“A cow? In the river? Oh, Merilyn would like that, all right.”
“She’s my mom. Come on, Dad. Relax. Nothing to it.”
Jeremy says he will drive down to the motel where Merilyn is staying. After that, they will do what they are going to do. At the back stairs, playing with the cat’s dish with his foot and biting his fingernail, Jeremy hesitates, smiles, and says, “Well, why don’t you loosen up and wish me luck?” and Conor does.
Five days before Merilyn left, fourteen years ago, Conor found a grocery list in green ink under the phone in the kitchen. “Grapefruit, yogurt,” the list began, then followed with, “cereal, diapers, baby wipes, wheat germ, sadness.” And then, the next line: “Sadness, sadness, sadness.”
In those days, Merilyn had a shocking physical beauty: startlingly blue eyes, and a sort of compact uneasy voluptuousness. She was fretful about her appearance, didn’t like to be looked at—she had never liked being beautiful, didn’t like the attention it got her—and wore drab scarves to cover herself.
For weeks she had been maintaining an unsuccessful and debilitating cheerfulness in front of Conor, a stagy display of frozen failed smiles, and most of what she said those last few evenings seemed memorized, as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything spontaneously. She half laughed, half coughed after many of her sentences and often raised her fingers to her face and hair as if Conor were staring at them, which he was. He had never known why a beautiful woman had agreed to marry him in the first place. Now he knew he was losing her.
She worked as a nurse, and they had met when he’d gone up to her ward to visit a friend. The first time he ever talked to her, and then the first time they kissed—after a movie they both agreed they disliked—he thought she was the meaning of his life. He would love her, and that would be the point of his being alive. There didn’t have to be any other point. When they made love, he had to keep himself from trembling.
Women like her, he thought, didn’t usually allow themselves to be loved by a man like him. But there she was.
When, two and a half years later, she said that she was leaving him, and leaving Jeremy behind with him, and that that was the only action she could think of taking that wouldn’t destroy her life, because it wasn’t his fault but she couldn’t stand to be married to anybody, that she could not be a mother, that it wasn’t personal, Conor had agreed to let her go and not to follow her. Her desperation impressed him, silenced him.
She had loaded up the Ford and a trailer with everything she wanted to go with her. The rain had turned to sleet, and by the time she had packed the books and the clothes, she had collected small flecks of ice on her blue scarf. She’d been so eager to go that she hadn’t turned on the windshield wiper until she was halfway down the block. Conor had watched her from the front porch. From the side, her beautiful face—the meaning of his life—looked somehow both determined and blank. She turned the corner, the tires splashed slush, the front end dipped from the bad shocks, and she was gone.
He had a trunk in the attic filled with photographs he had taken of her. Some of the shots were studio portraits, while others were taken more quickly, outdoors. In them, she is sitting on stumps, leaning against trees, and so on. In the photographs she is trying to look spontaneous and friendly, but the photographs emphasize, through tricks of angle and lighting, her body and its voluptuousness. All of the shots have a painfully thick and willful artistry, as if she had been mortified, in her somewhat involuntary beauty.
She had asked him to destroy these photographs, but he never had.
Now, having seen Jeremy go off to find his mother somewhere in Eurekaville and maybe take her to the flood, Conor wanders into the living room. Janet’s sprawled on the floor, reading the Sunday comics to Annah. Annah is picking her nose and laughing. Joe, over in the corner, is staging a war with his plastic mutant men. The forces of good muscle face down evil muscle. Conor sits on the floor next to his wife and daughter, and Annah rumbles herself backward into Conor’s lap.
“Jeremy’s off?” Janet asks. “To find Merilyn?”
Conor nods. Half consciously, he’s bouncing his daughter, who holds on to him by grasping his wrist.
Janet looks back at the paper. “They’ll have a good time.”
“What does that mean?”
She flicks her hair back. “ ‘What does that mean?’ ” she repeats. “I’m not using code here. It means what it says. He’ll show her around. He’ll be the mayor of Eurekaville. At last he’s got Merilyn on his turf. She’ll be impressed.”
