Five Tuesdays in Winter(6)

“Can we read the red car book?” Stevie asked me.

“Sure.”

We got to the landing. The air was warmer up here. We turned and could see Hugh now, still on the bottom step. He grew smaller as we headed up the next flight.

I lowered Elsie to her crib slowly, gingerly, and she did not wake up. I read Stevie two books, then he crawled into his firmly bound bed (Margaret made the beds every morning, tight as sausages). He was asleep before I’d gotten to the chorus of “Here Comes the Sun.”

Back out in the hall I stuck my head out over the upper railing. Hugh was still down there. He moved and I pulled back quickly.

Up in my room I continued my letter to Gina. It was over fifteen pages now, the longest thing I’d ever written. I liked to run my fingers over the words pressed into both sides of the pages with my blue ballpoint pen.

“Where’s Hugh?” Mrs. Pike said as I was buckling Elsie into her highchair that night.

“Davy Stives is home,” Kay said. “They went into town for dinner.” Town, to the Pikes, wasn’t downtown Ashing. It meant Boston, an hour away.

“I hope he told Margaret.”

“I told her.”

Mrs. Pike frowned as she spread her napkin across her dress. It seemed like she was looking for something else to complain about.

I retreated to the kitchen before her attention could alight on me.

It was nearly four in the morning when the Malibu crunched slowly into a spot below my window. I felt a familiar dread as he opened the car door and got out. But he wasn’t drunk. I knew drunk. I was already an expert calibrator of drunk and high and coked out of one’s mind. He cut a straight crisp line to the stairs and took them easily. He opened the door quietly and disappeared. The outside light went off.

He didn’t come down for breakfast. Kay and I took the kids to Drake’s Island on the ferry for the morning.

In the afternoon we were back by the pool.

“How long have you known she wasn’t happy?” I heard Kay ask him.

Mrs. Pike was out playing bridge so there was no chance of her overhearing.

“Happy.” He said it like it was a filthy word. “Is your husband happy? Every day? Some days? What is happy? What is being happy in a relationship? Are you happy? Such a stupid word. What the fuck is happy?”

“It’s not that complicated. You either like living with someone or you don’t. You either like the commitment part or you don’t. Maybe you don’t like the commitment part any more than she does, but she was the first one to say it out loud and now you are acting all indignant, but it’s really what you want, too.”

“Gesundheit, Herr Doktor. I don’t think so.”

“Well that’s how it was with Thea, right?”

“Thea? We’re not talking about Thea.”

“I’m talking about patterns.”

“My wife, with whom I made vows on that patch of grass right over there less than a year ago, wants out. That is not a pattern, Kay. That’s my life fucking falling apart.”

He walked off and slammed the gate behind him.

They thought I wasn’t listening. They thought I was a scuba diver searching for treasure that Stevie had hidden at the bottom of the pool. It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while sifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

I was eager to put the kids down and write to Gina about what I had heard. Hugh’s heart is in fragments. What coldhearted she-devil could cease to love such as he?

But they’d had chocolate pudding at lunch and weren’t sleepy. Stevie had a plastic record player and only one record, a 45 with “Feed the Birds” on one side and “It’s a Small World” on the other. I wanted to play “Feed the Birds” to make them groggy, but they wanted “It’s a Small World”—over and over. They danced to it, winding themselves up and flinging their clothing off until Elsie shimmied out of her diaper and flung it at the wall where it made a dark urine stain on the wallpaper with roses. I whisked her off to the bathroom where Kay had set up a changing table. Elsie had a bit of a rash and I wiped her crotch and bum white with Desitin. I liked the smell of Desitin. I sniffed my fingers. It brought on something from the earliest part of my childhood. I sucked in another long deep breath of it. I tried to remember a specific moment, a place, but it was only a feeling. A good feeling. A warm, safe feeling I no longer had.

I heard Stevie talking and then I heard Hugh and I hurried to pin on Elsie’s fresh diaper, but by the time we came out of the bathroom I could hear his steps going down the back stairs.

“Who were you talking to?” I said.

“My uncle,” Stevie said.

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was looking for something for me in the attic.”

“The attic?”

He pointed up. I hardly thought of my floor, with all those beautiful bedrooms, as an attic. “But he didn’t find it.”

The three of us snuggled in Stevie’s bed. Just as I opened Life Cycle of the Green Sea Turtle Stevie said, “Oh, he said that you are a excellent writer.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Who said?”

He was giggling, thinking I was playing that game but I was not. He saw I wasn’t joking and sobered up. “Hugh said,” he said softly. “Uncle Hugh said.”