Nancy Culpepper (26 page)

“They said erection too. Builders would call a house an erection.” Jack pulled on his T-shirt. He said, “ ‘My mighty erection,’ he ejaculated slowly.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Nancy said. She couldn’t think of what else to say.

Soon after she left Jack, a year ago, she visited Northampton, Massachusetts, where they had first met. She drove her old history professor around the countryside. Professor Doyle—she still wanted to address him that way—was still passionate about the Transcendentalists. “I hate time!” he wailed. Nancy was unnerved. She remembered how in class he pumped his fist in the air for emphasis, making history come alive, as if it were a timeless possession in his mind.

Nancy pulled over in front of a post office across the road from the house where she and Jack used to live. The green saltbox, now painted brown, was for sale. The field where she and Jack once ran with their dog had sprouted a monochrome faux–New England housing development. Nancy entertained a quick fantasy of purchasing the house and moving in with Jack, starting over.

“History is imagination,” Professor Doyle said, with a tinge of bitterness.

Jack napped while Nancy read snatches of Wordsworth’s
The Prelude,
his long paean to Coleridge, in the light from the window. Wordsworth was reviewing his life, gearing up to write his magnum opus, not knowing that most of his great works were already behind him. She absorbed the fleeting scenes of youth, when the two poets had connived to whiplash the imagination. Wordsworth wrote about the eloquence of rustic people, who didn’t use proper English and who toiled with bent bodies, people like those from Nancy’s past. The poets, in their quest for what they called the sublime, thought nothing of walking the length of England. With Dorothy, they went for midnight rambles in the dead of winter. Nancy could not stop wondering about Dorothy’s boots.

Robin’s gift was a box of chocolate mice from Boston, and Nancy nibbled several down to their inedible tails. Jack seemed unusually tired, and she let him sleep.

The light was fading when he stirred. Nancy knelt by the bed and nudged him awake. “Come on, Jet-Lag Jack,” she said. “You’ll get your days and nights mixed up. It’s time to go downstairs for dinner.”

Jack groaned and sat up. “What time is it?”

“Eight-ten. You don’t want to miss sticky-toffee pudding.” She grinned as he grimaced.

Jack roused himself from bed, fumbled through his duffel bag, and found a wadded shirt. He began to change into it. Then he reached for Nancy, who was slipping into her black running pants and clogs—her dinner outfit.

“Actually there’s more news,” he said, holding her arm. “I have prostate cancer.”

“What?”

“The prostate,” he said.

“Oh, Jack!”

“They have to do some more tests, but they want to do surgery.”

Nancy realized she was now sitting on the floor, clutching the side of the bed. He sat on the side of the bed, and she raised herself to sit beside him. “Maybe it’s not really cancer?”

“The doctor did a biopsy. I should have waited to tell you after I get all the results.”

She recognized her numbness, the clicking into detachment mode. The news would not sink in for some time. She started to tell him that he was crazy to travel overseas instead of going for surgery right away. But she refrained.

She saw her emotions lying around her, in heaps, like children flung from a Maypole.

Holding her tightly, he told her the details. He had been worried for some time. Perhaps he had come back to her out of a need, she thought, but it was also possible that he knew there was no time for recriminations and separation. Now she was called upon to exert that confidence she had imagined in herself, to say the right things. But she didn’t know exactly what. She was sitting in his lap, her head on his shoulder. Somehow they were now in the easy chair.

“I won’t ever leave you again.” The words didn’t sound like hers. “I’m not just saying that,” she said.

“I know. I’m not asking you to come back because of this.”

“I wanted to come back anyway. You know I did.”

“I was afraid to ask you, afraid it wouldn’t be authentic.”

“Let’s not worry about the authentic. We’ve always pressured ourselves to be authentic. Let’s just be ourselves.”

He smiled. “Whatever that means.” She rubbed his neck. “I missed you,” he said.

“I’m glad.”

He said, “I don’t want you to come home if you don’t really feel—”

“Home? We have no home.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean doom. Some people just live with it.”

“Unless I have the Frank Zappa kind.”

Nancy reached for her fleece shirt, but she wasn’t sure she was cold.

“Bopsy,” Nancy said.

“What?”