“Nothing,” Conor says, “ever impressed Merilyn, ever, in her life.”
“Her life isn’t over.”
“No,” Conor says, “it isn’t. I mean, nothing has impressed her so far.”
“How would you know? You didn’t follow her down to Tulsa. There could be all sorts of things in Tulsa that impress Merilyn.”
“All right,” Conor says. “Maybe the oil wells. Maybe something. Maybe the dust bowl and the shopping malls. All I’m saying is that nothing impressed her here.”
A little air pocket of silence opens between them, then shuts again.
“Daddy,” Annah says, “tip me.”
Conor grasps her and tips her over, and Annah gives out a little pleased shriek. Then he rights her again.
“I wonder,” Janet says, “if she isn’t getting a little old for that.”
“Are you getting too old for this, Annie?” Annah shakes her head. “She’s only five.” Conor tips her again. Annah shrieks again, and when she does, Janet drops the section of the newspaper that she’s reading and lies backward on the floor, until her head is propped on her arm, and she can watch Conor.
“Mom!” Joe shouts from the corner. “The plutonium creatures are winning!”
“Fight back,” Janet instructs. “Show ’em what you’ve got.” She reaches out and touches Conor on the thigh. “Honey,” she says, “you can’t impress everybody. You impress me sometimes. You just didn’t impress Merilyn. No one did. Marriage didn’t. What’s wrong with a beautiful woman wanting to live alone? It’s her beauty. She can keep it to herself if she wants to.”
Conor shrugs. He’s not in the mood to argue about this. “It’s funny to think of her in town, that’s all.”
“No, it’s not. It’s only funny,” Janet says, “to think of her in town if you still love her, and I’d say that if you still love her, after fourteen years, then you’re a damn fool, and I don’t want to hear about it. It’s Jeremy, not you, who could use some attention from Merilyn. It’s his to get, being her son and all. She left him more than she left you. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to go on with this conversation one further sentence more.”
Both Annah and Joe have stopped their playing to listen. They are not watching their parents, but their heads are raised, like forest animals who can smell smoke nearby.
“All I ever wanted from her was a reason,” Conor says. “I just got tired of all that enigmatic shit.”
“Hey,” Janet says, “I told you about that one further sentence.” Annah gets out of her father’s lap and snuggles next to Janet. “All right,” Janet says. “Listen. Listen to this. Here’s something I never told you. One night Merilyn and I were working the same station, we were both in pediatrics that night, third floor, it was a quiet night, not many sick kids that week. And, you know, we started talking. Nursing stuff, women stuff. And Merilyn sort of got going.”
“About what?”
“About you, dummy, she got going about you. Herself and you. She said you two had gone bowling. You’d dressed in your rags and gone off to Colonial Lanes, the both of you, and you’d been bowling, and she’d thrown the ball down the lane and turned around and you were looking at her, appreciating her, and of course all the other men in the bowling alley were looking at her, too, and what was bothering her was that you were looking at her the way they did, sort of a leer, I guess, as if you didn’t know her, as if you weren’t married to her. Who could blame you? She
looked like a cover girl or something. Perfect this, perfect that, she was perfect all over, it would make anybody sweat. So she said she had a sore thumb and wanted to go home. You were staring at your wife the way a man looks at a woman walking by in the street. Boy, how she hated that, that guy stuff. You went back home, it was cold, a cold blister night, she got you into bed, she made love to you, she threw herself into it, and then in the dark you were your usual gladsome self, and you know what you did?”
“No.”
“You thanked her. You two made hot love and then you thanked her, and then in the dark you went on staring at her, you couldn’t believe how lucky you were. There she was in your arms, the beauteous Merilyn. I bet it never occurred to you at the time that you aren’t supposed to thank women after you make love to them and they make love to you, because you know what, sweetie? They’re not doing you a favor. They’re doing it because they want to. Usually. Anyway, that was the night she got pregnant with Jeremy and it was the same night she decided she would leave you, because you couldn’t stop looking at her, and thanking her, and she hated that. For sure she hated it. She lives in Tulsa, that’s how much.”
