“Not me.”
“Does she?”
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“She who?”
“Your wife.”
“What about her?”
“Does she ever think of selling?”
“No.”
“The way you said not me I thought you were saying she would.”
“No. She wouldn’t. I just meant it rhetorically, you know. Not me.
Like that.”
“I see.”
A small silence deeds him the chance to take a breath and to move a step away from her. He adjusts a heavy volume on the shelf a few feet closer to the back of the store.
“Now is when we move to a subject you won’t want to talk about.”
“Excuse me?” he says, though he has heard her.
“Do Shostakovich and I look like a strange pair to you?”
He shakes his head—it is equal parts answer and request. She’s right: he doesn’t want to talk about this.
“The truth is, he’s calm and steady, usually, and very nice to me. But he bores me. This is like the twelfth house we’ve rented in the last nine years. I hate it. I feel rootless and agitated and—well, bored. And there’s nothing more destructive than a bored neurotic.”
Butterfield says, “I thought the term neurotic wasn’t in use anymore in the psychological community.”
“Maybe so, but it’s plenty current to us neurotics.”
He nods and starts to say “Well, I have some work to do,” but he can’t get it out. The part of him that willed going back into Macbeth’s the other night now compels him to keep silent. He’s a man who has been quite glad in his life and his marriage, and life is becoming complicated in ways that he can’t allow himself to look upon with any detachment. It is all just happening, as if there’s some aromatic drug emanating from this stunning woman’s body.
“You’re a neurotic, too, aren’t you,” she says, breathing it.
His own breath catching, he says, “I guess that depends on your—
your definition of the term.” He can’t quite breathe out all the way.
“I’d define it as somebody carrying an unruly mind around.”
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“I guess that qualifies most of us, then. I mean isn’t everyone’s mind unruly?”
“Not so you’d notice.” That infernal smile again.
“Well,” he says, gathering himself to say the politely extricating phrase.
Remembering, just in time, who he is. “I’ve got a lot of paperwork.”
“Oh, don’t let me keep you. I wouldn’t dream of getting in your way.” Once more, the smile. He chooses to ignore it, returning to the counter and pretending to work through the account receipts. Because of the rich man’s overlarge purchase, he’ll have to go to the bank this morning. He’s nervous having that amount of cash around. She wanders among the stacks without taking anything down, pausing to stare at titles, and then moving on. Now and then, her right hand goes up to move the black wealth of her hair back behind that ear. Her beauty has a nervous kind of frail sensuality, skittery and faintly sad, and yet somehow opulent, too, almost rank with sex. No, that isn’t quite it, either.
He can’t quite describe it to himself, but it is beauty of a very different kind than that of Elizabeth, or any other woman he has known before. It disturbs him to be thinking this way, and yet her face and shape and presence stir him, too, seem to drop down into him like something shimmering and burning, and, so, he keeps his eyes trained on the work at hand. A trio of elderly ladies come in for a few minutes and buy several postcards, a memoir book, and a night reading lamp. Their age looks to him awfully like an affliction—something avoidable, like a form of disgrace. Their very appearance seems like the wages of sin, their iniquities laced into flesh and bone; these shapeless, pale, faltering bodies are the price of indulgence. He can’t believe his own thoughts, ringing up their purchases, thinking of Holly and Fiona. They leave, haltingly, helping each other, so gentle and so mutually diminished-seeming, chattering about going to Harper’s Ferry.
Ariana comes to the counter, jingling her keys. “Are you afraid of getting old?” she asks.
He stares.
“I feel drawn to you,” she says. “Is that too forward?”
For an instant, he’s not sure he could’ve heard her correctly. He’s completely at sea.
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“You know?” she murmurs sweetly.
“I don’t—I can’t—I mean I—”
“I thought I’d be honest with you,” she says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
He hasn’t the shred of an idea what would be polite to say in the circumstance. “I don’t know,” he gets out. “I mean—I don’t know what to say.”
She comes around the counter and stands close, her attitude exactly that of someone looking at an exhibit. He actually takes a step back.
She says, “Do you know what Napoleon used to do when he approved of someone? So silly. He’d tug their earlobe.” She reaches up to take hold of his left ear. “Like this.” Then she steps closer, and he feels the warmth of her breath on his cheek. “Nice. What is it?”
“Listen—you—we—I don’t—” he stops.
“The aftershave.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“You should wear it all the time.” She takes one more breath, so close that he could simply turn and kiss her. He has the thought.
It must show in his face. “You want to kiss me, don’t you.”
“Yes.” He can’t believe himself. But he does indeed want very much to kiss her.
“Well?” she says.
He leans only slightly toward her, and in the next moment she’s pressing him against the wall, arms tight around his shoulders. Her mouth is amazingly soft, and she opens it so wide. A small moan rises from the back of her throat. It’s a long, long kiss, and he thinks of the open front door in the same instant that he thinks the words Christ Almighty. “Wait,” he says aloud. Too loud. Now he murmurs: “Wait. Let me—”
“Can you close this place?” she breathes.
