Schroder: A Novel (17 page)

“Can you read me one more poem from
Birds Come and Gone
?”

“No. It’s late. The birds came and went. Close your eyes, and before you know it, it will be morning.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Not on your life.”

“When will you be back?”

“Soon. Or, as you would say, soon
ish
.”

“I’m afraid to sleep alone.”

“You won’t sleep alone. Like I said, I’ll be back really soon.”

“Just one more poem?”

“Meadow—”

“Can you at least stand outside the door until I fall asleep?”

“OK. OK. I’ll be right outside. Now, go to sleep.”

Except for the light in April’s cabin, the night was completely dark. The lamplight spilled across the short distance and exposed me to the night. One movement and April would be able to see me from under the hem of her lacy window treatment. I cleared my throat. The lake lapped against the little beach, unseen, darker than the sky. I leaned against a tree with large, bald roots, kicking the dirt that formed a little collar around the barbecue. I could hear Meadow talking to herself, the beam of her flashlight roving the ceiling of the cabin. After a couple of extremely long minutes, the beam settled and I could hear only the lake. Three, four, five paces later, I’d crossed a realm.

April opened the door and stood behind the screen, a drink in one hand and a rolled-up celebrity magazine in the other. She pushed the screen door open with it.

“You’re supposed to wait for me to knock,” I said.

“I couldn’t stand the suspense.”

“I was hoping to get your autograph.”

April beamed. “I’ll do you one better.”

The headboard was cheap and loud and her legs were very long and she was strong and tawdry and enthusiastic and neither of us was very clean or polite and it occurred to me it had been a long, long, long time since I’d made love like that, I mean without apprehension, without bracing myself for some kind of fallout. It had been a long time since I’d visited that vast, unregulated sexual territory between two willing people—no hazards, no rattlesnakes, no treachery. But I remembered it. There is even a photograph of it. A Delaware Bay motel en route to Albany from Virginia Beach. We didn’t have a camera, so we bought a disposable one in the motel lobby, along with a package of pistachios and a liter of root
beer. In the shower, we stood cleaning the highway off one another. I found black grit in the corners of your eyes, and inside the carpet of your hair. I shampooed you brutishly, a real amateur; you just laughed. The sun gives us a day, but who fashioned the hour? What is supposed to be accomplished within its parameters? How long is an hour supposed to
feel
? That hour—the one in which we lay on the bed afterward, staring at each other in the underwater light particular to roadside motel rooms—that hour seems to still be taking place endlessly, and it is a kind of invigorating torture to me, and I can’t get rid of it.

How did you get rid of it?

“Why are you crying, hon?” April was saying now. “Don’t cry. Come on, John. That makes me feel like shit.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my face. “I’m sorry. You’re gorgeous. You’re good. I like you. It’s just—It’s been a long time since I felt so”—I searched for the word—“acceptable.”

“All right. Sure. That’s all right.”

“You make me feel acceptable. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not really. I just make love because I like to do it.”

“Well, that’s good. Good for you. I’m just a lot sadder than I appear. Ergo the random outbursts—” Here I leaned over her naked body for a deep drink of vodka from the bedside table.

“Come here,” April said, pulling me to her by the neck, and I lay across her like that, crying and apologizing, and topping off our drink and listening to her talk until everything smoothed out and made a sort of sense, and that was me falling asleep. My dreams were only mildly disturbed as the body beside me stirred and resettled and the night labored on and I
pretty much forgot I had a daughter and more importantly I believed she had forgotten about me.

I didn’t wake up until the morning, when dim light fell across my face.

Disoriented, I looked up. There was my daughter in the doorway, staring at me, her hair scorched white.

SILENCE THEORY

It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my research here in the body of my text. I don’t want to burden the prospective listener with subjects too esoteric, but on the other hand, it seems that my not mentioning my research belies some form of embarrassment? And given that I woke up today regretting yesterday’s confessions (see
here
, re: Delaware Bay) and am now practically impaired with bitterness that a) I felt such tender things about you, Laura, in the first place and b) I then immortalized them by writing them down, I think now would be a good time to change the subject. Let’s not forget that my audience here is diverse. I’ve got a legal obligation to humanize myself. For my own defense. Other people might want to know, how did I contribute to society? What did I care about?

I care about pauses. Actually, I collect pauses. Back in the year 1990, fresh out of Mune, after studying many of the most significant moments in human history, I thought it might be cool to collect all those moments—literary, cultural, political—when something was
not
said or
not
done. Hesitations, standstills, lulls, ellipses. All kinds of inactivity. I called it “Pausology:
An Experimental Encyclopedia.” The work stemmed from my longtime interest in the concept of “eventlessness” (which I would define as moments in history when nothing was happening, producing a significant insignificance).

