by Robin Black
“I don’t know about your heart,” Alison said, “but mine has never been particularly logical.”
“No,” I said. “Nor mine.”
We were on our fifth time around the pond by then. “I have always been a little irritated that Owen paced this off,” I said. “It … It takes some of the wildness out, some of that sense of just wandering in the countryside.”
We walked a bit more, still arm in arm.
“My husband hit me,” Alison said after a time. “That year after Nora went to school. He started hitting me. I became one of those women fidgeting with heavy makeup to deal with covering bruises.”
“Jesus, Alison. I’m so sorry. And here I am complaining about a paced-off pond.”
She shook her head. “That’s not why I’m telling you. You’re supposed to find Owen irritating. You’re his wife. But I wasn’t supposed to put up with being hit. Or before that. Even then, I shouldn’t have put up with being afraid of him. It’s just … it’s just so terribly difficult to admit that someone doesn’t really love you. Not in the way you thought. Not in the way you’d hoped. There were a lot of reasons I stayed as long as I did, Nora, of course, and also fear, but in part I just wanted to think he loved me.” She stopped walking, so I did too. We faced each other, and against the backdrop of tall marsh grass, her lips lacquered coral, her eyes that silvery gray, she seemed oddly vivid, a silver-haired figure from a surrealist painting.
“I’m so sorry, Alison. I had no idea you’d been through that. I knew about the temper. Not the hitting though.”
“I rarely mention it. I don’t like remembering, I suppose.”
“Does your daughter know?”
“Oh, that’s a long story,” she said. “For another day. The real point I’m making, the only reason I raised all that, is that I know how heartbreaking it is to lose belief in another person’s love. It’s devastating. However it comes about.”
“That’s what I did to Owen. That’s what I put him through.”
“Maybe. But then Owen chose to stay. And he’s an adult, yes? He could have done otherwise.”
We started to walk again. “I couldn’t have, you know,” I said. “Done what Owen did. If it had been reversed, I would have been out the door. I couldn’t have borne it.”
“Trust me, Gus. One never knows what one will endure.”
A rabbit, neither baby nor fully grown, scampered across our path some ten feet ahead. Alison asked, “Do you want advice? Or just a shoulder? Because I can give you either. I can even give you both.”
“What’s the advice? I mean, all I can do is just try to forget Laine ever wrote. Not act like some kind of moony teen around Owen. Seal my heart back up.”
“That. Yes. But … maybe this is presumptuous of me but … Don’t try to get in touch with him. You may … you may feel tempted.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not tempted. Not tempted at all.”
But it wasn’t true. I was already composing coded, chilly messages to send through Laine. Please do tell your father how thrilled I am that he has found real love at last. Please do give your father my love—assuming he even remembers who I am. “No,” I said. “I can see why you’d think so … but no. I have no temptation to be back in touch.”
“Well, that’s excellent, then.” Alison took my arm again. “So, do you feel as though you have to go the full seven laps? Because I confess, there’s something about knowing it’s a mile that makes me feel that. As though we’ll be shirking if we stop at five.”
“Bingo,” I said. “That’s exactly why it irritates me so.”
“But we’re going to do those two more laps, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” I said. “We are going to do the two more laps.”
At her porch, she hugged me. And I thanked her, meaning it. Two hours later, when Owen came in, he asked me what that had been all about.
“One minute I’m contemplating the indefatigable nature of a squirrel out my window, the next I’m watching my undemonstrative wife embracing our neighbor.”
“Oh, we had been walking around the pond. She had … she had told me some things about her marriage that were pretty terrible. I think she just needed a hug. Shocking, I know, but even I can be compassionate at times.”
“Shocking indeed. We’ll keep it to ourselves. I wouldn’t want your reputation ruined.”
