Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  Paul said, “I was through with it all by then.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said.

  He thought for a minute. “If I had seen him a few years earlier and he had said that I would have killed him.”

  But maybe now he was finally thinking about how his father felt. I didn’t know how long this period of thinking could go on. Thinking and waiting. Nine people waiting.

  The concert was part of a festival, four chamber works by different groups. Two-thirds of the way through the first one, during the pause after the andante, Paul got up from his seat and crawled across me to get out. He was gone for the rest of the quartet and the two mazurkas. When the intermission began I threaded my way through the crowd in the lobby but I couldn’t see him. Finally I went up to a pair of student ushers, a boy and a girl who were laughing and pushing each other, and said, “Did you see a man come out and leave, at the beginning of the concert?” The boy looked down at me, a woman with glasses and lines at her mouth. “Lots of people go out,” he said in a voice meant for the girl. She stepped in front of him and said, “A man did sit out here for a while. I don’t know, he might have left.”

  In an alcove by the cloakroom I found him in a telephone booth. This was in the time before cell phones. He was not on the phone, he was sitting in the booth with the door closed. He was leaning back as if he were asleep. For a horrible moment I thought he had gone into the telephone booth and died.

  Though I had made no sound, it was too late for me to leave because he had seen me. He stood up as if he had been getting ready to come out just at that moment. He wrestled with the door, trying to push it outward instead of pulling it toward him. I remembered something I had forgotten, how when the children were babies I sometimes thought, at a certain stage of tiredness, of climbing into the crib with them. I saw myself, the wife standing outside the booth, as another person, the one who would have come into the room if I had been in the crib and said, “What are you doing?” Someone proprietary and without impulses, a balding Karenin, a jailer. “What are you doing?”

  I wanted to say I saw nothing peculiar about his being in the phone booth and I was not there to bring him back. But he got the door open and came out, shaking out the knees of his pants, and without a word pressed through the crowd with me to the refreshment table. I could have said, “Are they all right?” pretending I thought he was calling the children. Or I could have said, “You called her, I know.” But I didn’t want to, because of the question of whether I had driven him to it. Not what if I had, but what if I hadn’t? What if I did not figure into it at all?

  We had come for the Schubert trio that was last, after the intermission. About the thin slivers of torte and the half cup of coffee that went with them for six dollars, we did not make our habitual jokes. Pale now, he went off to the men’s room. When he came back he was standing behind me for a while before I knew it. Then the lights dimmed and everyone surged back.

  A woman in a pleated caftan with shoulder pads pushed by me so hard I hit the doorframe. I looked back to see if Paul had noticed and I began to feel chilled and uncertain. He looked ill. Surely at dinner he had fought as fiercely as I, although I couldn’t remember any of the things he had said.

  We rustled, sat, settled, gazed at the stage. The musicians arrived onstage looking fresh and combed as if they had just laid aside aprons, washed their hands, and come out ready to serve us something they had prepared backstage. We grew still, the musicians smoothed their music, signaled back and forth tuning. Silence. Silence. The trio began.

  It was to hear this trio, the B flat, that I had bought these tickets months before. In its andante an almost untroubled devotion would be told again and again.

  When life is dark I listen to Schubert. I have taken books about him out of the library to learn why this should be so. Reading them the first time, and even rereading them, I have had such a strong feeling of woe, and of responsibility, as he stepped along his path, that it was as if I were reading about my son. For Schubert, there was no untroubled devotion. No wife, no proud children. He was himself the twelfth child of a teacher and a cook. Just five lived. So, seven deaths, for the teacher and the cook who had Schubert to bring up. He grew to only about five feet, not tall enough for the compulsory military service. He was known by the nickname Mushroom. Some of the piano music he wrote was too difficult for him to play. He drank too much wine, could not earn a living. No wife. No children. Even so, he was able to chart a despair and longing that seem to me to belong to marriage, although it may be I’m confusing marriage with life.

