He got out of bed and hurried through his morning shower as quietly as possible, thinking it would be nice to be up before Emily and make her a good breakfast. He always marveled at her descriptions of breakfast in her house. How could anybody start a day on a meal of doughnuts and root beer?
He walked as quietly as his limp would let him into the living room only to find that she was gone. There was a note on her pillow:
Dear Brian,
Couldn’t sleep. Lights came back on, so decided to go home. Call you later.
Love,
E.
For someone who can write pages and pages in that journal on the raptures of a particular view or a piece of music, she sure writes short letters, he thought. You’d think it was a telegram.
He attended to various household chores, figuring it was too early on a Saturday to call. In no time at all, he had finished laundry, cleaned floors, and had the house up to his fastidious standards. The phone rang at about eleven.
“Hi, Brian.”
“Good morning. I missed you this morning. You would have gotten a good breakfast if you’d stuck around.”
“Oh well, you know I’m not fond of breakfast.”
“What time did you leave here last night?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“Did you decide that your reputation would be damaged if you spent the night in my house?” He meant it as a joke, but the silence on the other end of the line told him that she didn’t think it was funny. “Sorry. Did you get any sleep?”
“No, and I’m really wiped out. Maybe you should just have a good day without me today.”
Brian weighed what she said and how she said it before he answered. There seemed to him to be something just a little off about her voice. “Is everything all right?”
“Sure. I’m just tired. I’ll see you tomorrow after church.”
Come Sunday, Brian and Paul decided it was too hot to cook in the house and that a steak dinner fixed on the grill was just the thing. They were working on stoking up an impressive blaze when Emily arrived.
“You look like Druids performing some ancient rite,” she said smiling, looking at Paul. “What else is on the menu?”
“We have the potatoes and bread all ready. You could chop the vegetables for the salad,” Brian said.
“I guess I can do that much,” she said, still looking only at Paul. “Maybe I can handle it without messing it up.”
She went to the kitchen to cut the vegetables, and the men were once again alone on the deck.
“You two didn’t have a fight or something, did you?” Paul asked.
“No, but I think I must be in the doghouse about something. She acted like I wasn’t even here.”
The meal went pleasantly enough. Paul talked about how well the fundraiser had done. “I was glad you two decided to come.”
“I think I was something of a bore myself,” Brian said. “I should have been thrilled. I was with the most beautiful woman in the place. Are you still annoyed with my anti-social remarks, Emily?”
“No, of course not. You were a perfect gentlemen, as always.” There was a quality in her voice, and a reluctance to meet his eyes that implied that there was more significance in her words than just what she actually said.
Brian decided to go for broke, “Then why are you mad at me?”
She broke away from the reverie she seemed to be in and looked at him. “I’m not mad at you.”
“There’s obviously something on your mind.”
“Yes, there is. I have a guilty conscious. I have to tell you something I did. Something bad. You’re going to be really upset.”
Paul interjected at this point, “I think I’d better go and leave you two alone.”
Emily said quickly, almost with a tone of panic in her voice, “No, don’t go. You know Brian will wind up telling you anyway, and I’d feel better if you’d stay.”
Brian had been sitting through this and running through the past few days in the back of his mind on fast forward. He couldn’t imagine what Emily was talking about. With genuine puzzlement he said, “Why don’t you just tell me. If I get mad, I get mad. It won’t be the end of the world. You know you don’t have to be afraid of me.”
Emily drew in a big breath. “Friday night after you went to bed, I sat up writing in my journal. I guess I dozed off. I woke up and I saw that the light was on in your room and the door was ajar, so I thought you must be awake. It never occurred to me that when you went to bed, the power was off and that the light was probably only on because you forgot it was on before. Anyway, I went to the door of your bedroom and you were asleep on your bed. I should have turned away when I realized you weren’t awake, but I just stood there like a peeping tom and watched you sleep. After a few minutes it dawned on me what a terrible invasion of privacy it was to just stand there, so I went back to the couch. I wrote in my journal for a little while longer, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt about what I had done, so I just got up and went home. I didn’t want to face you. Brian, I’m sorry.”
Rather than speak to Emily, Brian turned to Paul to explain, “Emily’s upset because I sleep in jogging shorts. She’s never seen me in anything other than a shirt and long pants. She’s never seen me without my prostheses.”
Paul asked him, “Are you as angry as she thought you’d be?”
“No, of course not. I was sort of dreading the day when she first saw me like that, so I guess now I can stop dreading it.”
“Why were you dreading it?” It was one of those moments where Paul sounded very much like a psychiatrist.
Brian’s answer was delivered in the tone of a person who thinks they are giving the obvious answer to a question, “Because it’s ugly.”
Emily’s response was immediate and forceful. “That’s ridiculous. If I’d thought you were ugly, I would have been scared. Fear isn’t my problem here. Guilt is.”
