The Time of Her Life Page 4

  One afternoon when a group of girls collected on Claudia’s porch with glasses of Coke, Annie Dobbs, who was going with Avery that year, had suddenly let out a little laugh. “I don’t know,” she said, “I hope I don’t end up still in love with Avery.” They were all a little in love with Avery no matter whom he singled out. “He’s not ever going to be all that easy to get along with. You know what I mean?”

  Claudia liked Annie Dobbs, who was a year older than she was, but she already had known, anyway, who was going to end up with Avery. In fact, she ended up with him every weekend after he had taken Annie home. He came drunkenly across the backyard and through a window into her bedroom on the first floor. Upstairs Claudia’s father lay partially paralyzed and perhaps oblivious since his stroke, and her mother lay in her separate bedroom sedated into sleep.

  The first night he had appeared at her window she had been undressing from her own date, and she had gone over to unlatch the screen wearing just her slip and bra and pants. He had stumbled in and lain down beside her on the bed fully dressed, too drunk to go home to his parents, who were still up and about. The following weekend she came home early from a party out on the Natchez Trace, leaving her date behind and catching a ride with another couple. She put on a pretty cotton nightgown. Once again, though, Avery just lay down beside her, cupping her shoulders companionably toward him until he got up to go several hours later. The next Saturday, not at all sure what she was doing, she had fumbled with his clothes while he lay there next to her, coming out of an alcoholic haze. At last he had turned to face her and then moved over her and they had made love briefly, and she had lost her virginity with no regrets.

  Claudia had suffered a good bit, though, during the rest of the years in high school when so many pretty, gluttonous girls were available to Avery. He went on to Tulane, and two years later Claudia followed him to New Orleans and went to Sophie Newcomb. They were married by the time Avery began graduate school at Chapel Hill. Claudia had been immensely relieved when they moved to Lunsbury and finally settled right in the middle of the country, where there was such blustery weather but an atmosphere that didn’t weigh so heavily on the senses.

  But this morning Avery’s sobriety intruded on Claudia’s expectations, which, lately, were only that the three of them who made up her family would get up that day and lead a regular life. She had begun to covet a small degree of boredom. She had begun to hope that if nothing else, their three lives would take on the calm, carefully planned pattern of the house Avery had designed for them. But Avery was going too far. His sober self was alarming in its determination, and Claudia realized that Jane was becoming more and more like him.

  Claudia wasn’t ever apt to make up her mind entirely. From any one formulated idea that might be an opinion she had, there trailed little wisps of “maybes.” Qualifications drifted around the things Claudia was almost sure of, the way the plastic grass had straggled out of Jane’s basket on the Easter mornings when she was very young. Her daughter was steadfast. Once she had a grudge or could place the blame it was a thing done, an emotion made, and Avery was like that, too, when he was sober. Claudia lay in bed and didn’t say anything at all. She had the sudden illusion that any word she spoke would start the doleful cranking out of all the minutes in the time ahead of her.

  “I can’t live with you anymore. We’re coming to pieces,” Avery said. “This time we’ve really got to do it. I’ve rented one of those unfurnished apartments near campus. We have the two cars.” He was talking out loud in the same puzzling way as the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there to hear it; maybe his words didn’t exist, so little did Claudia show any reaction. He talked on, with his arm still half covering his face to shield the world from the full force of his meaning, and Claudia knew that his efforts at rationalization were meant to convince her that his leaving was not to be taken personally. She also realized that she had been waiting for some time for the moment when he would decide to go, although her senses were leaden with the knowledge that they had once again come to this terrifying state of departure from the other. Always before, however, Avery had stayed in hotels or with friends, places designed solely for temporary inhabitance, so that the very circumstances forced him to come home.

  She traced her hand along the pattern of the bedspread and was surprised by a brief, secret surge of anticipation. Whatever else this was, it was at least a new development, a dramatic variation of their days. But it was a truant sensation, because she was also so sad that it was as if she had fallen flat and knocked her breath out. She had always been with Avery, and he with her. They would be orphans in the world without the other; she knew that, and she was struck through with trepidation. Nevertheless, an initial gleefulness overtook her for a moment. Even while Avery was speaking, she felt that same excitement, that same fugitive upswing of the spirit, that she had felt for a second as a child when her mother had told her that her father had died after he had been sick for so long. She felt that momentary exhilaration because so many new possibilities lay ahead. Although even upon that very instant of curious elation, Claudia became despondently reflective once again. She knew that it was shameful to be so passive in her own life.

  Claudia’s tendency in the mornings to get on with the time ahead was irrepressible, so that she felt a peculiar responsibility for Avery’s success at getting said what he was saying, at getting done what he was doing. She wanted to know what quality his absence would have when she and Jane were left behind. He should have gone before they built their clever little house.

