Oh William!, page 5
Otherwise I knew almost nothing about Catherine. She would shake her head when I asked her what her childhood had been like. “Oh, not so great,” she said one time. “But fine.” She never returned to Maine again.
I waited a week and then I called William at work and he sounded distracted. I said, “What more have you learned?” And he said, “Oh Lucy, it’s just crap. There is nothing more to learn.” I asked him what Estelle had said, and he hesitated and then said, “About what?”
“About your mother having another kid,” I said, and he said, “Lucy, we don’t know that she had another kid,” and I still asked him what Estelle had said, and after a moment he said, “She understands it didn’t happen.”
When we hung up, I realized that William was lying. About what, I was not sure. But there was in his voice something dishonest, is what I thought I heard. I decided I would not call him again about any of it.
Oh I missed David! I missed him dreadfully. Unbelievably I missed him. I thought how he knew I loved tulips, and how he always—always—brought tulips to the apartment; even when they were out of season he would go to a florist nearby and bring me home tulips.
When I was a young child, if I or my sister or my brother told a lie, or even if we had not but our parents thought we had told a lie, we had our mouths washed out with soap. This is not at all the worst thing that happened to us in that house, and that is why I will mention it here. We would have to lie down on our backs on the floor of the small living room, and whoever it was that had told the lie—let’s say for this example it was my sister, Vicky—then the other two kids, my brother and I, one of us was instructed to hold down her arms, and the other of us held down her legs. And then my mother would go into the kitchen and get the dishcloth and then she would go into the bathroom and scrub the dishcloth with the cake of soap and Vicky would have to stick her tongue out and my mother would shove the rag in and keep moving it until Vicky gagged.
As I have gotten older I think that it was unconsciously brilliant of my parents to involve the other kids in this activity; it kept us apart, as all the things that happened in that house kept us apart.
When it was my turn to lie on the floor I never struggled as my poor brother—who was always terrified at such moments—and my poor sister—who was always furious at such moments—did. I lay there and closed my eyes.
Please try to understand this:
I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.
I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don’t know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.
That couple who let me take the train back to New York with them that night I was stuck in the Washington, D.C., airport: Not too long afterward, they saw my picture in the newspaper and they came to a reading I gave in Connecticut. The woman was all bright smiles; she was really very nice to me, so much nicer than she had been when I was with them in the airport, and it was—I think—because now she thought that I was someone. The night in the airport I had just been a scared person who tagged along behind her. I have always remembered that, how different she was to me the night of my reading. My book had done very well, and the library I read in was packed with people. And I guess she must have been impressed with that.
What she could not possibly have known was that even as I stood before all those people and read and answered questions, I still felt oddly—but very truly—invisible.
For the months of July and August, Estelle and William have always rented a house in Montauk, on the very eastern tip of Long Island.
For a number of years after Catherine died, William and I and the girls would go to Montauk for a week in August; we would stay at a small hotel, and we would walk through the tall grass along a tiny path that led to the beach across the street. We would put large beach towels down and stick an umbrella into the sand. I liked the beach; I loved the ocean; I would stare at it and think how it was like Lake Michigan, but not at all. It was the ocean! Though, in truth, I have mixed feelings about our times there.
William very much liked Montauk, but in my memory he was often distant from me there, and from the children as well. One time when the girls were young we had to wait a very long time while William finished a huge bowl of steamed clams in a restaurant. I remember watching him as he peeled the black from the clams’ necks and then soaked them in the gray cup of water on the table; he did not speak, and the girls got restless, climbing onto my lap, and then moving around the place, walking close to other tables. “Take the girls outside,” he said to me, and so I did. But it still took him forever to finish the clams. I also remember one time when we drove back from Montauk to the city he did not speak to me once.
After our marriage ended I never returned to Montauk.
But.
William and Estelle rented a house out there. Bridget went to camp in western Massachusetts; she apparently loved it, and William would come into the city just a few days a week to work in his lab. Estelle stayed out in Montauk, and they entertained a lot there on the weekends. Mostly I know this because Chrissy and Becka would go there and stay a few days, sometimes separately and sometimes together. Becka described the house as having a lot of big windows, and Chrissy said the people they entertained were “terrific bores. From the theater, I guess,” is what she said. But Chrissy is a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, and married to the man in finance. Both girls told me how much Estelle cooked, and it made me feel tired to hear that; I have never liked to cook.
The second thing that happened to William is this:
On a day in early July, it was a Thursday, William called and said, “Lucy? Can you come over?”
“Over where?” I asked.
“To my apartment.”
“I thought you were in Montauk,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Come over right now. Can you? Please?”
So I left my apartment—it was a very hot day, the kind of day when moving about New York is not easy, the heat was so thick—and I got into a cab and went to William’s place on Riverside Drive. The doorman said to me, “Go right up, he’s waiting for you.”
