Any Bitter Thing (32 page)

He shrugged. “Not so great. But I’m thinking maybe we could start over from here.”

His voice caught on the words
start over
, as if it pained him to acknowledge that our marriage had ended without our permission and we’d wound up in the position to have to begin afresh.

It was only then I noticed what he had been doing at the table: sorting proofs. The pictures were from the wedding he’d shot a few weeks earlier—often he chose a souvenir from a shoot for his personal gallery, something that resembled his “work” more than his “Kodaks.” The bride and groom were teenagers, yet their stormless faces shone with a certainty more common to elderly couples for whom vigilance has become irrelevant to happiness. In the picture Drew had separated out from the rest, the bride and groom, two dimpled Italian kids, faced the camera square on, their hands twined, rings glimmering. What struck me about this choice was its lack of guile, an absence of irony that bespoke more of the photographer than his subject. A straight-on shot of confident, cornball joy.

I was still in the doorway. We seemed to require this physical distance after the intimacy of the night before. “I stopped in on Harry Griggs after I left the Chancery,” I said. “I thought you should know.”

“Okay. So I know.”

“He was out. But whatever those visits were for, Drew, they’ve run their course.”

“It kind of felt like you threw me over. I don’t care that he’s sixty years old.”

“It wasn’t what you think.”

“I wasn’t listening, and he was. That’s what I think.”

After a moment, I said, “Is that all she was to you? Someone to listen?”

“I’m a man, Lizzy. There’s always more.”

The silence that followed seemed like a forbearing one, doleful as it was; it did feel like a beginning. I went to the counter to pour some coffee, drawing my hand across my husband’s shoulders as I passed his chair. Outside a breeze stirred across the yard, rattling the spent stalks of daylilies I’d first planted with Mariette on the day Drew and I moved in.
Grasping at straws
, I thought when I saw them. I stared out at the drained light that comes between fall and winter; every so often I’d hear Drew pick up his coffee cup, then put it down.

I made a brief inventory of our sideboard: four mismatched crocks holding wooden spoons and spatulas and broken chopsticks, a flower pot spilling over with ancient receipts, a set of candlesticks from Mariette’s mother, dishtowels and stamps and two bottles of wine and a set of Tupperware still encased in plastic. I touched each thing in turn, and they in turn touched me with something akin to pity. “Look at this, Drew,” I said. I heard his chair scrape back. “Look how we’ve crammed this place with stuff. Do you think maybe we did this to make it harder to leave?”

“I thought we were just bad housekeepers.”

“Look at all this effort, though. How hard we were trying. The whole time we were fighting about Boston and feeling miserable and blaming each other, we were filling up this house as a kind of insurance policy. It would take a really long time and a thousand packing boxes to leave this place.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

“Drew, I don’t know how to begin looking for him.” I meant to say that I had lost two essential men, my first love
and my last; I didn’t have the heart to look for one until I found my way back to the other. “Maybe I don’t want to know why he didn’t come back. Maybe it was just—easier—for him to stay gone.”

“Lizzy,” Drew said.

“What?”

“Don’t leave me.”

I whirled around.

He said, “You think I don’t know you’ve been furious?”

He said, “You forgive the ones who leave, and you blame the ones who stay.”

He said, “I stayed.”

I lifted my arms. He crossed the room and collapsed against me. It was my turn to hold him up. So I did, rocking him a little: my husband, my sweetheart, my injured one.

TWENTY-FIVE

My uncle now lived in the world someplace, but it was Drew I moved toward.

I took the day off. Good, excellent, Rick said, take all the time you need, nothing ever happens on Fridays. Drew canceled two portraits, and because it was the first day of December—drought season for weddings—he had no brides to immortalize over the weekend. We unplugged the phone, feeling like fugitives holing up for the duration. I felt willing, even glad, to drop out of the stream of hours for a while, to let my life go on without me. To pause again, but on purpose.
With
purpose.

