MY LIFE WENT calmly along for five years after Gottschalk died. One day in early June, just after the lilacs and the mock orange had folded, I started, as always, working among the roses, the iris, and then the peonies. This succession of color and scent has always taken me out of myself, sent me spinning. As soon as I got up each morning, I started working in the gardens around the house. The bees were out, their numbers unusual in our yard, and I was surrounded by their small vibrating bodies. They followed me as I worked, but I like bees. They seem to know that I respect their nature, admire their industry, and understand that they are essential to all that grows. I brushed them off gently, as I always do. In fact, I have been stung only twice in my whole life. After I finished weeding and watering, I went quietly into Mother’s room, where she slept upright with a canister of oxygen. The rigors of her condition made her sharp and bitter for a time, but even when she was feeling awful, we still enjoyed each other’s company. She was a sharp-boned little Chippewa woman. She liked to joke, had been very dedicated to my father, and was to me.
“Where are you going?” Her voice was a rasp by then. Of course she knew where I was going, but wanted to get her line in.
“To work.”
“You’ll be digging a grave for me soon!”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will!”
She cried this out with baleful joy in her voice. I wheeled her to the bathroom door and she rose, supported herself on the railing I’d installed.
“Shoo!”
I closed the door. We were both dreading the day when even this last piece of privacy would be taken from between us. We were both thinking about the Pluto Nursing Home, but to get her in there we would have to sell the house, which was a beautiful and comforting old place on a double lot, where I’d gardened and planted all my life. Mother wanted to leave the house to me. To that end, she was cheerfully trying to die. Mother weakened herself by not eating and hoped to suffocate herself in her sleep by not using her oxygen. Her natural toughness was not fooled by these tricks.
“All right, I’m done,” she called out. In the kitchen, she ate a bit of toast and sipped a cup of coffee. I tried to get her to drink some water, but she was trying to dehydrate herself, too. As she did every day, she asked me what I’d be doing in the evening. It worried her that I hardly went out anymore.
“I’m going to play poker with you, Mom, then I’m watching the news and turning out the lights.”
“You really need a wife, you know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re not going to find one by sitting home with your mother.”
“I know the one I want.”
“Give up on that old, tough hen!” she said, swiping at me. She had found about C. quite some time ago. “Get yourself a spring chicken and give me a grandchild, Bazil. She cured your cancer, but she’s no good for you otherwise.”
As a boy, I’d had a strange series of lumps on my head. They came and went until C. had affected a miracle cure — which was painless, as I remember, and left no mark. My mother has always been convinced that I had brain cancer, though it couldn’t have been much more than cysts or warts. Still, I don’t correct my mother as she thinks I owe my life to C., and that confuses the issue about our being lovers. I even say, sometimes, “Well, I’d be dead without her,” when my mother begins to pester me.
I WAS ALWAYS eager to get to the graveyard in early summer. So few people died then. Mostly, there were just visitors. When I was working there, we had the most picturesque cemetery in the state. We were in brochures. Where the full sun hit, the peonies were just bursting from their compact balls into spicy, shredded, pink confettipetaled flowers. I brought a Mason jar to fill for C. I usually went over to her place just after five o’clock, when her receptionist left. I was careful to pass quickly through her backyard, along the fence.
I remember that day specifically, because it was the day that she told me that she was getting married to the man who had remodeled her office.
“It’s the only way I can break this off,” she said.
I was bewildered. “I’m old enough now. Why don’t you marry me?”
“You know the answer. I’m so much older.”
I was twenty-five.
“I thought it was going to stop mattering, some day.”
“I used to think so, too.”
“You think I care what people think? I don’t care what people think!”
“I know that.”
She had her profession, her standing, the trust of her patients to think about. I’d heard all of that again and again.
“Can’t it be over now?” she asked, her voice weary.
“No,” I told her, my voice as hard as hers was tired.
And it wasn’t over, although she married Ted Bursap, a general contractor. Ted was only five years younger than C. He believed that there was a future in Pluto, and his wife had just conveniently died. I’d buried her myself — in plain pine. I’d taken that as a sign of Ted’s cheapness, though it’s possible that’s what she’d wanted. C.’s marriage so grieved me that I started correspondence courses in my father and grandfather’s profession, and found I liked the law. Of course, there was a terrific law library in the house, two generations of law and philosophy books. Not to mention fiction and poetry, but I’d already gone through those. I disappeared in the evenings. That is when I discovered my grandfather’s papers, and when because of him I began reading Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Plotinus. For a while, everything written since A.D. 300 seemed useless, except case law, which fascinated me and told me that nothing had changed since those men had written.
Now that I was getting myself ahead, my mother approved of my not going out in the evenings. For a year after C.’s wedding, she and I were finished. I tried not to even look in the direction of her house. But we could not stay apart. One dusty summer evening, I watched from the cemetery as the sun turned white hot and then red. Through the pine trees, I followed this enormous ball of fire as it sank in the west. I looked in the direction that I had resisted looking, and saw Ted pull out of the driveway in his pickup. I walked between the graves and through the backyard the way I used to do, and there she was, waiting for me on the back kitchen steps. She had waited there every afternoon at five o’clock, all that year. She couldn’t help herself, she said, but she’d promised herself she never would let me know, that she’d let me get on with my life.
Ted, it turned out, had gone to Hoopdance to work out a bid on some small construction job, and he would be an hour there and an hour back, at least. Those two hours were different from any we had ever spent before. The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other’s faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.
The only problem with those old philosophers, I thought as I was walking back through the graves, was that they didn’t give enough due to the unbearable weight of human sexual love. It was something they correctly saw, though, as hindering deliberation, at war with reason, and apt to stain a man’s honor, which of course I accepted.
Ted never found out, but I told myself that he might not even have cared. From what I had seen, love and sentiment had never interested him much.
Ted had built many of those newer houses in Pluto, those with only a backyard cemetery view, and he was also responsible for many of the least attractive buildings in town. I’d hated Ted even before he married the woman I loved, but afterward, of course, I thought often of how happy I would be to bury him, how fast I’d dig his grave. And then after I began seeing C. again, coming home, knowing that Ted got to sleep with her all night, I’d imagine how satisfying it would be to cover Ted up and put a stone on his head. Just a cheap flawed rock. No quote. Next to his poor pine-boxed wife. I had also hated Ted Bursap because of the way he ruined this town — Ted bought up older properties — graceful houses beginning to decay and churches that had consolidated their congregations or lost them to time. He stripped them of their oak trim or carved doors or stained-glass windows, and sold all that salvage to people in the cities. He tore down the shells and put up apartment buildings that were really so hideous, aluminum-sided or fake-bricked, with mansard shingled roofs or flimsy inset balconies, it was a wonder the town council couldn’t see it. But they wouldn’t. Pluto has no sense of character. New is always best no matter how ugly or cheap. Ted Bursap tore down the old railroad depot, put up a Quonset hut. He was always smiling, cheerful. He did not love his wife the way I did; she had not saved his life, either — she had only fixed his hernia. They never had passion, she told me, although Ted was a patient man and treated her well.