“No one else ever enters that part of your house? No cleaning woman, handyman? Not your wife herself?”
I spoke quietly. I would not defend myself. I was feeling suddenly very tired. I yearned for the vertigo of thirty thousand feet above the earth. The possibility of lightning striking the plane’s wings, detaching its tail from its body. I had seen such photographs, records of disaster. Passengers and crew consumed in a flaming holocaust. I yearned for the freedom in that moment—glancing up from a hopelessly stalled scribble of poetry in my notebook to see flames leaping from the plane’s jet engines.
Rob Flint only repeated, more aggressively now, that he’d had to ask.
“You might ask your wife, you know. ‘Mrs. Flint.’”
“My wife would not do such a thing, Miss N___. There is no question of that.”
My suitcases were on the bed, packed, but not yet closed. Like helpless creatures on their backs, spread-eagled. I went to the bed and lifted the suitcases, to dump out their contents on the bed. Mostly clothes. Underwear. Soft things. Several books, a notebook. As at airport security, these personal items were exposed, somehow damning, of so little consequence. My “toiletries” were in my shoulder bag, to be shown separately in my demonstration to security guards that I was not a terrorist.
Rob Flint stood above the bed. I nudged him to look, with a wifely sort of intimacy. He touched nothing, but he did look: I saw the canny eyes moving swiftly. Both suitcases had zippered compartments, I took Rob Flint’s hand and pressed it against the compartments, so that he could feel, as he could see, that there could not possibly be anything of the size and density of a clock secreted there. Rob Flint recognized the absurdity of the search, and drew away. “Wait. Here.” I handed him my shoulder bag to examine, but he did no more than weigh it in his hands; in virtually the same instant, he handed it back to me.
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t really think, Violet . . .”
“Your wife thought so.”
I spoke with sudden bitterness. I felt my mouth twist into a wounded smile.
Rob Flint frowned. His face was flushed, he was not so attractive now. His flushed scalp showed through his hair. “I don’t care to discuss my wife, Violet. I’m not comfortable discussing my wife with a stranger.”
Rob Flint had been glancing toward the bathroom. The door was shut. Was there something hidden in the bathroom? My awkward visitor seemed reluctant to ask and so I pulled at his arm, with similar wifely impatience, to lead him to the bathroom. I opened the door to this large, white-tiled, quite attractive if windowless room, that he could see that there was nothing in this room, that had been cleared of my belongings.
Except, in the wastebasket, there was an odd, unwieldy object: not an antique clock but an accordion file with a Chinese design on its front.
I’d forgotten this. I’d forgotten that I’d thrown away the expensive gift from the students. Now my face heated again, with embarrassment and regret.
Rob Flint peered into the wastebasket as if he’d found what he’d been looking for. He lifted the accordion file, to look beneath it.
“Why did you throw away your gift, Violet?”
“I—I didn’t realize I’d thrown it away . . . It must have fallen into the wastebasket.” My voice faltered, shamefully. I was not a skilled liar and in that instant Rob Flint’s insult to me was countered by the very clumsiness of my attempt to lie to him. He all but laughed at me. Plaintively I said, “There wasn’t room for the accordion file in my suitcase. It’s so large . . . Would you like it back? You could return it to the students, they could get their money back.”
Rob Flint seemed not to hear this spiteful remark. He left the bathroom, still smiling; he paused to glance again at the bed, where my clothes were mutely spread. I understood that the man who’d been my lover was seeing again, as I was forced to see, our unclothed bodies on that bed, vulnerable, entwined. Oh, we had loved each other!—desperately, unmistakably. And now the memory had become improbable. Impossible to believe.
Unsteadily—yet with determination—I walked with Rob Flint to the door of the suite. At the door as he paused to speak to me I shoved at him as a child might shove another child, suddenly and without premeditation. My voice was sneering, nasal: “Go away. Go home. Tell her you couldn’t find it, I’d hidden it so well.”
