by Richard Ford
On Monday evening when he and Charlotte had returned from the city with the good news about Jonathan’s incision (in two days they were to fly to Owls Head), she’d fixed him a martini (the surgeon allowed one only) and herself her favorite gin highball, and had taken a seat at the picture window, facing the twilight, the woods changing shapes in shadows and the big tree house no longer visible. A balming breeze from the north had invited her to open the sliding door and to turn off the window units. Jonathan was back on his couch, coddling his martini on his belly. Charlotte was sitting so as to face away, her lovely silhouette against the light remaining in the spring sky. Peepers were peeping in the woods where there was a secret pond. It was, Jonathan felt, magical. Even here.
For a long period he lay saying nothing, though the pain below his Adam’s apple where they’d gone in, throbbed dully. Cubes tinkled in Charlotte’s glass. The fine, slick surfaces of her silk trousers shifted as she crossed her long legs. A bracelet rung fell lightly against another bracelet rung. She sighed—a very deep and profound suspiration. A sigh he’d never really heard—from Charlotte or from anyone. Not even when Mary Linn had died in front of him at breakfast. It was a sigh you could imagine someone sighing in a novel. Tess of the D’Urbervilles or some such gloomy book. A sigh that was, there in the descending spring darkness, more eloquent and plaintive and heartfelt than anything he’d ever heard. It made him feel terrible, for just that instant, alone and in need of something for which nothing was commensurate, and completely inadequate—to Charlotte, his wife, whom he felt he loved. Though he wanted to be adequate even if nothing could be commensurate for him. He wanted, with the great fund of feeling he contained, to give to Charlotte each and every thing she might need. He considered rising off the couch, walking across the empty space between them and laying his hand on her thin shoulder. Nothing more. No words. Though that didn’t seem the right thing to be doing. Possibly there was no perfectly right thing to be doing. Except here was a moment, a magic moment for the two of them together. So that what he did, trying not to sound alarmed, and taking a drink of his still-cold martini, was to say, “What’s going on in that dreamy head of yours?”
Charlotte smiled in the shadows. “Oh. Nothing. There’s usually not much going on in my head, Johnny. Sometimes I just have a feeling and let myself completely feel it. Don’t you do that?”
“I do,” he said.
“Well . . .”
“I usually try to find words to match my feelings, though,” Jonathan said. He half remembered something from college, something Archibald MacLeish had written, but he couldn’t say it. Something, something, “but equal to . . .”
“Well. That’s just you,” Charlotte said.
“They don’t have to be the right words,” he said. “Sometimes wrong ones can be as good. Sometimes better.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlotte said.
“So. What words would you put opposite the feeling that just made you sigh?”
“Ah,” Charlotte said and shook her golden hair as if to shake off confusion, then ran both her hands back through her hair—in a way that made Jonathan feel not even in the room with her, someplace high up in the ceiling if the ceiling had been high. Someplace from which he could not communicate with Charlotte. “Let’s see,” she said slowly. “I would say . . . that the words . . . that go with the way I felt . . . and that made me sigh are . . . Ummm . . . that I never have bad dreams anymore. Specifically . . . the ones about being enrolled in some class in college and having to take the final, only I haven’t been attending all semester, and I’m panicked. I don’t have that. Francis used to have those, too. He told me. He felt it had to do with being taught by Jesuits. Though I was never taught by Jesuits. So that’s it. Is that what you wanted to hear? Did Mary Linn ever sigh?” Charlotte kept staring out into the trees’ silent reticule.
He was looking intently at her in the all but vanished light. For an instant he saw a bat flicker past the window then disappear. “No. I don’t remember Mary Linn ever sighing. She wasn’t a sighing sort of girl, I guess.” He expected this would prompt Charlotte to say something. Something like, “Well, that should prove something.” Or, “That must’ve meant she was very happy.” Or, “Nobody’s the same, I guess.” But she said nothing—at all. He lay uncomfortably on his side, holding his martini glass that had grown warm, the gin in it flat and metallic. Charlotte sat, no longer in silhouette, but very still, staring into the new night. He could not hear her breathing, could not hear the ice in her glass or her bracelets touching down her arm. She seemed to have come to the end of whatever thought she’d had that had caused her to sigh and now was happy to have no other.
