“Fine, I’ll think about it,” Evelyn said, more because she didn’t want to argue in front of Ingrid than because she had any intention of considering the idea. There was no way she could explain to Ray that doing the housework gave her a claim on the house itself that she otherwise lacked; everything was so thoroughly his. To vacuum the expensive rug in the living room, to wash the good teacups by hand, to scrub out the claw-foot bathtub was in some small way to own them, to be invested in their upkeep, their well-being, their future. If they had a cleaning lady, as Ray called it, meaning a maid, Evelyn’s tentative right of ownership would be usurped. Besides, she had no idea what you said to maids, how you worked out the power of who was boss, how things should be done. Whatever it was, she would do it wrong and it would be a disaster. No, there was no way.
“So come up to the ridge.”
“You two go,” Evelyn said. She turned to Ingrid. “Go with him; Ray says it’s the nicest view in the neighborhood—” and then to Ray: “I’m just a little tired, sweetheart. Honestly, I just want to lie here in this chair, not go hiking. I’ll skip doing the floor, all right?”
“Come on, then,” Ingrid said to Ray, “or it’ll be too dark.”
They started off toward the ravine at the end of the backyard. When they had climbed the hill, they came out of the trees into open meadow. A wide flat seam of rock marked where the hill sloped steeply down again. They crossed the grass and sat down there. Ray was right, Ingrid thought, this was the nicest view. You could see all the old farm fields below, and the dark lines of stone walls, and an old barn that Ingrid recognized from having passed it on her bike. They were facing west, and the sun was already down behind the tops of the pine trees on the hills in the distance. Far off to the left in a bare patch of earth, a yellow backhoe, looking small as a toy, stood parked beside the pile of dirt it had excavated.
Ingrid realized she felt better; the complicated feeling Evelyn’s hand on her harm had sent crawling through her was dissipating. Ray was quiet beside her and they sat in silence for a while, watching the sun drop between the trees.
Then Ingrid said, “Can you really kill yourself with drink?”
“What? Sure. Not very efficiently, though.”
Had Ray been paying more attention he would have wondered at the origin of the question, but he was thinking about his conversation with Evelyn. How much easier it would be if she would just try to enjoy the pleasures life offered! A walk in the woods after dinner, a Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts. This weekend they had tickets with the Yeagers for Vladimir Horowitz at Symphony Hall. If Evelyn acted the way she just had—defensive, disinterested—the evening would be a disaster.
Perhaps, he reflected, he should take Evelyn out to dinner alone first, rather than making dinner a foursome. Then she’d have had his undivided attention and a few of glasses of wine to cocoon herself in before they met the Yeagers; she’d feel safer and less inclined to be paranoid—maybe she’d even have a good time.
“If I were going to kill myself I’d take hemlock,” Ingrid announced.
“What?” Ray shook away his thoughts and looked at her. “I trust you’re not thinking of doing so.”
“No—I’m just saying. I have a book on plant identification that tells you everything about poisoning yourself. You don’t even need to eat that much of it. What method would you do?”
“I wouldn’t kill myself.”
“Just
suppose
.”
“I’ve never thought about it,” he said.
Ingrid made an exasperated sound in her throat. “Well think about it. There must be some circumstance. Just suppose.”
“Well, all right.” He would indulge her. He thought for a moment. “I suppose, perhaps if I were, who was that explorer? Oates? He was stranded in the Antarctic with a party of men and they were starving. It was clear they would all perish in a matter of days, so he decided to meet death gallantly. He got up, very weak, and looked out of the tent at the blizzard. ‘I think I’ll just step out for a bit, ’he said to his men, and he walked out into the storm, out to his death.
“I wouldn’t mind dying like that—doing something adventurous. Climbing a mountain and dying up on some lonely peak. Being devoured later by mountain lions.”
Ingrid looked at Ray, at his round tortoise-shell glasses, at the slight protrusion of his belly visible against his shirt, at his clean fingers twirling a long piece of grass. He would never die from too much nature in a faraway place. And he didn’t even know it. Ingrid felt a rush of sympathy for him. But there was no way to express it and the sympathy nose-dived into depression. She foraged in the pocket of her shirt and pulled out a cigarette, the last one in the package.
“You really shouldn’t smoke so much,” Ray said.
“Why?”
“Cancer, Ingrid, emphysema. You cough a lot. I’ve heard you.”
“Aah.” Ingrid got the cigarette lit and took a deep drag. “I figure we’re all going to get blown up in a few years anyway, so there’s no point worrying about cancer. Do you think it would be worse dying a sudden violent death, like in an explosion, or dying slowly from radiation sickness?”
“Good Lord. You shouldn’t be thinking about such morbid things at your age.”
“At what age should I be thinking about them?” She attempted a smoke ring. “There are six nuclear reactors in New England alone. So even if we don’t blow each other up with missiles, in all likelihood we’ll melt ourselves down. Incidentally, there are only four reactors in California, so the one drawback of my coming east is that I’ve upped my chances of being in a meltdown by fifty percent.”
“That’s rather a bleak outlook, don’t you think?”
“Bleak and realistic: Three-mile Island? Or hello—Hiroshima? It’s not exactly comforting to be part of a species that would just go murder two hundred and fifty thousand people. Or exterminate six million, for that matter.”
“That’s true,” Ray said. Ingrid was right, in a way: human beings had been doing stupid and even evil things throughout history, and with each new century, the degree of stupidity and evil seemed to increase tenfold. But there was another way to look at it, a way Ingrid wasn’t seeing. “You have to remember,” he said, “that what we’re capable of as a species is something we’re continually discovering. Our great evils certainly do seem to find new ways of expressing themselves, but we discover we’re capable of great acts of love, too.”
“That is so reassuring,” said Ingrid.
