The Syme Papers (29 page)

‘Of course I’ll talk to Doc – to Bunyon‚’ I answered, less briskly and happily, I suppose, than formerly. ‘He’ll say what I say: wonderful discovery hem hem – revelation hem hem – all that jazz.’

I didn’t like the way I said it. It sounded wrong, the way I said it. It had the wrong echo, fell flat across the darkened neighbourhoods, as we drove towards home; barely disturbed the sprinklers in their whispered confidences; could not interrupt the yawning
miaow of a garden cat. It didn’t sound important – or important enough – among these common and familiar streets. I wanted to say it again in a different voice, the voice of revelation. But I was very deep in sleepiness now, and nothing seemed to matter any more. Not even revelation; particularly not revelation. Suddenly, and for the second time, I began to doubt. An awful infection, doubt – like middle age, not so much ill-health itself as a suspicion of ill-health, a constant watchfulness over aches and sniffs, a tendency towards portentous speculations. What would Bunyon say, what would anyone say, to the mad and wonderful precocity of Syme? What would I say in the morning, at home again, in my old bed? (You must remember the depth of jet-lag; the chiming of 4 a.m upon my biological clock; the way sleep, the desire for sleep, can make nothing seem to matter much any more.)

She had done this before, my wife, turned a celebration sour, a fact that always surprised me, given her capacity for joy. For she was a joyous woman, my Missy, and her trick was this: her own sudden pleasures never lost the power to surprise her. She lived like a woman constantly receiving the surplus of an old inheritance she constantly forgot. She gloried in the new riches, grew wide-eyed at the abundance she had not guessed of about her feet. Alas, disappointment never lost the power to surprise her, either; pain struck her upturned face a fresh blow whenever it fell (reminding her of another old inheritance she had forgotten). She was a natural innocent, and innocence, like poetry, is a skill one must be born with; it cannot be acquired, nor lost, once possessed. And it means no more than this: that the babble of incident running through her life fell untranslated from her tongue; she spoke the language of it already. I lived, as it were, beside a first-hand account. Needless to say, Pitt translates, consults dictionaries and encyclopedias, compares notes and collates inconsistencies, offers a variety of interpretations, themselves appended by a variety of footnotes, to which, if I could, I would attach another sequence of qualifications. Pitt lives in many-legged fashion, a careful caterpillar going over old leaves again, again. Until now – until Pitt, at last – well, we shall see what Pitt has ventured upon; and whether it will fly.

I said, ‘You weren’t much better pleased when I got the Fulbright, I have to say.’ The words tasted sour upon my tongue. That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase; ‘much better pleased’ is a vile phrase. Peevishness is a terrible pickler of the language … and how I despised the purse of my lips as I said it.

‘I’m as pleased as you like‚’ she said. ‘Only it’s best to let me know next time you change the world, so I can pay particular attention; and notice it. It’s a wonderful luxury, isn’t it, changing worlds? Meanwhile, some of us have been getting on with the old world, and doing what we could. As for the Fulbright, of course I was pleased to spend a year alone with a full-time job and the boys on hand in a home I hated. Of course I was pleased about that. Knowing full well you’d go away and start some craziness and never write a word and we’d be stuck in the same place when you got back and nothing changed. Pleased as punch.’

‘I’ve written’, I said, reflecting how quickly a man may come to feel he’s been at home for ages, ‘many, many words.’ And I sighed into the softer air of the neighbourhoods as she turned right at the post office towards the park. Dark streets of gravelly asphalt, overhung by live-oak and sycamore, broad and quiet enough on Saturdays for the boys to play football on, or leave their bikes spinning by the kerbless front yards. The crickets scraped away, reminding me once more of arthritic violins, while the sprinklers swished their skirts across the grass. ‘How wonderful to grow up here‚’ I muttered, mostly to myself.

‘I didn’t‚’ was all she answered.

Nor did I, I countered in my thoughts.

As good as, she responded, also in my thoughts. So I kept silent.

She pulled the car into the drive, the muffler clanking as the poorly laid cement caught it on the tail. A small white house, a square, one-storey high, white-boarded, blue-shuttered, in a square of grass at the edge of Shipe Park – corner of Avenue G and 44th Street. ‘You could chuck a ball’, my bigger boy once said proudly, ‘from our front yard to the swimming pool in Shipe. Well‚’ and he looked up at me, for I have taught him to be meticulous in his assertions (
do
as
I
say,
I
thought,
not
as
I
do
)
, 
‘I couldn’t.
Nolan Ryan could. We basically
have
a swimming pool‚’ he added, making up for it.

