Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  Wilbur wanted to listen to this sermon closely, for he had lived too long and through too much ever to trust the Russians, and he wondered whether or not Peter was going to deal with this portion of the issue—but the pain that flared in his chest distracted him. He thought he needed to belch, and dug his chin into his chest for a moment. The pain flickered, dropped, then flashed upward again. He closed his eyes tightly, as if that would squeeze the pain away.

  A moment later, he felt his wife’s hand pinch his thigh. He opened his eyes and glared at her: he knew she thought he’d fallen asleep in church. She smiled at him, but he continued to glare, offended by her, offended more by this presumptuous pain in his chest. She patted his knee and removed her hand.

  He shouldn’t be angry with her, he knew, for he had fallen into the habit recently of dropping into little catnaps at inconvenient moments during the day, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation with her or during a TV program. It was damned annoying how sleep was treating him these days, ambushing him at the wrong times, eluding him at night. In fact, in the past few weeks, sleep made him remember Bobbeen DuPont, his childhood sweetheart, whom he hadn’t thought of for years. She had played the same silly games with him that sleep played now: she had led him on and ignored him all through the year he was a freshman in high school, fifty-five years ago. Whenever he’d ask her to go for a walk down to the river with him, or to attend the church ice-cream social, she’d giggle and make excuses. If he gathered up his courage and walked right up to her house and knocked on her door to ask for her, she’d send one of her brothers to say she was busy, or that she wasn’t there—and Wilbur would walk back down the sidewalk, embarrassed and kind of mad, because he knew she was there. Sometimes he could even catch a glimpse of her at the upstairs window, or hear her whispering to her brothers, “Has he gone yet?”

  “So much for her!” he’d think. “There are lots of other fish in the sea.” Then, another day, he’d be walking home from school, and she’d come right up to him and ask if he’d carry her books or come over to help her with a math problem. Once she had even walked the two blocks from her house to his and begged him to come help her get a kitten down from a tree. Why she hadn’t gotten one of her brothers to get that kitten down, he didn’t know, but he’d gone back to her house and climbed that tree and rescued the kitten.

  “Oh, you’re so brave,” Bobbeen had simpered. “Oh, thank you so much, Wilbur. I was so afraid my poor kitten would never be able to get down.” Then she had insisted on taking him into the kitchen and washing off the scratch marks the terrified animal had made on his neck and arms. Bobbeen’s light girlish hands had lingered as she applied the Mercurochrome. She had pushed him down onto a kitchen chair and leaned over him to inspect the damage the kitten had done, and her breasts in her thin cotton dress were right there at eye level. He’d been in agony, feeling his penis swelling helplessly. He’d been terrified that one of her brothers would come in and know at a glance just what kind of feelings Wilbur was having about his little sister. He could still remember that dress—it was a blue-and-white check—and he could still remember the amazing pleasure of her hands on his skin, her breasts near his face, her breath on his hair. It was the first time in his life a girl had touched him intimately, and he wanted both to sit there forever as if in some kind of spell and to jump up and run away, frightened by what all this might mean. Bobbeen had walked him back home that day, chattering away, looking up at him through her long eyelashes. But the next day when he wanted to walk her home from school, she had surrounded herself with a cluster of girls and didn’t even acknowledge him.

  Two or three nights ago Wilbur had been up in the attic at three in the morning, trying to write a poem about this very thing—about how Bobbeen DuPont and sleep both played the same frustrating games. He thought there was some kind of lesson to be learned from the analogy, but he hadn’t yet concluded what it was.

  His wife, Norma, would be—amused?—horrified?—pleased?—to know that he had taken up writing poetry at the age of seventy. He did it only at nights, on those nights when he snapped out of sleep with the precision of a switch flicking on and found himself wide awake for no reason at all. Norma was a deep sleeper; he envied her that. He’d turn over in bed and watch her. Norma always looked as if she were enjoying her sleep. She’d be all curled up with her head bent so far down he couldn’t see her face. She made him think of a bird with its head under its wing. She liked to pull the covers up over her mouth so that the edges just touched her nose, and sometimes, when insomnia first hit him, he used to ease the covers down from her face, hoping to waken her. But she would only sigh and perhaps roll over, or dig her face deeper into her pillow. Norma was such a complete sleeper it made him jealous, as if sleep and his wife had conspired together and left him out.

