Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

  3

  At other times, in a more robust mood, the sort of mood in which life’s little disappointments no longer seem evidences of failure but welcome challenges to the all-conquering spirit, I seek the company of my third wife, who never spoils me. When I enter her room I find her lying on the bed, reading a book with a frown of concentration. Without looking up, she raises a rigid finger as a sign that she’s not to be disturbed; her whole body tightens with attention as she continues reading. After a long while she lays the book on her chest and lifts her eyes to me, with the same frown. At once she reproaches me with having neglected her. As I begin to defend myself, she tells me that the new cleaning lady has broken one of the blue wineglasses; there’s no more sliced turkey in the refrigerator, only sliced ham; the door of the linen closet doesn’t close properly. I assure her that I’ll take care of everything soon, right away, at this very moment if necessary; in response she rolls her eyes in a slow, exaggerated manner. Suddenly she looks at my shirt and asks whether I went to work with my collar like that. Have I checked my hair in the mirror lately? Her head hurts; her allergies are killing her; she’s sure she has a sinus infection; there’s no air in the room; the window is stuck again. I step over and raise the window easily. She asks whether it gives me pleasure to score a cheap victory at her expense. She’s short of cash; her blow-dryer is broken; something’s wrong with the switch on the coffeemaker. As I lie down cautiously beside her, she sits up and says it’s getting late; besides, she isn’t feeling well; she can’t breathe; there’s no air in the room, even with the window open; what she needs is a dehumidifier; why doesn’t she have a dehumidifier; a dehumidifier would make all the difference. I reach out and touch her arm. She stares at my hand and remarks that she hates her blouse—everything sticks in this weather. Slowly, watching her carefully, I begin to undo my shirt. She’s not in the mood, she says; besides, I don’t care about her; all I care about is myself; she can’t even remember the last time I told her I loved her. “I love you,” I say at once. She looks at her fingers and asks whether I really believe that I can make our problems go away just by uttering a few words that cost me nothing; but that’s just like me. As she removes her blouse she notices her upper arm; look how the flesh jiggles; she’s turning into a tub of lard. I assure her that her arm is fine, very fine, even somewhat on the thin side. She’s curious to know when it was that I became the world’s leading expert on the diet and fitness of American women. As we continue undressing, she complains about the mattress, which is supposed to be a medium but is actually much softer than advertised; it’s bad for her back; we ought to return it and get a good one, unless of course I think this is the sort of mattress she deserves; as we make love, she notes the squeaking springs and reports that the cleaning lady arrived fifteen minutes late and neglected to dust the base of the table lamp beside the couch. When we’re done she says, “You never take me anywhere.” Before I can answer, she asks how I can expect her to sleep through the night with a windowpane that rattles in the slightest breeze. I never pay attention to her; I don’t listen; I talk, but I don’t listen; she can’t breathe in this room; there’s nothing to eat in the house; her neck hurts; she doesn’t like the way the new cleaning lady looks at her. Her eyes are slowly closing; she glares at me sleepily. After a while I rise with caution, slip into my clothes, and take my leave, feeling refreshed and invigorated after such exercise.

  4

  All’s well between my fourth wife and me; really, nothing could be better; in fact, I have no hesitation in saying that our love is perfect; but isn’t this very perfection a cause for concern? When she declares herself supremely happy and swears she has never loved anyone as she loves me, I experience a deep happiness of my own; but doesn’t my happiness cause me, to a certain extent, to take things for granted, doesn’t it nudge me, however minutely, in the direction of smugness and self-satisfaction, and don’t these qualities render me, when all is said and done, less lovable? My fourth wife conceals nothing from me, reveals with utter trust the innermost ripples of her being, but in the act of loving self-revelation isn’t there a risk that she will gradually deprive herself of mystery? I can’t imagine any woman more desirable than my fourth wife, whom I stare at tirelessly, for her beauty, though flawless, is never cold. But doesn’t her beauty contain the danger concealed at the core of all extreme things, the danger of provoking irritation or resentment? In the same way, mightn’t it be said of her intelligence, her kindness, even her goodness of heart, that they encourage a search for flaws, that they incite in their admirer a secret craving for ignorance, confusion, and spiritual failure? Our love is perfect; I desire nothing more. Why then should I find my thoughts turning toward imperfection? Why should I sometimes dream of complaining bitterly, shouting at the top of my voice, accusing her of ruining my life? Why should I long to provoke, in the clear eyes of my fourth wife, the first shadow of disappointment and pain?