It was an old joke between us. Or an old routine I suppose, since calling it a joke implies humor. And maybe there was humor there for Owen. For me, it was something else. I’d always doubted that Owen understood that slightly standoffish manner of mine, the motherless part, the part that didn’t know what to do with Alison’s arm in mine as we walked. The part that could accept that sort of affection only like an ill-fitting garment, a hand-me-down I suspected wasn’t truly meant for me.
“I’m thinking of putting a moratorium on work,” Owen said, reaching for his water glass. “On what passes for work, I should say. For a few days, anyway. I think I have reached the point where I’m just spinning myself into deeper mud. I need a holiday.” He looked at me and laughed. “You should see yourself, Gus. Don’t panic, I’m not suggesting we go anywhere. I know that you’re mid-project. I just think I may forbid myself access to the barn for a week. Work in the garden. Take long walks. Paint the front hall. Stop pushing so fucking hard—since clearly whatever it is can push back with greater force.”
“I think that sounds right,” I said. “God knows there’s always more work that can be done around here. And you must need a break by now. I know I would. I think that’s very wise of you.”
“There must be a saying to cover this situation. Desperation is the mother of common sense? Something along those lines.” He began to drink, and I walked across the kitchen. I kissed his cheek, the glass still to his mouth.
“It’s a good move,” I said, thinking that it was good timing too.
What followed was a more relaxed week than our home had been witness to in months. Owen was a creature of great will. When he decided to do a thing, he did it. And having decided to set his worries aside for a time, he seemed able to do exactly that. And while I didn’t stop working altogether, I slowed down, gave it less space.
More than once over the years, I’d wondered whether people as close as Owen and I were indeed telepathic. Was he responding to a distress call I didn’t know I was sending and that he didn’t know he was answering? Something grabbing his attention just in time to remind me of why this life of ours was no mere consolation prize?
We lingered over our meals. We played Scrabble after dinner. I wandered out to whatever patch of garden he was weeding, and would end up staying an hour, more, just talking to him, laughing. A couple of times we ended up in bed together, daytime sex. We never quite matched the drunken near-brawl of that night after dinner at Alison’s, but we rolled around and teased each other and we played. The only thing missing for me that week was that he still didn’t want to talk about my work. I tried once and he sank into an awful and eloquent silence. But I didn’t mind it so much. Because in many ways our house felt like home again to me. No longer like a place defined by paucity—paucity of happiness, of shared enjoyment, of conversation. It felt like a second spring had come.
But then, after exactly a week, he announced he was going back out to the barn again—I can’t really just quit—and before another week was up, we were right back where we had been.
“I suppose I should be grateful for the days we had,” I said, sitting on the floor of Alison’s studio, surrounded by her paintings, those botanicals so outsized, each detail so vast, that I felt miniaturized among them all. The old, uneven pine floor, filthy and ridged, had produced a splinter in my palm that I picked at as I spoke. “I feel terrible for him. I know how this can just rip you up.”
“I wish I had some helpful experience.” She was standing behind her easel and I could only see her legs, tanned and muscular, her feet, bare, her toenails painted the same coral perpetually on her lips. �
��What do people do?”
I shrugged. “They suffer. They make bargains with gods in whom they don’t believe. They wait it out.”
“Maybe I should be glad I’m just a hobbyist.”
“If it makes you feel better to keep calling yourself that …” I looked at a painting I particularly liked, a four-foot-high watercolor of a broken piece of marsh grass. “Your work is good, you know. But if that’s going to make you all self-conscious, I take it back.”
“Thank you.”
“Alison, how do you not have splinters all the time?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know. My feet are probably too calloused. All those ballet classes I was forced to take.” Then, after a moment, she said, “You seem better, Gus. About that other thing, I mean. I hope you don’t mind my saying. I’m guessing the time with Owen helped.”
That other thing.
Was I better?
