Bodies and Souls (16 page)

It had occurred to him about two weeks ago that if he wrote poems in the attic in the middle of the night, perhaps he could write poems in the attic in the middle of the day. If so, he thought, he could tell Norma about it, and schedule it into their daytime plans: Well, he could say, I’m going up to the attic now, and Norma would say, Good, dear, I’ll be sure not to disturb you. Which would also mean that she would consider herself free from disturbances from him for two hours. That would please her, he knew.

That morning he decided to give himself a secret trial run. When Norma went off to her church ladies’ meeting, he fixed himself a glass of iced tea and climbed the attic stairs. But the attic, which seemed poetic and mysterious at night, with its shadowy corners and vagrant furniture, made him restless in the daylight. At night he could sit in the middle of that huge attic with only the light from a naked 60-watt bulb illuminating the room and the secrets it held. He could stare across the room at some hulking shape that was so disguised by the dim light and casual clutter that he could not tell for certain just what that item from his past was. And so his whole life seemed full of unusual and unlimited possibilities of interpretation. But in the day things were all too clear. He could make out the distinct outlines of each object, he could see that the outlandish shape which had aroused slightly exotic thoughts at night was by day only an old pine cupboard with one foot broken off and a set of discarded blankets tossed over it. Wilbur thought he had lived too long to be forced to see life in such a stark and pedestrian way. Surely one of the rewards the old deserved was ambiguity.

Still, he had tried to write his poetry in the daytime. He put his glass of iced tea down on his desk, and arranged his paper and pen, and twisted up his mouth in a concentrating attitude. Then he just sat there and stared while the ice melted and a ring of moisture formed around the base of the glass. He couldn’t think of one word he wanted to put down on paper. Finally, defeated, he went back down the stairs, and when Norma came home she found him asleep in front of the television.

That night, however, he awoke as usual, went up to the attic, and wrote what he considered to be one of his best poems. The pattern continued: he awoke and wrote at night, and fell asleep during the day. He knew his sudden escapades of sleep worried
Norma, and he wanted to tell her that it was all right, he was not hitting senility so soon and quick. But he could not bring himself to explain to his wife just what it was he was doing. Norma was a great one for clarity, and Wilbur always found it necessary to justify his acts in detail not so much because Norma needed to judge as because she needed to understand.

He’d never fallen asleep in church yet, though, and he doubted if he ever would: Peter Taylor’s sermons always kept him wide awake. Now the pastor was telling a joke—something the other ministers had seldom done—and Wilbur had to admit he liked it, found it
right
, this inclusion of levity in a religious service. There was no doubt about it: Peter Taylor was an extraordinary man, and Wilbur hoped that when he died, Peter Taylor would be the one to see his body through its last rites and to console Norma. Wilbur believed that some people just made better connections with God than other people did. Peter Taylor had such a charitable way about him and was so, well, lighthearted, that Wilbur could imagine how at his burial Peter Taylor would stand outside in the fresh air and simply lift his arms and toss Wilbur’s soul up to the sky.

Wilbur spent a lot of his time anticipating death. He wanted to be prepared. He hadn’t read very much in his lifetime—which made his poetry writing even more surprising to him—but he had spent a lot of time listening to ministers and thinking, and it seemed to him that the soul was the essential thing and that life was a process of building up the spirit while the body that surrounded and protected and constrained it gradually dwindled. All in all, it was not a bad system—as long as you could keep your faith in your soul, and Wilbur had managed to do that. In fact, just as much as he firmly believed in God, so did he also believe in the eternity of each individual spirit.

