Straying

by Molly McCloskey

  “Did you do something to be ashamed of?”

  “I did not,” I said.

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  What was I talking about? It was my first, flailing attempt to push him away. Even in the dimness of my self-knowledge, some part of me could see that. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, maybe you should think about it.”

  “I know,” I said flatly.

  “You know, you don’t know.” He threw me a look, condescending and gently dismissive, that seemed to say he’d been put on earth to indulge me. “Maybe you should’ve married one of your pals from the band.”

  I looked at him. He got up from the table. I hadn’t told him about that night. I could’ve, I hadn’t done anything wrong. But maybe I wanted to see if he’d hear about it, and he had.

  * * *

  EDDIE KEPT ME closer to him after that, at least for a while, and I didn’t know whether it was out of contrition—perhaps he regretted having scolded me—or whether he was afraid I might be drifting from his orbit. It was around this time, during the third year of our marriage, the year before we moved to the house under the mountain, that we began to drink more, and there were many mornings I awoke with a sharp, thrumming pain behind my eyes and a quiver in my hands and a feeling that we were avoiding each other’s eyes.

  The nights would begin pleasantly enough: we’d meet in town or drive out to the Point for an after-work pint, with a plan to come home and cook. But then we would decide to have our dinner out, and there would be wine, too much of it, and instead of going home after the meal, we would go on for a late drink somewhere because—why not? Every now and then the night felt like a wave we could catch, reminiscent of our beginnings. But more often an edginess or a melancholy seemed to make its way into our drinking. There were times I felt I knew Eddie less well than ever, and I was shocked by whatever chutzpah or hubris had allowed us to undertake such an enormous thing as marriage.

  There were also days that reminded me why I’d married him, days that seemed to relegate any unpleasantness or regret to the realm of temporary blindness or simple misconception. One afternoon Eddie phoned me from work and said he was coming home early and asked if I’d like to go mussel-picking at Culleenamore in Strandhill. He said we hadn’t done that since our first summer, and did I remember how much I’d enjoyed it?

  When we got to the beach, he reminded me how to go for the mussels lowest down on the rocks because they’d got less sun, and to choose those with the sharpest edges, as that meant they were younger. The tide was out, so that the sandbanks a few hundred meters from where we picked were exposed, and in the distance we could see seals. Eddie knelt on the rocks, his trousers tucked into his rubber boots, the sleeves of an old jumper pushed up to his elbows. He was filling a bucket, and I was on an adjacent rock, filling mine. When he straightened, he waved to me and smiled.

  A few minutes later, I heard him behind me. “Got enough?” he said, and held out his hand for my bucket.

  We climbed down to the sand and, for whatever reason, he set both the buckets down and put his arms around me and pressed me to him. I could see over his shoulder a honey-colored sky, the dune grass bending on the slopes. He gave my hair a tug so that my face was lifted to his, and he kissed me, then he walked up the beach to where the rest of our things were while I waited with the buckets. When he came back toward me, he was looking first out to sea and then down at the sand, like a sad little boy, and I felt a wave of pity for him. It wasn’t the first time, and I didn’t know whether to feel alarmed or reassured, whether pity and love were mutually exclusive or whether, on the contrary, they couldn’t exist without each other. As we left the beach, black clouds pushed in out of nowhere, and by the time we were on the road, fat drops of rain had begun to fall and the houses either side of us were smudges in the downpour.

  At home, Eddie steamed the mussels in white wine and we ate enormous bowls of them with crusty bread while the rain fell thickly beyond the sash window. Then we sprawled on the sofa, refreshed and tired from the sea air. I hadn’t stopped watching him since the beach—as he was driving, as he cooked, as he uncorked the wine—and I felt as though I were witnessing something quietly spectacular. I felt in love again. I had the thought that all that was needed for us to thrive was for me to allow him to appear, even occasionally, in this light. I imagined him, not for the first time, in the distant future, and I was sure he would age into the sort of older man I had always liked the look of, weathered and sturdy and thickset. I knew, too, that he would stick by me, and that that was not something one found easily, or cast too easily aside.

