O My Darling Page 3

  He looked over at his mother’s dog, who had moved demurely to the corner of the bedroom during the lovemaking but was now staring back at him through the darkness with his reflective eyes. When Clark turned forward again, he saw—he swore it—a lithe feminine shadow pass casually across the bedroom doorway.

  “What—” he said, and then stopped. He looked back at Charlotte, who still lay prone on the bed, awake but motionless. He slapped his hand to his head. Clearly, there was nothing there. Shadows. Still, he turned his head toward the dark opacity that filled the door, staring hard at it for several long moments.

  Charlotte cleared her throat.

  “Get me some brandy, would you be a doll,” she said.

  Clark looked over his shoulder. Behind him, she lay on the bed with her knees closed conclusively. They had been silent for some time.

  “I really don’t feel like being a doll right now,” he said.

  “Fine,” she said, “don’t be a doll and get me some brandy anyway.”

  He lay down, reached insincerely for her in the dark, and then covered his feet, which were cold and hanging off the edge of the bed. He wanted to say he was sorry. He didn’t say anything. Never apologize, came his father’s voice from a hundred occasions of his youth. The old man had passed on to Clark, like an heirloom, a pointed, almost righteous resistance to the act of apologizing. Do what you did or don’t have done it. In the silence, Clark looked down at his interminable legs. Charlotte was very quiet but he could tell she was still awake.

  “Do you think there are ghosts in this house?” he said.

  “Oh God,” Charlotte said, “If you’re going to talk about ghosts, I really need some brandy.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Clark. “I’m kidding. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  But, just to be sure, he looked out at the empty doorway. Then he touched the back of Charlotte’s night-darkened hair. Her shoulder was cupped by moonlight.

  “Hey,” he said.

  After a while, he kicked back the sheets and went to get the brandy, ducking under the doorjamb. He came out into the hall and looked around. Without turning on the lights, he made his way to the banister and descended the stairs. He was naked but for his socks, and he felt his lonely waddle brush back and forth between his thighs. He found his way downstairs to the liquor cabinet, and to the bottle of brandy.

  “Turn on the lights,” called Charlotte from the bedroom. “You’ll fall.”

  He found the bottle of brandy easily enough but had to grope through several boxes to find a glass.

  “Do you want your special glass?” Clark called over his shoulder. “Because I can’t find it.”

  “No,” Charlotte replied sleepily. “Any old glass.”

  Clark aimed the brandy into the glass, using his fingers to locate the stream. He stopped when the glass sounded full, more or less. It had begun to rain again that night, and the waterlogged wind threw itself against the windows and came through the cracks and chilled his bare buttocks. The hedges thrashed outside. There was no moon.

  “Clark,” called Charlotte above him.

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be up in a minute, Charlie.”

  Her voice sounded small from upstairs. She said, “No, I mean, are you all right? How are you—How are you doing?” She paused. “Oh, I don’t know. Do you want to talk? About anything. Your mother. Are you sad? I’ll listen. I promise. Would you like that?”

  He went to the foot of the stairs and stood there, head bent. He took a sip of the brandy and felt it slide down his throat.

  “No,” he said, shrugging. “I’m not sad. I don’t want to talk.”

  “All right,” she said. Again she paused. “So, I love you.”

  “Gee,” said Clark. “Say that again?”

  He rose one stair and listened for a moment, half-smiling, teething the rim of his glass.

  “I don’t like it when we yell across the house like this,” Charlotte said after a moment.

  “All right,” Clark said. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

  He stepped backward, felt around in the darkness of the foyer and came across a stool. He sat, legs slightly bent. He shuffled his stockinged feet back and forth a couple times and took slow sips.

  After a while, he poured a little more brandy into the glass and looked around. The shadows played with the shadows. He did not yet feel quite right in the house. He didn’t really know where anything was. He had expected to feel at home right away, kicking up his feet in the evenings. But nothing was anywhere yet. The dark trees rustled outside the window. He swirled the liquid in his glass.

  Suddenly, he felt his heart surge forward desperately, like a dog in a sack, and he realized he wanted very much to talk. He lurched to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Charlie?” he cried. “Charlie? You still awake?”

  There was no response. He turned and looked back into the darkness. He had the definite impression of the darkness looking in on him. He wrapped himself in a blanket that hung over the armchair and sat on the bottom stair. After a while, he realized his muscles were rigid. It was almost as if he was waiting for somebody—the stranger, that shadow, that piece of darkness—to sidle up to him on the staircase and tell him the secret. He clutched the bottle by the neck. Throwing back his head, he licked the last drops of the thick liquid from his glass, and poured himself another.

