Many years later, knots of grief cinched intractably within her, Ruth still urged her memory back to their first evening together: drinks at a posh restaurant on the shores of Lake Erie, how Gus offered to pay long before the bartender even noticed them, how he spoke so earnestly of dovetail joints. He wore a flannel shirt and carpenter’s jeans with fabric gone thin at the knees. He was wiry as a cornstalk and always would be. That night he spoke of how he wanted to make desks. “Desks!” he said, smiling as if he knew how absurd it sounded. For now he had his union card and worked what jobs came his way.
Ruth was working on her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Case Western, studying stochastics. She spoke at length about her research, which involved probability theory, random variables, and chaotic systems. Gus listened with genuine interest, and when she finally paused to say, “Does that make sense?” he admitted that he wasn’t a graduate student, wasn’t a student at all, had in fact never been to a college campus. “I doubt I can even spell stochastic,” he said, “but I love listening to you talk about it.” The only fancy bit of math he knew was about Euclidean planes requiring three points, and this only because he felt strongly that all desks—all tables of any kind—should have only three legs. Two legs could not balance a load, but four created wobbles. Three created a perfect Euclidean plane.
His knowledge seemed so practical compared to her own—how to fix squeaky floorboards, what made a diesel engine different, why oak leaves fell later in the season than maple leaves. She had never met anyone like him at Case or back home in Boston. He was wholly without pretension, frequently offered remarkable compliments, but quickly grew embarrassed when similar compliments were returned. Even that name of his, Gus, seemed clipped short, as if his mother and father considered extra syllables an extravagance.
When the bartender did finally bring the check, Gus reached for his wallet and realized he didn’t have nearly enough money. Who had ever heard of $6 bottles of beer? Cold shame spread over him, and he knew immediately that such a gaff would quash the small, snug world they had built during their evening together. But Ruth thought little of it, pulling out a wad of cash while Gus went quiet like a penitent little Catholic boy, which of course he was. What Ruth never told him—never told anyone—was that it was his mortification over such a trifle, so utterly sincere, that made her love him immediately.
He visited her family before she visited his. Theirs was a three-and-a-half-story house of deep maroon brick and cream trim in Beacon Hill and boasted a view of Boston Common. The sidewalks were of cockeyed brick, framed by cobblestones, and the shrubs were manicured into perfect moons.
They sat on a back veranda and ate eggs Florentine. Gus never did see the kitchen or who had prepared the meal. Her father flinched when they shook hands—just a small twitch, barely perceptible—and only later did Gus realize this was because he was a vascular surgeon of some note, ever afraid of rough calluses and strong grips. Her mother had tight gray hair and picked at her food with a single tine of her fork. Gus felt her eyes that morning as he reached for what was almost certainly the improper cutlery.
After brunch, the men separated from the women in a way that felt mannered and Edwardian. Gus stood next to her father on the front stoop and drank down a glass of coconut rum. They watched dog walkers wander the Common. His eyes cruised around all the sights. He had never been so far east, had never experienced the extravagance of an old city. For a long while they didn’t speak, and he felt as if he was being tested. Who could maintain the silence longer? Eventually, her father said, “Desks.” He nodded ever so slightly. “Is that a growth industry?” It wasn’t entirely clear what the suggestion was. Was he afraid he would have to support them himself if they got married? Embarrassed that his daughter was dating a man who owned more than one hammer? Or was this just the easy contempt that New Englanders reserve for midwesterners?
“They didn’t know what to make of you,” Ruth said on the drive back to Cleveland.
“Unfortunately, I think they knew exactly what to make of me.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s their problem.”
Ruth wanted arguments to resolve things, but Gus just needed them to end as soon as possible.
“Stop apologizing,” she would say. “You’re allowed to disagree.”
“But I’m sorry. I hate this.”
“If you want to sit in a booth instead of a table, you have to say so.”
“I don’t have an opinion. You choose.”
“You need to have more opinions.”
“About tables and booths?”
So Ruth would always win the fights, which was somehow worse than losing them. He made her feel spoiled, not by anything he did or said but because she was and he wasn’t. She had never realized it before then. It made her feel cold, like a bully.
Gus’s father lived at the end of a long lane in Medina County. Charming Ohio farm country. Ruth searched the cabinets until she found the hand mixer and started making her special pepper biscuit recipe. She chided his father for eating with a napkin tucked into his shirt but in a way that felt playful, like some ancestral joke that ranged back over the decades.
His mother had been dead long enough that they didn’t think to explain what had happened. It was clear enough that they both liked having a woman in the house again.
