Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (2 page)

Edgar looked at Fern. They both had red eyes. He said, “What about my book?”

“You made two thousand dollars on it. I don’t know what else to do,” she said.

“I’m going out,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

—

Edgar went down the grassy path to his dark green coupe and drove away from Fern. The night was warm and the air half salt. Fern was left with chocolate cake on plates and three children who had been waiting all day to celebrate. He was left with the feeling that his life was being carved out, that his expected contribution was a shell, not substance. Both Fern and Edgar remembered the
same thing: seven months earlier and after almost ten years of work on his novel, Edgar had sent it off to an agent. Two weeks after that, with shaving cream still on half his face, he had come running down the stairs, beating Fern and Cricket to the phone. Edgar had said, “Hello?” and then, “Uh-huh yes okay wow thank you,” like it was a single word.

“He has an offer,” he had said to Fern and Cricket. “He has an offer for my novel.” Cricket had been the one to cry first. Fern and Edgar had both knelt so that the three of them were the same height and they had put their heads together and wrapped their arms around each other. The twins had jumped aboard the huddle.

“It’s not a ton of money,” he said.

“Who cares about money,” Fern had said. “Who fucking cares about money.” The twins had looked at their mother in shock. “Sorry,” she had said. “I’m just excited.” Cricket had been more proud of both of her parents in that moment than any in her life: her mother knew how to swear and her father had written a book.

“Who fucking cares about money,” Cricket had echoed, sensing that in this happy moment nothing she could do would get her in trouble.

—

On this night, the woman from the store looked happy—she had little cheeses on a plate, she had a double-tall glass of gin. She had on white bell-bottom jeans and a white tank top with thin straps and no bra and high platform shoes, which she should have, as a feminist, disagreed with, but there she was, inches above the heads of the men in the room. She looked superior. She was superior. She popped a cheese in her mouth. It was cheap and that did not seem to bother her. The room was full of grass smoke and cigarette smoke and fat with bodies and they were all wearing very little
clothing because it was the season for it, and hot outside, hot inside and all the drinks would have been better with mint, if they had had any. In a few hours everyone would strip and run down the path to the beach, throw their naked bodies into the slosh of the Atlantic Ocean.

For Glory, this party was like all the other summer parties that had ever been, except that Edgar showed up.

“You came,” she said.

“Listen. I’m married.”

“Obviously. Everyone is married by now.” Glory was tall and had the ragged lips of someone who’d been kissing all night in a cold car, in winter.

They talked in the drone of the party. They did not mention jobs. Money was another thing they did not talk about.

A leather-vested man with sideburns to his jawbone and rose-colored sunglasses, booze-breathed and too close to Glory, said, “You look hip. I’ve got a stash in my van.”

Glory sidestepped him and moved closer to Edgar. “I’ve got a stash in my bra. Oh, wait, no bra. Guess it must be somewhere else.” She winked.

“You shouldn’t drink. It’s bad for the soul,” the man said.

“Men could stand to be reinvented. Men are due for an update,” she said. “But you seem okay,” she told Edgar. “I like you.” She looked him over—he was all sinew and blue eyes, his day in the sun made obvious by the color in his cheeks.

“Thank you,” he said. She made him feel small in a way that he liked.

“Don’t worry. I’m married too.” Glory pointed out her husband who was sitting in the corner wearing a button-down shirt with a big collar, high-waist brown pants and loafers and smoking a long, thin cigarette. He looked like someone trying to sell
something for less than it was worth. She half loved him for it. He was real, at least. Dumbish, and no way would he be there when a revolution swept them all away, but honest and fair. He was probably talking about human evolution, which was one of the topics Glory had approved for social situations. That and political corruption in southerly nations, or food. He was not allowed to discuss anything about Glory or her family, his family. Their wedding was unmentionable. Everyone knew that they were husband and wife and that this had been a decision made by other people and that Glory tolerated while John waited at the gates of her broad and lush paradise. It was obvious, to look at them.

At 11:00 p.m., drunk and stoned, Glory said, “Do you want to get some air?” and Edgar took Glory out to his sports car, which was either a brave or disgusting car for someone who had just claimed to believe in socialism. Glory admired the pale blond leather seats and the wooden gearshift.

“You’ve never had an affair, have you?” she said.

