I am happy to hear this confiding voice again. “I’m all right. This day’ll be over with.”
“Sorry I had to call you at wherever that was.”
“It’s fine. Walter died. We can’t help that.”
“Did you have to view him?”
“No. His relatives are coming from Ohio.”
“Suicide is very Ohio, you know.”
“I guess.” Hers, as always, is a perfect Michigan attitude. No one there has any patience for Ohio.
“What about his wife?”
“They’re divorced.”
“Well. You poor old guy,” she says and pats me on my knee and gives me a quick and unexpected smile. “Want me to buy you a drink? The August is open. I’ll run these two Indians home.” She glances into the near dark, where our children are sitting in a private powwow on the grass. They are each other’s confidants in all crucial matters.
“I’m okay. Are you going to marry Fincher?”
She glances at me impassively then looks away. “I certainly am not. He’s married unless something’s changed in three days.”
“Vicki says you two are the hot topic in the Emergency Room.”
“Vicki-schmicky,” she says and sighs audibly through her nostrils. “Surely she’s mistaken. Surely you can’t be interested.”
“He’s an asshole and a change-jingler, that’s all. He’s down in Memphis starting an air-conditioned mink ranch at this very moment. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
“I’m aware.”
“It’s true.”
“True?” X looks at me heartlessly. I am the asshole here, of course, but I don’t care. Something seems at stake. The stability and sanctity of my divorce.
“I thought you were interested in software salesmen.”
“I’ll marry and fuck,” she whispers terribly, “whoever I choose.”
“Sorry,” I say, but I’m not. Out on Seminary Street I see the lights go on weakly, blink once, then stay on.
“Men always think other men are assholes,” X says, coldly. “It’s surprising how often they’re right.”
“Does Fincher think I’m an asshole?”
“He’s intimidated by you. And anyway, he isn’t so bad. He’s pretty certain about some things in his life. He just doesn’t show it.”
“How about Dusty?”
“Frank, I will take your children to Michigan and you’ll never see them again, except for two weeks every summer in the Huron Mountain Club with my father to chaperone. This if you don’t lay off me at this moment. How would you like that?” She isn’t serious about this, and it’s possible, I think now, that Vicki has made this whole business up for reasons of her own, though I would rather believe it was a mistake. X sighs again wearily. “I gave Fincher putting lessons, because he’s playing in a college reunion tournament in Memphis. He was embarrassed about it, so we went over to Bucks County to Idlegreen and putted for a few days. He needed to improve his confidence.”
“Did you put some iron in his putter?” I would like to ask about the putative kiss, but the moment’s passed.
It is full dark now, and we are silent and alone in it. Cars murmur along Cromwell Lane, their headlights sweeping in the direction of the Institute, where an “Easter sing” is no doubt on for tonight. St. Leo the Great chimes out a last chance, admonitory call. Three uniformed policemen stroll outside laughing, heading off for a supper at home. I recognize officers Carnevale and Patriarca, whom I imagine, for some reason, to be distant cousins. They walk in lock step toward their personal cars and pay no attention to us. It is a dreamy, average, vertiginous evening in the suburbs — not too much on excitement, only the lives of isolated individuals in the harmonious secrecy of a somber age.
I can’t deny I’m relieved about Fincher Barksdale, though — a misunderstanding, that is what I’m ready to believe. “Your father sent a message,” I say.
“Oh?” Her face grows instantly skeptical.
“He told me to tell your mother he has bladder cancer.”
“She told him the same thing once when I was a little girl, and he forgot to ask her about it the next day and went away on business. Only now it’s different. It’s a way to make them feel passionate. She’ll think that’s hilarious.”
“He said I could marry you again if I wanted to.”
X sniffs, then looks into her hands as if one might contain something she’s forgotten. “He can’t stop giving me away.”
“He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”
“No, he’s not.” She casts a secret glance at me. “I’m sorry about your friend. Was he a nice, good friend?” The footlights that illumine the shubbery around Village Hall all go on at once. A Negro janitor steps to the glass door and peers out between his palms, then wanders back with a long dust mop in tow. It is cool now out of doors. A car horn blows briefly. The policemen’s taillights disappear down the dark streets.
“No. I didn’t know him very well.”
“What could’ve happened?” I hear my children giggle in the damp grass, sweet music of not-to-worry-in-this-world.
“He quit being interested in what’s next, I guess. I don’t know. I tend not to be much of an alarmist.”
“You don’t worry that it was your fault, do you?”
“I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t see how.”
“You have awfully odd relationships. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“I don’t have any relationships at all.”
“I know that. But it’s the way you like it.”
Clarissa calls out from the darkness haltingly, wanting to know the exact time. It is 7:36. She is beginning to feel a strangeness out of doors, as though she might suddenly be cut loose and abandoned. “It’s early,” Paul whispers.
“I’m going over to Walter’s house tonight. Would you like to come with me?”
X turns to me with a look of outlandish surprise. “What on earth? Did he have something of yours?”
“No. I just want to go by there. He gave me a key, and I want to use it. The police don’t mind if I don’t take anything.”
“It’s ghoulish.”
I sit in silence, then, and listen for meaningful sounds in the darkness — a train whistle far out on the main line, a long-haul trucker drumming up Route 1 from as far away as Arkansas, a small plane humming through the angelic night sky — anything to console us two in these last thin moments. Genuinely good conversations with your ex-wife are limited by the widening territories of intimacy from which you’re restricted. It is finally okay, I guess. “That’s fine,” I say.
“But you’re probably going anyway, aren’t you?” X looks at me, then stares out at the lighted foyer of Village Hall, through which is the tax assessor’s glassed-in office. We can both see the janitor with his dust mop moving in slow motion.
“I guess so,” I say. “It’s really all right.”
“Why?” She looks at me with narrow eyes, her look of skepticism at earthly uncertainties, entities she has never much liked.
“I don’t need to say. Men feel things women don’t. You don’t have to disapprove of it.”
“You do such odd things.” She smiles sympathetically, though magisterially also. “You’re so vague sometimes. Are you really all right? You looked pale when I could see you.”
“I’m not completely all right. But I will be.” I could tell her about Vicki knocking my block off, and being hit by a shopping cart. But what the hell good would it do? It would be in the way of full disclosure, and neither of us wants that again, now or ever. We have probably been here too long.
“We just see each other about deaths now,” X says, somberly. “Isn’t that sad?”
“Most divorced people don’t see each other at all. Walter’s wife went to Bimini, and he never saw her again. So I think we do pretty well. We have wonderful children. We don’t live very far apart.”