Sounding the Waters Read online

  He is right. Something starts to seem odd to me. Of all people, Jeannie knows the right way to handle it, no prompting needed, yet here she’s gone ahead, on her own, and created unnecessary trouble. I hope she is not sicker than she’s letting on.

  Bobby sits down at his desk and rubs his forehead, repeating my worry about Jeannie almost word for word.

  “She says she’s okay,” I say. “She just needs to avoid stress to stay that way.”

  “And in the meantime, you and Laura and Jeannie are going to leave me alone with the sharks and the sons of bitches.”

  “I hope Laura will come around.”

  “Who knows? You could help, you know.”

  “How?” I wonder if he means help with Laura.

  “Let me know if I’m screwing up.”

  He means his campaign. “I expect Jeannie will still let you know. Through me.”

  He laces his fingers behind his head and leans back. “So we’ll be seeing more of you. Hey, it’ll be like old times.”

  “They say you can never put your foot in the same stream twice.”

  He sighs, though whether over what I’ve said or what he’s about to say I cannot tell. “Am I making a mistake now?”

  “About what?”

  “Running.”

  “I don’t know, Bobby.” I have the old sensation of feeling that I am at great physical distance from the person I am talking to. It’s as if I can see the lips moving but can barely hear the voice. This is an unusual kind of question for Bobby, talking about closing the door after the horse has already left the barn. Jeannie’s resignation and Laura’s opposition must have unsettled him pretty deeply. With an effort, I bring myself to focus. “You’re running to advance issues you care about, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Though I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was also time for me to stop being ‘lite’ governor. You know Governor Roberts decided he wants to run for one more term?”

  “He broke his deal with you.”

  “He purely did. If he hadn’t, I’d probably have waited the two years for him to retire. Though with the mess in Washington, governors have to spend more and more time finding money to do what the feds should have already done. It stinks. And speaking of stinks, going up against Wheatley will be no walk on the beach.”

  “Particularly if Laura is not behind you.”

  He shakes his head. “She is something,” he says with the usual combination of admiration and rue. “I think she’s upset about Annie. We both are.”

  Annie, age sixteen, is my goddaughter. “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s been smoking cigarettes.”

  “With asthma?”

  “With asthma. And Laura wonders if she’s been getting into the liquor cabinet. Maybe you could talk to her?”

  “To Annie?”

  “We’re not having much luck ourselves at the moment.”

  I am hugely fond of Annie, but talking to her is hard for me. I am inclined to get a bad case of the “what ifs” when I am around her. My own daughter, Rebecca, was born five years and four weeks after Annie. “I don’t know. She sees me as an extension of you two.”

  “Give it a try?”

  It is my turn to let out a long breath. “All right. I’ll give it a try.”

  Annie is in her room, her door ajar. She is on the telephone, her long jean-clad legs up on her bed. Putting her hand over the receiver, she says, “Hi! I’ll be right off.”

  An introspective, watchful, and sensitive child, in the last few years of adolescence she has become steadily more outgoing. Because I experienced her personality in one way for so long, her new volubility always catches me off guard. I sometimes have the fantasy that a brash young actress has been dropped in to replace the real Annie. She is pretty in a fresh, wholesome way, but she doesn’t think so at all. She is convinced she’ll have to compensate for her “plainness” by being interesting, different, and by cultivating some talent or edge.

  About a month ago I took her and one of her friends to see a movie. Laura had warned me that she would not want me to sit with them since it was perceived as babyish by her classmates for anyone their age to be seen sitting with an adult. (I had already learned a number of years ago that public hugging by an adult is frowned upon for the same reason.) So I dropped them off and poked around a bookstore in the mall across the parking lot until they were done. After we took her friend home, I let her try out her new driving lessons and drive the last mile or so to her house. Though she was giddy with excitement about driving a strange car, she did fine.

  “Hey, Pie,” I say, my nickname for her had been shortened when she was a toddler.

  She mutters a few words into the phone, says, “Catcha later,” and hangs up.

  To my surprise and discomfort, she stands up and gives me a hug. She is as tall as her mother and her body has grown womanly. It no doubt was that way a month ago, but she was wearing a coat when I saw her.

  I lean against the molding of her door and I ask her how it’s going. She says it’s going good. Two years ago, she would have reflected on the question for a while, nodded judiciously, and said things were going well.

  “I hear you’ve been in a little hot water with the ’rents.”

  She flushes. “They told you?”

  “About the cigarettes. Is there more?”

  “Mom thinks I’ve been drinking.” She says this with such vehemence and disdain, I wonder if Mom is right again.

  “They’re just worried about your health.” She snorts and her mouth turns down. “So how are you handling all this campaign stuff?”

  “Better than they are.”

  “What do you mean?’’

  “They’ve been, like, at each other ever since Dad won.” She holds the fingers of each hand like a puppet and moves them back and forth. “They’re like, puh-puh-puh-puh-puh.”

  “And they’ve left you out in the shuffle?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Please! I just wish they would! Mom’s snooping all over the place now. Calling my friends’ parents. Everything.”

  “You can’t have the pediatrician’s daughter smoking, can you?”

