Age (12 page)

Under the steady glow of the hall light, my hand on the baluster, I believe that to be true. So I can answer lightly. ‘Do you know—I had. Forgotten. For the moment. But only as fathers do.’

And she believes me. But on the landing she stops. ‘Now you tell me. What you’ve been up to.
I’ve
told you. What I.’

So I tell her—if only part of it. ‘I’ve bought some land. Not far from where the farm used to be. Of course that’s all built over now, that near to town. But there was a patch—not too many miles north of it.’

She smiles—and says softly: ‘Ducks?’ And when I answer: ‘River. Not lake,’ She nods. That is all, positively all. She is wonderful. I have the sense that at times like these, moving back and forth between innuendo commanded from a lifetime of dual experience, we are each other’s bootstraps. By which we shall lift and lift one another. And fall. But not do worse than—fall.

H
OW FAR CAN ONE
see across a room—and when one is not in bed with the person opposite! Almost as far as one will see on the new farm, looking back on the old?

I am getting dangerously fond of this processor, which can transcribe my thoughts faster than I can feel them. And digest them, to conclusions still ahead? I have an idea—or maybe it does—that give it a hint and it could absolve me of my secrets altogether.

While Gemma over there holds my old Parker pen loose and absently in her hand. I used to have trouble finding the rubber tubes for it, the last of them discovered in a slice of a store way west on Fourteenth Street, whose owner sells parts for all superannuated desk material with as confidential an air as if he is a ‘fence’ for thieves. But not long ago I read that savvy Harvard Business School graduates are affecting pens like mine. It runs on ink.

Gemma, I fancy, is afraid of it—and maybe rightly. If ever I’m unable to wield a pen except through her, would that old gutta-percha case let loose all the leftover in both of us, all the unsaid? Or celebrate that—and why not? But women, who initiate so many of the formalities, are as superstitious of them.

Meanwhile, how busy she has been. Mr Quinn and his Quinling are gone. His apartment will be kept for him, for as long as he signifies, but to his delight, Gemma, who helped them pack, encouraged him to take his entire wardrobe, admiring the elegantly patterned jackets or yellowed white linens as they emerged. ‘You’ll need all those changes,’ she assured him. ‘I understand that the establishment is run as much as possible like a hotel. Actually they have a wine list. But you might be of some help to them there.’

He gave her one of his wife’s headbands, lavender-spotted, which she wore to the airport. She is so thin now that any gewgaw becomes her. Loitering behind the wheelchair, as Nephew pushed and she trotted brightly alongside, I felt quite
de trop,
Gemma’s coy glance over her shoulder telling me that this was intended. Just before they embarked she handed the nephew a carefully wrapped sack from our good liquor store, saying, Once he’s installed, open this.’

In the cab going home she rested her head on my shoulder. ‘Want to know what the bottle was?’

I remembered my crack about suing the old boy for alienation of affection. ‘No need. Château Yquem.’

Her chuckle will never tell me. I hoped it was that, for the sake of both Quinn and us. At our age it’s good to see sentiments come full circle, even repartee. And coyness is the parsley on the plate.

When we came home we broke out a more ordinary bottle for ourselves, and ate well, but no coziness could hide a new quality in the silence of the house. There’s an intercom on which we can respond to the downstairs buzzer; there always was. But no one will now intercede for it or overrule it. The door down there will flap outward only for ourselves and unlock only to our key. Our tenant made no more noise than a mouse, but a home that knows it has a pet mouse is marked by a quiet that is different. Again it is the weekend, with all our tenants absent. Outside, the city cries and calls in a rhythm woven into the silence like in a tapestry. Inside, this floor-through that once rang with schoolgirls is like a fortress from which the sentries have departed. For the first time in all the years of our tenure here we are totally alone.

Gemma too appears to be listening, staring at me as if it’s my turn to speak. I do.

‘Is it me you’re leaving? Or the house? Or us as we are?’ I know the answer perfectly well: All three of us. With the possible addition of herself alone, as well. As what people do flee—geographically?

It seems she has already bought her plane ticket to Saudi.

‘I took the money I saved up for Francesca’s emergencies.’

She always saved for those, pinching it from the few architectural assignments she still gets—as only fair to me, she would say, although all our other accounts are joint.

