Late in the Standoff Page 9

  “Listen to me, now—,” Don began.

  “Come on, Don,” Mrs. Ward urged him.

  “We didn’t know—”

  “That doesn’t wash,” I said.

  “Well, all right, but we weren’t sure which plan—”

  “You just wanted your money and you wanted out. Not very saintly of you, Don.”

  “Your realtor should have checked, she should have—”

  “No,” I said. “You should have.”

  “Don, let’s go.” Somehow, his wife mustered the stamina to move him. He half-stumbled backward on the walk. “We’re old people,” he said weakly. “Our kids used to play in this garden—”

  “Don.” Mrs. Ward took him by the shoulders and nodded toward their car. From across the street she glanced at me. “God bless you,” she said.

  “What’s Ziomism?” Haley asked me in the car, on our way back from Boys and Girls.

  “Zionism? Where’d you hear that word?”

  She showed me a pamphlet she’d picked up from the local synagogue. It was for Young Judea Summer Camp. “I want to go, but my daddy says they’ll turn me into a raving Ziomist.”

  Bill, Jean’s ex, was raised Protestant, and it had always been an open sore in their marriage that he only half-assedly supported Jean’s efforts to introduce Haley to Judaism. Jean wasn’t devout, but she loved the holiday rituals, the culture, and wanted Haley to treasure them too.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer Haley’s question. “Well, as I understand it—and I’m not an expert, okay, not by a long shot—it’s a movement among Israelis, and other Jews around the world, to expand Israel’s borders.”

  “You mean, make it bigger?”

  “Make it bigger, yes.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Have you heard of Palestinians?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “They claim some of the same land Israel does.”

  “I know that. I’ve learned that already.”

  “Good. Well, lots of people, including many Jews, feel that Israel shouldn’t expand. It should just stay where it is—and the Palestinians should accept them, too—so everyone can live in peace.” I didn’t know how historically or politically accurate I was being. I’d probably just butchered all the facts and—who knows?—scarred her for life.

  “My daddy says his heart will be brokender than it already is if I turn to Mom’s people and be a raving Ziomist.”

  “I have to say, honey …” I’d never spoken against Bill, never criticized him or questioned his authority in front of Haley. “I don’t think your daddy should tell you things like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not fair to your mom. Plus it’s too much of a burden on you for him to ask you to carry his emotional weight.”

  “Huh?”

  “He needs to solve his own problems.” Was I saying the right thing? Or greedily claiming ownership?

  I remembered, then, the day, two and a half years ago, when Jean and I told Haley we were going to live together. She’d giggled nervously and appeared not to register what we’d said. Later, at lunch in her favorite Mexican restaurant, she picked up a plastic fork. “This one’s for you,” she told me, and snapped the fork in half.

  “Don’t use her like that!” Jean yelled into the kitchen phone. “She’s not your mother. Or your girlfriend.”

  I had just come in from dumping the trash. I rubbed my hands, locked the door behind me. Whenever the air was chilly, I became aware of the dead spots in my chest and thigh, where the surgeon had “harvested” a vein for the bypass. He had told me I might never get feeling back in certain nerves, which had been disturbed by the procedure.

  “She’s talking to my daddy,” Haley said casually, glancing up from the floor where she’d spread her multiplication problems. Her cat purred beside her. “She’s mad about the Ziomism thing.”

  “Oh.”

  “You shouldn’t have told her,” she said.

  “Told her what, sweetie?”

  “Told her what my daddy said about his heart.”

  “Well, I’m her mother!” Jean said, lowering her voice and retreating into a corner away from us. “She’s not your private property!”

  Haley aimed a purple pencil at me. “You really shouldn’t have.”

  2

  It’s not Haley who’s waiting for me to die. Jean’s fears for my health seized her in our earliest days together, before either of us knew I had heart problems. Her anxiety is related to her father’s death, of leukemia, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-eight. She was traveling when he died so she didn’t get to tell him goodbye. Her psychiatrist-brother in L.A. tells her she suffers from “lack of closure,” which has distilled into guilt, so now she feels responsible for her dad’s death—and fears our ultimate separation.

