by Alan Rossi
She considered it again now. Your world is different. Before Nicholas was gone, she woke in her house, or she had before coming to this town, and she still did that. She woke in a room. Before, she had opened her computer. She had read the news, emails. She had drunk coffee. She had urinated, defecated, showered. After he died, she did all of these things, still. Everything was exactly as it had been except now she noticed that fact: everything was exactly as it always was. It was not monotony she was noticing. Long ago she knew some perspective on the world had been lost, some vital seeing of it. This was worse than monotony, that growing banality of her life, the clear understanding of it. This was worse and it was nothing she could pin down. Before Nicholas was gone, she did certain things. After he was gone, she continued doing them. Yet now she saw that she was doing things with the accompanying thought of why do this thing: there was, suddenly, an awareness of the arbitrariness of what she was doing. Whereas over the past however many years, starting in her early forties and progressing to now, when her boys were no longer boys, her husband was more of a roommate than a husband or lover, the world had slowly drained of both meaning and mystery, this was something utterly more stark: Nicholas was dead, yet she had to have a bowel movement. Things will become more different, David had said the evening before they drove to the small town where Nicholas lived, had once lived. She had said to him that she hadn’t been able to exercise. That was something different. He’d nodded his head. He said, I know that’s sarcastic, but things will feel more different and then they’ll feel more the same. Or more normal, he said. You’ll get used to it, I mean.
Louis Walters asked her if she wanted to talk about Nicholas. She’d nearly forgotten he was there on her screen. She looked at the computer and shook her head, not bothering to write. She took a sip of coffee and then typed to Louis Walters, asking what he would do if his daughter died, how did he think he would feel? She honestly wanted to know, and she was sorry it was such a morbid question. Louis Walters immediately said that it was nearly impossible to imagine, he would, he would feel, devastated, thoroughly devastated. That probably doesn’t help. She wrote that it didn’t. I would, he said. I don’t know. He paused, picking at a napkin on his desk with both hands, tearing little shreds off it. Katherine thought that he had no idea. He had no idea, for instance, that he wouldn’t be interested in eating. She hadn’t been interested in eating and still wasn’t interested in eating, though she ate. She thought of how two days after she sent and responded to several emails, informing other faculty members at the university that she would be gone for some indefinite amount of time, and could anyone take her classes for a short while, she had then written an email in which she explained that her son had died in a car accident, that he’d been driving on an isolated, rural mountain road, late at night, in the rain, and had somehow lost control of the vehicle. He and his wife had died. She wrote that she wanted to write this email so that people wouldn’t be gossiping and spreading false information, that this was the true information. Writing the email she could barely understand why she was writing it. She had felt both oddly comforted by writing the facts in the email, as though she had some clear handle on the situation, and completely distant, as though the woman typing was not her, that this was not even close to the action she should be taking. She had signed off by saying that she was thankful for the department and her friends there and their support, though she didn’t particularly feel that at all. After writing that email, she had responded to one student, who asked for an extension on a paper. One week, she’d written, slowly typing out each letter, as if watching her mind form the thought, the reply. Then she had gone into her office, stupidly, to be alone, and her colleagues visited one by one, except the younger ones, and she’d cried, they’d witnessed her crying, she was inconsolable, of course. She’d even forgotten that she’d written the strange email about her son. She thought that maybe David had alerted her colleagues. No, it’d been her, and she’d gone in and cried, ridiculously. Louis Walters had pulled up his chair and hugged her from behind, awkwardly, as her husband did a day later. Louis Walters had told her to take the semester off. She had been, and still was, having an affair with him. She was doing things though she didn’t care to do them. Looking at his face now, the cliché of their situation, the fact that he was a male in a position of power and she was his inferior, was almost beyond belief. Yet, at sixty-two years old, she had been talking with him, sleeping with him, meeting him in his office, locking the door. It had been a little antidote to the poisoned monotony of her life. It was a terrible, definitely a mean, selfish thing, yet she had done it. What Nicholas’s death brought into stark relief was this: she was doing it still. She couldn’t believe how completely foolish she was.
