The Progress of Love (18 page)

“He’s brutalized from all the TV he watches,” Clayton said. “He thinks it was some video. He can’t tell real blood from video blood.”

“Mom? Was it splashed?”

Robert has a rule about letting Peg deal with her sons unless she asks for his help. But this time he said, “Kevin, you know it’s about time you shut up.”
“He can’t help it,” Clayton said. “Being ghoulish.”

“You, too, Clayton. You, too.”

But after a moment Clayton said, “Mom? Did you scream?”

“No,” said Peg thoughtfully. “I didn’t. I guess because there wasn’t anybody to hear me. So I didn’t.”

“I might have heard you,” said Kevin, cautiously trying a comeback.

“You had the television on.”

“I didn’t have the sound on. I had my tape on. I might have heard you through the tape if you screamed loud enough.”

Peg lifted a strand of the spaghetti to try it. Robert was watching her, from time to time. He would have said he was watching to see if she was in any kind of trouble, if she seemed numb, or strange, or showed a quiver, if she dropped things or made the pots clatter. But in fact he was watching her just because there was no sign of such difficulty and because he knew there wouldn’t be. She was preparing an ordinary meal, listening to the boys in her usual mildly censorious but unruffled way. The only thing more apparent than usual to Robert was her gracefulness, lightness, quickness, and ease around the kitchen.

Her tone to her sons, under its severity, seemed shockingly serene.

“Kevin, go and get some clothes on, if you want to eat at the table.”

“I can eat in my pajamas.”

“No.”

“I can eat in bed.”

“Not spaghetti, you can’t.”

While they were washing up the pots and pans together—Clayton had gone for his run and Kevin was talking to Shanna on the phone—Peg told Robert her part of the story. He didn’t ask her to, in so many words. He started off with “So when you went over, the door wasn’t locked?” and she began to tell him.

“You don’t mind talking about it?” Robert said.

“I knew you’d want to know.”

She told him she knew what was wrong—at least, she knew that something was terribly wrong—before she started up the stairs.

“Were you frightened?”

“No. I didn’t think about it like that—being frightened.”

“There could have been somebody up there with a gun.”

“No. I knew there wasn’t. I knew there wasn’t anybody but me alive in the house. Then I saw his leg, I saw his leg stretched out into the hall, and I knew then, but I had to go on in and make sure.”

Robert said, “I understand that.”

“It wasn’t the foot he had taken the shoe off that was out there. He took the shoe off his other foot, so he could use that foot to pull the trigger when he shot himself. That was how he did it.”

Robert knew all about that already, from the talk in the diner.

“So,” said Peg. “That’s really about all.”

She shook dishwater from her hands, dried them, and, with a critical look, began rubbing in lotion.

Clayton came in at the side door. He stamped the snow from his shoes and ran up the steps.

“You should see the cars,” he said. “Stupid cars all crawling along this street. Then they have to turn around at the end and crawl back. I wish they’d get stuck. I stood out there and gave them dirty looks, but I started to freeze so I had to come in.”

“It’s natural,” Robert said. “It seems stupid but it’s natural. They can’t believe it, so they want to see where it happened.”

“I don’t see their problem,” Clayton said. “I don’t see why they can’t believe it. Mom could believe it all right. Mom wasn’t surprised.”

“Well, of course I was,” Peg said, and this was the first time Robert had noticed any sort of edge to her voice. “Of course I was surprised, Clayton. Just because I didn’t break out screaming.”

“You weren’t surprised they could do it.”

“I hardly knew them. We hardly knew the Weebles.”

“I guess they had a fight,” said Clayton.

“We don’t know that,” Peg said, stubbornly working the lotion into her skin. “We don’t know if they had a fight, or what.”
“When you and Dad used to have those fights?” Clayton said. “Remember, after we first moved to town? When he would be home? Over by the car wash? When you used to have those fights, you know what I used to think? I used to think one of you was going to come and kill me with a knife.”

“That’s not true,” said Peg.

“It is true. I did.”

Peg sat down at the table and covered her mouth with her hands. Clayton’s mouth twitched. He couldn’t seem to stop it, so he turned it into a little, taunting, twitching smile.

“That’s what I used to lie in bed and think.”

