Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  She stood up and took a step towards me, her eyes fixed on my face. “And if I let someone mess around in my eyeball with a knife, what then?”

  “We don’t use knives. If all goes well, your vision should stabilize. You should be able to continue with your normal life.”

  “‘Should’? What does ‘should’ mean? Will I be okay?”

  She was looking at me so fiercely I had to turn away. “‘Should’ means there’s every reason to think the surgery will be successful, but no one can give you a hundred-percent guarantee.”

  “I’m out of here.” She seized her bag and headed for the door.

  “You ought not to drive. You might hurt someone—your daughters, a friend of your daughters.”

  My last remark stopped her. “Shit,” she said. She sat down on the edge of my desk, glaring as if this too were my fault. I was reaching to touch her shoulder when I recalled Merrie’s warning. I let my hand fall and suggested she phone her husband.

  Greg arrived twenty minutes later, straight from his job unloading trucks at a supermarket. He had the build of a linebacker, tall, short necked, and thick thighed. His bulky presence made my office seem instantly smaller, but as soon as he spoke, his fundamental niceness was apparent. I again explained the need for immediate surgery and how careful Bonnie must be.

  “Treat her like a princess,” he said. “Got it.”

  I escorted them to Merrie’s desk, and was almost back at my office when I heard footsteps.

  “Doctor,” Greg said. “Are you saying Bonnie could go blind? You can tell me straight.”

  He was standing a few yards away, his uniform stretched tight across his chest, his muscular arms flexed, ready to pick up whatever burden I handed him. Remembering Jack’s mockery of my circumlocutions, I said, “That is the very, very worst case scenario.”

  “Thank you. That’s what I needed to know. Bonnie’s stubborn. We’ll get home, and she’ll start charging around, but I’ll tie her to the bed sooner than let her do one bad thing.”

  Before I could respond, he was hurrying back to Bonnie. I gazed after him with a feeling that, at the time, I did not understand. Now I suspect it was envy.

  EITHER THAT WEEK OR the next, Viv began to drive up to New Hampshire to observe the master classes at a riding school. At the time I paid this new activity no heed; it was just more of her endless busyness around horses. Only later, in what I have come to think of as my afterlife, did I understand that on these trips she crossed much more than a state line. The new university term had begun and the day after Bonnie’s appointment, Jack asked if I could pick him up at his office. I left work early, took Nabokov home, and drove to the campus. As I approached his second-floor office, a student was leaving.

  “Thank you so much, Professor Brennan,” she said.

  As soon as her footsteps faded, he turned to me. “Is she attractive?” he said.

  What I’d noticed was the young woman’s gratitude, not her appearance. “Moderately. She was beaming as she thanked you.”

  “Makeup?”

  “Not much. Maybe some mascara. How did you picture her?”

  “Nice looking, but not in a slutty way.” He reached for his backpack and began to gather his possessions. “It’s one of the things I’ve always despised about myself: I care so much how women look. In grad school I shared an office with this woman Sandra. She was smart, funny, kind, and I knew she liked me. But I couldn’t imagine going out with her because she was so homely. Sometimes I think I deserved to go blind.”

  “If everyone who misused their eyesight lost it, we’d all have white canes,” I said. “Hilary is attractive, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I can tell from the way waiters speak to her.” He picked up a stack of CDs. “God, I’m such a pig. Even now, when I ought to be grateful that any woman will give me the time of day, I still want to have a pretty girlfriend. It’s the opposite of every value I hold dear, yet I can’t fucking change.”

  I thought of Bonnie’s hazel eyes; of the shadow only she could see. “So what happened to the brilliant, homely Sandra?”

  “She married a millionaire who worships the ground she walks on—I wish.” He smiled and zipped up his pack. “She’s a single parent, teaching high school in Syracuse. Friends report she works too hard and is happy.”

  On the short drive to his apartment he made me describe the journey. It was Hilary’s idea; if he learned that the bad pothole was by the post office, the long traffic light was at School Street, then, even in a car, he would always know where he was. When we were settled in his living room, he told me she had taken him to meet Mercury.

