O My Darling Page 2

  “Not a million,” Clark said. “Three or four.”

  “Three or four million times?”

  “No,” said Clark, laughing and leaning back against the headboard. “Three or four times. I have fallen in love with groups of women, but I just count them once.”

  “Groups? Ethnic groups?”

  “No, no. I fell in love with my sister’s friends when I was a boy. They used to practice kissing on me. Sometimes more than kissing. I’ve told you about them. Janine Hoffstead. Kiki Zuckerman. Oh, Kiki,” Clark sighed. “I was in love then.”

  “You were not in love,” said Charlotte, clucking her tongue. “You knew nothing about love. You were a boy.”

  “Then I’m still a boy. Because I still know nothing about love. And I’m still in love.”

  Charlotte turned her head away, but he could tell she was smiling.

  “Who is she?” she asked.

  She rolled on her back and yawned, curling up her fists with the thumbs tucked in. She arched her back, her skin visible through her thin pink rayon nightgown. She stretched one consummately white leg, then she stretched the other. Her skin was so white, almost transparent at the wrists and knees. In the summer, she would carry herself about in the shade like a vial of mercury, wearing a frayed straw hat.

  “You,” he said.

  The bear of winter grunted in his sleep. The dwarf in the desert dropped a grain of sand. The lamb of spring leapt across the clean blue sky. The sky outside was clear and new and first.

  “Well,” Charlotte said. “I was thinking of making jelly toast. Your father sent us some blackberry jam.”

  Clark paused. He looked at the walls for a moment, his eyes casting beyond them.

  Finally he said, “I won’t eat that. Probably his girlfriend made it, the hag.”

  “You’re talking about Mrs. Flanigan,” said Charlotte.

  “Yes, Mrs. Flanigan,” he answered darkly. “The home-wrecker.”

  “Clark,” Charlotte said. “Let’s not go into it.”

  “You asked if I wanted her blackberry jam.”

  “Yes, but let’s not go into it. That home was wrecked long before Mrs. Flanigan came into the picture. You know that.”

  Clark stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t listening anymore. He didn’t know that.

  “If you want to talk about love,” he said. “If you want to talk about two people in love, talk about Mother and Dad. Way back when. Before Mrs. Flanigan. Before me. When they lived together in a chicken coop on the Rio Grande, right after they were married. When they were our age.”

  Charlotte sat up and reached for her robe.

  “I feel a disagreement coming on,” she murmured. “I think I’m coming down with a disagreement.” She smiled over her shoulder, but Clark was still staring at the ceiling.

  Charlotte had heard about the chicken coop half a dozen times by now. Each time it caused her pain. Not only did it pain her that he told the same story over and over with no nod to the fact that she’d already heard it, it pained her to know it was not true. Well, it was a Vera story. It contained elements of the truth—one malarial summer spent in Texas with a church group. The truth one had to get from Clark’s father in the kitchen over a glass of bourbon. From there, on many a visit, Charlotte had watched her handsome new husband sitting on a tiny footstool in the living room, laughing and hugging his knees, while a woman in a white nightgown spoke in her protracted, actorly way, making large facial motions as if playing to a large room, and Charlotte would think yes, he loves her, but surely he doesn’t believe her.

  “I mean it was unheard of,” Clark was saying, “two grin-gos out there on La Frontera. They even had a pet macaw. They called it…”

  “Julito,” whispered Charlotte, looking at her feet.

  “Julito. My father helped the locals build a church at night, by the light of a thousand candles. Afterwards, they’d fall asleep watching the stars through the chicken wire…”

  “Clark,” said Charlotte. “Do you want some jelly toast? I’ll make it for you. I won’t use Mrs. Flanigan’s jam.”

