Another You (9 page)

None of which Marshall remembered until, standing with his bare feet on the cold bathroom tiles, he glanced out at the snowy morning, looking through the window to where one long icicle seemed to divide the glass in two. He crossed the floor to rub his pajama sleeve on the smudge of frost inside the window, peering up to see where the icicle originated, peering down to guess the depth of snow. He saw a dog sniffing near a bush. Seeing his car in the drive transformed to an R. Crumb mound, he remembered that not long ago he had been out in the snow, standing on a hill with Cheryl. No, he hadn’t; he had dreamed they stood together in the snow, but actually, the time they had been together, they had been inside his car, or in the tavern. They had not stood in the cold night air and observed any winter wonderland, any department store’s miniature animation of village life on a wintry night. He had heard about her roommate’s problems, she had flirted with him—to give her credit, what she had done was certainly a rather forthright, innovative version of flirting—and driving home he had thought again about the necessity of getting adequate counselling for Livan, about the surprising stupidity of so-called counsellors who should not have been able to keep their jobs if they could only question the victim about how abusive sex might affect her future. For a while he had successfully displaced his hostility toward McCallum onto the counsellor, whoever she was—that would be up to Sonja’s friend from the book discussion group to find out for him. But exactly which one was Jenny Oughton? Though Sonja had tried to describe Jenny, the women were not very differentiated
in his mind: they were mostly women who had vaguely mannish haircuts, geometric earrings, and proper New England clothes, sitting in the living room shoeless, their socks individualizing them as pragmatic or mischievous. Though anyone could surprise you, those particular women, who were all about the same age, about the same height, either unnaturally thin or twenty pounds overweight, seemed, except for their feet, to hold no surprises. Sonja was the prettiest. She was also—from the few times he had overheard them discussing books—one of the most articulate. He was probably guilty of taking her for granted, though she never accused him of that. He saw from a note she’d left for him that she had gotten up early to visit Evie and then, hopefully, to show a house. Instead of writing the last word, she had drawn a rectangle and perched a triangle atop it: a house without doors or windows, the two geometric shapes meant to symbolize “house.” Maybe it was a form of superstition: if she didn’t say the word, if she didn’t refer to the house as what it was, maybe she would get the sale. Sonja was afraid of Friday the thirteenth and would not walk under a ladder. A ladder: he thought of the concluding lines of Yeats’s brilliant poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” then of the imaginary ladders he’d leaned up against his childhood home to frighten his brother, Gordon, inventing scenarios to scare Gordon about burglars climbing shadowy steps in order to pounce on him in his sleep. Instead of Santa with his bag of toys, the intruder would carry a bag containing ropes to bind Gordon’s wrists, gags to snake through his mouth. Marshall’s vivid imagination had transformed every branch blowing in the wind into a footstep, while the tree shadows were squinted into precarious burglars’ ladders leaned against the house in windstorms. He had hated to let one imaginary scenario go to accommodate a revision, so that if whoever was imagined to be entering the house by ladder was not frightening enough in his own right, the intruder would hold a cage in which a wild coyote paced, a coyote that would be set free on Gordon’s face, where he would devour him by first eating his brain. Marshall had such a talent for storytelling that even though he was younger than Gordon, Gordon could be made to shriek muffled cries of terror into his pillow. And Marshall was so good at pretending, that if their father came into the room, he could feign sleep convincingly. His father never doubted it, while he’d hiss in Gordon’s ear that he was going to pull him out of
bed and make him sit upright in the living room with all the lights on if his ridiculous night terrors didn’t end immediately. That was the punishment for too much carrying on at night: back in your clothes, out into the living room chair, and not the one with the footstool, either, hands in your lap, the overhead light burning. You could fall asleep if you were able to. If you stayed awake all night, well: that was your problem. Caused by you. Because of being ridiculous. So think about it.

He turned off the electric razor and placed it in the recharging stand toward the back of the counter. The image of a bound Livan cycled through his thoughts just as the memory of his cringing brother, hiding from burglars, faded. Having no image of Livan, in his mind he had made her look something like Cheryl Lanier: that height; those eyes, clear of makeup; the girl’s smooth, unlined face still settling into its final bone structure. When he’d returned home after being at the tavern with Cheryl, he had told Sonja he needed information from her friend at student health. In only the sketchiest way, not naming names, he had told her that some faculty member had apparently mistreated a student, and that the student’s visit to a psychologist at student health had only compounded the problem; what was the name of the woman in her book discussion group who worked at student health? He did not want the poor student to blunder into an inadequate counsellor a second time.

