We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”

  “They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.

  Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.

  “Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.

  “Yes, but they’re in New York.”

  “They have to win two.”

  “They’ll do it.”

  “It’s Roger Clemens.”

  “What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.

  “ ‘Ya gotta believe,’ ” Connell answered.

  “Well, then.”

  It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.

  At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.

  She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.

  “I almost died,” Connell said.

  “You’re fine,” Ed said.

  “I was scared. I’m still scared.”

  Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”

  “I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.

  “Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”

  “You really think they’re going to win?”

  “The Mets? Yes.”

  “Both games?”

  “Both. You’ll see.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”

  As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.

  She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched having him there. Still, it was going to be a long night, and she’d be exhausted in the morning, so she’d eventually have to move him off her.

  She lay there thinking, I almost lost him. I’m never serving goddamned cherry tomatoes again. Ed better be right about the Mets, or this kid is going to be more disappointed in his father than he is in the Mets. Then again, he has to learn that things don’t always work out the way you want them to.

  She went back and forth between thinking it would be nice if Connell got the outcome he wanted and thinking it would be character-building for him not to get it. Fatigue from a long day at work and the effects of adrenaline withdrawal must have been enough to overcome her need for space, because she felt herself drifting off, even though he was still attached to her.

  The kid would be thrilled, she thought. Let them win.

  The next thing she knew she was waking up. Somehow in the night she had gotten herself to face the boy, who was still sleeping, and Ed behind him on his back, out cold. Connell breathed in and out softly. His lashes were long like his father’s, and in the muted sunlight peeking through the blinds his cheeks looked sweet and full. As if he could sense her looking at him, he opened his eyes and blinked a few times in that half-conscious, slightly perturbed way he used to as a toddler when he hadn’t yet fully come to. He gave her a slumber-drunk smile; then he was back asleep. She didn’t know what to do with everything she was feeling for him, even for her husband, so she got up to take a shower and left the two of them to wake up and find each other there.

  Part III

  Breathe

  the Rich Air

  1991

  15

  After Connell turned in, Ed surprised her by not moving to the study to grade lab reports or read journal articles. He lay on the couch with the newspaper listening to Wagner. She didn’t have to know music to recognize that it was Wagner, because the swelling crescendos and singer’s deep voice gave it away. Ed often listened to Wagner when he was in a contemplative mood.

  She sat on the other couch with her book, happy to share with him the beaten-back chill of a February night, which made itself known in the frost on the windows. She switched the light on in the artificial fireplace, pausing briefly to rattle the glass coals and hear them clack against each other. It pleased her that the man she’d married, in addition to possessing an erudition that impressed even worldly friends, read the sports section in its entirety. At one point he rose and went to the study, and she thought she’d lost him for the night, but he returned with a pen to do the crossword. She loved the carefree way he called on her for help when flummoxed by a clue. It suggested an abiding faith in the soundness of his intellect that he could meet head-on those swells of ignorance that might capsize another man’s confidence; they were wavelets lapping against his hull.

  “I’ve done everything I can do,” he said, as he lay the quarter-folded newspaper on the coffee table. “I want to be realistic. Maybe it’s time for me to relax.”

  She glanced up from her book to catch his eye, but he was looking at the ceiling.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.


  “I’m turning fifty soon. I’m slowing down. I’ve earned a rest.”

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  “I’m going to become one of those guys who come home and call it a night. Maybe I’ll watch some TV.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “I can start right now.”

  Her heart leapt a little. It was pleasant to imagine him spending more time in their bed. He had finally given up the night classes, thank God, but he still worked so hard, often coming in from the study long after she was asleep.

  “I don’t know how long you could keep that up,” she said. “You’d get bored.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, if it makes you happy,” she said.