He said, “I’m sorry. I should go home.”

She leaned over and kissed him well, like it was enough, not a short and irritating detour on the way to the good part. Edgar had never kissed someone he did not love.

He pulled his head back and closed his eyes.

Glory looked out the window at the party. Everyone inside was enjoying the trap they had set for themselves. They were in the process of making the exact mistakes they had hoped for. Edgar saw John’s leg in the window, in the same chair he’d been in all night. There were people near him. Smoke swirled around him. “I worry about him like a mother,” Glory said. “I always hope he’s gotten enough to eat and made friends.”

“My wife—” Edgar started, but she interrupted him.

“I shouldn’t have brought up spouses again. Let’s not.” She
reached out to his thigh. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” she said, teasing him.

“I’m feeling very confused right now.”

Then a knock, and Glory and Edgar looked out his side to see who it was. A woman with long pale hair that looked like it had been carefully matted and a headband. “Are you leaving? I can’t find a place to park.” It was too dark to see the woman’s face, but Glory knew the voice immediately because it was her mother’s. Her mother, double-parked in her comfortable luxury station wagon and clothes a few years out of date that even Glory was too old to wear. She looked like she was in a play. “Mother,” Glory said. “Mother, mother, mother? You can’t be here.” Glory’s mother edged away. The outfit was worse than Glory could have imagined: her midriff was exposed (and very perfect, which made it all the worse) and her skirt was a mere strip of denim. She had silver anklets and no shoes on, and hers were the scrubbed and painted feet of a princess.

Glory’s mother recognized her daughter at the same instant and, without trying to defend her right to stay or offer an excuse, she began to run. She passed her own car, the lights still on and the door open, and she ran. Glory ran after her and Edgar ran after Glory. They rounded a corner, sprinted the straightaway. Glory’s mother was surprisingly fast. She took another turn down a dirt road and Glory let her go. She watched her little mother whip away like a rabbit and Glory collapsed onto someone’s lawn and Edgar fell beside her. They panted. They started to laugh. They had each hated their parents but had forgotten the surprising pleasure of being embarrassed by them. It made Glory feel young. Like they were living on the inside and the grownups were on the outside, and she half wanted to thank her mother.

“This is already better than other affairs,” Glory said.

Edgar thought of Fern in their bed with their children nearby. She would be reading a book and checking her watch. She would be waiting to talk about a future that had been suddenly upended. Maybe she would tell him that she was willing to give it all up, the houses and the cars and the comfort. Or maybe she was waiting to thank him for being the man he had always tried to keep from becoming. He felt like an impossibility—how could he do what was needed and continue to exist as himself? To Fern, Edgar silently said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m almost completely yours,” and he leaned over and kissed Glory. She kissed him back, reached up and tried to take his glasses off.

“No,” he said, grabbing them. “I’m too blind.”

“Four eyes,” she teased, but he did not give in. He only took his glasses off to sleep. He felt unmoored enough without being sightless too.

Eventually, they walked back. Edgar pulled his car out and Glory parked her mother’s and turned it off. She put the keys under the seat and left it unlocked and then she got into his passenger seat and said, “I’m taking you home. I’m taking you home and I might not ever let you leave.” Later, he would look back at the unraveling and see that this instant was the point of departure. Edgar decided: once. And just like that, he set his life aside. He set his husband-self, his father-self, his son-self, aside. He was all body, all sensation. His heart was a flapping wing. He was simultaneously jealous of himself for what he was about to do and scattershot with regret. They drove a mile to her house, grey shingles and a big porch, a thousand paperbacks on the shelves. The bedroom looked out at the windward side of the island where waves battered and crashed.

As Glory undressed him, Edgar felt like he had a new body. He appreciated her hip bones and shoulders because he was a man
with good taste and these were beautiful prizes, but the stronger drug was the version of himself he was meeting. This woman had never in her whole life, in the history of everything she knew, run her hand up this chest. He was the entire westward migration, the whole untrodden prairie, the shaggy peaks, the snow, and the cold sloshing Pacific on the other end.

Glory knew what he was feeling because she had felt it before. She also knew it never lasted. Everyone became familiar. There was no time, pretty soon, to bother kissing the ankles, the knots of blooded veins underneath the wrist. It was neck, ears, lips. Even lovers got tired. They had families. They had nothing to wear for the big fundraiser. They had a million things to do before school started and husbands or wives to lie to and love, and the empty mouth of nighttime.

