@Expectations Read online

  Lark’s voice filters in: “Are you all right?”

  “Who, me? I’m fine.” I catch a glimpse in the rearview mirror. No I’m not fine. I look like a wraith in a windstorm, and Lark? Lark is looking a little glassy himself.

  Lark strangles. “We’re here.”

  It’s too soon. “My God.”

  I’ve found the house. We are in front of his house. Tom’s house. It looks so ordinary! Split level development ranch model with aluminum siding in a depressing gray, beyond ordinary, with a mean little second-floor window, how little, how squalid, how not Tom! There are crumpled paper plates and napkins strewn on the bare, muddy front lawn and drooping balloons still tied to the mailbox—must have been a party here—and inside somewhere, Reverdy, no. Tom.

  The trouble is, my lover is bold, reckless and expansive, he moves through space like a man from a much bigger …

  Lark’s voice goes flat. “This can’t be it.”

  “But it is.” Tom never told me what the room looked like where he was typing. In the absence of information my mind supplied the details. I imagined it as. Well. More.

  “It’s kind of small.”

  We could be talking in the thin air at the top of Independence Pass, eleven thousand feet above the world. Our voices are that strained. We are gasping for breath. “Yeah.” My hands on the wheel look like they belong to somebody else. The house looks like it belongs to somebody else. The front door does not smash open. Nobody comes out. Too much time goes by.

  The thin stream of air coming out of Lark finally turns into speech. “What are we going to do?”

  “Go in.”

  This is so terrifying that neither of us moves.

  After a while I say, “Do you want to or should I?” Is there somebody in the upstairs front room, moving behind the curtains? I don’t know. My heart’s been running ahead of me for all these hours and now it threatens to stop. Everything is still. Especially Lark.

  I wait. Lark and I sit for a very long time. It’s hard to know what day it is but it’s near dusk, at least in this continuum. The congested suburban block the house sits on is ugly, banal, flat, but from here I can see mountains; beyond the ridge, the sky is wonderfully soft. In the street ahead there are children playing. Somebody else’s? Tom’s? I’m afraid to get out of the car; I want to get out of the car and hug them all. I want Tom’s children to come running to me and pull me into the house, pretty, not like our mother, you know about our mother, she’s … But I don’t know about Louise, I only know what Tom says about Louise. I want Tom Dearden to come out of his goddamn house and end this; I want him to come rushing out of the house with Louise hard behind, begging him to stop. I want him to come straight to me, I want him to wrench open the car door and pull me out of the car and hug me and never stop. I want him to hug me so tight that Louise knows and the children know and the world knows. I want him to do it right here in front of them all.

  On StElene, I could teleport. I could be with him instantly. @join reverdy. Here I am fixed in time, rooted in physical space. I want to begin. I’m afraid to begin. “Lark?”

  Lark whispers, “You go. I can’t.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” We are riveted by a thud. A child’s ball has hit the roof of the rented Hyundai. Helplessly, I watch it roll down the windshield and dribble off the side of the hood. Then because there is no help for it, I unbuckle and get out. I feel naked, standing out here on the walk in suburban Fairbanks, Alaska. Gone; I shudder. What if we’ve come all this way and he’s gone? But I know better. The balloons on the mailbox bob brightly; they’re today’s. I can see movement inside the house. A figure passes the standard plate glass window, headed for the front door. I hear my own bootheels. Click. Click. Click.

  I don’t even have to knock. A woman opens it and comes out, easy in jeans and a denim shirt open at the throat. This must be Louise. Where is my voice?

  Louise Dearden’s voice is low, pleasant, modulated. “Excuse me. I couldn’t help seeing the car. Are you in trouble? Is there something I can do for you?”

  Oh, God, she doesn’t look anything like he said.

  “Mrs. Dearden?” A part of me goes scurrying after the hope that this lovely woman is somebody else. It can’t be Louise Dearden, it has to be Reverdy’s sister, his daughter from a first marriage. Anybody but his wife. There is no way that this good-looking woman with the pleasantly expectant smile can be the terrible Louise. Tom’s unlovable wife is plain and spiteful. He’s told me so. This can’t be Louise, the real Louise has got to be lurking somewhere behind that front door, crouched to spring.

