Authors: Andrew Porter
“I don’t know,” he says. “What other choice do we have?”
Cadence looks at him and nods, sips her wine. “Don’t worry,” she says finally. “She’ll call.”
But she doesn’t. Not for almost an hour, at least. Not until Cadence has made it halfway through another bottle of wine and Elson is half asleep on one of the couches in the den. He can’t even remember how he made it from the kitchen to the den or what he and Cadence had been talking about before he left the room. All he knows now is that he had fallen into some type of dream, a semiconscious reverie, the memory of those early days with Cadence coming back to him in fragmented waves: the night they first met at his friend Brian Lowry’s house, those early days that they had spent at his apartment in River Oaks, the long drunken nights and the endless stream of parties, the scandal he had caused by dating a college girl, the scandal they had both caused when she had finally decided to drop out of college and marry him.
It is this that he’s thinking about as he sits up on the couch and tries to orient himself. The room itself is dark, and in the distance, on the other side of the house, he can hear Cadence shouting, shouting something at their daughter on the phone. Taking a moment to catch his bearings, he stands up slowly, then starts down the hallway toward the kitchen, but by the time he gets there, Cadence is no longer shouting on the phone. She is sitting on the floor, her arms draped loosely around her knees, the phone lying on the floor beside her. The room itself is dark, save for the bright oscillating pool lights from outside casting strange oblong patterns along the walls, and it takes him a moment to make out her face and realize she’s crying.
“Cadence,” he says.
But she doesn’t answer.
Without saying a word, he walks over and gives her his hand, helps her stand up, embraces her for what seems like the first time in many months. She looks at him but doesn’t speak. She lets him hold her.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he says after a moment, very softly.
She shakes her head. “I screwed it up,” she says.
“What did she say?”
“I shouldn’t have gotten angry,” she says. “I should have just listened.” Elson reaches then for his cigarettes and lights one, and though she
hasn’t smoked in twenty years, Cadence motions for him to give her a drag, which he does.
As she exhales, she shakes her head again. “How is this happening?” she says finally.
“What?”
“This,”
she says, motioning toward the phone on the floor, the room. “I mean, what did we do wrong? What did we do to deserve this?”
Elson puts his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it off.
“Just start at the beginning,” he says, sitting down now on one of the stools at the counter. “Tell me what she said.”
“It’s what she
didn’t
say,” Cadence says. “It’s what she’s
not
telling us.”
“Okay,” Elson says. “But she must have said something.”
“She did. She said she needed more time.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“Well, how much more time does she need?”
“Two more days.”
“Two?”
“Yes, two.”
Elson shakes his head at this. “Jesus,” he says, losing his calmness now. “And that’s it. That’s all she said?”
“No. She also said that if we called the police, or spoke to anyone, we would be ruining her life.”
At this, Elson stands up and begins to pace. “Is she still in Houston?” he says.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, what were the two of you talking about?”
“We weren’t talking. I was yelling at her. I don’t know. All this shit, you know. What she’s putting us through. I just lost it.”
Elson walks over and picks up the phone. “I’m calling the police.”
“Elson.”
“Seriously. This is ridiculous.”
“Not tonight,” she says.
“Why not tonight?”
“Because I don’t think I can take any more tonight,” she says, and then pauses. “And besides,” she says, looking down, “I have somewhere to go.”
“Where?”
“I have to meet a friend.”
“Which friend?”
Cadence says nothing.
“Which friend, Cadence?”
“Elson, one of the privileges of being divorced is that I don’t have to tell you every fucking little detail about my life.”
Elson stares at her, catching on. “You’re dating someone?”
“I’m not having this conversation right now.”
“Who is it?”
“Elson.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s no one you know.”
At this, Elson can feel the ground beneath him giving way, his body loosening. He feels as if he’s just been hit by a very large weight. Moving over to the other side of the kitchen, he sits down at the kitchen table and stares at Chloe’s journal. He’s known for some time that this was going to happen, that sooner or later Cadence would meet someone, but now that it’s a reality, now that she’s actually telling him it’s a reality, he doesn’t feel prepared to accept it.
