“Did you drive all the way up here to give me the forecast?” He laughs, hands shoved in his pockets, slow rocking on his boot soles. I know his habitual tics and poses, know this body—each vertebrae and pockmark, slight indentation of the breastbone, the dark nipples and well-muscled thighs, the pale appendectomy scar above the sudden sharp swell of his cock. Sometimes, I’m frightened by the sense that I’m breathing beneath his skin instead of my own.
“I was thinking I might walk the labyrinth.”
“Oh—good. Well, here it is.” He indicates the entrance with a mock-cordial sweep of his hand. “Help yourself.” I nod, wondering if we can pull off some sort of friendship, pull ourselves back from the precipice we’d been inching toward.
I hesitate by the first snow-dusted stones.
“Is this like a maze? Are there choices about which way to go?” The naked arms of surrounding oaks weave in a sudden gust, as if warning me away.
“It isn’t a maze—there are no wrong turns,” he tells me. “There’s just the next step.” Yuki trots to his side, panting. As he reaches out instinctively to stroke her, I feel an insane stab of envy. His love for this animal is so unquestioned, so un-cluttered.
“But where’s the exit?” I ask. “Where will I come out?”
“You come out the same way you go in,” he explains. “The entrance and the exit are the same. You follow it all the way in to the center before you come back.”
“I see. Is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?”
“Sure, if you like.” He grins inscrutably, placing one warm hand in the small of my back, urging me forward. “Some people get into the symbolism,” he says, “and others just do it for the experience—sort of a walking meditation.” I catch a scrap of his lush, earthy scent. A shaft of sunlight sears through his glasses, illuminating the otherworldly green of an iris.
“No one should have eyes like yours.”
“The idea is to walk mindfully,” he states as he ignores my comment. “Just stay open and notice each step, each thought, then let it go.”
“Okay. Mindfulness.” I take a tentative step. But the truth is, I don’t want to do this meditative walk, this labyrinth thing. We’re fools to pretend like this when all I really want is to take his hand, pull him up the stone path, across his deck, into the cottage glowing with early light.
“Some people say that when you get to the center, you’ll find what you need to let go of. But I’m sure you’ll get your own meaning.” He comes up behind me, gives another little shove, but I don’t go. Instead, I turn to face him; there are inches between my mouth and his throat.
“I don’t want to do it,” I breathe.
He steps back, nudges up his glasses. “Why not?”
“I already know what I need to let go of.” I stare at the full rise of his upper lip.
“Okay. Then, why are you here, Sylvia?”
It’s a good question. I want to say that it’s not right, ending things over the phone, but none of this has ever been right. Maybe I’ve come to say goodbye; only, that doesn’t make sense either, since I’m yearning for the stillness of his white room, that sensation of floating together just outside the ordinary world. I feel anxious to resolve or revisit something. Or is this just an excuse for bad behavior?
“It’s more complicated than I thought,” I say.
He inhales long and sharp, then blows out slowly, head falling back until he’s staring at the sky—in frustration? Surrender? His Adam’s apple looks painful against the rough brown skin of his neck, and I find myself thinking how easy it would be, really, to kill a man.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” he growls, looking me in the eye.
“Yes, you do.”
At this he turns and walks to the cottage, Yuki tripping on his heels, and I feel like a dirty, unwelcome child, standing alone in the midst of his frozen garden. I can’t believe it’s come to this—me, a forty-two-year-old mother, wife and business owner.
“Come have some tea,” he calls from the deck before disappearing inside. “Let’s talk.”
But we don’t talk much—at least not right away—it being twenty-eight days and January, with the sun streaming onto his futon, the fireplace crackling with birch bark. We leave our mugs of tea to cool on the table. By the time we get back to them, they’ll be ice cold.
