The Life Room (30 page)

She liked hearing his voice, too, but she was skeptical. “Why are you calling?”

“Do you want me not to call?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I talked to my mother the other day,” he said, in a voice full of sorrow. “She calls me on my cell late at night.” Pause. “She’s so miserable, Eleanor.”

“Don’t pick up the phone at night,” Eleanor said, climbing out of her anger. “Why does she call so late?”

“Because she’s lonely.”

“Not because she wants to hear your voice? To hear how you’re doing?”

“Eleanor. I thought we don’t sugarcoat, you and me. We don’t lie to each other.”

She remembered once when they were kids, going over to the Masons’ house to borrow butter for her mother. Stephen’s mother sat at the round, six-person kitchen table. The back door was open and through the screen Eleanor felt the eeriness of catching someone sitting in privacy. Stephen’s mother, dressed in a cool summer blouse and shorts, was nursing a cold drink. The heat made her face oily. Was she drunk? The overhead fan circled the air around the room. Eleanor felt a hint of it on her face through the screen, and thought about the long days and nights of unsaid words and unspoken longings churning in the air between its metal blades. As she talked to Stephen on the phone the memory of that day was still inside her, as if she were in that private kitchen, inside that unbearably hot house, as if she were somehow complicit. While Stephen’s mother opened the refrigerator and gave her a stick of butter she saw Stephen standing in the doorway. He was bare chested, wearing pajama bottoms. He looked at her, as if he were saying,
This is what’s it’s like here, now you know, Eleanor. Now you can see
. Or perhaps he had only stared into the dark, avoiding his mother’s gaze.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be in touch with your mom for a while,” Eleanor said. She held the phone against her ear in the office. She wanted to get off the phone. It made her feel guilty. She didn’t want to be where he was taking her, back to her childhood, back inside whatever tangled nest lay between him and his mother. “It’s okay to back away.”

“But she’s ill,” he said. “She has no one.”

“You can’t be her caretaker. She’ll survive with or without you.”

“Tough love, you mean.”

“Love is tough.”

“Eleanor, I didn’t mean to monopolize the conversation, talking about my mother. I didn’t plan to talk about her when I called.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize.”

“No one else knows what she’s really like. How’s your mother, Eleanor?”

She thought of her own mother and knew exactly how he felt. After she put the phone back in its cradle on top of the desk, she felt compassion for him. She realized she didn’t know where he was. He was unattached, a figment, a lost voice over the air waves. Was he in his car? In his hotel room? On the battlefields of Gettysburg, standing in grass? Why didn’t she tell him not to call? She listened to the caustic language of birds outside her office window, floating over the treetops.

“There’s someone else,” Eleanor said, the next time he called, watching the shriveled flower on the geranium on her windowsill that had been vibrant all summer. It came out of her mouth as if she were talking about something as casual as the weather. There was a pregnant pause that she wanted to fill, but could not. Did she want him to stop calling, and couldn’t tell him to, or did she want him to think that she was the type of woman who is adventurous?

“Oh.”

“I mean, someone who is attracted to me. Who I’m attracted to. But we know it isn’t going to go any further.” She caught herself in her own lie and was making it worse.

Silence. The blank, empty silence of two people breathing into the phone. The awkwardness of how to fill it. Of what to say. The awkwardness of feeling too much.

“Who is he, Eleanor?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Falling in love has upset you.”

“I’m not in love.”

“It’s the exhilaration. It makes you feel alive.”

“We’re just friends,” Eleanor said.

“Of course we’re friends. Eleanor, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“What about your marriage?”

“Michael? Michael’s fine.”

Noah came into their bed in the middle of the night and instead of getting up and insisting he sleep in his own bed, Eleanor let him wedge his body in between her and Michael. She didn’t want to be alone with Michael or to have her body too close to his. She felt a dark force she could not control pulling her away from him.

Nicholas was still having problems at school. Twice his teacher had called home to tell Eleanor that he had acted out. He said “ass” when she had asked the students for new spelling words. He hit a girl in the playground. “Miss Nightingale is lying,” he said, when Eleanor confronted him the next day. When she went to check on him later, hoping he’d be filled with remorse, he was in his room playing with his action figures.

