Truth and Consequences Read online

  “I don’t believe you,” Jane said when he finished, her voice trembling. She sagged against the electric stove as if for warmth and support. “I think you’re just saying what Delia told you to say.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alan replied weakly, alarmed by her guess. “You’re really prejudiced against her,” he added, regaining control. “You have been from the start.”

  “No, that’s not so—” Jane’s voice wobbled.

  “You’ve always been determined to think the worst of her.”

  “I haven’t, I’ve tried—”

  “That first week, you told me she was a complete egotist.”

  “Well, she is. She never thinks of anyone except herself.”

  “That’s just not true,” Alan said. “Delia’s actually a very wonderful and generous person.”

  Jane turned to stare at him. “You’re in love with her too,” she stated in the tone of someone who has just turned over a rock and found a dead toad under it. “Just like everyone else.”

  “I—” Alan opened his mouth to deny this, but was unable to do so. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “She’s been a very good friend to me. To us,” he amended. “She’s found me a gallery that’s already sold over fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of my work. She’s why we have that pasta-making machine you’ve wanted for so long.”

  “I don’t care. I hate her, if you want to know the truth,” Jane had cried, “and I hate that pasta machine. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. I can’t tell the least difference between what it makes and normal pasta, and I don’t believe anyone else can either.”

  In spite of himself, Alan (who believed he could tell the difference) must have allowed an ambiguous smile to appear on his face at this. Jane may have taken it as a smile of epicurean superiority, for a sudden spasm of rage convulsed her small neat features, and she snatched up the pasta machine and threw it, not exactly at Alan but at the floor next to his right foot, where it landed with a noisy, unpleasant jangle and thud.

  “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, jerking aside in a way that wrenched his back. “For shit’s sake, Jane, get ahold of yourself.” But already she had turned away from him and was hanging on to the back of a kitchen chair, weeping violently.

  “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have—” She stooped to retrieve the broken pasta machine. “But it’s because you’re lying to me, lying and lying,” she sobbed. “If you would just tell the truth, it wouldn’t be so awful.”

  For a moment, Alan had had the impulse to do this, but he stopped himself as he realized that the kitchen was full of other appliances and cookware that might be thrown, that might not miss. If he had been well, he wouldn’t have cared, but in his present condition any further injury could make his pain unbearable. Jane is a violent woman, he thought. I’ve been married to her for sixteen years and I never knew this.

  “I am telling the truth,” he insisted, beginning to feel like a complete louse.

  Jane did not reply, only stood and stared at him, her arms full of wrecked metal parts.

  “It’s late now,” he said, “and I’m in a lot of pain. I think we should just go to bed and sleep on it.”

  “All right,” she said in a voice of great weariness. “But I’m not going to sleep in the same bed as you.” With a gesture of angry distaste, she shoved the pasta machine down into the kitchen trash can.

  “I didn’t say you had to,” Alan had retorted. “Go on. We’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “Maybe,” Jane said. “You can use the bathroom first,” she added. It was the same sentence she had spoken almost every night for a year and a half. Since he hurt his back, it had taken Alan longer to undress and put on his pajamas and brush his teeth and swallow his prescriptions and get into bed and arrange his many pillows and fall asleep. When Jane came to join him, he would usually still be awake. Then they would put their arms around each other, and he would report on his pain, discuss the events of the day, and plan for tomorrow. But now the tone of the familiar phrase was no longer casual and considerate—it was harsh and flat.

  And when Alan, with groans and curses, had climbed into the antique four-poster, Jane had not come to lie beside him. As he lay there in the dim glow of the bathroom night-light, he could hear her small slippered feet descending the stairs to the downstairs guest room.

  Two-thirty a.m. He turned over, trying not to aggravate Old Clootie, staring into the dark. Why was it, he thought, that Delia, who had never said she loved him or promised him anything, made him feel better whenever he saw her, and Jane—who loved him, and had done so much for him—made him feel worse? Why was it that when he was with Delia, though his back still hurt, it was as if the pain were beside him and not within him—an unwelcome companion, but not a devil possessing and torturing him? Maybe it was because Delia never asked how he was feeling or expressed a condescending pity for him—and in the long run, in Alan’s opinion, all pity was condescending.

  He turned over again, groaning. Then, finally, the pills he had taken began to work, and he drifted into an uneasy, guilty sleep.

  It was late when Alan woke, almost nine. His back still hurt, but his head was clearer. You made a bad mistake last night, he told himself. You’ve got to remember that Delia is a visiting scholar at the Unger Center who will only be in town until next May. Whereas Jane is your wife who has promised to be true to you forever, in sickness and in health. You have to make it up with her. You don’t have to admit anything, but you have to apologize for upsetting her and tell her that you love her and are very grateful to her. Because it’s true—it must be true, even if you don’t feel it now.

  Alan groaned. The house around him was quiet: probably Jane was still asleep in the downstairs guest room. Well, let her sleep. He hauled himself up, feeling the familiar angry clutch of the lizard in his spine as he did so. He put on a navy-blue plush robe and slippers, used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and went downstairs to make coffee.