She sat forward and wrote to Louis Walters that it felt as though behind each action were both the space Nicholas had left behind and Nicholas himself, as though pointing at her life: her memories of him as a baby, as a toddler and child, an adolescent, a young man – all memories which were so much like dreams they barely seemed to have an existence, barely there in her mind, but which she often tried to sharpen and make clearer, like digitally enhancing surveillance footage – and then as a father himself, then as nothing, a person suddenly ended. In this endingness, a revealing of herself. Louis Walters read the message and said that she was proceeding through the stages of grief from what he could tell, and from what he could tell, this was depression she was experiencing. She wrote to him that if he said another thing about the stages of grief she wasn’t going to talk to him anymore. He put his hands up, nodded, and said, I don’t know what to say then. I shouldn’t be talking to you anyway, she wrote. You’ve said that enough, he said. I can sign off if that’s what you want. I’ll disconnect. She looked at him, his sad, hurt face, and she wrote, Don’t, if only to not create any more hurt.
Katherine thought that it was impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t experienced it, which was why Louis Walters had just been so dismissive: how in each of her actions – putting on shoes, tying the laces, standing from a chair – she felt the unfairness of this double Nicholas, the one who was there and the one who was not. There was an anger at his being gone, and underneath that anger, a sadness that sometimes overtook the anger, like a wave overtaking another wave. Both anger and sadness could flare up, matchlike, into heated intensity, a feeling in her body, and then wisp out. Reality itself seemed both clearer and more remote: like nothing much at all, like she was experiencing her life as though it were a book, a thing she was reading and interpreting, but barely experiencing, except in brief moments. There seemed to be a veneer of thought over everything. The walls in this room were walls, they were called walls, there were four corners, no, more than four, she counted, six, six corners, called corners, in this room, which was called a room. The window was a window, a word. The pane of glass, the air outside, inside, the mountain looming, the streets below, all first thought of, then there. Even now the only thing that felt real was this thought. She was first a character in the book that was her life in her mind before she was a real person. She knew that her life before this moment was like this, too, that everything she experienced was her experience of experiencing it. It was as though she was narrating her life while living it – this was the narration of her life, she was doing it now, again and again, moment after moment, and couldn’t stop. The thing she was attempting to do with this thinking, she thought, was find a way to access Nicholas again, and through him, herself. But with Nicholas gone, could one really have a thought about him, who was an absence? It was like trying to paint on the air. When considering Nicholas’s absence, her thinking and feeling couldn’t locate the object of that very thinking and feeling – there was no ground, nothing to grab on to, nothing upon which to contemplate or judge or perceive, and maybe this was the falling feeling she had felt in her office, some groundlessness.
A car pulled into the hotel parking lot, which at first she thought was David’s, but upon closer ins
pection was a Jetta and not a Passat. She watched it move ghostlike in the foggy morning air, soundless and smooth. It pulled into a spot and an Indian man and child emerged. Not a child, she thought, an adolescent. Visiting the college, she thought. What’s wrong? Louis Walters said. Talk to me Katherine. Just talk. No writing. She looked back at the screen, rubbed her eyes and cracked her neck, and then wrote that she thought David’s car had pulled into the parking lot. Has it? Louis Walters said. I can go. She typed that it wasn’t his car, she was mistaken. Like I am about so many things, she wrote. Now that’s being dramatic, Louis Walters said. Look, if you really feel guilty, then let’s talk when you get home. But pretending you don’t want to see me anymore because you feel lonely, because you’re with Mr. Distant, who won’t even openly talk about Nicholas’s passing, I mean, it’s hard to blame you. You need someone to talk with. Please stop, she wrote. Let her think. And don’t use the word ‘passing.’ She needed to think about what she needed to do. Once again, she wrote, what I really need to do has gotten lost. It’s not lost, Louis Walters said. There’s nothing you need to do. There’s only things you can do, and you can speak, and that’s what will help you, talking this out.
