In An Arid Land (17 page)

For ten years she had been the first to rise, the one to open the curtains on the new day and to switch off the outside light, the one to let in the cat and to turn on the heat in wintertime so the house would be warm when he got up. At roughly the same time every morning she would return to the bedroom, seat herself on the bed beside him and gently nudge him out of sleep. Saying nothing in particular, saying whatever came into her head, she would talk to him to get his mind going, and she would rub his arms and his back to stir the circulation, to get his body moving. It was amusing, the garbled things he mumbled while coming out of the spell and the way he would curl up and groan when he realized what was happening. She did this for him, so the annoying alarm would not be the first sound he heard each morning, so it would not crack the dawn peace which they liked to share for a few minutes before showering and dressing and going off to work. She had never needed the alarm her own inner timepiece served her well though she routinely set the bedside clock for six o'clock just in case, and then habitually turned it off as soon as her eyes opened. Now he was the one to preempt its mission when he returned each morning to wake her, and the change was unsettling. She remembered something her mother had said years ago:
The first out of bed has the upper hand.
But he was not up early to conquer; she knew this with the same certainty that she knew he was faithful. It was in his eyes.

Then one morning something jostled her out of sleep it was not him, not the physical him in motion, in the act of rising; it was the absence of him, a certain chill in the bed, an intense quiet, not a breath to be heard, an uncommon calm in the room and the clock, shining its green numerals above the night stand, blipped at that moment to 4:38. So it's earlier than I suspected, she thought, making her way by instinct through the black tunnel of the hall. She found him sitting in one of the redwood chairs on the landing, his hair still mussed from the pillow, his robe hanging open over his thick, crossed legs, a slipper dangling from the upheld foot. He moved only his head when he heard her come out and he smiled for her; she saw his face lift slightly in the amber sheen of the porch lamp by the door. The late spring sky was just beginning to pale above the trees in the yard.

"What are you doing out here?" she had asked, stooping beside him, but he only shrugged and said, "Couldn't sleep." Dew glistened on the planks of the landing, the arm of the chair, even his shoulders. "Aren't you cold?" she said and the sound of the word came back to her. She groped for the lapels of her robe and clutched them together at that point on her chest just above her heart. He patted her hand then and meekly touched her hair.

He said, "There's coffee."

"Yes, I smelled it." She took his mug from him, turned it up for a sip from the dregs cold, bitter, gritty. The damp air whispered in the boughs of the trees. Shivering, she said, "Would you like to talk?" and once again he smiled.

"Not now," he said and then exhaled noisily as if casting out something from his body something hard yet impalpable.

Back to bed she went for an hour's additional rest against the workday to come, but she found sleep elusive and lay awake as the songbirds started up outside the window. She thought, it's nothing, we all have such nights, a touch of restlessness, that's all. It's nothing.

And the next morning she thought the same, and the next: it will pass; he is a man of conscience and responsibility and it is to be expected that on occasion he will be troubled and thoughtful. We have much to think about and to concern ourselves with: this is why we have denied ourselves children; this is why we have to pinch and scrape; this is why we work the live-long day, why he goes to that dingy little office every morning to right the wronged sentences of those who think they have something to say; and why I go to my dingy little office to do the mailings and to answer the calls and to encourage them to act as I would act. We have chosen and such a choice is not an easy one; it causes him to reflect, that's all. I'm sure that's all it is. He could have done so many things, he had so many options. It's natural to regret, to wonder how his life might have been.

The man's father has died, for heaven's sake!

And the next morning, when accumulated weariness had upset the inner timepiece and caused her to oversleep, after the willful alarm had rattled so maliciously he must have forgotten and she had slapped the little button to hush it: we need to talk, to get it out, to understand it, but he refused, saying it was only a minor disturbance. But what is it? I don't know, he said. He smiled sadly somewhere inside himself and this showed in the movement of his lips: it will pass.

