Closer

John leans over Iris to touch the tiny pearls scattered over her T-shirt. “Are these from Tahiti? Is this cotton from Egypt? Because that’s what you deserve, Iris.”

She laughs.

He doesn’t. He flops down onto his back and puts an arm over his eyes. “I can feel my hands and I can feel my feet. I can feel that I am here. I mean, all of me, inside and out. This is unusual.” He looks over at her, one eye closed. “Maybe that makes no sense.”

“No, it’s…It makes sense. I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Well, then.”

He looks away again, closes his eyes.

They are lying out in a field near the barn, where they planted seeds for what will be an impressive vegetable garden, should things take. There will be four kinds of lettuce, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peas, beets, corn, basil, carrots, potatoes, watermelon, rhubarb. Iris has never planted a vegetable garden before, didn’t know anything about preparing or amending the soil, didn’t know how far down to dig for the seeds, didn’t know about making the little hills to plant the zucchini in, didn’t know how good it was to plant after a rain, didn’t know anything, really. But she was eager to learn. She helped in every way, and her body is feeling it now. But it’s good pain, the virtuous kind she used to feel after she went to the gym in Boston. This work is better than being in a gym. The sun on your back, the smell of earth on your hands, the birds lining up on tree branches to supervise, the clouds making for a bit of shade, then moving on, the little sounds of industry created by digging and patting, by watering from cleaned-out tin cans. She wonders how John will sustain this garden without water on the land, but if the season stays as rainy as it has been, he has a good chance of getting things going.

“I want to tell you something, Iris.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s not a pleasant thing.”

“That’s okay.” Now she’s a little nervous. Still, “You can tell me anything,” she says, and it has happened again, words falling from her mouth without any forethought.

“I want to tell you why I’m homeless. If I can. I want to try.”

She gets up on one elbow to look down at him, his eyes still closed. The shape of his lips makes her feel as though she’s gone liquid. He has such a noble profile: such a fine forehead, such a straight nose, such beautiful cheekbones. She looks at the beat of his heart in his neck, at the rise of muscles on his chest, down his arms, in his long legs. Dirt is caked in the lines of his hands. She spies a little cut on his palm, untended, and a sense of tenderness all out of proportion to the wound yanks at her stomach. She wants to put her head on his shoulder and feel their arms wrapped around each other, offering that timeless and intimate shelter. She wants to lie very still beside him for hours, while the sounds of the natural world go on about them. Also, she wants to take off her clothes and admit him. Instead, she lies back down and closes her own eyes, to listen.

He speaks in a curious monotone, as though to add inflection would make the telling too hard. “A few days after my wife left me, I was lying in my bed one night and I had to take a piss. And I didn’t care that I had to take a piss. I didn’t care about anything. I just lay there and eventually it was like my bladder burst, and I wet the bed. Then I got up. I got up, and I got my rifle and I crawled out the window and onto the roof and began to shoot. I shot at the stars. I shot at the trees. Someone called the cops and they came and arrested me and took me down to the station and locked me up. They put me in a cell with some other guys who were all a mess like me. And nobody asked any questions of me. Not one person cared that I’d pissed myself, and was reeking. Not one person cared anything about me. And it was the first time since I’d come back from ’Nam that I felt I could relax. It was the first time I didn’t feel the world closing in on me, that…pressure. I thought, ‘I don’t care about anything anymore and I don’t want to. I don’t care about anyone and I don’t want anyone to care about me. I can’t carry it. I can’t carry it.’ After they let me out, I never went home. I hit the streets. Every now and then, I’d try living inside, with other people. Be a roommate. Be a lover. But it never worked for long. I needed to be out. Free. These days, I only…Well, I wake up each morning and wait for the sun to break the sky. And when it doesn’t, I get up.”

He looks over at her. “I know I’m not right. I won’t ever be right again. There are days when I feel held together by cobwebs. But then there are other days. Like this one.”

Iris thinks of Maddy at the last Confession Club. She thinks of the admission that Karen Lundgren made about her own difficulties. All around are broken people, doing the best they can. And getting better. She has faith that John can, too. But she has a question she wants to ask. It is not her business, really. Yet it is, because of the gentle entanglement they have begun. Seeds in the ground. She clears her throat, then speaks quietly. “Why did your wife leave you?”

For a long time, he says nothing. Then, “That’s another story.” He stands and looks up at the sky. “It’ll be dark soon. Let’s go into the house now and not talk anymore. Will you come into the house with me, Iris? And after, we’ll go to dinner?”

She knows what he’s asking. And she rises to her feet and takes his hand.

A lot of people would have something to say about this, Iris and her homeless man. Here’s what she has to say about this: Good.


Iris is about halfway home from being with John when her confidence fades. She turns off the radio and begins a self-administered interrogation: What are you doing? This man is clearly unstable! What are you doing? Yes, a million people have doubts and insecurities, questions of self-worth, but a man who shoots a rifle from the roof?

