by Robin Black
“I always assumed I’d stop teaching when she was finished with high school, but then my marriage ended. Empty nest, empty marriage. So I needed a way to support myself.” She stirred the sauce she had concocted of tomatoes, basil, garlic, as she told us she was on sabbatical from her job. It was the kind of school with a fund for its teachers to take sabbaticals, a wealthy school, for wealthy children. “The timing was perfect. Ran away to the woods to be an artist. For a time, anyway.” Her former husband was a philosophy professor. “But not what you’re picturing,” she said. “Not the tweedy, muddling sort. Not at all.” Her daughter—Nora—was traveling in Europe for the summer, and would be visiting for a few days at the end of August or maybe over Labor Day. “She’s hoping, well, she was a creative writing major in school, and I suppose she’s hoping to follow through with that. But for now she’s got to be looking for work,” she said. “Some sort of nonprofit, I suspect. She’s a bit of a do-gooder type.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Owen said. “Or with creative writing, of course. Unless of course you plan on being happy.”
“No … Though …” She looked over at us from the stove. Her face was damp and flushed, some combination of the boiling water’s steam and the several drinks we’d each had by then. “I should ask. I don’t know if either of you is religious?”
We assured her we were not. “Heathens, through and through,” Owen said.
“Well, that’s a bit of a relief. So I can be frank …”
The daughter, it turned out, had become a churchgoing Christian. There had been a boyfriend, sophomore year. “I never liked him, but I had no vote.” The relationship had ended, but the influence remained. “It’s terrible to complain because your child believes in God, because she goes to church. People deal with so much worse than that. And it hasn’t changed her politics. I mean, she hasn’t become some, well … I should probably ask about your politics too.”
“We’re exactly what you would guess,” I said. “Look at us.”
“Right. Well, I was going to say she hasn’t become a right-wing maniac. She just believes in, from my perspective, in a fairy tale. And it’s the first thing that’s ever come along that makes me feel we’re really different. But there are reasons, she’s had a lot to deal with … it makes a certain kind of …”
She let the sentence fade into the pantry as she withdrew a box of spaghetti. Owen and I exchanged a glance. Stitched together another fact; took note of another unknown.
And what did she learn about us that first night? Truly, a marriage is a paltry, skeletal thing when both members are present, talking to someone whom neither knows well. Whatever little leaks and blurts one might make if alone, are censored out. How many years had we been married? We’ve been together a quarter century. Any children? No. Where were you before the move out to the country? We were in Philadelphia. (We were in limbo. We were in hell.)
“We’d been teaching a lot,” Owen said. “Especially Gus, who was always in more demand for individual work, which can actually pay more than the adjunct stuff. And she’s a better teacher than I’ll ever be. But we were just making ends meet. Not quite living in a garret, but not far off. Then my aunt died and we had a little money and suddenly this opportunity came up.”
We didn’t talk much about art that night. In Owen’s presence Alison seemed embarrassed to have described herself as a painter. “I was just trying it out, saying it like that. Being brave. Really I’m a biology teacher who likes to paint.” And Owen and I observed our well-honed practice of silence on the subject of our work, of course, so beyond the brief mention of the daughter’s writing aspirations, the whole subject of creativity was set aside.
We did talk about the land around us. Alison had been for walks in the woods along both properties. She’d also walked the nearly two miles into town. We told her which stores we preferred—not that there was much choice.
“We don’t know how the pharmacy on the corner survives,” I said. “Patterson’s. I’ve actually done a painting of it, of that whole block. Last summer, I set up across the street for nearly two weeks, and I don’t think I saw ten customers go in. No one under eighty. I’m certain they still grind their own pills in the back. It’s the drugstore that time forgot.”
“Yes, and that the Rite-Aid over in Lowry replaced,” Owen said. “Just nobody informed the Pattersons.”
Nothing of much importance was said, but that seemed unrelated to what took place.
