SONJA AWAKENED EARLY to see Marshall, wrapped in a bathrobe, an afghan draped over his shoulders, his sleep-crushed hair sticking up in an Ed Grimley, sitting on a chair he’d pulled close to the window, hands on his knees in the gesture of a small boy being told a story. What story might Marshall be imagining? The familiar story of Old Mister Whiteflakes taunting everyone because he could snow all winter, whenever he wanted, however much he liked? Or perhaps he was hearing more personal stories. Internal stories. A moment in his mother’s life, as previously recounted by his father. Something about her knitting, constantly knitting, as if she could make ordinary things, such as scarves and mittens, become magical because, unlike life, they would not unravel. Who had she been, really, that woman dead so many years, whom Evie, her successor, still talked about so adoringly, that young woman kissing her children’s gloves with her lipsticked blessing and embroidering the wristbands with forget-me-nots?
Marshall’s head was tilted back enough so that his eyes could connect with the moon, yet from across the room, from the bed, from which she could see only the tipped-back crown of his head, she felt sure his eyes were closed, that he had brought his chair close to the window not to look at the sky but to bask in the presence of darkness, the glimmer of starlight, the opacity of the moon. And then, in her sleepy reverie, she contradicted her thinking: one could describe, to a blind man, what the starbursts and showers of light were like. Oh really? How could one do that? With an illuminating analogy? Through the charm of synesthesia? She had been watching her husband, thinking, Thank God he’s not blind, certain that she would be a terrible guide for anyone who could not see exactly what she saw. Yet what foolishness that was: objectivity. Even little children knew that a thrice-whispered word metamorphosed to another, that no tadpole restrained itself from transformation to a frog, to say nothing of individual perceptions, which made a puddle a pond and a lake an ocean.
Marshall shifted in the chair, the afghan slid to the floor, she put her fingers to her lips as if she feared something. Then, in startled confusion, he rose from the chair, disoriented—there: she knew he had been asleep—and, in a kind of sleepwalk, started toward the bed.
Marshall curled on his side, on top of the covers, his face window-pane cold. She tried to tug the sheet and blanket from underneath to cover him, but it was no use. He stayed the way he had first fallen on the bed, the twist of afghan a half chrysalis binding his torso, his lips open, robe bunched around his chest. She touched his shoulder. If there had not been enough light in the room for her to see that this provoked a frown, even in sleep, she would have persisted, but it was too cruel—and where, exactly, would she begin explaining to him her irrational thoughts? Oh, darling, wake up: I’ve been thinking about tadpoles and puddles and lakes, and I’m very happy you aren’t blind. They were so bizarre that she tried to forget them herself, nestling against him, pulling covers up from behind to warm her back, then trying to catch the rhythm of his suddenly quieter breathing, as if, even in sleep, he had made a bargain with her: If I don’t have to listen to you, you don’t have to listen to me.
She was not going to get back to sleep, so she went downstairs and looked for something to do. Actually, it came as a relief that Marshall had so captivated her attention—that she had seen him as vulnerable, that she had felt close to him as he struggled through the night. Because she had been struggling through quite a few difficult nights herself lately, stung by guilt over the affair she was having with her boss, Tony Hembley, trying to deny the fact that in such situations, now that the ’60s were long gone, eventually she would have to decide.