It seemed that there was nothing to be said. For a long while, they just sat. Paul looked back and forth from one to the other, Brian and Emily stared at the floor in front of them. Then Paul seemed suddenly struck by a notion. “Emily,” he began, “You said you wrote in your journal for a while before you got up and went home. Did you write about what you had just done?”
“Yes, though I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. I’ve been writing in it an awful lot lately, and it all runs together after a while.”
“Do you always tell the truth in your journal? You don’t indulge in your tendency to put a good face on everything, do you?”
“I write the truth, I don’t take the time to doctor it up, I just put thoughts and impressions in as they come to me. That’s a big part of what I keep the journal for.”
At this point, Paul looked at Brian. “Might be kind of interesting to know what she wrote that night, don’t you think?”
“Emily’s journal is very private to her. I don’t think I ought to read it.” Brian said.
Emily immediately commented, “I invaded your privacy, I’m hardly going to stand on principle if you want to see it.”
Paul asked, “Do you have it with you now?”
“Yes, I take it everywhere. Just a minute.” She went and got the small blue volume and handed it to Paul. “You’d better read it first. For all I know, this might make things worse.”
Paul turned to the appropriately dated entry and read silently for a few minutes. He then crossed the room and handed the book to Brian. There was a strange look on his face, and after he handed over the book, he left the room and began to do noisy things in the kitchen.
Brian read what Emily had written. “It was a silly, schoolgirl sort of thing to do, like the boys in gym class spying through the door of the girls’ locker room. Standing there like a thief, I just looked at him. It was like stealing something, and I was determined to make the crime complete by getting an eyeful. I was struck first, as I always am, by the beauty of his face. It’s the face of a saint, good and strong and yet with
a hint of pain and loss across the brow, around the eyes. It’s a face that knows the dark side of the world.
“And then of course my eyes were drawn to see the things which I haven’t been allowed to see, where there should be a leg and isn’t, where there should be a hand and isn’t. I was prepared to be noble, to say, ‘Oh well, he’s handsome any way, I still desire him;’ but the nobility of a voyeur is a worthless thing, and besides, it wasn’t needed. I honestly think I’m frightened at times by how much I love him. I know that seeing him like this only makes me want him more. Beyond everything, I know that there will never come a day when I am not moved by the sight of this man.”
Brian put the book down slowly and crossed the room to stand next to the author. He took her face in his hand and looked at her as if he had never really seen her before. When he spoke, it was in a deliberate, controlled way, as if he was using his voice to hold back a flood, “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. You have this way of taking all the difficult things in my life and turning them into something worthwhile. I love you very much.”
“So you’re not going to task me to task for spying on you?” she said shyly.
“Just remember next time, don’t stop at the door, come right on in.”
On the following Sunday Brian dropped a small bombshell on the feast table.
“I got a letter from my parents yesterday. They’re coming for a little visit.”
Emily felt the tension level in the room escalate and wondered what the story was. Brian’s rhapsodies about the joys of his childhood had led her to assume that he had a good relationship with his parents.
“Well, that’s nice,” she said.
No reaction.
“Isn’t it?”
No reaction.
“I don’t get it. I thought you liked your parents. I thought they were like Ward and June, Ozzie and Harriet, all that good stuff.”
Brian finally spoke. “My parents are lovely people. Of course I like them. But they’re in their seventies and they don’t travel well. My father thinks that when you cross the Vermont state line you have to check your sanity at the border and leave it behind as a hostage. My mother, you should pardon the pun, wants to wait on me hand and foot. They both think I’m a little daft for living in the south. They’re difficult houseguests. They don’t like the water. They can’t eat whatever I cook. And through it all, they sit and smile these tense little smiles with this look on their faces that says ‘Are we having fun yet?’”
“Paul, you’ve met them, haven’t you? Are they really as bad as all that?”
“It’s hard for me to say. They don’t approve of me. Dr. McClellan is of the old school that says if you’re depressed, go out and chop a cord of wood, you’ll feel better. He views psychiatry as a short step up from voodoo.”
“Oh well, this is going to be fun. Do they do this every year?” Emily asked.
“Oh no,” Brian said, grinning evilly. “Only when they want to see what I’m up to. I suspect this time they’re coming to check you out.”
Emily was startled and shocked and panic stricken. This possibility had simply never occurred to her before. “What do you mean? I don’t like the sound of that at all. Why do they want to check me out?”
“I am a dutiful son. I write to my parents on a regular basis, so of course they know all about you. I think they want to make sure you are the perfect woman to match their perfect son.”
On one level she saw the humor in the situation, so she said, “Boy, are they in for a rude awakening. This is awful. I’m not looking forward to this at all.” But on another level where she took his words literally, there was suddenly a terrific knot in her stomach at the prospect of trying to please another set of parents. “When does all this happen? maybe I can catch a tramp steamer somewhere.”
“Two weeks. Don’t worry. They’ll adore you.”
