Curled beside Kate on that last night that we would ever lie together side by side, I listened to the even, breathy rhythm of her sleep, I watched her breasts and belly rise and fall, and I wondered why we’d never had a child. This was another subject Kate and I hadn’t talked about, though we sometimes made love without thought of contraception. All our friends who were busy with children often commented how much more we’d learn about each other once we became parents. You can’t help but be surprised, they’d say. Kate and I would nod politely, pretending those innocent remarks weren’t central to our troubles. Now, shifting uncomfortably in bed, I wondered if those words weren’t also a clue to our infertility. Maybe each of Kate’s eggs fisted itself up when my sperm approached, each little wriggling creature a question mark that shouldn’t be acknowledged. Or perhaps my sperm purposely lost themselves in her moist, inner folds, unwilling to open what waited in that distant, mysterious egg.
In the morning, after opening the blinds, I sat on Kate’s side of the bed and waited for her eyes to open to the early light. She stirred under the blanket, then her hand rose up suddenly, blocking the unexpected sight of me so close, so soon.
“Michael?”
I took her hand and held it, admiring the delicate bones, remembering the time she’d drawn an image of my own hand. Then I set it down on the blanket, terribly aware that no tender tracing could rewrite what I had to say.
“I’m so sorry, Kate.”
“Sorry?”
I nodded. “I want a divorce.”
Her voice unusually calm, she asked me to repeat what I’d just said.
“I want a—”
“But we’re so happy,” she interrupted, with a voice that held no such conviction.
I said nothing. Then Kate’s body seemed to ease under the covers, her legs languidly stretching out and releasing this happy marriage.
*
Kate felt certain that if we sold the house and each moved elsewhere, then our new towns and homes and jobs would allow us to rebuild our lives as soon as possible. Barely able to hide her pleasure at our ending, she became positively voluble as she outlined the benefits of this plan, and I finally agreed, if only to curtail any more painful discussions.
When the time came, Kate packed her half of our dividing house with a light touch, filling each box almost tenderly before taping the cardboard flap shut. I worked more slowly, noticing that she took special care not to pack any objects I’d collected—did she somehow understand that they held secrets, like the illustrations she kept inside herself?
Yet there was something of my collection that I wanted her to have, a secret gift that would be my rueful farewell: a long brown bootlace that once belonged to a young woman whose lush blond hair, I’d been told, was her own halo. While resting one afternoon in a park, she’d caught sight of a friend she secretly loved, unexpectedly approaching along one of the cobblestone paths. Though caught off guard, she quickly unlaced of one of her boots and used it to tie back her hair. She greeted him as he walked by, and when he stopped to chat she casually reached back and loosened the knot, her hair tumbling undone for this man who now, suddenly, had nowhere else to go.
While Kate continued her meticulous, patient packing, I climbed the stairs to our nearly empty bedroom and searched in her closet for her slim leather boots, hoping she hadn’t yet packed them. There they were, in a dark corner beneath a line of dresses, one boot lying sadly on its side. I picked it up and examined the lace—it was nearly the same color and only slightly thicker than the one I held in my hand.
I exchanged them, my fingers fumbling at the buttonhooks, satisfied with this small presence I was bestowing on Kate. Each autumn through winter she’d wear these boots, tightening them in the mornings and then going about her day, but in the evenings she’d unloose those laces, and the subtle energy of the one I’d just given her might make her pause for a moment, as if she heard someone speaking from far off, not yet recognizing that stirring within as the urge to finally let herself go. And one day, as all laces do, this lace would snap, perhaps finally breaking the spell of her own inner knot.