“A doctorate,” his father said, shaking his head. “Must be a lot of work.”
“I guess I’ve always known I would have to do it,” Ruth said. She then drank off the last bit of her coffee and stared out the window at the flat green fields.
Later, while Gus hand-washed the dishes, Ruth sat at the table with his father. “That sounds like some house you have there in Boston,” he said. They hadn’t been speaking of home or her family. It was obvious how close Gus was to his father.
“It’s so lovely here,” Ruth said. “The quiet, I guess I mean. And there’s something about always being able to see the horizon that’s comforting.”
That afternoon, Gus walked her the length of the property, down long fencerows where he showed her how to scare up rabbits from their dens until she told him to stop being mean. She wanted to pet a chicken but lost her nerve at the last instant. They tried to reach around the ancient bur oak in the barnyard, the largest tree she had ever seen, but even together their arms were swallowed up by its girth. “We call her Queen Elizabeth,” he said, explaining that the tree was roughly the same age as Shakespeare. She had always thought New England was old. Such grandeur, she thought, and such different grandeur than what she was accustomed to. How could something be so regal and so unassuming at the same time?
He led her through the outbuildings full of equipment. Where the wood siding met the ground it had mostly shriveled up with rot. Finally he guided her into the workshop, where she quizzed him on what each tool did, and he explained it to her, carefully and without a trace of smugness. The planer and the table saw and the jointer—they had all been his grandfather’s, had been made in Germany. Nothing even approached their quality anymore. She pulled open drawers and fingered drill bits and awls and rasps. “There’s a tool for everything,” he told her, “and most of them are good for only one very specific thing.”
“This will all be yours one day,” she said, and he said, “Not soon, I hope.”
In the middle of the floor sat a magnificent desk, wood still raw and unstained. Clean lines, trim like Gus himself. Not a trace of excess flourish to be seen. Solid, squared legs, tapered to a slender tip. Three legs only, always three legs, he said, again referencing the perfection of a Euclidean plane. Old-growth walnut, he went on, taking her hand and tracing it over the grain pattern, all harvested locally. He pointed out the dovetails in the lap drawer, the through-mortises on the legs. She felt she understood him better then, the artist lurking underneath those flannel shirts of his.
“It’s for your father,” he told her.
They had each other there on the desk. He was slow and deliberate, polite even in lovemaking, his callused hand never leaving the curve of her neck. It smelled of sawdust, and for the rest of her life, when she smelled that smell, flickers of arousal would warm her from the inside out.
A growing swell of energy between them, they each felt it, the way it lashed them together. Slowly they wormed themselves into each other’s lives, not always the grandest moments—holidays or great traumas—but the smaller, daily gestures: kissing with bad breath, boiling hot dogs for dinner, changing flat tires in the brutal Cleveland winter.
They talked about how happy they were as if afraid that they must decipher it daily, how astonishing it all was, or risk it diluting right in front of them.
“I don’t want to take your name,” Ruth said. “I’ve had this name all my life and I’m used to it now.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But what about our kids? It’ll be too confusing.”
“Your mother wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Her.” She looked out the window, squinting into the sun. “We both know I won’t hyphenate.”
“We could make a new name. Both of us.”
“Something fun?”
“Something tough.”
They each wrote down their choices. She chose Ivers. He chose Bazooka.
In the end, she took his name because they didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives explaining it at dinner parties.
Ruth miscarried deep into her second trimester. A problem with the umbilical cord. For a week they stayed in their little apartment, curtains drawn, the air thick like after rain. Sometimes she wanted to be close to him, nuzzling into his chest, and other times she just needed him not to look at her. These waves came suddenly, and he learned how to recognize them. He didn’t understand them, but he knew it wasn’t important that he did.
“I’m okay,” she insisted, “but I just can’t stop picturing the cord like a noose around his little neck.” For a long while she went back to the diaphragm without telling Gus. She was terrified of her own body and didn’t want him to know. Sex changed from something they did together into something that was done to her.
They spent weekends with his father on the farm and never told her parents at all. She took the rest of the semester off, technically to finish her dissertation, though she accomplished little. They adopted a dog, which generally brought more agony than joy. When it pooped on the carpet, Gus chased it around with a drywall hammer; when it ran away he stapled signs to telephone poles. He had wanted an Irish Setter, but Ruth wanted a Pomeranian. He joked with friends that they compromised by getting a Pomeranian.