Quickly I shut the door behind Rob Flint.
AT THE AIRPORT, I called the hospice another time. A woman answered—not the nurse with whom I’d spoken the other day. She identified herself as “Holly” and she seemed surprised to hear from me when I identified myself. And when I asked to speak to my father she said, in an agitated voice, “Oh but—hadn’t you been informed? Your father passed away yesterday—yesterday afternoon . . .”
My flight was boarding. A woman’s amplified voice drowned out the nurse’s words. I heard myself reply, and heard her speak, but could not decipher the words. Numbly I made my way onto the plane, carrying a single suitcase and my heavy shoulder bag. The other suitcase had been checked in baggage. I was trying to speak, and the nurse’s voice had grown faint. In my confusion, I seemed to think that it was my father who was speaking—my father’s faint, fading voice I was trying to hear.
The flight attendant was concerned for me, after the plane had taken off, that I was crying and seemed disoriented. The passenger beside me was an older Asian man, who appeared embarrassed, and I did not want to upset him. I was crying strangely, as if choking, trying to cough up dry sand in my throat. In my hoarse voice I managed to stammer—“There has been a death in the family.” It was an impersonal announcement, intended to forestall concern, for I did not know what else to say. “There has been a death in the family.”
Soon then I heard the flight attendant repeat in a lowered voice to others in my vicinity—There has been a death in the family. There has been a death in the family.
THE DISAPPEARING
THINGS HAVE A WAY OF DISAPPEARING. BUT—WHERE DO they go?”
She was speaking to someone. Speaking on the phone. Her reputation was for saying such things—astute in their way, but light, amusing. Her voice was always buoyant, she meant only to make you laugh, or smile. She did not ever mean to make you alarmed, or embarrassed.
Later that morning, as if to bear out her casual remark, in the dim light of the garage she saw that something was missing.
Amid the dense accumulation of things, an emptiness.
There is comfort in such accumulations. Layers of lives, of years. Gardening tools, wheelbarrow, aerosol cans, old bicycles, recycling bins, battered trash cans, cardboard boxes stacked in a corner. Cracked clay pots, exiled kitchenware and furniture. Antique television, dog-food bowls. You could do an inventory of a household by all that has been worn out or excluded, exiled from it. You could do an inventory of a life.
But yes, against the rear wall, something sizable was missing. She could almost see its ghostly outline against the wall.
Theft? But who would steal from their garage?
Nothing in the garage was worth stealing, this was a principle of storing things in the Vanns’ garage.
Then she saw: her husband’s bicycle was missing.
There was her English racing bicycle, and there was another bicycle she’d once ridden, leaning against the wall, tires long flat. There was a part-dismantled bicycle that had belonged to their son. But the space where her husband’s hefty black mountain bike had been was empty and she wondered how long it had been missing, how many times she’d glanced in that direction and failed to see.
She went to Ryan breathless, excited. “Your bicycle! Your bicycle is missing.”
She hadn’t wanted to say stolen. She hadn’t wanted to sound that sort of alarm.
But Ryan surprised her by telling her calmly that the bicycle wasn’t missing, he’d given it away.
“Given it away? But why? It’s a beautiful bicycle, you’ve always loved it . . .”
<
br /> This was not literally true. The mountain bicycle wasn’t beautiful any longer. Nor was it true that, in recent years at least, Ryan had loved it.
For many years in their marriage, they’d bicycled frequently. They’d bicycled from their home to the Delaware River, and back, in hilly terrain; they’d taken their bicycles on their car and bicycled along the Hudson River. They’d bicycled in Nova Scotia, Cornwall, Scotland, Italy, the South of France, sometimes with another couple who were also avid cyclists. But the past several years they’d bicycled less, and less. The past summer, they hadn’t bicycled together at all—Julia hadn’t wanted to acknowledge this. Ryan was too busy, or not in the mood for bicycling; or, Ryan was both too busy and not in the mood. And Ryan had “health issues”—arthritis, hypertension. Julia had gone out by herself on neighboring country roads, but there was little pleasure in it, bicycling alone. Little pleasure in doing anything alone, that had once been done with another.
