Another Insane Devotion (32 page)

“Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest
,
” Salter writes of his married couple. “From far off it seems a unity, it can be
comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one.”

My problem is that I can write only from inside the forest.

 

F. came down to North Carolina to tell me. We took a walk along the beach. Winters in that part of the country start later than they do up north and they're a lot milder, but it was cold enough, a day or two after Thanksgiving, that we walked with our shoulders hunched, our hands clenched in our pockets. When we faced into the wind, our eyes watered. I can't reconstruct the conversation, except that at some point she asked me, “Do you want to know what I felt then?” and I said I didn't want to know. It was probably the first time in all the years we'd been together that I didn't want to know what she was feeling, or had felt. I didn't want to look at her, and this too was new to me. I was angry but not in a way that can be assuaged by yelling, and so it seemed to me that my only recourse was to seal myself against her—and also to refrain from bursting out at her, to refrain especially from asking her not to leave. She could do what she wanted. The image that comes to mind is of a stone figure, eyeless, earless, noseless, mouthless, without any of the apertures that allow one human being to be penetrated by another, or rather by a sense impression of that other, as it may be made by the light reflecting off her person or by the molecules of air set in motion by her voice or the ones that bear the chemical signatures of her body. I suppose what I'm thinking of is one of the human beings who were petrified by the volcanic ash that spewed from Mt. Vesuvius when it erupted in AD 79, destroying the city of Pompeii. The date of
that catastrophe is traditionally given as August 24, but archaeological studies suggest it really took place three months later, at the end of November.

 

In view of our conversation, why did F. then invite me to come up for Christmas? Why did I agree to come? It was in many ways like other Christmases we'd spent together. We bought a tree and hung it with lights, tinsel, and ornaments her family had given her, including a ponderous angel made from an iron cowbell I half blamed for causing an earlier tree of ours to tip over. At the time I was in another room, so all I heard was a terrifying crash and F.'s even more terrifying shriek, and when I ran in, she was unhurt and laughing helplessly at the felled tree and scattered ornaments. Amazingly, only a few of them were broken. The cowbell, of course, was intact.

We gave each other gifts. We went to some Christmas parties, where we behaved like any other couple, and at times even a loving one, though perhaps a couple who have something uncomfortable pending between them, as if they'd been fighting when they left the house and are wondering if they'll start up again when they get home. On Christmas Eve, we flipped through the channels to see if any of them was showing
A Christmas Carol,
the old one with Alistair Sim as Scrooge. We couldn't find it, only a bunch of newer
Carols
starring contemporary actors and shot in color that browbeat the eye. We'd done the same thing the Christmas before and the Christmas before that, and almost all the Christmases we'd spent together except for the one time we had the initiative to rent the movie, which you could only get on tape. We groused about a world
that wouldn't let you see Dickens's characters in the somber black-and-white of Victorian mourning, on degraded footage whose tiny, writhing imperfections might be homunculi of the ghosts Marley shows Scrooge outside his window. We wanted to see the Scrooge of our childhood, and they wouldn't give it to us, and it was cruddy.

A little after New Year's, I flew back down south, with the expectation that the next time I came back up, it would be to pack my things and move to a new home. For a long time afterward, we had little contact. In April, F. wrote me saying she wanted to see if we could still be together. I read her letter in haste, then again slowly, with silent snorts of incredulity. It held no conventional expression of longing or regret; at times she seemed to be scolding me. On one level, I would have liked F. to say how wonderful I was and how awful she'd been, but I would have been suspicious if she had. I was suspicious anyway. Still it occurred to me that she was presenting herself to me the same way she had when we were sitting across from each other in a tea shop ten years before: bluntly, without apology, revealing herself and then withdrawing, inviting my compassion—maybe even my tenderness—but at any moment ready to repel it. She was letting me see her in the fullness of her being. In the end, I wrote back not because I wanted to be with her but because she had made me curious. Of course I know what they say about curiosity and cats. But I'm not a cat. I've only loved a few.

In the months after I came back, we went to see a therapist who had only one eye. At our first session, she told us she'd lost the other one to cancer. My guess is she did that so that we
wouldn't be distracted by macabre curiosity as to why one lens of her glasses was completely opaque. She had us play with little toys, which was embarrassing but also kind of fun, though not enough fun for us to pay $75 an hour for it, which was why in the end we stopped seeing her.

After an especially bitter fight over the Labor Day weekend, F.'s chest and back erupted in raised red marks. She thought they might be a spider bite. She's deathly afraid of spiders, and although the marks weren't especially painful, the unease they inspired in her kept mounting until, finally, while we were at the county fare watching the equestrian events, she said she wanted to go to the medical trailer. The trailer was manned by a male health aide who must have weighed four hundred pounds. His mass seemed to fill every inch of the cabin. It threatened to ooze out the windows like dough extruded from a malfunctioning bread mixer, not a home model but the commercial kind,
with a drum a child could stand in. There was barely room for F. to step inside and show him her welts. The aide, who had probably been hired to care for fairgoers laid low by overeating or motion-sick from riding the Fireball, took a look at F.'s marks and said they were above his pay grade.