  But looking over at him on the bed, she saw that he was far away in his false memories, a place in which he’d been taking refuge more and more often. How abstract he’d become lately, she thought, how hard to reach, when what she loved about him before was his nearness, his ready-to-go-ness, how he would pull a peach out of his pocket, sit down right then and there, and they would make a picnic out of it. He was the most spontaneous person she’d ever met, always alert to some small joy, always jumping up. She had been terribly drawn to this quality, for she herself was reticent, skeptical, often overcome with a great passivity when faced with something lovely she wanted. Now, beside her, he laughed softly to himself. His head was submerged in the pillow like a dark pearl, the black curls flattened against both temples. His large, gray eyes, almost astral in their gray blueness, looked so rapt that she almost turned to see what he was looking at. But of course he was looking at nothing. He was remembering. Remembering things that had never happened.

  Charlotte felt her pulse quicken. She felt stranded in the present. She didn’t want to be left alone in the present in this new house. Suddenly, the house felt hollow and large and impossible to furnish. She put the robe over her shoulders and looked outside into the small backyard.

  “I should work on that garden today,” she said. “I should plant things.”

  “Mom and Dad didn’t speak the language,” said Clark. “But they learned how to do things sort of anthropologically. Mother learned to make milk from scratch. She learned to make milk the way the Mexicans did.”

  “Don’t Mexicans get milk from cows,” Charlotte said to the window, “the way everybody else does?”

  Clark held up one finger instructively. “She watched, you see. She listened. She had the patience of a monk. And in that little schoolhouse by the creek, she would teach the local children to recite William Blake. ‘It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea…’ ”

  “But you weren’t there, Clark,” said Charlotte. “You don’t know what happened between them. You can’t tell what somebody else’s marriage is really like. That’s not even Blake, by the way.”

  And then, out of nowhere, Clark actually proceeded to recite the poem anyway, his long-fingered hands folded over his chest, “‘… That a maiden there lived who you may know,’ and so on and so on and so on.”

  Charlotte gripped the sheets.

  “Jesus, Clark,” she said. “If it was all so wonderful, then where was your dad when your mother died?”

  Clark winced. His eyes refocused. He was back. He stared coldly at the ceiling.

  “Yes, why don’t you go make jelly toast?” he said. “Use Mrs. Flanigan’s jam.”

  Charlotte lay back down on the bed and hung her head.

  “Damn,” she said.

  She was sorry she had said that, about his mother. She felt better, but she was still sorry she had said it. She watched Clark’s chest rise and fall.

  “You know I’m just jealous,” she said, rolling onto his chest and tickling his nipple. “I’m an orphan. I don’t have all sorts of pretty childhood stories like you do. Family legends. Starlight. Candlelight.”

  Clark said nothing. He continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “We promised we wouldn’t fight.”

  When he still didn’t answer, she murmured, “Please, Clark. I swear I’ll never speak of her that way again. I’ll never mention it again.”

  He blinked slowly and his face seemed to relax. He had long, dark eyelashes that sprouted delicately like the tines of a fish fork.

  “You know, maybe you were right,” Charlotte said. “Maybe they were in love.”

  “And maybe you were right,” he said, turning away. “Maybe I was just a boy.”

  TECUMSEH

  Clark’s mother had left no suicide note. It might have been the one time in her life in which she had not said enough. Sh
e did leave, however, a trunkful of uncompleted crossword puzzles, a viola, a hairbrush, two hundred and two watercolor studies of the same barn, three closets of pretty silk dresses with singed holes from her Turkish cigarettes, a dozen white nightgowns, a broken seismograph, the lingering scent of valerian root, the lingering sound of her raving in anger, a piece of cake with a fork in it that had been the last thing she tasted, several heavy glass ashtrays, her china, and a dog.

  Tecumseh was a shrewd, somewhat gloomy husky with a black muzzle and soft gray withers. His heavy coat was uneven, and he had the canniest way of walking sideways, like a crab. His eyes were the color of ice caps—almost white, almost the color of nothing. For as long as anyone could remember, this dog had followed his white-nightgowned mistress from room to room, a weary butler. Clark’s father hated him. And perhaps the feeling was mutual. The dog, of course, had been the first to come upon the body. The dog had been found waiting with the body. In the days following the suicide, the old man and the old dog had inhabited the same ruined house, avoiding one another in the hallways. During the funeral reception, the dog howled so woefully from the backyard that it was difficult to concentrate on mourning, and the guests appeared suspicious of themselves, unsure that they felt badly enough.