Where in the past she’d had to pedal hard to keep up with her husband who was likely to pedal heedlessly ahead, forgetting her, now she had no one with whom to keep pace; she should have felt a kind of liberation and relief, but she did not; she found herself squinting ahead, straining to see him in the distance . . . Oh where was her husband! So far out of sight. And now she was made to feel the loss of Ryan’s bicycle, the acute disappointment, something like betrayal in her husband’s casual explanation. Gave it away.
He’d given it to his nephew Kevin, he said.
“Kevin? But—why?”
“Because I haven’t been using it.”
She knew—as the husband of the household Ryan didn’t care to be interrogated. Nor did he care to be interrupted while reading the New York Times—it was something of a marital taboo, to interrupt him.
The husband didn’t like it that the wife should be staring at him with an expression of hurt, as if the matter of his bicycle had anything to do with her.
“Kevin’s bike was stolen so I told him, come over here and you can have mine.”
“Couldn’t Kevin’s parents buy him a new bike?”
“Of course, Dave and Carrie could buy him new bikes. That isn’t the point.”
“But what is the point? I don’t understand.”
“The point is, the bicycle is gone.”
“But—Kevin could return it, when he gets a new bike of his own—couldn’t he?”
“Julia, I said the damned bike is gone.”
The wife felt the rebuke. For some rebukes are husbandly.
There was something here having to do with the fact that Kevin was her husband’s nephew, not hers; Julia wasn’t close with Ryan’s brother’s family. Always she’d felt, since she’d married Ryan more than forty years before, that, if something happened to Ryan, if he passed away before her, she would never see his family again, nor would they make any effort to see her.
It was remarkable to Julia—(it did not hurt or offend her, but only amused her)—how Ryan’s family managed to take photographs or videos of themselves that excluded her. At holiday gatherings there was Ryan, and there was—not Julia beside him, arm linked around his waist—but a sister, a cousin, another relative. We’ve only been married more than half our lives, Julia would say, lightly. Can’t expect your family to accept me so quickly.
Ryan turned pointedly back to his newspaper. For him, the subject was closed. For Julia, all that day she would bear the minor wound of a marital rebuff; she would hear a faint echo, a disturbing echo, the bleak and irrevocable word gone.
“I’M NOT HURT. It isn’t that serious—just a bicycle. I am not betrayed.”
Speaking to herself as a way of instructing herself.
In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.
Julia’s bicycle remained in the garage, near the space where the mountain bike had been, alone and abandoned. It was a classy-looking English bike, thin tires and numerous gears. From time to time that summer she would take out the bicycle and ride along country roads near the house, out of stubbornness, and loneliness; not troubling to wear a safety helmet, as Ryan would have insisted, reasoning that she wasn’t going far, and she wasn’t bicycling in dangerous circumstances. She wouldn’t tell Ryan where she’d gone unless he asked—and he never asked.
How she’d loved bicycling! It was one of the happy activities of her life. She was a youthful woman for her age, her legs hard with muscle, her reflexes quick and stamina undiminished. It hurt her to think that bicycling might not be appropriate for her any longer.
Eventually, without Ryan bicycling with her, she would give it up. She knew this would happen, but could not acknowledge it just yet.
Like other things, in their close, intimate life. Things they would give up, or had given up; things they’d abandoned of which they would not speak nor perhaps even think, as days, weeks, months and years washed over them, warm water lapping over their mouths.
The husband, the wife.
Disappearing, and gone.
HE WAS BECOMING MYSTERIOUS to her. He was making her uneasy. Forty-four years they’d been married. In those years—obviously—she’d had every opportunity to know Ryan Vann thoroughly—intimately; yet, she’d begun to understand that the husband whom she knew, or believed she knew, was not altogether the man with whom she lived. Often now seeing Ryan at a little distance, in a parking lot or on the street, she could not always recognize him.
