Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  “Are you happy,” I might start, “for me?”

  You would smile at the boys. You would let me ask other, self-congratulating questions.

  “Could we have had any of this together, ever, us?”

  But these would still be prelude—softballs. You would know it from my nervous eagerness to talk. You would sit across from me at the table, watching the lights turn on and off outside the movie theater, signaling us to come in, listening to the traffic, swirling the last sip of beer in your glass, waiting to hear me out, as I argue with myself, and when I am done delaying, you would smile at me—as the painted ponies go up and down—at how I argued with you every time you said one life had nothing to do with the next, that it could never just disappear, that it wasn’t okay to sometimes find no meaning. Instead of singing more Joni Mitchell right back at me, you might see how it gets under my skin still. You know me well enough to wait a little longer. I cannot help myself. I have to ask it, if only to hurt you back. You listen for what I really came here to ask, because it means we still have something to talk about, if not quite say to each other. And whatever your answer, I would hear what I expect you to say, what I know you must say, even before I’m done with my question.

  “Shouldn’t I still wish you hadn’t died?”

  *

  When I meet new people, it is a long time, if ever, before they know about you. I like it this way. I hate explaining how you died, or worse, answering questions about the day, our last trip up the mountain, whether it was a black or brown bear. I can tell a reasonably straightforward story about falling in love with Cait, which requires no detour through grief and violence. It is a sweet story. With time, it has become self-contained.

  When you go missing in my stories, I notice your absence. It sometimes feels like a trick, to say so much about my life while leaving out one of the biggest parts. Doing so doesn’t feel deceptive. I don’t seize, racked with guilt. Part of what I mean to describe here is not grief at all, I think, but forgetting. The other day, while Cait made dessert, I said, “The year I lived in Bucharest . . .” and I was conscious right away that I had left you out, and probably Cait noticed it too, but so what? I knew she knew. I was talking about the coffee shop down the street from our apartment, the one we went to constantly, though in this particular memory, I went alone. I bought a kilogram of Easter candies, the most delicious milk candies I have ever tasted, and I walked into the park to eat them, listening to a radio interview with Paul McCartney, pausing at the intersection of the paths to admire the flower shops with tulips imported every few days from Turkey. Sometimes I brought them home for you because they were your favorites, but I don’t think I did that day. I ate them all myself. I listened to Paul singing, “Kisses on the bottom . . .” and you worked late most of that Easter holiday. We went to that park at least once a week. You held my hand and leaned into my shoulder. Sometimes, you wore the blue windbreaker, the one your mother bought for you after Christmas, with the long zippers and shiny tags, but you always took it off and tied it around your waist after a few blocks because Bucharest never got that cold. What should I have said about you that afternoon that wouldn’t consciously shift the conversation to your absence, that wouldn’t feel like I had mentioned my past life only to mention you?

  Ears prick at your name. Forks tap. Eyes dart to partners as games slow. It feels like stopping time itself to smile so resolutely and steady my voice, as words that once cast spells—Katie, grief, bears, wife, absence—now move like legislation between the head and heart, withstanding debates, inviting revisions and expansions almost as quickly as I can say them. Always, some incidental detail of the past forces a choice in the telling—ours or mine, us or me, her or their or its—that feels either too clever or discreet. Sometimes, I cannot find the connection to the present moment. Still, I speak as plainly as I can—nearly offhand. “You seem so friendly and happy,” a colleague says one afternoon over lunch, “not like you’ve been through a big tragedy.” I say it over and over again: “Yes, I am happy.” Happier than I have any right to feel. And I never say the next thing that comes to mind, which seems in many ways just as true. I was happy before you died too.

  Your name is a blessing. I say it now to mean a different life. Many people hear your name but not always the distinction. Or, they hear instead a harbinger. That life is short. We must enjoy what we can. Bad things are going to happen, and it is only a matter of time—hopefully a long time—until the person we love is going to die. Such sentiments are so obvious as to seem nearly clichés. They come from the other side of a consensus, however contemporary, about how and why death happens: that death is not exceptional, it is not experienced collectively, it does not shape a continuing life, the familiarity it invokes is neither healing nor reassuring. When I say your name, I do not mean to incant to the living. But I listen carefully to the questions that follow. Beyond what we tell each other, or say we mean and feel, the questions make a path between lives too. They let me know how much anyone really wants to know or understand.