For all that I’d loved that week with Owen, for all that it might have minimized any lingering emotions about Bill, I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to answer Laine’s email. Every time I tried, I reached the point at which I either would or wouldn’t acknowledge Bill’s marriage and balked at completing the task—as though my doing so would be giving it a closure I couldn’t bring myself to give. That news had reopened a landscape of memories from which I could not easily look away. A place unlike any real place on earth, where fertile hills abutted jagged glaciers, and deathly crevasses invited icy falls from sumptuous, sunny lawns. A place of beauty and danger that I pined for and despised and couldn’t bring myself to push back out of view.
“Yes,” I told Alison. “I am doing better. Thank you. It was a bad day or two, but in the end,” I said, “that was a different life. Years and years ago. I’m really okay with it now.”
I took her silence, just the few too many seconds before she said she was glad, to mean that she’d guessed I was only saying what I wanted to be true.
When Owen had gone back to work, so had I. But while he had just walked straight into the old familiar misery, I was excitedly engaged with the process of using my sketches to block out some canvases. After visiting Alison, I turned to one I liked especially of an individual boy—Oliver Farley, dead at seventeen, in a hospital in France—sitting on our front step, elbows on knees, chin in hands. Just waiting. The image of a waiting boy. That’s what I wanted to convey, once I fully painted him in. All the time in the world. This was the theme that kept coming up for me, the strand I hadn’t quite grasped right away. It wasn’t that the boys were all engaged in childlike activities or in the adult ones they had missed by being blown from their own lives so young. It was that they moved in these rooms of ours, occupied this space, as though they had all the time in the world. Let’s play a leisurely game of chess. Let’s linger over a breakfast cooked under the lolling gaze of a friend whose feet are up on the table. Maybe I’ll just sit here and do nothing much.
Time. And calm.
As I painted, not just that day, but throughout that whole period, I thought a lot about the atmosphere of my own childhood home. My mother, of course, had been the lost soul, the dead woman walled off, immured behind my father’s edict that she not be brought up. Brought out. Into the light. I don’t know if he thought of that as smoothing something over, the least unsettling course, but what I realized as I craved calm for these boys was how much hysteria lay behind my father’s extreme approach.
That night, as Owen unloaded the dishwasher, I readied the next load. Always looking for topics to fill the void, I told him about Alison’s strangely impervious feet, and he said, “Good to know. I’ll add it to the list.”
“What list?”
He reached up to shelve a stack of plates. “You really don’t know that you come home every day with little factoids about her?”
I shut the faucet off.
“It’s called getting to know someone, Owen, and I recognize we’re a bit out of practice, but it really isn’t so very strange. Is it?”
“No,” he said. “I guess it’s not. I was just teasing you, Gus. Trying to make some sort of joke.”
“Well, it was hilarious,” I said. “Everything’s rinsed clean, here. Mind if I go do a bit of work?”
“Not at all,” he said, as I left the room. “I’m glad one of us can.”
There was no mistaking the envy, nor the unfair resentment directed my way. I almost turned around to ask if it would help somehow if I gave up, sat shivah with him for both our creative lives. But I pushed down my anger, rehearsing for myself again, again, what misery he must be feeling, how awful that sensation of emptiness; and I went to work.
7
Usually, when there was a problem with my father, the home would call Jan—a doctor after all, a family doctor who had treated her share of elderly patients. And there really hadn’t been many emergencies. He wasn’t one of the aspiring escapees and his dementia had never included a violent side. But every once in a while he would spike an odd fever, a simple cold blossoming into pneumonia then treated with the sort of medical zeal one might think reserved for a man whose continued existence is undeniably a gift to him. Any ambiguity about the quality of my father’s life was banished with every technical skill available, by all professional valor. And so the drugs and tents and fluids were brought in until the fever was conquered, the lungs cleared, the battle won; the war still raging on in his brain.