When I first began gardening, uninformed, I was shocked by the impact water could have on a thirsty plant. Of course I knew that plants needed water, but I didn’t know the miraculous impact a good soaking could have. I would notice a perennial, often sage—we grew a lot of sage, for its color and its hardiness—practically shriveled from thirst and heat, and I would get out the hose and then half an hour later would see it revived, its leaves unfurled, its very being seeming healed.
Owen and I had sex when we got home.
We got into bed at the same time, unusual for that summer. Most nights, I would head up with a book, often about World War I, and he would wander out to the barn to bang his head on work for a while more. Or I would wake in the wee hours and find him sitting downstairs, a drink in hand. But that night we climbed the stairs together, leaving the darkened house below.
At what moment had we each begun to feel the erotic charge? Walking home over the hill, a little drunk, we’d been laughing together. I had bumped against him with my hip, flirting, teasing, like a teen. Once in the house, switching off the downstairs lights, checking the leaky kitchen faucet, I felt a charge in the air. Unmistakable.
Nothing coy, nothing subtle, no nuzzling against one another in the bed, finding the comfort of familiar sex that’s half about pleasure, half about the start of falling asleep. I sat on the edge of our bed, still in my jeans, and spread my legs, unzipped the zipper, lay back, waited to feel his hands on my hips tugging the denim down, waited to feel his mouth on me. Didn’t wait long.
Sex. We had always had so many different kinds. Like different sorts of music. Sometimes sweet. Sometimes just edging on violent. No whips and chains, but teeth a little too sharp, the occasional slap. Rough play. Sometimes in public, half hoping to get caught. Owen would get me off under restaurant tables, in backs of taxis. Before we lived such secluded lives.
And then there was the other sex, the sex that’s like the decent enough music you listen to because the drive is so long and it’s the only radio station you can pick up.
There are points in every marriage, maybe in every long relationship, at which you have sex with your partner not because you are so drawn to that person, so turned on that you want to have sex, but because you want to have sex and that’s who you can have it with.
By the time we met Alison, we weren’t having sex frequently at all—not by our old standards. And what sex we had was mostly of the radio station, long-drive sort. One or the other of us would feel the need. The other would oblige. We could go weeks without.
But then that night, after our dinner with her, we tore the bed apart. Hungry. A little tough, a little rough. The sort of sex where you feel both slavish and mean, tuned in to the tension of desire, the gratitude for the moment, the anger at the power those moments hold. Hands, mouths everywhere. Skin tingling. Unbearable.
“God, I needed that,” Owen said, afterward.
“Me too,” I said. “God, I needed that.”
There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you’re having and the one you’re not. Sometimes you don’t even know when that second, silent one has begun.
4
One of the unanticipated impacts of our life in the country was that time had taken on a different feel. As Philadelphians, we had been teachers, shoppers, socializers, therapy attenders, bus catchers. And all of these things require an awareness of the clock and of the calendar. You have to know it’s Monday, and you have to know it’s noon, if you are going to get to your Monday 1
p.m. appointment. But even after only a month or two in the farmhouse, we started shedding that awareness. It was so rare for it to matter much whether it was Tuesday or Sunday. We stopped our Wednesday night candle lightings. The rhythm was wrong. We weren’t living in seven-day cycles anymore. Not in cycles at all. Even my body gave up its cycles, my reproductive potential stuttering to an early stop as if in acquiescence to its pointlessness. I still kept track of daylight, of course, noticing, as painters must, when each day dimmed, but that is a gradual, unpunctuated sort of way to measure time.
Occasionally, though, there was a reason to keep track. The morning after we had dinner with Alison, I realized it had been two weeks since I’d visited my father—though it was a funny thing to measure. He was far enough down the road into his own private reality that time had taken on yet another quality for him. When I appeared, if he knew who I was, he might think I had been there the day before. Or not for a decade. On the previous visit, he’d greeted me with the news that I had just missed my sister Charlotte, dead for six years. It was a shame, he said, as she’d brought cookies with her and I could have had some.
