Imagine Me Gone (3 page)

Three weeks later I sailed back to New York for Christmas. I stayed just under a month. We wrote several times a week. Daily bits and pieces but lots of fond things, too. There were some particularly ardent ones from him—as strong about how he loved me as he’d ever said or written before.

I didn’t understand what his flatmate was saying when I called the day I got back to London and he told me that John had been admitted to the hospital.

“Has he had an accident?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But perhaps you should call his parents.”

I phoned right away. His mother handed the receiver to her husband with barely a word. “Yes,” he said. “We were rather hoping all this business was done with. His mother finds it most unpleasant.”

I had nothing to prepare me. John sat in what looked like an enormous waiting room with clusters of chairs and coffee tables, all those waiting being men, most of them reading newspapers or playing cards or just gazing through the filmy windows. His face was so drained of spirit I barely recognized him. If he hadn’t moved his eyes I would have thought he was dead.

The room got only northern light and the shades were half pulled. It just made no sense to stay in that tepid, dingy atmosphere so I said, “Why don’t we go for a walk?” I had to leave there to plant my feet back in reality, and to bring him with me.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. It turned out this wasn’t the first time he’d been hospitalized. His second year at Oxford he’d had to leave for a term. Since then—almost ten years—he’d been generally fine. He’d been the man I’d met. Now, utterly unlike that person, he barely spoke. He just held my hand as we walked through Hyde Park, the ghost of John in John’s frame.

He had to rest, he said. He was tired. That was all. But I knew that couldn’t be it, or was only half true. Being the pushy American, I made an appointment to see his doctor. This was most surprising to the staff, “But all right then,” he would speak with me.

I remember the man’s blue checked cardigan and square glasses, and his thick black hair brushed back with Brylcreem. I couldn’t tell if the room where we met was his office or just a space for meetings off the ward. The books on the shelves were arranged in desultory fashion and there were no diplomas on the walls. But he seemed comfortable and settled there and offered me a smoke before showing me to the couch. He sat opposite and attended mostly to the tip of his cigarette, which he flicked frequently against the rim of the sea-green ashtray nestled in its tarnished brass stand.

“He’s doing reasonably well,” he said, glancing upward with a slight nod of the head, hoping perhaps that would settle it.

“But why is he here? Can you tell me that?”

“How long have the two of you been together?”

“A year and a half.”

He thought about this for a moment, as if deciding how to proceed.

“There’s an imbalance,” he said, crossing his legs and resting the hand that held the cigarette on his knee. He wore cuffed wool pants and brown leather brogues. He must have been twice my age. Between the absence of any white lab coat and the slow, considered pace of his conversation he struck me as a professor more than a doctor.

“You could say his mind closes down. It goes into a sort of hibernation. He needs rest and sometimes a bit of waking up, which may not be necessary right now, but which we can do if it becomes so.”

“And it’s happened before.”

“Yes, it would have done.”

“And that means it’ll happen again?”

“Hard to say. It could well do. But these things aren’t predictable. Stability, family—those things help.”

I think that’s when I was closest to crying. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about what was happening. Not more than to mention and excuse it in the same breath, to say that all was well. But in that room with that man whose English kindliness undid something in me, I suddenly felt afraid and homesick, and probably I did cry for a moment. “We’re supposed to get married this spring,” I said.

He tapped his cigarette again against the lip of the ashtray, then slowly changed the cross of his legs, his shoulders and head remaining perfectly still. He pondered my statement for such a long time that I wondered if he’d heard me. Then he looked up with gentle eyes and asked, “In that case I presume you love him?”

I nodded.

“Well, then, that’s as it should be,” he said.

I went to the ward in Lambeth every afternoon and we took a walk together, even if it was raining. The light in that room was a kind of malpractice. I never saw or spoke to the doctor again. It was hard to get information from anyone. Asking questions wasn’t the proper form. It was the same way a couple of years later when I gave birth to Michael at St. Thomas’s, everyone perfectly pleasant but with nothing but blandishments to offer.

John stayed on the ward for a month. His father visited once, his mother not at all (John was perfect, and she wanted nothing to do with evidence to the contrary). I don’t know what he told his roommates or managers, but it wasn’t that he’d been in a psychiatric hospital. Often during that month I didn’t know which was worse, his dark mood or the shame and frustration it caused him. And he didn’t want to talk about the particulars with me.

I decided not to tell my parents. And certainly not my friends, because they would only worry. My sister, Penny, I did confide in, but swore her to secrecy. In an odd way I felt closer to John. I was the only one who visited regularly, and though it was a strain to be making decisions about a wedding when he barely had the energy to read the news—having to wonder what kind of shape he’d be in by then—there was something about those walks in the park, perhaps precisely because he didn’t talk a blue streak as he usually did, that added a kind of gravity to being in love with him. I’d always wondered before if the mystery that made the beginning of romance enthralling necessarily had to vanish, or if with the right person it just lasted on. I couldn’t have imagined the answer would come in this form, so tied up with trepidation and anger at him for disappearing, in a sense, leaving me with this remnant of himself, but there it was, a mystery deeper than I had guessed at. All his animation and verve could vanish like the weather and stay lost, but then somehow, after six weeks or so, return with such self-forgetting that he didn’t see anything strange about how blithely he led me by the arm into a car showroom to look at MGs, and then took me out to lunch and a bottle of wine, as if nothing had ever happened.

