The Age of Grief (18 page)

And so, how could she tell me then? She couldn’t, and didn’t. I think she was sorry I was me, sorry that I wasn’t him in bed with her. But when husbands express grief and fear, wives automatically comfort them, and they are automatically comforted. Years ago, such an exchange of sorrow would have sent us into a frenzy of lovemaking. It did not this time. She held me and kissed my forehead, and I was comforted but not reassured. We went back to sleep and got
up at seven to greet the daily round that is family life. Zap, she used to say, there goes another one.

I was worried about her and she was worried about me, and that was an impasse that served my purposes for most of that week. God knows what the bastard was doing to her, but she was very reserved, careful, good, and sad. She went to the grocery store a lot. Maybe she was calling him from there, standing in the phone booth with two children in the basket and a line of old ladies behind her waiting to call the car service.

Each of my children favors one sense over the other. Lizzie has been all eyes since birth. We have pictures of her at nine days old, her eyes focused and glittering, snapping up every visual stimulation. She is terrific at finding things and has been since she could talk. It took us a while to believe her, but now we believe her every time. She doesn’t stare, either. She glances. She stands back and takes in wholes. It seems to me that her eyes are the source of her persnickety taste and her fears. She simply cannot bear certain color combinations, for example. They offend her physically. Likewise, what she sees is far away from her, out of her control, and so makes her afraid. She rushes in, gets closer, so that she can look more carefully. But it is hard for her to reach out and touch or rearrange. Fear intervenes. She only looks, she feels no power.

Stephanie is the wild beast who is soothed by music. She has always heard things first, looked for them second. She often looks away from what she is paying attention to, making her seem evasive, but really she is listening. She is the only child I’ve ever known who doesn’t interrupt. I don’t even know if she listens to words as much as to tones, to the rhythms of sentences and the pitch of voices. Will she be a
musician? She likes music. But she likes the sound of traffic, too, and the sound of cats in the backyard, and the cries of birds and the rustle of leaves. She simply likes the way the world sounds, and she listens to it. She comes closer than Lizzie does, but she doesn’t seem to respond to what goes in at all, except with a single, final look, to make sure, maybe, that what is heard has a source. Then she backs away. Is she the one I should worry about?

Leah sat up at five months and reached for the toys that were in front of her. It took her another five months to crawl. Yes, she was big and fat, but more than that, she was satisfied. Her hands were huge, and she could hold two blocks in each of them when she was six months old. Hand to mouth. You couldn’t keep anything out of her mouth. Now it seems as though she doesn’t recognize anything without touching it. She runs her hands over my face. She holds on tight. She snuggles. Standing in front of a table of toys, she is as satisfied as a human can be, and she has stretches of concentration that Lizzie and Stephanie don’t begin to match, although they are five and three years older than she is. If you distract her, she looks drugged for a moment. Drugged by touch.

And so I have three separate regrets. What does Lizzie see? What does Stephanie hear? What unsatisfied, yearning tension does Leah feel in my flesh when she snuggles against me and puts her hands on my shoulders? There is no hiding from them, is there? And there is no talking to them. They don’t understand what they understand. I am afraid. I should call the pediatrician, but I don’t. I think, as people do, that everything will be all right. But even so, I can’t stop being afraid. They are so beautiful, my daughters, so fragile and attentive to family life.

I wish they were boys and completely oblivious, as I
was. I could not have said, before I met Dana, whether my parents’ marriage was happy or not. I didn’t know. She told me. She said, “Your parents are so dissimilar, aren’t they? I mean, your father is sociable and trusting and all business, and your mother just doesn’t know what to make of things, does she? They are a truly weird combination.” We were twenty-two. She had spent her first half hour with them, and this was what she came out with, and that is what I have known about them ever since.

