Just outside the window she could hear a child’s laughing voice and a man’s patient, deeper one attempting to speak some form of encouragement. She inched back the heavy plastic curtain and against the sharp rays of daylight looked out at the motel lawn, where a large, thick-bodied young man in a silver wheelchair, wearing a red athletic singlet and white cotton shorts — his legs thick, strong, tanned and hairy as his back — was attempting to hoist into flight a festive orange-paper kite, using a small fishing rod and line, while a laughing little blond girl held the kite above her head. Breeze gently rattled the kite’s paper, on which had been painted a smiling oriental face. The man in the wheelchair kept saying, “Okay, run now, run,” so that the little girl, who seemed perfectly seven, jumped suddenly, playfully one way and then another, the kite held high, until she had leaped and boosted it up and off her fingers, while the man jerked the rod and tried to winch the smiling face into the wind. Each time, though, the kite drooped and lightly settled back onto the grass that grew all the way down to the shore. And each time the man said, his voice rising at the end of his phrases, “Okay now. Up she goes again. We can do this. Pick it up and try it again.” The little girl kept laughing. She wore tiny pink shorts and a bright-green top, and was barefoot and brown-legged. She seemed ecstatic.
He was the man from the park in town, Nancy thought, letting the curtain close. A coincidence of no importance. She looked at Tom asleep in his clothes, breathing noiselessly, hands clasped on his chest like a dead man’s, his bare, brown legs crossed at the ankles in an absurdly casual attitude, his blue running shoes resting one against the other. In peaceful sleep his handsome, unshaved features seemed ordinary.
She changed the channel and watched a ball game. The Cubs versus a team whose aqua uniforms she didn’t recognize. Her father had been a Cubs fan. They’d considered themselves northsiders. They’d traveled to Wrigley on warm autumn afternoons like this one. He would remove her from school on a trumped-up excuse, buy seats on the first-base line and let her keep score with a stubby blue pencil. The sixties, those were. She made an effort to remember the players’ names, using their blue-and-white uniforms and the viny outfield wall as fillips to memory thirty years on. She could think of smiling Ernie Banks, and a white man named Ron something, and a tall sad-faced high-waisted black man from Canada who pitched well but later got into some kind of police trouble and cried about it on TV. It was too little to remember.
Though the attempt at memory made her feel better — more settled in the same singular, getting-on-with-it way that standing on the sunny street corner being misidentified by a busload of Japanese tourists had made her feeclass="underline" as if she was especially credible when seen without the benefit of circumstance and the encumbrances of love, residues of decisions made long, long ago. More credible, certainly, than she was here now, trapped in East Whatever, Maine, with a wayward husband on his way down the road, and suffering spiritual congestion no amount of life-by-forecast or authentic marriage could cure.
This whole trip — in which Tom championed some preposterous idea for the sole purpose of having her reject it so he could then do what he wanted to anyway — made her feel unkind toward her husband. Made him seem stupid and childish. Made him seem inauthentic. Not a grownup. It was a bad sign, she thought, to find yourself the adult, whereas your lifelong love-interest was suddenly an overexuberant child passing himself off as an enthusiast whose great enthusiasm you just can’t share. Since what it meant was that in all probability life with Tom Marshall was over. And not in the way her clients at the public defender’s saw things to their conclusions — using as their messenger-agents whiskey bottles, broom handles, car bumpers, firearms, sharp instruments, flammables, the meaty portion of a fist. There, news broke vividly, suddenly, the lights always harsh and grainy, the volume turned up, doors flung open for all to see. (Her job was to bring their affairs back into quieter, more sensible orbits so all could be understood, felt, suffered more exquisitely.)
For her and for Tom, basically decent people, the course would be different. Her impulse was to help. His was to try and then try harder. His perfidy was enthusiasm. Her indifference was patience. But eventually all the enthusiasm would be used up, all the patience. Possibilities would diminish. Life would cease to be an open, flat plain upon which you walked with a chosen other, and become instead cluttered, impassable. Tom had said it: life became a confinement in which everything got in everything else’s way. And what you finally sought became not a new, clearer path, but a way out. Their own son no doubt foresaw life that way, as something that should be easy. Though it seemed peculiar — now that he was away — to think they even had a son. She and Tom seemed more like each other’s parents.
But, best just to advance now toward what she wanted, even if it didn’t include Tom, even if she didn’t know how to want what didn’t include Tom. And even if it meant she was the kind of person who did things, said things, then rethought, even regretted their consequences later. Tom wasn’t, after all, trying to improve life for her, no matter what he thought. Only his. And there was no use talking people out of things that improved their lives. He had wishes. He had fears. He was a good-enough man. Life shouldn’t be always trying, trying, trying. You should live most of it without trying so hard. He would agree that was authentic.
Inside the enclosed room a strange, otherworldly golden glow seemed to fall on everything now. On Tom. On her own hands and arms. On the bed. All through the static air, like a fog. It was beautiful, and for a moment she wanted to speak to Tom, to wake him, to tell him that something or other would be all right, just as he’d hoped; to be enthusiastic in some hopeful and time-proven way. But she didn’t, and then the golden fog disappeared, and for an instant she seemed to understand slightly better the person she was — though she lacked a proper word for it, and knew only that the time for saying so many things was over.
Outside, the child’s voice was shouting. “Oh, I love it. I love it so much.” When Nancy pulled back the curtain, the softer light fell across the chair back, and she could see that the wheelchair man had his kite up and flying, the fiberglass fishing rod upward in one hand while he urged his chair down the sloping lawn. The bare-legged child was hopping from one bare foot to the other, a smashing smile on her long, adult’s face, which was turned up toward the sky.
Nancy stood and snapped on the desk lamp beside Tom’s open suitcase. One bright, intact, shrink-wrapped Wagner dog and one white Maine Lighthouse were tucked among his shirts and shaving kit and socks. Here was also his medal for valor in a blue cloth case, and the small automatic pistol he habitually carried in case of attack. She plucked up only the Wagner dog, returned the room to its shadows, and stepped out the back door onto the lawn.
Here, on the outside, the air was fresh and cool and only slightly breezy, the sky now full of quilty clouds as though rain were expected. A miniature concrete patio with blue plastic-strand chairs was attached to each room. The kite, its slant-eyed face smiling down, was dancing and tricking and had gained altitude as the wheelchair man rolled farther away down the lawn toward the bay.
“Look at our kite,” the little girl shouted, shading her eyes toward Nancy and pointing delightedly at the diminishing kite face.
“It’s sensational,” Nancy said, shading her own eyes to gaze upward. The kite made her smile.
The wheelchair man turned his head to view her. He was large, with thick shoulders and smooth rounded arms she could see under his red singlet. His head was round, his thick hair buzzed short, his eyes small and dark and fierce and unfriendly. She smiled at him and for no reason shook her head as though the kite amazed her. An ex-jock, she thought. A shallow-end diving accident, or some football collision that left him flying his kite from a metal chair. A pity.