Conor is watching Janet say this, focusing on her mouth, watching the lips move. “Son of a bitch,” he says.
“So she told me this,” Janet says, “one night, at our nursing station. And we laughed and sort of cried when we had coffee later, but you know what I was thinking?” She waits. “Do you? You don’t, do you?”
“No.”
“I was thinking,” Janet says, “that I’m going to get my hands on this guy, I am going to get that man come hell or high water. I am going to get him and he is going to be mine. Mine forever. And do you know why?”
“Give me a clue.”
“To hell with clues. I wanted a man who looked at me like that. I wanted a man who would work up a lather with me in bed and then thank me. No one had ever thanked me before, that was for goddamn certain sure. And you know what? That’s what happened. You married another nurse. Me, this time. And it was me you looked at, me you thanked. Heaven in a bottle. Are you listening to me? Conor, pay attention. I’m about to do something.”
Conor follows her gaze. A living room, newspaper on the floor, Sunday morning, the twins playing, a family, a house, a life, sunlight coming in through the window. Janet walks over to Conor, unties her bathrobe, pulls it open, drops it at his feet, lifts her arms up and pulls her nightgown over her head. In front of her children and her husband, she stands naked. She is beautiful, all right, but he is used to her.
“I’m different from Merilyn,” she says. “You can look at me anytime you want.”
Now, on Sunday afternoon, Conor cleans out his pickup, throwing out the bank deposit slips. When he’s finished, with his binoculars around his neck and his telephoto lens attached to his camera, the 400-millimeter one that he uses for shots of birds, beside him on the seat, he drives down to the river, hoping for a good view of an osprey, or maybe a teal.
He parks near a cottonwood. He is on the opposite side from the park. Above him are scattered the usual sparrows, the usual crows. He gets out his telephoto lens and frames an ugly field sparrow flittering and shivering in the flat light. A grackle, and then a pigeon, follow the sparrow into his viewfinder. It is a parade of the common, the colorless, the dreary. The birds with color do not want to perch anywhere near the Chaska River, not even the swallows or swifts. He puts his camera back in his truck.
He’s standing there, searching the sky and the opposite bank with his binoculars, looking for what he thought he saw here last week, a Wilson’s snipe, when he lowers the lenses and sees, at some distance, Jeremy and Merilyn. Merilyn is sitting on a bench, watching Jeremy, who has taken off his sweatshirt and is talking to his mother. Merilyn isn’t especially pretty anymore. She’s gained weight. Conor had heard from Jeremy that she’d gained weight but hadn’t seen it for himself. Now, through the binoculars, Merilyn appears to be overweight and rather calm. She has that loaf-of-bread quality. There’s a peaceful expression on her face. It’s the happy contentment of someone who probably doesn’t bother about very much anymore.
Jeremy stands up, throws his hands down on the ground, and begins walking on his hands. He walks in a circle on his hands. He’s very strong and can do this for a long time. It’s one of his parlor tricks.
Conor moves his binoculars and sees that Jeremy has brought a girl along, the girl he saw yesterday at the flood show, the one who was dancing with him. Conor doesn’t know this girl’s name. She’s standing behind the bench and smiling while Jeremy walks on his hands. It’s that same aggressive smile.
Goddamn it, Conor thinks, they’re lovers, they’ve been sleeping together, and he didn’t tell me.
He moves the binoculars back to Merilyn. She’s still watching Jeremy, but she seems only mildly interested in his display. She’s not smiling. She’s not pretending to be impressed. Apparently that’s what she’s turned into. That’s what all these years have done to her. She doesn’t have to look interested in anything if she doesn’t want to.
To see better, Conor walks down past his truck to the bank. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes again, and when he gets the group in view, Merilyn turns her head to his side of the river. She sees Conor. Conor’s large bearlike body is recognizable anywhere. And what she does is, she raises her hand and seems to wave.