  *

  When the video rental shop in Chicago finally closed down, we bought ourselves a whole library of sad movies. They made a catalogue of, if not our best moments, then some of the least forgettable. Moulin Rouge, for the night you broke your toe trying to hurdle the leg of the sofa. The English Patient, after that terrible fight. Waking the Dead, for the night we walked out into Dhaka to find a city yet indifferent to our national tragedy and still willing to sell us bootleg DVDs. When I saw a good sad movie without you, I would call and tell you to meet me after work for the late show. Or, I would rent it and bring it home a few months later. Then, it would be a different season: Chicago, in full bloom, or Bucharest, gray and rainy, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind missing something without all the snow. I was very good at guessing the movies you would like. You always picked the worst movies. The night you brought home Hearts of Atlantis, I was such a terrible snob. It wasn’t a bad movie. I just felt superior. I guessed the ending, scene by scene, and you never let me forget it.

  Can’t I bring to mind some fantastic last memory, one that I can hold on to and say, after so much time, means we were happy and the end of your life was a good one? Even if life doesn’t really work that way, can’t I now at least be happy for us?

  After a year in Indiana, I could not see still being the live-in uncle. My staying was sad and lonely. So was my leaving. And yet, what a beautiful last few days of one last time that summer became. Then, I was gone from Indiana. I was driving across America to California, and the short time I stayed in Missouri and South Dakota delayed only my sense that I should arrive at a beginning, far from any place I had ever been. California was new to me. The crossing itself was worth more than staying put. There were prospects out West: jobs, land, weather. Cait. My prospecting was linked with a past I made into an offering. I would never get free of it. I would not claim it. I would try to do better, if only that the end of one life—your life—might lead, finally, to the beginning, again, of mine.

  The last memory that gets erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the moment that Joel and Clementine first meet, at a barbecue among mutual friends on the beaches of Montauk, New Jersey. Having spent the entire movie willing, then witnessing his memory being wiped clean in the reverse chronology of their relationship (revenge—she did the same), Joel arrives finally at the beginning. As the house around them falls apart, Clementine meta-reminds Joel that their knowing each other is about to be lost, and they agree to try to enjoy, rather than preserve, the moment of undoing. The sea rises to flood the living room. The roof is torn off. But even this good intention doesn’t quite work out. Joel doubles back to the worry he felt the first time through. He apologizes, wishing he had acted differently. Clementine barrels forward, impressive and oblivious, to repeat the first mistake again, to start again the love they have, separately, in the waking world, already agreed to erase.

  *

  “Letting go,” a
friend says. “To hang on to B, we let go of A.” I don’t think it’s quite true. I wanted you first. I chose you first. I wanted that marriage first, its affection and contrast first, and I loved you first, fully and without any sense of alternative, before I knew how to love anyone next. Then, I don’t think I could have loved anyone better. And if I forget the rest—compress it into anecdote or hide it away in stories I tell too often, make my own cryptic shorthand, or sometimes simply refuse to tell—then such forgetting requires a good deal of imagination. I imagine the past in order to forget it. I fix the idea in my mind so long as it holds its shape without becoming eventually something else. I coax memory toward a reassuring plain of feeling and sense, where a life begins to move in an entirely different direction, and I mark the place where absence displaces a life. I will myself to find it again and again.

  I pay Microsoft thirty dollars each year for the privilege of keeping our emails, dating back to the first year we met. In them, we never seem to duke it out or exhaust each other, go back over again and again our small and big fights as I do now, holding fast to our positions. All I ever find are short notes, usually sweet and generous. We remind each other of evening plans. We add to the grocery list and encourage each other about some work matter. We trade small jokes about some show we’re going to watch or something a friend has done. It’s possible that I destroyed the worst emails while you were still alive. I definitely didn’t do it afterward. Perhaps, during our marriage, I shaped those letters to say what I wanted them to say about us and left out the rest. If that is true, then I was in some process of constant spin, an imagined presentation, or becoming, at which I strained to find myself by articulating who I imagined we were, and who I was beside you, because of it.