“How does your poor neck feel, sweetheart,” she finally said. She shook her golden hair again as if she’d waked herself.
“Good. Pretty good,” Jonathan said. “I’ll live.”
“I know you will,” she said. “We’ll have a good time with Byron and Tweedy. It’s always so nice to be up there. Maybe we’ll go for a sail.”
“That’d be great,” Jonathan said and thought about sailing fast with a mounting breeze behind them.
“It’ll be cold at night, it always is,” she said. Charlotte stood then and stretched in the shadows. Moonlight filtered in through the sliding door, reaching the angles of her long body. She yawned and walked out of the room without speaking more. He heard her bathroom door close, heard the light click on, heard water running from the tap. And he heard Charlotte humming, then singing. A Doobie Brothers’ song she always liked. “This is it, make no mistake where you are. Your back’s in the cor-ner.”
ON THE OWLS HEAD FLIGHT, DURING WHICH THE MAP OF THE NEW England coast floated blandly underneath—its not-quite-greenly settled shores, the big Narragansett, Boston and the Cape on toward the adamantine coast of Maine, Charlotte in the back seat thought intensely and exclusively of Jonathan, a large, neck-bandaged figure in his tan poplin jacket, squeezed into the “co-pilot” seat beside Byron, and enthusiastically talking about English as a second language.
Encased in the engine’s noise, Charlotte was realizing through these moments that she was not the most perfect person to be married to Jonathan Bell—even though she was married to him and liked him very much. Jonathan was a man who apparently believed in greater and greater closeness, of shared complications, of difficult-to-overcome frictions leading to even deeper depths of intimacy and knowledge of each other. Whereas she really didn’t, was simply not that kind of person and had never been. This discrepancy, she felt, was likely going to make them both very unhappy, since it meant that something immensely important to each of them was always going to be missing, or be far too present. And this (this absence or if you like, presence) would make Jonathan feel unappreciated, make him distracted and too insistent and wrongly misunderstood, which would then make her extremely unhappy. It occurred to her—too late, though she’d certainly thought it before—that the distant Francis Dolan had likely been the perfect match for her, as Mary Linn had been the perfect match for Jonathan. How often it must turn out that the first marriage was the best. Most people misunderstood that.
Out the airplane window, Charlotte saw other tiny planes taking off from Logan Airport, nosing slowly upward then disappearing. It was possible, she thought, she should never have gotten married again at all—and worse yet married poor Jonathan. Since what had foreseeably happened was that she—Charlotte—had turned out to be simply the woman she’d always known herself to be, including when she was selling Jonathan the loft on Watts Street and been so charmed by him on the terrace that sunny day. For some reason she had simply lost sight of herself, stopped paying attention, or even stopped believing in Charlotte Porter from Alpine. She’d wanted Jonathan to like her for being that—adore her, even—but not consider her as being anything more or less. Certainly not penetrate her. Not explore her. Not hope to find her out and learn her—like a second language. Just let her be. Only . . . what? She didn’t know. It was too bad.
/> Whatever she didn’t provide Jonathan—and she could say the words, but didn’t really understand them—obviously the kind, loving and obedient Mary Linn (whom she didn’t really care about) had provided perfectly. They’d been young and everything had been new. The world had been nothing but surprise after surprise. Then time passed. The surprises had stopped being a crucial feature, and they had grown accustomed to each other (Jonathan had said none of this), which must’ve been normal and good in its way. Even deep—the thing he liked. Yes. All that caused Charlotte—high above the Atlantic’s pearlescent curve—to realize (for the first time) how unthinkably terrible it was to lose a spouse. She and Francis had been lucky not to lose each other but merely to fall out of love. Europeans possibly understood this better than Americans. The two of them—she and Francis—hadn’t conceived of a point in life where a lack of new stimulus became a state of being so that you had to go deeper—whatever deeper meant. Just something you invented to pass the time that was otherwise passing too slowly. Neither of them had needed such inventions—at least she hadn’t.
