“No.” She is still looking off. “Not at risk management. I guess not.”
I hear a noise myself, unfamiliar and nearby, and stand up to the porch rail and peer over the lawn, hoping I’ll see Paul coming up the hill. But to the left, at the edge of the hardwoods, I can see, instead, all of Charley’s studio. As advertised, it is a proper old New England seaman’s chapel raised ten cockamamie feet above the pond surface on cypress pilings and connected to land by a catwalk. The church paint has been blasted off, leaving the lapped boards exposed. Windows are big, tall, clear lancets. The tin roof simmers in the sun of nearly noon.
And then Charley himself makes an appearance on the little back deck (happily in miniature), fresh from this morning’s sore-jawed brainstorms, cooking up super plans for some rich neurosurgeon’s ski palace in Big Sky, or a snorkeling hideaway in Cabo Cartouche — Berlioz still booming in his oversized ears. Bare-chested, tanned and silver-topped, in his usual khaki shorts, he is transporting from inside what looks like a plate of something, which he places on a low table beside a single wooden chair. I wish I could crank his big telescope down and survey the oarlock damage. That would interest me. (It’s never easy to see why your ex-wife marries the man she marries if it isn’t you again.)
I would like, however, to talk about Paul now: about the possibility of his coming down to Haddam to live, so as to stop limiting my fathering to weekends and holidays. I haven’t entirely thought through all the changes to my own private dockets that his arrival will necessitate, the new noises and new smells in my air, new concerns for time, privacy, modesty; possibly a new appreciation for my own moment and freedoms; my role: a man retuned to the traditional, riding herd on a son full time, duties dads are made for and that I have missed but crave. (I could also bear to hear about the howlers Ann and Charley have been conducting, though that isn’t my business and could easily turn out to be nothing: mischief Clarissa and Paul dreamed up to confuse everyone’s agenda.)
But I’m thwarted by what to say, and frankly inhibited by Ann. (Perhaps this is another goal of divorce — to reinstitute the inhibitions you dispensed with when things were peachy.) It’s tempting just to push off toward less controversial topics, like I did last night: my headaches with the Markhams and McLeods, rising interest rates, the election, Mr. Tanks — my most unforgettable character — with his truck, his gold-collared kitty and his Reader’s Digest condenseds, a personal docket that makes my own Existence Period look like ten years of sunshine.
But Ann suddenly says, apropos of nothing but also, of course, of everything, “It’s not really easy being an ex-spouse, is it? There isn’t much use for us in the grand plan. We don’t help anything go forward. We just float around unattached, even if we’re not unattached.” She rubs her nose with the back of her hand and snuffs. It’s as if she’s seen us outside our real bodies, like ghosts above the river, and is wishing we’d go away.
“There’s always one thing we can do.” She makes a point of rarely using my name unless she’s angry, so that most of the time I just seem to overhear her and offer a surprise reply.
“And what’s that?” She looks at me disapprovingly, her dark brows clouded, her leg twitching in a barely detectable, spasmic way.
“Get married to each other again,” I say, “just to state the obvious.” (Though not necessarily the inevitable.) “Last year I sold houses to three couples”—two, actually—“each of whom was at one time married, and who got divorced and married, then divorced, then married their original true love again. If you can say it you can do it, I guess.”
“We can put that on your tombstone,” Ann says with patent distaste. “It’s the story of your life. You don’t know what you’re going to say next, so you don’t know what’s a good idea. But if it wasn’t a good idea to be married to you seven years ago, why would it be a better idea now? You’re not any better.” (This is unproved.) “It’s conceivable you’re worse.”
“You’re happily married anyway,” I say, pleased with myself, though wondering who the “special someone” will be who’ll make decisions about my tombstone. Best if it could be me.
Ann scrutinizes Charley treading long-strided, barefooted, bare-chested back inside his studio, no doubt to see if his miso is ready and to dig the soy sauce and shallots out of the Swedish mini-fridge. Charley, I notice, walks in a decidedly head-forward, hump-shouldered, craning way that makes him look surprisingly old — he’s only sixty-one — but which makes me experience a sudden, unexpected and absolutely unwanted and impolitic sympathy for him. A good head shot with an oarlock is more telling on a man his age.
“You like thinking I ought to be sorry I married Charley. But I’m not sorry. Not at all,” Ann says, her tan shoe giving another nervous little twitch. “He’s a much better person than you are”—grossly unproved—“not that you have any reason to believe that, since you don’t know him. He even has a good opinion of you. He tries to be a pal to these children. He thinks we’ve done a better than average job with them.” (No mention of his daughter the novelist.) “He’s nice to me. He tells the truth. He’s faithful.” My ass as a bet on that, though I could be wrong. Some men are. Plus, I’d like to hear an example of some sovereign truth Charley professes — no doubt some self-congratulating GOP Euclideanism: A penny saved is a penny earned; buy low, sell high; old Shakespeare sure knew his potatoes. My unmerited sympathy for him goes flapping away.
“I guess I didn’t realize he held me in high esteem,” I say (and I’m sure he doesn’t). “Maybe we should be best friends. He asked me about that once. I was forced to decline.”
Ann just shakes her head, rejecting me the way a great actor rejects a heckler in the audience — utterly and without really noticing.
“Frank, you know when we were all living down in Haddam five years ago, in that sick little arrangement you thrived on, and you were fucking that little Texas bimbo and having the time of your life, I actually put an ad in the Pennysaver, advertising myself as a woman who seeks male companionship. I actually risked boredom and rape just to keep things the way you liked them.”
This is not the first time I’ve heard about the Pennysaver etc. And Vicki Arcenault was far from a bimbo. “We could’ve gotten remarried again anytime,” I say. “And I wasn’t having the time of my life. You divorced me, if you can remember precisely. We could’ve moved back in together. All kinds of things could’ve happened instead of what did.” Possibly I’m about to hear that the most difficult milieu adjustment of my adult life didn’t really have to be made (if only I’d been clairvoyant). It’s the worst news anyone could hear, and for a nickel I’d pop Ann right in the chops.
“I didn’t want to marry you.” She keeps shaking her head, though less forcefully. “I just should’ve left, that’s all. Do you even think you know why you and I got unmarried?” She takes a brief, angling look at me — uncomfortably like Sally’s look. I’d rather not be delving into the past now, but into the future or at least the present, where I’m most at home. It’s all my fault, though, for rashly bringing up the queasy matter of — or at least the word — marriage.
“I’m on record,” I say, to answer her fair and square, “as believing our son died and you and I tried to cope with it but couldn’t. Then I left home for a time and had some girlfriends, and you filed for divorce because you wanted me gone.” I look at her haltingly, as if in describing that time in our life I’d as much as stated a Goya could’ve easily been painted by a grandmother in Des Moines. “Maybe I’m wrong.”