The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  I listened to his voice and thought, Is this what he is passing down from one generation to another? Am I right in how I understand him, or is this another error? So, a matter of faith, not religious but generational, came into play. I had to believe, in all its implications, that I was my father’s son.

  With my mother, years before, he knew that sooner or later the man she was seeing, who was younger and who was having a kind of exciting affair with an older woman, would get tired of it. One day my mother came home and sat in the kitchen. She was wearing nice perfume and what used to be called a sundress. It showed her arms, which were tan, and she had her hair nicely brushed and even had a ribbon in it, probably to suggest that she was thirty-eight rather than forty-two. She came into the kitchen and slumped down, putting her handbag on the table.

  “This is the second time,” she said.

  “What is?” my father said.

  “The second time I’ve been stood up,” she said.

  “Where?” said my father.

  “In a motel room,” she said.

  My father got up and put his arm around her and she said, “I have no right to your comfort or your understanding. I am supposed to take this by myself, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know there were rules for this kind of thing.”

  “Well, there must be,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s not worry about that. What do you say?”

  She still said she didn’t have the right to anything, not really.

  Now, as I sat in his car, outside the Palm with Sara next to me, I wondered if I understood my father’s generosity of spirit. The dignity of forgiving, and how it enhanced the person doing it.

  You would think that a man who had been betrayed by his wife would be diminished, and I guess that could be true, but if I needed any proof about the value of forgiveness and its practical effect, all I had to do was remember that my father had seemed almost physically larger, and certainly morally larger, in that moment when he told my mother to stop worrying about rules. I realized, of course, that it was time to stop questioning such things. That’s what my father had meant: We had reached across that dark gulf, that inky substance that separates the living from the dead, and done so with precision, too. It was built into how much I missed him.

  “SO,” SAID SARA as she sat on my leather sofa under the photo of Einstein, “Do you need a shrink or something?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I always thought you were a little strange, but what’s this business about the wrecking ball? They were just knocking down a building, right? But you keep going on about it, you know, the way the ball swung up in the air, and the thing trembled and then, puff, that cement smoke and smash.”

  “It was really something,” I said.

  “I got that,” said Sara.

  In bed, in the evenings, we were more lost than ever, and we came to a place where we disappeared and were so far removed from ordinary life as to be shocked when we came out of it, to find that a car went by on the road, or that a steady tip, tip, tip came from the bathroom sink. We had vanished into that soothing, scented, slippery warmth. At times, Sara’s eyes were filled with fear. Where were we going? Or maybe it was something else altogether. She knew this is the way we said good-bye. Or at least she was afraid it was.

  I got up one night after that sense of almost disappearing and sat in the living room, fingers shaking, trembling into my legs, and yet I picked up a pencil and a piece of graph paper that I had used to make notes for a class I was teaching on stellar distances. One of the exercises I liked to do was to describe certain relationships and then have the graduate students write formulas to codify what I had told them. Now, with a kind of thoughtless air, I wrote that the possibilities for disaster, for time doing its worst, for dividing people, increased in direct inverse proportion to the square of the number of years that have passed, or

  D = 1/y squared.

  Where D is the intensity of disaster and y is the number of years. Just stupid doodling. For instance, if you put in the number of years, eleven, say, then the inverse square is .0082644628. That is, the smaller the number the bigger the disaster.

  “What’s that?” said Sara.

  “Just doodling,” I said.

  “Doesn’t look that way to me,” she said.

  She sat down next to me, her nude skin touching my leg and arm. Dissonance personified. It felt wonderful.

  “So,” she said. “That’s what you were thinking about when you watched that ball knocking down that building?”

  “No, no,” I said.

  “Jake,” she said. “Just who the hell do you think you are talking to? You remember I was the one who showed you the mistakes you made with calculus?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten a thing.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Sara. “Shit. Do you believe this? Just what were you thinking when you watched that wrecking ball?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You never lied to me before,” she said.

  “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”

  Still, I got up in the morning, when I had classes, and taught them, and then brought the papers from my students home and sat with a Texas Instruments calculator and worked through the solutions they had done, and Sara came home from work, kicked off her shoes and sat on the sofa, under Einstein, and rubbed her feet.

  “Sold a shitload of cars,” she said.

  “Good,” I said.

  We said less at dinner. Slept more. The bedroom seemed smaller and darker at night, and the lights from a passing car swept over the ceiling with a ghostly movement, like the memory of a lighthouse. Sara got a prescription for some dope to make her sleep. I stared at the ceiling. Sara said, “This crappy stuff doesn’t work worth a shit. Wanna fuck?”

  “We never talked about it that way,” I said.

  “Well, you should have thought about that when you made up your mind when watching that wrecking ball.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “So what was it like?” she said. “That guy you’re always quoting? Ortega y Gasset? Reality has its own structure. So is that what we’re talking about? You discovered what it is as far as I’m concerned? Well, maybe I have some ideas about it, too.”

  In the morning, Sara got ready for work, rolling up the legs of her panty hose and pulling them on, looking to make sure there were no runs, brushing her hair, putting on her lipstick, using a little bit of Kleenex, fluffing up her hair. She looked out the window and said, “So, Jake, that’s it.”

  A Hertz rental car had pulled into the driveway, and a blond woman, Gloria, sat in the front seat and leaned forward to see herself in the rearview mirror. She fluffed up her hair and pinched her cheeks.

