He put all this away with the care of an archeologist handling ancient artifacts, and felt deceitful for all his suspicions. Even so, he could not shake them.
Oh, God, help me.
She did some reading. She found that more than seven out of ten victims of the crime never report it. She looked it up and then went to other sources and looked it up again. The lowest estimate was six out of ten.
It filled her with resolve at the same time that it horrified her.
In the nights, this was the thing that woke her, this knowledge. Others managed to go on, others made their way, and she would lie awake hearing him in the next room or breathing in the bed at her side and think that she could make it. She could live past it and be through with it at last.
It was the work, the painting, that she could use to learn how to be herself again. Long ago she had written in her notebook something of Wyeth’s that she had admired without realizing its true force: I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.
But all the emotional contacts seemed so attenuated and frail now.
The country was at war in Afghanistan, and the master terrorist had declared a jihad on the United States. The anthrax horror was playing out on TV and in the papers. There were claims that the killer powder — which one reporter said looked like Purina Dog Chow — was “weapons grade,” and a man in Florida said this was the same makeup of the biological agents the Iraqi dictator had used on his own people. Someone else said there was evidence that smallpox was mixed in with the powder.
“The mortality rate of smallpox before the vaccine,” Faulk said to Iris one evening over dinner, “was something like fifty percent. You know what it was for the Spanish flu?”
“Eighty?” Iris said.
“Two.”
“What?”
“Two percent. And that translated into thirty million deaths worldwide.”
“God,” Natasha said, low, “can’t we talk about something else?”
“People will look back years from now,” said her husband, “and wonder how we went through the days.”
There was a sense of being threatened that was always there, like the dark outside windows in a well-lit house. Even when you didn’t talk about it, the effects of it made themselves felt. The cleanup in New York and at the Pentagon continued, and each night there were more stories about all of it.
They went together and bought a small used car for Natasha, and he rode with her as she drove over to Iris’s to show it off. Iris was irritable with them and said they shouldn’t have spent the money, they could have taken her car, since she seldom used it anymore, and it was a good car, with few miles on it, only five years old. Faulk watched his wife handle the old woman’s temper. She kissed Iris on the cheek and said, “You need your wheels, lady, and you know it. And we have the money.” She looked at Faulk. “Don’t we, honey?”
“We do,” he said, delighted at the smile on her face.
It was no surprise to him that she was most comfortable around Iris. They spent a lot of time over at the old woman’s house, and Iris liked the company.
At times, because they were mutually horror-struck at the history they were living through, he could believe they were coming out of their own personal trouble. Their little daily rituals were a hedge against the grief that was everywhere, and the two of them became adept at a sort of careful thoughtfulness with each other.
Each morning when they arose — sometimes separately, sometimes without much sleep — the first few seconds they were together felt easy enough, coming from the fog of dreaming and drifting, and they prepared for the day as if nothing were wrong. He would make her breakfast, and they would eat, or try to, talking aimlessly about what was in the papers. He went to work like anyone else, leaving her in her little space off the dining room, laying out her own work for the day, tubes and brushes and the small squares of hot-pressed paper.
Often, though, they were coming from hours of sleeplessness or, worse, nightmares. She kept having the nightmares. He worked at being patient and gentle. And when she would drift off, and sleep would not come for him, he would go into the little room off the master bedroom where his desk was, and the spiral notebooks, the two volumes of The Summa Theologica.
Sometimes he was in that cluttered, narrow room when the sun came up.
In the darkness, she would lie quiet, having awakened from the bad dreams, aware of him in the other room, and she felt small and spoiled and trifling, angry with herself for everything, even unimportant matters: her unspoken annoyance with him for minor habitual things she had never thought of before living with someone — the fact that he was squeamish about roasting a whole chicken because it made him too aware of the thing as a carcass; his tendency to leave his clothes hanging on doorknobs or draped over chairs; his late hours, sitting up reading or writing, and his refusal to allow her into that world with him (they did not talk anymore about what he was reading or what he was writing; if she broached it as a subject, he changed the subject). But these were negligible problems, requiring adjustments that would have been necessary anyway. Withal, there were the other matters, the mud on the floor, as Iris would put it: the undeniable and increasing unease in lovemaking; the instances of recurring panic — the latest when she remembered writing Iris’s address in the sand and felt it as a certainty that Constance had indeed seen Nicholas Duego at the airport. These nights, in the dark, alone in the bed, she experienced the worry about that, and then in the wooziness of half sleep actually hoped it had been Duego and that he was spying on her so he could see that she was not telling anyone, he would know that his secret was safe with her, and he did not have to do anything else.
And then she would wake and gasp, berating herself silently for the ways in which the fierceness of the anxiety kept her from any kind of thought about the general suffering in its terrible scale coming from the devastations of September, the horrors of the new war. She told herself that she had no right to complain about anything. She was safe. They were safe. From his little study there sometimes came the sound of the music he loved, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, and the concerto, too, played softly so as not to wake her — and if she had been asleep, it would not have awakened her.
Occasionally in their mornings he would speak to her about what was in the paper, the articles about the war and about the continuing work in the rubble of the Trade Center and in Washington, the details of the passengers of Flight 93. It was all just words to her, all a matter of fighting to maintain the half smile or the look of concern, feeling the fear rise, the helpless stirring of rage at herself for it, watching him struggle with his own intuition and anxiety about what was between them.
Neither of them could find the way to break through.
One morning in the middle of November, after spending long, mutually sleepless hours apart, they sat across from each other in the kitchen, with the paper on the table between them. Each was holding a section of it open, as if neither of them wanted to look at the other, though their exchanges that morning had been quite unruffled and warm. Before he was dressed he had sat on the edge of the bed and called Iris to ask if she wanted to come over. Iris had said she was planning to sleep some more. He apologized, put the receiver down, and showered and dressed and then walked into the kitchen to make the omelets for them. But neither of them had eaten much. Minutes went by with the only sound being the shuffling of the pages and the coffee cups being set down on the table. “This is terrible,” he said suddenly.