If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This Part 11

Or so she said.

At home, he would watch her. He would study his daughter the way he studied the animals in his lab, as though doing so might provide some kind of solution. She had returned rail thin, all eyes and bone. Her honey hair was jet black. Her lips were perpetually chapped, as though she'd been drained of some essential human moisture. She looked like a wraith, otherworldly, but she did normal things. That was what kept him mesmerized. The way she sat at the kitchen table eating yogurt. The fact that she spoke on the phone. That she listened to music. That she walked through the doorways of their elegant rented town house without falling to her knees at every threshold to reflect on what she had done.

For reasons he never understood, Cathleen had escaped official suspicion. And she had also resisted the idea that there was a villain to the piece-so she hadn't learned to hate as elaborately as he. That was his theory anyway, the foundation on which he built his resentment: that it had all been much easier on her. So he envied her, and he was angry at her, and about six weeks after Zoe's return, Jeremy embarked on a standard-issue, utterly predictable affair with a colleague at the lab, despite the fact that he didn't like the woman very much. Liking her or not liking her seemed oddly irrelevant to the decision to have s.e.x with her a few times a week. The truth was, he wasn't a bit sure he would ever like anyone again. He seemed to have lost the thread of how affections worked.

Ultimately, the smug satisfaction of doing something behind Cathleen's back lost out to the impulse to hurt her, so one night toward the end of the year, motivated more by spite than by anything like remorse, he confessed. She looked momentarily confused-shock at his disclosure, he a.s.sumed-then confessed her own affair right back at him. Under different circ.u.mstances, that might have signaled a chance to start over, one betrayal canceling out the other, the slate wiped clean; but as it went, they were like the dueling pair that shoots simultaneously, so both end up dead.

There were never any fights after that, not even much open acrimony, just an overwhelming atmosphere of defeat in the house. With all the predictable unkindness of irony, as the family broke apart it turned out that Cathleen and Zoe had both grown to feel at home in England and they decided to stay on. It was while driving Jeremy to Heathrow for his miserable, solo flight back to the States that Cathleen borrowed the queen's phrase.

"Our very own annus horribilis," she said. "I feel positively royal."

It's Cathleen, unmistakably Cathleen, waving from the platform of the Thomas the Tank Engine station when Jeremy's train comes to its stop.

"h.e.l.lo, you!" she calls out as he steps down.

He wasn't expecting her there. He waves-a small waist-level gesture, one arm pulling a bag, the other weighted with his computer. "h.e.l.lo, you," he echoes, too quietly to be heard.

He's a bit numb as he walks toward her. It's been fully five years. He used to see her quite often at family events when she would jet over, sometimes with Zoe, sometimes alone, moving across the ocean with an ease he never thought about too clearly when cursing the Atlantic's role in his life. Over time, they progressed from avoiding each other at those events to seeking each other out as people with whom they could at least be themselves. They even once drunkenly stumbled into a s.e.xual encounter that they tacitly agreed neither to repeat nor ever mention again; and the next few times they saw each other after that, he noticed they'd adopted an oddly jocular, teasing style of conversation that reminded Jeremy of the way his brother Jonathan and his old high school football teammates spoke to one another in middle age. But that was all years ago, as ancient in its way as their wedded days.

"I wasn't expecting you," he says as they embrace. "I didn't know you'd be here."

"Well." She says it with a slight shrug, as though to convey that it should be obvious why Zoe thought her presence necessary. "I hope it's at least an okay surprise. Can I help you carry anything?"

"It is. No, I'm fine."

He's startled by how entirely known known she is to him. Not just familiar or even evocative but inevitable in some way, as though she were the mama duck and he the little one on whom she long ago imprinted her heart-shaped face and her dark blue eyes, the straight lines of her posture, the angle at which she held her head, a certain sighing sound she would make before she spoke. she is to him. Not just familiar or even evocative but inevitable in some way, as though she were the mama duck and he the little one on whom she long ago imprinted her heart-shaped face and her dark blue eyes, the straight lines of her posture, the angle at which she held her head, a certain sighing sound she would make before she spoke.

As they walk toward a small lot filled with cars, he feels her settle over him like a climate in which he used to live.

Driving through the village in Zoe's ancient black c.o.c.kroach of a sub-subcompact, Cathleen points out what she calls the big sights: a tea shop, a pub, a bank, an unlikely-looking hotel covered with a profusion of ivy that Jeremy remarks appears more spooky than quaint.