There were many ways in which I loved my father more in his demented state. We’d sat there, on that earlier day, and talked a long while about Charlotte’s visit. It had been strange and lovely to think she had just left the room a few minutes earlier. That her not being there with me was a matter of a missed connection, a failure to coordinate our plans better. In the moment, it had soothed me. My father had soothed me, as he rarely had when he was still my real dad, tight-lipped and stoic, and not this otherworldly mystic receiving social calls and cookies from our dead.
Owen offered to go with me but I knew he wanted to be home and I didn’t want to be the cause of his missing a chance for the breakthrough that was bound eventually to appear, so I set off on my own.
It was my other sister, my younger sister, Jan, a doctor, the practical one, who had found the place where my father was to dwindle, then disappear. (I sometimes pictured a star doing the same thing over millions of years, slowly, slowly losing its bearings in the universe, finally flickering out.) The home is just west of Philadelphia, not far from where we grew up, about an hour from me, a little closer to where Jan and her partner Letty live. And it was an awful place but also as good as such a place can be. Jan and Letty are generous people. It hadn’t always seemed that way, because Jan has a certain harshness to her, or anyway she does with me; but they were certainly generous financially when it came to this. Jan chose the place knowing that our father’s schoolteacher pension would never be enough to cover it and that my sporadic teaching income wasn’t worth thinking about, but that they, a doctor and an investment banker, wouldn’t even notice that the money was gone. When Owen and I suddenly became flush, I offered to chip in more, but flush to us was still marginal to them and they were quick to say no.
The drive there always made me feel grateful for where we lived, but also primed me for all the sadness to come. I passed seven strip malls—a number I knew because Owen had counted them. There wasn’t a single one that didn’t have at least one store that was also in another, and a couple of them, the closest to us and the closest to my father, were pretty much identical. This unmistakable decline into homogeneity invariably depressed me. At some point in every drive to my father, I would catch myself thinking: what exactly is the fucking point? And maybe I didn’t really plummet because by then I had passed two Bed, Bath & Beyonds, two Lowe’s, two Home Depots, two Michael’s, and three Taco Bells. I know there was more to my despair than that. But I always told myself that the dismal scenery was the cause—every time.
My father was in what Owen called his high-quality science fiction mode that day, meaning that nothing he said had any bearing on reality but it all made a certain sense. Whatever universe he was in had solid, logical underpinnings. He had been on a sailboat and was angry because the man in charge—“The captain?” I asked as if clarity on this one point might be meaningful—had told him he could drink the ocean water, but it wasn’t true. The man hadn’t been lying, but he was wrong. He was mistaken.
Every once in a while, the schoolteacher in my father would come shining through. Like when he used the word mistaken. As in: I’m afraid you’re mistaken, young man. The American Civil War was not started by Napoleon. The schoolteacher, and the father too. As in: You may think I am going to support you, Augusta, if you leave college to draw pictures all day, but you are sadly mistaken.
I wasn’t paying the sort of attention I’d paid on the visit before when he’d told me about my long-gone sister’s baked goods. Mostly, as I sat in the small chair across from an identical chair that he barely filled with his dwindling, flickering starlight self, I watched his facial expressions, trying to translate them into something having to do with him. When he got stern like that, was he, somewhere in the folds of his consciousness, actually back in front of a class, giving in to the temptation to make a stupid child look even stupider? Or was he, as his better self, giving holy hell to the bully picking on the skinny kid who at thirteen still had trouble tying his shoes? Could there be this other narrative, the one he’d actually lived, playing out in the core of him? Could the smile he suddenly flashed have sprung from the Father’s Day when all of us, Charlotte, and Jan and I—under Charlotte’s direction, of course, she being the ringleader of all such activities—put on a little sketch, about who knows what? I couldn’t remember. But maybe he could. Somewhere.
