Upstate

by James Wood

  He would never forget that awful sensation of falling, of falling into history, into the long history of death. Without looking again at the horizon, almost shivering in the warm, blessed air, he walked back to his car.

  He never told anyone about it, and he hadn’t visited Hadrian’s Wall since then.

  35

  Not feeling like breakfasting on his own, a little shaken by his nighttime amnesia, he phoned Vanessa and took a cab to her house. He wanted a repeat performance of the morning before (minus Jerry the evangelical missionary)—he wanted the experience of sitting at Van’s table, drinking coffee and reading the paper, while she pottered around upstairs like a schoolgirl, getting ready for the day. Josh was leaving that morning for Boston, so with luck he might already have gone. Then he intended to take the Toyota and drive to Troy. And then maybe to Malta: he wanted to see the “famous” church that Van had visited with the Dents, the one that advertised its Sunday bread-making skills.

  To his disappointment, it was the other way around. Van was almost on her way out the door—early meeting with a student—and Josh was sitting at the breakfast table. Alan begged Van to watch her step—the arm! It was a little warmer than yesterday. Sun doused the kitchen; the sky was very blue again, “American blue” was how he now thought of it.

  Today, Josh seemed keen to linger in the kitchen. They were alone.

  “You’re leaving soon?” he asked. Yes, he was picking his rental car up in half an hour, said Josh. It was a trek: a cab had to take him a mile or two up Route 9 to the Hertz office. They talked briefly, meaninglessly, about how Saratoga Springs had grown, and Alan expressed surprise about all the restaurants and cafés on Broadway: there must be ten at least. Someday, said Josh, the main streets of all the richer American cities will have become one continuous, giant restaurant. “It’s all anyone does or cares about, now. Eating out.” Alan nodded, and was about to open The New York Times when Josh surprised him by sitting down opposite him at the pine table. His glossy young eyes gazed at Alan’s tired face. He was willing himself, daring himself, to say something.

  “Alan, you’re sitting here, in America, because I told Helen about problems Vanessa was having. So basically, you’re here because I asked you to come.”

  “Well, Josh, I’m here because I care about Vanessa, and I want to see her life in Saratoga Springs. And with you,” he added.

  Josh made a gesture with his hand, to flick this away.

  “Yeah, of course. What I mean is, since you’re partly here because of what I said to Helen about Vanessa, then you deserve to hear from me about—what’s been going on.”

  The boy seemed nervous, but he didn’t look away.

  “I would be very grateful.”

  Josh told the story of how they met (at the conference in Boston), how he had been living in Somerville, sharing a small damp space with a housemate, an old friend of his from graduate school, a guy he had thought he liked until he turned into a total control freak—and was really happy to come to live with Vanessa in Saratoga Springs. They read books together (of course, straight off, Van gave him a massive, “totally untenable” philosophical reading list), and they discussed ideas like adolescents, way into the night, and laughed at the same bad TV shows; they bought a new bed (Alan took this to be Josh’s discreet way of saying that they had sex, maybe even good sex; he wondered, for an uneasy second, if Van had ever had much, before Josh).

  “But happiness,” Josh said, “doesn’t come easily to Vanessa. For some people, maybe for someone like me, happiness is like all the other things you take for granted—inner-ear balance, say, or the regular thump of my heart, or my ability to sleep at night. Not for Vanessa. It’s like she doesn’t have that inner-ear balance. You and I walk down the street and don’t fall down; for her, falling down is kind of like the default position. Not falling down is an achievement for her, something she has to work at. But you know all this already—I didn’t. And if I sound like an instant expert,” he added, “it’s not just because I live with Van. My youngest brother, Neil, has been dealing with stuff like this since … forever, it feels like.”

  “You’re right about Vanessa,” said Alan, clenching his hands, “but I just don’t know why, I don’t know why.”

  “Well—”

  “Yes, all right, I know why: in the same way that I know why I have less money this month than last month: because I spent too much. But I don’t know why I got myself into the weak position of spending too much and having less money this month than last. Does that make sense?”