  Sara never had much at my house, and it took her only a couple of minutes to sweep her cosmetics into a duffle bag, to sweep all her clothes on hangers into the same bag, zip it up, check the way she looked in the mirror, and go downstairs where, when she passed Gloria, she said, “Good luck. He’s not so bad for an astronomer,” and then went out to the demonstrator Outback she drove, opened the door, threw the bag in, and got behind the wheel. She left one thing behind: that scarf, sheer and gray, which she had drawn so slowly over the hair between her legs.

  “Hi,” said Gloria.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Well, I came to tell you something,” she said.

  Albert Einstein looked down from his wooden frame, not puzzled so much as wise, as though he already knew. And, of course, this just meant that I suspected it, too.

  “I could tell you that I came to see my grandmother and to see how the TV is working and if she is going to have to go into long-term care. I could do that,” said Gloria. “I could even say that I finished my degree and was accepted a
s a resident at a hospital in Albany. I could even say that this application was just chance.”

  Einstein looked down.

  “But that’s not it. You remember when you stood me up and I was so angry I came in about two seconds? Well, that must have meant something because we’re going to have a baby.”

  “We?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “If you’ll accept my apologies.”

  For a while I heard a sort of buzzing, and then I realized it was the buzzing from those wires behind my parents’ house, particularly when my father said that where forgiveness was concerned, you shouldn’t worry about rules.

  “The oddest thing,” said Gloria. “Is that when I imagine the baby, when I touch my stomach, I feel how much, after all this time, I love you. Is there anything I have to do?”

  “I don’t think there are rules for this kind of thing,” I said. “Let’s not worry about anything like that.”

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Sara asked me to meet her at the airport, at the place just before the gate where only people with tickets can go. She had already checked her bag, and she stood there, still in her premature soccer mom outfit, which, I guess, she had gotten used to these days and actually didn’t feel right without. It reminded me of a cop I knew who said that once he was working undercover he didn’t feel dressed unless he had a pistol.

  Sara didn’t smile, although she did put her arms around my neck and pull me against her with a strength that I didn’t think possible. I could feel her flatten against me and the touch of her cheek, as smooth as powder, as she pushed it against me as though she wasn’t getting on a plane but on a spaceship to another galaxy. That we would never see each other again.

  “Oh, Jake,” she whispered, that breath against my ear, the touch of her echoing right down to those days years ago when we sat side by side in the library and looked at the limits of the observable universe. “Don’t you see? I’m doing my job. I’m the one who will always haunt you. Every man has a woman like that. I’m yours. That’s all. It’s got to be that way because everything else I do is going to cause you trouble.”

  “You believe that?”

  “You do, too, and don’t deny it for a second. You want me to give you the formula, you fucking astronomer? Trust me,” she said. “What have I brought you but trouble?”

  “There were some things besides trouble.”

  She swallowed.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

  A recorded voice said that I shouldn’t take any packages from anyone I didn’t know. Men and women with guns went by, and outside an airplane seemed to lift into the air with all the grace and power of the age: It was the poetry of the time we live in.

  “And does it work the other way?” I said.

  “You mean about the haunting?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That I haunt you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Women don’t think that way,” she said.

  She got into line and went through the X-ray machine. Then the stream of people swept her along, just as surely as if she had been in the green water of Furnace Creek. Those little mayflies, gray as silk, and the bubbles around the rock, all as keen now as though I were standing there. And the bottom of that well, where the darkness lay on darkness. Then she stopped and turned back against the tide and mouthed something, once, and then again, and finally I thought she said, or hinted at saying, Yes, I’ll be haunted, too. You’re doing your job, just like me.

  Then she stopped again.

  And then she was gone, into the slipstream.

  THAT LEFT ONE item. My father had never wanted any big deal made over what remained, which after the cremation was the contents of a galvanized canister. I had kept it in the file cabinet of my office, and one afternoon, in the late fall, when Gloria had gone to collect her things from California, to pack up and ship what she wanted and to leave behind the things that were no longer useful, I drove my father’s car, which I would soon have to give back to the state, to the parking lot at the trailhead at Furnace Creek. A cool fall afternoon. A sky the color of the center of a flame. Clouds like shreds of cotton here and there. It didn’t seem that I had to walk all the way up, or to one of those pools where we had fished, but it didn’t seem correct, either, to do it right by the parking lot.

  So, the sumac flowers were as red as pomegranates, and since it was such a lovely day with good thermals, the hawks were out, turning in a widening circle as they looked for the unwary. The stream was a constant, the sound almost making sense, that is, as though it were part music, or had the rhythm of a favorite poem, and as I walked I tried to guess what poet would do the job. Hopkins, I guessed, dapple-dawn-drawn, etc., but really it just came down to that rumble, bumble, bumble, and that splash against the rocks.

  I could hold the can by the bottom and just dump the gray stuff in, or I could use my hand.

  It was not all dust, as they would make you think, but it had bits here and there, bones, I guessed, pieces of a femur or a vertebra, but so reduced as to be just a gray relic, a chunk of what remained, and as these things went into the water, they made a noise that mixed a sort of rush into the rumbling. Finally, though, I had only the last of the dust in the bottom of the can, and as that drifted over the water, like smoke, I could finally give thanks. Then I turned toward home.

  Copyright © 2012 by Craig Nova

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN : 978-1-619-02098-6

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