  Schubert finished this piece in his last year, before dying at thirty-one of typhus, typhoid fever, or syphilis, depending on the biography you accept. Thirty-one. The year was 1828, the year of mysterious pain, fevers, of businesslike attempts at sales. The year of death in youth.

  Here we were, hearing his lost idiom and understanding it, as though one hundred sixty years had not chewed through the world leaving nothing Schubert would recognize, except maybe the three on the stage, two men and a woman, with the violin and the cello and the huge piano with Bösendorfer emblazoned on its mirrorlike black side. The young man is bent over the keys guiding it. The air of an important but not—for him—difficult test hangs over him.

  I fell in love with Paul in a class. I saw him bent over his spiral notebook, with dark circles under his eyes. He was carefully writing, shielding the page. I watched for a while and saw that he was not taking notes but writing a letter, which I felt sure was to a woman, a girl, as we said then. I started to think about how she would feel if she stopped getting the letters. When he looked up he looked straight into my eyes. He looked familiar. He had the flashing sad eyes of someone else. A boy. He looked like the boy from my grade school.

  For a long time I used to say to myself, no one can distract us from each other. Either of us. It was impossible that anyone else could offer more than we were offering each other, in the days of the alewives coming in on the waves of Lake Michigan.

  I did something.

  I called Sophie. We arranged to meet at a restaurant. I knew whom to look for. I had seen her across the auditorium that night when Paul stiffened and I followed his eye. I knew she would get to the restaurant first because she was a therapist and would know that the seated person has the power. She was there, with a book, a novel. It was one of those novels that maintain the reputation of being for the serious reader while in fact everyone reads them. I wanted to say something crushing about it, for I had read it too, but I just said, “Are you liking it?” as I sat down.

  “I do like it,” she said, and she added, looking at me searchingly as though I might help her, “but it’s taking me forever.” Everyone complained proudly of the long climb of this awful book.

  Was she pretty? No, but she had abundant red hair, and her eyes were large, and made up to highlight their blue-gray. Something about her did not look good. She had that skim-milk skin, blue under the eyes, that goes with the hair. She was not wearing her glasses. Things I had been afraid would come to me as I looked at her, physical things, did not. The need to be composed overrode any images.

  “I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am,” she said. Did this mean he had told her he was going to leave us? I didn’t want to ask questions; that would make me the outsider. But I didn’t want to let her ask questions; that would make me the patient.

  “I know you are,” I said.

  “You must wonder what kind of person I am.”

  I knew this was a consideration of the utmost importance to her. “I have some idea. I assume this isn’t your usual way.”

  “God. I would never have believed this could happen. Never. Never.”

  “But it did.” We kept making these statements, one after another. Somebody was going to have to ask a question, or take a stand. The waitress came for our order and Sophie complimented her on her earrings. I could see she was going through life like this, making everything a little better for this per
son or that.

  “So tell me what kind of person you are,” I said.

  “Oh, God. I’m . . . I’m . . .” She resisted the temptation to go on. Paul thought she was intelligent and maybe he was right. Her face grew intent. She had on black pants and a discreet blue-gray turtleneck, with a big necklace of hand-painted beads lying between her breasts. I could picture her without the makeup and the jewelry, at home like anybody, with her family.

  “Tell me about your house,” I said.

  She swallowed, and then she laughed. “Oh, God. Why not. This is going to be a strange day. I knew you would be like this.” This produced Paul, hovering as if she had passed her hand over a lamp, telling her all about me the way he told me about her. What would he say? This is my wife’s year of sadness, of strangeness. Of energy feeding out of ordinary life into her as it always has, but being turned into stasis, as if cries were being converted into print, or chords into notation, or dances into diagrams on the floor, and backward from there into just thought, thought, thought, so that she, my wife, says Paul, slapping his forehead with the realization of what has happened to me, does not do anything this year.

  And she is not like that, not passive, he would say, I hope he would say. Not a victim.

