Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (23 page)

“—To be perfectly honest,” she was saying, with a conspiratorial wink, “I'm surprised at my cathexis to you tonight.”

“Cathexis?”

“Id to id, kid.” She laughed. “Early childhood attraction.” She put her arms around his neck and smiled. “I know who I am now. I know all the little corners of myself. And not just the clean ones, either. I'm ready.”

“I'm not.”

“Of course you're not, sweetie,” she said, reassuringly. “You're running on fumes. It's called Jewish mother guilt.”

“You're over that, are you?”

“Worked it through on the couch. My banker, my new sweetie?” She paused and then went on proudly, “He's a German.”

“Ah.” Lily had always loathed Germans. “Amazing.”

“Very. Shows where I've gotten. Tonight, hearing you talk about Selma, I know you're not done with her. She's still hanging around, isn't she?”

If you only knew!

“Poisoning your
self.
I
worked through mine. You have to work through yours. And we'd be all set. Two strong selves. Win-win. Analyzed, the sky's the limit.”

Orville felt cold. The century-old radiators banged the pipes, taking their time catching up with the thermostat.
Like I never seem to catch up with my life.
He yearned for that sensual motherly warmth as a bird in late autumn, stalling migration, yearns for imagined sun. But he knew from his doctoring how far the actual falls short of the yearning, like the gap between a flight and a fall. He remembered something that had happened last summer with Celestina Polo in the hotel overlooking Lago d'Orta. A sparrow had flown into their room. A small sparrow, a fledgling. Even, perhaps, on its first flight. It fluttered frantically about the room searching for a way out. Finally, exhausted, it landed on the marble ledge over the fireplace. He reached for it and gently took it in his hand. It was tiny, remarkably light, as if made all of feathers. Ghostly but for its trembling. Its eyes glittered like black ice. He took it out onto the balcony, raised his hand palm up to the sky, as if offering a sacrifice from the realm of Good Human Beings to the Gods of Flight, and released it. It lay there on his palm, dead. It had died of terror.

“This may sound strange,” he said to Lily, “but I'm moving in another direction.”

“Which is?”

“I feel I've gotten too much into myself. I'm trying to get out of myself, looking for something else.”

“Ohh . . . kay,” she said, clearly suspicious. “What ‘something else'?”

He didn't know but said, “The spiritual.” This was Celestina's word, but he borrowed it like you borrow a friend's car when yours breaks down.

“Oh, boy.”

Her obvious contempt brought back a memory of his own contempt, at first, for Celestina's talking about spiritual stuff. And then brought back something Celestina had said in one of their long talks after making love. “Freud is a joke, a cruel joke. Just another tight-assed
patriarca
putting evil energy out into the world,
caro,
the energy of the ego, the self. The self is the past. If you focus on your past, you live your misery.
Allora,
always comparing yourself to someone else and feeling better than them or worse than them. Always into becoming, while our freedom is in our very being.”

“Never mind,” he said now. “You wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

“Not getting into myself or my past but getting out of it.”

“Running away?”

It was like a punch in the gut. This was her old accusation, and Selma's, too. “I was thinking,” he said, trying to breathe, “of being in love.”

“With?”

“Now, with Miranda and Cray. When I first met you, with you. We were so in love. Then, we forgot ourselves. Remember?”

“Cray?”

“Her son. He's six.”

She sat quietly. Her eyes pooled with tears. He felt a rush of old love for her—more, felt for all she'd been through and come through. She was, after all, a fighter.

She reached for a tissue and her arm hit her drink and spilled it and she said “Shit!” pretty viciously. Faster than he thought possible she got up, snatched a roll of paper towels, and wiped up the spill, cleaning the whole segment of the cherry table, then the whole table. She faced him again.

“Bottom line?” she said. “I stayed, you ran. Where do I sleep?”

“Wait a minute—”

“Where?”

“Upstairs. Four bedrooms. Take your pick.”

“Where will you be?”

“Down here. On the couch.”

“Very funny.”

“I didn't mean it to be.”

“Exactly.” She gathered up her things. “I'll find my own way.”

“Upstairs?”

“That too.” She turned away.

“Lily?”

“Yes?”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm not.”

“This is all so, so incredibly sad!”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “But I don't expect happiness anymore.”

“No?”

“No. Just a liveable level of neurosis.”

“Good night.”

“Good-bye.” She started down the hallway. He heard a sob. She came back and stood in the doorway. Her voice trembled as she spoke.

“My big mistake was not that I let you into my life, no. I loved you with all my heart, and we helped each other escape from our families, mostly, and that's a big deal. No, my big mistake was letting your mother into our lives. You want to know what did it, what screwed us up? It wasn't me, and it wasn't you, and it certainly wasn't any goddamn rodent. It was your mother. And it still is. Good-bye.”