When she pulls into the driveway, she sees the dim figure of Maddy sitting on the porch steps, holding a glass of wine. She sits down beside her. “Hey,” she says, wearily.

“Well, hey,” Maddy says, and if her voice were a dog it would have its ears perked up. “Want a glass of wine?”

Iris nods. While Maddy goes into the house to fetch it, Iris thinks about whether to tell Maddy what has happened. No. Not yet.

Maddy comes out onto the porch again, and the screen door bangs behind her. “Shhhh!” she tells it. She sits beside Iris, gives her a glass, and holds up her own to clink. The women take a sip and then Maddy says, “You slept with him, didn’t you?”

“Oh, God,” Iris says, and drops her head.

“No judgment here,” Maddy says. “He looks like the Marlboro man.”

Iris looks at her and frowns. “How do you know about the Marlboro man?”

“I lived with old folks, remember?”

Iris guesses that to Maddy, she’s old folks, too.

“What did you do tonight?” Iris asks.

“Well. It was a very exciting evening around here. First I watched a candle lift water, courtesy of Link. He explained very clearly to Nola and me why it happened, and you know what? I still don’t get it. He put some water on a saucer. Then he put a soda bottle over a lit candle that had been anchored there. When the flame went out, the water rose. Can you think why?”

“Don’t look at me,” Iris says.

“He also used the static electricity of a comb to bend a stream of water.”

“Okay…”

“You know what?” Maddy says. “I’m a little worried about him. It’s too much, these experiments all the time. It’s as though he’s looking for something not for fun, but for…I don’t know. It makes me uneasy.”

“What does Nola think about the experiments?”

Maddy laughs. “Oh, well, she’s thrilled! She can’t get enough of these experiments. I suppose next she’ll be asking me for a lab coat with her name stitched over the pocket.”

“We should make her one,” Iris says.

“You want to?”

“Sure.”

“Can you sew?”

“No. Can you?”

“Nope.”

Iris shrugs. “How hard can it be? We’ve got Lucille’s old sewing machine and I’ll bet she kept the instruction manual. She loved her instruction manuals.”

“That’s true.”

The women fall silent, and then Maddy says, “So I talked to Matthew today.”

“And?”

“I think he’s just about had enough.”

“Did you ask him about moving back here?”

“It has to be the right time. It’ll be a long conversation. Believe me, he wasn’t in the right frame of mind. He was angry.”

“He misses you,” Iris says.

“He misses Nola.”

“And you.

Maddy turns to her. “I don’t know what to do. This is where I want to be. We don’t even lock the door here.”

“We should, though,” says Iris.

“We should.”

“We have Nola to think about.”

“Yes. I think about her all the time. In the beginning, when she was so little, it was easy. It’s getting harder now, to try to do a good job with her. I so want to do a good job with her.

“I’m not happy in New York, Iris. You come out your door there and you’re in a sea of people you don’t know. I guess I never realized until I left how much I depend on familiarity. A lot of people talk about how oppressive small towns are, but for me, they’re freeing. And I don’t know if New York is the right place for Nola, either. Here, she can go outside in the backyard to play, she has a friend….Oh, I know he’s too old for her, but when she starts at the School House, she’ll make—”

“So she definitely is going?”

Maddy nods. “I paid the registration fee for both summer sessions today. You know what Nola said when I told her she’d be going to school soon? She said, ‘But I have to help Link. How can I do both things? I’ll be at my whiz end!’ ”

Iris laughs, then grows serious. “Maddy, I wonder if you just told Matthew—”

“Right now,” Maddy says, “I want to talk about you. I want to know if John was as good as he looks.”

“Better,” Iris says.

“He’s Irish, right?”

“Right.”

“Good on you both,” Maddy says. Then, standing, “I’m beat. I’m going in. You coming?”

“I’ll stay out for just a bit more,” Iris says.

Through the screen door, she hears Maddy rinse out her glass in the kitchen, hears her ascend the stairs. She knows Maddy will tiptoe in and stare at Nola sleeping, as she does every night before she goes to bed. Iris does it sometimes, too. She didn’t get a child of her own, no, but what a gift to have one living here now. She hopes when Maddy finally gets around to asking Matthew if he’ll move back, he’ll agree. If he doesn’t…

She finishes the last of the wine in her glass and thinks of John’s parting words to her tonight. They made love, they went to dinner at a small restaurant he’d found the next town over, Hidey’s Hole, the best brisket Iris ever tasted. Then they came back to the farm and they lay again on his bed made of hay. As he watched her dress to leave, John said, “Your back reminds me of a swan.” He sighed. “Oh, Iris. Bad news. Bad news. I think I am in love with you.”

She walked over to him and sat down. “Bad news indeed.”

“A veritable disaster,” he said.

“Nothing could be worse,” she said. “What will we do?”

He studied her face, ran his fingers so lightly up her arm she shivered. “We’ll see,” he said.