What He's Poised to Do: Stories (11 page)

W
E SET OFF FOR THE STATION THAT MORNING
, L
ILY AND
I. I know it pains you to hear this, my dear wife, but I feel I must tell the tale forward. You and I are one, in ways that we once discussed with regularity and even celebrated when you were my wife and I was your husband. Then we were divided. I am sorry, for I prefer love to war, but the truth is standing in the middle of the room and so I will not ignore it. The truth is your absence and Lily’s presence. I say “presence” euphemistically, when what I mean is something more specific. She is standing here, her dress not quite covering it.

We had been living in the city together for a little less than a year, Lily and I. Most of our time was spent in an apartment, exercising one another and dreaming of the day when we might start again in a finer place. I hadn’t known exactly what I meant by that, “a finer place,” until the postman delivered a letter written to Lily by an elderly friend of her parents, one Mrs. Pritchard. This fine woman had heard from Lily’s parents that Lily was looking for a place to spend part of the summer, and she was writing with a suggestion that took the form of a description of a village, and a road in it, and a house on that road that sounded like nothing so much as perfection. You and I once spent a summer in a village, but it was a dingy thing, with narrow paths that made movement through it nearly impossible. This village, as communicated by Mrs. Pritchard, sounded in me like a high note. Lily did not agree, but she did not have to; I heard her agreement in her silence.

At the train station on the morning of our departure, we were ringed by the denizens of the city that we had not, up until that very moment, met, and a more decrepit and disreputable crew I cannot imagine: There was a blind boy who could say only the words “more” and “money,” a crippled girl who tried to stay faithful to her innocent girlhood but was betrayed by the voluptuous flowering of her figure, and a man with a maimed hand who looked at the girl with a rude hunger that left no doubt as to the eventual destination of the hand. The deformities, both of body and of soul, came out of every corner of the station, and they reminded me of the small cottage in the seaside town where you and I stayed on our honeymoon. That was our village, and it was tolerable only because we went there with a hope that protected us from its reality. Do you remember? There were noises in the walls as something scuttled from left to right and top to bottom, like a text we were afraid to read. That was how I expressed it at the time, and you laughed and said that was too beautiful a conceit to waste on such an ugly sight. “The ugly is a component of the beautiful,” I said. You agreed. You were wrong, though you could not have known it at the time. The train station stands as proof of your error.

The sight of these half-human monsters huddling together beneath the vaulting archways of the station—if the founding architect only knew the ill use to which his wondrous creation would one day be put—sickened me at first, then angered me, and then, finally, struck me stone dumb. What can you say about a species that is so susceptible to the blackening effects of a city, other than that it is weak to the point of rot? It was left to Lily to remark upon the place, once we had boarded the train and were safely on our way. “Beastly,” she said, letting the single word hang like the man’s maimed hand. After a short pause, I took up her thought. “Oh, Lily,” I said, “I am so happy to be traveling with you into the country. It is in a rural setting that a man’s soul—or a woman’s, for that matter—can truly flower. And so I will lavish my attentions on the petals of those flowers.” Whether I said this in so many words or said fewer and imagined the rest does not matter. We were so close at that moment that speech and thought were one and the same. You, too, have experienced this closeness with me, wife, so you will be able to imagine. Lily and I were brought together by our idea of our union, which seems like either a paradox or a tautology but is in fact both. I took Lily’s hand, which was so warm with desire that it seemed to heat the air around us, and pressed it to my breast, and we listened to the click and the clack of the train on the rails and at length fell into faultless sleep.