We walked through the heat and dust to our car. Along with being worried about F., I felt nostalgic. Our first house had been next door to the fairground's rear entrance, and at night we'd been buffeted by the clatter of the rides and the thump and twang of country and western bands that I referred to collectively as the Haylofters; F. laughed every time I said it. We drove to the emergency room of our local hospital, the same one she'd been taken to years before when Bitey had made her dislocate her arm. Strictly speaking, it wasn't the same ER, since the hospital had been renovated. A bored triage nurse had F. pull up her shirt and fill out some insurance forms, then sent us back into the empty lobby. The procedure took no more than three minutes. After we'd been waiting another fifteen or twenty, we were joined by a family steering a young quadriplegic man in an enormous whirring black wheelchair. It seemed not only to be carrying him but assisting with his vital functions, perhaps even making his heart beat. Whatever was wrong with him was probably more serious than a spider bite, but he and his people were also made to wait, and about a half hour later, F. decided she wanted to go home. The next day she saw her dermatologist, who told her she had shingles. They're often brought on by stress, and hers went away after a course of Acyclovir. A few months later, the hospital sent us a bill for $400.

There were more fights. These weren't so much ugly as petty. I don't remember ever calling F. a name or her calling me one, but sometimes I imagined a cartoon in which I chased her around the dining table, kicking her in the butt. The kicks would be deeply embarrassing to her but not painful. Once, she told me, not in the cartoon but in real life, she fantasized about my being killed in a car wreck and telling friends she was too distraught to make funeral arrangements: they could bury me if they wanted. Once during a phone call, we both blurted out that we wanted to be done with the marriage, seemingly in the same breath and in the same words. I remember staring down at the receiver as if it had bitten me, or she had bitten me through it. Whose teeth had made those marks?

Sometime during this period, I told F. I wanted to stay together. Looking back, I can say I based my decision on the tiny psychic adjustments that took place as we crouched on the shrink's floor, arranging tiny dinosaurs and armored warriors. I made it because of what I'd felt when F. showed me the welts on her body, which looked like they'd been made by a red-hot wire: I mean a horror and pity so pressing that I instantly forgot what we'd been fighting about and for the next several hours thought of little more than making sure she was taken care of; we had plenty of time to fight some more once I knew she was all right. Maybe I just liked having a partner who laughed when I griped about the Haylofters.

If only, on hearing me say I wanted her, F. had thrown herself in my arms and said she was so happy, she wanted me too. If only she'd wept with gratitude or relief. She didn't. It's probably not in her nature. But her response felt grudging to me; it
still feels grudging, and so I am not content. She makes demands; she bitches at me and complains that I bitch at her. Sometimes I wish I'd kicked her out of that car in Rome.
Va al diavolo!
Sometimes I think that with improved employment opportunities and convenient packaged foods, men and women no longer need each other enough to stay together out of stoicism or habit. They have to choose, not just once, but again and again, a day, an hour, a minute at a time. When a choice has to be repeated so often, it falls subject to the same odds that govern the tossing of a coin. Sooner or later, the choice will be no. And sometimes I think that F. and I are like two plodding amateur dancers who take what they expect will be a short, heavy-footed leap—not even a leap but a jump—and discover that they are floating three feet above the ground. It's only when they look down that they fall.

In the months to come, we'll move to yet another house, a very nice one, overlooking a pond where muskrats swim tirelessly back and forth and a blue heron sometimes skims across the water looking, in elongated profile, like a hieroglyph come to life. The cats watch, fascinated, from a distance. They like to prowl the reeds in search of things to kill, but they know they're not the equal of a blue heron.

You'd think we could find peace in a place this beautiful, but we cannot. Both of us are waiting for something to happen.

Today we fought again, I forget what about. Needing to get away from F., I stepped onto the front porch, leaving the door half-open behind me. It's spring, the days are lengthening, and although it was closing on evening, the sky was still bright. Light fell slanting onto the grass. At the foot of the porch steps,
Biscuit was crouching, her neck craned forward, her shoulders hunched. Every cell of her being was straining toward something. It took me a while to see what it was. About fifty feet away, beside the tool shed, were two rabbits. They stood some ten feet apart on their hind legs, their soft plump muzzles working as they nibbled. Rabbits always seem to be nibbling something—carrots, cabbages, clover. I had no idea what these rabbits were chowing down on, but everything about them, down to the angle of their ears, seemed to express the tension between appetite and caution. Even as they ate, they kept watch about them with their depthless black eyes.

They must have seen Biscuit, just as she plainly saw them. And although I'm always conscious that my judgments about what a cat is thinking or feeling aren't really judgments but projections, at that moment I was pretty confident about what Biscuit was thinking. She was trying to decide which rabbit to go for. She knew she couldn't get them both. And the rabbits were waiting to see which of them she'd go for, though I suspect they also knew she couldn't get either of them: they were too far from her, and if they'd seen Biscuit in action, they'd know she isn't the fastest cat. Her poor legs are too short. Biscuit was watching the rabbits. The rabbits were watching Biscuit. I was watching them all. I was the fourth element in this constellation of viewers, the biggest and slowest moving, and the only one, to our knowledge, possessed of powers of self-reflection. Of the four beings that had come together in this space, I was the one that watched itself watching the others, in effect adding a fifth element to the arrangement, an ethereal spectatorial self that floated above the porch, insatiable in its watchfulness. This
trait may be what makes me a less effective predator than Biscuit. I'm pretty confident that if I were shrunk down to their size, I'd be a less successful prey animal than the rabbits.