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by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that my heart beat the way it did. For having walked by his house so many times, and gleaned with such pleasure all the small and large details of the world he had made, I admired him. I would have liked him for a friend. Even more, I would have liked him to gather me into his family, a family I imagined as manifesting the same humor and whimsy and discernment that was evident everywhere in his house and on his land. For I knew there must be a family, moving through the clean rooms of the house, laughing and groaning, just beyond the reach of what I could see.

  That same evening I returned to the farmhouse, still elated by the sight of the station wagon, to find that there was swordfish for dinner. And tired of my own reticence, I decided I wanted to talk about Jerry Roth. Not to the woman who had cooked the swordfish, with whom I usually talked, but to the people who were eating it with me. I think I would have liked the farmhouse much more if it hadn’t been for those eight other people, who would emerge from their rooms at the end of the afternoon, looking dazed and replete. They took turns walking to the village to buy bottles of wine that were opened and poured at dinner. I had to wait for a pause in the conversation; the wine made them talkative, and they had hit again upon a favorite subject: the other farmhouses, castles, villas, and cottages where they had been guests in the past.

  Potatoes. At every meal, said Laszlo. Boiled or fried. Or cold, cut up in little chunks and mixed together with a herb I couldn’t identify.

  But it’s Italy! Anna cried.

  My point, Laszlo said irritably, and jiggled the wine in his glass. Not what one would expect.

  Mary spoke: The first week with the baronessa, I could barely eat, she made me so nervous. And all those little dogs underfoot. I was sure I was going to step on one and cripple it. But the food was good; there were no potatoes.

  Ah, so you’ve been to Santa Maddalena, Laszlo said with a small sigh of resentment.

  The platter of swordfish was heaved up into the air and then made its precarious way around the table for a second time.

  They are fattening me up here, Cesar said, helping himself.

  Haven’t you seen that great big oven there in the back? Behind the barn? Erga said. We’re going to be plump and delicious when we’re done.

  She was looking at her plate as she said this, and without eye contact, I could not tell how merrily she intended it. We ate in silence, and for a fleeting moment it seemed possible that we had all been tricked, that this gift of quietude was in fact a term of captivity and terror.

  Have you tried walking? I asked them finally. I find that walking helps.

  Mary wiped her mouth and gently pushed back her chair.

  I just run, she said, I run as fast as I can.

  And so it was that I was running the next time I saw the house of Jerry Roth. By that point the running had become painful and strange to me. At first, when I began to run, I felt surprised by my lightness, I felt young and strong, I felt like a child running ecstatically, for no reason at all. But soon that feeling changed and my breath started to disappear. I had to pause to hitch up my jeans and wipe the fog from my glasses. Then, out of perversity, I began running again. Just to that tree, I told myself. And after the tree, an electrical pole, a mailbox, a NO TRESPASSING sign. I kept promising myself that upon reaching these landmarks I would stop, yet I didn’t stop, I continued to run, trying to be swift, becoming more damp and anguished as I passed each marker and found another just a little farther on. I must have been bleeding for some time before I noticed it. I suppose I thought the wetness slipping down my legs was sweat. So what made me notice? Maybe the smell, the faint animal smell, a smell that has always made me think of wounded prey in the underbrush, or a mother licking afterbirth off her young. Foolishly, I had not been expecting it. In the deepest part of me, I had not believed that my body would return to normal, or that one day I would be well again.

  I’m not sure if it was the thought of being well or the memory of getting sick that affected me. But either way, I bent over and started to cry. For the first time I wanted help, but predictably no one was near; there was a detached humming in the air, coming from the hidden insects or the electrical lines overhead. The horses and cows were absent from the fields. The sun burned indistinctly behind a thin screen of clouds. I limped out to the middle of the road, but I couldn’t see any trucks in the distance, approaching me at dangerous speeds. I was at a loss. I didn’t even know what to call the place where I had stopped. There was a route number posted on a sign a few hundred yards ahead, but that number had no meaning for me.

