5
It wasn't true that Edith Lawton had moved onto this street just to be able to say that she was surrounded by churches, which was what her enemies said about herâbut it wasn't true that she had been dragged here by her fundamentalist Christian husband, either, which was what Edith said about herself. Lately, Edith had a great deal of trouble sorting out what was true about her life and what she had made up. There seemed to be two people living in her head. There was the Edith Lawton who had been Edith Hull back in high school, the one who had never finished college and married at twenty. That Edith Lawton was angry all the time, even in her sleep, and embarrassed, too. How could she have known that it would matter so much, in the long run, that she had never finished her education? She had been so sure that being a writer would be different. Being a writer was what she had had in mind for herself from the beginning. What she had imagined was that she would slave away for a few years in a back bedroom, getting rejection slip after rejection slip, until the day when her talent was discovered. Talent was something she knew she had had all along. She could still remember the stories she had read about writers when she was growing up: Hemingway and all those people going to Paris to learn how to really live; Somerset Maugham sailing to Asia on a tramp steamer; Truman Capote coming to New York at the age of eighteen and never looking back. Now, when she met real writers, they were nothing like that. They had multiple degrees. They could swear in Latin. They felt comfortable talking about the medieval roots of deconstruction or the effect of orchard farming on church history. Or some of them did.
That was because some of them were people like Bennis Hannaford.
The other Edith Lawton, the one she had invented, was a writerâof sorts. She didn't make any money at it, and she didn't get her pieces in magazines whose names would be recognized by the reader in the street, but she at least got
published, which was doing better than most of the people she met at the “freethought” conferences she attended two or three times a year. “Freethought” was the word “the secular community” preferred to call atheism. The word “atheism” itself was supposed to have been tarred and feathered by the antics of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and that might actually be true. God only knows, Edith thoughtâand then mentally crossed out the “God,” because she couldn't say that aloud to the people she knew, not even as a throwaway expression. She had to be very careful around the collective population of “the secular community.” At the moment, they were her only claim to an identity. She was fifty years old, and she had the feeling that it had gone on too long. She had grown too old. She had made too many of the wrong decisions. She was never going to be the person she wanted to be. She was never going to be anything, really, except Edith Lawton, the class act of
Free Thinking
magazine and one of the distinctly more minor stars of The Secular Web. Even on The Secular Web, though, she wasn't able to compete with the heavyweights, with people like Jeffrey Jay Lowder and Farrell Till. Those people put up detailed analyses of biblical scholarship and Roman Catholic theology. She put up short essays about whatever came into her head in the week before her self-imposed deadline, and far too often she seemed to get things wrong. Mostly she was just a picture on a page or on the Internet, an apple-cheeked woman with too much hair and eyes far too small for her face, trying too hard to look literary.
Now it was five o'clock in the morning, and the alarm had gone off, and she did not want to get up. The world outside her windows was dark. In spite of the fact that she got up at this hour every morning, she had no idea what time it began to get light. She closed her eyes and let herself experience her body, just so that she could reassure herself that she wasn't getting fat. The last thing she wanted was to turn into one of those fat old atheist women who seemed to infest the movement like a plague of locusts. She sat up and swung her feet off the side of the bed onto the carpet. In the street below her, trucks rumbled endlessly and air brakes screeched. It was February. If she went to the window and opened it, she would be able to feel ice forming on her hand.
What she did instead was to get her robe and go to the
bathroom. She brushed her teeth. She took clean underwear and a clean nightshirt out of the linen cupboard and put them aside to put on after she had had her shower. Then she turned the water on as hot as she could stand it and stepped under it. This bathroom was the only completely apolitical place in the house. The bathroom downstairs had two bumper stickers on magnetic backs tacked to the side of the shower she never used. One said: GOD, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. The other said: GOD IS JUST PRETEND. Soap got in her eyes, and she brushed it out. It was a terrible thing to say, but sometimes she thought the bumper stickers were the best thing about the freethought movement. At least they had something in the way of public support. Freethought itself seemed to beâinvisible.
She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. She toweled herself off, although not quite dry. She let her hair hang over her shoulder in wet clumps of permanent wave curls. Then she put on clean underwear and a clean nightgown and her robe and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. She got to the landing before her stomach started to knot up.
“Will?” she called, into the dark of the stairwell.
There was no answer, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. She could hear him there, moving around between the sink and the kitchen table. She thought about going back to her bedroom and brushing out her hair, but that was stupid. It was worse than stupid. After twenty-five years of marriage, it was more like crazy. Then she realized she had said it, in her head:
her
bedroom, not
theirs
. Will had only been sleeping down the hall for ten days, and already she was taking it as permanent.
She undid the belt of her robe and tied it again. She went very carefully down the last of the stairs, straining to hear whatever could be heard. The percolator was on. She could smell the thick scent of the French vanilla coffee Will liked to have for breakfast. He'd made toast, too. He'd even burned it.
She went across the living room and down the back hall. It took everything she had not to stop on the way to brush her hair. Her big pocketbook was sitting on the coffee table in front of the hearth. She could have gotten the brush out of that and used it. The hall was narrow and claustrophobic. It
was always what she had liked least about this house. She couldn't remember now why they had bought it in the first place. Will had wanted to live out on the Main Line, or in Bucks County, or anywhere it was green. The thought of being stuck out in the suburbs had scared her to death.
