Our Souls at Night (3 page)

I was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, she said. We lived out on the northeast side of town. We had a nice two-story clapboard house. My father was a businessman and did well and my mother was a very good housekeeper and a good cook. It was a middle-class sort of neighborhood, a working-class neighborhood. I had one sister. We didn’t get along. She was more active and more outgoing, with a kind of gregarious nature that I didn’t have. I was quiet, bookish. After high school I went to the university and lived at home and took the bus downtown to my classes. I started off studying French but switched to elementary school education.

Then I met Carl in my sophomore year and we started dating and by the time I turned twenty I was pregnant.

Were you scared?

Not of the baby. No. Not of having one. But I didn’t
know how we would manage. Carl still had a year and a half to get his degree. On Christmas Day he joined me at my parents’ house—he lived in Omaha—and together we both told my parents after dinner, all of us sitting in the living room. My mother just started crying. My father was angry. I thought you knew better. He stared at Carl. What in hell’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with him, I said. It just happened. Well it didn’t by God just happen. He made it happen. There were two of us involved, Daddy. Well my God, he said.

We got married in January and moved into a tiny dark apartment in downtown Lincoln and I got a temporary job clerking in a department store and we waited. The baby came one night in May. They wouldn’t let Carl in the room. Then we took the baby home and were happy and very poor.

Didn’t your parents help you?

Not much. Carl didn’t want their help. Well, I didn’t either.

That was your daughter, then. I didn’t think she was that old.

Yes, that was Connie.

I only remember her vaguely. I know how she died.

Yes. Addie stopped talking and moved in the bed. I’ll talk about that some other time. I’ll just tell you
now that when Carl graduated we both wanted to come to Colorado. We’d gone to Estes Park once for a short vacation and liked the mountains and needed to get out of Lincoln and away from everything. And start up somewhere new. Carl got a job selling insurance in Longmont and we lived there for a couple of years, then old Mr. Gorland here in Holt decided to retire and so we borrowed money and moved here and Carl took over his insurance office and his clients. And we’ve been here ever since. That was in 1970.

How was it that you got pregnant?

What do you mean? How does anybody get pregnant?

Well, my memory is we were all pretty careful and nervous back then.

But we were young too. Carl and I were in love. It’s the old story. It was all new and exciting.

It must have been.

She let go of his hand and moved farther away and lay straight in bed. He turned and looked at her in the dim light.

Why are you acting like this? she said. What’s the matter?

I don’t know.

Are you asking about the circumstances?

I guess.

About the sex?

I’m being more stupid than usual. I just feel sort of jealous and I don’t know what.

Out in the country on a dirt road in the back seat in the dark. Is that what you want to know?

I’d appreciate it if you would just call me a goddamn son of a bitch, Louis said. A man too foolish for words.

All right. You’re a foolish son of a bitch.

Thank you, he said.

You’re welcome. But you could ruin this. You know that. Is there anything else?

Did your parents ever get over it?

It turned out they actually liked Carl. My mother always thought of him as a dark-haired good-looking man. And my father could see that Carl was a hard worker and that he would take care of us. And of course he did. We had some hard times. But mostly as far as being financially comfortable after the first seven or eight years we were fine. Carl was a good provider.

Then sometime in there you had a little boy to go with the girl.

Gene. Connie was six then.

Addie drove her car into the alley behind her neighbor Ruth’s house, got out and went up to the back door. The old lady was waiting, sitting in a chair on the porch. She was eighty-two years old. She stood up when Addie arrived and the two women came slowly down the steps, Ruth holding on to Addie’s arm, and came out to the car and Addie helped her in and waited for her to arrange her thin legs and feet and then she fastened the seatbelt and shut the door. They drove to the grocery store on the highway at the southeast side of town. There were only a few cars in the parking lot, a slow summer’s midmorning. They went in and Ruth held on to the shopping cart and they moved slowly through the aisles, looking, taking their time. She didn’t want or need much, just cans or cartons of food, and a loaf of bread and a bag of little Hershey bars in foil. Aren’t you going to get anything? she said.

No, Addie said. I shopped the other day. I’ll just get some milk.