  Unless that part is a lie.

  “Yes, I’m Louise Dearden.”

  Oh God, please don’t smile, Louise. Please don’t smile at me. “I. Ah. I’m. I came to see Tom.”

  “Oh!” Oddly, this pretty woman is blushing. I’ve caught her unprepared. “I’m afraid he isn’t … we were just.”

  She doesn’t have to explain; it’s clear from the glow in Louise Dearden’s face, in the flush that begins in the neck of her open shirt and spreads up her throat that she and the man inside the house have just left off making love. Later, when there’s time, I’ll wonder just exactly what was wrong with me that I don’t turn and go right then. What flaw keeps me standing there at Tom’s front door like a bull at the knacker’s waiting for the mallet, weaving with my head bowed because I know I’m beaten but I’m too weak to lie down?

  I cough apologetically. “I’ve come a long way. I need to see him.”

  “See him?” Louise looks surprised. “Are you from the history project? If you’re from the history project, you already know…”

  God, this is so humbling. “I’m sorry? Mrs. Dearden, I think he’ll see me, we’re both part of this … I…”

  “If you’re from the project, you already know he doesn’t see people.”

  “I just need to know if he’s all right!” I’m like a beggar with my hat in my hands, craning to see past Louise as if all I have to do is see Tom, or let him see me, and we can get through this. Our lives together will begin. “I’ve come a long way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise says again. Like a nurse calming a patient, she puts a hand on my arm. “He isn’t seeing people.”

  It crosses my mind that he can’t. But no. It would kill me. “I can come back.” Please let me come back.

  “You don’t understand. He isn’t seeing people,” Louise says.

  “But this is different. I’ve come so far!” I guess it’s exhaustion; I don’t falter exactly, I just go off balance, all of a sudden, and Louise’s face softens.

  “I’m sorry.” Whatever Tom Dearden is, she is protecting him.

  “Please!”

  “If you know Tom at all you ought to know.…” It’s as if she’s breaking the news of a recent death. “He just doesn’t.”

  “Why not, why not?” This is not the worst thing. Nor is Louise Dearden’s invitation to come in for tea the worst thing, even though I know I can’t bear to be in the same house with Tom and not touch him. Nor will having to sit in that pleasant, banal living room trying too hard not to cry be the worst thing. The worst thing will come later.

  His wife is waiting with that nice smile. “Please.”

  I follow her into his house.

  thirty-four

  I’m in his house, This can’t be his house, I think as Louise goes for a tray. Too ordinary, too small. There are no traces of my lover in this room: off-white Kmart curtains, green sectional, white birch coffee table, painted tole lamp, plastic flowers, plaque. Wrong. These can’t be his things.

  “If you’re not from Tom’s history project,” Louise says, returning with the tea, “is it about that silly game of his?”

  He can’t be here. If he’s here he’ll hear me. He’ll come down. I raise my voice, in case. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dearden, there isn’t any game. My name is Jenny. Jenny Wilder.”

  “That game.” She shakes her head. “Oh look, I’m so sorry!”

  �
��What?”

  She says sadly, “And you came all this way.”

  There is a chance he doesn’t know I’m here or he knows somebody’s here but can’t guess it’s me. “Jenny,” I say louder. “Jenny Wilder.” And I think I hear movement overhead; a stir as if someone big has come out into the hall and is waiting just out of sight, leaning over the rail at the head of the stairs. Reverdy? Tom? In a second our spirits will fly out of our bodies and meet midway and as if it is fated, fuse.

  “You don’t have to shout. Really. Tom knows you’re here.”

  Nothing happens.

  She reaches for my hands and as Zan jerks them away she sighs. “Oh dear, it really is about that game.”

  “This isn’t a game!”

  “I understand,” Louise says understandingly (Tom: she doesn’t understand me, she never understood me) when it’s clear she can’t possibly understand. “I just wonder if you understand Tom.”

