‘When you’re around, he cries. It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘It’s insane,’ he said slowly.
‘I see what I see.’
‘A face in the clouds, that’s what you see. You can’t think that way; you take him off his medicines, and then you think you can see the cause of his complaints. A chance observation with a worthless conclusion, that’s what it is. And besides, why can’t he stand having me around?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Come on, you’ve thought about it, you must have.’
She looked at him, motionless as a fish. ‘If you really want to know,’ she said then.
They waited. Hissing, the water went round and round. Seven seconds, that’s how long it took. She said: ‘I think he senses that you didn’t want him.’
There were some words that could not be undone. After they had sounded and dissolved into air, everything had changed; you looked back in amazement at how it used to be.
His chin dropped to his chest, as though his head had grown too heavy and broken free of his spine. He remained sitting there like that for a while. Then he straightened up and said: ‘I was hoping it would turn out better than I expected, I really hoped so. But it’s not. It’s actually worse. I don’t even know what to say. Once you get back to … normal, you’ll realise how insane this all is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I understand your anger.’
He got up, leaning on the armrest. ‘Not that bullshit, please.’ He started to walk away, but turned back. ‘Don’t try to tell me that my son is allergic to me … That I’m the one who caused his reflux. That I’m the reason why he cries. That’s … you’re completely out of your goddamn mind, you know that. Being pregnant affected your brain. The hormones have destroyed your mind. Fucking bitch.’
It was as though a dragon flew up from his breast. It felt fantastic. Never before had he let himself go like this towards her, and now it didn’t matter anymore. He had lost, and there was no longer any difference between the wasteland of the dreams and the reality that lay before him.
• • •
The strange thing, he realised later, was that after that, everything had just gone on. She put the vacuum stopper back on the wine bottle and the dishes in the machine, the plates with the plates and the glasses with the glasses, and he knelt in the pantry and sorted out Friso and Hunter’s laundry. He called out, asking whether she had anything for the wash. She went upstairs and came back down, adding their clothing to the mix in the tub. He had never been able to keep his eyes off the inside of underwear: Ruth’s clotted foam, his brother-in-law’s brown stripes, and the imprint of his anus stamped firmly onto the textile. Now he was repulsed by the thought that Friso’s molecules were sloshing about in the same water as their clothes, and took out everything that belonged to the three of them. This was, he realised, intolerance at the cellular level.
When he went into the bedroom to get his alarm clock, Morris started crying. Ruth snapped on the light and lifted him from his cot. She put him to the breast. Edward closed the door quietly behind him.
In the middle of the night, he pissed in the upstairs sink. In the darkness, he asked himself whether there was still some way out, a little crack in their new circumstances that would allow him return to his former life. So he lay there fretting, that night and in the nights which followed, in the silvery white light that fell through the skylight, its vague glow encompassing the rowing machine and the outlines of the movers’ boxes. Sometimes he clearly heard her voice saying ‘I don’t know what got into me, I’m so sorry’, after which, in his thoughts, he reclaimed his place in their bed and in their life — and with these fantasies he fell asleep.
*
In the days that followed, he noticed that Ruth had attuned herself to a functional kind of friendliness, rather like a receptionist or travel hostess. He responded with a neutrality that left him wondering how long he could keep this up before setting the house on fire and fleeing to the eastern shores of the Black Sea, to become a palm reader in the streets of Tbilisi and eat mandarin oranges by the river.
He lived like a pariah in his own home, but told himself that he was doing so only to give her time to come back to her senses and see the idiocy of her ways.
One evening, he fixed risotto, which she loved, albeit in little servings. He watched contentedly as she ate, and noted that, in any case, things looked the way they always had been.
‘Dear Ruth,’ he said a little later, as though reading a letter aloud, ‘please listen to me. Try to listen with your old ears, the ears you had back before we had Morris. Why don’t we go to a doctor and ask what he thinks? Whether he’s ever encountered a situation in which a father made his child sick? A father whose mere presence made his child cry? If that exists, that kind of allergy, then there must be other cases of it, too. Let’s look for a doctor, one we’ve never seen before, who can help us with this, because things can’t go on like this any longer.’
But she shook her head and said: ‘I can’t take another doctor. Things are just getting a bit better with him; I see no reason at all to go to another doctor.’
‘But what about this for a reason?’ he said, louder than he’d intended. ‘I’m sleeping in the attic, you’re treating me like a pariah, I’m a stranger in my own home!’
‘Well, then, that’s the way it is for now,’ she said. ‘Morris’s health comes first. Once he starts feeling better, we’ll see.’
The woman with whom he had lived for seven years had carried this woman inside her, a woman he didn’t know and whom he had never before caught a glimpse of — a rigid, dogmatic creature, capable of no mercy, sticking to the straight and the narrow.
She kept Morris away from him as much as possible, and his periodic outbursts of rage at this only steeled her in her decision. He was their child’s malady, and it was wise to keep children away from maladies.