  The kitchen was empty, but stuck to the center of the table was a yellow Post-It note:

  I’ve gone to stay at my mother’s, will phone later. J.

  Oh, Christ, Alan thought. It’s too late. I’ve already burnt my bridges. An image appeared in his mind of an eighteenth-century “Chinese” ornamental bridge he had photographed in an English park for his book on architectural follies. Originally it had been decorated in wood and plaster, with carved dragons painted red and gold and blue. But the arch at the far end (not visible in his photo) had been damaged in a recent fire, and a gilt rope was strung across the near end, warning visitors not to cross. He could not remember now whether the bridge had been scheduled to be repaired or demolished.

  Suppose his bridges were truly burnt, and Jane had left him for good and was out of his life? Suppose he was free to see Delia, to be with her whenever they wanted? It was what she wanted too, he was almost sure of it. The way she sighed when he touched her, the way she widened her silver-gray eyes and gazed into his when they arranged to meet—and when they did meet—Unlike Jane, she was always erotically inventive, sometimes amazingly so. She couldn’t really care for that useless person Henry Hull, her whole manner when she spoke of him suggested this. If she were free too—

  It would mean trouble and pain, it would mean blame and guilt. But so what? He remembered something Delia had said more than once, that it was not important for an artist to be happy, or to be good. “We’re above all that,” she had told him. “What’s important for us is to do our work.” Right now, he was neither happy nor good, but he was working, and if he had Delia—

  Alan glanced again at the note on the table, its dark-blue ink, its familiar neat girlish penmanship—and now he noticed another line of writing at the bottom, an afterthought in pencil:

  Ham sandwich in fridge.

  He knew what that meant: it meant that Jane still felt responsible for his welfare. To be sure of this, he opened the fridge and saw the sandwich, on a white plate with a slice of dill pickle beside it, th
e whole tightly covered with plastic wrap. He knew that there would be mustard and mayonnaise on the rye bread, and he could see the red-leaf lettuce that he preferred. There was no mistaking the message : whether he wanted her there or not, Jane was still in his life.

  THIRTEEN

  “Something awful has happened,” Jane told Henry as she climbed into his SUV late Saturday morning at the nearly deserted Farmers’ Market. Most of the stalls were empty; only a few sellers shivered in down jackets and knitted wool hats behind displays of pumpkins, potatoes, and homemade jams. A thin, mean wind gusted from the lake, where a rim of ice clung to the withered grass of the shore.

  “You’re shivering,” Henry said. “I’ll turn up the heat. Now give me your hands. Oh, so cold.” He pulled off Jane’s driving gloves and took her chilled fingers in his own, warmer ones. “All right. Tell me.”

  Though she had resolved not to break down, Jane could not keep back a strangulated sob or two as she related the events of yesterday afternoon and evening. Henry did not interrupt, only nodded occasionally, holding or rubbing her hands all the while. Gradually it dawned upon her that he was not registering shock or astonishment. “Yeah,” he merely said several times as she told the story, and again when she had finished. “Yeah.”

  “How do you mean, ‘Yeah?’ ” Jane asked, looking at him. Henry did not answer, only shrugged inside his duffle coat. “You’re not surprised,” she said suddenly. “You already knew.”

  “Well. More or less.”

  “But you didn’t say anything to me.” Jane pulled her hands away.

  “I—I could have been wrong,” Henry stammered. “I mean, I didn’t know for sure it was Alan this time.”

  “This time?” She stared. “You mean something like that has happened before?”

  In the silence that followed, she heard only the rough hum of the car heater.

  “Yeah,” Henry said finally. “But see, from Delia’s point of view, it’s not serious, it’s just something she needs sometimes. It doesn’t have anything to do with her feelings for me.”

  “But how could it not?” Jane cried.

  “Because it’s only play, she says. There’s no past or future to it. No depth.”

  “No depth?”

  “Just a little kissing and hugging. So it doesn’t count.” Henry smiled uncomfortably.

  Jane sat back, staring at him. The unwelcome thought had come to her that perhaps Alan and Delia were no more guilty than she and Henry, and that possibly everything that had happened between them was also shallow and temporary. “I see,” she said. “I mean, I don’t see.”

  “Neither do I, if you want to know,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “But at least she agrees that something happened,” Jane said.

  “Alan doesn’t?”

  Jane shook her head. “That’s the worst thing, the lies,” she said with a sob. “If he admitted what was going on, if he’d said he was sorry, I could stand it. If he said they were only doing what we’ve done, I’d have to, I guess—” She swallowed awkwardly. If Alan had told me the truth, I would have had to tell him the truth, she thought suddenly, and then maybe I wouldn’t be here.

  “But he didn’t say that,” Henry prompted.

  “No, he said that Delia was having a migraine, and he went to see if there was anything he could do for her. Then I broke into the room and screamed and threw things and made her headache much worse. He sort of turned it all upside down so everything was my fault. He said he never knew I could be so irrational and suspicious, and so violent.”

  “Uh-huh,” Henry said. “It sounds like he’s been taking lessons from Delia.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That’s what she does. If she doesn’t like the truth, she turns it around until she does, and eventually she’s convinced that things happened the way she says they did.”

