“Well?” Sonja said, looking up from the bed, where she sat, still fully clothed. Marshall, who had finally followed her into the bedroom, was momentarily startled: for a second it seemed she had read his mind, that she wanted him to sort through the possibilities that had been going through his head and give her a definitive answer about how and where this would end. Instead of answering, he sat beside her. It was ludicrous, the amount of time and thought that had gone into these students’ problems. Anyone who’d spent any time in the profession knew that being a teacher had more than a little in common with being a doctor, and that you needed to keep professional distance. So is that what he’d tried to do — keep professional distance — in the car, outside the big house in Dover?
What else could he have done? He was offering comfort.
Kissing Cheryl Lanier?
Never again.
Truly?
“I don’t know,” Marshall said. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“You must be surprised he came to the house.”
“I’m astonished. We don’t—” He almost said We don’t like each other, but instead said, “We don’t know the first thing about each other. How I got dragged into this, I’m not quite sure.”
“Happens,” Sonja said.
She had begun to pull off her clothes, tossing them piece by piece to the bedside chair, missing with the sweater, scoring a hit with the pants. He stood and undressed also, tossing his shirt in the hamper, draping his pants over the doorknob, stripping down to his underwear, which he did not remove. Then he edged close to her in the bed, thankful that he had a kind, sane wife, half wondering what McCallum had said to her but too tired to ask. If he thought about McCallum, down the hall, about his having to get up and deal with the old McCallum or even the new surprisingly forthcoming McCallum, it would create such anxiety he might not be able to sleep, and as much as he didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know, he was tired, tired.
Dearest,
My indebtedness to you is vast, eclipsed only by my affection. Hiding from my responsibilities, conducting myself as if I am entitled to bow to every inclination — because that is what it is: inclination, not a true sense of duty — I have stayed gone too long, choosing to convince myself that the urgency of Alice’s present situation supersedes all else. And yet when you did not respond to my letter, but only folded a piece of paper to contain the pictures of the children — my wonderful, so well cared for children who have nevertheless become orphans to their parents, though they are so central to your life, Martine, I do not know what I can ever do to repay you for your diligence, your charity toward us all, though I see us some days as mere pretenders, pretenders to living a proper life, simple cowards in the face of adversity, when actually we are moving in a circle of the damned. Oh, I do so hate to admit to such self-loathing, to such cynicism and such cowardice, yet you are my conscience and whether I confess or not, I could not hide from you.
Let me be blunt and say I despise her for her weakness, for her ability to deceive me, whether it be about a secretly ingested drug or what she makes seem a random fascination with a man in a hotel corridor, whom I know she has met before — a man she has probably been with, as the two of them go about enacting a charade for my benefit. But tell me this: which came first? My highly cultivated ability for self-deception, or Alice’s ability to see that whenever something goes wrong, she can play on my guilt? It is my superiority, my damnable feeling of superiority, that affects me so deeply I try every way to hide it from others, including my own wife. Here I am now, at her side — or I would be, if the doctors would allow it, though they feel, at present, she must be separated from me — here I am in limbo, trusting another person to keep things on course, conveniently forgetting that although one child is dead, other children remain, and that they need their parents as well as your superb care.
Yet they seem gone from me. To be honest, limbo is preferable to the pain of attempting to re-connect with them, which of course I must soon bring myself to do, as the disappearance of two parents must be quite traumatic, however much they adore you.
This morning, I stood with the snapshots by the window in my hotel, the strong sun giving their faces a Bela Lugosi glow, distracted by the beauty of the trees, the beauty — in my self-pitying mood, I saw it as the beauty of ordinary people walking to and fro, doing and thinking ordinary things, or even thinking terrible, unknowable things, yet nevertheless walking, moving, making progress, while I stood, as if two snapshots weighed so heavily in my hands they might as well have been enormous barbells that allowed me to hold them and raise them once and lower my arms again, yet after that rooted me to the floor so I could not move.
Something has been wrong with every part of me since his death. I say “his” because today even the name is too painful to write. Yet I loved him no more than my other children, or at least not until the moment when it was clear he had died.
What can you think of this long exile? My separation from house, from children, from you? Perhaps that is what you spared me with the blank piece of paper, trying to nudge me back to reality with images instead of words.
Ever,
M.
9
MARSHALL SAT ON the side of his bed, dialling Evie’s hospital room. He spoke quietly, conscious of McCallum sleeping at the end of the hallway. Sonja had left for work, and would go from there to the hospital to see Evie, she had told him, whispering herself, leaning forward to kiss his forehead, her hair falling forward to tickle his nose, a haze of perfume mesmerizing him — the perfume she’d begun to squirt underneath her hair. A very citrusy perfume that made him think of orange juice, breakfast, the blueberry pancakes he’d imagined not so long ago, the conversation he and Sonja had had about summer.
Sonja thought it was best that Evie have private nurses. She had discussed it with him just before falling asleep and he’d quickly agreed, embarrassed not to have thought of it himself. Unless something really demanded his attention, he didn’t often think things through, and somehow the hospital had seemed so functional, the staff so busy and so effective that, as was his way, he had assumed everything would go smoothly. Sonja had had to explain to him that this was not so: the overworked nurses would ignore blinking lights as long as possible; patients who didn’t complain were likely to be ignored. And then the unarguable: “You know if the shoe were on the other foot, Evie would do everything in her power to see you had the finest care. She always did.” Of course she had: she had taken care of everyone in his family, uncomplainingly, devotedly. It pained him to remember how hard she had worked, and how patient she had always been, humming softly as she dusted, transported by music on the radio as she hung out the wash to dry. That was how he thought of Evie: as constantly busy. In fact, he realized guiltily, that was one of the many reasons why it was always so difficult to go to see her: his inability to reconcile the active, upbeat person of the past with the relatively silent, passive person she had become. Yet when he woke up that morning, the events of the night before still alarmingly clear in his mind, he had reached for the phone as he had once reached for Evie’s hand, rationalizing his need to connect with her — even if it was a one-way conversation — as her needing him. Incredible to think of her now, incapacitated, the songs unhummed, thoughts allowed to pass by unstated, like little fish sliding through holes in a net. How little thanks he and Gordon had ever expressed, how withholding his father had been. The nurse picked up the phone on the second ring. As he spoke to the nurse, he was surprised to hear in his own voice some of his father’s brusqueness: he was glad she had had a good night; he was happy to hear that she had tested negative for pneumonia; if the nurse would be so kind as to hold the phone to her ear … oh, wonderful that she was reaching for the phone with her good hand. Absolutely wonderful (but, of course, to be expected).