None of which was any of Jonathan’s fault. He was a generous, kind, intelligent, loving, needing man—more loving and patient and decent, in fact, than she’d expected. He liked people to feel good around him—which she did. She was exactly the same way, at least in this last regard. Though their goals were different. She felt as accommodated to him as she first had on the terrace garden, in sight of the missing towers, of what was now his building. Nothing had really changed from that point on. But Jonathan—it was the engineer in him, she supposed—Jonathan was ever on the way to somewhere. For a moment, she supposed, it was that that had excited her, caused her to want to go, caused her to forget who Charlotte was.
Divorce, Charlotte felt, would be a much better and easier state to maintain than marriage. It took being married to a nice man like Jonathan, offering her the desirable things he offered her, to make this clear. She had been divorced from Francis Dolan for four years and didn’t feel they were forever banished from each other’s lives (though they’d never seen each other again and never spoke). She and Jonathan would do this better. There would be no anxieties, no sense of always, puzzlingly letting someone down. If they stayed married (which she now understood they wouldn’t) she would end up saying words she did not want to say—harmful things she’d heard other people say. She would grow somber and stop being gay and unpredictable and beautiful. Marriage would change her, and that she didn’t want. Jonathan was only fifty-three. He could find someone to be deep with. Or not. And in that way, as the lighthouse on Owls Head rose below them, and the whitely shimmering sea with tiny sails upon it stretched eastward, where there were green islands and what seemed to be a mountain—in that way, the matter of her marriage to Jonathan Bell was decided.
CHARLOTTE TOLD JONATHAN HER NEWS DURING THEIR WEEKEND IN Maine. She hated telling him so soon after his surgery, with the padded bandage still wound round his neck. But she had it in her mind all Thursday, and then on Friday morning she woke up feeling wretched and cruel and deceitful (though she wasn’t). Plus, she knew about herself, that when she thought something important she could never sit on it.
She and Jonathan had walked up to the Tenants Harbor country store to buy sandwiches and cold wine, with the thought to eating lunch in the cool sun on the seawall where the lobster boats unloaded. She felt she could tell him in a sweet way, even though she knew it would be a shock.
Jonathan was happily seated with his lobster roll un-wrapped, opened across his bare knees, watching two ospreys transporting sticks to the top of a tall spruce across the little harbor. They were repairing their nest. It had not been possible to go kayaking due to Jonathan’s incision. But they had had a strenuous walk in the late morning that had led them to the store. Tweedy and Byron had driven into Rockland for dinner supplies and package-mailing. It felt to Charlotte that she and Jonathan were alone enough on the seawall for a serious talk—they were conspicuously alone, which she found unexpectedly stressful. It was as if she had already told Jonathan what she intended to tell him, and he was—in his sweet way—pretending not to react just to make her feel better. Jonathan was wearing pink walking shorts, a white T-shirt, and a porkpie made of green toweling. He was very pale and looked, she felt, ridiculous with his new extra poundage and his bandaged neck that showed a tiny bit of bleed-through.
“Jonathan,” she said.
“The larger of the ospreys is the female, I believe,” Jonathan observed. Store customers were trafficking in and out behind them, piling into SUVs with their lunch and driving away. It was a lovely noon. They had a half bottle of cold Pouilly-Fuissé and plastic cups.