Still, it’s different this time. He’s jagged and greedy in a way I’ve not experienced him. I feel raw and exposed afterward, sickened by our lack of restraint. Sprawled across his sunlit sheets before noon, I can’t see how we’ll ever have the strength to end this. And not for the first time, I watch the ugly scenarios unfold: Nathan’s heartbreak and grim fury, the girls choosing sides, mediation perhaps, the house sold off and our assets divided, extended family splintering…. I’ll need to enlist my mother’s help just to afford the narrow, south-facing apartment over some professor’s garage where I’ll live with my part-time children: Mondays through Wednesdays and every other weekend? Every other Thanksgiving and Christmas? I imagine them huddled in the backseat, driving to and from their dad’s place, duffle bags in hand, Emmie clutching Pink Bunny, Hannah’s withering glances.
And what of Tai? Will I have him over on free weekends? Will this love or obsession or whatever it is weather the annihilation of my present life?
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed now, his dark head in his hands, and I am triply liable for drawing him back in after he’d set his will against me. As if I need more guilt.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he turns and touches my arm.
“Don’t be—that’s not what I want to hear you say.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He chuckles wretchedly. “That you’ll love me forever? That you’ll run off with me?” He crawls onto the bed, threads his arm through mine.
I’m desperate to remember when I used to feel this way about Nathan, that first summer when we couldn’t get enough of each other. I’d ambush him on the stairs the moment he came home from his ten-day construction gigs in Long Island. More often than not, we never even made it to the bedroom. Sometimes, afterward, we’d sunbathe on the roof outside the landing. He’d read me Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, sipping Diet Coke through green plastic straws. We’d commiserate about our fathers’ deaths, the trials of being the youngest. I knew without question that I’d marry him. Knew it the first time I laid eyes on him, really—his impossibly lanky legs spread before him on the porch he’d just mended, the steady hands and handsome English features, eyes that took me in with the helpless pleasure of a captive—
“Run off with me, Sylvia,” Tai whispers. “I have a friend with land in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He has three cabins he never even uses.”
“And what, we’ll live off the land? Become ascetics?” I chuckle, but he isn’t laughing. I turn to stare at him, propped on an elbow. His eyes are the intense color of antique glass. It takes me a moment to understand that he’s serious, another to allow the fantasy—cover of coastal fog rolling through cedars, the overgrown garden engulfing our rough-hewn hippie cabin, two rickety chairs on the porch facing a vast, untenable quiet.
“I—I could never leave my daughters, Tai.”
He pauses two beats longer before saying, “Bring them, then.”
There is an ancient, familiar pressure in my chest. I close my eyes. “They love their father,” I finally blurt. “I couldn’t—wouldn’t ask them to make that choice.” Not a sliver of me doubts this, despite the mayhem in my heart.
“Well.” He sighs deeply, falls back onto the pillows. “At least tell me you’re tempted. Some little part of you?”
“Of course. But I thought you were against escapism?” I tease.
“Ah. Now you know all my secrets.”
“You know mine, too,” I say, but we both know it’s not true. There are certain things that I’ve never talked to him about, certain subjects I won’t broach.
“Tell me your dar
kest secret.” He reaches for my hair.
I laugh. “You are my darkest secret.”
“Mmm, I don’t think so—if that were true, I’d know.”
“What’s yours?” I ask. “You go first.”
“Ha—I should have known you’d try to bargain with me.”
“Why should I go first? You started it.”
“Fair enough. Okay, then.” But he’s quiet beside me, staring at the ceiling beams, black lashes unblinking as if peering into some crumbling room of his past. A shiver of pain twists his forehead; he takes my hand, rubbing it between his own like an amulet.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I watched my little brother die,” he says without looking at me. “More or less, anyway. I didn’t realize it was happening at the time—I thought he was just nodding off. We were hanging out with friends, New Year’s Eve 1981. Listening to old Dylan albums, drinking whiskey, shooting up. For me it was just a recreational thing, but for Matt—” He shudders. “I didn’t realize how serious it was, how far he’d gone.” A tear streaks past the crow’s feet, across the veined skin of his temple. I reach to whisk it away before it slips into his ear. “You know some of this already.”
My throat constricts with sorrow, his losses pulling hard at my own. “My God—it must have been terrible.”
