Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Oh, is this your hubby?” the desk marm burbled, pronouncing it “hooby.” She smiled pleasantly at Jack. “Enjoy your stay, luv.”

  As they climbed the soft-carpeted stairs, Jack said, “I brought my boots. You said we were going to climb a mountain a day. Do I need a walking stick?” He joked, “Maybe I need a cane.”

  “We’re not old.”

  “If you say so,” he said. “That reminds me. I’ve got some news.”

  “Oh, what?” She couldn’t tell if he meant good news or bad. Jack had perfected an enigmatic expression.

  “Robert and Robin took me to the airport. Robin sent you something. It’s in my bag. But that’s not the news.”

  “So is Robert going to marry that girl?”

  Jack shook his head. “Who knows?” he said, with a slight flicker of a grin.

  “She’s nice. I like her.”

  Robert had been living with Robin for two years. Nancy thought Robin was an improvement over his ex-wife, the post-colonial feminist academic from Brattleboro.

  In the modest room, Jack glanced around at the evidence of Nancy’s life there—books, hiking boots, a periwinkle fleece neck gaiter—as if he was seeing a side of her he didn’t know. Although he was still slim and athletic, she could see his face was older, but she was already getting used to it. His familiar face jumped back into place. Probably he saw the same aging in her, but he regarded her tenderly, as though he hadn’t noticed the white down that in certain lights was beginning to show on her chin.

  “I was afraid something would happen to you here, out walking alone,” he said, hugging her once more.

  “It’s not dangerous here. Tourists, tourists everywhere.”

  “I still didn’t like it.”

  “Tell your news?” she asked.

  “We need to wait a little for a better moment.”

  “A Romantic moment?”

  He grinned. “I get it.”

  “The poets have been keeping me company.” She laughed.

  “Aren’t they a little old for you—dead, maybe?”

  “Historians always get crushes on dead guys.”

  Nancy vowed not to bore him with her latest obsession. She was putting away her jacket, making a place for his luggage. She felt a bit flustered, as if she was going to entertain a near-stranger. They hadn’t really kissed yet.

  When Jack came out of the bathroom, she went in. Beside the sink she had made a wall display of Lake District scenes—Grasmere, Loughrigg, Derwentwater. Tourist postcards, not art. He probably disapproved, she thought. She hadn’t always understood his photography. “What is it a picture of?” she always wanted to know, but he wouldn’t tell. “History majors!” he would say. Yet she thought a photograph of knives laid in bomber formation lacked subtlety. Was it supposed to be a statement—about war, say—or was it the simple shock of surreal juxtaposition, as facile as a video on MTV? Even MTV was a generation ago, she thought now. She could hear the telly. Jack had turned on BBC 4.

  She had once told him his pictures were cold, and that hurt him. He was actually warm and loving, much more so than she was. Still, the pictures were cold somehow, she felt. But was that a good reason for the breakup of a marriage?

  He was standing by the window, watching the swift, narrow rush of the River Rothay below. His hair was thinner, sandier, but not really gray. Her own brown hair had an auburn sheen, and in bright light she could still find individual rust-red hairs, as if they had been borrowed from Jack.

  Turning from the window, he embraced her and they tripped around in a clumsy little circle on the thin floral carpet. She thought his news would be about his photographs, and she wanted to show affection, offer praise. She had been rehearsing. Never good at small talk, she had always found it difficult to issue congratulations or happy, encouraging words. She was often preoccupied; she was laconic; she didn’t elaborate or waste words. It did not occur to her to say, “Good job, honey.” She had never called him “honey.” But of course she had always loved him. He knew that.

  Now Nancy, the grad student miraculously possessed of style and a sense of proportion, and ready with appropriate words, smiled. Jack had opened the curtain and was gazing across the fast-flowing water at the church tower. The Wordsworths lay in its shadow, in the graveyard.

  “Robert and Robin—it’s their news,” Jack said, turning to her. “They’re having a baby.”