"There's always a fine line between the two," she says. "Isn't there?"

Conversation for conversation's sake. It doesn't have to make much sense.

Once they've left the village and are onto country roads, she asks him if he's seeing anyone. He isn't surprised by the question. It's always been a point of honor with Cathleen to show no discomfort discussing such things. So he says that yes, he supposes he is, that yes, he is seeing someone, you could call it that; but he doesn't volunteer much more. Not that her name is Rose-a syllable he loves for sounding more like an endearment than a real name. And not that she is thirty-four years old. Nor that he met her when she rented the third floor of the house he and Cathleen moved into the year after Rose was born. And not that he is in love with her, marrying her in four months. He isn't planning to tell Zoe any of these things during this visit, and Cathleen has always been a bad liar.

"She works in the university library," he says.

"Interesting." But her tone doesn't quite match the word, as though having proved that the idea doesn't disturb her, she's lost interest. Or maybe it does disturb her, and a brief display of equanimity is the best she can do. Either way, after a pause, she volunteers that she's recently ended a longish relations.h.i.+p with a Russian pianist; and Jeremy recognizes one of her words: longish longish. Along with shortish, noonish, Fridayish shortish, noonish, Fridayish. A deep vein of imprecision has always run through Cathleen.

"I spent the whole last few months with Uri trying to decide if he was more of a boooor boooor or a bore. Until I realized it wouldn't much matter if he were out of my life." or a bore. Until I realized it wouldn't much matter if he were out of my life."

They drive in silence for a bit after that.

"What about Colin?" he eventually asks. "What's he like? Will I like him?"

"Well, if you don't, you'll be the first. But you will. He's one of those people who doesn't ask the world to wors.h.i.+p him, so of course everyone does. And he's very good to her."

Jeremy would have given low odds on any husband of Zoe's lacking a little wash of saintliness. "She seems much happier. In emails, I mean. As far as I can tell, anyway."

"As happy as any of us," she says.

"As happy as any of us," he echoes a moment after that, struck, as he says it, by how happy he's been of late. Happier than most. Happier than Cathleen, it seems.

"She's very changed, Jeremy. You'll see." There aren't any intersections in sight when she flicks her turn signal, only property entrances, so he realizes they must be very close. "She's grown up a lot, you know."

But of course he doesn't know. "I'm glad," he says. "By nearly thirty, that's the idea. We were parents by her age."

"That hardly means we'd grown up." Cathleen turns at a gap between high, thick hedges, onto a long dirt drive. Its ruts and ridges bear witness to a persistent cycle of rain and heat. On either side, anywhere Jeremy looks, vast fields stretch, acres and acres of fields blanketing gentle hills. There are at least three barns in sight and a large half-timbered house right ahead. It is as though they've gone through one of those magical gates in children's stories, into a universe that couldn't possibly fit into the s.p.a.ce concealing it.

"It's huge," he says. "It's enormous. I hadn't expected anything on this scale."

"Oh, that's right." She beeps the horn with three sharp hits of her fist. "I keep forgetting. You haven't been here before."

And Jeremy doesn't say anything to that. No response comes to mind.

It wasn't Rose's idea that he write Zoe and ask about a visit, but it was on her account that he did. Jeremy had long been ashamed of this aspect of his life, this glaring lapse of his, this daughter across the water, but he had never before cared so much about having done something shameful.

It was excruciating telling Rose. They were walking. They liked to take walks together in the neighborhood, commenting on the houses he had lived among for three decades but of course never quite seen before. They were just a few blocks from the house when she asked a question that had clearly been on her mind for some time. How often did he see his daughter?

Even before hating the answer he had to give, he hated the tone in which she asked. A reluctant, eggsh.e.l.l-walking tone. As though she knew she was in danger of learning something about him she wouldn't like. Her voice, always low, both deep and quiet, seemed to emanate from somewhere close to the ground. Her hand tightened its grip on his-as though defiant against the impulse to unclasp it.

He told her the whole story. But what did it amount to? He had let his daughter go. Like a kite that requires too much attention, too much sensitivity to its ways. Too much care.

Rose listened, quietly, and her grip on him never loosened, but she didn't pretend it was a matter of indifference to her. In the end, though, Jeremy didn't write to his daughter because he was ashamed of himself or wanted Rose to think better of him but because something about loving Rose, about Rose loving him, made him believe that it might not be too late.