A few months later they went out to dinner and drank too much wine. She laughed like a teenager and sat cross-legged in her chair. They tossed bits of uncooked macaroni into each other’s glasses and then apologized to their waiter. When dessert came she got quiet again as if some shadow had descended. She stared into her glass and picked at the polish on her forefinger. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said, and he knew then they would haul this on their backs for the rest of their lives.
Her father died in March, and his father died in June. They both realized then that the last traces of childhood were gone. She thought the wakes would be dramatically different, but they weren’t, hushed voices and hollow platitudes for rich people and poor people alike. She wasn’t terribly sad but had to pretend she was; he was devastated but had to act like he wasn’t. And so for several months it seemed as if they weren’t talking to each other so much as to the emissaries they sent out into the world.
One night she found him sitting on the toilet lid. The door was closed and the light was off, but she knew he was in there. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m trying.”
She sat on the floor in front of him. The Pomeranian stood in the doorway, guarding them, like it knew things weren’t right.
“He told me once that your desks were his favorite things.” His father had never really said that to her, but she inferred a great deal from his long proud looks.
They writhed together there on the cold tile floor. He was manic, desperate, even a bit rough with her, which he never was before or after.
They named her Annabelle. They had never been so exhausted or so happy. Gus could scarcely bring himself to take on jobs that stole him away. Ruth officially abandoned her dissertation, all those years of work that suddenly seemed frivolous.
Gus built Annabelle a crib of cherry, with lovely tapered spindles and long finger joints. He was afraid of SIDS—it was all you ever saw on the local news—and so he often slept in the chair next to the crib. He strummed a toy ukulele for her. It wasn’t long before Annabelle learned how to smile. D minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out of reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G, and little Annabelle would smile and kick.
One evening when Gus was working late, Ruth was alone with Annabelle. They hadn’t eaten yet, and she was trying to apply for jobs. Their budget had become frighteningly thin. She stirred a pot on the stove and held Annabelle and scrolled through a list of academic positions, then secretarial ones. It was all too much. She wanted to scream and chuck rocks through the windows. Here she was: a mother, but was she anything else? Anything at all? Motherhood had seized her destiny while she had been too busy to notice. Fathers were somehow exempt from this fate. She hated Gus for being gone, hated herself for quitting her dissertation, hated Ohio most of all. Then Annabelle threw up on her shoulder, and before Ruth could clean it up or set her down, her daughter had started gumming up the vomit.
She told Gus about it when he got home.
“She ate her own puke?”
“Sorry. Jesus.”
“What color was the puke?”
“I don’t know. Purple maybe? I think we had plums earlier.” Gus held Annabelle up and looked at her. “Hi, there, my little puke-eater. Next time we could cook it for you first. That seems like our job. Your mother can do wonders with garlic and a little olive oil. You could have yourself a nice puke fritter!”
He gave her a bath and read her one book after another before bed. Ruth listened from outside the bedroom door as Gus made his outlandish voices and Annabelle giggled. It often worked this way: all day she fought off a manic craving for a break, only to find that when it finally came, there was little joy in it. By the time she got back to her job applications, the toyish strums of the ukulele pulsed out from the bedroom, washing over her like a sleeping serum.
Gus would sometimes lay playful traps for her, which made her feel young and loved:
“If you had to change one thing about me, what would it be?” he asked.
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s the point.”
She thought for a moment. “I’d make you twenty pounds heavier.”
“I’m serious.”
“I am too,” she said. “It would make me feel thinner. I gain weight like a normal person but you just keep on looking like some teenage bronco rider.”
Years later, when she emptied the trash bin in his workshop, she found dozens of empty Archway cookie packages. At first she was terribly confused—he had virtually no sweet tooth to speak of—and only after some thought did she remember.
Annabelle started preschool, and suddenly every wall in the house grew crowded with crayon artwork. Their friends became the parents of Annabelle’s classmates, their free time split between swimming lessons and playgrounds and the zoo. Ruth took a position as an office manager for a pet food distributor. Gus began selling a few more desks, working late rehabbing grand staircases in Cleveland Heights and Willoughby and Hudson. They bought an old Craftsman home with pipes that knocked when they flushed toilets. They put rugs over the old oak floors and let Annabelle chase them from room to room while she screamed like a Viking. Blanket forts dominated their living room for weeks at a time. They raked leaves and jumped in the piles. They became experts about dinosaurs and then sea shells and then paper airplane design.
Without noticing it, they had created an entire country with its own language and customs and mythologies and even defensive perimeters. Their own lines allowed few breaches. Their country was complete on its own. A wide world existed beyond their borders, they could still hear its bustling chaos, but they were content to ignore it and to be ignored in kind.
