Already an accomplished writer of short fiction (Tenorman, Intimates, etc.), Huddle applies his story-writing skills to this shimmering debut novel, which traces the protracted, subtle fallout of an affair between 15-year-old Marcy Bunkleman and 41-year-old Robert Gordon, the husband of her mother's best friend. As the book opens, an adult Marcy recalls the relationship years after it has ended, in a voice so clear, so sure of itself, that readers may be jarred when in the second chapter Marcy's point of view is abandoned for that of her husband, Allen Crandall, who knows nothing of the affair--or indeed, of much else concerning his wife. Subsequent chapters unfold like short stories or brief character sketches, with first-person narratives from the perspectives of other people linked to Marcy: Robert, his wife, the Crandalls' daughter, their best friends from college. Huddle effortlessly creates seven distinct voices, inhabiting each character convincingly and completely. Few of these people have any knowledge of Marcy's secret past, leaving them free to meditate on their own disappointing loves, but the affair nevertheless becomes a kind of powerful black hole, exerting its gravitational pull on everyone's perception of Marcy whether they realize it or not. The shifting viewpoints can make for a fractured, glancing narrative--a significant death and a significant divorce both occur offstage, for instance--but the multiple voices also create surprising dimension and texture in a slender novel. Like a shattered mirror pieced painstakingly together, every shard captures a different angle. Huddle sets the narrative in Cleveland, where Marcy grows up, and in D. C., where she settles, but the setting is really incidental; the real action takes place internally. It is this inner terrain to which Huddle is most sensitive: the ways we reconcile or fail to reconcile ourselves to our moral lapses. His view of the human condition brims with wisdom, compassion and a rare grace. Agent, Bill Clegg. Author tour. (Sept.) FYI: The first chapter, "Past My Future," appeared in Best American Short Stories 1996. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
The Story of a Million Years
Narrated by Julie Dretzin, Kate Forbes, Christina Moore, L.J. Ganser, Ruth Ann Phimister, Scott Shina, Tom Stechschulte
David HuddleUnabridged — 6 hours, 29 minutes
The Story of a Million Years
Narrated by Julie Dretzin, Kate Forbes, Christina Moore, L.J. Ganser, Ruth Ann Phimister, Scott Shina, Tom Stechschulte
David HuddleUnabridged — 6 hours, 29 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Actually, this is the story of some 20 years, told through seven discrete voices about lives intertwined, often intimately. The first narrator, really the pivotal character, is the beautiful and focused Marcy; others are her eventual husband, the vain A.B.C.; her best friend, Uta, who shares a dance-floor intimacy with A.B.C.; Uta's husband, Jimmy, who is A.B.C.'s best friend and is deeply in love with Marcy; businessman Richard, who had an affair with the teenaged Marcy while he was in his forties; Richard's wife; and, finally, Marcy's daughter. It could be argued that this first novel from award-winning poet/storywriter Huddle isn't a novel at all; plot is minimal, and the chapters (although sharing a theme about moments of selfless goodness) could stand alone. Still, the shared experiences and the different "selves" that the varied voices bring to them build to a rare complex reality, and the faceting and near-perfect prose give this reality a lustrous sheen. Highly recommended for quality fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/99.]--Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
This tightly focused study of two marriages and its partners' carefully guarded inner lives is the first full-length novel from the veteran poet and prose writer whose earlier fiction includes several story collections and the novella Tenorman (1995). Huddle tells the tale through the reminiscences of seven different narrators living at various times in a Cleveland suburb: the result is a kind of suburban midwestern, domestic Rashomon whose finest sequences offer disturbingly candid revelations of how even the most intimate and trusting relationships are fraught with misunderstanding and secrecy. Beautiful Marcy Bunkleman, for example, will never confess either to her parents or her husband the affair she conducted, when only 15, with her mother's 40ish married friend Robert. Neither Marcy's self-absorbed husband Allen (nicknamed "A.B.C.") Crandall nor her best friend Uta will reveal that their friendship led them to a single (shabby) sexual episode—nor will Uta's deferential "house-husband" Jimmy Rago (who's also Allen's old college buddy) let on that he's guessed their secret, or attempt to act on his lifelong love for the amiable though indifferent Marcy. The emotional gyrations these four push themselves (and one another) through are cast into vivid relief in single sequences that are narrated, respectively, by the aging Robert, who even years afterward cannot come to terms with his feelings for Marcy and memories of his "seduction" of her; by Robert's unhappy wife Suzanne, who understands her wayward husband's psyche far better than she knows her own; and finally by Marcy's adult daughter Suellen, whose climactic view of her mother alone (after Allen has left Marcy)hauntingly underscores the several ways these people have isolated, second-guessed, and, ultimately, both served and cheated themselves. An old story (comparisons to Updike and Cheever are inevitable), but Huddle makes it fresh by giving his characters vividly distinctive personalities—and the rueful honesty to see themselves as the flawed people they have somehow become.
