The Pilot's Wife (18 page)

When Mattie goes to bed, Kathryn’s forced good cheer begins to wane. She stays up late, calculating grades. She calls the London number at midnight, five in the morning in London, and is frustrated to listen to the phone ringing in the crew apartment with no one to pick it up. In an hour, Jack will have to leave for the airport for his flight to Amsterdam and Nairobi. She begins to worry then that something serious may have happened to him. For a while, she vacillates between anger and concern, until she falls asleep on the couch with her grade book and calculator on her lap.

He calls at quarter to one. Quarter to six, his time. His voice wakes her with punctuated bursts.

— Kathryn, what is it? What’s happened? Are you all right?

— Where were you? she asks groggily, sitting up.

— Here, he says. — I was here. I just checked the voice mail.

— Why didn’t you answer the phone?

— I had the ringer turned off. I was exhausted and had to sleep. I think I might be coming down with a flu.

She hears the congestion in his voice. Airliners are notorious breeding grounds for colds.

— It’s a good thing it wasn’t an emergency, she says, allowing a note of pique to seep into her voice.

— Look, I’m really sorry. But I was so tired, I thought it was more important to sleep. So what is it? he asks. — What’s the news?

— I can’t tell you. Mattie wants to tell you herself.

— It’s nothing bad?

— No, no. It’s great.

— Give me a hint.

— No, I can’t. I promised.

— I don’t suppose you want to wake her up now?

— No, she has a final in the morning.

— I’ll call her from the air, he says. — I’ll time it so I call when she wakes up.

Kathryn rubs her eyes. There is a small silence over the phone. She would like to see her husband’s face right now. She would like to crawl into the bed in the crew apartment with him. She has never seen the crew apartment. Sterile, he has described it. Like a suite of hotel rooms.

— So, she says.

— Kathryn, I really am sorry. I’ll get the airline to get a system that bypasses the voice mail if it’s an emergency. I’ll get a beeper.

She sighs into the phone. — Jack, do you still love me? For a moment he is silent.

— Why do you ask?

— I don’t know, she says. — I guess I haven’t heard you say it in a while.

— Of course I love you, he says. He clears his throat. — I really love you. Now go to sleep. I’ll call at seven.

But he doesn’t hang up, and neither does she.

— Kathryn?

— I’m here.

— What’s wrong?

She doesn’t know precisely what is wrong. She has only a vague feeling of vulnerability, a heightened sense of having been left alone for too many days. Perhaps it is only being exhausted herself.

— I’m cool, she says, borrowing Mattie’s expression of the moment.

— You’re cool, Jack says.

— Yeah, whatever.

She can almost see her husband smiling.

— Later, he says, and hangs up.

— Later, she says, holding the lifeless telephone in her hand.

T
HEY
MOVED
FROM
ROOM
TO
ROOM
,
DUSTING
, VACU-uming, washing tiles, hauling trash, making beds, putting laundry into hampers. Robert worked at these tasks like a man, she noticed: sloppy with the beds, good in the kitchen, washing the floor there as though he were punishing it. With Robert in her bedroom and in Mattie’s, potentially dangerous objects were defused: A shirt flung over a chair was just a shirt that Robert tossed onto the floor with a bundle of other laundry. Bed linens were bed linens, in need of washing like everything else. He picked up discarded papers in Jack’s office and, without examining them, as Kathryn would have had to do, put them all into a drawer and closed it. In Mattie’s room, Kathryn felt Robert’s scrutiny, sensing that he was afraid it would be in that room she would falter, but she surprised him and herself by being particularly speedy and efficient. Even more stoically, she had helped Robert take the Christmas tree down, both of them dragging the dried-out tree through the kitchen and out the back hallway, the tree shedding its needles on the floorboards and the tiles. By the time they were finished with the cleaning, the milky swirls in the sky had given way to low, lead-stained clots.

“It’s supposed to snow,” he said, spraying out the inside of the kitchen sink with the hose.

She opened the cupboard beneath the sink and put away the bathroom cleaner, the Pine Sol, the Comet. She rinsed her hands in the spray from the hose and dried them on a dish towel.

