by Lauren Groff
Inexorably, the university grew. It swelled and expanded under a steady supply of conditioned air, swallowing the land between it and the swamp until the university’s roads were built snug against his father’s land. Dinners, now, were full of his father’s invective: Did the university not know that his snakes needed a home, that this expanse of sandy acres was one of the richest reptile havens in North America? He would never sell, never. He would kill to keep it.
While his father spoke, the traitor in Jude dreamed of the sums his father had been offered. So simple, it seemed, to make the money grow. Unlike other kinds of numbers, money was already self-fertilized; it would double and double again until at last it made a roiling mass. If you had enough of it, Jude knew, nobody would ever have to worry again.
* * *
—
When Jude was thirteen, he discovered the university library. One summer day, he looked up from the pile of books he’d been contentedly digging through—trigonometry, statistics, calculus, whatever he could find—to see his father opposite him. Jude didn’t know how long he’d been there. It was a humid morning, and even in the library the air was stifling, but his father looked leathered, cool in his sun-beaten shirt and red neckerchief.
Come on, then, he said. Jude followed, feeling ill. They rode in the pickup for two hours before Jude understood that they were going snaking together. This was his first time. When he was smaller, he’d begged to go, but every time, his father had said no, it was too dangerous, and Jude never argued that letting a boy live for a week alone in a house full of venom and guns and questionable wiring was equally unsafe.
His father pitched the tent and they ate beans from a can in the darkness. They lay side by side in their sleeping bags until his father said, You’re good at math.
Jude said, I am, though with such understatement that it felt like a lie. Something shifted between them, and they fell asleep to a silence that was softer at its edges.
His father woke Jude before dawn and he stumbled out of the tent to grainy coffee with condensed milk and hot hush puppies. His father was after moccasins, and he gave Jude his waders and trudged through the swamp protected only by jeans and boots. He’d been bitten so often, he said, it had become routine. When he handed his son the stick and gestured at a black slash sunning on a rock, the boy had to imagine the snake as a line in space, only connecting point to point, to be able to grasp it. The snake spun from the number one to the number three to a defeated eight, and he deposited it in the sack. They worked in silence, only the noise of exuberant natural Florida filling their ears, the unafraid birds, the seethe of insects.
When Jude climbed back up into the truck at the end of the day, his legs shook from the effort it took him to be brave. So now you know, his father said in a strange, holy voice, and Jude was too tired to take the steps necessary then, and ever afterward until he was his father’s own age, to understand.
* * *
—
His father began storing the fodder mice in Jude’s closet, and to avoid the doomed squeaks, Jude joined the high school track team. He found his talent in the two-hundred-twenty-yard hurdles. When he came home with a trophy from the state games, his father held the trophy for a moment, then put it down.
Different if Negroes were allowed to run, he said.
Jude said nothing, and his father said, Lord knows I’m no lover of the race, but your average Negro could outrun any white boy I know.
Jude again said nothing, but avoided his father and didn’t make him an extra steak when he cooked himself dinner. He still wasn’t talking to him when his father went on an overnight trip and didn’t come back for a week. Jude was used to it, and didn’t get alarmed until the money ran out and his father still hadn’t come home.
He alerted the secretary at the university, who sent out a group of graduate students to where Jude’s father had been seen. They found the old man in his tent, bloated, his tongue protruding from a face turned black; and Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you. He stored this knowledge in his bones and thought of it with every decision he made from then on.
At the funeral, out of a twisted loyalty to his father, he avoided his uncle. He didn’t know if his mother knew she’d been widowed; he thought probably not. He told nobody at school that his father had died. He thought of himself as an island in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of seeing another island in the distance, or even a ship passing by.
* * *
—
Jude lived alone in the house. He let the mice die, then tossed the snakes in high twisting parabolas into the swamp. He scrubbed the house until it gleamed and the stench of reptiles was gone, then applied beeswax, paint, polish until it was a house fit for his mother. He waited. She didn’t come.
The day he graduated from high school, Jude packed his clothes and sealed up the house and took the train to Boston. He’d heard from his uncle that his mother lived there, and so he’d applied and been accepted to college in the city. She owned a bookstore on a small, dark street. It took Jude a month of slow passing to gather the courage to go in. She was either in the back, or shelving books, or smiling in conversation with somebody, and he’d have a swim of darkness in his gut and know that it was fate telling him that today was not the day. When he went in, it was only because she was alone at the register, and her face—pouchy, waxy—was so sad in repose that the sight of it washed all thought from his head.
She rose with a wordless cry and flew to him. He held her stoically. She smelled like cats, and her clothes flopped on her as if she’d lost a lot of weight quickly. He told her about his father dying, and she nodded and said, I know, honey, I dreamed it.
She wouldn’t let him leave her. She dragged him home with her and made him spaghetti carbonara and put clean sheets on the couch for him. Her three cats yowled under the door to her bedroom until she came back in with them. In the middle of the night, he woke to find her in her easy chair, clutching her hands, staring at him with glittering eyes. He closed his own and squeezed his hands into fists. He lay stiffly, almost shouting with the agony of being watched.
