Objection 1.
The crux of this case is against the grain of genuine straightforward honesty in my wife, who has in all other instances taken pains to be direct and truthful with me while denying that there is something more giving her these panics and night spells than the memory of having been trapped and believing she had lost me.
Objection 2.
Further, she has shown herself to be quite strong in asserting herself and her version of things when confronted or questioned, even with the lately subtle and guarded form reservations and questions have mostly taken (she will not speak of it directly), and there is clearly the same puzzlement as mine about all this in the one person she would confide in other than her husband if indeed there were such a circumstance, her grandmother, who I have come to believe continues in the same dark as I am about the cause of these confusions of feeling.
On the contrary, It is well known that in many circumstances involving a dishonesty in order to protect the feelings of someone whose well-being is in question, there exists an extreme scrutiny about matters of no bearing on the essential question, in order to preserve the deception.
I answer that, The idea itself is so contrary to the experience of being with my wife in every single other instance, and that when I watch her with her grandmother, or her friend Marsha, or our friend Andrew Clenon, it is impossible to put together this bright, intelligent, warm, expressive, and clever person with the one who seems inwardly, in spite of all her effort, to cower at the prospect of intimacy with me. That is, any intimacy beyond simply lying next to each other to read or talk. And she shows the quickest tendency to a kind of interior cringing at any suggestion that something is not the same, that something is missing. Ease is missing. She denies it and asks for time, and there seem to be moments when she comes toward me, but it all feels produced.
Reply Obj. 1.
The essential circumstance which is such cause of dismay is something emanating from those more than two weeks we were apart, and all the hurts and doubts stem from uncertainty about a singular event I am not privy to but about which there is undeniable evidence.
Reply Obj. 2.
What really amounts to only a few hours of fearing she had lost me does not seem at all sufficient as a cause of such a long period of lingering aftershock.
6
The two women worked on the bending exercises for Iris’s knee, and some lifting with two-pound weights, and then Natasha drove her to the bank and to the store. Iris talked excitedly and happily about the new baby. “It’s just what this world — just what we need now,” she said. “Have you thought about a name? I bet not. Well, it’s new. I wonder what you’ll settle on. Have you-all talked about it? I can come over and babysit every day. It’s going to be so wonderful living so close. My God, I’ll — I’m about to be a great-grandmother.” She was using the cane, but was clearly less dependent on it, touching it to the ground with each step. “Imagine that. A great-grandmother.”
“Yes, you will be that,” Natasha told her. “You already are that.” Sometimes the bad possibilities did not play themselves out in life, and people were lucky and knew it and appreciated it. Two months. Two months. This was Faulk’s child.
“I actually like the sound of it,” Iris said. “Great-grandmother.”
The day was cool and sunny, and they stopped for lunch at the Otherlands Coffee Bar and sat out on the wooden deck in the shade of an umbrella and were happy. With Iris’s happiness, Natasha could believe that this was a happy thing. Suddenly she thought of sitting here with Constance the day before the wedding, and it made a little cloud of unrest in her soul. She looked at Iris’s lined face and loved her for the calm that always seemed to reside there. “Come have dinner with us tonight, okay? That’s when I’ll tell him.”
“Oh, tell him when he gets home from work.”
“No, I want you there. Please?”
Iris smiled and nodded, thinking it over.
“Come help us celebrate. I want to have a party.”
“Well, it’s up to you, sweetie.”
There was a brief pause.
“It was good seeing Liam after all these years,” Iris said, and then bit into her sandwich. “He didn’t remember that I met his wife. They visited a couple of times at the beginning.”
“Were you in love?”
Chewing, she seemed to be trying to decide for herself what the situation had been. “We were very good friends, I guess you’d say now. Nothing happened. We had fun, though. I was grieving, raising a child alone.”
The cool air and the heat of the sun was on them. Natasha realized that she did not want to know more. All of it was past, and she wanted the past to be past. Gone.
“I have pictures from those days,” her grandmother said. “You should see your face in them — this little kid with deep shadows under her eyes and a look like grief itself. The irises of your eyes didn’t touch the bottom lids. It made you look sadder than you were.”
She heard this without quite taking it in. She was thinking about the fact that this was Faulk’s baby and not Duego’s — and then she was beset with the idea of Duego, wherever he was in Florida … or Memphis; that was also possible. Two people knew what had happened on that beach in Jamaica. The thought had not quite registered with her before she imagined him witnessing her silence and deciding to leave her alone. Perhaps this moment he was with some other unfortunate young woman, still being who he was and what he was. It seemed wrong of her not to have thought of it earlier in this way.
Iris was talking about Natasha’s mother. “When she was pregnant with you she was the bloom of health. She had no morning sickness at all. No discomforts. It was like she was made to be pregnant. And that was when she got the idea of getting away from Memphis. The grime of Memphis. That was the way she talked about it. Grime. She got big as a house, and she was happy that way, and all she could talk about was finding a way out of this town. Grime. I’ve always loved this town and felt at home in it. It’s the best of both worlds — a big city that feels very much like a small town. But she wanted out of it in the worst way. I thought it was odd.”
“Well, we’re all odd, aren’t we? If you scratch the surface.”
“I had a beau,” Iris said, and gave the small nodding gesture that admitted it was Liam Adams. “For a little while when I was left alone. And I needed it, then.”
Natasha reached over and touched her wrist. “You never told me this.”
The old woman stared at her with brimming eyes. “ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It’s all right if you did.”
“I have one memory that’s pretty clear,” Natasha said. “The two of them sitting in the front seat of a car and snow outside the windows. I was in the backseat. They were talking low, and we were waiting for someone. But that’s all. I don’t know who we were waiting for. And I remember crying once because I couldn’t tie my shoes, and Daddy trying to show me — and she said, ‘You’ve hurt her feelings.’ And I cried harder, milking it, but I can’t see their faces, and I don’t know where we were. A sunny living room somewhere and summer outside the window.”