He wonders if today can be salvaged. Perhaps it’s the room—should he have gotten a bigger one? But no: it’s the silence, the immobility of the room that’s the problem, the implacably fixed furniture, the hushing carpet, the heavy curtains, the whole place awaiting human animation.
He likes looking at her. She’s small and slight, with a polished curtain of hair spilling down her back. Her head is bent.
Ella is looking down at the bedspread, waiting for the worst. It is shameful, it is excruciating, that she’s become part of this. What if she’s seen by someone she knows, in this corridor of bedrooms, with this man who is not her husband? What is she doing here at lunchtime, with a man she hardly knows? She can’t look at him. She can feel his presence—large, solid, he’s much taller and stronger than she is—as he stands behind her. She’s now obligated to go through with this, since she agreed to come. It feels like an execution. She dreads his touch.
She thinks of her husband. He’s downtown right now, in his office, in his shirtsleeves and suspenders. He’s on the phone, or making a point to someone—he loves making points—or having another cup of coffee. He’s doing something completely ordinary. He’s not betraying her utterly, betraying her to the bone, though he has. But he’s not doing it right now, and she is. She could call him, there’s an ivory phone on the table by the bed. He’d answer at his desk, his voice familiar. “Hello?”
It was a mistake, but she has to go through with it. She is obligated: of course she knew what it meant, meeting at the Plaza for lunch. Now she will have to have sex with him in this strange airless room. She will have to offer him her naked body. She would rather die.
Nat steps closer to her.
It was a mistake, that’s all.
He turns her body to him and glimpses her grieving face. He puts his arms around her and stands still, holding her close without moving. He can feel her, rigid and fearful. He says nothing, embracing her quietly. It’s a mistake, that’s all. What he wants is for her not to be miserable. He holds her until he feels her quiet, until she understands that she is safe; that all he wants from her is this close holding, this understanding.
TWO
They’re married, and now to each other.
The divorces were tumultuous and unhappy, but Nat and Ella persevered. They weathered the storms, they made their way determinedly through the torment toward each other.
Now they have been married for nine years, and they love each other. They’re knitted deeply into each other, and they warm themselves at each other’s hearts. They long for each other, and their bodies teach each other pleasure, but they fight terribly. They say unforgivable things to each other. Once, Nat took Ella violently by her shoulders. “You make me so angry,” he said. “Someday I’m going to kill you.”
Ella, beside herself with rage, was pleased. “Fine,” she told him, satisfaction in her voice. It seemed a vindication, proof of something.
When they are not fighting they are happy, drunk on each other, but when they fight, Ella fears they will split apart, and if they split apart, she fears it will be the end of her. She can’t imagine herself, if this marriage fails. She can’t imagine her life if Nat were to leave her. She can’t imagine her existence without him; it would be black and meaningless, the void. It is terrifying to her, this prospect, like falling into deep space.
She knows, in one part of her mind, when she is calm, that this is absurd. She has her own life, with friends and a career—she is a literary publicist, and has founded her own agency. Her life won’t really be over if she and Nat split up. Still, there are times, when they are fighting, when rationality is not available. She has trouble breathing, and she thinks of the blackness of deep space, which seems to be waiting for her.
Now they are driving from Florence to Siena, along a narrow, crowded motorway. The cars around them are lunatic: on the left, Maseratis and Mercedeses pass at a hundred miles an hour; on the right, huge trucks sway dangerously, taking up one and a half lanes. Behind them headlights flare constantly, signaling them to move over. For half an hour they have been driving in hostile silence.
Nat breaks it. “I just don’t know why you couldn’t have gone on to the market yourself.”
“I just don’t know why you couldn’t have waited for me, with the car. Or given me the car,” Ella says. “I don’t know why you have to decide what we do and when we do it.”
Nat makes an exasperated sound. “I see,” he says, “ I decide everything. Is that what you think?”