“I have to tell you something,” Charlotte said. “I hate to. But I don’t think being married is working out well for me. Us. I mean . . .” She repressed an urge to lay a hand on his wrist, and instead clasped her own hands tight together and pulled her elbows in. She did look at him and smile, but felt it was the way a nurse would smile at a dying patient, which Jonathan Bell was not. It was actually a smile of forgiveness—for herself. She made herself stop smiling.
Jonathan, his sandwich on his knees on top of the wax paper, looked at her beside him—only glancingly—then stared at the birds he’d been so delighted to watch and tell her about. “Oh,” he said. “This is not working.”
“No,” Charlotte said. “It’s not.”
“Why?” Jonathan said. “Is that a possible question?”
“It is,” Charlotte said. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while.” Which wasn’t true. She was not the kind of person who thought about things for a while. She didn’t really believe anybody was. When Charlotte thought about something once and very intensely, as she had about Jonathan on the plane ride up, that was then what she believed, which hardly ever changed. She almost said, “Why, Jonathan? Because you have an interest in some unknown you’re willing to invent, and I don’t.” That, though, seemed insulting and wasn’t really true. So she said, “I’m going to make you unhappy as a wife, Jonathan, and I don’t see any reason to do that.”
“Do you have another lover?” Jonathan said, continuing to eat his sandwich.
“Of course not,” Charlotte said.
“Not that that would be the worst thing. I guess,” Jonathan said, then sat silently for a time. Two big gulls landed in the rocky shallows in front of them and began eyeing them eating their sandwiches. Jonathan tore off a piece of his bun and tossed it, which set the gulls shouting and flapping, which attracted another gull.
“I’m not sure what you observe about me,” Jonathan said, now very formally. “My history. My age. My temperament. It could be very little.” They had never, she knew, had this kind of conversation, though he’d tried. She knew he liked it—no matter what its devastating subject—because it promised to search deeper into whatever he thought the conversation was really about, but that she didn’t think needed searching into. “I think you might be underestimating me.”
“What part?” Charlotte said. “I think you have a good temperament.” She took a tiny bite of lobster—the claw meat. She’d now said the hard words. There was no claiming them back. They could talk on like friends. Their marriage was over.
“My ability to love,” Jonathan said solemnly.
“Oh, no,” Charlotte said. “I don’t underestimate that.” She wiggled her pretty painted-blue toes at the gulls, causing them to paddle closer. “You’re very, very loving.”
Jonathan breathed audibly in and breathed out, and began folding the butcher paper over the remains of his sandwich, still in his lap. She smelled a tiny scent of perspiration—on one of them or the other.
“A wife should make her husband happy and feel good,” Charlotte said, feeling much better about everything, as if a heavy iron door had opened, then closed, but then opened surprisingly again. The sun was warming her legs.
“I think you have to make yourself happy, not wait for someone to do it,” Jonathan said.
/> “I know,” Charlotte said. “That’s true. And that’s what I’m doing by saying this to you. I’m trying to make myself happy. But you, too.”
Jonathan nodded. His sandwich had become a neat, white parcel in his large hands. The sun was on them. A nice new smell now—a scent of clean clothes, starch, and soap—arose from somewhere, released by the sunshine. Charlotte realized the two of them looked like people having a fine time sharing a sandwich, feeding the gulls, basking in sunlight. Nobody would think they were putting an end to a life together. There was nothing fine about it. Though she was glad to feel not horrible, and not required to do it all over again. Jonathan was never horrible. He was anything but that.
“It’s a skein, isn’t it?” Jonathan said in his measured way.
“What is?” Charlotte said. This time she did willingly smile her forgiving smile—for him. He was forgiven for being left behind.
“Getting married, being not married, getting married again, getting now un-married. All of it.” Jonathan touched his finger to the upper edge of his gauze bandage, beneath which was wounded flesh where there’d been a defective thyroid gland. Charlotte hadn’t liked looking at the scar. “It’s all a skein. There’s probably no reason to concentrate too hard on any single part of it. You need to see the whole thing to understand it. And of course we can’t yet.”