Other Plans (8 page)

“I'm not out to please Grace,” he said. “But before we get into this any further, we have to draw up an agreement, Ma. Sort of a premarital. Like who gets the TV, who gets the BMW, that kind of junk.”

“How about who gets the kids?” she asked.

Sometimes she got pretty big for her britches, he thought. “If she's under fifteen or over thirty, the deal's off. And I'm not just whistling Dixie, Ma. I mean it. A guy's gotta have standards.”

She pushed her glasses back into her hair and laughed. He knew he had her.

“First,” he said, ticking off on his fingers, “I need plenty of cash. A tenner for the flicks and another tenner should do it.”

“For what?” she asked, highly amused.

He raised his brows. “For the fun later, down at Alfie's. What else?”

Alfie's was a lively gin mill down by the station that had a certain cachet due to the frequency with which its regulars got themselves juiced up and, in a strong feeling of camaraderie, had been known to put fists through windows and pound heads on floors. Not an ounce of malice was involved. In the morning, they were all friends again.

He'd never been inside Alfie's, but he and Keith had often hung around outside, breathing the delicious smells of stale beer and perspiration Alfie's exuded, speaking to them of manhood, sophistication, and, best of all, debauchery.

“How'd it go with Dad?” she asked, crossing her arms on her book. “Did you part friends?”

“I'll need some ones, too, Ma, in case this girl has a sweet tooth and has to have a box of Reese's Pieces. And we'll need at least two bags of popcorn. A minimum of two.”

“Why don't I just write you a blank check?”

“Ma, I'll say one thing for you. When the chips are down, you give in gracefully.” He patted her on the head. “Dad's getting as soft as a grape. He was talking to Grandy, and when he hung up he told me to get lost. I'm home free, no bruises, no nothing. How about that?”

“Oh, John.” She snapped off the light. He thought it was because she didn't want him to see she was crying. He saw the tears and wondered what was going on for her.

Taking the stairs two at a time, he shouted out a country-western song about a man whose wife had left him with all the kids while she went off in a pickup truck with a jailbird to find the big time in Natchez. John always knew words to songs like that, and sang them at the top of his lungs. They sounded better that way, he said.

John could hear his father still on the phone, talking to Uncle Ed. For lack of anything better to do, he listened in on the extension.

“The pain was agonizing,” Uncle Ed was saying. “No one who hasn't had gallstones, Henry, can possibly know what real pain is. Like hot pokers. Labor pains. When I described the pain to Marge, she said, ‘That sounds exactly like the pains I had with Susan.' And that's when I decided to call the doc. You better get yourself checked out, Henry. You're no spring chicken, you know.”

Very quietly John hung up. So his father thought he might have gallbladder problems. No wonder he'd been testy lately. He thought of calling Keith, but decided that could wait. To celebrate his good fortune, he did his history assignment. Then, with all those dates swirling around in his head, he lay on his bed thinking of ways to screw his mother out of a couple more bucks. If he was going to go into the gigolo business, feed Grace Lerner's nerdy niece full of expensive munchies, she'd have to pay for first-class accommodations. His time was valuable.

Long after John had gone up to his room, long after Henry, his face gray with fatigue, had said he thought he'd turn in, she sat there quietly, thinking about how things had turned out, thinking about John, about Henry. About the way they were always at each other's throats. John's face, when he said, “Dad's getting soft as a grape,” had been suffused with joy. It made her very unhappy that they didn't get on, which Henry knew. But still he pursued his tack, so stiff, so unyielding when it came to John. They had spoken of it many times, always at her instigation. Invariably, Henry turned away, unwilling to say more than that John must be made to understand he couldn't goof off for the rest of his life. “He is very irresponsible, Ceil,” Henry had said through stiff lips.

“You're too hard on him. You never give him a break. If you must be so severe, then treat Leslie with the same severity. It's not fair the way you single him out for constant criticism.”

“Leslie doesn't need it the way he does; she's disciplined, she's tough on herself, she's motivated, Ceil.”