  I sat up on the sofa and straddled him, and we made love like that, hardly undressing at all, hardly speaking, the taste of the sea still on us. It felt creaturely and instinctive and surprisingly gentle. Afterward, as always, he seemed shy, so that I was left with an uneasy conscience and an odd desire to protect him.

  Later, in bed, I lay there in the dark, thinking that if I could only give myself to this, to Eddie, without hesitation or doubt, I could stop this struggle and begin my life in earnest. We had talked about having a child, if in a rather glancing manner—someday, accompanied by nervous laughter; we seemed to agree that it was the next right thing, the natural thing. We had gotten a kitten, a black-and-white female we named Olivia, and we made a disproportionate fuss over her, reporting to each other on her latest adorable antics, conversations always laced with a certain self-consciousness, as though we suspected ourselves of displaced affection, aware of what we weren’t yet brave enough to do.

  I turned on my side and touched my head to his shoulder. He was asleep. I imagined being pregnant with Eddie’s child and felt a rush of desire that was overlaid with something unfamiliar. For an instant, I could feel myself falling under Eddie’s spell again, as I had that first summer when everything was strange to me and I relied on him to interpret the world. I was sure that was what pregnancy and the early years of motherhood would mean, a deepening of my dependence on him. A wave of aversion passed through me, but so did a feeling of smugness, something I was sure I had detected time and time again in families, those sealed-off, self-regarding little units. On the one hand, they repelled me; on the other, I envied them and wanted what they had. A family, I thought. Our family.

  In the days that followed, I regarded my husband with something like submissiveness or reverence, as though I were already carrying his child and the fact had rendered me awestruck. One night in the sitting room, he turned to me and said, “We should think about buying a house,” and I clapped my hands—actually clapped them like a schoolgirl—and leapt off my chair to join him on the sofa.

  It took us six months, but one morning we found ourselves driving up the mountain road to view the house that would soon be ours. It had rained earlier, quite heavily, and now the sun was out. The mountain was a steel blue and the wet grass glinted in the light, the land so lushly green it looked irradiated.

  We took possession in October, and it was truer than I could have dreamed that our move to the countryside felt, if only for a while, like a return to our better selves, to that blissful first summer of our beginnings.

  THE DAY IS dissolving into twilight by the time I get back to Monkstown. I’ve been in the house only three weeks, and already it feels like home, some part of me believing that everything I see here is the accrual of my own life rather than the belongings of strangers.

  My friend’s friends bought the place in the seventies, when a lot of these seafront houses had fallen into disrepair or been divided into flats. There was no electricity in the house, and the light fittings and chandeliers had been removed, so that cables hung frayed from the ceilings. Now the walls are lined with books; there is a closet full of china, a walled garden, kitchen drawers as big as suitcases; there are dainty three-legged mahogany side tables, silk-covered cushions on the sofas that face the open fire. The carpets are plush and spotless. Every house on this stretch of road has undergone
a similar transformation. On the next street over, a terrace of about a dozen houses, there are some days as many as six Jaguars parked. Six seems to be the full complement. I count them on my way to Tesco.

  Every Thursday, a Hungarian handyman comes, and on Mondays, a Romanian woman cleans the house. Otherwise, it’s just me, ascending and descending the stairs like some historic-homes tour guide without an audience. I have never lived in a house so big, and during my first week here, I aimed to spread myself among as many rooms as possible. I prowled the garden’s depths, even at night. I wanted to know every corner of the place, every tree and dormant flower, each painting and book. I wanted to plunge into this accretion of family and history and nation. I imagined the precise way I would occupy each of these rooms and the sort of person I would become as I did. In the library, I saw myself sitting by the large window in the straight-backed chair like some fusty old scholar, reading Clarissa and Tristram Shandy and all the other great works that have hovered, unread, over my life; in the enormous first-floor front room, with its broad white chaise longue, I would gaze at the sea from my reclining position, sipping tea from a china cup, as though in a period drama; in the kitchen, with its gigantic drawers of spices and pulses and exotic vinegars, I would concoct dishes I’d long meant to try but for which I’d never got round to assembling the ingredients.

