American Appetites (11 page)

But now the house is empty. And the silence is deafening. A becalmed ship, drifting out to sea. Her bare feet have brought her to that spot at which the dining room opens out onto the living room, perpendicularly, the farthest wall, which Glynnis, though her eyes are good, can barely see; dissolving into mere night, the plate-glass walls and windows and sliding doors dissolving to mere night, no words and no language, and Glynnis thinks in triumph, My house. My family. My life. Mine.

1.

T
he end came swiftly and irrevocably. And surely without premeditation.

It was April 23, and unseasonably warm; and when Ian returned from the Institute, at dusk, it was, still, warm as an evening in summer; the air smelled both flowery and crystalline: an evening, Ian thought, to break one's heart. The sensation of vertigo, of being rudderless, adrift, suspended, that had plagued him for so many weeks—or had it been, now, months?—seemed the more intensified tonight, as if the very air had altered. He would not be able to breathe, he thought; he would suffocate, entering his house.

He parked the Honda in the graveled drive, in its usual position; noted that Glynnis's station wagon was in the carport, in its usual position; had a vague recollection of having seen something out of place, or amiss, out front . . . though he would not realize what it was until the next day: an oblong package, by the size and shape of it a shipment from the Musical Heritage Society containing a record Glynnis had ordered, signaling the curious fact that the mail had not been brought in, as it always was, when Glynnis's car was in the drive; when Glynnis was home. On days when Glynnis was out and returned after Ian did, he sometimes wandered about the house, looking vaguely for something he could not have named, feeling that it should be on the kitchen table, where Glynnis usually sorted the mail, though sensing too that, whatever it was, it might also be waiting for him on his desk; for Glynnis sometimes brought his mail there. If he made a particular effort to figure out what was missing, he would remember; often, of course, he simply pushed the vexing thought away, and forgot, and to Glynnis's amusement, or annoyance, failed to bring it in at all. “You leave everything for me to do,” Glynnis would say, half seriously; and though the accusation was surely unjust, Ian could offer no refutation. He lived in a world of his own thoughts and had done so since boyhood. And, of late, it seemed to be getting worse.

That morning, Ian had been at his desk, at the Institute, at seven-forty-five. There was a problem with one of the computer programs they were using for the Health Service project, and there was a problem, made the more nettlesome by distance, about the exact day when Ian was scheduled to give his paper at the Second Annual International Conference on “Hunger and the ‘First World'” in Frankfurt, West Germany, in late May. (The paper itself, for which Ian had high hopes, was not yet written: consisting, at this time, of mere scribbled notes and pages of computer printouts, which, when Ian stared at them, refused to crystallize into the formal, impeccable logic characteristic of Ian McCullough's best efforts. I will sleep on it, Ian told himself. I will give myself a few more days before I begin to get desperate.) There was, at his office, the usual daunting wash of mail, including, these spring mornings, a number of those dispiriting, because so frequent, requests from former students, former colleagues, former friends, for letters of recommendation (for university positions, Guggenheim, Rockeller, National Endowment fellowships, and the rest). Sometimes I think I dare not die, Denis said, for fear my ducklings would expire. Through the day the telephone rang, and rang, and rang, and some of these calls Ian took in his capacity as editor of
The Journal of International Politics
, and some of these calls he took in his capacity as the head of the demographic research team; and some he took as, merely, Ian McCullough. When he was gone from his desk for any period of time—he played squash, late mornings, five days a week, then had lunch, most days, in the Institute dining room, with his friends—he would return to find a tidy little pile of pink slips awaiting him, with notations from Mrs. Fairchild, his secretary.
A message from. Please call
. Always, he looked through the pink slips quickly, with both anticipation and dread. Would she have called him? No? Yes? Today? But why
not
today? She called at unpredictable times.

He did not like to telephone her; though, of course, he sometimes did, having long ago memorized the Poughkeepsie number, which he could punch out as rapidly as his forefinger moved; a sort of stylized tic it had become, requiring little conscious thought. At the other end in the paid-for but so rarely, these days, occupied apartment, Sigrid Hunt's telephone rang and rang and rang; and Ian McCullough, gripping the receiver, would think, Yes, good, no one is home. Good.