  “But you believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure. I believe you.”

  “It’s not just the lies,” Jane said with a long sigh. “It’s as if Alan’s changed into a different person. Maybe partly because of the pain, but it’s more than that. It’s as if he’s under some awful spell. When he looks at me, it’s so cool and judging, as if I was just somebody he’d hired to work for him, who was making a nuisance of herself. Last night when we were talking in the kitchen I felt all cold and shivery, like the wind was blowing indoors. I can’t—I don’t—” With a wail, Jane collapsed against Henry.

  “There, there,” he said, putting his arms around her, stroking her hair.

  A few moments passed, then Jane sat up again. “The thing is, I don’t think I can stand to live in the same house with him anymore,” she said through tears.

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Not now, at least.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard in years,” Henry said. He pulled Jane toward him again and kissed her wet face. “Where will you live, then?” he said presently.

  “I can stay on with my parents, in my old room.”

  “That’s so wonderful.” He began to kiss her again.

  “Janey, darling. Shouldn’t we—I mean, would you like to go somewhere where we can be together?” he said presently. “It’s so cold here, and anyone can see us.” He gestured across the parking lot at the stalls of the Farmers’ Market, where a vendor of honey and jam was glancing in their direction.

  “I can’t,” Jane said with a sob. “I’m still sort of under the weather.” She registered the incomprehension on his face. “I’m bleeding,” she said awkwardly, and wished at once that she had chosen another phrase. But what she had said was true in every sense. She was underneath a storm of bad weather, blown about and half drowned, and bleeding emotionally as well as physically.

  “I don’t care. I want to be with you.” Henry pushed Jane’s windbreaker aside and put one heavy warm hand on her cotton shirt, over her left breast. “Maybe we could go to the Center, to the cupola.”

  “We can’t—” Jane felt weak and confused and excited, all at the same time. Even when he was well,Alan had never touched her during what he called “your monthlies,” though she had once or twice suggested it long ago. “Anyhow, we can’t go to the Center. There’s a conference there this weekend; the place is full of French literary theorists.”

  “Yeah. Very bad vibes.” Henry laughed. “Then we’ll drive out into the country. I think I know a place.” He started the car and turned toward the exit.

  I shouldn’t do this, Jane thought. I should tell him to stop and let me get out. But another part of her thought, Why not?

  “There’s an old barn off the Myers Road, I saw it when I was jogging the other day,” Henry said presently. “No houses nearby, and nobody’s using it except to store hay.” Jane said nothing—she felt out of breath, unable to speak, as if she were standing in a strong wind.

  “Here you are,” Henry said as he shoved open the sliding door of the barn. It was full of hay, but in tight rectangular bales. While Jane stood in the entrance shivering with cold or something more serious, he unfolded a knife and cut the wires on three bales of hay, then shook them out into a heap. “There you are.” Henry slid the barn door back into place; now the only light came from long vertical chinks in the sides and a triangular opening at the peak of the roof. Then he took off his duffle coat and spread it over the hay. “Here. Sit down, and I’ll warm you up.”

  “Lovely, lovely,” Jane murmured nearly an hour later, not for the first time. She felt strange and light-headed and happy, as if she were floating on a sea of hay.

  “Yeah. There’s nothing like the real thing.” Henry laughed. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  “Me too.” It was true what he had hinted before, she thought: Delia only liked, only allowed, what her mother called “hanky-panky.” “Is it very late?”

  “Well, it’s”—he held up a bare arm and checked his watch—“twelve-fifteen.”

  “Oh, lord.” Jane gave a heavy sigh as a weight of obligation an
d guilt fell upon her, heavy and scratchy as the hay that towered around them. “I have to get back to the house.” She sat up.

  “Really?” Henry yawned and pulled her toward him.

  “Yes, I have to pack, and cook something for Alan that he can warm up over the weekend, and find a graduate student to drive him to campus and back next week.” She gave another, deeper sigh. What have I done? she thought. You’ve done what you’ve been wanting to do for months, a voice said in her head. Something wonderful and right, something selfish and wrong.

  “You still think you have to take care of Alan?” Henry raised his eyebrows.

  “Well, yes. For a while anyhow.” A sensation of fatigue came over Jane. “Until I can arrange for someone else to do it. Somebody has to.” She rose to her knees, pulling her clothes together and brushing herself off. The nest where they had lain was flattened and trampled, and slightly stained with bodily fluids.

  “You’ll never be able to get this stuff back into bales,” she said.

  “No, probably not.” Henry grinned. “And I’m not going to try.”

  “But what will they think, the people who own the barn?”

  “They’ll think it was tramps.”

  “I suppose so.” It was tramps, Jane thought. I’m a tramp. But it was worth it.

  Holding hands, stopping every few feet to kiss, they walked to his car.

  “Can you call me this afternoon?” Henry asked as they reached the Farmers’ Market.

  “Ye-es. I can call from the P&C. But won’t Delia be there?”

  “Yeah, probably. And we’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. Hell. Tomorrow—can you meet me here about ten?”