  So he began his own secret life, and it did give him a sly pleasure. He’d slide out of bed and grab up his robe and tiptoe out of the room. The first few nights he had gone down to the kitchen for a soporific, a glass of warm milk with a little brandy in it. After he realized that wouldn’t work and that he was destined to be awake for hours, he decided, well, then, he’d make use of those hours. Maybe it was a gift from God, those hours of consciousness while the rest of the world slept. So he began to take his milk up to the attic with him.

  At first he had only looked at old photo albums or out the window at the night-altered world. Then, without really thinking what he was doing, he’d begun to write down what he now thought of as his little poems. He didn’t suppose they were any good or that anyone would ever read them, but what a satisfaction they supplied! He had often heard his sons, who were now college professors with grown children of their own, discuss whether or not art redeemed life, but never before had Wilbur understood what that meant. Now he thought he knew, or was beginning to understand. The comparison of the fickle ways of the first love of his childhood and the first need of his old age provided him with an oblique but definite sense of justification. There was even a substantial, physical satisfaction about it, as if he had put together two random pieces of wood and made a towel rack or a stool.

  He wrote sitting at an antique school desk. There was a hole in the top of the desk for an ink jar; it was a very old desk. It had been covered with boxes and old clothes, but he had cleaned it off and moved it over near the window so he could stare outside while he was dreaming or thinking or writing or whatever it was called that he did up there. He hid his poems in an old fishing tackle box because he thought it would be the last place anyone would think to snoop around in. He supposed he had thirty or forty poems in there by now. He wondered if any of them were any good. From time to time he considered showing them to his sons, but each time the chance came, he let it go by. It was not that he feared embarrassment or humiliation. It had more to do with his awareness that right now, at this time in their lives, his sons did not need the complication of seeing their father in a new light, as a writer of poetry. Somehow both his sons continued into adulthood living turbulent lives—problems with wives, mistresses, children, jobs—and Wilbur thought they needed the stability of thinking of their old father in the way they always had. They might take this poem-writing business of his as a sign of encroaching senility, and he wouldn’t care for that. But because he didn’t want to show the poems to his children or his wife, this strange creative activity made him feel lonely for the first time in his life, as if he were going somewhere all by himself. He really wished he could find someone to read his poems and discuss them with him.

  Why? Why did he want someone to read these poems, why did he write them in the first place? Had he taken up scribbling as a means of whiling away insomniac hours? Or did the insomnia come on him because he harbored a secret desire to write poems and knew that the night hours were the only private ones he had? Since he’d sold his dry-cleaning business five years ago, he had suffered the clichéd abasements of the retired husband. He knew Norma loved him, yet in his most crotchety moods he fe
lt he might do her a favor by dying. He seemed always to be in her way. He kept active in his clubs and organizations, and had started off five years ago with ambitious plans. He had always thought he wanted to paint; he bought an easel and a palette and paints. But after a year of serious effort, he had realized he had no knack for the visual arts. Now the easel stood forlorn in the attic, and he didn’t even feel chagrined when he passed by it each night on his way to the desk.

  In the warmer months he spent as much time as possible puttering around in the garden, and Norma praised his cabbages, roses, tomatoes, and zinnias. But it was a chore for him, this gardening bit; his heart wasn’t in it. Still, it kept him out of the house, out from underfoot: Norma was more irritable in the winter months when the weather forced him to stay inside most of the day.