“Do you think I decide anything?”
“Do you think you don’t decide anything?”
They get into these maddening, circular series of questions, each challenging the other, losing the point, going off on tangents, becoming increasingly angry.
Nat is exasperated by Ella’s self-centeredness. How can she not know that everything he does is with her in mind? What he wants is for her to be happy. This entire trip—Florence and Siena, the churches, the old hotels, the views—was for her. The impassive faces of the holy martyrs, the mysterious half-smiles of Madonnas. It’s early spring, and wildflowers star the long pale grasses in the fields. This was all meant to make her happy, and why does it not?
“I decide nothing!” Ella says, furious. “Nothing at all! You decide where we go, where we’ll have dinner, what time we’ll leave in the morning, what we’re going to see, everything. You even keep my passport! I don’t even carry my own passport!”
“I keep your passport with mine, and with our tickets,” says Nat, reprovingly. His face has darkened, his mouth tightened. She has broadened her attack, flailing wildly about, as always. “It’s just so I’ll know where everything is. If you want your passport, Ella, of course I’ll give it to you.”
“I don’t care if I have my passport or not,” Ella says wildly. She feels trapped by him, helpless; he seems both reasonable and unjust. She knows it’s practical for him to keep the passports. Yet why should he have hers?
“Did you not want to come to Italy?” Nat turns his head and looks at her, dangerously, in the midst of the manic speed of the motorway. The car swerves slightly, then swerves back, in and out of the terrifying stream of cars.
Ella hopes they will crash.
“Of course I wanted to come to Italy!” She is distraught. “But you don’t ask me what I want! You decide everything yourself, and then you tell me what we’re going to do, and then you’re furious if I have a tiny, remote, minutely differing suggestion! I have to do everything you say, always! It’s as though I don’t exist!”
What she’d wanted was for him to come with her to the flea market in Florence, wander through the stalls with him. It was a junky market, only odds and ends, but it was Florence. The people offering the broken clocks and plastic dolls were Florentine. Their faces—surprisingly fair, ruddy, blue-eyed, with red-brown hair—echoed those in the old frescoes. Ella loved all of it; she always thought the living scene was as interesting as the museum.
Nat thought it was dreary and trashy. “Why should I want to look at a flea market, full of junk?” he had asked. “I have to move the car. I’ll take it back to the hotel, and you come back whenever you want.”
But Ella feels crushed by the weight of his disapproval, by the thought that she was someone who wanted to look at junk, someone he disdained. All of it makes her feel panicky and abandoned: she speaks no Italian and has no sense of direction. She knows she’d get lost, trying to find her way back up to the hotel. She is afraid of being lost, and afraid of asking questions of strangers. She loves him. She hates being at odds with him. The flea market was a bad idea; she should never have suggested it. He disapproved of it, and of her. And now she has made him angry again; he may leave her. At any time he may leave her. He is easily angered at her. She starts to weep from despair. She is always doing things wrong. They have been married nine years; she has not managed to give him a child; he may leave her. They are always fighting. She will die if he leaves her. She knows this is irr
ational; knowing it does not help.
Nat keeps on driving, the corners of his mouth turned down in disapproval. She is so extreme, Ella, so wildly intemperate, and so utterly unfair. Her complaints are wounding: he feels that his life is given over to making her happy, that all their decisions are made on her behalf. He’d thought she’d like the trip to Italy, and she had seemed to. This is the way she acts: at first she says nothing, later she complains bitterly. It’s completely unfair. He loves her. He is easily wounded by her, he is outraged by her when they fight. She is irrational, messy, late. She maddens him. He is completely absorbed by her. He cannot wait each night to see her, to see her turn her head, to listen. He waits to hear what she will say; he is endlessly interested by what she will say. His body needs hers. They are joined, which makes all this so excruciating: she levels these wild charges at him, as though she were dismissing their connection. How can she? How can she take such extreme positions over something as trivial as the flea market? These trips seem to be more pain than pleasure. How can she act so brutal and miserable to him? He never thinks of leaving her; she’s at the center of his life.