  Charlotte remembered the funeral in all its variety of painfulness. She remembered the dog—unkempt, apoplectic—in the backyard. She disliked dogs, but for some reason elected herself as the one to go outside and calm the animal, whose howling was upsetting everyone. She had approached across the yard with her arms out, slowly, cop-like, but as soon as she was close enough, the dog leapt up and snapped at her, its chain taut as wire.

  Retreating to the patio, alone in her thin dress in the cold, Charlotte could not help but reflect on the dog’s beastly loyalty. For the dead woman had never liked Charlotte, had never once been warm. Why not just admit it now that she was gone? And now Vera was dead, and it was a terrible thing, but alone in the cold on the patio of the dead woman’s house, Charlotte remembered all the woman’s queer, maddening, extravagant late-night requests, so many attempts to lure Clark back to her, when Charlotte had only wanted to be liked. And surely the woman knew she would lose him to someone, he whom she had lost now forever by her own hand! Charlotte had stood shivering in the cold, watching little white puffs come out from the dog’s mouth, confused as to how she was needed. It was horrible, all of it. Suicide. Her poor tall husband, stooping now to accept kisses in quiet rooms. She would not have wished any of it on anyone. And yet she was relieved. To her own shame. Her mother-in-law’s death was like the fall of a bizarre and powerful civilization of which she’d never been a part. But what did you do with the shame? Where did you put it—in what basement?

  The next day, they had driven away from the house together in the sunshine. Two and a half years into their marriage, and only then did it seem to Charlotte that they were beginning, setting off truly for the first time, like honeymooners, just the two of them. Beside her, Clark seemed calm and mature in his funeral suit. He stared manfully ahead at the road. She’d put a hand on his thigh. She wanted to say I love you, but to her the phrase so often seemed to require some sort of introduction or ceremony; one did not say I love you in cars, or in buses, or when speaking of something else. Or while waiting in line. Or when one was sleepy or flatulent or bad-smelling. She blinked in the January sunlight. What did it mean that, as a grown woman, the phrase was still exotic to her?

  I… I…

  She turned to look back at her mother-in-law’s house, so that she might see it disappear behind them forever, the house of heartache and insanity, to give it one last big sayonara, when instead, she was confronted with the whiskered mug of Tecumseh. She screamed.

  “Clark!” Charlotte cried. “Your mother’s dog is in the back of our car!”

  Clark turned around and looked at the dog. “I know,” he said. “Good boy.”

  “But I’m allergic to dogs!”

  “No you’re not,” said Clark.

  “I mean, I don’t like them.”

  Clark smiled into the rear view mirror, as if he didn’t want the dog to have to hear what was being said about him. “We’re going to have to keep him,” he said.

  “What?” Charlotte looked back at the creature. “Why can’t we take him to the pound and find some nice loving home? We barely have room in our apartment.”

  “We’re buying a house,” said Clark, slipping the check out of his breast pocket, which he had just gotten from the lawyer the day before. It was stark white in the sunlight. “We’re buying that house from the paper with this money that my mother left me.”

  Charlotte had fallen silent. She wanted a house very much, but she was shocked. As long as she’d known Clark, he’d never made such a run of firm and serious decisions. She looked over at his profile. The top of his black curly hair was sticking to the car’s felt interior.

  “Listen,” Clark said, after a while. “I hardly took anything of hers. I didn’t take her watercolors or her capes or anything. I let Mary take care of everything. They put the rest in the yard. In the yard.” He looked over at Charlotte, and that was when she saw a particular pallor in his eyes she had never seen before. From the backseat, Tecumseh yawned loudly. “So, I’m going to take care of the one thing left, the thing that mattered most to her. I think she would have wanted me to.”

  “But how could you know?” Charlotte said. “How could you know what she wanted? It was impossible to know with her. She was…”

  Charlotte looked back at the dog. It withdrew its long pink tongue, and appeared to stop breathing for a moment. It cocked its head, as if to say, like some street tough, You lookin’ at me?

  “I knew,” said Clark. “I knew.”

