Chapter 7

Awakened by the insistent low buzz of the alarm, he stretched across the bed to switch it off. He had refused to move the clock to the night table on his side of the bed; he would not formalize Carolyn’s new hours. He buried his face in her pillow, smelling faint delicate scents of her, remembering their lovemaking.

He pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen, poured steaming coffee from the automatic coffeemaker, and carried the cup back to the bathroom. No longer would he sit at the dining room table with the paper and his coffee; he used to do that with Carolyn. And the newspaper, which she now read before he did and left folded beside his coffee cup, he would take to the office with him.

He spread shaving cream over his face, his thoughts straying back to the first days of his marriage when Carolyn would come into the bathroom in the mornings to sit without speaking on the lid of the toilet, knees under her chin, to watch him shave. In those days she had been fascinated with every aspect of his maleness, scrutinizing how he tucked his shirt in and fastened his pants, how he knotted his tie, even how he arranged his genitals inside his shorts.

He had enjoyed her fascination even while understanding that it was not meant directly for him. There had been few men in her life. When Carolyn was nine her stockbroker father had tidied up his affairs, including deeding the house to his wife, cashed his last commission checks, cleaned out exactly half of the family bank accounts, and vanished—Mexico, Carolyn’s mother believed—making no subsequent effort to contact his wife or only child. Carolyn’s mother soon sold the house and moved into an apartment next to her sister and brother-in-law and their two daughters. These cousins of Carolyn’s had become her closest companions—but then they had gone away, the family moving up to Evanston before Carolyn turned twelve.

Although she could speak freely and without apparent pain of the desertion of her father, it was at least as great a betrayal as that of his own mother, of which he never spoke; and he had always understood the disconnectedness in Carolyn. He understood the tenuousness of her roots—and was aware that she did not. Now she lived on the farthest coast from even these roots. Her mother, a vague, nervous, washed-out physical caricature of Carolyn whose fine-edged lucidity made him uneasy, had been in a sense further removed from Carolyn—she had recently remarried. Not only did he understand Carolyn’s disconnectedness, he welcomed it; he wanted all her sense of belonging and permanence to come from him.

He was proud of this marriage, his second. He had read that divorced people more often than not repeated their mistakes, seeking out similar marriage partners. Carolyn could not have been more different from Rita.

He thought of Rita seldom—and then with relief and gratitude that she was gone from his life leaving no residue other than memory. Her age, he supposed, had been the most grievous problem. Women, after all, no matter how malleable they seemed, how willing they professed to be in the areas of compromise, were set in their personalities without hope of change once they got into their twenties; and Rita had been twenty-five, he twenty-three.

At the time, she had seemed the ideal woman. Attractive, with a healthy glowing vivaciousness, her primary appeal had been a maternal caring for him; she had flattered and praised and encouraged and catered to him, even eased some of that pain he had carried with him since boyhood, that great wound opened in him by his mother.

But Rita’s volubility allowed for no silence, and her unflagging energy became a draining suction. Sex especially was a swamp in which he felt inextricably mired. She needed lengthy intercourse for orgasm, and each time he had to hold on and hold on while she gasped almost almost almost until mercifully she came and he could have his own orgasm, more agonized release than pleasure. Each time he would lie utterly spent while she babbled praise and love, her grateful hands holding his head pillowed into her big soft breasts, until he dropped into black sleep.

Occasionally she wanted to give him fellatio, which he detested but surrendered to out of a shameful sense that he should want it, enduring the act by squeezing his eyes shut to excise the vision of her pendulous breasts as she bent over him, the sight making him feel as if he were being serviced by a whore. Steeling himself, he would reciprocate, a suffocating ordeal of wetness and nauseating odor, while she emitted little shrieks and her body flopped on the bed like a beached fish.

There was no peace anywhere in his life. After he had been married four years and had begun to acquire his first professional success, she wanted to have a baby. After all, as she nagged insistently, she was approaching thirty. Unable to hear the thought of another demanding voice in his life, he put her off with granite determination. She retaliated by pouting and then withholding sex, and when he did not bother to conceal his indifference—indeed, his relief—the acrimony between them reached irrevocable heights. They divorced with outward amicability but with dark hatred between them. A scant, embarrassing three months later, Rita remarried.

