Читать книгу Cost - Roxana Robinson - Страница 12

When Julia woke, the house was silent. Her room was flooded with the thin light of early morning, and the plaster walls were bright with sun. The big dormer windows stood open wide onto the front meadow, and the air was cool and sweet.

As she woke she found herself thinking of Jack, and wondered if she had been dreaming about him. The glint of his red-brown hair that grew straight downward, resisting the part; the way he raised his chin when he laughed. He was so handsome: really, with his straight brows and brilliant blue eyes. It made more difference than it should.

Julia was smiling, remembering the time they'd been at a diner somewhere—where? Outside, it had been winter. Sitting at the counter, drinking coffee. Wendell was there, so it was before the divorce, and Steven. They'd been talking, with Jackie at the end of their row, listening intently.

Too intently: there was something odd about his look. He was staring at them, and they turned, one by one, to look at him. He was humming quietly, stirring his coffee. As they turned he began to sing, that corny ballad about the logger who stirs his coffee with his thumb. It took them a moment—Jack's expression was so earnest—to see that he was doing it, stirring his coffee with his thumb, his finger buried deep in the inky liquid. It was his face, that manic, deadpan stare: it still made Julia laugh.

Jackie was always the star, the center of things. There was a glitter about him, the hypnotic gaze, the slow wide smile. The sense of wild possibility. He might do anything, and you wanted to be there when he did. He didn't care what happened. Risk appealed, you could sense it.

It had caused trouble for years. All those times Julia had been called in to meet with his teachers, his principals. But Jack was a sweetheart, not one of those sullen, hostile kids who hated their parents. (Julia knew kids like that: what would you do? Shoot yourself?) No, she was grateful for Jack, good-natured, warm, smart, creative. He'd always gone his own way, and why not? He was electrifying. You couldn't take your eyes off him.

She remembered the time they'd all been down at the dock, loading the boat for a picnic. Jack was carrying the hamper with all the food, sandwiches, fruit, potato chips, cookies, napkins, the works. Wendell stood in the Whaler, receiving things from the others, setting them in the bottom. Julia was walking down the ramp, carrying her own bundles, when it happened.

Wendell took a bag from Steven and set it down at his feet.

“Hold on,” he said to Jack. “Let me move some of this. Everything's over on this side, let me balance it.”

“That's okay I'll take it around to the other side,” Jack said. He walked along the dock beside the boat, up to the bow, then started to walk around it, stepping casually off the dock and into the air. Dropping, with the loaded basket in his hands, into ten feet of ocean at fifty degrees. His expression, as he went down, was mild and unconcerned, his body frozen in mid-step, hands locked on the hamper.

It was so absurd, and electrifying: they couldn't believe they'd seen it. She'd been furious, all those soaked sandwiches, the ruined food. He was outrageous, he dismissed everything the rest of them took seriously: warmth, dryness, order. He liked chaos, reveled in it. But it was impossible to stay mad at Jackie, he was so funny. So original, so bright and charming, so good-natured.

Though it was hard not to worry about him. His life was late in starting, or something. Was that it? He'd finally, barely, managed to graduate from college (an obliging one that no one had ever heard of, in northern New Hampshire), but at least he had a degree. Which had led him exactly nowhere, so far. He lived a Gypsyish downtown life of start-up bands, part-time jobs, optimistic schemes, and the very occasional unpaid musical gig. He was in a band, though not a rock band. It's not rock music, he'd told Julia, shaking his head and grinning with that generic rolling-eyed amazement at parental ignorance. As though she'd called it Latvian chanting. What it was, instead of rock, was a mystery to her. Mostly rhythm and electronic feedback, as far as she could tell.

But Jack loved it, and she loved watching him play, seeing him onstage in his skinny black jeans and black T-shirt, his head nodding in charmed obedience to the monstrous beat. That slow grin, the magnetic sideways glance. Who knew how he'd end up?

The bands he was in never actually seemed to progress. They seemed continually to be part of some emerging and dissolving process, like early life forms, and Julia wondered how long this ought to go on. At some point, didn't you accept the fact that the music wasn't succeeding? Move on? Though your child should decide this for himself; the parent's task was to be supportive. What Julia was determined never to be was like her father: judgmental. The world would always be the critic, her job was to be the fan.

Despite what seemed very ill-considered choices. There were things it was hard not to worry about. Drugs, of course, had always been a part of Jack's life. Certainly part of the downtown music scene, they were all around, she knew it. Julia rolled onto her stomach and burrowed her head into her flattened pillow.

