All He Ever Wanted (35 page)

I looked for some sign of Etna, a shadow passing behind the lace curtain, but I could see nothing. I stood on a stone wall
for a better view but could make out only the white bureau with its mirror. Perhaps my wife was writing to Phillip Asher,
I thought. The notion rankled, and I put it aside. Perhaps Etna had fallen asleep with the light on, I thought instead, in
which case I might steal into the room and put it out for her — a husbandly thing to do. I would not wake her, I reasoned;
I would merely watch her sleeping for a moment. Possibly I might sit down at that guest room desk and write to her myself
— a novel idea! — and seek to explain the events of the past several months. I would convince her of my love. I would ask
for her forgiveness.

The more my thoughts went on in this absurd manner (or, rather, the more the alcohol soaked into my organs), I began to conceive
the idea — an urgent one — that I should go to Etna at once. I must convince her that with time our little family would heal.
I must persuade her that the incident could be forgotten. I would go to her and fold her into my arms and let her cry and
tell her, as one would a child, that everything would be all right. In the morning we would wake Clara and help our daughter
out of the emotional and moral muddle into which I had put her. We would leave the house and go to the cool of the mountains
and exorcize the unhappy memories we had attached to that landscape. And when we returned, it would be autumn, and we could
all go on as we had before last winter. We had been ill, I would tell my wife, and now we would all recover our health and
our wits and once again attend to the routine and the mundane.

Oh, foolish man. Oh, foolish, foolish man.

Sometimes I think that the incident I am about to relate did not happen at all, that in fact I found Etna’s door locked and
she would not open it to me. That, in fact, this was merely a dream the feverish night produced.

In this dream, I walk without stealth up the stairs, announcing my intentions with a firm step. I make my way down the hallway
to the guest room and stand outside. I consider knocking but then decide that such an action might put upon Etna the burden
of decision: to open the door or not, to admit me or not. After a few seconds’ deliberation, I turn the knob myself.

My wife is sitting on the edge of the bed. Her head snaps up when I reveal myself. Her face is streaked, her overblouse partially
unbuttoned. I glance at the desk and see upon it, as I feared, a letter. Lavender ink on a lavender envelope. A name but no
address. Address unknown. In the trenches, perhaps. Listening to a different symphony entirely.

Etna’s face is cold and hard. Her hair is an ugly knotted rope down her back. I see again the unbuttoned blouse, the letter
on the desk, the curtains unmoving in the night air.

“You are a monster,” Etna says evenly as I approach the bed.

I walk directly to her, and before she can pull away, I press her face into my formidable stomach. She tries to twist her
head but cannot.

“I am not a monster,” I say.

I press her back upon the bed.

“I am your husband,” I say.

“I am not your wife,” Etna says.

I cover her mouth with my hand, and her eyes widen, as they must.

“Don’t speak,” I say.

In this dream, or vision, of mine (which may or may not, as I say, be true), I release the hand that is pressed upon her lips
and kiss her there instead. Etna becomes quiet, even docile, as though afraid to rouse the children, who might come into the
room wondering why their mother is calling out. With gentleness and delicacy, I roll one stocking over her kneecap, feeling
the downy hair of her shin. I draw up her skirt and find the opening in the corset covering. She has not, on this hot day,
worn the corset itself, which is a boon to my prying fingers. I unfasten the buttons of the overblouse. I touch my wife in
every place to which a husband has a natural and God-given right. After a time, I roll Etna in such a way that she is on top
of me, both of us looking at the ceiling. Lying in this way, she feels like an extension of myself, as if we are the same
person. Lying in this way, I cannot see her face, which, in any case, might break my heart. Etna makes a sound and tries to
stand up, but I cover her mouth once again and clasp her to me. I play her like an instrument, a cello, perhaps, until the
violation is complete.

When I am done, I fall into a deep pit, tumbling as in a dream within a dream. I fall until I think I can plummet no more,
and then I keep falling.