The doctors found the tumor in Annabelle’s brain when she was four years old. It was the size of a robin’s egg, malignant, and needed to come out.
“But you can do surgery, can’t you?” Ruth asked.
“We’re not sure yet,” the doctor said. That phrase—We’re not sure yet—became an oft-heard refrain through months of consultations, and they learned it had a very specific meaning: We are quite sure, and it’s bad news.
They saw specialists in a dozen cities: Pittsburgh, Orlando, Denver, Los Angeles, Toronto. Ruth was ferocious in her research, in her preparation for each appointment, bringing with her pages of questions that she asked like accusations. The numbers gave her something to focus on, though quantifying bad luck in such a way also made her want to murder the universe.
“Do you know the odds of this happening?” Ruth asked one time. “Sixty-eight million to one,” she said. “Sixty-eight million.”
Gus looked down at her legal pad, the scratches and strange symbols, Greek or Latin, perhaps. He sometimes forgot about her imposing mathematical pedigree, which now became a prison, intellect stunting emotion. What was the point of calculating probabilities or the effects of random elements? Gus wanted to know. They were here already. These calculations served only to make him feel like a helpless victim. What he didn’t understand, of course, was that they allowed Ruth a respite, precious moments of cold, abstract thought. Through them, she could quarantine her despair so that it would not pollute everyone around her.
They drove to Boston to see a specialist her father had known at Mass General. She was from Mumbai and had a long name that Gus could not pronounce. The doctor paged through Annabelle’s chart, frowning and shaking her head without speaking. When she finally looked up, she smiled at them, but it was the kind of smile offered to a dear friend at a funeral.
“No more bad news,” Ruth said.
This specialist was aiming to lead a trial of an experimental treatment that involved first inducing a coma and then utilizing a special cocktail of drugs that would, perhaps, target the ravenous tumor.
“She’s a good candidate, isn’t she?” Ruth asked, not completely a question.
The doctor leaned in with a bowl of candy and told Annabelle to take as much as she could hold. Ruth realized then that this doctor had done this many times, was as expert in delivering bad news as she was in the operating room.
“I won’t presume to understand what you are going through,” she said. She spoke with that peculiar British Indian accent, which Ruth decided meant she had likely been educated at Cambridge or Oxford. “My father was a particle physicist and my mother died when I was a teenager. He could be a harsh man, largely devoid of human sentiment. He forbade me grieving over my mother’s death because he believed there was no reason, scientifically speaking, to do so. According to the law of conservation of mass, she was still with us. Mass cannot be created or destroyed, of course. In fact, he pointed out, the very atoms from my mother’s body were now repurposed in our own bodies. This is true of every human who has ever lived. Every human currently alive is composed of the very atoms of every person who has ever lived. Every person! Billions of atoms from each person. Can you imagine? A billion atoms that make me a person once made Shakespeare a person, and Cleopatra and Gandhi and Einstein.”
“Also Hitler and Stalin,” Ruth said. “Genghis Khan, Oliver Cromwell, Caligula, Attila, Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“Ruth.”
The doctor ignored this and handed Annabelle another sucker.
“So, scientifically speaking,” Ruth said, “we cannot be sad.”
“Ruth,” Gus said, more pleading than scolding.
“Well,” the doctor said but then said nothing else.
Gus insisted on making the casket himself, long hours alone in the workshop, and he was unable to see the strange selfishness of this. It was a refuge he refused to share with her. He fixated most on the casket dimensions, hardly larger than a laundry basket.
“Why are you punishing yourself like this?” Ruth asked.
“She’ll be in there forever.”
“Come home,” she said, but he had already gone back to work.
They couldn’t even hold hands at the funeral or feign unity at the wake. They each faced the same choice at this moment—anger or sadness—and each opted for anger. Perhaps this was not a conscious decision. The world had drained them of compassion until no residue remained. Anger seemed easier, cleaner, almost tangible. But in the coming years, each of them would look back at this time, searching for the precise moment they pivoted away from each other, because if they could isolate the fulcrum, the singularity, perhaps some wormhole would sprout and revive a conduit to the past.
Ruth said awful things and then felt horrible about them, but then she would say more awful things. It was an addiction she could not kick, as if discarding her grief and forcing him to bear it instead. You can’t play ukulele and fix this, you know. You always wanted a boy anyway. She’ll never need one of your desks now.
