December 31, 2008. All too often paper hats are involved. Other things about New Year’s Eve that mortify Bunny are false gaiety, mandatory fun and that song, the one that’s like the summer camp song. Not “Kumbaya,” but that other summer camp song, the secular one, where everyone links arms and they sway as they sing, “Friends, friends, friends, we will always be.” It’s not that song either, but the New Year’s Eve song also requires arm linking and swaying and it sentimentalizes friendship with an excessive sweetness that is something like the grotesquerie of baby chicks dyed pink for Easter. The overplayed enthusiasm for the passing of time, the hooting and hugging at the stroke of midnight baffles her, as does the spastic rejoicing to be that much closer to old or dead, as if old or dead were something to be won, like a three-legged race or American Idol. The only way Bunny knows to keep safe from the countdown New Year’s Eve is to lock herself in the bathroom and wait for the fanfare to fizzle out like the silvery sparks of a Catherine wheel.
But there is time yet.
It’s still morning, and although her eyes are closed they might as well be open, the way she knows Albie is there at the foot of the couch, looking down at her, just as she knows that he is wearing blue jeans, a pair faded from wear—never pre–faded or stone-washed or anything but 505 Levi’s—and a light blue button-down oxford shirt, one of the same Brooks Brothers button-down oxford shirts he’s been wearing since he turned twelve. For thirty-three years he’s been wearing the same make and style shirt, although there has been variation in the color. That is, if you consider white to be a color. On his feet are rubber beach slippers. Not flip-flops, but rubber slippers with two wide straps that crisscross; rubber slippers that are generally worn at the beach by skinny old men in plaid swim trunks whose perfectly round bellies protrude as if they’d swallowed a honeydew melon whole, the way a snake swallows a rodent whole, and you can see, all too clearly, the shape of the mouse until it is digested. When a python swallows an alligator or a person, such as that fourteen-year-old boy in Indonesia, the shape of the meal is sharply defined for days or weeks. This is one of those things she wouldn’t have minded not knowing, and it’s not an easy thing to forget. Even now, when there is much that she forgets, she remembers that if an anaconda eats your dog, the outline of your dog will be visible for far too long. Although Albie’s belly does not protrude like a honeydew melon, he has developed a hint of a paunch, just a hint but, coupled with the rubber slippers, it is enough to distress her. Then again, what doesn’t distress her? Well aware that when she opens her eyes, she will find him dressed exactly as predicted, and for the duration of a flashbulb popping, she will hate him for his predictability, and for the forlorn irrevocability that accompanies a solid marriage, a marriage that requires no effort, which is meaningful disappointment only if you stop to give it some real thought, if you stop to give it, like the rubber slippers, more attention than it deserves.
“I’m awake,” Bunny says.
To sit beside her, Albie needs to sidestep one of the five or six stacks of books on the floor. Books stacked without a plan, just as the books in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are arranged carelessly. His books. Her books. The books she reads, as opposed to her books, as in books she has written. Those, the many remaindered copies of them, are in boxes and, like all bogeymen, they are hidden under the bed.
Albie doesn’t write books. He publishes articles and papers in magazines like the Journal of Natural History and Animal Ecology but, for him, public recognition has no bearing on the pleasure he derives from his work. He is freakishly well-adjusted. The books that are his, those he reads, are an eclectic and, unless you know Albie, an irrational lot. Aside from zoology and its related fields, his interests include cartography, game theory, philatelic history, ancient Greek poetry, and magic tricks, among other super-nerd subject matter, although—the rubber slippers excepted—Albie is not a super-nerd person. Not even when he was a teenager, but that could be because he went to Stuyvesant High School where geeky boys are considered dreamy.
Bunny’s range of interests is also varied: history, politics, antiques, animal rights, psychology, fashion, and literature, serious literature, although now she is interested in nothing.
Seating himself on the edge of the couch parallel to her hip, Albie keeps some inches of distance between them, the way you’d keep a few inches back from the edge of a cliff, and he asks, “Did you get any sleep?”
Sleep has never come easily to her, but until recently the drugs worked well enough. But now, two or even three times the prescribed dose brings her no closer to drifting off at night like a normal person. Often, she doesn’t fall asleep until dawn, and from there, she’ll sleep away the day, the entire day. You’d think that ten, twelve, thirteen hours of sleep would be restorative, but hers is sleep that keeps to the surface, as if she were floating on a rubber raft in a pool. However relaxing that might sound, to sleep, to really sleep, is not to float on the surface, but to be deep down near the ocean’s floor.
On other nights, nights like last night, when she does manage to fall asleep before the sun comes up, the sleep is fragmented, interrupted by spates of waking and restlessness. It was the waking, the restlessness, and weeping in distress that had cut into Albie’s sleep, too. Despite that weeping wants an audience, it was never her intention to wake him. To cry when no one can hear you could well belong in the category Bunny calls “Wow Thoughts for Stupid People,” like the sound of one hand clapping. But unintentional or not, there came a night when Albie woke yet again to the ugly noises of his wife’s despair, and he snapped, “Shut up. Will you please just shut the hell up,” at which point Bunny took her pillow and went to sleep, or went to try to sleep, on the couch where a few hours later she put the same pillow over her face to block out the relentless morning sunlight. There she stayed until late afternoon when the sun was less aggressive. On her way to the bathroom, she cut through the kitchen where she found a pot of coffee kept warm but gone stale, and a blueberry muffin from Carol Anne’s, her favorite bakery, on a plate next to a note that wasn’t really a note. It was a lopsided heart and xoxo Albie scribbled on a torn-off corner of a brown paper bag. She wasn’t hungry, but because it was there and because Albie meant well, she broke off a piece of the muffin. In her mouth it tasted like an apple going bad, without flavor and mealy.