He went to see her once a week but refused all dinner invitations. He couldn’t bear the density or lateness of her love. He was in his junior year when her long-percolating illness overcame her and she, too, left him. Now he was alone.
* * *
—
There was nothing but numbers then.
Later, there would be numbers but also the great ravishing machine in the laboratory into which Jude fed punched slips of paper and the motorcycle he rode because it roared like murder. He had been given a class to teach, but it was taken away after a month and he was told that he was better suited for research. In his late twenties, there were drunk and silly girls he could seduce without saying a word, because they felt a kind of danger coiled in him.
He rode his motorcycle too fast over icy roads. He swam at night in bays where great whites had been spotted. He bombed down ski slopes with only a hazy idea of the mechanics of snow. He drank so many beers he woke one morning to discover he’d developed a paunch as big as a pregnant woman’s belly. He laughed to shake it, liked its wobble. It felt comforting, a child’s pillow clutched to his midsection all day long.
By the time he was thirty, Jude was weary. He became drawn to bridges, their tensile strength, the cold river flowing underneath. A resolution was forming under his thoughts, like a contusion hardening under the skin.
And then he was crossing a road, and he hadn’t looked first, and a bread truck, filled with soft dinner rolls so yeasty and warm that they were still expanding in their trays, hit him. He woke with a leg twisted beyond recognition, a mouth absent of teeth on one side, and his head in the lap of a woman who was crying for him, though she was a stranger, and he was bleeding all over her skirt, and there were warm mounds of bread scattered around them. It was the br
ead that made the pain return to his body, the deep warmth and good smell. He bit the hem of the woman’s skirt to keep from screaming.
She rode with him to the hospital and stayed all night to keep him from falling asleep and possibly going into a coma. She was homely, three years older than he, a thick-legged antiques dealer who described her shop down a street so tiny the sun never touched her windows. He thought of her in the silent murky shop, swimming from credenza to credenza. She fed him rice pudding when she came to visit him in the hospital, and carefully brushed his wild hair until it was flat on his crown.
One night he woke with a jerk: the stars were angrily bright in the hospital window and someone in the room was breathing. There was a weight on his chest, and when he looked down, he found the woman’s sleeping head. For a moment, he didn’t know who she was. By the time he identified her, the feeling of unknowing had burrowed in. He would never know her; knowledge of another person was ungraspable, a cloud. He would never begin to hold another in his mind like an equation, pure and entire. He focused on the part of her thin hair, which in the darkness and closeness looked like inept stitches in white wax. He stared at the part until the horror faded, until her smell, the bitterness of unwashed hair, the lavender soap she used on her face, rose to him, and he put his nose against her warmth and inhaled her.
At dawn, she woke. Her cheek was creased from the folds in his gown. She looked at him wildly and he laughed, and she rubbed the drool from the corner of her mouth and turned away as if disappointed. He married her because to not do so had ceased to be an option during the night.
* * *
—
While he was learning how to walk again, he had a letter from the university down in Florida that made a tremendous offer for his father’s land.
And so, instead of the honeymoon trip to the Thousand Islands, pines and cold water and his wife’s bikini pressing into the dough of her flesh, they took a sleeping train down to Florida and walked in the heat to the edge of the university campus. Where he remembered vast oak hummocks, there were rectilinear brick buildings. Mossy pools were now parking lots.
Only his father’s property, one hundred acres, was overgrown with palmettos and vines. He brushed the red bugs off his wife’s sensible travel pants and carried her into his father’s house. Termites had chiseled long gouges in the floorboards, but the sturdy Cracker house had kept out most of the wilderness. His wife touched the mantel made of heart pine and turned to him gladly. Later, after he came home with a box of groceries and found the kitchen scrubbed clean, he heard three thumps upstairs and ran up to find that she had killed a black snake in the bathtub with her bare heel and was laughing at herself in amazement.
How magnificent he found her, a Valkyrie, half naked and warlike with that dead snake at her feet. In her body, the culmination of all things. He didn’t say it, of course; he couldn’t. He only reached and put his hands upon her.
In the night, she rolled toward him and took his ankles between her own. All right, she said. We can stay.
I didn’t say anything, he said.
And she smiled a little bitterly and said, Well. You don’t.
They moved their things into the house where he was born. They put in air-conditioning, renovated the structure, put on large additions. His wife opened a shop and drove to Miami and Atlanta to stock it with antiques. He sold his father’s land, but slowly, in small pieces, at prices that rose dizzyingly with each sale. The numbers lived in him, warmed him, brought him a buzzing kind of joy. Jude made investments so shrewd that when he and his wife were in their mid-thirties, he opened a bottle of wine and announced that neither of them would ever have to work again. His wife laughed and drank but kept up with the store. When she was almost too old, they had a daughter and named her after his mother.
When he held the baby at home for the first time, he understood he had never been so terrified of anything as he was of this mottled lump of flesh. How easily he could break her without meaning to. She could slip from his hands and crack open on the floor; she could catch pneumonia when he bathed her; he could say a terrible thing in anger and she would shrivel. All the mistakes he could make telescoped before him. His wife saw him turn pale and plucked the baby from his hands just before he crashed down. When he came to, she was livid but calm. He protested, but she put the baby in his hands.