When his third and youngest son, Ricky, had died in a car accident at the age of seventeen, Wilbur had been caught up in a crisis of belief that had nearly destroyed him. First, of course, he had to deal with the sheer loss, the loss of his youngest, tallest, most laughter-filled child; it was an almost intolerable devastation. And with Ricky’s death he had discovered that it was necessary for him to come to terms with just exactly what it was he believed about life and death and God and man, and that seemed a formidable task. He felt he was being forced to delve into the supernatural, to enter forbidden territory without the protection of host or guardian. For a long time he had been very sad and frightened. He had lost a great deal of weight, because as he had gone through the inevitable routines of daily life, he had found himself continually thinking: Ricky would
have loved that joke, or I wish Ricky could have seen that home run, or if only Ricky could know that Doreen McKensie has gotten herself engaged to Ted Smith! When he had such thoughts, his whole torso would go stiff and cold with fear and sorrow, and his throat would clamp up tight inside his skin, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow food or water for hours.

One day Wilbur had closed his shop in the middle of the day and walked by himself down to a spot on the bank of the Blue River where he was pretty certain of being alone—it was not an especially pretty spot, a noisy highway ran just the other side of it, at the top of a steep bank, and no one fished there because at this point the river ran so shallow. Both sides of the river were overgrown with willows and ash trees and weeds and there was no sandy beach to sit on. Wilbur had just crouched down in the middle of some tall grass and stared at the water and, finally, assured of privacy, he had cried. He had cried and cursed God and man and life and death and wondered why he shouldn’t go ahead and take his own life and get it over with.

It was with perfect clarity that he suddenly heard Ricky’s voice: “Hey, Dad, look at the water skaters!”

Wilbur had looked automatically at the river, where a group of bugs were skimming busily on the surface, before he realized that he had just heard Ricky’s voice. He knew it was a trick of synapses, of longing and grief short-wiring his brain. Still, Ricky’s voice had been so vivid. And he hadn’t seen the water skaters before … He stopped crying, stopped thinking, and just stared at the flow of the river.

A few days later, in the shop, when he was loading up the cleaning and packets of freshly ironed shirts into the delivery truck, he heard Ricky’s voice again, saying, “Dad, you’d better get that left back tire checked. It’s low again.” It was the sort of thing Ricky might have said, because he was the son who hung around with Wilbur and helped him in the shop. Still, it was embarrassment more than disbelief that kept Wilbur from going home to his wife and children and telling them that he had heard Ricky say he should have a tire checked. If he was going to hallucinate about his dead son, surely it should be on a more spiritual level.

But he felt continually better after that, and slowly he began to believe that all that religious claptrap he had heard all his life might be true: that Ricky might be gone from this earth, but still somehow be very much real and present, and in a way, alive. He began to feel—whenever he heard a joke and thought: Ricky would have laughed at that—that
perhaps Ricky was hearing it and
was
laughing. Wilbur began to enjoy a sense of companionship as he went through life. Perhaps he was crazy and that pretense was simply the only way he could bear to continue living. Or perhaps Ricky’s spirit really did accompany him, now and then.

As the years rolled by, Wilbur heard Ricky’s voice less and less until now it was a rare occurrence, but certainty of Ricky’s presence grew. Ricky had never been a child to hold grudges, and he didn’t seem to be a bitter presence even now. Wilbur had the feeling that Ricky didn’t mind being only an observer. Wilbur began to think that while life was of course usually preferable to death, the experience of daily life was just as fraught with unpleasantness, worries, fears, and griefs as it was with pleasures. Taken daily, life is harder than we like to think, and simply getting through a life requires any number of ameliorating illusions. Perhaps God had not been so unkind, after all, to take Ricky’s body from him after only seventeen years. Worse things might have happened to him—he might have grown up and lost a son of his own. At any rate, Wilbur now firmly believed that Ricky’s spirit still existed, and if he sorrowed over the vanishing of his son’s body and smile and clear blue eyes, he felt comforted by a sense of the sturdy eternity of the boy’s soul.

Wilbur found the teachings of the Church compatible with his life, or perhaps it was that he had shaped his understanding of the events of his life to be compatible with the teachings of Christianity. He believed in the definite individuality of souls. He saw Ricky’s soul as hearty and adolescent, forever cheerful. Norma’s soul was delicate, orderly, and elaborate, like a paper snowflake, much the same now that she was sixty-five as it had been when she was twenty. His own soul he thought of as a tough old piece of brown twine that had been put through so many convolutions by life that it now sat inside his chest all tangled in a clump of knots. Sometimes he could even feel it in there, sinewy and vigorous and triumphant in a sly way, now that it was obviously winning the game in the hare and tortoise race between body and soul. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and no one knows why He does what He does, but Wilbur had always thought that if you had something, well then you stood the chance of losing it. That was just the way it was. He kept trying to be grateful for what he had, for what he had not lost.

