Jenny and the Jaws of Life Read online

  She sat down beside him. “See, they’re just like those old ones you had that frayed through in the seat.”

  “Very nice,” he said, and did not look at her

  “I want to pack them. All your old pj’s are so ratty-looking.”

  He lowered the box to the floor. “Oh, honey,” he said.

  Untying her terry robe she lay back on the bed behind him. It took him too long to turn his head and see what she had done. A quarter second would have been too long, so abrupt was her need of him. She pulled him down, filled with the sense of her own selfishness. She gripped him, she mauled him, and he seemed a small and sacrificial thing, a long thin animal, pale-skinned, defenseless. This is shock, she thought with some satisfaction, proud of her body’s capacity for textbook response, and of her ability to recognize it; she had read that death often produces such reactions. But her desire was too sharp; it raced through her in stingy narrow stabs, unconnected to him and scarcely connected to her, it made her frantic, inhuman, and ugly: she gathered him to her and into her and through her like an implacable machine. She could not be satisfied; he held still, finally, resisting her in silence, to tell her this; and she subsided. She lay beneath him, her head turned away from his pitying regard. It had been the proper thing to do, the one perfect thing to do, and she resented his failure to take her where she needed to be. She thought, I could have cried then, I could be crying right now, and he comforting me, and we would be together now, and not like this.

  It was late afternoon of the funeral day. Rebecca stood in her mother’s golden kitchen, in a broad ray of orange sunshine, washing dishes and glasses with tireless efficiency. The guests had all left, well fed and well impressed with the dignity and competence of the two women. Her father’s business partner had given her brother an awkward embrace in farewell: “Take good care of them, Charlie,” he said, when it must have been clear to all that Charlie was the one who needed tending. He looked more than ever like his father, she thought, tall, long-limbed, and frail now, weak from crying. She had always loved her brother. Even when they were children he had seemed to her innocent, and herself corrupt and wise. As far back as memory went she had known when the truth would serve, and when was the best time for silence or a lie, and he knew nothing of the arts of tact and subtle manipulation. He had his father’s instinctive charm and none of his mother’s patient reserve and detached analytic curiosity.

  Rebecca had grown up believing that all men were optimists, credulous and clear-eyed and in need of vigilant protection; she and her mother had always known that some day the axe would fall, had squirreled away part of themselves for just such a moment as this. She was proud of her mother, and never more so than today: they had stood on either side of Charlie, beside the open grave, gripping his hands in their cold ones; had borne him through the worst of it, so that the three stood erect and proud; and Simon had seen it all.

  When she turned off the faucet and wiped down the counters and stove top she heard the men’s low voices in the living room. Her mother was resting. Evidently Simon, who during the past three days had moved among them like a benign ghost, correct, discreet, was now with her brother. She listened to the faint reverberation of their alternating voices, her husband’s moderate tenor, the deeper husky tones of her brother. It must be hell for Simon, she thought—he was as self-contained, as private as she; more so, in fact; he would hate to witness such unashamed display. Unlike her mother she had married a man much like herself, exactly like she wanted to be. Rather than complementing her he provided her with a standard to work toward, perhaps to surpass. From the beginning she valued his strengths, and saw that she must either seize advantage of them—let him take responsibility for her, as he was inclined to do—or reject the shelter they offered and so strengthen herself. She chose to be his equal.

  The conversation stopped. She stood for a minute listening, then straining for the barest sound. Unable to contain her curiosity, and intending to extricate Simon, she walked to the living room door. Simon held her brother in a tight, one-armed embrace; her brother’s chest rose and fell with dry sobs, his face was pressed against his hand; she could not see her husband’s face, turned away from her as it was, toward her weeping brother. There was nothing stilted or formal or embarrassed about the embrace. He comforted Charlie simply, naturally, with straightforward generosity. She could not bear the sight. She steadied herself against the door-jamb, recovering balance; then stepped back, and briskly away, and they disappeared.

  Her mother looked very young, lying curled up on the pale yellow comforter, in the middle of their new bed, a huge low rectangle that half filled the bedroom. Maybe it was the room itself that made her look that way: she had recently redecorated—they had planned, she told Rebecca, to make the whole house over—and the walls and carpet were an even paler yellow, almost white; and on the two marble-topped nightstands stood deep burgundy vases filled with daisies. Except for the bed, it was a young girl’s room. Her mother opened her eyes and smiled, like a young girl, at Rebecca standing in the doorway. “I’m not sleeping,” she said.

