The Secret Lives of People in Love (11 page)

I am sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off. There is broken glass strewn across the red stone floor. The back door is wide open, and moonlight drips through the trees and pools in the doorway. I am sitting at the table drinking tea in darkness, while my wife is somewhere in the fields that stretch endlessly behind our house. I hold the cup with both hands, as though engaged in holiness. I can imagine her in mud up to her ankles, her glasses spotted with rain, hair breaking like black sea on her shoulders.

When I arrived home and saw the broken glass and the open door, I knew she had received news from the doctors. Flapping in the breeze on the table like a white tongue is the letter, which may confirm her worst fear. I dare not read it. In the darkness I can see the cluster of words scattered across the page; like small fallen bodies they reach out for us.

I wonder if she smashed the glass on purpose or if one of her walking poles nudged it as she twisted her back and thrashed all limbs, ne
gotiating her crutches like giant chopsticks as she made for the empty, moonlit pasture.

Her legs are so deformed you’d think they were rubber. I touched them for the first time on our wedding night at a bed-and-breakfast only eight miles up the mountain. On a clear day you can see it from behind our cottage. I remember the bed and the crisp, yellowing sheets. I wondered how many people had slept in it. I marveled at how the pillow, like a small theater, had staged countless dreams. At dusk, when I smoke in the garden, the lights of the bed-and-breakfast flutter beneath a faint flock of stars and remind me of our first night. We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river—we could feel the weight of each other’s stones.

My wife’s legs are so unnaturally twisted that when she was a girl her classmates boasted of frequent nightmares in which their own legs melted into dead white snakes. And they called her names that pierced her like arrows. Every night she fell asleep bleeding and dreaming that one morning she would awake with legs as straight and strong as trees and that on Saturday morning small pink fingers would push the doorbell—a prelude to the breathless voices calling her out to play.

My father was a miner. Her father was a welder who repaired steel-frame supports in the shafts. She dreamed that when her bones woke up and joined hands, her father would light his welding torch and turn her poles into a bicycle with a basket on the front, the sort other girls used to ferry hot parcels of fish-and-chips or crab apples poached from a tree by throwing sticks into the branches.

Once, she threw her poles into the branches of a pear tree that grew at the edge of the schoolyard. They stuck, and when the bell rang sum
moning children back to their cold desks, she sat shivering outside until a teacher noticed a speck by the fence and sent for the caretaker and his retarded son, who dragged the ladder across the yard pulling faces to the window of every classroom.

My wife is out in the fields, in the shadow of a mountain crowned by mist. Perhaps she is leaning against a stile and watches the drifting cows, their eyes as still and black as well water.

The village we live in erupted from mud, and mothers wage an impossible war against the perpetually dissolving ground. Above the village, the sky is so stuffed with cloud that water, like some curious animal, finds its way into everything and lives on the backs of the people—slowly drowning them.

On Saturday the unmarried and the widowed kiss and fight at the Castle Pub on the hill. Anyone not at the pub or in the ground is sprawled before blazing fires in cottages, which, like sad ornaments, dangle upon the hillsides on smoky threads. Children watch black-and-white televisions in kitchens as fathers chop heads off fish and smoke cigarettes, peering into back gardens until evening, like a grieving stranger pulls his cloak across the day.

My tea is cold, and the moon, anchored by the hopes and wishes of those abandoned souls churning their way home from the pub, has drifted deeper into the sky.

My wife and I have been back and forth to Wrexham Hospital in the rusting truck. They slide a needle into her spine, which like lightning splits me in two.

And there’s the letter that I daren’t read, because I have wanted a son since my father was crushed in a collapsed shaft.

I was a boy in this very kitchen, perched at the table in darkness waiting for him to come home and take me to the fair. I had my heart set on the acquisition of small orange fish, which were being dispensed liberally to children in thin plastic bags.

When suppertime passed and my father was still not home, I was so angry that I drew a picture of him and then stabbed it with my pencil. I pictured him at the pub, his face smeared with coal dust, sitting quietly with his workmates rolling cigarettes.

