The Widow’s Husband Read online

  I shake his hand, which seemed dry and rough, perhaps callused. I give my name and add, “Where’s your wife?”

  “Same as your husband—somewhere else. I have no idea where she is. Been divorced for, let’s see, going on seven years now. I’m on my own, ma’am. Like you.” At this, I feel a pang. Seven years, a long time. How does he exist? But he looks fine. He wears a summer-weight seersucker suit with thin ivory and olive drab stripes. His shirt’s the same olive drab shade, and his tie picks up the ivory tone. Clearly, he’d put time and effort into mixing and matching. Would Amy say that paying so much attention to details indicates that he’s on the make? I am afraid that she would, and she’d probably be right. This sends an icy chill through me, because I’m not ready, can’t cope.

  I look down to see what I’m wearing, a thing I have to do often. My dinner outfit is a beige linen dress, badly wrinkled from its trip in my suitcase. I knew this outfit didn’t travel. Why did I bring it? I vow to do better, to smarten up.

  “I come here when I can,” says Stan, and I have to think what he’s talking about. “I design automatic garage door openers for a firm in San Jose, well, tell the truth, mostly I install them, so I need a break, something to get the blood flowing. You see, what I do is … dry, mechanical … well, bloodless is the word. My passion is Jack London’s work. His whole life, really. He lived near here, just over the ridge to the east. He loved this country. He was a real man, with real blood in his work. I commune with his spirit, that’s why I come here.”

  “Jack London … something about building a fire in Alaska—”

  “The Yukon.”

  “What I remember is personal stuff, a chaotic lifestyle. Didn’t he leave his family, his wife—didn’t he have daughters? He left them to marry some wild woman he’d fallen for. Wasn’t there a scandal?”

  “I suppose you’d call it that. He met Charmian Kittridge, she captivated him. He built Wolf House for her right over there in Glen Ellen, but it burned down just before they moved into it.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It was a tragedy. I can’t begin to describe what it did to him, it … destroyed his life. There was a suspicion of arson, because he’d just fired a worker who was the type to bear a grudge. It was a horrible inferno. The redwood beams, heart wood, he’d had them cut from two thousand year-old trees felled on his own property, they burned so hot, they glowed blue in the night. He never recovered from the sight of his house being destroyed.”

  “Some things you never get over.”

  “Uh-oh, I don’t like the sound of that. I hope that doesn’t mean … well, I hope I didn’t … ah, step on toes, open up old wounds. Your old man take off or something like that?”

  “Something like that. So Jack London didn’t desert his wife? Is that what you’re saying? He wasn’t cruel?” Immediately I regret the accusatory edge to my voice, and I worry about how it’s going to affect him. But why am I trying to please or placate this nondescript man? Always the man, make yourself pleasant for the man, the man. I add defiantly, “If you ask me, there was a streak of cruelty there.”

  “You misunderstand him. See, he’d come back from the Yukon confused, adrift, he needed an anchor, a woman to keep his house, type his manuscripts. He needed to be above distractions like family, so he could do what he had to do, which was write. He needed a woman who wouldn’t expect too much of him, be too demanding.”

  “Stay in the dark so he could shine.”

  “Yes, genius is always so.” He says that firmly; I am not to argue with it.

  “Seems to me I’ve read that his wife, the first one, did that.”

  “True, but he needed a woman with some fire, passion. He was highly sexed, and his mate had to keep up with him, in that regard.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. A man like Jack London is not going to put up with the dull convention of staying with a wife he didn’t love, that he’d outgrown. Besides, with her he’d had only daughters, and he thought Charmian could give him sons—”

  I interrupt him. “Not all men have to prove themselves through sons. Do you have sons?”

  “Sure do, and men need sons. Especially a real man like Jack London. Daughters are fine, somebody’s gotta have them, for the sons to marry. But they’re not like sons. Jack wanted his line to go on, with male heirs. He was illegitimate, you see, he never knew who his own father was and that haunted him. It was a sort of death, and he was afraid of death.” He bends in closer, and I catch a whiff of garlic, tobacco, and something stale—his clothes, despite his overall neatness, need an airing. “Jack London was a man among men,” Stan confides. “He ate raw meat, he preferred it. During duck season, he ate two raw canvas-backs a day. He experimented with hashish, he drank, he brawled.”