  Quickly, though, I found my presence contracting. I retreated from all those rooms, which is to say that I stopped imagining the lives I might live in them. Now I occupy less and less space, though whatever space I do occupy, I occupy intensely. The house is as cold as it is beautiful, but it is more than the desire to stay warm that is behind this gathering in of self. It feels like a rather obvious metaphor—for the swift descent from the illusion of plenitude to the actuality of limits, for the way life is so effective at narrowing our horizons. A child’s world is infinite not because the child is capable of realizing any dream but because the child does not yet know just how many dreams she will need to forsake, how little time and energy and fortitude will actually be available to her in this lifetime.

  Now I take my air at night, my quota of two cigarettes, on the covered patio outside the kitchen’s sliding doors, and with feet firmly planted, I peer into the garden’s far reaches. Beyond the end of the lawn, the upper half of the Protestant church, which dominates the Crescent, looms like a giant risen from slumber, and when the night is cold and wet and the moonlight falls on the yew tree and its needles glint like tinsel, the spectacle of it all is more than satisfying, for though I lament that narrowing of world that comes with age, I know that, like all children, I overlooked much and took everything for granted, and that even into the early years of adulthood, when I thought about the world at all in that way, I mistakenly assumed that all of its good, beautiful things would come around again, and then again, and again, until the time was right for me to pluck them. Now I am old enough to know that there are people I would like to see again whom I have already seen for the last time, there are places I dream of returning to that I will never revisit, and that though a few things do come around again and offer themselves, many more do not.

  When I used to visit my mother in Florida, in the time before Stan’s death, before the sadness settled on her, I felt stirrings of that old sense of possibility, of the largeness of life. I would arrive at their retirement condo and lie down in the spare room, on the too-soft single mattress, between sheets I was sure I remembered from childhood, and I would feel each time the strange and sudden onset of hopefulness. It was, I thought, trace memories of youth, awakened by being back in my mother’s care, of a time when I believed that the world awaited me and that its intentions were good.

  Whenever I left her at the end of those visits, there lingered between and within us a longing for each other that was tender and oddly intimate, like the longing of lovers. It unnerved me slightly, this feeling, but it didn’t surprise me.

  She met Stan the year I went off to college. She had taken a cruise of the Pacific coast with her bridge pals. Stan was a widower and was the fifth wheel accompanying two couples, one of whom was casually acquainted with a friend of my mother’s. Before they disembarked a week later back in Portland, my mother and Stan swapped numbers. One year later to the day, they married.

  As they neared retirement age, a lot of their friends were relocating to Arizona, but they both loved the sea, and eventually, they moved to Florida. On one of my visits to their condo, in the last months of Stan’s life—I was living in Nairobi then—we were all sitting in the living room in front of our three folding tray tables, eating dinner that had been delivered from the dining room. The food was rather good, but the dinners came in individual Styrofoam boxes, each food group nestled in its own compartment; even when we transferred the dinners to our plates, their components retained that air of separateness, as though wanting nothing to do with each other. Every night my mother decried the use of Styrofoam. Every night we watched Jeopardy! It was my mother’s favorite show. I used to think that if I could do one thing for her, it would be to send her on a honeymoon with Alex Trebek. A cruise through the Bahamas, with lots of bridge and sunbathing and jumbo-shrimp cocktails. Alex would dote on her, wooing her with his knowledge of absolutely everything. He would draw her out like he does with his contestants, their banal idiosyncrasies elevated, briefly, to something interesting, and my mother would feel clever and beautiful and young again.

  We were just finishing our ice cream, eating it straight from the Styrofoam cups, producing together an almighty squeaking, when an ambulance and a fire engine pulled into the parking lot beneath their window. There was an astonishing amount of whirring and whooping and flashing red lights. Everything in America seemed like this to me: larger, louder, unignorable. Everything, even the Reaper’s arrival, felt just a little like halftime of a football game.

  I had been there a week, and this was the third time it had happened.

  My mother said, “We’ve got a front-row seat here.” And then, sounding intrigued: “See if you can see who it is.”