I shouldn’t eat this chocolate but what difference does it make now. I’m going to eat whatever I want to.

She put canned soup and stew in her cart and boxes of frozen dinners and a couple of boxes of dry cereal and a quart of milk and some strawberry preserves.

Is that everything?

I believe so.

Don’t you want some fruit?

I don’t want fresh fruit. It’ll just spoil. They went around to the canned fruit and she took down two cans of peaches in their sweet syrup and some canned pears, then a box of oatmeal cookies with raisins. At the cash register the clerk looked at the old lady and said, Did you find everything, Mrs. Joyce? Everything you wanted?

I didn’t find me a good man. I didn’t see one of them on the shelf. No, I couldn’t find any good man back there.

Couldn’t you? Well, sometimes they’re closer to home than you think. She glanced quickly at Addie standing next to the old lady.

How much is it? Ruth said.

The clerk told her.

Your blouse has a spot on it, Ruth said. It’s not clean. You shouldn’t come to work dressed like that.

The clerk looked down. I don’t see anything.

It’s there.

She took her money from her old soft leather purse and slowly counted out the money in her hand and laid the bills and coins on the counter in neat order.

Then they went out to the car and Addie put the groceries in the back seat and got in.

Ruth was looking straight ahead at the highway, where the cars and cattle trucks and grain trucks were going by. Sometimes I hate this place, she said. Sometimes I wish I had gotten out of here when I could. These small-town small-minded pissants, she said.

You’re talking about that clerk.

Her, yes, and everybody like her.

Do you know her?

She’s one of the Coxes. Her mother was just the same. Thought she knew everybody’s business. Had a mouth like this one. She makes me want to give her a good slap.

So you know about Louis and me, Addie said.

I get up early every morning. I can’t sleep. And I sit out in the front room watching the sun come up over the houses across the street. I see Louis in the morning going home.

I knew somebody would see him. It doesn’t matter.

I hope you’re having a good time.

He’s a good man. Don’t you think?

I think so. But the returns aren’t all in yet, either. He’s always been kind to me, though, she said. He mows my lawn and shovels the snow on my walks in the winter. He started that before Diane died. But he’s no saint. He’s caused his share of pain. I could tell you about that. His wife could’ve told you.

I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Addie said.

That was a long time ago anyway, Ruth said. Years ago. I think his wife mostly got over it. People do.

Addie said, Tell me about the other woman.

Who do you mean?

The one you had an affair with.

You know about that?

Everybody does.

She was married, Louis said. Tamara. That was her name. It still is if she’s still alive. Her husband was a nurse, working nights at the hospital here in town. It was unusual for a man to be a nurse back then. People didn’t know what to make of it. They had a little girl about four years old, a year older than Holly. A little tough thin blond girl. Her father, Tamara’s husband, was a big sort of heavyset blond guy. He was a good guy, really. He wanted to write stories. I guess he wrote some at night at the hospital. They’d had some trouble before and she’d had an affair with somebody back in
Ohio. She was a teacher in the high school like I was. I’d been there only two years when she got hired.

What did she teach?

She was one of the English teachers too. The freshmen and sophomore classes. Basic stuff.

You taught the upper-level courses.

Yes, I’d been there longer. Well, so she was unhappy at home and Diane and I weren’t doing so well either.

Why not?

Because of me, mostly. But both of us too. We couldn’t talk. We’d get in a fight or an argument and she’d start crying and leave the room and wouldn’t finish what we were talking or fighting about. That made it worse.

Then at school one of you made some kind of a move, some gesture, Addie said.

Yes. She put her hand on my arm when we were alone in the teachers’ break room. Are you going to say something to me? she said. Like what? I said. Like do you want to go out for a drink or something? I don’t know, I said. Do you want me to? What do you think? That was in April, the middle of April. I was doing our taxes for the year and on the fifteenth, after supper I took the tax returns to the post office to get them mailed on time, and I drove by her house and I could
see her sitting at the dining-room table grading papers, and so I parked down the street and came up on her porch and knocked and she came to the door. She was already in her bathrobe. Are you alone? I said.