By Saturday afternoon we’d lost any sense of routine, eating at odd hours, sleeping when we felt like it. We watched some television—sitcoms and game shows and animal documentaries—and dug into Drew’s store of old movies. We ate meat. We played Scrabble. We made a chocolate-meringue cake, the blind leading the blind, that required six separated eggs and a double boiler. We made a stew with beets and potatoes and a pound of beef. We made love. We made a bubble of time.

“We’re on vacation,” Drew said.

“How do you like it?” I put the cake in the oven. It was one in the morning, between Saturday and Sunday. We’d done our sleeping in the afternoon.

“I feel stranded,” he said. “Like in a mountain cabin after an avalanche.”

I licked the spoon. “We’ve got cake. Stranded people eat tree bark.”

“I’ve never been stranded before,” he said. Which, metaphorically speaking, was not true. “How about you, Lizzy? How do you like it?”

“Actually, it feels just like rehab. Except it doesn’t hurt.”

Drew said, “Maybe he was afraid if he came back you’d hate him for leaving you in the first place.”

All weekend it had gone like this, Father Mike popping in and out of our ongoing conversation, seemingly at random. “I wouldn’t have hated him,” I said. “If he’d shown up, say, at my college graduation, I would have been so happy.”

“What about now?”

I’d been happy to see him in the hospital—I could still conjure that feeling of revelation—but then I’d believed he was speaking to me from an unreachable place. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Just knowing he’s out there is so—jarring—that it’s kind of hard to imagine the next step.”

“You don’t have to start looking right away.”

Where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he?

“It’s entirely possible,” I said, “that he died anyway, that it really was a figment I saw, or a hallucination, and that sometime between back then and now his heart gave out after all. Do I want to know that?”

“If it were me? I’d want to know.” He’d been whipping frosting in a bowl, and now set it aside to paw through the Yellow Pages. I peered over his shoulder at two columns of names under the heading “Investigators.”

“Wow,” I said. “Who is everybody looking for?”

“Makes you wonder,” he said. “Do you want to call one of these guys?”

I shook my head, tears welling, bludgeoned by the notion of Father Mike in an actual
place
—not in the chiffony anywhere of Earth, but in the bordered somewhere of Denver. Chicago. Honolulu. Marseilles. For the moment I preferred my uncle in his half-imagined state, the specter who had appeared to me in my hour of need.

We ate our cake on the living room floor and watched another movie, a depressing, handsomely shot indie film in which the six windburned sons of an Italian patriarch sleep with each other’s wives and ruin the family winery before expiring one by one in the Second World War.

“The point?” I asked, which is what I used to ask.

“Of life?”

“Of the movie.”

“Oh, that,” Drew said, lying back on a heap of cushions and easing me down with him. “It’s a rotten world.”

“That’s the point?”

“That’s always the point,” he said. “Why else do you think people watch these things? To confirm their core beliefs.”

We lay there a moment, fingers twined. “It isn’t a rotten world,” I said.

“Actually,” Drew said, “it is. What with war and famine and jerks at intersections.” He kissed my temple. “You didn’t like the movie?”

“Which part? The pretentious story line or the zombie acting?”

“That long vineyard shot at the end was something. They filmed it in black-and-white, then colorized it afterwards.”

“Really? They did?”

“It was subtle, my friend. Not for the casual observer.”

He blushed a little then, having inadvertently let slip his desire to become a cinematographer, a secret he’d confided when we first married but hadn’t mentioned even obliquely in quite some time. Not to me, at least. Maybe he told the woman at the wedding as she canted her heart-shaped face and pursed her engorged lips and bestowed upon him the grace of being seen.

“That one shot was worth the whole price,” he said.

When we were first together and going to a lot of movies and art openings and makeshift theater productions of Beckett and Ionesco—when we were, in other words, courting each other by borrowing from lives whose darkness appeared artful and therefore necessary—Drew always salvaged something that was worth the whole price. A brush-shaped paint stain on the artist’s leather skirt. A hummable, apologetic soundtrack behind the final credits. The toupee tilting off Estragon’s existential head at curtain call.