“Jenny Oughton,” Sonja had said. “I can’t believe you’ve forgotten the name of my best friend.” She flipped open her address book to write down Jenny’s work number. “She’s hard to get in to see, though, because she’s in charge of a yearlong research project—which I’ve told you about and you’ve no doubt forgotten. So be sure to remind her that you’re my husband. Never thought I’d be so helpful, did you? Knowing me is like knowing the doorman at a hip new disco.”

Were there still discos? Did anyone use the word “hip” anymore? He’d wondered that when Sonja said it, and he wondered again as he pulled his robe off the hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked downstairs, heading toward the kitchen telephone. Raves, that’s what the students talked about: going to a rave. He had no image for raves, except that the idea of them made the kitchen look ridiculously banal, bleached as it was by morning sunlight, crumbs
on the floor, white dishtowel dangling from the handle of the refrigerator so that the refrigerator seemed to be offering itself in surrender. He called student health and asked to speak to Jenny Oughton.

“Dr. Oughton?” the young woman who answered replied. “She’s not available. May I take a message?”

“I know she’s involved in research,” he said. “I’m the husband of her friend Sonja Lockard. I teach at the college. I need to speak to her about”—how to phrase it?—“a private matter.”

“Certainly,” the voice said. He could almost sense the young girl drawing herself up to full height: responsive; businesslike. “Let me put you on hold.”

He waited. He pulled up a stool and sat at the counter by the wall phone, resting his arm on a pile of newly laundered underwear Sonja had not yet taken to their bedroom. He found himself wondering if the women’s socks corresponded to their underwear. Perhaps, because Sonja’s usual socks, navy-blue knee-highs, seemed a practical accompaniment to her white cotton pants. She had gotten rid of her bikini briefs, she had told him when he asked, because she could easily tuck the T-shirts she wore under blouses and sweaters into her pants when the pants rose to her waist, but the T-shirt would work its way up if she tried to keep it in place anchored under bikini briefs. It shocked him, sometimes: how mundane, but how compelling, were the things his wife told him. Was it because he loved her that he could retain such information—even conjure it up apropos of almost nothing, while sitting on a stool and glancing over his shoulder, thinking about eating a banana? He wondered, idly, if there was any poem that contained the word “banana.” “Peach,” certainly: what Magritte had done for the green apple, Eliot had done for the peach. For a moment he thought how different, how absurdly different, the whole poem would be if Prufrock had wondered whether he dared to eat a banana.

“Sonja’s husband?” a woman’s voice was saying on the phone. “Hello, Marshall. I’m on a speakerphone; that’s all there is in this room, and several people are here with me. I just wanted you to know.”

“That’s fine,” he said. Was he talking to the woman with the socks patterned with roses, or the heavy-duty gray ones that men and women alike wore, with the band of red around the top?

“What can I do for you?” Jenny said.

The gray ones.

“I’m actually wondering if there’s any time today I could stop by to talk to you briefly. It’s about a student—a slightly complicated situation, and I’m calling to ask you a favor, having to do with her seeing someone at student health.”

“If this has to do with psychological counselling, I’d need to refer you to someone else. Sonja may have told you that I’m involved in research right now.” There was a slight echo on the line as she spoke the last word of each sentence. “Now,” he heard, in a quiet tinny waver.

“Still, could I drop by?” he said.

“Certainly.” Gray socks; he was right. “I usually take a break around two, or you could come when we close at five.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be there at five.”

As he replaced the phone, it rang almost immediately. It was Sonja, calling from Littleton, ten miles away, wanting to know whether she had left her gloves in the basket by the door, or whether she’d forgotten them at the house she’d shown earlier that morning. He sprinted into the hallway and saw them there: the long suede gloves. “Weren’t you cold without them when you walked out the door?” he asked.

“I was sleepwalking,” she said.