If Ruth said awful things, Gus said nothing at all. He retreated to the farm, to the workshop, where he could easily make her feel like an interloper. He spent whole days there, while Ruth sat at home, waiting for him to return to her, though he never truly did. She began to spend weekends in Boston. For months they lingered on this way, trapped in a stalemate.
Ruth appeared at the workshop one afternoon. Gus had been mindlessly sanding the tapered legs of a desk for several hours, his arm ached from it, and as he stood to look at his work, he realized he had sanded so much that the third leg was now noticeably thinner than its counterparts.
Ruth sighed. “I need a break.”
“Me too,” he said.
“From you. From all of this. I don’t expect you to understand.”
Gus dropped the sanding block, and it rattled on the concrete floor.
“Do you have to act like this?”
“How am I acting?”
“Like the spoiled little rich girl.”
He’d never once spoken to her that way. Halfway through saying it he already felt horrible. He didn’t love her any less now, but everything around them had changed, as if they were standing still while a storm swept through around them.
Ruth sat down on the cold concrete and suddenly looked very young and very fragile. For a moment Gus had some hope, the smallest breach. But her face was drawn, had grown tighter, menacing.
“We can use a lawyer we know,” she said. “Charlie’s brother, I guess. Keep it all simple.”
“Simple,” he said.
It was stunning how quickly their country could crumble. Civil war. A dozen years to construct but only a few months to collapse.
Gus started moving his things out of the house the next week. At first Ruth was still there, but by the time he was nearly finished, she managed to be absent. The last hours he moved slowly, one small box at a time, adding in extra, unnecessary trips. What did he hope for? A change of heart at the last minute? A dramatic reconciliation where they fell to the wet ground and kissed?
He found a note on the kitchen counter, just a small Post-it, as if Ruth did not even care if Gus found it: It’s different for mothers.
He stared at the letter. It demanded that he develop a fresh emotional response, one that hadn’t yet been charted and classified by scientists: profoundly sad and confused and resentful and sad again around the edges. Such hardness in her. Jesus, he thought, halfway wishing he were capable of such hardness also. How easily grief could mutate into something else entirely. She was right, of course: there were things that only mothers were capable of, like lifting cars off their children during tornadoes. Like this.
He left the note where it was. He needed her to wonder for the rest of her life if he even saw it. Initially, he had planned on leaving her the Pomeranian, but the note stopped him. He made room in the front seat, where it curled into a ball and fell asleep as they drove away.
Gus moved back to the farm. He leased the land: soy, wheat, corn, hay. Days he worked jobs in Cleveland—elaborate built-ins, mantels, newel posts hickory spindles on wide staircases—and evenings he built desks, the glow of the old workshop spilling into the barnyard late into the night. He ate microwave dinners in his underwear and left the telephone off the hook. He became a ghost, the sort of man that people in a small town recognize, though no one can recall ever speaking to.
Ruth sold the house to the first offer. She couldn’t be in Ohio any longer. She moved back to Boston, where her mother still lived, and soon she was attending fundraisers and charity auctions in the ballrooms of the most elegant old hotels. She found herself surrounded by people so wealthy they had no need to locate Ohio on a map. The city offered as many distractions as she needed, faces new to her and those whom she had known many years earlier when they were thinner and more eager.
Ruth eventually settled in with a man named Harold Gutman. He had worked as an intern under her father and kept a trimmed beard, mostly gray now, and had a single bumper sticker on his BMW, which read, very simply, “DOCTOR.” Ruth found this a strange and gaudy touch for a man who otherwise largely passed through the world undetected. When he started speaking of marriage, she would turn away and tell him that she wasn’t so sure, not yet. She still had so many things to sort out, tangled linkages in her brain. It was in the evenings when Harold Gutman would invariably make such hints, always after a few drinks. He never proposed outright, only took her temperature, which was icy for many years, though he was convinced a thaw would eventually come.
“I’m just not sure,” Ruth would always say if he pressed her. Of course, she was perfectly sure, perfectly sure she did not want to marry Harold Gutman, did not want to marry again, ever.
It was this incessant talk of marriage which pushed her back into her dissertation. She needed something to occupy her evenings in order avoid Harold Gutman’s affections, and so she holed herself up in the wood-paneled study, finally finishing eight years after Annabelle’s death. She declined to walk at the commencement ceremony because she did not want to travel back to Cleveland. Instead, she strolled the Back Bay streets alone, and when she returned to their apartment, she found on her desk a sticker of the letter S, which Harold Gutman had left for her. Together they would be “DOCTORS” for all the world to see.
