CHAPTER FOUR

1991

I woke up in the spare bedroom that night, surprised to find my wife lying beside me, staring from across the mattress, her hands folded under her cheek and her eyes shining in the night glow from the window. “How long have you been here?” I said. I felt almost violated at the thought of her creeping around without my knowledge.

“Something’s happened,” she answered.

“What?” I shook myself awake and sat up, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but Susan rolled over and faced the wall. She was crying now. “What happened?” I asked. I was tired, maybe still a little drunk, but she had my attention. Squinting at the curves of her bare white shoulders against the soft amber light of the city, I thought of Hank and Mary, who were barely children anymore. I thought of the gallery and all the precious objects I had collected. “Susan.” I traced my finger down her spine, trying to prepare for one of those dreaded midnight moments, because bad things do happen, though you spend most of your life trying to convince your children that everything will be all right.

“Why do you touch me like a cactus?” My wife rolled over again and looked at me, tears gleaming on her cheeks.

I pulled my hand back and sat up against the headboard. “I just want to know what’s wrong. Did something bad happen, Susan?” I tried to act gentle, as if I were speaking to a child.

“Yes, in my head,” she said. “I was just lying there alone and everything fell apart. I have no one to talk to. I’m going to miss Hank. Then she’ll go.”

I turned on the light and squinted at her. “What exactly is the problem?”

Her eyes were red and sad, and she looked at me like she expected something. “My mother didn’t even know she was pregnant with me until my father saw a bulge in her stomach while she was running through a sprinkler.” Susan paused. “Isn’t that horrible? It never even occurred to her. It was a big joke between them, the fact that she didn’t know. Did you realize that about me?”

“God, Susan,” I said, kicking the covers off my legs. “Is that it?” I felt angry and manipulated, but I laughed it off. I had heard this sort of thing before.

“You don’t take me seriously,” she said. “You don’t even try to act concerned. You think I’m a nag because I want you to deal with things. Like that box.”

“Enough about the box,” I said, getting out of bed. “You can’t just bulldoze in here in the middle of the night and expect me to absorb your mood.” I walked out of the room and closed the door behind me. In the living room, I leaned my elbows on the mantelpiece and tried to rub the grit out of my eyes. It would have been easy to go back to bed, to listen to Susan, to reassure her that I loved her, to go through all the motions that seemed to work for other people. Years ago at the altar, we had been asked by those in charge of the ceremony to accept each other in spite of our weaknesses, to love each other in sickness and in health, and at the time it had seemed normal to promise these things. I had had no sense of myself. She was somewhere to go.

*   *   *

Later I stood outside the bedroom door, knowing it was as simple as turning the knob. I could hear her crying, yet something inside me refused to budge. I felt like I was twelve years old again, and our housekeeper had caught me shooting squirrels out of trees with a BB gun. A few years later, at Moira’s funeral, I had just sat there picturing the way that woman had looked at me—like I was responsible for all the grief and suffering of the world.

Down the hall I detected the dull hum of Mary’s stereo, which upset me. She should have been asleep. I got the uneasy feeling she’d been listening to my argument with Susan through the wall. I went into the living room and stayed up all night, rehanging the paintings in my pajamas, trying to remind myself that my marriage hadn’t always been this way.

The August we moved to Port Saugus, my wife had slept naked with all the windows open. One hot night she had awakened suddenly and stood up, skin white in the moonlight. I watched her at the window, concern edging across her face. Somehow Bucky and Binx, our new beagles, had dug a hole in the dirt underneath the wire of their pen, and she had caught sight of their little puppy bodies staggering across the moonlit yard. Before I could move, Susan had run outside. Still naked, she chased the dogs all the way across the lawn to the edge of the neighbor’s place, her rear end rippling as she ran, her long hair flying like a hippie’s. The neighbor’s lights had snapped on, illuminating her beautiful body, as she dove to the ground on her hands and knees, grabbing for one tiny leg. She rescued both of them then, parading proudly back across the lawn with a spotted body cradled underneath each ample breast. That night I had stood at the window laughing, half amazed at my wife’s intuition, her determination, her shamelessness. But all these years later, stomping around in the middle of the night, rehanging Captain Yardley’s yellowed watercolors, I just wanted to erase her from my mind. I treasured the late night quiet, the sense of the rest of New York sleeping. I thought of Binx and Bucky beneath an oak tree, their bodies turned to tiny skeletons in the soil, and of my parents, buried for over thirty years now. I could barely even remember where.