Another text arrived from David, which said that he’d be home soon, but he wanted to stop at the patisserie. Did she want a croissant or something? She needed to eat. She held her phone up, showing Louis Walters her typing to her husband, no longer hiding it from him, a thing she had done initially, as though she had to hide Louis Walters from David, and David from Louis Walters. No, she wrote to David. Then, Thank you. She didn’t like that Louis Walters had used the phrase ‘Mr. Distant’ to describe David. Not that it was inaccurate, but she was the one who called David that, Mr. Distant. She hated that she’d told this to Louis Walters, because now he used it, like it was his, or theirs together, when it wasn’t. Louis Walters would ask about Mr. Distant, ask if she and Mr. Distant were ever, you know, intimate anymore, a slight jealousy that crept into their situation. He’d ask if Mr. Distant was still talking to College Sweetheart. This was another thing, regrettably, that Katherine had told him: one afternoon, David had inexplicably left his iPad open to his personal email, and she couldn’t help but pick it up and swipe through. Startlingly, she’d found that he’d been conversing with a Laura Moser. Frequently. This was not another teacher in the law school, she didn’t think, no name that she knew, yet she did know the name, somehow, though she wasn’t sure how. She couldn’t help but click on one of the emails to find out who this person was. She wished she hadn’t. Laura Moser wrote, in the particular email that Katherine had opened, that she couldn’t imagine being married for so long, that she’d divorced twice, would never get married again, though she wanted a partner, a companion, and a lover. But more than anything, Laura Moser wanted the freedom to be herself, something that’d been kept from her by her previous husbands, who were controlling traditionalists with the thoughts of liberals and the actions of nuanced, complicated, subtle misogynists. What Laura Moser really wanted was an open relationship, the freedom to take lovers and friends without jealousy or pain, and that was exactly what she was doing. She was living out her life exactly as she wanted, doing what she wanted, and you know what she’d found? Getting what you wanted did make you happy. Katherine had to quit reading, closing out the email, though she had then gone back and read through all of them, little pieces of nostalgia from both David and Laura Moser, sentimental, about how much they were in love in college, and trying to figure out exactly what happened, why they’d parted, David, in one email, writing that he often thought about their lovemaking – he actually used that word – and said it’d been something that’d never left him, that no one had ever been as good as her, as uninhibited and free, and that, he was embarrassed to admit, he still used these memories. He used her thighs, her breasts, her hands, her hair and eyes, even her feet. The word ‘used’ had made Katherine want to vomit. This Laura Moser woman, in a subsequent email, confessed the same thing, and had been so embarrassed about it for so long, she didn’t know people in their fifties, no, she thought, sixties, still fantasized about sex with old lovers, but she did, and now she could openly share her fantasies with her current lover. Sure, occasionally there were issues, but mostly things were completely smooth sailing. In one email, Laura Moser claimed that she often thought of the time when she and David found a house being built and used it as a place to escape the dorms, how easy it was in those days to sneak into places: cemeteries at night, houses still under construction, the restaurant she worked in, after hours. No thought of consequence. Then came a string of emails in which they detailed their favorite sexual memories, which nearly caused Katherine to destroy the iPad, but she’d composed herself, read on, and then even worse, a string of emails that detailed their most tender memories, and after that, comical emails about their past arguments. David shaking Laura Moser out of her sadness on the campus green one night, telling her a guinea pig’s just a guinea pig, dammit, I’m a person! In an act of what she viewed as complete composure, Katherine had sent all the emails to herself, forwarding them, then sent them to David, who was at work, teaching a class, one by one. Eighty or ninety emails filling his inbox. He’d had no explanation when he got home, and merely said, Yes, I’ve been talking with her, but that’s it. Just talking. Nothing more meaningful. And anyway, we’re just reminiscing. About fucking, Katherine had said. Oh come on, David had said. Aren’t we over all the jealousy by now? No, Katherine had said. We’re not. Then, several months later, she’d met Louis Walters. The emails were not the cause of her affair, but they opened things up for her, allowed her some space that might not have been open otherwise, allowed her to view herself as capable of being someone else, as capable of being with David and not. She eventually told Louis Walters about the emails, about David – who he’d met in person at department parties – and about how he was Mr. Distant. When Louis Walters used them in conversation, it felt as though he was accessing some part of her life that she felt should’ve been closed off, easily red-taped, though she knew it was her fault, since she brought them up. And she’d probably brought them up to make herself feel better, to let Louis Walters know that she wasn’t the type of person who would just cheat on a person, there had to be some pain there first, so she portrayed David as a remote man, Mr. Distant, which she called David to his face as a little joke, a playful thing – they did a kind of comic superhero joke, like when they were eating dinner and he’d suddenly completely tune out of the conversation, then suddenly return, and say something like, I just thought of the moment my mother, when I was a young boy, hit me with a switch. It only occurred one time, and I had a scar for years, and Katherine had said, Mr. Distant, with the powers of staying visible but being completely gone. It was a passive-aggressive joke, with an element of truth, she knew, added in, and which she knew David knew. But then that was why it was funny. In addition to the Mr. Distant thing, she also portrayed David to Louis Walters as having emotionally cheated on her, a phrase she actually used – I know David didn’t cheat on me cheat on me, but he sought out emotional connection with another woman, and that would be bad enough, but he sought, and found, it should be noted, this emotional connection with another woman who was once a lover or girlfriend or whatever – and she had told this to Louis Walters, she knew, so that she wouldn’t feel so bad doing what she did with him, but also as a way to present to Louis Walters that her cheating with him was not something she did casually: she had to have a reason for it, some kind of inner damage that she and Louis Walters were treating, like a course of antibiotics for some infection in her existence.