  I shrug. I’m still put off by the allusion to sex, and the daughter put-down. Had Emmett needed a different kind of sex? Or more sex? Well, don’t all men think that? Had he needed a son? What the hell had he needed? Was it something I could have provided, and hadn’t? What nerve men have! But then again, Emmett might have resented the kind of competition a son would have presented. He’d had enough trouble dealing with Amy.

  I sigh, lean back. Then I notice him looking at my breasts, so I lean forward again. “Jack London sounds like an animal.”

  Stan recoils. “No, he was a red-blooded hero. He was the great American writer, not properly understood or appreciated by ordinary people.” He adds, “You want another couple of drinks? You’ve finished both of them. Be careful. Crème de menthe bites back.”

  “Why not. Where is the dang barkeep?” I notice that the room is quieter, emptier. Most people have drifted out, and I think that if I had any sense, I’d go, too. But Amy and her friend are still in their booth, heads together, deep in intimate conversation.

  “He spends half his time out back having a cigarette. You can’t smoke in here anymore. A new law.” Stan scowls. “I mean, it’s a bar, fer chrissake! Jack London wouldn’t have put up with this shit.”

  “Cigarette smoke bothers people. My husband had to quit—”

  The barkeep appears again. Trailing an odor of tobacco smoke, he brings our new drinks. Now that I look for it, I see his cigarette smoldering in an ashtray just beyond the doorway.

  We’re silent over our new bright green drinks. Now I’ve done it, I think. I’ve turned him off, and how. To bring up Emmett again. To argue about Jack London. To contradict him about smoking, and he’s probably a smoker, too. I’ll never get anywhere this way. But where do I want to get? I don’t even like this guy. Idolizing Jack London! However, perhaps I haven’t given his great American author proper due. I’ll have to get his work from the library and give it a try.

  I say that to Stan, that I’ll read some Jack London, my peace offering.

  “Yeah, do that, but don’t stay with the kid stuff, the dog stories, White Fang and Call of the Wild. Reach out for his other works. Try Voyage of the Snark, or his Australian stories. My wife and I, when we were together, we traced some of his travels. The South Seas, Canada, Mexico.”

  “Mexico—is that where you got your watchband?”

  “Yeah, in Baja.” He straightens the band on his thin freckled wrist, holds it out so I can admire it. “You usually see these watchbands with turquoise, but these are pieces of carnelian, and onyx. I bought it because it was unique.”

  “You went to Baja to buy a watchband, or to follow in Jack London’s footsteps?”

  “Well, neither one, exactly. Me and Beth, my wife, we knew we were on thin ice, so we made that one last stab at it. You know, the rerun of a honeymoon, to see if we could make it work.”

  “And did it?”

  “Christ, no, it was pure torture. See, I’d outgrown her, she bored me. That happens. One of you moves on, and the other one doesn’t. You can’t go back, even if you want to. So you go out there on the vacation, on the second honeymoon, or the third, in the heat and the light and the sun, and you give it your best shot, then you f
ace facts. Mainly that it’s over. We came home and got a divorce.”

  “Really. That’s the way it was, huh?”

  “Well, wasn’t it? You been there. What did you think?”

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s how it is.” I’m having trouble keeping my various personae straight. I drain my new drink, lean on the bar, and pull on my earlobes. As soon as Amy and I get home—where is Amy? she’s disappeared—as soon as we get home, I’m going to buy those pinecone earrings. And a new dress to go with them, something that won’t wrinkle. “We went to Baja once,” I say, “me and Emmett. Our last vacation together.” I add mentally, And we went for the same reason you did, although I didn’t know it at the time. A last stab to keep it going. Of course it hadn’t worked. Emmett found me spiritless and disappointing. I’d bored him, and he hadn’t known what to do about it.

  “Really? You went to Baja?”

