“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Shelby says. “Now I would like it if I didn’t feel that there was going to be a scene to start things off this morning.”
Amanda sighs. She seems as perturbed with Shelby as she is with Tom. “And if I can say something without being jumped on,” she says to Shelby, “because, yes, you told me not to buy a Peugeot, and now the damned thing won’t run — as long as you’re here, Tom, it would be nice if you gave Inez a ride to the market.”
“We saw seven deer running through the woods yesterday,” Shelby says.
“Oh, cut it out, Shelby,” Amanda says.
“Your problems I’m trying to deal with, Amanda,” Shelby says. “A little less of the rough tongue, don’t you think?”
Inez has pinned a sprig of phlox in her hair, and she walks as though she feels pretty. The first time Tom saw Inez, she was working in her sister’s garden — actually, standing in the garden in bare feet, with a long cotton skirt sweeping the ground. She was holding a basket heaped high with iris and daisies. She was nineteen years old and had just arrived in the United States. That year, she lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, Metcalf — his friend Metcalf, the craziest man at the ad agency. Metcalf began to study photography, just to take pictures of Inez. Finally his wife got jealous and asked Inez to leave. She had trouble finding a job, and Amanda liked her and felt sorry for her, and she persuaded Tom to have her come live with them, after she had Ben. Inez came, bringing boxes of pictures of herself, one suitcase, and a pet gerbil that died her first night in the house. All the next day, Inez cried, and Amanda put her arms around her. Inez always seemed like a member of the family, from the first.
By the edge of the pond where Tom is walking with Inez, there is a black dog, panting, staring up at a Frisbee. Its master raises the Frisbee, and the dog stares as though transfixed by a beam of light from heaven. The Frisbee flies, curves, and the dog has it as it dips down.
“I’m going to ask Amanda if Ben can come live with me,” Tom says to Inez.
“She’ll never say yes,” Inez says.
“What do you think Amanda would think if I kidnapped Ben?” Tom says.
“Ben’s adjusting,” she says. “That’s a bad idea.”
“You think I’m putting you on? I’d kidnap you with him.”
“She’s not a bad person,” Inez says. “You think about upsetting her too much. She has problems, too.”
“Since when do you defend your cheap employer?”
His son has picked up a stick. The dog, in the distance, stares. The dog’s owner calls its name: “Sam!” The dog snaps his head around. He bounds through the grass, head raised, staring at the Frisbee.
“I should have gone to college,” Inez says.
“College?” Tom says. The dog is running and running. “What would you have studied?”
Inez swoops down in back of Ben, picks him up and squeezes him. He struggles, as though he wants to be put down, but when Inez bends over he holds on to her. They come to where Tom parked the car, and Inez lowers Ben to the ground.
“Remember to stop at the market,” Inez says. “I’ve got to get something for dinner.”
“She’ll be full of sushi and Perrier. I’ll bet they don’t want dinner.”
“You’ll want dinner,” she says. “I should get something.”
He drives to the market. When they pull into the parking lot, Ben goes into the store with Inez, instead of to the liquor store next door with him. Tom gets a bottle of cognac and pockets the change. The clerk raises his eyebrows and drops them several times, like Groucho Marx, as he slips a flyer into the bag, with a picture on the front showing a blue-green drink in a champagne glass.
“Inez and I have secrets,” Ben says, while they are driving home. He is standing up to hug her around the neck from the backseat.
Ben is tired, and he taunts people when he is that way. Amanda does not think Ben should be condescended to: she reads him R. D. Laing, not fairy tales; she has him eat French food, and only indulges him by serving the sauce on the side. Amanda refused to send him to kindergarten. If she had, Tom believes, if he was around other children his age, he might get rid of some of his annoying mannerisms.
“For instance,” Inez says, “I might get married.”
“Who?” he says, so surprised that his hands feel cold on the wheel.
“A man who lives in town. You don’t know him.”
“You’re dating someone?” he says.
He guns the car to get it up the driveway, which is slick with mud washed down by a lawn sprinkler. He steers hard, waiting for the instant when he will be able to feel that the car will make it. The car slithers a bit but then goes straight; they get to the top. He pulls onto the lawn, by the back door, leaving the way clear for Shelby and Amanda’s car to pull into the garage.
“It would make sense that if I’m thinking of marrying somebody I would have been out on a date with him,” Inez says.
Inez has been with them since Ben was born, five years ago, and she has gestures and expressions now like Amanda’s — Amanda’s patient half-smile that lets him know she is half charmed and half at a loss that he is so unsophisticated. When Amanda divorced him, he went to Kennedy to pick her up when she returned, and her arms were loaded with pineapples as she came up the ramp. When he saw her, he gave her that same patient half-smile.
At eight, they aren’t back, and Inez is worried. At nine, they still aren’t back. “She did say something about a play yesterday,” Inez whispers to Tom. Ben is playing with a puzzle in the other room. It is his bedtime — past it — and he has the concentration of Einstein. Inez goes into the room again, and he listens while she reasons with Ben. She is quieter than Amanda; she will get what she wants. Tom reads the newspaper from the market. It comes out once a week. There are articles about deer leaping across the road, lady artists who do batik who will give demonstrations at the library. He hears Ben running up the stairs, chased by Inez.
Water is turned on. He hears Ben laughing above the water. It makes him happy that Ben is so well adjusted; when he himself was five, no woman would have been allowed in the bathroom with him. Now that he is almost forty, he would like it very much if he were in the bathtub instead of Ben — if Inez were soaping his back, her fingers sliding down his skin.
For a long time, he has been thinking about water, about traveling somewhere so that he can walk on the beach, see the ocean. Every year he spends in New York he gets more and more restless. He often wakes up at night in his apartment, hears the air-conditioners roaring and the woman in the apartment above shuffling away her insomnia in satin slippers. (She has shown them to him, to explain that her walking cannot possibly be what is keeping him awake.) On nights when he can’t sleep, he opens his eyes just a crack and pretends, as he did when he was a child, that the furniture is something else. He squints the tall mahogany chest of drawers into the trunk of a palm tree; blinking his eyes quickly, he makes the night light pulse like a buoy bobbing in the water and tries to imagine that his bed is a boat, and that he is setting sail, as he and Amanda did years before, in Maine, where Perkins Cove widens into the choppy, ink-blue ocean.
Upstairs, the water is being turned off. It is silent. Silence for a long time. Inez laughs. Rocky jumps onto the stairs, and one board creaks as the cat pads upstairs. Amanda will not let him have Ben. He is sure of it. After a few minutes, he hears Inez laugh about making it snow as she holds the can of talcum powder high and lets it sift down on Ben in the tub.