The Eliot Girls (18 page)

He glanced around. “How long have you been married?”

She thought for a second. “Fifteen years. No, sixteen.”

“You were quite young.”

“Not really. Not for the times.”

His stare dissected her, as though he was about to challenge her. She shifted uncomfortably, nervous but revelling. Then the light splintered his iris and his attention bounded away again.

She was tempted to turn the question around on him but afraid that if she mentioned his wife, he would remember that he shouldn't be there. One of the things she had heard at school was that he and Clayton Quincy had been married for under a year, a fact that further foiled her attempts to read him. This was the inequity she was always fighting—the thirst to know about him when he seemed uninterested in knowing much about her other than the way her neck tasted. Even at work, this essential detachment was there. She had been so certain that he would be a show-off, that he would be perpetually hammering her and the other teachers with his superior knowledge, but in time she came to realize that a more typical boastfulness might have been a relief. His intelligence seemed to be something he protected, as though they weren't worth displaying it for. Where were the theatrical verbosity and rhetorical pyrotechnics that had so dazzled her in her university professors? But this disengagement had its appeal, too. He was a stranger to her, as she was to him.

“Well, it's a good marriage,” she said. “It's not a bad marriage anyway.”

The room was growing dark around them, the thin light in the windows replaced with deep indigo. The days had been getting shorter for a long time now, but Ruth felt she was noticing the season change all at once, for the first time. She was surprised, as always, by the hasty end to the day. She turned on the lamp at Richard's bedside, and the room filled with a warm light. A private glow of home and hearth, domestic interiors.

“It's odd seeing someone's room when it's so different from how you pictured it,” he said, lying down again.

“You pictured my room?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

He looked around. “I don't know. I can't quite put my finger on it. I wouldn't have anticipated a print like that, for instance. It doesn't quite fit with the nude, does it?”

He gestured towards a large picture on the far wall, of white horses in a field. She had bought it early in her marriage at an overheated print shop on Wellington Street. It was a decidedly dated print, no longer remotely to her taste. Against the backdrop of a watery teal sky, three white horses grazed on a meadow's long grasses, which swayed dreamily in implied wind, while at a distance the rest of the herd loitered angelically, also grazing. Richard had initially refused to hang the picture, mistaking the horses for unicorns. Now it was so sentimental a relic of her past that Ruth had never considered removing it.

“A long ago purchase,” she said, looking away in embarrassment. “Look, it's getting late. The clock wants me to notice it.”

“It's a lovely room,” he said, reaching out his hand. “Far better than anything I've ever lived in.”

“It's just a room.”

“I'm tempted to fall asleep here.”

“Don't,” she replied. She sat up and buttoned her shirt crookedly, then tossed his underwear and socks to the foot of the bed.

He rose slowly and gathered his clothes like a child being ordered to pick up toys. She averted her eyes while he dressed. This nakedness seemed entirely unconnected to his earlier nakedness. Where his eroticized body had been an argument, an assertion of itself, a demand to be followed, this body sought invisibility, was benign and defenceless, asking to be shielded. He stood in front of the window and stooped to pull on his old grey underwear, which had a small rip at the hem of the right leg. He pulled his black socks up lopsidedly, balancing precariously on one long, pale leg, then the other. When he reached for his pants, she felt his eyes seek hers, and a torrent of feeling came over her, more similar to what she felt for her daughter than anything she'd ever felt for a man: a throbbing protectiveness, an affection far more raw, more fierce, than sexual desire.

She knew that soon he would be gone from her bedroom. She knew that they would have to negotiate their way back downstairs, and that the descent would be delicate and tense, as perilous as the ascent was mindless. She knew that the dogs would bombard him and he would drive away too quickly. She knew that she would tear the sheets off the bed and stuff them into the bottom of the laundry hamper, and she knew that her house would return to her, then, in all its uncompromising inevitability.

