All My Relations (24 page)

Physically Harry recovered, but he cringed from Dominic in a defeated way until the February housewarming. Ella had installed the Chinese lion in a niche beside the front door. Harry told a number of the guests he was “waiting to die.” But then he led the house tour, limping slightly, with an anecdote for every room. “Picture Ella squatting up there, just a thin plank holding her, and it's jumping like crazy as she drives the nails …”

Guests complimented Dominic effusively. His sunken tub was “a disaster,” Dominic pointed out, the misaligned tiles slewing this way and that as if riven by seismic faults.

“You must be proud,” a local hospital director insisted.

“I don't feel anything for this house,” Dominic said.

The visitor looked to Ella, who shrugged.

When Dominic's company relocated the Terrys permanently to Denver, buying the house at a handsome price, Dominic and Ella were beyond regret, or even relief. Marco had foreseen occupying the house as the resumption of family life. Leaving filled him with shocked apprehensiveness.

The Terrys rented a spacious three-bedroom in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Harry settling into an apartment three blocks away. He watched TV curled on the couch all day, ignoring Dominic's efforts to rouse him. Dominic couldn't see Ella without wanting to knock her down. Once again Marco instinctively protected her, creating diversions. He was suspended for tripping and injuring a classmate. Viral meningitis hospitalized him for three days, while his parents helped him to the bathroom and summoned the nurse for his painkillers. The doctor labeled his illness “opportunistic,” with stress a possible susceptibility factor.

Dominic could not grasp how their efforts of the past two years could have been reduced to nothing, worse than nothing. It was as if a piece of opaque tape had been stuck over that time. The failure discredited them all, made them somehow unrecognizable.

He was destroying a nest of red ants in the yard. As the poison took effect, the colony's purposeful swarming deteriorated. The ants staggered off to convulse slowly in isolation, antennae and limbs twitching. He could not separate the image from what he saw in his family. He thought about the ants while eating and driving to work. It was worse than a tic. In search of relief,
vaguely considering hypnosis or some drug, he went to a therapist.

“The lesson of the house may be that this is no longer the family configuration for you,” the therapist said. “It doesn't work. Perhaps it did once, but people change, lives change. That's what we're not willing to acknowledge.” She was blonde, about Dominic's age, wearing a severe teal pantsuit and chunky dangling earrings.

Dominic broke down, hands clenched between his knees. He scarcely heard what she was saying: “It's as if you lifted the shell off a turtle and found, say, a bluejay. What is this? It doesn't fit.” The woman paused. Her gray eyes were kind. “It hurts,” she said. “It's painful, casting off the shell. And freedom? It's not easy. The bird has to find food. Make a nest. See, I'm warming to my metaphor. There are predators trying to eat you, cats, and eagles. You swallow the wrong kind of berry and you get constipated.” Dominic laughed a little. She smiled. “But at least you're one with your life again. When you move, your life moves with you.”

Dominic took her hands, sensing that she was weak and unscrupulous. That suited his bitterness. Two sessions later, she and Dominic went to her townhouse. Stripped to the waist, she kissed him with pained intensity. Her heavy breasts, with their big yearning areolae, sank into his palms.

When Dominic confessed the affair, Ella was relieved, as if she were dropping to her knees to receive a long-awaited blow. But she kept falling, fast, and there was no bottom.

Dominic moved in with the therapist. Despite no prior experience, Ella applied for a job as office manager for a construction firm. “I just built a house with my bare hands. You think I can't shuffle papers?” she snorted. She was hired anyway.

For the first weeks, Ella was positive Dominic would return. Each of their conversations was incomplete, lacking his plea
for reconciliation. As she realized that wouldn't happen, she cried for hours at a time, shaking, dizzy. Marco's reaction to what his father had done hurt and bewildered her. Instead of concealing the affair from his friends, he openly boasted of it. Yet he took care of her, drawing landscapes for her office and managing household chores during her depressions, when she'd sleep twelve hours a day. For him their bond was unbreakable, now that their deceitfulness had driven his father away.