  Rebecca picked up an old wedding picture from the bureau and sat down beside her mother. “He was awfully skinny, wasn’t he? You always said he was handsome, but I think he got much better looking than this.” The picture was not as yellow as the walls. Her parents smiled shyly at her, foolish and happy. “You haven’t changed much.” This was a lie; she was softer now, and plump, and her wispy golden hair was cut short.

  “He looks a little like Simon there,” her mother said.

  “I don’t see that at all.” She lay the picture on the nightstand.

  “You know, your father liked Simon very much. A couple of years ago, when you phoned and told us about him, he was a little upset. ‘Why, he’s my age,’ he said. ‘What the hell does she want to marry an old man for?’ Well, he liked him right off when you brought him out here. Liked him the minute he saw him. You know your father.”

  “‘A man’s character is written all over his face. You just have to learn how to read it.’”

  “Actually, I think he got to like the idea, too, of Simon’s age. When he stopped to think about it, he took it as a compliment.”

  “He took everything as a compliment.” They laughed, and Rebecca briefly squeezed her mother’s cold hand. They had always been so easy together. Touching was never important to either of them. It was their men who were affectionate; the men had more literal minds.

  “I’m taking it very well,” her mother said. “I surprise myself.”

  “It’s horrible. It’s the worst thing that could have happened.”

  “No. If it had been me, leaving him…that would have been worse.” She pushed herself up into a half-sitting position, resting her head on her crooked-back arm. “And if he had to die, I’m glad he went this way.”

  “For his sake, yes. But you had no time to prepare. Sudden death is always—”

  “Prepare,” her mother said. “How would I have done that, I wonder.” She spoke softly, with her eyes closed, as she often did when she was tired or had a migraine. “I have heard there are people, doctors, who specialize in grief, who claim that when you know someone is dying, you begin to grieve right away. The more you grieve beforehand, the less you will afterwards. You give yourself a kind of credit, I guess.

  “Imagine,” she said, “being a grief specialist.” There was a long silence. She opened her eyes and regarded her daughter without any expression at all. Her stare chilled Rebecca. But then she relaxed into a slow smile.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “About when you were a baby, and we were afraid there was something the matter with your legs because you weren’t walking, and then we found out you were practicing secretly in your room.”

  “I just wanted to get it right.” This was one of Rebecca’s favorite stories.

  “Oh, yes. And then that Sunday when we had all those people over to the house, and you decided to go public—just g
ot up and walked across the floor, just as nonchalant as you please. I never saw your father laugh so hard.” She grinned, and pain skittered across her face.

  “I love you.”

  “Is anything wrong between you and Simon? You don’t seem close somehow.”

  “Everything’s fine.” The question shocked her. It wasn’t like her mother to pry. And there was nothing wrong, she was just cold. These were cold times. She stood up. “Try to sleep,” she said, and walked to the door, and turned around. “Mother? Are you all right?”

  “No,” her mother said.

  Rebecca broke at the last minute. An hour later and she and Simon would have been boarding their plane at San Diego International. In retrospect, the timing of it provided her with still further evidence of her own amazing competence.

  Her mother was already at the garage, starting the car; Rebecca, Simon, and Charlie roamed the house making a last-minute check to see if they had left anything behind. She went into the yellow bedroom for a brief glance around and suddenly felt her knees turn weak. It’s coming, she thought, with perfect certainty, though she had had no idea what form it would take. She stared at the wedding picture, held it straight out in front of her, and this helped; soon she could not see his features for the tears. Good, she said to herself, here I go, but then it was not good; pain appeared, flared out with astonishing power, with the force of nausea. She clapped her hand tight over her mouth and shook with fear and the worsening pain, and when Simon found her she was pacing the room in panic, fighting it, on the edge of it; and when she saw him standing close by, his arms extended toward her, she exploded into rage: “Look at this,” she hissed at him, pointing at the huge yellow bed, feeling her face and body harden, contort, and was fueled by the sense of her own ugliness and utter irrationality: “Look at it! She has to sleep there! Look at it!” She pounded her thighs with the knuckles of her clenched hands. He caught her, and she did break then, and in her last act of will wrenched away from him and ran through the house until she found her brother. With profound humiliation and crazy spite and sincere generous impulse she gave her little brother this gift, the awful spectacle of her grief. And she cried at last for her poor father, a good man, silly and self-important, fragile, human; because his death was such a cheat; because of the ignominy of his last words, of his death fall to the kitchen floor; she cried out of pity, and because she would miss him, and because she would not miss him more. Then she let Simon take her to the car, and slept on the way to the airport, and all the way home.