But for some moments yet she had him there, in her bedroom, mutely unrepentant, in the heady convolution of foolishness and bravery, and she joined him in acknowledgment of what they had just done.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
T
en

IN THE WEEKS THAT
followed, the insomnia that crept up on Ruth periodically in her life became a fixture. It seemed that she had entirely forgotten how to fall asleep. What had once seemed so simple was now as elusive and tortuous a process as trying to find her glasses when they were sitting on top of her head. She thought of other nights longingly, as if recalling a perfect long-ago kiss. What had she done on those good nights?

Could she really hear, or was she just imagining, that someone had been turning over a coughing car engine for the past fifteen minutes? When Audrey was a baby, Ruth had often lain in bed, thinking, even though everyone was fast asleep, that she could hear her crying in the distance. She would evoke, with disturbing verisimilitude, behind the house's ticking and heaving, the radiator's irregular thumps and the creaky exhalations of the old pipes, the exact rhythm of Audrey's wails, the choking rise and wearied pauses, the splutters of frustration and need. What was real, and what was in her head? A heavy bass beat—presumably from a teenager's car parked not far enough away—invaded the dark. The throaty squeals of fighting raccoons erupted undeniably. She was glad to have her unwilling vigil disturbed by these sounds. They were real. Richard's uneven breathing was real. The stifling heat of his body.

Finally she got up, wrapped the chenille throw around her shoulders, and went downstairs, noting the time—1:13—on the greenish light of the oven clock. In the living room, Stevie greeted her as if it were one o'clock in the afternoon, then climbed back into her spot on the couch and fell asleep, as promptly as if she were rubbing Ruth's nose in it. Could it really be that simple?

Of course, it was no wonder wakefulness plagued her. Her head was stuck at Eliot, in the final moments of her afternoon. She had returned to her classroom after stealing a package of paper for her home printer and found Henry sitting in a shadowed corner, his hands folded tidily in his lap, watching her. His voice started out of nowhere. “Touch your breast,” he said. It was by now the last week of school before Christmas break, and the fact that they would not see each other for over two weeks hovered in the air between them. When he said, “Come with me,” she didn't stifle her ready consent, nodding with complete, though hidden, happiness, smothered by the scratchy embrace of his winter coat.

All her feelings for Henry were headily regressive. Something about being in love seemed essentially girlish, an inciting of emotions and activities she ought to have outgrown—she hadn't been so desperate for approval in years, so unreasonably hopeful, so wracked by pleasurable despair—but she was doing all those trite and tired things, holding hands, kissing in the rain, necking in cramped back seats, and for once her feelings were spinning in a maelstrom of incautious superlatives, for once her mind wasn't spoiling it all with cynical commentary. Could she be in love in this way as a woman with lines on her face, a woman whose body was aging noticeably, a woman with a teenage daughter? All this gasping excitement, this scatterbrained unrest, was unseemly somehow: it made her both young and old, acutely aware of her age and forgetful of it. She should be interested in politics. She should be reading historical non-fiction.

People often said that what destroyed them most about an affair, what ultimately made them end it, was the secrecy. Ruth had thought that she would feel that way—after the first night in the staff room, she had worried that she couldn't go ahead with it—she had thought that she would feel revulsion for herself, for the lies she was blithely offering Richard, for her callous bliss. She had thought that every joy would be cancelled out by guilt, by concern for her family, by a reliable moral pulse. But the secrecy was a dizzying liberation. A revelation. She felt that she could never again live without the energy her secret breathed into her. She wanted to fight this thing with Henry—a fight that was not just the fight against infidelity itself but the fight against failure, against the collapse of decency, against being a certain kind of person—but to complicate this fight, the proper fight, was the competing fact that she also didn't want to be another kind of person: a person who wouldn't do this. The strongest part of her didn't just want to have an affair. It wanted to be someone who could be blindsided by an impossible love, or a love that might not even be love at all, but merely an extravagant infatuation.