*
While reestablishing my insurance business in a new town, I once again traveled from one yard sale to another, or I checked the local paper for an announcement of any new auction, longing for the sound of a caller’s swift and keening voice. I quickly added to my collection, and in my new home I allowed every object its own perspective and tiny pull of gravity, so that it might radiate to the other objects in invisible, kaleidoscopic associations. My objects were always willing to silently offer their tales, and I was their rapt audience as I wandered through the house. On my dining room hunt-board sat a gravy bowl that was once a young girl’s magic lamp; on the living room mantelpiece stood the candlestick holder an elderly man had thrown out his window the day before he died; in a corner of the foyer stood a plant stand, owned by a woman who never dared grow anything and kept it empty. On my desk rested a petrified wood paperweight and its many stories: one woman had carried it with her everywhere, an unlikely balm for her too-tender heart; then her twin sister, jealous of anything that couldn’t be shared, managed to steal it; and finally their brother, weary of the bickering that always seemed to exclude him, sold it to me.
In a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter lay the soiled, bent arm of a doll. It once belonged to a timid child who held it before her whenever she had to venture down the basement for a family chore: one quick wave of that tiny arm somehow warded off all imagined dangers. Sometimes I felt the need to hold it myself, snug in my jacket pocket, and take a long, aimless walk through this new town I was still learning. My soft plastic talisman always seemed to lead me somewhere I needed to be: to a parade ground where the marching band of the local college blared out fearlessly uplifting music; to a small stream in the middle of a park, its gliding waters clear down to the smooth stones; to a late-night mall and its wonderful crush of teenaged kids flirting with each other up and down the aisles.
One evening during one of those walks I found myself hungry and standing before a diner, so I settled into a booth inside and ordered a greasy burger. While waiting for my meal I noticed a woman in the booth ahead of me, who brushed one graying strand after another from her face as she stared at the small jukebox propped against the window. Occasionally she forgot her wayward hair and reached toward the buttons, her fingers poised but never willing to push.
Her quarters surely lay inside the machine, but she wasn’t ready to spend them just yet, and again and again she nearly punched in the numbers before drawing back her hand. What song was she afraid to release, and why—some lyric that might offer advice she was afraid to hear, a melody that would call up an old love or the memory of a child now grown and gone?
The quiet drama unfolding within that woman affected me as well, and I reached into my pocket and held the hand of that little hidden arm in an anxious grip. Then a surprising thought ran through me: Why not give this bit of toy away? It had helped someone once before. It had helped soothe my entry into a new life. It might, if I told this woman its story, help her too.
I shook my head, wishing my hamburger could arrive right at this moment and release me from the familiar impulse to save others. I’d make a fool of myself, wouldn’t I, with my sudden appearance before this woman and the fantastic story I’d try to tell? Squeezing the soft plastic arm again, I felt little fingers cup into a budding, reassuring grasp, the gift of just enough courage to help me slide across my seat to the aisle. My sudden movement drew the woman’s gaze, her eyes so thick and dull with unhappiness that she might be willing to try anything, even waving a tiny toy arm against whatever the world threatened. I smiled awkwardly, and stepped forward.
PART FIVE
I Had a Hunch about You
“I should explain why I came here today,” Sylvia said, her spoon poised above the rice pudding. “You deserve that, at least. It goes back to an old family story, something I’d beg my parents to trot out whenever I could.”
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I was being dismissed. I looked down, forked a corner of my own dessert, and said nothing in return.
“My grandfather was a magician. He worked out-of-the-way towns, set up a small tent, did the usual tricks. Except for one big drawing card. He’d bury an assistant alive in a coffin and charge good money for a peek down the periscope. One summer, he took my mom along on the tour.”
Sylvia paused, letting her words sink in.
“The first time he buried her, Mom cried so much she ruined the act. But without this big draw, Grampire—that’s how I think of him, Grampire—had no show. He needed extra help, so in the next town he hired a local, and this is where my dad comes in. He got the job to bury her.”
“Sylvia, this sounds much stranger than my ideas about the horoscope.”
“It’s as true as any story that your parents tell you can be. Who knows, maybe they made it up,” she said, as if considering this for the first time, “a family myth to entertain their daughter. I wouldn’t put it past them. Anyway, I’ve believed it since I was a kid, so it’s a part of me now.”