  She laughs. “Exactly. Or wearing strange clothes. Or hanging out at the mall. BIG NO-NO’S. Plus she wouldn’t even let me get my ears pierced more than once. She goes, ‘No way!’”

  “They let you pierce them the first time.”

  “That was YEARS ago. This time…I just sort of did it.” I look at her ears. There is a row of four rings in her left ear.

  “They must have loved that.” She nods. “I sneaked cigarettes when I was your age.”

  “You did?”

  “Kents. With the Micronite filter. Six years later I was a regular Marlboro smoker. Six years after that, I tried to quit. Couldn’t. Tried four more times over five years before I finally made it. It’s easy to start and amazingly hard to stop.”

  She looks at her sneakers. I can see I have lost her with this little sermon. I have lumbered over to that dull herd of aged humans who think they know everything. She says nothing.

  “So,” I say. “Anything I can do to help? Buy you some mint chocolate chip in a waffle cone?”

  She smiles but doesn’t look up. “No thanks.”

  “Want to go for a drive?”

  Her eyes get round. “Can I drive again?”

  “Sure.”

  She leaps to her feet. “Oh, cool!”

  I knock on Bobby’s study door. “Come in,” he says dully. He looks up from some papers and sees it’s me. “How’d it go?”

  “I don’t know. I’m no shrink, but I wonder if the problem has something to do with your and Laura’s arguing. When did she start smoking?”

  “Few weeks ago.”

  “When it looked as if you could win the primary?” He nods. “Maybe she’s having tr
ouble because you two are having trouble.”

  “Our dust-ups never seemed to bother her much before.”

  I shrug. “She’s older. Maybe this one seems more serious. After all, if you win, it’ll have a big effect on her life. She’s got all her friends and family here.”

  He rubs his temples with both hands. “Jesus. I don’t know if this is worth it. I really don’t.” He gazes out the window at the bare trees for a while.

  I wish I could give him a good response. In the old days, I would take the opposite position to whatever he was feeling. Kick things around until they got clearer. But I don’t even play devil’s advocate anymore; I am scared someone might listen to me.

  I leave him alone in his office rubbing his temples again. I am light-headed with weariness.

  2

  When I get home, the red light on my answering machine is blinking.

  “This is Gail,” says the familiar voice. “I’ll be at Brendan’s opening tomorrow, and I assume you will be, too. I need to bother you to sign something. If you can’t be there, I’ll fax it to you Monday. Bye.”

  A request, a kind of warning, from my former wife. She’ll be there for Jeannie’s husband’s sculpture exhibit. And why not? She and Jeannie are old friends and associates. I met her through Jeannie in the first place.

  Seeing Gail will be unpleasant. For both of us. A fax would be better. I find that my mouth and throat are very dry. I drink down two tall glasses of iced tea from a pitcher I keep in the refrigerator. I still feel dry when I am done. I ignore it, hoping the feeling will pass. I make a new pitcher, drink some more, and go to bed. I sleep poorly, though a little less poorly than usual.

  Jeannie calls me at mid-morning. “You talked to Bobby?” she asks.

  “I did.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  I tell her, including his annoyance at her swift public resignation. “I think you should talk to him,” I say. “Annie’s acting up. Laura doesn’t want him to run. It’s a mess.”

  “I know. I’ve been talking to them.”

  “He’s thinking seriously about quitting.”

  Even when Jeannie is surprised, she usually pretends she isn’t. Not this time. “What?”

  “Withdrawing.”

  “He can’t.”

  “He wants to, I think.”

  “His political career would be over.”

  “I suppose it depends on how he does it. John Glenn slipped in the bathtub and withdrew. He survived.”

  “He hadn’t already won the nomination. I can’t believe it. Bobby’s never quit anything in his whole life.”

  “He quit college.”

  “He just took time off. I better talk to him, pronto.”

  “To Laura and Annie, too.”

  She mutters something about withdrawing I can’t make out. “I was also calling,” she says, “to make sure you’re coming today. With Gail being there, I figured you’d wiggle out if you could.”

  “I am in the middle of something,” I say, looking at the thick transcript of the Fisher trial I have been reviewing.

  “It’s Sunday. Brendan would be awfully disappointed if you didn’t show up. So would I. So would my mother.”

  “Why do I have the feeling I am being manipulated?”

  “I would never do that,” she says. “And I promise never to do it again.”

  “And you? How are you doing?”

  “Doing,” she says. “See you at one.”

  I look at the stack of court documents, their height and familiar inky scent as reassuring as the fat Sunday paper. More reassuring. No fresh griefs or calamities or obituaries will present themselves in the case Jack Fisher lost. If I am skillful enough when I read the record of his case, I will give Mr. Fisher the chance to present his claim all over again and, this time, perhaps, not lose. And if the worst happens and I should make a mistake, he won’t suffer a new setback—that has happened already—I simply might fail to win. I am paid to do this. I don’t make many mistakes, or at least I haven’t yet, and there are occasions when I find it all very satisfying. How many times do we have the chance to reverse another’s loss? In life there is rarely a court of appeals, and most verdicts are final.

