This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  “Because Jim and I were friends?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” she said, her throat constricted. “I’d better go.”

  He followed her downstairs and out to the dooryard. After a moment’s confusion, sorting out which was the driver’s side of her little compact and which the passenger’s, Peter got in and shut the door.

  At some indefinable time between their entering the kitchen and leaving the house again, the sky had become overcast, threatening rain. The trip to town was about six miles, first on a dirt road along the narrow peninsula, the colorless bay sometimes visible through the trees, then a turn onto a paved numbered route that passed some fields and barns, crossed an iron bridge. Conversation along the way they made deliberately bland: How many people live in the village? How do they earn their living? Meg could bite her tongue for telling Peter about Jim’s screwing around, which served no purpose but to make this expedition even more awkward than it would be otherwise. And she wished she’d eaten something, filthy though she’d been, rather than going right upstairs to shower after she’d fixed Peter’s breakfast. Her gut felt queasy. She’d developed a headache that was like a narrow-gauge drill bit intermittently entering her skull above her left eye.

  Meg pulled into the parking lot in front of the nursing home, and they got out. The home, a white wooden structure with striped awnings, had been a private house in the days when sardine canneries brought moderate prosperity to the town. Now the house looked as defeated as the industry that had funded it, the awnings tattered by winter storms and the house needing a coat of paint. Still, Meg told Peter as they walked up the steps, the aides were kind and competent, and in spite of its age and makeshift repairs, the place was kept pretty clean. You couldn’t hope for much more than that.

  They found Jim in the day room, in a wheelchair parked near a window that overlooked the marsh. Meg said, “Look who’s come to see you, Jim.”

  She saw him now through Peter’s eyes: his hair not exactly gray, but faded and much sparser, the mouth drooping, spittle leaking from one corner. Tall as ever, but the muscles gone as slack as his mouth, so that he had to have a strap buckled around his shrunken torso, as if he were a dummy stuffed with rags, and his neck propped inside a surgical collar. The sweatshirt and jogging pants he wore were easier than regular clothes for the aides to manage when they dressed and undressed him. How the irony in that must rankle, since Jim had prided himself on his fitness. As if it were her own, she felt Jim’s shame. She should never have brought Peter here.

  He carried two chairs across the scuffed tile floor, which was laid out like a checkerboard, and set them in front of Jim’s wheelchair. “Hello, Jim,” he said, settling himself into one of them.

  Jim did not try to speak. Maybe it was Meg’s imagination, but his expression seemed wary—frightened, even.

  “It’s been a long time,” Peter said. The near-echo of what he’d murmured to Meg, his tongue licking at her nipple, made her wince and turn away. She almost would have preferred him to exclaim, “You look grand, Jim,” and clap him on his bony shoulder.

  She didn’t take the chair next to Peter’s. Instead she stood at a card table on which lay a jigsaw, half completed. The picture was of a whitewashed cottage, yellow roses climbing a trellis along the left-hand border. Distractedly she chose a puzzle piece and turned it this way and that, trying to fit it into gaps on the trellis. In a far corner of the room an ancient gentleman moaned in his sleep.

  “I’ve solved it, Jim,” Peter said. “The Digby Magdalen.”

  She recalled that when he was a graduate student Jim had written a seminar paper on a play about Mary Magdalen, which had given him fits. For some reason he’d expected Peter to help him with the project, and resented it when Peter went on devoting himself to his own research instead. She looked up and saw that Jim’s pale eyes had begun to water at the corners. If Peter weren’t here, she’d lift an edge of the cloth diaper knotted around Jim’s neck and wipe them for him, and the slobber at his mouth. His feet, in their fuzzy bed socks, stirred. A kind of gurgle, impossible to interpret, came from deep in his throat.

  . . . indeed a miracle play, Peter was saying . . . absolutely a coherent whole . . . bridge between medieval and Renaissance . . . Bernardine doctrine . . . by her miracles the Magdalen comes ever closer to divine transformation . . . is not confused with, but becomes the mother of God . . .