Beside the stairs was a basket of things that needed to be ironed, including her favorite pillow shams that wrinkled like crepe paper but could be quickly steamed into satiny softness. But she was too sleepy to iron. Instead, she went into the living room and curled up, pulling an afghan Evie had knitted for her over her lap, turning on the reading light, and scanning Sunday’s still-unfinished crossword puzzle. She saw that Marshall had written in a couple of words she’d missed in pencil, and also that he’d doodled as he thought about the answers, drawing circles that became ovals, then what looked like a fried egg, its albumen spreading out lacily from the yolk. Or maybe it was no such thing; maybe she was just hungry. For another few minutes she gave thought to “Poet translated by FitzGerald”—wouldn’t Marshall have known that?—yet Marshall was always preoccupied, so possibly he had not even glanced at that part of the puzzle. Even when he was supposed to be asleep, he often moved around the room, sleepwalking or just plain drifting, quietly walking part of the night away. It was to her advantage that he was so often in a world of his own, or distracted, she thought, and then, instantly, felt ashamed of her thoughts. Gordon, Marshall’s brother, was apparently a restless sleeper too; at least, his new wife—the only one of his wives she had ever had a real correspondence with—often remarked on Gordon’s insomnia, or his troubled sleep. The brothers were at once physically similar and also dissimilar: both had unusually colored green eyes, deeply hooded; both had large feet and hands, though only Marshall’s had a sculptural delicacy. Of course, working with his hands had toughened and abraded Gordon’s hands in a way Marshall’s behind-the-lectern gestures had not. Also, the difference in age between them, which was not great, would not explain Marshall’s almost unlined skin, the tiny crow’s-feet at his eyes drawing attention to one of his best features. Marshall was six feet tall, though he slumped so much he didn’t appear particularly tall. Gordon was shorter by several inches, though he held himself ramrod straight, shoulders squared—perhaps the carriage he’d learned in the army, while Marshall was pursuing his Ph.D. She lifted the photograph of herself and Marshall off the side table and rubbed the dusty frame. It had been taken in Boston many years ago by the teenage son of a woman she’d worked with. What had happened to the woman and her talented son, who had been so passionate about his photography courses? She’d lost track of so many people, and so had Marshall—though he’d never had as many friends and acquaintances as she. He maintained that men didn’t socialize the way women did, but lately he didn’t socialize at all, and she hardly did, herself: just the book discussion group, or an odd evening out when Marshall taught his night class. In the photograph, Marshall’s hand clasped her shoulder, and he nuzzled her hair, which was much longer, falling below her shoulders. His eyes were half-closed, his thoughts turned inward, but she hadn’t been relaxed at all: her eyes a bit too wide, her smile slightly artificial. Still, the tenderness between them showed. Then and now, when he wasn’t thinking about three things at once, going in one direction looking for his briefcase and another to find the pile of papers he’d just graded, meanwhile forgetting his watch on the dresser and leaving the lunch bag on the kitchen counter, he would look at her appreciatively and his gaze would calm her. She knew he loved her, but she was often surprised to see that he was looking quietly at her simply because he liked her. She didn’t mind at all that it was the same way he would look at the covers of certain books, or the way he’d look out the window and appreciate, for a brief second, the sight of branches blowing in the wind, or be amused by squirrels cavorting on the telephone wires.
Thinking fondly of her husband—relieved that she did, because for quite a while her thoughts had habitually turned, instead, to Tony—she went into the kitchen and made pancake batter. No assurance he’d have time to eat pancakes, unless she was unkind and woke him up after his stressful night sleepwalking, but if he did wake up, the batter would be there. Cracking an egg into the powdery mixture, she thought again about his doodles, and about the inked and pencilled puzzle, slightly sorry that instead of going to foreign films or going dancing—well, a few times, years ago in Boston, they had gone dancing—they now sat so many nights in front of the fire, settling for nothing but relaxation and wordless connection with one another. Strange, really, that while she felt comfortable with their pleasant domestic routines most of the time, at other times the sameness seemed oppressive. Just a day or so ago, she had complained to Tony about their evenings at home, yet when he had commiserated, calling them “your quotidian quotient,” she had become defensive. She had actually found herself talking about the solitary beauty of the second-growth pine, and of the birches, lit by the backyard spotlight, and if Tony hadn’t laughed, she would probably have continued: the mesmerizing fire in the fireplace; the complex patterns the shadows cast upon the wall. “I’m here to save you from your life of happy pretense,” Tony had said to her, clinking the rim of his coffee cup to hers. One thing about Tony was that he never minded overstepping his bounds—and when he had, he registered his glee by making a silent toast, or by flashing the V-for-victory sign. It was a mistake to confide in him, but also, for some reason, irresistible. Now she forced him out of her mind and finished stirring the batter.
