Chapter 13

ola had tried to leave Briggs once, three years into her marriage, r not long after Henry was born. Her despair, in those days, was like something heavy laid across her shoulders. She couldn’t breathe with the weight of it. And so, on a rainy morning in early fall, she arose, packed her suitcase and the baby’s diaper bag, and left.

Henry was colicky, and when Lola parked her car at the Kool Breeze Motel he woke up in his car seat and began to wail. She leaned over the seat and talked soothingly to him, stroking his brow and trying to get him to take his pacifier, but he arched his sturdy little back and kicked his sturdy little legs and screamed with rage. He reminded her of Briggs when he did that, red-faced and screaming, leaving her panicked and dazed, with the sensation of being struck repeatedly about the head and shoulders. After a minute she climbed out of the car, went around, and opened the back passenger door, struggling with the child seat restraints until she freed him.

The minute she picked him up, Henry stopped crying. He always did. Her mother said that she spoiled him, that a child needed discipline and routine and not pampering, but Lola ignored Maureen’s advice. When Henry cried, she picked him up. Unlike most of the rest of their social set she rarely left him with nurses or nannies or babysitters, and she never left him with Maureen. At night, when she heard his first few whimpers on the baby monitor, she would rise with relief from the big bed and pad down the long dark hallway to the nursery. She would pick him up and nuzzle her face against his soft neck, losing herself in the smell of curdled milk and talcum powder. Sometimes he didn’t wake at all, falling back into a heavy slumber against her shoulder. She would croon to him softly and then lie down beside him on the narrow nursery bed, watching in wonder as his small chest, illuminated by the soft glow of the nursery light, rose and fell rhythmically.

Briggs, still a relative newlywed, protested. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say Lola had this baby just to get out of sleeping with me,” he’d complain to a roomful of cocktail party guests, and everyone but Lola would shout with laughter.

The baby hiccupped and Lola patted his back softly. It had begun to rain, large heavy drops that splattered the top of the car and the pavement and then began to fall more steadily, like a curtain being slowly drawn. Lola pulled the baby’s hood over his face, and turning, ran toward a door marked Office.

The small lobby was overheated and crowded with shabby furniture. It smelled of cat and unwashed linoleum. A large dirty window framed the parking lot, the rain-soaked street, and the neon lights that were just beginning to come on against the darkening sky. Lola stood for a moment staring out at the curtain of falling rain and wondering if she was doing the right thing. But if she went anywhere else Briggs would find her. He would know to look for her at the Renaissance or the Hilton or the boutique high-rise hotels of Five Points South. He would never think to look for her in a place like this.

A woman with long red fingernails came through a swinging door in the back. “Can I help you?” she said, eyeing Lola and the baby suspiciously. She glanced out the window at the parking lot, where Lola’s expensive foreign car sat gleaming in the rain.

“Yes. I need a room.”

“Thirty-six dollars a day,” the woman said in the hoarse phlegmatic voice of a chain-smoker. Her black hair hugged her head like a helmet. She poked one finger up under the edge and scratched reflectively as she squinted at Henry. “Does that baby sleep the night?” she said.

“Yes,” Lola lied. Henry blinked in the bright lights and peered curiously around the room from beneath the hood of his jacket. His eyes fixed on the surly desk clerk. He smiled suddenly, brilliantly, and two deep dimples appeared in his fat cheeks.

The clerk was not moved. “My other clients don’t wanna hear no baby crying all day and night,” she said, grimacing to show a line of crooked yellow teeth.

Lola didn’t like to think about who her other “clients” might be. The Kool Breeze Motel had the cheap, seedy look of an establishment popular with working girls and hourly guests. “He’s a good baby,” she said, rearranging Henry in her arms. “I’ll need the room for several days. Can I pay you in cash?”

She parked as close to the front of the low squat building as she could and then, picking Henry up and slinging the diaper bag over her shoulder, she made an awkward dash for room number twelve. A narrow porch skirted the front of the building and Lola stopped beneath the overhang in front of the door, fumbling with the key while Henry sucked his pacifier and looked out over her shoulder at the sheeting rain. After a few tries Lola managed to get the door open.