  “Beforehand I was thinking all horses are the same to a blind man. But then I held out my hand, and he gave a big, warm snort. His breath smelled of grass, and summer.”

  “You could ride,” I said. “Helen Keller did.”

  “Are you suggesting I climb onto a tall animal, over which I have zero control, and allow it to carry me around? No thanks. So what’s this about a security issue at Windy Hill?”

  Hilary had noticed the new alarm, and Claudia, in response to her question, had used this vague phrase. Which is worse: breaking a promise or telling a lie? As ten-year-olds, Robert and I had debated this choice and voted for the former. A few months before, when I asked Marcus and Trina, they had said the same. Now, in response to Jack’s question, I followed Claudia’s example, lying to keep my promise. I mentioned the break-ins at the nearby businesses, how the police had advised updating the alarms.

  “Hilary would go ballistic,” he said, “if anything happened to Mercury.”

  “But she never rides him nowadays.” I was not sure if I was asking, or telling him.

  “And there’s the rub.” Gradually he had begun to understand that behind her grief about Michael lay a more complicated narrative. For nearly a decade brother and sister had scarcely seen each other. He disapproved of her husband; she disapproved of his feckless lifestyle, his living like a stable rat in his forties.

  The room was growing dark when I said, “I had this patient yesterday. She made me feel I owe you an apology. You were so calm about losing your sight, I never said how sorry I was. I must have seemed like an unsympathetic oaf.”

  “Actually you seemed like a Hippocratic oaf.” He gave the glint of a smile. “Your stoicism was easier to deal with than the hysteria of friends. You helped me understand that nothing—shouting, praying, smashing every glass in the house—was going to change things. I take it she’s attractive?”

  “She has beautiful eyes, and she works in the cafeteria at the middle school.”

  I would have said then, and I still say now, that I was not in love with Bonnie, but some emotional gear had shifted. Otherwise I would not have copied her number into my phone, and I would not have dialed it the following morning. Fortunately I called her landline, where no missed call would register. Fortunately she did not answer.

  14

  I BLAME THE SNOW FOR what happened next. It fell and fell. Our cars were buried, the stables were buried, our lives were buried. The horses had to be kept indoors and exercised in the arena, which meant vastly more work for Viv and Claudia. Jack organized a roster of students to guide him back and forth to his office. My mother worked at home. Marcus and Trina had frequent snow days, and we scrambled to make child-care arrangements, trading with Anne and other parents. I know Viv talked to Claudia and that some kind of peace was brokered, but I did not dare to ask the particulars. Nor did I dare to ask about the dream that had stopped her from getting an abortion. It was long ago, I told myself. What mattered was our family, our shared life, that we had been happy for more than a decade.

  I was still waiting for the right moment to suggest that Viv buy a horse of her own, but she was even more distant, a distance only emphasized by meals. While the rest of us ate winter food, pasta and baked potatoes, she ate fish and quinoa. When Marcus and Trina asked why, she said, “I need to be stronger to ride Mercury.”

&
nbsp; “But it’s not kind to eat animals,” said Trina. “We ought to eat less of them.”

  “Fewer,” said Viv. “What did everyone learn today?”

  Marcus said he’d learned that the Sami have nearly a thousand words to do with reindeer. Trina said she’d learned that her friend Rachel’s mother was whitening her teeth.

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “No, it’s weird. Like there’s a light on in her mouth.”

  I glanced at Viv, hoping to share the pleasure of our daughter’s wit, but she was slicing her tuna.

  DURING THOSE SNOWY WEEKS first Steve, then my mother, asked if something was wrong, leaving the “something” vague. Ask Viv, I told them. Steve, my docile friend, obediently changed the subject, but my mother was more persistent. “What do you mean, ‘Ask Viv’?” she said.