  Like an egg balanced on end, Jim’s head wobbled at the top of his stiff collar. His left hand lifted from the arm of the chair, flopped down again. Meg began to move toward them, diagonally across black and white squares.

  Peter leaned forward in the chair. Mysteriously he said, “I did it for you, Jim.” His voice seemed to drop a little. “I’m very glad I came.” For a horrifying moment Meg thought he was going to confide in Jim what had transpired in the upstairs bedroom. And perhaps he had—with his smile. Gently he touched the sleeve of Jim’s sweatshirt and said, “Goodbye, friend.”

  Out at the car, Meg discovered that she still held the jigsaw piece in her hand. She placed it on the dashboard, thinking she’d return it the following day, and turned the key in the ignition. They didn’t speak at all on the way home.

  Peter laid his chicken sandwich on his plate and said, “Did you ever consider divorcing him?”

  “When I found out he’d been sleeping around?” She rose from the table to take from the refrigerator the bowl of fruit salad left from the previous night’s dinner. Overnight the cut fruit had released its juice, and the banana turned dark and soggy. She sat and spooned some of the salad onto her plate. “Sure I considered it.”

  “You could have married again,” Peter said, examining his half-eaten sandwich.

  “There wasn’t anyone around I wanted to marry.” Their glances met, then she looked out the window at speckled yellow birch leaves drifting down in a light breeze. Might be going to rain soon.

  “Anyway, it would have been so hard, Peter. So painful to drag all those bitter feelings into the open, into a court of law. I figured that having Jim gone for good wouldn’t be that much different from the way life had been for me for years. Whether he’d spent his evening in a carrel writing a journal article or in someone’s bed, the effect was the same.”

  Meg ate a spoonful of the fruit salad. “Then, around the time I’d gotten used to the idea of Jim’s girlfriend, the odd symptoms began. The first thing was, he had trouble holding a pen tightly enough to write with it. That hand and arm would twitch, like a cat convinced it has fleas. I suggested his problem might be psychological—maybe he needed a rest from doing so much scholarship. Bullshit, he said. Next he fell down a flight of stairs after a lecture and had to be brought home in an ambulance. Fractured his leg in two places.”

  “I remember your writing about the broken leg.”

  “Even then I didn’t suspect anything was seriously wrong. People do stumble and fall, even healthy people.”

  “They do,” Peter said.

  “So he spent six weeks hobbling around on crutches. During that time he started to have trouble swallowing, would gag or choke on things. Stew meat, vitamin pills, even oatmeal. Finally his doctor made him see a neurologist.”

  One of the cats was mewing outside the screen door, but Meg ignored it. “And then we knew. After that, there was no question of divorce.”

  Peter nodded.

  She rose from the table and scraped her plate into the compost bucket. “Peter,” she said abruptly, “when your wife decided to take a flat in Hampstead, did divorce cross your mind?”

  It took him a moment to collect his thoughts. “I understood from the start how important Enid’s work was to her. She tried living in Oxford for a year, as we’d agreed, but found it too confining. Her right to a career was part and parcel of our bargain.”

  Bargain. A strange way to express the concept of marriage, but accurate enough, Meg supposed.

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nbsp; “I felt obligated to honor it.”

  “And you still do.”

  “Yes. I still do.”

  After a silence, during which he attended to his sandwich, she said, “Is your paper really about Mary Magdalen?”

  The question seemed to startle him. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  “What did you mean when you told Jim you wrote it for him?”

  “Meg,” he said, “let’s talk about the hole.”

  “What hole?”

  “The hole with the stone in it, where you want to put in another bed.”

  “Oh, that hole.”

  He smiled, and his haymow brows lifted. “I was thinking about it on the way back from seeing Jim. Do you happen to have a crowbar?”

  She’d inherited a bunch of old tools rusting away in the shed when she’d bought the house. “I think I recall seeing one. Maybe even two.”