The next day a new patient came in, a heavyset, pugnacious man about my age. I poked around in his mouth and said, “Besides your present cavities, you have some very poorly filled teeth here.” He sat up and looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve never been to a dentist who thought much of what was done to your teeth before him. And I’ll say this, you’d better be cheap, because five years from now, some guy’s going to tell me he’s got to redo all your work, too.” He sat back and looked out the window for a second, but he must have thought that the ice was broken, because he started right in again. “Doctors never say boo about what they see. I mean, some guy could cut off your healthy leg and leave the bad one, and you wouldn’t get another doctor to admit the guy had made a mistake.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Things are more fucked every day.”

“Open, please,” I said.

“I mean, I don’t know why I’m sitting here having my teeth fixed. It’s going to cost me a lot of money that I could spend having the other stuff fixed. By the way, don’t touch the front teeth. I play the trumpet, and if you touch the front teeth, then I’ll have to change my embouchure.”

I said, “Open, please.”

“Well, I’m not sure I want to open. I mean, if you don’t do anything, then I can spend my money on therapy or something that might really improve my life.”

“We do ask patients to pay for appointments they don’t keep. If you’re uneasy about the discomfort, we have a lot of ways to make sure—”

“Hell, I don’t care if it pinches, like you guys all say. I don’t care if it hurts like shit. I just want to feel I’m not wasting my time.”

“Proper dental care is never a—”

“My wife made this appointment for me. Now I’ve lost my job, and she’s kicked me out. But she sent me this little card, telling me to go here, and I came. I mean, I can’t—”

“Mr. Slater, please open your mouth so that we can get on with it.”

“I can’t believe she kicked me out, but I really can’t believe she cares whether or not I go to the dentist.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Slater. But you are wasting my time and yours, too.”

“Didn’t you say you’d get paid, anyway?”

“That’s our policy, yes.”

“How long does it take you to fill a couple of teeth?”

“About half an hour.”

“Then just let me talk. I’ll pay you.”

“I don’t like to talk, Mr. Slater,” I said. “I’d rather fill teeth.”

“But I’ll pay you the money I should be paying a psychiatrist.”

I put down my mirror and my probe. Dana passed the door and glanced in, curious. Her eyes left an afterimage of blue. Slater said, “That your wife?”

“What do you want to talk about, Mr. Slater?”

He sat back and deflated with a big sigh. He looked out the window. I did, too. Finally, he said, “Hey, I don’t know. Go ahead and fill a couple of teeth. You’re probably better at that, anyway.”

“That’s what I’m trained to do, Mr. Slater.”

He made no reply, and I filled two molars, right lower. He didn’t speak again, but every time I changed my position or asked him to do something, he fetched up a bone-quivering sigh. His front teeth, I should say, were a mess. A brittle net, crooked, destined for loss. He left without speaking to me again, and paid with his MasterCard.

After he left I wanted him back. I wanted the navy-blue collarless jacket that he wouldn’t take off. I wanted the Sansabelt slacks that stretched tight over his derriere. I wanted the loafers. I wanted him to tell me about his wife. He didn’t smile much. He had a rough way of speaking. He was tall and not a pleasant man. It seemed to me that I could have drilled his teeth without novocaine, man to man, and it would have relieved us both.

He was with me all the rest of the afternoon. I imagined him leaving the office when I did. I imagined how he would walk, how he would get in his car, how he would drive down the street—thrusting and pugnacious, jamming the pedals, hand close to the horn all the time. Grief, I saw, had loosened him up, as if at the joints, and up and down his vertebrae. He had become a man who would do or say anything, would toss back his head or fling out his arms in a gesture impossible before. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt bitterly sorry for him all afternoon. It seemed to me that his fate would be an ill one, and mine, too. All of our fates.

By the time Dana came home, I couldn’t stop doing
things as Slater might have done them. I was talkative and aggressive. I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her around so that she would look at me. I wandered around the kitchen, opening cupboards and slamming them shut. I talked about all of my patients except Slater at boring length. My voice got loud. Dana shrank and shrank. At first she laughed; then, with a few sidelong glances in my direction, she began to scuttle. I wondered if Slater’s wife was just then doing exactly the same thing. But she wasn’t. She had kicked him out, and I could certainly see why. Finally I stopped. I just stopped where I was standing, with my mouth gaping open, and Dana and I traded a long glance. I said, “What time is dinner?”