  I was at her house, helping to rearrange the ground-floor room. It was here that I had often joined my father in the late afternoons to drink tea and talk about whatever caught his attention: the best way to boil an egg, the skunks that attacked his garden, Basho’s travels. On one of these afternoons, sitting by the window, he had described the Simurg, a bird in Persian mythology, large enough to lift an elephant. It was very old, and very benevolent. “I picture it having beautiful brown feathers,” he said. “Like an owl. Sometimes, when I’m having a bad day, I wish the Simurg would carry me away.”

  Now I was more sorry than I could admit to see my mother reclaim the room. “Just what I say,” I told her. “Viv’s off on Planet Mercury. I’m the last to know what she’s doing.” I set the cardboard box containing a new bookcase on end and began to cut it open.

  “She loves that horse, doesn’t she?” My mother was kneeling on the other side of the room, surrounded by books. “It’ll be exciting when they start competing.”

  “It’ll be a nightmare when they start competing. She’s already gone all the time. It’s as if she forgets she even has children.” The sound of the blade, pushing through the cardboard, seemed to both echo and amplify my anger.

  “Would you say that if she were a man?” Still on her knees, my mother was watching me. “With your father, and your work, and the kids, Viv has come last for years. Then, finally, Edward died. Mercury is an amazing horse, an amazing opportunity. Marcus and Trina won’t feel neglected if you help them understand that.”

  “‘Finally’?”

  “Finally,” she repeated. “Did you ever wonder what it would be like if your life had revolved around taking care of Viv’s father?”

  “But Dad—” I started to say. But Dad was part of me. But Dad’s illness brought me back to Boston. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “Nor did I,” she confessed, “until I started seeing Larry.” While they were in Philadelphia, his wife had fallen and broken her hip. He was convinced it wouldn’t have happened if he had been nearby. “We won’t be leaving town again any time soon.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’d love to travel.”

  “And I will.” She smiled. “Just not with Larry, not now. It’s frustrating, but I admire his loyalty to Jean.” She stood up and came over to inspect the bookcase. “I hope you and Viv can work things out so you both get a part of what you want.”

  “I hope so too,” I said. But what would a part be? A fetlock for her? A scalpel for me?

  THE DAY AFTER THE conversation with my mother, as we yet again dug out our cars, I asked Viv if she was glad Edward was dead.

  “Not glad,” she said, angling her shovel into a drift. “But these last few years, everything was hard. And it was all for nothing. He wasn’t going to get well. He wasn’t happy. I hated to see him struggling day after day.” Her blue eyes regarded me across the snow. “Didn’t you feel that way, at least sometimes?”

  “I don’t think so.” But even as I spoke, I remembered standing in his room, on another snowy day, holding a pillow while he slept, wondering if I had the courage to use it, knowing I didn’t. I had never spoken of that moment, tried never to think of it, but standing knee deep in snow, I silently acknowledged that I had thought of killing my father.

  “You’ve had a lot to put up with,” I said, “being married to me.”

  I know the date because in my appointment book there is a note: “Call Bonnie D. re op.” Later that same morning, when I went to the mall to get supplies for Nabokov, I sat in my car outside the pet shop and dialed her number. She answered so swiftly she must have been holding the phone.

  “I just want to make sure you’re all set for tomorrow,” I said. Her operation had been postponed because of a cold.

  “Thanks for calling, Dr. Stevenson. I’m okay. Greg’s taken the day off work. He won’t even let me put on my own shoes.”

  The snow was falling in tidy flakes that melted the instant they touched the windshield. I turned off the engine to hear her voice more clearly. “And what about your daughters? Are they old enough to help?”

  “Alice waits on me hand and foot, and she keeps Suzie in line. What’s that noise?”

  “A van reversing. I’m at the mall, picking up supplies for the parrot.”

  Bonnie did not comment on the oddity of this. “Oh, the parrot,” she exclaimed. “He was so cute, spouting poetry. I was telling Greg we ought to get a bird. It would be someone for me to talk to when I’m here alone all day.”

