Night Music (41 page)

Then she turned and stared straight at him. He did not move. He felt his lips form a word, and he spoke her name, but she did not hear him.

No, he thought, this is not possible. This cannot be.

It was her, yet not her.

He was looking not at the face of the woman who had died barely a year before, her features heavily lined by old age and the depredations of the disease that had taken her, her hair thinning and gray, her body small, almost birdlike, where she had shrunken into herself during those final months, but at the face of another who had lived by that name in the past. This was his wife as she once was, as she had been before their children were born. This was his beloved as a young woman—thirty, perhaps, but no more than that. And as he gazed at her, he was taken aback by her beauty. He had always loved her, had always thought her beautiful, even at the end, but the photographs and memories could not do justice to the girl who had first entranced him, and about whom he had felt as never before or since about a woman.

She moved toward him. He uttered her name again, but there was no response. As she reached the bathroom he stepped aside, performing a neat little dance that left him outside the room and her inside. Then the door closed in his face, and he could hear the sounds of clothing being removed and, despite his astonishment, he found himself walking away to give her a little privacy, humming a tune to himself as he always did in moments of confusion or distraction. In the short time that he had been asleep, the world appeared to have changed once again, but he no longer had any understanding of his place in it.

He heard the toilet flush, and she emerged, humming the same tune. She cannot see me, he thought. She cannot see me, but can she somehow hear me? She had not responded when he called her name, yet now here she was, sharing a song with him. It might have been coincidence, and nothing more. After all, it was one of their mutual favorites, and perhaps it was hardly surprising that, when she was alone and content, she would hum it softly to herself. He had, by definition, never seen her alone. True, there were times when she had been unaware of his presence for a time, allowing him to watch as she moved unselfconsciously through some of the rhythms and routines of her day, but such occasions were always brief, the spell broken by her recognition of his presence, or his belief that there were important matters to which he had to attend. But truly, how vital had they been? After she died, he would have given up a dozen of them—no, a hundred, a thousand—for just one more minute with her. Such was hindsight, he supposed. It made every man wise, but wise too late.

None of this was relevant. What mattered was that he was looking at his wife as she had once been, a woman who could not now be but somehow was. He went through some of the possibilities: a waking dream, perhaps, or a hallucination brought on by tiredness and travel. But he had smelled her as she passed, and he could hear her now as she sang, and the weight of her footsteps left impressions on the thick carpet that remained visible for a moment before the strands sprang back into place.

I want to touch you, he thought. I want to feel your skin against mine.

She unlocked her suitcase and began unpacking her clothes, hanging blouses and dresses in the closet and using the drawer on the left for her underwear, just as she did at home. He was so close to her now that he could hear her breathing. He spoke her name once more, his breath upon her neck, and it seemed to him that, for an instant, she lost her place in the song, stumbling slightly on a verse. He whispered again, and she stopped entirely. She looked over her shoulder, her expression uncertain, and her gaze went straight through him.

He reached out a hand and brushed his fingers gently against the skin of her face. It felt warm to the touch. She was a living, breathing presence in the room. She shivered and touched the spot with her fingertips, as though troubled by the presence of a strand of gossamer.

A number of thoughts struck him almost simultaneously.

The first was: I will not speak again. Neither will I touch her. I do not want to see that look upon her face. I want to see her as I so rarely saw her in life. I want to be at once a part of, and apart from, her existence. I do not understand what is happening, but I do not wish it to end.

The second thought was: if she is so real, then what am I? I have become insubstantial. When I saw her first, I believed her to be a ghost, but now it seems that it is I who have become less than I once was. Yet I can feel my heart beating, I can hear the sound my spittle makes in my mouth, and I am aware of my own pain.

The third thought was: why is she alone?

They had always arrived together to celebrate their anniversary. It was their place, and they would always ask for this room because it was the one in which they had stayed that first night. It did not matter that the decor had changed over the years or that the suite was, in truth, identical to half a dozen others in the hotel. No, what mattered was the number on the door, and the memories that the sight of it evoked. It was the thrill of returning to—how had she once put it?—“the scene of the crime,” laughing in that low way of hers, the one that always made him want to take her to bed. On those rare occasions that the room was not available, they would feel a sense of disappointment that cast the faintest of shadows over their pleasure.

He was seeing her in their room, but without him. Should he not also be here? Should he not be witnessing his younger self with her, watching as he and she moved around each other, one resting while the other showered, one reading while the other dressed, one (and, in truth, it was always he) tapping a foot impatiently while the other made some final adjustment to their hair or clothing? He experienced a sensation of dizziness, and his own identity began to crumble like old brickwork beneath the mason's hammer. The possibility came to him that he had somehow dreamed an entire existence, that he had created a life with no basis in reality. He would awake and find that he was back in his parents' house, sleeping in his narrow single bed, and there would be school to go to, with ball practice afterward, and homework to be done as daylight faded.

No. She is real and I am real. I am an old man, and I am dying, but I will not let my memories of her be taken from me without a fight.

Alone. She had come here alone. Or alone, for now. Was there another on his way, a lover, a man familiar or unknown to him? Had she once betrayed him in this room, in
their
room? The possibility was more devastating to him than if she had never existed. He retreated, and the pain inside him grew. He wanted to grasp her arms, to demand an explanation. Not now, he thought, not at the very end, when all that I have been waiting for is to be reunited with her at last; or, if there is nothing beyond this world, to lose myself in a void where there is no pain, and her loss can no longer be felt but merely absorbed into the greater absence beyond.