In the elevator I felt very worried; I had been worried since William called me, but the doorman made me even more worried. I got off the elevator and went down the hall to their apartment door, and I knocked, and William called out, “It’s open,” and so I walked in.
William was sitting on the floor in front of the couch; his shirt was rumpled, and even his jeans looked dirty. He had no shoes on, just socks. “Lucy,” he said. “Lucy, I can’t believe this.”
At first I thought the place had been burglarized because there was a sense of much of it missing.
But this is what had happened:
William had gone to a conference in San Francisco and delivered a paper. He felt at the time that the paper was slight, and he thought people in the audience knew that; he got very little feedback on it. At a reception afterward, men and women he had known for years were gracious to him, but only one man mentioned his paper, and even then William felt it was merely out of politeness. On the flight home he thought about this: that his career was essentially over.
As he stepped into the entranceway of his building—it was midafternoon on Saturday—the doorman seemed extremely serious as he looked at William. The doorman nodded and said, “Hello, Mr. Gerhardt.” William did notice that. But William only said, “Good afternoon.” He did not know the names of all the doormen though he had lived in the building for almost fifteen years; this particular doorman was one whose name William could not remember. And then, when William unlocked the door of his apartment, he saw immediately that it was different, it seemed more vast, and at first he thought (just as I had when I entered it) that it had been burglarized. On the floor—he almost stepped on it—was a handwritten note from Estelle on a regular-size piece of paper. William handed me the note from where he sat on the floor, and he said, “Keep it.” I sat down on the couch and read it. The note said (I did keep it):
Honey, I am so sorry to do this in such a way! I am really sorry, honey.
But I’ve moved out—I’m in Montauk at the moment but I have an apartment in the Village. You can see Bridget anytime you want to. Don’t worry about any alimony for me, I’m all set. I’m really sorry, William. I am not blaming you for this (but you ARE kind of unreachable a lot). But you’re a good man. You just seem faraway at times. I mean a lot of times. I’m really sorry not to have let you know, I guess I am a wimp.
Love, Estelle
I sat there on the couch and said nothing for a long time, just looked around at the apartment. I could not tell what was missing, but there was a hollowness to the place, and the sunlight that came through the window made it feel even more ghastly. Finally I realized that the big maroon chair was gone. And then I saw on the mantelpiece a large vase, and William followed my gaze and said, “Yeah, my Christmas present to her, she left it here.”
“God,” I said. We said nothing for many more moments. All of a sudden I realized that the rugs were gone except for a small one in the far corner of the room; this is partly why the place looked so bleak. “Wait,” I said. “She took the rugs?”
William only nodded.
“God,” I said again, quietly. “My God.”
Then William said—he was sitting with his long legs out in front of him; his socks looked dirty and his feet were pointed outward—“Lucy, what scares me is the feeling of unreality I’ve had. It’s been five days and I just can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t real. But it is. And it scares me. I mean the sense of unreality scares me.” Then he said, “Go look in the bedrooms. All of Estelle’s clothes are gone, and most of Bridget’s, and Bridget’s furniture is all cleaned out. And the kitchen has only half the stuff left.” He turned his head to look up at me, and his eyes seemed almost dead.
He told me that he had felt waves of exhaustion these five days. He’d slept without dreaming, and he often slept twelve hours, rising only to go to the bathroom, and the fog of his fatigue would descend again. He said, “I never, ever saw this coming.”
I touched his shoulder. “Oh Pillie,” I said quietly. I looked around again. The vase was glass with colored glass shapes in it. “Oh dear God,” I said.
After many minutes, William turned and crossed his arms on my lap where I still sat on the couch and then put his head on his arms. I thought: I could die from this. I touched his head of full white hair.
“Is it true that I’m unreachable a lot?” He looked up from eyes that seemed smaller and were now red. “Do you think that’s true, Lucy?”
“I have no idea if you are any more unreachable than the rest of us,” I said, because it was the nicest thing I knew to say.
William got up and sat next to me on the couch. “If you don’t know, then who does?” He said this with what I thought was an attempt at humor.
“Nobody,” I said.
And he said, “Oh Lucy,” and he reached for my hand and we sat on the couch holding hands. Every so often he shook his head and whispered, “Jesus.”
Finally I said, “You have the money, Pill. Don’t stay here. Go to a nice hotel until you get this sorted out.”
And it was funny, but he said, “No, I don’t want to go to a hotel. This is my home.”
I say it was funny, because he called it his home. Of course it was his home. The man had lived here for years. He had eaten countless meals at those wooden tables with his family, he had showered here, read the news, watched television here. But I have still never felt that I had a home. Ever. Except for the one with William years and years ago. I have told you that before.
I stayed there for the afternoon. I went—because he asked me again to do so—and looked into his bedroom and also Bridget’s, and everything he had said was true. The blue quilt was a mess on their bed; she had not taken the quilt. There were dust bunnies on the floor of Bridget’s room, I suppose from beneath her bed, which had been taken. “Where is Bridget going to sleep when she comes over?” I asked William when I came back into the living room, and he looked surprised and said, “I haven’t thought of that. I guess I’ll have to get her another bed.”
