He goes on and on in this fashion, wheedling, cajoling her, asking permission, saying their marriage has been wonderful, the family is wonderful, but he has to be true to his nature and his nature is insisting loud and clear that he must change his life. He’s certain she knew there was trouble between them—well, not so much between the two of them as between him, Jim, and the straight world he’s saying good-bye to; he’s sure she’ll understand. They will drive to Longboat Key tomorrow, he and Robin, in Robin’s car; he’ll leave the Wrangler here, of course, and of course he’ll call home every night to tell her how the trip is going until she grows accustomed to the notion that he, Jim, is driving his own chosen road. This is my true identity, he says, the empowered self I’m growing into and have always been.
“Always?”
“You got it,” he says.
At length there is silence between them. He turns and taps the Bose and plays Ravel. He has selected
Bolero,
with its insistent melody, its endless repetition, and she does not want him to repeat himself or say again how Robin is the man he wants, the man who offers freedom and who understands as she does not that he, Jim, is a wanderer, not a person to be locked up in the office or kept like a caged animal at home. I didn’t keep you, she wants to remind him, I didn’t build that escapist fantasy you yourself arranged downstairs. She asks him about his new lover instead, and he says Robin is a lawyer with a practice out of Bloomfield Hills. They met last September at Weber’s, at a boosters’ breakfast for the football team; Robin had attended Michigan and enjoys the sport and gives money to it and what they have in common is a gift for the moment, for being in the moment. The horns of
Bolero
flare blaringly in unison, and Claire remembers a movie called
10
where there was a beautiful blonde called—what was her name?—Bo Derek, and Dudley Moore who desired her, who was crazy with desire and when he asked her why she played
Bolero
she said it was for fucking, and Dudley Moore looked shocked. It’s the music I like best to fuck to, whispers this blonde movie star in a cabana by the beach, and now the image of her husband and his new friend Robin is flickering across the screen of her shut eyelids and will not dissipate,
ridiculous,
and Claire can hear herself laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“I was thinking about you and Robin,” she says. “Do the girls know?”
“No.”
“When will you tell them?”
“We’ll tell them together,” says Jim. “Or anyway that’s what I was hoping. Or we can wait a while to tell them.” For a moment he does seem unsure of himself. “Whatever you decide.”
“Robin,” she says. “It’s a girl’s name too. Except this is Cock Robin, right?”
“Don’t be shitty about this,” he says. “I did try to be a good husband.”
“Not hard enough,” she says. The girls are at rehearsal. “Not hard enough by half.”
“It’s not my
fault,
Claire. And not yours. It’s nobody’s problem, in fact. Like the way giraffes are taller, say, than elephants and elephants are built differently from zebras and zebras are different from cows.”
“Is that what Mr. Wonderful, Mr. Cock Robin has taught you?”
He shakes his head.
“Have you practiced this particular speech?”
“No.”
“No? Well, what about the one about the leopard’s stripes? Or is it spots?” She hears herself playing for time. “Why can’t the leopard change his spots? How long has this been going on? Oh,
Jim . . .
”
“We’ll make it a trial run, OK?”
“What do you want to tell Becky and Hannah?”
“I told them I’m taking a business trip. To a, you know, convention . . .”
“Why?”
“Because I do need to be certain. Because I’ll call them over the weekend. Or talk to them when I get back.”
She will not cry. She goes out of the living room into the den, her perfectly proportioned den, the room where she is situated but the feng shui of the space feels wrong, with nothing in its proper place, and she makes her way upstairs. Jim is watching her, of course, and gauging her reaction, but she will not let him see her cry and walks the thirteen stairs to the landing and turns left and shuts but does not slam the door and does not lock him out. It happens all the time, Claire tells herself, it happens so often I shouldn’t be shocked. She lies down on the bed, their bed, and stares at the ceiling and reminds herself that next Monday is her turn to host Quilting Club since Martha and Julie will be out of town—and so it’s just the six of them, except Ann Halpern is coming back tomorrow from that cruise to the Galápagos she insists on calling an expedition, and has been talking now for months about Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection and the sea turtles and the yellow finches until all the women are dying to tell her, Ann, just please shut up, so they will be seven at teatime next meeting—and forces herself to consider the quilt, to picture the section of star-bursts and moons, and decides she’ll bake a lemon cake for Quilting Club next Monday as if nothing has happened and nothing will happen and then she falls asleep.