The reality of his reunion with Zoe isn't a bit as he's imagined it. For one thing, he wouldn't have recognized her if he'd pa.s.sed her on the street. Ever since the year in London-or since London since London, as he thinks of it-she stayed a collection of jagged surfaces, bones poking out at her collar, on her wrists, her knees, her ribs. Her shoulder blades, jutting straight out from her back, had seemed like vestigial wings, reminders of her flight. But now she's grown plump, round and soft, as though nature reversed a sculptor's work, encasing her true form in this obscuring one. Her hair is back to its honey tones. The heavy Goth makeup is gone. She looks like the woman he pictured her becoming when she was a child, not like the woman he believed she had become.

He'd also thought there might be a moment, a few words spoken by them both, something to mark this as a new beginning. But the tentative hug they exchange in the drive and his first impressions of her become tiny details in what is quickly a bustling, comic scene that includes their reunion and also an errant cow wandering over as though she too wants to catch up; a large dog jumping onto Jeremy, leaving prints and long muddy streaks on his pants; an ancient man on a small tractor waving, calling something unintelligible as he pa.s.ses; the husband, Colin, appearing from a barn, smiling and ginger-headed, shaking Jeremy's hand, taking his suitcase; a tabby cat circling them all; a sense of rush and hurry in the air, something about the vet having been there, about dinner being close to ready, all of it conspiring to carry them through those first few minutes and through the front door of the house with a lightness that doesn't allow for anything as potentially heavy as an acknowledged fresh start.

"You must be very respectful with Jeremy," Cathleen says as they sit at the round oak kitchen table-so large Jeremy has images of the house being built around it. "He's become quite famous, you know."

"Not really." He hasn't come to be admired. He has come to be forgiven. "Not outside the field."

"Well, I'm certainly outside the field," Colin says, with a smile. His face reminds Jeremy of a well-disposed marionette, the jutting chin, the cheekbones like hills, a seemingly simple good nature beaming through it all. "Most of the time, I'm outside in in the field. But I'm very impressed, from what I've heard." Jeremy tries not to think about what this young man has heard about him. More bad than good, no doubt. "It must be rewarding to do work that helps people." the field. But I'm very impressed, from what I've heard." Jeremy tries not to think about what this young man has heard about him. More bad than good, no doubt. "It must be rewarding to do work that helps people."

"Your work helps people," Cathleen says. "You're feeding the world."

"Oh, yes. Indeed we are. One head of designer lettuce at a time. We're not quite up to the cancer-research standard."

"We're not there yet." Zoe is peeling a potato-with a knife-so rapidly Jeremy is fearful for her hands. "But we'll get there. We do have bills to pay, and designer veggies are like gold."

"I'm looking forward to hearing all about it," Jeremy says. His gaze is fixed on the course of her blade, on the flying strips of skin. "I'm looking forward to seeing it all."

"I'll give you a tour," Colin says. "The whole operation."

"Not today, though." Zoe's potato falls into a ceramic bowl; another takes its place in her hands. "Dinner's in just a little while. I hope everyone's hungry."

"I am," Jeremy says right away, though he isn't. Prodigal father and obliging guest-the roles overlap. "The whole house smells incredible," he says. "How could anyone not be hungry sitting here?"

After a few more such innocuous exchanges-the weather, a pregnant cow-Colin excuses himself to make quick rounds in the barns, calling back No rest for the wicked No rest for the wicked with all the good humor of a man who knows himself to be anything but; and for a time, no one speaks. It's as though a gust of tension pa.s.sed him in the doorway. Zoe has grown more intent on her potatoes. Cathleen is staring off into s.p.a.ce, the corners of her lips drawn down, as though she's gone somewhere troubling, as though a bomb could explode without her noticing. with all the good humor of a man who knows himself to be anything but; and for a time, no one speaks. It's as though a gust of tension pa.s.sed him in the doorway. Zoe has grown more intent on her potatoes. Cathleen is staring off into s.p.a.ce, the corners of her lips drawn down, as though she's gone somewhere troubling, as though a bomb could explode without her noticing.

The last time the three of them were alone together in a kitchen, a kind of bomb had gone off. It was the final morning of that awful year. Sitting there now, Jeremy feels a churning of shame, like nausea, as he remembers the profound ambivalence of his goodbye to Zoe that day. How insincere he must have sounded. How insincere he was as he asked her one last time if she was sure she didn't want to go back home with him. What relief he felt at her sullen certainty.