“I’m not going back to school,” he said later. “You can’t make me.”

“What happened? Tell me what’s wrong.” Eleanor kneeled down in front of him.

“Nobody believes me,” he said. “I had to sit out for recess. Miss Nightingale didn’t believe me.”

“What didn’t she believe?”

“That I didn’t use the middle finger.”

“Did you?”

“See. No one believes me.”

She stared at him.

“If you and Daddy get divorced,” he said, “I would want to live with Daddy.”

“Why?” She tried not to show that the comment hurt her. She knew he was angry at her.

“Because Daddy does more fun stuff with me. But you lay with me before I go to bed.” He looked up at her and smiled, fully aware of what he was doing. “Still, I would want to live with Dad.”

“It wouldn’t be your decision. Children don’t decide where they are going to live. Their parents decide for them. Besides, Daddy and I are not getting a divorce.”

“Do you think it’s true, Michael?” Eleanor asked later when she was repeating the story to Michael.

“Of course he did,” Michael said. “What’s wrong with you? That’s not something a teacher would make up.”

“What’s wrong?” Eleanor said. “What’s wrong with our son?”

“You know,” Michael said, standing before her almost lifeless.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not here anymore. You haven’t been here for the last six months. Not for me, just barely for the boys. I don’t know where you are. I don’t feel good,” he said.

“I
am
here. I’ve been consumed with my book. I’m sorry. I’ll try not to think about it so much. You know how much I care about you and the boys.”

She woke up in the morning in a panic, gasping for air. After she took the boys to school she went across town to the church on Fifth Avenue where no one who knew her might find her (her own synagogue wouldn’t do), the church that said
THIS IS GOD’S HOUSE. ALL ARE WELCOME
. But there was yellow tape over the entranceway to the door. Construction workers were outside. They were not letting her in.

“Here’s what you do with your new mitt. You put a ball inside it like this, and then you put it under your mattress and sleep on it.” Eleanor listened from the living room as Michael was putting the boys to bed. “That way the leather begins to soften into the shape of the ball,” he said, bestowing his boyhood knowledge on them before he turned off their light.

“Can you hear my heart, Daddy?” Noah said. Eleanor pictured him taking Michael’s stethoscope and placing it against his chest, a routine Michael did with the boys before bed. They liked to listen to their heartbeat. Michael showed them how to take their pulse and blood pressure.

“I am your heart,” Michael said. “Sleep tight.”

After, he appeared in the doorway of their living room wearing jeans and a turtleneck, looking handsome and tired. Why did she feel so separate? She wanted Michael to force his presence upon her, to reconnect her, but instead he sat at his desk and put his eye over the lens of the microscope, retreating to his cells and their own insular language. If I don’t force him to pay attention, he’s not there, she thought. The paint was chipping along the moldings on her living room wall. The fabric on the pillow seemed faded. Or was it just her mood?

They went upstate to spend the weekend at Sally and Rick’s house in the country. Marcia and Brian and their kids also went. They barely spoke during the car ride home. Nicholas played his Game Boy. Noah was stretched out on his back like a pharaoh, listening to music.

“What did you think of what Brian said at dinner last night?” Michael asked as they were driving home. “Goddamn it, Eleanor. Do you purposefully do that? Not hear me?”

“I was thinking about my work,” Eleanor lied. She reached out to touch his thigh. Her eye caught the angry scowl across his face. She retracted her hand.

“You always think about your work lately.”

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“When Brian was joking last night that Marcia has been so nice to him that he suspects she’s having an affair. What did you think?”

“Do you really think that if someone’s nice they’re having an affair? That’s silly.”

“I don’t know. I think there’s something going on.”