  5

  Whenever I want to be with my fifth wife, I find her in the company of a young man. He’s handsome in a boyish, somewhat delicate but by no means unmanly way, slender but well muscled, dressed always in a dark sport jacket, a light-blue shirt open at the neck, and jeans. He is polite, self-effacing, and silent. When my fifth wife and I have lunch together in a downtown restaurant, facing each other across a small table, he sits to her left or right; when we talk at night by the fireplace, he sits on the rug with his head leaning against her leg; when I take off her clothes, she hands them to him; when we slip into bed, he’s there beside us, lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his neck. At first his presence disturbed me, and filled me with bitterness, but in time I’ve grown used to him. Once, waking in the night beside her, I saw over her shoulder that he wasn’t there; I felt anxious and shook her awake; and only when, smiling faintly, she lifted the covers to display him lying between us in his dark sport jacket, light-blue shirt, and jeans, sleeping soundly with his head between her breasts, did my anxiety subside enough to permit me to fall back to sleep.

  6

  Always, when I’m with my sixth wife, a moment comes when she rises slowly toward the ceiling, where she remains hovering above me. “Dear,” I plead, falling on my knees, “won’t you come down from there? I’m worried you’ll hurt yourself. And besides, what have I done? I didn’t disturb you as you sat at the kitchen table with your sketchbook and your stick of charcoal and drew seventeen versions of a fruit knife lying beside a green pear and a white coffee cup. I didn’t clear my throat loudly or walk up and down humming to myself as you leaned back on the couch with your legs tucked under you and twisted a piece of hair slowly around your finger while reading Anna Karenina for the eighth time. I didn’t step up behind you and kiss you with a wet smack on the back of your neck while you sat fiercely erect at the piano practicing over and over the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor, Köchel 310. And if I’ve allowed my eyes to stray for a moment to your glittering knees beneath your dark wool skirt, it was only in order to rest from the judgment of your intelligent, severe eyes.” “Idiot!” she replies. “Do you really think I can hear you from up here?” And with that she begins to fly back and forth across the ceiling, laughing her tense, seductive laugh, brushing my hair with the tip of her foot.

  7

  Whatever I like to do, my seventh wife likes to do. When I mow the lawn on a warm Saturday afternoon, admiring the straight strips of fresh-cut grass as bursts of sweet-smelling blades fall at my cuffs, she walks alongside me, clasping the left half of the black rubber grip on the red lawn mower handle. When I read a mystery novel set in a country house in Surrey in the summer of 1935, she reads a second copy of the same book, glancing at me over the tops of the pages and stopping when I stop. On poker night she’s the only woman among us; I watch her narrow her eyes as she checks her tightly held cards and slides a white chip sharply forward with her index finger. At breakfast she eats the same cereal I do, using the 2 percent milk I prefer; her orange juice, like
mine, has lots of pulp; at the mall, she chooses the same brand of running shoe, with mesh nylon uppers and antimicrobial insoles; our umbrellas match; our sunglasses are identical; when I tell her my childhood memory of running toward a rainbow in a field of high grass, she recounts the same memory. Once, when life was too much for me, when I needed to get away from it all, I drove north for five hours to a drizzly seaside town, where I took the last ferry to an island with a rocky shore before a dense forest, in which stood a single cabin without a telephone. When I opened the door and held up my lantern, a raccoon leaped from the table; bats swept across the ceiling; pinecones lay everywhere; on a wooden chair I saw her purse.

