SOMETHING WAS WRONG IN Vanessa’s house.
She didn’t know when she first noticed it, but somewhere between first tomatoes and the Cape Cod clams, the call and response between her husband and Isabelle stopped. Others still yelled out questions, called her name, and there was still “Daddy! Daddy,” but the incessant back and forth that drove Vanessa crazy was no more. At first, all Vanessa could think was, what a blessing. Not why? but thank God.
But something was wrong in her house.
Vanessa couldn’t put her finger on it.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t pinpoint what gnawed at her. Over the course of her life she had become so adept at turning away from the things that made her anxious, so skilled at engaging her mind and her hands with other thoughts and tasks, that when she suddenly found herself wanting to examine a question, she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the tools.
It was uncharted tides: how to plow through the anxiety to unearth the reason for it.
She kept coming back to it, though. The more she thought about not thinking about it, the more she thought about it. On the surface, everything was right. Yet just underneath the serenity was a circling black drain. What was it?
It came to her one night in late February. Finn was too nice to her.
The question was why.
He had been very good to her the first years of their marriage. Never a cross word between them, never a raised voice. But recently they had developed a new, unpleasant way of talking to each other—in stroppy monosyllables, punctuated with ironic remarks and snide comments.
Suddenly, all that stopped as if her husband had turned off that part of himself. Another Finn emerged, like the old Finn—but not quite. This new husband never asked Vanessa to come out of her room anymore. He never asked her to do a single thing, even if it meant having Olivia do it.
The new Finn would rather ask his mother than Vanessa!
On the one hand, commendable.
On the other hand, why?
The new Finn had been in a remarkably good mood for months. She couldn’t determine when she first noticed it, but she’d never seen him with such a smile on his face and a spring in his step. He literally walked around humming all day. The best you could say about the former Finn was written by Yeats, that being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. But that wasn’t the constantly whistling man currently living in her house.
On the one hand, a pleasant change from the gloom of the last few years.
On the other hand, why?
The new Finn turned to her in bed, said goodnight darling, gave her a warm husbandly pat and was asleep in minutes. And in the morning, he was gone hours before Vanessa woke up. She never heard him leave.
The pat and the kiss and the goodnight darling was what was left. Gone was even a pretense of him reaching for her before she could say she was tired or her head hurt or her body ached or she wasn’t at peace or the world wasn’t at peace. He never asked for anything and was perfectly nice about it.
She remembered how last summer, during one of their ugliest arguments—their new normal—he said, “You know Vanessa, I keep asking and you keep saying no, but there will come a day when I will stop asking, and after that will come a day when I will stop caring that I’ve stopped asking, and after that will come a day when I won’t give it to you even if you ask it of me.”
Was that what was happening now? Was that what was wrong?
But to ask her own husband for something that no woman should have to ask for was beneath Vanessa. That wasn’t how she was raised and she was incapable of it. Some things were simply not done in an Evans marriage or in any marriage she had ever heard of. The man asked, and the woman gave, that was all.
Vanessa might not have initiated marital coition but she did say a few coquettish things to Finn in bed to see where the dust settled. She did put on his favorite nightgown. She dabbed on some of his favorite perfume. She scooted over one or two inches closer to him in bed.
Was it her imagination, or did he inch away from her in response? No nightgown or perfume or flirting carried her nearer to him.
Yet he was so delightfully good to her!
Since there was no one to talk to about this, Vanessa dismissed it—mostly. They had been married twelve years. They had gone through difficult times. This was simply the next stage in their marriage. At least they still slept in the same bed, unlike her mother and father, who’d had separate bedrooms for decades. Did Walter and Lucy have separate rooms since the twelfth year of their marriage?
One time—just once—Vanessa asked Finn if anything was the matter.
He hugged and kissed her. “Absolutely nothing, darling. Everything is wonderful.”
“You don’t get as upset with me for my little bouts of nerves,” she said with a small chuckle.
“I’ve learned to accept you as you are,” he said. “There’s no point in getting worked up about it. I know how hard it’s been for you. You’re doing your best, and that’s all I want from you, nothing more.”
And then he turned his back to her.
Was there a finality in the way he said nothing more? Was there a veil over his eyes when he looked at her? A curtain that fell and didn’t rise again.
Nothing rose again.
She tried to remember the last time she and Finn had been together. Admittedly, it was difficult, with Vanessa’s mother sleeping in the room next to them, and all the fights they’d been having.
Could it have been over a year?
That seemed impossible.
Yet Vanessa couldn’t remember their last moment of real intimacy.
But what was most fascinating about the debate within herself regarding the reasons for Finn’s outward warmth and inner reserve was that it wasn’t the thing that was wrong.
Something else was wrong.
It wasn’t her husband not touching her, it wasn’t her husband being caring toward her. It wasn’t his turned back, his bright and early jumping out of bed, his late turning in, his carefree whistling. It wasn’t any of those things.
It was something else.
Something that was adjacent to their lack of physical closeness, yet utterly removed from it.
After months of trying to pretend these thoughts didn’t exist, after months of trying to think about other things, in April 1933, Vanessa realized that since New Year’s Eve, from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to sleep, the intrusive thoughts had replaced all other things. Something had happened on New Year’s Eve that made her unable to concentrate or read or teach the children or process jokes or understand recipes. It almost made her unable to clean! Something happened—but she didn’t know what it was.
If the problem isn’t him not making love to me, if the problem isn’t him smiling and joking all day, if the problem isn’t him being considerate of me for no good reason—then what is the problem?