The only sound in the room is the rhythmic rasp of Zoe's knife. This is one of those moments, Jeremy knows, at which he can pierce the social membrane and acknowledge what they're all thinking about anyway. This is an opportunity to be direct.

"Are those your potatoes?" he asks instead. "From here, I mean."

It's too soon, he tells himself. He's just arrived.

"They are." She doesn't look up. For all he's seen of her face, she could be wearing a veil. This was a point of contention way back when. She seemed eternally to be avoiding meeting his eye. "I'm making potato salad for tomorrow," she says. "We thought we'd try a cookout if the rain holds off. Grilled chicken."

"It's their own chickens, you know." Cathleen is back in the conversation, woken from her trance.

"I'm very impressed."

"You don't know the half of it. She slaughters them herself. Killed two yesterday. Does it without batting an eye."

"You make it sound like I do it for pleasure, Mum." He has noticed her unmistakably British intonations, but the syllable startles him. Who is Mum? Mum? The characters have new names. "It's just that Colin can't bear to. He's quite soft about such things." The characters have new names. "It's just that Colin can't bear to. He's quite soft about such things."

Apparently she isn't soft about such things. Of course not.

"They have an abattoir and everything. She goes in there and does murder most... well, fowl. F-o-w-l fowl. It's a little hard to imagine, isn't it?"

"It certainly is," he says-though in truth it isn't. Not at all. In truth, this is the first information he's received since arriving that makes sense to him, that connects this quiet, seemingly diffident woman to the razor-sharp girl he knew. Why don't you just go f.u.c.k yourself, Dad? Why do I even make these f.u.c.king trips? Why don't you just go f.u.c.k yourself, Dad? Why do I even make these f.u.c.king trips? "I imagine it's all in a day's work, at some point," he says. "I imagine it's all in a day's work, at some point," he says.

"It has to be done." She brushes her hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. "So I do it. I don't enjoy it."

"I've always felt that way about the lab animals. People a.s.sume you have to be callous, but I don't think that's it. It's not callousness. It's a kind of acceptance. I'm truly sorry about what we put them through."

"Like father, like daughter," Cathleen says. "I think I'm in the Colin camp."

"Someone has to do it," Zoe says. "If people want to eat." She drops another potato into the bowl. "Or cure diseases," she adds.

He feels as though she's handed him a bouquet. "I'm amazed by how you've taken to this life, Zee. I really am."

She puts down her knife and stands, gathering the big crockery bowl of stripped potatoes in her arms. Her hands, flat against the pale brown glaze, are red and chapped, he sees. Her nails, clipped down to the nubs. "Dinner's probably twenty minutes off," she says. "If you want to wash up or anything."

Cathleen has told Jeremy that there isn't much hope for a cell signal, though occasionally one decided to roll through. "Like a beneficent mist," she said. She told him there is Internet, wireless, inside the house; but his computer is still packed up and he can't quite bring himself to ask if he can use theirs. Better to roam the fields in search of the beneficent mist.

The day has cooled, a chill leaching into the mild air. It reminds Jeremy of New England-and the farm smells, too, take him there. Weekend escapes up to Vermont in the early fall. Apple picking, leaf peeping. And then, later in the season, the ever-earnest selection ritual in a pumpkin patch. They had been big on that sort of thing, he and Cathleen, when Zoe was small. They didn't want her to be one of those city girls who seemed to be made of plastic, to exist outside the natural world. It's a little jolting to him now to see Zoe so connected to nature, over her head, as she is, in crops and livestock. It's disorienting in a way. He's unused to the possibility that any aspects of his parenting, even minor ones, may have stood her in good stead.

As Jeremy kicks his way over the tangle of gra.s.s and weeds and brambles that run along the drive, past a barn and then around another, he checks his phone, then checks it again and again, but to no avail. When he pa.s.ses a square little structure, white plaster, flat roof, strikingly unadorned, he has no doubt it's the abattoir. Its function is evident from the deliberate lack of evidence about what its function might be. He thinks he may see a glimmer of a bar on his phone right around there and begins taking one step at a time, forward, to the side, back again, as though chasing a s.h.i.+fting shadow; but it's gone.