  One afternoon, as we lay in bed together, sipping margaritas after making love, I touched my palm to her chest and she began to cry. “I think I’m grieving for my father,” she said, surprised.

  I don’t understand how one intimacy ripples into others, but Jean admitted that day that love and grief are strongly twinned for her, bound up not only in memories of her father but in love’s structure: life’s irresistible attraction to other life, the urgency, the energy, then the surprisingly swift falling-off after life has done its work. Just as someone, knowing she’s about to leave a place, can feel homesick before she’s moved, Jean, after making love, feels wistful already for her body and mine. She’s mourning our losses in advance.

  We fell in love when we were both in our early forties, and her melancholy is magnified, I suspect, by the fact that we middle-aged people—old enough to know better, at least—felt happier, sillier, more erotic than we ever had before. Time seemed pliable, warped—all the sweeter for being short. We felt we’d discovered our youth for the first time, just as it seemed we were on the brink of letting go of it, gracefully.

  From the beginning, she worried about my slightest cough, skin blemish, or exhaustion at night. I’d kid her about her misplaced hypochondria. Once, she came right out and admitted she feared she’d lose me early. I joked about her romantic streak: her favorite movie was Truly, Madly, Deeply, the story of a young widow whose love for her husband is so intense that his ghost returns each night to schmooze with her. M. F. K. Fisher, Jean’s favorite writer, was an early widow.

  When Jean and I bought the house from the Wards, Haley was six. We fixed her room up to look almost exactly like her room at her daddy’s house, ten blocks away. Our house was in a neighborhood of run-down student rentals, once-proud bungalows that had been trashed over five decades. The Wards had lived here for thirty-seven years—nine kids!—and though we hated their taste (what were those people thinking?), we were grateful they’d left intact the Craftsman-style wood trim and had maintained the place beautifully. Two blocks away was the campus, where Jean and I taught literature. Convenience, old-fashioned charm, plenty of room … we felt lucky, but still, Jean seemed to skulk around waiting for judgment to fall. I wondered if the pain she felt, dissolving her marriage—though she’d been miserable with Bill—had mixed with her father-guilt to crush her joy. We were two of our circle’s straightest arrows, not religious, but fair-minded, traditionally moral. Unlikely partners for an affair. Yet here we were. Transgressors, against society and all of society’s gods. Surely we wouldn’t—shouldn’t—get away with this.

  When Jean first heard that the Levin place might be destroyed, she took it as a sign that her fears were on target. The Angel of Doom in the shape of a backhoe. Purely by coincidence, we learned the news on Passover. “That’s right, get the Jews,” she muttered, reading the city’s notice.

  My attempts to laugh away her worries had ended about sixteen months after we’d moved into the house. One night, during love, I doubled over with chest pains. She drove me to the emergency room. Doctors told me I’d narrowly missed “keeling over, kaput.” Two days later, a cardiac surgeon opened me up, as w
e’d done to our kitchen pass-through, and performed a double bypass.

  My primary-care doctor informed me I’d “exhibited no risk factors.” I was as unlikely to develop ticker trouble as I was to start an affair.

  In any case, all my jokes about Jean borrowing trouble have stopped. We linger with each other now, squeezing as much as we can out of life. I’ve tried to reduce my daily stress, but our town is small, and I can’t help running into Bill.

  One day, he and I arrived at the same time to pick up Haley at Boys and Girls. Jean had told me Haley was going to spend the night with us; Bill had the date wrong. Haley handled the moment better than we did. She looked at us, shrugged, then went on chasing her pals in the parking lot. “It’s my night,” Bill said, anguished. He scratched his sandy hair. “Okay,” I said, and told Haley goodbye.

  I drove away, damp with sweat. I was shaken already: earlier that day, I’d shampooed the carpet at home (this was before we’d ripped it out); now, I was convinced Haley’s kitten had licked up the cleaning fluid. I should have locked her in a back room until the carpet dried. No doubt, I’d return to find her dead. Haley would be inconsolable.