She supposed she should be grateful she could keep such odd hours at the real estate business, communicating essentially by Post-it notes and taped messages, though the more she thought about it, it was possible she might appear both organized and brilliantly improvisational to Tony: certainly he had realized he was hiring an unconventional person, someone with a zigzagging past that slalomed his own. She had finished law school, flunked her exams the first time around, gotten sidetracked taking night courses in literature while keeping the books for a Boston electronics store for almost two years, then enrolled in a Harvard summer program she thought would teach her about new computer technology, which instead resulted in her retreat into the works of Jane Austen, followed by the rather unexpected promotion of Marshall to full professor at Benson College, their joyful decision to leave their apartment for a real house, followed by their having the good fortune to meet Tony Hembley at a friend’s summer wedding in the Adirondacks, where she spontaneously joined him at a rickety piano to accompany his accordion-played Cajun rendition of “Bosco Stomp.” More than half the guests were too drunk to understand what a weird spectacle was transpiring, though she and Tony had gotten it entirely: the inexplicable oddity of finding a soul mate in the unlikeliest place at the unlikeliest time, a kind of obligation, naturally, required of those thus blessed. “… Too stupid to pass the law boards,” she had said. “… So couldn’t imagine the rest of my life fastening suspenders to my pants and tying a noose with a rep tie. Just had to switch from Dean Witless to real estate,” he’d replied.
The house Tony found for them was half an hour from Tony’s own house, twenty minutes from Marshall’s job. The first time she had gone to Hembley and Hembley (Tony’s little joke; he was the sole owner of the business, but he felt he should acknowledge he was a Gemini) it had been as a client, the second as a buyer, the third as a prospective employee. “Why don’t you study and take the law boards a second time?” he’d said to her. “Why don’t you get rid of your trust-fund guilt and expand out of your parents’ converted garage?” she’d said. Checkmate: she passed the exam on her second try, then turned her attention to the next challenge and studied to become a real estate agent; he moved into a gargantuan church put up for auction by the Feds that sold far below market value. He had placed two gargoyles above the entranceway, painted the interior with richly pigmented Benjamin Moore historic colors, then written a long letter which was printed in the New York Times, indicting himself, as well as the system, for allowing people to take advantage, at the taxpayer’s expense, of expedient fire sales to unload properties following the collapse of the savings and loan industry. This resulted in his real estate business’s instant notoriety, plus the interest of a local congressman who took the occasion to speak for his constituents as being scandalized by the FDIC practices. The whole business became such a cause célèbre that the first day Sonja went to work for Tony, cameras recorded the employees’ entrance while TV reporters identified her as “a disaffected lawyer moving on to other things in the nineties.” The program ended with a close-up cut to the gargoyles, as a recording of Tony’s Cajun swing played in the background. Truth was, she was not so much disaffected as the repository for other people’s anxious desire to change their lives by moving from one place to another. Many clients appeared in extremis, the hysteria of selling and buying taking on a life of its own, people projecting wildly onto her so that she became their censorious parent, their skeptical employer, the devil himself if she questioned their financial stability. She forced Tony and the business out of her mind and walked upstairs to awaken Marshall.
“What’s the matter?” he said sleepily, as she rubbed her hand across his shoulders.
“Why should anything be the matter? I just thought you might want to get up and have some pancakes with me before I go off to work.”
“Winter,” he said.
“What?”
“No blueberries. Winter,” he said.
“This means you’re rejecting them?”
“Rejecting you and every idea you’ve ever had,” he said, reaching up and pulling her forward, so her face was close to his. He snuggled into her neck.
“You were sleepwalking last night,” she said.
“Wasn’t,” he said.
“You were.”
“You were dreaming,” he said.
How was it he could make her laugh just by contradicting her? Because he made her see that everything wasn’t so serious, she supposed. On the other hand, wouldn’t he be disturbed if he awoke to find her sitting by the window—wouldn’t he find it a little spooky? She did not do such things, he had already told her teasingly, because she exhibited good manners even in sleep. As he struggled up, she thought how young he seemed sometimes, hair awry, creases in his face made by lying on wrinkled sheets.
“Blueberry pancakes,” Marshall said. “It’s July. Seventy degrees out there, temperature climbing. Nice day to go rowing on the lake.”
“Are we going to do that this summer?” she said. “Last summer we only did it one time.”
“Next summer I build you a tree house, put in a grape arbor, don’t let the grass dry out, we go rowing at every opportunity.”
“I don’t want a grape arbor,” she said.
“You want a tree house?” he said, slightly surprised.
“What if I did? A sort of home office.”
“You like working at the House of Gargoyles too much,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Do you believe I made pancakes?”
“You didn’t?” he said, rolling out of bed.
“I did. Big thrill, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Now I’m hungry.”
She watched him walk to the bathroom, thinking how amazing it was that after all those years they had lived with the bathtub in the kitchen, now there was a large bathroom off the bedroom. It was only the fun—the mindless fun of those days she missed. Not the poorly heated, badly insulated apartments. Not the doctored canned spaghetti sauce, or the jugs of red wine that would taste, at best, as if they had no taste at all.