A stunning first novel . . . Impossible to put down.”
The Wall Street Journal
A stylized morality tale about desire, decency, and fulfillment, this novel, narrated by its main characters, concerns two couples who, over the course of thirty years, become so close as to be nearly one semi-functional family. Sex seems to be the motiving force here; sordid deeds and agonizing thoughts of sordid deeds are rendered in an innocuous diction that does little to make them attractive. Seven actors preside serviceably, if unexceptionally, each impersonating one of the narrating characters. They reinforce the feeling of circumspect salaciousness that makes this a perversely diverting listen. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170937295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Past My Future
A few weeks after my fifteenth birthday, a friend of
my parents, a Mr. Gordon, asked me -- quietly and
directly -- if I would like to have an adventure with
him. He asked his question on a sunny afternoon while
he and I sat together at the edge of my family's
swimming pool, splashing our feet and talking. Mrs.
Gordon sat with my mother a few yards away; they were
tanning themselves and chatting. I appreciated how
quietly Mr. Gordon spoke. Only I could hear him. Of
course I knew that if I wished, I could brush his
question aside as more of his teasing. But I knew,
too, that if I let my mother and Mrs. Gordon know
what he had just said, he would be in trouble.
I told him yes -- a yes just as quiet and
direct as his question. There came a pause in our
conversation -- and in our kicking of the swimming
pool water -- during which he and I kept looking at
each other. I noticed Mr. Gordon had shaved closely
and recently. It pleased me to think maybe he'd done
that for me.
He said, "Well." And I said, "Well?" And he
said, "Well, Marcy, I shall be in touch with you."
Thinking about that day and those few minutes
of conversation beside the pool, I ask myself if I
understood exactly what he had in mind. I wasn't an
infant. And I was very well aware that he was married
to my mother's friend. But to be perfectly frank, I
wanted my adventure with Mr. Gordon to be a sexual
one.
Not long before, I'd read some magazine
articles that my parents had given me and parts of
the books that they'd hidden away from me. One night,
months earlier,I was supposed to be attending a
country club dance; instead, I was walking around the
golf course and smoking cigarettes with a boy. He and
I had some very exciting kissing, which led,
logically, to his putting his hand on my breast.
If he hadn't gotten nervous and laughed about
what we were doing -- which I took to mean that he
was laughing at my breast -- that boy could have gone
a lot further with me than he did. Had he whispered
that he wanted me to take off my clothes, I would
have taken them off. I'd had no experience with that
kind of intensity; it took only a few moments for me
to reach the point of being vulnerable to the boy.
When you're older, you learn to stop short of that
point or else to move to it as quickly as possible;
that night I was intoxicated by what I hadn't ever
felt before. The boy was a year ahead of me in
school, but the next day, when I thought about what
we'd done, I understood that he had no more
experience than I and probably even less knowledge.
I would have tried whatever he knew enough
about to ask for. Instead of a request, I got his
inane whinny of a laugh.
I was still trying to get used to my breasts.
One seemed to be ahead of the other, which, for all I
knew, made them comical. But I felt certain that even
if they were, Mr. Gordon wouldn't laugh. He had
always paid reserved attention to me, had brought me
presents, had once even called me from Singapore to
wish me happy birthday. Whereas someone my own age
would casually humiliate me, Mr. Gordon had for years
been offering me careful respect. So I said yes.
When you go into a room with one other person and
lock the door behind you, you are momentarily free of
every principle by which people ordinarily speak and
act with each other. How you're going to be -- what
you say and do, what you think and feel -- with that
person is entirely up to the two of you. You may
legislate as you wish. I learned that from spending a
number of afternoons in a seventh-floor view-of-the-
lake sublet in Marsden Towers. Because I was on the
track team at school, my parents didn't question me
about how I spent my afternoons. I actually had quite
a bit of time available to spend with Robert in the
apartment he'd rented for us. In those rooms I felt
free and strong, which was why I kept wanting to go
back there for as long as I did.
The world would have me feel that what Robert
and I did was wrong. As if he'd committed a crime
against me beyond even what is considered acceptably
criminal. I refuse to feel that wrongness. Robert
harmed me no more than I harmed him.