“And a bureau,” I said. Then I said, “Go take a shower and let’s go out to eat.”
So he did that, and he looked better as he stepped back into the living room in a different—a clean—shirt, rubbing a towel over his white head of hair.
We spoke of many things that night at dinner. The restaurant was an old, comfortable-seeming place, and at that time of year we easily got a table and we sat toward the back, and we talked. But I felt terrible. I felt terrible for this man who used to be my husband. We talked a long time about Estelle and Bridget, and then a little bit about our girls; he asked that he be the one to tell Chrissy and Becka about Estelle leaving, and I said, Of course.
Then William said, holding a piece of bread, “Catherine had a kid before me,” and I said, “I know that.”
William told me how he had researched it—before this conference—and realized his mother must have become pregnant a few months after his father went to England and then to Germany. “So the kid,” William had done the math, had all the dates, “would have been about a year old. She would have been practically walking, Lucy, when my mother just strolled right out the door.” He looked at me then, and the pain on his face was estimable. It broke my heart, and somewhere I faintly understood that he must have felt that his mother had betrayed him as two of his wives had done.
He added, “But the father, Clyde Trask, he got married a year later to a woman named Marilyn Smith.” William spoke the word “Smith” with disdain. “And he stayed married to her for fifty years. They had some boys together.”
I reached and squeezed his hand. I said, “Pillie, we’re going to get this all figured out. We’re going to deal with everything, don’t you worry.”
He said, “Well, you deal with things, that’s for sure.”
I said, “Are you kidding? I don’t deal with anything!”
And he said, “Lucy. You deal with everything.”
In the taxi on the way back to my apartment that night I thought how I had left William in a similar way, only with more warning. And I had not taken anything except for some of my clothes. But I had told him I wanted to move out. I had told him that I had an image of myself as a bird, folded up in a box, living with him. He could not understand that, and I do not blame him. I got a small apartment just a few blocks away from the brownstone we lived in in Brooklyn then. But I did not move out for almost a year, and then when he was at work one day—it was a Monday and I picked up the phone and I called a mattress store and within two hours a mattress had been delivered to my tiny apartment, and I thought: Oh God, Lucy. Or maybe I didn’t think anything. I was just terrified. So I put a bunch of things in a garbage bag and I walked the garbage bag over, and I bought one pan at a drugstore and also one fork and one plate. And I called William and I told him I had moved out.
I always remember his voice that day. He said, “You have?” His voice was so small. “You’ve moved out?”
It was good of him, I thought in the taxi, not to remind me of this today.
I also thought about Estelle, and I thought—I assumed this—that she could not have done this if she was not involved with another man. I had not mentioned that to William. I wondered who he was, if he was the theater fellow she had said to that night in the kitchen, “Are you bored to death?” It made me angry to think of her. Jesus, I thought, I can’t stand you. She had hurt William, and I couldn’t stand her for that.
About Catherine, I did not think a great deal right then. I was more concerned with that empty apartment that William was inside right now. Although in my distress for him, some kind of unpleasantness I felt toward Catherine emerged as well.
The night I found out about William’s affairs—he had been having more than one—our girls were in bed, they were teenagers by then, and it was around midnight, and he finally told me, in small bits of information and then larger ones. Two days earlier I had found a credit card receipt that I had taken from his pocket to prepare the shirt for the cleaners; it had been for a dinner for apparently two people—this is what the price seemed like to me—at a restaurant in the Village, and he had told me that he was working late that night. I was scared as I showed him the receipt and asked him about it. When he saw the receipt he (I thought) seemed taken aback, but he said that a woman he worked with was having trouble so he had had dinner with her. Why hadn’t he told me? I cannot now remember what he said, but it was reassuring and it had assuaged me—sort of. (For a few years at that point I had had dreams that he was cheating on me, and every time I told him William would speak to me kindly and say, “I have no idea why you would be dreaming that.”) But that evening we had had friends over and the woman of the couple went up on the roof with me to have her cigarette and she told me she had been having an affair with a man in Los Angeles. “The sex is great,” she said, inhaling. “The sex is amazing.”
And when she said that to me I knew. About William. I don’t know why, but that was the moment I knew, and when we came downstairs I looked at William and I believe he saw in my look that I knew, and we waited for the guests to leave and then the girls to go to bed, and I told him what the woman had said, and after a while he confessed. First to one, and then to a couple of others. There was a woman that William worked with that he seemed to care for especially, although he said he was not in love with any of them. But he did not tell me about Joanne for another three months. And when he told me about Joanne I thought I might die. I had already thought I would die hearing about the other women. But this woman, Joanne, had been in our house countless times, she had brought the girls to see me in the hospital one summer when I was sick, she had been a friend of mine as well as my husband’s.
