The lights were off and I left them that way. Downstairs, the student lounge was empty. The low-slung furniture with the rough orange fabric—endemic to such places—seemed to glow in the dusky natural light, as did the posters taped to the walls: Literary Ireland; the Tower of London and the Beefeaters; Barnes and Noble’s take on Oscar Wilde, right beside James Michener. At the far end of the room a coffeemaker lay disassembled on a long folding table, like a bomb waiting to be put together.
My footsteps echoing on the linoleum, I went up the stairs to the second floor, into the empty faculty lounge, where the furniture was the same as below but the posters were better and the rows of wooden mail holes looked like a Chinese puzzle. A vending machine hummed and knocked. All down the long hall the doors were closed except for one at the end, where a wedge of light spilled out, breaking into the otherwise unrelieved dimness, and from which I could hear the rapid clicking of fingers on a computer keyboard. I remembered Jean Olsen’s Jeep downstairs, and the book-length study of R. P. Blackmur she was writing, and her desperate, decent hope for tenure, and I felt nothing and wished she’d never left her house. My office was three down from hers and I moved quietly. I had the door unlocked and shut behind me, the light on, before I felt the pressure drop and the solitude take hold; the solitude I needed. I’d made it undetected. Everything was the way I’d left it. The window was closed. The six-week-old air was crammed with dust, and the dust entered my nostrils and mouth, it was on my tongue, tasting of death, it was thick on the surface of my desk, on the spines of my books, on the framed pictures of my wife and children.
Sound and movement from the bottom of the ocean: I blinked and raised my head off my arms. The door was open, a person standing in the shadows. A woman. Jean Olsen. I was still hunched over my desk, where I’d been sleeping—not sleeping, passed out. My neck was stiff and painful. I made myself straighten up.
“Should I turn the light on?” Jean asked.
“No.”
“Should I leave?”
I didn’t answer.
“Then I’ll stay until you definitively kick me out.” Jean came deeper into the room, plopped herself down on the worn brown-corduroy couch that for thirty years had sat in my father’s office at the University of Chicago. “I had a feeling it was you. When I heard footsteps a while ago. I couldn’t think of anybody else who’d be here on a summer night.”
“Except you,” I said dully.
“Right. Except me.”
It was like being underwater. I could hardly see her expression in the dimness. Then through the open door I heard the vending machine start up, a faint, motel-like humming. I rubbed my neck and felt the crushing weight inside inexplicably shift from my chest to my abdomen, where it weighed more and hurt more and at the same time felt more remote. If this was grief, I did not understand. I was beyond touching, this life or any other, and while Jean Olsen sat looking at me I tried to remember which drinks exactly could be bought for seventy-five cents and a trip to the faculty lounge: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sprite, Nestea, Dr Pepper. . . . Suddenly, the machine fell silent again. And Jean Olsen let the shoes drop off her feet onto the floor, one and then the other.
“You know,” she said, “you could really use some air in here.”
I said nothing.
“I’m going to open the window a bit, all right?” She got up and cranked open the window half a foot. Evening air breezed in, surprisingly fast. The sound of crickets. Jean sat down again. “And in spite of what you said about the light, I’m going to turn on this little reading lamp right here, okay? I think it would help.”
The lamp came on. We both sat blinking. Jean was wearing faded blue jeans and a tank top that showed off her tanned arms. Her face was handsome and strong, her hair cut shorter than mine. She was thirty-one years old, still with the tall, firm, hipless body of a girl athlete. She sat with her knees up, her bare feet comfortably splayed over the worn corduroy.
After a long silence, she said, “What happened to you and your family is beyond awful.”
“It didn’t happen to me,” I said. “It happened to Josh. He’s dead, I’m alive.”
“It happened to you too, Ethan.”
“It happened because I let it happen.”
“That’s not true—”
“What do you know about it?” I said.
“Nothing,” Jean murmured. She looked away. The room was oppressively silent.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me.”
Her shoulders rose in an uncertain shrug. “It’s okay.” She got up and went to the window, looked out through the finely meshed bug screen that made the night beyond appear washed out, used.
“How’s Blackmur?” I asked, as kindly as I could.
Jean gave a thin little smile. “Critical.”
“You’re smart, Jean. Smart and honest. It’ll work out.”
“I didn’t come in here to talk about me,” Jean said. She turned from the window and faced me. “I was thinking after I heard you come in about how you stood up for Larissa and me two years ago.”
“I didn’t do anything special.”
“We wanted to live together in a college dorm, Ethan, as faculty advisors and as lesbians, and you made them do the right thing. It was a big deal for us.” There was a hardback copy of Henry James’s Notebooks, edited by Leon Edel, sitting on my desk, and Jean reached out and picked it up. Dust grayed her fingertips and she wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans. She opened the thick book and flipped through the first few pages. Her eyes were on the writing as she said, “I guess I just wanted to come in here and remind you that you’re a good man.”
Her words did something, had an effect all their own; hidden beneath the desk, my hands gripped one another tightly. My voice was stiff. “I appreciate that, Jean.”
“I keep remembering this day last fall,” Jean said, still looking at the pages of the book. “I think it was Columbus Day, because the campus felt totally empty. I was walking past the music building, coming up here to do some work, when I heard someone playing the violin. It was really beautiful and I stopped to listen. I stuck my head inside. Josh was sitting on a chair at the back, up on that little raised platform where we have the concerts. He was practicing. There was a music stand in front of him, but most of the time he kept his eyes closed, and his body looked scrunched up and relaxed at the same time, and the sunlight was coming through one of the stained-glass windows and making his face into a rainbow. He was so beautiful, Ethan. And it was obvious you thought so, too. I could only see the back of your head. You were sitting in the last row of benches, grading papers. But every once in a while you’d look up at him and nod.”
Jean closed the book. She put it down. She looked up and saw that I was crying. “And I wanted to tell you that I never had a father like that. Most people don’t. Most people grow up waiting for their father to come and listen and nod, but he never does. He’s too busy watching the playoffs or taking the goddamn lawn mower apart to listen. You listened to him, Ethan. You heard him.”
I sat still behind my desk. I couldn’t speak or otherwise move, and Jean did the only right thing then.
“I’m going to leave you alone now,” she said.
Grace
She woke to an empty house. She woke in a fog, with no sense of herself. The dimensions of her life came back to her only gradually. She lay unmoving and felt the walls close around her, rough and cold to the touch.
The clock read 10:45. It was Monday—the day she’d promised herself she would start to do some of the things required of her. There were so many things. Ends to tie up, holes to fill. She shut her eyes and saw Josh’s casket disappearing into the ground.
Deep under the covers, she curled into a ball, into her center, seeking a primordial comfort.
Downstairs, in robe and bare feet, she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. She couldn’t eat. Just the sight of a package of English muffins in the refrigerator made her long to be sick. She could
imagine starving herself to death without any trouble at all, gradually turning bodiless, then mindless, memoryless, into nothing. Except it would be too easy. She stared out the window at the garden she’d made. Sallie chasing a squirrel up the oak tree.
There were these periods, small pools of underwater time, when Josh was not there for her. When she couldn’t or wouldn’t think about him and so couldn’t locate him, even in memory. Gone . Already. While she treaded water, got lost in oblivion. While she was undone by such complicated maneuvers as getting up and sitting down. Undone by English muffins. Overheard saying, to absolutely no one, “Brushing my hair is beyond me.”
She got up from the table, carried the mug to the sink, and set it precariously on top of the tall pile of dirty dishes: it did not fall.
If it falls later, she thought, while I’m thinking about something else, I will not care.
There was a To Do list in her head, comprehensive and written in a nice, fine hand. The problem was remembering it. The lines got broken up, separated, like a sheet of paper ripped into pieces and thrown into a hat at a party, each piece with a different word on it. She could only draw one word at a time, which was useless.
She chose the bathroom first, hers and Ethan’s. She went to the laundry room for the cleaning supplies and yellow rubber gloves, and put them all in a plastic bucket and carried them up the stairs and down the hallway. She looked neither to the left nor to the right as she went. But she could not ignore it: the door to Josh’s room was closed, the door to Emma’s open. She walked fast, her stomach reeling, her mind crying out, and then she was standing in her room. Sunlight broke dappled through the curtains onto the hardwood floor, her clothes strewn there, the bed against the wall looking stripped and violated on her side, where she’d thrown the covers off. But not on Ethan’s side: he’d pulled the sheets up almost to the headboard, as if to cover any trace of his presence. She had no recollection of his getting out of bed; did not really remember him being there at all, except that he’d been the one who’d turned out the light last night. The tidiness of his side of the bed disgusted her. How contained it was, and selfish. You couldn’t tell from it anything about what he was thinking or feeling or suffering.
Now, standing in the middle of the spacious, sunlit room, she ducked her head as though she’d just gone shooting into a tunnel. The bucket fell from her grasp. It banged on its side and clattered terribly, and the cleaning supplies spilled out: Fantastik, Windex, Comet, a sorry old sponge, those yellow gloves shocking as a scream. And she started to cry, sinking to her knees on the hard floor.
Later, she sat on Josh’s bed with her feet on the floor, her palms flat on the spread. Everything cold to the touch. Everything neater than it was supposed to be in the room of a ten-year-old boy. She remembered, on that morning eight days ago, walking through this door and telling him he wouldn’t be going to the concert unless he cleaned his room from top to bottom, left to right, spic to span—“We’ll leave you behind.” A mother’s idle, love-crippled threat. And how much it hurt now to discover the degree to which he’d listened and obeyed. The room was neat, the bed was made. All his secrets lay tucked away in their secret places. Such a cruel irony that this should be the only room in the house with any order now. As though a bomb had fallen everywhere else. Well, she could exist here, in this room. It was the only place. She could curl up here and let the world outside remain as it was, beyond her, not understanding, not giving a damn—
Far below, the doorbell rang.
No. Go away.
She waited. But then the bell rang again, and like some automaton she stood up. When the bell rang a third time, she went to the stairs. Gravity urged her down them. Then she was at the front door. She was opening it: a police officer, walking back along the flagstone path to his police car parked at the side of the road. He was almost to it when he heard the door open and turned around. He wore mirrored sunglasses and she wasn’t sure if he was the same one she remembered from before.