She thought what it would be like to tell Michael the truth. She knew she wasn’t being fair. She had everything a woman could want, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop what was overtaking her. Maybe if she explained it to Michael she could stop it.
Michael, I don’t know how it happened
. She wanted to take his hands, which had healed many other bodies, into hers.
It’s someone from my past. We reconnected again. He makes me feel necessary. It’s like he’s healing something
. But the words would not come forward. She watched him looking ahead responsibly, staying between the lines to avoid oncoming traffic, his sturdy hands carefully turning the wheel toward home. “Did you enjoy the country? You look so tired,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

The boys fell asleep in the car. When they got home she carried Noah from the car. His legs curled around her waist, finding a secure spot, while his head leaned into her neck, and his fingers gripped the sweater on her back. She carried him blindly in the dark, navigating the shadows and corners in her house, knowing where each chair sat in the living room, each sofa, each lamp.

She watched Michael take off his clothes, wash his hands, and put on a pair of sweatpants and T-shirt. She looked through the open door of the master bathroom at their matching white robes hanging like phantoms. If only she could tell him something about her work and her thoughts, tell him about the unknown parts of herself and bring them to life with him, but she was mute. His refusal to step outside his anger, his refusal to penetrate her and she him, his belief that he was entitled to her happiness, her pleasure, and her well-being just because he was her husband—she could not understand or accept. They were like two beings at war with each other, and at the same time seeking comfort. “How’s the stent coming along?” she said. “Any advancements on that front?”

“It’s a work in progress. We have to go over these findings with a fine-tooth comb. We don’t expect results overnight.”

“I’m so proud of the work you’re doing,” she tried, retreating to the kitchen. Noah, having woken up, took her hand and dragged her into the living room where Michael was working.

“Tell Daddy you love him,” Noah said.

“Of course I love him.” Eleanor dried her wet hands on the front of her jeans.

“Tell him,” Noah insisted.

“Noah, you’re being silly.”

Michael looked up at her, waiting, his reading glasses slipping down his nose.

“Of course I love Daddy.”

She couldn’t sleep. Or if she slept it was in that half-asleep, half-awake state where her mind was still active and present. She kept the bedroom door open, a habit they had fallen into when Nicholas was a baby so that they could hear him if he cried in the night. Through the open door she watched the pattern of light in the dark hallway that came from the dim light underneath Michael’s microscope in the other room. The light danced off the walls, evaporated, bloomed into focus again. She thought about Michael. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t attuned to the same nuances as she. It wasn’t as if she could understand the cells he studied underneath his lens. Why was it so important now that they speak the same language? When she had first met him it hadn’t seemed to matter. Why did it now? She prayed for sleep to overtake her before Michael came to bed so she wouldn’t have to experience their estrangement, but even though she closed her eyes when he entered the bedroom and slid underneath the covers, she was wide awake.

Michael, too, was restless. He tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable. He threw the sheets off his body, tortured by the airlessness that sat in their bed like another person prying them apart.

“You can open the window,” she said, hugging his shoulder. “I don’t want you to suffer. I can’t sleep, either.”

She wandered into the boys’ room and slid in next to Nicholas.

“What about Daddy?” Nicholas said, when he found her sleeping next to him in his bed in the morning. “Daddy’s all alone.”

She began to have fantasies of God watching over her, though she had never considered herself to be a religious person. She felt God’s presence when she was moved by the beauty of nature. But now she was frightened by the shift inside her. She imagined God watching over her to help her find her way, the way she had imagined her father had when she was still a young girl and he no longer lived at home. She told herself if she was present to every nuance of how she felt and of what she believed to be true and authentic, then she would survive the crisis within herself.

God must have orchestrated everything. He had sent Stephen to Paris to her. He was testing her faith in her beliefs and in her marriage. Their meeting seemed an improbable coincidence the more Eleanor considered it. She wondered if God was trying to bring her closer to her true nature.

She walked home through Central Park on her way back from school. It was snowing. A light dust of white covered the lawn and trees. She heard a voice from behind. Someone was singing an old gospel song. “Come bathe in the water with Jesus, come bathe in the water with Jesus. I saw the light from heaven come down.” She looked around to follow the voice. A beautiful, large black man was walking through the avenue of snow. God was malevolent. He was teasing her.