  Absorbing work is often underappreciated. Most activities that cause you to forget your preoccupations, who you are, or what day it is—drugs, alcohol, sex, violent exercise—are transitory or have unpleasant sequels, or both. And even sleep is susceptible to bad dreams or glimpses of a self one would rather forget. But work is safe and predictable and may be pursued for hours every day. No hangover or sore muscles or refractory period where the spirit and flesh cannot cooperate. Sinking into work is a relief, a warm and bracing bath, a vacation from who you are and what you may become. I do it every day, including often on Sundays, and I continue on this Sunday all the way until Jeannie calls me back to point out it is nearly one o’clock.

  I arrive at the park at one thirty. It must be fifty degrees and the sun is shining weakly through a skim of clouds. Some yellow daffodils, white crocuses, and early red tulips are scattered about in the park’s flower beds, and you can smell some of the ancient black topsoil that Ice Age glaciers left behind, soil which has made the base all over this state for the most productive farmland anywhere in the world.

  Fifty people or so are wandering about among Brendan’s enormous sculptures. His work has grown so much in scale over the last few years, he even had to rent a barn outside of town to keep his tools and materials. He takes objects of nature, from rock formations to trees, and recombines them into forms of shaped metal, finished wood, and polished rock, trying to catch and hold the light, using the technological to heighten the effect of the natural. Granting agencies and art galleries have appreciated his work, though at unpredictable intervals, so he works at part-time jobs to make money.

  I am looking at an eight-foot-high, smoothly finished rock-and-steel piece called Menhir and Dolmen #2 and sipping a ginless tonic. Gradually I become aware of someone standing next to me. It is Brendan.

  He grins and shakes my hand with his sinewy, rough, and permanently stained one. Jeannie has prevailed on him to wear something other than his usual work pants, steel-toed boots, and a T-shirt, and he twists his neck in his brown turtleneck uncomfortably, first one way and then another, before he says, “Glad you could come.”

  I gesture at the sculpture in front of us. “Strong work.” I have only one piece of his left—Gail got the rest in our divorce settlement—and I sometimes think about buying another. But neither my office nor my home could hold one of these.

  Brendan, besides being an old acquaintance, always makes me feel more at ease, since his own discomfort with social gatherings is nearly as great as my own. He is, and wishes to be, friendly but apart from with his family, he never seems quite sure about how to go about it. I wish I had the wish to be friendly. Though that is not quite right either, since it is not so much friendliness as the source of wishing itself that has dried up in me. I ask how he made this piece, and soon he is talking about Druidic history and new arc-welding techniques when a few art students start eavesdropping. He grows shy.

  I scan the faces of the crowd, a mixture of brightly dressed community residents and tweedy university faculty. No Gail. The local paper’s entertainment reporter comes up to Brendan to get some comments from him. Poor Brendan takes in and releases a huge breath, and I excuse myself and walk to the next sculpture.

  I wave at Jimmy, Bobby and Laura’s oldest child, home from college for the opening. Jimmy, holding a camcorder up to his eye with one hand, waves vigorously with the other and returns to what he is doing. Unlike the small-boned, dark-haired, dark-eyed Annie, he is redheaded and blue-eyed. He is also a tall, extremely muscular, fun-loving, good-natured kid who likes video games as well as any pursuit that has a ball in it. For him, the twenty-first century cannot come soon en
ough. He is at Northwestern studying for a career—depending on which week he is asked—in drama, computers, filmmaking, political science, environmental engineering, business, or social work.

  Annie, looking pensive and shy, is standing nearby, watching the crowd, shifting her weight awkwardly but with a contained sensuality, as if her mind is telling her one thing and her body urgently another.

  Jeannie awkwardly lowers herself to a bench and slides her cane beneath its legs. Annie sits next to her on one side, while Jeannie’s mother, Alice, is standing on the other. “It’s a chronic disease,” she tells her mother. “It gets worse. That’s what it does.”

  “Shouldn’t you be resting?”

  “That’s why I’m sitting down.”

  “I mean at home.”

  “Home? And miss this?” She turns to Annie. “See what mothers are like? No matter how old you get, the worrying never stops. It’s part of the job description.”

  “Do you worry about Andrew?” her niece asks, looking about for her fourteen-year-old cousin.

  “Andrew who?” Jeannie says. Annie laughs. “Of course I worry about him. All the time.” She turns to her mother. “It’s just not the only thing I do when I think about him or see him.”

  Her mother smiles wanly and absently straightens a flower Jeannie has pinned to her coat. She catches sight of me. “Why, hello, dear! How long have you been standing there?”

  I squeeze her hand, kiss her familiar careworn cheek, and breathe in a faint smell of camphor. “Hello, Alice,” I say. After she was widowed at midlife with two children, she never remarried, and she worked two jobs until Jean and Bob, as she called them, were out of school. Though I spent many hours in her house during my high school years, it took only one meal for me to see that even food was a difficult expense. She insisted on fairness, hard work, and kindness from her children, together with church on Sunday and donations to the poor even at times when other donors felt she should have been the recipient. When I carefully started coming to her house only after I had eaten lunch and dinner, she began to invite me at least once a month for pot roast and was irritated if I took anything less than a heaping portion.