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  Close to Home

  Barbara Hall

  FOR BOB

  Prologue

  THE FIRST TIME Lydia ever saw her husband, she made fun of him.

  The place was Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She was reclining on a towel, her elbows digging into the warm sand, her face turned like a flower toward the sunlight. Her friend Camille lay in a similar pose beside her. They were twenty-eight. They were beautiful. The world was theirs to ridicule.

  Lydia watched the middle-aged women lumbering past, stuffed into violently floral swimsuits, their pink thighs rubbing together, hair pulled back or held in place by mastic sprays. Some were accompanied by husbands, their spreading bellies and bald knees separated by baggy plaid trunks. The men always glanced at Lydia and Camille, then looked quickly to the ground, kicking at seashells.

  “Shoot me now,” Camille said, watching them.

  “That won’t ever happen to us,” Lydia reassured her. It had become Lydia’s role over the years to reassure Camille. It was a pointless exercise, as Camille’s self-esteem was perfectly intact. But this was the game they had played since high school. Camille criticized herself, pointing out some phantom imperfection, and Lydia told her how silly she was and extolled her virtues. Lately she was starting to grow tired of this routine. She felt they were too old for it, but it was too late to change. They were stuck.

  Many of the things in Lydia’s life felt stuck. It was as if her story had already been written, and all that remained to be played out was the slow, unsurprising resolution, the moral. She wasn’t quite sure what the moral was, but she supposed that would be the point of the next fifty years.

  Lydia knew it was ridiculous to feel old at twenty-eight, but she did, and in an effort to fight off that feeling, she mouthed reassurances. She didn’t know how to tell Camille that the fat women with the distracted husbands filled her with a cold terror. She could see herself in them, bloated and resigned. She could see Ham, the man she intended to marry in less than three months, glancing at beautiful girls on the beach, then looking away, ashamed of his desire.

  “I mean, for one thing,” Lydia said, “we can afford liposuction.”

  “You can afford it, with Ham’s money. Me, I’ll probably marry some amateur musician or a government lawyer or something.”

  “No, come on,” Lydia said, her reassurance now taking on a halfhearted tone. “You’ll marry anybody you want to.”

  Camille sighed and stared at the Atlantic Ocean as if she were in the market to buy and it wasn’t quite big enough. That very look was the thing that made Lydia certain Camille would get what she wanted.

  Even sitting there on the beach, Lydia saw the way a man’s eyes would flit over her and land hard on Camille, sensing her desire to be pleased. Camille ignored them, of course. She was so accustomed to attention that it bounced off her, as if she hadn’t the ability to absorb any more.

  Lydia watched her friend, envying her unique talents, one of which was a capacity for sitting in direct sunlight without sweating. She seemed impervious to the elements. The wind left her hair alone and even the insects kept their distance.

  “Oh, look,” Camille said, sitting up suddenly, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What have we here?”

  She also possessed an ability to spot men from great distances. This, Lydia suspected, was the secret to her indifference. By the time a man noticed her, she had already thoroughly reviewed and rejected him.

  “Look where?” Lydia asked, squinting.

  Camille nodded at two figures moving along the shoreline. Lydia could barely make them out.

  “Not bad,” Camille said, watching their approach with intense concentration. “Still warm.” And, finally, as they got closer, “Never mind. Chromosome damage. Bad gene pool.”

  “What makes you think so?” Lydia laughed, though she felt uneasy about it. Camille had always been hard on people, and her strict standards made Lydia feel that her own ability to judge character was radically inferior. The fact that Lydia recognized a more generous instinct in herself seemed a weakness. It gave her the sense that she was missing the point.

  “One’s got a fake leg,” Camille said, still scrutinizing them as they approached.

  Now they were in focus, and Lydia could see that one of the men walked with a slight limp. His left leg ended at the knee where a piece of flesh-toned plastic took over. She was ashamed of how unappetizing she found it, yet she stared as the two men staked out a spot in the sand. She was fascinated and repelled, as he detached his prosthetic and set it carefully aside like a radio or a thermos, an everyday piece of beach equipment.

  “He could have lost it in an accident,” she suggested.

  “Worse. Farm labor.” Seeing Lydia’s skeptical frown, Camille said, “So how many rich people do you know with prosthetics?”

  “He could have lost it in a skydiving accident. Or racing in Monte Carlo.”

  “You optimist,” Camille said. She lit a cigarette, letting her eyes comb the sand again.

  Camille was looking for an affair. Not for herself but for Lydia. She was thoroughly convinced that Lydia needed to commit some radical deed before she went down the aisle with Hamilton Crider. “You’re marrying your high school sweetheart, for God’s sake,” Camille was constantly saying. “You’re morally obligated to do something bad.”

  Actually, in high school, Lydia and Ham had only been flirtatious and cruel to each other. Their love, in those days, was like any young love: afraid of itself, resentful of its obligations, looking for an escape route. It was much later, after she had graduated from college and dropped out of law school, that she and Ham reunited with the degree of maturity needed to pursue anything resembling a relationship. Now she felt comfortable with him. She felt it was something that was meant to happen. She didn’t even mind the disappointing sex. That seemed to be a part of the bargain.