“A man in charge of a boat,” he said, “should know about water.”
An old painting of mine hung behind him and I glanced at it while he spoke. A streetscape I’d done in New York, when I was twenty years old. Fourteenth Street. About six months before this visit, I’d found it stuck behind his bed. One of his nurses, not knowing it was mine, told me he’d said it was boring. “Of all things,” she said. “Boring!” But he hadn’t been wrong. It dated from before I had learned to use my natural precision to my advantage and it had that kind of technical strain for correctness that makes just about everything dull. I had been going to take it from behind the bed, bring it home, throw it out, hide it away, but Owen said I shouldn’t. Because what if my father ever wanted it back? What if he woke up one day and said, Where’s that old painting of mine? The one my daughter Augusta did? Which he may well have done, because during the spring the painting reappeared. Though it was also entirely possible that a different nurse had just found it and thought it belonged on the wall.
I stayed about two hours. I didn’t kiss him goodbye, as I hadn’t kissed him hello. We weren’t a kissing family. Not the three thorny ones of us who were still alive, anyway. My sister Charlotte had spilled over with affection, and I always imagined my mother being the same, but not me and not Jan and surely not our father.
The sun was low as I pulled into our drive. There’s a line of tall spruce on the western edge of our front lawn. They mark the place Owen stops mowing, leaving all meadow beyond. When the sun is at a certain point in the sky, summer afternoons, the shadows from those trees lie across the grass like felled giants. “Why not just sleeping?” Owen asked me, when I told him that.
“Because they’re too still for sleep,” I said. “They’re too untroubled.”
All the drive home I had felt age settle over me. No more the daughter. Not even the forty-seven-year-old woman. Certainly not the seductress tossing the bedcovers into chaos with her lover the night before. But an old, tired soul. Aching from the heart outward. I sat in our drive for a few moments after turning off the car. I sighed as I looked at those heavy shadows on our lawn. When I opened the door, creaking my newly ancient body into the day, I found Alison standing in the drive. Her face took in my condition even before we could say hello.
“I’ve been visiting my father,” I said. “I think I told you? He’s in a home. He has Alzheimer’s. It’s been a long day.”
“How terrible. I imagine it has been.” And then, “You look like you could use a drink. M
aybe even two.”
I smiled—barely. “I can see you’re going to be a bad influence,” I said. “But I think you’re right.” I looked over to the barn. “Why don’t you come over this time, though. We have a good bottle of red … Let me just tell Owen I’m home, then we’ll go inside.”
She said she would be over in half an hour. She reached over and gave my hand a squeeze before turning away.
When Owen’s work was going well, I would never knock. I’d just barge in. Even when the doors were closed. I knew he wouldn’t hear a knock if he was really absorbed. He would be far, far away, in another place and time.
But I had learned during those months of his frustration to pause at the door and at least give him a warning shout. Not because there was anything happening that I might derail with an interruption, but because he felt ashamed. He needed a moment to arrange his expression or maybe to set himself up at the computer as though he were engaged. We’d never had that conversation, he’d never asked that explicitly of me. But I had learned. And so, that day, at the top of the great wide ramp to the open barn doors, I knocked and I called, “I’m back.”
“Oh, good. Come on in.”
Without question, the barn is the most spectacular space on the property. Cleaned of all trace of the livestock it once housed, all that remained was the shell. Pennsylvania bluestone floors. Wood walls of horizontal planks, heavy beams, a vaulting ceiling into which we had cut four skylights that we’d framed in old weathered barn wood. It had the cool hush of a church.
“How was it?” he asked.
“It was the same. It was sad. I’m tired.” I walked over and touched his shoulder, gave it a quick kneading. I didn’t ask him how his morning had gone. “Alison stopped by,” I said, stepping away. “We’re going to have a glass of wine. Or something. Two glasses of wine. She rightly diagnosed my need.”