“Well, it’s the things you don’t know at the time that kill you later, right? The things you think you should have known. I was his big brother. Should have realized he was in trouble—at least that’s what I told myself. I was pretty caught up in my own world.”
“You were just a kid yourself.”
“Of course. I know that, in my rational mind. But some things are beyond reason, right? Some things you just can’t talk yourself out of. Can’t rationalize away, like you.” He smiles bitterly. “You’re one of those things.”
“Did you try to talk yourself out of it? Out of this?”
“Yeah, every day. But what about you? You have to tell me yours now.”
“Hmm. I was hoping you’d forget.” I sigh and shut my eyes, probing the damp caves of memory, searching the darkest corners for those moments that squirm from awareness, huddle in clusters like bats. I don’t know how personal I want to get. I could tell him about the years in L.A., my “lost years” as Theresa refers to that desperate swath between eighteen and twenty-two—bad sex and panic attacks, dropping acid in a roach-infested duplex in Venice Beach….
“You don’t have to tell me unless you want to,” he says. “I don’t need—”
“I killed my father,” I hear myself say, and my eyes fly open.
“You what?”
“I killed my father,” I repeat. “Though, I didn’t really know it—until now.”
“But your dad died in a car accident.”
“Right,” I tell him. “But I caused it.” Now the trembling kicks up—a small, startling eruption near my kidneys, rippling up through muscle and tendon, ribs and throat. My fingers burning, heart suddenly hammering as if I’ve run a fifty-yard dash.
“How can that be, Sylvia?” His voice is so low, it’s nearly underground.
“I told my mother to leave him—more than once. And I provoked him, too, made him drink and lash out, made him crash—” I’m sitting hunched over, clutching the hard freckled knot of my knees, though I don’t remember how I got this way.
“You don’t really believe that?” He’s smoothing his hand up my spine, taking a soft fistful of hair, tugging the roots the way he does.
“I think,” I finally say, “that it’s what I have believed. I’ve just never spoken it before.”
“Tell me.” He pulls me down beside him, cinches his arms around me. “I want to hear the whole story.”
I have never told the whole story to anyone, but now I do. Wrapped in his ivory quilt while the light traverses us in panels, I start talking about Mr. Robert and the shoe-box letters, my dad’s anger and drinking, the church and its threat of damnation. As the winter sun rides to the top of the sky, I talk about Wallowa and the Corvette, how Mom sought my advice and I gave it. How I chose her lover—cherished his letters, held his secrets. How I told her to leave because it seemed like the answer we needed. I confess about the night my father left—the violence, the phone call, his sobs, how I burned the letters in a Santa Ana, then walked until dawn. How his car flipped across the highway as a man crashed through my dreams. I pause, breathing fast. Tai takes my hands, pressing the pain from my palms. “Keep going,” he says.
The words rush like water through a dam—the second marriage, my bungled baptism, how Alison found God as I was turning my back on all that, how she went after law and order while I embraced chaos, how she was born again as I sought annihilation, taking longer and longer walks, thinking if I went far enough, fast enough, deep enough into the night, I could somehow walk clean out of my guilty skin and into another life—a happier life.
“And did you?” he asks me after many breaths. “Did you find that happier life?”
“I don’t know—I might have,” I say. “If so, I’ve been doing my best to screw it up.”
I have no idea how much time we’ve spent, except that it’s past noon now—clearly time for me to go. I am strangely still, hollowed out and clear as he strokes my damp face, outlining eyebrows, lips, fingers, throat, as if inventing me from scratch. His touch is so light, I almost don’t realize we’re making love again—softly now, this last time.
2005
DRIVING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN AT HALF PAST ONE, I’M tending an unaccustomed quiet, seeing the old landmarks as if for the first time: a narrow white house lists between frozen swells of farmland, clapboards peel from the north side of a barn, four Holsteins hover against the leafless foothills. In an empty field, that board still sits propped in a rusted truck bed, the words All things pass scrawled across it in blue paint.