  “Let’s have a go.”

  He washed up the lunch dishes, spilling a certain amount of water on the floor in front of the sink, while she rooted around upstairs to find something he could wear. Hanging in Mike’s closet was a pair of corduroys he’d worn before he took his great growth spurt—heaven only knew why they’d been preserved, even through the move to Maine—and in the ragbag she found a flannel shirt of Jim’s that she’d been saving to rip into dust cloths.

  Arrayed in these hand-me-downs, Peter was a comical sight. The threadbare corduroys came only to his shins, and she’d already removed the buttons from the shirt, so she had to safety-pin him into it. The sleeves, way too long, dangled over his hands until he turned them up. She got out the camera, in case she ever needed to blackmail him, she said. But as she watched him trundle the wheelbarrow over hillocks toward the woodpile, she thought there was something indefinably erotic about seeing him in her son’s and husband’s clothing.

  Meg took a picture of him loading logs into the barrow, and then set the camera on a stump, propped on a piece of kindling, so that the time-delay mechanism could capture the two of them together. She came next to him and put her arm around his waist, hugging him to her, feeling the soft, worn flannel under her fingers, and told him to smile. They held still, watching the little red light blink, waiting for the shutter to slide open. If only it never would, if only they could stand that way forever. But the shutter opened, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and slid shut, and the automatic advance whirred. “One more?” she asked. Too late: he’d turned and was heaving a log into the barrow.

  After Peter dumped the pile of logs near the hole, he positioned two fat ones, split side down, next to the rim and picked up one of the long crowbars they’d found in the shed. “Right,” he said. “With the crowbars we’re going to lever up the rock as high as we can, using these logs as fulcrums. Then I’ll nudge a log into the hole with my foot, and while you steady the rock, I’ll use my crowbar to shove the log under. If we can get enough logs under the rock to raise it to the surface, then all we need to do is roll it off.”

  “If,” she said. “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

  Easier said than done. The stone weighed a ton, and it wanted to wobble off the forked end of her crowbar, especially when Peter used his to maneuver the log in the hole. Nevertheless, he eventually succeeded in forcing the first log beneath the stubborn granite. The stone lurched sideways and upward about an inch, and Peter, red in the face, let out a cheer.

  “This time, I’ll hold the rock, and you do the maneuvering,” he said. He repositioned the fulcrum logs, and again they levered the granite upward. Unfortunately, the log she kicked into the hole turned out to be too big, and she had a devil of a time manipulating it. Meanwhile, Peter, struggling to raise the rock higher with his crowbar so her job wouldn’t be so hard, became even redder in the face. Please God, let him not burst an artery, she prayed. At last she managed to wedge the log more or less underneath, the granite seemed a little higher, and they both cheered.

  “If only we had a third person to work the logs in while we held the crowbars,” she said, “it would be a piece of cake. Almost.” Both of them, probably, pictured Jim in town in the nursing home, drooling into his bib.

  “We can do it,” Peter said. “We’ve made a good start already. We just have to go slow, take rests, spell each other holding up the rock.”

  Together they developed a knack and a rhythm. Circling the rock with the fulcrums, they jammed the logs one by one under the rock and on top of the ones below it. Little by little the heap of logs Peter had dumped by the hole shrank. There were some setbacks, when the logs under the rock would suddenly shift and catapult it into the clay wall of the hole, and they’d have to ram it toward the center again, Peter grunting and Meg muttering swearwords. Nevertheless, gradually the rock’s shoulders, and then middle, emerged.

  “It’s working, Peter. They ought to give you the Nobel Prize in physics for this.”

  He smiled as though he’d just finished making his acceptance speech and was modestly acknowledging the crowd’s applause. “How long do you think it’s been buried?” he asked.

  “Oh, roughly since the last ice age.”