  Nancy gasped. “Well, knock me down and call me Popeye!” It was something her mother might have said. The phrase shot foolishly through her newfound poise. She sank onto the bed. “Wow. I’m speechless.”

  “I was surprised. Bowled over. Thrown for a loop. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I’m agog. I’m stupefied. I’m—”

  “You had time to rehearse that!” Nancy cried. Jack’s trick of reeling out synonyms had always amused her. Now she started to cry.

  “It’s O.K.,” he said, curling his arm around her shoulders. “Robin is a sweet girl. Robert’s old enough to make us grandparents. Not that we’re old! You just said that.”

  “Stop,” Nancy said through her tears. “I’m not crying over that. I’m crying because of the synonyms.”

  “Want me to go on? I was dumbfounded. I was nonplussed. I was—”

  “That’s one thing I missed. I missed that so much.”

  “I begged Robert and Robin not to tell you yet, to let me bring the news, because it’s our news too. I wanted to share it with you, to see the look on your face.”

  She smiled, but only slightly. She had a sense that she was somewhere off to the side, observing her happiness. She held back, for fear of ruining it.

  The bed slanted downward, and the shiny duvet on the comforter made crinkly sounds. The bed was unfamiliar to their marriage. And the time of day was unusual, too. Robert, their child, was becoming a father. This was how it was done, she thought, as she and Jack reenacted the moment of creation. She couldn’t get away from the surprise: a bit of her and a bit of Jack, combined once, now recombined with something else to initiate a new generation. The phrase “recombinant DNA” floated through her mind, although she wasn’t sure what it meant.

  Jack sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was slow. You used to call me ‘Speedy.’ ”

  Nancy patted him. “It’s all right. We’re out of practice.” She smoothed the goose-down comforter in place. The thing was surprisingly warm. “Ejaculation,” she said suddenly. “Jack off! I never thought of that before. People used to say ejaculation when they meant exclamation.”

  “They said erection too. Builders would call a house an erection.” Jack pulled on his T-shirt. He said, “ ‘My mighty erection,’ he ejaculated slowly.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nancy said. She couldn’t think of what else to say.

  Soon after she left Jack, a year ago, she visited Northampton, Massachusetts, where they had first met. She drove her old history professor around the countryside. Professor Doyle—she still wanted to address him that way—was still passionate about the Transcendentalists. “I hate time!” he wailed. Nancy was unnerved. She remembered how in class he pumped his fist in the air for emphasis, making history come alive, as if it were a timeless possession in his mind.

  Nancy pulled over in front of a post office across the road from the house where she and Jack used to live. The green saltbox, now painted brown, was for sale. The field where she and Jack once ran with their dog had sprouted a monochrome faux–New England housing development. Nancy entertained a quick fantasy of purchasing the house and moving in with Jack, starting over.

  “History is imagination,” Professor Doyle said, with a tinge of bitterness.

  Jack napped while Nancy read snatches of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, his long paean to Coleridge, in the light from the window. Wordsworth was reviewing his life, gearing up to write his magnum opus, not knowing that most of his great works were already behind him. She absorbed the fleeting scenes of youth, when the two poets had con
nived to whiplash the imagination. Wordsworth wrote about the eloquence of rustic people, who didn’t use proper English and who toiled with bent bodies, people like those from Nancy’s past. The poets, in their quest for what they called the sublime, thought nothing of walking the length of England. With Dorothy, they went for midnight rambles in the dead of winter. Nancy could not stop wondering about Dorothy’s boots.

  Robin’s gift was a box of chocolate mice from Boston, and Nancy nibbled several down to their inedible tails. Jack seemed unusually tired, and she let him sleep.

  The light was fading when he stirred. Nancy knelt by the bed and nudged him awake. “Come on, Jet-Lag Jack,” she said. “You’ll get your days and nights mixed up. It’s time to go downstairs for dinner.”

  Jack groaned and sat up. “What time is it?”

  “Eight-ten. You don’t want to miss sticky-toffee pudding.” She grinned as he grimaced.