  The windows were misting up, cutting me off from the quotidian world. Idly I drew a bird on the glass—the Simurg—and watched its wings blur. Bonnie was still talking. She’d never had a pet, but when she was a kid, her neighbors had a Pekingese. “Rollo had these huge brown eyes, and his owners were at work all day. I used to sneak into their yard to play with him. Somehow they found out. They came and shouted at my parents. Rollo was worth thousands of dollars. If I didn’t stay away, they’d call the police. I never got to play with him again.”

  Her own eyes, I realized, had a little of that exophthalmic quality so marked in those of Pekingeses. “Well,” I said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. Don’t eat or drink anything after midnight.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Stevenson. I appreciate your calling, especially after I stomped out of your office. I know you were doing your best.”

  As I bought Nabokov’s bird food, I thought how there was no art to detect inappropriate behavior. I always called patients before surgery—by some standards, in not calling Bonnie, I would have been remiss—and yet our conversation had crossed a line. When I got back to the office, Nabokov and Merrie greeted me warmly, and my patients for the rest of the afternoon were punctual and grateful. Later, when I drove to the stables to collect Marcus and Trina, the sky in the west was still light. A van was parked in my usual spot by the trailers. As I maneuvered between two cars, a light went on in the car in front. Two heads came together. Then a door opened, and Charlie loped towards the barn.

  15

  PERHAPS ONLY THOSE WHO are, or were, married will understand how Viv and I saw each other every day, slept together every night, and yet seldom found time to talk. At last on a Saturday, when both the children had play dates, we decided to tackle the long-postponed task of painting the basement. As I stirred the sky-blue paint and Viv lined the doors and windows with masking tape, I said I’d been thinking about returning to surgery.

  “Why not?” She unfurled more tape. “You used to enjoy it.”

  She spoke as if we were discussing returning my library books. Later, when she claimed I had been oblivious for months, I would say the same about her. As I started rolling paint onto the walls, I explained I would have to study to requalify. For a while I would earn less.

  “How much less?”

  At once she registered her misstep. Since our conversation about the alarm system, money had been a dangerous topic. Switching to the ultrareasonable voice she used to urge the children to tidy their rooms, she said we should discuss the pros and cons. Maybe when Marcus was settled in middle school? She kept talking, but the phrase “pros and cons” had carrie
d me back to my conversation with Claudia in the tack room. Had the dream baby looked anything like our son? Now, writing this, I wonder what would have happened if I had asked Viv that question—if one of us had adjusted our orbit to cross paths with the other. But when she paused, I said I’d also been thinking she should buy a horse of her own.

  “Buy a horse?” She was painting around the door, her hand deft and steady. “Why would I do that? Claudia and I were just saying we’ve finally got the right ratio of horses to students to boarders. We’re not going to replace Nimble.”

  “I meant a horse just for you, to train for competitions.”

  “I have Mercury.” She hurled the sentence across the room.

  “But you don’t own him,” I said. “You don’t have a legal arrangement with Hilary.” What I wanted to say was that he was too good for her, that he made her want too much.

  “Don, I used to be in business. We have an understanding. She pays his board, the veterinarian’s fees. I take care of him and pay the expenses of competing. She doesn’t want to sell him but if she did, she would sell him to me.”

  Years ago, when Marcus was still a baby, someone had asked Viv if we were married. No, she said, we have an understanding. As she spoke, she smiled at me, and I heard the word with new meaning; we were standing on the same ground. “And is this understanding written down?” I asked now. Paint oozed beneath the roller. “Witnessed?”

  I can name only some of the muscles involved in the hard stare she gave me. “I thought you Scots believed a woman’s word is her bond.”

  For several minutes the radio filled the silence until, by way of a peace offering, Viv brought up Burns Night. Every year we joined with my parents to celebrate the Scottish poet; my father, as long as he was able, had acted as master of ceremonies. Now Viv reported that my mother was making the vegetarian haggis. I said Steve would offer the “Address to the Lassies.” We finished painting the basement, and the following evening I found myself presiding over a table full of friends and neighbors. When we joined hands to sing Burns’s most famous song, “Auld Lang Syne,” I felt we were honoring both my father and the poet.