  In all seasons, he took long walks. Every day for five years now—when his health was good—he had walked six miles a day, following a route around Londonton that varied according to the weather and the season. When it was cold, he moved briskly from his neighborhood out to Main Street, which was truly the main street of the town, dividing Londonton into two neat halves. Main Street was also the only highway, connecting Londonton to the rest of the world, though it had no semblance of a highway about it. It was just a two-lane road winding gracefully through a picturesque town. Tourists crowded this road during high summer or foliage season to snap pictures of the colonial mansions that lined the street, and it was only during that period of time that the Londonton residents regretted not having a stoplight on the road. Wilbur would linger, even in the coldest weather, on the iron bridge that crossed the Blue River. He would lean over the side of the bridge for a while to study the condition of the water. Then, in cold weather, he hurried on down to what everyone called “the square,” but which was really a large oblong: two streets joined parenthetically around an oval green. All the shops in Londonton were here, and here Wilbur could always find one shopkeeper or another to join him for a brief chat and a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop. The only shop he never entered anymore was the dry-cleaning business he had sold to Fred Sanders. Every day he passed it. Wilbur would think that maybe soon he’d go in and see how the place looked under new management—but not just yet. In cold weather, after coffee with friends at the square, he’d hurry back to the warmth of his house.

  But in warm weather, his route was different, his walk longer. Then he would climb the gentle hill at the end of the square and walk around the college grounds, luxuriating in the sight of such grand old buildings, harmonious plantings, and beautiful young students. He liked it in the spring when these students spread themselves out all over the lawns, soaking in the sun. He could remember for a moment how it was to be that way, young, sweaty, and optimistic on a sunny day, though he had never gone to college or had the leisure to consider getting a tan. When the weather was really fine, or even in the winter if there had been a good new snow, he roamed as far as Slope Road, to see how the fine big houses of the town looked enhanced by snowdrifts or blossoming trees. The Bennetts lived on this road, and the Moyers, and the Vandersons; the Howard mansion was at the very end of Slope Road, but so far away and so surrounded by acreage that Wilbur never went there. He always ended his walk by returning to his own neighborhood, which was more modest. The houses and lawns were smaller here, and more littered with children and animals and their paraphernalia. He especially liked to stop and chat with Suzanna Blair’s children. Priscilla and Seth were favorites of his, and they often presented him with presents they had made for him—Play-Doh sculptures or colored pictures of Mickey Mouse which he took home and taped onto the refrigerator. These walks invariably cheered him up, for he loved his town and the people in it. He often thought that when he lay dying he would take consolation in remembering these walks: how the Blue River flowed ceaselessly under the bridge, how life flowed ceaselessly through the town, always going on.

  Back at home he would try to find odd jobs to do around the house: screens to be put up or taken down, something needing to be hammered or tightened or glued, trivial masculine assignments of one sort or another. He did the same sorts of things for their various widowed lady friends. But all these things hardly provided a full-time occupation. Norma had often hinted that he should take up some kind of carpentry work; for Christmas three years ago she had given him an elaborate tool kit. And he did like carpentry. But the things he made seemed so silly and extraneous—there was actually nothing they needed that he could carve or build, and in spite of his gender he could summon up little expertise for such pursuits. He began to wonder what he was good at doing.

  Two winters ago when Norma was sick, he had been piddling around in the kitchen and found himself making homemade bread, which had turned out, according to his palate, absolutely delicious. He had proposed to Norma that from then on he bake all the bread for their little household; Norma had assented warily. But even though she admitted that the bread was delicious, he could tell by the way her face twitched and her voice went high and tight when he was in the kitchen that she felt threatened and offended to have him rummaging around in her domain. And then it always seemed that he missed something or did something wrong when he was cleaning up. He didn’t see the flour he had spilled under the table, or something. He had stopped baking. Norma regained her equanimity.

  It had occurred to him about two weeks ago that if he wrote poems in the attic in the middle of the night, perhaps he could write poems in the attic in the middle of the day. If so, he thought, he could tell Norma about it, and schedule it into their daytime plans: Well, he could say, I’m going up to the attic now, and Norma would say, Good, dear, I’ll be sure not to disturb you. Which would also mean that she would consider herself free from disturbances from him for two hours. That would please her, he knew.