  Jack roused himself from bed, fumbled through his duffel bag, and found a wadded shirt. He began to change into it. Then he reached for Nancy, who was slipping into her black running pants and clogs—her dinner outfit.

  “Actually there’s more news,” he said, holding her arm. “I have prostate cancer.”

  “What?”

  “The prostate,” he said.

  “Oh, Jack!”

  “They have to do some more tests, but they want to do surgery.”

  Nancy realized she was now sitting on the floor, clutching the side of the bed. He sat on the side of the bed, and she raised herself to sit beside him. “Maybe it’s not really cancer?”

  “The doctor did a biopsy. I should have waited to tell you after I get all the results.”

  She recognized her numbness, the clicking into detachment mode. The news would not sink in for some time. She started to tell him that he was crazy to travel overseas instead of going for surgery right away. But she refrained.

  She saw her emotions lying around her, in heaps, like children flung from a Maypole.

  Holding her tightly, he told her the details. He had been worried for some time. Perhaps he had come back to her out of a need, she thought, but it was also possible that he knew there was no time for recriminations and separation. Now she was called upon to exert that confidence she had imagined in herself, to say the right things. But she didn’t know exactly what. She was sitting in his lap, her head on his shoulder. Somehow they were now in the easy chair.

  “I won’t ever leave you again.” The words didn’t sound like hers. “I’m not just saying that,” she said.

  “I know. I’m not asking you to come back because of this.”

  “I wanted to come back anyway. You know I did.”

  “I was afraid to ask you, afraid it wouldn’t be authentic.”

  “Let’s not worry about the authentic. We’ve always pressured ourselves to be authentic. Let’s just be ourselves.”

  He smiled. “Whatever that means.” She rubbed his neck. “I missed you,” he said.

  “I’m glad.”

  He said, “I don’t want you to come home if you don’t really feel—”

  “Home? We have no home.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean doom. Some people just live with it.”

  “Unless I have the Frank Zappa kind.”

  Nancy reached for her fleece shirt, but she wasn’t sure she was cold.

  “Bopsy,” Nancy said.

  “What?”

  “Mom pronounced it that way—when she had breast cancer. Biopsy. Bopsy.”

  “Bopsy, Mopsy and—Cottontail?”

  She slid from his lap and stood. “You know I love you,” she said. “It’s time that I hate.”

  Jack’s news hit her again. It was illogical, unreal.

  She wondered if Mick Jagger ever worried about his prostate.

  While Jack was in the bathroom, she roamed through a small paperback he had brought about the prostate. The walnut-sized gland— always described as a walnut, like something a squirrel would hide. The inconvenience of it, such a silly thing to harbor in one’s body. A tumor in itself.

  Her whole life with Jack was reconfigured in a couple of moments, its arc becoming a circle, like the circle implied in a rainbow or a sunrise.

  The downstairs dining room, looking out on the river, was almost deserted. Their table for two was in a corner across from the sideboard of fruit and pudding. The table setting included three china patterns, Nancy noticed.

  “The cuisine is strangely inventive here,” she told Jack. “Nouvelle Borderlands.”

  She chose an Italian eggplant dish with cubes of smoked tofu and a pasta called orecchiette—fat blobs like collapsed hats. Jack ordered the plaice. The pasta came with roasted potatoes and carrots on the side, while the plaice had mashed potatoes, carrots and courgettes.

  As they ate, Nancy talked rapidly, spilling out everything she had saved to tell Jack. They were ignoring his prostate, but her thoughts had adjusted like blocks of text rejustifying on a computer screen.

  “Do you like the plaice?” she asked.

  “It’s fine—I guess what you always called a charming, cozy hotel.”

  “I meant the fish.”

  He grinned. “If I’d said the fish was good, you would have said you meant the hotel.”

  They laughed. “Maybe you know me better than I thought you did,” she said.

  In the gray morning they walked, in rain gear, under the soft, dim sky. Jack had slept through the night and declared his jet lag deleted. Dumped. Vanquished. Atomized. But his eyes still looked tired.