  “Oh, Tom.” Pain drives me to my feet. Tom. If I can only see him, and explain. “Tom! It isn’t a game!” Am I shouting, does he hear? Will the sound of my voice bring him or is he waiting for me to shoulder Louise aside and run upstairs to him? “It’s everything,” I say, making a lunge for the stairs. My head fills up with the sound of her voice. “Everything.”

  “Oh my dear, I am so sorry.” Louise is on her feet, blocking the little hallway, prepared to protect her husband with her life.

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Please don’t,” she says with a sweet, sad look. She adds in his words, Reverdy’s words! “Please don’t. It isn’t real.”

  But I am wild. I shove her out of the way and push on, shouting, “Well, real people get hurt!”

  And I charge the stairs. At the top I hesitate, breathing hard. The air in the small, dark upstairs hallway ripples as if stirred by a recent disturbance, its texture changed by a residual whir, as if somebody has just turned and fled. Someone—Tom?—just darted into the room at the far end of the hall. The door swings shut. I throw myself against it. “Tom.” Trembling, I knock. Wild, I keep my voice light and clear so that there will be no mistaking it. “Tom, it’s Jenny. Reverdy, it’s Zan!”

  Nobody answers. I hear the click as the door shuts and the distinctive final crash of the dead bolt slipping into place.

  I won’t call again. I won’t put my ear to the door or shout and I certainly won’t hammer. Instead I stand in the empty hall with my breath shuddering and make myself count to a hundred before I turn to go down to confront Louise, who stands waiting discreetly at the bottom of the stairs.

  Louise says, “I’m sorry.”

  I say, “So am I.”

  The next to worst thing comes in the seconds after I’ve thanked Louise and excused myself and blindly headed down the front walk, hoping I can figure out how to explain this to Lark. The worst thing doesn’t even come when I knuckle the tears out of my eyes and look back at the dim little second story window and see a man’s figure behind the curtains. I see a tall shape lounging against the frame. And knows he sees me, although the curtain hides his features, masking his expression. It is, of course, Reverdy-who-was. I am looking at Tom Dearden looking at me.

  There is a rustle at my back. Lark has come up the walk to meet me and he stands, staring up at the house. “Oh shit,” he says. “It’s him.”

  “Yes.”

  He understands everything. “Oh, shit.”

  So the worst thing in this passage that I’m going to play and replay for the rest of my life, replaying it for as long as I’m physically able to get up in the morning and dress myself and go out into the world and greet my grown children and their grandchildren and go through all the motions of being a three dimensional person IRL.

  The worst thing is the moment when Tom Dearden—who in spite of all my passion and all my hopes has never been anything more or better than this fugitive figure at the window—when Tom acknowledges everything that has passed between us.

  And waves goodbye.

  thirty-five

  I stumble back to the car. When I slide into the driver’s seat I turn to face Lark. For the rest of my life, I’ll owe my friend here for not asking, “What happened?” Or, worse, “What are we going to do?” And I owe him for not responding with the easy, automatic and previously coded StElene warm hug.

  What we do from here on out has not been coded. It needs to be considered. We can’t log on and expect somebody else to take our minds off it or help us solve our problems; we won’t go back until we’ve confronted them. We have to solve them ourselves. Lark and I have been through a lot together; by this time we’re so close that it’s OK for Lark to keep his distance, not hug, not say the expected there-there. He is too rocky himself for there-there. He lets me know how he feels by letting me see into his eyes.

  I love him for not asking, “Are you all right?”

  What he does instead is say with a wry grin, “Guess we’d better activate Plan B.”

  My hands are jittering on the steering wheel. “As soon as we get a Plan B.”

  “I can’t go home.”

  “I don’t know if I can.” I’m trying to figure out what’s best for us. I’m too wasted right now to know.

  Lark and I get each other home. Better. We face what’s ahead together and get each other through. At Lark’s suggestion I book motel rooms at the airport so we can get unwrecked before we go back to our lives. It’s important. We have to put our lives back together before we can even think about what’s next. At the motel, we crash and burn. We sleep until we can’t sleep any more. Then we eat. Then we begin the long progress back to Brevert.

