We can afford a child. Children.
She did not say. Did not risk.
(Perhaps) (she was thinking) it was a mistake to have moved into a place not far from the old house when her husband died. She’d had to sell the house — of course. Soon after his death which had been an unexpected death after a brief, virulent illness. In a state of grief and exhaustion she’d looked at a number of possible places in which to live nearer the college yet somehow she’d found nothing quite right, and decided to rent a condominium hardly a mile from the old house on Linden Road.
And so, approaching her former house as she’d approached it for so many years, sometimes alone in her car, sometimes beside her husband in the driver’s seat — (for always Jed drove when she was with him in the car: He would never have allowed anyone else to drive), she could not overcome a sense of apprehension though she knew, of course she knew, that the house belonged to strangers, and that (probably!) these strangers were not standing vigilant at their front windows waiting for the widow to pass by. Yet still, her heartbeat quickened as she approached: In her mind’s eye she parked her car as usual in front of the garage, and made her way from the car into the small flagstone courtyard, and opened the front door which was painted a deep ruby-red, and stepped inside — Hello? I’m home...
The husband had not liked it if, as she’d done sometimes, she entered the house without announcing her arrival. Hoping for a few minutes to herself, private time, to catch her breath (she might’ve said), put a few groceries away in the kitchen which she’d picked up on the way home, before calling to her husband — Hello, Jed. It’s me.
Sometimes, if Jed was home, and he’d heard her, he would come to greet her; more often, she would seek him out in his office, which was a large, comfortable room at the rear of the house on the second floor.
Once, when a late-afternoon meeting was canceled and she’d returned to the house earlier than Jed expected her, the door had been locked against her. The doors.
She’d tried the front door — locked. Thinking it was just an accident, she tried another. Locked.
And another — also locked.
Of course, she should have had a house key. What was the reason she hadn’t had a house key?
He was nearly always home. His car was in the driveway now. She’d lost the habit of taking a house key with her and so, after a moment’s hesitation, she knocked on the door, not loudly, not rudely, for she did not want to disturb the husband if he was in deep concentration at his work, but still there was no answer and (so far as she could see) no movement inside the house.
She walked around the house, peering in windows. “Jed? Jed?”
Had to be upstairs. Maybe playing music, wearing earphones.
(Why was she so agitated? Her underarms stung with perspiration, a rivulet of sweat ran down the side of her face like an errant tear.)
(But he was alone, she was sure. He had never brought anyone to the house in her absence. She was sure.)
“Jed? It’s me...”
Each of the doors was locked. Pride prevented her from checking the windows.
The solution came to her — I will go away as if this has not happened. No one will know.
It was an era before cell phones. But if she’d called, she had the idea that her husband would not have answered the phone.
She went away. She returned hours later, at the expected time. All the doors were unlocked. Interior lamps had been lit. When she entered the house he was awaiting her with a little bouquet of Shasta daisies, carnations, and red rosebuds.
“For you, dear. Missed you.”
She was touched. She was relieved. She smiled happily, as a young bride might smile, sweetly naive, trusting. She kissed his cheek and asked, as it would have been natural for a young bride to ask, “But why? Today is not a special day, is it?”
“No day with you is not a special day, darling.”
He had shaved, his lean jaws were smooth and smelled of lotion. His white cotton shirt was fresh. The sleeves were rolled to the elbows as he rarely, perhaps never wore them.
Later, when the husband was elsewhere and would not discover her, she’d examined his office. His closet in their bedroom. Their bed.
Cautiously lifted the bedclothes to stare at the lower sheet that (so far as she could judge) was smoothed flat as it had been when, that morning, she’d briskly made up the bed.
What on earth am I looking for? — she was ashamed, she had no idea.
What has he made me into, how has this happened? How is this person — me?
In marriage, one plus one is more than the sum of two. But sometimes in a marriage, one plus one is less than the sum of two.
He was correct: It would not have been worth the risk.
She’d come to agree. Their very special feeling for each other, their unique love, would have been irrevocably altered by the intrusion of another.
Seven years! The time has passed quickly; or, the time has passed very slowly.
There have been few changes to the house, that she can see from the road. But there had been changes.
When she drives past the house she finds herself slowing the car, to stare. Her heart quickens in anticipation of seeing something that will upset her.
She hates it, seeing changes in her former house that upset her! — thinking how these changes would upset her husband too.
For some reason the new owners removed the redwood fence which the husband had had erected at the front of the property, for privacy. (Why on earth? Had the fence become rotted? She didn’t think so.)
Then, they’d had the house repainted: a dull beige with brown shutters so much less striking than the original cream with dark red shutters.
Once, seeing that the new owners had had a large oak tree removed from the front lawn, she’d felt weak with indignation. She’d happened to drive past at the time of the tree’s demise, chainsaw rending the air into unbearable shards of sound. Screaming.
He had not screamed at his fate. Rather, he’d been medicated, unable to protest. He had not even known (she’d wanted to think) what was happening in his body. That sequence of small, inexorable surrenders.
In fact, yes: He had screamed at his fate. He’d screamed at her.
Not that he’d known who she was, then. Not that he’d hated her.
Slowly she drove in the tense delirium of approach. For it seemed to her — Of course, I am going home. It’s an ordinary evening.
(But why then was she so frightened? The ordinary does not provoke fear.)
He hadn’t been comfortable with the ordinary, in fact. His work had been a highly refined mathematics applied to the manufacture of digital equipment which she hadn’t understood even when he’d tried to explain to her in the plainest speech.
He hadn’t been comfortable with resting. He hadn’t taken a vacation in the more than twenty years she’d known him. At one time he’d worked as many as one hundred hours a week as a consultant for (rival) companies. She felt a thrill of horror that, now that he’d died, he could not ever do anything meaningful again. That would have hurt him, stung his pride.
How surprised he’d have been to see a stranger so comfortable in his house. At his worktable, a long white table, wonderfully practical, useful. What is this? What has happened? In his bed.
How like science fiction our lives are, she thinks. The alternate universe in which, innocently, ignorantly, we continue to exist as we’d been, unaware that, in another universe, we have ceased to be.