  “Annie Dobbs said one time that you would be hard to end up with,” Claudia said mildly, stopping Avery in mid-sentence. He turned for a moment to stare at her and then went on explaining. Claudia was wishing they were still in the first house they had bought when they moved to Lunsbury, when Jane was still an infant. Each house along that street had had a different façade, but inside there were the same three split levels, the same efficient plumbing at the core, the same three bedrooms replicated in all the other houses—two windows to each room. Those rooms were designed to accommodate transience, and she thought that it would have been an easier thing to be left behind there, because that had never been a house that would bespeak loss, and she had enjoyed the homogenized neighborhood. Now they lived in what had become an intellectual ghetto. Their nearest neighbors were the Tunbridges, who were a mile away across the meadows and at least three miles around along the unpaved, rural roads. She had never admitted that she preferred living in their middle-class suburban tract house.

  One morning in that other house Avery had come downstairs to find her watching the family across the street dismantle the columns on their front porch—their house was a Southern Colonial—and then hose them off inside and out before reestablishing them beneath their second-floor balcony. Claudia had been standing at the window, gazing across the street, watching their neighbor heft the hollow columns with one hand and carry them around to the side of the house, one by one, where the hose was attached. His wife had detached the capitals and immersed them in a dishpan of soapy water and worked at them with a cloth. Claudia had liked the look of the house without its columns; it had taken on a guise of tough vulnerability, a Mae West posture, and she had stood for a long time leaning against the windowsill and looking out, while Jane, who was just walking, hung around her knees and whined.

  Avery had been beside himself. “Doesn’t it ever occur to you to be anything but curious? I mean, you’re interested! And that’s it. That’s all you are. I mean, for God’s sake, those people think their house is beautiful! I don’t even know if you know the difference. You look at everything as if it were in a museum.”

  These nine years later she thought he might be right in thinking that her perception was trapped in an ingenuous misunderstanding of the human condition. She had a hard time making the kind of distinctions he expected intelligent people to make, and she was still trying to develop a correct sense of discernment. She was trying as ha
rd as she could to learn how to be judgmental in the right way.

  Avery was still talking, telling her all his plans, and finally she said, “What about Jane?” But before he even answered she got out of bed. Her question was only what was expected, only a wistful kite tail trailing off beyond their reach. He didn’t know any more about Jane than she did. The two of them loved their daughter unconditionally, but they loved her as the third person among the three of them, and they loved her as the only one among them not complicated by sexuality. They didn’t know that it was not like the love of other parents for their children; what Avery and Claudia felt for Jane was an extreme regard.

  Avery did tell her what he planned for Jane, though. When Claudia went to the kitchen to fix coffee, he followed right behind her. Jane was old enough to go back and forth between them. He intended to follow through with her violin lessons. It was he, after all, who had struggled along with her during the first year of her Suzuki class, and it was he who had discovered Alice Jessup, her private teacher. Through all these words Claudia could not escape the fact that he had been thinking about this for some time.

  “You know, Claudia,” he said, “that the last thing I have in mind is to make you or Janie unhappy.”

  Claudia believed that, but she didn’t believe it in the spirit in which it was said. She had her own idea of the shiny thing that Avery sought. He needed to take some action that would translate into goodness and rightness and perfection and immediacy—a reflection of his own life upon the earth. And, truly, in Claudia’s estimation that was a frivolous and childish desire, but she had never said that to him when he was sober. In her mind it seemed reasonable to accept certain things as givens and then to love the people you have to love and live out the life you have to live. One might strive for this or that but never hope for it. Striving was what humans had come up with to pass the years.

  Avery pulled back the kitchen curtains while he still had his head turned to talk to her, so she noticed before he did the white light that filled the room in a way that made the surfaces glisten as though they were covered with cellophane. The windows were glazed with ice so smooth that it was like old glass, only a little flawed and bubbled. Ice covered their road, their driveway, the leaves on the trees, so that each one of them hung gleaming orange or red under a frozen crust.

  They both stood at the window to look, and Claudia put her lips against the glass and slowly exhaled. The warmth of her breath made the ice crack into a chrysanthemum of feathery splinters that crept outward across the pane from the round circle of the most concentrated heat. She stepped back and observed the world through the pattern she had made. It was very much like looking out through a kaleidoscope filled with clear crystals. When the wind blew, the ice was shaken from the trees in an unnerving shower that rattled like buckshot onto the brittle lawn below.

  They turned on the radio and found out that all the town was frozen. When they listened to the explanation that a freakish Canadian air mass had settled over the region, Avery thought it was very likely that he could see it accurately in his imagination. Heavy and dark and silent, slipping in low over the gentle hills of southern Missouri, displacing the warmer, friendly, humid air in just the way a cold despondency closed in on him and unsettled the pleased good humor induced by a drink or two. He never expected it, was never prepared.

  The moisture in the upper air had condensed into rain which froze on its way to earth, and the ice had accumulated so quickly that cars were frozen in place, and city equipment couldn’t move. The announcer read out long lists of cancellations and warnings. Walking was hazardous; driving was impossible, and people would have to make do with whatever supplies they had on hand.