At work Ella smiled at contractors and surveyors, bantered with associates. The competence she once had despised was her salvation. It was the narrow scaffolding plank that carried her safely from one Sheetrock joint to the next, over the plunge to concrete.

The therapist did impressions, including Nixon's Checkers speech in Bugs Bunny's voice. As Dominic laughed helplessly, she spread herself over him. “Republican cloth coat, ya maroon,” she yukked in his ear, before sticking in her tongue.

Rising from bed in the morning was a daily battle for him. Though discharging his professional duties, he was indifferent to their outcome. He felt defeated by the slightest inconvenience, such as kneeling to retie his shoe.

“I know exactly what you're going through,” she said. “My marriage broke up when I went back to school.”

“I don't want my marriage to break up,” Dominic said.

That sank in for a few minutes.

“You're ready to go back to your family. It's time,” she said. Her chest flushed and her chin trembled. “I'm not a very good therapist. All I do is articulate what you already feel.”

Dominic surprised Ella at the construction office, closing time. They could go out, he said. “I can't tell you how much I regret what I've done.”

“Convincing,” Ella said. “Did she write the script?”

“Somebody can make an effort,” Dominic said patiently.

“Why?” She was still excited. They stood beside her car, close enough to touch. His size blocked the wind.

“Don't you want to try to work this out?”

“You sound completely false,” Ella said despairingly. And the affair, which she had numbly accepted as a judgment on her, struck her for the first time as contemptible. “‘I'm done screwing this woman, so shucks, I dunno, I'll go home to Ella,'” Ella said. “Is that all the imagination you have?”

“I wouldn't say starting a round of finger-pointing is your best move.” Despite the measured words he was suddenly heated, out of control. “This from someone who practically kills my father, slutting around.”

“Now you're loud and clear,” Ella shouted. She smacked his face. She was slapping him again and again, with both hands. “Now you're talking with spirit, Dominic.”

“If he'd died then, you would have been the one with him, not me.”

Ella slammed the car door behind her and covered her face with her arms.

Preparing dinner that night, she kept repeating to herself, “It's too pitiful that we've come to this.” She pivoted awkwardly and the refrigerator's butter compartment knocked the salad dressing from her hand. She watched the cruet's descent to the tiles, where it burst, spattering her feet. She grabbed the catsup and let it drop, then the mustard, salsa, mayonnaise, fruit juices. Marco, running, saw his mother ankle deep in brilliant fluids and thought she had cut her feet off.

The incident of the refrigerator was decisive for Ella. She became parent representative for Marco's fifth-grade class and took him to Broncos games, fearfully expensive. She divided chores sensibly and enforced the schedule. For the first time she could remember, he told her, “I love you, Mom,” and her heart was too full for her to sleep.

As she had done since leaving Arizona, Ella cleaned and laundered
for Harry. She saw this as balancing the ledger. “You look lovely vacuuming,” he said, tears in his eyes.

Ella concealed her weight loss under roomy clothing. Politely she discouraged the interest of a Department of Transportation engineer who brought her snapshots from his scuba diving in Mexico. While the house had failed the Terry family, she understood what it had given her—a stiffening, as from cartilage to bone, that she would not casually let go.

Dominic crashed with Harry. No longer shielded by the success of his family, he submitted to his father's view of him as quaint and hapless. Harry unwound halting reminiscences of Bernice in which neither Dominic nor his brothers and sister were mentioned. When presented with the wrong order by pizza delivery, Dominic stammered his complaint so unintelligibly that he paid up and ate pineapple-olive.

“I'll make more money this year than the President,” Dominic told his father. He imposed evening game shows on Harry, pounding him in
Jeopardy
and
Wheel of Fortune
. Occasionally both men nodded off during
The Tonight Show
, waking in grayness, stiff.

Leaving for work one morning, he imagined his father drowning, blue face gasping beneath the surface, and Dominic's own arm shooting down, his palm on Harry's fibrous hair, pushing, the face receding in a stream of bubbles. Shoving the door closed, Dominic practically ran to his car, but the image bobbed up derisively in front of him.

