“That’s okay,” he said.
I held a hand to my mouth, but the nausea passed. “The thing about you,” I said, “is that for one brief second I almost believed you. I was almost convinced that you really
should
have your brains blown out. You could talk the rain from a cloud, Rob. I’ll mortgage my frigging house to pay your hospital bills if it comes to that, but I’m not helping you with this craziness.”
To my surprise, his response was to grab me firmly by the chin with both his hands, lean close and look deep into my eyes.
“Please,” he said.
“What?”
“Look at me.”
“I am.”
“No,
look
at me.”
Obligingly, I looked. Those large, midsummer sea-blue eyes I’d first glimpsed over thirty years earlier, responding to a knock on our front door, now widened before me. I’d never before stared into another man’s eyes from close up. I’d never felt the strange altering heat of feeling that accompanies such a thing as time passes. We kept holding each other’s gaze as he stared calmly back at me, and slowly, a strange process began. His face started to grow abstract, the hard planes of it began to melt and run, and the accustomed perceptual pegs of face, eyes and nose broke into a completely unrecognizable jumble of indistinct pieces that began serially reassembling in waves of new sense. Beneath the haggard worn adult flesh, I believed I could see, suddenly, the face of the cherubic little boy starting up, eager to show off his reading and speak in laughably adult sentences. I could see the shining adolescent, beating all over with hungry pulses, and the long-haired rebel, slouching languid inside some posture of inner rage. There was also a terrifying moment when the same elements assembled abruptly into something dark and monstrous, a grotesquely ill-fitting and ghoulish mask. But this quickly passed, and the planes returned to normal. And yet something had taken place in the interim. Restored to itself,
Rob’s face remained filled with a strange, luminous quality, a sparkling intent that seemed to have traveled from all those previous perceptions back to the present tense.
“Let’s do it,” he said softly.
I felt suddenly very drained, and very tired.
“No, Rob,” I said in a flat voice, “I’m sorry, but no.”
He sat back away from me. He sighed. He tensed, as if about to say something, then seemed to catch himself and relax again.
“No?” he asked. “You sure?”
“Never.”
He shut his eyes for a moment.
“Okay, weakling,” I thought I heard him whisper.
“What?” I asked.
“I said you were a weakling.” He opened his eyes.
I laughed. “What, because I don’t want to go along with your fantasy plan for murder? For that I’m a weakling?”
“No, you’re a weakling because you never once in your life had the balls to follow through on the truth of your own perceptions.”
I felt the sting of accuracy in what he was saying, and lowered my head.
“You were always jealous of me,” he said.
“Maybe.” I flung my head back up. “But so what?”
“And you
should
have been jealous of me.”
Despite everything, I was suddenly furious. “Ah, now I think I get it. You’re going to try to provoke me into killing you, is that it? What is this, a movie of the week? Come on, Rob.”
“Poor Nick,” he said.
“I’m going to go now,” I said.
“No, wait!” To my horror, he then fell to his knees in front of me, placed his hands together, pressed his face into the dirt and raised it, caked with filth, while crying, “Forgive me, Nick! That was a stupid thing to try! I’m coming to you now in simple friendship and love to ask you to perform this little mercy. Mercy! You never understood,” he said, “how strong you were—and I need that strength now! You were always better than you knew—and that’s the part of you I’m talking to!” Moistly, his eyes rolled up to meet mine, the lashes grimed.
“Please, brother,” he said.
“Rob.”
“Please!”
“I can’t.”
“You can!”
“I won’t!”
He started crying again, deep, racking, sepulchral sobs, and I looked away and up at the sky, which, as ever, stretched above us with the shell lusters of its distances promising celestial perfections at which our life on earth could only hint. What does loyalty signify? I wondered. What would it mean to follow an idea or a person through the thickets of one’s distaste, overriding one’s own suspicions and trampling one’s core beliefs in the ser vice of some huge, dimly comprehended abstraction like Faith? How might it come to pass, and for what reasons, that a person perfectly in control of his own faculties could be talked, cajoled, beseeched into doing something he fundamentally didn’t want to do? We were in the epicenter of our childhood, that place where we’d first flirted with each other in the manner of young boys, trying out our moves,
tumbling through our shyness and pride. How was it that Rob, here, for the very last time in his life, was about to get his way?
