Any Day Now (11 page)

Just outside of Chicopee — he'd made an amoebic sort of loop, several loops really, he now realized — he pulled into a strip mall and parked in front of a store. “Lucky Buck!” trumpeted the yellow and orange banners. Rich had seen their ads in local circulars. Junk For a Buck would have been a better name, but in the first aisle he found them: two large plastic baskets filled with last year's Christmas candles. Some were scented with fake cranberry and bayberry; some were angels or reindeer, their cute parts chipped. White showed under the gold.

“I'll take them both,” he told the clerk, after he'd hauled the first basket to the counter.

“Both what?” the kid asked.

“Both baskets,” Rich said.

“But they have candles in them,” said the kid.

“That's what I want. I want the candles,” said Rich.

“I'll have to charge you for the baskets, too,” the kid said.

One fit in the back seat, one in the hatch space. Rich drove off with a hundred pounds of unwanted wax.

He was reading the instructions when Louise came in at 6:30.

“I hate that bitch,” she said.

He cringed at both words. Hate is a word that shouldn't even be in our vocabulary. He'd used that line in more than one homily. Sometimes the venom in his normally loving wife stilled him. But who was he to judge? He'd lived his whole life trying to be a holy little son of a gun.

“Witch Hazel really getting to you today?” he asked.

“Who else? Oh, baby,” she said, taking her coat off, “I am sorry for being late. You're pissed this time, aren't you? Because I didn't call. I thought about it, but…what's that smell?”

He looked up, really seeing her now. The truth was he hadn't been thinking about her return. He didn't even know what time it was. Usually he heard the car, headed for the front door where he divested her of her outer things and gave an appreciative fondle to her underthings.

“What's that smell?” she asked again. “It smells sweet. Are you making jam again?” She walked to the stove, draping her coat on the back of a chair.

Rich watched her lift the lid on the jam pot, a wedding gift from Louise's mother. Making jam was the one thing he and Louise's mother had in common.

“Wax,” she said. “In weird colours. What are you cooking up here, Rich? This is an awful lot of paraffin.”

He didn't answer right away, wanting her to get it on her own. He felt happy with himself in a way he hadn't felt since the early days in this house when he was still amazed at having his very own life with his very own wife.

“The Easter candle,” said Louise, and then she turned around and she wasn't smiling anymore. “But I thought you were going to let me round up the candles,” she said. “I wanted to.”

“I needed…” Rich gestured to the stove. The air was thick with the smell of Christmas past.

“To do it on your own,” Louise said. She nodded. “I understand.” She took her coat and left the kitchen.

Rich tried to go back to the directions, the original directions hand-copied by Greg so many years ago. “Fasten the plastic tubing really securely with strong twine.” “Or else,” another note in the margin cautioned, “you'll be waxing your floors!” Rich folded the instructions and placed them on the counter, next to the plastic cylinder he'd constructed in the garage an hour before. It should make an okay mold. The thick wick was anchored to the outside, top and bottom, with generous margins. The wax was just about ready to be poured. He spread the day's paper on the floor, on the stove, on the counter, anchored the corners down with masking tape. He knew well enough: hot wax had wings. It flew.

What colours. Swirls of Christmas gold, Old Tannenbaum green, holly red. He'd never seen a paschal candle like it. But then he'd never had an Easter like this. A married Easter. An Easter where his body would descend and rise again.
I am coming back to life.

He reached for the pot's handles, steadied the cylinder between his feet, feeling the old fear and excitement. This was always a dramatic moment, the tipping of the pot, the aiming of the wax's descent. You had to get this part right and it was always a gamble.

He gripped the pot, tipped. The colours fell below him. The smell rose above him. He dared not move. He'd seen the disasters that hit a kitchen when the person on top decided to adjust the angle. The person on top! That's what was different, too. You needed two people, at the least, to do this part: one, standing to pour; one, kneeling, to steady the mold.

Yet, somehow, here in this kitchen he was able to do both things at the same time. All these years he'd been cautioning his people about the need for a team approach. All that gather-thee-in stuff.

The flow was slowing. Rich tipped the pot to drain the last small pool. Louise was standing in the door when he straightened up.