When the Pomeranian died, Gus buried it behind the barn. He stood in front of the old rotary wall phone, ready to dial Ruth and deliver the news. It was all he could think to do. Should he or not? They hadn’t spoken in years. He wouldn’t even know how to say hello. Old lovers were far worse than strangers. Should he use her name or not?
Hello, Ruth.
Ruth, hello, it’s Gus.
Hi, there, it’s me.
Ruthie, dear, I’m sorry to deliver such bad news.
When he finally dialed, a man’s voice answered, and he hung up immediately.
Ruth took an adjunct position at a local community college, teaching a course or two each semester. It felt like a concession, but she ended up liking her students, most of whom were bright and engaged. Some days she would stay on campus for eight or ten hours, teaching and meeting with students. She loved most how they would stomp into her office, breathless and full of absurd excuses. She would come home and tell Harold Gutman about them. “Even when they say ridiculous things, they’re so enthusiastic about it,” she said.
“What about children then?” Harold Gutman asked her one evening after a benefit at the Park Plaza. He’d allowed himself an extra glass of wine and was feeling warm and confident.
She squinted, though it was dark in their bedroom. “We’re too old for that, Harold.” She was only forty-six but felt much older.
“We could adopt.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, but no, we couldn’t.”
Harold Gutman didn’t pursue it after that. No marriage, no family of their own. Instead, her students would become her children, in a way that was common but not terribly healthy.
When a full-time teaching post opened up, Ruth took it. “If your father were still alive” was all her mother would say to the news, which was the harshest sort of admonishment she could muster at the thought of a community college. Harold Gutman too seemed perplexed. “Isn’t it terribly repetitive?” he asked, and she told him that of course it was. “I don’t like surprises or changes the way I used to.”
At a conference in Phoenix, she slept with a young assistant professor of statistics. He was barely thirty and played video games on his cell phone. He was aggressive in bed like an upperclassman in a fraternity. In the morning, when she woke and saw him there splayed atop the covers, naked and hairy, she immediately thought of what a horrible thing she had just done to Gus. How would she admit this to him? Would he ever forgive her? It was only at breakfast, when they sat in relative silence, that she realized she meant Harold Gutman. It was Harold Gutman whom she had betrayed.
Several years later Ruth took a stroll down Newbury Street, not so much interested in buying anything as in walking the promenade the way people do after a harsh winter. She was just about to turn back for home when she saw in the front window of a store a three-legged desk. That unmistakable aesthetic: austere, unassuming, clean.
“It’s a gorgeous piece, isn’t it?” the salesman said. He wore a tailored vest, no tie, buttons undone through the hollow of his chest.
“It’s beautiful.”
“A relatively new artist, just breaking onto the scene in the last few years. He lives in Iowa, I believe—Iowa or Ohio—and crafts everything individually, which is unheard of anymore.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said again.
“This desk is made from bur oak and features through-mortises and a tripod—all of his desks do.” He eased out the lap drawer. “He does all the dovetails by hand, no jig. You can see the Shaker and Pennsylvania Dutch influences, of course, but he has carved out new territory. Remarkable work, lines as distinct as I’ve seen since Tom Moser.”
Ruth traced her fingers across the edges of the desktop. She could smell the workshop, the arousal taking shape in her. Sparks that had hidden themselves away, dormant for many years.
“We’re thrilled to have some of his pieces here,” the salesman said. He was young and very fashionable and seemed afraid of Ruth’s silence. “Ordinarily our New York and London stores get first crack, but they’ve done remarkably well here. All the young students, perhaps. People want smaller, cleaner desks now. Computers are smaller than ever. No more of those shelved, multilevel monstrosities of the eighties and nineties. That’s the trend, anyway.” He slid the lap drawer back in. “Quite the visionary.”
The pain from this encounter was real, and yet so was the excitement. Ruth was alternately sad and angry, though she couldn’t deny she felt more alive than she had in many years. She became convinced Gus’s aim was to torture her. He could have sold desks anywhere. Why Boston? Why so close to her parents’ old brownstone? Clearly, he wanted to force a confrontation between them where he would reveal to her . . . what? His children, his beautiful new wife? How he had survived and moved on? He would not say a word, but he would parade them in front of her. That was very like him, the quietest possible revenge.
But then other days she thought that perhaps Gus simply wanted to see her and didn’t know how. He would kiss her on the cheek, tell her how he had missed her, how differently his life had ended up without her. And then he would look down and say, “Could we just talk about her now?” And she would cry, and he would cry, and they would talk about her all night.