It was a worrisome two weeks. Emily bought several new outfits, tried recipes for various dishes that she might serve them, and generally tried to find ways to please them. Brian seemed to take a perverse delight in making the process difficult with such comments as, “They’ll never eat that,” or “Don’t bother, they won’t know the difference.” Emily was of the old school that said that old people are supposed to be treated with great respect and pampered. Brian, on the other hand, thought that a little rebellion was good for the soul. When pressed for truth, he admitted that he was a little nervous about the visit too.
“Do you really think they’ll like me?” Emily asked nervously as they sat together listening to music on the evening before their arrival.
“Why not make them the ones who are on trial? Maybe they should be nervous about whether you like them.” It never occurred to him that his parents were, in fact, nervous about just that.
He was waiting to meet them at the airport at four. He observed as they got off the plane that they never seemed to get older between visits, but that they both looked their ages. Dr. Stuart McClellan was seventy-nine years old and his formerly red hair was solid gray. Brian thought his father’s appearance announced his profession of physician as loudly as a foghorn announces the weather. When he said, “How are you?” you wanted to tell him everywhere it hurt. He was an attractive man with finely chiseled features, and a perpetually intense gaze. He was the kind of man that you take seriously.
Louise McClellan was a petite person whose visage always looked faintly like she was trying to remember where she left her keys. She had very light brown hair streaked with gray and china blue eyes. Brian had seen people make the mistake of underestimating his mother in social situations. She was in fact formidable, as anyone who crossed her or hers swiftly discovered.
The drive to Brian’s place from the airport was the standard, “How was your flight? What’s the weather like back home? How’s everybody in town doing?” until Mrs. McClellan began her favorite litany.
“Brian, haven’t you lost some weight, dear?”
“No, Mom, actually I think I’ve gained a pound or two.”
“Mmm. You know, you ought to get outside more, you look so pale.”
“It’s too hot to be outside this time of year. Besides, I already have all the freckles I need.”
That line always brought to Louise’s mind the story of Brian’s great aunt Stephanie and the terrible trouble she had with freckles. Great aunt Stephanie in turn brought to mind cousin Frank and did Brian know that he was making a fortune in something or other down in Australia. Little was required of Brian in this conversation, just the small encouraging noises and she could go on all day. Brian was brought to himself with a start when she suddenly said, “So, tell us all about this Emily person.”
Brian had to laugh a little as he said, “Well, all right. What do you want to know? Emily is a librarian; she works in the county library. She is very pretty and very nice. I’m sure you’ll like her. She’s anxious to meet you. And she can tell you the rest when we have dinner at her home tomorrow night.”
The small talk resumed until they arrived at the house and fussed over getting things inside. Mrs. McClellan took charge of the suitcases and went to the bedroom to get things unpacked, so Brian knew it was time for the paternal litany. Dr. McClellan made it a point to talk in a deliberately man-to-man, doctor-to-doctor way when they had this conversation. He never met his son’s eyes.
“So, Son, how have you been?”
“Fine, Dad, I’ve been very well.”
“Leg giving you much pain?”
“No, not too bad.”
“Things okay financially?”
“Yes, I’m fine there. I’ve been thinking about maybe a new car.”
He wasn’t really. Brian knew that this was bait his father could not pass up. Dr. McClellan had strong opinions on the subject of buying American, the fact that McClellans had always driven Fords, and his firm belief that those foreign models wound up costing you more in parts. This would keep him off the subjects that Brian didn’t particularly w
ant to talk about. He and his father had a difficult time having a personal conversation without getting angry. They both held firm to the delusion that if you don’t talk about the things that make you angry, you won’t be angry any more. In fact, there was a vast well of hostility within Brian which was directed against his father, and they both knew it. Neither was willing to do anything about it.
After a dinner of roast beef (oh, Brian, you must keep up with your cholesterol), baked potatoes (you know sour cream is just loaded with fat), mixed vegetables (you should try them raw sometime, cooking robs the vitamins), and a chocolate pie (white sugar is simply poison), they adjourned to the living room for coffee (let me carry that coffee pot, dear).
An evening of catching up on old friends and they were off to bed. “Strange,” Brian thought, “it’s nine thirty and I’m exhausted.”
He was lying in bed the next morning listening to the unmistakable sounds of his mother cleaning. Brian thought of himself as a meticulous housekeeper (and not just by male standards), but his mother wasn’t happy until she was quite certain that the kitchen floor was clean enough not only to eat off of, but to do major surgery on. When he was young, Brian assumed that all mothers were compulsive. When he later realized that some people could actually sleep in houses where dishes occasionally sat overnight waiting to be washed, he assumed that his mother was just one of those people who thrive on the aroma of disinfectant the way others do on the sweet smell of spring.
Dressing after his shower, he detected the unmistakable bouquet of bacon frying. “Why mother,” he thought sarcastically, “Don’t you know that bacon is just full of cholesterol?”
His entry into the kitchen was greeted predictably. “Good morning, dear, didn’t you sleep well?” The implication, of course, was that he looked tired.
Brian just smiled and said, “I slept like a log. How about you two?”
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