But we did not. Only a little living room (where, I noticed, pushing through the screen door, no newspapers lined the cushions of the couch for once); a kitchen (sink gleaming, pot dripping clean on the counter), where the lino peeled from the corners to let the ants get under; a master bedroom (cool as cucumbers in the fridge, thoroughly tidied, sheets tucked in), looking over the air-conditioning unit in the backyard; and a second bedroom, built on the end, with a bunk-bed and a carpet furred and patched as an old dog. No dog itself until tenure, Missy maintained.

‘I’m going’, I whispered, setting my leather suitcase by the couch, ‘to have a look at the boys.’

‘Don’t‚’ she said. ‘It’s a school night.’

‘Just a look.’

‘Don’t wake them!’ she urged, angry again at my arrival, my right to claim half of what was ours.

So I crept through the door, both of us creaking. The fan itself seemed to be the voice of their sleeping; breathing softly in tireless circles, aching now and then, with a noise like the crickets outside. The floor was neat, Missy saw to that, aside from a scooter tipped over, tired. A hulk of computer cluttered the desk they shared, keyboard in the opened drawer, monitor pushed to the edge, joystick perched on top. The light of the screen-saver, an airplane zooming brightly across the night, bouncing and zooming again, lit the faces of my boys in the ugliness of sleep: eyes squeezed and gummy, lips crumpled, cheeks flushed. I lifted from the other pocket of my Harris tweed the pack of Devonshire toffee I had purchased at the Heathrow Harrods (a world away) – a tiny, vaguely Scottish-looking hole-in-the-wall, much decorated by the plaid of shortbread, and the pink of iced salmon, in the window. Toffee, I thought, was suitably British. They should know toffee.

The wrapper crackled unbearably in my thick fingers; but I picked the sugary blocks away at last. It is rare that the imagination anticipates all the details of a plot, however small. But everything happened as I knew it would. Aaron, the older boy, sleeping
on top, a fair-faced, easy child, unlike his stubborn father, quick at games and friends, shifted and peeped out of his corporeal shell. ‘Oh‚’ he said, ‘hello‚’ and I put a piece of the toffee upon his lips, a rich brown chunk that melted at once into his sweetened sleep. ‘Thankoo‚’ he murmured, through a sticky tongue. I could see almost how I would slip into his dreams again.

Ben was awake now and wide-eyed, smaller, almost lost in the corner of his blanket. I noted the crook of his shortened arm against his belly, the muffled woolly shape of it. A great shame this arm, root and emblem of his awkward nature, his patient difficulty with life, though it could appear curiously grown-up, wizened, when propped akimbo at his hip – as if his trouble were not youth but a foretaste of old age. I put a chunk of fudge into his other hand, and let him feel it, and smudge it, and press it into his own mouth – he never took anything as given. ‘We’ll talk in the morning‚’ I whispered, tickling into his ear. And left them both to the brown sweet dreams upon their tongues. The sugar might trick them from sleep; but they wouldn’t mind, they wouldn’t mind, I knew. My own father, bald and shining in the light from the cracked door, had woken me once coming back from a job with a stick of cane sugar – which I chewed and mumbled deep into the night, repeating as it were his presence, again and again, never to be forgotten.

‘They were awake already‚’ I said, stepping into the bedroom, and seeing Susie through the bathroom door. ‘They were already awake.’

We have come at last to the
description
of love, which requires, above all, an attention to this and that. Lord Peter Wimsey, I believe, could track his man by the shape and shadow of his back; there is much to be said for this, for the shape of the back, and I am also skilled in these matters, though in other respects I have little enough in common with Lord Peter Wimsey. Susie, naked in the white glare of the bathroom light, did not turn, engaged as she was upon countless spells and their magical ingredients, ranged along the toothpasted shelf above the sink: bottles of lotion, scented and particular soaps, saline solutions
for ‘her eyes’ as she called them, and the little cages in which the fingertip lenses were kept. I knew, of course, that there was some concession in this, that the door was not shut, nor her shoulders draped in the heavy white towel of her robe.