From where he is standing, Conor thinks that Merilyn has invited him over to join their group. Through the binoculars a trace of a smile, Conor believes, has appeared on Merilyn’s face. This smile is one that Conor recognizes. In the middle of her pudginess, this smile is the same one that he saw sixteen years ago. It’s the smile he lost his heart to. A little crow’s-foot of delight in Conor’s presence. A merriment.
And this is why Conor believes she is asking him to join them, right this minute, and to be his old self. And this is why he steps into the river, smiling that smile of his. It’s not a wide river after all, no more than sixty or seventy feet across. Anyone could swim it. What are a few wet clothes? He will swim across the Chaska to Merilyn and Jeremy and Jeremy’s girlfriend, and they will laugh, pleased with his impulsiveness and passion, and that will be that.
He is up to his thighs in water when the shocking coldness of the river registers on him. This is a river of recently melted snow. It isn’t flowing past so much as biting him. It feels like cheerful party ice picks, like happy knives. Without meaning to, Conor gasps. But once you start something like this, you have to finish it. Conor wades deeper.
The sun has come out. He looks up. A long-billed marsh wren is in a tree above the bank. He cannot breathe, and he dives in.
Conor is a fair swimmer, but the water is putting his body into shock and he has to remember to move his arms. Having dived, he feels the current taking him downriver, at first slowly, and then with some urgency. He is hopeless with cold. Tiny bells, the size of gnats, ring on every inch of his skin. He thinks, This is crazy. He thinks, It wasn’t an invitation, that wave. He thinks, I will die. The river’s current, which is now the sleepy hand of his death waking up, reaches into his chest and feels his heart. Conor moves his arms back and forth, but he can’t see the bank now and doesn’t know which way he’s going. Of course, by this time he’s choking on water, and the bells on his skin are beginning to ring audibly. He is moving his arms more slowly. Flash-card random pictures pop up in his mind, and he sees the girl in his studio the day before, and she says, “I don’t like you.”
He doesn’t want to die a comic death. It occurs to him that the binoculars are pulling him toward the river bottom, and he reaches for them and takes them off of his neck.
He swirls around like a broom.
He pulls his arms. It seems to him that he is not making any progress. It also seems to him that he cannot breathe at all. But he has always been a large, easygoing man, incapable of panic, and he does not panic now. His sinking will take its time.
The touch of the shore is silt. The gra
spings of hands on his elbow are almost unfriendly, aggressive. Jeremy is there, pulling, and what Conor hears, through his own coughing and spitting, is Jeremy’s voice.
“Dad! What the fuck are you doing? What in the fucking … Daddy! Are you okay? Jesus. Are you … What the fuck is this? Shit! Jesus. Daddy!”
Conor looks at his son and says, “Watch your language.”
“What? What! Get out of there.” Conor is being pulled and pushed by his son. Pulled and pushed also, it seems, by his son’s girlfriend. Perhaps she is simply trying to help. But the help she is giving him has been salted with violence.
“What do you think?” Conor asks, turning toward her. “Do you think he pulled at the nails?”
Conor’s trousers are dripping water on the grass. Water pours out of his shirt. It drains off his hands. Now in the air his ears register their pain; his eardrums are in pain, a complex aching inside the ravine of his head. And Merilyn, the source, the beneficiary of his grand gesture, is simply saying, with her nurse’s voice, “He’s in shock. Get him into the car.”
“Merilyn,” he says. He can’t see her. She’s behind him.
“What?”
“I couldn’t help it. I never got over it.” He says it more loudly, because he can’t see her. He might as well be talking to the air. “I never got over it! I never did.”
“Daddy, stop it,” Jeremy says. “For God’s sake, shut up. Please. Get in the car.”
Jeremy opens the door of the old clunker Buick he bought on his sixteenth birthday for four hundred dollars, and Conor, without thinking, gets in. Before he is quite conscious of the sequence of one event after another, the car’s engine has started, and the Buick moves slowly away—away from Merilyn: Conor remembers to look. She grows smaller with every foot of distance between them, and Conor, pleased with himself, pleased with his inscribed fate as the unhappy lover, tries to wipe his eyes with his wet shirt.
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