Warm Wuinter's Garden (40 page)

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to lose some
trees.”

“It’s not really that bad, is it?”

Dilly wanted to tell her husband to look up
and look around. In the first years of their marriage Bill and
Dilly had spent much of their free time planning and working
together on home projects. But, as Bill advanced in his career, he
tended to take more and more time for work away from the hours they
had used to share.

This day, a late April Sunday, Bill had gone
to the office early in the morning. Lunch was over before he had
returned. In the afternoon—an afternoon of high floating clouds and
zigzagging insects still drunk from a winter’s sleep—Bill had
stayed seated before the computer. As Dilly raked the mocha icing
of rotting autumn leaves from the dark brown dirt around the base
of bushes, as she groaned to push filled wheelbarrows across the
lumpy yard, as she lopped at dangling branches and unwove the web
of bittersweet from its prey, she would look toward the window
where Bill was working to see the submarine green of his pulsing
screen. It seemed to Dilly that, unlike what was going on around
her in the yard, that it had been much longer than a winter since
Bill had surfaced from his self-containment.

Work, work, work.

Dilly was sure that Bill used it to insulate
himself from the world around him. Golf was negotiable. Television
and fishing, football and drinking, all of these things that men
used to separate themselves from women were discussable. But, work
was not. Work was inviolable. It shielded and protected and
prevented. It gave Bill the separation that, she suspected, he
wanted. It gave him the most selfish of rewards—distance within a
family—while providing him with the most unselfish of excuses—the
work was done for them.

Dilly, too, knew the righteous feeling of
self-serving self-sacrifice. She was not so deluded that she
couldn’t imagine Bill looking up from his screen and out the window
and thinking the same thoughts of her. She knew she should use that
ironic sharing to gentle her thoughts, but she chose not to.
Instead, as she cut brush and hauled her loads to the midden hidden
at the back of the yard, she used the similarity of their behaviors
to try to become angry.

Bill was selfish. He was blind to the
loneliness which overwhelmed her every day at the moment the house
emptied. He chose to ignore her growing fear that her life’s ebbing
had turned torrential. He was stoical against her inveigling they
have a fourth child. He was becoming so cold and so hard that the
brushings of each life against the other brought neither the warmth
of love nor even the heat of anger. They had gone from the smooth
exciting rubbings of new love to the often angry friction of
raising a family to disconnection. Separation.

Dilly’s fierce brushing began to make her
scalp hurt.

“How’s your work? Did you make some progress
today?”

“Yes, I did. But I still have a long way to
go.”

“What is it?”

“The environmental specs on the modular
co-generation plants we want to sell to hospitals and small
manufacturers.”

“Could that be big?”

“Very big. A lot of places could make money
with this.”

“How’s that?”

“It depends on the business, but if there’s
enough waste to burn they can end up with more electricity than
they can use. They sell the overage to the utility. “

“What if the utilities don’t want to buy
it?”

“They have to buy it. By law.”

“Really?”

When Bill looked at Dilly with the same look
that he gave to Roger when Roger asked an inane question, she felt
the same way she had on their early dates. She grew flustered. She
needed to keep things moving smoothly.

“When do you need to have it done?”

“About two months ago. Everybody dogs it.
Like they think time has an on/off switch that they can flip when
they want. Then suddenly everybody is
very
alert because
some vice president has gone crazy and left blood where there once
was an engineer. It’s the same old problem. An engineer’s an
engineer, but, if he’s any good, then, in their wisdom, they make
him a project manager. But no one wants to remember that if the guy
had had any people skills in the first place, he probably wouldn’t
have become an engineer. Most engineers are the kind of guys that
couldn’t get out on the dance floor in high school. Why would
anybody think that just because ten or fifteen years have gone by
they would have learned how to dance? They take a good engineer and
either make him a manager or push him into sales. But either way
they never issue him any tools. No one ever wants to train
anyone.”

