Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn't need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
IT WAS A RELIEF when Ron came home. She got up, took a shower, cleaned the house. She made food, too much of it, and put on red lipstick. She took off Leonard Cohen and put on Teddy Wilson's big band, sang along to "Basin Street Blues." Ron made love with her at night, sometimes even in the afternoon. Neither of them made much noise, but I could hear the quiet laughter behind their closed door.
Early one morning, when Claire was still sleeping, I heard him on the phone in the living room. He was talking to a woman, I sensed it immediately when I came in, the way he smiled as he talked in his striped pajama bottoms — wrapping the phone cord around his smooth fingers. He laughed at something she said. "Flounder. Whatever. Cod."
He started when he saw me in the doorway. The blood bleached out of his rosy cheeks, then returned, deeper. He ran his hand through his hair so that the paler strips sprang back under his touch. He talked a bit more, arrangements, flights, hotels, he scribbled on a scrap of paper in his open briefcase. I didn't move. He hung up the phone.
He stood up, hiking his pajama bottoms. "We're going to Reykjavik. Hot springs with documented healing powers."
"Take Claire with you," I said.
He threw the paper into his briefcase, shut it, locked it. "I'd be working all the time. You know Claire. She'd sit in the hotel and cook herself into some morbid fantasy. It'd be a nightmare."
Reluctantly, I saw his point. Whether he stayed out of town as much as he could to screw around, or just to avoid dealing with Claire, or even on the off-chance he was what he claimed to be, just a tired husband trying to make a living, it would be a disaster to bring Claire along if he couldn't spend time with her. She couldn't just wander around by herself, see the sights. She'd sit in the hotel and wonder what he was doing, which woman it was. Torturing herself.
But it didn't let him off the hook. He was her husband. He was responsible. I didn't like the way he talked to that woman on the phone in Claire's own house. I could imagine him with a woman in a dark restaurant, seducing her with that same smooth voice.
I leaned in the doorway, in case he decided to try to go back to bed and pretend nothing had happened. I wanted to make him understand that she needed him. His duty was here. "She told me how she would kill herself if she wanted to."
That got his attention, made him stumble a bit in his smoothness, a man tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, an actor who'd forgotten his lines. He brushed back his hair, playing for time. "What did she say?"
"She said she'd gas herself."
He sat down, closed his eyes, put his hands over them, the smooth fingertips meeting over his nose. Suddenly I felt sorry for him too. I only wanted to get his attention, make him realize he couldn't simply fly off and pretend everything was normal around her. He couldn't leave her all to me.
"Do you think she's just talking?" he asked, fear in his hazel eyes.
He was asking me? He was the one with the answers. The man with the firm grip on reality, the one who told us when to get up and when to go to bed, what channel we were watching, what we thought about nuclear testing and welfare reform. He was the one who held the world securely in his smooth hands like a big basketball. I stared at him helplessly, horrified that he didn't know whether or not Claire would kill herself. He was her husband. Who was I, some kid they'd taken in.
I couldn't help but picture Claire lying on the bed, clad in her jewels, pearls welled in her mouth. What she had given up to be with Ron. The way she cried at night, arms pressed tight around her, bent almost double, like a person with stomach cramps. But no, she still waited for me to come from school, she wouldn't want me to find her dead. "She misses you."
"It's almost summer hiatus," Ron said. "We'll go somewhere. Really get away, just the three of us. Camping in Yellowstone, something like that. What do you think? "
The three of us, riding horses, hiking, sitting around the campfire, memorizing the stars. No phone, no fax, no laptop computer. No parties, meetings, friends coming by with a script. Ron all to herself. That would be something to look forward to. She wouldn't want to miss camping with Ron. "She'd like that," I finally said. Though I thought I'd believe it when I saw it. He was a great reneger.
"I know it hasn't been easy for you." He put his hand on my shoulder. Smooth. There was heat in his hand, it warmed my whole shoulder. For a moment I wondered what it would feel like to make love to Ron. His bare chest so close I could stroke it, the gray hairs, the quarter-sized nipples. He smelled good, Monsieur Givenchy. His voice, not too deep, sandy and calming. But then I remembered, this was the man who was causing all the problems, who didn't know how to love Claire. He was cheating on her, I could feel it in his body. He had the world, all Claire had was him. But I couldn't help liking his hand on my shoulder, the look in his eyes. Trying not to react to his masculine presence, solidity in his blue pajama bottoms. She's a young woman, he told Claire. It was just part of his act, the appreciation thing. I bet he did it with all the lonely spoonbenders. I stepped away, so his arm dropped. "You better come through," I told him.
20
IN JUNE, true to his promise, Ron rented a cabin in Oregon. No phone, no electricity, he even left his computer at home. In the forests of the Cascades, we fished in high green rubber boots to our waists. He showed me the fly reel, how to cast like a delicate spell, the glistening steelhead trout like secrets you could pluck from the water. Claire pored over bird books, wildflower guides, intent on naming, as if the names gave life to the forms. When she identified one, she was as proud as if she herself created the meadowlark, the maidenhair fern. Or we'd sit in the big meadow, propped up each by our own tree, and Ron played cowboy songs on his harmonica, "Red River Valley" and "Yellow Rose of Texas."
I thought of my mother in Amsterdam, singing Whoopee tiyi yo, git along link dogies. Explaining to me that a dogie was a calf that had lost its mother. It's your misfortune and none of my own. Ron was from New York, I wondered where he learned songs like that. TV probably. I saw how he looked at me when I sketched by the riverbank, but did nothing to encourage it. I could live without Ron, but not without Claire.