  A month went by before she was conscious of the strain between them, so eagerly did she submerge herself in the December holidays, and in newfound enthusiasm for thesis work, an ambitious project she had abandoned the year before. Full of nervous energy, she did the Christmas shopping for both of them, ranging through department stores and specialty shops, agonizing over every purchase. She was as pleased with her final selections, and with the elaborate dishes she prepared for him, as she would have been about the success of far weightier enterprises. She was fascinated with minutiae, she fairly hummed with content, like a well-tended motor, until she realized that Simon was unhappy.

  He was sleeping far too much. He napped when he came home from school, and often for an hour or more after dinner, and always on Saturday afternoons, and Sundays after their morning country walks. He was always lying down. “Something’s the matter with you,” she said, the instant she recognized it, jogging him awake with her voice. “Are you sick? Don’t you think you should see a doctor?” She made some attempt to appear solicitous, but really she was furious. She knew him; withdrawal from her was his way of reproach, his only way, though he had never done it on such a grand scale before. “Do you know you’ve been doing this for weeks—just sleeping, like a lump? I’ve been worrying about you.” “Have you,” he said, a sardonic mumble, and he was asleep again, before she could say, “God, you annoy me sometimes.” It was the old game, guess your offense, and this time at least she was innocent.

  Simon didn’t withdraw to make her feel guilty. Simon, she knew, was never petty. Rather, he had always and consistently refused to insult her and demean himself by articulating the obvious. If the offense was not apparent to her he would wait until she saw it for herself, and corrected it, or defended it, and he never expected apologies. He was older, and more patient; he could always out-wait her; and he was rarely, if ever, unreasonable.

  In the face of his gentle supine rebuke she could not sustain her December sense of purpose, and dropped into immediate and serious depression, a state that she had, she saw, been avoiding by means of mindless enthusiasm and activity; the inevitable cost of her family’s tragedy. She wrapped herself in mourning; she grew as dependent upon its habits, as comfortable with its routine, as does an invalid with his favorite quilt. Now she slept as much as Simon—noticed this, too, with no small satisfaction. She attended to their needs perfunctorily. She shut him out on purpose, making her intentions clear. Their home fell under siege. They did not speak of it.

  She cried a great deal, thinking sometimes of her father, prodded by sudden recollections of happy times, more often of childhood misunderstandings, broken promises on both sides; thinking sometimes of nothing at all, crying like rain. She cried soundlessly in the bathroom, with the door locked. Once Simon tried the door; she watched the brass knob rotate once clockwise, once counterclockwise; he stood outside saying nothing; watching, she was bitterly offended. Many nights she left their bed, stealthy and wide awake, and cried in the spare room, secure beneath the cheap, garish coverlet of the cheap and narrow bed.

  Until one night in late March he woke her there; she had fallen asleep and awakened to harsh light and the snap of a switch, and he stood over her, gray, hopeless, strange. “I can’t stand it any more,” he said.

  She had, for the first time ever, outwaited him. He looked tired and sick; she saw at once that she had done this to him, and was frightened. “I’m sorry,” she said, choosing her words with care, “I just get blue sometimes. I don’t want to bother you, so I come in here.”

  “I don’t believe that, and neither do you. You can’t be that stupid.”

  She had not looked at him in so long. She became conscious of a tiny horror, steadily growing, as a parent must feel when, emerging from glorious rage, he sees blood and bruises on his only child. “Look,” she said, sitting up, keeping her voice calm, “we’re too alike. We’ve always known about this problem. When things go wrong between, us, which doesn’t happen often, we take forever to come out of it.”

  The spare room was functional, impersonal, like a motel room, only worse: cartons were stacked in corners, bedspreads and curtains were ill-matched castoffs, and on the walls she had absently hung trite prints, faded calendars. They deserved better than this room, sitting in this room at this most terrible hour of night. She caressed his shoulder. He was still warm. “This has been a bad time for me. I’m sorry I haven’t taken it very well.” He did not return the caress.

  “Do you want to tell me now why you’re angry with me?” he said. She didn’t answer, keeping her eyes down. “This started the minute your mother called.”