In the morning Jim does leave. He takes a suitcase and a duffel bag she has not helped him pack; he readies breakfast for Becky and Hannah and she cannot bear the prospect of going down and joining them while they bustle in the kitchen and chatter together; she asks herself what she could say that wasn’t said the day before and has no answer, no idea; instead she stays upstairs. At seven-forty, as they are heading out the door and late already, hurrying, Becky arrives at the foot of the stairs and shouts: “Are you all right, Mom?” Claire responds, not loudly, “I’ve got a headache, I’m getting one of my headaches. I’ll see you after school.”
This satisfies her daughters. They go, and then she hears her husband on the stairwell and the landing and standing at the bedroom door. He knocks.
“Yes?”
“I’m leaving. I wanted to wait till the girls left for school. But Robin will be here by eight . . .”
“How prompt of him. How reliable.”
“Don’t be that way,” he says.
“What way? What way am I being?”
“Dismissive.”
“Funny,” she says to the opening door. “It doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels like I’m being dismissed.”
“What happened in Saratoga?”
“I like your shirt,” she tells him. “It’s so very, very
Florida.
”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” says Claire, “it’s none of your business. Not any longer. Not now.”
“All right,” he says. “I’ll call you.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Tomorrow. From the road.”
“Wherever you are.”
“Wherever we get to,” he says.
“Fine. Fine.”
“A good-bye kiss?” he asks her.
“No.”
“I hate to be going away like this.”
“Like what?”
“With you so angry. So wound up.”
She will not let him lecture her; she does not need, she tells him, his touchy-feely feel-good sweetness when he’s the one who’s pulling out, who’s heading south with his sunblock and his panama hat and bathing suit and boyfriend; she doesn’t have to put up with this shit. Exactly why, Claire wants to know, should he be trying to make her believe the whole thing is
her
fault,
her
problem? She needs to pee; her mouth feels stale; her hip still hurts from how she slept and he’s standing there all bright-eyed and preparing to escape and saying no hard feelings; it isn’t fair, she wants to say, it isn’t
right.
But Jim is unstoppable, enameled in his new identity and schoolboy-eager to be on the road; when the horn sounds in the driveway he takes the stairs two at a time. She goes to the window and watches. There’s a bright red car, its trunk lid sprung, and her husband throws his suitcase and his duffel bag into the trunk, then slams it and opens the passenger door. He does not look up at her or lingeringly gaze at the house they bought and remodeled together; he kisses the man at the wheel—a quick kiss, a peck on the cheek—and then the driver reverses and the car is gone.
That night he calls. When he asks her how the day has been Claire can find no answer; she cannot remember a thing worth reporting; she has stripped the beds and washed the sheets and vacuumed the living room and, because while she had been away this week nobody went shopping, driven to Hiller’s Market—provisioning the house once more, buying paper towels and lightbulbs and orange juice and toilet paper and coffee and milk: every single item the three of them have used and not replaced. She bought sushi from the sushi bar and bags of salad and two jars of calamata olives and cereal and eggs and fat-free milk and diet root beer for the girls, tracking up and down the aisles until the cart was full and paying with a credit card and loading and unloading the Jeep as though nothing has been changed. “How do you feel?” he asks her, and she says, “Just great, how are
you
feeling?” and he says, a little tired from the trip. We went straight south through Ohio and crossed the river at Cincinnati and then drove through Kentucky and into Tennessee and now we’re somewhere dull past Knoxville. It’s been a long day’s driving: Route 75 the whole way, he says, I’m tired, kiss the girls.
