“I think it’s fine,” I finally say.
“What’s fine?”
“It was nothing,” I say. “We’re always hearing noises.” That’s basically true. Often, at night, a racket of clawed feet on the roof produces the false impression that animals have penetrated the abode.
“Let’s call nine-one-one,” Jayne says.
I don’t have to tell her that our phones are downstairs, in the kitchen, plugged into chargers. I say, “Sweetie, there’s no need to worry. Nothing has happened.”
“Shouldn’t we check?” she says.
What she’s really suggesting is that I should check—that the checker should be me. I should get out of bed and go downstairs and find out what is making the noises. My feeling is that this isn’t called for. Those noises happened a long time ago, is how I feel about it. I feel that they are historical facts.
Jayne says, “I won’t be able to sleep.”
I wouldn’t say that she says this loudly, but she’s definitely no longer speaking in what you’d call a low voice.
Jayne says, “I’ll just lie here all night, wondering what those noises are.”
What those noises were, I want to say. For some reason, I feel very exhausted.
Jayne says, “Honey, it’s not safe.”
I hear her. She’s arguing that, even if we could fall asleep, it would be unsafe to do so in circumstances where we’ve heard thuds and coughs of an unknown character and origin. I say, “You’re right.”
I don’t move, however. I stay where I am, in bed.
* * *
—
It’s important to examine this moment with some care and, above all, to avoid drawing simplistic psychological conclusions. In that moment, which I clearly recall, the following occurred: I was overcome by a dreamlike inertness. I was not experiencing fear as such. I have been afraid and I know what it is to be afraid. This wasn’t that. This was what I’d call an oneiric paralysis.
Thus, I could intuit that my wife was looking at me, yet my own eyes, open but unaccountably immobilized, were directed straight ahead, toward some point in the darkness: I lacked the wherewithal to turn my head and return her look. Her bedside lamp lit up, presumably by her hand. I sensed her climbing out of the bed. She appeared at the foot of the bed. There she was visible to me. She fixed her hair into a bun and put on a dressing gown I didn’t know existed. She was as beautiful as ever; that much I could take in. She said, “I’ll go down myself.”
Here I became most strongly conscious of my incapacitation—because I found myself unable to intervene. But for this incapacity, I would surely have pointed out that she was taking a crazy risk. I would have reminded her that Arizona is teeming with guns and gunmen. I would have proposed an alternative to venturing alone downstairs. In short, I would have stopped her.
To be clear, my inability to speak up wasn’t because I’d lost my voice as such. It was because the content of my thoughts amounted to a blank. I was the subject of a mental whiteout.
My beloved left the sleeping zone. I heard her footfall as she went down the stairs.
My symptoms improved a little. I found myself able to move my feet over the border of the bed—though no farther. I could not escape a sedentary posture. I perforce awaited the sound of whatever next happened.
Which was: a soft utterance. Certainly it was a human voice, or a human-like voice. Then came a pause; then a repetition of the utterance, equally soft; and then what sounded like a responsive utterance. I heard a movement being made, a movement I understood in terms of clumsiness. Then came a series of sounds made by bodily movements, it seemed, then another, slightly longer speech episode involving one voice or more than one voice, I couldn’t tell for sure. What was being said and being done, and by whom, and in which zone: all of these matters were beyond me. I was on the bed’s edge, that is to say, still bedridden. This state of affairs persisted for a period that even in retrospect remains incalculable: soft utterances belonging, it seemed, although I could not be sure, to more than one speaker; pauses; the sounds of movements human or animal; and my own stasis. At any rate, there eventually came a moment when the light in the living zone was switched on; and very soon after that I heard the distinctive exhalation of the refrigerator door being opened, and the splashing, or plashing, of liquid being poured into a glass. Here, my motive powers returned as mysteriously as they had abandoned me. I got to my feet and went down.
* * *
—
Jayne is seated at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. She has taken to drinking milk regularly, for the calcium: one of her greatest fears is that she’ll lose bone density and end up stooped, like her mother.
“Good idea,” I say, and I pour myself a glass of milk, too, even though my bone density isn’t something I lose sleep over. I sit down across the table from her.
Jayne is on her smartphone, scrolling. I wait for her to send a text or make a call, because she doesn’t pick up her gadget for any other reason. She keeps scrolling, though, almost as if she’s just passing time.
I’ve never seen her in any kind of dressing gown before. This one has an old-fashioned pattern of brown-and-green tartan. She looks good in it. “I like your dressing gown,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says. “I thought it might come in useful.”
I survey the surroundings. I see nothing amiss or unusual. Nor can I smell anything out of the ordinary.
Jayne finishes her milk. “I think I’ll go back to bed now,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s late.” I go up with her.
In the morning, we follow our routine. I make scrambled eggs and coffee for two, we consume the eggs and coffee, and we retire to our respective work zones: I to the garden office, where I do the consultancy stuff that occupies me for about five hours, six days a week; Jayne to the studio, which is her name for the zone of the house dedicated to her printmaking activities. We are both very busy on this particular day and work longer and more intensely than usual, and at midday we separately grab a bite to eat. In the late afternoon, I check in on her.