“I did it myself,” he said, amazed to hear the four-year-old in his voice.

He cracked up first, but Louise was soon laughing so hard she had to sit down.

Sometimes it works. She imagines him sitting at one of those wood desks, the kind you see now only in movies about convent schools. No inkwell, no, that would be way before his time. She sees the amber puddle collecting, widening, beneath him. She visualizes the other kids' faces, a sea of childhood cruelty. And for that moment she understands why from time to time he has to stick his (victimized, ridiculed, undisciplined) dick into other women.

Mostly it doesn't work and Martine is left with what she's known for a while. Her husband's a liar and a cheat. Can this marriage be saved? Probably not, but right now they're doing the newest new thing, which is actually an old thing: EFT, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, though Martine calls it Emotionally Fucked Couples Therapy. Jerome says she never swore this way before.

“I don't really like it,” he tells her. “You're better than that. More articulate.”

“Honey, I've articulated and articulated,” she reminds him.

And she has, eighteen years of articulation. But when he admitted to their last marriage counselor that he'd had a fling at a music camp two months after they were married — a heartbreak of a summer for her, the new bride who'd had to stay in the city and work — she's found shouting expletives works better. Because what's left to say? What's left to say
reasonably
?

But this, according to Jerome and to Harry, their new therapist, is what makes EFT so different, so superior. “Forget about working on communication skills,” says Harry. “Forget about all that Venus/Mars bullcrap.” (Martine does admire Harry's vocabulary.) “We're back to our little selves.”

“We've done the inner child,” Martine told Harry at their first session. “We've done I'm OK, you're OK. We've done the empty-chair Gestalt thing.”

“This is completely, one-hundred-percent different,” Harry said. “We're not going back to Mom and Dad and figuring out how they messed us up, all that blaming shit. Here we're into blamer softening. Here, we're
being
Mom and Dad. To each other. Here, dependence is OK. Admitting it is even more OK. You and Jerome are going to treat each other like the lovable, blameless kids you really are. Because none of us really grows up, right? From now on, you're going to be in each other's corner.”

Lovable and blameless are not the words that come to mind when Martine looks over at Jerome, sitting in the corner, alone on Harry's loveseat. In their first session they sat on it together. Now she's across from him in a low-slung, beige chair, the kind of let's-get-grounded furniture they've seen in every therapist's office. What could possibly make any woman pant over this exhausted-looking middle-aged man? Jerome hasn't been sleeping well lately because this time he's afraid she's really going to leave. Since his latest escapade, with the second violinist this time, Martine has kept a suitcase packed at the front of the closet, a fly-away bag.
Escapade
. She pronounces it with a French accent because it sounds more fun. And she refers to Sarah, the violinist, as the second fiddle or the plucky fuck. Also more fun. It's gotten so bad, with so many new revelations — oh, her, too? — that it's begun to be almost fun. OK, not fun. Funny?

What does it mean to be in each other's corner? Martine hasn't a clue any more, having gradually lost the urge to do right by Jerome. Even being in her own corner — climbing the bloody Stairmaster, eating leafy greens, hanging with sympathetic friends, throwing herself into work, all those
Oprah
strategies — seems a job for someone braver, more butch. Being in the kids' corner — Bram, thirteen, Steffen, eleven — comes easier. Kids need. They need
now
. That's the guiding principle.

Jerome seems to know what being in her corner means. He tells Harry and Martine every week what is necessary to keep them together. “When I feel the need to boost myself I have to look inside, not outside,” he says.

“Look to Martine,” says Harry. “She's your buddy. She's your truest friend.”

“I know,” says Jerome, eyes wet with regret. And then he tells them another story — she's heard them, she's heard them — about the stepmother who checked his sheets every morning of his horny adolescence, about the bullish nuns, and the college girlfriend who told him he wasn't hung enough, and of course, the humiliation of the janitor's visits to mop the floor in Grades 1,2,3,4, once even in Grade 5. Not to mention the child psychologist his parents lugged him to for the peeing problem, who fondled him once.

But right now, week four, they're not focused on Jerome and the mortifications of his flesh. They're on Martine.

