I spent the rest of the morning putting the furniture in the living room back in its original position but realized while doing this that I liked how the furniture had been rearranged—and felt a weird pang of nostalgia as I pushed the couches and tables and chairs around. And the carpet—though still discolored—was spotless: the footprints stamped in ash were no longer evident, and even though the wide expanse of beige Berber bordering on green shag was bothersome, the room was no longer open to interpretation. I then went outside to the field and checked on the blackened wet patch; to my relief, it had almost dried up, and the hole was beginning to refill itself, and as I looked out over the acres of field leading out to the dark bank of woods, taking in deep breaths of the fresh autumn air, I briefly felt that maybe Jayne was right, that this was a meadow and not a place where the dead reside. Next I went upstairs to look at the scratches on Robby’s door, and when I knelt down and ran my hand over the grooves I’d seen on Halloween I could detect no change. Again: relief. I felt now as if the bad news Kimball had brought yesterday was being balanced out. The afternoon was long and quiet and uneventful. I watched football games, and Aimee Light still hadn’t called me back.
At six o’clock Jayne dressed me in a pair of black Paul Smith slacks and a gray Gucci turtleneck and Prada loafers—chic yet conservative and imminently presentable. While she took the next hour to pull herself together I went downstairs to greet Wendy, the girl who was going to watch over the kids tonight since Marta had Sundays off. Wendy was a not unattractive student from the college, whose parents Jayne knew and who also came highly recommended by all the mothers in the neighborhood. Jayne had initially resisted calling Wendy since we were only going next door for a few hours and could simply bring the kids with us, but Mitchell Allen mentioned something about Ashton’s ear infection and subtly vetoed our plan. And considering what Kimball had told me yesterday, I was grateful to have someone in the house to look after the kids. While waiting for Jayne I downloaded onto the computer the pictures she’d taken on Halloween: Robby and Ashton, both sullen and sweaty, already too old for the holiday; Sarah looking like a child prostitute. An image of the cream-colored 450 SL initially caught my interest, but it no longer seemed fixed with meaning—it was simply someone’s car and nothing more. I realized this after uselessly trying to enlarge the photo and locate the license plate, but it had been washed out in the glare of the street lamps and, as with everything else that Sunday, didn’t seem to matter much. I skipped any shots that I was in, but the photos that bothered me most weren’t the ones of me looking frightened and blitzed but those of Mitchell Allen and Jayne posing in front of the Larsons’ house on Bridge Street, Mitchell’s arm wrapped protectively around Jayne’s waist, his lips raised in a mock leer. That seemed far more worrisome than the small and innocent car I’d briefly become so afraid of on Halloween night and now no longer was.
I had actually gone to Camden with Mitchell Allen but barely knew him there, even though the school was a tiny and incestuous place. What had surprised me to discover was not so much that Mitchell Allen was now living next door to Jayne, but rather that he was married and had fathered two children: Ashton, who because of their close proximity was Robby’s default best friend, and Zoe, who was a year younger than Sarah. Given what little I knew about Mitchell at Camden I had assumed he was bisexual if not, in fact, totally g*y. But back then, before AIDS hit, everyone was basically screwing everybody else during that brief, sexually freewheeling historical moment. After we graduated and the eighties passed, it was not unusual for the “lesbians” I’d known during that era to have married and become parents, and the same held true for many of the Camden men whose sexual identities remained hazy and blurred during their four years in New Hampshire. It was considered cool at Camden to be bisexual—or at least to be perceived as bisexual—and the student body not only was inordinately tolerant of its own sweeping pansexuality but actively encouraged it. Most guys shrugged off the occasional one-night stand with another male and some even wore it as a badge; Camden girls thought it was hot, and the Camden boys considered you mysterious and dangerous, so it opened doors and increased your desirability level and made you feel, within the context of everything, that you were more of an artist, which was really what we all strove for—to let our peers know that there were no boundaries, that everything was acceptable, that transgression was legitimate. And after getting over my initial surprise (because my only memories of Mitchell were composed of rumors that he’d initiated a lengthy affair with Paul Denton, another classmate of ours) I recalled a girl named Candice whom he hooked up with during his last couple of terms, before he began graduate school at Columbia, where he met Nadine on the steps of Low Library, a replica of the ditsy, hot blonde Mitchell had dated as an undergrad. When we were first reacquainted this summer at a neighborhood barbecue in Horatio Park he pretended to mistake me for Jay McInerney, a lame joke that Mitch was so enamored of that he repeated it three more times to other couples he introduced me to, but since these weren’t readers they failed to “get it,” causing Mitchell to realize that he didn’t have an audience. Neither one of us was particularly interested in getting to know each other better or to reminisce about Camden and our respective raunchy pasts, even for the sake of our sons (the improbable best friends). For his part, Mitchell was simply too enthralled by Jayne to make any attempt at male bonding. We were older now and living in a different world, and Mitchell let Jayne’s presence reduce him to that peculiar desperation frequently seen in men who fall into close contact with a movie star. The cool, uncaring facade Mitchell played out in Camden—the exquisite vagueness, the stab at bohemia, the Christmas in Nicaragua, the Buzzcocks T-shirt, the punch he spiked with MDA, the screwing around and the moving away—all of that had been zapped out of him. This was due, of course, in part to age, but this erasure was also connected to his immersion in suburbia (plenty of men my age in Manhattan still retained some semblance of their youthful edge). The handsome and edgy sexual adventurer was replaced by a dorky guy nearing forty with a slavish devotion to my wife. Nadine noticed this too and kept a tight rein on Mitchell whenever school activities or the occasional dinner party brought the four of us together, and I didn’t really care; I had my own proclivities, and I knew that Jayne was so not interested. It was the inevitable outcome of being early-middle-aged and bored and having a beautiful wife. But when Nadine flirted shamelessly with me—that was when the tiredness and the cliché of suburbia would dampen whatever enthusiasm I had for my new life as a man trying to form himself into the responsible adult he probably would never become.