The room was cold and musty and smelled of damp socks. A lumpy double bed covered in a yellow bedspread stood in the middle of the room between two side tables bolted to the wall. A lamp crowded one of the tables and on the other a large metallic box sat beneath a sign that read VIBRA-KING VIBRATING BED! LET US MASSAGE YOUR WORRIES AWAY! 25¢ FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES! Above the bed hung a faded print of an English countryside complete with a thatched-roof cottage and a flock of grazing sheep. Across from the bed was a small closet covered by a grimy curtain, and beyond that was a door leading into a bathroom not much larger than the closet.

Lola stood looking despondently around the room. Henry had grown heavy in her arms and she needed to set him down but she didn’t want him to touch anything. Beyond the plate-glass window, framed on either side by a pair of threadbare drapes, the rain fell steadily. Lola took Henry’s baby blanket out of the diaper bag and spread it across the bed. Then she lay him down on the blanket on his back and piled pillows around him. He couldn’t roll over yet but he was getting close. She gave him one of his soft rattlers and he grasped the toy and shook it, making little spastic jerking movements with his arms and legs. Lola leaned and turned on the table lamp and then sat beside him on the bed looking out at the rain.

She wasn’t even sure how she had found this sad place. The memory of it had come to her in a moment of quiet clarity in the midst of the panic she had felt when she decided once and for all to leave Briggs. An old memory, dreamlike and grainy around the edges, had shimmered into her consciousness and it wasn’t until now, sitting in the lamplit room and looking out at the curtain of falling rain, that she remembered why. She had come here as a child. She had come here with Maureen looking for her father.

Lola pulled her sweater closer about her, determined not to dredge up the ghosts of her past. But there was something about her situation, her flight from a loveless marriage, the damp dimly lit room, the rain drumming against the roof and shimmering like a veil across the neon-lit street, that summoned those ghosts. She couldn’t help herself. It was only natural, she supposed, when she had finally done to Briggs what her father had so often done to Maureen, that they should reappear. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.

Big Jim Rutherford. Even now she smiled when she thought of him. You couldn’t help but like him no matter what his faults. A large handsome man, a politician who charmed people into voting for him by making them laugh, he had lived an unfettered existence right up until the last six months of his life. Then a lingering death, shut up in the big empty house with only morphine and Maureen for company. Lola had been away at school. “Your mother was a saint,” people said at the funeral. “She cared for your father right up until the very end.” They shook their heads reverently at this image of sacrificial love. But Lola had a different image, one born of many years spent as silent witness to her parents’ matrimonial Armageddon, an image of her father dying slowly, inexorably before the silent and unforgiving Maureen, shut away from the genial world he had loved, her prisoner at long last.

I want something better for my son, she thought, stirring herself. She reached and slid her Daytimer out of her purse. She dialed Sara’s number and left a message for her on the answering machine, leaving the number of the motel and asking her not to call the house. “I don’t want Briggs to know where I am,” she said, and hung up. She had left a note on the kitchen table. By now he would have read it.

It was hard to say when she first fell out of love with Briggs Furman. Or whether she had ever really loved him to begin with. They had both attended boarding schools in the mountains of Tennessee, he at an all-boys’ school called Cavendish and she at an all-girls’ school called St. Anne’s. The schools were separated by twenty miles of rolling tree-lined highway, but the boys of Cavendish were often bused to St. Anne’s for dances and social mixers, and the girls were bused to Cavendish for sporting events and dances. A Cavendish– St. Anne’s match was considered very stylish, and many a St. Anne’s girl went off to Ivy League colleges in the east only to settle down after graduation with a Cavendish boy. So it was perhaps inevitable that Lola Rutherford, one of St. Anne’s most popular cheerleaders, and Briggs Furman, Cavendish’s starting quarterback, should meet and eventually date.

Lola liked him well enough at the beginning. He was polite and tall with a sturdy muscular body that would eventually run to fat but that in his youth looked like an image found on a Grecian urn. He was blond and square-jawed with piercing blue eyes. The girls at St. Anne’s were crazy for him. When he came over for mixers they would follow him around in clumps, giggling and blushing and hanging on his every word.

