Dancing After Hours (12 page)

To Robert’s left, while he ate, was the living room, and to his rear the kitchen. Behind Lydia was a large window, and the wide and deep back lawn ending at woods. They had four acres with many trees and they could not see their neighbors’ houses; even now, in winter, there were enough evergreens so all the earth they saw from the house was their own. Before dinner Lydia drew the curtains at her back; she felt exposed through the glass. On Robert’s second night at home, he asked her to open the curtains; he said he was sorry, but the covered window reminded him of the hospital. The hospital had been very difficult. He had served in two wars without being injured, and had never been confined to a hospital. Now when he saw the curtains behind Lydia, he felt enclosed by something that would take away his breath.

He could wheel slowly down the carpeted hall that began where the living and dining rooms joined, but the hall was too narrow for him to turn into the rooms it led to; one of these was a bathroom. He longed for a shower, and never felt truly clean. He kept a plastic urinal hooked by its handle over a railing of the bed, and Lydia emptied and cleaned it. For most of his four weeks and five days in the hospital, he had to use a bedpan, and nurses cleaned him. In his last week, the physical therapist and a nurse helped him from his wheelchair onto a hospital commode; they removed the inside arms from the chair and the commode, pushed the transfer board under him, and held his legs as he moved across. Then they propped his legs on pillows
on a chair and left him alone. He had to use both hands to push himself up from the seat, so when the two women returned, they held his legs and tilted him and the nurse wiped him. Now he did this in the living room with Lydia. He knew Lydia did not mind wiping him, she was cheerful and told him to stop feeling humiliated because his legs were broken and he had to shit. But his stench and filth, and the intimacy of her hands and voice, slapped his soul with a wet cloth.

Five mornings a week, a home health aid woman helped him wash and shave on the bed. The housekeeper came on three mornings, and worked upstairs while the woman bathed him. A visiting nurse took his blood pressure and temperature and pulse. A phone was on the bedside table, and his son and two daughters called him often; they had flown to Boston to see him during his first week in the hospital. On some nights friends came; they tired him, but he needed these men and women. He felt removed from the earth as he had known it, and they brought parts of it with them: its smell was on their coats and hats and scarves, its color in their cheeks, its motion in their beautiful and miraculous legs.

During his first ten days at home, Lydia left the house only to buy groceries, and she did that while someone was with him. Then on a Friday night, while they were eating dinner, he said: “I’m starting to feel like a cage. I want you to walk to the store tomorrow.”

“It’s Saturday. You’d be alone.”

“I’ve got the phone and a urinal.”

“I don’t want you to feel alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Next morning she hung a second urinal on the bed
railing, put a pitcher of water and a pitcher of orange juice and two glasses on the bedside table, and wrote the phone number of the store on notepaper. She was wearing jeans and boots and a dark blue sweater. She bent over him and looked at his eyes.

“Listen: if you have to shit, you call me. I’ll be through the door in twenty-eight minutes.”

She kissed him and put on a blue parka and black beret, and he watched over his right shoulder as she went out the door. He lay facing the mahogany table and the dining room window and the winter light. He could not see the lawn, but he could see trunks and branches of deciduous trees and the green pines. His wheelchair was beside the bed, the transfer board resting on it, but he could not go to the stove, could not even get far enough into the kitchen to see it, and for breakfast they ate scrambled eggs; Lydia always turned off burners and the oven, but in his career he had learned to check everything, even when he knew it was done. He had not thought of fire till Lydia was gone, and Lydia had not thought of fire, and he saw himself in the wheelchair pushing away from flames. The back door was in the kitchen, so he could leave only through the front; outside was a deck and four steps to the concrete walk that curved to the long driveway. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply into his stomach and told himself:
Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance
. Years ago in California, a gunnery sergeant had said that to the company at morning formation; Robert was a second lieutenant, watching from the barracks porch; the gunny had fought in the Pacific, and Robert, unblooded still, looked at the man’s broad, straight back and believed this was a message brought from the
dread and chaos of war.
I can call the fire department, then get on the wheelchair, take the blanket, go out the front door, and sit on the deck and wait for the firemen; if it gets bad, I’ll tuck my chin and go bass-ackwards down the steps and hope the casts hold and I don’t crack my head; then if I have to, I can drag myself all the way to the fucking road
. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. He was still afraid, and for a while he read
War and Peace
. Then he slept, and he was dreaming of white-trousered soldiers on horses when Lydia opened the door. He was happy to see her, and he said nothing about fire. He said nothing about it when she walked to the store Sunday morning; and when she went Monday, the home health aid woman and housekeeper were with him for all but the last hour.