Time passed. The sun stretched out the shadows of trees, which lay across the tracks like bridges. We crossed under one of those bridges and then the train shuddered to a stop. We were in the village where Mrs. Pritchard lived and where, more important, her house stood amid woods, meadows, and even a little stream that wound through those woods and meadows. I had retained nearly every detail from Mrs. Pritchard’s letter; that fine old woman, though her shaky script betrayed her age, had an appreciation of the power of description that rivaled my own. Lily went out ahead of me, carrying our luggage—we had managed to get most of our clothes in a single hard wheel case, although there were two other small bags that held my books and journals—and I followed. From behind I could read the sentence of her figure (particularly that which lay within parentheses). My mouth began to water. I felt a tremor in my thumb and index finger. Should I feel shame for that reaction? A man’s hunger for a woman is part of nature, wife. In my time with you, I frequently saw the disclosed forms of other women. There is no point in apologizing for this. It was one of the imperfections of our union. I have forgiven you for your part in it, and I know that you will extend me the same courtesy. Since I have been with Lily, I have seen only one other woman in her natural state, and she was seventeen, and as such represented a false promise of fullness and flexibility. Her name was Mona, and she was my student in a course I had designed that sought to communicate the intimate link between poetry and nature. She was a good student, Mona, and she came by one afternoon to discuss the heartlessness of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” The topic undid us so completely that we had found ourselves, quite by accident, in my apartment, where I first checked to make sure that Lily was not present and then did my level best to direct the conversation toward those “orbs of light and shade” and those “wild and wandering cries” and away from the inevitable. I was not the teacher I hoped to be, though, because when I paused midway through what I thought was a rather convincing discourse, I saw Mona on the bed and her clothing in a heap on the ground beside it. Her hands were rounded in a kind of cage at the tops of her thighs. She opened the cage.

“These bags are heavy,” Lily said, shattering my reverie.

“Are they?” I said.

“They are.” She set them down. A less trained observer might have read the expression in her eyes as an appeal to me to relieve her of her burden, but I knew it for what it was—a reminder of what would occur later that afternoon, when we had snugged the bags in the corner of our new home. The suitcase that was now at Lily’s feet contained all we would need for the afternoon’s activities, including a hand mirror, a length of rope, and a razor that would prevent her from sinking into a barbarian state, especially about the legs and hips.

“It makes no difference to me,” I said, answering her unasked question. “Dry or with a bit of shaving powder, entirely or in part. You decide.”

She looked at me with feigned confusion—I learned that look from you, and also to dismiss it, and for that I am grateful—and we set off down the road leading to the cottage. Rustic life in all its glory was arrayed for us as if Mrs. Pritchard, or some other benevolent angel, had retained a troupe: there was an old woman waiting for the last of her pigs to ford a small stream and set off for home; there was a younger woman sitting beneath a tree and finishing with the needlework on a large tablecloth; there was a sunburned girl who was running from a sunburned boy toward a large tree that sat center-meadow, a god of the place.

While Lily went ahead with the suitcases, I stopped to inspect a leaf I saw at the side of the road. It reminded me, to be frank, of you: it was not a particularly spectacular specimen, and yet it was more spectacular than anything I could have imagined. The edge had browned slightly, and with it the vein skeleton. A corner had been eaten away by a beetle or one of the other divinely low creatures that flourished in this part of the country. It was a shabby thing that still communicated an indisputable beauty. “Lily,” I called, but my voice was faint from wonder, and she did not hear me. I gripped that leaf by its petiole and took it with me, telling myself that this piece of evidence of the majesty of the everyday would be a great help when Lily and I reached our destination, dropped our bags, and settled into the narrow but sturdy bed that had been described to us in our correspondence with Mrs. Pritchard. I could place it on a table and watch it while the world turned upside down. Nature would steady us both.

I worried that Lily was so far up the path that she would reach the cottage before me, so I hurried to arrive before her. You know how fast I can run when I try. Still, this was done at great sacrifice to village life, or rather to my enjoyment of village life: to have any chance of arriving at the house before Lily, I had to rush through the characteristic scenes that were in abundance all around me, and as a result I have only the blurriest recollection of them. I do know that I saw a number of beautifully picturesque arrangements of flowers in neat little window boxes in front of neat little houses. I saw a woman spinning with a distaff in an enclosed porch. I saw a priest sitting sociably beside a young woman whose face was flushed a deep pink from what I can only assume was a sudden appreciation of the Lord’s word.