Through clenched teeth she said, “I hate that word. Find another one.”

“Whether or not you like the word, it's important to be motivated. I worry about him. He's so … so feckless, I guess is the best word. He's always clowning. He's an escapist, Ceil.”

“And you? I suppose you were all business, all buttoned-down, chairman-of-the-board dedication when you were his age, is that it?”

“No, of course not. But my father was stern with me, and I think it's the way to be with John. It's the only way I know. I want him to grow up to be a responsible person, a good man. And right now, he's as soft as a grape, to coin one of his phrases.”

“He's got good stuff in him,” she said. “In a few years, he'll be a man and you'll see. I just hope it won't be too late for you and him to be friends. At the rate you're going, you're going to destroy any chance you have. Your relationship will be too far gone.”

“Ah, Ceil.” He tried to embrace her and she would have none of it.

John, at six, had come to her and asked, “Would you give up your life for your child?” He'd put one finger on her arm, the way he did when he wanted her full attention. He was getting over the measles and the two of them, trapped in the house, watched a great deal of television.

“Why do you want to know?” she'd said, shaken by his question, by the intensity with which he'd asked it.

“It was on television. There was a fireman who said the lady had gone back into her house to find her child and the flames engulfed her. What's ‘engulfed' mean?”

“It means to swallow up,” she said.

“Then the flames swallowed her up.” He took that in. “Does that mean she got burned up?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, they found her child was already out of the burning house so the lady didn't even need to go back. But the fireman said she gave her life for her child. So I wondered if you would do that for me.”

He waited, finger still on her arm. She chose her words carefully, knowing he needed reassurance, if not comfort.

“I hope so,” she said. “Yes, I would.”

“How about Leslie?”

“Yes, Leslie, too.”

“That's what I figured,” he said. He seemed relieved. “That's exactly what I figured.” A few minutes later, she heard him upstairs, making warlike sounds as he moved his myriad little plastic men through battle maneuvers.

Something about John's face tonight had brought that back to her. She took a crumpled tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. Then she reread the chapter she'd been finishing when John came with his news of being let off the hook. Even after reading it a second time, she still couldn't remember what she'd read. She turned off the light and, feeling her way in the dark, made her way up the stairs to bed.

7

Henry was a genuine romantic. He became Ceil's friend before he became her lover. But before that, they had almost become enemies.

They worked together in the office of the architect who eventually took Henry on as a junior partner. Ceil had a way of holding her head, thick hair swinging, a way of walking, as if she owned the world, that got to him. When he first laid eyes on her, his breathing actually grew labored and his chest hurt, like a man in the throes of a heart attack. He suggested they have lunch at the drugstore around the corner; they would go Dutch, he said, and have a BLT, which the drugstore did superbly, and a chocolate float.

Sorry, she was busy. That day and the next. The whole week, in fact. It wasn't so much the Dutch bit as it was his presumption that she'd be free on such short notice. Henry lunched instead with a frivolous blonde whose brother was a friend from college. Henry paid the check.

Henry was a Yale man, a fact he did nothing to either conceal or belabor. Yale turned out to be a drawback, as far as Ceil was concerned. Oh, he was debonaire; rangy, square-jawed, with neat fingernails and beautiful manners. Every time they stepped off a curb, his hand cupped her elbow; doors were opened for her as if it were second nature for him to open doors. If she had been a smoker, she knew he'd have lighted every cigarette for her. But she thought him a snob, not realizing until much later that his ways were his own and had nothing at all to do with snobbishness. Gradually, she began to like, rather than resent, the fact that Henry had done well at Yale and was on the fast track at the firm where they worked. She herself had quit a mediocre college after two years, eager to get on with the business of life. Well, that was her somewhat high-minded reason. The real reason she'd quit was that she hated to study, despised taking exams. Years later, the mother of two almost-grown children, she still occasionally dreamed of being alone in a large, echoing hall, bent over her paper, chewing on a pencil, knowing she had none of the answers. She woke from these dreams of failure with her heart pounding.