  “My house,” she said, leaning forward and waving her hand through the vapor of Paul’s image. She was actually going to say something about the remodeling, I thought. Fortunately she said only, “It has come to a stop since Jenny got hurt.” It’s the worst irony that we gave our daughters the same name, but at least I know the thing didn’t get its start until after she had Jenny.

  Now her Jenny has what they call deficits. Jenny is not going to grow up to do anything like what either of her parents does for a living. She is not going to do much more than the basic things. Sophie is worried about who marries the kind of woman she will be. “Mawwaige,” I said when Paul told me this. We always liked to say it the way Peter Cook does in The Princess Bride, at the wedding of the maiden to the vile prince. Paul grimaced. “She means who will take care of Jenny,” he said hoarsely. He takes responsibility for the fall out the door, the ruined brain. “Let’s face it, you may have to provide her with a dowry,” I said. I could say anything. He knew how I felt about what happened to a child. He knew I would not draw the line at hurting him, though, and would in fact try as hard as I could to make his feelings of wretchedness more intense, until he would have to come closer in—because he always had to talk everything over, the worst, the most unassimilable things—closer, to be comforted. He let it go.

  Talking of her child, Sophie had momentarily let go of whatever held the proud tension in her skin, her thoroughbred look. She mottled and sagged. Her nose reddened and her eyes clouded, and she took her white hands off the table.

  “Let’s be done with all this. I want to make a bet with you.”

  “What is it?” Sophie said, raising her chin with a determination not to be surprised.

  “I want to tell you about us. I don’t want you to interpret what I’m saying. I just want you to see the two people, the five people, you wandered in on. And then, I’m not asking for anything. But I’ll make a bet with you that you’ll get out of it. Because something that has been set going and gone for years, that is on its own course, something like this, something made—” Here I ran out of breath.

  Sophie knew not to be friendly now or to supply me with words. She looked sick. We paused to look at all the men and women in groups having lunch meetings, with their personal lives set aside.

  “Why are you asking me this now? I haven’t seen him, we haven’t seen each other, it’s been—”

  “But that’s not your choice, is it? I’m asking you now because of a thought I had last week. I thought, I wish I could just shoot her, the way I could in a French movie. I did. That’s when I decided to call you.” I said this in a rush, though quietly. I had gone into a pawnshop because somebody told me that was where you should get the guitar for your child’s first lessons, because they all wanted to be rock stars and yours might not be serious about the guitar for long. While the man was showing me a very expensive guitar a musician had pawned, I looked down and saw in the display case, nestled among the ring trays, a small pearl-handled revolver.

  “Are you threatening me?” Sophie was cool, though her skin was muddy.

  “I just wanted to meet with you.” That sounded so professional, as if we could share ideas for a project.

  “All right. All right. Have you been so happy,” she said slowly, “that you think telling me about it is going to change my feelings?”

  “I don’t know about your feelings,” I said. “What does happiness have to do with it?” Of course she knew how we have fought all these years. I moved and she jumped. What if I had the little gun?

  “I do want to hear,” she said. “I’ll listen.”

  “And don’t listen as if you’re going to counsel me,” I said. “I’m not your patient.”

  She drew herself up. “When you’re finished, do I get to tell you my side? My story?” she said. “I realize I am in the role of the bimbo who appeared in Paul’s life and deflected the—the chariot of your marriage.” She went rosy at this turn of phrase, with the excitement of speaking more sharply than she usually did. She was used to other people being the ones who got excited. “And furthermore,” she said, breathing unevenly, “people fall in love with the, the spouses”—she expelled this word like a pit—“of their best friends. So they know all there is to know, and furthermore they like or they even love their friend, and in some cases that doesn’t make any difference at all to what has happened to them, what has happened is beyond their control.” Her voice broke.

  She’s going to cry, I thought. That’s all right. I kept still.

  “You can’t always control life,” she said plaintively.

