How could he bring himself down to that level? How could he make such an idiot of himself? How could he turn out to be so boring? Bouncing away. She kept seeing him and it hurt. Why could he never turn and look at her, why could he never turn and want her? Why all these silly women one after the other? The first wife, who had become a drunk; the second, who had been a shrew; the third, who had been a spendthrift and unfaithful. Now vapid Candida who was going to bring a scandal down on his head.
He had called her a pest when she had been going to meet him to make things better between them, and now it was all ruined. He had accused her of following him. Of spying on him. He must have seen her use the binoculars through her bedroom window. He knew she watched him and he despised her. She had destroyed everything when she was only trying to get back what had been good, and now even the past was changed and sickened.
She stopped fighting the water. She stopped pushing on it with her heavy exhausted aching arms and legs. It let her in like a goose down comforter. She was angry and hurt and she could not see in the darkness which way to go. She could not even tell where the shore was. She felt blocked on all sides, suffocated. The water was splashing into her mouth. She was too tired to keep her head above water. She was too tired to fight the water. She was too tired. The water came round her soft and comforting and warmer than the cold dank air. She had to lie down, let go and lie down and down. She would show them. She would make them all sorry for what they had done to her. She would show Dinah and Willie and Siobhan and Jimmy and Tyrone how vile they had been. She was quitting. The mess of living was theirs to clean up. She was going to lie down where it was warm and dark, she was going to drift slowly deep down into sleep and forget all of them.
Chapter Forty-Five
DINAH
‘Pass the fusilli,’ Tanya said.
Seeing Itzak’s face, Dinah laughed. ‘She has a great technical vocabulary for pasta and for music, considering she’s only six in October.’
‘I’m six already,’ Giselle’s daughter Eileen said importantly. ‘I was six August seventeenth.’
‘Even if you’re older than me, it’s no good having a birthday in August,’ Tanya said. ‘You have to be at Tanglewood and not home, so you don’t get to have a real party.’
In some ways being there with Itzak interfered with Dinah’s wooing of Tanya, her favourite, but she was interested and nervous also to see how he was with the kids. There was no way she could judge his potential as a father by watching him eat Nita’s fusilli, she realized, but studied him nonetheless. It was important to her that he fit in with Nita and Tanya; maybe she and Nita should have paid attention to their dislike of each other’s husbands the last time around.
‘This is one of the best ways to eat zucchini ever,’ Itzak said. ‘Dinah is a volcano of zucchini. She appears out of the country every time with a backseat full. She arrives with one dress and forty zukes.’
‘You get no sympathy from me. The more she brings me, the better I like it. But she never brings me enough tomatoes. Ever notice she’s stingy with her tomatoes?’ Nita wrinkled her nose at Dinah.
The first time she had brought Itzak over to the house in Newton, everybody had been stiff and proper, but by now they were at ease. They ate too much, drank too much wine and after the girls were in bed, got started reminiscing about Juilliard, which was boring for Giselle but enthralling for the rest of them. Here Dinah was, reliving her entrance audition, here Itzak was with sweat breaking out on his forehead as he described switching teachers in his second year. Then his first teacher, whom they all knew, actually struck him in the face and burst into tears of outraged betrayal.
Both Nita and Giselle said they were jealous of Dinah, because Itzak was bringing her to Scotland in early September to join him there. She would overlap with his time at the Edinburgh festival by a couple of days and then they would have a week of vacation before she came back and he set about a series of concerts in England.
‘Aw come on,’ Dinah said. ‘It’ll rain the whole time.’
‘Better to get wet in Scotland than broil in Boston,’ Nita said. ‘Maybe I’ll go out to your house that weekend. Tanya would love it.’
‘So would the cats. Do it.’
Even on the way home in the car, they were still reminiscing. When she met someone else from Chicago, they had a few routines they might go through together, but if they did not come from the same neighbourhood, that was the end. But with flute players who had gone through Juilliard, a year of remembering aloud would not touch the labour, the drama, the passion. Relationships with teachers were more intense than those with lovers, and never had she known before and never would she know again the fierce direct competition, open, raw, unmitigated by politeness or pretence. Of course Mark or Susan or Willie could not share such reminiscing, any more than they would have enjoyed Nita’s sly anecdotes about the BSO or Itzak’s gossip about other orchestras, other conductors. Itzak, Dinah, Nita and Giselle each made a living quite differently, yet all in the same extended world.
‘It was a nice evening,’ he said as they climbed the steps of the Brookline house. As they opened the door, Figaro and Tosca were sitting on the stairway at human eye level, where they would glare together at the humans who had abandoned them. ‘You were relaxed. I like an evening when I figure you’re doing something else besides worrying if you should be with me.’
‘Itzak, have I been that bad? I fuss about commitments.’
He always checked his answering machine when he came in. He sat on the couch to listen and she curled on his lap. A call from Aspen, worrying about next summer already. Most concert arrangements were made through his agent, but a few places called him directly, either because they knew him or because they were angling for something special. Then Jimmy’s voice came on. ‘Dinah, something may be wrong with Mother. We don’t know. It’s nine-thirty and I’m at the new house.’
