Well, it was not a dream, it was a voice. Try to pay attention. This voice brought back to me how it was when I needed to get away after my baby with Martha had died and my life with Martha with it. I didn’t care where I went. I got on the first bus I saw at the Port Authority. I fell asleep on the bus, and when I woke it was winding its way through the hills of western Pennsylvania. We stopped at a small travel agency in one of these towns and I got off to walk around the town square: It was two or three in the morning, everything was closed of what there was, a drugstore, a five-and-ten, a picture framer, a movie theater, and taking up all one side of the square a sort of Romanesque courthouse. In the square of dead brown grass was a greenish-black Civil War statue of a man on a horse. By the time I got back to the travel agency, the bus was gone. So I walked out of town, over the railroad tracks, past some warehouses, and about a mile or two away — it was dawn now — I came upon this broken-down scrabbly-looking farm. I was hungry. I walked into the yard. No sign of life there so I walked around to the back of the house and found myself standing at a screen door. And there were these two just as I’d made them up or thought I had, the child and the old woman. And the old woman was the one who’d made that remark the morning I stood with my coffee and paper in Washington, D.C., waiting for the light to change.
So what you’re saying is that you ran away and found yourself at the actual screen door of some broken-down farmhouse somewhere in Pennsylvania that you’d previously imagined?
No, dammit. That’s not what I’m claiming. I did get on that bus and the trip was exactly as I’ve said. The shabby little town, the dirt farm. And when I got to the house it’s true that those two people were in the kitchen, the old woman and the child with her crayons. There was also a roll of flypaper hanging under the ceiling light, and it was black with flies sticking to it. So it was all very real. But nobody asked me to fix the screen door.
No?
I’m the one who suggested that I fix it. I was tired and hungry. I didn’t see a man anywhere. I thought if I offered some sort of handyman’s help, they’d let me wash up, give me something to eat. I didn’t want charity. So I smiled and said: Good morning. I’m a bit lost, but I see your screen door needs mending and I think I can fix it if you will offer me a cup of coffee. I’d noticed the door couldn’t close properly, the upper hinge had pulled away from the frame, the mesh was slack. As a screen door it was quite useless, which is why they had hung flypaper from the ceiling light cord. So you see, it was not a preternatural vision that drew me to that place. I had taken that bus ride and seen that farm and those two people and then blanked them out of my mind until the morning in Washington when I was standing on the corner waiting for the red seconds to wind down and heard—
You were then working in Washington?
— yes, as a government consultant, though I can’t tell you doing what — and heard the voice of the old woman saying more or less what I had said when I appeared outside her screen door. Except in her voice the words had a judgmental tone — as if I had given her an insight into my hapless existence, to the effect of: “As long as you’re standing there why don’t you for once make yourself useful and fix the screen door.” There’s a term for this kind of experience in your manual, is there not?
Yes. But I’m not sure we’re talking about the same kind of experience.
We have our manual too, you know. Your field is the mind, mine is the brain. Will the twain ever meet? What’s important about that bus trip is that I had reached the point where I felt anything I did would bring harm to anyone I loved. Can you know what that’s like, Mr. Analyst sitting in his ergonomic chair? I couldn’t know in advance how to avoid disaster, as if no matter what I did something terrible would follow. So I got on that bus, just to get away, I didn’t care. I wanted to tamp down my life, devote myself to mindless daily minutiae. Not that I had succeeded. What he said made that clear.
What who said?
Martha’s large husband.
When Andrew stepped inside the front door he saw Martha’s large husband putting on his coat and hat and Martha walking up the stairs with the baby in her arms while turning back the little hood, unzipping the snowsuit. Andrew took note of a large well-appointed house, much grander than the house he and Martha had lived in as man and wife. The entrance hall had a dark parquet floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw to his left a comfortable living room with stuffed furniture, and a fireplace with a fire going, and on the wall over the mantel the portrait of what he took to be some Russian czar in a long robe with an Orthodox cross on a chain and a crown that looked like an embroidered cap. To the right was a book-lined study with Martha’s black Steinway. The staircase, carpeted in dark red with brass rods at the bottoms of the risers, was elegantly curved with a mahogany banister that Martha was not holding as she mounted the stairs with the baby in her arms. Martha wore slacks. Andrew noticed that she had maintained her figure and he found himself considering, as he hadn’t for many years, the shape and tensile strength of her behind. The coat of Martha’s large husband was of the round-shouldered style with a caped collar and sleeves that flared out. Nobody wore coats like that anymore. The hat, a sporty crushproof number, was too small for Martha’s large husband’s head.
Martha said without turning her head: Go with him, Andrew, in the same quiet commanding tone of voice she used when they were married.
Andrew ran ahead and opened the passenger’s car door. He was grateful when Martha’s large husband maneuvered himself into the seat. Off they went to Martha’s large husband’s preferred pub. He directed Andrew wordlessly, pointing left or right at the intersections, grunting and pointing to the parking space when they’d arrived. It was a bar in a mall. Andrew anticipated a conversation, some sort of understanding — they after all had the shared experience of the same wife — but once they were seated at the bar with their drinks in front of them in tall crystal-cut glasses, and though Andrew waited for the conversation to begin, Martha’s large husband did not speak. So Andrew said something along these lines:
Everything you believe about me is true. It is true I accidentally killed my baby girl that I had with Martha: In good faith I fed her the medicine I believed had been prescribed by our pediatrician. The druggist sent over the wrong medicine and I was not as alert as I should have been, I’d done a day on my dissertation in cognitive science, I had spent hours at the lab, plus department meetings and so forth, and I dutifully fed the medicine into her tiny mouth with an eyedropper. All night I did this every two hours, until the child stopped crying and was dead. I didn’t know it was dead, I thought it had finally gone to sleep. I was tired and lay down myself, it had been my task to stay up with a sick child because Martha was exhausted — she’d been teaching her master class in piano all day, and I was the man, after all. What woke me was Martha screaming, it was not human, it was the sound of a huge forest animal with its leg caught in a steel trap, and maybe not even an animal of the present time, but something like its paleontological version.
Martha’s large husband said, looking into the blue mirror behind the bar: When an animal’s leg is caught in a trap, do you know what it does to free itself? It chews the leg off. But of course it is forever disabled and unable to reasonably provide for itself and live a normal life.
You mean Martha, Andrew said.
Yes. And so I have been permanently crippled as well, having in love married an irremediably damaged woman who can no longer practice her profession. Thanks to Sir Andrew the Pretender.
Is that who I am, Sir Andrew the Pretender?