I realize now that my mother worked at being friends
with Suzanne Gordon. I realize now my mother had a
very restrained crush on Robert -- a little like the
one she had on Jack Kennedy. Robert was accustomed to
being flattered by others. To my mother, he made
himself entertaining, as he probably did to anyone
who courted him. My mother and Robert had grown up
together in Shaker Heights; in the past, whenever
they were together, they had enjoyed discussing the
lives of their childhood acquaintances. Robert and my
father had a formal relationship that was played out
in terms that amused my mother and me. We teased my
bookish father about the stilted conversations he and
Robert carried on when they were required to chat.
Mostly they discussed tennis, which Robert played
regularly but didn't keep up with, and which my
father didn't play but kept up with. My father had no
real interest in tennis; it was just that every day
of his life he read the Plain Dealer very thoroughly.
There was a subtlety to the way my mother and
Suzanne Gordon related to each other, a warmth that
was half real and half pretended. To me, their
conversations always sounded nervous. Having thought
about her all these years, I've decided that Suzanne
was never able to locate herself properly in life,
though she was an astute and able person. When I was
growing up, I remembered things Suzanne said, and I
thought about her a lot. She had no job; she had no
children. Though she volunteered at the hospital and
the library, she made no friends among the other
volunteers. Her manner was too distant, and her
conversation was probably too peculiar. My mother
said she thought Suzanne spent hours of her life
paging through books from museums. I've come to
understand that what fascinated me about Suzanne was
how alone she seemed -- and how it didn't,
apparently, bother her that she had no real friends.
The interest she had in Robert, however, she
was able to share with my mother. Each knew where the
other stood, though I believe that neither ever spoke
frankly. As a young child, I'd studied the way my
mother and Suzanne talked. They sat with their backs
straight in their chairs, their ankles crossed and
their hands in their laps, their faces pleasant. Such
a formal pose perfectly suited Suzanne; I still have
vivid memories of her sitting like that in our living
room, with the light from our bay window catching the
reddish highlights of her hair. I could sense the
awkwardness of her talk with my mother when they took
up certain topics they felt obliged to discuss --
such as my father, whom my mother wasn't comfortable
discussing and in whom Suzanne had no interest. But
when they managed to bring the conversation around to
the subject of their mutual passion, they became
animated, witty, and amused, even slouchy and
unladylike in their postures.
"Robert actually laughed at that joke?" my
mother might ask, sitting forward in her chair.
Suzanne's laughter would lilt through our
house. "Not only did he laugh at it. Last night he
told the same joke to Nick Shelton in this
disgusting . . ."
I took these exchanges as the proper way for
grown-up women to converse. They put on little shows
for each other. I didn't want to be like that, but I
thought it probably happened as you got older -- you
gradually became more artificial. It made me cringe
to think that out in my future I had similar
conversations awaiting me.
As I imagine most men do, Robert struggled to balance
his appetite with his stamina. He was, however, a
master of sustaining the illusion of vast possibility
within the circumstances of sexual intimacy. He and I
did nothing especially strange or hurtful or even,
for that matter, adventuresome. I was fifteen. He was
forty-one. For a while, that alone was adventure
enough for each of us. At first, Robert liked to say
that if it weren't for those twenty-six years between
us, we'd have no interest in each other. He seemed to
be practicing a joke he might tell people if he and I
ever went out together in public: "You know, if Marcy
and I didn't have that twenty-six-year
difference . . ." I was glad when he stopped saying
it to me.
We did not go out together. Ever.
The project we undertook was informing each
other about ourselves. He didn't say so, but I think
Robert hoped I would teach him how it was to live in
my mind and my body. He anticipated the questions I
wished him to ask me. He knew when to be quiet and
let me talk. Or when to let me think through what I
had just told him aloud until I came to the next
thing I wanted to tell him. He knew when to interrupt
me, to get me excited, to make me try to answer four
questions at once. Whatever he wanted to know about
me, I was eager to tell.
Once he asked, "So do you think you'll want
to have children?"
I didn't have to think for even an
instant. "Of course I will!" I blurted. The moment I
spoke those words, I knew them to be true. But it
struck me as odd that Robert had to force himself to
smile and that he didn't ask how many I wanted or
whether I'd prefer boys or girls.
"Let the commerce commence," Robert liked to
say in his booming voice upon entering our little
foyer at Marsden Towers. I understood him to mean
both our talk and our sex. Mostly, Robert asked
questions and I answered them. During these
conversations, we undressed, we kissed, we nuzzled,
we stroked; after a while I understood that we were
talking as a way to extend the sex, to stretch it
out, make it last. Like Robert's fingers, our words
and sentences brushed over my skin. Or maybe instead
of Robert's fingers. When I let myself actually watch
his fingers moving across my breasts or up along my
thighs, I didn't like it nearly as much as keeping my
eyes shut while we talked and his hands did what they
did. I liked that part more than I ever told him. So
the talk, for me, became the best part of the sex.