“Clayton. We would never either one of us ever have hurt you.”

Robert believed it was time that he said something.

“What this is like,” he said, “it’s like an earthquake or a volcano. It’s that kind of happening. It’s a kind of fit. People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit. But it only happens once in a long while. It’s a freak occurrence.”

“Earthquakes and volcanoes aren’t freaks,” said Clayton, with a certain dry pleasure. “If you want to call that a fit, you’d have to call it a periodic fit. Such as people have, married people have.”

“We don’t,” said Robert. He looked at Peg as if waiting for her to agree with him.

But Peg was looking at Clayton. She who always seemed pale and silky and assenting, but hard to follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines fixed in steady, helpless, unapologetic pain.

“No,” said Clayton. “No, not you.”

Robert told them that he was going for a walk. When he got outside, he saw that Clayton was right. There were cars nosing along the street, turning at the end, nosing their way back again. Getting a look. Inside those cars were just the same people, probably the very same people, he had been talking to during the afternoon. But now they seemed joined to their cars, making some new kind of monster that came poking around in a brutally curious way.

To avoid them, he went down a short dead-end street that branched off theirs. No houses had ever been built on this street, so it was not plowed. But the snow was hard, and easy to walk on. He didn’t notice how easy it was to walk on until he realized that he had gone beyond the end of the street and up a slope, which was not a slope of the land at all, but a drift of snow. The drift neatly covered the fence that usually separated the street from the field. He had walked over the fence without knowing what he was doing. The snow was that hard.

He walked here and there, testing. The crust took his weight without a whisper or a crack. It was the same everywhere. You could walk over the snowy fields as if you were walking on cement. (This morning, looking at the snow, hadn’t he thought of marble?) But this paving was not flat. It rose and dipped in a way that had not much to do with the contours of the ground underneath. The snow created its own landscape, which was sweeping, in a grand and arbitrary style.

Instead of walking around on the plowed streets of town, he could walk over the fields. He could cut across to the diner on the highway, which stayed open until midnight. He would have a cup of coffee there, turn around, and walk home.

One night, about six months before Robert married Peg, he and Lee were sitting drinking in his apartment. They were having an argument about whether it was permissible, or sickening, to have your family initial on your silverware. All of a sudden, the argument split open—Robert couldn’t remember how, but it split open, and they found themselves saying the cruellest things to each other that they could imagine. Their voices changed from the raised pitch and speed of argument, and they spoke quietly with a subtle loathing. “You always make me think of a dog,” Lee said. “You always make me think of one of those dogs that push up on people and paw them, with their big disgusting tongues hanging out. You’re so eager. All your friendliness and eagerness—that’s really aggression. I’m not the only one who thinks this about you. A lot of people avoid you. They can’t stand you. You’d be surprised. You
push and paw in that eager pathetic way, but you have a calculating look. That’s why I don’t care if I hurt you.”

“Maybe I should tell you one of the things I don’t like, then,” said Robert reasonably. “It’s the way you laugh. On the phone particularly. You laugh at the end of practically every sentence. I used to think it was a nervous tic, but it always really annoyed me. And I’ve figured out why. You’re always telling somebody about what a raw deal you’re getting somewhere or some unkind thing a person said to you—that’s about two-thirds of your horrendously boring self-centered conversation. And then you laugh. Ha-ha, you can take it, you don’t expect anything better. That laugh is sick.”

After some more of this, they started to laugh themselves, Robert and Lee, but it was not the laughter of a breakthrough into reconciliation; they did not fall upon each other in relief, crying, “What rot, I didn’t mean it, did you mean it?” (“No, of course not, of course I didn’t mean it.”) They laughed in recognition of their extremity, just as they might have laughed at another time, in the middle of quite different, astoundingly tender declarations. They trembled with murderous pleasure, with the excitement of saying what could never be retracted; they exulted in wounds inflicted but also in wounds received, and one or the other said at some point, “This is the first time we’ve spoken the truth since we’ve known each other!” For even things that came to them more or less on the spur of the moment seemed the most urgent truths that had been hardening for a long time and pushing to get out.