  That morning he decided to give himself a secret trial run. When Norma went off to her church ladies’ meeting, he fixed himself a glass of iced tea and climbed the attic stairs. But the attic, which seemed poetic and mysterious at night, with its shadowy corners and vagrant furniture, made him restless in the daylight. At night he could sit in the middle of that huge attic with only the light from a naked 60-watt bulb illuminating the room and the secrets it held. He could stare across the room at some hulking shape that was so disguised by the dim light and casual clutter that he could not tell for certain just what that item from his past was. And so his whole life seemed full of unusual and unlimited possibilities of interpretation. But in the day things were all too clear. He could make out the distinct outlines of each object, he could see that the outlandish shape which had aroused slightly exotic thoughts at night was by day only an old pine cupboard with one foot broken off and a set of discarded blankets tossed over it. Wilbur thought he had lived too long to be forced to see life in such a stark and pedestrian way. Surely one of the rewards the old deserved was ambiguity.

  Still, he had tried to write his poetry in the daytime. He put his glass of iced tea down on his desk, and arranged his paper and pen, and twisted up his mouth in a concentrating attitude. Then he just sat there and stared while the ice melted and a ring of moisture formed around the base of the glass. He couldn’t think of one word he wanted to put down on paper. Finally, defeated, he went back down the stairs, and when Norma came home she found him asleep in front of the television.

  That night, however, he awoke as usual, went up to the attic, and wrote what he considered to be one of his best poems. The pattern continued: he awoke and wrote at night, and fell asleep during the day. He knew his sudden escapades of sleep worried Norma, and he wanted to tell her that it was all right, he was not hitting senility so soon and quick. But he could not bring himself to explain to his wife just what it was he was doing. Norma was a great one for clarity, and Wilbur always found it necessary to justify his acts in detail not so much because Norma needed to judge as because she needed to understand.

  He’d never fallen asleep in church yet, though, and he doubted if he ever would
: Peter Taylor’s sermons always kept him wide awake. Now the pastor was telling a joke—something the other ministers had seldom done—and Wilbur had to admit he liked it, found it right, this inclusion of levity in a religious service. There was no doubt about it: Peter Taylor was an extraordinary man, and Wilbur hoped that when he died, Peter Taylor would be the one to see his body through its last rites and to console Norma. Wilbur believed that some people just made better connections with God than other people did. Peter Taylor had such a charitable way about him and was so, well, lighthearted, that Wilbur could imagine how at his burial Peter Taylor would stand outside in the fresh air and simply lift his arms and toss Wilbur’s soul up to the sky.

  Wilbur spent a lot of his time anticipating death. He wanted to be prepared. He hadn’t read very much in his lifetime—which made his poetry writing even more surprising to him—but he had spent a lot of time listening to ministers and thinking, and it seemed to him that the soul was the essential thing and that life was a process of building up the spirit while the body that surrounded and protected and constrained it gradually dwindled. All in all, it was not a bad system—as long as you could keep your faith in your soul, and Wilbur had managed to do that. In fact, just as much as he firmly believed in God, so did he also believe in the eternity of each individual spirit.

  When his third and youngest son, Ricky, had died in a car accident at the age of seventeen, Wilbur had been caught up in a crisis of belief that had nearly destroyed him. First, of course, he had to deal with the sheer loss, the loss of his youngest, tallest, most laughter-filled child; it was an almost intolerable devastation. And with Ricky’s death he had discovered that it was necessary for him to come to terms with just exactly what it was he believed about life and death and God and man, and that seemed a formidable task. He felt he was being forced to delve into the supernatural, to enter forbidden territory without the protection of host or guardian. For a long time he had been very sad and frightened. He had lost a great deal of weight, because as he had gone through the inevitable routines of daily life, he had found himself continually thinking: Ricky would have loved that joke, or I wish Ricky could have seen that home run, or if only Ricky could know that Doreen McKensie has gotten herself engaged to Ted Smith! When he had such thoughts, his whole torso would go stiff and cold with fear and sorrow, and his throat would clamp up tight inside his skin, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow food or water for hours.