“I'm not feeling much,” she tells them.

“Tell us,” says Harry. “How did we get here?”

Martine looks at the two men. What can they know of a woman's large, absorbent, suffering…heart, she was about to say. Then she thinks of the place Jerome still frequents, the core of her, the core of all those women, where he surrenders his mad, mating-dog self. It's us and them, she thinks, and we're out-manoeuvred.

“How did I get here?” Martine asks. “Well, I passed Go, but I didn't collect two hundred anything. And, Harry, I swear every time you refer to blamer softening I think you're talking laxatives.”

“She always made me laugh,” Jerome says to Harry.

“Sometimes we use humour to deflect intimacy,” says Harry, and Martine wants to pitch something hard at his smooth face. Harry has the mouth of a punk, but looks like a Boy Scout. “I think we should use him as our investment broker, too,” she said to Jerome after their first session.

“I'm not trying to be funny,” Martine tells the men. “I'm trying to be honest. That's what you want, isn't it?”

“The hurt,” Harry says.

“The betrayal,” says Jerome.

“We call it attachment injury,” says Harry.

“I like that term,” Jerome says.

Martine is about to say, “Why don't you two have yourselves a little talkfest?” but she has to stop, tears suddenly, alarmingly, close.

“I miss my dad,” she says.

“Oh, baby,” Jerome says.

Jerome has always said she enjoyed an unusually close relationship with her father. Close is what he calls it, but abnormal is what she hears. Her father has been dead for nearly four years now, but Martine still cries when she's home alone with the radio on and an old Broadway song…“Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City” or “I Gotta Crow”…brings him wondrously back. The hospice-care people joked that they were getting a Broadway retrospective, with visitors popping cassettes into the tape recorder on his nightstand. After he died, Martine drove herself nuts trying to remember his last song. Her brother thought it might have been “The Impossible Dream
,
” but that was so convenient. One of the nurses said she thought she remembered taking
Oliver
out of the case that last evening. Her father would have gotten a kick out of “Food
,
Glorious Food” as his swan song. But it had to be better than that.

“He was so simple,” says Martine to the waiting men, and feels ugly bubbles rise.

“A good man,” Jerome explains to Harry.

“Not like you,” Martine says to Jerome.

“It's been hard for you, hasn't it, Martine?” says Harry. “You're distressed.”

Martine deep-breathes. She is the Lawrence Welk bubble machine gone bad.

“Let it out,” says Harry. “You're holding an awful lot in there, Martine. It's time to face the dragon.”

And Jerome coaxes, “I'm trying real hard here, honey. But I can't do it without you.”

“You do it without me all the time,” Martine says.

“But I don't want to anymore,” says Jerome in the you're-absolutely-right tone he's adopted since he came clean about Sarah. “I've told you that.”

All the paintings on Harry's wall — small, framed oils of what seem like the same landscape — are crooked, Martine notices for the first time. One, the ubiquitous old mill amid fall foliage with no humans to spoil the joint, is especially off-kilter.

Martine points. “You trying to make us all crazier, Harry?”

“None of my clients are what you'd call crazy, Martine,” says Harry.

“What
would
you call us, Harry?” Martine asks.

But it's two o'clock and Harry has a merit badge for punctuality. “That's a promising place to start for our next session,” he says. “I suspect control, specifically being out of control, might be an issue for you, Martine.”

The two who are married talk outside in the parking lot. They stand by Martine's van; she doesn't see Jerome's car. “I'll get Bram from hockey on my way home from rehearsal,” says Jerome, by way of saying, see, no post-rehearsal pouncing for me. Their boys have been spending a lot of time at various friends' houses and various rinks. Jerome and Martine know why the kids are doing this, especially Martine, who's getting the brunt of it. Unjustifiably, she thinks. Just when she needs the love and support of her sons — about time — they turn away, cool and non-partisan.

At some earlier, more forgiving moment, she and Jerome agreed to keep his indiscretions a secret from them. Martine is sorry now because what it looks like is that Mom's absolutely barking (get that woman some drugs) and Dad's just a hassled guy.