*   *   *

When I took hank to college three days later, I promised my wife I’d stop at the bank near Port Saugus and pay the absurd amount of money to get whatever was inside that ridiculous safe-deposit box. I’d tried to convince her that I wouldn’t find anything, but it wasn’t good enough. She was relentless and I wanted to end the dispute. Pressing a brass key into my palm, she closed my fist around it, saying, “It was on your old key ring in the file drawer. I can’t imagine what else it’s for.”

“Well, we’ll give it a try,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, her fingers tracing my knuckles. “I know it isn’t easy.”

Leaning forward, I kissed her on the mouth, although I was angry. “I know it isn’t easy” may be my least favorite phrase. But she looked so sad, and in a way I understood. At one point we had had our dreams, and now it all seemed so different, as if all the good parts were over.

After the doorman had helped us pack up the car, and Susan and Mary stood waving at the curb, I realized I’d completely forgotten the key. “Wave to your mother,” I said to Hank quickly, as if that would change things. I suppose I could have gone back upstairs for the key, but I convinced myself that the bank would open the box for me and find nothing to plague us or auction off. Anyway, I was helping out, performing my fatherly duty, taking care of Hank’s move in the hopes of making Susan’s life a little easier. On the highway I let Hank listen to any radio station he wanted, and when he drove too fast I just ignored it. I didn’t really care for the music, but it hid the fact that we had so little to say.

At a bar in the middle of New York State, halfway between home and the college, I bought my son a beer, and we ate peanuts, throwing the shells on the floor. Hank asked, “Are you and Mom happy?”

I looked into my drink, trying to hide my discomfort. “Well, yes,” I said. “We’re very content. Why do you ask?”

“Because you don’t seem that happy.”

“You know, Hank, your mother can be difficult, but that doesn’t make her any less appealing.”

He looked at me as if I weren’t quite right and muttered, “Mom’s not that difficult.”

At school, I carried his lamps, skis, and books through the cinderblock halls and up four flights of stairs. I tried to help him arrange the room. But he had his own ideas and seemed ready for me to get going. Before heading out, I gave him a present I’d been saving, rolled up in some old clothes in the trunk. It was a Zulu ceremonial club, a symbol of manhood, but when he just looked at it, uncertain, I slipped him a fifty, hoping to end the awkwardness. Then the bottom dropped out of a box I’d forgotten to reinforce, a container full of things his mother thought he needed: a tissue dispenser, ceramic bookends he’d made in fourth grade, and a picture of Hank and Mary each holding a struggling beagle, standing together under the oak tree in Port Saugus. The glass over the photograph had shattered but I carefully removed the photo, putting it in my breast pocket and promising to find another frame, a better frame, maybe even get it engraved. When Hank shrugged, I caught a glimpse of what Susan saw in me and suddenly felt ashamed.

I got home late, after Susan had gone to bed, and left early before she rose, jotting down a quick note and leaving it on the kitchen table for her to find. Nothing in the box, it said. I had never lied to Susan so blatantly before, but I told myself there was no harm done. It would be easier for everyone. I stole out of the apartment as the dawn light was easing through the windows and made certain the door latch caught softly, telling myself I was being considerate as I always tried to be.

*   *   *

At the gallery, Francesca spilled her coffee and let out a string of Italian curses as the postal worker tossed down a new stack of bills. Every time the telephone rang I was relieved to find it wasn’t Susan. But of course I knew she was waiting and I had no idea what to say.

That night, as I walked down Fifth Avenue, the sky began to clear. It felt like an omen. The evening sun cut through the leaves, casting an emerald halo over the sidewalk. As the soft lights went on in the windows around me, and happy strangers in safe marriages drifted through their lives, I found myself thinking about the times when Susan and I had still slept beside each other, wondering if it wasn’t possible after all to try again.

*   *   *

A year ago, after our last family trip to Port Saugus and before I started sleeping in the spare bedroom, I took to hiding myself there in the evenings. The room became a sort of sanctuary; no one ever knocked or tried to interrupt. Usually, I just sat there reading, occasionally glancing over at the windows across the street. My neighbors and their quiet comings and goings, their seemingly comforting routines, had always soothed me in a strange way.

One night as I sat watching, the boy’s room just across the way lit up and a woman stepped in front of a poster of a big green crayon, holding her son in her arms. He had his head on her shoulder, his small foot dangling just below her hip. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep on the couch or put his head down on a restaurant table. Perhaps his parents had just let him keep on dreaming. I hadn’t been able to look away, though the mother’s face remained a mystery, clouded by rain.

I could have sworn a moment of understanding passed between us, though I suppose she couldn’t see me sitting in the darkness. It was in the way she’d cradled her elbows in her hands after she put down the child, then moved her palms up and down her arms, rubbing off the chill I, too, was experiencing before reaching up suddenly and pulling the drapes closed.