  8

  A sword in my bed divides me from my eighth wife. If I love her, I must not touch her; to do so would be to violate a vow that she herself has exacted. True to my word, I remain inches from her, sick with desire. My plight would be lessened if I were never to share my bed with her, but my eighth wife insists that she lives solely for these moments. Mindful of my suffering, which is also hers, she sometimes conceals her body from me, slipping between the sheets with her quilted down coat zipped up to her chin. At other times, suffering for my suffering, and desiring to reward my feat of denial with the one pleasure she can permit, she’ll adorn herself with blue-green eye shadow, purple-black mascara, crimson lipstick, expensive oils, creams, and lotions, and dabs of perfume behind the ears and on each wrist, and display herself, on her side of the sword, in shimmering and translucent underclothes in a variety of fashionable styles. It’s possible of course that my eighth wife wishes only that I’d violate my vow, despite her assurance that to do so would be to destroy her love for me by making her lose respect for my word. How else to explain her presence in my bed, her provocative underclothes, her frequent headaches, her prolonged sighs? Indeed it’s tempting to believe that the real test isn’t whether I can demonstrate my love for her by remaining true to my word, but whether I love her fiercely enough to smash through an arbitrary prohibition—an event she secretly desires and desperately awaits. But the very temptation of this thought is a warning: in my state of violent desire, dare I trust an idea that encourages me to betray my word and to side with the passion I’m struggling to overcome? It’s also true that, despite my suffering, I’m proud of my success in keeping my word; to succumb to temptation would be to experience a loss of self-esteem. Is she perhaps desirable to me only insofar as I’m able to overcome desire? In that case it’s I who have encouraged her to exact my vow, it’s I alone who am the source of my torment. Sometimes a strange longing comes: to plunge the sharp sword deep, deep into my eighth wife’s side. In this desire to be rid of her and thereby end my suffering, I detect a secret flaw. My suffering, however painful, is always qualified by the possibility of failure, the possibility that, despite everything, I’ll become like other men and break my word at last; her death, by removing that possibility, would remove the sole thought that relieves my anguish. For all these reasons, I understand with terrible clarity that my plight can never change. In this understanding I sense a final danger: by believing that nothing can change, do I not relax my will, do I not open myself all the more to temptation? And with a last, desperate burst of strength I rouse myself to new rigors of wariness.

  9

  There are times when I can’t bear the company of anyone but my ninth wife, despite the little secret we never discuss. What does it matter to me if, bending to gaze into her brilliant dark eyes, I see her looking a little to the left or right, so that I have to shift my position slightly to create the illusion that we’re gazing deep into each other’s eyes? Sometimes, as she crosses the room with her graceful strides, she’ll happen to knock against me if I’m not quick enough to step out of the way. On these occasions she doesn’t stop, doesn’t acknowledge me, and the slight smile on her lips remains unchanged. In every way my ninth wife is cheerful and obliging. Why then should I complain if, holding out my hand lovingly to lead her toward the bed, I see her stare past me? Why should I give it a second thought if she steps on my foot as she walks to the bed alone and lies down with her little smile? Once, as I was about to plunge my face into the thickets of her hair, I was stopped by a faint sound that appeared to be coming from her throat. When I bent my ear against her neck, I heard a dim whirring. A small adjustment proved necessary, after which, despite the interruption, I was able to devote myself entirely to the pleasures of the dark.