He so wanted to hear Rose's voice. Now, he knows, it's too close on dinner to fuss with the computer, so he begins a text. Here with Z Here with Z, he writes. He decides against mentioning Cathleen. It's too complex a circ.u.mstance for the form. He'll tell Rose when they speak. Who knows Who knows, he writes. All polite chat so far. All very civil. Not awful except no cell. I love you more and more All polite chat so far. All very civil. Not awful except no cell. I love you more and more.

He knows it can't go right away, but sends it even so, hoping that if the mist does roll in it will find the message waiting there and carry it to her. It's an act of faith of a kind.

As Jeremy walks back toward the house, he remembers for the first time in years and years that when Zoe was missing, even though he didn't believe in G.o.d, he would pray.

"She doesn't slaughter the cows," Colin says, as he pa.s.ses around the plate of steak. "We send them off for that. Though I've seen her in moods when she might."

"He's joking." Cathleen has a frown of mock disapproval on her face. She's pulled her hair back for the meal and a line of silver s.h.i.+nes at the roots. Jeremy wonders what similar details of decline she sees on him. "Not everyone here knows you're joking, Colin."

"Oh, I'm definitely joking. She's a little lamb herself."

"Well, it's delicious, whatever the process," Jeremy says. "Perfectly cooked, too."

"I always eat my best meals here," Cathleen says.

She might as well have planted a flag, he thinks as Colin launches into a long story about a supposedly famous chef of whom Jeremy has never heard-though he tries to look impressed-and how the man came to the farm armed with a list of bizarre requests. Colin turns out to be one of those people who take on the heavy lifting when the conversation sags.

"He didn't quite ask that we hold seances over the cabbage, but it wasn't far off. There was certainly some mention of only harvesting with a full moon."

"What did you tell him?" Cathleen asks. "Did you tell him to p.i.s.s off?"

"We lied," Zoe says. "We lie to him every time he's here."

"Right through our teeth." Colin taps his front tooth with his finger. "We describe the rituals to him in detail," he says.

"Oh G.o.d! That must be hilarious. And they look so trustworthy, don't they, Jeremy?"

"They do indeed," he says, a little shocked, despite his own spotty record, about the apparent ease of it for them. "I would never have guessed."

As the conversation moves on from there to other local matters, Jeremy has the growing sense of being an outsider, almost as though he is literally being pushed from the table. It's unpleasant, but also inevitable-unless, of course, they're going to discuss what lies behind his visit, which they clearly are not. Not at the first meal. There are so many people the three of them all know, Colin's family, the neighbors, Cathleen's London set. As the cast of characters swells, so too does the effort it takes to catch him up. She's Colin's aunt on his mother's side and the first time I met her, she was about to get married but then just a year later... She's Colin's aunt on his mother's side and the first time I met her, she was about to get married but then just a year later... It's Cathleen, mostly, who tries, and occasionally Colin, who seems particularly bothered when Jeremy can't appreciate a good joke. Zoe, more animated than he's seen her yet-as though his exclusion has energized her-makes no effort at all. She doesn't even look his way, and as the minutes pa.s.s, he finds himself sinking into the conviction that at best what's possible between them at this point is a kind of truce, superficial and civil. That they'll stay in touch-though now that he's met Colin, his guess is that it will be he who keeps up any regular contact. But Jeremy and Zoe will at least be over the worst of it. At least and at most. It's Cathleen, mostly, who tries, and occasionally Colin, who seems particularly bothered when Jeremy can't appreciate a good joke. Zoe, more animated than he's seen her yet-as though his exclusion has energized her-makes no effort at all. She doesn't even look his way, and as the minutes pa.s.s, he finds himself sinking into the conviction that at best what's possible between them at this point is a kind of truce, superficial and civil. That they'll stay in touch-though now that he's met Colin, his guess is that it will be he who keeps up any regular contact. But Jeremy and Zoe will at least be over the worst of it. At least and at most.

He is preoccupied enough with the demise of his hope that a three-day visit might do any more than that, that he almost misses it when Cathleen brings up the subject of his personal life.

"She's a university librarian, isn't that right, Jeremy?"

He tells her it is. "In the rare books library."

"How did you meet?"

One bedroom, lots of charm. She had seen it on Craigslist. "The usual. A c.o.c.ktail party. That kind of thing."

"What's her name?" Cathleen asks.

"Rose."

"That's very English," Colin says. "I have at least two aunts named Rose."

"She was named for a grandmother, I think. Not English. They're Jewish."

"Is she observant?" Cathleen asks.

He frowns. "No. Not at all. She knows how to cook all the food, but that's about it."