On the other side of the kitchen, Cadence is quiet and perfectly still, perhaps preparing herself for an explosion, bracing herself for a fight, but Elson doesn’t move. He doesn’t do a thing. He is somewhere else now, outside of himself. He is back in the front seat of his car on that late-summer evening in 1981 when he first saw Cadence coming out the front door of his friends’ house, moving slowly across the lawn. He is remembering the way her body emerged from the darkness, the way her face was suddenly illuminated by the lampposts along the street, and the excitement he felt upon seeing her, this beautiful woman, the future mother of his children, the way he knew, even before she spoke, even before she said a word, that something remarkable was happening.
IF SHE HAD TO BE HONEST
, she hadn’t expected it. She hadn’t expected that reaction. She’d expected something else—maybe a fight, or an argument—but not that. She hadn’t expected he’d actually cry. In all the years she’d known him, in all the years they’d been married, she had only seen him cry once, when his father died, and even then, he’d done it privately, in their bedroom, with the door shut. She hadn’t known how to interpret it, how to react. She’d been expecting him to explode at her, to lose his cool, but instead Elson had sat there quietly, saying nothing, staring out at the pool. When she finally walked over to him, he looked up at her with something like desperation, and that’s when she’d realized he was crying.
“Elson,” she’d said and touched his shoulder, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he just turned around and looked back at the pool.
“I should go,” he’d said finally.
“You don’t have to,” she’d said. “You can stay. We can talk.”
But he shook his head. And later, as they stood at the door, he’d said, “I’m sorry, Cadence. I’ve done some terrible things to you. I really have, and I’m sorry for that.” Then he’d turned around and, without saying anything else, had walked down the pathway to his car.
After he left, she stood by herself in the kitchen for a long time, staring out at the pool, trying to process what had happened. For years, she’d believed she was incapable of hurting him, or that he was incapable of being hurt. Even throughout their divorce, he’d been impervious to her insults, her attacks, her accusations. He seemed to have this ability to deflect almost anything she said. He seemed to have this barrier around him. So what had happened since then? Had he really changed? Or had he always been this way? As much as she hated to admit it, she’d been
strangely touched by it all, the whole scene, the sight of him crying, his grave, unexpected apology. She wondered what he was doing now, where he had gone after he left. For the first time in a long time, she found herself wondering if he was okay.
On the other side of the Hyatt Regency bar, Gavin is talking to the bartender, a slim older woman, who is making them drinks. Cadence is sitting by herself at a small table in the corner, watching him, trying to think up a good excuse for why she can’t stay here tonight, hoping she doesn’t have to, though of course it had been her idea to come here in the first place. She had actually insisted on it—
to spice things up
, she’d told him earlier—though in reality it had been much more complicated than that. Ever since she’d last made love to Gavin, she’d been dreading the idea of going to his apartment. She found it depressing, she realized now, the darkness of it, the smell of sweaty gym socks, the constant clutter around the room. Initially, Gavin had suggested another place, a small motel down the street from his apartment, where they could meet. It would be closer, he’d said, and cheaper. But she had bristled at this.
“I’m not a prostitute,”
she’d responded.
“If you’re worried about money, I’ll pay.”
He hadn’t said anything to this but had eventually agreed to go to the Hyatt. Later, when they arrived, they’d gone straight up to the room and tried to make love, but Gavin had had some trouble, something he blamed on the medication he was taking, and so they’d finally given up and come down to the bar.