Tears, and snot running from his nose; his hands hanging at his sides in a way that allowed the sick, sad animal to be seen, with the thin veil of the human soul clinging. And in all of that the constant reminder of our twin paths, lived sometimes at variance, sometimes in common, but leading all the way back to the beginning of shared time.
I picked up the gun.
“H
E WON,” SHE SAID SADLY
.
“Who did?”
“Rob Castor.”
There was a pause. “How do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Lucy, “that your relationship with him and his family destroyed this marriage.”
I got slowly to my feet from the couch. It seemed the wrong moment to be sitting down. Two large valises stuffed with my clothes and papers lay on the floor alongside me. My car, already started outside, was warming up against the winter chill. A week earlier, with dinner over and the children abed, Lucy had convened a meeting at the kitchen table, and calmly requested a divorce. I had been amazed by the fluency and self-possession with which she stated her case. Since returning home from her sacred intimacy retreat, she’d said, everything was far clearer, as, she’d added crisply, was the path she had to now take. She was big on
“paths” suddenly, and on “the place of achieved honesty.” She had that earnestness in her face that I hadn’t seen since she’d begun boning up on motherhood years earlier, turning our then one-room apartment into a heaped lending library of books on the subject. We argued slowly and carefully over several days, as she explained that it didn’t make sense to do what we were trying to do, because, at bottom, both of us were waiting for something to happen that probably wouldn’t happen and maybe shouldn’t, if it came to that. Had there ever been a merge? she’d asked rhetorically. Had there really truly ever been a merge between us?
“The thing about Rob,” she went on now as I stood motionless in the living room, staring at my bulging, forlorn-looking luggage, “was that you never understood how he always envied you having me, having the kids, having all those things you looked down at through his eyes as dumb and boring and middle class. You didn’t realize it, Nick, but at bottom, he envied you bad.”
“Rob wasn’t the envying type.”
“You don’t think so? I do. I think he was eaten up with the stuff. And you always underestimated yourself around him. You made yourself out to be this boring drudge next to a guy you thought was a glorious rainbow of a personality, but you were wrong. I’ve always wanted to tell you this, and now I can. Rob was just a common hustler with a gift for language. He also—hello?—happened to be a murderer. If he ended up dead and buried, that’s nobody’s fault but his own. But you seem to have taken the whole thing personally, like you have to be his official mourner or something and walk around with a long face for the rest of your life.”
Three days into our “discussion,” on bended knee, I’d given a short, passionate speech in which I’d begged her to reconsider. I’d spoken of the children, invoked our long-standing kindness to each other, and excused my recent behavior as a temporary midlife crisis, nothing more. As I spoke I carefully watched her face, trying to gauge the effect of my words on her feelings. A kind of whiteness had clouded her features when I began talking, and it dispersed only when I finished. It was sometime not long after that, looking calmly into my eyes, that she said the word “no.” She said many other things, but I don’t remember any of them. A kind of arterial roaring had begun in my ears, and as I walked out of the room, I recall repeating to myself hypnotically that everything would be fine, that this was all exactly what I’d wanted, and that in a certain crucial sense it was not she but I who’d initiated the divorce in the first place.
In the days afterward, by common consent, we went out of our way to minimize all public displays of sadness or remorse for the sake of the boys. The children, in fact, seemed by virtue of their own existence to be instructing me in some heavy primary lesson of life. The sheer animal ease with which they ran around in their boots tracking muddy ice through the house, the vital fizz they gave off as they hurled snowballs at each other or slid screaming up and down the local hill on their sleds seemed somehow to point up the sour, imprisoning egoism of divorce. Were we so contracted, Lucy and I, that the natural pleasures of childhood struck us as miraculous?