Just before dawn, I heard a sound that briefly woke me. Had I not drunk so much the night before, I might have roused myself.
There was the shutting of a door. Footsteps. Another door shutting. Or do I only imagine this in retrospect? I dozed, half
drugged, sensing that I must try to regain consciousness, that I must try to come awake. When finally I did so, I sat up with
a jerk. The sun was already announcing itself in a filigree pattern on the wood floor. I rubbed my eyes and then my temples,
for I had the dull, relentless headache of a physical and moral degenerate.

Objects in the room gradually took shape. Where was I? In my own bed, of course, but where was Etna? She was sleeping in the
guest room. I remembered then, with sudden and brutal clarity, the events of the night before. I remembered the sounds that
had woken me earlier in the morning. I stood and went to the window and looked out over to the carriage house. The door was
open, and the Landaulet was gone.

I went out of the house without jacket or hat, still wearing the clothes I had slept in. A sense of urgency propelled me forward.
I started the Ford, the sound of the motor shocking me in the silence of the morning. Unable to turn my head without considerable
pain, I trusted to luck as I backed down the driveway. I made the turn and steered the motorcar in the direction of town.

I drove too fast up Wheelock Street, past the house of the widow Bliss. I sped by the Hotel Thrupp, which bore no trace of
cataclysm, infernal or not. I turned the corner at the college quadrangle, the leaves of its sycamores browning and curling
in the August heat. It seemed an early-morning steam rose from the overcooked grass and that one could almost see, in faint
depressions, the ancient paths of students. I urged the Ford past the motley architecture of that undistinguished college,
past Moxon’s Victorian house, past the driveway to Ferald’s limestone manse. I took the turn to Drury. It seemed I traveled
in dream time, unable to move forward fast enough. As I drove, I imagined in great detail what I would find.

The body would be lying partially on the Persian carpet and partially on the linoleum, as if, in her last moments, she had
been reaching for something near the kitchen sink. There would be an ugly rose, a diseased rose, on her throat, quite the
boldest splotch of color in that room of white iron and dried hydrangeas. I would give a cry and then turn away, but not before
I had seen the unnatural posture of the body, and then the bit of glass from the broken bulb of the chandelier flung against
a chair.

I would stagger to the sink and turn on the tap and wet my face in the stream of water. I would stand and shake my head, as
a dog will toss the water from its body. Light-headed, I would search for something to support my weight, all the while trying
to fend off a distinct sense of nausea.

I would once again look at my wife.

Her face would be grotesque in its contortions, covered with blood that had spilled from her nose and mouth. (I believe medically
one would say that she had drowned.) I would bend my head to her linen overblouse. I would trail my fingers along her thin
white arm. I would touch her cheekbone and her acorn-colored hair….

No, no, I said to myself, shaking my head violently. This was too melodramatic. This was not how it would be.

I made the left turn into the driveway and brought the motorcar to a stop outside the cottage. The Landaulet was nowhere in
sight, but the door to the cottage was open.

I climbed out of the Ford and walked to the threshold, peering tentatively inside. I called out Etna’s name and was answered
with silence. My eyes scanned the floor, which needed a sweep but otherwise was bare. I glanced up at the chandelier, that
white iron monstrosity, all its bulbs intact. I stepped inside the cottage. Apart from the stale air, which even the open
door had not been able to dissipate, and a gloom brought on by the curtained windows, the cottage was much as it had been
when I had locked it up late in the spring. (That Etna might have kept a second key hadn’t occurred to me.) I opened the curtains
and the windows and the shutters, letting light and air into the musty room. I looked all around me to make sure that Etna
was not there, unwilling to show herself. I climbed the narrow stairs to check the attic bedroom, but I had to climb straight
back down again: one could scarcely breathe in the spinous garret.

“Etna,”
I called again.

I took inventory of the contents of the cottage, but apart from Etna’s writing case, I noted nothing missing. My headache
reasserting itself, I leaned against the apothecary cabinet. My hand brushed against the front of the white tin cake box.
The door banged open, revealing a fan of blue and white and lavender envelopes that spilled across the floor. I picked them
up and studied the addresses.