Pamela’s here but she’s in bed already. Why don’t you come in?

So I went in.

That’s how it started?

Yes, on tax day. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.

I don’t know. These things happen in all kinds of ways.

You know something about this.

I know something about how these things happen in people’s lives.

Will you tell me?

Maybe. Someday. So what did you do?

I left Diane and Holly and moved in with her. Her husband moved out, stayed with a friend. And well, we got along for a couple of weeks. She was a beautiful hard wild woman, with long brown hair and brown eyes that were kind of like an animal’s eyes in bed, and she had lovely skin, like satin. Her body was pretty thin.

You’re still in love with her.

No. But I think I’m in love a little with the memory
of her. Of course it got bad in the end. One night her husband came over when we were eating supper in the kitchen. Tamara and her little girl and me. We sat there at the table talking with her husband like we were all advanced and sophisticated and that we were people who would just break up marriages and go on like free people. But I couldn’t go on. I was sick of myself. Her husband there at the table and she and the little girl. I got up and left the house and drove out in the country, the stars were all shining and there were the farmlights and yardlights all looking blue in the dark. Everything looking normal, except nothing was normal anymore, everything was at some kind of cliff’s edge, and late that night I came back. She was in bed reading. I can’t do this, I said.

Are you leaving?

I have to. This is going to hurt too many people. It has already. And here I am trying to be a father to your daughter while my own is growing up without me. I have to go back because of her, if for no other reason.

When are you leaving?

This weekend.

Then come to bed now, she said. We have two more nights.

I remember those nights. How it was.

Don’t tell me about them. I don’t want to know.

No. I won’t tell about them. When I was leaving I just cried. She did too.

Then what?

I went back to Diane and Holly and moved back in the house and lived downstairs and slept on the couch. Diane was pretty quiet about it. She was never vindictive or nasty or mean about any of it. She could see I felt like hell. And I don’t think she wanted to lose me or lose the life we had.

Then in the summer one of my old college friends came out from Chicago and wanted to go fishing and I drove him up to the White Forest above Glenwood Springs, but he didn’t like it, he wasn’t used to the mountains. When I took him down a steep trail to a creek, he was afraid we were lost. We caught some nice fish too, but it didn’t matter. We drove back to Holt and Diane met me at the door. Holly was sleeping, taking her afternoon nap, and we went to bed immediately, it just caught us that way, maybe the best time of any, that kind of unthinking urgency, while my friend was waiting for us downstairs to eat supper. And that was it.

You never saw her again?

I didn’t. But she came back to Holt. She’d moved to Texas at the end of the school year and taken a job
down there. Then she came back to Holt and called me. Diane took the call. She said, Someone wants to talk to you. Who is it? She didn’t say anything, just handed me the phone.

It was her. Tamara. I’m here in town. Will you see me?

I can’t. No. I can’t do that.

You won’t see me again?

I can’t.

Diane was out in the kitchen listening. But it wasn’t that. I’d made up my mind. I had to stay with her and our daughter.

Then what?

Tamara went back down to Texas and started teaching where she had accepted the job. And Diane let me stay.

Where is she now?

I don’t know where she is. She and her husband never got back together. So there was that too. I don’t like to think about my part in that. She was from back east. Massachusetts. Maybe she’s back there.

You’ve never talked to her?

No.

I still think you’re in love with her.

I’m not in love with her.

It sounds like you are.

I didn’t treat her right.

No, you didn’t.

I regret that.

What about Diane?

She never said much afterward. She was hurt and angry when it was starting. More then than later—more crying, I mean. I’m sure she felt rejected and mistreated. She had good reason to feel that way. And that was picked up by our little girl from her mother and probably is a part of her feeling now about men, including me. She has the feeling she has to be a certain way or she’ll be abandoned. But I think I regret hurting Tamara more than I do hurting my wife. I failed my spirit or something. I missed some kind of call to be something more than a mediocre high school English teacher in a little dirt-blown town.

I’ve always heard you were a good teacher. People in town think so. You were a good teacher for Gene.

A good one, maybe. But not a great one. I know that.