An only child, Ceil longed for siblings. Her friends were always telling tales of being sent away from the table for horsing around, or for excessive burping. One girl she knew had four brothers and, adding insult to injury, fifteen cousins of both sexes.

Ceil felt her life was impoverished by the endless quiet dinners, murmured conversations, Jell-O for dessert. She yearned for a long, loud, crowded table, passing great dishes of peas and carrots and potatoes up and down, fighting over who would get the outside piece or the second joint. She had never been sent from the dinner table. How she had wished for someone to misbehave with.

Ceil's mother and father were both teachers; serious, dedicated, no-nonsense people who tithed to their church, drove an eight-year-old car, and never played cards for money. Her mother favored dresses of flowered rayon or nylon, bought a size too large to allow for added poundage when it came, as it surely would. Her father wore brown trousers and a jacket of greenish tweed or, on special occasions, a navy blue suit that she knew would last him all his days. They were wonderful people. She loved them with all her heart. They, in turn, worshiped her and, though they tried to conceal the fact, never quite got over the fact that they'd produced her. Her mother, who was not otherwise given to jesting, used to say that the gypsies must have brought her, for she bore no resemblance to them, or to anyone else in either of their families. They, the least vain of people, had one vanity, and her name was Ceil. Long-legged, narrow-waisted, with a luminous complexion, she was not beautiful but she had something.

Henry had asked for her hand in the old-fashioned way. She had warned her parents what they could expect after the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding had been dealt with. Despite this preparation, her father had done something terribly discomfiting to her.

“I don't know,” her father kept saying, stalking around the living room with his hands locked behind his back. “I just don't know.”

Finally, she'd said, “Don't know what, Daddy?” feeling tears of exasperation building behind her eyes. She hadn't been absolutely positive that she wanted to marry Henry until her father kept up his litany of “I don't knows.” Then, in a flash, she knew that Henry was the man for her.

“They're talking about a draft,” Ceil's father warned. “Things don't look good in Southeast Asia, not good at all.” It was just before the outbreak of Vietnam.

“Henry's too old to be drafted,” Ceil said. “Much too old.” Henry was twenty-nine.

Ceil had never actually slept with a man before Henry. There'd been plenty of jockeying in back seats, on beach blankets, lots of flashing skin, unlikely bulges. But no actual skin-to-skin stuff. When the real thing came along, the act of making love leisurely came as a surprise. It was both what it was cracked up to be, and not. Henry was tender and considerate, when what it turned out she was looking for was Tarzan. Or Don Quixote.

As a girl, Ceil had been an avid reader of sex manuals. She and her friends spent many a Saturday afternoon circling the right stores, hesitating, darting in and out, reluctant to be the first inside. They giggled over the pictures, memorizing the page numbers of particularly revelatory ones. There was even a section devoted to describing ways to drive men wild with your lips, your tongue, even your teeth. One of Ceil's friends, whose father was a dentist, went crazy over the teeth section, which was maddeningly silent on the question of her braces.

An older girl, with violet eyes and breasts of startling dimensions, boasted a penchant for vodka and older men with mustaches, and had connections in Manhattan and Paris, if you could believe everything she said. She whispered to Ceil that she, personally, knew of more than one hundred ways to perform oral sex.

Oral sex? You mean kissing? Ceil said. Oh no, the purple-eyed siren said, opening the book. That wasn't what she meant. This is what she meant.

The memory of those sex manuals went with Ceil to her marriage bed. But Henry, after a few sorties resulting in a week-long crick in his neck, called it quits and returned to his conservative ways.

Then, on their first Christmas, Henry bought Ceil a red-lace teddy, cut high on the thighs and low on the chest. He presented it to her somewhat shamefacedly, not wanting her to take his present amiss. Ceil, delighted by what she took to be an unleashing of Henry's hitherto rather restrained sexuality, threw her arms around him and pushed them both toward the couch, the nearest thing to hand. But Henry consulted his watch and said, “If we're going to be at your parents' house by noon, we better get going, Ceil.”