  It is August. You would turn forty this year. I have a recurring dream. We are arriving to the end of a journey. It is San Francisco. The airport is only a minute or two away. We are happy. We take our bags and walk through an empty airport. No security. Antiseptic and modern walls, as though we are inside of some fantastic high-tech contraption no one yet knows we cannot live without. I am trying to say good-bye to everyone: my parents, my brother, my sister, their families, and finally, you. There is a spotlight on us. I can hardly see your face. I wake in my bedroom and the shade is up a little at the bottom of the window. I roll out of the light and pull the covers over my shoulder. The bed is warm, my place worn in. I must have hardly moved in the night. How could I want to be anywhere else? I turn in the bed toward Cait. I want to roll into her body and hold her. I want to sleep with her these few minutes before the boys wake and we draw straws for who will get up to make them breakfast, read books, put on a show. The room adjusts. It is clearer to me now. It is not morning, but late afternoon. I have fallen asleep reading on the bed. Cait has left the house to let me sleep. She has taken the boys to the park to meet our friends who are just back from a vacation. I can just remember the dream, enough to make it a story—the light and saying good-bye, the airport, white walls, my family, you—though I have no idea how much I have forgotten, those first or last parts of the dream that I cannot revive, more than the obvious departure. What does it matter how I sort out the rest? A few hours later, I can hardly remember the dream.

  The Lake

  I am there, and Katie is not dead, and because it is late summer, we take turns jumping from the floating dock into the cold water, well clear of the buoys and the motorboats, in high season, kicking up their wake, buzz-sawing a light chop where the solstice’s long shadows green the shallows clear to the lake bed and the balls of our feet scrape rocks as big as tortoise shells, scrape and bounce the silt but make no noise, and nothing lurks inside or below them because such nature is bountiful and welcoming, and seems to like that we are there. Behind us, trees, mostly firs and Jeffrey pines. Around the lake, the roofs of cabins and docks are stained to match their crowns. A larger lake borders this one, deeper at the far end, folding the sky around Katie as she shimmers the end of another shallow dive and comes up fast, smiling and laughing, a hint of mockery in that laugh, but always, mostly, joy. Often, when I dream of Katie, she is some place we knew together, an old apartment, a hike on the trail the day she died, but not this time. We race to the dock. The wood under my palms is smooth and warm as I pull up short, squinting into the bright sun at branches falling on the far side of the lake. A man is walking through the trees. He is swinging his chainsaw into the heavy limbs and stepping across their crowns. Power lines snap and pop beneath him. He is looking at me—at least, in my direction. The cup of the lake dips into the trees. The boats near the beach slow and tap. I know this place well enough to recognize it, and to know that my memory is out of place in the life that the dream contains. But my recognition is fast and loose. It loses shape as quickly as light on the lake changes color and jigsaws the reflections of trees, my face, Katie’s bright and young face. Something near the man’s chest—a badge? the edge of his saw?—catches the light and flashes, blinks and flashes again. I look away. The silence of his chainsaw is heartbreaking. I want the noise to start again, to hold together a few moments longer the edges of a world I know I am forgetting. I sink beneath the waterline. Where I try to surface, the dock over-shades the green sky.

  *

  The noise has stopped, as in my dream, and whatever continues past that silence changes pitch, ferrying a different life to a place I cannot return, not like that, probably never. I am here. It is four in the afternoon, fifty miles south of Paris, as far from the lake in my dream as I’ve ever traveled, and seven years to the day that Katie died. I am sleeping in a friend’s house, trying to get well—head cold, pool water—and Cait has gone with our boys and host to the nearby gardens while I rest for our flight home the next morning. Fifteen hours, France to California, with a pregnant wife, an almost four-year-old, and his brother, just turned two. Someone should be sleeping. I was asleep.

