Sometime before 4 P.M. you will arrive at the house, assuming the flight from Denver isn’t delayed. You had not known you were flying into a Midwestern heat wave and now you are reluctant to leave the air-conditioned interior of the car. For five weeks you’ve been away and now, staring at the house set back some distance from the street, amid tall, aging oaks and evergreens, you will wish to think Nothing seems to have changed. As if you have not noticed that, at the windows, downstairs and upstairs, venetian blinds seem to have been drawn tightly shut. As if you have not noticed that the grass in the front lawn is overgrown and gone to seed and in the glaring heat of the summer sun patches of lawn have begun to burn out.
On the flagstone walk leading to the front door, a scattering of newspapers, fliers. The mailbox is stuffed with mail no one seems to have taken in for several days though you will not have registered Eight days! at this time.
Perhaps by this time you will concede that, yes, you are feeling uneasy. Guilty, and uneasy.
Knowing how particular your husband is about such things as the maintenance of the house and grounds: the maintenance of neatness, orderliness. The exterior of the house no less than the interior. Recognizing that appearances are trivial, and yet: Appearances can be signals that a fundamental principle of order has been violated.
At the margins of order is anarchy. What is anarchy but brute stupidity!
And so, seeing uneasily that the house seems to be showing signs of neglect, quickly you wish to tell yourself But it can have nothing to do with me! Five weeks you’ve been away and only twice, each time briefly, you have called me, and spoken with me. Pleading with me Let me go, please let me go as if I, of all people, required pleading-with.
My valentine! My love.
You will have seen: my car parked in the driveway, beside the house. And so you know (with a sinking heart? with a thrill of anticipation?) that I am home. (For I might have departed, as sometimes, admittedly, in our marriage I did depart, to work in my office at the university for long, utterly absorbed and delirious hours, with no awareness of time.) Not only is the car in the driveway, but I have promised you that I would be here, at this time; that we might make our final arrangements together, preparatory to divorce.
The car in the driveway is in fact “our” car. As the house is “our” house. For our property is jointly owned. Though you brought no financial resources to our marriage and it has been entirely my university income that has supported us yet our property is jointly owned, for this was my wish.
As you are my wife, so I am your husband. Symmetry, sanctity.
This valentine I’ve designed for you, in homage to the sanctity of marriage.
On the drive from the airport, you will have had time to think: to rehearse. You will repeat what you’ve told me and I will try to appeal to you to change your mind but of course you will not change your mind Can’t return, not for more than an hour for that is the point of your returning: to go away again. You are adamant, you have made up your mind. So sorry please forgive if you can you are genuine in your regret and yet adamant.
The house, our house: 119 Worth Avenue. Five years ago when we were first married you’d thought that this house was “beautiful” — “special.” Like the old residential neighborhood of similarly large houses on wooded lots, built on a hill overlooking the university arboretum. In this neighborhood known as University Heights most of the houses are solidly built brick with here and there a sprawling white colonial, dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Our house is dark-red brick and stucco, two stories and a third part-story between steep shingled roofs. Perhaps it is not a beautiful house but certainly it is an attractive, dignified house with black shutters, leaded-glass windows, a screened veranda, and lifting from the right-hand front corner of the second floor a quaint Victorian structure like a turret. You’d hurried to see this room when the real-estate agent showed us the house but were disappointed when it turned out to be little more than an architectural ornament, impractical even as a child’s bedroom.
On the phone you’d murmured Thank God no children.
Since you’ve turned off the car’s motor, the air conditioning has ceased and you will begin to feel a prickling of heat. As if a gigantic breath is being exhaled that is warm, stale, humid, and will envelop you.
So proud of your promotion, Daryll. So young!
How you embarrassed me in the presence of others. How in your sweetly oblivious way you insulted me. Of course you had no idea. Of course you meant well. As if the fact that I was the youngest “senior” professor in the humanities division of the university at the time of my promotion was a matter of significance to me.
As my special field is Philosophy of Mind so it’s “mind” that is valued, not trivial attributes like age, personality. All of philosophy is an effort of the mental faculties to discriminate between the trivial and the profound, the fleeting and the permanent, the many and the One. Pride is not only to be rejected on an ethical basis but on an epistemological basis, for how to “take pride” in one’s self? — in one’s physical being, in which the brain is encased? (Brain being the mysterious yet clearly organic repository of “mind.”) And how to “take pride” in what is surely no more than an accident of birth?
You spoke impulsively, you had no idea of the crudeness of your words. Though in naiveté there is a kind of subtle aggression. Your artless blunders made me wince in the presence of my older colleagues (for whom references to youth, as to age, were surely unwelcome) and in the presence of my family (who disapproved of my marrying you, not on the grounds that you were too young, but that you were but a departmental secretary, “no match” intellectually for me which provoked me to a rare, stinging reply But who would be an intellectual match for me? Who, and also female?)
Yet I never blamed you. I never accused you. Perhaps in my reticence. My silences. My long interludes of utter absorption in my work. Never did I speak of the flaws of your character and if I speak of them now it is belatedly and without condemnation. Almost, with a kind of nostalgia. A kind of melancholy affection. Though you came to believe that I was “judgmental” — “hypercritical” — truly you had no idea how I spared you. Many times.
Here is the first shock: the heat.
As you leave the car, headed up the flagstone path to the front door. This wall of heat, waves of heat shimmering and nearly visible rushing at you. “Oh! My God.” Several weeks away in mile-high Denver have lulled you into forgetting what a midsummer heat wave in this sea-level Midwestern city can be.
Stale humid heat. Like a cloud of heavy, inert gas.
The heat of my wrath. The heat of my hurt. As you are my wife I spared you, rarely did I speak harshly to you even when you seemed to lose all control and screamed at me Let me go! Let me go! I am sorry I never loved you please let me go!
That hour, the first time I saw your face so stricken with repugnance for me. Always, I will remember that hour.
As if, for the five years of our cohabitation, you’d been in disguise, you’d been playing a role, and now, abruptly and without warning, as if you hadn’t known what you would say as you began to scream at me, you’d cast aside the disguise, tore off the mask and confronted me. Don’t love you. It was a mistake. Can’t stay here. Can’t breathe. Let me go!