He had a rough night on the couch. Awakening at dawn, he heard Lily come downstairs. He lay there in the living room, squinting through his banging hangover down the hall toward the kitchen, pretending to still be asleep. She stood at the kitchen counter, pen in hand. She glanced at him to see if he was awake.

There was no sound. The snow had stopped. The wind had died. Sharp reddish light was starting to dice up the dark. She was leaving.

He lay still, in turmoil. An old part of him was desperate to open his eyes, a new part unwilling.

Lily finished her writing. She glanced at him again, seemed to shudder, or shiver, and, he sensed, even move toward him a step or two. Quickly she turned away and, without looking back, walked out the back door, forcing it open against a significant drift.

He sat up. A car door slammed. An engine started. She'll never get out, he thought. I'll help her. He walked to the back door, hesitated. Ah, the hell with it.

He heard her car wheels whine, trying for traction, and then he heard them getting it. Despite himself, he felt a wave of regret. Wait—there's more to say! He walked out the back door into the high drifts of the backyard, his bare feet landing in her footsteps. Standing in the driveway he shouted, “Hey, Lily, wait!”

Too late. Somehow she had gotten out without a hitch, her big new Saab blasting through a drift where the driveway met Coffin.

She was gone. He stood there in the clear space where her car had been, as if at a barren fresh grave in a snowy cemetery, surprised at how sad he felt now that it was finally over. Then he realized, from the fierce bite of the cold, that not only was he barefoot and bareheaded but wearing only his underpants. He went back inside.

On the kitchen table was her note.

Dear O.,

I feel all torn up. I'm not as tough as I came across. I made a vow “'Til death do us part” and it's still down there in my unconscious somewhere. I still love you but I know now that it's over. Because you have changed, and because you're so deeply involved with your “Miranda.” And your “Cray.” Finally I have closure. I'm crying but that's it. Love,

Me.

He was staring at the letter—at the stains of her tears that had fallen on it—when the front doorbell rang. Hope shot up his spine—and fear shot back down. He put on his clothes, went down the hallway, and opened the front door.

Henry Schooner. Bundled up beautifully, head bare, dazzling white. Behind him was his mammoth army Jeep, a snowplow hung from the front. It was revving rhythmically, like an animal growling, ready to spring.

“Hey, old buddy. Need any help gettin' out?”

“No, thanks.”

“Y'sure? I mean, you got that bare patch there for traction where your lady friend's car was parked, but that darn Chrysler's hell's bells in the snow. Can't have our town doctor socked in, right?”

Orville stared at him, stared into that cheerful good citizen's dark eyes, until he had a weird feeling that brought to mind how the boy Mowgli had been hypnotized by Kaa the Snake's eyes in the
Jungle Book
video, and the only words that came out, and from what seemed a long way off, were, “Right. Thanks.”

“No charge,” Schooner said happily and tromped down the porch in those oversized no-nonsense boots worn by the astronauts walking on the moon, tromped through the four-foot snowdrifts where the walk used to be, and got into his indomitable moonbuggyish Jeep. Rolling down the window, from which came the optimistic strains of Copland's great symphony of the West, Henry called back up to him, “And don't worry, old friend. I'll send my man right over to do your walk.”

· 18 ·

Miranda was up in the attic of her house. She sat on the floor. The rusted lid of her aunt's old steamer trunk yawned wide above her. As if, she thought, to drive home the indifference of things to human history. They rust, we die.

The attic ran the length of the house, from the small gable window looking out at the two lone pines to the matching window facing the river, through which came the slanting sun of the February afternoon, settling in four trapezoidal sheets on the wide floorboards—much as it had, on and off, for 320-odd years. It was a Saturday. She was alone in the house. Cray had gone off with Amy to watch her rehearse
West Side Story
at her private school, Spook Rock Country Day. Penny had picked him up at one and would drop him back at three. Miranda had arranged all this carefully. She needed to be alone for a few hours of nostalgia. Her mother's satin-and-lace wedding dress, which had also been her wedding dress—floor-length, it had hidden her leg that day—flowed out of the trunk onto her lap. It was the fourth anniversary of the day her husband had died.

She saw now how deaths echo deaths. For the first time since his death, her time with her grief was not pure. Next to the trunk was the cardboard box emblazoned with Scomparza Moving and Funeral that contained Selma's letters. The slant of light on the floorboards reminded her not of Florida sunlight but of that autumnal light through the library window falling on the slab of Becraft limestone pocked with trilobites, the afternoon that Orville and her love had coalesced. She felt split between the memory of the man who had died and the little death of sorts, two nights ago now, of the man she had come to love. Both men had let her down. The worst was the false promise each had made to her son.