  Standing there in the road, I was visited by an idea, startling and clear. It was the idea of crisis; the idea that I was in the midst of having one. And with this idea, my earlier sense of lightness returned, and though my face was burning and my chest hurt and sharp pains were rocketing up my shins, I wanted to run again. I wanted to get there fast. For I knew now exactly where I was going.

  I knew, too, what I was going to tell him. Why I had come, a stranger running down the road, and knocked on his door. Doubled over on the threshold of his old house, beneath the black-leaded lights, breathless and red-faced, dark stains growing on the legs of my pants. And it wasn’t completely untrue. It had been true only two months before, but then I had been in the restroom on the third floor of my department, inside a stall where the metal was beginning to show through the gray-green paint, as a slender graduate student I had once taught was energetically brushing her teeth at the sink. She had probably just finished eating one of the frugal, grainy meals she brought with her to campus in a cloudy plastic container.

  So I ran as best as I could until at last the white house appeared before me; I climbed the steps at the base of the slope, followed the flagstone path, passed beneath the branches of the magnificent tree, all the while ushered along by the profound sense of permission that the word crisis had given me. In fact I’d come to feel that I was seeking help for someone other than myself. As if under a spell, I lifted the knocker, and when the brass hammer dropped down on its plate, the force of its fall eased open the door, which was, of course, unlocked. Jerry Roth shared none of his neighbors’ suspicions. No bolts, no barbed wire, just a half-lit entryway with a good Turkish carpet and a bowl of summer roses, and beyond that a bright kitchen smelling of coffee and slightly burnt toast. And the table! The table was even better than I’d imagined: huge, rough-hewn, radiant with age, practically seaworthy; surely salvaged from a tumbledown farm nearby and then refurbished at some expense. The kitchen chairs looked rescued too, mismatched as they were, some with spindles, others slatted, one with a little painting of grapes and fruits fading on its back, all of them gathered in expectation around the table, as charming and different as children. The chair I sat in had narrow armrests, and I could feel the shallow dip in the wood where hundreds of other elbows had rested, or maybe only a few chosen elbows repeatedly over the course of a hundred years. The newspaper was close at hand, not the local paper but the Times, whose presence I so missed that I almost started crying again, already opened to the film section, my favorite, and a review of an Iranian movie that my friend and I planned to see together.

  The review was admiring, not to anyone’s surprise, and full of the sort of empty reverential phrases—a master of world cinema, etc.—that made my friend particularly impatient. My friend had little patience with a number of things: dog owners, pigeons, overcooked food, fatuous reviews, ATM fees, antiques, and people’s mispronunciation of his name. Yet he had been unfailingly patient with me. Opening the windows wide, reading to me from William James, walking my dog, taking my clothes and sheets to the laundromat. Why something that not only ended but began in an accident should have so undone me—but, well, it did. And he had been undone too, which moved me. It made me realize that he’d been serious all along.

  As I was finishing the review, an orange cat wandered into the kitchen and promptly jumped up onto the table, and for the first time I experienced a pang
of disapproval: Jerry Roth was not a great disciplinarian with his animals, and the cat settled itself right on top of the newspapers. I moved a dish out of the way so the cat wouldn’t lick the butter from the toast, deciding as I did so that I might as well eat the rest of the toast myself, since it was already cold.

  Did I call out at any point? Make myself known? I think I said hello when I stepped inside his house; I must have done that. But I felt quite sure, quite quickly, that no one was home, despite the cups and dishes still scattered on the table, despite the smell of breakfast in the air. The house had the quality of being recently and hurriedly evacuated, but not for any sinister reason—maybe the kids were late for swim practice, or the milk had run out. They had left the house in a rush; they would be back soon; but for now, it was mine.

  All my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel teakettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemütlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs. To put it another way, cozy. Which did not describe my overheated apartment in the city, or the dim, chaotic ranch house I’d grown up in, places that were home but not home, not the home I wished to have, might one day have, if time or means or aptitude ever allowed it. A home I’d have to make. Sitting at Jerry Roth’s table, I felt suddenly that I’d spent my adult life engaged in the most impoverished kind of making. What did I have to show but lecture notes, a short book on other books, comments in the margins of seminar papers, an occasional terrarium? It occurred to me then that to make a kitchen like this required a breadth of imagination I might not be able to summon.