“I’ve made you something,” she said now, getting up from the couch herself.
“What’s that?”
“Some food, Nick, to tide you over.”
She went to the fridge, from which she withdrew a big Styrofoam cooler. “A leg of lamb, some pork chops, a few side dishes.”
She placed it on the ground between us. There was then a silence during which the desire to cry came over me with such swiftness that I avoided it only by pressing my hands between my knees till the pain made me gasp. When I looked up, tears were streaming down her face.
“You look pale,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“I feel pale.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Dear God,” I said simply, and stared at the ground.
Several times, in the previous few days, I’d fallen prey to that particular kind of magical thinking which proposes that with a mere small adjustment or two, it can all be made to go away. Earlier that same evening, struggling to keep my emotions in check, I’d casually bid the boys good night, and had lingered an extra moment, caressing their hair as they lay in bed while feeling that the sheer normalness of my actions would somehow forestall the inevitability of what was coming.
Lucy now reached forward and affectionately adjusted my collar.
“I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said in a low voice.
Rather than speak, she simply nodded in a way that seemed both to acknowledge that truth and declare her determination to proceed.
“You know I’ll always love the good in you,” she said quietly.
I struggled to say something but couldn’t find the words.
“And you’ll get everything you want in life,” she went on. “I’m sure of that. I really and sincerely am. Hold on to that thought. And I’ll do likewise. And we’ll talk very soon.” I leaned forward to kiss her good-bye, and as our lips touched, a cold, sick churning began in my stomach, and more than her kindness or love, I realized at that very moment, it was her body to which I was fatally attached. It was the warm breasts I had held through so many nights, the collarbones that cupped the natural perfume of her skin, the tapering pedestal of her long legs that I was suddenly in an agony of parting from. We hadn’t made love for a long time, but no matter. The thought of future trespasses of that body by strangers made me want to howl out loud like a dog. I was glad for the heavy physical weight of the bags in my hands at that moment. They grounded the balloon of my regret, which was trembling with uplift and wanting just then to soar into an attack of full-on congestive sobbing. Keeping a tight hold on myself, I pulled away from Lucy, nodded stiffly, and knowing I’d be screening the film of this moment for the rest of my life, walked out the front door to my car with as much dignity as I could muster. The house with the lighted eyes of its upstairs windows and the brows of its eaves had never looked friendlier, more inviting, and as I drove off it was all I could do not to feel that it was myself I was looking at, the simpler, surer self I’d been when we’d first bought that house, that self whom—as I turned the corner at last and the house slid out of sight—I was certain I would never see again.
I drove along the roads of my hometown slowly, as if grown suddenly unsure of streets traversed ten thousand times. Arrived at the residency hotel, I checked myself in in a kind of trance. I stretched out in the scratchy sheets of my bed, and I closed my eyes. To think was to risk a landslide. Better simply to inhabit the present tense as best I was able. I beckoned sleep to come forward out of the shadows and soothe me, but sleep resisted. I wanted to be blotted out. I wanted to drink oblivion and have it flood me with forgetfulness. I had never completely come to terms with what I had done in the woods six months before, when the shot rang out, and a violent compression of sound, widening upward and climbing fast, was soon dispersed on the heavy, still, hanging summer air. In and around the torn-up places inside myself, I continued to miss Rob. He used to say that nouns were bits of two-sided tape that made symbols stick to life. He once told me all of poetry was contained in the
b
of the word subtle.
Lying in my rented room, I wanted to fast-forward five years and compress all the stumbling, the late-night bone-chewing, the confusion and the pain into the future synthesis of a brisk, purposeful man who cared about new things, and new people. I could feel the soft moment arriving in which sleep would open up like a mouth and swallow me. I would flow through that sleep and wake up a tiny bit better. And each day from here on in would have that much less anguish than the day before, and would be a small stop against the forward current of regret. Because what’s past is past, right?
Right?