?"

"Essentially, yes." Then Marilyn whispered, "But first you have to show Jon the tape."

"Like h.e.l.l I do."

"I'm sure Essie knew that was exactly what you'd say. I'm sure that's why she made me the intermediary."

"Well, Jon's in Charlotte, so forget it." He was more meticulous about giving me his schedule now than he'd been when he lived with me. Before dropping me off after temple, while I was debating how to make a clean break from him, he'd told me he was leaving this morning to do an interview, and gave me all the numbers where I could reach him before he came back tomorrow.

"He won't be in Charlotte forever," Marilyn said. "Show it to him when he gets back."

I saw there was no getting out of this. "So when is this meeting?" I asked.

"Taneka says Essie will let us know. I think they're planning some kind of big party. Taneka made it clear we're supposed to be patient and not ask."

"Lovely."

"Listen, I thought it was as hokey as you do. I tried to call Essie and talk to her myself, but Taneka wouldn't let me through. First Essie was asleep. Then she was out. I said, for an old woman who can hardly walk, it's amazing how much she goes out. Taneka said, she goes out more than you expect. Finally I thought, well, I'll just go over there. Then Steve said don't, it'll just make her mad. I spent two days thinking about nothing else. Finally I just gave up."

"And took the tape over to FedEx," I said.

"Listen, I know it was c.r.a.ppy to send it to you with no warning. I just couldn't see what good warning you would do. And I wanted to give you-I don't know. Maybe some time alone to take this in."

"This is why you changed your tune the other day about Jon being the rat that he is, isn't it? You didn't just 'give up,' you switched sides on me, didn't you? You and Essie. Let's help the little man meet his daughter, let's help the little man tell the girl about her mother, since the only time the father was ever alone with her was the half hour they were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g."