He sat heavily in the chair. The telephone rang, but whether in his world or hers, he did not know. They were layered, one on top of the other, like twin pieces of film, each containing a different actor. His wife, her shoes now discarded, skipped across the floor to the bed and picked up the receiver.

“Hello? Hi. Yes, everything's fine. I got here okay, and they gave us our room.” She listened. “Oh no, that's too bad. When do they think they'll be able to fly you out? Well, at least you won't miss the entire stay.” Silence again. He could hear the tinny voice on the other end of the line, and it was his own. “Well, it makes sense to stay at an airport motel, then, just in case. It won't be as nice as here, though.” Then she laughed, sensual and throaty, and he knew what had been said, knew because he had said it, could almost remember the exact words, could recall nearly every minute of that weekend, because now it was coming back to him and he felt a flurry of conflicting responses to the dawning knowledge. He felt relief, but also shame. He had doubted her. Right at the close, after all their years together, he had thought of her in a way that was unworthy. He wanted to find a way to apologize to her, but could not.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered, and to acknowledge his fault aloud gave him some relief.

He went through his memories of that time. Snow had hit the airport, delaying all flights. He had been cutting it pretty tight that day, for there were meetings to attend and people to see. His was the last flight out, and he had watched the board as it read
DELAYED
, then
DELAYED
again, and finally,
CANCELED
.
He endured a dull evening at an airport motel so that he would be close enough to catch the first flight out the next morning, if the weather lifted. It had, and they spent the next night together, but it was the only occasion on which they had found themselves apart on the eve of their anniversary, she in their room and he in another, eating pizza from a box and watching a hockey game on TV. Recalling it now, it had not been such a bad night, almost an indulgence of sorts, but he would rather have spent it with her. There were few nights, over the entire forty-eight-year history of their marriage, that he would not rather have spent by her side.

There was something else about that night, something that he could not quite remember. It nagged at him, like an itch in his recall demanding to be scratched. What was it? He cursed his failing memory, even as another emotion overcame him.

He was conscious of a sense of envy toward his younger self. He was so brash then, so caught up in his own importance. He sometimes looked at other women (although he never went further than looking) and he occasionally thought of his ex-girlfriend, Karen, the one who might have been his wife. She left to attend a small, exclusive college in the North-east with the expectation that he would follow, when instead he went elsewhere, choosing to stay closer to home. They had tried to make it work at a distance, but it had not, and there were moments in the early years of his marriage when he had thought about what it might have been like to be married to Karen, of how their children might have looked and how it might have been to sleep each night next to her, to wake her in the dark with a kiss and feel her respond, her hands on his back, their bodies slowly entwining. In time, those thoughts had faded, and he dwelt in the present of his choosing, grateful for all that it—and she—had brought him. But that same young man, carefree and careless, would arrive the next morning, and take his beautiful wife to bed, and not even understand how fortunate he was to have her.

She hung up the phone and sat on the bed, running her fingers across the stone of her engagement ring before tracing circles around the gold band that sat below it. She stood and then, as he remained in his chair, aware now of flurries of snow falling outside, she drew the curtains, turned on the bedside lamps so that the room was lapped by warm light, and began to undress.

And it was given to him to be with her that night, both distantly yet intimately. He sat on the bathroom floor as she bathed, his cheek against the side of the tub, her head resting on a towel, her eyes closed as the radio in the room played an hour of Stan Getz. He was beside her as she sat on the bed in a hotel robe, a towel wrapped around her head, painting her toenails and laughing at some terrible comedy show that she would never have watched had he been present, and he found himself laughing along with her as much as with it. She ordered room service—a Cobb salad, with a half-bottle of Chablis—and he saw the fingerprints she left upon the chilled glass. He followed the words on the page as she read a book that he had given her, one that he had just finished and thought she might like. Now he read along with her, the contents of the book long since forgotten, so that together they both discovered it anew.

At last, she removed the towel and shook out her hair, then took off the robe and put on a nightdress. She climbed beneath the sheets, turned out the light, and rested her head on the pillow. He was alone with her, her face almost luminescent in the dark, yet pale and indistinct. He felt sleep approach, but he was afraid to close his eyes, for he knew in his heart that she would be gone when he awoke, and he wanted this night to last. He could not take being separated from her again.

But the itch was still there, the sense that there was an important, salient element to this that he could not quite recall, something linked to a long-forgotten conversation that had occurred when he had finally found his way to this room. It was coming back to him; slowly, admittedly, but he was discovering more pieces of that weekend in the cluttered attic of his memory. There had been lovemaking, yes, and afterward she had been very quiet. When he looked down at her, he saw that she was crying.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“It can't be nothing. You're crying.”

“You'll think I'm being silly.”

“Tell me.”

“I had a dream about you.”

Then it was gone again. He tried to remember what that dream had been. It was relevant, somehow. Everything about that night was relevant. Beside him, his young wife's breathing altered as she descended deeper into sleep. He bit his lip in frustration. What was it? What was he failing to recall?

His left arm felt numb. He supposed that it was the position in which he was resting. He tried to move, and the numbness became pain. It extended quickly through his system, like poison injected into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and a rush of air and spittle emerged. He experienced a tightness in his chest, as though an unseen presence were now sitting astride him, constricting his breathing and somehow compressing his heart so that he saw it as a red mass grasped in a fist, the blood slowly being squeezed from it.

“I dreamt that you were beside me, but you were in distress, and I couldn't reach you. I tried and tried, but I couldn't get to you.”