At the end of their fights everything is somehow righted. A great calm happiness floods through them both, like a neap tide rising and moving through the fields, smoothing out the rutted landscape like liquid silk. This is hard for them to remember when they’re fighting; it’s hard to believe it’s a possibility.
Nat swerves more now, across the traffic, into the slower lane, then he swerves again, cutting out of that lane too. He pulls off the highway altogether, onto a tiny semicircular pullout, edged haphazardly by whitewashed stones. A rocky hillside rises steeply above it; just ahead, on the road, is one of the low stone tunnels that perforate Italian mountains. The tunnels are pitch-black inside, narrow and claustrophobic, and the cars race through them at supersonic speeds. Their car was just about to enter this one, and the traffic beside them continues to slide smoothly and hypnotically into the small black mouth, which is like that of a monster. But just before they are sucked into the dark maw, Nat pulls completely off the road and jerks the car to a stop in the turnout, the corners of his own mouth turned down.
Ella sees his disapproving mouth, his lowered brows, his fierce eyes, and she turns away, to the window. A sob swells her chest: whatever he is about to do will be terrible. She is afraid he will hit her, though he has never done this, or threatened to. She is afraid he will reach across her and open the door, and tell her to get out, to clamber onto the steep rocky hillside rising above them. Then he will pull the door shut and drive on, vanishing into the black tunnel and leaving her there forever.
Nat puts the car into neutral, jerks on the hand brake, and turns off the engine. He turns to Ella, his brows still dark. He leans awkwardly across the tiny car, across the gear shift, and puts his arms around her. He pulls her as close as he can, the upright gear shift between them. He holds her against him and strokes her head, her silky hair.
They’ve gotten themselves into this terrible trough of unhappiness, and this is all he can think of to get them back to the other place, where they remember each other. He holds her tightly inside the circle of himself, pressing his cheek against her head. He feels her collarbones against his chest, her shoulder blades beneath his hands. Her hair is shorter now, but still silky.
Ella feels his arms close around her, she breathes in the familiar smell of his skin, and she closes her eyes in relief. She feels her whole body yield, give way. This is more than she had hoped for. It is everything.
THREE
They have been married for nearly a quarter of a century, and they have stopped fighting. Something between them has steadied, and they no longer frighten each other. Instead, they trust each other. She is less intemperate, and when he gets annoyed she finds his exasperation amusing. She waits it out, smiling, and smooths his hair. He finds her exaggerations funny; she no longer infuriates him.
They look different now, of course. She is still small, nearly childlike, but her waist has thickened, and her face bears a mask of fine lines. She is no longer beautiful, but pleasant-looking. Her hair is now short and iron gray, thin and straight, with bangs, like a felt helmet. One knee gives her trouble, and sometimes she limps slightly. This morning, standing in line at the airport, waiting at the ticket counter, Nat saw her lean over to rub it. The sight made him feel tender, and he thought of her moving, with him, toward age, and toward the dark curtain beyond. He takes comfort in knowing that they will approach this, whatever it is, together.
His own body has thickened as well, and his hair has receded. His forehead is rising slowly, like a cliff from the sea. This disappoints him: his father had all his hair until he died, at eighty-one. Nat’s hair had once been thick and springy—it was his secret vanity.
Ella doesn’t mind his baldness, no longer notices it. She is so used to his face—the deep lines from nose to mouth, the dense eyebrows, the neat pouches beneath his thoughtful eyes—that it might as well be her own. She barely sees herself in the mirror now, her eyes fading, her lips blurring. They have been living together for decades now, and they belong to each other. They have forgiven each other the dreadful acts, and they appreciate the generous ones. They admire and enjoy each other. They have grown together into this marriage, adding year after year to the trunk of it, each line encompassing the one before. The years in which they fought are now enclosed, entirely and forever, by these later ones, in which they do not. These are years in which they simply love each other, years in which trust is dominant.