  Two men at work in the garden have stopped their machines and gone home for the day. They are rebuilding the wall between the house and the road where the center bricks have collapsed after an especially mild winter. From my window, I can see the pile of broken stones cut out from the corners and the road beyond it. Some new bricks are stacked to either side of the gap, alongside jackhammers, mechanical saws, an overturned wheelbarrow, and a mini-excavator the boys all morning have climbed up and down while pretending to dig out the yard and the front porch. They have never seen an excavator up close, they are thrilled and making noises, and soon enough, they are fighting over who gets to sit where and for how long a turn lasts. When our host asks if Cait would like to see the nearby gardens, the gardeners wave and smile their thanks. Cait promises the boys croissants and juice to make the walk. Walt eats a croissant with great reverence, from one end to the other, carefully unwrapping the darkest flakes, peeling away the center, while Sam eats croissants by the fistful, two and three at a time, dipping them in juice if we let him. We try not to let him. The boys race to the gate. Walt has blond hair and new glasses for our trip, with clunky plastic frames like mine. His body has stretched in the last two years from Sam’s husky toddle to a lean boy’s trim. Sam is strawberry blond, like me. He has his mother’s beautiful blue eyes and a different kind of charisma than Walt, a better sense of strangers and how to charm them. Perhaps this is his lot in life, at least until his younger brother is born: to please everyone. When Cait kisses me and says good-bye, I can smell the sun in her hair. She is not so pregnant yet that it’s hard to hug for very long without nearly toppling each other. I watch her turn the corner from the house, down the side lane, and into a field filled with lavender, irises, tulips, lupines.

  Giverny is a dream at the end of our trip: no cars, no city, everywhere mostly nature, and then, a kind of nature I have only imagined while looking at postcards over my desk, next to photographs of Tangail and Bangkok and Bucharest and Delhi, a nature that travels well. I fold my shirt and pants, set the alarm on my phone, and shake two earplugs loose from a tub I have carr
ied, in my suitcase, across Europe. The next morning, when we leave the house, I will remember the titles of books in the library, the bear-shaped pillow on each of the boys’ beds, even the order of drawers and shelves where we stacked the dishes after dinner. But I will have no memory of the houses on the other side of the road.

  Our bedroom is shaded and cool. The blanket and pillows are white with green trim. Every few minutes, a tiny French car barrels down the single-lane road and through the curve. However I stare at them, the drivers keep their eyes on the road. That the house has come into view through the gap in the wall is apparently old news. The road is narrow. There is little room to pass.

  I fall asleep through the muffle of nearly avoided noises, and when I awaken, the silence that follows seems instantly to become the song of birds. Songbirds, I think to myself, they are so beautiful, though Cait later explains to Walt that the wrens and magpies of my imagination are ordinary pigeons nested in the rafters at the top of the house. They sleep there in summertime to be close to the cisterns. Their cooing makes a hierarchy among male birds hoping to scare each other off and isolate mates. I am lucky to be here, I tell myself, the world has arranged my place here. I chase a second dose of antibiotics with a tranquilizer, more or less following the hotel doctor’s instructions. As the tranquilizer teases its first, pleasant fuzz, I move slowly, willing such pleasure to cling to the edges of everything, rise like a tide, and carry me past consciousness again, away from the continuing day.

  *

  How did we get to the lake in the dream? Katie would not have known the way. I must have taken her down the hill from Cait’s family cabin, crossing the road, then the path from the beach, out to the docks that face the jumping rocks. In that dream world, Cait was surely our host, our dear friend from the Peace Corps who had invited us to California for a weekend of nostalgic remember-whens and then-and-nows. And if we headed back up the hill after dinner, we might have sat out on the porch with Cait, drinking whatever was left in the cupboards, at altitude feeling the liquor in minutes, passing a bag of chips to soak up the alcohol, taking our time to make a beautiful dinner. We would have asked Cait who she was dating, or perhaps her husband might be there too—her children, their friends, a whole separate life I know only in the dream, by coincidence and invitation.