Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “I added that we could make good progress on the way if she read to me some of the more significant changes she was recommending. Iris finished her drink, and then her face brightened a little. Relaxed is maybe a better word.

  “And so off we went, surging through the rain over glistening roads, alone in our little traveling world, me driving and Iris next to me, her shoes on the floor and her stocking feet folded neatly beneath her in the seat. We accomplished little in the way of actual work. She did make an effort, once we were out of the city and rolling through the fields, to read me some of her notes on the more problematic chapters of Inglorious Sun. She thought I had overdone the cloud metaphor and we sparred about that for several miles. But the conversation easily segued into more personal topics and we never returned to business. I learned of her Connecticut roots and of her years at Yale and her love of trains. We spoke of our late parents, remembering the good things about them. She waxed romantic about her great-grandfather’s Parisian publishing house.

  “But when we spoke of literature, we tended not to do so in professional ways. Rather, we discussed our love of it and of our need for it; like it kept us alive. Iris recited Emily Dickenson from memory. We marveled at the people who were indifferent to the writing arts, expressing regret for any life so bereft. I did not mention Julia, of course; but I did think of her.

  “There were also long stretches of empty wet road in which neither of us spoke. And in a way I suppose I remember those parts of the drive as the most intimate. Strangers alone together must talk. Business associates must talk. We were suddenly something else to each other, or so I came to believe. Not strangers. Not business associates. Something else. We were people who could be alone together, content merely with the sound of the other’s breath in the rush of water and wind outside our little capsule, streaking through the gunmetal clouds so heavy with rain that they sat upon the roads like mountains.

  “When we reached the cottage, Iris stood outside the door in the sopping rain pooling over her shoes as I fumbled incompetently for the key, dropped it into a crack of the floorboards of the decking, and had to fish it out with the help of a twig. We both laughed uproariously, me on my knees, Iris holding one of her bags over her head, as our clothing grew heavy and became increasingly plastered to our skin.

  “When at last we tumbled inside, we were both soaked and dripping. I started a fire in the fireplace and set out a towel on the hearth for Iris to sit on and another to dry her face and blot the water out of her blouse. Her hair had taken on curl in the rain and hung in blonde ringlets around her temples. She sat carefully, her back to the popping wood, and removed her stockings, which she arranged on the towel next to her.

  “As she tossed lavish compliments around my father’s fish shack, it occurred to me that the décor, while not feminine per se, certainly did not have the feel of a bachelor’s retreat or, for that matter, an unmarried writer’s studio. Extraneous color and detail suddenly seemed everywhere. The curtains screamed. The flat, bluish pillows that Julia had fastened with fabric ties to the backs of the four high-backed chairs arranged around the kitchen table were calling out towards the fireplace. I worried for a moment that Iris would perceive a woman’s influence in the room and that such perception would lead in short order to curiosity, then concern, and then back to the old cautions she had seemed to abandon somewhere along the road.

  “I recall remarking, as if by some warm but unbidden memory, that my mother had been very fond of the place. Very fond. My mother hated that place. The smell of it. The remoteness of it. The abandonment it represented. She hated it. In other words I lied, Matilda. Instinctively hoping to head off any suspicion, I lied right to her face and for all the wrong reasons.

  “But if Iris found anything disconcerting about the décor of the fish shack cabin cum cottage cum studio, she did not mention it. Instead, she sighed contentedly at the sound of the ocean emptying itself over the hardwoods of the surrounding forest. She closed her eyes and took in the wild, fecund scent of the place through her nose. Coming back into the present, she patted her sopping trousers and told me that she might be better off if she changed into her spare clothes. Before she could ask, I was out the door and into the rain to retrieve her other bag from the trunk of the car.

  “When Iris emerged from the bedroom, her empty wet clothes were slung over her forearm. Her hair was thoroughly tousled, hanging in curls beneath her shoulders. She was dressed in a dry pair of jeans and a yellow cotton blouse that she had not bothered to tuck into her waistband. She paused in the doorway when she saw me across the room, at my writing table by the window, staring at her and gripping the knob of my second Selectric. She gave me a wry smile and proceeded in her bare feet to the fireplace where she arranged her clothes on the towel next to her stockings.

  “I remember thinking then that Julia, my wife, the prettiest girl I had ever met, would have taken that moment to blush and to apologize to me for how she must have looked, but that Iris, with her prominent European nose and her military posture and her throaty laugh and her seniority, felt no such need. Iris came to everything and everyone on her own terms that you were free either to take or to leave. She was her own person, fully realized. Iris apologized to no one.

  “I had not moved a single muscle by the time she had straightened and turned from the fireplace. She looked at me; reading me. She was the sound of rain and the light of flame and the warmth of fire and the smell of the forest in summer. She was the future. She was the written word on a page. She was fame. She was wealth and culture. She was all of those things at once. All of the things I loved in the world and all of the things I wanted. She asked whether I had some dry clothes for myself but it was like I could no longer hear. Even the dry wood raging in its bright orange tongues behind her, did so in complete silence. I saw a question on her face. All I could say in response was… I love you.”