Try again, she said.
His daughter grew, sturdy and blonde like his wife, with no ash of Jude’s genius for numbers. They were as dry as biscuits in her mouth; she preferred music and English. For this, he was glad. She would love more moderately, more externally. If he didn’t cuddle with her the way her mother did, he still thought he was a good father: he never hit her, he never left her alone in the house, he told her how much he loved her by providing her with everything he could imagine she’d like. He was a quiet parent, but he was sure she knew the scope of his heart.
And yet his daughter never grew out of wearing a singularly irritating expression, one taut with competition, which she first wore when she was a very little girl at an Easter egg hunt. She could barely walk in her grass-stained bloomers, but even when the other children rested out of the Florida sunshine in the shade, eating their booty of chocolate, Jude’s little girl kept returning with eggs too cunningly hidden in the sago palms to have been found in the first frenzy. She heaped them on his lap until they overflowed, and she shrieked when he told her firmly that enough was enough.
* * *
—
His fat old uncle came over for dinner once, then once a week, then became a friend. When the uncle died of an aneurysm while feeding his canary, he left Jude his estate of moth-eaten smoking jackets and family photos in ornate frames.
The university grew around Jude’s last ten-acre parcel, a protective cushion between the old house and the rest of the world. The more construction around their plot of land, the fewer snakes Jude saw, until he felt no qualms about walking barefoot in the St. Augustine grass to take the garbage to the edge of the drive. He built a fence around his land and laughed at the university’s offers, sensing desperation in their inflating numbers. He thought of himself as the virus in the busy cell, latent, patient. The swamp’s streams were blocked by the university’s construction, and it became a small lake, in which he installed some bubblers to keep the mosquitoes away. There were alligators, sometimes large ones, but he put in an invisible fence, and it kept his family’s dogs from coming too close to the water’s edge and being gobbled up. The gators only eyed them from the banks.
And then, one day, Jude woke with the feeling that a bell jar had descended over him. He showered with a sense of unease, sat at the edge of the bed for a while. When his wife came in to tell him something, he watched in confusion at the way her mouth opened and closed fishily, without sound.
I think I’ve gone deaf, he said, and he didn’t so much hear his words as feel them vibrating in the bones of his skull.
At the doctor’s, he submitted to test after test, but nobody understood what had gone wrong in his brain or in his ears. They gave him a hearing aid that turned conversation into an underwater burble. Mostly, he kept it off.
At night, he’d come out into the dark kitchen, longing for curried chicken, raw onion, preserved peaches, tastes sharp and simple to remind himself that he was still there. He’d find his daughter at the kitchen island, her lovely mean face lit up by her screen. She’d frown at him and turn the screen to show him what she’d discovered: cochlear implants, audiologic rehabilitation, miracles.
But there was nothing for him. He was condemned. He ate Thanksgiving dinner wanting to weep into his sweet potatoes. His family was gathered around him, his wife and daughter and their closest friends and their children, and he could see them laughing, but he couldn’t hear the jokes. He longed for someone to look up, to see him at the end of the table, to reach out a hand and pat his. But they were too happy. They slotted f
ull forks into their mouths and brought the tines out clean. They picked the flesh off the turkey, they scooped the pecans out of the pie.
After the dinner, his arms prickling with hot water from the dishes, they sat together watching football, and he lay back in his chair with his feet propped up, and all of the children fell asleep around him on the couch, and he alone sat in vigil over them, watching them sleep.
* * *
—
The day his daughter went to college in Boston, his wife went with her.
She mouthed very carefully to him, You’ll be all right for four days? You can take care of yourself?
And he said, Yes, of course. I am an adult, sweetheart, but the way she winced, he knew he’d said it too loudly. He loaded their bags into the car, and his daughter cried in his arms, and he kissed her over and over on the crown of the head. His wife looked at him worriedly but kissed him also and climbed inside. And then, silently as everything, the car moved off.
The house felt immense around him. He sat in the study, which had been his childhood bedroom, and seemed to see the place as it had been, spare and filled with snakes, layered atop the house as it was, with its marble and bright walls and track lights above his head.
That night, he waited, his hearing aid turned up so loudly that it began to make sharp beeping sounds that hurt. He wanted the pain. He fell asleep watching a sitcom that, without sound, was just strange-looking people making huge expressions with their faces, and he woke up and it was only eight o’clock at night, and he felt as if he’d been alone forever.
He hadn’t known he’d miss his wife’s heavy body in the bed next to his, the sandwiches she made (too much mayonnaise, but he never told her so), the smell of her body wash in the humid bathroom in the morning.
On the second night, he sat in the black density of the veranda, looking at the lake that used to be a swamp. He wondered what had happened to the reptiles out there, where they had gone. Alone in the darkness, Jude wished he could hear the university in its nighttime boil around him, the students shouting drunkenly, the bass thrumming, the noise of football games out at the stadium that used to make Jude and his wife groan with irritation. But he could have been anywhere, in the middle of hundreds of miles of wasteland, as quiet as the night was for him. Even the mosquitoes had somehow diminished. As a child, he would have been a single itchy blister by now.