She hit the button, backtracked and listened again. ‘Something wrong? What does that mean?’
‘Call and find out.’
‘It’s midnight. Jimmy and Willie get up early.’ She frowned. ‘I’ll call my house.’ All she got was her own answering machine. She left a message for Jimmy, feeling silly. She was not about to call Susan in the middle of the night to ask her if she were feeling ill. She would call in the morning. Something wrong. Had Susan flipped out? She had been tense enough, violent with Siobhan and Willie. She remembered their burns.
At eight she called first her own house, then the new house. Susan and Willie’s line was busy. Itzak was reading her a review from the Globe with sarcastic comments about the critic’s ear and musicology, when the phone rang. Itzak always let the machine answer, but as soon as she heard Jimmy’s voice, she picked it up.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you since I got your message,’ she began apologetically.
He interrupted her, speaking in a flat tone. ‘Mother’s dead. She drowned in the pond last night. They just pulled the body out.’
‘What?’ she barked out, but she had heard and did not let Jimmy finish his repetition. ‘She can’t be drowned! She can’t be!’
‘The pond’s big and deep enough,’ Jimmy said. ‘You know she was swimming every evening. It was dark. We can talk about it when you get here.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘When are you coming?’
‘Hold on.’ She turned to Itzak, briefing him. ‘I have to go.’
‘Of course. We’ll both go. I have appointments to cancel and I’ll throw some things in a bag.’
‘Jimmy,’ she said into the phone and then a wall fell on her. She dropped the phone and went down on her knees, moaning. Itzak picked up the phone and spoke into it. She got up and grabbed the phone from him. ‘Jimmy, she can’t be dead. What do you mean she’s dead?’
‘I have to try Johnny again. See you in a couple of hours.’
She was slashed open. Susan. Never to talk to her again, never even to see her a
cross the yard. Her anger had dried like blood all over her face. Anger was a luxury she had indulged in, a vice, and now Susan was gone. They would never make peace. There was no tomorrow for them in which to say the soft words, to give the small presents of attention and solicitude, to touch and bless. Her hands opened and closed helplessly in her lap.
She had abandoned the hope that Susan and she would be lovers again, that they would twine their lives together, that their days would be warp and woof of the same rug. But as long as they were neighbours, she had assumed they would be friends again. They would share meals and stories and seasons. It could not end in silence, in raw estrangement, in emotions cut open and exposed like metal wires in an electric cord sliced through. All summer long, Susan had swum every evening a fixed distance and back. She could see Susan swimming into the darkness away from them, in anger and spite away.
‘I loved her,’ she said to Itzak, who was kneeling beside her. ‘I loved her! How could she die?’
‘You had already lost her, Dinah. She was already dead to you.’
‘There was always a chance to be friends again, to sit in the kitchen and drink coffee and remember together. Now she’s really lost, still angry at me. She’ll never stop hating me.’
‘Where she is, she doesn’t hate anyone.’ Itzak pulled her to her feet. ‘Come. Get yourself together. We should go. What you can do is be useful to your friends. What I can do is to get you there and help you.’
‘Are you sure you want to go? I can fly.’
‘And leave your car here? And the cats? Besides, if we’re a couple, we should act as a couple. I’m going with you.’
‘But you hardly know any of them.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Either we’re a couple or we aren’t,’ he repeated.
‘I let her down. She was so needy and so lovely, Itzak, that maybe we did all just take and take from her. She had to be loved more than anybody had time for. Now she’s dead.’ What will Willie do? she thought, but stopped herself from saying it. Her bathrobe was wet on the chest from her tears.
She wanted to rush back to their last scene together, back to the table, sit down again and find the right words. Find the words to say, Susan, I am still your friend. Susan, if we can’t be lovers, say you forgive me whatever you feel I did and I’ll forgive you for ending our life together. Let’s kiss like friends if we can’t kiss like lovers. Let’s touch noses lightly like cats and sniff each other’s joys and troubles. Susan, Susan, Susan, don’t leave us, don’t shut me out. Susan, you can’t die on me in raw angry silence! The unsaid words ran down Dinah’s face in salt.
Chapter Forty-Six
WILLIE
Willie had been sitting outside with Toby drinking beer and chatting about fish and the weather and the coming exodus of the summer people. All of the time he was watching for Susan to come out of the water, thinking that she was taking an awfully long swim tonight, when he heard a woman scream. Willie stood on the pier and called till he was hoarse. Then they took the dinghy out to search for Susan.
Out on the pond, when Toby rested his oars so they could listen for a swimmer, for an answer to their shouts, they heard loud voices. ‘That’s the MacIvors fighting again’, Willie said. ‘Maybe that’s who was screaming.’
By the time they had circuited the pond, it was after nine. Willie was beginning to feel a cold stone in the bottom of his chest. When they got back, she would be home. They had missed her in the dark. She would be tossing things around upstairs or in the kitchen eating. He told himself that and yet he was scared.
When she was not in the house, he called Candida to ask her if she had seen Susan. It took a long time to answer the phone, but he remembered they had been yelling at each other, and let it ring. Finally Alec picked it up. ‘And who the hell is this?’