I nodded. “I have some experience in that area.”
Again Sylvia paused, almost replying, but then continued. “Grampire plied my mom with liquor to calm her down, while Dad had to dig the hole, check the periscope, air hole pipe, and the string of light bulbs that lit up her face. Dad always said that the first time he looked through the periscope at her, something happened to him. But I could never get him to tell me what he saw.”
My mother’s face in the coffin suddenly appeared before me. If any of us had managed to really see her, to see through her disguises during those last terrible months, would anything have changed?
Sensing my distraction, Sylvia said, “I’m talking too much.”
“Not at all,” I said, offering a cautious smile.
“Really, I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
“That’s a phrase I’ve heard more than a few times before.”
“Oh?”
I shrugged. She was near the end of her story, and then we’d never see each other again.
“So,” she continued, frowning. “That night my mom and dad whispered for hours, though they have different memories of what they talked about.” Sylvia laughed, “When I was a kid that was the source of some of their more amusing disputes. But they both agree that’s when they fell in love. While Grampire was sleeping they stole his car, and my mother never saw him again.”
“I hadn’t thought of this before,” I murmured, the words surprising me as I said them, “but my parents never once said anything about when they met.”
“Well, the point of my story is this: I’ve always tried to imagine my father’s face when first he looked down that peephole. Impossible, I know, especially if this was a story he and my mother made up. But I wondered, was he just curious, like the customers who’d soon be lining up? Did horror cross his face, or anger—at Grampire, or at himself for agreeing to dig that hole? Sadness? The expression I’ve always wanted to be true was a certain kind of attention, a recognition in his eyes that showed he got her, even if he didn’t know her yet.”
Sylvia looked out the window. Her story wasn’t over, but I wasn’t sure she was willing to tell me the rest. She turned back to me, her skeptical regard, I thought, a kind of armor, protecting her from whatever words she’d decided to say. “Back at the park, just for a moment, I thought you … looked at me that way. I had a hunch about you. Maybe I was wrong.”
Stitching Wounds
I slumped in my chair at the airport lounge and waited for my boarding call, weary after a three-day conference of independent insurance agents. My mind filled with too much business talk—such-and- such coverage for such-and-such an occasion, the newest payment schedules and benefit packages—I watched people rushing along the terminal hallway or loitering at a nearby newsstand, and I was alert to the grim-faced, the haunted. Here was the true poetry of my profession, a version of insurance I’d been practicing for months now: I searched passing faces for any absence that might fit with one of my objects.
My flight number was called, and as I gathered up my briefcase, I noticed a neatly tailored man with well-kept gray hair hurrying by. One of his arms rose with a slight, warding-off gesture, though no one walked near him—what was he shooing away? Something I couldn’t see, perhaps something he couldn’t even remember, because when he swiped at empty air again I understood he wasn’t trying to protect his expensive suit. That gesture might be from his childhood: his young self inside him, a boy’s now forgotten fear or sorrow rising up in nervous motion. He was defending himself, after so many years, from troubles he might never escape.
I could offer him a small comfort, even if I had to miss my flight. I followed him through the crowd and waited nearby while he lined up at his departure gate’s check-in counter. When he stopped at a sports bar I sat on the stool beside him. I ordered scotch too, but he didn’t notice this or the three video screens above us filled with baseball, basketball, boxing. Under all that furious motion he stirred his ice cubes in circles.
Because he might kick back that drink in seconds and hop off the stool for his flight, I didn’t have time for his edgy movements to tell me what I needed to know. So I took a chance.
“Mutual funds?”
He stopped that stirring, turned to me a bored, I-don’t-need-this smile. “Excuse me?”
I’d made a mistake, perhaps, so I offered a broad, self-deprecating grin and said, “No, I’m not selling, just asking. I thought that might be your field.”