  “The beans want sticking,” Nancy said to Jack in the garden behind Dove Cottage.

  “What?”

  “Dorothy wrote in her journal, ‘The Scarlet Beans want sticking.’ It’s the same way my grandmother talked. And my mother too. They grew scarlet runner beans, and they had to find sticks for the vines to hold on to. Dorothy wrote about William gathering sticks to stick the peas.”

  “You’re still thinking about your past,” he said, not unkindly.

  Nancy was thinking of the time Coleridge stopped in at Dove Cottage, while Dorothy and William were away. Coleridge went into the garden, picked some peas, and cooked them. He dressed them, he wrote in his notebook. Nancy’s mother used that word. She dressed eggs, dressed a hen. Nancy was pleased to find this cultural connection to her parents and grandparents, but she wouldn’t mention that to Jack now. Nancy followed him down the cobbled lane past Dove Cottage, where he occupied himself with taking photos of some small-animal skulls displayed on the side of a stone house.

  She said, “Did it ever occur to you that Wordsworth would have an accent, that he would have sounded like the Beatles?”

  “Give me a line.”

  “ ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’?” Jack tried it but didn’t quite get it right. They laughed. She wondered if he was remembering their other trip to the Lake District, but she didn’t ask.

  A World War II–era Spitfire appeared suddenly, low in the sky over Grasmere. Jack fumbled with his zoom lens and took several shots. “Damn,” he said. “I wanted to get it against that hill over there. I just got sky.”

  “There were fighter jets every day last week,” Nancy said.

  Early in their marriage, in their rural phase, Nancy grew vegetables. It seemed a moral obligation to grow something if there was good ground. But one night she found herself up at midnight preparing English peas for the freezer. And it occurred to her that she had left home in Kentucky to get away from the hard labor that had enslaved her parents. She was meant to use her mind. But her mind wandered, and she never had a successful career, because she shied away from groups, with their voluble passions. A career was more important to Jack, and she knew he sometimes felt a failure because he hadn’t exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

  Eventually they sold their place in the country. Jack craved the stimulation of artistic friends, and Nancy had grown restless. They moved to Bosto
n, which Nancy loved for its history, and fell in with a set of articulate, intellectual dabblers. But she found something myopic in their ways, how they stirred and sifted the doings of the day as if they were separating wheat from chaff, passing judgments on everyone who came to their notice. Their gatherings, although bohemian, were little contests, a show of strained witticisms. They never made crude remarks or talked about sex or money, and they assumed that everyone in the nation knew who Susan Sontag was.

  “I should have made a big pot of chicken-and-dumplings, complete with the yellow feet sticking up,” Nancy told Jack once after a miserable dinner party when she had cooked fried chicken. “They would jump right in if it was Chinese. But if it’s Southern, it’s unacceptable.”

  Jack just sighed. “There you go again, Nancy. They ate.”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

  Kentucky wouldn’t release her. She wouldn’t let it. She fought Jack on this, and he always accused her of being held back by her culture. She and Jack had often been apart for considerable stretches of time—her many trips to Kentucky; a former job that kept her on the road; and then a serious separation a decade ago. She went to England then, too, but that trip held no good memories. It was only a midlife crisis, she and Jack assured each other, when they reunited. Then a few years back, her parents died, in a ghastly six-month period—cerebral hemorrhage and massive stroke. Nancy broke from Boston then and began living part-time in Kentucky while she reconsidered herself and waited for her grief to subside. She supposed that 9/11 freed her from her own personal grief, but she never said so, for fear of sounding melodramatic. After her parents’ farm was sold, that hard rural way of life that had endured for centuries passed away. Nothing held her there, except what Jack called the guilty-daughter syndrome, her conviction that she had betrayed her parents in a hundred ways and that she had never really explained herself to them.

  Now Nancy stood in Dorothy’s garden and gazed at the yew tree beside the house, a tree that had been there two centuries ago.