Had it been a biological shift, had there been a corresponding change in the evening, had he begun to bed himself earlier perhaps she would have dismissed it as a mere adjustment in the routines of his life. People do that, certainly; we all do. Yet still it was midnight or sometimes one o'clock before he would put away his work or his reading, and she would feel his weight ease onto the mattress beside her and then hear the long day's final sigh come up from his lungs. Always she reached out to him then as if to make sure that it was flesh and bones lying down beside her and not just the spirit of this good man seeking its nightly repose out of long habit. And always he took her hand then, held it for a moment. This, she thought, was a pact between them that allowed each to put away the turbulent daylight period and to rest, finally, if only for a few hours in his case, though she was uncertain anymore whether he slept at all.

At times she wondered if he made a show of coming to bed only to appease her, to sate her concern, to let her think that he slept at least in those, the earliest, the bleakest hours out of the twenty-four. She did not have the strength or the will to hold off sleep long enough to discover the secret. She knew this: he was gone from the bed when she woke; and the coffee was made and the paper on the table; and the dishes sometimes sat dirty beside the sink now for days at a time. What is it? What's wrong? Nothing, he would say. Nothing. Don't worry.

How odd this was for a man who had always gone about his life with there was no other word to use but gusto, an exuberance that attracted even small children to him as if they saw the keen, smoldering essence of his living in those dark glittering eyes. It was an exuberance that exhausted him most days. He usually slept like one who relished the peace of it, as if slumber were a daily salvation, a man who, as far as she could tell from what he said, was never troubled by dreams. When they were first married it seemed that those seven, eight, sometimes even nine hours were like a wink to him and that with waking he would start exactly where he had left off the night before.

She was the one who from time to time would lie awake searching the blank ceiling for respite and release; she the one who on infrequent nights roamed the house, her mind unable to let go of some trifle, some slight by a co-worker, some detail of policy over which she disagreed. She was the uncertain one, the restless one always had been. Such an extravagance, such an indulgence! An indulgence that she dared not allow herself now, during this period, and she lay alone at midnight hoping it would end, thinking that her absence from the lighted parts of the house, her naked presence in the darkened bedroom might coax him out of his disturbance. At times she wanted to call out to him,
Come to me! I am not immune.
But how could she? It would seem an intrusion and selfish. And what if he declined?

Perhaps it was his age. He had turned forty earlier in the year, a difficult number to live with: at least half, perhaps two-thirds of his life, gone, passed away, over with. Mid-life, it was called. She had read about the crises men face and she knew her own confusion, her own thoughts of a neglected past and an uncertain future, and the odd stirrings in her body. It was a time to take measure, to look around, to re-evaluate. His father, whom she had seen only a few times at infrequent family get-togethers, was seventy-two when he went in his sleep just a few weeks ago; his mother had been seventy. Given the probabilities that would mean he had a good thirty years to live. A lot can be done and seen in thirty years. But a close friend had died only last December and he was what? how old? it was quite disturbing to them both he was only in his fifties. Let's see, she thought, and I am thirty-eight and his brother what has he told me? his brother the businessman, the one who took their father's place and has tried all these years to draw him back into that world.
Come home, his brother would say, let's do it together, there's plenty for both of us, no reason for you to deny yourself the way you do. What will you have when you're old?
His brother was forty-four, and twice divorced. And well-off, so comfortable with his two-story house and his new cars, his Junior League wife and all those children making all that noise.

Could it be children? she thought. Is it a child he wants now that he is forty and I am thirty-eight with so little time left? The fertile years peeling away, and that fear of growing old alone and unremembered. What if she were to die who would he have? She had worried the same worry, looking ahead: what if he were to die? Would there be anyone? They had passed up a chance once when they were first in love, and she had considered a child many times since, though it would have altered everything shattered the well-paced quiet of their lives, strained them financially, hampered them in their causes and careers. Careers! What are careers if we cannot sleep at night together? She would have considered a child, certainly, if he had wanted one. "Just tell me," she muttered in the darkness of the bedroom, pushing away thoughts of how it would bloat her body and deplete her energy in order to imagine a little mouth sucking at her breast. She had seen the affectionate looks he gave the neighborhood children when they played near the yard and the attention he paid his nephews and nieces on their rare visits. He would be a good father, she thought, with his gentle hands and tender heart and his exuberance. What exuberance? He had lost his exuberance, it seemed, at least for her. And where had it gone?