The commerce could also change into the silences we
let pass when we were simply breathing with each
other in the afternoon sunlight that shone on our
bed. We concentrated on not talking, because the
silence had become what would make the sex last.
There were times when that, too, was exactly what I
wanted.
Though his curiosity about me was his first
interest, Robert also wanted me to know how it felt
to be him, to live in his mind, his body. These
topics weren't anything I had a natural curiosity
about; what I most wanted him to talk about was his
wife, but he was reluctant to do so. If I asked a
question about Suzanne, he would answer so carefully
that I could almost feel him searching for the most
neutral phrasing. Sometimes he'd finish up his answer
with "Why do you want to know?" I hated that. I
always told him, "Oh, just because . . ." I'm not
sure I knew it at the time, but I know now that I
wanted Robert to describe making love to Suzanne --
what little things she might say, what she liked,
even how she might sigh or whimper. I wanted to
compare myself with Suzanne. But that, of course, was
exactly the kind of information Robert wasn't about
to give me. And I didn't want him to know I had such
a squalid curiosity.
So I asked questions about "the adult world" -
- as if it were a scientific topic. I did have a
vague curiosity about being grown up, or perhaps I
had a need to vent my complaints about grown-ups.
Robert listened to me; sometimes he agreed; sometimes
he sided with the teacher or the parent I was
criticizing. He asked me not to categorize him as "an
adult."
One afternoon he told me, "Think of the
bodies of human beings as cars. We can't see each
other's interiors. Cars see other cars. I'm a station
wagon. You're a sports car, but you have your top up
so that I can't see who's driving. All I see is this
little red MG streaking past me on the turnpike. I
think to myself, My goodness, I wish I could be like
that MG. But the thing about it is, I'm exactly like
that MG. Except that I got put behind the wheel of
this station wagon -- this middle-aged body with a
middle-aged male mind under the hood -- and I can't
get out. I have to keep driving the equipment I've
been given. But who's driving each one of us is this
androgynous blob of a creature, one per car, each the
same as the others. The driver of my car is exactly
like the driver of your car.
"These creatures don't age. They're neutral
creatures, and they're impatient with their cars for
having such limited equipment. Mine thinks I'm silly
to worry so much about you getting home on time. But
it understands that I'm given to worrying. And yours
probably wishes you'd keep your eye on the clock so
as not to risk having your parents quiz you about
where you've been. It knows precisely how flimsy that
excuse of yours is -- 'Coach made me stay late.' If
my inner being could talk to your inner being, the
two would immediately recognize that they're
identical. Right away they'd start criticizing us to
each other. Mine would say, 'I'll swear, Robert is so
damn middle-aged sometimes. He just about drives me
nuts.' And yours would say, 'I know exactly what you
mean. The other day Marcy went shopping with her
mother, and you wouldn't believe how she spoke
to . . .'"
We were always engaged in whatever we were
talking about. I've come to know he was quite an
imaginative man, though when I was with him, he did
not seem remarkable in that way. It was that he so
much liked talking with me that he made our
conversations interesting. He found ways to do that.
And the ways he found came about from his figuring
out what would entertain me or interest me or pique
my curiosity. He didn't ever condescend; I had a
sense of conversing with him, as if the two of us
were talking our way toward some destination.
Here is something Robert told me he thought a young
woman should know: if you think a man might be
interested in you but you're not sure, find an
occasion to sit close to him. Go with this man to a
lecture, say, or a reading, something in an
auditorium, preferably not a movie or a play, both of
which can be distracting. Unobtrusively fix yourself
not to be touching him but to be very nearly so. If
possible, align your upper arm with his upper arm,
not touching, of course, but approximately an inch
apart. It's simple. If he has no interest in you,
there will be nothing to notice. If he's interested,
you will feel a certain warmth coming from his body.
If he's extremely interested, you'll be surprised
that his body would so overtly and crudely give him
away.
In a man's mind, even when it's clear that he
wants a woman to be thinking about him, he would
prefer her not to know the extent of his liking her.
His body, however, will always reveal how much or how
little interest he has. Arranging the appropriate
seating is the only difficulty. The man who knows
this secret may, even as you're trying to find out
about him, easily measure your own interest. Robert
even claimed to be certain his own body had given him
away once when I was fourteen and he and I were alone
in my parents' living room. But of course I couldn't
have known that at the time.
