The Time of Her Life Page 11

  Avery had planned the ingeniously spaced and shaped windows that caught the right light at exactly the right moment, and the superstructure had gone up in the summer five years ago, during a long sunny spell. Every time they had visited the house to be sure everything was going all right it had been like stepping into a prism. Light poured in some windows and was refracted off others. Avery had expounded to their builder, Harry Oliver, about how the flat planes of the building—the wood floors, the ceilings, the pale walls—would give the illusion of motion as the light changed with the seasons and even during the length of one day.

  “It will be different with each change of the weather, really, Harry,” Avery had said. And that particular day Claudia remembered noticing for the first time how attractive Avery could be to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. Avery was nicer than she was, she had thought at that moment. His interest and generosity were enormous as he engaged his builder’s enthusiasm—coaxed Harry into imagining the building—while she stood impassively by like a mannequin, peering up out of the unglazed windows and drawing lines with her foot in the sawdust on the floor. She cared only that Harry did the work; she hadn’t cared if he enjoyed doing it. She wasn’t going to share with him her sparse allotment of warmth. But Avery was insistent, leaning over Harry with fervent enthusiasm. “Don’t you see? The space we’ll be enclosed in in the summer will be cool and shady because of the trees, but in the winter the walls will seem to fan out with the light. I think it’ll counteract that feeling of being closed in in winter.” He had never quite induced Harry to be interested in the theory that propelled the construction, though. Harry was concerned only with getting the job done, and he worked well because he was very fond of Avery, but he had never cared about Avery’s idea of a house so flexible that one would not feel defined by or trapped within it. Harry had been much more interested in getting the oddly shaped windows to fit and storm windows to fit over them.

  One day Avery and Claudia had arrived at the house and stepped inside, and it had been nothing at all like stepping into a prism. In fact, they had been so surprised that both Avery and Claudia had reached out to brace themselves against the sensation of falling down into their own hall. The floors, as far as they could see until a wall cut off their line of vision, had been turned a dark blackish brown instead of the lovely pale unstained oak. Avery had been in despair. Every pinpoint of light that fell in through the glass panes seemed to be absorbed by that dark surface. He guided Harry through all the rooms, showing him how it was wrong, explaining how major a disaster this was. Harry followed him along, and he was sorry about it, although he also seemed to be baffled by the scope of Avery’s distress, which was so broad that it had not been translated into anger.

  Finally the three of them had stood clustered around the beautiful hand-hewn beam that ran the entire height of the house, and Harry shifted back on his heels to make an apology.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’m afraid it’s that Jacob Bean.”

  “Harry, what do you mean?” Avery said. “Did you contract this out? I thought your own crew was going to finish the floors for me. I could have gotten Len Maroni even though it would have cost more. It’s going to cost more, anyway, to redo this.”

  Harry had stooped down and run his hand along one of the dark floorboards. He traced the grain that showed up in black ripples across each plank. “I don’t think we can ever get this as light as it was. We’ll have to take it down at least a quarter of an inch. No, I used that Jacob Bean. A lot of people use that on oak these days. It gives it this real rich look. We might be able to bleach it after I take it down, but you’ll lose a lot of the grain. The floor will be real pale, though.” While he was assessing the floor, he handed a can over to Avery, who looked at it and then passed it over to Claudia. It was a can of Gordon’s Jacobean wood stain.

  Avery had straightened up, and he and she had looked at each other. They were too dumfounded to be amused or outraged; they had only exchanged a mute acknowledgment of the ironies of life. And they had never had the floors redone. They had run out of time and energy and money and had carpeted the living room and left the other areas as they were. But often, when Avery had been drinking, he would expound upon a theme he had developed that turned upon the incident of their dark, shiny floors.