Lola was sitting in the quad in her Mat Maid uniform the day she first spoke with him. The term cheerleader was considered gauche and vulgar, so at St. Anne’s they were called Mat Maids. The uniforms and the activities were the same but the titles were different, as befitted a twenty-six-thousand-dollar-a-year boarding school. The Mat Maids were chosen for their popularity and their beauty of face and perfection of figure, and Lola had already served on the squad for two years on that bright fall day.

He was crossing the quad in front of a phalanx of giggling girls, walking with that peculiar swagger known only to rock stars and high school quarterbacks. Lola was sitting on the steps of Baylor Hall, her head buried in a copy of Wordsworth. They were ten feet from each other when Briggs stopped his admiring horde, and, throwing up one hand in greeting to Lola, said, “There’s my girl.”

Lola, still caught up in daffodils fluttering in the breeze, lifted her face, smiled dreamily, then went back to reading.

A small ripple went through the group of girls. Briggs squared his shoulders and tried again. “I thought Mat Maids only read in class,” he said. “Never out of class.”

A nervous twitter went through his fan club. Lola raised her face again and fixed him with a blank stare. Her eyes were wide and innocent as a kitten’s. “Do I know you?” she asked sweetly.

It was silly, she realized later. Of course she knew him. He had dated half the Mat Maids and most of the tennis team. But she had been caught up in Wordsworth, her mind floating free as a wandering cloud, and she had not been able to focus on the boy standing in front of her.

The humiliation he suffered at her hands seemed to awaken in Briggs the first faint stirrings of love. A girl had never treated him that way before. He had always been the sun, and they had been the planets circling endlessly in the glow of his magnificence. But this girl showed little aptitude for circling. She seemed made for straight lines and geometric angles. He called that night and asked her out.

They dated for several months before Maureen found out. By then Lola had already decided to break it off with him. She had decided one night after dinner, when they had ridden the bus together into town to see a movie and had stopped by a local restaurant for a meal. They were sitting at a booth in a brightly lit hamburger joint and all around them was the bustle and banter of the town kids as they greeted one another loudly and hopped from booth to booth. “Stairway to Heaven” played in the background. Lola was looking into Briggs’s handsome face and trying to block out the noise and confusion around her, trying to concentrate on what he was saying when it suddenly occurred to her that she was bored. Desperately, terminally bored. She was more interested in what was going on in the booths around her than she was in listening to what he had to say. She thought, All he ever talks about is himself. I could never love someone like him.

But when Maureen drove up for Parents’ Day she fell immediately for the charming and handsome Briggs. She was like one of his little giggling groupies, hanging on his every word, blushing when his blue eyes rested too long on her. Between the two of them, Lola could hardly get a word in, sitting quietly in the backseat of the car or at the dinner table while they gossiped about people they knew or droned on endlessly about fashion and style and exotic locales. By the time she left, Maureen was as infatuated as a starstruck schoolgirl and Lola decided it would be easier to just go along with it all. She would break up with him over summer vacation.

But Maureen and Briggs’s mother had different plans. They got together for day trips and cocktails several times before school was out, and each planned a series of summer “visits” for “the children” complete with cotillions, ice-cream parties, and barbecues. Lola saw more of Briggs that summer than she had all school year. She decided to wait and break up with him in the fall, once they returned to boarding school. But then his mother got sick, and by the time she died the following summer, Lola had already fallen into the inertia of their relationship. Besides, she couldn’t break up with a boy whose mother had just died.

By senior year they were like an old married couple that has learned to ignore each other’s faults in exchange for the comfort and stability that comes with custom and routine. Lola felt a certain faint affection for him, although she didn’t think it was love. He was from the same social class and upbringing as she was, they were both Episcopalian, they shared many of the same friends, and they knew many of the same people.

Many couples she knew had married and started families with less affection and compatibility between them than she and Briggs shared. Her own parents had done it. And although their marriage hadn’t turned out well, it had endured long past the impetuous marriages her schoolmates’ parents seemed to jump in and out of every six or seven years. Some of her friends had two and three sets of stepparents. The fact that someone would leave a marriage just because they weren’t happy seemed alien to Lola. It seemed cowardly. Her own parents had done battle for nearly thirty years and neither one had flinched or weakened until the very end.