“I’m hungry,” she said, feeling the mild satisfaction that always came from having a clean house. Like having had a bath.

“Good,” he said, turning. “I’ve got lobsters in the car.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“From Ingerbretson’s,” he explained. “I picked them up on my way here. I couldn’t resist.”

“I might not have liked lobster,” she said.

“I saw the picks and crackers in the silverware drawer.” “Observant,” she said.

“Occasionally.”

But standing there, she suddenly had the sense that Robert Hart was always observant. Always watching.

Robert cooked the lobsters while Kathryn set the table in the front room. A dry snow shower had begun, and swirls of snow-flakes fell silently against the glass of the windows. Kathryn opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. She had opened one and was about to open the other when she remembered that Robert didn’t drink. She tried to put the two bottles back into the fridge without Robert’s noticing.

“Please,” Robert said from the stove. “Drink the beer. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, it would bother me more if you didn’t.”

Kathryn looked at the clock: 12:20. Time out of time. Once again, the envelope began to open. It was a Friday. Normally, she would be at school, fifth period. Normally, she would not be drinking a beer. Although it
was
Christmas vacation, she thought; she was theoretically not due back until the second of January. She had given no thought to how she would manage in the classroom. An image of students moving in a hallway rose to the surface, but she banished it.

At five minutes before noon, Robert had turned off all the ringers on the telephones. There was nothing so urgent it couldn’t wait an hour or two, he had said, and she had agreed.

In that spirit, she had covered the table near the windows in the front room with a red flowered cloth, the gaiety of the cloth incongruous against the somber sky outside. Robert put on music: B.B. King. Kathryn wished she had flowers. But what exactly was she celebrating? she wondered, feeling vaguely guilty. Having survived the last eleven days? Having cleaned the house? She set utensils, bowls for the shells, bread, melted butter, and a thick roll of paper towel on the table. Robert walked into the front room from the kitchen bearing wet, slippery plates of lobsters. There were water spots on the front of his shirt.

“I’m famished,” he said, setting the plates down and sitting across from her.

She examined the lobster in front of her. And it was then that the swift, sharp shock of memory once again assailed her. She looked up quickly and then out the window. She brought a hand to her mouth.

“What is it?” Robert asked.

She shook her head quickly, side to side. She held herself still, locked in an image, not daring to move either forward or backward for fear of the crevices. She breathed in deeply, let her breath out, laid her arms on the table.

“I’ve just had a memory,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Jack and me.”

“Here?”

She nodded.

“Doing this?”

It was like this, she wanted to say, but not like this. It was early summer, and the screens were on. Mattie was at a friend’s house, and it was later in the day, nearer four o’clock or five. The light was unique, she remembered, shimmery and green like sea glass. They had had champagne. What were they celebrating? She couldn’t remember. Possibly nothing, possibly themselves. She had wanted to make love, she remembered, and so had he, but neither of them would sacrifice a hot boiled lobster, and so they had waited with a kind of delicious tension between them. She had sucked the legs of her lobster with exaggerated kisses, and Jack had laughed and said she was a tease, which she enjoyed. Being a tease. She seldom did that.

“I’m sorry,” Robert said. “I should have known. I’ll take these into the kitchen.”

“No,” she said quickly, stopping his hand as he reached for her plate. “No, you couldn’t have known. And anyway, my life is filled with these. Hundreds of little memories that catch me off guard. They’re like mines in a field, waiting to detonate. Honestly, I’d like to have a lobotomy.”

He moved his hand from under hers and laid it over her fingers. He held her hand in the way a man might hold the hand of a woman friend, waiting for a small crisis to blow over. His hand felt warm, because Kathryn’s had suddenly gone cold. All her memories did this to her; they made the blood leave her hands and feet. Like fear did.

“You’ve been good to me,” she said.

Time passed. How much? She could no longer gauge seconds, minutes. She closed her eyes. The beer had made her slightly sleepy. She wanted to turn her hand over, to have him touch her palm. To slide his hand along her palm and up her wrist. She imagined she could feel the warmth of his hand traveling along the underside of her arm, past the elbow.