The restoration of his single status soon evolved from relief into awkwardness. At work he was now odd man out, automatically excluded from talk of wives and children, a misfit at company functions involving employees’ families. He was soon led to understand in subtle ways by men above him that those who blended best into the corporate echelon met certain criteria of conformity. Marriage gave evidence of stability; marital responsibilities created career commitment; married meant normal. Single, on the other hand, meant alienation from the mainstream, potential independence in the workplace. Whatever his professional abilities, a single man was a potential corporate maverick. Single meant not-quite-normal.

Understanding more and more of the intricacies of corporate politics, he studied the wives of the men around him and congratulated himself on his single status. Aside from his own innate talents, he could gain advantage and increased career opportunity by marrying the right kind of woman, and he was lucky to be free to choose a new woman.

He met Carolyn at his cousin Joan’s wedding reception. A freshman classmate of Joan’s, eighteen years old, possessed of laughable ideals and the endearingly foolish belief that the world was filled with nobility, she was elusive and shy and unaware of her loveliness. He was enchanted by her, drawn to her in an amused and tender protectiveness new to him. The tranquility in her, her central chord of stillness, was like a nourishing oasis in his life. And young as she was he felt challenged by her, by her quality of reserve, an ambiguity he could neither encompass nor fathom.

With single-minded calculation he laid siege. When he learned she was seeing two other young men he was suddenly charged with fear. That he would fall in love with her had not been in his calculations; the possibility that he might fail to win her terrified him.

He knew his maturity was an asset, his sophistication an advantage. Attempting to overwhelm, he deluged her with large and small attentions: dinners, the theatre, flowers, cards, notes, gifts. Physically he was affectionate, but careful not to press after his initial overtures met resistance. Her reticence, entrancing after the clamorous and exhausting demands of his marriage, only deepened his love. At the same time he sensed that the old-fashioned quality of their courtship appealed to her idealism, her romantic nature.

He met her mother, who clucked over him in birdlike eagerness, approving of his professional accomplishments—at twenty-eight he was already senior salesman, eighteen thousand a year plus bonuses plus company car—and his conservative appearance, his seriousness, his maturity, his prospects. Although divorced, he was childless and alimony-free.

He chose the day Carolyn passed all her freshman finals for his marriage proposal. When she did not reply, only looked at him, he was so fearful that he could scarcely control his voice as he added that of course he would want her to continue with college full time until she graduated.

“All right,” she answered, her voice uninflected, as if the condition of continuing college had decided her, as if she were agreeing to a business deal.

He did not care. She was his.

They had not yet gone to bed together. “I want to wait now,” he told her honestly. “I don’t know why it’s so important—but I want the marriage ceremony; I want the waiting. I want everything special there can be.” She smiled at him then, a radiant smile that seemed to him purest love.

Six weeks later they were married in a small private chapel so banked with flowers he could still call their fragrance to memory. She had turned nineteen; he was twenty-nine. His boss had been best man. His father, visibly uncomfortable in a formal suit, had tugged constantly at his tie as a dog would scratch at a flea. His brother, Rolfe, wearing a cheap gray seersucker jacket over shapeless pants, had attended along with his husky and coarse wife Theresa whom Paul despised no less than he despised Rolfe. Carolyn’s mother had of course been there, prim and frightened in her beige lace dress; and the two cousins Carolyn was close to, who were her bridesmaids; and several of her friends from college who seemed to him more curious onlookers than friends.

They flew to New England. The incandescent fall landscape was afterward a blurred memory in him; even the photos Carolyn had taken were meaningless, without any reference points. Desire unlike anything he had ever known had overwhelmed all his senses. Tenderly he touched and loved her, and her shy response continually ignited him. Now that she was fully his, his love plumbed new depths, acquired a new intensity of possessiveness that both astonished and terrified him.

As welcoming as she had been to his caresses, she had seemed at times restrained, had looked at him with something like remoteness.

“I want everything wonderful for you,” he told her. “Am I too fast? Too anything?” He pleaded, “Tell me.”

“It’s me,” she confessed. “It’s not you at all. It’s just…nerves.”

During their third night she was wetter than usual for his entry, and when he felt for the first time a clasping of him in her, he came instantly, groaning his ecstasy. Afterward she lay with her eyes closed, her breathing rapid and shallow. He asked eagerly, “Good? Was it…good?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and looked at him. And still there was that distance in her eyes, a veiled privacy. In the ensuing years, whenever he had looked into her eyes after lovemaking the veil was always there, as if something within her was still beyond his reach.