  “You never liked him,” she said, almost blurting it out. It might be the true explanation. It made sense. “That time I brought you out to meet my family you were bored, terribly polite. You acted like a goddamn aristocrat.” She managed anger. “Because he liked Mantovani records, and golf, and none of them are educated. I don’t come from class, like you, you made me ashamed of him….” Simon sighed with disgust and left her there. She followed him into the bedroom. “I don’t mean I blame you, you didn’t do it on purpose. It’s just that naturally I resented you a little when…when he died.” This was so obviously a lie that she watched without protest as he got into bed and turned his back to her.

  “What is it?” she cried, climbing in beside him, hovering over him. “Tell me now. I can’t stand any more either. I’m scared.”

  “Rebecca,” he said
finally, calling her by name for the first time in years. “You can stand anything. But you can’t control it all.” And after a while he said, in a dry voice, devoid of sympathy, “Winter’s over now. Three months wasted. That’s three months gone.”

  She let him sleep then, or perhaps he lay awake too. She gave herself up at last to honest mourning, to frank despair, and of course he could not help her. She had killed him in her mind a thousand times, and he had watched her do it.

  The next morning, Sunday morning, was sunny and warm. She could see it was warm from the soft blurred edges of the shadows outside, the powder-blue sky. False spring, she thought, without hope. But they left for their Sunday walk as usual, on schedule, with a minimum of discussion, and drove to an old favorite place, an Audubon sanctuary a half hour from home.

  They had never come here this early in the year. The oaks, maples, and birches were bare, and the blackberry bushes, and there were still large patches of grainy snow in the thickest part of the woods. But the evergreens were lush in contrast, their damp needles giving way pleasingly underfoot, and song sparrows and fat, handsome chickadees broke the clean silence with friendly buzzes and high, thin pipings. Simon walked ahead of her on the trail, setting her an easy, loping pace. She followed, hands in pockets, though it was not cold, looking occasionally left and right, seeing little. They covered a mile this way, effortlessly, without a false turn or an unnecessary word. They moved as gracefully together as they always had, only their silence now was not companionable. It is terrible, she thought, how the bodies move so well in their old accustomed patterns, undirected.

  And with this thought, the thought of bodies, she wanted him. At first it was a mere idea; but almost at once her body took it up, sang with it, with marvelous urgency. She had not wanted him since the night her father died, and that dark frantic desire was only the faintest shadow of this. He was stopped a few yards ahead of her, gazing through binoculars at the top of a far-off maple. He stood bent forward, back straight, one long sneakered foot propped weightlessly on a moss-covered rock; the elbows of his old red flannel shirt were frayed through in ragged circles, revealing chapped pink skin. He might have been a young man, except that slender shafts of light, filtered through pine, exposed the fine leather of his neck and ears, the eggshell skull beneath thinning, charcoal hair; a wise innocent, he was; an aging faun. A passing crow sounded alarm, but he did not hear; and she laughed silently at the thought of her own menace. She opened her mouth to tell him but could not speak; she was shy of him; alive for the first time in so long, she could not take the risk. So when he moved forward, leaving the yellow-marked trail for the blue one that would lead in another mile to the water, she followed, keeping her own counsel by a desperate act of will. She tracked him through damp sunny clearings and shaded snow, past holly trees and silver birches and thickets of mountain laurel. Utterly distracted, single-minded, she stalked him, and saw herself an absurd ungainly animal, like a great lovesick bird who, on account of some tragic nestling misapprehension, desires only impossible union, outside its own species. Halfway to the water she knew she must tell him, and searched, left and right, hanging back and catching up again, for a place they could go. She looked for a pine needle bed, but all secluded spots were ruined with white crust. And when she finally found a spot—a large flat rock set somewhat back from the trail, not too visible, with only a thin film of snow upon it—and drew a deep breath to call for him, she heard voices, high, excited giggles and a sharp answering baritone, a father and son, somewhere nearby. And still she would have dared, on the rock, anywhere, if she could just have determined where the people were, and in what direction they were heading. But there were so many trails, yellow, blue, green, and red, coinciding here, diverging there, circling and crossing one another. The voices receded and returned, sometimes with startling clarity, as she shadowed Simon through the maze. Finally she hung back for a full minute, deciding to disappear for a time into the woods alone and take care of herself. Her skin was feverish, she breathed in shallow gasps. But out of sight of him her body saw no point to it. A degree of reason came to her as she wandered toward her goal, just enough reason to discourage, not enough to calm; and with a sigh she turned back and headed down the trail.