And whether or not his little lesson was a
useful one, I couldn't say. I've never had an
occasion when I thought to test it.
We ended because of a boy. I shouldn't be ashamed of
that, though I think of this as the way I betrayed
Robert. A boy my own age. I began talking to Robert
about this boy. For a while I wasn't aware of what I
might be revealing. I was simply telling him about
school, and Allen Crandall kept coming up in my
conversation. I heard myself say his name, again and
again. And I watched Robert as I said it.
My saying it so often must have made me
realize I liked Allen Crandall. He was an athlete who
moved through the hallways with a swagger. Allen
wasn't afraid to disagree even with those teachers
who got mad if you disagreed with them. Sometimes I
saw Allen looking at me as if he knew something
amusing about me, though I knew he didn't. As I
talked more and more about him to Robert, I began to
notice a hardening of Robert's face, so I tried to
hush myself up. By that time -- or well before --
Robert had sensed my interest in Allen and began to
question me.
A sadness came into Robert's voice -- even
into his body -- that I hated.
The sadness actually became Robert's oldness.
For more than a year, I hadn't paid much attention to
his age, but now it seemed evident in everything
about him. His face, his clothes, the way he talked
and combed his hair and rubbed his temples when he
was tired. Even the way he smelled. He had an
expensive cologne-deodorant-soap fragrance about him
that I'd loved from back in my childhood, but now it
began to bother me. When he bought me presents,
usually clothes that no one my age would ever wear,
they embarrassed me. Everything about Robert seemed
inescapably sad. He made me think of my father, alone
in the house on Sunday afternoons and listening to
one of his classical records turned up loud the way
he liked.
The commerce had become almost completely
conversation -- and conversation that neither Robert
nor I seemed to enjoy. Quickly after I started
talking so much about Allen, the commerce had changed.
"Let the commerce commence!" I called out one
afternoon when I burst into the room, exhilarated
from my day at school. As I came in, Robert was
walking toward me in the little foyer. I knew he had
in mind to give me one of his sad hugs, where it felt
as if he was trying to wrap me up with him in his
suit jacket. That day I was standing close enough to
him to notice his wince the instant I'd made my joke.
To his credit, Robert managed to stay just far enough
ahead of me to know how I felt. One rainy afternoon I
walked to Marsden Towers, thinking I had to make
myself tell him I wasn't going to be coming back
anymore. Just as I set my hand to knock, he swung
open the door. He was cheerful, teasing, impeccably
dressed in a new suit and shirt and brightly striped
tie. Usually he took his suit jacket off while he
waited for me to arrive, but not today. He wore it
buttoned, and for a moment or two he was as dazzling
to me as when I'd been a young girl looking up at
this grand visitor to our house. When he kissed me on
both cheeks and then my forehead, I noticed that his
shoes had been freshly polished.
"I'm setting you free, my dear," he
said. "Our adventure has reached its conclusion." He
had fancy glasses on a tray and champagne for himself
and Perrier with a dish of lemon slices for me. He
poured the glasses full, handed me mine, and lifted
his to me. "This has been lovely, Marcy," he said. "I
can't begin to tell you."
He planned to say more, and I wanted to help
him say it. I lifted my glass to him, too, and our
glasses made the little tink that seems so
celebratory when you're in a happy mood. Though he
opened his mouth to go on, he couldn't. Just before
he turned to the window, he began swatting the air in
front of his face. I thought he might be about to
sneeze or that he was trying to wave away some insect
buzzing at him. Then, with his back to me, he made a
noise. Or I saw his shoulders move, and I imagined
that he made a noise.
I knew.
"All right, Robert." I set my glass back down
on the tray. "Thank you," I said. When I tried to
think of more to say, I found nothing but what the
kids say to each other in the halls at school -- See
you later. I'll call you tonight. Take it easy. So I
kept quiet and touched the back of his suit jacket. I
brushed my hand down his back just a bit. Just enough
to feel how much he didn't want me to touch him.
And I knew, then, to leave the room.
As a child, I was sometimes awakened by my parents
making love. My room was across the hall from theirs,
and often what woke me was one of them getting up to
close their door. I could hear only faint noises,
their voices more like humming than talking. But even
with the door muffling their words, I could
distinguish something different in their tones, a new
sound, a quality that I didn't hear in their ordinary
conversation -- like a sound each made especially for
the other, as if softly singing.
Sometimes either they forgot about the door
being open or they thought it was too deep into the
night for me to be awake. At any rate, they'd leave
it open, and I could listen carefully. I was greedy
to hear them. I don't know how old I was when I
realized what they must be doing. When I was very
little, of course, I must have had no idea what they
were up to. But I don't remember that. I remember
only knowing what the noise meant and wanting to hear
every single bit of it.