That night she tries to sleep. She cannot fall asleep, however, and blames the espresso and blames Jim and lies awake for hours with nothing in her head but rage, but grief, a set of pictures of her mother and her sister and brother and husband together on some farther shore she cannot swim to, will not reach, and all of them playing Frisbee and laughing and having a terrific time while she flails at the saltwater and fails to make headway or join them. Then they fold up the blankets and beach towels and pack up the picnic things and disappear. In the morning she’s exhausted at the prospect of the day ahead but the girls go blithely off to school orchestra practice, inattentive, dismissive, and she turns on the Weather Channel and watches while the meteorologist explains where there’s an upper air disturbance, where it’s fine across the country this morning and where the snowfall is heavy and where the rainfall is welcome or there is increasing risk of drought. She is glad the girls have failed to notice or, if they noticed, made no fuss about it, and she wonders what this means about the way they relate to their parents and if Jim had been in fact correct when he said this separation was a long time coming, already in the cards and not—to the girls—a surprise.
This morning Claire turns her attention to the stack of mail accumulated in her absence, but there is nothing really, some magazines, some bills, a check, a series of announcements of concerts she won’t go to and sales she’s missed and movies she won’t see. She tunes in to NPR for Click and Clack, the yak-it-up brothers from Boston who make fun of each other and joke with the person who calls in a problem and then give advice—it’s
good
advice, she’s certain—as to what’s wrong with a car. She trusts these men with their Italian name and rapid fraternal patter and their silliness and way at last of getting down to business and solving problems just by hearing what the trouble is and offering a diagnosis; for a wild instant she thinks she should call and ask them what to do about two men in a red sports car driving south. What make is it, they’d ask her, and she’d confess she doesn’t know; what year is the car, they’d ask her, and she won’t know that either; what’s wrong with it, they’d ask her, and she’d say
everything.
Bone-deep exhaustion is upon her, and on the chaise longue she sleeps dreamlessly till two, and then the girls return, there’s dinner, and then again Jim calls. He isn’t feeling well, he says, his legs hurt from the driving or not so much the driving as the cramped position in the passenger seat, the forced inaction of the trip, you’ve no idea how long the distance feels and he has a new respect for General Sherman’s march through Georgia; war may be hell, Jim jokes, but so’s a peacetime foray straight down Route 75. Why are you driving, she asks him, and he says we didn’t know how long we’d stay and Robin has this thing about planes. Where are you, she inquires, what’s the town you’re staying in and he says, red clay country, cracker country, somewhere just south of the Florida line, I miss you, kiss the girls.
The following morning is Sunday and harder, since the girls are home, and though they sleep till noon and wake up noisily, playing their loud music and lounging around in the kitchen in leggings and sweatshirts they insist on calling “sweats” the house feels empty, altered, and Claire isn’t sure she can carry it off. She starts the day by listening to
Weekend Edition,
the news about Iraq and the military buildup there and news about the inquiry into the space shuttle disaster, and pitting herself against the puzzle master from the
New York Times.
Then for an hour she vacuums the house and thinks about her brother and how in Saratoga Springs he promised to vacuum the cottage himself . . .
Now Becky and Hannah are drinking their juice, finishing their English muffins and Velveeta—she can’t understand how they stand it,
Velveeta,
a cheese spread with the consistency of peanut butter, a tastelessness they appear to enjoy—and discussing what matinee to go to together, and she wants to tell her daughters how strange it is that “matinee” means “afternoon” because really it ought to mean “morning” when, once more, the telephone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hello? Is this Claire Handleman?”
“It is.”
“It’s Robin.”
She swallows air. Her throat constricts.
“He asked me to call you.”
“Robin who?”
“He
told
me to.”
She will not yield. “Who told you to?”
“Jimmy. Jim. Your husband.”
The girls stand, stretch; they smile at her. Then they walk out of the room.
“Why are you calling?” she asks.
“That’s the point. It’s the reason I’m calling, Mrs. Handleman. He can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“Isn’t
able
to.”
Only now does Claire notice the strain in his voice, the taut-strung anxiety he’s been trying to control. “What? What is it?”