Beside her, Stevie twitched and yelped softly, dreaming. The floorboards creaked upstairs. She thought Richard was getting up to use the bathroom, but his figure appeared on the stairs, naked. He didn't speak until he was in the doorway.

“Come back to bed,” he said.

His voice had none of the husky tremble of sleep about it, and he didn't look at all cold, but his face did look tired, unready for lucid interactions. He half-squinted at her as though even the moonlight was too harsh. There was nothing he could do for her, but she stood and accepted his outstretched hand, followed him back to bed.

Under the covers, she lay on her back, stiffly alert, like a child assuming the posture of sleep but not the spirit, and Richard lay on his side, his head on his bent arm, sleepily stroking her arm. Marlow snored on the floor.

“I can't sleep either,” he said. “I'm coming up on that awful deadline. Max the pit.”

“He's still boarding, no?”

“I'm being pushed.”

“Well, it's long enough for the poor dog. There are lots of people who would want him. It's time for you to bring an end to this standoff.”

“I know. I keep putting the owner off. He won't agree to an adoption.”

This picture of Richard at work, ineptly trying to stave off his clients' most ignorant demands, was not the one she had cleaved to over the course of their marriage, not the one she needed when she suffered a loss of faith in her union. As he spoke of the dilemma, which ought not to be a dilemma at all, she was overcome by a terrible sense of defeat.

“You've got to do something, Richard,” she said, her urgent voice hardly conducive to the tone his hand, still stroking her arm, was trying to create. “The dog needs you. Don't let some fool make all the wrong decisions.”

She thought of the pit bull, shut in its crate at the clinic, lucky in its ignorance alone, booted from the family it loved while its fate was feebly debated by two men who claimed to love dogs. Richard ought to have been its protector, but some intangible weakness was preventing him from embracing this role. An urge to hit him stole over her. She sat up in bed and pressed his arm hard. “Richard, are you listening to me? Richard?”

“I'll figure it out,” he said at last.

How could she convey to him the importance of this particular moment, this particular animal? The view of Richard that had sustained her—it was not just a memory, but a living stream that carried her past the petty disturbances of every day—was of a man in total control. A man who was the guardian of the most uncomplicated, and sometimes the most exemplary, love people experienced, a warden, indeed, of life itself.

It was with him that she had first seen an animal euthanized. They had been working together for several months when he had asked her one afternoon in June to assist in the euthanizing of an old ginger cat; she had just watched in sympathetic misery as its elderly owners had left, shaking, unable to stay through the procedure. Every part of her wanted to bolt, but she scooped up the cat gently but definitively and followed Richard into the upstairs exam room. In silent complicity they readied themselves. She was careful not to betray how wobbly she was feeling. She didn't sing to the cat in that irritating voice so many assistants used or look mournfully at Richard as if to say,
Must we do it? Is there a way around it?
She rubbed behind the cat's ear and said in a common sense voice, “You've had a good life, haven't you?”

Until this moment, she had never paid much attention to Richard. The things about him that left her sexually indifferent—his conservatism and diffidence, his inviolable professionalism—now rendered him a steadying presence. He presided over the event both calmly and compassionately, and his witnessing of this death, of this moment before death, aroused such gratitude in her that she discovered it was possible to feel utterly adult and utterly girlish at the same time. And she knew that she ought not to be noticing his deep brown eyes (she had looked around them or over them or next to them before, but never at them), or the shadows beneath (always present, she realized), and if she knew that she ought not to be noticing his eyes as the cat lay between them, then she knew that she certainly ought not to be noticing his lips, the way he pressed them together in concentration. But she was feeling somewhat unhinged, dreamily sad, and she couldn't stop herself from thinking that she would like to end just like that, histrionics banished, a sacred silence all through the room, and at her side one who understood the respectability of death.

Richard administered the two needles promptly, and it was over.