He had started reading
War and Peace
a week before his horse slipped and fell on his left leg, scrambled upright, then slipped again and fell on both his legs; then Robert was screaming, and finally the horse got up and watched him. Then he moaned, and breathed in quick rhythm with the pain, and called toward the stables beyond a stand of trees, called “Help,” and knew he had screamed under the horse because he could not move, and such helplessness felt like drowning in sunlit air near the shadows of pines. In the hospital he had morphine and now, in the bedside table Lydia had carried downstairs, he had Demerol and Percodan. When pain cut through his concentration so he could not focus on talking with Lydia, he took Percodan; when pain was all he could feel of his body, and it filled his brain and spirit so he moaned and tried not to yell, he took Demerol. Always there was pain in his legs, but if he
kept them elevated and did not move his body, it was bearable for hours at a time, and he read; and, resting from that, he looked out the dining room window, and at the mahogany table.

He had never had any feelings about the things of domestic life. In them he saw Lydia’s choices, and his admiration was not for the objects but for her. If all the furniture in the house were carried off by thieves, his only sorrow would be for Lydia. She had bought the mahogany table early in their marriage. She had money, and when each grandparent and parent died, she accumulated more. The table had traveled in moving vans back and forth across the nation. It had remained unmarked by children, and by officers and their wives from Hawaii to Virginia; it had stood amid family quarrels and silence and laughter, amid boisterous drinking and storytelling and flirtations, and here it was, in this house in the country north of Boston, without a scar. He had lived with it for decades, and now, lying helpless and in pain, he began to feel affection for the table. In the morning he opened his eyes to it; at night in the dark he looked at its shape in the pale light of the window as he waited for one drug to release him from pain and another to give him sleep.

The shock of the horse crushing his bones, then anesthesia, surgery, pain, and drugs had taken his vitality. He could not finish a meal, he could not remain either awake or alert from morning till night, he did not want to smoke a pipe or drink a martini, and he could not feel passion for Lydia. One night in his third week at home, when she bent to kiss him good night, he held her to his chest, his cheek pressing hers, and all his feeling for her was above his loins, filling his breast, and
one or two joyful tears moistened his eyes. Then he watched her cross the room to the stairs; she wore dark shades of brown: a sweater and skirt and tights and high-heeled boots. He watched her climb to the hall and disappear into the light she turned on at the top of the stairs. He listened to her footsteps going to the bedroom; then the hall was dark again, and his bedside lamp was the only light in the house; it warmed his cheek.

He had not climbed the stairs for two months, and now he saw that all of the second floor was Lydia’s: the bedroom, the large bathroom with its sweet scents of things for her body, her room where she read and wrote letters and paid bills. Always she had paid the bills, and this had nothing to do with her inheritance; it was common for officers’ wives to manage all elements of the household, so the man could be rushed off to war without pausing to brief his wife on debts, automobile maintenance, and so on. Upstairs were a sunporch, a television room with a wet bar, and two guest bedrooms. For three years he had inhabited that floor. But Lydia had given of herself to those spaces enclosed by wood and glass, colored by paint and light, and he felt they were mysteriously alive and female.

Then he realized this was true of the first floor as well. At cocktail hour he had mixed drinks in the kitchen, and sometimes cooked there or on the patio with charcoal; but certainly the kitchen was hers. So were the dining and living rooms and, down the hall, the bedroom and study and the bathroom, where he had showered after fishing or hunting or riding, lifting weights or running. Only his den, at the end of the hall, was truly his: the pipe stands and humidor on the desk,
the ashtray always emptied, the desktop clear; the rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers locked behind wood and glass; the barbell and weights and bench; the closet door closed and behind it tackle boxes and boots, waders and running shoes on the floor, and, on hangers above them, the clothing of his passions. His fishing rods hung on pegs on one wall, his hats and caps on pegs on another, above a bookcase filled with literature of war. His rear wall was glass and through it he could see nearly all of the back lawn and watch squirrels on trees in the woods, crows, gliding hawks; sometimes a doe suddenly appeared at the edge of the woods and Robert Townsend watched it with joy.

