No amount of paper squid ink could make it easier to take.
In the following weeks, I mowed the lawn, and painted Davy's room, and recaulked the tub—chores Danny always did but that, with him out of town, fell to me. I listened to Linda's updates on women's rights: the Supreme Court ruled women couldn't be refused jobs solely because they had small children unless fathers of small children were also refused jobs; the Women's Caucus sued every law school in the country for discrimination against women; a Pittsburgh paper was ordered to end the sex segregation of its help wanted ads. I nodded sympathetically as Kath and Linda worried over the sit-in at Stanford Hospital, concerned for Lee's and Jeff's safety should it turn violent. I drove for Maggie's field trip to a park where the class grubbed in the stream, where I talked with other moms about anything but writing while the children ate a picnic lunch and had a water-balloon fight on a playground rich with puddles they couldn't resist. I took Maggie and Davy to the library, despairing of all the books on the shelves—so many books that surely there was no more room for mine.
Nights, I stayed up late reading, and woke early and tired, and started the whole routine again. And the rejections just kept coming: “I'm sorry to say . . .” “. . . not quite right . . .” “I'm sure another editor will . . .” I saw what Fred meant by “lovely,” though, when less flattering responses came in: “. . . the more I read, the less enchanted I became.”
DANNY GOT HOME from his stint in Canada just in time for us to catch the plane for Kauai that May, for a three-day party paid for by the company, with all the employees who'd been in Canada and their wives. He'd arrived home late that morning, had lunch with Mags and Davy, and repacked his bag while I dropped Davy at Linda's and walked Maggie back to school. We'd barely even spoken ourselves before we boarded the plane, which cast a certain spell of unreality over the whole trip.
“Hawaii, Danny, can you believe it?” I said as he hoisted our hanging bag into the overhead bin and took the seat next to mine, on the aisle.
“You gave Linda the hotel number?” he asked. “And Mags has Allo blanket and Davy has Mutt?”
“They think a three-day sleepover is as big an adventure as going to Hawaii,” I said as the stewardess started the spiel about all the things you really don't want to hear when you and your husband are on a plane while your children are at home, ready to be orphaned: oxygen masks, flotation devices, “in the event of a crash.”
“I miss them already,” Danny said. “I wish we were staying home.”
I'd known he would feel this way the minute he saw the children and had to leave them again. I'd offered to skip the trip in a half dozen phone conversations, but he always said he didn't want to disappoint Bob or Andy. I wondered now if that was the problem, or if
it was just me he didn't want to disappoint.
He's tired, I told myself. Cranky. He's been working too hard.
I looked around at all the familiar faces on the plane. “If this thing goes down, there goes the company,” I said.
Though Bob wasn't there, I realized; I supposed as long as he survived, anyone else at the company could be replaced. “Where's Bob?” I asked. “Isn't he coming?”
In the sharp moment of silence before Danny answered, I knew I'd said something wrong. “What?” he said. “Are you dying to tell him your book—”
Didn't sell. He'd stopped himself from saying the words, but I heard them anyway. And while I was recovering from that blow, my face turned to the window, to the long stretch of nothing but deep ocean below, I saw that he was right, that my novel hadn't sold and it wasn't going to, that what Fred Klein had been saying in our last conversation was that “Michelangelo's Ghost” was as dead as the Cubs would be that entire season. Eighteen publishers had passed. Fred might well have been a Cubs fan, though, because he remained staunchly loyal, unreasonably optimistic. “This new one you're working on,” he said. “Get it done and we'll send it out.” There's always next season, was the idea. But the Cubs hadn't won the World Series since 1908.
“I'm sorry,” Danny said. “I shouldn't have said that. It's just that . . .”
He never said what it just was, though. “Bob is coming separately,” he said. “Flying himself.”
We arrived the way one arrived in Hawaii in those days: greeted by hula-dancing, grass-skirted young women who draped leis around our necks—and we would wear leis every night of that vacation. Corny, maybe, but it was what we needed, or we wanted it to be, anyway: something to break us out of the gloom that had set in between us on the plane. To be honest, I'm not sure we even thought it was corny any more than we thought, consciously anyway, that this was Hawaii, perhaps the trip of our lifetime, that it would be unforgivable to arrive barely speaking to each other, especially after we'd gotten through all those months apart.