  “The thing you always have to remember,” Camille had told her when she first got engaged, “is that you’re doing this to make your parents happy. Marrying Ham is your way of apologizing.”

  “For what?”

  “Dropping out of law school.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’ve loved Ham forever.” She made the statement without emotion. She declared it on a daily basis, like a catechism.

  There was much to admire in Ham. He was smart but not arrogant, Harvard educated but humble about it. He rarely told anecdotes, but when he did they were witty and succinct. He had money but disguised it well. He was an investment banker, but he never talked about work. He read. He cried at old movies and he loved going to restaurants and throwing dinner parties. He liked dogs. He wanted children. The list went on and on.

  So why did certain aspects of his personality nag at Lydia like food caught between her teeth? The way he called people by their first names, immediately after meeting them. The way he had to qualify every moment together, constantly rating their experiences, as if their lives together were some sort of Zagat guide.

  Most troubling, however, was his sense of social responsibility. He worried about the underprivileged, but he seemed to ride his compassion like some noble carriage. She always felt that lurking somewhere in his empathy was a degree of superiority. All those “poor” people were consigned to an existence he knew he’d never have to endure. His pity had a generic quality that troubled her.

  Once she had made the mistake of voicing some of these concerns to Camille. She really had only wanted to sound out her theories, but Camille had taken it a little more seriously.
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  “Honey, you are looking for demons. Leave that poor man alone and go have yourself an affair. Get it out of your system.”

  Lydia was not particularly interested in having an affair—the thought of all that subterfuge exhausted her. But she did recognize a need to get away. There was so much to escape, she didn’t know where to begin. She wanted to escape the scrutiny of her parents, who were always present, even though they lived in Springfield, Virginia, and she was safely ensconced inside an Upper Northwest townhouse with three other law school dropouts. She wanted to escape D.C. altogether, with its pathetic attempts at grandiosity (did the Kennedy Center really fool anybody?), and its pandering to tourists with gentrified little pockets of hipness, such as Adams Morgan, an area whose idea of being multicultural meant putting an Ethiopian restaurant next to a tapas bar. One ethnic restaurant after another, all full of white Georgetown students.

  Lydia hated the traffic and the distant sound of gunshots from the other side of the Hill and the gray-suited lawyers bumping up against each other in the metro. She hated the self-conscious secondhand-book stores with the snarly attendants, professional students with unfinished novels in their backpacks, and the chatter of activists on the street—save this animal, that Slavic country, the other endangered root vegetable. She hated the legislative assistants spouting off their narrow political philosophy in crowded Irish bars. She disliked knowing that these uninspired, pimply youth would be the leaders of tomorrow. She hated the busking at Dupont Circle, the middle-class kids with dreadlocks moaning about conditions in countries they’d never even glimpsed. D.C. was the land of safe rebellion. Sitting right there under the Supreme Court, everyone with an opinion felt free to air it with a tune, a shout, or a flyer.

  Lydia longed for stillness, quiet streets, a little taste of apathy. People who still thought that the rain was clean and Democracy worked and God was coming. She thought constantly of a place where people might actually have an interest in living rather than exhibiting their lives.

  There were few people she could air such complaints to. Ham, for all his calculated compassion, had a low threshold of boredom when it came to her soul-searching. Her parents would be appalled at the mention of her dissatisfaction. Her parents didn’t just live in Fairfax County. They were the Hunts of Fairfax County. Every other library, museum, or hospital ward was named after one of Lydia’s relatives. The notion of ever leaving the place had never occurred to any generation of Hunts. Therefore, the fact that it was occurring to Lydia was something she needed to keep to herself. Her parents were still convinced that Lydia would eventually go back to finish off her law degree at UVA and abandon her current studies toward teacher certification at Georgetown. Her mother referred to Lydia’s sudden desire to teach as her “little fit.” Secretly she worried that her mother might be right about that. But getting married was no fit. It was an act of stone-cold sanity. It felt inescapable and final, like the right thing to do.

  The one-legged man and his friend spread their towels a few feet from Lydia and Camille, a location too close to the water. The tide was coming in, and in no time they would be scrambling for higher ground. They didn’t seem to care.

  Lydia stared at the men as they settled down. No one else was looking at them, but she found it hard to stop. She couldn’t tear her gaze away. She wanted to defend them.

  “Yeah, okay,” Lydia admitted. “That one lost his leg to farm equipment. The other one’s body makes up for it, though.”

  “That’s the spirit, lusting after farmhands. It’s very D. H. Lawrence. But let’s not take this thing too far, Lydia,” Camille said.

  The one with the fake leg looked like a carnival worker. Thin and reedy, his ribs pushing against the skin as if they were trying to escape. His hair was an ash blond, his skin so white it looked bleached, taking on the pale blue tint of his veins. He had a wispy mustache and smoked constantly, staring at each woman as she walked past. He stared at them all—thin, fat, young, and old. He seemed to find some merit in all of them.

