I'd Give Anything(5)
I slapped my hands down on the table. “Our daughter is fifteen years old.”
Harris winced, as if I’d hit him instead of the table.
“I know,” he said.
“Oh God, she might even know this girl.”
“Ginny.”
“Please tell me she doesn’t go to Lucretia Mott. Just tell me that.”
“Jesus, of course not. You think I would do that?”
“Do what, Harris? What thing did you do with this girl that you would, of course, never have done were she a student at our daughter’s school?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing with this girl.”
“Could you manage to keep the regret out of your tone when you say that? Could you do me that courtesy?”
“Nothing happened, Ginny.”
“Well, since you were fired, Harris, sacked, kicked to the curb, clearly something happened.”
“You don’t have to be mean, you know,” said Harris.
Because I couldn’t trust my newly untrustworthy hands not to grab him by the throat, I got up from my chair and took a walk around the yard.
It was November. Everything was cut back, tied up, put away, spent. The Adirondack chairs stacked in the storage shed with the hanging pots and their wrought-iron hooks. The gazebo bird feeder we’d bought at an Amish store in Lancaster and the two blue blown-glass teardrop hummingbird feeders, all carefully wrapped and stowed in the basement. Little marble birdbath empty of water. Bushes and trees and planters empty of blooms. But under the limestone-colored sky, there was grace in my sleeping garden. Harmony. Quietude. I tried to let it embrace me the way it sometimes did in the early mornings when I sat out there with my coffee and my dogs and watched the apricot light fill the tree branches. Now, peace didn’t really come, but something else did—or began to—shyly sending out a few delicate tendrils: tenderness, not so much for my husband as for the garden, the unsuspecting burlap-covered rose plants and dormant flower beds, the fence with its hopeful row of shiny copper fence post caps, the whole life we’d made. The twin tornadoes that had earlier begun to rage inside my head and stomach slowed their writhing.
I walked back to the table where Harris sat, his hands fidgeting, his big shoulders bowed, his square jaw shifting in the manner of a child who is trying not to cry. I sat down.
“It wasn’t an affair,” he said, without looking up. “I wouldn’t do that, especially not with a woman of that age.”
“Just tell me,” I said.
“I let it get too personal. I won’t deny that. I got overly invested I guess you could say. And I knew how it could look to other people if they found out. So I tried to keep that from happening. I did some very stupid things.”
“Just,” I said.
I stopped to take a deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth, a cleansing breath I guess it was, although nothing really felt cleaner afterward.
“Tell me.”
We were a full thirty minutes into—which turned out to be approximately two-thirds of the way through—the conversation that followed before I understood that Harris had not gotten fired because of the thing (the nothing) that had happened with Cressida Wall, eighteen years old. Instead, his boss, Paul Jones, had fired him because of the “very stupid things” he had done to try to hide the nothing that had happened with Cressida, to try to keep the meddling and misconstruing Dale Pinckney from reporting the momentary hand-squeeze he had witnessed in the Vedge Table, a chase you’d think Harris might have cut to more quickly, particularly since the “very stupid things” were not only stupid but also, possibly, illegal. But for the first thirty minutes, all I heard about was Cressida.
He said this:
“To be honest, I forget Cressida’s age most of the time, and maybe that’s irresponsible, but, in my own defense, I’m not the only one in the office that happens to. I couldn’t be. Cressida is more mature and self-possessed than women twice her age. And smart, insightful. She would start talking, and you’d just think, ‘Wow, that makes so much sense.’ Not, ‘That makes so much sense for a high school student,’ but for anyone. And her face; it has adult bone structure, undeniably adult. And her eyes. Her eyes, too.”
And this:
“HR read our emails, as part of their investigation. They seemed surprised that I hadn’t deleted them, but why should I have? They’re mine. And, hell, you can read the emails, Ginny. There’s nothing inappropriate, not a single sentence that crosses a line. I’ll grant that the sheer number looks bad. We sent each other a lot of emails, sometimes in the middle of the night, as Paul pointed out. But they were completely innocent. And it wasn’t like I was flooding her inbox. She answered all of them. Every single one. You can check.”
And also, this:
“Paul tried to paint it as if I’d pursued her, but I didn’t. If anything, she chose me.”
Half an hour of this: my trying to ignore the impossible-to-ignore notes of pride in his voice, Harris’s enthusiasm for the girl leaking out from the tight container I tried to make hold our conversation. Whenever I saw an opening, I mentally jumped in with edits to his story, replacing words, adding modifiers or dependent clauses, the grammar of ambiguity: “innocent” became “professional,” “investigation” became “routine inquiry,” “wrote each other a lot of emails” became “corresponded fairly frequently,” “in the middle of the night” became “after typical business hours.”