He ignored her eye-rolling. “And not only the kinds of love that make headlines—the great political movements of nonviolence, or people who dedicate their lives to a cause and such. I think all of us have a greater capacity for love than we realize. And if we’re lucky, we find ourselves in a situation that brings it out.”
Ingrid said nothing, and Ray took the absence of a sarcastic remark as a sign that she was at least considering what he’d said. But the silence allowed him to replay his words, and hearing them in his head, he felt embarrassed. Why was he trying to convince a sixteen-year-old nihilist that love was a redeeming force in the universe? He turned his attention to the view. The sun had almost completely disappeared, and beneath the fanfare of pink and orange clouds, the grasses in the field had turned from a radiant green-gold to a dark gray. All at once he felt deeply depressed. He stood up and dusted his hands on his khakis, as if the feeling were one that might be brushed away like dirt.
“Shall we?” he asked.
Ingrid didn’t answer for a moment; then she stood up too.
“I haven’t watched the sun set for a while,” she said. She looked at the ground and drew a circle in the grass with her toe. “It’s nice up here. Thanks.”
Something rushed inside him, moved from him toward Ingrid. It was he who felt gratitude. “I’m glad you like it,” he said, and then found he couldn’t look at her. “We’d better go back while we can still see the path,” he said, and turned away.
Later, he spoke to Evelyn as she was getting into bed.
“I’ve been thinking, sweetheart. On Saturday, instead of dinner with the Yeagers before the symphony, perhaps just the two of us should go out.”
“Just us? Without the Yeagers, you mean?”
“Yes. Just you and me. I’d like to take you somewhere really nice.”
“I’d like that,” she said, “thank you.” And she kissed him, so long and slow and soft that he had the fleeting feeling that this show of gratitude was too strong for the situation, that there might be a misunderstanding somewhere, but her mouth was warm and delicious and her skin so pliable and smooth and sliding against him that after a moment no part of his mind was left free to analyze the exchange.
10.
Saturday afternoon at five o’clock Ray was tying his tie in preparation for the evening out. He’d made reservations at Les Artistes, a place he’d taken Evelyn a few times when they were dating, and where they hadn’t been in ages. Evelyn sat at the dressing table in a black dress he thought she looked very well in. He watched in the mirror as she dragged a mascara brush over her lashes to turn them from gold to black. She caught him looking and stopped, turned and watched him tie his tie.
“You look nice,” she said.
“You look even nicer.” He snugged the knot.
“What did you tell the Yeagers?” she asked.
“That we were having dinner alone and we’d meet them at Symphony Hall at seven-thirty. They didn’t mind.”
She put down the mascara. “But you said we weren’t going to the concert!”
It took him several long seconds to process this.
“Evelyn, I meant that you and I would go to dinner
first
, just the two of us, and then meet them at Symphony Hall, not that we’d cancel the whole evening.”
It was incredible that she could have misunderstood him, he thought, it was
not credible
. It was Vladimir Horowitz, and he’d been humming the Beethoven piece all day. Fighting back something that felt like fury, he said, “Do you really hate the Yeagers that much?”
For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then the color on her eyelashes began running in sooty rivulets over her cheeks.
“I thought you’d picked me,” she said. “Just once, I thought you’d picked me over them.”
“Why does there have to be a choice? But in any case,
I have
chosen you. I
married
you. That’s the strongest choosing there is. But Alex and Marseille are still my friends.”
And the argument was off and running like a music box, the same repetitive plunking tune that wouldn’t stop until the whole maddening song had been played. The hour of their dinner reservation came and went as Ray stood on one side of the bathroom door while Evelyn cried on the other. Then, tired of talking through the door, he went downstairs, made and drank a Manhattan. When he came back up, Evelyn was sitting on the edge of the bed. She’d washed off her makeup and her face was swollen and pink from crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m an idiot. I’ve ruined your evening.”
“Never mind. I’ll make us sandwiches and we’ll go straight to the concert.”
She shook her head at him and lay down. “I’m not going like this. Look at my face.”
He moved his eyes to his wife’s forehead, kept them there, on the constellation of freckles that resembled Ursa Minor, hoping his voice would not betray the anger he felt. There was still time to get to Symphony Hall.
“You look fine without makeup if you ask me,” he said, “but put it back on in the car if you want.”
“My eyes are bloodshot and my nose looks like Jimmy Durante’s. Marseille will see I’ve been crying—I don’t want them to think they aren’t getting along.”
“We
aren’t
getting along,” Ray said, his voice rising in exasperation, “we’re having an argument!”
“But we’re getting along in general! I—look, Ray, I’m not going to symphony hall with you and the Yeagers. It’s not going to happen.”
“You can’t waste a ticket to Vladimir Horowitz.”
“So take Ingrid.”
“Come on. That’s ridiculous.”
“Why? Practically all she’s done since she got here is ride her bike around by herself or sit in the junk room typing. She’d probably love to go into Boston.”
“But I wanted to go with you.”
Though as he said it, he realized he no longer did. He sat down on the bed, intending to take his wife’s hand, do something to reconnect at least with his desire for her company. But as he leaned in toward her she got up, flung open the bedroom door and went down the hall toward the guest room.
“You’re not going to ask her,” he called, but she was already doing it, he could hear her knock, and Ingrid’s muffled “Come in.” He jumped up, followed in time to hear Evelyn say that her face was all red because she was having an allergy attack and was not going out after all and—he heard his own words played back to him in his wife’s voice—“You can’t waste a ticket to Vladimir Horowitz.”
When he reached her room, he saw Ingrid was lying on the bed with the iguana stretched out along her leg, a paperback novel—he recognized his copy of
The Long Goodbye
—open across her stomach. Ingrid turned her attention to Ray.