Maybe it was just her fatigue. Cray had caught the inevitable February cold, and his coughing and sneezing had kept both of them up most of the last two nights. Between her exhaustion and her grief, she felt as if she were in an altered state—quick to snap, slow to forgive. Cray had been the target of some of this. When he left with Amy and Penny, she thought she caught a hint of relief in him at getting away from her. Which also broke her heart a little. The weird thing now, she thought, in the fuzz of being overtired but not sleepy, is that of all these things in the attic, the Orville stuff is more vital to me than the stuff of my dead husband. Am I avoiding the pain of my marriage and its end?

She hadn't yet gotten together with Orville after the awkward phone call when he told her that his ex was with him. He called the next morning, said he would come out and see her after work that night. His voice sounded different—distant, filled with what she took as unfaced guilt—and she felt herself falling, spiraling down. At the end of the day he called from the hospital, shouts and sirens in the background, saying that he was overwhelmed. He sounded tired and sardonic. He called again after midnight. The sound of ambulances and horrific screams filled the phone line. People were dying, he said, but, “just my luck, not fast enough for me to leave.” He couldn't get there but would see her the next day. Given the impending anniversary of her husband's death—which she'd kept secret from him—his easy cynicism about death didn't sit well with her.

His last phone call came an hour ago, his voice raspy with fatigue. He was in his office, hadn't slept all night, and said he'd be there within the hour.

“Don't bother,” she'd said.

“At all?” He sounded worried.

“No, no—I mean that soon. Take a nap, get yourself together. I've got something to do. I'll see you for dinner. Say, six?”

“Is Cray around?”

Miranda felt a surge of resentment. Orville had lured Cray in and was reaping the benefits of a son without doing the true work of a father. She saw all this as her own fault, and instead of screaming at him, said, “Should be, by then.”

“Great. I miss him . . .” a millisecond hesitation, but long enough, “. . . too.”

You fucker,
she'd wanted to say, but hung up.

She turned to the trunk again, to Joe. Studying their wedding photo, reading his love letters, her heart felt it all over again—the love, the tenderness, the hope, the spilling out of her secrets for the first time ever to a man.

She wept softly. But the sobs deepened, became angry. She pounded her fists on the dusty floorboards, screaming, “What an asshole you are and maybe you did it on purpose, you jerk! You couldn't stand our happiness, was that it? Too little risk?” The forlorn stupidity and aloneness of it all tore at her heart. “What about your son, fuckhead? Look what you did to your son! Do you know he goes around even at his happiest like a kid who's had a hole blown through his heart? That I can see in his hunger for the other asshole, the Great Doctor Rose, the questions he has to live with every single minute of every single day—‘Why, Momma, why? Who was he, Momma, who was he?' You think I can tell him? I don't think I ever really knew!
Our
son. He's gonna walk around the world looking for you, Joe, and what do I say to him? Were you too much of a goddamn boy yourself to share him with me? And now I'm doing it again? Shit!”

She stopped. The attic seemed to have become small, a dollhouse attic. The trunk was a dollhouse trunk. The dress was made of paper, not satin, not lace.

Desolate, she wrapped her arms around herself and rocked gently back and forth, remembering now—finally!—the way he hugged her, how they fooled around and were foolish, and so young, and a wave of grief hit her and knocked her off her feet, surprising and inevitable like grief always is, and she was weeping quietly, calming, riding out the long ebb of her sorrow, feeling it start to turn to just sorrow.

“Hello? Miranda?”

Startled, she checked her watch. Of all days to be early, he chooses today? Damn.

Orville's head poked up through the open trapdoor.

“Miranda?” he called again, in a worried voice, his eyes searching the dim attic.

“Yes?”

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Your car was out front, but there was no sign of you and . . .” He caught sight of the wedding dress and then the big cardboard box from Scomparza Moving and Funeral. “What's wrong?”

“What time is it?”

“Almost three.”

“I thought I said six. Dinner.”

“Two patients went quick, and I managed to arrange some coverage.”

“No nap?”

“Nope.” His eyes were accommodating to the dimness. In her eyes he saw distress. “You look horrible. Can I come up?”

“No!”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Go away. I'll be down in a few minutes.”

“I want to help.”

“Please. Go away.”

“I'm sorry about not seeing you sooner. It's all my fault. I wanted to, I tried my best to, but—”

“Goddamnit it's not about you, it's got nothing to do with you!” She saw his face fall and felt awful. Reaching out a hand toward him, she said, “C'mon. I'm sorry. Listen.” She took a deep breath. “I . . . well . . . today's the day my husband died.” She saw his surprise, and then felt his shame.

“I . . .” He paused. “I'm so sorry . . . really, really sorry. I'll leave you to it.” He started to climb back down the ladder.

“No! Come here.” He hesitated. “Come here.”

“I thought you wanted me to go away.”