During his adolescence, drugs had seeped into Jack's landscape like a toxic plume. All those things she kept finding in his bedroom, under the bed, among dirty clothes in his duffel—the grubby bags of pot, the bongs. And nothing seemed to stop Jack, not her and Wendell's serious talks, not their later anger and shouts and threats, not Jacks suspension from school, not even, once, his expulsion. They might as well have been ordering him to breathe a different kind of air.

She picked up the pillow, punched it, and laid her head down again.

That time they'd gone together—though by then they'd been separated—to visit him at college, when he was so weird all weekend, grinning, unfocused, completely stoned. Wendell was angry, but Julia was hurt to see he wouldn't face them without chemical protection. But it had been just after the divorce, maybe Jack had been angry at them for that. Acting out his rage.

For a moment Julia allowed herself the luxury of blaming all Jack's problems on Wendell's despicable behavior—why not? Wendell actually had been despicable—though this lasted for only a moment. It was a dangerous luxury. Considering Wendell's despicable behavior would lead to considering her own behavior, and to the (morally indefensible) fact that she did not know, absolutely, who Jack's father was. It had been Julia's only affair, and brief.

For five months she'd been caught up in its runaway current. She'd been in thrall, powerless, it seemed. Each time she came home from seeing Eric, each time she stepped into her own apartment, into the safe domestic haven she'd created, the one which she now mocked so cruelly by her behavior, she felt remorse. Each time she opened the door onto its mute reproach, each time she saw the trusting faces of Wendell and Steven looking up with pleasure as she arrived, each time she saw them like this—innocent victims of her deceit—her heart smote her, and she determined in that instant to end it.

And the next day—the very next day!—hearing Eric's voice on the phone, she felt her heart quickening again in her chest, and nothing else was permitted entry into her mind. She thought of nothing else. She abandoned the rest of her life. She found herself rushing from the apartment, beds unmade, dirty dishes on the table, appointments ignored or forgotten. She lied to her husband, friends, babysitter, anyone who asked. She lied about a dentist's appointment, a seminar, a student conference, moving the car on the street. When challenged, she produced more lies. She'd been shocked and impressed at herself, she'd had no idea what she'd been capable of. She'd done things that she'd never have thought of doing. In the back of their own car one night, parked on the street, on their own block. At a party, standing up, in a bathroom, Wendell knocking at the door. She'd been insane.

She'd been helpless, willing, thrilled. The tautness and electricity of this sumptuous, illicit love, how your body yearned for it! How her skin, everywhere, had waited for Eric's touch, for his breath on the back of her neck, for the urgency of his gaze. How her blood quickened at his husky, intimate whisper in her ear. She'd been taken over by pleasure, by ecstasy; it had been her entire life for five months.

Wendell, though, had started it all.

Late one evening, after dinner, the two of them still at the kitchen table, they'd emptied a second bottle of wine. Wendell's eyelids grew heavy, his manner affectionate and confidential. He told Julia how very fond he was of her, very fond. Then he admitted, grinning, almost proud, that he'd taken the secretary from the Classics Department to a motel just across the George Washington Bridge. He'd told her all this as though she, Julia, were his accomplice. Just for the afternoon, he said, as though that made a difference. When Julia stared at him, furious, he seized her hand unsteadily.

“Don't get so mad,” he said. “It doesn't mean anything. Anyway, it was in New Jersey.”

“You think you're not married in New Jersey?” Julia asked. “How many other states are you not married in?”

“Come on,” Wendell said, shaking her hand gently. “Don't be jealous. I thought of you the whole time. When we parked the car I just sat there. I wanted to call the whole thing off.”

“But you didn't,” Julia pointed out.

“Don't be cross. You're much better in bed than she is. I'm weak, that's all.”

Julia said nothing, furious. What she thought was Why am I bothering to be faithful?

So when Eric Swenson, a sort of post-Expressionist with a long auburn ponytail, smelling of turpentine, whose studio was near hers, asked if she wanted to go for coffee, she said yes, and for five months she was swept up in that stream. Then one morning she'd waked up to nausea, and when she rolled over in bed she felt the tenderness of her breasts and knew she was pregnant, but with no idea by whom. At that moment the switch was turned off. After that, she felt exactly nothing at the sound of Eric's voice. His touch on her skin made her twitch, and she wanted to shake off his hand like an insect. It was over.

When Jackie was born—after nine months of fervent virtue, as though she could make the unborn child into Wendell's son simply by her own good behavior—she told herself he was Wendell's son. It could easily be true; she'd never know. Jackie had her blood type, A negative, and he'd grown up as Wendell's son. Julia had never told anyone.

