The World Below (30 page)

I kicked at the yellow leaves. “It’s so beautiful here,” I said. It was my offering. And it
was
beautiful. The deep green of the pines on the islands, the bright light fractured and sequined on the moving water, the carpet of glowing leaves underfoot here, turning the air around us buttery and golden. Wasn’t this enough? Couldn’t we both let go?

“Yes, let’s agree on that,” he said, with a chilly smile, and I turned and started to walk up to the car.

We parked twice more and walked to the water’s edge. At the last stop, we walked across the long dam holding the water back. We looked over the vast expanse of flooded valley off to its side. We didn’t speak much, and I thought he must be feeling it too, the sense that something that had seemed possible at the start of this day didn’t feel that way any longer.

In the car on the way home, we tried—I could feel us both trying—again. Samuel told me a long story about a dance they’d had in one of the town halls the night before it ceased to exist officially. He was planning to include it in one of his essays.

“It’s a very dramatic tale, very touching, actually. It was a fireman’s ball, complete with orchestra. They stopped the music just before midnight to listen to the clock striking twelve, and the accounts say you could hear sobbing everywhere in the room as the hours tolled.”

“God,” I said, eager to jump in. “This is something the movies could do, you know. There’d be sweet violin music”—I lifted my arms to bow an imaginary instrument—“and shots of the dancers in the town hall alternating with images of the water rising inexorably in the night.”

We had found something healing, something that worked, and we used it to move away from what we’d disagreed about. All the way home we talked. We talked about his book. We talked about my grandparents. We talked about Thanksgiving; he was going to his daughter’s in Chicago. We talked about my daughter Karen, and what books might interest her as she lay imprisoned in bed, gestating. Neither of us mentioned the reservoir again, but its brooding splendor, its massiveness, stayed with me, like a chill I couldn’t shake off, a tone I kept hearing under the words we spoke to each other.

It was dark as we drove into West Barstow. Samuel asked me if I’d like coffee or a drink at his house—the Gibsons’. He said I could
warm up and see it for the first time. I think he hoped-I think both of us hoped–we could somehow bring things around. I did anyway. It’s why I agreed.

Yes. A drink, I said. “A drink and a viewing.”

Inside, the house was high-ceilinged and spacious-feeling. The furniture was dark and ornate, old-fashioned. Oriental rugs so worn as to be nearly uniformly gray, their patterns almost a matter of the imagination, were scattered everywhere on the wooden floors. After the cold outside, the dry heat of the house felt good, and the gentle, dim light from the old lamps with their shades stained tea-color with age was somehow reassuring.

In the living room, the furniture was pushed back against the walls, each piece as far away from the others as possible, as if to discourage any possible human interaction. But Samuel had pulled one chair up to a round coffee table where papers and books were stacked, and now he slid another one up near it.

We sat down together. There was a floor lamp next to his chair. A yellow pool of light from it fell over his lap and his hands. His face was slightly shadowed. His hands looked gnarled under the light. I looked at my own hands. Gnarled too, of course.

He thought I was looking at my nearly empty glass. He lifted the bottle from the table. “More scotch?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said, and held my glass out. He filled it, and I sat back and sipped. “But how about you?” I asked.

“Oh, no, I think I’d better not,” he said.

“You’re so cautious,” I said.

“I suppose I am, but it gives me crazy dreams,” he said.

“I don’t mind the odd crazy dream,” I answered. “My life is uneventful enough to welcome craziness wherever it comes from.” Abruptly I thought, what was I doing? Flirting? Beckoning him?

For what? I scolded myself. For what? Surely there was a perversity in this behavior on my part, when I was feeling so distant from him. Cut it out, I said to myself.

“Let’s not get into a contest about the uneventful life,” he was saying. “You haven’t got a prayer of winning that one.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to change the subject. “Anyway, define
event?
”

“Define
life?
” he answered.

“I asked first.”

There was a long pause. “Event,” he said. “Children,” he offered. “A job. Sex.” His voice was tinged with sadness, I thought. I was glad I couldn’t see his face more plainly.

“No fair,” I said, trying to keep my voice playful. “I was going to use all those to define
life?
”

He swallowed the last of his drink and sat holding the glass. “How would
you
define
event
then?” he asked.

“Oh, I suppose the accidents that happen to us. War or illness. Hurricanes. Floods. Pestilence.” I smiled at him. “Children,” I said. “Sex.”

He leaned forward. The light struck his face now, harshly. His skin looked white and papery. He was frowning. “But don’t you think—wouldn’t you agree—that there comes a time in life when even those—the accidents—happen less often?”

“How could that be?” I said. “How could that possibly be? Accidents always happen.”

He shrugged. “One is removed, I suppose.” He sat back again. “One has less at stake, and so it seems that these things really do happen more to others. Without some urgency, it’s hard to feel an event personally.” He set his glass down with a little
thunk.

“Is that how it seems to you?” I asked, finally.

“It is,” he said.

I thought, at that moment, that he was asking me for something. That he was asking me to happen to him. I felt I had a choice. I could set my glass down too and cross to him, cross to him and touch him, kiss him, lead him upstairs. Be his event, like the prince who comes to wake the princess.

Or I could do nothing and this moment would pass, and we
would be two people talking a little sadly at the end of a pleasant enough day.

I did nothing. And it wasn’t that I didn’t find Samuel attractive, because I did—though it may be that seeing that photograph of him in his prime had helped me with this. But it was over. I felt it then. The moment of promise, of suggestion was gone. Because of everything. But mostly, yes, because of his insistence that I had imagined the buildings I remembered seeing, because of his insistence that his enormous reservoir was the country lake I’d paddled my grandfather across. His insistence that I was wrong. A small mean thing like that.

