“Donna, I pay the mortgage here. I pay—”
“Oh, you pay, you pay, you pay. And what, you think that puts you in charge?”
He starts to say something, but she has no interest in hearing it.
“I see you sitting there, in that godawful chair, thinking that you’re somehow brave for … for I don’t know what, to be honest. For sticking to your guns? For suddenly deciding to have a belief about something? Well, you’re not, Bill. And I don’t have a problem telling you that. You’re acting gutless, and that’s the truth. You’re acting like a goddamned coward.”
He finishes his wine and crosses one leg over the other. She wonders how long that stupid biography of Johnson has been sitting there. She wonders if he’ll ever get around to reading it.
“And what, you think you’re being some liberal hero? Allowing our son to choose this life for himself?”
“No one’s choosing anything. And no, I’m not a hero, Bill. You accept your son for who he is and where he’s at not because you’re heroic, but because you love him.”
She stands up and reaches for her glass of wine.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” he says. “He gets this taken care of, or he doesn’t come home.”
Donna drinks, swallows, and runs her tongue across her teeth.
She says, “Yeah? Then how about this: Unless you wake the fuck up from this bigoted, Neanderthal dream of yours, I’m leaving you. You got that? I’m out of here, and I’ll tell the kids exactly why I left.”
She finishes her wine and watches the color slowly drain from his face.
February 10, 2012
Paul sobs through the last paragraph of his eulogy, and so does everyone else. As Donna watches them, she begins to cry herself, though for reasons only she can understand. She hadn’t left Bill, though perhaps she should have. The truth is that he loved her more than she loved him—that had always been the case, and it always would be—and she used that terrible fact to her advantage when she blackmailed him two years ago. You wouldn’t leave me, he’d said, testing her when she threatened. Oh, yes, she’d responded, I would. They’d both known that she’d meant it, too. Because like all relationships, theirs was one in which one party had settled; in which, in the event of some dissolution, one party would leave with less heartache, less anguish, less personal unraveling. And that party, of course, was her. She’d thrown her ace on the table, and now Bill faced the awful reality of loss.
What did she want him to do, he asked. How could he get her to stay?
“Don’t ever mention this conversation” is what she’d said. “You act happy when you see him. You love him like you’ve always loved him. I don’t care if you have to pretend. You do what you need to do.”
He agreed. It was a bitter resignation, but she didn’t care; she knew that the unbalanced nature of their love would compel Bill to keep his word, no matter how spiteful he became, and that was all the assurance Donna needed. Paul was a fragile and sentimental boy who had grown into a slightly less fragile and sentimental man, someone who lived in romantic superlatives, that the truth could so readily destroy. Still, watching him now as he descends the shallow stairs from the pulpit, his shoulders folding in on themselves, Donna wonders if she did the right thing.
They had been close, after all. While Paul had gravitated toward Donna when he was a boy, when he reached adolescence he withdrew from her and began spending more time with Bill. At first she was hurt—in so many ways she’d come to view Paul as special, a more exact mirror of her than Alice had ever been—but in time she quietly accepted the shift in alliances. She understood that Paul craved a masculine energy, something that could reaffirm the parts of himself that he’d suddenly begun to doubt. And so, she let him go.
Alice stands as Paul returns to the pew. She holds him as he cries, his body convulsing.
As for Donna, she’s only told one person of that awful agreement she and Bill had made: Eloise. It happened two nights before her husband died, when the doctors informed her his death was imminent and her children, at her urging, flew back to Chicago. Paul and Alice had left the hospital for the evening, but Eloise remained at Bill’s bedside with Donna, where they both watched him sleep, his skin already gray and cold. Listening to the incessant chirping of the machines that were tracking Bill’s death, Donna wrestled with what to say to her daughter. She knew she had to tell someone. For the past four years, she had felt the secret slowly eating at her. It existed on the fringes of whatever wan happiness she felt, threatening always to flood in; she’d be in the garden, enjoying herself, when she’d suddenly remember the deception that belied that brief moment of peace. Briefly, she’d considered telling Alice, but that thought quickly faded. She knew the fierce loyalty that Alice felt toward Paul, as well as her father; the news would thrust her into an impossible position. For better or worse, though, Eloise floated along the peripheries of those relationships. No matter how hard she tried to crack Paul and Alice, they wouldn’t let her in. Instead, they were content to relegate her to a pedestal—but a pedestal built of spite and malice. Watching her eldest daughter try to find equal footing with her half siblings used to break Donna’s heart—and in many ways it still did. Now, though, as Bill took his last shallow breaths, she realized this distance had its advantages.
Swallowing the dregs of the coffee she’d spent the last four hours drinking, Donna told her. She just came right out with it.
Eloise listened, and when Donna was finished, she nodded. “I suspected as much.”
“You did?”
“The last few times we were all together he treated Paul like an absolute stranger.”
They were quiet for a moment, and Donna remembered last Christmas, when she screamed at Bill for being so cold to his son. She’d spent the holiday terrified that Paul was going to ask her if something was wrong, if he’d done something to upset his father, and she’d have no choice but to come clean. He didn’t, though, and Donna was once again thankful for how convincing denial could be.
“Please don’t say anything to Paul,” she asked Eloise. “Or Alice.”
Her daughter took her hand. “I’d never do that, Mom.”
November 22, 2012
It’d been a gradual scrubbing away of Bill, not a full-blown yard sale. That’s what she wants to tell Paul, but she knows it won’t matter. The process won’t interest him so much as the end result: his father has vanished. For the past thirty minutes she’s been following him through the house, enduring his lashings as he’s embarked on a full cataloging of all his father’s possessions that are now missing: golf clubs, clothes, a fly-fishing rod. In short: everything.