  Maggie phoned while they were sitting in the kitchen, and she assured Claudia that Jane could stay—must stay—until the ice could be navigated. She was crisp and chipper, unlike any grown-up Claudia had ever known as a child. Maggie was admirably adult and sure, so Claudia stifled the sudden pang of longing she had for her daughter to be here, at home with her while Avery took his leave.

  “Is Jane all right? Can she borrow some things from Diana?” Claudia said.

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone, and Claudia instinctively turned and curled the cord halfway around herself in an attitude of self-protection.

  “The thing is,” Maggie said, with the efficient sound she made of defining her G’s at the end of a word in a little drawl, “are you both all right? I meant to call you yesterday. I should have noticed that Avery had had so much to drink. I should have served coffee.” She didn’t say any more. Maggie took the blame upon herself; she could be counted on for discretion. Even so, Claudia didn’t like it much, to be asked anything about herself; she didn’t confide in anyone but her daughter and her husband. She didn’t have Avery’s knack of camaraderie.

  “We’re fine. We have milk and eggs and plenty of food,” she answered, and she was met with another brief pause before she got a reply. It was clear that in some way she had insulted Maggie with her reticence, and they hung up on a brisk note: Jane would spend the night again at the Tunbridges’, and they would get in touch in the morning.

  For the next four days Lunsbury was frozen inside its buildings. The wind had stripped the trees of their heavy leaves, and it blew in gusts between the houses, carrying frozen debris that sandpapered the shiny surfaces outside until the world took on a matte finish. Claudia stood for long spells staring out the windows. With Avery halted in mid-departure, she was enclosed in a curious last-ditch frenzy of lustful imagination. When they sat in the kitchen listening to the radio, she let her gaze brood over Avery’s body. She watched his hands with an intensity detached from herself, not connected with anything she was doing or saying at the moment. Nothing was clear to her in that time, neither elation nor despair; the waiting had muddled her ideas. There was nothing to drink in the house, and they were solemn and sober and quiet. They listened with attention to the news. A state of emergency had been declared, and the weather was discussed at great length. But Claudia was bemused by the phenomenon of the ice. It disconcerted her more than she would have expected, and there was still no way to get Jane home.

  Claudia and Avery spent those long days going through the house room by room, packing and sorting until Avery would be able to leave. They argued about the shoe racks or the china without passion. It was Claudia who said that he should take those things, speaking out mostly for the sake of having noise in the house. He could come get them anytime, of course, and he was indifferent; he pretended boredom. She would not be able to extend any influence into his life that he planned to lead from now on. And he was ill at ease. Avery disliked being detained. He had always fidgeted at stoplights, become embarrassingly irritable in checkout lines, bemoaned editorial delays. When they heard on the radio that barge traffic was frozen to a standstill in St. Louis, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, he had got up and walked around the kitchen in frustration. He had taken a package of pecans out of the freezer, where Claudia was saving them for Christmas, and stood at the window, staring out, eating the frozen nuts one by one and musing.

  “I can’t believe that,” he said. “We can go to the moon. We can play golf on the moon—idiots!—but a frozen river is going to cause grain shortages.”

  “I know,” said Claudia, although most of the puzzles in the world, natural or engendered by mankind, did not surprise her, and she was wise enough not to point out that this strange quirk of weather that paralyzed the region strengthened the theories that Avery was currently expounding in his book.

  The ice outside heaved and exploded randomly across the yard and road and up their front steps during the day, and then by morning it would have frozen once more into new patterns of webs and craters. Claudia experienced sympathetic and random implosions of lust while she watched Avery move among the boxes. The haggardness of his enforced sobriety was erotic; it would be a pleasure to soothe him. At night she would dwell on this a
nd imagine that they were immobilized by unconsummated desire, not ice, in this abnormally frozen season. Those musings would be half dream, and she would fall asleep restless with the idea of Avery touching her when, in fact, they took care not even to brush fingers when they handed boxes back and forth.

  Once Avery had been standing behind her while she sorted through a closet, and when she turned around, she was startled into sudden irritation to find him so quietly nearby. She put her hands against his chest and lightly pushed him backward.

  “I can do this myself. I know what you need to take. Please leave me alone!”

  He stood there in front of her looking slightly baffled, and then he raised his hands against her in the same way she had just shoved him away. He didn’t push her; he only placed a hand lightly over each of her breasts for a moment, long enough so that she felt the warmth through her blouse. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and moved away. Claudia stood in the doorway of the closet alert and tingling with the sensation of having been passed over by the ghost of a gesture, and she shuddered involuntarily from head to toe out of sheer yearning.

  Later that same day Avery was wrestling one of the twin-bed mattresses from the guest room down the spiral staircase just as she was coming up the steps. They stopped, both of them embarrassed; a mattress is a final thing. Avery was taking it into the garage, where he was gathering his belongings until he could leave. All at once he sat down on the steps, clasping the cumbersome mattress, and began to weep without a sound. She sat down beside him.

  “I don’t know how you expected this to be,” she said after a moment.