Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

On occasions, she knew, she had flirted that spring as well with Chip Kinnell, the widower father of her fourteen-year-old Brontë scholar, Lindy Kinnell, stretching out their parent-teacher conferences and their visits in the hallways on those mornings he would bring his daughter to school. Kinnell was a rarity in the arbitrage circles in which he traveled: He read fiction that didn’t have spies and submarines in it and could talk with Catherine-abstractedly fingering a purple Hermes tie patterned with, of all things, baby ducks-about the books he was reading now and the books he had read aloud to his wife while she was dying.

At least once, she feared, Charlotte had watched her in a conversation with Chip and grown suspicious. But suspicious of what? She was doing nothing wrong. One afternoon Charlotte had eavesdropped on a discussion she was having with Eric Miller, another English teacher (a younger English teacher; Catherine was almost certain that Eric hadn’t hit thirty yet) at Brearley, and it was clear that her daughter hadn’t understood that sometimes a harmless flirtation only enhances a friendship. Deepens the camaraderie.

It was, however, completely innocuous. All of it. All of them. At least that’s what she told herself.

And she couldn’t help but believe that if Spencer hadn’t become so damn mercurial, she wouldn’t have begun taking small comforts from the attention that Hank Rechter, Chip Kinnell, or Eric Miller paid her. She wouldn’t have paid so much attention to them. She wouldn’t have talked to them about… meat. Yes indeed, Hank and Eric and Chip were carnivores, and they knew what her husband did (everyone knew what her husband did) and they would tease her about it. They would make jokes about souvlaki and shish kebab, and Eric would try to interest her in the Sabrett hot dogs that were sold from a cart outside on the street.

She hoped this coming vacation would offer a meaningful reconciliation with Spencer, though she had to wonder how you could reconcile with somebody who didn’t even know you were apart. Earlier this week she had imagined that with Spencer away from work in Sugar Hill-in a corner of the world that he loved-she would be able to talk to him. Perhaps he would talk to her. Perhaps they would finally work through their… issues. Now, however, she doubted that would happen, at least in quite the way she had supposed. Now she guessed if they talked about anything, it would be because she had chosen this week to see if dread could be transformed into something like relief when she broke the news to him that she simply could not continue any longer as she was-as they were-and she wanted change. Counseling, perhaps, though even counseling was a capitulation, a collapse of her adolescent imaginings of what her marriage would be. And maybe she wanted something more than counseling or change. Maybe she wanted out. Yes, that was it, all right. At the moment, at least, after his appalling behavior when they were packing this morning-the clock, the coffee, his retreat to their cats-she absolutely could not stand what their marriage had become and she wanted out.

Reflexively she picked her tennis racket up off the top of her suitcase so she would have something to do with her hands now that she had stowed her cell phone away, and much to her surprise she found herself volleying in slow motion. She’d played a lot of tennis that summer with her friends who were women, and she realized that she was looking forward to playing now with her brother and-if they were speaking-with Spencer. She was looking forward to playing with men. When she’d been younger she’d been an exceptional player: a high school standout in New York, ranked in Massachusetts when she was at college. She’d learned to play summers as a child at that goofy club her own grandfather had helped found near their country home in Sugar Hill, hitting balls for hours at a time with the different young adults who would parade through there year after year masquerading as tennis pros. Most of them were college students-and, she knew now, mediocre tennis players at best-but to a nine-year-old they seemed the height of glamour and sophistication and talent, and she had only fond memories of her afternoons on the clay courts in her shorts.

Her first summer here with Spencer, when the two of them were working at area restaurants, she’d destroy him on those very courts at least every other day before they’d go to work in the late afternoon, and the fact that he never seemed to mind endeared him to her. He could volley with her to help her keep her stroke in shape, but he rarely took more than a game from her each set they played, and she didn’t believe that he ever once broke her serve.

It was funny: The man could not bear to lose an argument-would not lose an argument-but he was perfectly content losing to her at tennis. To his brother-in-law at golf, to his mother-in-law at badminton. Suddenly, she found this athletic acquiescence of his disturbing. Suddenly, she found all of him physically less attractive than she once had. He seemed wide-faced these days, especially now that his hair had rolled back to the top of his head, and his ears looked like uncooked Chinese dumplings. He was heavier than in college (but weren’t all men?), and sometimes she thought the dark hair that once had fallen across his forehead had migrated to his back, his shoulders, and the insides of his ears. She knew he was fierce at work-spirited with politicians, feisty with the press-and though all too often he brought that fierceness home with him, he never brought it to the tennis court.

A thought came to her: She did things with Spencer that didn’t interest her-such as that vegetable garden-for the sad reason that it was easier to do things she disliked than to bicker. This couldn’t be healthy, and it struck her as yet another indication that her marriage might be over. It was possible, wasn’t it? Maybe that’s what happened to some marriages: They just ran out of energy and forward momentum, and both halves of the equation no longer saw the future as any more promising than the present. This notion made her even more queasy, and she tried to tell herself that she was wrong, that she didn’t really want out, that this was all just a bad patch. All marriages had them. Still, she wondered if Spencer’s motivation for playing tennis was similar to her involvement in his vegetable garden: He did it despite little enthusiasm because playing was easier than arguing.

No, that couldn’t be right. Tennis for Spencer was an element of the world of Sugar Hill, an important component of the spell the place held for him. She knew he associated it with their first summers there together, his introduction to New Hampshire.

Maybe, she decided, focusing now with real effort on the week and a half before her instead of on the bigger problems posed by her marriage, if her brother and sister-in-law were willing to drive back to the club after dinner, she and Spencer could squeeze in an hour of doubles tonight-or, perhaps, they could even get in a game before dinner if she could catch John and Sara before they left the pool for the day. Maybe on vacation Spencer would find it within himself to care about something other than the plight of a bullhook-pricked circus elephant and actually play to win for a change.

She guessed she’d have a better chance of rounding up a match if she asked her brother (with any luck he’d even have a fresh can of balls, a real novelty for the Seton family when they were together in New Hampshire) than if she bounced the idea off Sara, who she presumed was still bleary-eyed by her five-month-old. And so she retrieved the cell phone once more and left a message for her brother with a woman who happened to pick up the phone at the clubhouse. If he got the message before she and Spencer reached Sugar Hill, then they could drive directly to the Contour Club instead of straight home.