Now, however, as she sits here, staring at him, she feels only sadness, sadness and guilt. She feels guilt for the way she left Elson earlier, the way she didn’t comfort him as she should have, and sadness for the way she yelled at Chloe, the way she ruined any future chances for reconciliation. She realizes now that ever since the night that Chloe disappeared, she’s been blaming herself for what happened, for her disappearance and, more specifically, that she’s begun to associate Gavin with this guilt. If she’d been at home, after all, instead of with him, this might have never happened. She might have been able to stop her. This isn’t fair to Gavin, of course. He’s been nothing but supportive. But still, she can’t help it. Every time she looks at him, every time she stares at his face, she sees the evidence of her own bad behavior, her own guilt, and has to turn away. In retrospect, she should have just canceled with him the moment she got that text message from Chloe earlier that day, or at least
after she’d spoken to her that night, but for some reason she hadn’t. For some reason she’d thought that seeing Gavin might provide her with a temporary respite from it all, a little distraction, though now, more than anything, she simply wants to leave.
When Gavin finally returns, he places a vodka tonic down in front of her and shakes his head.
“Guess how much these cost?” he says, smiling.
She looks at him.
“Just guess.”
“I have no idea.”
“Twelve bucks apiece,” he says. “Can you believe that?”
“I’ll get the next round.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says defensively. “I’m just saying that that’s a lot of money, don’t you think, for a shot of vodka and a little tonic?”
She shrugs. Lately, his obsession with money, with the amount things cost, has begun to annoy her. Every time he looks at a menu, he’ll shake his head in disbelief, or roll his eyes, and later, as they’re eating, he’ll say things like,
So how does that ten-dollar sandwich taste?
or
Hey there, how’s that three-dollar latte?
It seems ironic to her. For someone who majored in business, who actually teaches classes in business, he seems to be constantly surprised by the concept of a free-market economy and cost-push inflation. In a way, that’s why she chose the Hyatt. She wanted to test him, to see how deep his stinginess ran. Now, however, as he sits there silently, she feels bad for her rudeness.
“So you were telling me,” he says, after a moment, “about your daughter.”
She looks at him. “I was?”
“Yes.”
“What was I saying?”
“That she called you tonight.”
“Oh, right,” she says, trying to remember how much she’d told him. Somehow the day’s intake of alcohol has muddied her memory, sullied her thoughts, and she feels suddenly regretful for saying anything. Long ago she had vowed never to mention any of this stuff to him, to leave him out of it.
“You were talking about the cops,” he continues, “how you were thinking about calling them now.”
“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Well, I’ve changed my mind about that.”
“You have? Why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she says, looking over at the bartender. “I just don’t think we should.”
He looks at her, sips his drink. “Oh yeah?” he says finally.
“She asked us not to.”
He seems to consider this, says nothing.
“You disagree?”
“No,” he says. “It’s none of my business.”
“You look like you disagree.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I don’t know enough about the situation, actually, to have an opinion.” Then he pauses for a long time, and she can see that he’s turning it over in his mind, processing it. Finally, he says, “It’s just that she seems a little young, you know.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that you’re putting a lot of faith in a girl who’s only twenty-one.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“I know that.”
“Well, she’s not a dolt,” she says. “I trust her.”
He looks at her, says nothing, and she realizes then that she might have misspoken, that by suggesting that her own daughter was not a dolt, he might have thought she was implying that his son was. His son, the kid with special needs. His son, the boy he never talks about.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s fine.” He picks up his drink then and turns toward the jazz trio in the corner who are setting up their instruments.
The truth is, he talks so little about his son that she often forgets that he exists. He had brought him up once, that first night, had talked about him for a while, about how he was mentally challenged and so forth, but ever since that night, he hasn’t mentioned him. There are no pictures of his son in his apartment, no drawings on the refrigerator, no toys hidden in the closet. No evidence at all that he exists. In her weaker moments, she often reverts to her initial suspicion that he might have made this child up for the sole purpose of luring women back to his apartment, of gaining their sympathy and trust. It’s a ridiculous suspicion, of course, but for some reason she feels it returning to her now, feels the weight of
it on her mind. She stares at him for a long time, then finally says, “Can I ask you a question?”