I've read about children being drawn to the
sounds of their parents' love-making, but I wasn't
ever tempted to interrupt them. I stayed very quiet,
because I wanted them to reach their conclusion. That
was marked by my father's restrained shout -- into
the pillow, I suppose -- "Oh, oh! Oh, my darling,"
he'd say. I loved that. I loved his calling out. My
father is long dead now, but remembering his voice
like that still makes me smile.
As an adult, I've thought about what I heard.
I've wondered, for instance, about the extent of my
mother's satisfaction. None of the noises I ever
heard suggested she reached orgasm during their
intercourse, though the sounds she made did suggest
that her intercourse with my father was something she
liked. And she always seemed to me to be aware of her
sexuality. So what did she do? Masturbate when no one
was around? Go without orgasms altogether? In those
days there wasn't much sex, I'm tempted to say, but
of course that would be wrong. Enlightened sex is
what there wasn't much of. And I could be wrong about
that, too. Publicly, she was a bit of a prude; it's
possible she faked not having orgasms. I suppose it's
rude to wonder very much about your mother's coming.
Also, I wonder what effect eavesdropping on
their love-making had on me. Did it make me overly
interested in sex? Had my parents awakened me and
insisted that I listen, that would have been sexual
abuse. But of course it was very nearly the same
experience, my listening to them so carefully from
across the hallway. Did it, for instance, make me
vulnerable to Robert when he posed his question to me
by the pool? Would I have so readily known what
Robert meant if I hadn't had this education, so to
speak? Would I have said yes so readily?
Not so long ago, when my friend Uta and I
were talking, we came to the topic of our parents'
sex lives. I told her I'd often overheard my parents
doing it. When I asked Uta what effect she thought
that may have had on me, she said, "I don't know,
Marcy. I can tell you that never in all my life did I
see or hear any evidence that my parents even had sex
lives. If you ask me, that was much worse than what
you're talking about. I sometimes wonder how I ever
got my feet on this planet. At least you know how you
got here. At least you know your parents cared about
each other enough to do it."
I told Uta she had a point.
A few afternoons when he thought I would be home by
myself, Robert called and attempted to chat,
politely, about how things were going for me. This
was after our last meeting at Marsden Towers, and
though I didn't wish them to be, these calls were
awkward occasions. Neither of us was able to relax
into conversation.
On an afternoon when Allen Crandall had come
home with me, ostensibly to study for an exam, Robert
called.
It was spring, near the end of May. Allen and
I were full of ourselves and more than a little
silly, with the end of the school year approaching
and with our discovery of each other. I was just
finding out how it was to be with somebody that way,
with our moods and our voices so perfectly matched.
We were gossiping about our classmates and mocking
them and laughing a great deal while we walked around
my house, drinking soda and munching on chips and
crackers from the kitchen. I was catching on, then,
to the way Allen talked, a clipped, half-joking way
of saying everything. When the phone rang, I had no
doubt who the caller was. The instant I heard myself
say hello -- with the fun still in my voice but also
a bit of the dread I felt at having to carry on even
a short conversation with him -- I knew Robert would
know that Allen was with me.
There was the slightest pause. Then Robert's
voice came through the receiver: "Hello, Marcy. I
hope you're well. I'll call you back another time."
I said, "All right." The line went dead.
And of course Allen asked who it was.
Instantly, I had to make up something to tell
him. "My mom," I said. "She wants me to . . . set out
some eggs." I went to the refrigerator, removed a
tray of brown eggs, and set them on the counter.
When I turned to him, Allen was looking at me
with his head tilted. He gave it a little shake and
said, "Speaking of eggs, you think we ought to crack
those books?"
I said, "Nah." And I went toward him, meaning
to tickle him. I wanted to recover the mood we'd been
in before the phone rang.
"Weird over here at your house," Allen said,
dodging my attack. "Your mom calls and you get sad.
You say 'All right,' hang up the phone, then go to
the refrigerator and set out a tray of eggs. Weird."
I stopped trying to tickle him. "You haven't
seen anything yet, my dear," I said. "My dear" coming
out of my mouth made my face turn hot; it was
Robert's phrase, not mine. But I was determined not
to let Robert's phone call ruin my afternoon with
Allen. I began picking up things throughout the house
and setting them in odd places. I carried a magazine
from the living room to the kitchen, where I put it
in the refrigerator; I plucked down my father's ski
hat from the closet and arranged it as the
centerpiece of the dining room table; I asked Allen
to take off his loafers, which I then ceremoniously
carried back to the kitchen and placed in the sink.
