“I wouldn't miss it for anything,” said Danielle. Like Bernie, she was ruddy, cheerful, and sturdy. She wore her thick gray hair in a ponytail tied with red and brown yarn, and was wrapped in several layers of hand-knit red and brown sweaters and scarves rather than a coat.
“You know, most women would do anything to avoid having to listen to their ex,” Alan said.
“Not me.” Danielle smiled. “I'm not angry at Lennie anymore, it's been too long. Anyhow the kids will expect me to give them a report.” She moved ahead, toward the double doors.
“So how are you doing?” Bernie asked as they followed.
“Oh, okay,” Alan replied, and saw Bernie register the true meaning of this answer according to their unspoken code, perhaps that of all invalids:
Not so good, actually
. “How about you?”
“Not too bad,” Bernie said, meaning,
Better, actually
. “I'm driving again, you know.”
“Yeah? That's great.”
“It's all because of this doohickey.” Bernie held up a large brown canvas carrying case. “Changed my life.”
“A briefcase changed your life?”
“Yep,” Bernie asserted. “Well, nah. It's what's inside. Feel it, see if you can guess.” Alan touched the briefcase and encountered a thick, flat, curved piece of hard material, probably wood. It was familiar somehow, but he could not identify it, and shook his head.
“It's a toilet seat,” Bernie confided. “This exercise guy at the Yâyou know, the one with the red hair and the Star Trek T-shirtâhe put me on to it last week. You go to Sears, he said, buy yourself one of these. Take it apart, throw away the lid. Get a bag for the bottom piece. This here, it looks like a briefcase, right? Hell, it is a briefcase. Nobody can tell what's inside. I take it everywhere. All of a sudden, no extra pain when I sit. Danielle doesn't have to drive me anywhere. I can go to the drugstore, work at my desk, drive to school to check on the dog project. Fly on planes, go to conferences, anything I want.” He laughed.
In the past, before the lizard moved into his back, nothing on earth would have persuaded Alan to carry around a toilet seat in a canvas bag. But Jane had left him; he was eating scorched or soggy microwaved meals and depending on unreliable student drivers. “You think it would work for me?”
“Could be. Wanna try it?”
Together, Alan and the Kotelchuks moved toward the rear of the room. Bernie placed the briefcase on a seat, and Alan lowered himself onto it cautiously. Usually he could hardly bear to sit on a hard surface for more than a few minutes. But now the pain did not increase ; it even seemed to moderate slightly.
“Yeah, that's better,” he conceded, standing up out of the way so that Bernie could sit down. Over the past year or so, several people, including Jane, had suggested that he should obtain and carry about with him an inflatable rubber ring of the type used by sufferers from hemorrhoids, or women after a painful childbirth. Alan, whose horror of seeming ridiculous had not diminished, had always refused. But a briefcaseâyes, that might be possible, as long as nobody knew what was inside it.
Even before the lecture started, Alan had to get up and walk about at the back of the room. It was the same one in which, not long ago, Delia Delaney had read; but the scene today was very different. Delia, with her red-gold curls loose down her back, her violet eye shadow and trailing lacy scarves, had been a figure of beauty and glamour. Zimmern was an elderly professor of nondescript appearance with a lot of dark-gray hair and a dark-gray suit. Delia's audience had been larger and younger and more than two-thirds female, and included many women whose appearance and getup was as unusual, though far from as alluring, as her own. Today it was the standard mix of humanities students and faculty, with a scattering of older townspeople and retirees who had perhaps known Zimmern when he taught here a quarter century ago.
While Delia spoke, Alan had leaned forward to absorb every word. He had been amazed by the brilliantly theatrical, emotional quality of her performance, and gloried in the secret knowledge that earlier in the day he been closer to her than anyone in the room. But though L. D. Zimmern spoke with wit and erudition, Alan lost much of his discourse. Instead, his attention oscillated between the increasingly intolerable pain in his back, his own oppressive domestic situation, and his desire to see Delia again as soon as possible. She should have been there now, but her husband had called the Center that morning to say that she had a migraine and wouldn't be able to make the lecture, though she hoped to be at the official dinner.