  Angus was quiet and still for nearly a minute. I looked at him sideways from my place on the sofa, my hands in my lap, clutching bloody wet tea towel. I wanted to reach out. To place my hand on his knee. To bring him back. But I didn’t dare, for the same reason that I have never liked shaking someone who is dreaming. For fear that they will not wholly return and that they will be lost in that empty space between worlds.

  “I love you. It was so simple to say. Out it came. Like I was some poorly drawn, hopelessly predictable character in a dime store pulp romance. Of all the scenarios I had imagined, and of all the irresistible eloquence I had rehearsed, those three words tumbling out onto the floor like so many marbles and jacks was utterly beyond the pale of my expectation. And in all the decades since that rainy afternoon, I have never uttered those words to another living soul. Never. Never. Or, if I have said it, I have never meant it. I love you. Those words. And Iris looked back at me, blinked once or twice, and then said, just as simply, I know, Angus. I know you do.

  “She came to me then, across the room, like she was floating. She held my face in her hands and she kissed me on the mouth. I couldn’t let go of the damned typewriter I was so terrified and awestruck at having realized what was in my heart. She separated her face from mine, brushing my face with her palms, passing her thumbs over my eyelids, catching the strands of my hair with her fingertips. Her eyes reading me. Reading me. She smelled like rain. Then she pulled me closer again and I closed my eyes.”

  “Oh, my …” I whispered, not actually intending to vocalize my thoughts. Angus glanced at me with one of his cantankerous expressions.

  “You asked how I got this scar,” he said. “I’m telling you. I have no intention of detailing for you what ensued beyond… beyond that meeting of lips. Notwithstanding your generation’s lurid preoccupation with cinematic, not to mention pornographic, reimaginings of such moments, you will have to plunder someone else’s memory. I have prostituted my art for money. I have sold my literary children into slavery. I have misrepresented my parents and I have lied about myself more often than I have told the truth.
But I will not debase the memory of … of that …by trying to reduce it to words. Not that. There are no words. Trust me. I have spent a lifetime trying to find them.

  “Suffice it to say that when it was done and we were spent, I was happier than I believe I have ever been either before or since. So much of great literature has been written about love and the human heart. Virginia Wolff wrote that the beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. I had always accepted such themes grudgingly, believing them overdone and even resenting the great, ennobled muscle on behalf of other, less celebrated parts of the anatomy. But in the wake of that afternoon I understood our romantic literary obsession with the heart for the first time in my life. My mistake was in thinking it merely a convenient metaphor for something … what… something grander I suppose. Ineffable. Something spiritual, beyond the physical plane.

  “But the romantic heart is not a metaphor. It’s not merely iconic of something external. We carry it around with us. It beats, physically, in our chests, pounding out our true name. It saves us. It tortures us. It racks us with fear. I was afraid of looking into my heart, says Turgenev. I did not want to know whether I was loved, and I did not want to admit to myself that I was not loved. But we do look, don’t we? We must. It leads us to the precipice and we do its bidding, come what may.

  “Anyway… Iris and I sat there next to each other, our bare backs against the sofa, watching the fire and listening to the rain. I told her that I had been waiting my entire life for her. She looked at me and told me that if we stayed together she would have to withdraw as my editor and assign my account to someone else. She wanted me to know that. ‘Rules are rules,’ she said.

  “I laughed heartily at the triviality of her concern. I told her that I would have the woman over the editor any day. It pleased her, I think; being valued as a woman more than as a professional editor. She leaned over and kissed me on the temple. And that…”

  There was a discernible catch in Angus’ breath and he swallowed.

  “That is how Julia found us.”

  CHAPTER 71 – Susan

  “I have told you what I see. I will now tell you what I have done.

  “It is fine and convenient for us to stand in angry gatherings and to wave signs and to point accusing fingers at you and to curse you for what has happened to this country on your watch, now stretching toward its seventh year. But the hard truth of it, sir, is that what is happening to this country is not happening on your watch. It is happening on my watch. This is a democracy. This is my watch. I voted for you. I am responsible. God forgive me. I come from proud South Dakota, true blue McGovern Democrats who will surely roll over in their graves to hear me say it, but I voted for you, sir. Twice.

  “This is a democracy. The congressmen and congresswomen who have cowered at the prospect of being labeled weak or unpatriotic; who have abdicated their responsibility to hold you to the letter and spirit of your constitutional charge; who have legislated you a clear path so that you might avoid, as much as possible, the inconvenience of illegality; who have helped you to politicize those questions that should be beyond the pettiness of politics; those congressmen and congresswomen have done so in our name and they have done so because we sent them to Washington and they have done so because we have allowed them to stay in Washington. We live in a democracy and all of this is happening on … my …watch.