Louis Walters asked her if she knew she’d just been holding her coffee cup and staring for the last couple of minutes. It looks like it’s getting cold, he said. There’s no more steam. She put the mug down, then picked it back up, sipped it, and then put it down again, and wrote, Yes, I knew that. I did it on purpose, to see if you thought it matched your image of what a person in mourning shou
ld look like. He smiled a little. Does it? she wrote. I suppose so, he said. She wrote that if she wanted to hold a cup of coffee without drinking it, letting it get cold, that’s what she was going to do, and if she wanted to stare at nothing and feel nothing, that’s also what she was going to do, and if he didn’t want to do that, he didn’t have to and could sign out. I understand, he said. I just thought you should know you don’t have to hold a coffee cup for all eternity. There are tables available. Surfaces upon which to place items we don’t always want to be holding. She nodded without giving any recognition to his little joke and thought that the worst part about telling Louis Walters these things was that she had liked, for years, that David was a remote man. She liked his distance from the world, as though he were an alien sent to observe and watch. It was a fascinating trait, one which served to relocate Katherine’s own perspective on the world, served to show her the advantages of watching, of distancing in order to understand, a distancing from oneself as much as from the world. What was even more fascinating was that David could be pulled from his distance like a tethered astronaut slowly pulled back to the ship. She could do it with a hand on his thigh, a cool look, playing with the curls of his hair. She liked being able to turn him from mind to body with the ease of flicking a light switch, and additionally she liked his mind, which scrutinized everything, but which was also fair, generally kind, just poetic enough. Bringing him back to his body had become more difficult, though. He taught two grad school law courses at the state university, reticently moving toward retirement, and in this transition, which she felt might bring him back to the world, and to her, he’d simply found (beside the email situation, she thought) another solitary activity: gardening. He said it reminded him of being a boy, of growing up on a farm, before his father had sold it. He liked working with dirt. I like digging up the back corner of the yard, he said. My hands. Jesus, I forgot they were here, he said. Look, he waved his hands, put them on her body, look, my hands, he’d said. Arms and hands and head. He’d gently headbutted her, and she’d laughed and slapped him away – all this before she knew about the emails, before Louis Walters. She’d liked to watch him in the garden. Pulling out the rocks, digging, tilling the ground, bringing manure from the hardware store, constructing a small fence around the vegetable garden, a garden that was already quite large – neighbors commented that it took up most of their backyard – and got larger every year. He made and remade the fence each spring, citing wear and tear from rain and animals. The fence was a small wooden thing, which allowed him to anchor chicken wire, covering over the small plants, and then some kind of veil-like covering for the herbs. He wore work boots and jeans when gardening, a loose flannel. He was in decent shape and looked so much like Nicholas. When he came inside for water, there were patches of sweat around his neck and armpits. Sweat on his face and arms. He smelled like a mixture of his sweat and deodorant. He didn’t wear aftershave. He watered the garden, weeded, cut the plants back, sprayed organic sprays to rid the garden of pests. He brought in leaves from the plants with small holes in them: beetles. He looked up photos, compared. He brought in roma tomatoes with blackened ends: end rot. He brought in leaves with their ends gnawed off: slugs. He inspected the leaves of plants and soil in the same way he inspected the vegetables themselves, with care and concern for what he was growing. He sometimes brought in a jalapeno chili and would hold it up, like holding a tiny baby kitten, turn it around in the sunlight, then take a bite, eating the whole thing raw. She’d never seen him do such a thing. She understood two things then: he’d found something else to pull him out of his distance from the world, to pull him into some connection with his body. The other thing was that David cared about what he was