Her own parents had survived a thirty-year marriage and yet here she was turning tail and running after only three years.

Lola got up and went into the bathroom to bathe her face with a wet washcloth. Henry fretted the moment she disappeared, turning his eyes to follow her, but when she came back he brightened and thrust his arms and legs out like a turtle rolled on its back. She leaned over and nuzzled his neck until he giggled and grasped her hair with his fat fists. After a moment she rolled him over on his stomach, patting his back gently as he practiced lifting himself with his arms.

She wasn’t leaving Briggs because she expected to find happiness anywhere else. She had given up on happiness the day Lonnie Lumpkin was wheeled out of her life. She did not expect to find it again. What she wanted was a quiet simple life, a cottage on the beach where she and Henry could spend their days basking in the sun and swimming in the sea. Briggs’s loud, exuberant ways, his fierce temper, and his constant craving for her wore her out. He was, at the root of it all, an unhappy man. And he wanted everyone around him to share his unhappiness.

The phone rang shrilly, startling her out of her reverie. She leaned over and picked it up, putting one hand on Henry’s back to keep him from rolling off the bed. “Sara,” she said. “Thank God.”

“Why are you doing this?” Briggs asked in a heavy voice.

She was quiet for a moment listening to the sound of the rain. “How did you find me?”

“Your mother.”

Of course. Maureen had known where to look with an instinct born of thirty years of looking for her own wayward husband. Lola had been foolish to come here; she saw that now.

“Why are you doing this?” Briggs repeated and his voice, which had been flat and expressionless, rose slightly in pitch. “Didn’t I give you everything a woman could possibly want?”

“Those are just things.”

“Things!” he said harshly. “Just things!”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now. I need time to think.”

“I loved you through all of that …”

“I know. I know.”

“You bitch.”

“Don’t.”

“Through all that bullshit with that fucking house painter. Do you know how humiliating that was for me? Do you know how it felt knowing everyone was laughing at me?”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You cunt.”

“I wish you didn’t love me. Then it wouldn’t be so hard.” She could hear him breathing. Outside the window the rain had subsided. Clouds of mist swirled around the streetlamps.

“There better not be anybody else,” he said in a quiet voice.

“There’s no one else.”

“It better not be that fucking yard boy.”

“Hush. It’s no one.”

“Because if it is, I’ll kill him.”

She knew he would. He was capable of murder. She had learned by now to handle his rages. She had learned to speak quietly, to show no fear. “It’s me,” she said soothingly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s me. I need a different life. I need a simple life. I don’t need the money. I don’t want it. You can have it.”

There was a humming sound on the line like a phone left off the hook. When he spoke his voice was bitter. “You don’t want the money? Have you ever lived without it, you spoiled bitch?”

“No, but I …”

“What?”

“I can get a job.”

He laughed. “You? Get a job? Doing what?”

“I can live with my mother.”

“No,” he said. “You can’t. She won’t support you. She’ll put you out.”

Her face, in the mirror, turned pale. She knew he was right. Her mother wouldn’t support her in any divorce action. She’d be furious with Lola for the scandal, for the airing in public of family dirty linen. She’d take Briggs’s side like she’d always done, like she’d taken the side of the masochistic Charlotte Hampton all those years ago. Once a Scottie, always a Scottie. “All I want is a quiet life,” Lola said. The dimly lit room, which before had seemed only dirty and threadbare, now surrounded her like something sinister. She could feel it closing over her like the lid of a box. “All I want is my son,” she said.

“Your son.” And then, as if he had finally realized what he needed to say to break her, he added harshly, “My son. And don’t think I’ll just let you walk out of my life with him. If you go, he stays. You may not prize money but I have a lot of it, and without your mother’s support you have nothing. And in case you don’t know, Lola, it’s the partner with the most money who winds up with the best deal in a custody arrangement.”

She began to cry softly. Henry tried to turn his head to see her, bobbing up and down on his elbows. He put his face down on the blanket and began to fret. Lola sobbed into one hand and patted him with the other. Now that she was crying, Briggs’s anger seemed to have dissipated.

“Come home,” he said in a weary voice.

“No.”

“Come home,” he said. “Don’t make me come get you.”