Hating his father seemed to undermine the last meaning in Dominic's life. Yet there was excitement, too. He called Ella. “My parents were pathologically selfish,” he said.

“You could knock me over with a feather,” Ella said.

“Don't you see? That explodes everything. Even the house—I was building it as much against Harry as for us.”

“Dom, I'm just about full up with the subject of your personal
development.” Her tone softened. “It is strange, not being able to talk things through together. But we'll have to do without it.”

She did give permission for Marco to visit him on weekends. Dominic rented a cottage with a spare bedroom. The first night alone he didn't sleep or move until the alarm rang. For eight hours, his job would enclose him in the bubble of his talent, converting technical esoterica into market-plan increments. When he stepped out, pain waited for him with his overcoat. He never had conceived of hurting so much. The hurt was Ella, he knew, but it was too primitive to be named. It was simply a grinding against every moment. He tried to startle the hurt away by shouting, turning suddenly, but it was constant, unvarying. Opening a can of tuna made interesting ripples in it.

An anniversary passed: a year ago he had rushed home to Tucson and his stricken father, usurped house, unforgiving son, and alienated wife. That time now seemed an unattainable happiness.

At first he and Marco didn't know how to be together. Their closeness always had come from doing rather than talking, but Marco no longer enjoyed imaginary play. He needed answers for the loss of their family. Together they sought definitive responsibilities, lessons to be salvaged. Dominic wasn't satisfied assuming total blame. Nor could he entirely penetrate the dull, miserable fog surrounding Ella and Harry. He resorted to the house itself, as an implacable force of nature. “Like a boulder dropping on a frog,” Marco proposed, grateful his father wasn't accusing him.

“Or maybe an MRI,” Dominic said. “Maybe all it did was diagnose what was wrong with us.”

They were leaving a movie, Marco's hands in the pockets of his gray coat. His face crumpled. “I wish it hadn't happened,” he said, clinging to Dominic's waist. They dragged each other along the sidewalk.

Out of duty Dominic continued to wait on Harry. Disregard
for his father allowed him to see a disarmed, feeble old man, for whom he could feel simple sadness. Prodded by Dominic into regular walks, Harry perfected a downcast shuffle, but his color improved, and he began combing his hair.

Occasionally Ella would encounter Dominic there, coming or going. She was enraged with longing at his attendance on Harry. Never, she thought, had she risked the disfiguring shapelessness of loving the unworthy. Her son and until recently her husband were unchallengingly lovable. Her love seemed sleekly validating, like the vagina closing around the penis.

Eventually, the morning came when Dominic woke for work neither numb nor agonized. Despite the cold, he decided to walk. His legs drove against the snow, heels punching through the crust. He counted on their momentum to carry him where he needed to go, and he knew he could exist without Ella. Rather than detouring around a patch of ice, Dominic launched himself across it, skating on the soles of his shoes.

In the midst of his exultation he realized that Ella was the only woman he would want. He imagined her swatting his airplane from the sky with a big length of Sheetrock, and laughed, even though she sat astride Harry's shoulders, thighs clamped around the old man's head. For the other's sake, each of them had become the worst possible self, Dominic thought, he abstract, Ella corrupt. It had never occurred to him to define love that way, and he was shaken by the discovery. He could think of only one person with whom he could share it.

His watch showed time enough before Ella took Marco to school.

When Dominic appeared at the door, ruddy from the wind, Ella saw in his face what had happened. She had reasons and grievance on her side, but they buckled under love and she let him in.

They exchanged pleasantries, Dominic complimenting Ella on her swirling caftan, ignoring the gauntness it was intended to
hide. “Aren't you going to kiss?” Marco demanded. They smiled at him.

“We're having hot chocolate,” Ella invited.

“Take it outside,” Dominic said. “The morning is so new and beautiful.”

Bundled in down coats, they planted lawn furniture on the white covering. The bare limbs of the elm bounced in the wind. Once the three had imagined themselves as a house on a hill, dug into stone with the tenacity of a lion. Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure.