by Mark Powell
“We were on a committee together. That’s all. I barely knew the man.”
“Yet here you are ringing me up.”
“I can meet you Saturday.”
“It’ll be precious, John. I want to hear all about the new wife and kids. I want a little coffee klatch, just the two of us. We’ll knit a tea cozy and talk about our hopes and dreams.”
“I’ll be there Saturday. That’s all I’m calling to say.”
“That you’ll be there? Oh, Professor,” Stone said, laughing now, “I never doubted it for a second.”
11.
It was September when Tess started running again. At first it was a neighborhood thing—she would push the double stroller while Wally rattled beside her on his training-wheeled bike—but after a week she felt things returning, her legs, her lungs. The way she could swallow air in giant gulps and then live off it for what seemed hours. It had started one day when she was hurrying across the parking lot to the walk-up ATM, John and Laurie and the boys sitting in the Chick-fil-A parking lot. Without thinking, she had broken into a jog, a trot, really, the simplest of things. The knee flexing—ball-of-the-foot, ball-of-the-foot—and it occurred to her that she hadn’t run in better than four years. Not a single step. All those years, all those miles, and to have it go out of her like breath. To exhale something that had been so much a part of you, and so easily. She slowed to a walk, almost a crawl. They could wait. Even if John and the children were in the car they could wait.
The next day she made her initial foray around the neighborhood with the children. This wasn’t necessarily easy. You had to get Wally interested in his bike—he wasn’t really. You had to get Laurie asleep or at least sleepy. You had to get Daniel interested enough in a book that he wouldn’t wake Laurie once she did finally fall asleep. And of course he would eventually wake her no matter what. When the crying set in—first Laurie, then Daniel—the run was over, but by that point Wally was actually interested in his bike—finally!—and was mad and himself on the verge of tears that his ride had been ruined. The ride being, as he explained it, the only thing he’d been looking forward to all day.
“Please,” she would say.
It was a general appeal, intended for whatever audience would listen.
But after a week she was waking up to run alone. It didn’t matter how early—she could feel the addiction spilling back into her body. Running as a suitable response to what was in the fridge. Running as answer to a world of V-neck T-shirts and sex in the missionary position, a world like the inside of chain hotels. Desk, chair, bed. Some vaguely impressionist print hung on the drywall. She needed to be out running because otherwise she’d go full-blown crazy.
She was still hearing things, and it wasn’t just the man in the basement, it wasn’t just his clicking. At night, she could almost hear the USB drive, this thing that seemed to have acquired a heartbeat, the faint pulse she sensed from the nightstand where it had slept buried beneath old greeting cards and the boys’ art projects and an album of wedding photos. It was almost sentient, the way that as she thought about it, she felt it thinking about her, conspiring against her. Stupid, she knew. It wasn’t alive. How could it be alive?
She was seeing things, too.
She was room mother for Wally’s kindergarten class. Paper hearts, shamrocks, granola. They preferred the cupcakes bran, these matronly childless devotees of Maria Montessori. They were learning to write code. Scratch 1.4. They did holidays, class performances—you couldn’t exactly call them plays. Field trips to the dairy, the fire station. The second-graders got to go to the Nickelodeon in Atlanta and how’s that for something to look forward to, Wally, how about that? Nights were electric toothbrushes—not the spicy toothpaste, Mom!—prayers, books—Huckle, Critter, Arthur. Nights were soft and sweet, but days—days she saw them everywhere, these Middle Eastern men. Women in headscarves, hijabs, whatever they were.
Twice she went secretly to a Christian therapist, told John she was doing a Zumba class at the gym, not that he asked. Tess—stupidly, it turned out—told the therapist about the man in the basement, about watching the videos. But she—Tess had specifically sought a she—didn’t get it. Why this, Tess? Why this fixation on suffering? And Tess wanted to scream, Tess wanted to tear things off the walls, pictures, diplomas, because why? Seriously? How about because people are dying? Because they are cutting off heads. Because bombs are falling while we sit here with your brochures on “Biblical Truths” and “Clinical Skills.” If I’m fixated on suffering maybe it’s because no one else is, she wanted to scream. But she didn’t scream it. She didn’t even say it. She just sat there while the therapist talked about the pointing finger versus the moon, the idea of reflected light.
Luna, Tess, from the Latin.
The Old French was lunaire.
Had she considered this idea that she was orbiting her husband’s and children’s lives?
And Tess admitting no, she hadn’t, and then wondering later how she had ever considered her life as anything else.
A week after graduation she had moved to St. Pete with Emma, her best friend and teammate, who, like Tess, was a middle-distance specialist and as wiry as the rigging of a ship. They rented an apartment a block off the beach and got jobs waitressing at a raw bar in Pass-a-Grille, a weightless time, basically living the young adulthood they never experienced at Florida Wesleyan. Running but not logging the miles. Drinking Michelob Ultras after her shift ended. Failing to record her hours slept or resting heart rate. It was irresponsible when she held it against those regimented college years, and it felt wonderful. She felt an airiness gather beneath her, as if the breeze moving over the sand and families camped beneath beach umbrellas past the cabana shade might be enough to lift her.
Often it was.
For weeks she ran when she wanted, drank when she wanted, stayed up late, slept through church. She didn’t want a husband or a career, at least not yet. She wanted to have fun.
In July she entered a road race—an Autism Awareness 5K—and the night before they got tipsy at the pre-race party, Tess and Emma in skirts and heels and lipstick, and the men, everywhere the men were noticing them in a way they never had, introducing themselves, bringing over fresh cups of the cheap keg beer. It was harmless fun—the men were runners after all, how dangerous could they be?—and they went home to sleep alone in their separate bedrooms. But Tess hadn’t really slept. Rather she had simply lain there, feeling her body hum.
The next day she arrived at the starting line still jangly with the night, the energy, the fun, the spell she seemed to have cast not only over every man in sight but over herself as well. Possibly, she was still drunk. But it was equally possible she was simply awake, aware, in a way she had never been.
When the gun fired she reeled off three 5:35 miles, hardly conscious of what was happening. She had never run like this. There was no strategy, no pacing. There was no thinking and that had never happened. She had simply run, her mind captive to her legs and heart.
In the final stretch she felt the road narrow to a sort of tunnel (it wasn’t), a shaded arbor that folded over her (it didn’t), and she sprinted the length of it, barely out-kicked by the lone male runner who finished just seconds ahead of her. My God! And you want to talk about reflected light! She felt more like a star newly made. She had never run like that. She had never lived like that, and ran past the finish line onto the beach where she slipped off her Nikes with the timing chip wound in the laces and ran straight into the Gulf, not stopping until her race bib was plastered against her still-heaving chest.
And that was where she heard him.
The man called to her when she was coming out of the water, mid-thirties and already tipsy on the post-race beer. Cock-eyed and smiling. Too old for such, but then again, Tess, twenty-two-year-old Tess, was probably too old for running a sanctioned 5K semi-crocked. Even if it was the best race of her life.
She talked to John Maynard out of amusement, or maybe curiosity, or maybe a
chemical overload of endorphins. Whatever the reason, they spent that day and the next together. Two weeks later he invited her to his friend’s place on St. Simons Island and out of some otherwise dormant sense of propriety she insisted on driving her own car.
She was both relieved and disappointed to find they were sharing the house with a few others, but it had turned out to be an amazing day. Swimming off the dock, cooking on the charcoal grill, all of it in a lazy haze of vodka lemonade. She and John had been a couple then, but not really. A sort of couple, but she was hoping. Then that evening they went swimming alone and she came out of the water with her T-shirt matted over her top and John said: that shirt you have on makes me think of you with no shirt on at all. It was the dumbest line she’d ever heard, but then again she wound up with her shirt off, all her clothes off, so how dumb had it really been?
He proposed a week later.
Crazy, no other word for it. But maybe it was the crazy that had so enticed her. Since returning to St. Pete they had made love at least daily, usually twice, once three times, the final act coming against a wall of sacked Old Bay seafood seasoning after she let him in through the rear service door of Salty Mike’s during her ten-minute break. It was a sort of delirium and in the context of the sex and drinking and the long morning runs along the beach—hung-over, but the hangover unable to touch her—a marriage proposal seemed not only sane but logical, the only possible culmination of so much wild excess. That she didn’t know exactly what he did for a living or where he was from or how he’d spent the last decade only made it seem crazier, which, naturally, made it seem more right.
They were married on the beach on a Sunday in early November, her parents and brother and sister in reluctant attendance. They were happy for her in that way in which happy signals a million things, none of which exactly equate to gladness, but don’t preclude it either. In a family of risk-taking achievers, it had always been Tess they had chided, Tess the dutiful, Tess the chaste. Now that Tess had gone and done the most reckless thing any of their well-bred imaginations could conjure, could they really be anything other than supportive, even if their support was as lukewarm as the water they stood beside?
Their indifference only made her love him more.
Barefoot on the sand in strapless white. Body brown and lean. Her sister and Emma as her maids of honor. Her brother David as John’s best man. At her insistence they went back to the borrowed house on St. Simons Island for their honeymoon. He wanted to take her far away, but she wanted what she realized she had wanted that first day driving up: she wanted the two of them together and no one else, the two of them swimming and drinking wine and making love in the third-floor bed with the windows open and the curtains billowing. Brown pelicans diving into the surf, wings tucked like the coat of arms of some ancient central European family. She wanted shortening days and cooling nights. She wanted vanilla candles and sand bedded in her scalp, and she got that, she got everything she wanted.
For a while, at least.
They wound up staying almost three weeks. She lost her job, but who cares, right? She was inside this giant house she was pretending was hers, inside this giant life that maybe was hers, her only link to the greater world her morning runs and the occasional phone call to Emma who couldn’t believe how unbelievably lucky she was and what else could Tess do but agree?
Some days they snorkeled, the water not exactly clear, not green like the Caribbean, or even aquamarine like the Gulf, but what mattered was that here they were, man and wife, swimming together 100 meters off the stony point where the beach made its turn.
They might have stayed forever had the friend—whoever he was, wherever he was—not needed the place back. They returned to St. Pete and she hauled what little she had to John’s condo on Redington Shores. She was happy there, if a little isolated. John, she discovered, was a psychologist who worked as a professor when he wasn’t working as a consultant to the government. He’d also written a seriously misunderstood book on understanding grief (she had sat up one night and drunkenly read every single one-star Amazon review). But he didn’t seem to be working much at the moment. He had saved money he said, he was between things.
Christmas was at her parents’ on Sanibel—there was still no mention of John’s parents, or of anyone else; she as yet knew nothing of his first wife and daughter and none of it seemed terribly relevant at the moment. She was happy, she was running, halfheartedly looking for a job until he asked one day why she didn’t just focus on her training. If she could completely devote herself to running couldn’t she be like an Olympian or something?
The thought both flattered and scared her. In truth, she knew she no longer had either the fire or the discipline to train and race at that level, and it was because of him. Because of what he had awoken within her. She had fallen in love with a certain amount of ease, the world’s lovely give that can surely be found if only you go looking for it. And she had. It was out there, and she had found it. Only once she found it, once she experienced the idea of self-indulgence, she knew she could never go back to self-denial.
And why should she?
She’d lived her life according to training plans and schedules and everything else that denied everything that was normal, that was comfortable, that was American, and now she had gone and fallen in love with the everyday.
So why suffer? Running was akin to going to war with yourself. The 800 comparable to an attempt on your own life, immediate and irrevocable. The 1,500 was slower, there was thinking involved, positioning. But the pain was also less theoretical. The slowness of seventy-two-second quarters had a way of revealing layers previously unimaginable. Self-immolation. Hurt tucked within hurt, and all of it arranged in the heart. As if it had been sleeping there all her life, waiting for the opportunity to flood outward into muscle and lung. She didn’t want that anymore.
So when he asked if she wanted to devote herself to her running she knew it was impossible.
Still, she said yes, she said thank you, she said of course, and some days she ran furious 400-meter repeats on the Eckerd College track or eighteen-mile distance runs across the causeway or down to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, ran with the sort of clear-eyed focus reserved for the God-sent, the ones who define life in terms of some staggering mission. But some days, many days, she did nothing more than put on her sweats and spend hours at a coffee shop refreshing her Facebook page.
She won every local road race she entered, but made sure to stay local. The training was enough to make her the fastest woman in greater Tampa, but not enough to push her beyond. She did regret it, her lack of conviction. She did feel the requisite amount of grief: she had been given a great opportunity for which she cared not at all. Which was another way of saying she wasn’t ungrateful, but wasn’t exactly grateful either. What she was, was satisfied.
It showed. In so many ways it showed, this sudden smugness.
She lost touch with Emma, lost touch with old friends. Lost touch with everyone except John.
Reflected light?
She could have told the therapist that the idea that John’s life illuminated her own was actually a rather generous assessment. More than his light, she felt his gravitational pull, the way he seemed to sling her through the greater universe. She loved to run, to cook, to while away the days on their balcony watching the kite-surfers skim the sliding surf. But she was also coming to terms with her boredom.
It was around the time she started thinking of a baby that John began to unravel. It started with his inability to sleep which led to all those foggy predawn conversations which led to his eventual revelation of a prior life, one that had ended, of course, with the death of his wife and eventual estrangement (if that was what you wanted to call it) from his daughter. That he had hid this from her—that it had been too painful too share, but now he was sharing it—only made her love him more. It was not unlike her parents’ poorly masked disapproval: it wound them tighter. At least that was how she chose to interpret event
s.
So his revelation of tragedy: it started with that.
It started with his taking some undefined government job that took him away for months.
It started there. It ended back in the house on St. Simons Island, almost two years after their first visit. John bedridden for weeks, depressed and scared though of what he never said. It ended when she told him she was pregnant. It ended, to the extent that it ended, only with the birth of Wally and their move to north Georgia. The logic something like: John needs a fresh start, John needs to be working.
The logic must have been something like that, but it was impossible to say since one day he simply came home to announce he had accepted a position at Garrison College and that they would be moving. At the time, she was sitting in the living room, nursing Wally and suddenly calling to John who had already disappeared up the stairs to the bedroom because I’m sorry, what? What position? What college?
And he hung his shirtless self over the rail to say Garrison College in Garrison, Georgia.
A joint appointment in counseling and psychology.
Which answered her question but told her absolutely nothing she actually needed to know.
From the distance of years, she saw the extent to which it stunned her.
It took her away from her parents.
It took her away from her life.
Reflected light?
She never went back to the Christian therapist. She didn’t need therapy.
She needed to know those things that lay just beyond her. She could tell you her husband was in his office or meeting some administrator or conducting a counseling session, but she couldn’t tell you what he thought about at night when he lay beside her and pretended to sleep. She could tell you the migratory patterns of sperm whales—she’d read up—but not the extent to which they loved their young. She could give an exhaustive biography of the man in the basement, complete with schools attended and jobs held, but she knew nothing about what hope might harbor in his heart.