But Jackie was the secret reminder of her scarlet season, those days spent swinging out into thin air, over the wild shadowed depths of the canyon. It was the thrill of it, the luxury of yielding to something so dangerous, so delicious, so irresistible, intoxicating. She'd been incapable of resistance, she'd had no thought of stopping. It was a madness, it was addiction. Remembering those days was like a soldier remembering the battlefield—the explosions around him matched by those in his thundering heart—in disbelief that this life and the earlier one could have been contained within the same body.

Jack was himself, of course, but he was secretly this as well, and sometimes when Julia looked at him she saw a double image—himself and his mother's secret stain. She loved him for this as well as for himself.

Long afterward, Eric asked her about Jack, at a crowded cocktail party in someone's apartment on Claremont Avenue. Eric was standing near her, too close. He held a cache of peanuts in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. His voice was low and confidential, and Julia drew away. His eyes were bloodshot, and the skin on his nose was tight and drawn.

“I wondered,” Eric said, watching her, “about your son. The younger one.” He raised his hand, opened his mouth, and tossed in a peanut. “Because of when he was born.” He chewed, his jaws grinding steadily.

“He's not yours, Eric,” Julia told him. “He's Wendell's. There's no question.”

Eric said nothing. He closed his hand over the peanuts and shook them. They made a soft rattling sound inside his fist.

“It's true. I know the night it happened,” Julia said, as though by persuading Eric she could make it so. “Women always know.”

He waited, still chewing, watching her appraisingly.

Now Julia turned over in bed, gazing up at the plaster ceiling, with its deltas of fine hairline cracks. She'd have said anything, to anyone, to make Jack into Wendell's son. Partly out of loyalty to her marriage, partly for Jack's sake. It still mattered. She'd do anything to make Jack into Wendell's son. The force of her will would make it true.

Anyway, all Jack's problems might be unrelated to his parents (whoever they were), or to their own bad behavior, or their divorce. It was tempting to think you played a part in everything your child did, since, when he was small, you did. But your child grew into his own life, chose his own path. And you couldn't blame everything on divorce—look at Steven.

She might be overreacting, in any case. Maybe drugs were no longer a problem for Jack, maybe they had never really been. It seemed everyone took them now. Steven had, she knew. Julia had herself, in college. Taking drugs was a rite of passage, an initiation into an esoteric society, somewhere darker and cooler than childhood. The illicit thrill of the secret community, the coded phrases, the rituals.

Though her own druggie phase seemed unrelated to Jack's: whatever your children did was always a little too daring, a little too fast. How were you meant to deal with them and drugs? It was hard to tease out a line to follow among the tangle of illicit behavior, tacit consent, public obloquy. Was it a question of degree? Telling your children never to take any drugs seemed naïve, so should you say that it was all right to try marijuana but not cocaine? Both were illegal. Where did you draw the line?

By the time it was a problem you had no control, anyway. Your children had left home, or were spending so much time elsewhere that they might as well have. You might draw the line anywhere you wanted, your children could simply step over it. And fighting with your children was so horrible, all that shouting and misery.

Maybe they had been too lax. How did you know? And what did you do if you had been? She thought drugs must be in Jack's life. She was hoping for them to subside, as they had in Steven's, where they must also have been.

The cracks in the ceiling had always been there. Julia thought they showed merely the way the old house shifted and settled with the sea sons, the wood frame swelling and shrinking, the plaster dampening and drying. Wendell's view had been more ominous: he thought they mapped the fault lines where the plaster, some apocalyptic day, would give way. Wendell used to lie in bed, gazing upward and predicting ruin. Only a matter of time, he would say.

Julia's thoughts had become too boisterous for her to stay in bed with any longer, and she got up. She took off her nightgown, hanging it inside the tiny slanting closet under the eaves. The air was cool and fresh, and she felt her skin tighten against it. She shivered slightly, but she liked this brief moment of nudity, the sense of swimming in the morning's clear river. She dressed and padded downstairs, barefoot. The worn wooden steps were soft beneath her feet.

The kitchen looked abandoned and untidy, strands of corn silk on the floor, dirty pans soaking in the sink. The air was close and stale, and Julia opened the porch door wide and put on the kettle. She took the broom from the closet and began to sweep, enjoying the brisk abrasive passage of the broom, the deep virtuous satisfaction of cleaning. Next to godliness: there was a lofty claim. Certainly it was an instinctive impulse; animals did it, grooming themselves, licking and biting, keeping themselves clean. Dogs licking each other's face, horses biting languidly along each other's back. A healthy animal was clean, a dirty one was ill or wounded. And who was Hygeia, anyway? She washed out the last pans, rinsed out the sink, and made coffee.