Mrs. Etna Van Tassel, Holyoke Street, Thrupp, New HampshireMr. Phillip Asher, The Hotel ThruppMrs. Etna Van Tassel, Exeter, New HampshireMr. Phillip Asher, 14 Gill Street

I sat hard on the ladder-back chair. After a time, I laid the letters upon the table and put them in order. (Of course, Nicholas
Van Tassel must read any series of letters in their proper order.) I read them through once, and then once again. I set them
in a neat stack.

Etna and Phillip Asher, my wife and the man from Yale, had married their letters — a marriage, it would appear, more durable
than my own.

I threw my head back and howled, a ghostly and guttural cry that might have frightened any sane man or woman.

My wife had come and gone. I understood then that she would not be back. She had tripped the latch of her cage and set herself
free.

She had set herself free of me.

* * *

What began in fire would end in fire, I decided. Was this an attempt at catharsis on my part or merely the result of a lifelong
attention to metaphor? I do not know. What I do know is that it is considerably harder to start a fire than one might imagine.
Lacking invention, I stood with a dish towel over the cooking fire, trying to coax a flame into life, only to watch it catch
and die, catch and die, disappearing in the humidity-sodden cloth. Finally, after much fluttering of the towel, I had the
beginnings of a decent flame. I set it down beneath a curtain.

I took the tin cake box with its contents and, impulsively, the dress form, for which I had no use but which was, after all,
the wire ghost of my Etna, having her height and her dimensions. I packed them in the Ford. Hurrying now, I climbed into the
motorcar, put the vehicle in reverse, and moved backward down the driveway, hardly daring to watch as first a curtain and
then a bit of wall turned orange. At the end of the driveway, just as I was about to make the turn toward Thrupp, I saw a
lick of fire poke itself through the open door, and then there was a whoosh of dramatic proportions as the entire cottage
went aflame. It was a mesmerizing sight. Fire is truly a beautiful thing.

The blaze raged, its heat impressive even from the end of the drive. It was then, as I was watching the fire, that I had an
entirely new thought that intrigued me deeply: If Etna Bliss had set herself free, did it not follow that I was free as well?

The idea was a stunning one. I began to explore it, feeling the tentative relief of someone who discovers that a tragedy has
an unexpected bonus. Could it be that I was relieved of the obsession that had been Etna Bliss Van Tassel? The obsession that
had dogged me for almost sixteen years?

It could. It could.

I tested my heart and mind as a man will who has been knocked unconscious upon the battleground and wakes and feels for his
arms and legs to see if they are still intact — my sense of relief no less exhilarating than that of the soldier who discovers
himself to be still alive.

I might have sat at the end of the driveway all morning, trying to absorb this notion, but I began to worry then, for the
fire was spreading. I had not intended to burn down the nearby manse as well. I quickly drove away and stopped at the first
house I came to. I told the much-surprised man who answered the door that there was a fire just down the road and that he
should call the brigade. As it was reported to me later, Etna’s cottage was almost entirely destroyed by the time the fire
truck arrived, but the larger house, despite the heat and the drought, suffered little damage.

(“The cottage belonged to your wife,” said a policeman who came to my house later that day.

“Yes,” I said.

“Lucky she wa’n’t in it,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” I said.

“Can I speak to the wife?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“I see.”

“She’s quite distraught.”

“Of course she is. What’d she have it for anyways?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The cottage. What’d she do there?”

“Sew,” I said with confidence.

“Sew?”

“She gave classes to the indigent,” I said.

“Did she?”

“She did.

“Unfair, then, i’n’t it?”

“Unfair?”

“To lose the cottage that way.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Most unfair.”)

If I had had any intimations of freedom in the moments when I watched the cottage burn, I needed to set them aside when I
returned home. For there were my children, Clara and Nicodemus, to whom I had to explain that their mother had gone away for
a rest. Nicky cried, and Clara did not believe me. “You sent her away,” she accused, and, truthfully, it was a charge that
was difficult to refute.