Her fingers under Robert’s went slack, and she felt the tension drain from her body. It was erotic, but not, that loosening, that giving up. Her eyes seemed to have unfocused themselves, and she couldn’t see Robert or anything else properly, only a sense of light from the windows. That light, diffuse and dimmed, created an aura of languid ease. And she thought that she ought to feel disturbed for thinking of Robert and herself in that way, but a kind of leniency seemed to have descended upon them with the haze, and she felt merely vague and drifting. So much so that when Robert, perhaps in an effort to bring her back, tightened the pressure on her hand, she felt jolted into the present moment.

“You’re like a kind of priest,” she said.

He laughed. “No, I’m not.”

“I think that’s how I’ve come to see you.”

“Father Robert,” he said, smiling.

And then she thought: Who was to know if this man’s hand traveled up the inside of her arm? Who was to care? Weren’t all of the rules now broken? Hadn’t Mattie said so?

The silence of the steady snowfall enclosed them. She could see that he was struggling to understand precisely where she was and why, but she couldn’t help him, because she herself didn’t know. The front room was always slightly too cold in winter, she thought, and she shivered once in spite of the steam she could hear rushing into the radiators. Outside, the sky was becoming so dark it might have been mistaken for dusk.

He withdrew his hand, leaving hers uncovered. She felt exposed.

She drank another bottle of beer. Between them, they ate all of the bread and the lobsters. In the middle of the meal, Robert got up and changed the CD. From B.B. King to Brahms.

“You have wonderful music,” he said when he returned. “You’re interested in music?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“Piano, especially. Was the music Jack’s or yours?” he asked, sitting down.

She cocked her head, not certain she understood what he meant.

“Usually the CDs and the sound system are the passion of either the husband or the wife, but not both,” he explained. “At least in my experience.”

She thought about this.

“Mine,” she said. “Jack was tone-deaf. But he liked rock and roll. And some of Mattie’s music — for the beat, I think. What about you?”

“Mine, too,” he said. “Although my ex-wife kept the sound system and most of the CDs. One of my sons has inherited an ear. He plays the saxophone at school. The other one seems to have no interest.”

“Mattie plays the clarinet. I tried to get her to play the piano,” Kathryn said, “but it was torture.”

Kathryn thought about all of the hours she had spent with Mattie at the piano, Mattie clearly not wanting to be there, exaggerating her nearly pathological reluctance by having obsessively to scratch her back where she couldn’t quite reach, or adjust the bench, or take an inordinately long time finding her fingering. It was an effort just to get Mattie to play a song once, never mind actually practice the piece several times. Often, Kathryn had ended up having to leave the room in a barely restrained rage, at which point Mattie would begin to cry. Before the first year was out, Kathryn could see that if she insisted Mattie keep on with the lessons, their relationship would be in tatters.

Now, of course, Mattie was almost never without her music — in her room, in the car, and plugged into headphones as if they delivered oxygen through the ears.

“You play?” Kathryn asked.

“Used to.”

She studied him and added a small detail to a portrait that had been forming since the day he’d entered her house. It was what one did with people, Kathryn thought, form portraits, fill in missing brush strokes, wait for form and color to materialize.

He dipped a piece of tail in butter and brought it dripping to his mouth.

“The night before Jack left for his trip,” Kathryn said, “he went into Mattie’s room and asked her if she wanted to go to a Celtics game with him on Friday night. A friend had given him really good seats. What I want to know is this: Would a man ask his daughter to go with him to a Celtics game if he planned to kill himself before he got back?”

Robert wiped his chin and thought a minute.

“Would a man who had really good seats to a Celtics game kill himself before he got to see the game?”

Her eyes widened.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “No. It doesn’t make any sense, not in any realm of human nature I’ve ever heard of.”

“And Jack told me to call Alfred,” Kathryn said. “He told me to have Alfred come on Friday to fix the leaky shower. If Jack wasn’t planning on coming back, he wouldn’t have done that. Not in the way he did it, almost as an afterthought as he walked to the car. And he’d have been different with me. He’d have said good-bye differently. I know he would. There’d be one small thing that maybe wouldn’t register at the time, but would after the fact. Something.”