  “Yeah, Emmett, my husband, wanted to fish. See, he’d read about the fishing in the Sea of Cortez, or seen it on TV or something, and he wanted to give it a try.” Wasn’t that the truth? Yes, he’d run through his passion for sailing, wanted to take up something new. He wanted to land a marlin, or a tuna or something gigantic that he could have had mounted, or at least take a picture of, to hang on his trophy wall.

  But there in Baja, after a couple of days of catching nothing, he’d given up. It was expensive to charter a boat and all that gear. Then too, he’d had the feeling the Mexicans were laughing at him, the gringo, the greenhorn, the ugly American. He’d caught nothing, except diarrhea, finally gave up in disgust.

  None of that was my fault.

  Nevertheless, Emmett had been disappointed. He’d been forced to spend a day with me, to tag along on my shopping trip instead of wresting from the azure sea that prize fish that the whole world, or at least the harbor folk, would admire. He’d moped through the plaza stalls, and yes, he shopped for silver feather earrings. That was the day I took pictures; no wonder he looked tired and disgusted. He was tired and disgusted. It wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault! I want to leap off my barstool and dance.

  “Hey, you want to go over to Glen Ellen tomorrow? I could show you around.”

  “I don’t think so. We’re … well, we’re doing something, I forget what.” I giggle. Where is Amy?

  “She’s gone. They took off. You need help getting home?”

  “God, no. There’re lights along the path, no problem. And Amy’s a big girl, she can take care of herself. We can all take care of ourselves. We’re adults.” But I’m already feeling the beginning of a green headache and don’t know how well I am taking care of myself.

  Once on the path to the cabin, though, with cool air on my cheeks, damp breath of the forest in my face, I feel strong and sure. I still have tomorrow, I have tomorrow to walk the trail, to eat ice cream, and to dream in the sun. Emmett’s tomorrows ran out, his heart had beat so many times, and then it beat no more.

  My own heart will beat so many times, and then no more, but that number is still an unknown, and I step along the trail, relishing the beating of life, the beating of life in my body. I still have time, there is time. My heart is strong, and beats and beats and beats. As if it will go on forever.

  CHAPTER 7

  Painful, though, the beating. My heart is beating, throbbing, in unison with a surly green headache the next morning. I climb out of bed and stagger into the bathroom to slurp up handfuls of water, Indian style. In the wavy glass of the bathroom mirror, I see my tongue has a green crème de menthe coating. Amy, too, might wake up feeling ill. I glance back into the bedroom; she’s still asleep, curled into a loose knot under her quilt. She’d appeared sometime in the night—her bed had been empty when I turned in.

  This can’t be why people travel. To eat and drink too much, waste hours in a bar talking to a fool, and wake up feeling evilly out-of-sorts. My own house, where I feel physically well, if not emotionally gratified, shimmers in my memory, an oasis of sense and security. Moreover, my cozy nest, viewed from this alien place, seems a haven in which I can dream, meander through selected memories, enjoying the freedom of my own mind. A place where I can treasure my own silence, although lately I’ve been filling it with sighs and mutters, of talking to the cat or back at the TV like a crazy woman. Well, so what. I have the freedom now, at least at home, to furnish my solitary existence with such oddities as I alone deem appropriate. In this place, away from my refuge, I’m saddled with Amy, am somehow responsible to and for her. It seems an onerous weight after floating in free fall these last few months, and standing here in the bathroom, I let my shoulders sag under the burden. Suddenly my time alone becomes precious, and I yearn to get back to it. One more day, one more day in these environs, marooned.

  But after I make coffee in our tiny kitchenette and drink a cup out on the porch, the fragrant forest again cast its spell. The quiet, the light and air, a hint of damp, of dew not yet disturbed—I’ll be fine. While Amy sleeps, I should get the tree-finder booklet and explore, but recognizing varieties of trees no longer seems to matter.