  Back at the farmhouse there was a pedestal in the corner of the sitting room, and on the pedestal sat a large guest book that held the names of past visitors, a book I had already leafed through many times, trying to kill the afternoon. Most of the names meant little to me, but once in a while a name would leap out from the page and spread its light over the room—a moment both exhilarating and deeply shameful for me as I was reminded that I had no business being there. The guest book adhered to a formula, full name followed by discipline and date of residency, and one of the earlier entries stopped me, because instead of putting down architect or composer or essayist, the visitor had written, in slim capital letters, HOMEMAKER. But she was a poet, I knew—a poet of such importance that even I, who almost never read poetry, perked up at the sight of her name. She had written this in 1976, long enough ago that it was hard for me to interpret her use of the word. Was it a political act to write that, a reclamation? A gesture of defiance? Or could it be modesty. Self-doubt. A wry critique of taxonomy and titles? Maybe, more simply, she felt it the most apt description of how she spent her days. I couldn’t tell; though the writing itself looked black and fresh, her intent remained distant and unreadable to me. Nevertheless this entry in the guest book made me happy. In the years since she wrote it, her genius as a poet had been named and rewarded, and I liked how the word she chose early for herself now had the glamour of genius attached to it; how HOMEMAKER reached forward through time and lightly claimed that.

  The orange cat shifted peaceably on the newspaper. I considered fixing myself another piece of toast, or finding a guest room and lying down to rest for a few minutes. My body was still tired and weird from all the running, and when I stood up from my chair, my knees buckled and I nearly lost my balance. I laid my palm on the knotted surface of the table. Through the wide kitchen windows I could see the rainbow horse waiting in the garden, and beyond that, the crooked apple tree. A fringe of young trees grew along the property line, weakly shielding the back lawn from the shaggier woods that rose up behind them, and while I was staring at the saplings, trying to figure out what kind they were, I saw a large body emerge from the forest and start lumbering toward the house. It took me a second to realize that the body belonged to a man. It was so pale and slow and enormous, and wearing such a short and colorful bathrobe, I thought unfairly at first that I must be seeing a woman, a morbidly obese woman in a swimming cap. But what I mistook for a swimming cap was actually a bald head. And as the man drew closer, I understood more and more clearly the size of him. He moved laboriously, shuffling more than walking, halting every few steps to catch his breath. His head shone and his shoulders heaved. The hem of his bathrobe fluttered above legs that looked at once curdled and bloated, swollen to the point of bursting. His leg flesh drooped over his knees.

  I knew but did not accept that this man approaching the house was Jerry Roth. He made his slow, huffing way across the lawn in the unconscious manner of someone who had done so a thousand times before. Upon noticing something in the grass, he kicked at it briefly, but didn’t, probably couldn’t, bend over to pick it up. It seemed impossible that the man responsible for this house was the same as the huge, repellent person kicking at his lawn.

  Jerry Roth then lifted his eyes and blindly took in the whole of his house, or at least the back view of it, a view I had never seen, and I must have forgotten that I was as fully apparent to him as he was to me, because I continued to gaze at my ease from the kitchen, and felt truly shocked when his blank stare narrowed into a hard look, pointed in my direction like a gun. He stopped short and raised a heavy arm to block the sun’s glare from his eyes. I could see now that his bright bathrobe was covered in flocks of flying cranes, wings and necks outstretched. Suddenly he dropped his arm and began moving toward me at a pace I didn’t think possible for him.