But most of the time he was working, of course. At his desk or in the computer room or in the Institute library, a handsome vaulted plushly carpeted space in which the individual was dwarfed, not in size (for the highly specialized library was not large as libraries go) but in significance: amid the neatly arranged stacks of books, books to the floor and books to the ceiling; amid the hieratic portraits of great men, Hobbes, Comte, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Engels, Spencer, Durkheim, William James, John Dewey; amid glass-encased exhibits of such items as newly acquired antique or rare or simply very expensive books like the leatherbound gilt-embroidered
Iliad
opened to the early speech of Achilles when the hero tells the doomed Lyacon, who has begged him for mercy,
Now there is not one who can escape death, if the gods send / him against my hands in front of Ilion, not one / of all the Trojans, and beyond others the children of Priam. / So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamor about it? / Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are. / Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid / and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? / Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime / when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
. . . words which, beyond the curving glare of the glass case, stirred in Ian so profound yet so inexplicable a sense of his own extinction that he had to leave the library at once and return to his office, to the little lavatory adjoining his office, that no one might be a witness to his agitation.

But most of the time he was at his desk: quite visibly and, it seemed, happily working. His young assistants joked behind his back of being terrorized by Ian McCullough: not by the man himself—“he's really wonderful, so easy to talk to, actually sweet, and unpretentious”—but by the professional standards of integrity, industry, singlemindedness of which he was a model.

Ian would not have wanted them, or anyone, to know how he plunged into his work these mornings as a swimmer plunges into the wave that sweeps toward him and will engulf him. There is no way but forward, after all.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
, it had happened again; or, rather, had
not
happened again; and Glynnis with her instinct for self-hurt murmured, You don't love me, you are indifferent to me, is that it, isn't that it, do you love another woman, is
that
it?—and Ian could do nothing but protest, for he too was hurt, and perplexed, and anxious, and resentful, yes, and angry as well, saying of course he loved her of course of course he loved her, why didn't they let the matter rest?

It was not precisely a new issue in their marriage, in any case. Over the trajectory of twenty-six years and even, as Ian vaguely recalled, intermittently at the very start, he had sometimes been impotent in their lovemaking—if “impotent” was the right, the not too cruelly clinical term—not, as Glynnis believed, out of indifference to her, and certainly not, as she was beginning to believe, out of rejection of her, but simply because it happened that way. And did not happen the other way.

Glynnis called him “abstracted,” when she was in a mood to forgive, and “cold-blooded” when she was not.

From time to time they had discussed the possibility of going to a marriage counselor, or to “some sort of therapist”—not in Hazelton where everyone knew everyone else but in New York City, of course; but the problem never seemed quite serious enough, really chronic enough, to warrant such desperate action. And they were both too busy. And they weren't the kind of people who did such things: no one in their circle was. (With the notable exceptions of Leonard Oppenheim and Paul Owen, who had both undergone psychoanalysis, as young men; but then Leonard and Paul were gay and presumably less adjusted to the quotidian.) Glynnis's pride would never have allowed her to spill her guts, as she inelegantly called it, to a stranger; and poor Ian would not have known the first thing to say. Should one apologize? Stammer out a sort of defense? Plead one's own inviolate and evidently intransigent nature?

What was new, mysteriously new, since, in fact, the night of Ian's birthday party, was Glynnis's emotional response, her so very emotional response; the startling and, Ian thought, wholly uncharacteristic bitterness she voiced, as if it were a bitterness long withheld out of charity to him.
That
was the surprise—the insult! For years the problem had come and gone, waxed and waned, held to its own unreadable cycles, a consequence of so many factors in their shared lives, such a snarl of domestic, social, and professional contingencies, it would have required the subtlety of a demographic study to diagnose causes, assign blame. Glynnis had been, most of the time, really quite sympathetic—Ian's “abstractedness” had not yet shaded into “cold-bloodedness.” But now the hurt, the childish contorted face, the shifting of the eyes that held in them, so far as Ian could see, no love of him, not even pity of, or awareness of,
him
—these scenes, enacted for the most part in embarrassed silence, seemed, for no reason Ian could name (except the reason he could not name), to be worsening.