  10

  In an atmosphere of drawn curtains, medicinal smells, and perpetual twilight, I visit my tenth wife, who’s burning up. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are unnaturally bright; on the dark coverlet her pale arm has the whiteness of bone. Illness consumes her. Fever parches her lips, burns along her throat and eyelids; her ears are hot. Her straw-colored hair, brown in the dusk-light and uncombed, streams on the pillow. Her hair was once straight and obedient, but illness has released a hidden wildness: it falls in snarls and tangles, plunges over the pillow-edge, tumbles along the bedspread, where it lies sprawled and spent. I’ve brought her a few violets and marigolds, picked from our garden, but when she strains to raise herself, lines of tension crease her forehead, as if she’s struggling against two hands holding her shoulders down; after a while she gives up and falls back exhausted. I lay the flowers on the bedside table, near the digital clock. A glass of water, decorated with orange and green fish, stands on the table beside a box of tissues. When I hold the glass to her mouth, she drinks eagerly, desperately; suddenly she turns her head away. Water flashes on her face like a wound. I wipe her lips with a tissue; they’re cracked like dry leather. With my fingertips I stroke her hot, pale forearm, her bony cheeks. Under her fevered eyelids her large eyes glitter. I want to comfort my tenth wife, I want to lavish her with attentions, but there’s little I can do except sit on the chair next to the bed. In this dusky room, in this world removed from the world, I feel myself bursting with health. My vigor strikes me as intolerable, like a shrill, continual noise. What to do? Her illness excludes me—since she cannot be well, I have to become sick. Slowly I bend down and kiss her dry, hot mouth. I want to inhale her fiery germs, I want to drink her fever, feel her disease glowing inside me like hot spiced wine. Deftly I slip under the heavy covers, releasing an odor of stale bedsheets. Am I mistaken, or do I sense a slight soreness in my throat? My forehead feels hot. Is it my imagination, or has my hand grown pale? I will find her, I’ll join her at last in her own land. Eagerly I meet her gaze. Her eyes, weary and glittering, stare at me as one might stare at a sudden animal across a stream.

  11

  Whenever there’s work to be done, when things can’t be put off a second longer, I turn to my eleventh wife, who knows exactly what to do. It’s she who climbs the tall ladder and fastens the loose gutters in place, lifting her hammer into the blue sky as she plucks a gutter nail from between her teeth, while down on the grass I steady the ladder rails with both hands. She’s the one who strips the paint from the front porch with the electric sander, bending over the boards in her dust mask and safety glasses, she it is who repairs the cracked ceiling above the basement landing, caulks the second-floor window frames, installs copper flashing in a roof valley, replaces a rotted porch post, while I carry paint cans, fetch drill bits and putty knives, and bring her large glasses of ice water that she drinks lustily, with her head flung back. Standing in the shade at the side of the house, I look up to see her crawling across sunny roof slopes or leaning far out of upper windows. Tools glint on her body like jewels; her bare arms quiver with energy. Once she begins a task, it’s difficult for her to stop. At night I can hear the blows of her hammer on the roof; at dawn, through the partly open blinds of my bedroom window, I can see her ankles and the rung of a ladder. Sometimes my door opens in the dark and she comes to me, like a shout in the night. She lifts a screwdriver from behind her ear; carpet tacks fall from her hair. She’s efficient, she’s brisk. Afterward, as I turn my head in the hope of resting against her shoulder, I see her, through eyes heav
y with sleep, striding about the room, measuring heights with a metal tape, screwing brackets into the wall, swinging up two-by-fours that rise into a row of shelves.

  12

  If I speak of my twelfth wife as a negative woman, it’s because she is the sum of all that did not happen between us. In a crowded room on a summer night at a party overlooking a lake, I did not cross over and sit down beside her. I did not, seated beside her, begin a long, ambiguous conversation, during which I bent my face closer and closer, while she, laughing lightly, tucked one leg under a thigh and brushed a few crumbs of potato chip from her sleeve. That night we did not walk hand in hand along the shore while inventing new names for the constellations and bursting into wild laughter. In July we did not pick up a rented Opel at the Zurich airport and drive along winding roads past green hillsides spotted with red-tiled roofs on our way to a high hotel with a balcony that looked down at the shining water of Lake Geneva and the dark towers of the Castle of Chillon. One night in August, in the amusement park, I did not, seated on a blue horse, watch her throw back her head and laugh unheard among carousel melodies as she rose and fell on her red horse with the white bridle and the golden mane. The negations multiply swiftly, forming a rich pattern in reverse; spawned by an initial gesture of refusal, our unacted history outgrows the narrow compass of accomplished lives. We cannot end, for time does not contain us; nor can we suffer change, for the structure of our negative biography rests on the unchangeable foundation of nothingness. We are more than mortal, we two. All lovers envy us.