Today they’re on a flight from Boston, where Nat had a business meeting and Ella saw her sister, to San Francisco, where he has another meeting. After that they’ll go on to Los Angeles, to see his daughter Beth, who is a screenwriter. As far as they can tell, she is not a really successful one, but who can read the cryptic signs of Hollywood? Beth is funny and bright, always full of optimistic talk about meetings and development. She was angry about the divorce when she was younger, but seems to be over it. All three of them have lived it down, settling into enjoyment of one another’s company. Her boyfriend—though is boyfriend the right word? It’s hard to keep track of the correct word now—anyway, the person who is around more than anyone else, is a psychotherapist/mystic/studio musician named Ralph. He, too, is bright and funny, and if they lived in the East they would have regular salaries and health benefits, instead of this hand-to-mouth existence. Or maybe not. Maybe they are both simply outside the world of regular salaries and health benefits, and so it’s a good thing they’ve found each other in West Hollywood.
Ralph and Beth have promised to take them to their favorite sushi restaurant. Ella doesn’t like sushi—why do people still eat raw flesh, five hundred thousand years after the discovery of fire?—but she eats it with Beth. She loves Beth, and in some ways gets along better with her than Nat does. Nat gets frustrated by Beth; he wants her and Ralph to get married and get jobs with health benefits. Ella finds this funny and touching. She thinks of it now and she reaches out and smooths his shoulder. He is the beloved. She feels grateful for his solicitude, the way he wants to take care of them all, herding them toward shelter like an anxious sheepdog. At her touch, Nat looks up from his book and smiles at her.
They’re sitting in business class. Nat works for a large management consulting firm, and he’s flown hundreds of thousands of miles. They both benefit from all the times he’s been weathered in at O’Hare, fogged out of Portland, delayed at Dallas/Fort Worth. Now, when they fly together, they enjoy these wide comfortable seats, the kindly attentions of the flight attendant, the little compote of warm nuts after takeoff.
They haven’t taken off yet; they’ve taxied out onto the runway and are waiting in line. Not for long, though: the skies are clear, and it’s after Labor Day, the summer traveling peak over. Their stewardess has taken away their jackets. She’s in her fifties, slightly stocky, with a wide, pleasant, animated face, slightly pockmarked. Her short hair is dense black, maybe dy
ed.
During the safety video it was she who put on a life jacket and stood in front of the cabin. She made smooth, ritualized gestures, setting the oxygen mask neatly over her nose, pointing out the emergency exits. No one watched her, and Ella wondered if this was because everyone had already heard these instructions, or if it was a subliminal superstition, the fear of naming dangers. The idea that it’s bad luck to allow the idea of peril into your mind. By doing so you’re calling danger into being, so the less you think about safety measures, the less likely you are to need them.
Maybe to counteract that superstition, Ella pulls out the plastic safety-instruction card from the pocket in front of her. She studies the people, tidily life-jacketed, who are sliding down the chute in an orderly line. Their faces seem lively and intent, not frightened or unhappy. It’s broad daylight, and the chute rests on flat ground. If this really happened, Ella thinks, there would be clouds of black smoke and bursts of orange flame. Or maybe they would be sliding into the ocean, at night, in blinding rain and huge swells. Disasters take place in perilous conditions, storms and darkness, not on clear days under blue skies. In any case, it wouldn’t be like this—orderly and pleasant. Ella, feeling she has somehow triumphed over the card, slides it back into the pocket.
All the stewardesses have disappeared now, up front, perched on their tiny provisional foldout seats. The sky is blindingly bright, cloudless. They are in a line of planes, all huge and motionless. Heat waves shimmer up from the tarmac, and the planes seem to tremble slightly. The pilot’s voice comes over the intercom.
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