Peaceable Kingdom (14 page)

All week the house has been full of visiting friends, teenagers hired to help out, carpenters converting part of the barn into a studio for Christine. It is her wedding present from John, for which she feels so grateful that she refrains from mentioning that the construction should have been finished weeks ago. And no wonder. All but one of the carpenters were on a perpetual coffee break at her kitchen table, smoking Camels and flirting with the catering girls, though the one the girls liked was the handsome one, Robert, who was never at the table but out working in the barn.

Christine began taking refuge in the studio, watching Robert work. A few days ago, she invited Robert to the wedding. Now she looks for him and sees him standing not far from Stevie.

Putting her weight on her good leg, Christine leans against John. “Sit down,” he says. “Take it easy.” He has been saying this since she got pregnant, more often since the bite. But if she greets the guests sitting, she will just have to talk about that. She tells herself that none of it—the adrenaline, the tetanus shot, the pain—has in fact been harmful. She wants desperately to protect the baby, though in the beginning she argued against having it. John said he understood, but she had to realize: Stevie was a baby for so long. It won’t be like that again.

No one here has met Stevie’s dad, who went back to Philadelphia when Stevie was fifteen months old. One thing Christine likes about being settled is that she got tired of explaining. Describing how Stevie’s dad left right after learning that something was really wrong with Stevie, she was often uncertain how angry or self-righteous or sympathetic to sound.

When Stevie was two she had moved here to the country, found a rented house and a woman to watch him while she supported them, substitute-teaching art. Evenings, she would have long, loud conversations from across the house with Stevie, who couldn’t yet sit up. That was when she met John. John has a small construction company; he built the house they live in. When Christine and Stevie moved in, she quit teaching, put Stevie in a special day program in Pittsfield, and was able to paint full time. Stevie loves John, and signs of Christine and John’s success are everywhere: the house, the garden, the nail-polish-red Ferrari that Annette, Christine’s art dealer, has just this moment driven up from New York.

Annette wears white pedal pushers and an enormous white man’s shirt; her leopard high heels sink into the lawn so that pulling them out gives her walk a funny bounce. She plows through a circle surrounding Christine and John, first hugs, then briskly shakes hands with them both, then looks down at Christine’s bandage and says, “I hope they crucified Rin Tin Tin.” Christine wonders how literally Annette means this; she remembers a recent art piece, some sort of ecological statement involving a crucified stuffed coyote.

“The dog’s under observation,” says Christine. “The doctor called the town sheriff—”

“Observation!” Annette says. “At the end of a loaded gun. Well, I don’t know. Why would anyone want a dog? Remember when Wegman’s dog got lost and he put up signs on the lampposts and of course the signs got recognized and taken down—they’re worth fortunes now.”

“Did he ever find the dog?” John asks.

“Of course not,” says Annette.

“That’s fabulous,” says John. Christine has often noticed how quickly Annette makes people sound like her, use her words—even John, who likes Annette, but not for the reasons Annette thinks. He isn’t fooled by her asking him for business advice; he knows she has a perfectly good, high-powered accountant of her own.

Annette wedges herself between John and Christine, leans toward Christine, and says, “Let’s see the new studio.”

But John and Christine are watching a tall man with Donahue-platinum hair bounding toward them across the lawn. It’s the minister, Hal Koch. “Like in the cola,” he said when they went to see him in his study; Christine thought he must say that often, a good man guiding strangers in their choice between a soda and a dirty word. She’d wanted to go to a justice of the peace, elope without leaving town. But John wants something more formal, guests and God as witnesses that now she is really his. John has a religious streak, inherited no doubt from his mother, a wraith-like woman in an orange dress and wooden yoga beads, now edging timidly toward Stevie.

Without even registering Annette, Hal Koch shakes hands with John, then Christine. He says, “Terrific place!” Within a few seconds he is questioning John about construction costs. John answers patiently, though Christine can tell it is driving him mad; it is a measure of his sweetness and patience that he will not even let himself catch her eye. In fact, she likes it that this sort of talk can take place, that people know John, respect him, know what to say. Christine had been grateful for this in Hal Koch’s study, because John and the minister kept quietly talking about John’s business while Stevie was switching the overhead light on and off as fast as he could.

When Stevie finally stopped, Hal had said, “He’s a beautiful kid.”