Downstairs, waiting for him, she poured glasses of orange juice, started the coffee machine. A tree house—what a nice thought. Why not take advantage of being in New Hampshire? If they’d had a child, Marshall probably would have built a tree house. Or was that hopelessly old-fashioned? The child would have had to unlace Rollerblades to climb up. And would it be worth the climb, just to sneak a joint? A joint—probably now it would be crack. Or something new—some tranquillizer used on cows that had been discovered to make you feel powerful and highly accomplished, the biggest cow in the field, a cow who was going places. Well: that speculative cynicism was the way Tony thought, and not dissimilar from the way Marshall saw things. Tony never passed up an opportunity to announce that the world had gone to hell, and that you could never outguess the next ludicrous happening. So, if Tony was even half-right—and you couldn’t work with Tony day after day without at least half believing that he might be half-right, which would still account for accepting a lot of skepticism—would this be any sort of world to bring a child into?
Out the window she saw the tracks she had made in the snow the night before, taking out the garbage. Snow had drifted in, softening the impressions, making it seem someone delicate and narrow-footed—certainly not a large, shivering person wearing her husband’s heavy rubber boots—had trod in the snow. The outside world was made both simple and lovely by the snow. You could become fascinated, if you forgot you had seen it the day before, and the day before that. Like a sad situation, or a problem, it could seem quite captivating if you were thinking it through for the first time, not the ten thousandth. And what good did it do to think about it? Now that she was forty years old, did she really want to undergo surgical procedures done with no guarantee of success to risk having another miscarriage? The snow that had drifted into her footprints seemed to have already answered the question, but she would have to be a poet to explain, metaphorically, how the question and the observation were related. Just the sort of thing Marshall would present to his class, exciting them with strange new connections, implied complexities. He liked to shake them up; he’d admitted that.
As if some such far-fetched poem really existed, and had already been shared by the two of them, he came into the kitchen smiling.
I begin this note with a comma after your name, having been corrected previously by Alice, who tells me that a colon should be reserved for business correspondence. A comma is apparently a more pleasant way to begin.
I enclose a brochure of wicker rockers, which I mentioned before I’d try to get to you as soon as possible. Alice cannot decide between the ones on p. 4 and the larger ones, p. 16. In my experience, Macy’s may well be out of both styles, and if one is in stock and the other not, that solves our problem right there. But I think either would be fine and leave it to you to cast the deciding vote.
Let me change my mind about something I told you to mark on the calendar before we left for New York. I don’t think, after all, that it would be a good idea to have the dinner on July 4th, even though that is the only day the Burks can be with us. We recently viewed a performance during which several flares were shot into the sky, and I could tell that Alice was very unnerved. I suddenly envisioned us out on the back porch, having dinner, and realized how upset she would be to see fireworks in the distance. I am trying as much as possible to keep her happy, and also to see that she enjoys the house again. Frankly, if she did not think of it in conjunction with your presence, I’m not sure she’d be eager to return. You may already know more than I; surely it cannot always be easy to keep everyone’s confidence and not feel that sometimes, in your silence, you are misleading someone else. These awkward situations arise often enough in business. I’ve had to smile through recitations of situations-in-the-works when I’ve already been the recipient of privileged information about the outcome; I’m all too aware that people’s private circumstances are often the exact opposite of the way they are presented. I’m not above sneaking off a letter to you behind Alice’s back, as we see! Something must be done so that she does not equate private gestures with possible betrayals, though.
Item #2. Do you think we should get a dog? I think you are the best person to ask, because dog owners always tell you to get a dog (though they’re full of warnings), and people who don’t have dogs seem to feel you shouldn’t even take on a house plant. Alice has often reacted with immediate warmth when she sees certain dogs, though in thinking back, it doesn’t seem to me that this has been true lately. But please do not worry: I am not sending you off to find us a dog, just asking you to order a set of rocking chairs. We can discuss the dog when I get there. Maybe whispering as she leaves the room.… Oh, I should not make fun. Or I should make fun of myself for being so unsure of what would please my own wife that I feel I must consult you.
I don’t say this to burden you, but you do realize how we both depend on you. Nothing could come as more of a surprise to me, because I think of myself as rather reluctant in matters of true friendship.
With affection,
M.