Eventually, a neighbor knocked and entered. She set a plastic Thermos of soup in front of me and explained how my father was stuck in a mine and that it would be on the news. I thought of the drawing and cried.

My mother waited at the entrance to the shaft for three days, and I slept at the neighbor’s house beneath a crucifix made from clothes pegs. I imagined myself wandering the grassy mountainside and then digging with the pencil I’d used to stab my father until his hand pushed through the soil holding a bag of fish.

My wife is the neighbor’s daughter. Before the night my father died, I’d only seen her on Sunday afternoons tilting around her front garden like a broken toy.

She told me that while my father’s body might be crushed under tons of black earth, the body is nothing but camouflage. She whispered that every soul is a river trying to find its way back to the sea.

I have wanted a son since my father’s accident. I will continue where he left off. I hoped I was the crucial link. When I can bury every ounce of my disappointment about what I think the letter says, I will slip through the gate into the fields and bring her home. I never want
her to know that fatherhood was the ambition of my life. I don’t want her to feel as though she has let me down; yet for a moment I consider what would happen if I packed a small bag and escaped, perhaps to London where I could work on a market, or up to Scotland where I’d mine deep lochs for eels. It’s tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.

In this very kitchen I would listen to my mother tell stories about my dead father. The Sunday afternoon they drove up Sugar Loaf and listened to the crackling radio with a blanket spread over their legs. It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment. She told me about their first weekend away in Blackpool, fishing for crabs off the pier with cans of beer and hot sausages wrapped in newspaper. She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time.

After he died, I began to imagine the deformed girl from next door as my lover. I imagined driving her up Sugar Loaf Mountain on the back of my bicycle and then touching her legs, and then kissing them with the coyness of snowfall. I imagined defending her in the playground, and with my pillow I practiced punching the rubbery noses of my schoolmates should they dare open their mouths and spill ugliness upon her.

Years ago, I wrote to doctors in America and asked how much it would cost to straighten her legs. Every single one of them wrote back requesting charts, personal information, and, most importantly, photographs. The only photographs I had of her legs I took surreptitiously while she was asleep. I sent them all. There is nothing they can do now,
they said, but advances in technology are made every day, and I should keep in touch—which I secretly do. Every Christmas twelve doctors across America each receive a package of tea from Wales.

But if she were whole and her legs were capable of symmetry, I would no longer lift her in and out of the bath, nor drive her to the library where she stamps books and enrolls new members, for these are rituals of marriage in which I lose myself.

I imagine if she were like everyone else: scrambling from the truck on Sugar Loaf Mountain to chase one another. It would take ten years off our lives to run like that. All couples should run away from each other and then collapse in a knot.

Everyone in the village knows me as they knew my father. Once my wife took some coal from the burner and smeared a little dust on my face. She told me I look like him—that our eyes contain the same color water. Death ends a life but not a relationship.

I sweep up the glass on the red stone floor, then find my rubber boots. She won’t have eaten. I will carry her home and then lower her into a hot bath. She will cry, and I will say nothing.

It is almost midnight and wind throws light rain against the cottage, whipping the windows and softening cemented stones. The ground beneath the gate has been churned by the split hooves of cows. The mud is thick with puddles as deep as buckets.

As the ground begins to harden I hear the frantic call of some animal. The pasture is free of cows and glistens like wedding cake. As I trudge across it, I notice a white speck in the middle and realize that the noise is the sound of my wife’s laughter.

I quicken my step and begin to pant. Drops of rain, silvered mo
mentarily by moonlight, plummet through white plumes of my breath like stars.

My wife is standing without her poles and for an instant I suspect a miracle, but as I approach I see that she is up to her knees in mud and that her poles have been tossed out of reach by the same passion that makes her laugh.

Before I embrace her, I turn around. Mist has swallowed the house. Only the white field and our two shaking bodies inhabit the earth.

As I fall to my knees and reach for her torso, I feel her fingers press against my scalp. Her voice is light and powerful.