In some respects, the centuries have yielded up nothing new in the world. This is the end of the terrible twentieth, and Butterfield finds himself thinking of the horrors of history—the plagues in Europe, the depredations of the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition, the terrors of the bloody lane at Antietam, the mass graves of Treblinka, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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the bombing of Dresden, the killing fields of Rwanda and Cambo-dia. It’s all there in his mind, disordered, by turns general and utterly specific, yet all eerily present—a kind of vast, shifting mural of death against which his present transgression might be played out, nothing more than a shadow-puppet’s dance, a small thing, a little taste of the forbidden, momentary and no more momentous than gazing at a pornographic picture. He has trouble concentrating. Ariana is definite and very focused.
It’s all over in a matter of a couple of minutes.
Pa r t Tw o
=
O c t o b e r – N o v e m b e r
i n c i d e n t a l f i n d i n g
1.
Afternoon, now. Bright, warm. Not a cloud in the sky. More like a mild, cool day in July than the middle of October. Oliver Ward turns onto Temporary Road and parks the truck. The two old ladies are out in the leaf-littered, ragged, dirt-patched yard, working in the one little space of order in it, the garden along the front porch. They seem remarkably peaceful. Stepping down out of the truck, he takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his brow, then reaches back into the cab for his clipboard. They appear not to have any idea that he has arrived.
He’s come to tell them that he’s going to have to hire someone to help him with the electric wiring and the drywall, not to mention the new kitchen and bathroom. He has installed a separate fuse box; he has done the fra
ming and some of the wiring and laid in new heat ducts, rerouted some of the others. But there is still too much to do, more than a man can do alone.
He clears his throat to announce himself, approaching them, and Fiona, nearest to him, straightens with an aching slowness, putting both hands at the small of her back and then pulling one forearm across her face. “Glad you could make it, Oliver,” she says, smiling. Then she indicates Holly. “She bet me you’d be late. I win. Thank you.”
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“Nothing personal,” Holly says. “I’m always a little late myself.”
They talk briefly about Alison and the children, and the unseason-ably warm weather. Fiona says she herself has only just arrived, having spent her morning substituting in the Saturday religion classes at Saint Augustine. Holly drove her and picked her up. Both women spent a pleasant few minutes with Brother Fire. They seem quite comfortable together, and Oliver has the thought that the old priest might be having an effect on them; maybe everything will fall through now. But Holly says she’s anxious to talk about the plans for dividing the house, and Fiona nods enthusiastically.
His capacity for the appreciation of marvels is highly developed, and, even so, the complexity of human relations sometimes has the flavor of something exotic to him. While most people move through life with a sense of the ordinariness of their daily transactions, he’s continually filled with wonder.
Mary, before she died—in the last week of her life, in fact—told him that she believed he had kept some capacity for emotional freshness that children usually outgrow. But there were other instances when she spoke of that aspect of his personality as a terrible innocence, nothing less than irresponsibility, charming but ultimately harmful.
He possesses no way of deciding such a thing with any finality, but there seems enough truth in it. He doesn’t feel that he can help who he is anymore. The difference between who he might’ve been had she been able to change him, and who he is belongs finally to the province of regret—that realm of misplaced hopes. He doesn’t like to think about any of it. And yet, these days, getting toward sixty years of age, he thinks about it more and more.
As he does now, while they all file into the house and through the hanging plastic, to what will be Fiona’s part of the present living room.
She opens a gallon bottle of Dr Pepper while Holly gets ice and glasses.
Oliver hasn’t said he’d like anything to drink. He looks at the broken glass with its companion lying, still untouched, under the side table in the dining room, dust so thick on it now that the glass looks as though it is made of solid wood or plastic. Several times while putting the frame up for the dividing wall, he thought of removing them; but decided t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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against it. Lately, it makes him feel as though he’s part of the stubborn game.
Fiona pours three tumblers, then picks two of them up and holds them out. Oliver takes his carefully and murmurs, “Thank you.” Holly takes hers and says, “Ah, energy.”
They sit on the couch, side by side, and sip the cold drink. Oliver has never liked soda pop, not even when he was a boy, and so he manages to keep a small smile, trying not to grimace through the syrupy sweetness.
He tells them about the separate fuse box and about rewiring the original one.
“I think we should revisit the windows,” Fiona says to Holly.
“No, we settled that, dear.”
“Yes, but after all it’s yours.”
“What’s mine, dear?”
“You chose it, is what I meant.”
“I chose what? The windows?”
“The house.”
“We both did that, sweetie.”
“Both sides will have windows,” Oliver says. “It’s just that one will have a couple more.”
“Well, but we already settled that Fiona gets the windows,” says Holly.
“I won’t argue, darling. But I did think you picked the house. I’m only along for the ride, remember.”
“Well, I appreciate that but—”
“Ladies,” Oliver says. “I’m gonna have to hire some help.”
“Well,” says Fiona. “But let her have the side with the most windows.”
“I don’t want the bloody fucking windows,” says Holly. “In fact, I don’t want any windows at all. I want total darkness. Complete, utter darkness. The outer darkness. That’s what I want.”