The second call—it was probably best the calls hadn’t come in reverse order; it would have been difficult to withhold the news from Sonja—was that Evie had had some sort of seizure, not a stroke, a seizure, and was awaiting transfer to the hospital. For a long time he’d known this was coming, and yet he hadn’t known, had done nothing to prepare himself. He had conveniently pretended that Evie’s situation wouldn’t worsen; he had seized upon whatever encouraging news Sonja gave him after her visits: that Evie had laughed at a joke; that she’d suggested he might help out by baking cakes, which Sonja thought might have been a subtle joke on Evie’s part. He knew he had let her down in big ways as well as small. He wished, foolishly, that he had baked a cake for Evie. He wrote down the name of the doctor and the hospital’s phone number, thanked the person who had called, then stood with his hands in the pockets of his robe, looking out the back door at the white lawn, the white bushes. The wind was gusting,
blowing the fine, dry snow upward as the sky sent down more in a gradual sift. If Evie died, he was going to be filled with regret, and Sonja was going to be very, very sad. If she died, he was going to feel guilty that he hadn’t accompanied Sonja on her many visits to see her: he was always secretly pleased when Sonja made the trips alone, relieved that he wouldn’t be expected to relive the past with Evie or, worse, be asked to read to her from her anthology of poetry: insipid, rhymed poems that were a travesty of the genre, as if he, a professor, were inseparable from the drivel any uninspired fool had written. A seizure: What did that mean? You lived in your body, but when something went wrong, you had to consult a doctor to tell you what had happened. It was absurd, how little everyone knew: it was like inhabiting a house while at the same time suspecting that if you peeked under the rug, you would realize the floor sagged because the supports had rotted, and what that meant was that you had several options. Inspect for termites, first off, everyone in agreement. Then, if termites could be ruled out, what? Surgery? The various degrees of pain imagined and computed, rarely referred to directly. Except that if the problems were bad enough, you could always—at least hypothetically—exchange one house for another, while the body was the only house you would ever inhabit, inescapable, the decor dealt out hereditarily, the gradual deterioration nothing you could do very much about. From his robe he took the note he’d pocketed earlier, in the upstairs bathroom, and looked again at Sonja’s simple house. It seemed, like all symbols, evocative and also mysterious—a serviceable image that would communicate simply at the same time it implied complexity: there was no such thing as a winding road that was only a winding road (thank you, Robert Frost; thanks, Beatles). As he pocketed the note on his way upstairs to dress, he wondered why he had fixated on the little drawing, decided that it had provoked his thoughts because Sonja’s hand had drawn it; he was appreciating not so much the drawing as the creation of his wife, his wife who simplified complexities, or who tried to. Come to think of it, the drawing was not much different from what she did all the time: keeping things running smoothly; assuming responsibility and not talking about all the trivia involved in getting so many things done—including her ability to deal with emotional issues he’d just as soon sidestep. Sonja remembered birthdays and anniversaries, Sonja dispatched flowers
and thoughtful notes, Sonja got in the car every week and drove to visit Evie regardless of the weather, as long as the roads were passable. Though that particular drive might be one Sonja would not be taking in the future. It was slightly strange, he thought, that the bad news had shaken him so little; he worried more for Sonja’s sake than for Evie’s, imagined himself dutifully accompanying Sonja through the formalities of hospital visits or attending the funeral, saying the proper things, paying whatever bills needed to be paid. When Evie first went into the nursing home, he had gotten power of attorney. One of the first things he had had to do was get his name put on Evie’s checking account so he could pay her bills. The newly printed checks had come with Evie’s name and his printed double-decker at the top, with both addresses, but only his phone number. The checks themselves astonished him. When he ordered the new checks they printed the information on Evie’s former choice of decorative checks: faded images of pirouetting ballerinas at the barre and larger dancers in the foreground swirling behind the line to write in the name and amount, their pastel tutus and long-legged pink torsos reflected in a rectangular mirror, the whole surface of the check filled with tornadoes of clashing colors so that only the deepest black ink could effectively overlay the pandemonium. With these checks he had sent payment for Evie’s diapers (payment made directly to the diaper service, not included in the regular monthly expenses at the nursing home), payment to the phone company for Evie’s monthly service (she dialled their number exclusively, he saw), payment for a tweed jacket she had asked Sonja to order from a catalog, and which he first had seen worn backward, like a straitjacket, because Evie had gotten confused dressing herself the morning he and Sonja visited. Looking at her in the chair, soon after receiving the gaudy checks, he had imagined the ballerinas surrounding her in her strange, Ivy League tweed bondage, seen them the way, in certain light, he had sometimes been sure he could see the currents of the air, shimmering at the edge of the shoreline or far in the distance, wavering above the mirage of a lake his car approached across long distances of hot asphalt. Those visits to Evie had seemed interchangeable with taking a long drive: time passing slowly, the speed of the car seeming slower than what the speedometer indicated, a drowsiness overcoming him until he found he needed caffeine, yearned to stretch.