In order to see Delia, Alan had planned to go to the reception and skip the dinner, since he was unable to eat unless he was standing up or lying down. Now, as soon as the lecture was over, he met the graduate student who had been hired to drive him home, and arranged for a detour to the local mall, where he purchased a white plastic toilet seat and a black nylon briefcase. At home he separated the sections of the toilet seat with some difficulty, threw the top half in the trash can, concealed the bottom half in the briefcase, and went into the garage. He had not driven his Volvo for over a year, but until recently Jane had exercised it once a week, and it started readily.
There was still some pain, but it was manageable, Alan decided. With a sense of freedom and power that he had not had in a long time, he canceled the taxi he had ordered and drove to the Unger Center.
His luck held: Delia was there. Unfortunately, though, the reception was over, and she was already sitting at the other end of the long dining table, not far from Jane, who clearly saw him but did not speak or wave. Meanwhile, he, as the senior Unger Fellow, had been placed at the left of Lily Unger, with L. D. Zimmern, the guest of honor, on her right. It was soon clear that Zimmern and Mrs. Unger were already acquainted, though they had apparently not met for some time.
“So you never married again,” Lily Unger said to Zimmern, in a teasing tone that Alan had never heard her use before.
“No. Tried it once, didn't like it. Same thing with oatmeal.”
“Oatmeal?” Lily giggled.
“It's supposed to be good for you, maybe it is, but it's also tasteless and lumpy.”
Yeah, you could be right, Alan thought, and then was interrupted by Davi Gakar's wife, on his own left, who wished to talk about the differences between Eastern and Western religion. It was not until she turned to her other neighbor that he was able to speak again to Lily Unger and ask the question that had been on his mind all through the shrimp bisque.
“Who's the old bald guy talking to Delia?”
“Wally Hersh,” said Lily, well informed as usual. “He's a big trustee. Also powerful on the Alumni Council.”
“Yeah?” Zimmern said. “He looks like a big hamster.”
“He does, sort of.” Lily giggled.
Alan stared down the table. Wally Hersh was large and beefy, with the muscle-bound physique of a former athlete now running to fat. At the moment, Delia was leaning toward him, laughing. Her red-gold hair was piled on top of her head, and she was wearing a low-cut blouse with a big white lily tucked into the cleavageâapparently one of those that this same Wally Hersh had sent and Jane had thrown at her.
“He was here all last week for the yearly meetings,” Lily said. “I don't know why he's still hanging around.”
Wally Hersh, who was not only well over sixty, but red-faced and slightly popeyed, was now leaning toward Delia, smiling and patting her soft white hand with his coarse red paw. How can she allow that? Alan thought.
“He'd better watch his step with Delia,” Zimmern said. “She can be dangerous.”
“Really?” Lily Unger remarked with surprise and some disapproval. “She's been tremendously popular at the Center. A little overemotional, maybe, but very nice and charming to everyone.”
“She wasn't nice and charming to me,” Zimmern said. “She cut me dead at the reception just now.” He gave a short laugh.
“Really?”
“I figure she's still mad about something I wrote once. It was years ago, but apparently she hasn't forgiven me.”
“Oh? What did you say?” Alan leaned forward.
“It was when she came out with those Southern mountain tales of ghosts and lost children and unfaithful lovers and black crows that sit on the roof and foretell death.
Heart's Ease,
yeah, that was the title. I called her the intellectual's Dolly Parton.”
“You know, there is a resemblance,” said Lily Unger, laughing. “She's just as pretty, anyhow.”
“You should have seen her twenty years ago,” Zimmern told them. “You can't believe how beautiful she was then. And some of those early stories really weren't bad. The trouble was, after a while she began to repeat herself.”
“Her reading was a great success,” Lily Unger said, a little huffily.