When they were done, Glory put two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them, handed one over. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Cambridge.”

“No shit. Me too. Then we can do this again sometime.”

A beat of terror in Edgar’s pulse. This woman would not vanish into the summertime haze.

“How do you deal with the guilt?” Edgar asked. His heart was pumping it out all through his system.
Fern
, his heart seemed to say,
Fern, Fern
.

“Eh. I make it worth his while.”

John came home later and slept on the couch without bothering to knock on the bedroom door first.

Edgar drove back to his summer family in the dawn, the twin highs of sex and grass wearing off together. A doe leapt out of the blackberry brush and stood in the middle of the road, looking at Edgar. Still as a photograph. She watched him, her eyes reflecting
the headlights. It was too late for Edgar to go unseen, to slide back in without a mark.

He told his drowsing wife he loved her and it was true. Things were blooming outside that had not been blooming a week ago and other things died on the branch that had been luscious. Edgar grabbed Fern hard around her waist. She was his wife; their pleasures, their troubles, belonged to both of them. Edgar wanted to implicate her.

Fern lost her nightgown easily. Edgar was a hot wind and everything loose was swept up. Fern bent. She felt as if she was just meeting this man, that she was in bed with a foreigner. She pulled her head up like a person coming out of the water. “Edgar?” she asked, looking for magnetic north.

“It’s me,” he said. “Who else?” He glanced around the bed, because he’d felt it too, a new presence.

“No,” she told him. “No one else. I got confused. Where were you all night?” she asked.

“Just a party.”

“What party? I’m sorry that I called your mother. I’m sorry we need money to survive.” But her eyes were not sorry. Her eyes said,
Time to grow up now. Time to earn and support.

Edgar suddenly felt hungry, very hungry. “Do we have any blueberries? I could make pancakes.” Edgar was putting on his pants. He did not have time for a shirt. “Let’s squeeze orange juice,” he said. “I’m in the mood for fresh.” The sun came over the hill and sent a razor of light into the room.

“I don’t think we have oranges.”

“We don’t?” As if this made no sense.

“It’s not one of the things I buy.”

“The
only
thing you don’t buy,” he scoffed. All around them
was the evidence of her material desire: the fat headboard of the bed, holding her up; the rug from a faraway, sandy nation carried by camel and freighter; the pale butter-colored sofa with thin, modern arms that Fern had had made for this particular spot, to fit the dimensions of the stained glass above it; the stained glass itself, three deer in tall green grass, their long necks bent towards sleep. The modern house, all glass and view, and outside, grass and water.

“Don’t pretend you don’t care about any of this,” she said.

Edgar ignored her and went into the kitchen and assembled the ingredients, began to measure and pour, a mess accumulating quickly around him.

The children woke up to the sound, stood in the doorframe, their father in a sunlit stream filled with flour dust and their mother watching him with narrow eyes, as if he had arrived without invitation. Edgar said, “Pancakes!” and the twins were gleeful, but Cricket saw how angry her parents were, felt the treacherous space between their two poles and refused to enter the room or eat the breakfast. She sensed that something big had been upset.

—

They packed up a day early and the children cried all the way home, flat furious to be taken away. The ferry ride back to the mainland was pain itself, their beings and their bodies pulled in opposite directions. “Promise that someday we’ll stay on the Vineyard all year,” the twins pleaded to their parents. “We’ll go to the one-room schoolhouse and we’ll swim even when it’s too cold to swim.” Why didn’t they? Fern wondered. There was no good reason not to, except that their house was made of wood and glass and they would have frozen by December. Edgar thought of the house, the sea, the island and the fact that he only got to love the place because he could afford to. If he became Keating Steel, they could come every summer of their
lives and their children’s children would grow up with the same saltsmell in their rooms as they fell asleep, the same blackberry stains on their fingers, the same memorized feeling of utter peace after having jumped into the cove and stayed under as long as their lungs would allow. And if he did not become Keating Steel? Edgar could not imagine selling the house, not only because it would have been devastating (to think of telling the children made his throat cinch) but because it seemed impossible—the place was not real estate but body part, heart part, something beyond ownership.