  The higher the rock rose the better they got at weaving the logs in beneath it, outwitting the rough-skinned, clay-encrusted, bullheaded enemy. At last it was entirely out of the hole, squatting on top of what seemed like the best part of a cord of logs, its bottom surface level with the terrain.

  Meg flopped down on the grass they’d trampled, feeling the same exhausted euphoria as after the births of her babies. Peter took off his ratty garden gloves and mopped his forehead with the handkerchief he’d stowed in Mike’s pocket. His graying hair was stuck to his head, drenched in sweat. He removed his eyeglasses and wiped them, too. “That rock must be the size of a washtub,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon. That rock is at least the size of a dinghy.”

  Nearsightedly he blinked at it. “Dory.”

  “Tugboat.”

  “That rock,” he declared, hooking his eyeglasses over his ears, “is the size of the bloody Queen Mary.”

  She loved him so much it felt like a disease you could die of, no less hopeless than Jim’s. “You’re leaving tomorrow, aren’t you,” she blurted.

  He stuffed the handkerchief into a pants pocket and sat beside her on the grass. “Friday is the day I give my paper,” he said quietly.

  You couldn’t get somebody else to deliver it for you? she wanted to ask. You couldn’t say what the hell, screw the goddamn paper? But if anything like that were possible for him, he’d have to suggest it himself. She rolled over and pressed her face into the crook of her arm so that if she were to weep he wouldn’t see the tears. After a while Peter laid his hand on the back of her work shirt, his fingers light as a leaf falling. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m not having a heart attack, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Meg.”

  “Then don’t say anything.”

  The rain that had been threatening since late morning began as a finely sieved drizzle. Soon Peter stood and brushed mud and dried grass clippings from Mike’s corduroys. They returned the crowbars to the shed and went into the house.

  A week after Peter drove away in the rental car, Meg pulled the tomato plants out of their bed, cut up the stalks with kitchen shears, and added them to the compost.

  The following day the minister of the church where she sings in the choir arrived in a pickup, along with two parishioners. With little effort the three men toppled the big rock off the hole. “Which way?” they asked, and when Meg replied that she didn’t care, they rolled it toward the seaward side of the lawn, which they chose not for esthetic reasons, but because the land sloped in that direction. The rock came to rest against a knot of skinny stumps belonging to an alder that Meg had sawed down the previous spring, near the edge of the woods.

  Her he
lpers rescued the logs from the hole and restacked them on the woodpile. They shoveled the clumps of clay back into the hole and topped it up with soil from a hill of loam, now nourishing canes of wild raspberry, that had been trucked in the previous year for her first raised beds. Meg could hardly bear to watch the operation, but felt it would be ungracious not to stay outside until they were finished and afterward offer them coffee. To her relief, the men didn’t ask who’d helped her lift the rock. Might as well have been done by snapping her fingers and saying abracadabra.

  Every time she passes a window on the garden side of the house Meg’s eye snags on the rock. It looks naked and forlorn, sitting there on frosty grass. In the spring she’ll plant a clump of daylilies next to it, maybe splurge on a mugho pine to nestle up against its rough pink surface.

  Before leaving the country Peter wrote her a brief letter on hotel stationery. It was raining in Boston, he said. He’d lost his umbrella somewhere, absentmindedly left it under his chair in the conference room where he read his paper, or perhaps in the taxi afterward. No doubt he’d encounter rain when he landed in London, too. “I expect,” he wrote in his tiny, hooked, nearly illegible hand, “it will be a long while until I see the sun again.” Since that note she hasn’t heard from him.

  The snapshots came back from York Photo Labs. The one of Peter at the woodpile is a little blurry and poorly framed—she’d been over-eager. The one of the two of them, shot by time-delay, could be any middle-aged couple on a camping holiday, the woman’s hair awry, the man’s face mostly in shadow. No details (the safety pins on the flannel shirt, for instance) visible to anyone who didn’t know they were there. She’d ordered a double set of prints, but won’t be sending the extra pair on to him, probably.