Secrets and Surprises Part 11

There was static on the line; a bad connection. His boss was placating: of course he wouldn't fire him, but when did he think-(cars roared by). They hung up, both joking about Florida oranges.

He had tried to call Joanna from another phone later on, to say he was coming. There was no answer. He tried to call Susan, but of course she was at work, no answer there either. With the back of his arm he wiped the sweat off his forehead. What the h.e.l.l had his boss been joking about-what was funny about Florida oranges?

Joanna's house was only a ten-minute drive from the highway. It was a small pale-green house. The lawn was full of exotic bushes. In front of the house a pink 1955 Cadillac convertible was parked. The upholstery inside was white, in perfect condition. Whose was it?

He went up the walk and knocked on the doorframe of the screen door. A girl came to the door when he knocked.

"What do you want?" she said.

"Does Joanna still live here?"

"Yeah. Who are you?"

"I'm Bobby's father."

"What do you mean?" She looked confused. She put her face closer to the screen. Her eyes were large, like Anita's. She was prettier. Older.

"I'm his father. I came to visit him."

He snapped his arms into his sides. He had been standing there like a bear, leaning forward, arms away from his body.

"What does he look like?" she said.

"He has medium-length brown hair. He has braces. Wait a minute-he was getting braces when I was last here, but I don't know if he got them. He looks like me. Don't you see the resemblance?"

"Yeah," she said. "Come on in."

"Who are you?" Donald said. "Where are they?"

"Bobby's gone over to a friend's house. I'm waiting for him to get back. Your wife is playing volleyball."

"Where?" he said.

"Do you know the Orrs?"

"No."

"She's there."

They stood facing each other. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was about to light the filter.

"It's to surprise them," he said. "They didn't know I was coming."

"Oh," she said.

"Wrong end," he said, reaching out to touch her hand before she could touch the lighted match to the cigarette.

The television was on, but she had turned down the volume before opening the door. Red Skelton was gesticulating, his face expanding and contracting as if it were made of putty.

"If you're going to be here," she said, "I might as well go."

He nodded. She was going down the walk when he remembered about paying her. She turned around when he called after her and c.o.c.ked her head. "Pay me?" she said. "Joanna's my friend. I watch Bobby and she watches my daughter."

"You have a daughter?" he said.

"Yes. I have a four-year-old daughter." She smiled, deciding to be more friendly. "Her father is watching her. They went to the beach. I just live three streets over."

She waved. She went out to the car and started it. The radio came on when the car started. It was a fine car: in perfect shape, motor idling quietly, paint sparkling. She waved again. Donald waved. She was gone.

He walked into the kitchen to look for a drink, realizing that he was not only tired but depressed. Depressed that he didn't know one friend of Joanna's and that the one he had just met was by accident. Maybe it wasn't one of her close friends. How could she be a close friend if she didn't even know that Joanna had never married. But maybe Joanna had told people she was divorced, for Bobby's sake. For Bobby's sake he would have married her, but she wouldn't do it. They had argued about it, but he couldn't change her mind. She lived in an apartment in New York with three other girls-a tiny apartment on the East Side. When she was three months pregnant she started bleeding. She called the doctor and he told her to go to bed. She and Donald jogged around Central Park. They danced the Virginia reel in his apartment as best they could, because that apartment was only slightly larger than hers. They sat in a bar and she said, "Everything's okay. Everything's going to be okay." The bleeding stopped. They jogged again, every night for a week, running like maniacs. Bobby was born six months later, in Florida. She had gone there because she had friends in Florida, and because he would not stop pestering her to marry him. Bobby was born one week before Donald's birthday. One of her friends called him at work to tell him. Ironically, after she described the baby, she said, "Everything's okay." She told him that Joanna did not want to see him, that when she was ready she would call. No call.

Most houses that look small outside are a little larger inside. This one was not. He found rum to drink and walked around the house sipping it. He went from the kitchen back to the living room to the bedroom adjoining it and went in. It was her room. There was no bedspread, and the bed was made with white sheets. He sat on it, realizing how tired he was, then got up and smoothed out the wrinkles. The room was almost empty. There was a wicker chair in front of a big antique mirror, an ugly high white-painted dresser. He walked out and into Bobby's room. There was a pile of clothes on the floor. On his dresser was a letter. It was addressed to someone named Robert Winter. It could have been anybody. Robert Winter lived in Pennsylvania. Who would Bobby know in Pennsylvania? He looked in the bathroom (Jean Nate on the gla.s.s shelf above the sink, a sand dollar, a tube of toothpaste, coiled like a snake), then walked exactly three steps and went back to the kitchen, where he put down his drink because he didn't want it, and stepped down one step into the living room. He hoped that Bobby would come home first. Then she would be cordial if Bobby was glad to see him. If she came first, there was little chance of her being friendly. On a table by the sofa was a pile of pictures. Most of them were of Bobby, in uniform, playing baseball. There was one of her father hugging Bobby, in the snow, outside his big house in Ma.s.sachusetts. Probably they had gone there for Christmas. There was one of Joanna in a long yellow skirt and a white blouse, and she was standing stiffly, as she always did in photographs. She looked as if she was going out for a big evening. Who was she going with? Robert Winter?