  FAMILY HAPPINESS

  Several months into their uneasy living arrangement, Charlotte and her mother-in-law’s dog were still not getting along. There seemed to be a dispute about which of them owned the new house. When Charlotte tried to fill his water dish, he snapped at her hand. In an effort to replicate a hunt, he would scatter his dog food and then go collect it again, and she often stepped on the food he’d forgotten about. Sometimes, when she was unpacking, the dog would come out of nowhere and snatch something out of a box and drag it to a corner and stand over it as if it were kill. It did not help in the least that Clark allowed the dog to sleep on the bed, a place he clearly took in his previous household, and she could feel his hostile shape on her legs all night. Every sunrise, when Tecumseh leapt off the bed and began to howl, Charlotte would shake her fist at him. The dog and the woman would stare at each other, his eyes white and hers dark. It was clear to both of them that they were vying with one another, just as Charlotte had vied with her mother-in-law when she was alive. With her dark eyes Charlotte would say, This is my house. With his defiant white eyes the dog would say, There is no such thing as a house.

  But then, one spring morning, when Charlotte came to the door to fend off yet another fastidious request from Mr. Pitts, things changed. For Mr. Pitts, who lived at the crest of Quail Hollow Road and liked to stride up and down the hill in creased apple-green slacks nosing into everyone’s business, was chastening Charlotte about the use of power tools as per the Clementine sound ordinance. Charlotte was doing her best to listen politely through the screen door. It was April, and yet out of all the people in the neighborhood, only Mr. Pitts had ever come to greet them. Although they had waved over the hedges at their neighbors the Ribbendrops, and on Saturday nights could hear the parties of the divorcée on the other side, in general no one in the neighborhood seemed to be taking Charlotte and Clark very seriously.

  Except Mr. Pitts. How he went on and on! Charlotte was just about to raise her glove to interject, when she heard the strangest sound behind her. It was like the sound from a monster’s throat. Before she knew it, Tecumseh was rising out of the shadow of the hall, leaping toward the old man’s terrified face on the other side of the screen door, fangs bared and glinting.

  The screen bowed with the dog’s weight, and the old man stumbled backward. Charlotte put her hand to her face. She didn’t even have time to apologize. The man was hightailing it back up the hill. And he never bothered them again.

  After that, Charlotte and Tecumseh got along rather we
ll. Theirs was more of a truce than a friendship. Charlotte did not snuggle or woo him, like Clark did. She would sometimes pat him on the head, right where the lobes of his brain left a soft recess. In a gesture of compromise, the dog accepted his new bed downstairs underneath the liquor cabinet, and Charlotte got up dutifully at first howl, to let him go outside to greet the sun god or whatever it was he did. It occurred to Charlotte that the truce she was making was also with the dead woman who, in their years together, had never once been kind to her.

  How had it come and gone so quickly? One minute she was watching a tall, curly-headed stranger chase his scattered newspaper down the street, and she was laughing—for what she remembered first was the sound of her own laughter, an egg breaking in her chest—and eleven ardent weeks later, they were married. During those eleven weeks, Clark had told Charlotte all about his parents—rapturous stories of how they had built churches by candlelight in Mexico, how his mother as a young woman had once taken part in a certain Latin American revolution by delivering a cake with a secret map in it. The way Clark spoke, one couldn’t help but imagine the young couple running over the stones of the world in high boots—brave, semi-divine. She wanted in to a family like that.

  For she, on the other hand, had been adopted at the age of two by an aging couple by the name of Paul and Dodie Gagliardo, who lived in a nearby industrial town once famous for its production of panty hose. She remembered little of note from her childhood: a ubiquity of graham crackers, an inability to bounce a ball, the battlement-like shape of the mill buildings at dusk, cold window panes. She did not know or want to know what had become of her birth mother, although there remained snatches of memories, and those snatches of memories felt like little stabs when they surfaced, and left her with no whole, and she might as well have beaten herself on the head with an adze if she was going to spend her life speculating about it. Why why why. Well, why not? It wasn’t a big mystery. Some people just don’t want children. She understood that. She herself, for example, was sometimes frightened of them, frightened especially when holding babies—how they swayed about searching for the pretty colors.

  Paul and Dodie Gagliardo were schoolteachers with pleasant, tea-colored faces made somewhat tense over time by their inability to conceive. Charlotte attended the school at which Daddy Gagliardo taught science, and he often walked her home from school, pointing out the early evening stars that shone over the brick horizon of the mill buildings. They had all done quite well together, and as far as one could measure, there was love. Love of the undemonstrative, old-world stripe—the love that bakes bread, that paws at the face with a spit-dampened Kleenex. But it was the cordial estrangement between them all in later years—just the blameless, gradual drifting apart—that was most real, reinforcing the fact that they had never technically belonged to one another, most especially not to Charlotte.

  She had been ashamed to tell Clark about the true nature of her relationship with the Gagliardos. When she finally confessed, of all things, he laughed. He covered his face with his hands. “I was so confused,” he laughed. “Charlotte Gagliardo! You didn’t look Italian.” And that was that. No shame, no coldness, no backing away. Only this gentle bemusement, for wasn’t life tricky? If she had said, I was born of a clam, he would have said, I’d like to hear about that!

  What he taught her then, with his strangely trusting, hell-bent love was, if life was tricky, you were freed from the burden of having to play it straight yourself, and anything was possible—anything. You could spend entire afternoons floating in inner tubes, you could commandeer the megaphone from the Bingo leader at the boardwalk, you could get engaged, you could talk with relative impunity about the fantastic plans you would never enact, you could drive up to your parents’ house unannounced, holding the hand of a woman almost as tall and thin as you, she shyly folding a strand of stiff blonde hair behind her ear, and you could say, This is Charlotte. We just got married.

