For the first few months after he was gone, she had seemed to be coping admirably; in fact she seemed to be adjusting to their separation astonishingly well, even to be calmer than she had been before he left. She told herself and her friends and her mother that perhaps it was for the best, they had never been perfectly matched after all, she had always longed for someone more expressive and exciting, who shared her love of literature and art, who longed to travel, who had a greater capacity for amazement. Perhaps this could be a new beginning and a chance to find a truly fulfilling life. She sold the house they had lived in together, rented an apartment within walking distance of a good coffee shop and a discount supermarket. She saw friends. She saw movies. She started taking a swing dance class.
But then, two days ago, as she was drifting off to sleep, her phone began to ring. Her mind surfaced from the soft, dark pool in which it had submerged, just in time to hear the last cycle of tones die away before her voicemail picked up. Her phone was in the kitchen and at first she thought that maybe she could burrow back down and find her way to the threshold of sleep again, but no, she was awake, wondering who had called so late. Her brain began to spin and gather speed. Could it be an emergency, something seriously wrong? A friend in trouble? Her mother in the hospital? She climbed out of bed and made her way down the hall and took the phone from the counter where she’d left it and stared at the string of digits on the screen. It was not a number that she recognized, but the country code was +33 and the numbers that followed were the area code for the town where, as far as she knew, her husband now resided. She knew no one else who might be calling her from there. Right now in western Europe it was early morning, well before dawn. She looked at the screen but there was no icon telling her anyone had left a message. She listened to her voicemail anyway, just in case. Nothing. She considered calling the number back but thought, suddenly, angrily, that she did not want to give him the satisfaction of having her jump to attention just because he dialed her number. Suppose he had not meant to call her at all; he’d only misdialed and that was why he hadn’t left a message? Or what if he had meant to call her but then changed his mind? When he answered the phone his voice would be dry and distant and polite in that way he could be when he wanted to protect himself. She could not bear the idea of having him treat her coolly, so instead of calling him and asking him what he wanted, she put the phone back down on the counter and left it there and went and climbed back into bed. She lay down and clicked off the light on her nightstand. She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep again. But she could not, and all that night, and the one after, and now again tonight, she has lain awake, staring into the dark, her mind like something stranded on a beach, longing to swim out and get lost at sea but unable to reach the water’s edge.
Now, when she looks over toward the window, there is a blue glow seeping in beneath the blind. She does not know if she is angrier with her husband for calling her and unsettling her so much or with herself for allowing something as trivial as a phone call to make her come unhinged. She sighs. She looks over at the numbers on the alarm clock on the nightstand. Soon it will be time for her to get up. She might as well go and make some coffee and get ready to start work.
Since counting didn’t work, the next night she tries imagining the sound of ocean waves. This is what it said to do on a website she found called Overcoming Insomnia when she should have been working on her most recent project, a book instructing engineers on the maintenance and repair of machines that shape the steel exteriors of cars and trucks on the assembly lines of the European subsidiaries of American car manufacturers. But she was too tired to concentrate and had drifted into looking online for answers to the question of what to do if you cannot get to sleep.
Imagining the sound of the sea seemed like a good exercise when she read about it, even though she is extremely suspicious of the whole idea that you can “overcome” insomnia, which sounds as if you are supposed to triumph by an act of will, wrestle your sleeplessness into submission, and which evokes intense concentration or brute force or both, when really what she needs is the exact opposite of this: a kind of soft dissolving of herself during which she turns from a person into a cloud of gold dust that hovers shimmering for a minute before dispersing into the dark with a sound like someone blowing out a candle. Insomnia is more like something you have to sneak under or find a hole in the fence of or find a way to flow around than something you can “overcome.” Also, the man who produced the website, Howard Francus, MD, whose smiling photograph appears on many of its pages, has written a book with the same title as his website, Overcoming Insomnia, and the site is really a promotional platform for his book. She can’t help suspecting that the information that Dr. Francus put on the website for free is only the peripheral stuff, the least effective and therefore least valuable insights and techniques he has to offer, because wouldn’t he want to keep the really good stuff, the real secrets, the magic surefire answers to himself so that you had to buy his book? What would be the point of using the website to promote his book if everyone just read the website and was immediately cured and no one needed to pay $24.99 plus shipping and handling to find out how to go to sleep at night?
Nevertheless, in spite of her profound misgivings, lying in the dark, she tries to imagine the sound of the ocean. It has been a long time since she went to the ocean. As a child she used to live near the coast. Now she lives in a city that, although it is on a lake, is very far from the ocean. There are hundreds of miles of dry land in every direction. Before he left, she and her husband had been planning to go to the beach as soon as both of them could find time for a vacation. In fact, she loves the sea, the smell and sounds of it, the way it throws the light back up into the air so that all the objects near the shore, the houses and the people and the trees and the grass bowed over on the dunes, are tossed around inside a storm of light. How she misses the sea! And she and her husband never did get around to going there together because it always seemed like there was some reason to postpone the trip — either they needed to go and see his family or hers or there was some reason why he couldn’t leave work or she had taken on too many projects to go away from home for an extended time — and so they delayed and delayed and sometimes when they were in bed at night and felt close to each other either because they had made love or just because some of the cold distance between them seemed to give way a little, they would talk again about going to the ocean, they would promise to make the time, they would get down the calendar and mark off a week and determine that the next day they would each do what was necessary to ensure that they could go away. But then something would come up and it wouldn’t happen and after a while they stopped talking about it and then they stopped talking about anything at all.
At some point she realizes that she has said to herself that “they” felt close to each other and “they would determine” to finally take the time to spend together, but in fact she doesn’t know whether it was only she who felt these things, the closeness and the renewed goodwill toward their marriage; she supposes that her husband shared these same emotions. But it is just as likely, given what happened later, that he was feeling and thinking something entirely different, although what it was she cannot know. He is a sealed box to her now, his mind and heart entirely opaque, and what is worse she understands that he always was this way; it only seemed that she could see inside him, all the way to the bottom of him as it is possible to see through shallow water at the edge of the sea.