Physically, it seemed he had less and less. Long ago he’d lost most of his hair and the skin of his arms and legs hung slack in places that had once been bulky with muscles and flesh. Now even most of his teeth had decayed and been replaced. He was getting
hollowed out.

On the other hand, Norma seemed to be growing. Each year there was more of her. Ten years ago, on her fifty-fifth birthday, she had come into the dining room, where Wilbur and their three children awaited her with surprises: champagne, an elaborate layered birthday cake, and piles of presents, including beribboned boxes of fancy chocolates.

“Why, how nice this is of all of you!” Norma had cried, but Wilbur could tell that somehow something was wrong. Her face had taken on that tremulous look that betrayed some secret problem. The children all pretended not to notice—later Wilbur realized that they had thought Norma was upset about growing old—and they celebrated her birthday with almost violent enthusiasm. During the birthday feast, Norma’s spirits seemed to take a turn for the better and soon she was as jolly as the rest of her family, but that night when Wilbur was alone with her, he discovered her sitting on the edge of the bed in tears.

“My God, Norma, what’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed.

She babbled something, but she was crying so hard he couldn’t understand even a word. Finally he brought her a glass of water, and she drank it and calmed down a bit, and said, “My metabolism.”

“What?” Wilbur had asked.

“My metabolism.”
Norma repeated. “Oh, Wilbur, the older I get, the harder it is to keep my weight down. You were all so sweet to think of me and surprise me with all those delicacies, but it will take me two weeks to undo the damage I did at the party today.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, Norma,” Wilbur had said, “I always have thought you were silly to worry so much about your weight. You’re a pretty woman. You always have been and you always will be. Twenty pounds more or less isn’t going to make any difference at all.”

“Twenty pounds more will make me look
fat
!” Norma declared. “Why, if I gain even five pounds more, my cheeks will swell up and my eyelids will get puffy, and I’ll look like a pig!”

“You will?” Wilbur asked, and tactless in his amazement, he studied his wife’s face. Norma sat glaring back at him, daring him to see how she had gotten old, how five more pounds would destroy her looks. And Wilbur did see that his wife’s face had changed. She was very slim, so slim that her skin seemed stretched and taut over the
bones of her face. He struggled for a moment to find the right words to say. He and Norma had lived together for so long and through so much that a necessary civility had developed in their intimacy, and this kind of vulnerability took on a crucial aspect. He wanted very much for his honesty to be kind.

“You’ve lost that sheen you had when you were young, when we were married,” he said. “That’s true. So have I. But you look—softer—now. I like softness. There’s something appealing about round, soft women. I don’t think anything could ever make me stop loving you, or thinking that you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“Oh, Wilbur,” Norma had said, and turned her face away. He put his arms around her, and drew her to him and kissed her hair. They made love, being very gentle with each other, without even drawing back the bedcovers, and when they were through and were lying together side by side, Norma had raised her head and studied Wilbur for a moment, then smiled.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see.”

They saw. Norma relaxed her dietary standards and did gain weight; over the past ten years she had gained a good thirty pounds. Wilbur shriveled; Norma burgeoned. At last it became a joke: “Well, Mr. Sprat, shall we have some chocolate cake for dessert?” Norma would ask. As her weight grew, so did, it seemed, her sense of humor and proportion. After all, they were both helpless as various parts of their bodies became puckered and wrinkled and sagged and speckled and bent. Still they loved each other, and the realization of that was a gift of such magnitude that they considered themselves lucky. Wilbur came to believe that the sparkle in the eyes of this woman he had loved for so many years was a far prettier thing than any younger woman’s more brazen blaze.