Only Life
At forty-one, Addie is taking soy vitamins for hot flashes. She rinses her hair with henna to color the gray.
William is forty-three and wears gel inserts in his shoes.
Neither of them thinks of love the way they used to, as something to be fallen into, like a bed or a pit. It isn’t big and deep and abstract. Love is particulate. It’s fine. It accumulates like dust.
William sketches Addie sitting in the red chair with the sun coming in through the window Peale has just washed. She is holding a leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick.
“You know what Eudora Welty said about Moby-Dick,” Peale says.
“What,” they say.
“He was a symbol of so much, he had to be a whale.”
On fall nights William and Addie go driving. William picks Addie up at the store after closing and they drive through State campus down Western Boulevard to Avent Ferry Road, out past the shopping centers and apartments and subdivisions, out past Lake Johnson, into the country, all the way to Holly Springs. The road through the country is narrow and rolling, lined with fences and barns. They drive past farmhouses with shades drawn, their windows yellow blanks. A few porches have jack-o’-lanterns.
William likes to imagine living in one of the houses. Coming in from his farm every evening, sitting down to supper with his family, clearing the table afterwards, helping the kids with their homework, teaching them long division, tucking them into bed. He and his wife sit up and read for a while, maybe watch a little TV. He goes to bed first. When he’s almost asleep his wife comes in and lies down behind him. She laces her arms around him. He can feel her breasts against his back, her heart thumping.
Addie keeps silent on these drives. She pretends this is the only life she’s ever had, in William’s truck, with William driving, and all she can hear is the hum of tires on the highway, and crickets. Always crickets, even in October.
William takes her flowers on Valentine’s Day, three dozen perfect red roses he has scavenged from a florist’s Dumpster because he knows she loves flowers but not extravagance or waste. He knows she will love rescued roses in a way she could not love paid-for roses.
Addie loves the sound of William, the quiet of him. The soft thump of his jeans dropping on the floor. His breath, which is quiet even when he’s breathing hard. He doesn’t talk when they have sex, or make her say what she wants. He keeps his eyes open all the way to the end. He doesn’t go inside himself like other men. With other men, you could be anyone. With William she is Addie.
He falls asleep curled against her, front to front, and she rubs her hands up and down his back, like she can learn him by his skin and bones.
They are in her apartment. It’s not yet dawn but she has an early appointment so she’s up already, standing over her sock drawer, deciding what to wear, mumbling to herself — quietly, she thinks, but she wakes William.
“Are you praying to your socks?” he says.
He always wakes up awake. It’s because he doesn’t dream, he says. He doesn’t have that layer to pass through.
“Sorry,” she tells him. “Go back to sleep.”
“You never know,” he says. “God might be socks.”
Addie and William like discovering important books that aren’t as famous as they should be, like The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, and The Brothers K by David James Duncan. Addie starts a list, “Unheard-Of Masterpieces,” and posts it in the store by the cash register.
“You never know,” William says. “One list in one store could change history.”
William believes that no act, if it’s purposeful, is too small. He protests junk mail by filling postage-paid return envelopes from one company with advertisements from another. Addie follows his example and sends Time magazine the fake check for $58,000 that came from the credit card company.
William lives in a house on a hill on a cut-through street where drivers often speed. He has made a sign for his front yard, a black sandwich board painted with big yellow letters, and set it perpendicular to the street so that it can be seen from both directions. One side says, THIS IS A NEIGHBORHOOD WITH CHILDREN. The other says, SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.
William is an open book, not afraid for people to know him. He throws big parties even though his house is gutted and full of lumber for the walls and cabinets he is going to build. On the Saturday before Easter, he has an egg-decorating party for all his artist friends. He rents folding tables and chairs. He orders dyes from a Ukrainian shop in New York. On the morning of the party he buys eggs, organic white ones that haven’t been scrubbed. He spreads newspapers and sets out votive candles and tins of beeswax and tiny tools with special names, and his artist friends come and sit around the tables and make egg art. They’ve all done this before: they know how to draw fine lines with wax, they know to use the pale dyes before the dark. They carry their finished eggs to the kitchen and blow them out in a big metal bowl in the sink. Raw-egg smell fills the house and makes Addie nauseous. This is her first time at the party, her first time decorating eggs that aren’t hard-boiled, and she does things backwards, blows out her egg first so that it can’t be dipped in dye, but she doesn’t want to waste the perfect eggshell so she glues cotton to it and makes a face and legs out of clay and calls it a sheep. It’s primitive, something a child might make. But William tells her he loves it, the wistful little face. He holds it up for his friends.
“I drank too much,” Addie says on Easter Sunday. She is helping William put the egg things away. “My hands won’t stop shaking. I can’t remember a thing I said to your friends last night, but I remember talking. I talk too much. My father always called me a bigmouth.”
“Did you know,” William says, “the mouth on the Statue of Liberty is three feet wide?”
To cure her hangover he takes her out for hot fudge sundaes. It’s a sunny day and the patio at Goodberry’s is crowded with slouchy, flirty teenagers, parents with strollers, children pitching pennies in the fountain. Car radios blare from the parking lot.
Everyone loves ice cream, especially Addie. William is unnerved by how fast her sundae disappears.
Addie has a scar across her lower abdomen in the shape of a smile. She won’t let anyone see it. When she and William have sex, she turns off the lights.
One night, in the dark, under the covers, he runs his finger across it. He is gentle and doesn’t ask any questions. Addie doesn’t offer any answers.
Sometimes Addie wonders who will die first, she or William. She imagines the two of them old, their faces wrinkled, their eyes sunken but alert, stealing worried glances at each other, waiting.
William is not afraid of dying. He is afraid of being left. Three women have left him so far: his mother, who died when he was thirteen; a woman he lived with, who said he needed her too much; and another woman he lived with, who said he was too self-sufficient and didn’t need her enough.