At first I thought I was doing something groundbreaking. I was writing antihistory. History’s negative. Then I realized the obvious, that the material I was trying to collect was totally undocumented. One summer I hired a research assistant through my old prof at Mune, and we spent most of the summer just trying to figure out how to begin. After Meadow was born, I had to adjust my ambitions and reckon with the fact that there was no way that my encyclopedia would ever be “complete.” And after a while, looking over the bits and pieces of promising chapterlets and indexes, I thought, well it could make for an interesting coffee table book. I don’t know. People kept asking me, “How’s the book? Making progress on that book?” The truth is, I had told too many people about it to stop.
¹¹

For all of his brilliant writing, playwright and unofficial pausologist Harold Pinter loved moments in which the characters did not speak, leaving us now with plays chock-full of excruciating or “pregnant” pauses. Although Pinter later came to repudiate his famous pauses, he happily wrote 140 of them into
Betrayal
and 224 into
The Homecoming
, which, if faithfully
acted, led to some satirically long, theater-clearing performances that will fuel bad undergraduate repertoires for generations to come. I’d like to draw a connection here between dramatic pauses and marital pauses. Both dramatic and marital pauses vary in duration; the shortest, or most minor, are easily ignorable (“…”) but do signal some form of inner struggle; other beats are longer and more loaded with effortful suppression or confusion (
pause
), but the longest pauses (
silence
) are the ones no one should have to bear, and speaking personally I would have rather been flayed alive than to stand there with my wife having
nothing to say
, as in nothing
left
to say.

Therefore, anyone interested in Pinterian pauses could save the cost of the ticket and spend an evening witnessing someone’s disintegrating marriage. Here’s an excerpt from mine:

Ham Sandwich: A Marriage
for Laura

WOMAN

Looking up from her schoolwork

Oh. I didn’t know you were here.

MAN

Yes. I’m… here.

WOMAN

Well… you might as well sit.

MAN

Where?

WOMAN

Anywhere.

MAN

Next to you?

Silence

WOMAN

Is she asleep?

MAN

Who?

WOMAN

Our little girl.

MAN

Oh, yes. She was very tired. But happy.

WOMAN

Happy… Happy…

Silence

MAN

And you?

WOMAN

Startled

Me?

MAN

Are you…?

WOMAN

I don’t know.

Pause

I don’t know.

MAN

Might we…

WOMAN

Oh. I don’t know anymore.

MAN

Do you…

WOMAN

No.

Pause

Not anymore. I…

Silence

Pause

MAN

Well. Would you like a ham sandwich? I’m going into the kitchen. I could…

WOMAN

Yes. All right. Thank you. A ham sandwich would be nice.

MAN

All right.

He stands

WOMAN

Wait.

MAN

What is it?

WOMAN

I don’t really want a ham sandwich. I’m not hungry.

MAN

Well. Would you like another kind of sandwich? Egg salad? Roast beef? What about an ice cream sandwich?

WOMAN

Like I said. I’m not hungry.

MAN

What about a pretzel? A fruitcake? Lamb with mint jelly? WHY IS EVERYTHING I OFFER YOU INSUFFICIENT?

Silence

END OF PLAY

But that’s not very funny.
¹²

Well, Harold Pinter wasn’t a very funny playwright either.

I’ve always been fascinated by—and uncomfortable with—pauses. My research forced me to see that short pockets of silence were everywhere and that even sound needs silence
in order to be sound
. There are tiny silences all over this page. Between paragraphs. Between these very words. Still, they can be lonesome. So for all my project’s shortcomings, I’d say the worst is that I haven’t shaken the lonesome feeling that pauses give me. Sometimes I still wish there weren’t any silences at all. And so it is with some reluctance that I give you this one.

MEN AND WOMEN

When dressing in your underclothes, you used to loop both straps of your bra over your shoulders and then bend over, catching your breasts, as it were. Then you would reach around and hook the clasp, adjust the fit of the cups, and then you would stand, perfected. I often watched this ritual from the bed. I would wait for it. I liked the way it evoked a bow, the way that when you stood, you seemed to invite applause. I appreciate the tease of undressing, but there is nothing so transfixing as a woman dressing, article by article, fitting her toe through the ruffled hole of the panty, or drawing closed a zipper, pinky erect, saying, with her whole form,
Maybe later
. Of course I never really felt worthy of all that. It always seemed to me that as a man I was so much uglier in comparison. Take my male
toilet
. I would stand there in the bathroom with white bits of deodorant caught in my underarm hair, penetrating my own nostril with the whirring pole of an electric nose-hair trimmer. You left a scent of camellia in your wake. I left tiny whiskers in mine. My footfalls were heavy. Yours were soundless. You could handle glass. I looked like an idiot holding a champagne flute, a real gorilla. I’m grateful, really, and also sad, that you were so beautiful.