  His friend, Lydia thought, was different. His friend was dark. Not just his hair, not just his skin but his whole persona. The darkness ran deep; it connected to his soul. He seemed dominated by a sense of detachment, oblivious to his immediate surroundings. He did not look at the women. He stared at the horizon, as if picturing something beyond it, like heaven or Europe.

  It was Camille who spoke to them first.

  “You’re in my sun,” she said.

  The dark one turned to look at her. Lydia stared at him. His face is a cloud of doom and worry, she thought. She had never seen anyone whose concern seemed so intense, whose ruminations seemed in complete control of him. He looked young, barely into his thirties. What could this man already be burdened with? she wondered.

  “Your buddy,” Camille said, pointing her cigarette at the carnival worker. “He’s casting a shadow on my shins.”

  The reedy friend looked over his shoulder and grinned, revealing gapped teeth turned sepia from nicotine. “I reckon somebody’ll have to move the sun, then.”

  “Kyle, slide over an inch,” the dark one suggested.

  “Shit, no. Women have took over enough of the world. They can’t have my patch of sand.”

  Camille gave Lydia an eye roll of the told-you-so variety. Lydia smiled and wondered why her heart felt suddenly fat, incapable of getting enough blood to her brain.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Camille asked.

  “Danny,” the dark one answered. “What’s yours?”

  Camille only smiled and said, “Y’all staying here?”

  She affected a thick accent and jerked her head toward the Myrtle Beach Hilton behind them. She assumed that they must have wandered up the beach from the cheaper hotels on the strand.

  Lydia felt embarrassed now. Even though she was just as critical as Camille and enjoyed a nice, confidential laugh at someone else’s expense, she didn’t enjoy humiliating people. And she especially did not enjoy humiliating this man. His worried eyes were starting to get to her, and the way he stared curiously at Camille, his head slightly cocked, as if he could not fathom her motives.

  “As a matter of fact, we are,” Danny said.

  “Oh? Well, let me commend you. The grounds are absolutely lovely,” Camille said.

  Lydia shot to her feet, brushing sand off her legs. She felt hot with embarrassment, though Danny did not seem annoyed.

  Lydia said, “I’ve had enough sun.”

  “See what you’ve done? You’ve run my friend away,” Camille said.

  “And what would it take to get you to go with her?” Danny asked. It happened so quickly, so smoothly. Camille was caught off guard. She opened her mouth and finally succumbed to a cackling laugh.

  Lydia gathered up her towel and Danny watched her with unapologetic curiosity. The wind whipped up, blowing sand from her towel in his direction. He rubbed his eyes, then looked at her again. She returned his stare but didn’t speak. Under his scrutiny, she found she had nothing to say.

  The next day Camille was stricken with a serious case of sun poisoning. Her body swelled until she resembled a large pink cushion. She lay in a dark room with cold washcloths on her face, trying to preserve what was left of her complexion.

  “Sun damage,” she moaned. “I can feel the wrinkles spreading like fire across my forehead. I am going to look like Ronald Reagan when I leave here.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Lydia said irritably. She had been cooped up in the room with Camille too long. She had lost the desire to reassure her.

  “You’ll have to carry on without me. Go, find the groundskeeper. Tell him it’s your last chance for happiness or something.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy on the beach.”

  “He’s not a groundskeeper,” Lydia said, embarrassed by her desire to defend him. “I’m not going to see him again, Camille. I just want to go home.”

  But they didn’t go home. They stayed, and she did see Danny again. First
in the lobby of the hotel, then later in the bar, then by the pool where he complimented her bathing suit and bought her a drink with a parasol in it.

  His one-legged companion, Kyle, who turned out not to be a carnival worker but a former appliance salesman living on disability, had mercifully found a new set of friends, some generous drinkers on a printers’ convention. This left Lydia and Danny alone most of the day, discussing in casual detail their backgrounds and plans for the future. No messy analysis of families or neurosis or frustrated ambitions. Just talk. Unemotional history. Danny was from Virginia, too. He had acquired an economics degree from James Madison University and was working at a commercial contracting firm, only months away from taking the reins from the founder. He lived in a small town in the southwestern part of the state, famous for nothing but the fact that it sat on one of the largest natural deposits of uranium ore in the country.

  “About once every five years some company tries to buy off the land and mine it, but the environmentalists get on their high horse and some actors get involved and it goes away. Sissy Spacek came to town one year. You’d think she was a Kennedy. Everybody in town came to the rally, and half of them had no idea what uranium was.”

  Lydia laughed, trying to picture a small town set aflutter by the arrival of an actress. In D.C., any day of the week, you could bump into the people who were manipulating the legislation of the most powerful country in the world. She didn’t tell him that, though. She was afraid it would sound belittling.

  They disclosed their likes and dislikes, and not surprisingly, there wasn’t a great deal of overlap. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like theater; it was that he’d never seen any. And it wasn’t a matter of not caring for Turgenev; he didn’t know who he was. Lydia’s stomach did a flip and she almost sneered, but when she tried to explain who Turgenev was she found she couldn’t, beyond the fact that he was a Russian writer. She’d read him, she was sure, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what he believed or why he was significant.