She took her mug onto the porch and sat down on the steps, lifting her face. The air was quiet and fresh, and the sky clear. The grass in the meadow was heavy with dew. There was no wind; it would be hot later.

She wished Jackie were here, right now, to see the meadow, still shimmering with dew, the cove beyond showing a cross-hatched glitter. Right now, in this pale candid light, it seemed impossible to think of being troubled, impossible not to feel the certainty of some kind of clarity and grace.

The screen door behind her creaked, and she looked up, apprehensive that it was Edward. But it was Steven, tousled and barefoot, in wrinkled jeans and a T-shirt.

“Hi,” Julia half-whispered, smiling: the morning was still too quiet for talk. “You're up early. Want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Steven sat down in a chair above her. He stretched out his legs, crossing his ankles. “Yeah, I am up early. Don't know why.”

They sat in silence, looking out over the meadow.

“So,” Julia said. “You're back. Any thoughts on what you want to do next?”

“Yeah,” said Steven. “I'm thinking of law school.”

Julia took a sip of coffee. “What does your father say?”

“Haven't told him yet.”

“Why do you want to go?”

Listening to Steven's response, she thought, My responsible child. She felt a wave of helpless affection. She wanted to say yes to whatever he wanted. She wanted to make herself into a carpet, flatten the world beneath his foot.

“Of course we'll do what we can to help,” she told him. “I hope you'll end up in New York.”

“Thanks,” said Steven soberly. “I'll see where I get in.”

“You'll get in everywhere,” Julia told him. Steven grinned and rolled his eyes.

They fell silent, Steven squinting out across the field, Julia sipping from her mug. She was trying to prepare herself for the next, the difficult, subject.

“So, how's your brother?” Julia asked finally. “You saw him in New York?”

Steven shrugged, frowning. “Yeah, I saw him.”

Julia waited. “And? How's he doing?” Anxiety began to tick in her mind.

Steven shrugged again. “It's hard to say. I don't really know.”

Steven wouldn't tell, she could see that. She hated asking him to inform on his brother.

“He's not working,” Julia said tentatively, hoping to be corrected.

“He says he's getting a job.”

“That's great,” Julia said. “Doing what?”

“He said working at a video store,” Steven said.

“A video store?” Julia repeated, dismayed.

Jackie, with his quick bright mind, his sense of humor, his reach and grasp of life? In a video store, with its sluggish air, the bored and affectless adolescents behind the counter, the endless loop of action movies on the overhead screen? How had his gaze fallen so low?

But of course any job was better than none, better than sitting around in someone's apartment getting stoned. Anything was better than that awful glazed-eye apathy. Any job was better than those empty claims about rock bands and music production, those sad, noncredible schemes. Any job meant getting up each morning, clean clothes, punctuality. Responsibility. Those small-minded quotidian things. Her own gaze had fallen as well.

“Do you think he has a plan?” she asked. “I mean, long-term?”

“I don't know what he's doing,” Steven said again, not looking at her.

Julia watched him.

“What do you thinks going on?”

Steven shook his head.

“Do you think he's taking drugs?” she asked.

Steven hesitated, still not looking at her. There were certain things he did not want to say to his mother—or to anyone—about Jack. There was the question of loyalty. He and Jack were connected. He could not step across the family space to stand with his parents, though in his mother's question he felt the covert pull to do so.

“Everyone takes drugs,” Steven said flatly.

“Do you?”

After a moment he said, “Not really. Not anymore. A little pot now and then. Not much. But Jacks younger.”

“You think it's a problem,” Julia said.

Steven didn't answer.

“I suppose you don't want to say,” Julia said.

She remembered the afternoon, a few months ago, when she'd come home to the apartment to find Jack in the living room. For some reason she'd felt oddly alarmed at the sight of him; for some reason he'd looked like a stranger.

He'd arrived unannounced, and that too was disturbing, though she couldn't say why. Didn't he often come home without telling her? Or not? She couldn't remember, but this seemed different. And he looked so filthy, his hair so greasy and unkempt, as though for days he hadn't even run his hands through it. He seemed dirty in some alarming way, as though his body no longer mattered. Or was she overreacting? Most of her students were grubby and unkempt. But this seemed different, more serious.

He was wearing blue jeans worn to a colorless gray, an old zippered sweatshirt over a white T-shirt. He turned toward her when she came in, and she was shocked by his face. His eyes were empty.