  I passed a restored apartment house. Increasingly anxious, I remembered a former student of mine who had lost her dog to a fire there, a year or two ago. Still thinking of Haley and Bill, I felt irrationally responsible for the dog, now, too. If I’d been a better teacher, more at ease in front of groups, not futzing around and keeping the class overtime, damn it, somehow that dog would still be alive. God forgive me.

  At home, I found Haley’s kitten sitting happily on a windowsill, staring at the broken windows of the Levin place.

  3

  Haley had been pissy all week, upset about her homework, picky at dinner. One night, when we’d told her she’d watched enough TV, she paced the den. The heels of her sandals slapped the hardwood floor. “Bored bored bored,” she said.

  “Why don’t you sit in the window,” I suggested, “and draw the old Levin place?”

  “Why?”

  “It might be gone pretty soon. If that happens, your drawing will be one of the few records the city will have left of it,” I said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  We went back and forth until I wore her down. She got out her gel pens and sullenly scratched a few lines on a sketchpad: the broken rain spout, unhinged doors, tilted window frames. “Done.”

  “Terrific.”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “No no, sweetie, this is wonderful, this is—”

  “I mean the house.” She grabbed her blankie and started upstairs for her room. “It’s not even worth drawing.”

  The day before show time in front of the planning commission, Haley was with her dad. Jean and I came home from classes, made love in the late afternoon. We were more in the mood with Haley out of the house. “I’m afraid she can sense it, from three rooms away, if we even kiss,” I’d told Jean one night. “She’s way beyond her years—”

  “No. She’s right at her years,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

  She ran her hands along my chest. I tried and tried to feel something. Finally, I turned my wet eyes toward the wall. In the day’s wavering shadows, tinged by the last of the sun’s red light, I could make out a faint square in the plaster—though we’d painted—where one of the Virgins had hung. Jean’s brown hair splayed across my belly. She clung to my hips. “Neighborhood compatibility,” I whispered, and we laughed.

  For a while we lay half-asleep, then, “Time to get ready,” Jean whispered. “Okay, I’m awake,” I said, feeling for my pulse. We showered, dressed, fed the cat, then drove downtown to Barton’s, a musty restaurant full of leaden foods and blue-haired organ music. Its claim to fame was that Hillary Clinton had stepped out of a limo here during her husband’s ’96 campaign. For ten minutes she shook diners’ hands. God knows what she was doing in Comalia. Maybe her publicist thought a photo op in a small-town eatery would wrap up Texas’s ag votes. For me, the restaurant was notorious because its former owner, just my age, had gone face down one day into a bowl of four-alarm chili. Dead of a heart attack.

  Jean and I would never have set foot in the place, but our neighborhood association wanted to meet here tonight—it was quiet, rarely crowded. The students in town preferred Taco Bell, out by the interstate.

  Rex Smithers, the association president, a retired car dealer, asked the six of us who showed to read our prepared testimonies. We’d have five minutes each in front of the planning commission, he said. We made revisions, cutting the fat, making sure our points didn’t overlap. Rex passed out a list of words. “Spice your speeches with these,” he said. “They’re positive, attention-getting—the kind of thing I’ve heard the commission really responds to.”

  I glanced at the sheet:

  continuity

  stability

  identity (sense of history, place, culture)

  character

  style

  community

  quality

  livability

  human scale

  home

  Mentally, I added “chicken-head.”

  “We don’t want to be negative,” Rex said, “overly emotional, or sacrilegious—”

  “You better believe that padre’ll have a crack legal team with him,” said Andy Nelson, a dentist who lived two doors east of us. “That is, if he’s stopped diddling little boys long enough to put together a team.”

  “Andy,” Rex said, blushing. “That’s precisely the kind of talk we have to squelch.”

  “I know, I know. A joke.”

  “Please.”

  “I know.”

  “He doesn’t need a legal team,” Jean said. “He’s a lawyer himself and very articulate. Don’t underestimate him.”

  She and I excused ourselves early and began discussing where we could get some healthy food when we spotted the Wards in a booth. They were sitting with a thin woman in a blue scarf, just like the one Mrs. Ward wore. In front of them were great platters of buttery mashed potatoes, chicken fried steaks, creamy, heart-clogging pies—what are those people thinking?