Months later, Richard confessed that he had felt anaesthetized himself that day—by the proximity of recent death, he initially thought, but he knew that no past euthanizing had cast a similar spell over him. As a vet, he'd had to put many animals to sleep, and because there was no way he could square himself with being an administrator of death, he'd come to see the needle as the one with the will, himself as the necessary mechanics behind it. No, it was a proximity of a different kind that had disarmed all his physical capabilities, that both troubled and soothed him: every warm rising breath of the body that had never been so close to him. He had never before noticed Ruth's hands. One lay on the metal table at the cat's head and the other rested on the cat's stomach. Her fingers were slender and straight, but the nails were rough and unmanicured, and he hadn't expected the effect this observation had on him.

Richard had once received a birthday card with a photograph of a woman cupping a brimming handful of red currants. The card was not to his taste, but he found himself drawn again and again to the image. In a gesture of sentimentality that wasn't at all his style, he tore off the photograph and saved it in his desk drawer. In the foreground of the photograph were the woman's plain hands and the glistening currants, linked by a network of green stems, and in the blurry background was the woman's blue gingham apron. For a time, Richard had thought that he would have to find something worthwhile in the composition of the photograph to justify his attraction to it. Did he detect an unusual vibrancy in the blue of the gingham? Was there sexual imagery in the bursting red currants? Or perhaps, more compellingly, the photographer was presenting a feminist argument about the relationship between sexuality (the currants in the foreground—why?) and domesticity (the long-suffering apron). He finally gave up theorizing and allowed himself, after a humbling assessment of his taste in art, simply to be content with the feeling the photograph gave him. He knew that it was shamefully womanly to store a card photograph in his desk and to approach that desk every so often with the sole intention of pulling out the photograph to stare at it in the dusty light of the window, to seek entrancement and find it so easily, and to estimate conscientiously how often he could refer to that picture without diluting its impact (once a week, he settled on), to go against his self-respect and pride in his taste all because of the warm, obscure feeling that washed over him every time he glimpsed the currants, the gingham, those hands.

In Ruth, as the cat lay between them, he saw some suggestion of that picture he had saved for so many years. The connection lay in the hands: those slender, athletic fingers with the masculine nails. He understood, finally, his vision of the feminine. Ruth was not the kind of woman behind that apron. But it didn't matter. As she and Richard looked at each other over the cat's body, both were conscious that nothing more intimate could have passed between them. Death had come into the room, and along with it, the wonder they'd been missing.

In the years that followed, Ruth sometimes worried that they had bungled all the quintessentially sublime moments of a life: the engagement, the wedding, the new baby. No one would ever tell stories about them; they were too boring. She had told Richard that she was pregnant on an answering machine message, as an aside to her main reason for calling, a request that he bring home soda crackers. In the minutes after giving birth, her first words had been, “I can't believe I wanted to do this.” Richard's proposal had been equally a mess. In her shared house on Howland Avenue, her roommates squabbling in the kitchen, he had produced a blue velvet ring box from his knapsack, where it lay next to an extra pair of briefs and half a tuna sandwich, and asked her if she would like to get married. Even in the midst of these moments, a part of her had known that such blunders had consequences beyond the immediate, transient disappointment. She and Richard had failed to form a compelling account of their life together, a narrative that referenced all the amazing collisions of time and space that delivered them into each other's worlds, a myth that was poignant and self-reverential and sustaining.

Yet there was this: a cat's heart had ceased beating under her hand, but Richard's eyes had assured her that everything would be okay.

 

“WE NEED TO TALK
about Marlow” were Richard's first words to her the following morning.

Ruth was standing in the corner of the kitchen in cotton underwear and a T-shirt, holding a skirt to be ironed, and Audrey sat at the table picking at a bowl of Cheerios. Alert to the sound of his name, Marlow thumped his tail against the tile floor. “You there, old man,” said Richard, crouching down to box his ears gently. “Ruth, I got an email from Jess this morning. She can't walk the dogs today. She's got stomach flu.”