  “It happened because we managed to attract our own ghost,” he would say. “By the sheer force of our personalities. We’re haunted. We’re haunted even though we’re right here in the middle of the country without a history and without a place. We’re the new Americans. Transient! Right here in the middle of the country you’d think we’d be without consequence, wouldn’t you? Not like Maggie and Vince and their house. Secret passages and so forth. Tales of the Underground Railroad. There never was an Underground Railroad, you know, but it makes a good story. It never existed. But that’s not the point. We’re contemporary. We have a brand-new house and a brand-new ghost. The only thing is… the trick about spirits… is that you don’t get to choose the kind you get. Jacob Bean is an American ghost, but I’m not sure he’s an amiable ghost. He does give us stability, Claudia. He gives us resonance! Still, I’m not sure of him. He’s certainly a dark character. The dark side of things. He could be the incarnation of all the dreadful possibilities.”

  Not all the consequences had been dreadful, however. Avery had written a very successful book called Amercan Ghosts, and the story of Jacob Bean had been a jumping-off place for a long investigation of transience and melancholy. He had worked very hard on that book, and Claudia had thought it was fine, although she had noticed that to fit its tone he had turned her into a petite and ethereal sort of woman with long, drifting hair. “I wish you had at least left me with a little sex appeal,” she had said. “And I’m five-nine.” She had meant this lightly, although Avery had been insulted. She never remembered not to tease him about his books.

  But the whole thing had never been a joke to share, even though on many occasions they had entertained Maggie and Vince and various other friends with charming and artful stories in which the progenitor of Jacob Bean, Harry Oliver, was portrayed as a caricature of a stubborn Missourian, a wily and obstinate native of the Show Me State. Those were other stories, though, of unmatched doorknobs at a bargain price, or “Colonial windows” Harry had bought on sale with the hope that they could be made to fit the unique spaces that called for a clear glass pane, unbroken by mutton bars, which was Harry’s term for mullions. Early-on and innocently Claudia had theorized that “mutton bars” were used by early settlers in their glassless windows to keep out any curious sheep that might be in the vicinity. These were the stories they told to their friends. Claudia never even thought about Jacob Bean if she could help it. He was not a spirit with whom she wanted to do battle.

  Avery had moved out, but he did not stay away. He was back and forth, meddling in their lives, muddling their days. Privately, and on some unadmitted level, Claudia was always glad to see him, relieved to know that he was right there. He arrived often in the late afternoons with a sack of onions or a bunch of parsley to chop in the food processor, or he would have a block of cheese to shred and meat to chop because he was going to make tacos. Sometimes he would come by to pick up a book or a blanket or a pan he needed or wanted to borrow. These appearances made the quality of his absence like that of a festering sore. Claudia fretted over his presence or his absence with a kind of morbid interest and doleful satisfaction. She edged around and around the issue in her mind and picked and prodded at it from all different angles. Her state of mind was pocked like the landscape with its own frozen pools of hostility, hopefulness, passion, and anger.

  Avery came in just after lunch one day, when Claudia was making soup. She was feeling a little pleased with herself for having worked up the energy to make herself so useful and busy. She hadn’t heard him knock and didn’t know he was in the house until he leaned around the door of the kitchen. He had taken to knocking, and so she had learned to expect it. It irr
itated her today when his sudden materialization took her so much by surprise that she gave out a little yelp.

  “I knocked,” he said, “but no one answered. What’s the matter? I didn’t mean to surprise you. Aren’t you decent?”

  She didn’t say anything to him while she turned back to her soup. The fact that he had taken to knocking at his own door discomfited Claudia; it filled her with a strange, cringing irritation, and a little fear. She didn’t like to contemplate this new and mysterious otherness from her that Avery had assumed.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Did someone kiss you and you’ve been transmogrified into my dear old uncle? I wish you wouldn’t be such an ass!” She loved Avery, and she knew that as much as he was charming he was also foolish. But he had something on his mind, and he wasn’t a bit insulted. In fact, she turned away again when she noticed that he was filled with some sort of charitable goodwill this afternoon. She didn’t watch him cross the room. His whole body, lately, was inclined toward her differently, in a puppyish, awkward apology. She couldn’t bear it that he was in her kitchen; she couldn’t bear to turn and see him in this new attitude toward her because it would arouse in her once again that powerful sense of defeat and utter helplessness. It would put her into that hopeless state that accompanies grief. She wanted to believe that, like all she believed about Avery, this new manner was simply one more pose.