Her left hand flumps open—in memoriam? The inhalator rolls away—no more need for it now? She’s scarcely mentioned the baby to come, or even Christina—are they merely a direction to go?

‘And do I follow you?’ I said.

Her look is sidelong, then a full-throated stare, the breasts raised, shoulders contracted backward in an agony of acceptance, the same stance she gave me the night we met, from her bed. I know every cell of this woman, her indecisions and her certainties, yet I do not dare touch her. Age makes another person out of the dearest bride.

But if this is coquetry, it’s the deepest flirtation of our lives.

Why won’t she tell me why she really wants to give up this record of us? Which she had at first entered as engrossedly as I.

Why doesn’t she ask me why I bought that land?

Just so she dragged her right hand farther behind her in the bedclothes, all those years ago, and the flung hairbrush rolled from the bed and fell. Now the pen drops from that same hand into the bedclothes. Both hands are now empty, as back then. And now my arms should grip her waist, my head should be on her breasts.

Instead, I am at her desk. She won’t have to tell me again, to stop the lovemaking. Across the length of a room come the changes, the deepest ones. I could feel this one in my own cells. No bones creaking, no blood ebbing. Just that slow jolt, repeated in the brain, when the carriage stops, has stopped.

But she can never be a stranger to me. I’ll follow that.

I’ll use the rest of the money
I
was saving for Christina.’ She would know that’s how I bought the land. But not what I’d been saving the balance for.

She doesn’t even nod. ‘What I wrote. I never printed it up.’

I exchange stares with the word processor. One couldn’t call it a glare, on either side. In my boyhood I was fond of a drawing I had of Aladdin’s lamp. The genie had risen from the spout, long and elastic, but only half formed.

A sharp twiddle on those fully formed keys there, and we’re free of it. Her record.

Is she suggesting that I—? She’s capable of anything.

On the bedside table, next to my book, is my own sheaf in its thick envelope, right under the fresh page she’d been scratching on. The envelope is one of those heavy-grade mud-colored packets carried by lower-class European diplomats perhaps, or maybe their spies; I get them from the last of the corner drugstores down here. Inside it, the sheets I write on are a thin tan, as tough and resistant as the town that makes them.

‘Tearing paper is harder. That paper. I used the Italian. Are you sure you’re up to it?’

She stretches out a defiant hand. It touches my book instead. She draws the hand back.

‘And why can’t we each destroy our own?’ I shouted it.

‘Because—we wouldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Or you—wouldn’t. And maybe not I.’

A sheaf, a whole sheaf. It’s like that litany the Jews say—at Passover is it?—A loaf, a loaf, something like that. Meaning, it’s what you have on hand, to offer?

Plus all I meant still to say. Of how age isn’t at all as I thought it; a menopause of the life principle, a general decline. Or a birthing—by the bodily pain Gemma and I haven’t had much of yet—back into the general delivery.

It’s like life. A total disease. Or parade. I think the Sisters, those nuns, would understand that I mean. Whatever it is, it’s worthy of being spoken of every day. But it’s also a nitpicker’s paradise.

For Gemma grabs up my sheaf, tumbles out of bed, and brandishes it with that triumphant air women have when they’re forcing themselves to do what they’ll regret. ‘Here. Do it, then. And I’ll do mine.’

As she advances I see how the pretty feet have grown greenish with veins, and the toenails have yellowed to horn. Guilt says I should be ashamed to observe this; age says I have that right. They are like my own. These days I see everything of the flesh so near. And all of it as my own flesh—even children. What is happening to us—is it as great as anything in literature—and what any child can see?

Close she comes, closer—will she touch me first, or this machine? A misnomer, as I know. What’s sitting on the desk here is a progression almost without matter, of replicas without devotion to any original. A succession of tumbrils, of many little tipcarts, ready to thrill once and deliver their load—to the abyss.

‘What’s that blot on the back of your gown?’

She turns slowly, sneaking up on it the way women do when they fear that menstrual blood has seeped through. ‘There’s no blot on my dress, Rupert …
Rupert!’

I have to brush away auras to see it, but it’s there.

‘Yes there is. And on the bed, too. That great inky blot.’

Fritillary shapes fly there to mask that great spreading, big as a third body on the bed that is empty of us.