  He’d already moved to the stereo to change the record. He plugged his headphones in and had them on before she could hear what he was listening to. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

  She waited for him to acknowledge her gaze. He liked to lie like that and slip into a reverie, but he usually opened his eyes between movements to give her a little review with his raised brows. She wondered if he were sleeping, he was lying so still, but then he began tapping his foot rhythmically. When the side ended, he lay there, arms crossed across his chest, impassive. She shut off her light and stood to head into the bedroom. She called his name, but he didn’t reply. She watched for some kind of acknowledgment of her departure, but he only shifted his glasses. She went to him and stood over him. He must have imagined he could outlast her in this game, but she was starting to grow disturbed by it. She leaned in to kiss his cheek good night; before she reached it he had opened his eyes and was staring back at her in a kind of horror, as if she’d interrupted him in a reflection on something monstrous.

  “I’m heading to bed,” she said.

  “I’ll be right in.”

  After a few bouts of fitful sleep—she never slept well without him beside her—she headed to the living room. She found the end table lamp on and Ed still wearing the headphones. A record was spinning, and he’d set up a stack to be played by the autochanger. She shut the stereo off and called his name. He put a hand up to silence her.

  “I’m just going to lie here a minute,” he said.

  “It’s four in the morning.” She switched off the lamp, but ambient light still filtered into the room from the coming sun. “You need good, quality sleep. You’re always saying that. Don’t lights interrupt sleep? You need REM sleep. Restful sleep. Come on inside. You have to teach in a few hours.”

  “I think I’m going to cancel class,” he said. “I’m not feeling it.”

  “Huh?”

  He hadn’t missed a class in twenty years. They’d had fights about it. You can miss a single class, she would say when something came up. They can’t fire you for it. They can’t fire you, period.

  “I think I’ve earned a day off,” he said.

  “Well, either way, just come to bed. It’s late.”

  She stood over him until he got up. They shuffled down the hall together. In the morning when she woke he was sitting at the foot of the bed.

  “Maybe you’d better call for me,” he said.

  After she’d made the call, she showered and dressed. When she headed to the kitchen, she saw him lying on the couch again, as if he hadn’t moved from the night before, the only difference being the cup of tea on the table.

  “You’re taking this whole ‘taking it easy’ thing pretty seriously,” she said.

  “I’m just gathering my energy,” he said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

  He let himself be kissed good-bye. She went to work. When she returned she was surprised to find him in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. She hadn’t really believed he’d stay home all day; it was unlike him. His record of never missing work was a matter of somber pride. Connell’s bag and jacket were slung over a chair in the dining room.

  Ed’s eyes were closed. His feet beat the time. She stood over him, tapped him on the shoulder. As she spoke, he motioned to the headphones to indicate he couldn’t hear her. She mimed pulling them off her ears.

  “I’m listening to music,” he said.

  “Plainly.”

  “How was work?”

  “Work was fine,” she said. “Did you stay there all day?”

  “I got up to eat.”

  “So this is the new thing?”

  “I’m trying it out. I’m feeling enormously refreshed.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said.

  “I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs,” he said. “This is step one. I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”

  “What about work?”

  “I’m going to need you to call in again for me tomorrow.”

  In the big mirror in the other room she saw herself in the coat she’d been meaning to replace. She had once thought of thirty as a terribly old age, but now she was turning fifty at the end of the year, and thirty seemed impossibly young.

  “How long do you plan to do this?”

  “I hadn’t formulated a plan.”

  “Shall I expect you to eat with us tonight?”

  “Of course,” he said, waving her off and putting the headphones back on.

  As she began to prepare dinner, she reflected on what this thing could be. It was clearly some kind of midlife crisis. Something was spooking him: getting old, probably. She was confident it wasn’t another woman. They were coconspirators in a mission of normalcy. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life. She knew he was reliable, and not only because he wasn’t going to miss work to sleep off a drunk, or gamble his paycheck at the track, or forget their anniversary. He was, in a subtler way, reliably knowable. Some women yearned for a hint of mystery about their men; she loved Ed’s lack of mystery. It had shade, depth, texture; it was just complex enough. His heart contained too little passion for him to attempt a grand affair, and too much for him to endure a scurrilous one. He was too preoccupied with his work to love two women at once; he lacked that tolerance for superficial interaction every successful adulterer wielded.