“Mom pronounced it that way—when she had breast cancer. Biopsy. Bopsy.”

“Bopsy, Mopsy and—Cottontail?”

She slid from his lap and stood. “You
know
I love you,” she said. “It’s
time
that I hate.”

Jack’s news hit her again. It was illogical, unreal.

She wondered if Mick Jagger ever worried about his prostate.

While Jack was in the bathroom, she roamed through a small paperback he had brought about the prostate. The walnut-sized gland— always described as a walnut, like something a squirrel would hide. The inconvenience of it, such a silly thing to harbor in one’s body. A tumor in itself.

Her whole life with Jack was reconfigured in a couple of moments, its arc becoming a circle, like the circle implied in a rainbow or a sunrise.

The downstairs dining room, looking out on the river, was almost deserted. Their table for two was in a corner across from the sideboard of fruit and pudding. The table setting included three china patterns, Nancy noticed.

“The cuisine is strangely inventive here,” she told Jack. “Nouvelle Borderlands.”

She chose an Italian eggplant dish with cubes of smoked tofu and a pasta called orecchiette—fat blobs like collapsed hats. Jack ordered the plaice. The pasta came with roasted potatoes and carrots on the side, while the plaice had mashed potatoes, carrots and courgettes.

As they ate, Nancy talked rapidly, spilling out everything she had saved to tell Jack. They were ignoring his prostate, but her thoughts had adjusted like blocks of text rejustifying on a computer screen.

“Do you like the plaice?” she asked.

“It’s fine—I guess what you always called a charming, cozy hotel.”

“I meant the fish.”

He grinned. “If I’d said the fish was good, you would have said you meant the hotel.”

They laughed. “Maybe you know me better than I thought you did,” she said.

In the gray morning they walked, in rain gear, under the soft, dim sky. Jack had slept through the night and declared his jet lag deleted. Dumped. Vanquished. Atomized. But his eyes still looked tired.

“The beans want sticking,” Nancy said to Jack in the garden behind Dove Cottage.

“What?”

“Dorothy wrote in her journal, ‘The Scarlet Beans want sticking.’ It’s the same way my grandmother talked. And my mother too. They grew scarlet runner beans, and they had to find sticks for the vines to hold on to. Dorothy wrote about William gathering sticks to stick the peas.”

“You’re still thinking about your past,” he said, not unkindly.

Nancy was thinking of the time Coleridge stopped in at Dove Cottage, while Dorothy and William were away. Coleridge went into the garden, picked some peas, and cooked them. He dressed them, he wrote in his notebook. Nancy’s mother used that word. She dressed eggs, dressed a hen. Nancy was pleased to find this cultural connection to her parents and grandparents, but she wouldn’t mention that to Jack now. Nancy followed him down the cobbled lane past Dove Cottage, where he occupied himself with taking photos of some small-animal skulls displayed on the side of a stone house.

She said, “Did it ever occur to you that Wordsworth would have an accent, that he would have sounded like the Beatles?”

“Give me a line.”

“ ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’?” Jack tried it but didn’t quite get it right. They laughed. She wondered if he was remembering their other trip to the Lake District, but she didn’t ask.

A World War II–era Spitfire appeared suddenly, low in the sky over Grasmere. Jack fumbled with his zoom lens and took several shots. “Damn,” he said. “I wanted to get it against that hill over there. I just got sky.”

“There were fighter jets every day last week,” Nancy said.

Early in their marriage, in their rural phase, Nancy grew vegetables. It seemed a moral obligation to grow something if there was good ground. But one night she found herself up at midnight preparing English peas for the freezer. And it occurred to her that she had left home in Kentucky to get away from the hard labor that had enslaved her parents. She was meant to use her mind. But her mind wandered, and she never had a successful career, because she shied away from groups, with their voluble passions. A career was more important to Jack, and she knew he sometimes felt a failure because he hadn’t exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

Eventually they sold their place in the country. Jack craved the stimulation of artistic friends, and Nancy had grown restless. They moved to Boston, which Nancy loved for its history, and fell in with a set of articulate, intellectual dabblers. But she found something myopic in their ways, how they stirred and sifted the doings of the day as if they were separating wheat from chaff, passing judgments on everyone who came to their notice. Their gatherings, although bohemian, were little contests, a show of strained witticisms. They never made crude remarks or talked about sex or money, and they assumed that everyone in the nation knew who Susan Sontag was.