"Starley," he had said, years ago in New York, "Joanna is pregnant and she won't marry me."

"I wouldn't marry you either," he said.

"Why wouldn't you?"

"Because I'm a man."

"Christ-what are you joking about? This is serious. She's going to have a baby, and she won't get married."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You're sorry she won't marry me, or what?"

"What's the cross-examination?" he said. "I'm sorry about everything."

They were walking past the reservoir, where he and Joanna had run the week before.

"Give her time, she'll change her mind."

He took big steps when he walked. Donald took big steps with him.

"What do you want to get married for, anyway?" he said.

Four months later Starley was married to Alice.

He sat quietly with his hands in his lap until he heard her car in the drive-the VW she insisted on driving, even though he had patiently explained each time he saw her how unsafe a car it was. He fidgeted, not knowing whether to get up and open the door, or just sit there. Either way, he would probably frighten her. While he sat thinking, he lost the opportunity to move. She opened the door a crack, put her head around the corner, and her eyes met his.

"Oh G.o.d," she sighed. "I wondered why the door was hanging open."

Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She was carrying a tennis racket. She had on white shorts and a black T-s.h.i.+rt. She wiped her hair out of her face.

"Okay," she said. "What are you doing here? I a.s.sume it got too cold for you up north."

"It did," he said. "It really did."

"Where's Deena?" she said.

"Is that her name? The woman with the four-year-old daughter?"

"She didn't have her with her, did she? Am I crazy or something?"

"No, she ... she told me. She said she had a daughter. I didn't know her name."

"Deena," she said. "Now, what are you doing here?"

She sat in a wicker chair. He thought, If I can still be so attracted to her, I can't love Susan. If I had reached Susan on the phone, what would I have said?

"Who's Robert Wilson?" he said.

"I don't know. Who?"

"Isn't that his name?" He got up and went to Bobby's room. He came back. "I mean Robert Winter," he said.

"A friend of his who moved to Pennsylvania," she said. "Did you count the silverware to make sure it was all there too?"

"Joanna," he said. He locked his fingers together. "Do you remember Starley?"

She sighed, obviously exasperated. They had all been constant companions in New York; the three of them-later the four of them-had gone dancing together at night.

"He died," he said. "He was run over by a truck."

Her mouth came open. She slowly pulled the rubber band out of her hair and rubbed it into a ball between her fingers. "Starley's dead?" she said. "I just got a letter from Starley."

"No you didn't. What would he write you a letter for?"

"He wrote me." She shrugged.

"What did he write you?"

"Stay here," she said. She crossed the room, stepped up, turned into her bedroom.

"What is it?" he said, following her.

The letter was about a picture that Starley could get her a print of from the National Gallery of Art. She must have written to ask him if he could get it. At the end of the letter he had written: "P.S. Why don't you let bygones be bygones and marry him, Joanna? He shacks up with one dreary woman after another, the latest of which dumped him because her fifteen-year-old son wouldn't do his math homework as long as she had him around."

"Imagine thinking that after all this time I'm going to marry you," she said. "When I knew you I was eighteen years old, and I thought that you were hot stuff. I thought New York was a big, impressive place. I was eighteen years old."

Past her, outside the window, was a bush with bright-green leaves and lavender flowers that looked very bright in the half-light.

"That's pretty," he said, pointing over her shoulder. "What kind of bush is that?"

"Hibiscus," she said. "But look-what are you doing here?"

He was sitting by her on the bed. Her skin was cool, on top of her arm where his arm touched hers. The bed linen was cool, too, because the window had been open and the bush outside had shaded it from the sun. It was summer in Florida, and winter back north. He was holding her hand. Years ago he had held her hand when she was eighteen. He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. He picked up the letter with the other hand and dropped it to the floor.

"Starley's dead," he said. "A truck hit him. It was an accident."

He was surprised to be saying out loud what he had been thinking for days. In the apartment she had shared with the three other girls in New York they had gotten used to whispering, in the bedroom, behind the closed door (a sign that her roommates were to stay in the living room or, preferably, go out). They had whispered, she had whispered that she loved him.