‘My pen, my pen bleeds for us,’ I hear myself cry. Then I fall.

As one does knowingly, lightly through cloud.

H
OW MUCH LATER DID I
wake to find the two of us on the floor, her arms nursing both of us, below her tranced stare?

I saw again with full clarity now. But she was dead away, blank among her nimbuses.

‘What was I going to do just now, Gemma? A minute ago?’

She is facing our wall, blued now with dusk. Or was it now early morning?

Did she get to the desk before I blanked out? I thought not. My papers are where she must have dropped them. In exchange for me.

I am weak, but nothing I now confront is speckled or shaded beyond the ordinary. Her arms are rigid, thralled, but strong. And when addressed during these lapses, she will often answer to the point, as a person in full command might do, though absently. When I tell her doctors this, they shrug—and don’t credit my clarity.

We are one person now, made up of two. Advantage must be taken of it.

‘Gemma. You were going to tell me. Why must we destroy it.’

‘Destroy what?’

‘What we wrote.’

She is silent, struggling. ‘Oh that.’ She shrugs—but not with the minimal tic of her doctors. A long-hoarded, slow rise of the shoulders, arms crossed, hands nursing her elbows. ‘Because—’ She gets it out quite tonelessly. ‘Only one of us will be—read.’ She arches toward that wall as if to a person, her hands slipping to the floor. ‘No! That’s not what I mean.’ Her palms realize what they are pressing. She turns them up, spreading her fingers. ‘I mean—one of us will be left unread, that’s all … What am I doing on the floor? … Rupert—what are you?’

I could lie, pretend. I could say that we fell out of bed—wrapped in a mutual dream. Once in the early years we did do that. After sex and sleep it was, and we awoke laughing. On this same floor. I see the two of us, ruddy and moist.

But with what is creeping toward us, better to be as honest as we can. There’ll be enough clouding up. ‘I fell—in one of my attacks. You came after me. We must have both conked out.’

‘Get back in bed!’ she says—from the floor. That’s my Gemma.

I would prefer to stay at the desk. But she’s herself again. So am I. These are the moments that must be saved. The ones when we are both ourselves.

‘Bed welcome,’ I say, once we are in it. ‘Hand me my pen.’

She sighs luxuriously, handing it to me. ‘And there is no—blot—now?’

‘None.’ But for a while, I don’t write.

One half of our joint record will be read, by the survivor. The survivor’s half will not be read, by the dead. How simple. The builder saw, three-dimensionally, what this apostle of print did not.

One of us will be read. The other never will be. My heart is wrung for both of them.

But isn’t that what always happens? One half a couple has to go on, unread from then on. And is that why some people—Gemma—raging against that impasse, want willfully to destroy? Before destiny can get to them?

‘I can afford to be—lost,’ I say. ‘I already have a record—of sorts. But yours must not be.’ It might never have anyone else, except me.

‘I don’t mind. I won’t have said that much you haven’t. Above
our
lives. We talk so alike now’ She flashed me a humble glance. ‘And print—it’s not my medium.’ Her voice wavered on that, her hand hovering over the night table, seeking some medicament. Was she thinking of that White Plains relic of her medium? ‘Let’s have breakfast!’ she said, and sprang out of bed.

‘But—’ I point to that wall, on which long shadows are converging. It’s not morning after all. That blue was dusk.

‘I know. But we can choose now, you know. We can do anything.’

‘How right you are.’

When she comes back with her laden tray the room is in half-dark. I switch on the bed lamps, then turn them off again. Aided by the reflected streetlamps, this seductive semidark will last for some time. Half the poems in that book were written in it. The bedlights are on a stat that at a flick will light both, or one and one, and grade each down as wanted. This house is old but has its modernities—quite a few—that I have never thought of as crude. They are hers—her words.

Still, we must get out of this house. So much of the world only now and then laps at its edges. Black water, when it does come, seeped from other people’s basements—why do I think that? When our own basement is as dry as a bone.

Above the bed tray, that old side-pocketed one whose wicker she scrupulously repaints, telling me meanwhile how much the catalogues now charge for them, her face is serious. ‘Look what I found when I moved the tray.’ We haven’t used it recently. Except after sex, I don’t relish meals in bed.