Allen was kind enough to overlook my desperation in
trying to amuse him. He let himself be amused, and
soon we'd recovered the spirit of kidding around.
That day I decided I wouldn't ever, under any
circumstances, tell Allen about Robert and me. Why
that day? I suppose because I saw myself taking a
great deal of trouble to disguise the fact that my
former lover had called me. I realized that even
having a former lover, no less a man almost three
times as old as I was, wasn't something I wanted
anybody my age to know. You'd think -- since I
married him -- a time would have come when I could
tell Allen all about Robert.
Such a time did not ever arrive.
The swimming pool, the commerce -- the way we
ordered take-out food brought to us and ate it while
the commerce went on -- how Robert and I were with
each other was this intricate and intense part of my
life. I wouldn't give it to Allen. I wanted to hold
it entirely to myself -- whether from embarrassment
or selfishness, I have never been able to decide.
For many months I kept expecting to see Robert. I
knew he was having to maneuver to keep from
encountering me when he socialized with my parents.
He did manage that. If he and Suzanne came to our
house, it was at a time when I wouldn't be there. And
somehow he kept those occasions to a minimum. When my
parents saw the Gordons, it was at a party at someone
else's house, at a restaurant, or at the Gordons'
house. My mother was aware that Robert and Suzanne
weren't at our house nearly as often as in previous
years, but it wasn't something she chose to discuss
with me. I knew she was keeping it to herself, and I
might have been a little irked about that. I do
recall a conversation between my parents; my mother
said, "We don't seem as close to them as we used to
be," and my father said, "Oh? I hadn't noticed any
change." Since they'd been talking about something
else at the time, they let the topic of the Gordons
drop, which suited me well enough, because my pulse
had picked up in a way that made me uncomfortable.
I've always had trouble giving it a name --
affair, relationship, arrangement, liaison. I still
don't know what to call it. At any rate, in the first
months after Robert and I ended whatever it was, I
dreaded seeing him. And I thought he might try to see
me. When it became apparent that he didn't want to
see me, I began wanting to see him. I wasn't sure why.
I certainly didn't want to talk with Robert;
the telephone conversations we'd attempted made me
feel as if I'd done something awful to him. So even
though talking had been what I most valued about
being with him, I knew I wasn't after any more talk.
But now I did want to see him, and not just his face,
but the whole of him. As if my eyes had to take hold
of him.
Maybe, more truthfully, what I wanted was for
him to look at me and for me to see what his face
would tell me about who I had become.
For a while I entertained a fantasy that
Robert came into our house one of the afternoons when
I was alone. He simply walked in. From the living
room, where I sat, I saw him and wasn't surprised or
frightened. He was dressed as he was when I'd seen
him last, in one of his dark business suits, with a
white shirt and a bright tie. With his hands in his
jacket pockets, he stood in our foyer, looking at me,
neither frowning nor smiling. I returned his stare.
Then he took his hands from his pockets and made that
downward movement, fluttering his fingers, as if he
were miming the way leaves would fall from a tree. In
our rooms at Marsden Towers, that gesture meant that
he wished me to take off my clothes.
By that time -- I was sixteen -- I knew more
about my body and had come to think that how it
looked didn't have much to do with who I actually
was. I was thin, and my legs were perfectly muscled,
but how they could move was what really mattered. For
my school's track team I did the 100- and 220-yard
dashes. My body's strength and quickness were what I
loved. I became irritated when people made so much of
how it looked. So in this fantasy, I said, "No,
Robert. That isn't possible." My voice had a
sternness I had never used with him. I remained
sitting. Robert said nothing. He merely nodded,
looked wistful, turned, and left the house.
When I knew he was gone, I tiptoed quickly to
the door, locked it, and stood with my back braced
against it.
This moment of my back against the door felt
like something that was really going to come to me, a
little treasure. For months, I found myself moving
through this daydream, refining it, taking a peculiar
comfort from it.
One evening my parents invited Allen Crandall
to join us for dinner at Forlini's, a noisy place
that had taken over the bottom floor of one of the
city's old department stores. The dining area was so
enormous that on a busy night it was like a circus
tent. Waiters and waitresses ran, busboys and
busgirls ran, even the two hostesses ran and smiled
and shouted among the tables of people as if they
were running an obstacle course for clowns. My
parents liked Forlini's because the crowd was young
and stylish; my father said it gave us a preview of
the people who would be running the city in another
ten years. My mother and I enjoyed the spectacle,
seeing so many people all at once, not to mention the
zipping back and forth of the waiters and waitresses,
who all wore khaki shorts and red T-shirts and must
have been hired for their lively appearance. Allen
had never been to Forlini's before; ordinarily, he
would have concentrated on practicing his
conversational skills with my parents, but this
evening he was nearly overwhelmed by the thick hum of
voices, all those bodies, and their laughing,
talking, feeding faces. The four of us sat at our
table, gawking at the people around us.