“No doubt. Most people can't tell the difference between the original and a good copy. My theory is, Delia hasn't really taken in anything that happened after she left the mountains of West Virginia. Her life there was so intense, so violent, so primitive. It was full of everything that's in the early stories: passionate crazy people and crazy ideas. If she'd stayed, it probably would have destroyed her. So she escaped, she went to college, and then eventually to New York. Never went back. But she paid a price. The world outside the mountains isn't quite real to her, you can tell that from her later writing. Same thing with Edna O'Brien, same thing with Colette, but worse because Delia's never found another subject the way they did. No, I'm afraid she's had it.”
With difficulty, Alan said nothing, fearing that if he spoke he would speak too vehemently, betraying the strength of his feelings. Lily Unger, however, came at once to Delia's defense. “Well, I must say, I don't agree. I admired her last book very much.”
“I'm sure you did,” Zimmern agreed politely, but in a manner that somehow cast doubt both on Delia's writing and on Lily Unger's artistic taste and discernment. Then he turned away to a pretty woman on his right, the wife of a dean, whose main interest was the preservation of the natural environment.
“So how are you feeling these days?” Lily Unger asked him kindly. But Alan was almost unable to reply. At the moment, he was hardly aware of the pain in his back, he was so preoccupied with a sour, angry sensation that he had not felt in many, many yearsâa sensation that he identified, after a moment, as not heartburn but corrosive sexual jealousy. “Oh, not too bad,” he lied, smiling with effort and trying without success to wrench his gaze away from the far end of the table, from Delia.
FIFTEEN
“Well, hello there,” Henry said as Jane, nearly twenty minutes late, came up to him at a display of homebaked apple and pumpkin pies on Saturday morning. It was a cold, windy day, the last weekend this year for the Farmers' Market. But the sun was bright, and several dozen people were buying root vegetables and eggs and homemade pottery and bread from those stalls that remained open. He touched her cheek lightly, causing a sensation that resembled her sister's description of a hot flash.
It had been a hard week for Jane. Living at her parents' house was awkward and constraining. Though her mother loved her, she could not help treating Jane like the child and adolescent she had once been: asking her to set the table, sending her to the P&C when she ran out of milk, reminding her to dress warmly. Carrie had always had definite ideas about what Jane should do, and what she should do now was go back to Alan. He was her husband and he needed her. She should forgive him and let bygones be bygones.
“How can I forgive him if he won't admit he did anything wrong?” Jane had asked rather desperately.
“He knows he's done wrong,” Carrie had said, not ceasing to knit the blue sweater with a pattern of red and white ducks that she was making for Jane's sister's youngest child. “And he knows you know it. I'm sure he feels sorry and ashamed of himself now.”
“Maybe,” Jane said.
“But a man has his pride,” her mother continued, as if Jane had not spoken. “And it's not as if he'd actually been unfaithful. From what you told me, it was probably just a little hanky-panky. All you need to do is say that you want to put this behind you, and go on with your life together.”
“Maybe,” Jane repeated. But I don't want to go on with that life, she thought. I want to be with Henry, only Mom doesn't know it, because I haven't told her. I'm just as bad as Alan, a liar and an adulteress.
“I'm sure he'll be relieved and grateful. And of course you'll let him know that it mustn't happen again.”
“But it will happen again, probably. Because of that awful woman.”
“You don't know that, dear.” Her mother looped a strand of red wool over the white. “You've had such a good marriage. And everyone admires you so much for the way you've taken care of Alan since he got ill.”
“Mh,” Jane had said. She wished she could talk to someone besides her mother. But since she began to love Henry, she had stopped confiding in her friends. The only person she could talk to now was Henry, who was half the problem.
“I'm sorry I was late,” she said to him now as they moved apart from the crowd around the stalls and stood under the bare yellow branches of a big willow.
“That's okay.”
“I brought you some black walnuts, from the tree we saw on Warren Road. Here.” She handed over a heavy brown-paper bag. “They're much better than the walnuts you get in the stores. But you need to let them dry out for a few weeks, and then crack them on stone with a hammer.”
“Thank you. . . . So how's it going?”