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Page 17.

Chapter 7

On a day not longer after, on Everitt Street, trees glowed brightly and the buds on the trees were even brighter golden-green as Jon Harney and Merile Doherty sat on the porch outside her bedroom sipping iced tea and lazily regarding Saturday morning tree tops.

“This looks like a day to drive somewhere,” he said.

She sat back contentedly, hands folded in her lap, a restful smile turning her cheeks solar. “What did you have in mind?”

He lifted the tea glass and studied its fresh sediment in the morning sunlight. In some spirit of mutuality they had invented this small gesture, They shared a glass. They drank from this glass in turns, refilling it often from a plastic pitcher full of clacking ice cubes. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

She pursed her lips and arched her back. Her bare ankles wriggled on the porch palisade. The late June breeze ruffled her fine yellow hair. “When was the last time you were in Vermont?”

He shrugged in some embarrassment. “I haven’t been to Vermont in five years. I’ve only been there once, with a ski group from college. I can only imagine Vermont full of snow. Why? How long of a ride do you suppose it is?”

She sat back, giving him a sedate and reasonable look. “Too long, I’m afraid. It would take us a few hours.”

“We could spend the weekend!” he enthused.

She shook her head. “I keep thinking Bill might call. Somehow I wouldn’t feel right about taking off for the whole weekend, not without writing him first.”

Jon Harney set the glass down, careful to avoid any show of jealousy. What right did he have? He’d resolved not to question her commitments. Somehow he always returned with a faint bitter taste to these reminders that their relationship was bounded, that there were limits. A thunder clap, a landing 747, a few bones from Australia, and he’d run. She was the only thing keeping him contented with his lawns and flower gardens. He wondered if he’d have quit by now—perhaps find some coat-and-tie job or maybe bury himself a few more years at some graduate school, only to end up mowing more lawns because he had no inkling of the practical now nor would he then. Sadly, the Bills of the world were born with this kind of street savvy. They had this boardroom, mahogany-row deep pile carpet smell in their blood from birth. Jon Harney, first in his family to rise above trucking or mucking, had cruised into the sky but was lost, flying blindly in dense cumulus clouds of poetry and sincerity.

Merile bit her lower lip speculatively and looked at him. “I have a week’s vacation I can take this summer. That’s nine days, if you count weekends. If you want, maybe I and my imaginary girlfriend Mimi could take a week’s ride up into northern New England.”

He frowned, more for her than himself.

She held out her hand for him. “You care about me, don’t you?”

He took her hand in his. “I love you.”

“No.”

“What else could this be? Am I sick?”

She smiled. “That’s Shakespeare. This is reality. Jon, I love you too, like a—”

“—Husband?”

“Like a lover. You are my lover. I am your—”

“Wife?”

“Silly man. I am your girl, your dream, your whore, your bitch, anything you want me to be.”

He fought conflicting feelings, to leave, to love, just not to like. It was more than that now.

She pawed at him. “What do you want, Jon?”

I want you to love me like I love you.

She read the look in his eyes and stared. “You should leave if you are going to hurt yourself.” She reconsidered the legalese in that look. “I don’t want to hurt you.” Then she made faces as if seeing him for the first time. “Oh, baby. I do love you. I am just—stuck like this. A beetle trapped in amber. You are a poet, Charles Egeny, free as the wind. I am a prisoner, and you brought me a loaf of bread with a file baked in it, but I am too weak and foolish to saw my way out or even see my way out. What would I do? I keep busy typing and filing, a little light reception work. I couldn’t possibly support myself.” She paused. “I never finished college. I wanted to take singing lessons, but I can’t hold a tune. I was going to major in communications, but I can’t write. I was going to be a history major, but I can’t remember the difference between Julius Caesar and Caesar Salad.” She stroked him as if he were a pet chinchilla. “Baby.”

“You are beautiful,” he said. “You have a doctorate in being perfect. I am a shmoe who mows lawns. I know, one day I’ll teach English or something. I don’t even want to think about it.”

She laid her head on his lap, the girl from the cigarillo ad, whose husband was that craggy handsome cowboy riding away into orange mesas in the remote provinces of Upskate and Downskate. She would never age nor want for money nor fail to speak in symbols (Ivy League, Seven Sisters, Lah-di-Dah).

You are not leaving Bill to run away with me.

He rose, took her hand in his, and sat on the armrest by her legs. She breathed in deeply, a gesture of sadness, “Jon, this trip to Vermont might be the only few days we ever have together. I mean real days together, where we can be alone and without any thought of being seen or being wondered about.” With the corner of her eye she indicated the dense tree crowns all around. “I’m pretty sure nobody can see us, and even if they do, they don’t know Bill, and nobody would wonder about you being here…” As she spoke, her eyes evinced a deep and sincere thirst to drink from his cup. Their age difference was, after all, slight. She looked younger, and he could pass for older. He bent his head to kiss her hand. He half-lifted her willing, elegant paw, but stopped—instead, more gallantly, he lowered his crown to honor her.