“Yes?” she said.
He took a couple of steps toward her. “Mrs. Learner?”
“Yes.”
He pulled the gray hat off his head and held it at his hip. “Sergeant Burke, Mrs. Learner. State trooper, Canaan barracks. I’m the one in charge of your son’s case.”
Say “police officer,” Em.
She said, “I’m Grace Learner.” She felt dislocated, pulled from the socket.
The officer nodded. The sunglasses couldn’t hide the fact that he was looking at her strangely. He is trying to be careful and correct, she thought.
“We already met once before, ma’am.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I was going to call,” he said, “but I was coming out your way and thought I’d just drop by instead. I promised your husband I’d keep him posted on things.”
“My husband’s not here.”
He nodded again. He’ll go away now. But he stayed where he was, looking at her. Probably expecting her to be properly curious about his news: He can go to hell. Curiosity is just another kind of hope, and hope is sick, it is feeling after death. She wanted to knock the mirrored glasses from his face.
“Maybe I should come back another time. . . .”
“It’s all right,” she said, surprising herself.
She stepped back from the door, and he came slowly forward along the flagstones and into her house. For a moment she saw the beginnings of her face take shape in his glasses, before he took them off. His eyes were gray. Then, looking down, she saw the gun in his holster, its curved grip jutting out from his hip like a bone or a horn, and it reminded her of the gun her daddy had brought home from the war, the gun that he’d kept, along with his old uniform and his medals and the love letters he’d received at the front, in an army trunk in the attic. Where once he had found her snooping.
It was the letters she’d come to look at, but he didn’t know that. He’d assumed it was the gun. She remembered the dry heat of the attic and the smell of the trunk, naphtha and must. And how he had taken the gun out from its dented metal box and shown it to her, saying grimly, “This is a dangerous thing, Gracie. A terrible, dangerous thing. I keep it because it meant something to me in the war. But it’s got nothing to do with our lives here, honey, and you must promise never to touch it.”
She had promised. She had loved him so. And then, years later, after he had died and she had found herself grown and married, one day the trunk itself and all of its contents had arrived from Durham on a truck. Thinking of her infant son, she had stuck it in the barn, and made sure that it was locked, and never looked at it again.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked Sergeant Burke.
“That would be nice, ma’am, thank you.”
On the wall to the left of the stairs hung the Arts and Crafts mirror her grandparents had given them as a wedding present. It was a handsome piece, simple and true. She had always admired it. Now, leading the way to the kitchen, she saw herself in it. She’d forgotten all about the ugly robe she was wearing, forgotten the bed-pressed hair and red, swollen eyes. And suddenly she understood the embarrassed expression on the man’s face, why he stood with his shoulders slightly hunched, as though drawing away from the sight of her: the ugly, tedious fact of her misery had unmanned him. Not that she blamed him. She almost started to apologize for her appearance but couldn’t get the words out. All at once, a crushing weariness.
She poured him a mug of coffee and led him to the living room at the back of the house. An old room, the floor lower at the middle than at the corners, the walls faintly bowed. On one of the walls, a watercolor landscape she’d made in college.
Sergeant Burke sat on one of the comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace, sipping his coffee, looking at her where she sat on the sofa. Then looking past her, down the length of the room and all that was in it, through the far windows of old blown glass. The bubbles and imperfections in the panes transformed the sunlight in some way she couldn’t fathom. And she th
ought: He is an observer, this man, a professional—a detective, a hunter-gatherer of facts. He will see all there is to see about us.
“The coffee’s good,” he said.
“What?”
“The coffee.” He held up the mug. “Tastes good.”
“Oh.” She nodded, tried to smile. “Would you like some more?”
“No, ma’am, thank you.”
She stared into the cold stone fireplace. Cold since when? A chilly night in early June. The fire crackling. Reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Emma while Ethan played chess with Josh. Josh had won—he had won, checkmate. She touched her hand to her cheek. “I don’t know where my husband is, Sergeant.”
He said nothing.
“Is it Monday?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ethan drops Emma off at music camp.”
“Probably on his way home right this minute,” Sergeant Burke said encouragingly.
She said, “It must be lunchtime by now.”
Sergeant Burke looked down at the floor. “It’s after three, ma’am.”
“So late?” Aware of her fingers slipping off the cliff edge one by one, endless space below. Attached by nothing. I do not want to fall. She folded her arms over her chest and squeezed until breathing was a challenge she could think about for a few seconds at least.
“Ma’am,” the officer said. His voice was tentative, awkward. “I don’t know if your husband told you, but we’ve got a counselor we work with over at the barracks. Her name’s Charlotte Lewis. She’s got a master’s degree in social work. More than that, she’s a nice lady. And, uh, if you ever felt the need—”
“ ‘Need’?” She could taste the word on her tongue like metal.
“To talk. Talk about things.”
“With whom, Sergeant? This woman? Did she ever meet my son? Did she ever know him? Could she possibly have any idea who he was?”
Who was this talking? she wondered suddenly. Whose voice coming out of her mouth? I do not recognize her.
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