His mother had been a stern and cold woman who thoroughly cowed both his father and his brother. Rolfe had inherited his father’s height and sandy hair; he, Paul, had his mother’s coloring and her blue eyes. He and only he had been close to her, had been privileged to understand that her forbidding demeanor was the bluff she ran against the meanness and poverty of the world she was trapped in, her means of surviving her all-male surroundings, of enduring a husband as crude as his rough and tumble business—supplying corpses of cars to wrecking yards.

Just after he turned sixteen his mother fell ill. The day after she was given a diagnosis of intestinal cancer she rented a motel room and accomplished her death efficiently—washing down two bottles of sleeping pills with a pint of vodka and without the least trace of sentimentality, her formally signed note reading, THIS IS BEST.

His father accepted the suicide with numb stoicism, inarticulate in this loss as in all other facets of his life except his work. Rolfe, older than Paul by three years, said to Paul, “You and her—the two of you thought you were better than the rest of us. But now after this…” Paul had turned and walked away from him, and in the twenty years since that day saw Rolfe only when unavoidable; he could not bring himself to consider forgiving him.

His mother, however, was beyond all forgiveness. Why had she died without any acknowledgment of their special bond, as if she wished to annihilate his connection to her? THIS IS BEST. The manner of her death denied that he had been an exception to those words, denied that he was different, denied his potential in the world, reassigned him to the hopelessness of his surroundings.

His anger and bitterness fueled an unsuspected strength he unearthed in himself—a single-minded obstinance. He thrust pain and futile questions out of his mind and with grim persistence, undeterred by all obstacles including exhaustion, put himself through Chicago State University, working the night shift stacking cartons of cans in a meat packing factory. Vowing that he would work for a Fortune 500 company and no other, he patiently researched and applied to one company after the other, in alphabetical order. He was hired as an inside salesman on his fifth interview.

Aside from his wedding to Carolyn, he looked back on his first day at American Tube Supply as the greatest day in his life. He had won—had smashed all barriers, defeated all the forces marshaled to pull him down and keep him at the level of his father and his brother. Thoughts of his mother—the words THIS IS BEST—still crept into his mind, to be pushed angrily away. He had risen above what she had done to him, yet in the ultimate betrayal she was not there to witness it. She was outside his triumph, his anger, his revenge.

How carefully he had initiated with Carolyn the subject of having their own child. She had looked at him questioningly, her eyes grave and accepting. He remained silent, waiting for her to speak. Finally she ventured, searching his face anxiously, “You’re ten years older. I know you must want them…but when I finish college, just a few more years…I know I’m being selfish but it’s important to me, dear Paul...”

“Whatever you want, Princess, it’s your decision,” he said, thinking that in a few years he would be better able to know if he could ever share her, whether they would ever have a child.

He knew better than to suggest she did not need a degree, that he would take care of her, that while the extra income would be welcome when she did take a job he did not want a paragon who juggled husband and home and career. In the world of his work where he was increasingly valued and finding more and more secure a place, he was admired and envied—as he knew he would be—for Carolyn’s youth and good looks and subtle sensuality. A fairy princess could not be more perfect than the woman he had fallen in love with. He did not want anything about Carolyn to change. As his career gathered impetus and placed new social and financial demands on them, she had doggedly continued going to the University of Illinois. After they bought the condo on the Near North Side—a real bargain but a precipitous drain on his income—she borrowed tuition money from her mother and took a part-time job, working several hours a morning in the college bookstore. Hoping she would become discouraged and drop out—or at least postpone her degree—and with the fresh and vivid memory of his own hard-won college degree as justification, he immersed himself in his work, giving lip service encouragement and sympathy but no help with the cleaning and cooking and shopping. If she stopped even briefly, he calculated, it was odds on she might never go back. Her grades declined, she became tired and morose, but still she persevered through the first two years of their marriage, refusing to drop out for even a semester.

As she began the final semester of her third year, he found her late one night slumped over her books, her face gaunt even in the relaxation of sleep, her pen still within slack fingers. Suddenly he was pierced with love and pride in her, proud of her determination and guts. She would make it through to graduation—he would make certain of it. The next day he ordered her to quit the part-time job, and after that he did much of the housework, began to shop for groceries. She had thought him a hero.

The euphoria of her college degree soon evaporated under the cool disdain of personnel managers who examined her resume and interviewed her for entry-level positions in business.