“I’ve learned a lot from him,” John said. “I feel like I’m privileged to know him.”

This is how John stands up for Stevie, by telling the truth: there is more to Stevie than anyone suspects. But there is also the way John says “know him” and a funny thing he does with his eyes; she has seen him do it so many times and never has figured out how exactly he tells people without a word that Stevie isn’t his. Everyone seems to catch on, even Hal Koch, who redirected his compliment to Christine. It isn’t that John is disowning Stevie, distancing himself beyond ill luck or faulty genes. He just wants extra credit. And really, he deserves it. People who admire John for taking on Stevie can’t imagine what it’s meant. It’s partly why this wedding—why John and Christine’s life—makes the guests feel so good that a little dog bite can’t touch it.

John and Christine and the minister walk over to the rose arbor. Everyone gathers round. The guests have nearly fallen silent when John holds up his hand and walks over and gets Stevie and pulls him under the arbor with them. He leans Stevie back against his stomach and joins his arms in a V down Stevie’s chest. Stevie looks pleased. A wave of emotion rises up from the guests, a tide of pleasure and sympathy. And suddenly Christine hates them. It’s not that she doesn’t value their kindness but that she will scream if one more person, however genuinely, wishes her well.

Of course her nerves are raw: three months pregnant, the heat, the nonstop achy drumbeat of blood in her leg—and on top of that, getting married. She is glad that the service is short, the bare-bones civil ceremony, glad that it all goes by very fast and in a kind of fog. In his study, Hal Koch had asked if they wanted a prayer or a poem—he said lots of couples chose poems. He put this question to Christine, though the wedding was John’s idea. Christine said, “How about the Twenty-third Psalm?” and there had been a funny moment when the two men fell silent and looked at her until she laughed and said, “Joke.”

With evening, the perfumy scent of the tall white lilies fills the entire garden. This is the worst time of year. It used to be taken for granted that people go crazy around midsummer night and stay up all night in the grip of unruly dreams and desires. All day the sun gives the world a hallucinatory buckle, and even in the evening, after a shower, heat seems to keep shimmering behind your eyes like the ocean’s roll after a voyage. No one could look at the trees and the flowers and not know that this is their peak.

The air is humid and sweet, and the green of the grass is the brightest it has been all day. Christine feels suddenly dizzy. She’s sure she can get away with a glass of white wine, but a few of the guests seem less certain, and before they move on to the lemon tarragon chicken and spinach salad, their glances stray accusingly toward her glass. John helps Stevie fill his plate. Christine sees Robert walking across the lawn toward the studio. There is something she wants to tell him: the reason she’d stopped at that barn sale was that they were selling a work sink she knew would be perfect for the studio. Maybe if the sink is still there, Robert could drive by and look at it.

Inside the studio, Robert leans against a sawhorse, slowly smoking a joint. He holds it out to Christine, and though she knows it is madness getting stoned at your wedding, with all its social obligations, and probably terrible for the baby, she takes it, takes a drag. Soon she feels uncomfortable standing, looks around for something to lean on, and nearly backs into the table saw before Robert points and yells, “Yo!”

“That’s all I need,” says Christine. “A little something to match the dog tooth marks in my leg.”

“It’s strange about weddings,” says Robert. “I’ve noticed. People tend to get seriously accident-prone. One of my brothers got married with his arm in a sling, and a cousin got married in a neck brace.”

“At the same time?” asks Christine. “What happened?”

“Different times.” Robert laughs. “I don’t know. My brother was hunting, fell out of a tree. The cousin I think was in a car wreck. How’s your leg?”

“Fine,” Christine says, and then for some reason says, “Really? Really, it hurts.”

Robert says, “I’ll take a look at it for you.” His voice has in it an unmistakable flirty edge, and Christine is pleasantly shocked, not so much by the sexual suggestion—which he can only make because he is younger and working for her and this is her wedding day and nothing can possibly come of it—as by the intimacy of his daring to joke about so serious a subject as her dog bite. In some ways it presumes more, makes some bolder claim than John’s unfailing solicitousness, and, by distracting her, works better to reassure her and dull the pain. She fears that Robert will ask what happened exactly and that she’ll get halfway through the story and stop. But what he says is, “Was that the barn sale out on 7, a couple houses past the Carvel?”