“Why do you give him such a hard time?” Steffen asked this morning when Martine slipped on juice Jerome had spilled and failed to wipe from the kitchen floor. She'd slid into the wall, stomped and yelled. Jerome came running, looking really sorry.

“Get your head out of wherever it is,” she shrieked.

Afterward, her throat hurt, the boys slunk off to school and Jerome stayed to talk. “I know you're very, very angry at me. And I know that you might not ever be able to forgive me. And I might have to live with that. And that you might even decide to leave. And that this might be the best thing for you.” Lately Jerome has begun to talk like this. Nothing contradicts. All things exist simultaneously. And and and…

He picked at a Pop-Tart left on Stef's plate, crossed his legs — a flash of crotch through the old robe — adjusted his glasses, sprung out from wearing them on his head to read scores, and ran his beautiful (bowing) hand through the greying curls. She'd loved all these details once. Her rumpled music meister.

“Really, sweetie, if you don't start talking to Harry, we might as well do something else.” Jerome licked the crumbs from the plate, looked up to smile and shrug. The kitchen, the one they'd spent nearly a year designing and renovating, was absurdly cheery with morning light.

“You know,” he said, “these things taste pretty good.”

“You know,” she said, “you have no taste.” She retrieved his plate, knowing it would stay there all day otherwise. “I thought you had a rehearsal this morning.”

“This is more important,” he said and got up to unzip her slacks.

He had no rehearsal, it turned out, so coaxing her back to bed was no sacrifice. Dumb body, she thought as she came.

Now in the parking lot outside Harry's office, trying to organize what remains of their day, Martine suddenly grabs the shoulder of Jerome's sweater, a sweater, she realizes, she hasn't seen before. “Don't ever do this to me again, do you understand?”

“We have a lot to work out,” says Jerome, letting her hand stay there. “We both need to disclose more. That's what Harry says and I agree. And you know, it's not like I had sex with any of those women to do something to you. It's my own stuff.”

“You know what I would like?” she says. She sees Harry walking toward them…no, toward a car. Harry raises a silent hand, but Martine doesn't let go.

“Tell me,” says Jerome, eyes weary.

“I would like to stop selling the notion of fidelity. Come on down and check out our terms: secure woman, happy kids, peaceful home, long-term satisfaction. All
you
have to do is keep it to yourself. And, by the way, Harry just drove off in a brand new Mercedes.”

Jerome takes her hand — not to hold it, to remove it, though she doesn't feel like letting go just yet. “I really want to be in your corner, Martine. But you have to be in your own corner first.”

“Oh, cut the psycho-babble,” she says, but what she's hearing is the sober way he's just said her name.

In the van, the tears run cold into her turtleneck. It's November, the beginning of things she doesn't enjoy: bleak skies, the six-month chill in the bones, Christmas shopping. And the worst thing:
Nutcracker
.

Last year, in Jerome's ninth season as first violinist with the Symphony, the Sugar Plum Fairy had fairly bouréed them into the ground. Bram was in the middle of hockey season (he was good, all his coaches said, which meant they were committed to four nights' practice a week, six months of the year); Stef was having a hard time adjusting to the new, private school they'd thought would better suit his learning style; Martine was marking like a maniac and dodging her department head who was threatening to fatten her teaching load if she didn't get that second book published
now
. And Jerome was out every night at rehearsals. Life bulged at the best of times: a houseful of people doing and doing. They'd made jokes all season about going nuts, cracking up, about
Nutcracker
being a nuts-cracker, and Jerome had even put forward the idea of not doing it the following year.

But here they are, two days after their parking-lot confab, at the pre-
Nutcracker
party with ballet dancers, ballet mavens, even non-glamorous sorts like first violinists swooping down on giant platters of bruschetta and shrimp. It's an annual gesture of goodwill before the tantrums and
crises
. Martine knows nearly everybody by now, though each year there's a new crop of dancers, younger and younger yet. This year's Sugar Plum and her partner look minuscule, fittingly like dolls come to life. The girl, blonde hair in a severe (but sexy) ponytail, tiny diamonds glinting in her ears and a non-stop smile on her triangular little face — absolutely edible, Martine decides — leans against the baby grand, duly dusted for the night.