“So this is what you do in here?”

I turned around to find Susan standing behind me, her back against the door frame, white as a ghost in her nightgown.

“It’s not what you think.”

“How do you know what I think? You never ask.”

“I was watching the storm.” I could have explained it better, how something about the sleeping boy had made me want to go back to the moment when our own children were little and trusting, before they’d started to call everything into question. But that sort of effort always came out sounding convoluted. It exhausted me; Susan wanted everything explained. It was like she wanted to get inside me and poke around.

“I thought you were probably wishing you had a different life,” she said bitterly. Then she closed the door behind her, bolting an invisible latch, sealing us into our separate lives. I didn’t go back to our bed after that, and she didn’t ask me to.

We never talked about the change in sleeping arrangements, and when the children asked, Susan blamed it on concrete things: my snoring, the way I kept her awake by rubbing my feet together like a grasshopper. Over time, we began to believe in these invented explanations ourselves.

*   *   *

“How about a kiss, Susan,” I said, when I got back home.

She stood in the hall with her arms folded under her breasts as if she’d been waiting for me, wearing those pig slippers the children had given her for Christmas one year, with the beady little eyes and ears. She’d put them on immediately and we’d all laughed so hard our sides split. “So the key fit?” she said.

I nodded, warily.

“And the box was empty?”

“That’s what I told you,” I said.

“Are you sure, because if you’re not you should say so now.”

I stared at my feet.

“You didn’t even go,” said my wife, opening her fist and showing me the key. “You couldn’t even do that much.”

“I forgot,” I said.

“Bullshit, Lowell! You had every intention of forgetting. And then you lied.”

“Oh, come on, Susan. Will you lighten up? It’s a box.” I went into the spare room, put my briefcase on the bed, and splashed some water on my face. Then I went into the living room to make myself a drink. A stiff one, with lots of bourbon.

“Oh, wonderful. Does that make it easier?” my wife said. She leaned back into the couch and propped her slippers on the ottoman so that the pig eyes were staring straight at me. “You’re so predictable.”

“Susan.” I laughed. “I’m not paying three thousand dollars for a safe-deposit box full of jack shit.”

“Lowe, I think you know what’s in that box. Admit it.”

“I already told you I don’t know.”

“You don’t know anything. You forget everything. You forget where your feet are. I always have to pick up the pieces, and you can’t even remember I’m alive!”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” I said, although I sat right down in my chair anyway.

Susan took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her bathrobe pocket and lit one.

“When did you start doing that again?” I said.

“Today,” she answered. “I was so depressed about your lie, I went to Dr. Davis. He told me to do something good for myself, something I enjoy, and I’ve always enjoyed this, really. He told me to be honest. And honestly, my smoking years were the happiest of my life.”

“I’d rather you didn’t smoke in the apartment.” I would have rather she not smoke at all. Smoking would kill her. I pictured myself at her bedside, sucking fluid from her lungs with some strange sort of mechanical bellows, the children creeping around in the shadows, shutting doors more softly than children should have to. Except they were grown.

“There are several things I’d rather you didn’t do,” my wife said icily. She sucked in deeply on her cigarette and let out a slow stream of smoke.

“Where’s Mary?” I asked.

“At Jack’s,” my wife answered.

“A boyfriend?”

“A friend who’s a boy.” She looked at me sadly and shook her head. “You don’t know anything about us, do you? You never really bothered.”

Maybe I didn’t want to know. I’d been thinking a lot about Francesca lately, about how she never criticized. She accepted me for my eccentricities, even found them amusing.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve been telling Francesca not to open my mail for years. She listens to me because she trusts and respects me.”

“Is that what you want? Someone who listens to everything you say?” my wife asked, staring at me with her eyes narrowed, her elbow resting on her knee, the smoke from her cigarette curling up around her head. “Because you don’t really say anything. You just go on repeating the same things over and over, like I’m someone you see once a year at a cocktail party.”

“Nobody respects me,” I said. “That’s what I want.”

“Do you respect me?” My wife waited for an answer.

“Just take off those slippers, OK?” This was all I could manage.

“I have tried so hard to draw you out, to make you happy. It’s always been about you, as they say,” she went on, violently stubbing out her cigarette.

The bourbon rose up, stinging the inside of my throat, making me wince. “Now what the hell do you mean by that?” I said.

My wife went quiet, the angry red in her cheeks draining to a shade so pale she suddenly became a girl again, standing in that snowy garden. I couldn’t bear to remember her that way, so long ago.

“I wanted to take care of you because you were so alone and I was alone too. I never thought about what I needed. Now I’m asking for something back.”