“The letter,” she says. I try to pull her from the mud, but it holds her as though it were holding its first flower.

“Did you read the letter?” she says again.

“I don’t care about that anymore,” I say, but a burst of wind carries away the words and she laughs again, lifting her arms to the sky as though channeling some great force through her body.

By the time Gerard leaves the office it has stopped snowing. Lights are coming on, but it’s not yet dark. At the end of each block the sidewalk disappears under a pool of gray ice water.

Gerard thinks of everyone’s footprints in the snow. Manhattan was once a forest. He imagines the footprints of an Indian slipping home, on his shoulders a warm carcass with clumps of snow stuck to its fur.

Gerard thinks of his own footprints and how soon they will disappear. He exhales into the world and his breath disappears. He recalls Rilke,
what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food
. He wonders if his life is an extraordinary one.

Gerard remembers the freezing cross-country races at his English prep school. Bare white legs spotted with mud. Plum-sized hearts thumping.

He remembers Hetherington, the physical education teacher, his strong jaw and sweet blue eyes—the desire to see his boys drink up the glory of victory. Hetherington ran in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
He won a medal. Hitler watched. Millions were about to be killed as a teenage Hetherington crossed the finish line. A few years later, children walked into gas ovens after a long journey from home. They were scared but trusted their parents.

Gerard feels stabbing love for his daughter. He crosses Fifty-third Street. Her name is Lucy, and she is eight. She has short brown hair with Hello Kitty clips pinned cleanly to her head. Gerard once sat next to a rabbi on the train to Southampton. The rabbi had just returned from England. He was making a documentary about the war.

“But there are so many already,” Gerard had said.

Walking up Fifth Avenue he cringes at the insensitivity of his comment. He must have thought I was like everyone else, thinks Gerard. Am I like everyone else, he thinks. The rabbi had merely put his hand on Gerard’s cuff for a moment.

It suddenly begins snowing again.

Yellow taxis are nodding through the snowy dusk. The lights from shopwindows are beckoning. Gerard thinks of the mannequins. They are very still, perfectly still. They are talking about something they’ve never done. They are sitting down to meals they’ll never eat; tucked into beds in which they’ll never dream.

He pictures Lucy in their warm apartment perched at the table reading a simplified
Black Beauty
in large print. Her legs are swinging under the table in concentration. He has never known such devotion.

Gerard is handsome. He has slept with many women. Most knew he would never love them, so they kept a distance, sparing themselves the grief of an ancient pain. Gerard loved one woman once, but not Lucy’s mother.

Lucy is at home with Indira, a heavy-set Barnard student from New Delhi who cooks dinner every weeknight and helps Lucy with her homework. Gerard and Lucy love Indian food. Indira often stays and eats with them—at first she wouldn’t. She is becoming part of the family. Her father died.

The snow is covering everything. Gerard remembers
The Invisible Man
. A crackling film from the 1930s. He watched it one night with Lucy. She’d seen it listed in
TV Guide
and wanted to watch it. It was on late. She fell asleep after five minutes. Gerard could feel her heart thudding like a soft, warm rock. As he carried her to bed, she asked him what happened to the invisible man. Gerard told her that he was caught because it began to snow and he left footprints. That’s beautiful, she said, without opening her eyes.

It’s a blizzard now.

Flakes like clumps of fur ripped from winter’s back.

And then he sees Laurel through the falling snow.

Eight years have passed.

He can’t believe it and stops walking.

A woman with bags bumps into him and curses.

Laurel is a few feet away.

He steps over to the glass and taps gently on it.

A line of people inside the shop turn to face him like a sleepy jury.

Her face is still sharp and angular like a Cubist painting, but softened now by her eyes, which have sunk or regressed partly into memory. He thinks she is more beautiful than ever. Her mouth opens in the shape of an almond. Gerard cannot tell if she is smiling.

All this happens within five seconds.

Gerard wonders if he has done the right thing. Perhaps he should have walked on. Later at home in his study, he could re-create the moment he saw her in line at the shop and let the memory spill over like a faucet left running.