Dilly had heard this speech of Bill’s many
times before. It was delivered to family and in-laws at almost
every holiday gathering. He almost always gave it on those
occasions when they were invited to have dinner with people who
weren’t engineers. And he frequently gave it to her and the kids at
the kitchen table when he was feeling dissatisfied, which, lately,
was often. Having heard it so many times, Dilly knew that Bill was
on the verge of exploding in righteous anger over the difficulties
he had had in getting the firm to pay for his MBA courses.

“They’ll train a guy in hydrostatics or
circuitry or PV theory, but cut him loose when it comes to
marketing or motivation.”

“But if you keep working the way you do,
someday…”

Dilly read Bill’s look and corrected
herself.

“…someday soon, you’ll be in a position to
change that.”

Bill’s face was painted with the fierce
disinterest of a young boy left unchosen for a schoolyard team.
Dilly put her hairbrush down, inhaled deeply, held it and tried to
will her breasts to rise and her nipples to harden.

“Do you want me to rub your neck?”

Bill was leery. Over the last months the most
uncomfortable moments of the day had been those at bedtime. The
tension of work, the after-images of too much sugar or caffeine,
the well-worn, over-written, over-wrought palimpsests of
parenthood, but most of all, the ever-present and unresolved issue
of whether to have another child would be carried into their
bedroom, and, unlike dirt and grease and plaque, those physical
prices of a day, not be shed before they entered their bed. The
herbal smell of smooth-oiled cheeks and the menthol sharpness of
clean breath would be fouled by the untended accumulation of their
thoughts.

There had been many nights when Bill had
looked down at Dilly, flat on her back under the tautly tucked
covers, and looked to the empty space on his side of the bed and
wondered how there could possibly be enough room for his
anger-swollen, regret-filled body. He would insinuate himself
inside the tight seal of the covers and slide down along the edge
of the mattress before lying rigid and afraid that at any moment
all of these
things
, these remembered and
unforgiven
hurts and fears and slights, all of these cumbersome feelings, as
large and as intractable as cheap foam bolsters, that all of this
baggage that they had brought to what once had been their
sanctuary, that all these things would break free, overwhelm and
push him from their bed.

There also had been nights, rare nights, when
there had been a lightning strike’s moment when he knew there must
be some word, some small incantation, which if he could but say it
would clear their bed of all else but an unencumbered,
history-less, memory-less them. But, though recognizing the moment,
he never was quite sure what the word was, nor its precise and
correct pronunciation and, as a result, he chose to remain mute, to
hold tight to his small space, to try to sleep his familiar,
vulnerable vertiginous sleep.

Did he want his neck rubbed? What had Molly
Bloom said through the rolling bass of Professor Mahaney’s voice in
a small classroom almost twenty years ago? Yes and yes and yes and
yes. Yes he wanted his neck rubbed and, yes, small warm kisses
brushed onto his hair and, yes, a foal’s nip of lip along the
tingling ridge of an ear. Yes, he wanted the weight of her wanting
sitting heavy on his chest. Yes, he wanted the mass of her breasts
swung over him, a double pendulum, slowly swinging in an endless
time of their own making. Yes, he wanted the mindlessness of their
early couplings when they still had had the wisdom to shuck off the
day with the abandon with which they had shed their clothes. Yes,
he wanted that naked warmth and wisdom back, but somehow he knew
that he was no longer deft enough to strip himself of all the
encumbrances. He could get undressed, but he was long past the
point of getting naked for his mate.

“No, no thanks. That’s okay.”

As he said no Bill shook his head in harmony
then let that movement segue into a rolling back and forth, a
rotating of his tired head upon its stiffened neck.

Dilly drew close with her hands extended so
that in her white gown she resembled a faith healer going down into
her congregation.

“No. That’s okay.”

“Sssshhhh.”