Finally pulling into the parking lot at my studio, I’m surprised by a sudden urge to paint. I need the rigor of canvas to ground me, the consolation of oils and dirty brushes, the familiar sting of turpentine. Still spent and sad and swollen, I need the sharp, solitary focus of creation to fill this hollow place between my breasts. There’s a load of work to do—Roz Benton was right about that—and as I bound up the stairs of my building, unlock the studio door, I’m wondering how much I can accomplish in the slim hour before school is out.
I slap my mail onto the worktable, hit the flashing play button on my answering machine. Interspersed between telemarketing calls, workshop inquiries and a brief, uninformative message from Hannah’s school are three messages from Nathan.
“Sylvie, it’s eleven-thirty Monday. We need to talk. Give a call the second you get this, okay?”
“Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie… Where are you, hon? I’ve tried your cell. And the line at the house.” Pause. “It’s urgent, okay? I’ve got some news, so call me.”
“Goddamn it, Sylvie. I wish you’d pick up! I’m with Hannah—she came home from school today. Nobody’s been able to reach you—can you please call or get your butt home?”
“Shit,” I say aloud, pulling in a resigned breath. I pick up the phone, square my shoulders in preparation for this call.
“Sounds like you’re in deep,” a low voice behind me drawls, making me startle and drop the phone. Eli leans against the open door frame, clad in baggy camouflage pants, a torn brown sweatshirt, a black ski hat. His arms are locked over his chest, eyes piercing. “Sounds like your husband’s having a hell of a time finding you.”
“Eli! How are you? Can I do something for you?” I force a smile and shove my hand in my pocket, fishing for Tai’s agate—a habitual nervous gesture now.
“Nah. I don’t think so.” An uncomfortable smirk inches over his face. “I’m just here to get my paintings.”
“Okay. Well, you’re welcome to them.” I’m trying to appear casual, pretending my heart isn’t thudding in alarm. “But class starts again next week, you know.”
“Yeah, only—I’m not comi
ng back.” He moves to the corner of the studio, starts rifling through a stack of half-finished canvases. “Maybe you should just call your husband.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” I ignore his last comment. “You’ve got tremendous—”
“Talent,” he interjects. “I know. You told me already.” He selects two acrylics from the stack. “And I believed you, by the way.”
“Well, you should. I was—”
“Yeah, ’cause you know that night at my dad’s? I actually thought you’d come up to talk about my artwork, Ms. Sandon.” He chuckles. “I was so pumped, man. I guess I needed to believe it—pretty lame, huh?” He shoots these words like small, sharp darts and they find their mark; my head grows dizzy and the blood feels thick in my veins. “I didn’t get it yet that you were a damn liar, just like my dad. I mean, it’s not the first time—”
“Okay—please listen, Eli.” I’m gripping the metal edge of the table. “The things I’ve said about your work are absolutely true.” I hate how phony my voice must sound—despise how I’ve ravaged my credibility. “You must believe this, Eli. My relationship with your dad has nothing to do with—”
“Don’t talk to me!” he blurts, tossing up one arm as if to shield himself. “I’m not a complete idiot.”
“Then don’t act like one,” I snap. He lowers his arm, regards me. “Giving up the thing you love—just because someone else screwed up? Threatening to enlist—what the hell is that?” We glare at each other. I feel a sharp pain in my palm and realize I’ve sliced my hand on the table edge. Eli shakes his head, tucks the paintings under his arm. Outside, someone’s engine is revving, tires spinning on the ice. I think about the first time I saw him—how he looked as raw and vulnerable as a picked scab. We’ve made so much progress since then.
“I’m outta here.” He walks toward the door. “Have fun fucking my father.”
“Just—wait.” I reach for his arm; he yanks it away and I put my hands in the air, in surrender. “Okay, you’ve a right to be pissed.” His nostrils flare; I catch the sweet residue of marijuana and my own pulse churns in my ears. “You feel betrayed, I know it—probably better than you think. But it’s not a reason to toss your future away!”
Outside the Ordinary World Page 28