I thought about both of my husbands then and wondered if it had been like this for them, if at some point, as a result of some small thing that suddenly seemed a large thing, an unbearable thing—lipstick on my teeth as a reminder of my slovenliness maybe, or some begging quality to my voice, or a stupid remark in public—they turned; they nearly involuntarily made a decision: this is
over
. I cannot live another day with this person.

Though they had, of course. Lived another day with me. And another. Each of them had, until a larger and a larger and a larger thing had happened. Until the bad thing that we could fight over, separate over, happened.

Maybe I should be grateful, I thought, that this little bad thing had happened now and would make unnecessary bigger and uglier ones between Samuel and me.

We sat there for a while more, talking. He wondered if I was interested in taking on the writing of the basketball columns; the editor had offered it to me. I asked him about his current essay. We discussed tax policy in Vermont. It was easy, partly because I was a little looped by now-two big scotches on an empty stomach.

When I stood up to go home, he stood too and said he would drive me.

“What? It’s a five-minute walk!”

“Ten,” he said.

“Seven and a half,” I said. “Never let it be said I’m incapable of compromise.” I moved toward the front hall. “No. No, I need the air,” I said.

He was following me. “It’s dark and cold,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

I turned around to face him, and we nearly bumped into each other in the narrow hallway. “Samuel, I don’t want a ride,” I said. “You cannot force me to take a ride.”

He had stepped back. Now he opened the closet door and handed my coat to me.

“If you try to, I’ll scream,” I warned him.

“Oh, come on, Cath.”

I screamed. Once. “See? I mean it,” I said. My hand rose involuntarily. I had hurt my throat a little.

He stood frozen in the act of reaching for his own coat. Then his arms dropped. “Apparently you do.” His voice was hurt and chilly.

“Come on, Samuel,” I said. “Don’t be pissed. I’m a grown woman. A grown person. I know what I want. I want to walk home. Alone. And sober up and smell the night air.”

“I must accede to that, apparently.”

“You must. You absolutely must.” My coat was on by now. Samuel was still standing by the closet. “Good night,” I said, gently. “Thank you.”

He seemed to hear the apology in my voice, the sadness for both of us. He came over to me and held my hands for a moment. “Good night,” he said.

I stumbled down the uneven front walk and stepped onto the paving. I made myself turn and wave to Samuel, who was standing behind the glass storm door. His hand lifted in response, and then he stepped back and shut the inner wooden door.

It was cold. Starless. Moonless. I had a certain pleasant numbness brought on by the scotch. Even so, I buttoned up my coat and then fished in my pockets for the hand-knit mittens I’d bought a week or so before at a church bazaar. If I was going to stay, I’d need a hat soon, too, and a decent winter coat, not just the wool one I had
on. But was I going to stay? I didn’t care at the moment. All I felt was a child’s shallow excitement at what seemed like an escape.

From what? I wasn’t sure. Something safe. Something too rooted and confining for me. I felt giddy, drunkenly pleased with myself. I was walking fast against the cold, my steps jolting on the uneven, buckled sidewalk, my own fogged breathing loud inside my head. Main Street was busy, fifteen or so cars parked in front of Grayson’s, and people coming in and out with bags of last-minute things they’d need for dinner that night, calling greetings or good night to each other. I saw a woman I knew from the newspaper getting out of her car, and we waved and called out
hi.

There were no street lamps on my grandmother’s street, and the sudden darkness felt inky, like a texture. No lights on at the house either; it looked cold and empty. I slowed as I crossed the yard.

I stood on the porch for a minute before I went in, looking at the dull night sky. I could feel my exhilaration drain from me, though nothing else came to replace it, just an odd blankness, a hollowness. It lingered with me even as I moved around inside, turning on lights, making dinner. It was with me when I lay down alone in my grandmother’s bed, and it was still with me when I woke, quite early the next morning. I had coffee and then breakfast. I watched the gray squares of the window lighten to reveal the world outside. When I thought it was late enough, I called my Boston lover, Carl, at his office.

He wasn’t there. His voice mail said he was out of town all week.

I didn’t leave a message. It was so much a desperate whim, my sense of needing him, of wanting him, that it was gone as soon as he wasn’t there to answer it. Because it wasn’t Carl that I really wanted anyway. No, I think what I wanted was what Samuel had seemed to want the night before: I wanted to escape myself. I wanted to feel overwhelmed and disrupted. I wanted something-an event- to happen to me, to sweep me up and change my life.

Unexpectedly, from another quarter, it did.

Thirteen

T
he call came in the night, as these calls always seem to. You’re jolted from sleep, you fumble toward where the noise, the alarm, comes from, you shake off whatever world you’ve been in to get to the one you’re being summoned to.

It was Karen’s husband, Robert. Her labor had begun again, unstoppable and urgent this time. They’d had to deliver the baby early; there had simply been no choice.

I moistened my mouth. “Is she all right?” I asked.

“The baby?”

“Well, Karen, I meant. And the baby, of course. It’s a girl?”

“Yes.” He laughed sorrowfully. Behind him I could hear voices and a binging noise, the busyness of a hospital. “Yes, a tiny little girl. Named Jessie.”

“Oh, I love that name,” I said. I turned the bedside lamp on and squinted into the harsh light.

“And Karen’s okay. She’s … she’s fine, really.” I waited. “Things are really a mess here, Cath,” he said finally, his voice suddenly private and close.

“But the baby’s
okay,”
I insisted.

“The baby—I don’t know. Yeah, they say she’ll likely be okay. But she’s
so
banged up. It was a really messy birth, I guess. They had to kind of
vacuum
her out. And she’s unbelievably tiny, and they’ve got her hooked up to all this stuff. It’s really … I don’t know. It’s awful. It’s just godawful. This tiny little girl, full of tubes. Christ, she’s got a
blindfold
on.”