She found herself distracted during her lectures, and more than once she had to excuse herself into the hallway. For months this happened at regular—and then increasing—intervals. Harold Gutman noticed the change in her, but she told him it was just the stress of teaching.
Gus had burrowed his way back into that small nook of her brain where the trauma still lingered, quiet for many years but never truly dormant. His appearance had disturbed a system at rest, jolting it back into a slow but accelerating orbit that would slowly consume her. But Ruth surrendered to this freely, as if leaning into a strong wind, considering for the first time in many years that perhaps memory can exist without despair.
Harold Gutman didn’t understand why he needed a new desk. His old one worked perfectly well, and besides, he was used to it.
“This one is just better,” Ruth said.
“I liked all the drawers and nooks in my old one. Where will I put everything now?”
“You’ll get rid of things. That’s the point.”
He frowned, unconvinced. She sauntered over to the desk, leaned against its edge, and slid off her heels. She unbuttoned her blouse and leaned back, trying to appear seductive but feeling ridiculous.
“What are you doing?” Harold Gutman asked.
“I’m showing you how much better this desk is.”
“But we have a bed, a big comfortable bed. And I don’t think it can support us both. It seems to be missing one leg.”
She bought more desks, at first just to furnish guest bedrooms, then two more for the house Harold Gutman kept on the Cape, then more that she put directly into a storage bay. Eventually, the young furniture salesman asked what she’d been hoping he’d ask. “I’d be happy to arrange an introduction,” he said, “for such a generous fan of his work. He’s in town occasionally.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ruth said, suddenly feeling diffident as a teenager.
“I haven’t met him myself, but he’s supposed to be a modest, quiet sort of man. With all his success, he supposedly still lives in an old farmhouse in the middle of Iowa.”
She told him it wasn’t at all necessary, there was no need to go to such trouble. She just adored his desks was all. The salesman shrugged, unconcerned. Later that night, though, she dialed the number on his business card and told him that she had changed her mind. She would like to meet the artist the next time he came to Boston.
It was a Saturday in October when she arrived at the store to see him. She told Harold Gutman she had an appointment with a student, and he nodded, suspecting a lie was hidden somewhere. He had noticed her fussing in the mirror far longer than usual. They both knew they were clinging to the threads of whatever they had, like the last day of a vacation that is spent mostly on travel.
Wet leaves painted the sidewalks on Newbury Street. When she entered the store, Gus’s back was to her, but he was the same as ever. Hadn’t gained a single pound, though he’d gone fully gray. He wore carpenter’s jeans and a flannel shirt. As she drew nearer she realized that the pants weren’t just of a style; they were the exact pair he often wore years earlier. She recognized a stain above the left pocket.
How long had it been? She’d become horrible with dates. Twenty years? That sounded about right.
“Jesus,” he said when he turned around. It took him several moments before he could compose himself. Ruth felt absurd. She had hoped that he knew, that he had actively targeted Boston, but Gus seemed truly shocked.
They strolled down Newbury Street. Gus clasped his hands behind his back and took long, loping strides. He glanced over at her and smiled that calm smile she remembered. Strangers often took this for arrogance, but she knew it was just his quiet nature. Silence is something that should be protected, his father used to say.
“How’s the farm?” she asked.
“The same.” He stopped walking and looked up at the roofs of the buildings, tarnished copper and clay tile. He frowned. “That’s not true. I don’t know why I just said that. Queen Elizabeth died,” he said. “Came down in a bad storm a few years ago.”
“No!” she said.
He nodded. “More than a few years ago now, I guess. I built a kiln next to the barn and cured all the lumber I could, some thousands of board-feet.”
“And the desks?”
He nodded. “Bur oak is just about all I’ve worked with ever since.”
“I could tell you still use the handsaw for the dovetails. You always did hate those jigs.”
“You do something one certain way for long enough, and you become incapable of doing it any other way.” It was just like him to say something like that. But it made her feel more like a client than the mother of his dead daughter.
He stepped off the curb to allow a mother with a stroller to pass. Ruth watched the woman and child move away from them, then disappear around the corner.
“I suppose Queen Elizabeth is still in our bodies, isn’t she? Or her atoms anyway.”
Gus looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then he remembered. He nodded but said nothing.
They walked on in silence for several minutes, and then Ruth said, “I hated that doctor. But her story stuck with me. I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it? When I went back to my research after all those years, I tried to calculate it. How many atoms from the dead might migrate to the living. It became this strange obsession, not at all related to my dissertation. It took a long time, but I eventually worked out a reasonable prediction and asked a scientist on campus about it, and he pointed out that my math was generally good, but I’d overlooked one basic error of physics.”