He was “older”—of course. But that was not the mystery.
When his hair had begun to thin in his early fifties, out of vanity the husband had gone to a barber and had his head shaved—totally, abruptly. At once then he’d seemed smaller, less distinctive. For so many men—(Julia now noticed)—were totally bald, out of vanity perhaps; in vague emulation of those iconic black athletes and rap stars who shaved their heads for reasons of sexual glamour. The husband’s head was of a normal size but seemed diminished, as his ears were more pronounced. His face now seemed wider, flatter, stretched from ear to ear like a clown’s face, but perhaps Ryan didn’t notice, as he had no awareness—(Julia was certain)—of the curious labyrinthine lines, creases, and dents in his scalp. She thought—The hair was a disguise. The scalp can’t be disguised.
For thirty-two years Ryan had been a well-paid research consultant for a New Jersey pharmaceutical company that specialized in medications for blood-related diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. His training had been in chemistry and molecular biology. He was now part-retired. He had a private, professional life apart from his wife—an office several miles away, and a “laboratory” which she’d never seen. Julia wasn’t sure of Ryan’s work-hours, for he seemed to set his own work-hours that varied from week to week. She wasn’t sure who his associates were any longer; when she asked after one of them Ryan was likely to say, “He’s no longer with us.” Or, more cryptically, “Him? He’s gone.”
Gone. But where?
Still, she wanted to think that she knew her husband intimately—as he knew her. For there was nothing secret in her life—(she didn’t think so). Their life together—(it was a single, singular life, not lives)—had been worn smooth as the stone steps of their front walk, upon which countless feet had trod over the decades.
Yet she found herself recalling—with an involuntary flinching as if a shadow had passed swiftly over her head—an incident from their early life.
This was not a good memory. This was not a shared memory. In the years following the incident, neither the husband nor the wife had spoken to the other about it.
They’d been married just three years and they were living in another part of the country, in a large Midwestern city on the southernmost shore of one of the Great Lakes, when they’d returned one afternoon to their (first, newly purchased) house, a two-bedroom Colonial in a residential neighborhood, and discovered that the side door, which was the only door they routinely used, was unlocked—what a sinking sensation, to push open that door!
The door had been locked, when they�
�d left earlier that afternoon.
And so it was bizarre how, at first, as they stepped into the house, they hadn’t seemed to understand that something had to be wrong.
Walking into the kitchen, and beyond, staring—was something out of place? Missing?
The very air felt altered, as in the aftermath of agitation. There was a smell—smells . . . Then, they saw: books had been pulled down from shelves, scattered on the floor as if they’d been kicked. Chairs dragged out of place. A mirror on the floor, badly cracked.
The rage of the thief or thieves, discovering that the household contained so little of value.
“Someone has been here . . . My God.”
Very like a fairy tale, it seemed. Someone had intruded into their house and into their life. And yet—who?
Julia felt faint, disbelieving. Ryan’s breathing was harsh, quickened. When Julia clutched at Ryan’s arm, half-consciously he pushed her away, in his effort of concentration.
Yet neither thought to quickly leave the premises, and to call 911 immediately.
They hurried upstairs, Ryan in the lead. The acrid smell was stronger here, an odor of both sweat and urine. In their bedroom, that was so private and so intimate a place, the intrusion was shocking: closet doors flung open, bureau drawers yanked open and their contents dumped on the floor. Clothes and shoes scattered rudely on the floor. Even then, they were thinking slowly, with effort. As if they were wearing iron shoes, and could not move easily. They couldn’t seem to grasp—This has happened. It is real. Something has broken into our lives. We have been violated.
The bathroom—in the toilet, a hot-looking, yellow urine, that had not been flushed away. Julia would recall a moment’s relief, naïve gratitude, that the perpetrator hadn’t defiled the floor, or the walls. Quickly holding her breath she leaned over to flush the toilet.
Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Page 15