“How’s it going?” I say.
“Good,” she says, all vagueness and preoccupation. She is standing at her worktable, her palms black with ink. She wears the green apron I know so well.
I peek over her shoulder. “Very nice,” I say.
Jayne does not respond, which is to be expected.
“For tonight, I was thinking steak,” I say.
“Yay,” Jayne says. She loves steak, if I make it.
So I step out and get the meat and cook it. I open a bottle of red wine. I serve the meat with grilled asparagus and sautéed potatoes.
“You don’t like the steak?” I say. Jayne has only eaten a mouthful of it. Otherwise she has finished her food—including two helpings of potatoes.
She says, “I’m not that hungry.”
“Not hungry?” I say.
“Maybe I’ll have some later.”
I say to her, “What happened last night? When you went downstairs.”
Jayne says, “You were right. It was nothing.”
I say, “I heard voices. I heard you talking to someone.”
“You did?” she says.
“You’re saying those voices I heard were nothing?”
“You tell me,” Jayne says.
“You were there,” I say. “I wasn’t. You tell me.”
“Where were you?” she says. “In bed?” Now she is eating her steak.
I say, “You’re hungry now?” I say, “Who were you talking to?”
Jayne says, “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”
It must be said: I’m furious. “Can I get you anything else?” I say. “A glass of milk?”
* * *
—
I didn’t press Jayne further. If the
re’s one thing I’m not, it’s an interrogator. I decided to bide my time. Jayne, who is a great one for marital candor and discussion, would open up to me sooner or later. Meanwhile, I held off telling her about my side of things, in particular, the bizarre condition to which I fell victim on that night—a catastrophic neural stoppage. My story went hand in hand with her story. I couldn’t tell her mine unless she told me hers.
Three months have passed. Neither of us has brought up the subject.
The nocturnal noises have not reoccurred. There have been noises, of course, but none that have caused a disturbance. I may have played a role in this.
It has always been the case that, when Jayne and I call it a day, she goes upstairs while I linger in order to lock up, switch off the lights, perform a visual sweep, and generally satisfy myself that everything is shipshape and we can safely bed down. Lately, however, I have taken to staying downstairs after my patrol, if I can call it that. I sit in my armchair. All the lights have been turned off except for the lamp by the chair, so that I am, in effect, spotlighted, and clearly visible to any visitor. I remain seated for a period that varies between half an hour and a whole hour. I don’t do anything. I remain alert. I offer myself for inspection.
“Are you coming up?” Jayne called down when I first began to do this.
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m just seeing to a few things.”
“OK, well, come up soon,” Jayne said. “I miss you.”
A short while later, she was at the top of the stairs. “Love, I’m going to go to sleep soon,” she said.
“You do that, my darling,” I said. “Get yourself some shut-eye. You’ve worked hard.”
“Is that new?” she said.
“It’s my dressing gown,” I said.
The dressing gown had been delivered that morning. It had bothered me, when I began these vigils, that I lacked appropriate attire. To watchfully occupy a chair was a pursuit that belonged neither to the day nor to the night; neither to the world of action nor to the world of rest. Specifically, I wanted to remove my clothing at day’s end and yet not sit downstairs dressed only in pajamas. The solution was to put on a dressing gown.
Shopping for a dressing gown isn’t straightforward. Not only is there the danger of ordering a bathrobe by mistake, but there’s also the danger of buying something that will make you ridiculous. After a considerable effort of online browsing, I got one made of dark-blue silk. I chose well. I enjoy slipping it on and fastening the sash and—because this, too, has become part of the ritual—wetting and combing my hair so that, unforeseeably, I am more spruce than I’ve been in years. I’m very much a jeans-and-lumberjack-shirt kind of guy.
“It looks nice on you,” Jayne said. As was now the norm, she, too, was wearing her dressing gown. She added, laughing, “In a Hugh Hefner kind of way.”
Was this an entirely friendly qualification? I couldn’t tell; an unfamiliar opacity clouded Jayne in that moment. And when she got me monogrammed black slippers for my birthday—“To complete the Hef look”—the cloud suddenly returned. Still, I wear the slippers happily. And whenever I finally turn in, Jayne is always awake or half-awake and always rolls over on her side to hold me and always asks, “Is everything OK?” It is, I tell her.
When I’m in my chair, I automatically compare any weird noises to those that disturbed us that night—the thuds, the coughs. The comparison has not yet yielded an echo. I also replay in my mind what I heard when Jayne went downstairs, which sounded to me like a conversation between Jayne and another person, even though it may have been nothing and certainly came to nothing; and I find myself again looking forward to the day when Jayne will finally reminisce about the incident, and will at last disclose what happened to her during those long moments when I found myself in a veritable psychic captivity, a state that I’ll finally have the opportunity to describe to her—although it may be, because Jayne is given to worry, that it would be best if I protected her from learning about a biobehavioral ailment of such troubling neurophysiological dimensions. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve kept something from her. I’ve never told her that, when she and I first met, I had reached a point in my life when it would comfort me to look around a room and figure out exactly how I might hang myself. Jayne is my rescuer from all of that.