  He leaned on a counter in the kitchen, out of the way of her cooking, although he didn’t come to rest, exactly. He stood there in the manner of someone who has only stopped off for a moment.

  “I was talking to Maggie today at the Faculty Club,” he said. “She said you hadn’t done anything yet about Christmas, and you know, I was thinking about it. It’s already the ninth. I’ve got an idea.” He seemed to be pleased that she hadn’t done anything about Christmas. “Why don’t you let me and Janie do it? Remember how she loves it? God, remember how she’s so particular about picking out the trees? It doesn’t matter to her that not all the sides are going to show. They’ve got to be perfect, anyway, all the way around.”

  Claudia hated the fondness in his voice, the revolting nostalgia. He hadn’t been gone long enough to have earned this new attitude. She loathed his animation and cheerfulness. She took great care lining up sticks of celery in the Cuisinart so they would slice evenly. Avery was watching her with good-natured attention.

  “What are you making? Are you making that chicken soup? The kind without the corn? And no tomatoes? You were always right about that. I mean the tomatoes. It’s a much better soup without them. The broth is so good by itself.”

  Claudia looked at the vegetables spread out on the counter before her and was immediately discouraged about the project—carrots to peel, and onions. She wiped her damp hands on a paper towel and sat down at the table, crossing her legs and turning at an angle to Avery. She thought she might die of the fury that overtook her because he was in her kitchen and saying these simple things to her just now. She could not endure it unless she only allowed him into her peripheral vision. She only granted him a sidelong presence, a corner-of-the-eye sort of being there. She held her hair back with one hand absentmindedly and did not let her thoughts come together. She didn’t try to think of anything to say to Avery.

  “Why don’t I wait and see if Janie wants to go with me and get the trees and the greens? We could do it this afternoon. She should be home pretty soon since this is her short day at school, and Alice doesn’t want her at her lesson today. She wants to reschedule for tomorrow at four-thirty. And Janie’ll be disappointed if we don’t put up the decorations. The house is pretty dreary in December without them. So gray.”

  Avery constructed the celebrations of his life like houses of cards, with deliberation and the utmost care so they balanced all alone but were the result of his creation. He had always directed the goings-on of holidays and birthdays, and that had been fine with Claudia. Those things didn’t interest her much; those occasions might have drifted by without her remembering them. However, this year, in her kitchen, unremittingly sober and with a slight aura of earnest melancholy, Avery exuded a greedy enthusiasm that was for himself alone. Claudia knew that Avery was relishing his new sobriety, and he was very pleased with his expansive benevolence toward her—she, who might fail to pull the holiday together. And most of all, Claudia thought he was pleased to find out how well intentioned he was, and she begrudged him every one of these pleasures. It irritated her even more to know that lurking beneath his self-satisfaction was the real thing—a childish and simple delight in festivities. She sat at the table for a moment and contemplated him with a cold eye.

  “Okay. I think that’s not a bad idea,” she said. “Maggie says that she thinks that Janie’s having a hard time.” And she cocked her head at him to indicate that this was his fault. She tilted her chin at a self-righteous angle that suggested that he owed his daughter this much after all. “But let’s make a party of it like we always have. That would probably please Janie more than anything. I’ll invite anyone I can get for this evening, and we’ll let everyone help with the decorating. You and Janie go get the greens and trees, and I’ll get food and wine and call everyone.”

  She was so lonely all of a sudden, only for Avery, and he had somehow put himself beyond her, but it was with celebrations that Avery marked off the days of his life so that this was all that was left to her by way of seduction.