Funny, he thought, how quickly you became used to another person’s madness. In the rare moments when he was allowed to hold Morris and play with him, he did his utmost to show that his son felt at ease with him. That was how he tried to refute her conviction, by adapting to it. His assimilation went so far that he now moved around the house only on stockinged feet and always spoke quietly: anything to rule himself out as the cause. He lived like a phantom, and he winced when the steps creaked beneath his weight. He adapted quickly to his life as an illness. But his assimilation, he thought, was actually just one huge admission of his guilt. That was how she must perceive it, as a loud Yes, I am Morris’s sickness.
At night, through the floor, he could hear him crying. Had he not wanted him, the way she said? He tried to get through to his thoughts and feelings from back then. When she’d said she was going to stop taking the Pill, he had agreed right away. He had been opposed to the fertility test, that was true, but did that mean he actually didn’t want a child? Or did she regard even his half-mordant seed as sabotage?
The ultimate consequence of her thinking, he thought, as sleep went on eluding him, was that the sickness had to leave the house. She had not gone so far as to say it, but that could happen any moment.
In fact, he thought a while later, they both had the feeling that he should leave the house. She, so that their child could be healed; he, so that he could prove that his doing so had no effect on the baby’s health. He would demonstrate his innocence. That would be his strategy, so that one day he could leave his life as illness behind him and become a father and husband once again. Yes, it would be better for everyone if he dropped out of sight for a while.
• • •
What a mistake to think that the world belongs to you as soon as you pull the front door closed behind you, toss your sleeping bag and carryall into the back of the car, and drive down the street. For Edward Landauer, the world actually grew smaller than ever. He now spent almost all his time at t
he institute, in his office. His backlog of work vanished quickly, his final lectures for that trimester were ready to go, and he just sat there, cruising the Internet. The listless surfing from here to there left him beside himself with disgust and boredom, but there was nothing else to do. At the end of the day, he left the building with the others, but returned after having dinner at The Wall of China. He took a doggy bag with him, in case he got hungry at night.
It was late June, a wall of green had thrown itself up around the institute.
‘And,’ Mrs. Hordijk, his secretary, asked, ‘what are your plans for the summer vacation?’
‘First a week at Juan-les-Pins,’ he said. ‘And after that, we’ll see.’
‘Lovely, isn’t it, to just travel around and see where you end up?’
He nodded, yes, it was lovely — something like that.
In the evenings, he wandered through his staff’s deserted offices. He examined photos of their families, and read their memos and the comic strips and pearls of wisdom they had cut out of the newspaper and hung on the wall. If they had forgotten to turn off their computers, he helped himself to their e-mails. And while they lay snuggled up against their partners in their peaceful homes, he snuck through their existences and wove together the loose ends of their unremarkable lives. Sometimes, before going to sleep, he would go by the animals, past the ferrets lying together in a tangle and, on their roosts, the chickens that opened one sleepy, beady little eye when he said ‘Goodnight’. Returning to his office, he went to the cupboard where he kept his bedtime items: a sleeping bag, a self-inflating air mattress, and a down pillow from home. There, where the light came latest in the morning, in a corner under the windowsill, he made his bed. Above the little sink in the restroom, he brushed his teeth and trimmed his beard. On occasion, he showered under the emergency shower in a lab, because odours and signs of neglect might make people wonder.
In the hours that he lay awake, he returned to his early childhood, and remembered more and more of it all the time. At a certain point, in his mind’s eye, his grandparents’ orchard reappeared, bringing with it the sweet taste of sandhill plums and burgeoning, rust-dotted pears. It was a memory from the early 1960s, he calculated, before Route 59 had turned into the highway that put an end to the trees and the little farm itself and also — as his mother, for one, was firmly convinced — to his grandfather’s life. Despondency, his father believed, didn’t give one cancer, but his mother dipped into her ready supply of proverbs and adages, and pulled out this one: ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, Willy, and not everything that counts can be counted.’
And so Edward climbed up and down the ladder of his life, and understood as little of the parts as he did of the whole.
One night, he was rudely awakened from his dozing. The door of his office flew open, and the light clicked on. Edward sat up partway and squinted. In the doorway stood a security guard. He took a few steps into the office, his hand on his hip, feeling for the flashlight that was big enough to serve as a club. His gaze swept over the man in front of him, and his bulging carryall. ‘Who are you?’ he said at last. ‘What are you doing here?’
Edward pulled his pass from his pants pocket and handed it to him. The guard looked back and forth between the magnetic card and the man who was sitting in front of him, sticking out of his sleeping bag like a butterfly that had wriggled its way only halfway out of its cocoon.
‘I’m the boss here,’ Edward said.
‘Maybe you are,’ the other said. ‘But still, what are you doing here at this hour?’ The collar of his shirt was too wide for him; his neck stuck out a bit helplessly.
‘Working overtime,’ Edward said. ‘Consider this overtime. And now I’d like to go back to sleep again, if you don’t mind.’
‘I’m only doing my job, sir.’
Since when were security guards so quick to take umbrage? So indignant?
He lay back down again and said: ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a long day. Please turn off the light.’
A few seconds later, Edward heard the footsteps retreating down the corridor. Sleep came as noiselessly as a scythe through the tall grass.