His face was flat: he wanted to frown, didn’t want it to show. He didn’t like being guessed.
So I decided not to try, and instead confessed: “Me, I’m a collector.”
Something flared in his eyes, an interest he wanted to hide. I took a sip of my drink, making a show of enjoying it, and waited. If the conversation was over I’d simply catch my flight.
“What do you collect?” he finally asked, his question not quite idle, and to emphasize his seeming disinterest he glanced away at one of the three television screens, where a leaping shortstop made a catch.
“Oh, everyday objects, really. But only those that have stories.”
“Stories?” Though he still stared at the screen, at the pitcher and manager conferring on the mound, he waited for my reply.
“I’m interested,” I said, “in objects that once shared a secret with their owners.”
This was something he wanted to hear about, because as he faced me I might as well have been another screen, offering a particularly absorbing show. There went his hand again, averting something invisible. It seemed gentler now, almost a sign of healing. If every conversation is a kind of dream, as I had come to believe, then now he had found the place inside himself where I fit.
I coughed lightly, hesitated. “Before saying any more, I should tell you that I followed you here. You see, I noticed this.”
I swung my arm in a tight, nervous arc: a passable imitation of his gesture, and the man drew back a bit on his stool, as if I had suddenly become unclean.
“I had a feeling,” I continued, “that your gesture is the symptom of a condition that might benefit from something I have with me.”
He nodded, his eyes weary. He was going to have to hear out this pest. He set his drink down on the bar and I looked down at the lacquered surface, at the little trough of uncollected tips by the beer taps. The coins’ tiny faces glistened in the light, but what sort of speaking had ever come from those lips, those eyes? Each face in profile stared toward the edge of its circular world, unaware of us. As for paper bills, Lincoln, Hamilton and Jackson gaze out in three- quarter view, as if there’s something much more interesting to see right behind our shoulders. At least George Washington regards us from his little oval window, his eyes half closed, his mouth a tight line. Yet they seem unwilling to reveal anything of their mysterious travels or who has held them in their previous lives. That’s the power of money—its i
ndifference to us. Also its great emptiness. Certainly what I had to offer would speak to this man in ways his prosperity could not. Money hadn’t yet warded off whatever chased him. It never would.
So I set down between us an oval stone: polished dark gray, with a deep nick across it the length of a fingernail. Its smooth surface flickered as if alive from the reflected, shifting images of the television screens.
His hard face told me that he was considering leaving, so I said, “Most people are accustomed to seeing value in objects. I hope you’ll grant me that some objects, at least, have value for their stories. Just watch this stone while I speak, then decide if this is a joke.”
He shifted in his seat, not quite the beginning of an exit, and I added, “You think I’m wasting your time. Why would I waste my own?” I took my ticket from my jacket pocket. “I’ve missed my flight, sitting here talking to you.”
“So you’d like me to miss mine as well?”
“Your choice. My small misfortune creates no obligation on your part.”
“Of course not.” He sat down and motioned to the bartender for a refill.
I showed no satisfaction, merely nodded my head and gestured to the stone. “It’s not particularly important how I came by this stone. More important is the man it once belonged to. Years ago he lived alone, in one boarding house after another. He only took part-time jobs, because they gave him just enough money to live on and more than enough time to collect rocks. Every day after work he’d find an old lot or a bit of woods, and he’d get down to his true work—loading stones into a box he’d collected from a liquor store or somewhere else.
“When he was done, he’d haul that box to his tiny apartment. Slowly he filled up the rooms, with more boxes stuffed with rocks and stones until there was room for no one but himself: boxes up to the ceiling, with only a narrow path leading from the door to his bed and hot plate, and from there another narrow path to the toilet and sink. Those boxes had once held canned foods, quarts of paint, bottles of wine, power tools, books, small appliances, and their logos must have faced him along those narrow paths, images of the world he was trying to crowd out.
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