There had also been a different sort of incident at the end of that spring, when he had fallen into days of inconsolable tears, a river with no source, no destination point. Flood, flood, flood, unholy, torrential flood. During that time—four full days, as many nights—Jan and I took turns sitting by his side consoling him, or not consoling him at all but trying to. And I had tried too to console the young nurse, Lydia, who believed she had somehow caused this deluge—impossible to imagine from so dried up an old man. She had asked him about his life, she said. About his wife. He had split open in response, become a lake.
“It could have happened to anyone,” I told her. “It probably didn’t matter what you said.”
She couldn’t have been much more than twenty. I watched the argument taking place in her expression, the desire to be freed of blame pushing against the conviction, the hope, that her words should have meaning.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It’s none of our fault.”
In the third week of August, Jan was up in Nova Scotia with Letty for their annual vacation up north, so the first report of a violent outburst came to me, an early morning call—from a nurse I’d never met whose knowing voice, gravelly, deep, seemed somehow at odds with her optimistic statement that this might well just be a one-time event.
“What happened?” I asked. “Exactly, I mean.”
He had grabbed the shoulders of the nurse helping him button his pajamas. “It’s often something simple like that. Something for which there’s no real explanation. He shook her. Pretty hard. Your father is a very strong man still. Surprisingly so.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said—though I knew an apology wasn’t quite right. Sorry for what? For my father being ravaged by a disease? For his having worked so hard all those years to stay strong and well for his girls? Running those endless laps around the school field every afternoon. Pulling himself up on the bar tensed across the door to the bedroom he and my mother once shared, stopping often at that threshold, on his way to grab his wallet, to change his shoes, and just lift himself once or twice. A devotion, I’d thought unexpectedly, when home from college one time. A little act of remembrance, a piety. What had seemed so peculiar, so irritating—Hurry up, Dad! Oh for God’s sake, just go in and find your keys!—had struck me that day as something beautiful.
“It was almost sexual,” I told Owen, not many years after. “But not in an icky way. Like he was still physically devoting himself to her. And of course it was all about being sure we had at least one healthy parent left. I just think it was also about more than that …”
B
ut of course I had been perpetually desperate for signs that she still mattered to him, that the door he’d slammed after her death had panes through which something still shone through, maybe something of her that I would one day see.
The nurse said, “It’s easier with the ones who have grown physically weak. Though, as I say, this may well have just been a one-time event. We like to report all such incidents right away. Then if we do have to move him into a different level of care, you’ll understand …”
“Yes. Of course.” Something occurred to me. “Which nurse was it?”
“Lydia. She’s fairly new.”
I told her we had met. I rolled my eyes to the inexplicable heavens. Having their cruel little laugh. Poor girl.
“I’ll come check in on things today,” I said. “Maybe a familiar face will help.”
At Alison’s door, I was like the girl hanging out by the locker of her latest crush just hoping he’ll ask her out. “And so, that’s why I won’t be around today … or anyway, for the morning.”
She asked if I wanted company. “Or is Owen …?”
“I’m letting Owen work.”
“Well … I could actually use a change of scene,” she said. “Unless it feels too … I don’t mean to intrude.” She knew better though. She would be ready in ten minutes. We would meet back on her side of the hill.
She drove. “It will do me good to be behind the wheel,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll never learn my way around this part of the world. I’m hopeless at maps. And anyway, you look like you could use an hour in the passenger seat.”
This is us on the road to the finest private hell that money can buy:
We are seated close together, or so it seems to me, used to my van as I am. Two middle-aged women. I am in a jean skirt and black T-shirt; and with my arms inactive on my lap I am aware of the paint that clings to me even when I believe I have scrubbed it off. My hands, my wrists, seem covered in a translucent extra layer of skin, almost reptilian, adhering to the pores and fine lines beneath, pulling the texture of me into view. I feel grubby, overly conscious of this sheath. And Alison is in one of her bright colors again—a teal dress. Her car smells like her. As we pull off the property, out onto the road, I realize there is a scent I now associate with her. Spring flowers. Lime. For a moment, I close my eyes and breathe in, trying as I do to pull apart the strands of scent.