Then she becomes pregnant. The real deal this time. A baby boy. Jeremy. How she loves that boy. Clayton loves him, too, but soon realizes it’s a competition. Enid wants the boy’s love exclusively, and begins, when Jeremy is barely walking, her campaign to poison the father’s relationship with his son. If you want to grow up strong and successful, Enid tells him, he’ll need to follow her example, that it’s too bad there’s no strong male role model under this roof. She tells him his father doesn’t do enough for her, and how it’s a sad thing that Jeremy has his looks, but that’s a handicap, over time, he can learn to surmount, with effort.
Clayton wants out.
But there’s something about Enid, this darkness about her, that to even hint at the subject of divorce, even some kind of separation, there’s no predicting how she’ll handle it.
Once, before leaving on one of his extended sales trips, he says he needs to talk to her. About something serious.
“I’m not happy,” he says. “I don’t think this is working out.”
She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She doesn’t ask what she could do to help the marriage, to make him happy.
What she does is, she gets up close to him, looks deep into his eyes. He wants to look away, but can’t, as though mesmerized by her evil. Looking into her eyes, it’s like looking into the soul of the devil. All she says is, “You will never leave me.” And walks out of the room.
He thinks about that on his trip. We’ll see about that, he tells himself. We’ll just see.
When he returns, his dog does not run out to greet him. When he opens the garage door to put away the Plymouth, there is Flynn, a rope drawn tightly around his neck, hanging from the rafters.
All Enid says to him is, “Good thing it was just the dog.”
For all she loves Jeremy, she’s willing to let Clayton believe the boy’s at risk should he ever decide to leave her.
Clayton Sloan resigns himself to this life of misery and humiliation and emasculation. This is what he’s signed on for, and he’s going to have to make the best of it. He’ll sleepwalk through life if that is what he has to do.
He works hard at not despising the boy. Jeremy’s mother has brainwashed him into thinking his father is unworthy of his affections. He sees his father as useless, just a man who lives in the house with him and his mother. But Clayton knows Jeremy is as much a victim of Enid as he is.
How can his life have turned out like this? he wonders.
There are numerous occasions when Clayton considers taking his own life.
He’s driving across the country in the dead of night. Coming back from Chicago, rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan, doing that short stretch through Indiana. He sees a bridge abutment up ahead and bears down on the accelerator. Seventy miles an hour, then eighty, ninety. The Plymouth begins to float. Hardly anyone wears seat belts, and even if they did, he’s unbuckled his, thereby assuring that he’ll go through the windshield and perish. The car eases over onto the shoulder, spewing gravel and dust behind it, but then, at the last minute, he veers back onto the highway, chickens out.
One time, couple of miles west of Battle Creek, he loses his nerve, steers back onto the road, but at that high speed, when the front right tire catches the ridge where shoulder meets pavement, he loses control. The car veers across two lanes, right into the path of a semi, plows into the median, coming to a stop in high grass.
What usually makes him change his mind is Jeremy. His son. He’s afraid to leave him alone with her.
He has to make a stop in Milford one time. On the prowl for some new clients, new businesses to supply.
He goes into a drugstore to buy a candy bar, and there is a woman behind the counter. Wearing a little name tag that says “Patricia.”
She is beautiful. Reddish hair.
She seems so nice. So genuine.
There’s something about her eyes. A gentleness. A kindness. After spending the last few years trying so hard not to look into Enid’s dark eyes, to now see a pair so beautiful, he feels light-headed.
He takes a long time to buy that chocolate bar. Makes small talk about the weather, how only a couple of days earlier he’d been in Chicago, how he’s on the road so much of the time. And then he says something before he’s even aware he’s said it. “Would you like to have some lunch?”
Patricia smiles, says if he wants to come back in thirty minutes, she gets an hour off.
For that half hour, as he wanders the shops of Milford’s downtown, he asks himself what the hell he’s doing. He’s married. He has a wife and a son and a house and a job.
But none of it adds up to a life. That’s what he wants. A life.
Patricia tells him over a tuna sandwich in a nearby coffee shop that she doesn’t go to lunch with men she’s just met, but there’s something about him that intrigues her.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“I think I know your secret,” she says. “I get a feeling about people, and I got a feeling about you.”
Good God. Is it that obvious? Can she divine that he’s married? Is she a mind reader? Even though when he first met her, he’d been wearing gloves, and now has his wedding ring tucked into his pocket?
“What sort of feeling?” he asks.
“You seem troubled to me. Is that why you’re driving back and forth across the country? Are you looking for something?”
“It’s just my job,” he says.
And Patricia smiles. “I wonder. If it’s led you here, to Milford, maybe it’s for a reason. Maybe you’re driving all over the country because you’re supposed to find something. I’m not saying it’s me. But something.”
But it is her. He’s sure of it.
He tells her his name is Clayton Bigge. It’s like he has the idea before he actually knows he has the idea. Maybe, at first, he was just thinking about having an affair, and having a fake name, that wasn’t a bad plan, even for an affair.
For the next few months, if his sales trips only take him as far south as Torrington, he drives the extra distance south to Milford to see Patricia.
She adores him. She makes him feel important. She makes him feel as though he has some worth.
Driving back on the New York Thruway, he considers the logistics.
The company was rejigging some of the sales routes. He could get the one that ran between Hartford and Buffalo. Drop going to Chicago. That way, at each end of the run…
And there’s the money question.
But Clayton’s doing well. He’s already been taking extraordinary measures to conceal from Enid how much money he has tucked away. It would never matter how much he made, it would never be enough for her. She’d always belittle him. And she’d always spend it. So he might as well tuck some aside.
It might be enough, he thinks. Just enough, for a second household.
How wonderful it will be, for at least half the time, to be happy.
Patricia says yes when he asks her to marry him. Her father had already died, but her mother seems happy enough. Her sister Tess, though, she never warms to him. It’s as though she knows there’s something off about him, but she can’t put her finger on just what it is. He knows she doesn’t trust him, that she never will, and he is especially careful around her. And he knows that Tess has told Patricia how she feels, but Patricia loves him, genuinely loves him, and always defends him.