She is holding a tray of raw fish and a bottle of iced tea. In that moment of recognition he is not consumed by a rushing sensation of love—quite simply a door opens to a room that has never gone away. The years apart were just years without one another.

They were together only a few months. They met at a dinner party given by one of Gerard’s colleagues. There were candles, and wine, and the women wore dresses that left their shoulders bare. The candles made their shoulders glisten. Even unattractive women have beautiful shoulders. He and Laurel talked for hours. He felt as if they were catching up, though they’d never met.

When he finds her in the line she is about to pay, but Gerard quickly hands the cashier a few bills.

Laurel blushes.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” she says.

“I know,” he says and tries to maintain eye contact, but people are pushing past.

“So, how are you?” she says.

“Fine,” he says. “And you?”

“Good,” she says. “How is your daughter?”

“She’s wonderful, just wonderful.”

“How is her mother?”

Gerard pauses.

“Dead,” he says.

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Oh, my God.” Laurel is genuinely shocked.

“When Lucy was six months old, Issy went back to Los Angeles to fulfill her ambition of becoming an actress,” Gerard said.

“What? She left her child?”

“Four years later she died.”

It still felt uncomfortable to say her name in front of Laurel.

“That’s crazy,” Laurel says, “really crazy.”

“That she died?” Gerard asks.

“Yeah, that, but for a mother to leave her child.”

“It’s what she did.”

“I know, but it’s crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“Did she ever visit?”

“No.”

“Wow. I’m sorry, Gerard.”

“It’s okay. Lucy has no memory of her.”

“But she was still her mother.”

“Sure.”

“Does she know?”

“No. I’ll tell her when she is older, in high school maybe. I cannot bring myself to hurt her with the truth now. Something like that can destroy a child.”

“You’re still kind,” she says.

“I love her, I’m her father. I want what’s best for her.”

“You were kind to me, too.”

“Was I?” Gerard says. “I don’t feel as if I was.”

“You were,” she says, “despite everything.”

Gerard went to Issy’s funeral in Los Angeles four years ago. She was found floating in a pool. She’d written Gerard’s name as her next of kin. Los Angeles was seventy-five degrees and dry. The air-conditioning in his rental car smelled like candy. Issy had played the part of a psychic on a soap opera. People exchanged business cards at the buffet after the cremation. Gerard told Lucy he had to visit Hollywood on business. She wanted to come. Indira offered to sleep over and did. Gerard brought Lucy a present back. He wanted to buy many but stopped himself. He didn’t want LA to have a special significance. He brought Indira a gift, too—a tote bag from MoCA with little birds on it and French writing. Lucy had asked about her mother recently. Gerard didn’t know what to say. He was planning on going to a child psychologist to ask for advice.

Gerard met Issy a month after he met Laurel. A decade ago, Gerard had never met any of them.

Gerard vaguely remembers the feeling of being in love with Laurel and the desire to have sex with Issy. He knew that other men enjoyed the occasional partner outside of long-term relationships, and he wanted to try it. Issy was an incredible lover. She sprayed perfume on her thighs. She was uninhibited and never took her heels off, even after. Issy wasn’t upset when Gerard told her that he was falling in love with Laurel. She laughed and then cried and told him she was pregnant. Gerard thought it was a joke. She was always telling lies. Then he felt something crack inside him because she wouldn’t stop crying
and he knew it was true. He told Laurel the next night, and she said she understood. A week later, Laurel broke it off in an e-mail.

Gerard agreed to move in with Issy.

Gerard still has Laurel’s wristwatch at home in his bedside cabinet. She left it in his apartment eight years ago. Miraculously, the battery still works. Sometimes at night Gerard takes it out and falls asleep as it drips from his fingers.

Laurel is forty-three now. She is a senior editor of business books. She had a cat, but it died. Gerard buys some coffee and asks if they can walk together. Of course, she says, and then looks outside at the blizzard and laughs. She is wearing the same kind of heels Issy used to wear. As they leave the deli, there are people getting out of a taxi.