I sat up. “My God. Drew Mitchell, you’re an optimist.”

“Am not.
You
are.”

“Ninety minutes of the film equivalent of gall-bladder surgery and you think forty seconds of camera voodoo is worth—what did you pay for this thing? Twenty bucks?”

“
You
work with teenagers,” he countered. “On
purpose.”

“There’s that,” I said, thoroughly trumped. “Touché”

Our house, at that wee-morning hour, felt still and shuttered. There was something reminiscent about the turn our conversation had taken. We used to argue all the time about things like the relative rottenness of the world. Good arguing, I mean; not the kind of arguing that started after a couple of years in Hinton.

“This reminds me of Boston,” I said softly.

He smiled. “Boston’s a fine town.”

I gave Drew a haircut. He painted my toenails. Like two animals from the same pack keeping tabs on each other by smell, we padded around the house, sitting in all the chairs and lying
on all the beds and handling each other’s things. Sometime before dawn Drew crumpled candy wrappers into balls and tried to teach the cat to fetch, which made me laugh, and then Drew laughed, too, really hard. Clouds parting, water giving way, fences collapsing, such a sound. We looked at each other, startled, a little ashamed. How had we gone so long without laughing like this?

At sunup we unearthed Drew’s photographs. His “work,” that is. We propped them against books and lamps and windows, arranged them into groupings on the floor, and sat in the double chair, surrounded by all manner of human misery. A drunk tottering out of a wrecked Corvette. A second-grader being loaded into a strobing medi-van. A woman in a bathrobe embracing a two-hundred-year-old chestnut tree as its companion tree falls under a chain saw. Drew had caught these people, every single one, at the exact moment when Before becomes After.

“My worldview definitely needed some freshening up,” Drew said, surveying the photos.

I put my legs over his legs. “No,” I said. “I was wrong.” These bruised people shored me up, and I wanted them near me, not because misery loved company but because the business of human striving felt common to us all. In this was the presence of God.

Well. I had married a religious man. Here was news.

In all, we lost three days. Or, found three days.

We hardly slept, and when we did sleep, one of us would wake every so often, and, in the manner of the woman and her chestnut tree, embrace the other as the last tree standing.

On Sunday, midmorning, I said, “I bet there’s still a ten-thirty at St. Bart’s.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Mass? Seriously?”

“I want to see the church again. The inside, I mean. It wouldn’t kill either one of us to say a prayer.”

A week earlier he would have talked me out of it. He would have looked at me funny. Now, he shrugged on his coat, saying, “Next stop, the distant past.”

It had snowed a little overnight, the first snow of the season, a weak sheen that nevertheless rendered the morning as a white light that had to be blinked back. Already the snow was melting away; we didn’t even need a shovel. We had reached the end of a season of benevolent weather that had not yet yielded a deep frost.

Standing on the porch, I squinted into the daylight. “Where have we been?”

“Staying married, I hope,” Drew said. Our sequester finally over, we escorted each other to the car, entwined. Our town seemed deserted and coiled in that Sunday way that never changes. Inside the car, I felt protected from the outside quiet and its intimation of something about to spring.

“I wonder if it might have been a relief for him to land in Baltimore,” I said. “Maybe it felt a little like this. Everything on hold.”

“Maybe,” Drew said, easing the car into the street. “People take comfort from the damnedest things.”

What had it felt like, wearing a cotton bathrobe and terrycloth slippers, eating three squares a day on a Formica tray, shuffling downstairs for individual therapy in the morning, group in the afternoon, at night sitting around with other damaged clergymen watching reruns of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
? A nervous breakdown, the bishop called it, but I preferred the notion of suspended animation, found time, a reprieve of the sort you might get in jail or at boarding school or inside a forty-three-hour sleep or during an isolated weekend with your husband of five years, a stop-time in which you cease trying to connect the
before and the after, because in fact you are balanced on the point of connection. All weekend I had thought of my uncle this way, precariously balanced, a form of suspension that a growing part of me felt loath to disturb.