When he reemerged from the narcotic gloom of Buck’s sanctuary, he had the book clutched in his hand, and there was a nostalgic feel to it — to the book and the whole business of it, opening the cover and seeing the title there in bold black letters, and the epigraph (“Death is something I only want to do once”—Oliver Niles) — and he opened a can of chicken corn chowder, thought briefly of heating it in the fireplace, then dismissed the idea and settled into the couch to spoon it up cold and attack the book. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, no hum of the household machinery or drone of the TV to distract him, and he began, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to read.
My mother was my child. I mean this in no metaphoric sense, but literally, because my universe is not strictly like yours, the universe of decay and decrepitude, in which one sinks each day closer and closer to the yawning mouth of the grave. I loved my mother — she raised me and then I raised her — and my memories of her are inextricably bound up with the cradle, the nursery, toys and playthings and the high ecstatic thrill of juvenile laughter. And sadness. Infinite sadness. But it is not my mother I wish to tell you about, but my wife and lover, Sonia, the mature woman of fifty with the voice of smoke and the eyes of experience, the silky girl of twenty who would bound ahead of me along the banks of the Río Luminoso as if she had been granted a second childhood. Which she had.
Let me explain. You see, in our scheme of things the Creator has been much more generous than in yours. In His wisdom, He has chosen the age of fifty as the apex of existence, and not a debilitated and toothless ninety or an even more humbling ninety-five or a hundred. (And what is more obscene than the wasted old man with his mouth full of mush and crumbs on his lapels, or the gaping hag staring round her in the street as if she’s misplaced some vital part of herself?) We do not progress inexorably in age as you do, but when we reach the magical plateau, that golden age of fifty, we begin, as we say, to go down. That is, one is forty-nine the year before one turns fifty, and one is forty-nine the year after.
When Sonia was forty-nine for the second time, I was thirty-one for the first. She had been a dancer, a model, a photographer and a sculptress, and she was looking forward to going down, and, as I presumed, doing it all over again. She’d known some of the great younging minds of her day — they were history now, all of them — and I admired her for that and for her accomplishments too, but I wanted a wife who would stand by me, fix me paella and roast veal in the languorous evenings and hand me a crisply ironed shirt each morning. I broached the subject one afternoon just after our engagement. We were sitting at an outdoor café, sipping aperitifs and nibbling at a plate of fried squid. “Sonia,” I murmured, reaching across the table to entwine my fingers in hers, “I want a wife, not a career woman. Can you be that for me?”
Her eyes seemed to grow until they ate up her face. Her cheekbones were monuments, her lips like two sweet desert fruits. “Oh, Faustito,” she murmured, “poor little boy. Of course I’ll be a wife to you. I have no interest in society anymore, really I don’t — I’m retired from all that now.” She sighed. Patted her lips with a snowy napkin and leaned forward to kiss me. “I just want to be young again, that’s all — young and carefree.”
The room had grown cold and the darkness was coming down when John next looked up. It was the darkness, more than anything, that did it: he couldn’t see to read. He woke as if from a dream and saw that the windows had gone pale with the storm — it was snow now, and no doubt about it. The can of soup, the spoon still transfixed in a bit of congealed goop at the bottom, stood frigidly on the end table beside him. When he let out a breath, he could see it condense in a cloud at the tip of his nose. Stirring himself — this was a crisis, the pipes would freeze, and just look at that fire, nothing but embers and ash — he stoked the fire impatiently, laid on an armful of kindling and two massive slabs of split oak. It was four forty-five, he was a hundred pages into the book and the snow was raging down over the slick heart of the ice that lay beneath it. And where was Barb? Stuck in a drift somewhere? Abandoned in a darkened mall? Dead? Mutilated? Laid out on a slab at the county hospital?
The anxiety came up in him like a sort of fuel, pure-burning and high of octane, and he’d actually lifted the phone to his ear before he realized it was dead. There was no dial tone, no sound of any kind, just the utter nullity of the void. He went to the window again. The sky was dark now, moiling with the flecks and bits of itself it was shedding over the earth. He could barely see to the end of the drive, and the lightless houses across the street were invisible. He thought of the car then — his car, the compulsively restored MGA roadster with the fifteen-hundred-dollar paint job in British racing green — but he couldn’t risk that on streets as slick as these were bound to be. He hardly drove it in winter at all — just enough to keep it in trim — and it certainly wouldn’t get him far on a night like this, even in an emergency. And he couldn’t call Barb’s absence an emergency, not yet. They were having a storm. The lines were down. There was no way she could get to him or he to her. He couldn’t call the police, couldn’t call her sister or that restaurant in the mall or that store, Things & Oddments, that featured so prominently in his monthly credit card bill. He was powerless. And like the pioneers before him, he would just have to batten down the hatches — the doors and windows, that is — and wait out the storm.
And where better to do it than stretched out on the sofa in front of the fireplace, with a hurricane lamp and a book? He gave the fire a poke, spread a comforter over his legs, and settled back to read.
“Sonia,” I cried, exasperated, “you’re behaving like a child!”
She was dancing through the town square, riding high up off the lithe and juvenile stems of her legs, laughing in the astonished faces of the shopkeepers and making rude flatulent noises with her tongue and her pouting underlip. Even Don Pedro C_______, the younging commandant of our fair city, who was in that moment taking the air with his aging bride of twenty, had to witness this little scene. “I am a child!” Sonia shrieked, tailing the phrase with a cracked and willful schoolgirl’s laugh that mounted the walls to tremble in every fishbowl and flowerpot on the square. “And you’re an old tightwad!” And then she was off again, singing it through the side streets and right on up to the house where my mother had been twice an infant: “Don Fausto’s a tightwad, Don Fausto’s a tightwad!”
It was my fault, actually — at least partly — because I’d denied her a bauble at the jewelry merchant’s, but still, you can imagine my consternation, not to mention my embarrassment. I bit my lip and cursed myself. I should have known better, marrying a woman going down when I was going up. But I’d always been attracted to maturity, and when I was a young, aging man of thirty, I found her fifty-year-old’s wrinkles and folds as attractive as her supple wit and her voice of authority and experience. Then she was forty-five and I was thirty-five and we were closer than ever, till we celebrated our fortieth birthdays together and I thought I had found heaven, truly and veritably.