Yes, where had it gone? To another, a younger woman perhaps? A blonde? A redhead, maybe? Someone small and petite and pert? Someone who giggled and fawned? There was that one, the volunteer. But no, she moved away months ago. Who then? He was a handsome man that cleft and the heavy brow, the easy manner, the way he held himself so erect and ready when listening to someone speak to him at a committee meeting or a party. Sometimes she found herself staring at him at such times and tried to remember just how it was that they had come together, why he had chosen her out of all the women he had known. Twelve years it had been since they first met, first worked together, "raking muck," as he would say. He had the look of a poet in those days, a three- or four-day beard most of the time and crazy long hair. Wavy, graying hair now which he kept trimmed so his face would show. A clear, strong face. That face he was a handsome man who could have almost anyone. She said, "So tell me then if that's what it is," and her voice fell back upon her in the small dark room. She whispered, "No, don't . . . tell me."

You're being silly, she thought; I would know, I would see it. He didn't have the stealth to hide such things from her. Unless that too, about him, had changed.

Her body moved, legs stretching across the new cool of the sheets on his side of the bed, and something roused within her. Carefully her fingers searched out her breasts, colossal and uncontrollable, the bulging nipples as large as pacifiers, and she thought of the child she had never known, the mistake, taken in a clinic, lost to the practice of their politics and their "personal goals," their youth, youth? Are you young at twenty-seven? And then down her fingers went to the flaccid belly that disgusted her when she examined herself in the mirror"like a marsupial's pouch," she would jest at those times he watched her in her ablutions. And then down her fingers went to the hips on which she could so easily rest her hands when she stood in position, awaiting the music to start for the exercises that did nothing but make her body ache. And then she imagined herself as a whole: strong, "tall and hefty," as her mother had said in her mean moods, almost as tall as he was and a mere thirty pounds lighter than his masculine bulk and dark, dark all over. Hair and skin and eyes. Old World Italian eyes that had nothing of her father's fair blue in them. But I like big girls, he would say; and those legs! She wondered about the truth of it, and she hated what was happening to her. The wondering especially.

"Then come to me, if only for my legs," she said, thinking even as she said it: Or is that part of our lives already over?

She heard from somewhere in the house: a door closing? a kitchen cabinet? had he dropped something? And she contained an urge to go see, to help him clean it if it was a mess and then to ask him, Are you all right? Tell me what's wrong. Please tell me.

Once, just a few nights before when she woke alone in the bed at the dreariest hour of all3:03, the digits showed she had gotten up quietly and tiptoed through the house. She paused here, there so as not to startle him, though again she had found him sitting on the landing. At the window by the door she stood, holding open a place in the curtains to look out, and she watched him for a long time. He sat there in the yellow-lighted, dewy haze, smoking a cigarette even though he had quit years ago, and simply looking, out into the trees or beyond, in the way a dog looks about when it has nowhere to go, and then he did something very strange. He leaned forward and held out his cupped hand and he moved his head as if he were speaking to someone, questioning someone, beseeching someone. This went on for a minute or more. She couldn't see his face, but his head wagged up and down and back and forth, and his hand flailed the air for emphasis, and then, when it appeared he had got his answer or had made his point, his arm fell to his side and he slipped into a deep slump in the chair, his shoulders round like an old man's and sort of hangdog, as if the answer had not been the one he wanted. Perhaps he was crying in despair; she couldn't tell and she wanted to go out to him, to sooth him, to comfort him. But she had felt like an eavesdropper or a burglar in her own house, standing there watching him, so she went back to bed and tried to imagine to whom he was speaking.