Willie stared at the phone as if it had given him a light electric shock, but he was too desperate to be stopped. ‘Have you seen Susan?’
‘Susan? Your wife? Why would I see her?’
‘Please, could you ask Candida? She was swimming in the pond. I heard somebody scream. Did Candida see her?’
‘Ask her yourself.’ Alec dropped the phone and it clonked and clonked. ‘For you, bitch,’ he said loudly. ‘One of your boyfriends.’
‘Hello?’ Candida said thickly. She sounded as if she had been crying. ‘Oh, Willie … Susan? How would I know?’
‘She was swimming in the pond. She hasn’t come back. I’m worried about her.’
There was a long silence. ‘I think I did see her. Near the raft.’
‘Near the raft? She never swims that far.’
‘She did tonight.’ Candida hung up.
Maybe she had swum all the way across the pond. He called Tyrone. Sally answered. ‘No, Mrs Dewitt hasn’t been by in several days. Mr Burdock is engaged right now. He’s on another line. I’m afraid he can’t help you, as he’s been here all evening working with me. He’s talking to Tokyo, and frankly I do not expect him to be free any time soon.’
Laurie’s phone did not answer. He ran out on the pier and again shouted and shouted, with Bogey yapping at his heels. ‘Find Susan,’ he said to the dog, who stood wagging his tail and looking hopeful. Could Susan have decided to disappear as some obscure punishment for him? But where could she go in a wet bathing suit with the temperature around sixty? When he got back to the house, feeling foolish and frightened at the same time, he called the police.
Just after dawn, it was Toby who figured out where to find her. He remembered where his uncle had come up after going through the ice one February. Jimmy’s high school buddy George, now a cop, hooked the body and drew it up.
It could not be, it could not be. Willie had the sense of having taken a wrong turn. He could still go back and fix it. He could still make it come out if he could only remember the way back and do it again. The medical examiner finally came. The body was taken away to the funeral home in town. He could not think of it as Susan. Susan was somewhere else. Susan was still in the house or in the pond.
He went upstairs and flung himself on their bed. Lately she had made him sleep in Jimmy’s old room, but he had known that was only temporary until he could get around her. He should never have let her take up the habit of swimming after dark. But she had not been speaking to him for the last two weeks, except for an occasional sarcastic remark or bitter complaint. He should have got through to her. It was his fault for hanging back. He had been waiting for her anger to ease up. He lay moaning on her bed, inhaling traces of the perfume she enjoyed. Every so often Tyrone gave her perfume. Willie didn’t like her to use too much of it, for he liked the natural smells of her body. Now the dying scent of the perfume from the pillows made him want her so intensely he thrashed to and fro.
When he cried, it was only a dry heaving. He could not actually squeeze tears from his eyes. His father had not been able to endure a boy’s tears and had taught him to suppress them before he was ten. Now his eyes felt dry and hot, his lids itched, his sinuses were swollen with the urge to cry, but he could not. He could not force out a drop of relief.
He was being consumed with a dry flickering white fever of remorse. Grief was a thing that burned him. Grief took him over and used him up. He went on, burning and burning, a pain that was fierce and yet endless. Susan was taken from him. Taken stupidly. Taken by the pond he had loved. It was a thing that lay blue, freckled with sunlight on the short chop and yet it was evil underneath. She had wanted to leave here but he would not agree. Then the pond took her, the pond killed her.
Jimmy was dealing with the undertaker. When Willie could feel anything beyond the pain, he felt what a good son Jimmy was, how oddly tender Jimmy could be. When Jimmy returned from town and hurried upstairs to check him out, he rolled over and began to tell him so. ‘Because I appreciate you. Because you’re the best son a man could have. You come through for me time after time … We have to call Johnny.’
‘I left a message on her answering machine.’
‘No, Jimmy, you didn’t!’
‘Just that it’s an emergency.’
‘We have to call Dinah.’
‘She’s on her way.’
‘Tyrone.’
‘He left for the city this morning, I am told.’
‘We can reach him there.’
‘Maybe.’ Jimmy walked to the window, looked out. ‘I actually saw him leaving. After I called. Laurie was driving his Mercedes, with him talking on the car phone. They went by while we were waiting for the medical examiner.’ Jimmy spoke softly but bitterly.
‘Tyrone is always zooming off. He probably meant to go to New York this morning anyhow. He has some million dollar deal on tap.’ He buried his face into the pillow again.
‘Laurie didn’t say anything to me last night. She only said she’d have to go to New York sometime before Labor Day, not this morning.’
Willie could not care about Tyrone. He did not want to make arrangements and talk to undertakers. He just wanted Susan back. If he had Susan, he would not care if she did not speak to him. He would not press her to make love. He would be happy just having her in the house. The room was pretty and very much like Susan. Her little blue glass vases. Her jewellery box standing open with its jumble of necklaces like a child’s heap of painted shells and pebbles. Her mound of pillows wearing velvet and satin and patchwork and lace. Her drawing table held a half-completed design just as she had left it, wild roses in plum, olive leaves, blue hips. The entire room was a dress thrown down still warm from her body: surely she must rise and put it on. Surely she must appear here where everything spoke her name.