In the fifteen years of our marriage, he’s never gone back to a hospital or come anywhere close, in fact. He’s never had to stop working, or gone nearly so low as he did that fall. He has moods, and occasionally a stretch of a few weeks when I notice his energy flagging, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to rid myself of the worry I have then, that it will all get much worse. Which is part of what keeps the mystery between us going. You could call that perverse. Fear playing that role. But it’s not only fear, and what’s hard to explain is that the fear is also a kind of tenderness. I’m the only one who knows in the way I do that he needs someone to watch over him. At the worst moments, when the children are tired and the house is a mess and I see from the pace of his walk up the drive at the end of the day that he’s at a lower ebb, it can seem no better than having a fourth child and I want to walk straight out the door and not come back for a month. But most of the time it’s not like that. I may not be able to tell what he’s thinking, but he reaches for me. And the excitement from the beginning fills me again at those moments. I don’t see how it could if I understood him through and through.

Seventeen years together. Three children.

And here we are, the five of us, floating up Route 1 in this boat of a car, the children beginning to scramble again in the back: Michael calling out additions to his list of a hundred names for Kelsey ending in
ator
—the eviscerator, the nebulator, the constipator—all of which she answers to from the bucket seat, yelping in response, having ears only for the tone of a voice, causing Celia to climb over the backseat to protect her from Michael’s mockery, while Alec stands up behind his father’s seat and reaches his hand around to play with John’s double chin, asking how much longer it’s going to be, all of them their father’s impatient children.

I’m the only one who doesn’t always want answers. John may never articulate his questions, but they are with him, a way of being. And the children want answers to everything all the time: What’s for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner? Where’s Kelsey? Where’s Dad? Why do we have to come in? Why do we have to go to bed? Some days the only words I speak to them are answers, and reasons I can’t answer, and instructions in place of the answers they want.

The questions won’t stop up here, but once we’re on the island and the three of them are spending most of the day playing on the rocks, or in the boat with their father, or traipsing up and down from the porch to the tide pools and back with their crabs in tin saucepans, the salt water and sun will wear down the edges of their nervous energy, and now and then I’ll get to be with myself long enough that when they come back, or I spy them going about their business, I will actually
see
them for a moment. Which ordinarily I don’t. Sight isn’t really my sense of them. They’re touch and sound. I can look at pictures from just a few years ago and barely recognize them. But the day starts and ends with their voices and bodies. John is something else. There are parallel worlds. Apparently science says so now, too. I didn’t know it until Michael was born. Now it’s obvious. I was reading a novel the other day and some character said, “We live among the dead until we join them,” something portentous like that, dreary, and I thought, Maybe, but who’s got time for the dead with all this life, all these lives, all jumbled up?

We arrive at the little blue clapboard cabin in Port Clyde in midafternoon and go to the general store to order the propane for the morning and buy groceries. John wants us to get up early again tomorrow to get out to the island as soon as possible. He’d go this evening but by the time we got the house sorted out and the food put away we’d still be making beds by oil lamp. And besides, the children like this mainland cabin too, playing on the granite boulders that jut from its sloping lawn, dashing up and down the aluminum bridgeway that runs over the tidal flat to the jetty. I watch them at it as I get supper ready.

They sense, without noticing, the new world about them, the salted air, the clear light we don’t get farther south until autumn, the brightly painted lobster boats reflected in the rippling mirror of the bay. These are not things to pause over for them, the objects at hand always being what matter most—the chain Michael can put across the bridgeway to try to block the others from coming down, the bushes they hide behind, the tall grass they climb through, which will have Alec and Michael wheezing soon enough.

After supper, Michael and Celia are allowed to stay up for another hour reading. Though he has a room to himself at home, Alec doesn’t like being on his own when he imagines the other two are still conspiring together somewhere in the house. But tonight it’s okay because his father’s telling him a story. John never reads them books. He makes the stories up. I don’t have the energy at the end of the day for that, or his invention. He makes a ghost out of tissue paper, a king out of a wooden block, and Alec will be quieted to the point of trance, by the story, but also because his father’s attention is pouring over him, and only him, like the air of heaven. And when John leans down to kiss him good night, Alec will reach up to feel his double chin again, chubby and warm and a little scratchy, and he’ll be content in a way I can never make him because I am never the exception.

I disappear for twenty minutes into Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
while John does the dishes, fighting past my initial irritation at all the class nonsense and how no one will say anything of significance to anyone else because it’s simply not done to be
explicit
. Like in James or Wharton. Those novels where you’re screaming at characters to go ahead already and blurt it out, save us a hundred pages of prevarication. But my pique wears off and I sink into the allure of the Ashburnhams at Nauheim, idling on the notion of how someone could so distort his life around an obsessive love, when John comes in having forgotten the dish towel still over his shoulder, and looks across the disarray of the room for the newspaper somewhere in the tote bags. He wouldn’t be able to remember where he stowed it to save his life. I reach into the side pocket of his briefcase and hand it to him.

“Did you call Bill?”

“Yes, we’re all set,” he says, already scanning the headlines, settling into the chair opposite me beneath the standing lamp.

I’m pleasantly tired enough to trust he got the dates right when he spoke to Bill Mitchell. Why it couldn’t be settled a month ago I don’t understand. I just have to assume we have our two weeks (they arrived a day early one year and we had to check into a motel). John’s absentmindedness is chronic and infuriating. Whereas I remember the dates for everything. It’s embarrassing actually to admit how much I still store in my head: our first visit to John’s parents (April 5, 1963), the day he bought his Morris Minor (March 10, 1964), and on and on. I remember the anniversaries of these events too, but I don’t mention them to people because unless it’s a birth or death or wedding I get quizzical looks, as in, Why have you bothered to retain such trivia, why does it matter? (I tell the children instead; they have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t really listen, but nod anyway before asking their next question.) It was sixteen years ago last month, for instance, that John appeared unannounced on my doorstep with a car already packed with food and wine and drove us all the way to the Highlands, to a friend’s house he’d been loaned for the weekend.