“About half an hour. Dave—”

“I’m going out. I’ll be back, okay?” Slater wouldn’t have asked in that way for permission. Neither would Dave Hurst, a month ago. I slammed out the back door and got into the car.

After I left Dana, Slater left me, and Dana joined me. I had hardly seen her back at the house, the whole time I was hovering around her, but now I could practically smell her, feel the vigor of her presence. As a rule, I don’t know what she looks like. I don’t think I have known, since the beginning, before everything about her looks became familiar to me, and saturated with feeling. As I drove along in the car, a picture of what she looks like came to me for the first time in years. And I thought, She is pretty, but she is getting a little prim-looking, with her gold button earrings and the gold chains around her neck. She wears neat blouses in the office, even now, in the midst of passion. And as this picture came to me, it also came to me that this passion was unbearable to her, and that the only way she knew to make it
bearable was to pour herself into it as well as everything else, the way she has always done. I stepped on the gas, and soon I was streaming down the interstate at 92 miles per hour. “Lord,” I said, “let me fly. Give me that miracle to ease this pain.” I pushed the car up to 100. I hadn’t had a car into three figures in seventeen years, since Kevin Mills let me gas his father’s Oldsmobile 98 up to 115 the summer after we graduated from high school. I went fast, but I didn’t fly. Instead, I thought of my children and turned back at the next exit. I realized that the object of Dana’s affections had refused her.

At the dinner table, Slater invaded me again. I was cutting Leah’s meat and she was complaining that the pieces were too large, so I cut them and cut them until they were nearly mush. Then she said, “I don’t like it.” I sat back and looked at her, then around the table at the others, and it seemed to me that I was Slater, visiting for dinner. The woman was blond, sort of pretty and nice enough, I thought, but her children were horrible, the oldest sullen and suspicious—clank, clank-clank went her knife and fork on the plate—the next one an oblivious blonde, masticating her food with annoying languor, and the third irritable and squawking. At last, inevitably, Leah smacked her bowl and it landed upside down on the floor. As Slater, I waited for their mother to do something about it. As my wife, Dana looked at me expectantly. Leah looked at me expectantly. I pretended to be their father. I jumped up and grabbed Leah out of her chair, and said in gruffish tones, “That’s enough. I’m putting you into your bed.” And I carried her upstairs. The windows were dirty and the sills needed vacuuming, and there were toys all over the floor of the child’s room. The responsibility for all this seemed put upon me, and I stomped
down the stairs, shouting, “Be quiet! Stop yelling! You can come down in five minutes.”

“Dave,” said Dana.

I answered to this name.

“I don’t think you should shout at her like that.”

“Somebody has to. Maybe nobody has enough. You don’t. What the fuck is going on around here?”

Dana looked up fearfully. “Nothing. Nothing is going on, just everything the same. Why don’t you sit down and—”

Now I really was Slater. “Everything’s more fucked every day.”

Lizzie and Stephanie had put down their forks and were staring out at me from under their foreheads, as if they couldn’t take the full blast of me in their faces, but couldn’t resist a look.

Dana said, “Why are you like this? Why are you so angry all the time? It’s unbearable.”

“I’m not angry all the time! I’m not really angry now.”

“Listen to yourself! Can’t you hear what you’re saying?”

“But it’s true, things are more fucked every day! Every day! Every day is worse!”

“No, it isn’t! It isn’t. Don’t say that. I won’t listen to that! You’ve always said that! I hate it.”

“I have not always said that. I just realized it today.”

“You have.” She burst into tears. I was bitterly hurt and angry. Her greatest lifelong sin seemed to me to be that she didn’t agree with me about the way the world is. I thought, I could accept anything else, let her love him, let her fuck him, let her talk to him forever, but give me this little agreement that I’ve never had before. I said, or rather
shouted, “Admit that I’m right. Admit that every day is worse!”

“I won’t!”

I could kill you, I thought.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said you could kill me.” I looked into each horrified face and saw that I had said it, or Slater had said it. I groaned. “I didn’t mean to say it.”

“But you thought it.”