  “We live in an economic democracy. We live in a country that exalts the free market economy and the power of the consumer. We have commoditized news and information as though each fact, each item of truth, was just another kind of snack food that comes in a variety of flavors and colors, endlessly manipulated for the sake of marketing. But the makers of this product cater to us. You and me. We have the power to reject those who would sell us fear and half-truths and spin in place of information. We have the power to kick to the curb of commerce those in the media who blindly regurgitate political talking points and resell them to us as reporting. We have the power to marginalize those would-be journalists who cannot see the difference between opinion and fact and who, as tens of thousands of lives hang in the balance, repeatedly sacrifice the tough follow-up question for concerns over patriotism, and access, and market share.

  We are the market. You and I. And we have the power.

  “And yet we have rewarded the wrong voices. We have allowed greed and score-settling and petty politicking and fear mongering to poison our national discourse over this war – over life and death on a massive scale; over religion; over security and morality and responsibility; over what it means to be an American. We have voted with our dollars and with our time and attention and the media has heard us loud and clear. For we are the consumer and we have the power. I have watched a lot of television and have not changed the channel nearly enough. I am responsible. This is my watch.

  “What have I done, Mr. President? What is my contribution to the things that I see around me? Acceptance. I have accepted the trajectory of this country as though that trajectory were comprised of events that are not of my making and not within my power to change. I have watched it all unfold on the little screen in my kitchen as I chop the celery and put away the dishes. The war – and when I say war I mean the war over the identity of this country – has been all around me. For years. It seems now that there has never been a time when that war was not raging. It would seem that there is never peace, never a cease-fire, in the war to define ourselves; the war to know ourselves, as a country, as a people, as individuals, and to resolutely be that thing. That war never stops. And I have been missing in action. What have I done, Mr. President? I have failed to show up for the fight. That is what I have done.

  “And in the meantime, my country has wandered away from me. I have watched on my tiny television as my country has followed you into delusion, sleep walking into a narcotizing dream of exceptionalism. I have watched on my tiny television as we have isolated ourselves from the rest of the world, slowly but surely barricading ourselves, setting ourselves apart from – as though above – the rest of humanity and the rules it lives by. I have watched from my tiny television as our national identity has devolved into a meaningless tautology: we are Americans and we are No. 1 because we are No. 1. We speak of our greatness, and therefore we are great. You have modeled for us a self-eulogizing tailspin in which we proudly uphold the label of greatness, the flag pin of greatness, the wish of greatness, like an aging man in the grips of a midlife crisis acting obnoxiously on the empty wish of a youth that has passed him by. You have asked us to embrace a fragile greatness of a kind that belongs to empires past their prime. You have aged us well beyond our years, Mr. President. You have encouraged us to abandon our true self and we have obliged.

  “And where have I been? In my kitchen, watching it happen. I have been absent.

  “Nearly thirty-six years ago, four of my friends were murdered. One of them, Jeff, right over there beyond those trees. A bullet through the mouth. Another, Sandra, over there. Bullet through the neck. The other two, Allison and Bill there, and over there. Bullets through the chest. Sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds. One of those 67 rounds caught another of my friends, Dean, in the back, paralyzing him from the chest down. Eight others were wounded, most of whom I knew.

  “I was not here for those thirteen seconds. I did not see my friends die. I did not bear witness. I did not hear the shots. Because I was absent. Those thirteen seconds for me have lasted thirty-six years. Because I was absent. Absent because I was given an ultimatum to prove my love to another; to prove my allegiance to another. I proved my allegiance to something other than the truth; to something other than the best in me; to something other than my true self.

  “But I sure passed that test of loyalty. I passed with flying colors. And in so doing, I took my eye off the fight. I abandoned the responsibility of being present and accountable. I was absent. And I have been absent ever since. Accepting. Deferring. Going along to get along. Allowing mysel
f to become another gear in the machine that works the way it works. Another pillar in the architecture. Watching the world through the filter of that tiny screen in my kitchen.

  “But I am here now. This summer, I hear the drumming. This, summer, after all these years, I hear the drumming. Again. Here. Now. In Ohio. In this new day I am here now, Mr. President, just as you are here now and the air still smells of blood and gunpowder and I realize that it is never too late to show your love. Because, make no mistake, I do love my country.

  “But proving my loyalty should not require my unquestioning obedience; it should not require my deference; it should not require me to sacrifice my right to object; it should not require me to go along. The test of my patriotism should be the passion quavering in my voice as I object in defense of the very principles on which this country was founded. I will not apologize for my independent mind as though it is inconsistent with my love and loyalty. I will not be shamed or cowed. I will not hide my grief or my rage. It is your turn to admit you have been wrong. I will not apologize to you or for you. It is your turn to apologize. To explain yourself. It is your turn to show your loyalty. I will not turn away or short-change the truth of things in order to preserve your fictions and your conceits.

  “You will label me like you have all the others, I realize that. I am suddenly a traitor in your eyes. Or maybe you will be kind and label me a simple rube; an unwitting pawn played to great effect by the enemy. But I know that one way or the other, in your eyes I am suddenly a threat to the union. So be it.