  Emmett’s gone, and he took his knowledge with him. While Emmett studied trees, lawn care, use of equipment and machinery, household maintenance, joke-telling, income tax returns, how to make a living, routing schedules at the plant, and the details of his latest hobby (I now view his passionate submergence in hobbies as an escape from me), while he studied all that, I studied him. He’d been my discipline, my avocation, my major field of endeavor. I’d studied him as if my survival depended on grasping the subtleties of his persona. I wanted to please him. I ferreted out his tastes, discovered that he liked deviled eggs with dry mustard powder mixed with the mayonnaise. He preferred his meatloaf made with tomato sauce and cracker crumbs, not oatmeal and milk, my mother’s recipe, which he said was blah. He liked his socks clipped together with a kind of clothespin contraption, not rolled together, which he said stretched out the tops. He liked his tee shirts folded in thirds, not halves, because that way they fit better in the drawer. He liked the sheets untucked because he couldn’t sleep with hot feet. He slept hot; lying next to him, I felt that the bed contained an extra heating element, my own personal energy source.

  He wanted to be the first to break open the Sunday paper—he hated for anyone else to take it apart. He read the sections in precise order: first sports, then commentary, then business and comics, and ending with the front page. All the while I cooed around him, bringing him his juice, his Sunday blueberry pancakes with orange syrup, keeping his coffee cup filled. I’d loved taking care of him. At least that part of him, I admit ruefully.

  He’d come home from Vietnam, and that was it—I was lost to my previous existence. Vividly I remember the first time we reconnected after he mustered out of the Army. I opened the door of my parents’ house, and there he was, shining on the step. So handsome in the yellow porch light, a blond god miraculously fallen to earth. For me.

  He wore a suede jacket cut like a sport coat, and a denim shirt boiling with embroidery. And bellbottoms, not exactly the outrageous sort, but bellbottoms nevertheless. No bandanna, ponytail, or earring; but a blue beaded peace sign on a leather thong around his neck.

  Of course it’d been the seventies, that gaudy decade. But my mother, the prim housewife, her print dress decorous and proper, my father, the accountant, his plastic pocket liner bristling with fine-point ballpoints, had gaped at Emmett. Later, my mother used popinjay to describe him. I can hear my mother’s voice, “Well, he’s a proper popinjay, isn’t he.” That archaic expression had filled me with indignation. At the same time, I was taken by the sound of it, the feel of it on my tongue, the slight sarsaparilla flavor. I was secretly impressed with my mother’s tart, and correct, judgement. Emmett had looked a popinjay, whatever that meant. Then again, what did my mother know? To my meek and mild parents, hopelessly behind the times, anything untoward leaped out. But even if he had gone beyond colorful to flashy, even tawdry, in his personal taste and adornment, so what! Was that
a crime?

  I dedicated myself to him. I quit junior college and got on full-time at the phone company to support us when he thought he wanted to go back to school. I quit my friends, my habits and routines, and I embraced his. I became a part of Emmett, or tried to become a part, tried to graft myself onto him. And now here I am, struggling to find out who I have a chance of becoming, in the void that Emmett left.

  So a woman who abdicates her own personality to adopt someone else’s deserves to find herself in a fix, I scold, getting up and going into the cabin for more coffee. The coffee, at least I am sure of the coffee, will not equivocate about it: the coffee is delicious in the clear fresh air of the forest.

  A hot shower further restores my spirits, and a good brushing restores my tongue to its natural color. I wipe mist off the mirror and study my reflection. I think about silver pinecone earrings. They’d match that gray silk dress I’ve been thinking about. The earrings will show off my new short hair, and the dress will show off my eyes, which are gray. Would Emmett approve of a gray dress? Well, not gray, silver. Silver is my color, I see that now. I will let this preposterous hair dye grow out, and put on a new shade, something to accentuate my multiplying gray, my silver. Silver, silver, silver, I’ll go with silver. Shirley Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, James Brolin, Richard Gere, Michael Landon. They’ve all gone silver. Michael Landon is dead, true, but no matter, he belongs with those Silver Foxes. Briefly I think of the Silver Fox I’d met on the bridge, but push the memory down. Bad medicine that, finding a man attractive. The silk dress, though, is another matter. Even though silk requires dry cleaning—

  “Mom, how long are you going be in there?” calls Amy through the bathroom door.

  “Be right out,” I say, chagrined. Caught mooning into my own eyes like a schoolgirl!

  Wrapped in a skimpy motel-type towel, having forgotten to take my clothes in with me, I reenter the main room. How awkward! Amy, however, yawns, stretches, rolls casually out of bed in a short nightie.