  Are all locally owned places, with historic ties to the city, worth preserving?

  We tried to slip past, but Don spied us, though he pretended he hadn’t. As we approached the table, determined not to hide—now that we’d been caught—the thin woman, facing away from us, removed her scarf and touched a large, grainy scar on the side of her head. It appeared to flake a little. “I’ll never get better,” she said mournfully. Then she noticed us and swiftly tied the scarf back into place. For a minute none of us moved. I remembered Don’s words: We’re old people. Finally, Jean touched Mrs. Ward’s wool sleeve. “I hope you’re enjoying your new home,” Jean said. “Thank you,” Mrs. Ward said and patted Jean’s hand.

  4

  The meeting took place in a conference room in the city’s new fire station, a two-story red brick building with automated doors for wheelchair access, banks of computer monitors behind the receptionists’ desks, and vintage photos of horse-drawn wagons on the walls. A list of fire-safety tips—“Hot Topics”—wilted in a wall-bin labeled TAKE ONE! The station sat catty-corner to a Hollywood Video. Frat boys squealed their tires, pulling out of the lot, sneaking soft-core DVDs back to their tents, no doubt, or to the underpasses they were forced to huddle under, since—according to Father Matt—cheap housing was so scarce in our mean little burg.

  The commissioners looked well-fed: their shirt-buttons strained under too-small blazers, most of which were orange or black, the colors of the college’s athletic teams. Probably these guys all ate at Barton’s.

  A dark spot smudged Father Matt’s forehead and the foreheads of all his supporters. “What happened to them?” Jean said, staring openly. It hit me: Ash Wednesday. The old words came rushing back. The faithful must do penance. Remember, unto dust shall ye return. Father Matt’s group sat stiffly, hands folded, staring intently at the commissioners, their pale
flesh marked by the palms’ residue. We were sunk. The priestly robes, the solemn, graveyard air, the moral authority. We didn’t stand a chance against a display like this.

  Haley squirmed in her seat. Bill had promised to babysit, but an hour ago he had canceled. “Hot date,” he’d said, grinning slyly at Jean as he stood with Haley under our dim yellow porch light. He’d come without calling.

  “Bill, you promised,” Jean said. She fiddled with her earrings. I wrestled my necktie behind her. “We’re in a hurry. We can’t—”

  “You want me to date, don’t you?” he asked, I was happy for him. In any case, he knew Jean wouldn’t argue with him in front of Haley. “I’ll take her tomorrow night,” he said. He bent to kiss his daughter, and she looped her arms around his neck. I had to try again with my tie.

  “All right, honey, it’s going to be a really long meeting,” Jean said once Bill had driven away. She held Haley’s chin so she’d listen. “You’ll need plenty to do so you can sit quietly. Bring some books and your gel pens and your Walkman, okay? Don’t forget your headphones …”

  We scrambled to gather Haley’s stuff as well as our testimonies, which were paper-clipped inside manila folders. The cat leaped onto the table and rubbed my arm; I dropped the folders and a few loose pages from Haley’s sketchbook. Hastily, Jean and I pulled things together. “Come on, gals, let’s go, let’s go!” I said.

  Now we sat in the firehouse trying to ignore the stares of our opponents. Unseasonably cool air assaulted us from a large open window. I felt for my pulse. Behind me, a man muttered, “Politics. It’s the wet bar of soap at the bottom of a bathtub.” Across the aisle from us, a local sandwich shop owner complained to a woman beside her, “Last year I had to sell thirty thousand turkey subs to raise the scratch to bring my building up to code.”

  The meeting came to order. Haley sighed loudly, bobbing her head to Pink or Sting or Smashmouth. I touched her knee to try to settle her down. She moved her leg away. From across the room, Mrs. Ward gave us a tight smile. Nine kids? Any advice? I tried to signal back, nodding at her. Don wore his Navy uniform, which mostly still fit him. The sleeves were short. The elaborate gold buttons wobbled with each swift breath he took. “For God’s sakes,” Jean whispered. She rolled her eyes.