"Is that Robert? Isn't that Robert and
Suzanne?" my mother asked my father. She was sitting
up straight in her chair and squinting across the
room.
A splash of ice water down my back might have
been less shocking. And some part of me was oddly
angry that my mother had addressed her question only
to my father. To her, my acquaintance with Robert
meant so little, she didn't think to ask me. That
angry part of myself seemed a distinct and dangerous
person at the moment. She was a Marcy who wanted to
smack the restaurant table hard enough to make the
flatware clatter. She was a Marcy who wanted to make
a speech to her parents, to Allen, even to the diners
near us: "Is that Robert Gordon? Well, Mother, why
don't you ask me? I'm the one whose fingertips have
touched every square inch of that man's body. I
expect I am the one you should ask whether the man
you're looking at is Robert."
What that Marcy wanted to prove with such a
speech was beyond my knowing. As quickly as she'd
come close to bursting into the open, she withdrew to
my prudent self. I was, in fact, being so prudent
that I couldn't make myself turn directly toward
where my mother was straining to see. Then she must
have remembered I could recognize Robert, too,
because she said, "Right there, Marcy." Since she was
sitting beside me, and I wasn't looking the right
way, my mother actually pulled my chin to turn my
head in the proper direction.
So I saw him.
My mother continued to hold my head turned
toward Robert as if she thought she had to help me
see him. My sight seemed to soar across the room and
cast light on him. So clearly did I see his face that
I noticed a ripple of tension pass from his temple
down along his jawline. I saw him squint to make out
what peculiar thing my mother was doing to my head. I
saw him half lift one hand toward us, as if to wave
or signal my mother to loosen her hold on me. His
other hand stayed on Suzanne's upper arm as they
moved toward the steps that led up and out of the
restaurant.
What disturbed me was how Robert's body and
Suzanne's body were so well matched. Robert had
dressed down for the evening, in a dark golf shirt
and chinos. His thin chest and thick waist were much
more visible than when he wore a suit. Suzanne's
dress somehow accentuated how age had softened her
figure. Anyone else looking at the couple leaving the
restaurant probably wouldn't have noticed their
bodies at all, but I couldn't help it. The two of
them were connected by how their bodies were placed
in time; I saw that as clearly as when I suddenly
realize I've been watching the male and female in a
pair of birds. In Robert and Suzanne, this was not
something I wanted to see. My stomach went into a
spasm, as if I were watching them undress.
Red-capped and bandana-ed cooks shoved pizzas
and casserole dishes into wood-burning ovens while
they shouted to each other and to the waiters and
waitresses. Robert and Su<->zanne were far across the
cavernous room, which swelled and echoed with the
raucous voices of hundreds of people. A woman at a
table near us laughed at a very high pitch; she
seemed unable to stop herself. Near Robert and
Suzanne a man stood up and waved both arms to get
someone's attention. An Edith Piaf song played
stridently over the sound system. Even the ceiling
lights appeared to flicker.
He was much paler than I'd ever seen him,
which made me suspect that during the months of our
meetings at Marsden Towers he'd been using a tanning
lamp. I wondered why I hadn't noticed it at the time.
Robert continued to move away from me even as
he kept his face turned toward me. It looked as if he
was almost pushing Suzanne to the exit. Though he
knew me well enough to know I would never make a
scene, he must have been terrified that I'd approach
him in front of his wife; terrified that I might say
hello to him.
A fury lit up inside me -- and died almost
immediately. Had I been close enough in that single
instant, I would have spat on him.
I've tried to forgive Robert his cowardice of
that evening. I don't think I've managed it. I saw,
in his pale face, eyes staring at me across the room,
that with his wife beside him he couldn't stand to
speak to me.
So he ran from a child.
Of course he had to turn his face away from
me. When Robert did that -- when he gave me the back
of his thin shoulders to see -- I felt released. I
felt as if I had just beaten him at something, and
suddenly became aware that I'd half risen from my
chair and that my parents and my boyfriend were
staring at me. Easing back into my seat, I turned and
found three frozen faces. Allen had even paused in
chewing his food. I knew our lives depended on what I
did next. It took all my strength to smile at Allen
and resume eating.
Copyright (c) by David Huddle. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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