  A few days later he returned to work, but the headphones ritual persisted in the evenings. One night he returned to his study, and she felt relieved. She assumed he was grading lab reports, but when she went in to bring him a plate of cookies she found him writing in a notebook, which he took pains to block from her view. When she went back later that night to look for it, it was gone.

  • • •

  Their dinners began to feel strange to her. Ed looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and he never wanted to talk about his work—or about anything, really, but Connell’s day and the happenings at school.

  “And then,” Connell said, “they lifted him up to grab the rim, but they didn’t give him the ball to dunk. Somebody pulled his shorts down. And then they pulled his underwear down! He just hung up there until Mr. Cotswald ran over and got him.”

  “Ha!”

  Ed laughed with just a bit too much gusto. She’d expected him to condemn the boys’ behavior. It was as if he hadn’t really absorbed what Connell had said. Something in the warmth in his voice, the distraction that flickered in his eyes, made her wonder if she’d been too hasty in ruling out an affair. A listlessness had come over him lately that seemed at times like a species of dreaminess.

  “Well.” Ed pushed back his chair. He gave Connell a perfunctory pat on the head and retired to the couch and the privacy of his headphones. Connell looked embarrassed, as if he’d extended a hand for a shake and been rebuffed. She knew enough not to compound it by speaking to him.

  She went to bed feeling frowsy. She squeezed the deposits of fat at her hips and wondered how they had managed to sneak up on her. She knew the doctors at work still turned to look at her in the halls, but if Ed didn’t see her that way, then the interest of other men felt less a vo
te of confidence than a shabby habit that in its mindless lack of differentiation—she saw the way they looked at so many of the girls—called into question whether she had ever been beautiful at all.

  Ed came in after midnight. He stood over her, gazing oddly. She could feel herself stiffen.

  “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “What are you listening to, anyway?”

  “Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have so many records I haven’t even cracked the plastic on. It makes me anxious to see them all sitting there. I’m working my way through them.”

  She was surprised by how relieved she felt to hear this. It was sufficiently particular to actually be plausible. It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy—retreat to the high ground of a major project.

  • • •

  She had long measured a meal’s success by the range of colors arrayed on the plate, but it felt hopelessly middle-class now to conceive of food in this fashion, and she looked askance at orange carrots, bright green beans, white mashed potatoes, the dark pile of meat and onions, picking at it with her fork in the way she resented in her child.

  She used to love to sit at her kitchen table and watch the drapes kick up in the wind, to look through the window across the little divide and see the Palumbos gathered in their dining room, but now the house next door felt far too close. She hated its plain brick face and the shabby décor visible within. She had long tolerated this vulgarity because she felt privileged to have a house at all, but now she found it too disappointing to bear.

  Lately she couldn’t stop thinking about Bronxville. When she’d left Lawrence in 1983 for the nursing director job at St. John’s Episcopal in Far Rockaway, she’d missed going to Bronxville every day. When she returned to Einstein a couple of years later to be head of nursing, she’d begun to think the timing might finally be right to move to Bronxville. The commute would be shorter for both of them, she was making good money now, Ed had gotten into a decent pay class himself, and they’d made a few good investments. They had put eight thousand dollars into oil shale stock on the advice of one of Ed’s colleagues, a geologist at NYU, and it had climbed to forty-four thousand. But then in ’85 the shale oil company went bankrupt. That year, they also lost twenty grand on a penny stock scam with First Jersey Securities. The final nail came in 1987, when her boss left for a government appointment, and the new head of the hospital fired those he could and appointed his own leadership team. Though she landed on her feet at North Central Bronx, she had to take a pay cut to do so.