“Quick,” Gerard says and they get in.

In the cab they talk about the president, their parents, and Laurel’s brief marriage. She is divorced now, and her ex-husband is living with another man in Brooklyn Heights. She laughs, but Gerard can see she is disappointed.

When they get to her building, Gerard’s nose starts bleeding. Night has fallen upon the city, but the snow isn’t stopping.

“Oh, my God,” Laurel says, and tips Gerard’s head back. People watch them.

“Jesus, come inside, okay?” she says to Gerard.

“Okay,” he says.

In the elevator they talk about their jobs. He can feel the blood clotting in his nose. Tiny fragments of snow have lodged in Laurel’s eyelashes.

Upstairs, Gerard calls Indira to say he’ll be back a little later. Then
he and Laurel make love first in the kitchen and then in her bed. Her body is not as he remembers it. It is softer and somehow more pliable. Her toes seem perfect.

Her apartment smells of expensive scented candles. She makes coffee after. Her furniture is modern and gray. He feels somehow inside of her—held by her, and he remembers as a boy, swimming to the bottom of a thick pond in summer.

When he arrives home, Lucy jumps down from her chair and runs into his arms.

Gerard kneels and her weight becomes his.

“Why aren’t you in bed, pebble?” Gerard says.

Indira appears in the doorway. “School is canceled tomorrow because of the snow, so I didn’t think you’d mind if she waited up.”

“Of course, Indira, it’s perfectly fine.”

“Why are you so late, Daddy?” She is kissing him all over his face. Gerard imagines her mother floating in the pool.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too, Daddy, but where were you?”

“I met an old friend and we had dinner,” he says. Lucy can smell a lie a mile off.

“Is your old friend an old woman?” Lucy asks.

“Yes, how did you know?” Gerard laughs.

“A daughter knows,” she says and runs back to the table, laughing and flailing her arms as though they are about to become wings.

Indira won’t stay, so Gerard gives her more than enough cab money and thanks her for staying late. She kisses him on the cheek and he holds her. Her hair smells of onions.

After a bedtime story, Lucy asks if she can meet her father’s friend.

“I think that would be nice,” Gerard says. Lucy looks shocked, as if she’d expected him to say no. Children are difficult to read sometimes.

“Does she like ice cream?” Lucy asks.

“Yes, she eats it every day.”

“Are you going to marry her?”

Gerard pauses. “Wait and see.”

“Does she have any children my age?”

“I don’t think so. Do you want her to?”

“Only if they’re not boys.”

She asks her father to sit on the edge of her bed until she falls asleep. He says yes, as always, but falls asleep first, as always. Soon they are both asleep.

The snow is blowing against the window.

The room glows with the breath of streetlight.

Around midnight, Gerard wakes up. Lucy stirs.

“Daddy, where’s panda?” Gerard finds her stuffed panda and lays it next to her. She goes back to sleep immediately.

In the kitchen, Gerard pours himself half a tumbler of whiskey. He turns out the lights in the apartment, checks the front door, and then walks barefoot into his study.

Instead of taking down a book from the shelf, he looks out the window. He can see all the way up Lexington Avenue. The snow is drifting across the city in waves. Traffic is thin. A few glowing eyes.

He knows that before long Laurel will move in with them. He thinks
of Issy. He remembers her laugh, then the roar of snapping flames at her cremation.

All of a sudden he feels a chill like cold water down his back. The tumbler of scotch slips from his fingers and shatters on the floor. Gerard spins around. His heart leaps into his throat. Someone was there, he could have sworn it. But in the space between him and the world he can see only air, only air and the auras of the day past and the day to come.

He thinks how strange life is with its frayed edges and second chances; and though by morning he will have forgotten that he ever thought it, Gerard feels as though he is being followed, that there are voices he can’t hear, that the footsteps of snow on the window are just that, and like Lucy’s conception—life is a string of guided and subtle explosions.