Chapter II #3
I watch Harry draw a tree. Somehow he knows about shading. He’s filling in the trunk now, making shadows. I bend closer. He’s drawn a face just below where the branches split.
‘What’s her name?’ he asks without looking up.
‘Daphne,’ I say.
Jack leans over you to see the drawing. ‘That is so cool.’
Harry tears it out of his sketchbook and hands it to you. ‘You can have it if you want.’
‘Really?’ You look down at the drawing. I see your old face briefly, when it was more expressive, full of feeling. Your new face is guarded, slower to react. ‘Thank you.’
It is perhaps as confusing for you to be here as it is for me.
Jack takes our bowls to the sink and puts a deck of cards on the table. ‘What are we playing?’
‘Do you mind?’ I say to you.
‘No. Cards are great,’ you say. I can tell you haven’t played a card game in a long time.
Jack shuffles and you laugh as his small hands split, riffle, and bridge the deck back together. ‘Only a child of yours could do that so young,’ you say.
We’ve been in a Rummy 500 phase all summer so it’s a surprise when Jack says, ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster?’
‘No,’ Harry says. ‘It takes too long to teach.’
‘You can make a chart,’ Jack says.
‘I know how to play,’ you say.
The boys don’t believe you. No one outside our family has ever heard of this game. You insist that you do, and they tell you to prove it by naming a whole family.
You smile. You love a challenge to your memory. ‘All right.’ You look at Silas. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster.’
The boys nod.
You look at me. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s wife.
’ You nodded at Harry. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s eldest son.
’ You turn to Jack. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s ten children.
’ You glance over at the dogs, asleep on the couches beyond the wood stove.
‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s nine servants.
’ The boys laugh. You pause. You look around for the cat but she’s vanished. ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’s parrot.’
‘No!’ The boys shake their heads furiously.
‘You always forget the donkey,’ I say.
You grin at me. ‘I do. I always forget the donkey.’ I can’t help smiling back. ‘Okay. The donkey, the parrot, the twins, and the baby!’
‘How does he know?’ Harry asks me.
‘Our friend Ivan taught it to us. Many years ago.’
‘I didn’t know it came from Ivan,’ Silas says.
Harry can’t understand this, these years before him, before our family existed. He looks at Silas. ‘You weren’t there?’
Silas shakes his head. ‘I didn’t know them then.’
Jack, dealing out the cards, is taking in this information easily, but Harry looks like he would like to go up to his room and mull over questions of time and existence for a few hours.
We fan out our cards. Silas keeps his low, close to the table. He’s started to do that lately, hold things farther away to read them. You’re making the little humming noises you always make when organizing your hand.
‘You’re left of the dealer,’ Jack tells you.
‘Oh, excuse me. Silas?’ I could tell you were up to a little mischief.
‘Yes.’
‘May I please have Heart the Lover?’
‘Yes, you may.’ Silas passes the king of hearts face up, close to you, trying to get you to touch it before saying thank you.
‘I thought you might,’ you say and reach for the card and we get ready to scream. A half inch before you touch it you say, ‘Thank you,’ and pick up the king with a flourish that makes the boys laugh. ‘Silas,’ you continue.
‘Yes.’
‘May I please have Heart the Lover’s wife?’
‘No, you may not.’
‘Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying,’ he says.
Silas and I chuckle and Harry asks why that was funny and now I’m the one who wants to go upstairs to ponder time and existence for a while.
I lose twice. I don’t keep track of what people have.
Jack is dismayed by my poor performance.
He and Harry, flushed and hoarse from the yelling, beg for another round, but Silas tells them to say their goodnights.
They stand up reluctantly. I hug them tight and kiss their steamy hair.
You stand up and say you’ll be off early in the morning and might not see them and they both wrap their arms around your waist. Silas says he might miss you, too, as he has to be at school at seven tomorrow.
‘Great meeting you after all this time,’ Silas says and gives you a loose hug and a few pats.
I don’t want them to go upstairs but they do.
‘Good guy,’ you say.
‘Yeah. He is.’ I go to put the kettle on. ‘Tea?’
‘Sure.’
You lean your back against the kitchen counter as we wait for the water to boil. I feel a bit giddy from the game and terrified to be alone with you.
‘Does he maybe look a little like Sam?’
‘Seriously?’
‘In the face? Around the mouth maybe?’ You push your lips together with your fingers.
‘No. Stop.’
My alarm amuses you.
‘Good lord.’ I get mugs from the shelf, boxes of tea from the cabinet. I need to redirect things. ‘So, are you seeing anyone?’
‘Like a shrink?’
‘Like a person.’
‘No shrink. No woman. No cry.’ You smile at your little joke.
On one of our first dates Silas told me when he was younger he thought it was ‘No Woman, No Crime.’
‘No dating?’
‘I participate in the courting ritual from time to time.’ You choose a teabag and a mug.
‘It’s scary out there, now that I have this profession.
Women like a guy with a job. They love a worker bee.
It’s like they see the pollen on my legs.
’ He brushes his pants with both hands. ‘But what else am I going to do with my time? All my friends have disappeared into their houses. I only see them if I get invited to the sidelines of one of their kids’ soccer games.
What is it with soccer? It’s so fucked up. ’
I tap the photo of Jack’s peewee team on the fridge.
‘Et tu, Brute?’ you say.