“Now I want you with me.” But suddenly she remembered Selma's letters and, as he climbed up, gave the Scomparza box a push further back into the darkness. “Watch your head.”

He crawled over, feeling like a big dog. Still on all fours, he asked, “You want to talk about him?”

“No, just sit here beside me.” She smiled. “Sit! Sit! Good boy.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, he did. They had just settled down side by side in silence when a horn honked outside, and then they heard the door open and slam and several voices call out for both of them.

“They're back,” she said. “Let's go.”

“No, no, you stay. I'll go.”

“Cray will wonder—”

“I've been dying to see him. Let me.”

“Amy's with him.”

“Even better. Come down when you're ready.”

Orville clambered down the ladder and met Cray just as he was running up the narrow stairs. “Hi, Cray!”

“Hi, Orvy!”

“Oh, I
love
that word very much!” Cray jumped up into his arms and gave him a cross between a hug and a choke hold. He sneezed into Orville's ear and sneezed again. “Here,” Orville said, taking a fresh tissue out of his left pants pocket, where he always kept a supply. “Blow.”

“Uncle O.?”

“Amy babe!”

Orville carried Cray downstairs to Amy and Penny. Penny fingered her key ring. As usual, she seemed to him to be one step ahead of where she was. On a tight schedule.

“I'm on a tight schedule,” she said. “Gotta hop.”

“Okay. How was the show, Ame?”

“Great!”

“Were you good?”
“Way!” She looked him over. “You look bad!”

“You should see it from this side.”

“Are you taking the vitamins I got you?” He nodded. “You're not! I told you—”

“C'mon, Amy,” Penny said. “We're late.” They left.

Cray, coughing, pulled at Orville's leg. “Orvy, I wrote you another novel.” He put a piece of paper in Orville's hand.

MY FRIEND ORVY

By ***
CRAY
*** age 6 and 1

 

You are my frend I am yor frend

We are both frends together

Even tho we are apart

We still can be together in on way

That way is

If Im alon you are with me

If yor alone I am with you

Thats it!

 

“Hey, that's great! Thanks.”

“Can we watch a video together?”

“Until your mom comes downstairs, sure.”

“Why only until then?”

“'Cause I have to talk to her.”

“You always talk to her!” He sneezed more stuff onto Orvy.

“Here, blow again. Hey, that was a great novel.”

“Yeah, but my imagination isn't too big anymore.”

“It isn't?”

“Nope. When I was little I had a big imagination. It was real big—this big!” He spread his arms wide. “And when I grew bigger it got smaller.”

“It did?”

“Yeah. It's big 'til you get to school. Then there are all these things they teach you and it fills your head up so it gets smaller and smaller and then it's really small. Like this big.” He put his fingers close together. “So now it's small.”

“I don't think it's so small. I think it's still very terrific.”

“Not as small as grown-ups', but it's small. When you're really really grown-up it goes away. I'll put on
Bambi.
You stay with me for the scary part.”

But Orville couldn't. Bambi's mom was still alive when Miranda came down. Cray demanded that he watch with him since he was too afraid to see the hunters kill his mom. Orville felt a pull to Miranda, needing to attend to unfinished business. Miranda, too, needed to talk. Cray sulked and turned back to the TV. Miranda suggested they go out for a walk by the river.

The late February afternoon was cold, the sun mostly down. The dark trees and bushes and railroad trestle over the creek stood out as sharply against the shiny white fields as a photo negative. Both Miranda and Orville were exhausted, their perceptions awry and jagged. He offered her his arm. She took it. Through their puffy winter coats, touch was muffled.

They inched along the icy snow-packed road toward the turnabout where the road and the creek and the tracks in front of the river all met. The snow was deep. Only a few black flecks of cinder, disturbed by the snowplow, freckled the white. The wind was from the west now, from the mountains. The creek was iced over and silent, the river iced mostly over and silent. No boats were in sight, and no birds. But for the wind circling their chilled ears, there was no sound.

Orville kept silent to give Miranda a chance to talk. She said nothing. He tried to clear the air about Lily's visit, telling Miranda pretty much what had happened.

“But she
is
in fact gone?” Miranda asked coolly.

“Yes.”

“Not about to return?”

“No. She's in love with herself and her analyst—in that order.” He considered. “And a German, too. She views the German as progress.”

“How old is this woman anyway?”

“Chronologically, thirty-eight. Psychoanalytically, I think three or four.”

“And you have no plans to get back together with her?”

“No way! What is this? It wasn't my fault she showed up.”

“It was your fault not to see me for two days—”

“All I saw for two days was bits and pieces of Columbians.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, okay. Okay. Look, she threw me. And ever since, I've been in a funk, a total funk. I'm a creep. I said I was sorry and I am. Can't you just let go of it?”