doing. She’d almost forgotten what that felt like. When she commented one afternoon on the fact that David looked like Nicholas out there, she almost, for a moment, hadn’t been able to tell the difference. There was Nicholas, she’d said to him. Then there was Nicholas and you at once, and then just you. Hmm, he’d said. Then, You mean he looks like me? She’d been surprised by the question and the force of its actuality and logic. Yes, she said. That is what I mean, I guess. It makes me feel closer to him, doing the work, David had said. He was referring to how Nicholas had built his own house, had his own, much larger garden, an acre. A greenhouse. To both the boys, really, he’d added. They talked with Nicholas infrequently on the phone, a landline, which she couldn’t believe still existed, in his cabin-like house. He reported on the land he was clearing, then burning, for a garden, a little farm. He reported on the barn he was turning into a workspace, in order to build a greenhouse and additions to the house, to be able to take the house completely off the grid, using solar panels on the roof. It’d be a lot of work, he told them on the phone, but he liked the work, which was so different from his job teaching anthropology classes. It was more like his fieldwork in the Amazon, he said, where he both examined the culture and role of drugs in the indigenous experience and also, tangential to the project, had helped build houses in the nearby village with a missionary group, just randomly joining up with them, he hadn’t cared they were religious. They listened to him on speakerphone, his voice both his and not, somehow different, though she didn’t know how, exactly. He called with reports, not to talk. Not to share, as he once did, his internal world. She never knew how he was feeling anymore. If he felt April was right for him, if he genuinely liked the small town he was living in, if he was happy. Nathaniel, Nathaniel would talk to her for hours about his troubles, his anxieties, his new vegetarian dishes, his idea for a restaurant that he couldn’t get a good enough loan for, his care for and grievances concerning Stefanie, occasionally apologizing for what a shit he’d been in high school and college, and she loved Nathaniel for this, but she missed Nicholas. He’d gone and never returned, even when he did return physically. When he was building the cabin on the mountain, April, pregnant, had stayed with Katherine and David, and Katherine had occasionally overheard April talking with Nicholas, Nicholas saying something about how he was starting now, and she’d heard April say that he still had to text her even if they didn’t speak for a week. Katherine hadn’t known what to make of this, but April was in the kitchen, so she had to ask, she couldn’t not ask, couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard. I’m sorry for overhearing, Katherine had said. But why aren’t you talking for a week? Are you having a disagreement? April had been holding her belly, which was not large yet, only about four months pregnant, and she’d said that they weren’t fighting or anything, but that Nicholas spent a week in silence each year. Since when? Katherine had said. The last three years at least, April said. To what end? Katherine had asked. April said just to be quiet, just to shut up, at least that’s what Nicholas had said. It has something to do with the idea he got from a shaman, though I don’t know what exactly, that it’s language that can open things, and language that can close things, and too much language is a prison. That’s what he said. You should ask him, April had said, and then poured herself some tea. When Katherine told this to David in bed that evening, he’d said, Hmm, sounds like Nicholas. She’d wanted to talk about it more, but didn’t. David had picked up his book, as he always did at night. Sitting in front of the computer, not talking with Louis Walters, she didn’t even know if David knew that part of the reason she wasn’t speaking now was to feel something about Nicholas, though she didn’t know what. She didn’t know how to be quiet. Of course she was tired of speaking to other people, but what did Nicholas see in this quiet? she wondered. She sometimes felt as though he’d located some secret, in the space of his silent weeks, she imagined he’d discovered something unfathomable, the truth of existence or at least his own, but now that she wasn’t speaking, all she really felt was that she was still speaking internally. She had no idea how to be quiet.