“Okay, maybe Vermont is too far. Maybe there is someplace around here where we can have a picnic,” she pressed.

He rose and lifted their communal tea glass. The liquid tasted sweet and bitter. Her hand fell onto the thin cotton of her dress, and he noted its early, faint patterning amid the late-hour tennis tan. She saw her hands too, and said, “It’s just a question of those few days. You don’t have to think there’s a trap. Only what’s in your head.”

He looked doubtfully out into the tree crowns, where a darting squirrel zigged and zagged evasion patterns across warped dark-gray bark.

Jon took Merile not to Vermont but to Sleeping Giant Park, a half-hour drive out of New Haven toward the north along Route 10. Traffic was heavy, and the heat set in, so he put the top of the car up. He wore blue jeans, crew socks, loafers, a hang-ten shirt. She wore white deck shoes, pink socks, and a simple skirt of light blue denim. A halter top freed her long caramel arms and slender hands.

“I keep wishing you weren’t married,” he said along the way, regarding a stubborn red light with frustration.

She budged slightly in her relaxed position, legs extended under the dashboard, one hand in her lap while she watched her other hand toying idly around the mirror outside the car. “I’m older than you. The age difference would bother you soon enough.”

He shrugged, shifting gears and slowly releasing the clutch as the light turned green and summer holiday traffic edged along.

“Ultimately it will,” she prophesied. “That’s why it doesn’t matter that I’m married.”

Puzzled, he glanced at her; then concentrated on the road ahead. Suddenly he wished he were far away, tipping beer or chasing girls with one of his male friends. A feeling of futility overcame him, making his hands doubly sweaty.

She smiled wanly. “I supposed one day Bill will find the right bones and come back to settle down with me and spend a lifetime writing important papers about his discoveries. Maybe that’s the reason I stay put like I do. We’re okay together when he’s here.”

Jon said in a sickly voice, “Please…”

She sidled across the seat and laid her hand gently on his thigh. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud.” She reached up and stroked his hair. “I want us to have a good time today. Don’t be sad or angry.”

He gritted his teeth, full of frustration and futility. What was he doing getting himself emotionally involved with a married woman?

She sat close to him and said softly, so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath in his ear and inside his collar, “You wouldn’t marry me or anything. I know Charles Egeny, maybe better than you think. I know you’re not about to tie yourself down, but I also know you’re in the back of your mind always searching for that perfect young girl who is going to make you happy.”

He pulled his ear and collar away. Tears threatened to blind him. He actually heard himself sob, as if he were someone else.

She however pressed—”Please listen. I know how you feel about me. I feel it too. We are crazy about each other. But it’s unrealistic to suppose anything is going to come of our relationship. Even if I were to divorce Bill, I really don’t believe you would marry me. I don’t believe you would tie yourself to me. And I know it frustrates you to feel your emotions going down a dead end. But it doesn’t have to be a dead end. Maybe just a…brief stop. You can spare me a few hours here and there can’t you? I won’t stand in your way.”

He laughed and brushed the wetness from his eyes. “I suppose you’re right. What would I do now, anyway? Drive around? Drink beer? Buddy up with my old friends and talk about how we’d like to get laid if only we found some ripe young chicks or maybe…”

“…Maybe pick ripe fruit from the married tree?”

He nodded. “I guess that’s sort of what I’d be doing.” He sat upright and put his hand on her knee. “You’re right. This feels like—say, remember that night, with the Beach Boys?” A hard rock tune resounded in the dashboard speaker, and abruptly the mood was broken as they rolled along happily making pretend.

“We’re just on a date,” she said.

We’re just kids playing house.

“Yes, and I haven’t dared yet to touch your boobs.”

“No, you haven’t even gotten as far as to put your arm around my waist.”

“I’m going to try it, you know.”

“I see that look in your eyes. I’ll fight you off with a chair and a whip, you lion.”

“I may be a lion, but you are a pussy.”

It’s fun to pretend, to play, to fight like this.

“I am open for business anytime you want to get your whip wet.”

“I’m ready to pull over and take you right here.”

“I wish we could. Too bad you don’t have a van. We could make love in the back and nobody would see us.”

“I’m going to love you in the back, in the front, in the bush.”

“You make me all wet when you talk dirty to me.”

I will never find another woman like you in my life.

As he drove, she gently massaged the back of his neck. “I cried about us.”

“What?”

“We are a tragedy, baby.”

This really hurts—but it’s such a love-hurt.

“Oh god now I am getting all wet again—in the eyes.”

“Don’t, sweetheart.” She nuzzled his ear, nibbled his lobe, snuggled her cheek against his shoulder. “My poor baby.”