“That it takes far too long,” Gus said. “Centuries for them to dissipate.”
“You, too?” Ruth asked, and Gus touched her arm, telling her yes. She froze, his hand warm on her skin, afraid that the smallest movement might dislodge them.
After a few moments, they noticed they were blocking the sidewalk and had to move on. “So, Queen Elizabeth isn’t actually in us,” Ruth said and paused. “Never will be.”
“No,” Gus said, “but she’ll end up in someone eventually.”
They started walking again. He dug his hands into his pockets and gazed around. She felt a sadness in him that had never been there. A hollow look in his eyes. Whether it was all the talk of death or long-term loneliness or just the general cruelties of life, she couldn’t know. The truth was they had been apart far longer than they’d been together. Could she even claim to know him anymore?
They ended up at an outdoor cafe, drinking tea. Ruth warmed her hands on her mug and sipped slowly. Gus noticed that the table wobbled on the uneven bricks, and so he shimmed one leg with a folded napkin. They both felt uneasy, wishing they’d gone to a bar instead, where it becomes easier for old lovers to ignore how well they know each other’s bodies.
“I can’t believe no one else snatched you up,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “I doubt I made it very easy.” He looked away, his eyes training to all the commotion on the street. “When Queen Elizabeth died, it was strange at first not having a tree there, like a pulled tooth when all you can do is trace the gap with your tongue.” He set his tea down. “Then I found myself sweating all the time. It took me over a year to realize that the house itself retained that much more heat with the tree gone. No more shade.” He paused and for a moment seemed ready to weep, but then he coughed and looked away.
“I know what you mean,” Ruth said. “It felt so strange when I moved back to Boston, like I didn’t actually grow up here.” She didn’t tell him how for years she would think about him in the middle of the day, how some silly little thing would happen and she would make a mental note to tell him when she got home, only to remember hours later that she couldn’t.
They went back to their tea, their own thoughts. It hurt Ruth to see the many ways Gus was still the same man, how her absence had not changed that, but it also hurt to see the many ways he was now different, to know that she’d had no hand in shaping his new quirks. He still palmed his mug rather than using the handle, but he took smaller sips now, probably because he moved slower. He was older, but he was also successful, could accomplish fewer things each day. He probably appreciated success in ways that she never would.
“It’s strange seeing me, isn’t it?” she asked. “I can tell it’s strange for you.”
He squinted at her for a long time, and she began to worry that he would never respond. She was thinking of that terrible note she had left him, though she wasn’t certain if he’d even seen it. Finally, he said, “Not strange, no.” But then he stopped talking and grimaced. “It’s like having phantom limb syndrome. I feel you over there, and I know you belong over here, but you’re there and I’m here and there’s no changing that.”
A warmth crept into her limbs, like muscles being stretched. She had forgotten how his words could puncture straight through to her core. All these years separated hadn’t changed him in the important ways. She cried then. It was a dirty, messy sort of cry, not at all dignified. All the grief of her life seemed to surface: a loveless mother and father, an unfulfilling career, dead children, dead relationships. She couldn’t look at Gus. He didn’t reach for her or offer a tissue, just let her have it out as privately as possible.
“I just worked,” he said, hoping to give her more time to recover herself. “Eventually, I could go five minutes without thinking about her, and that was a revelation. I learned how to function without pressuring myself to find joy in anything. But five minutes is as long as I ever got. Never more than that, not even now.”
She already knew that Gus was the only one she could ever talk to about Annabelle, but she realized then it wasn’t that simple. It was all they would ever be capable of talking about. But she also realized that it was the only thing she wanted to talk about, and that would be true for the rest of her life.
When she’d composed herself, she said, “It’s hard to know that you’ve used up all the good parts of your life so early.”
She wanted him to disagree but he nodded. “Thank God we’re still young,” he said, perhaps as a joke, but perhaps not.
They didn’t speak for several minutes after that, and neither of them had any intention to. It was the silence of age, if not of wisdom, and also the silence of those who have weathered the worst long before and now have little fear of the world’s residual cruelties. Occasionally their eyes met and lingered, but they managed only to grin at each other as if they shared some private secret that they would never try to articulate, not even to each other. Eventually, the waiter approached and silently placed the check between them—perhaps he saw that neither of them wore a wedding ring and wanted to be proper—and there it would stay, each of them ignoring it, hoping they might sit together just a few moments longer.