  “Alan, it’s really not about weakness.”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound … look, Van and Helen went through so much. Cathy and I divorced—that was exceptionally hard for the girls. Of course it was. It was a bitter divorce, and I had to soldier along on my own, not always doing as good a job as a father as I thought I was doing. Van and Helen took sides; Van blamed me, I suppose.”

  “When did Van’s mother die?” asked Josh, though he knew the answer.

  “Eleven, no, twelve years ago: 1995. Cathy’s death was … we don’t speak about it much—never, now. And their dad has a new girlfriend. Who is younger than him. I understand all that. But still: look at Helen, for goodness sake! Unhappiness isn’t inevitable by any means. It still doesn’t really make sense. Why one daughter and not the other?”

  “Well, unhappiness isn’t inevitable, but then neither is happiness. My brother has far less cause than Vanessa, but he’s finding it a real struggle right now just to get out of his goddamn bed, and spends most of his waking hours smoking weed. I think he’d smoke weed in his sleep if he could. And our mom is a psychiatrist … So—I don’t know if it’s helpful to think about why. It should be how and what and if, not why.”

  Alan was stung by Josh’s “far less cause,” and resented that Van was being yoked together with the pot-smoking deadbeat brother. But he was touched by his gentleness, his attention and sympathy, his intelligence. He remembered Van saying to him, as they walked in the icy twilight—how long ago that seemed now—just before the glorious klaxon horn of the train, that Josh was the kindest, most decent person he would ever meet. That train, that train …

  “Van doesn’t much like being alone, you know,” said Josh.

  Alan thought, ruefully: since meeting you she doesn’t much like being alone, because she’s in love with you and wants to be sure of your love. Before she knew you, she spent many content hours on her own: in her bedroom in Northumberland, lying diagonally on her bed, reading those enormous philosophical books.

  “Sometimes we fight about this. She gets anxious about me staying out at night for a drink, or taking an extra day if I’m away in New York, or wherever: You heard her last night?… Well, everything really changed one evening at dinner, about three months ago, when she asked how I would feel about moving to England with her. She’s bored with Saratoga. I get it, so am I. It’s why I need to get away. But I don’t know how I feel about England. How would I work there? I don’t know anyone in Great Britain. We’re a tight-knit family, Neil and I are really close. So I guess I hesitated, and Van—I think—took my hesitation to mean I won’t really commit to her. She didn’t exactly say this, in so many words, but … Alan, you’ve no idea how fast she began to go down. I was really frightened. Her eyes—on bad days they were just dead, something just died behind them. I really did what I could, I insisted she go to a doctor, not just to the therapist. And ultimately I contacted Helen, of course.”

  “It was really bad?” said Alan. He wanted to blame Josh.

  “Sometimes it was like she didn’t inhabit the words she was speaking. I can’t quite describe it. She was hollowed out. As if, when she spoke, she was doing a kind of ironic voice-over to her own life. God knows how she managed to keep on teaching at the end of last semester.”

  “Were you frightened that she would try to do herself harm? Was that what made you fearful?”

  “Rightly or wrongly, I was frightened, yes. That’s why
I wrote to Helen.”

  “But look—did she throw herself down those stairs? Even if she did, it’s hardly a suicidal gesture, is it? I mean, you couldn’t kill yourself that way. There aren’t enough stairs!” His voice had risen, his fists were clenched, and Josh looked at him with frank sympathy.

  “I don’t think she tried to kill herself, Alan. I think she needed to get someone’s—my—attention. It worked. I couldn’t take her depression, and I ran away: I went to my parents in Chicago. Not something I’m proud of. And then Van fell and broke her arm and of course I came back right away. We went back to Chicago together, and my parents totally loved her. They changed my sense of her.”

  “Of course they loved her.”