“Jack!” she said. “How nice to see you!”

She'd tried to act casual and motherly, but her words had frozen. There was a terrifying absence about him. Was he swaying slightly, standing there? Convention held her on its rails (what should she have done?) and she offered him coffee, a beer. No, he'd said to everything, no, thanks.

Finally she'd asked if anything were the matter. No, he'd said. Nothing was the matter.

He shook his greasy head, and Julia suddenly remembered him as a child, sitting in the bathtub, small and naked, pearly white, his legs stretched sturdily out in front of him.

Julia, fixing coffee anyway, talked as she moved about the kitchen. They sat down, and Julia slid a mug over to Jack. He slouched bonelessly against his chair. He looked at her, then away. His silence was blank and monumental, she felt it pressing on her.

His skin was pale, nearly translucent. His eyes seemed glazed and hooded, the lids heavy. Below them were dark rings, faintly glistening with oil or sweat. He looked down at his mug, his gaze interior. His fingers grasped it loosely; his fingernails were filthy. The zipper on his sweatshirt was broken, the fabric thin and worn. Why did he look like this? Where were his other clothes?

Jack sat still, then looked up, his gaze moving about the kitchen. There was something in him that excluded her. Finally he stood, shoving his hair from his face.

“Okay, I'm taking off,” Jack said.

“Can I give you something?” she asked. She was frightened by his stillness and distance. “A little hay for your horse?” A family joke: it was what Katharine always said when they came to see her. Katharine would tuck a rolled-up bill into her daughter's hand, to pay for gas. It was a love token.

Jack shrugged again, not moving. It was as though he were waiting for a sound his mother could not hear. His eyes were dull.

“Let me give you something.” Julia rummaged through her purse and found a twenty, two of them. “Here. Take a cab home.”

Jack took it without looking at it. “Thanks.”

There was a field of silence around him. She followed him to the door. In the hall he turned to close the door, and she saw his face, now shadowed, beyond her territory. It seemed feral, the dark eyes watchful. There was something wrong with them, his eyes.

“’Bye, Ma,” he said. “Thanks for the hay.”

He'd been like a stranger, terrible. Why had he come? There was something, too, that clicked in her memory, about the visit, some forgotten unease. What was it?

Now, on the porch, Julia put her arm around her bare knees, hugging herself.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked Steven.

Steven leaned back in his chair, his hands knitted together over his flat stomach. He didn't answer.

It was certainly drugs, Steven thought now, suddenly, allowing himself to know, it was certainly serious. The knowledge crowded in on him and, now it was clear, had been there all along. The stinking hall, the awful apartment, Jack's blank dead stare. The weird eyes, the wrong smile. The blood on his shirt cuff. The familiar request. Steven had given him money, as always. He felt sickened by all this: his brother's sinister affect, his mother's cautious questions. Her request for loyalty, the insidious “we.”

“Steven?”

“I don't know what you should do.”

Steven refused to be we. He didn't know what his parents should do. He only knew of cures—rehabs—from friends who'd gone through them. He didn't know about the other side, how the parents had done it. He knew kids who'd been handed plane tickets and taken, that minute, to the airport, muscled into seclusion like involuntary monks. He'd had friends who'd asked their parents to get them into programs. He'd heard of those creepy couples who burst into bedrooms in the middle of the night, taking some poor kid off to one of those sinister boarding-school boot camps. He didn't know about making the arrangements. He wasn't going to be part of some organized plan to hunt Jack down.

Julia sipped her coffee, aware of his distance.

“You know,” she said tentatively, “I wish you'd help me. I'd like to know if you think it's serious, and if we should do something, or if you think it's just a phase he's going through, and if we should wait for it to pass. I'd appreciate your advice.”

Julia had always believed that parents should not ask children for help, they should be capable of dealing with their own problems. But now she needed Steven: he knew more about this than she did.

After a moment, Steven answered. Saying nothing was also taking a position.

“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Okay. I think he's in trouble. I think it's bad.”

The words echoed oddly in her head.

“What do you mean, bad?” Julia did not look at him. The air had taken on some kind of charge.

“I think he's on serious drugs.”

“What kind?” Her chest felt constricted.

“Heroin,” Steven said.

There was the word. He'd loosed it like a snake, quick, black, lethal, whiplashing fast and horribly into their world. But it wasn't his fault, was it? The word had already entered his brother's world, the long black shape sliding into the crevices of his brother's life, vanishing into the shadows, where it was coiling and expanding, gathering strength. Taking up more and more space, crowding out the life that had been there.