We take our teas to the couches in the family room. You sit on one and I sit on the other. The dogs follow us in and jump up beside you. You look to the wall of bookshelves Silas and the boys built earlier in the summer.
‘I didn’t picture you living in a house.’
‘I know. It’s weird.’
‘After all those tiny rooms. Your room on Pye Street?’
All bed, you once said.
‘And that little closet in Paris?’
‘Chambre de bonne,’ I say.
‘Chambre de merde, didn’t we call it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I can’t believe you don’t see the similarities to the Breach. That radiator.’ You point to our big black radiator in the corner. ‘We had the same one. Remember? In the hallway across from the bathroom.’
‘It’s a radiator.’
‘And the moldings on your doorways, with the circles at the top corners? Same.’
I don’t remember the moldings.
‘It’s uncanny.’
I picture you going back to Atlanta and telling this to Sam. It’s uncanny. She’s re-created the Breach in Maine right down to the moldings.
‘I haven’t lived in a house since then,’ you say.
‘You have. MacDougal Street.’
‘That was just a room. It didn’t feel like a house.’
‘You should rent one, then. Or buy one. Worker bees buy houses.’
‘What would I do with a whole house? It would only make me feel lonelier.’
‘What about Sam? You must see him a lot.’
‘Sam is busy procreating like the rest of you.’
You get up to look more closely at our books.
You have no idea. My body relaxes slightly. I thought perhaps that’s why you’d come.
Silas thinks I should tell you. And here is my chance, right here. For a long time I said nothing out of anger. I punished you with the only weapon I had, silence. Now I feel like I would hurt you more by telling you. You don’t seem strong enough for it somehow.
You study all the books by Churchill—the histories, the memoirs, the letters, the speeches, the poetry—for a long time and make no comment.
On a table beside the shelves are a few framed photographs. You lift up the one of my mother.
‘Silas said she died. I didn’t know that.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Nine and a half years.’
‘He said it was sudden.’
‘It was. She went to Chile on vacation and she came back crumbled up in a box.’
He winces at this. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I know she would have liked the quick painless exit. It was definitely her style. But selfishly I wanted a goodbye. A real goodbye.’
I took that photo of my mother. She’s on her deck in Phoenix, squinting in the sun, waving a hand at the camera. At the edge of the picture, on the chair beside hers, is the lumbar cushion she’d bought me for the back pain I had during the last trimester.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ you say in nearly a whisper.
‘When?’
‘When your mother died.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I guess you’d met Silas by then.’
‘I met him six months later. I was a wreck. But he understood.’
‘I wish you’d called me.’
Above us I can hear Silas and the boys, their bedtime noises, bickering, giggling. One of us tells them a story every night. Silas has a long-running tale of two hedgehogs. This week they have been stuck on an ice floe in Antarctica.
I see you struggling to say something, another reproach I really don’t want to hear. ‘I think Silas needs a closer up there. I better go sing some songs to settle them a bit.’
You nod. You understand I’m cutting you off.
‘Your room’s the first one on the left. Twin bed. Yellow bedspread. Just kidding—it’s blue.’
Early the next morning, before anyone else is up, we eat a bowl of cereal and I walk you out to your car. You open the trunk and hand me a book, the one you talked about yesterday, about Iceland and sheep.
I thank you. We hug. You get into your car.
When you roll down the window, I say, ‘Drive safely.’
‘You know I will.’
We look at each other a bit warily.
Why did you come?
You wait for me to say something else and when I don’t, you lift your fingers briefly off the steering wheel and back out of our driveway. I follow you in bare feet and wave in the road until you’re gone, then walk back to the house.
I sit on the porch steps and look at the paperback you gave me.
It’s your copy, a bit worn, the pages swollen, the cover starting to curl back.
There’s a scrap of paper wedged in the middle of it.
I pull it out. It’s not addressed to me or anyone.
It’s just a paragraph. But I recognize it immediately.
It’s the Céline passage you read me that time.
I don’t know if you meant for me to see it.
The handwriting is messier than in your letters.
I read it.
We kissed. But I didn’t kiss her properly as I should have, on my knees if the truth be known.
I was always partly thinking about something else at the same time, about not wasting time and tenderness, as if I wanted to keep them for something magnificent, something sublime, for later, but not for Molly and not for this particular kiss.
It goes on about his fear that life would steal away in the night with everything he longed to know about it, while he was expending his passion kissing Molly.
I wouldn’t have enough left, I’d have lost everything for want of strength, and life—Life, the true mistress of all real men—would have tricked me as it tricks everyone else.
I read it over several times. You have your regrets and I have mine. I sit on the porch step for a while, thinking about life’s tricks, the ones we see, the ones we don’t.
Silas’ car comes in the driveway. He gets out holding a pint of blueberries, adorable in his short-sleeved work shirt.
‘What about your meeting?’
‘It was moved to later. Blake came in with these from his farm and I got this craving for pancakes.’
‘The boys will be ecstatic.’
He looks down at the book and the paper in my hand. ‘He’s gone?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Good guy.’
‘That’s what he said about you.’
‘I liked him,’ Silas says. ‘You didn’t—’
‘No. I didn’t.’
‘Someday.’
‘Someday. Maybe.’
He puts out his hand and I take it. He pulls me up to standing and we go inside to make the pancakes.