  “And since we came back, she’s been better. Like winter and summer. It’s funny, almost exactly the same moment I got in touch with Helen about visiting, Van began to get better. Like how your symptoms never actually manifest when you go to the doctor to complain about them? So you haven’t seen her in anything like the state she was in six weeks ago.”

  “It was a kind thing, to take her to your parents for Christmas,” said Alan quietly.

  “Was it kind?” he asked, with some pain in his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a silence. A dirty minivan came up the clear white drive.

  “It’s very hard to live with someone’s absolute need. I just … I don’t know if I can be responsible for her happiness.”

  “Why not?” Alan asked, with more desperation than he intended.

  “It’s like someone saying to you: ‘This is a very expensive vase, on no account must you break it.’ Eventually you’ll break it just because you were warned not to. I can’t be responsible for her happiness, precisely because there’ll come a time when I’m responsible for her unhappiness.”

  Ah, that would be one definition of love, thought Alan, but he merely muttered, with growing emptiness in his stomach, “I understand, I suppose.”

  They were quiet.

  “Alan, if she really wants to go back to England, I don’t think I can go with her. Not right now.”

  “Well then, she can just stay here, can’t she? Both of you can just stay here.”

  Josh didn’t reply, but looked at Alan with his expressive, guilty eyes, and Alan looked away, and his face fell, though he tried to hide it. He saw it: whether Josh knew this consciously or not, Alan had been brought over from England to look after Vanessa, in the event of the dissolution of her relationship with Josh. In fact, he had been brought over from England to manage that dissolution. Alan said nothing, merely shook his head from side to side as he looked down at the brimming newspaper.

  “You see, maybe it wasn’t so kind of me to take her to meet my parents?” said Josh. “With all the implications…” Again, he spoke in pain.

  “Your instincts were kind,” repeated Alan, the sadness slightly clogging his tongue.

  The cab blared twice, quickly.

  “You need to go now. That’s your cab.”

  36

  When the taxi had gone, Alan stood at the chilly window, looking out, as if the cure of whiteness would empty his head—the hard, packed drive, the white snowy roofs of two clapboard houses nearby, offered up like tilted blank canvases … He admired Josh, suddenly—their conversation had altered his estimation of the young man. It couldn’t have been easy to speak in the way he did. Josh still loved Vanessa. But he could not live with her. He was fearful, he felt Vanessa’s unhappiness like a threat. Or he didn’t love her enough, and could not live with her enough. One or the other, or a bit of everything—these were just different fractions of withdrawal. The withdrawal was the sum. Not this week or next, maybe not even this month or next, but sooner rather than later, especially if Vanessa was set on returning to Britain. Sooner rather than later, Josh would go. Helen had been right about him, though not perhaps for the reasons she offered. Maybe it wasn’t fair to assume that Josh had asked Alan to come from Northumberland to manage the breakup of the relationship. Josh, he now noticed, had in fact asked for nothing, for no help of any kind. But Alan understood his new task. An idea began to form. Was he brave enough to carry it out? Could he say what needed to be said? Could he be as brave as Josh had been?

  He wanted to talk—not to Candace right now, but to Helen. He went to the living room and dialed Helen’s mobile in London.

  “Dad! What’s up? Is everything okay? How’s Van?”

  “She’s out, teaching. I went to her class yesterday, sat in. She was very impressive indeed. Wonderful actually.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be? She knows that stuff up and down, backwards and forwards.”

  “Yes she does.”

  “And Josh? Be kind to him, he’s just a big excitable puppy … So what’s up?”

  “Josh has just gone to Boston for a couple of days. He’s researching some long article.”

  “Again? To be completely honest, I don’t like the sound of that. He’s away an awful lot. What does he get up to, on these trips of his? I mean, if I were Vanessa, I’d keep an eye on him.”

  “No, no,” said Alan sadly. “I think you’re wrong. I think he’s very loyal actually.”

  “What’s happened, Dad?” she asked with suspicion. Alan was about to tell her, but suddenly could not.

  “Nothing, all’s well…”

  She was getting distracted by something, he could tell.