“What makes you think I was alone?” I said.

She looked down at her hands and bit her lip, which meant she thought she knew me better than I could know myself.

“What exactly do you need?”

“I’ve told you so many times it’s not worth repeating.” She got up from the couch and started toward the foyer. I knew she was going to bed.

At the doorway she stopped, turned around, and stood there looking at me as a last orange beam of sunlight cut across the room. “I’ve always been good for you,” she said. “In spite of what you believe, I want what’s best. We have to go forward now. We have to.”

I heard her slippers padding away, and then the creak of her bedroom door.

Upstairs, I could hear Butterfield, the Dempseys’ lapdog, skitting back and forth across the floor. I went to the picture window and looked out over Central Park, at the leaves in the gathering dusk, picturing them turning yellow and wondering if we would be here in this same place when it happened again next year. I tried to imagine myself anywhere else but packed into this box of an apartment. Even in the near darkness, I could see straight down through the leaves into the park, to the zoo where I knew the polar bears would be swimming slow laps in their murky green pool as the city churned around them.

I stayed up late, thinking about my son, wondering how much better he was faring without us. Sometimes, it seemed, leaving home was what saved a person. Home could be so complicated. I ate cold chicken out of the icebox without using a plate, ripping the meat off the bone with my teeth. I pored over Das Wrack, borrowed from the Institute of Fine Arts library, staining the jacket with greasy fingers and wondering if I’d have to pay a fine. Did they still do that? Gradually I drank too much, and Susan did not reappear.

Hours later, as I came out of the bathroom, I noticed my daughter leaning against the living room door frame with the cat in her arms. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. I didn’t recognize anything. I was stunned. “You startled me,” I said, grasping the edge of the bathroom door and hiding my drink on the sink behind me. It had always been this way between us. She was often troubled, but whenever I tried to get her to speak up about what the problem was, she’d slam the door or tell me nothing was wrong.

“What are you doing, Dad?” Mary hissed, in a whisper that was more judgmental than conspiratorial. Standing there against the backdrop of the dark hall, she looked like a Velázquez, her hair coming loose from her braid and Tom Osborne’s orange tail twitching beneath her chin. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there.

“Waiting up,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me. “You’re supposed to be home already.”

“Were you drinking in there?” my daughter said, setting Tom down on the floor. She narrowed her eyes and twisted the tip of her braid around her finger.

“No,” I said. “Don’t turn this around. Listen, sixteen is too young to be out past midnight with a boy.”

My daughter stared at me. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“I have no idea.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Honestly, I have no idea what anyone’s doing around here. You women are pretty goddamned self-absorbed and secretive.”

“What are you saying?”

I watched the cat twirl its tail around her leg.

“Just don’t grow up too fast.”

“I can’t wait to grow up,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out of here!”

“Tell me why,” I said, trying to grab her arm. But she pulled away. “I want to know why.”

“You’re drunk,” she said, as she melted back down the dark hall with Tom Osborne at her heels. “It’s so embarrassing.” In spite of my anger, I wanted to follow her, to sit down on the edge of the twin bed and reach out for the hand I had helped create, but then what would I say exactly, Don’t leave us alone?

In the spare bedroom, I sat down in the chair and closed my eyes, straining to hear a sound from my wife’s room. I tried to imagine what she was dreaming as clearly as I’d once been able to in Port Saugus, when we’d lingered in bed together in the mornings before the children woke up and she described every vivid image and physical sensation that had gone through her head the night before. She’d been walking over the river and she’d felt the coldness on the soles of her feet. The whole world was buried in snow. The oceans were frozen. Her mother had driven her car across the Bering Strait. Her stories always chased away the fragments of memories that came to me in the night. Back then, I had never dreamed about the minister or my parents.

Putting my hands together in front of my forehead, I made a sort of steeple out of my fingers, and leaned my elbows on my knees. Something wet slipped down the edge of my thumb, and when I drew my hands away from my face I realized I’d been crying.

*   *   *

I tried to leave early before Susan got up. Then I put the safe-deposit box key in my pocket. Maybe I’d use it. Maybe I’d throw it in the river. I guess I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. But Susan found me in the foyer as I unlocked the door. She stood in her nightgown, its white hem brushing the Oriental rug. She seemed so young and innocent, standing there without the faintest idea what I was up to. “Where are you going?” she said, without the least bit of suspicion. She rubbed her eyes in the gray light.

I thrust the suitcase into the hall, and answered, “I’m claiming the safe-deposit box, like you wanted.”

“Well, part of being married, Lowe, is doing what the other person wants,” she said, covering her mouth to hide a yawn. “Life is a give-and-take.”