It’s quite possible that she has forgotten all about the night of the noises. Certainly, the alternative scenario is very improbable: that hers is a calculated muteness; that she is keeping the facts from me on purpose. It would be most unlike Jayne to do such a thing. She can’t abide tactical silences. Moreover, this particular silence would serve no purpose that I can see; therefore it cannot be purposeful.
Meanwhile, I’ve become quite the expert in what might be called bionomic audio. For example, I’ve learned that the chatter of skunks can resemble the chirping of birds. This sort of knowledge doesn’t offer itself on a plate. It requires a physical deed. Several times I’ve stepped out of the abode, armed only with a flashlight, to investigate a noise. One night, while pursuing a scuttling in the bushes—it could have been a lot of things: the raccoon may be spotted in Flagstaff, and the gray fox, and the feral cat, and certainly the squirrel—I found myself in the middle of the woods without even a flashlight. It’s true that a “woods” is a sizeable wooded area and that we’re actually concerned with a copse here, but to me it seemed as if I was in the middle of a woods in the middle of the night, even if was only about ten o’clock.
It was very dark. Our block has no streetlights, and the nuisance of light trespass doesn’t affect us in the slightest. We have only one next-door neighbor, and her property, hidden by oak trees and brush, has been scrupulously disilluminated in compliance with the dark-skies ordinances for which Flagstaff is so famous. I recently looked into installing motion-detecting security lights around the house, only to immediately fall into a deep, scary pit of outdoor-lighting codes. Jayne was opposed to the very idea. “You’ll just light up a bunch of rodents,” she said. She also said, “I refuse to live like a poltroon,” which made me smile. I love and admire her fiery verbal streak.
A “poltroon,” I read, is an “utter coward,” which I knew. I didn’t know that the word probably descends from the Old Italian poltrire, to laze around in bed, from poltro, bed. Interesting, I guess.
* * *
—
Where was I? In dark woods. But once my vision has adapted to the absence of light, of man’s light, I am in bright woods. It is a paradox: dark skies, precisely because they’re untainted by the pollution known as sky glow, are extraordinarily luminous. A strong lunar light penetrates the high black foliage and falls in a crazy silver scatter in the underwood; and it’s quite possible that starlight also plays a part in the woods’ weird monochromatic brilliance, which has a powerfully camouflaging effect in that every usually distinct thing, each plant and rock and patch of open ground, appears in a common uniform of sheen and shadow. This must account for the strange feeling of personal invisibility that comes over me. I lean against a tree—and am tree-like. I find myself calmly standing sentry there, part-clad in my mail of moonlight, and doing so in a state of such optical and auditory supervigilance that I perceive, with no trace of a startle reflex, the movements not only of the forest creatures as they hop and scamper and flit but even, through the blackened chaparral, the distant footsteps of someone walking on San Francisco. When my phone vibrates, it’s as if I’ve pocketed a tremor of the earth.
“Love?” Jayne says. “Love, where are you?”
I inform her.
She says, “The woods? You mean the yard? Are you OK? You’ve been gone for half an hour.”
I turn toward the abode. An upstairs window offers an enchanting rectangle of warm yellow light. Otherwise our abode partakes of the dark and of the woods.
I assure Jayne that all’s well. A bit of me would like to say more—would like to let her know
about my adventure in the silver forest.
“Come inside, love,” Jayne says. She sounds worried, as well she might. She is a woman all alone in a house in the woods.
“I’ll be right there,” I say. “Sit tight. I’m on my way.”
Goose
◇
In late September, Robert Daly flies New York–Milan. He travels alone: his wife, Martha, six months pregnant with their first child, is holed up at her mother’s place upstate, in Columbia County. Robert is going to the wedding of Mark Walters, a Dartmouth roommate who for years has lived in London and is marrying an English girl with a thrilling name—Electra. Electra’s mother is Italian, hence the Italian wedding. Although he has been to Europe a number of times, Robert has never visited Italy. Italy, New York friends tell him, is the most beautiful country in the world.
Robert is happy to find himself in the most beautiful country in the world. He needed a pick-me-up. Life at the bank has been downright difficult. His solitude is also a cause of happiness because being alone, these days, is a harmless form of freedom. But driving out of Malpensa Airport in his tiny, chariot-like rental car, gripping a stick shift for the first time in years, Robert is frustrated. Every time he turns onto a road he believes will lead him south, he winds up heading in the direction of the Alps, snow-capped even at this time of year and altogether astounding in their abrupt and fearsome immensity. Eventually he makes his way onto the autostrada. There, cruising at what he believes to be a fast speed of 120 kilometers per hour, he is constantly menaced by light-flashing cars—with a mysterious invariability, silver cars—and, finally, by a racing pack of motorcyclists costumed in checkered leather outfits. Robert makes way for the zooming harlequins. His place is in the slow lane, between gigantic trucks that frighten him.
Good Trouble Page 10