  We don’t talk about what has just happened—we can’t. And we don’t talk about StElene. No way. And Tom Dearden? It hurts too much to talk about that now. Maybe never, I think. He’s as important to Lark as he is to me. Correction. Was to me. Stuck in Brevert, South Carolina, where I never belonged, I went into an imaginary world and rode out to what felt like happiness on a dream. Wait a minute, lady. You knew what you were doing. That wasn’t any dream. I went into a conceptual world and rode out into the wild blue on nothing more than my expectations. So what if I did? I understand now that it was never about StElene, Reverdy’s world of performative utterance where what you type is. It was about me.

  But Lark and I are mending. It hurts to think about where we’ve been or what we have discovered; there’s no way we can talk about it now. Instead we start cobbling a plan. If I can get Lark back into college, at least I will have done something to make his life better, and mine? Too soon to tell.

  Boarding lounge to boarding lounge, Buffalo wings to nachos to frozen yogurts, Lark and I decompress in stages. It’s like coming up from the Mindanao Deep. We have to surface slowly, to keep from getting the bends. So we talk. About everything in the world, except Topic A. We talk about the world, and about futures. About exigencies in our physical lives. About all the personal stuff I’ve left behind in Brevert. About what’s next for him.

  Because there’s one thing left to do and I know it needs doing, I find the email kiosk at O’Hare and log on to collect my mail. I think I can shake off StElene but tendrils keep clinging; they trail behind me like shreds in the aftermath of a long dream. Never mind. I have a piece of unfinished business.

  If I know Tom Dearden, we aren’t finished yet.

  “How did I guess?” There it is. A mail for jwilder from Tom Dearden. He must have posted it seconds after he saw me run away from his house without giving me the dignity of a last-minute wait! My unseeable lover is mailing me from behind a firewall. To make his loving plea, he has chosen a protected account that delivers mail with no hint as to the location of the sender. My throat goes sour. I can axe this message unread. I can drop kick Tom Dearden into oblivion without finding out what he has to say. It’s what he deserves! But I have to finish this. In the realm of last things, I think, this is the last thing.

  DEAREST ZAN, he writes in all capital letters, what’s the matter Tom, why are
you shouting?

  WE HAVE TO TALK. I HAVE FOUND A NEW PLACE FOR US! MEET ME THERE TOMORROW NIGHT AT TEN, YOUR TIME. I LOVE YOU, I WILL EXPLAIN.

  And as if he’s secure in my love and supremely sure of his authority—as if he knows I’ll follow wherever he leads me, Tom supplies the telnet address I am supposed to type in so we can be together. Sort of.

  DAKBUNGALOW.MOO.MUD.ORG 8888

  LOVE ALWAYS IN ALL TIME AND ALL SPACE

  REVERDY

  This is what you do when it’s over. Control D. Delete. Empty your trash so you will never see it again.

  How could I have gambled everything I have for this?

  By the time the cab from the Savannah airport glides along the bay and turns off Front Street and into Church Street, it’s night again. Lark and I are back in the world that looked so drab compared to my life on StElene. The cab’s headlights flicker in and out of the Spanish moss and light up bits of architectural detail on the town’s big houses. I can smell the salt air coming in over the water; I can almost hear the beetles moving in the marsh.

  What makes me feel both touched by grace and guilty at the same time is the certainty that Charlie will be glad to see me! I tore up the note that ended our marriage. He doesn’t know! He’ll let me in without guessing that an entire world has ignited and gone out like a torch in the short time I’ve been gone. He can’t know that I’ve survived a wild, compressed emotional lifetime since he last saw me or that it began right here, after he brought me down Front Street, only half-kidding, this is your new life.

  The cab spills us on the sidewalk. I am rehearsing my first line. “Oh Charlie, I’m so glad.”

  Lark and I have a tentative plan. We’ve built a story. I tell Charlie that Lark is one of my patients; he cracked up in New Orleans and I had to fly out there to help, emergency, no time to call. I stayed to talk my patient through his admissions interview at Tulane because thanks to me, he’s going back to school. At least that’s true. He is.