  “No.”

  In the silence, she gasped. She gasped again and bent forward. “I’m having the most awful cramps,” she said against her hands holding the table.

  “I see you are.” I felt a thrill of pleasure. Oh, I had heard about these cramps of hers. But she gave a groan.

  “Oh God,” she said. “I was afraid this would happen. All morning I was—” She pushed her chair back and got herself into a folded position, breasts against knees. She stayed like that and people looked over at us.

  This is not really fair, I thought. It’s a way of taking over. Though I did not doubt that she was in pain, because she had no embarrassment about the position she was sitting in. Now the people in the restaurant were going to some lengths not to watch us. The waitress with the earrings gave me a questioning look.

  “Oh! Oh no!”

  “What?”

  “Oh no. I’m bleeding.” She started to stand up and then crouched back onto her chair. “Oh no. Oh no. I can’t stand up. I mean this—I’m hemorrhaging.”

  “Well, let’s go to the ladies’ room,” I said, picking up her limp blue arm.

  “I can’t. Listen. This is not just my period. This is something else. This happened once before. There’s blood thumping out of me. Oh God. I have to get to a hospital.” The waitress heard the word “thumping” and ran to the phone. People began pushing back their chairs and heading toward us.

  When the aid car arrived, a woman wheeled in the gurney with a casual speed. The sight of her settled everyone down. She gave the rest of us in the room a small gesture that said to get out of the way. Sophie wept and grabbed the woman’s hand on one side of the trolley and mine on the other. It was true, her chair had blood on it, though not a lot.

  In the emergency room they gave her something that stopped the bleeding and made her silly. She lay holding my hand. She gave the doctor a weak wave of her other hand. “There’s something so funny. This woman wanted to shoot me.” Even in this condition she had her effect; the doctor stood there smiling down at her. “But you weren’t going to, were you?” she said sweetly to me.

  “No. I don’t have a gun.” The doctor
gave me a stern look. “I would never buy a gun,” I told him.

  “I didn’t think so,” Sophie said. She craned her neck on the paper pillow and said to the doctor, “You look tired.”

  “But you never know,” I said.

  Sophie said, “I want to tell you something. Come here. I want to whisper.” I bent down. “This is not a miscarriage,” she said. “Don’t think that. This is something else. I’ve had it happen before.” I didn’t answer. She pressed my hand.

  I had never thought of that. I had never thought that could happen. That she and Paul could have a child. It had never, never before this, come into my mind.

  I told Paul. I told him the same day, about everything, the pawnshop, the stupid book Sophie was reading, my plan to explain our life, the EMTs with the gurney and the shock pads. As I talked his face became slack and his eyes faraway. I told him how Sophie wanted to tell her side. How she had spoken of her children but not her husband. How a scene had come to me in the ambulance, in which Paul, summoned by her husband Stan for a talk, would not speak of me. The two of them would talk as if Paul had risen out of the sea and laid hold of Sophie. I told him how it all came to nothing with Sophie, nothing, because we had not even begun our talk when she did this. I said, why didn’t I delay her rescue and just let her bleed to death? There was a moment when I might have pulled out the gun if I had had it. I didn’t say what the moment was.

  “I don’t think so,” Paul said.

  “Women do. You think I liked her!”

  Paul didn’t smile. He would not let me joke with him. He would not let Sophie come into the realm of things that were ours. Ordinarily I could have said, “Turn around, talk, goddamn it. Don’t stand there with your back to me thinking about when you can call her!” But the children came in from outside, not thinking about us.

  Late in the first movement the cello broke a string. It was a particular seventeenth-century cello, according to the program. Crack! The sound echoed in the hall as if the bridge on the cello had snapped, but it was just a string. The three limped to a stop, all grinning, not as in Schubert’s time, when surely humiliation and ruin hovered lower, in greater readiness to descend on one, than they do now. The most awful things happen now, but no one will call it ruin.