“Really, ladies,” Oliver says, rising and then, with a heavy-feeling brutal thudding under his skull, sitting down suddenly. Knocked down, it seems, in a bell-like space of sharp burning. He has fallen onto Holly’s right leg. This hot, blunt-instrument pain spreads to the back of his 172
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head, and he thinks momentarily that he’s been hit with something. To his horror, he finds that he can’t move.
“Oliver,” says Holly. “Lord, what’re you doing.”
He can’t speak, either. The air seems to solidify around him, encas-ing him in it, an ice; though—even shivering, cold, sinking into a cave of frost—he still feels the white heat burning under the flesh of his forehead. She pushes him from herself and stands, and he realizes he’s lying on their couch, in this ice block of unbreathable air. The pain in his head is like a blackness now, coming over him. He looks up at her and sees the increasing alarm and concern in her face. Fiona seems to speak from some far, watery distance. “What’s wrong?”
“Oliver?” Holly says, fading from him. “Say something.”
The blackness covers her, the room, memory. Oliver turns in a little space and tries to ask for more light, tries to speak his own name, tries to hear or see or listen. There is only the roar of the ice now and cold darkness, night coming on with a rush, and the thudding pain, the clamor of his own heart.
2.
In a corner of Alison’s living room is a small practice amp, with paperback books piled on it. Alison’s ex-husband, Teddy, wanted to learn how to play guitar, so he could jam with Oliver, and he did take lessons for a while. Oliver plays an old Guild concert acoustic guitar, and Teddy’s electric would’ve drowned it out. But no amount of explaining could dissuade Teddy, who believed that Oliver would eventually buy his own electric, once he saw how much easier it was to play than his old beat-up Guild. When Teddy wanted something, he believed in it so completely that you couldn’t get through to him with the facts. This was also true of him when he didn’t want something.
Marge’s Greg—the champion asshole—bought the guitar from her a few months after Teddy moved out, and subsequently sold it. She keeps the amp out of a kind of inertia, really; though there is something vaguely t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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talismanic about it, too. Teddy was never so happy as when trying to play the guitar, though he never got any good at it. Poor Teddy couldn’t tell when the thing was out of tune, and he had no sense of timing. The few times he tried to play along with Oliver were embarrassing.
She looks at the amp now and recalls when life seemed happy. Since the divorce—and he granted her full custody—he has come to take the children out with him on only three occasions. Easter, the fourth of July a year ago, and one Sunday in early August. Each time, he had very specific things in mind to do, and, in each instance, he ended up dressing Jonathan down for some minor—or imagined—failure, mostly having to do with Jonathan’s responsibility for watching the baby. Teddy’s impatience with Jonathan is mirrored, perhaps not so strangely, by her impatience with Teddy. The sound of his voice grates on her nerves now, and it’s hard to be civil, though she manages it.
She’s off today. She stands at the window again, watching Greg water his lawn.
“What’re you looking at?” Jonathan asks. He’s sniffling with another series of sinus symptoms. Everything around him, it seems, gives him these psychosomatic episodes, stress-related, the doctor says, because they clear up when he plays, or reads, or watches television.
&nbs
p; “Greg’s out on Marge’s porch, hosing down the backyard like it’s the middle of summer.”
He sniffles again. “It’s supposed to be better if you do it early in the morning or at night. In summer. We could have a frost tonight. The grass is going to die anyway. What’s he doing? It’s insane isn’t it?”
“I believe clueless is the word,” Alison says.
A moment later, the boy sighs. “I miss Marge.”
Her sensitive boy.
She learned young that voicing one’s troubles only seems to make them worse. And she knows all the various theories about therapy and talking things out—she has even read some Freud—but, for herself, such delving only seems to make her feel tired, more beset.
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of the world’s troubling ideas, she’s cognizant of the essential homilic nature of the thought that one must teach oneself to see surrounding miracles. Nevertheless, the fact that such sentiments are used loosely by people who never think to follow them, and the fact that they are as familiar as the names of the weekdays on a calendar—well, none of this makes them less true. The secret heart of experience, for Alison, involves the quality of attention. One learns to appreciate; one struggles to be good enough for it, strong enough, awake enough. You raise your head out of the dark and look around. And if there’s luck, and you persist, elements of your own ragged, hard-to-live life begin to reveal their in-dispensable shimmer.
For instance, there’s her doll-making.
She has recently returned to it. Since earliest childhood, dolls have fascinated her, and she always enjoyed combining the shapes and the colors of the miniature clothes. She can’t draw or sculpt, can’t reproduce a single recognizable worldly shape, really, other than the cone of a dress and the naturally pinched features that come from sewing the cloth over the head-shape of a doll. Last spring, she spent a week sitting at a flea market in the valley, with other craftspeople, selling her dolls. She sold most of them. The ones she didn’t sell are like projects for her, for the future; she’ll get them into shape. She keeps several half-finished ones on a shelf in her workroom, a lot of silent witnesses to her work.
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