He reached out as if he was going to touch her shoulder but then pulled his hand back. He hardly ever touched her now.
“That’s what I’m proudest of,” he said. “Not that you’re so pretty, because that’s just your mother’s genes really, I can’t take any credit there. Or even that your grades are good, though I am very proud of that. But you know how to conduct yourself. The Vincents, I’m worried they’re going to steal you away from us, they adore you so much. Every time I see them they tell me how great you are. No one has a bad word to say about you. That’s what I’m proudest of.”
What unnerved her about these hagiographic speeches was not the mention of the Vincents but their strangely valedictory, summing-up quality, as if her father were preparing to die.
They hadn’t been caught, but still, something so elaborate and time-consuming as a trip to Oneonta couldn’t be attempted very often — eight or ten times in all. Sometimes a week went by when the only place they could safely be alone together was in Dennis’s car itself. Molly still kept to the same babysitting schedule at the Vincents’, so there were two or three nights a week when Dennis would take her home through the empty streets, driving too fast, pulling in behind the supermarket or down the dirt road where the train tracks had been torn up fifteen years before, turning off his lights. Undoing his safety belt but staying in his seat. His passivity, his desire for her to make the first move, was less a sexual instinct than a moral one: it let him feel that he was being acted upon. Molly leaned across to blow him if she felt for some reason they were in a hurry. There wasn’t a lot you could do in a car but once in a while she liked it with her back to him, her hands on the steering wheel, listening for his gasps, looking through the windshield into the darkness and the noisy woods. For a few minutes everything was wrenched out of its usual context.
When she was alone in the Vincents’ house with Kevin and Bethany, Molly could put it all out of her mind with a surprising ease, though sometimes the sight of a framed photograph or a glance into the darkened master bedroom would remind her of the position she was in. The Vincent children, partnered by shyness, happiest in their own home, reminded Molly more and more of herself and her brother; and they were just reaching the age at which Molly and Richard had begun to grow apart. Kevin was big for his age, and the other kids had made sport of his oversensitivity, teasing, enraging, and then running from him in well-founded fear. Molly stroked his head and told him that what other people thought or said didn’t matter, but to him this was just one more adult maxim, the logic of which fell apart when you walked out your own front door.
With one or both parents at home, though, the atmosphere became a little more dense. Dennis was usually the first one home now. In part this was because the thought of Molly and his wife talking together outside the range of his hearing was torture to him: but it also had to do with Joyce Vincent’s job. Half the people in Ulster and the neighboring towns were trying to sell their homes, and to sell them right away; for those in the real estate business it was like watching the stock market crash. No one wanted to move to the area now. The only potential buyers were longtime residents who were interested in trading up to a nicer, newer place, and those people would wait for prices to hit rock bottom — for foreclosure, ideally. Joyce was out of the house evenings, weekends, driving walkins thirty miles to look at places just so they could wrinkle their noses and say it felt too remote. Some of the people who were looking to her to save them from default were friends of hers, parents of her children’s classmates, couples whose mortgages Dennis had approved. She had never worked harder in her life. It didn’t do much good. Bull’s Head, for instance, was now thirty percent empty.
The worse things got — and the guiltier she felt for working so much — the more Joyce needed to flank herself with the two children when she came home. She’d sit on the floor without even taking her coat off and join in a game of Chinese checkers; or she’d try to pull both kids on to her lap and get them to recount their day to her in exhausting detail. Kevin, who was ten, was beginning to shy away from his mother’s affections a bit. Bethany, on the other hand, was drawing ever closer to her, even as they began to look more and more alike; the girl doted on these evenings in the circle of her mother’s protective, guilt-driven attention, a mother who always seemed to be trying to make something up to her. Molly, meanwhile, would look at the waxy mask of normalcy on her lover’s face. If his wife and children were in another room, she might fix him with a long look, or even touch his hand or his stomach. He hated it — he had not the least affection for risk. She didn’t torment Dennis for fun, but she did find his torment interesting. Though she sometimes mused that a man who, in Dennis’s situation, felt no remorse at all, who deceived and charmed and led two intersecting lives with perfect equanimity, might be interesting in his own way.
When, for example, the family that was renting Dennis’s childhood home broke their lease and left town after the father was laid off by IBM, Molly thought the hardship of finding a place to meet was finally over for the two of them; after all, the heat and electricity were still on, and the house was furnished, nearby, empty, and not for sale. Dennis said that it was simply out of the question. He said he felt it would be tempting fate, and when she was impatient with that answer, he said that the idea of cheating on his wife with his babysitter in his parents’ bed was such a psychic minefield that he doubted he would be able to perform at all. Molly thought that this was a little sentimental of him; she pointed out that the logistical difficulties of seeing him — walking through the woods, waiting behind trees, being dropped off by the side of the road — were very hard on her, hard enough that they might well outweigh some neurosis that he didn’t even have yet but was only worried about developing. In the end, he was too afraid of her displeasure. When he finally consented, on the condition that they use only the guest bedroom, Molly felt simply that common sense had triumphed; though his distress — and her power to make him do something so rich in significance for him, so discomfiting — was not lost on her.
In the new, narrow bed, his obsession with variety continued; often he would want to change positions three or four times in the course of one encounter. At first Molly had thought this was a courtesy to her, an assumption that she would want to try new things (which she did) that she’d never had the opportunity to try before. But it went on like that, like he was trying to pose her for a deck of dirty playing cards or something; and it dawned on her that he was searching for a particular reaction from her. Not just trying to make her come — she did come, sometimes — but to find something that would make her lose control of herself, make her feel she needed him. He was a submissive man more by nature than by desire, because he still dreamed, apparently, of dominating her, of seeing her beholden to him, a dream that he couldn’t make come true.
Of course it wasn’t as cathartic now as it had been the first time — or the first time with Ty Crawford, when she couldn’t imagine such a thing as a sexual routine and thought it would be that self-consuming, that final, every time. But a long sexual relationship introduced its own dynamics, the unromantic awakening of the senses, the grind of repetition, the powerful reduction of everything that attempted to make sex stand for something greater than itself. Passion as a kind of drug, in the sense that it granted you an absence from yourself. Besides, even to the extent that it did become boring, what was there in Molly’s life to take its place? Sometimes she became depressed, but the remarkable thing, she found, was that the sex itself could also be used as an instrument of her depression, a way in which to negate herself, to lose faith in everything.