In seconds her fingers found the knots of
muscles and Dilly began the careful kneading that untied them.
Later, in fake fever, she found another part which, with frantic
kneading, she knotted into desire. After Bill had come inside her
Dilly held her legs tight against one another until the bones on
the inside of her knees grew sore. She held Bill’s seed as fiercely
as a dog a rat. She held onto her duplicity as triumphantly as a
rat his scrap. She lay awake breathing slowly, willing her egg down
from its blood dark nest. Her shadowy smile grew as wide as a leer
as she listened to the ragged breathing of the cuckolded man who
had once been her husband before he had left her for his unending
assignation with work and old age.

* * *

Bill Koster-Phelps awoke with a strong sense
of unease. He wondered what catalytic process had occurred during
sleep to change last night’s feeling of triumph and satiation into
such a gnawing worry. Next to him, Dilly was breathing deeply. He
realized how rare it was to see his wife’s face in repose. He
almost always fell asleep while she continued to read, and it was
unusual for him to find her in bed when he awoke. As Bill stared at
the relaxed flesh of Dilly’s brow and the slackness of her mouth he
recalled times from early in their marriage when he would awake to
find her in fitful sleep after having spent part of the night
sitting up to relieve an unborn’s crush upon her organs or to tend
a squally baby. Back then he would stare at her in the early
morning mustard glow of curtained sunlight. With his face
half-buried in the warm yeasty dough of his pillow, his half-open
eyes would trace the fleshy curves of her face. He would follow the
swirl of bright down that began in front of her ears before
spreading out along her broad cheeks. He would push his cheek
deeper into the pillow so that he might look below her jaw line to
the thickening of her neck. He would look at Dilly’s fleshy
failings and try to note them with an engineer’s detachment, but on
most of those mornings the facts, though noted, would mean nothing.
Bill would stare at all the imperfect pieces of the human being
asleep next to him and feel a singular sense of well-being. This
was his wife. His mate. She who loved him. Mother of their children
and nurturer of their love. His wife, his life.

As he stared down Bill wondered at the
peacefulness of Dilly’s sleep. All of the turmoil of the last
months—her dissatisfaction with an empty house, their arguments
over another child, her worries about Bett, her anger about the
war, their frequent go-nowhere discussions of money—had become
gouged so deeply into her flesh that he had begun to notice the
occasional fleck of pink make-up caught in the creases. For some
mysterious reason, this morning her flesh bore no trace of the
emotional erosion it had suffered. Her forehead was smooth; her
eyebrows sat upon their ridges as relaxed as tawny cats draped on a
warm porch rail. The long lines which had been cut deep at both
sides of her mouth had been shortened and spackled. Bill wanted to
credit his efforts in the previous night’s lovemaking with her
transformation, but the engineer in him knew enough to be cautious
in his claim. In the minutes that he stared at his deep-sleeping
wife, Bill’s thoughts grew as taut as his body had been several
hours before. Finally, with his own brow deeply creased, Bill eased
himself from the bed. Twice during the few steps to the bathroom he
turned to stare at his wife as sharply as a novice hiker at a
snapping sound in a quiet woods.

During his shower, and while dressing and
drinking coffee, and during his disjointed conversation with the
whirlwind of his children and his late rising, unapologetic wife
and during the drive to work and throughout the day as he studied
blueprints and paged through government regulations, Bill’s brow
frequently furrowed with the effort of playing and replaying the
previous night’s and early morning’s images. Late in the afternoon
Bill took ten minutes to study the yellow pages. He made two calls.
In the first he learned that only his signature was required on the
consent form. In the second he made an appointment with a Dr.
Osterin.

As he drove home Bill wondered whether he
really had what it took to be a good manager. Had he been
outplayed? The closer he got to his home the stronger grew his
sense of unease. As he walked toward the back door he tried to look
past the thickening evening shadows to see what awaited him. He
guessed Dilly would continue her tenderness of the previous night.
That would be a clue. Stepping onto the stoop he worried that his
decision was tattooed upon his face. He tried to clear his mind of
the phone calls so his face would look to be preoccupied with
nothing more than work.