She got to the kitchen door and stopped. Will was sitting in his usual place at the table, his legs stretched out awkwardly in an attempt to make himself more comfortable. He was so tall and thin, anybody who looked at him could tell that he'd played basketball in high schoolâin much the same way, Edith thought, that anybody could tell he had once been an Eagle Scout. She cleared her throat. He looked up, impassive, and then looked down again. He was reading the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. His face was open and smooth, as if he had nothing on his mind this morning but the sports scores and that odd knocking noise the car had started to make on the way home from work yesterday. He had the face of someone who had never had anything but a clean conscience at every split second of his life.
Edith came around to the other side of the table and got a coffee cup and saucer out of the cabinet. She put them down on the counter and reached for the coffeepot. The coffeepot was full, which made her feel suddenly and light-headedly relieved. At least he wasn't trying to starve her. At least he wasn't acting as if she didn't exist.
She put the coffee cup down in front of her usual place at the table, and then she saw it: the latest copy of
Vanity Fair
, open to that incredible two-page spread that was the start of the article on Bennis Hannaford. Edith brushed wet hair off her forehead. She had seen the piece before. Will had to know that. She had seen the piece and noted the obvious, which was that
Vanity Fair
had tried to make Hillary Clinton look glamourous and almost succeeded, but with Bennis Hannaford they hadn't even had to try.
She flipped the magazine shut and pushed it into the middle of the table. Then she sat down and said, “Well, that was nice of you.”
Will looked up. Edith found herself wishing, uneasily, that he would let more emotion into his face. As it was, it was as if a rock were looking at her.
“I thought you'd be interested,” Will said flatly. “She is a
friend of yours. Or was. She was a friend of yours. Isn't that the way it works with you?”
Edith stirred the coffee in her cup, even though she hadn't put any sugar or milk in it. “I don't know what you're doing this for. I really don't. None of what happened here has anything to do with Bennis Hannaford.”
“She went out of her way for you, do you remember that? She sent you books. She gave you advice. She suggested magazines that might be willing to take your work, real magazines, not that rag you have your face in once a monthâ”
“Thank you very much for supporting me in my professional aspirations.”
“She told you how to put together a book proposal. And it worked. You sold the book.”
“To a freethought publisher. Don't make it more than it was. To a freethought publisher, not to the mainstream.”
“Well, Edith, she told you. You're not going to make it into the mainstream writing about how God doesn't exist.”
“None of this is about Bennis Hannaford,” Edith said.
“Right,” Will said. “This is about the fact that I came home early from work last week and you were in our very own bed in our very own house with our very own lawyer, fucking like a rabbit.”
“Oh, for God's sake,” Edith said.
Will's coffee cup was empty. He got up and put itâand his saucer, and his spoon, and his crumb-filled breakfast dishâin the big stainless-steel sink. Edith didn't think she had ever heard Will use that word before. He didn't use words like that. He almost never said “hell” or “damn.” He really was an Eagle Scout.
Will turned on the water and rinsed off his breakfast things. He put them in the dish rack on the counter and wiped his hands on the towel they kept threaded through the handle of the refrigerator.
“There's a funeral on at St. Stephen's today. Be careful when you go out. What's-his-name will probably be there with his pickets.”
“Roy Phipps.”
“Whatever. I think you're wrong, you know. I think this does have something to do with Bennis Hannaford. And withâwho was it, before? When we had just started going
out. That woman at the Foundation for Secular Studies, or whatever it was called. You've got this habit, do you know that, Edith? You always kill the ones you love.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
Will looked aroundâas if he might have something left to do, as if he'd forgotten that he'd done it all already. He wiped his hands one more time and put the dish towel back. Edith just wished that he'd get mad at her. He should be screaming, shouting, stomping around the house. He should have put his fist through a wall. She could still see him standing in the doorway to the bedroom last Wednesday afternoon, leaning against the doorjamb as if he were watching two cats play in the sun. They had been in the sun, too, she and theâthe lawyer. She couldn't make herself say his name anymore: Ian Holden. They had been lying, stark naked, on top of the quilt instead of under it, because they'd both been too damned hot and in too damned much of a hurry. She'd been sitting straddled on top of him and yelling “heigh ho, Silver!” at the top of her lungs every time she'd let her body rise and fall back down into the saddle she'd made of him. She'd been acting more like fifteen than fiftyâbut she had certainly looked fifty. She'd seen it in the stripe of light that had fallen across them from the opened door. Her hands were pocked and lined. Her breasts sagged.
“Look,” she said.
“I have to get to work,” Will said. “I've got a project deadline I'm not sure I'm going to make. I've been a little distracted lately.”
“I've said I'm sorry. I don't know what you want me to do except say I'm sorry.”
“Annie Heston.”
“What?”
“The woman from the Foundation for Secular Studies,” Will said. “I remembered her name. I think it's interesting you didn't seem to.”
“I don't see why we can't talk about what happened,” Edith said. “I don't see why we have to go at this as if we were a couple of teenagers playing at how all love is such an agony we're never going to be the same again.”
“Right,” Will said.
He walked out of the kitchen and down the long hall to the
living room. Edith heard him open and close the front-hall closet. He would be getting the puffy down vest that was all he ever wore to work no matter how cold the winter. She got out of her chair and went after him, hurrying just a little. When she reached the living room, he was just opening the front door.