  Charlotte looked out the window. She thought of the lonely, reverent way in which Clark had moved about his parents’ house those past several days, preparing for the funeral, behaving almost as if his mother was merely napping upstairs. He did not act the way his sister and father acted. He did not act as if anything were over.

  SOLD

  The house they picked was yellow and squat, with a friendly, twowindowed stare. Across the street sat a tawny apple orchard full of blackbirds that yawed all day. Clark and Charlotte had seen a picture of the house in the newspaper: 12 Quail Hollow Road. They had never really owned anything together before.

  When they first went to see the house, they were pleased to see that it looked just like its picture in the paper. Charlotte fell in love with the sunny kitchen and the small backyard, while Clark liked the chimney pot that muttered when the wind blew. The floors inside were herringbone parquet, and the treads on the staircase were short, like the treads of an old cabin, even though the house was not old. The backyard was bordered by evergreen hedges, and in the middle of the yard there was a single hawthorn tree that looked perpetually seized with fright.

  In the upstairs bedroom, there was a fist-sized hole in the wall, the only thing the previous owners had left behind them. A hole in the wall and a number of golden hairpins stuck in the cracks between floorboards, as well as a certain perfumey after-scent that betrayed how recently the house had been vacated. Otherwise, it was a cozy house, and appeared to be in excellent condition.

  “Go ahead,” said the realtor. “Throw out a number. Seize the day.”

  He smiled, a hairpin between his teeth.

  And soon the house was theirs.

  Down the hill from the house lay a small city called Clementine. This was to be their new town—a small, nondescript city watched over by an enormous glowing clock atop the city hall. Venturing through this town with its liquor stores and darkened churches and old prewar doorways with inscrutable Latin phrases carved on the lintels, they often got lost or turned around and had to ask for directions, at which point a stranger would simply gesture up toward their hill, where their new house, the place in which they suddenly belonged, lay waiting.

  Several weeks after burying his mother, Clark became
the new guidance counselor at Clementine Junior High School. They took a picture of him and put it up in the hallway. His expression was that of being about to speak. His head was at the very top of the frame, betraying, even in the photograph, his extraordinary tallness.

  ELSEWHERE

  Clark got his gypsy darkness from his mother, as well as her grayblue eyes, but he got his height from his father. Both men were tall enough to wear Tall Man clothes. Inside houses, Clark retained the stooped, wincing look of very tall men. But outside, under the skies, he looked comfortable, loose and athletic, the white palms of his hands flapping beside him. Sometimes Clark fantasized about having a life custom built to scale—not just Tall Man ceilings and Tall Man chairs, but Tall Man luck, long as his shadow, and Tall Man grace, like Lynn Swann leaping out over the end zone as if it were a clearing of heather, and a Tall Man’s ability to know what to say.

  For example, one night in bed with Charlotte that first spring, soon after moving into the house on Quail Hollow Road, he was seized with a strange feeling he could not explain. It was a feeling of being elsewhere. He did not feel he was actually in the bed, in the house, making love with his wife, but rather looking back at his young body with an old man’s eyes. Sorrow washed over him. He pulled away from Charlotte’s embrace and sat upright naked at the edge of the bed.

  Clark was already prone to nostalgia. He missed many things merely because they were over. And because he missed them, he assumed they had been good things. He missed his boyhood. He missed the town of Carnifex Ferry where he had been raised until six years of age, before a succession of misunderstandings regarding his mother had sent them to other towns. That night, visions of Carnifex Ferry flooded him—a baseball sailing out over a fence, an idling bookmobile, Sno-Cones being lowered into hands, people running inside from the rain. He realized that he could remember that town in precise detail even though he could not remember anything but a shadow of the past year, and he missed it and he missed the summers his family spent at the nearby lake, where, on his fifteenth birthday, he lost his virginity to Kiki Zuckerman in a lean-to. That same day, he’d burst his eardrum while diving off a drawbridge, which lent the love act a dreamy impossibility that he never quite forgot. Suddenly, he missed being a virgin. He was nostalgic for the enormity of small moments. This nostalgia was so oppressive that he felt as if he’d become an old man in the space of an hour.