  In that moment I thought meaningfully, for the first time in several weeks, about William James; in this case, about William James and his bear. To explain, James published an influential paper in 1884, a paper titled “What Is an Emotion?,” and in this paper James put forth the theory that standard emotions such as sadness or rage or fear are not antecedent to the physiological responses we associate with them, but rather the product of these bodily changes. This was a radical notion at the time, a reversal of the usual way of seeing things. Common sense, according to James, tells us that when we lose our fortune, we are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. Yet this order of sequence is incorrect, James asserted: The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry; angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. Coming between the stimulus (bear) and the feeling (fear) is the body: quickened heartbeat, shallow breathing, trembling lips, weakened limbs. And that collection of responses is what lets you know that you’re afraid.

  My own research had very little to do with his theory of emotion, and I confess to feeling somewhat irritated when the bear would be brought up almost immediately upon my mentioning an interest in William James. Why did it loom so large in people’s memory, and why did it seem to be the only aspect of James’s work that they retained? It needled me, enough so that at some point I went back and reread the paper, only to discover that the famous bear made the most minor of appearances, invoked only twice and amid a series of instances. Much more remarkable to me was the story James tells of being a child of seven or eight years old and seeing a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it; James stirred the blood around and, his childish curiosity aroused, lifted the stick to watch the blood drip from it. Then, without warning, he fell over in a dead faint. James recalls feeling, even at such a young age, astonished that the mere presence of a pailful of red liquid could provoke such formidable bodily effects. The child and his bucket of blood—now why didn’t anyone remember that?

  But as I stood there frozen in the kitchen of Jerry Roth’s house, I felt in my every muscle the indelibleness of James’s oft-cited example. It was simple. When you meet a bear in the woods, you run. And of course that is what I did: I ran.

  * * *

  In another version of the story, I jump out the nearest window and break my neck in the fall. Otherwise I am devour
ed, or thrown into a fire, or drowned. Barring that, I am dropped from a church steeple as punishment. In the version first recorded by Robert Southey, I manage to get away but am taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Corrections for being the vagrant that I am. It takes almost no effort to dig up these variations; over time, the trespasser turns from curious fox to bad old woman to bold little girl: a girl who is at the start called Silver Hair but who eventually gets saddled with the cloying name she hasn’t been able to shake since. Given the possibilities, it’s clearly best to be young, blond, and impertinent, because then you do not suffer any retribution for what you’ve done. Your escape is assured. As for me, I am over thirty-five, soft-spoken, brown-skinned—yet I, too, seem to have gotten off scot-free.

  It can be difficult, however, to sift out retribution from reward, to really tell the two apart, commingled as they often are. For instance, after I left the farmhouse, having never touched my chapter on William James, my friend and I decided to have another go at it, this time more solemnly and deliberately than before, and to our indescribable relief, it stuck. My body grew larger and larger, unrecognizably larger, until suddenly one morning our daughter was born. We rigged up a sort of three-sided crib at the edge of the bed that allowed me to reach for her in the middle of the night and to nurse, without ever having to sit up or even raise my head from the pillow, and when she was done, I’d just slide her back on her special shelf and fall asleep again. Which is all to say that though she slept beside me I never worried, in those blurry months, about rolling over on my child and smothering her; among the many possible horrors I worried over, this was not one of them, this was one of the few I could lay to rest. Strangely, though, my body remained convinced that I had to stay very still as I was sleeping, that I couldn’t toss about or sprawl, that I needed to contain myself to a sliver of the bed, as if to avoid the risk of something terrible happening. It was an odd compulsion, and my hand or arm would often go numb as the result of sleeping in this anxious, unmoving way. Then one night my daughter’s voice punctured my dreaming so cleanly that I was able to hold the shape of the dream before it vanished, and its shape was the shape of Jerry Roth, the monstrous bulk of him, heaving softly beside me in the bed, and I knew, I knew, that I couldn’t move, because to wake him would be—to what? To die? My heart raced, my breath was shallow. I brought my hands to my chest and they were damp with sweat. In the darkness this felt like fear. But I lifted the elastic band on my underwear and put a hand between my legs, and I understood then that my rigid, dreaming body hadn’t been afraid. After wiping my fingers on the sheets, I reached out and found my daughter on her shelf.