“This is 1981, they can’t ask me those questions,” she raged at Paul. “It’s not legal to ask how old I am and if I’m married and if I plan to have children. They can’t do that! But if I say anything it’s good-bye Miz Blake, nice chatting with you!”

One evening as she related the frustrations of that job-hunting day, her voice choked with tears, he made a mistake.

“Take it easy for a while, Princess. Take a little vacation. You’ve earned it, all those years in college. You don’t even have to work.”

Her eyes were a bright green hardness he had never seen before, and she said in a quiet voice, looking at him as if he were a repugnant stranger, “I do need to work.”

He proceeded to compound his error. “I have contacts. Let me make a few calls—”

She shrieked an oath at him and fled into the bathroom and locked the door.

Throughout their marriage her chief weapon during their few serious quarrels had been silence—and even when he perceived himself as totally in the right he always capitulated, her avoidance of him, even briefly, more than he could bear. For the next two days she would not speak, would not hear his apologies and explanations, his efforts to atone and make peace. Afterward he wondered how long she would have maintained unforgiving silence had her anger not been consumed in the jubilation of finding a job at Jorgenson Illumination.

“Not only am I a customer service representative,” she proudly informed him, “but they have women supervisors and managers. The salary may not be much but I don’t have to type except for filling in the blanks on order forms!”

He swallowed his laughter, hugged her in joy and relief, and took her to bed before she remembered how angry she had been.

She was very good at the job, earning a performance bonus after only four months. A supervisory position, despite her age of twenty-two, was a distinct possibility in a year or so. But then he was offered the promotion, the transfer to Alabama. After her burst of happiness for him, she was desolate for herself—and then as quickly shrugged it off. “There’ll be other jobs for me. I just wish I’d had a little more time on this one. I need more experience to get another good job.”

In the fall of 1981, in the midst of recession, conservative Birmingham, Alabama, did not welcome into its job market a young married woman freshly moved in from Chicago, judging her a likely transient unfit for anything more responsible than low-rung secretarial work. After two months of futility she took a clerical job, which she hated along with their apartment, the weather, the city of Birmingham, and the South. They made no friends and stayed home most evenings.

When they left Birmingham at the end of 1982 he was regretful; he looked back with nostalgia to their days in this unwelcoming city with its various hostilities. He and Carolyn had been united in their isolation and he had been utterly content. There was never a question whether he would accept the promotion to Los Angeles—a big promotion, district manager in the company’s largest sales region. They could buy a house again—even in L.A.—made possible by the company’s relocation bonus package. In his new tax bracket the write-off would surely be necessary. But Los Angeles seemed so much larger a city than Chicago, open and endless, and he did not like the unvarying brightness, the raw newness of the landscape, the alien feel of it. There was an unsettling within him, inchoate, indefinable, as if his life were edging slightly off center, as if he were losing his firm grip over some primary domain of his own interior landscape.

The house in the San Fernando Valley was a zone of comfort; privacy was possible in this vast, flat, anonymous plain of sameness, these enclaves of three-bedroom homes plus swimming pool plus barbecue, each enclave boasting its own shopping mall and each with its wide main streets where traffic flowed swiftly past huge supermarkets and Taco Bells and Burger Kings. But still he watched Carolyn closely, in nebulous anxiety that the vibrations he felt from this bizarre city would change her.

She immediately found a job—the job she currently held—so excited that she would not hear his protests that she faced a forty-minute, rush-hour commute to Glassell Park. When would it ever end, he thought in disgust, this irrational fixation women had about jobs where they did not have to type.

Paul Blake locked his house and walked into his garage, dark suit coat over his arm, and climbed into his Buick for the drive downtown.

On balance, he reflected, the change in Carolyn’s hours and the acceptance of the promotion without his consent were mere ripples on the surface of his marriage, but he must be careful. As the saying went, a bird must be held lightly, not tightly. But, he added grimly, not too lightly.

She had surprised him. Still she was capable of surprising him. He had searched those green eyes for eight years trying to see and under-stand how to touch a depth of feeling—perhaps passion—that he had always sensed was just beyond his view, closed off from him, a privacy that did not involve him. Squeezing his eyes shut for an instant, he retreated from the glimpse of emptiness his life would be without her—that lurking depth of fear that was always in him, even after many untroubled years of marriage. He pulled out of his driveway in a screech of tires.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 667