  Avery and Jane had picked out three handsome spruces in graduated sizes. The tallest tree, which stood over ten feet, was anchored against the honey-colored central beam of the house, and the other two were cleverly placed to simulate a small grove of trees. All over the living room stood laundry baskets that Avery and Jane had filled with white pine boughs they had cut from the stumps at the Christmas tree farm. Avery was on the spiral staircase, where he could drape the top of the tall tree with string after string of tiny white lights. They were the only decoration he would allow to adorn the elegant spruces, and he was directing people here and there who were busily arranging the same sort of little white lights among the branches of the other two trees.

  “You see how it’ll be?” Avery asked at large. “Magic, Janie!” he called to her. “It’ll be magic.” He was drinking a cup of the wine punch that Claudia had made, and he was relaxed and delighted.

  Vince was working with the Petries, who lived farther up the hill, on one of the other trees, and Alice Jessup and Maggie were finishing up the smallest tree. When Claudia had phoned to invite the Tunbridges, she had said to Maggie, “Janie will be so pleased. I’m sure it’ll cheer her up. Don’t you think so?” But Maggie had made it clear that she was dubious about the whole enterprise.

  Diana and Jane were cutting greens with garden shears and arranging the shorter stems behind the pictures and along the mantel. The Fitzgeralds were there without their daughter, but they were a bit at sea, never having been a part of this frenzied activity before. Sally Fitzgerald was in the kitchen, helping Claudia make quiche, and Will took over the makeshift bar on the sideboard and kept the punch bowl full. Even Jane and Diana were drinking punch, and Jane had swallowed one of her last five capsules from the Percodan bottle she had taken from Maggie’s medicine cabinet. She was quiet and dreamy but extremely amiable and friendly. She was watching the party as though she were the stable center of a turning merry-go-round.

  It was a Wednesday night, and by ten o’clock people had eaten and drifted off to leave Claudia and Avery to finish the last of the decorating. Jane had gone up to her room where she slipped fully dressed under her covers to lie stretched out, gazing at the ceiling in a sort of rapturous contentment.

  Claudia cleared the living room of plates and glasses and left them in the kitchen. She sat down on the couch and sipped a scotch and soda while she watched Avery go from picture to picture, improving on the arrangement of greens that Diana and Jane had made behind each one. He was not so jovial anymore, though. He was growing tired and cross.

  “You could
fix me another one of those, too,” he said. “No soda.” He had come to the final task, and he sat on the bottom step of the staircase and unwound the sixteen-foot garland of white pine while he drank his scotch.

  “This isn’t so easy, you know. Getting everything right. It’s not as easy as you probably think. You’ve never done it.” He was petulant and sorry for himself because of all the work he was doing. He laboriously wound the unwieldy garland in and out of the balustrades and over the banister so that it swagged magnificently up the central curve of the house. Then he carefully entwined the garland with more strands of little white lights, taking care to conceal the wires among the spiky tufts. When he picked up his glass to take a sip, he left a handprint of sap on its slick surface. He plugged the final string of lights into the plug at the top of the stairs that he had had Harry install for just this purpose. But, by now, no part of this activity afforded him any satisfaction.

  “How come you don’t care about this?” he said to Claudia. “How come you didn’t do this for Janie? You never pay any attention to what people need!” He was speaking very loud to be sure Claudia would hear him at the foot of the stairs and all the way across the room.

  “You haven’t even found the Christmas stockings! Have you? Have you even looked for the stockings? Poor Janie! At least you could have found her stocking so she could hang it up!”

  Claudia began to protest. She was as astounded as usual to see Avery so frantically distressed. So loud and angry. And she didn’t like to be accused in this way. But before she could say so, he flung himself down the stairs in three bounds and crossed the room to stand menacingly in front of her. She was so dismayed that she raised her forearm instinctively in front of her face, because his expression was bleak with anger. He grabbed her arm and pulled her up so abruptly that she was not quite balanced, and she sagged against his hold on her.