My heart ached as I passed by these simple villagers, these simple tiles of benignity in the mosaic of the village, for I knew that it wanted little more than to settle among them and explore the common lines of fellowship and companionship. There would be time for that after the house, and Mrs. Pritchard’s narrow but sturdy bed. Lily was ecstatic to be in the country. I had sensed it even before she herself had sensed it. Like you, she had spent most of her life in the city. Like you, she had been raised among its smokestacks and alleyways and fire escapes, and its adulterations were knit into her bones. On the train, Lily told me that one of her earliest memories involved playing hopscotch as a child, and confessed that as she grew older the numbers on the board came to represent a different sort of progress. I drew out from her a clearer sense of her meaning. She told me that she assigned a number to different levels of excitement. “Are you excited today?” I asked. She held up one hand, I assumed to give me a measure of her feelings. As was her habit, she did not offer a full account; she was generally embarrassed by the passions she felt. But her five fingers were stiffly raised. I verified her excitement by the traditional means, holding up three fewer, just before the conductor arrived to punch our ticket. When he departed, she drew me out as well, to the same end.

I will tell you a story that would embarrass a different sort of woman. The night before Lily and I left the city, I opened the window of my apartment and let her put her head out. Her hair was long and black and difficult to manage, in the fashion then popular in the city. I took my business with her then, just like that, with her head out of the window. “When we get to the country,” I remember saying to her, “we will do this again, near a country window, and the air that you breathe will be new air. A little death, a little rebirth: Is this not what you want?” I cannot describe the expression she wore as she listened to me, mainly because I could not see her face, which was outside the window. The next day, on the train, her face was once again concealed from me. This time it was beneath a blanket I had draped over my lap. The conductor’s curiosity did not recommend him.

At any rate, my dear wife, my memory of these clarifying moments caused me to walk faster along the path. I passed a stable that contained no horses but was rich with the promise of them, and then I passed a house in which I imagined country folk eating a hearty meal and exchanging simple tales of life and its triumphs and disappointments, and then I passed a lake upon which a swan drifted in silent judgment of any place less beautiful. Finally, I overtook Lily, who was huffing and puffing, trying to tug the suitcase through a section of the path that had gone soft from rain. My excitement was mounting, and I made sure she saw so as a form of incitement. She scowled at me to conceal her appetite.

I came to the house, fit the key in the lock, and pushed it open. There was a note on the table in the entryway welcoming us. The note was written on the inn’s stationery, and there were more blank sheets beneath it, along with an envelope. I took the paper and envelope in my free hand and bounded up the stairs. The bedroom was just as Mrs. Pritchard had described it: small, Spartan, with a low table. I set the paper and envelope on the table and went to the window with the leaf I had taken from the path. A leaf contains a world, at least, and I held it there in my hand at the window, watching Lily struggle up the last stretch of path toward the house. She had given up carrying the suitcase and was now dragging it through beds of flowers, some that had recently bloomed and some that would never bloom. She could not see it from ground level, but there was beauty all around her. I twirled the stem of my leaf between my thumb and index finger. She did not see me, as she was not looking up. I let the leaf fall, like an invitation, and it landed in the soft grass just before the porch; as Lily tried to wrestle the suitcase up the stairs, her shoe came down directly upon it. I had given her the shoes—they resemble those I made you wear when we were fully man and wife. The heel pierced the leaf through the heart. It was a kind of murder. At that moment, I decided I would write you an account of the day. I would spare you not a single detail, from the morning train to the events of late afternoon that were about to unfold. I would tell you of Lily’s hot breath, her wide eyes, the parts of her and the whole. I felt the prospect of it all thrum through me, and I undid my shirt and pants, and lay back on the bed, and waited for Lily to arrive.