“That’s the one,” Christine says.

“I stopped there,” says Robert. “Believe it or not. They were selling a work sink—big slabs of bluestone, copper fixtures, enormous, you could see it from the road. It will be great for this place. It was only a hundred and twenty-five bucks. If you guys don’t want to pay for it, we can call it a wedding present from me. This must have been after you were there. There was no sign of a dog. I’m going back with some friends this week to help load it onto the pickup…”

Robert rattles on, clearly worried about spending John’s money, and so doesn’t see Christine’s eyes fill with tears. One thing she’d thought as she stopped at the sale was how good the sink would look in the studio, and the other—she knew this and blamed herself at the moment the dog ran toward her and even thought this was
why
she was getting bitten—was the pleasure of telling Robert she’d found it; they had been talking a lot about sinks. This is another part of the story she’s told no one. She feels as if she has been caught in some dreadful O. Henry plot, some “Gift of the Magi” sort of thing, except that couple were newlyweds and in it together and on their way up. The implications of this happening to her and Robert are in every way less simple.

All week, she has been saying that she fears the finishing of the studio because it means she must start working again. But that, she realizes now, isn’t the reason at all. She feels as if just telling Robert that she, too, stopped for the sink would add up to more than it is, to some sort of declaration, an irrevocable act—though most likely he would just see it as your ordinary, everyday believe-it-or-not.

“Thank you,” she says. Even this comes out more heartfelt than she’d planned. She is so uncertain of what to say next that she’s almost relieved when Annette walks in.

“What a space!” Annette says. “God, I could fit my whole loft in that corner.”

“Robert built most of it,” Christine says and is instantly sorry. Annette wheels on Robert with that fleeting but intense curiosity—part affected, part sincere—that art-world people seem to have for anyone who actually does anything. As Annette looks at Robert, Christine wishes she’d given her the lightning studio tour, once around and out the door—she might not have even
seen
him. But isn’t this what Christine wants, some version of the appreciation she desires when Annette comes to look at her work?

Robert looks directly at Annette and smiles. Annette gives him her three-second downtown grin, but so good-humoredly and with such invitation that a wave of jealousy, loneliness, and embarrassment overcomes Christine. Why should she feel that way now? She, after all, is the bride. Her being the bride is probably why Robert sees no disloyalty in turning so easily from her to Annette.

“How
are
you?” Annette asks Christine, meaning—it’s clear from her tone—the pregnancy, not the bite. She’s trying hard to focus, to not let her sudden interest in Robert make her exclude Christine. But she is only making things worse, making Christine feel damaged, out of the running, like some guy with a war wound in a Hemingway novel.

“All right,” Christine says. “The dog bite didn’t help.”

“God,” Annette says. “I just remembered. That’s what happened to Jo-Jo the Dog Boy’s mother. She got bitten by a dog when she was pregnant. Remember Jo-Jo the Dog Boy?”

“I sure do,” Robert says. “Poor guy. The real-life Chewy-Chewbacca.” Both he and Annette seem pleased to have found this bit of trivia knowledge in common.

“Great,” says Christine. “Thanks a lot. That’s just what I need to hear.”

“Chris
tine
,” says Annette. “No one believes that stuff anymore.”

“What are we talking about?” Robert says. The fact of Christine’s pregnancy seems to have just dawned on him. “Double congratulations!” he says. “I wondered why you guys would bother getting married after all this time.”

He can’t resist looking at Christine’s belly. That he feels free to do this—and that he hadn’t known, though she’d assumed that everyone knew—reminds Christine of what it’s like to be pregnant: a secret for so long, and, even when it is obvious, still a secret—all those secret shifts and movements no one else can feel. When she was pregnant with Stevie, that summer in New York, she used to walk down the street and feel herself skimming over the pavement, encased with Stevie in a bubble, one of those membraned, gelatinous eggs out of Hieronymus Bosch. That is how she feels now, that this bubble containing her and the child is hovering slightly above the studio floor, rising toward the window, then floating down again, near enough to see Robert and Annette moving closer by millimeters. Suddenly she is stung with envy, though not of Robert and Annette or their lives—which, she tells herself, lack everything she treasures most about her own life. She feels that her life is closing down; it has always been closed down.