That weekend, he thought he was going to die of boredom. Marjolein was not answering the phone. He took a long walk in the woods around the institute. Beneath the light-green awnings of beech there hung a vague smell of rotting. He missed Morris, but it wasn’t time for that yet; he had to be patient. Another two weeks, for sure. Mid-July, that was his guess — by that time she would have seen the error of her ways. It couldn’t take longer than that. That wasn’t possible.
Early that evening, he tried Marjolein’s number again. ‘Hello?’ she said, in a tone that sounded as though someone else had picked up the phone for her.
‘It’s me,’ he said.
‘I can’t talk right now,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘That’s fine, doll, sure,’ he said, but she had already hung up.
He kicked the leg of his desk. Maybe her marine had come home. Where were the roadside explosive devices when you really needed them?
Sunday lay before him like a steep climb. He left the institute only to go to the supermarket. Because the one in Bilthoven was closed on Sundays, he had to drive into downtown Utrecht. The whole country smelled of suntan lotion; he snuck up and down the aisles like an illegal alien. He didn’t want to run into any of his students. Merely a ‘hello’ would betray his miserable state. He drove back to the institute and put a few bottles of beer in the fridge of the kitchenette down the hall. The cool of the woods came in through the open window; at night, he sometimes heard owls.
Another six hours or so, then he could go to sleep. He longed for a message from home; he was deeply disappointed that Ruth didn’t call. Like an exile, he was carried by the hour further and further from home, across rivers and plains, to the edge of the world where the sun never set. The mute darkness of evening was hardest to take, and so, in order to have those hours behind him as quickly as possible, he waited till late to walk to The Wall of China. But the restaurant was crowded, and he didn’t feel like sitting at a table by himself amid all the cheerful cackling. The staff was friendly and discreet, the boy at the takeout counter said something like ‘You like much Chinese food, right?’, but that was it. He drank a beer and flipped through a few back issues of Car and Driver. Carrying his dinner in a plastic bag, he walked back to the institute.
He ate fried rice and vegetables. His phone did not ring — as though he were dead to the world.
• • •
Monday morning. Voices in the hallway, doors opening and closing. He listened with relief to the sound of life returning.
‘Well, good morning,’ Mrs. Hordijk said. ‘You’re in bright and early.’
He peeked into the lab where Marjolein usually worked. She wasn’t in yet.
At the end of that morning’s departmental meeting, Gerson stuck his grey head around the corner and said: ‘Good morning, everyone. Don’t let me interrupt you. Ed, when you’re done, could I talk to you for a minute?’
‘We’ve already finished,’ Edward said.
They crossed the hall to his office. Gerson put his nose in the air, sniffed, and said: ‘Man, what a smell. Are you starting a restaurant or something?’
He closed the door behind them and perched one buttock on the edge of the desk. ‘Listen, Ed …’
Rolling his chair back from the desk, Edward looked up at him with an amused smile.
‘How are you getting along?’ Gerson asked.
Edward crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. ‘You’ve never asked me that before.’
‘I’m serious, Ed.’
The smile slid from his face. ‘Why do you ask? Is there anything wrong?’
Gerson looked him over. ‘Two things,’ he said. ‘Or three, really. Your performance on the radio a
while back, that wasn’t very … adept, to put it mildly. That’s not the Ed I know.’
Edward coughed into his fist. Avoidance behaviour. ‘What can I say,’ he said. ‘You know, with Morris … it’s very difficult. He still sleeps poorly, we’re up all night with him. Maybe I’m not very sharp at the moment, that’s right, but he’ll be six months old soon, then the worst of it should sort of be behind us, then …’
Talk, talk, keep talking. Cover everything with words, smother it.
‘I suppose that’s what’s to blame.’
‘And I hear that you’ve been sleeping in the office,’ Gerson said, as though he hadn’t been listening at all.
Don’t flinch, don’t give up. ‘Oh, that time,’ he said.
‘It seems to me that you know that’s not done. It gives people, how shall I put it, the wrong idea.’ He looked around the office. ‘Do you mind my asking why you sleep here?’
Edward started, stopped, began anew. ‘I spend the night here sometimes, that’s right. The rare occasion. When I’ve been working late. At home, it’s … I don’t think you know what that’s like, a child who cries all the time. Sleep deprivation is torture. So … I know it’s not exactly de rigueur, but Christ, under the circumstances …’
‘And are things okay at home otherwise? With Ruth? With the two of you?’
Edward scratched his arm with a pen. A grimace. ‘Ups and down, of course, but these are tough times with Morris and all, like I said … But otherwise, fine, yes.’
‘Are you sure? If there’s a problem, I can take that into account. I can cut you a little slack.’
‘That’s … thanks, but it won’t be necessary. Things are fine otherwise.’
‘I don’t want you sleeping here anymore, Ed. We can’t have that.’
Edward nodded. He wished Gerson would wipe that look off his face. That surgical look. Were they done yet? Had he run through his little list? A wisp of rage spiralled up inside him. He was going to turn fifty next year, goddamn it; he didn’t want to feel like this anymore. It was humiliating.
A Beautiful Young Wife Page 8