  Stan heaved himself with effort from the La-Z-Boy and took the three steps toward the window. I didn’t know whether to get up and join him and risk seeming prurient, or to stay where I was and risk appearing insufficiently interested in what was, after all, the central drama of their lives.

  “We’ve got two or three people here close to a hundred years old,” Stan said to me. He said a hundred like ahunnerd. “You don’t get much beyond that.”

  Stan had, as of that night, less than three months to live.

  We rinsed our Styrofoam cups and stacked them in the recycling bag. We never did see who it was being taken away. My mother went into the bedroom and lay down on her bed to read. Stan had recently bought her a Kindle. She would take it into the bedroom every night, place it beside her on the bed, then pick up her library book. She loved the public library, with its air of thrift, civic-mindedness, and good intentions. But she pretended, for Stan’s sake, to love her Kindle, too. She had learned how to recharge it, and this she referred to as using her Kindle.

  Stan’s kidneys were failing. His doctor tracked their diminishing function in percentage points, as though ticking off his days to live: it amounted to the same thing. Stan had opted not to undergo dialysis, which was, I suppose, when he officially began his dying. It also marked a change in my mother. Her voice grew thinner and sometimes contained a trace of fear. Her default mood had always been one of cheerful enthusiasm. Now, on the phone, she often sounded distracted, as though she had caught sight of something approaching in the distance, something she couldn’t quite make out but which she was almost certain would bring trouble.

  In the days before he died, it all got much worse, dramatically so. They filled him with painkillers that made him hallucinate. He screamed at my mother and banished her from the room as though casting out the devil.

  I flew from Nairobi to be with her. Stan was still alive when I booked my ticket, he had not yet begun
to writhe and shout, and there was no hint of how swiftly it would all unspool. It was Monday morning, and I was due to fly on Wednesday. On Tuesday, she called to tell me that he had died that morning.

  I asked the questions one asks at such moments, and my mother said to me, “You sound upset. Are you okay?”

  She is in denial, I thought. She’s in shock.

  “Well,” I said, shaking and a bit exasperated, “I am upset. Aren’t you?”

  “I’ve done my crying,” she said calmly, as though it were an errand she had run, a very private errand, about which I should not inquire. I never understood her, but I know that she was a merciful person, and the best I’ve surmised is that steeliness and a kind of keeping at bay steadied her through life and its vicissitudes. This was a woman who took the plots of movies seriously and personally. She talked about the characters as though they were people she knew going morally astray. How could he do that? she would cry. On the other hand, she disengaged from the news. “I try not to listen,” she told me once. “I can’t do anything about it, and it makes me sad, it makes me think civilization has gone crazy.”

  With regard to my work, a don’t ask, don’t tell policy had evolved. In the beginning, I had tried to share things with her, everyday things unrelated to violence or poverty. I wanted to counter the stereotypes I imagined she was burdened by. I sent her upbeat stories I had written for donors—about a disabled woman who had created her own small leather-goods business out of a shack in Trincomalee and a few hundred dollars of microfinance, or a young Tamil who’d left Jaffna to train as a doctor in London, then given up his life of relative luxury to return to his war-torn homeland and his suffering people. But I soon realized that any picture I painted served as a foundation for envisioning more, and this she did not want to do. And so I stopped.

  It didn’t really trouble me, her refusal to imagine deeply for fear of imagining the worst—it’s hardly an uncommon strategy—but it was only when Stan died that the implications of this approach revealed themselves, for better and for worse. When my mother said to me three months after her husband’s death, “I’m surprised how much I miss him,” I got the impression that her surprise was adding to the pain. I was amazed. How could she not have known? I had known. I’d been dreading, on her behalf, her aloneness. Unlike my mother, I dwell anxiously on the future, convinced that expecting the worst will render the worst less destabilizing. But the future, when it arrives, is never quite as I pictured it, and even if there is suffering, it is somehow not what I prepared for. I find myself as though in a dream, one of those dreams in which I realize I have studied for the wrong exam. All I have done, with my fretting and my vivid imagination about the future, is render myself miserable, yet again, in the present.