  “Dad, when you’re back here—you come back in two days, is that right?—I will take you up on your idea. I’d like to bring the twins up to Northumberland for a weekend, soon.”

  “And Tom, too, of course?”

  “Yeah, sure. Tom, too.”

  “We’ll make a plan.”

  “It was fun, you know, being in Saratoga Springs with you and Van, even if you didn’t always feel that way.”

  “Oh, I did. I loved our train journey…”

  “Me too—me too. I’d better go, someone’s buzzing me.”

  “Off you go. Speak soon.”

  * * *

  He set off again in the despised Prius. He was heading for Troy, but all he really wanted to do was drive and drive—through the cold suspended countryside, where the snow made everything equal. He would drive all day if need be. And at the end of his journey, having been to Troy and come back, perhaps all the old facts would be magically different.

  He couldn’t protect his daughters, he couldn’t help them. Helen was a survivor, of course. Tough Helen could look after herself. But could Vanessa? In the lecture room, she had been so confident and easy, bringing up all her quotes and references. Alan was proud of her, as if she’d won the top prize at school. How much of that confidence and happiness now rested on Josh? Without Josh, would she quickly fall, as if a plinth were removed from a statue? And then what? How far would she fall? Josh had tried to withdraw—Alan knew this now—and Van had fallen hard. For some reason, he thought of how very differently each child used to sleep, and wondered if it was still the same. Helen used to lie in a kind of fury, on her side usually, with her knees drawn up and her arms tightly flung around her chest. She breathed through her open mouth, and frowned. Vanessa was peaceful. She slept on her back, and her features were serene and smoothed of worry. Distant, patient, calm. She seemed very far from life, as if in a Victorian photograph. He didn’t mind waking Helen, because it would likely be a blessing. But Vanessa appeared to have attained a peace that waking would shatter. He would put his hand on Van’s soft brow and quietly whisper—far too quietly to wake her—“Van, love, it’s time. Time to get up. I’m sorry to do this…” He longed for her to find the peace by day that she seemed to have found at night.

  He was driving past a modern church—a redbrick community center with a white witch’s hat for a steeple—and then, only half a minute later, past another church, this one older and much more handsome, its dignity somewhat vitiated by a large banner that had these words: 1 CROSS, 3 NAILS, 4 GIVEN. More churches than bars in this state. I
n England, any decent village functioned on a two-to-one ratio of pubs to churches. He pulled up behind a yellow school bus, whose octagonal STOP sign was extended on a mechanical arm. The gunshot of American commands; he liked that. The blunt YIELD on all the signs that, at home, would have said GIVE WAY. He could hear that YIELD. If it was necessary to stop, then nothing worked better than STOP. Children were boarding the bus, dressed like schoolkids everywhere—like paratroopers or marines, bulkily padded and hooded, burdened by massive backpacks, huge plastic water bottles dangling from their belts like army-issue desert canteens. Ready for combat, the poor things.

  Troy was half an hour down the interstate. He understood what Helen meant when she called it “Soviet.” The snowy distances, the tall buildings and freezing, martial spaces; the big river, embalmed in ice, and lashed by a sternly unattractive bridge. Maybe Kiev or Ryazan was like this. The city had an overwhelming atmosphere of broken utility: empty warehouses, ruined factories by the river, many unused offices. People—Trojans, would that be?—moved through the streets as quickly as they could. Life was bitten down to the quick here, the cold punishing all civic life. But there were fine church steeples, beautiful old flat-roofed buildings, wide sidewalks. Gracious unmolested streets, apparently unchanged from the 1880s. Down by the windy river, it was an utter wasteland: weeds, rubble, grit in the eyes. But what an opportunity for redevelopment—there must be half a mile at least of empty waterside space, just waiting for the right hotels, restaurants, and flats. Build, and the people will come. Oh yes, like his beloved Dobson Arts Café. Troy should be twinned with Newcastle: the inhabitants would understand each other much quicker than a Geordie could explain himself to a Londoner.