“I should have made a big pot of chicken-and-dumplings, complete with the yellow feet sticking up,” Nancy told Jack once after a miserable dinner party when she had cooked fried chicken. “They would jump right in if it was Chinese. But if it’s Southern, it’s unacceptable.”

Jack just sighed. “There you go again, Nancy. They ate.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

Kentucky wouldn’t release her. She wouldn’t let it. She fought Jack on this, and he always accused her of being held back by her culture. She and Jack had often been apart for considerable stretches of time—her many trips to Kentucky; a former job that kept her on the road; and then a serious separation a decade ago. She went to England then, too, but that trip held no good memories. It was only a midlife crisis, she and Jack assured each other, when they reunited. Then a few years back, her parents died, in a ghastly six-month period—cerebral hemorrhage and massive stroke. Nancy broke from Boston then and began living part-time in Kentucky while she reconsidered herself and waited for her grief to subside. She supposed that 9/11 freed her from her own personal grief, but she never said so, for fear of sounding melodramatic. After her parents’ farm was sold, that hard rural way of life that had endured for centuries passed away. Nothing held her there, except what Jack called the guilty-daughter syndrome, her conviction that she had betrayed her parents in a hundred ways and that she had never really explained herself to them.

Now Nancy stood in Dorothy’s garden and gazed at the yew tree beside the house, a tree that had been there two centuries ago.

Her parents were gone. Their farm was gone. She was herself. It was the twenty-first century.

Heavy rain hit at lunchtime, but by afternoon it eased and the sky brightened slightly. They walked to Easedale, past Goody Bridge. The rain-swollen stream was rushing and high under the bridge. They walked along a boardwalk with the water lapping at the edges, then crossed a sheep pasture to the rocky trail that ascended the mountain. Tall granite fences, the ancient work of farmers and shepherds, made hard lines up the mountain. The rock steps of the path were carefully laid, now worn smooth by generations of walkers. The ascent up to Sour Milk Gill was not difficult.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Nancy asked Jack.

“I’m O.K. Fine. Couldn’t be better.”

“Maybe we should have trekking poles,” Nancy said, indicating a young couple with backpacks who were descending at a fast clamber, their metal-tipped poles clicking rapidly against the stones.

“I knew I should have brought a cane,” Jack joked.

“We’re not old,” Nancy said.

They walked steadily for about a mile, Nancy following Jack’s lead. They paused just before a steep ascent and drank some water. Nancy stood on a large, smooth rectangular stone that served as a small bridge over a streamlet. As she gazed across at the waterfall, she thought she glimpsed her own image, outsized, with a halo, in the mist above the water. She felt she was in one of Coleridge’s “luminous clouds.” The sudden sensation faded as she said all this aloud to Jack. “The poets called it a ‘glory,’ ” she explained. “It’s accidental, not something that can be forced. It just swoops in, like a bright-feathered bird landing inside your head.”

“I’ve read about that,” Jack said. “It’s caused by a tiny seizure in the brain.”

“Well, then, I’m having a tiny seizure.”

The path veered close to the tumble of the waterfall, which was known long ago as Churn Milk Force. Nancy, watching the crash and spray of water, suddenly felt a rare burst of anger as she pictured the days lined up ahead, days that could descend into a dark tedium. Churning through her mind was an intolerable parade of flash-card images—a hospital corridor, a shrunken body, falling hair, a coffin. She would not be able to endure it.

“Stand still. I want to take your picture.” Jack lifted his camera and pointed it at her. “I like the way your hair seems to be in motion.”

He fiddled with his lenses, paused to let a hiker past, and began snapping.

“What are you thinking?” he said, shielding his camera in its case.

She hesitated, unzipping her jacket partway. She heard a sheep bleat. “I was remembering when we were in the Lake District before,” she said. “In Kendal. Remember Mrs. Lindsay and how when she was small, the old people would tell about seeing Wordsworth walking around with his walking stick? Just think—we knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Wordsworth! I’ve never forgotten that.”