On the very day following Ian's birthday he and Glynnis had had a quarrel of an indeterminate sort, over a trifle, yet protracted for much of an evening; and quite spoiling that evening, which, with Bianca home, was supposed to have been rather special. And a few days later they clashed again, and quarreled again, over another trifle: their emotions flaring up, and raging, like a grass fire in a dry season.

“I suppose it was a miscalculation,” Glynnis said; “a surprise party for you.” She spoke quietly, yet there was a mild emphasis on
you
that fell harshly on Ian's ears.

But he naturally protested, insisting that her party had been a great idea, and brilliantly executed; everyone had enjoyed it;
he
had enjoyed it; what more was there to say? “We certainly all look happy enough here,” he said, indicating the dozen or more Polaroid snapshots tacked on Glynnis's bulletin board. “I look in fact transcendentally happy,” he said, though his lean narrow face, surprised in the camera's glare, was bleached out and curiously distended, and his smile looked too emphatic to be genuine. “And look at you: radiant.”

(For Glynnis, long practiced in being photographed, and naturally photogenic, seemed to know how precisely to smile for a camera: a forced pose that became transmogrified, on film, into utter ease and spontaneity.)

Still Glynnis would not let the matter rest, seemingly could not let it rest, alluding yet again to his “air of distraction” and the lengthy telephone call he'd made “that might have waited until morning.” Ian said irritably, “I didn't make a telephone call, in fact. I
tried
to make it and couldn't get through.” “Ah, I see,” Glynnis said, lighting up a cigarette and eyeing him frankly. “Was that how it was.” Ian walked out of the room, his heart beating hard; paused, thought better of his retreat, and came back; and told Glynnis that, since she asked, since she pressed the point, he supposed he
was
distracted much of the evening . . . by Bianca's behavior, for one thing, but also by—how to express it?—his uneasy sense that there was something shrill and self-congratulatory about the party. “Us celebrating us,” he said.

Immediately, even as the words were uttered, Ian knew they were terrible words, words never to be unsaid; yet, plunging head on, as something heated and constricted in Glynnis's face seemed to bid him to do, he said, “I just felt, I suppose, that the occasion was somehow . . . excessive.”

“But it was your fiftieth birthday,” Glynnis said, in a faint, hurt voice, as if he had struck her. “We've gone to other parties . . . like that.”

“I don't give a damn about my fiftieth birthday,” Ian said, trying, now, to make a joke of it, “or any of my birthdays. That, surely, you understand?”

“But I love you,” Glynnis said, stubbornly, as if that were a refutation.

So, repentant, Ian tried to temper what he'd said, for he had not meant it, exactly; but Glynnis was wounded, and struck out in bewilderment and rage; and within minutes, again, they were speaking angrily, in clumsy raised voices. And again Ian left the room, pain beginning between his eyes and his heart beating suffocatingly hard; and Glynnis shouted after him, in a fury, “Then go! Just—go! Go to hell!”

(Ironically—or was it, by Hazelton's anecdotal standards, comically?—Ian fled into town on the marvelous Schwinn racer Glynnis had given him for his birthday. He would not have trusted himself, in such circumstances, in such agitation, to drive a car.)

In a telephone booth he'd called one of the numbers Sigrid Hunt had given him, a Manhattan number, and after many rings a woman answered; no, Sigrid wasn't there and no she didn't know where Sigrid was and no she couldn't take a message—sorry. Her own life, she said, with a hint of malice, was complicated enough.

Ian, embarrassed, tried to explain that he was a friend of Sigrid's from upstate; his name Ian. He wanted very badly to speak with her, or, failing that, simply to know how she was—“How is her health, for instance?” There was a pause, a murmurous sound of voices in the background; perhaps Sigrid was there after all and would speak with him; but the woman said, “
Her
health is fine, mister,” and the sound, as of muffled laughter, increased; “how is
yours?
”