He ran his hand along the sheet, then rested it on top of her leg. As he tried to clear his mind he heard the hum of the highway, the faint static that had made it difficult to talk when he made the phone call earlier. He was talking to himself, but she was answering him.

"Wait," he said, his voice no louder than the sound his hand made stroking the sheet. "Wait a minute," he said. "Wait."

"Wait for what?" she whispered.

Deer.

Season.

T.

here had been very few times in their lives when they lived apart, and now, for almost three years, Margaret and Elena had shared the cottage in the Adirondacks. In all that time, things had gone smoothly. The only time in their lives things had not gone well was the time before the sisters moved to the cottage. Elena and Tom, the man Elena had been living with, had broken up, and Tom had begun to date Margaret. But Tom and Margaret had not dated long, and now it had become an episode the sisters rarely mentioned. Each understood that the other had once loved him.

Elena had lived with Tom in his brother's high rise on the East Side of Manhattan, but when Tom's brother came back from Europe they had to leave the borrowed apartment, and Tom suggested that it might be a good idea if they lived apart for a while. It had not come as a surprise to Elena, but Tom's dates with Margaret had.

Margaret had never lived with Tom; she had dated him when she was going to nursing school, telling Elena that she knew living with a man would be a great distraction from her work, and once she had decided what she wanted to do, she wanted to concentrate hard. It hurt Elena that Tom would prefer Margaret's company to her own, and it hurt her more that Margaret did not seem to really love him-she preferred her work to him. But Margaret had always been the lucky one.

Tom visited every year, around Christmas. The first year he came he talked about a woman he was dating: a college professor, a minor poet. If the news hurt either of them, the sisters didn't show it. But the next year-they were surprised that he would come again, since the first year he came his visit seemed more or less perfunctory-he talked to Elena after Margaret had gone to bed. He told her then that it had been a mistake to say that they should live apart, that he had found no one else, and would find no one else: he loved her. Then he went into her bedroom and got into bed. She thought about telling him to get out, that she didn't want to start anything again and that it would be embarra.s.sing with Margaret in the next bedroom. But she counted back and realized that she had not slept with anyone in almost a year. She went to bed with him. After that visit, a sentence in one of his letters might have been meant as a proposal, but Elena did not allude to that in her letter to him, and Tom said nothing more. Finally his letters became less impa.s.sioned. The letters stopped entirely for almost six months, but then he wrote again, and asked if he could come for what he called his "annual visit." He also wrote Margaret, and Margaret said to Elena, "Tom wants to visit. That's all right with you, isn't it?" They were standing in the doorway to the kitchen, where Elena was putting down a saucer of milk for the cat.

"What are you thinking about so seriously?" Margaret said.

"We need a new kettle," Elena said. "One that doesn't whistle." She lifted the kettle off the burner.

"Is that what you were really thinking about? I thought you might have been thinking about the visit."

"What would I be thinking? I don't care if he comes or not."

"I don't either. Maybe next year we should just say no. It does sort of stir up memories."

Margaret poured water into a cup and added instant coffee and milk. She put the kettle down and Elena picked it up. It irritated Elena that Margaret always added the coffee after she had put the water in. It also irritated her that she had time to be bothered by such things. She thought that as she got older, she was becoming more and more petty. She had a grant, this year, to write about Rousseau's paintings, and she kept bogging down in details. After a few hours' work she would be bored and leave the house. Sometimes she would see no one but Margaret from week to week, except for the regulars at the village store and an occasional hunter walking through the woods, or along the roads. In the summer she had dated an older man named Peter Virrell, one of the summer people who had stayed on, but they had very little to say to each other. He was a painter, so they could talk about art, but she got tired of researching and writing and then talking all night about the same subject, and he drank more than she liked and embarra.s.sed her the next day by calling and begging forgiveness. She found excuses not to see him. Once, when she did, he drank too much and insisted on holding her when she didn't want to be held, and with his lips softly against her ear whispered, "Stop pretending, stop pretending ..." She had been afraid that when he stopped whispering, he was going to strike her. He looked angry when he let go of her and stood there staring. "Pretending what?" she said, trying to keep her voice even. "You're the one who knows," he said. He sat in front of his open fireplace, tossing in bits of paper that he had shredded and worked into little b.a.l.l.s.

"I don't have to explain myself to you," she said.

"I'm forty years old and I drink too much," he said. "I don't blame you for not being interested in me. You don't intend to sleep with me, do you?"

She had not been asked that so bluntly since college, when a few crazy boys she knew talked that way. She didn't know whether to resent it or to try to answer him.

"That's what I thought," he said. "Next do you say that you want to go home, and do I drive you?"