Her hair fell longer now down her neck. A clump of it stuck, brown and glossy at her right ear, where a splash of water caught it when she washed her face. Her shoulders, narrow, half-slumped, always hurt my heart: they suggested so vividly the weight of things borne. I could count the fine ribs breathing down her sides, for the skin covered only lightly the wonderful device in which her clock was kept. A long back, broad-bottomed, pink – a little blue in the chill of the air conditioning. Then the stubbornness of her thighs, the tender ticklish blue veins at the back of her knees, her red ankles wrinkled by socks and her tiny feet, cold on the bathroom tiles, childish, unchanged. ‘You’d better have a shower‚’ she said, turning round.

In class she wore bright flowing frocks from C.P. Shades and, when the Texas sun or Texas air conditioning permitted, sweaters she knitted herself. On weekends and grocery days, cheap Gap blue jeans and plain Nike kicks with the laces tucked in, and a tie-dyed shirt from the rag and bauble market on the Drag. She favoured their heavy and jangly stones as well depending softly from her lobes; necklaces wrapped thrice around and still long and loose enough to tangle in her fingers when she spoke; and a hair-clip, like a tennis sweetheart’s, chalk blue, to free her bangs. Occasionally, in her Jewish moods, a woven shawl, bundled about her head; and she looked like a boy then, with her plump, fair cheeks, broad lips and sturdy nose. She had silk pyjamas, which she called ‘Sears’ finest’, for bed and days spent sick at home – for she grew sick easily and utterly and happily.

And these she wore, under a summer duvet – as I stepped out of the shower steaming and into bed, where the cotton clung to me in various patches, and grew dark. I smelled of great warmth, and the thick scent of my skin filled my own nose with the sour breath of soap and water. She lay with her arms at her sides unmoving; her toes delicately suggested by a bump in the comforter; her eyes,
blue as bottles, tilted at the ceiling. Quite silent. She did not stir, even when I tugged and shifted, leaned upon my elbow in the bed, and looked at her. And looked at her again, as the bald pink of my pate pricked and tickled with the sweat of the shower.

I said, ‘Pitt is clean now.’ This was true and unanswerable, so she did not answer; and I dripped and pondered what else to say, to assuage or incite.

I said, ‘Pitt has made good for once, poor Pitt, by chance.’

I said, ‘Pitt is a great believer in abiding by good luck.’

I said, ‘We’re OK.’

(Like tossing pennies and wishes in a deep well, waiting for a ripple and echo and answer, receiving none; dropping another coin and listening again.)

I said, ‘Pitt apologizes for loneliness. Pitt has suffered greatly from loneliness himself.’

I said, ‘Hello.’

I said, ‘I have stumbled upon my life’s work.’

‘Well‚’ she answered finally, in a dead voice, ‘that must be nice.’ At which she began to cry, as if all the stillness had leaked from her bones at last, and she could move again. This endured a minute perhaps, but I dared not touch her. Then she turned in bed upon her own elbow and looked at me. We lay there, eye to eye, our elbows nudging.

‘I harden my heart against you‚’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re so stubborn‚’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘You always do what’s wrong, and say it’s right‚’ she said. ‘And I’m the one who has to figure it out.’

‘No, no,’ I promised her, ‘not now.’

She did not mention then that she told me as much when we married and she wished to discuss the question of our children and religion, beforehand. Not now, I said. It will come to us, I promised; or them. Perhaps I’ll convert, I teased, if we get that far. (We never got that far and I stopped teasing.)

Nor did she refer to the day I decided to finish my Ph.D. and she
declared, I know where this will end, and it isn’t New York City; and I said, Things will turn out, you’ll see. Of course, we were the ones who turned out in the end.

And when we came to Texas and she vowed, I won’t move every two years for you, while you get your head on straight, with the boys in school; and I promised, We’ll stay here, of course, and set up shop. (I said shop and meant shop; she would have baulked at the word home.) But I am an optimist, you see, as Syme was. The world will turn to us in the end, if we are right.

I did not mention this to her either.

Instead, she pressed against me, and squeezed the curious jigsaw of our legs and arms into a single – puzzle. The shadow that fell between us shrank and disappeared, for a time at least, at such proximity. And still, I noticed, breathing the heat of her cheek, there clung to her – a scent of oranges.