Every other room in the house was female. If he closed his den, removed his things from the downstairs bathroom, and lowered the toilet seat, there would be no sign of a man in the house. In the warmth of the bedside lamp, he smiled: probably he never would have made this discovery if he had not lost the freedom of walking in his home. They could not have built the house without her money; but her money had never been important to him; it had come with her, like her golden hair, and if she lost it, he would love her as dearly as he would when her hair yellowed and grayed and no longer shone in the sun. The money had spared him worry about the children’s education, and the nuisance of worn-out cars and appliances; but it did not touch what he loved in his life; his salary was sufficient for that. Reading
War and Peace
drew from him a comparison between himself and Lydia, and Tolstoy’s officers and ladies; Lydia’s money had given them the ease, the grace, of the aristocracy. But it had not spared them the rigors and the uprootings of military life, the
sorrow of two wars, and the grief for dead friends and their widows and children, and for the men he had lost: men who were like sons he was given when they were eighteen, boys whom he loved for only months before they died. Their names and faces stayed in his heart; if you looked closely at his eyes, you could see them. Lydia knew his grief well, and tenderly; were it not part of him, she may have loved him less.

He took a sleeping pill and turned off the bedside lamp. He liked this new way of seeing the house, as if the entire structure were female and he entered it to be at its center with Lydia; and she had made a place for him, his den, as she gave him a place in her body. A great tenderness welled in him. He regretted his rebukes of Lydia, through the years, and his infidelities when he was alone overseas. These were with prostitutes. He had acted in privacy and had never told anyone. Afterward, he had forgiven himself in the same way that, on hungover mornings, he had absolved himself for being a drunken fool: he sloughed off remorse as he shaved his whiskers; then he put on his uniform and went to work. He did not justify his adultery; he believed a better man would have been chaste; but he saw it as an occupational hazard of soldiering. He was an active man, and his need for a woman’s love was nocturnal, or it seemed to be. But during months of separation from Lydia, that need moved into daylight: a tender loneliness, a sense of being unattached, of floating near the boundaries of fear. Also, Robert Townsend loved women: a woman’s eyes could move his blood as the moon pulls the sea. It was neither easy nor simple for him to live for a year without the nakedness
of a woman; he had done his best, and on more than a thousand nights he had prevailed.

He wished this night, drugged in the living room, that he had been perfect, that he had made love with no one since he met Lydia on a blind date in La Jolla. He was a second lieutenant wearing dress blues, the date was for the Marine Corps birthday ball, and while his friend waited in the car, he strode up the long walk to the lighted front door; she was living with her parents still, and he was unabashed by the size of the stone house, its expanse of lawn and accumulation of trees. In his left hand, he held his white gloves and her corsage. He rang the doorbell, then stepped back so she would see the height and breadth of him when she swung open the door. Behind him was the ocean, and he smelled it with every breath. Then she opened the door: she was in a silver gown with a full skirt, he was smelling her perfume, and he looked at her tanned face and arms and golden hair and felt that he was looking at the sun without burning his eyes.

In the hospital the surgeon told Robert that his knees would not fully recover, his left one would probably never bend more than forty degrees, and he would live more comfortably in a one-story home. The surgeon was a trim young man with gentle brown eyes; Robert liked him, and told him not to worry about an old Marine climbing a flight of stairs. One afternoon when Lydia was in the room, the surgeon talked about stairs and Robert’s knees again, looking at her. He said there would also be atrophy of the legs because the casts
would not come off for months. Then, until Robert came home, Lydia looked at houses and land, but she did not love any of it. She spoke to the building contractor, and phoned orthopedic surgeons in Arizona, near her family ranch.