It wasn’t so far from laughing to making love, which they did, all with no retraction. Robert made barking noises, as a dog should, and nuzzled Lee in a bruising way, snapping with real appetite at her flesh. Afterward they were enormously and finally sick of each other but no longer disposed to blame.

“There are things I just absolutely and eternally want to forget about,” Robert had told Peg. He talked to her about cutting his losses, abandoning old bad habits, old deceptions and self-deceptions, mistaken notions about life, and about himself. He said that he had been an emotional spendthrift, had thrown himself into
hopeless and painful entanglements as a way of avoiding anything that had normal possibilities. That was all experiment and posturing, rejection of the ordinary, decent contracts of life. So he said to her. Errors of avoidance, when he had thought he was running risks and getting intense experiences.

“Errors of avoidance that I mistook for errors of passion,” he said, then thought that he sounded pretentious when he was actually sweating with sincerity, with the effort and the relief.

In return, Peg gave him facts.

We lived with Dave’s parents. There was never enough hot water for the baby’s wash. Finally we got out and came to town and we lived beside the car wash. Dave was only with us weekends then. It was very noisy, especially at night. Then Dave got another job, he went up North, and I rented this place.

Errors of avoidance, errors of passion. She didn’t say.

Dave had a kidney problem when he was little and he was out of school a whole winter. He read a book about the Arctic. It was probably the only book he ever read that he didn’t have to. Anyway, he always dreamed about it; he wanted to go there. So finally he did.

A man doesn’t just drive farther and farther away in his trucks until he disappears from his wife’s view. Not even if he has always dreamed of the Arctic. Things happen before he goes. Marriage knots aren’t going to slip apart painlessly, with the pull of distance. There’s got to be some wrenching and slashing. But she didn’t say, and he didn’t ask, or even think much about that, till now.

He walked very quickly over the snow crust, and when he reached the diner he found that he didn’t want to go in yet. He would cross the highway and walk a little farther, then go into the diner to get warmed up on his way home.

By the time he was on his way home, the police car that was parked at the diner ought to be gone. The night constable was in there now, taking his break. This was not the same man Robert had seen and listened to when he dropped in on his way home from Keneally. This man would not have seen anything at first hand. He
hadn’t talked to Peg. Nevertheless he would be talking about it; everybody in the diner would be talking about it, going over the same scene and the same questions, the possibilities. No blame to them.

When they saw Robert, they would want to know how Peg was.

There was one thing he was going to ask her, just before Clayton came in. At least, he was turning the question over in his mind, wondering if it would be all right to ask her. A discrepancy, a detail, in the midst of so many abominable details.

And now he knew it wouldn’t be all right; it would never be all right. It had nothing to do with him. One discrepancy, one detail—one lie—that would never have anything to do with him.

Walking on this magic surface, he did not grow tired. He grew lighter, if anything. He was taking himself farther and farther away from town, although for a while he didn’t realize this. In the clear air, the lights of Gilmore were so bright they seemed only half a field away, instead of half a mile, then a mile and a half, then two miles. Very fine flakes of snow, fine as dust, and glittering, lay on the crust that held him. There was a glitter, too, around the branches of the trees and bushes that he was getting closer to. It wasn’t like the casing around twigs and delicate branches that an ice storm leaves. It was as if the wood itself had altered and begun to sparkle.

This is the very weather in which noses and fingers are frozen. But nothing felt cold.

He was getting quite close to a large woodlot. He was crossing a long slanting shelf of snow, with the trees ahead and to one side of him. Over there, to the side, something caught his eye. There was a new kind of glitter under the trees. A congestion of shapes, with black holes in them, and unmatched arms or petals reaching up to the lower branches of the trees. He headed toward these shapes, but whatever they were did not become clear. They did not look like anything he knew. They did not look like anything, except perhaps a bit like armed giants half collapsed, frozen in combat, or like the jumbled towers of a crazy small-scale city—a space-age,
small-scale city. He kept waiting for an explanation, and not getting one, until he got very close. He was so close he could almost have touched one of these monstrosities before he saw that they were just old cars. Old cars and trucks and even a school bus that had been pushed in under the trees and left. Some were completely overturned, and some were tipped over one another at odd angles. They were partly filled, partly covered, with snow. The black holes were their gutted insides. Twisted bits of chrome, fragments of headlights, were glittering.