  But of course, impulsive romantic gestures are not universally admired. Vera Adair had slumped perceptibly when she met Charlotte, holding out a limp hand, and saying to her son, Some smile she’s got. At that point Charlotte felt Clark cringe beside her, for the crookedness of her eyeteeth was a sore point he well knew, ever since they had called her Chops at school. Charlotte clapped a hand over her mouth. And just then, a towering man in a wool sweater who was Clark’s father emerged from his study and took Charlotte by the arm into a sitting room and offered her a drink in congratulations.

  And that’s the way the visits went for two years. Toward the end of her life, the strange, impulsive woman became more withdrawn, her stories more fantastical, but she never quite gave up taunting Charlotte with her particular intolerance for rejection and surprise. It was almost as if she were prodding Charlotte with whom she no longer wished to be—a loner, a skeptic, an orphan—slumming in the realms of family happiness. More than once, on visits, Charlotte had found her own suitcase packed prematurely by the door, or a taxi mysteriously waiting on the street, and Vera would chirp from a distant room, dressed in her signature white nightgown, “Oh, I thought you were leaving today, dear.”

  Suddenly, the quality of this memory made Charlotte laugh. Across from her, at the kitchen table, Clark looked up from his crossword puzzle. The dog sat beside them on the linoleum floor, watching the toast as Charlotte lifted it off the plate. His lips were caught inside his mouth. Charlotte laughed again but more tenderly, and she reached out and patted the dog on the head.

  “What’s so funny?” said Clark. “Why do you keep chuckling to yourself?”

  Charlotte fed the dog her toast, which he ate in large, crocodile bites.

  “Oh,” she said, dusting off her hands, looking around at the house, which was finally starting to look like a real, lived-in house. “I’m just proud of us. How we’ve all—gone forward so normally. All things considered. The past, I mean. The crazy past.”

  Clark closed his naked legs and opened them again. He was in his underwear, holding a blue crayon.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Even the dog,” said Charlotte. “I think he’s completely recovered. Voilá. A fresh start.”

  She smiled down at the animal, who had swallowed his treat and was looking up at his new mistress—history, a rumor.

  END OF DISCUSSION

  By the time summer came, the Adairs were doing quite well. They passed many dexterous nights in bed, and stayed up late drinking root beer or brandy in the darkness, laughing and playing Pick It Up Now and various other games they’d invented in their married, childless idleness. It felt to them both that perhaps it was now, perhaps now life was starting up, for real, at last. They opened all the windows and summer air filled the house. The rooms were painted, the furniture largely in place. Tecumseh continued to scatter and hunt for his dog food, but he didn’t howl at sunrise much. And after the doghouse was built in the backyard, Charlotte often checked to make sure he had not choked himself by encircling the structure with his chain. As for Clark, he had not seen the feminine shadow again, and he never thought of it.

  Charlotte had found herself a hopefully very temporary job as a secretary for a cheerful negligence lawyer named Warren Ziff, and Clark, who had just completed his first term at Clementine Junior High, was relieved to have the summer off. Finally, he didn’t have to coddle or interrogate anybody for masturbating in the bathrooms or for defacing the teachers’ lounge or for handcuffing somebody else to a shower stall, for everything kids did that was transgressive and passionate and senseless—for everything kids did, really. He didn’t have to coddle the teachers, who bickered and complained and puked about everything. He hated listening to people. He was awful at it. Well, he was all right at listening, but then people wanted to know what you thought. People wanted to know whose side you came down on. Take this, for example: two boys get in trouble for fighting. The first boy says the second started it, the second says the first, and they’ve both got black eyes. Well, if they’ve both got black ey
es, what’s the problem?

  There was something wild in children, he thought sometimes, but you could not love that wildness and it was not particularly beautiful. You could only hold it at bay until it died by itself.

  Clark was supposed to be taking night classes. He had his teaching certificate, but officially he wasn’t trained to be a guidance counselor. He wasn’t certified. In a pinch, when the previous guidance counselor had been struck with some obscure joint disease, the junior high school had hired Clark on the condition that he finish his qualifications by taking human development classes at the Clementine Community College. But over time, the night classes bored Clark and he stopped going. He figured humans would continue to develop whether or not he took classes about them. And the trick to guiding a child? Get the hell out of the way. You need a certificate for that?

  Clark liked summer vacation and he took it very seriously. He liked being a guidance counselor in the summers. He slept late in the warm mornings, and when it started to get cool again he would know it was evening and would begin to make dinner for Charlotte, stirring a pot, opening a beer, watching TV, watching the light change. He liked the soberness of shadows, long and thin like him. By day, he walked Tecumseh around the neighborhood. He felt that he and the dog understood one another. Sometimes Clark took him to the apple orchard across the street and let him bark at the blackbirds. Together, they sat on the brittle grass in the shade, the husky’s tongue lolling out on the side, dreaming of different things.