“Connie, what can I say to you? You’re not defective. You’re a bright, witty, breathtaking woman, and I don’t care how much money Harold makes. I don’t care if he moves the Smithsonian into his gazebo and invites the Washington Redskins to play in his backyard. So let’s just forget it.”
In the mirror, he saw her eyes brim with tears. There would be no more playful banter today. She had brought back the memories, which hung over them like the stalled thunderhead of a summer storm. At the time, Connie was just finishing her master’s degree, still writing her thesis on French impressionism. They’d just starting going out, and one August night, after a swim in the cold Atlantic at dusk off Siasconset on Nantucket Island, wrapped in a blanket on the beach, they’d made love. He remembered even now her salty taste, her long wet hair falling into her face, his body grinding into her with the urgency and passion of new lovers.
My God, the heat we brought to each other.
He could still picture the fusion of their bodies, each of them heedless of the scraping sand and incoming tide, seeing only the first stars of evening, the rising moon, and the fire in each other’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to re-create that with her now. For longer than he cared to admit, their lovemaking had been infrequent and perfunctory.
But then… oh Lord, then the sex had been synchronized with the pounding of the waves. He had sung out her name on the sea breeze, exploding into her with a thunderclap from within, watching bolts of lightning through closed eyes.
He had also exploded into her without protection, an event that just now prompted Connie to refer to her husband not as “Sweetheart” but rather as “the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.” Actually, he had used a condom, but it burst because, in his feverish haste, he had neglected to squeeze out the air pocket in the tip, which then detonated in the midst of their furious coupling. Sam Truitt’s manual dexterity, it seemed, was limited to putting a spiral on the long snap.
Connie became pregnant. Their first crisis, the one that would launch all the others. Just like the chaos theory the physicists introduced to popular culture. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a typhoon in the Pacific. And, he supposed, the explosion of a condom on Nantucket can cause an October freeze in Georgetown fifteen years later.
At the time, they handled the situation surprisingly well. He was sensitive, caring, understanding. She was thoughtful, mature, and decisive.
He said it was her choice all the way. He believed, then as a man, and now as a judge, that the woman had all the votes. There was no talk of marriage. After all, they barely knew each other. But if she chose to have the child, he promised to be there for them both. He’d visit, bring birthday presents, pay for everything right up through college. He gave himself an A for his hypothetical parenting skills, which she reminded him, were considerably greater than his actual contraception skills.
The abortion was quick and apparently without incident. Well, not without psychological incident. Connie became depressed. He felt guilty. He’d never heard the term back then, but now he supposed they were snared in a codependent relationship. He wouldn’t leave her, not like that. He was captured in the web of her moodiness, sinking in the quicksand of her unfulfilled needs.
They were married six months later, and the artificiality of the closeness that carried them through the abortion soon evaporated. For reasons neither they nor the doctors could understand, this healthy, athletic, screw-every-damn-night couple could not conceive. Several years later they learned that the abortion had caused an infection, which scarred her Fallopian tubes.
Complicating their lives, hanging over them like an unseen ghost, was the child they never had. They did not even create an illusion, a fantasy child to sustain them like the playwright Albee’s ineffectual George and vicious Martha, locked in a perpetual embrace of psychological cruelty. Their life together had begun with the act of conceiving an unwanted child on the shore of an ocean, and in what Sam’s Southern Baptist relatives would have considered an act of biblical retribution, they cried a sea of tears trying to duplicate the feat.
“Do you know what really angers me?” she asked, finally.
Everything, he thought.
“The fact that you don’t see the connection between your words and the source of your feelings,” she answered herself.
He had to get out of there. The bedroom was growing smaller by the minute. He stood and tried to escape, squeezing between his wife and the bed, banging his shin into an open vanity drawer.
“Damn! Plessy versus Ferguson! ” When he was angry, Truitt tried to confine his profanity to the names of horrific Supreme Court decisions. Sopchoppy responded with a quiet woof.
“I told you this house was too small,” she said as he fled, hopping on one foot.
The Truitts’ two-hundred-year-old farmhouse near Waltham was ten times larger, Connie frequently reminded him. They had eighteen gently rolling acres with a stream on one side of the property and a duck pond on the other. But Connie was unhappy there, too, always complaining that the house was too big, too drafty, too old, too far from Boston.
Washington was going to be their move to the city. Embassy parties, dinner at Citronelle, shopping for antiques.
Sam Truitt cared nothing for black tie dinners or sauteed foie gras with poached figs in port wine sauce. His tastes were simpler, preferring cut-off jeans and a meal of plain grilled snapper and boiled swamp cabbage, a legacy of growing up in Everglades City. It took him thirty years to find out that his momma’s swamp cabbage was called heart of palm when served in fancy restaurants, including The Palm, and an appetizer portion could set you back eight bucks. He used to eat about a pound of the concoction for supper. His mother, a Florida Cracker, would slice open a palm tree with a machete and cook the fibrous meat with sow’s belly or ham hock in a fifty-five-gallon drum on an open fire. They’d eat, year-round, at a picnic table under a live oak tree, zebra butterflies flapping over their heads, causing typhoons in Tonga, he now supposed.
Washington was also going to rejuvenate the marriage, and who knows, maybe lead to a magical fertility that had escaped them farther north. So far, all it had accomplished was to bring them into closer confinement.
Two scorpions in a shoe box.
He preferred the open spaces of the wetlands where he grew up. Connie insisted on referring to the Everglades as “the swamp,” despite his insistence that it was really a slow-moving freshwater river some sixty miles wide. Just after his nomination to the Court last spring, he returned to Florida for “Sam Truitt” day, which the local weekly termed the largest celebration the town had ever seen, if you didn’t count the annual seafood festival. The volunteer fire department led a parade, with the high school band playing off-key Sousa. A chugging John Deere tractor hauled Sam and Connie down Conch Avenue on a float with papier-mache pillars representing the Supreme Court, Connie choking on the diesel fumes that hung in the humid air.
In the sweltering Fishermen’s Hall, Truitt made a speech, tracing his success to values learned in the sloughs and creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands, and Connie stood there in a yellow sundress, fanning herself with a commemorative poster, complaining about the heat, picking over the supper of fried catfish, hush puppies, and key lime pie-washed down with sugar-laden iced tea. Later, manhandling bottles of tequila, Truitt and some of the good ole boys, now leathery fishermen with scarred hands and squinty eyes, swapped lies about their youth and who built the fastest airboat from broken airplane propellers and old Chevy engines.
Truitt hadn’t been home since his mother’s funeral eight years earlier. His father had died three years before that. This time, as he clasped hands and slapped shoulders of old friends and acquaintances, he kept an eye on Connie, studying her discomfort. While he felt at home, she looked afraid of stepping in something squishy and repulsive.