We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “Your husband was wandering back and forth in traffic in front of the church,” Officer Garger said quietly. “He was stopping cars, waving his arms. Cars were backed up all the way to the train station. When we approached him, he was wild.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If the responding officer hadn’t seen the bracelet on his wrist, we would have booked him for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. We ascertained that he was trying to find his way home.” He took out a breath mint, asked her if she wanted one. “It’s Alzheimer’s? Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He seems young to me.”

  “Fifty-four.”

  “I understand this is not the first incident,” the officer said. She nodded silently. “He comes into town?”

  “He doesn’t,” she said. “This is an exception.”

  “What nobody wants is for this to turn into a legal situation. If your husband is deemed a threat to himself or others, or if the home situation creates an impediment to his safety—”

  “I’m a nurse. I know the law.”

  “Do you let him out alone?”

  “We usually have a nurse, but I had to let her go. I haven’t found a replacement yet. I got him that bracelet in case something happened. I have to go to work; I can’t stay with him.”

  “Have you considered a nursing home?”

  “Not as long as I can help it.”

  “Are there any family members who can help?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Nobody?”

  She thought of Connell at school. She had hoped he’d grow up when he went off to college, but he couldn’t even remember to call home on his father’s birthday without a reminder.

  “Well, there is my son. But he’s away at school. He’s in a play this summer. I can’t ask him to come home.”

  “You know what I think, Mrs. Leary? If you don’t mind my saying?”

  “What?”

  “You sure can.”

  • • •

  In bed that night, she thought about the way Officer Garger had looked at her. She’d gotten that look lately from men—repairmen, deliverymen—who came to the house and saw what kind of shape Ed was in. She had a few more wrinkles now, and a hint of crow’s feet, and the other day she thought she’d seen the makings of a jowl. Still, she knew she remained beautiful and that a distressed situation like the one she was in with Ed might bring out the chivalry in even unenlightened men. Lately she had told them the story as soon as she opened the door. She considered it her duty to explain that Ed was incapacitated. He had come to pride himself on his hard-won home improvement skills and would have hated for the professional craftsmen he respected to write him off as another eunuch of a househusband.

  They looked at her with pity, some with more than pity. They didn’t like to look at Ed or raise their voices around him. It made conversations more conspiratorial than they might otherwise have been.

  She couldn’t avoid admitting to herself that she’d given Officer Garger a look of her own. She knew it hadn’t communicated much but a vague dissatisfaction, but guilt still crept through her. When Ed’s hand explored her shoulder, she rolled over and went to sleep.

  74

  It was the day of their first practice as a cast. He and Jenna had arranged to meet beforehand at the Medici. He walked past the place and circled the block, then steeled himself enough to go in. He found her in a booth in the back.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  At the first read-through, Jenna had been a revelation as Puck, sexy and feral. Connell had read his own lines in a workmanlike fashion that was accidentally appropriate for the role of Francis Flute, the bellows mender given Thisbe to portray in the mechanicals’ play-within-the-play. He liked to think he would have made a good Oberon to her Puck, but the director knew better. Oberon went to an upperclassman whose magnetism attracted the available attention of much of the cast, Jenna included. When the director announced that Thisbe would be wearing a pink prom dress, the loudest laugh in the room came from Oberon.

  “It’s okay.” She leaned down to reach into her backpack, her long red hair shifting forward to block his view of her. “Here, let me give you this. We should get going.”

  “Hang on a second,” he said, beginning to panic. “Let me sit down.” He creaked in the joints as he bent into the seat. When he squared up across from her, he felt the nervous energy he had been carrying around in his chest settle with a queasy finality into his gut. She was not going to reconsider. If it had been a moment of betrayal that had driven her away, some passionate carelessness in the predawn hours, perhaps he could have pulled her back to him. She had a peculiar tolerance, even a fondness, for the self-absorption of dynamic young men. There had been no regrettable evening though; likely he had been too ready to offer his devotion. The little sedimentary deposits of his need had piled at her feet until they blocked her view of him.

  “I think we have time for coffee,” he said, “and to talk a bit.”

  “Let’s have some, then.” She signaled to the waiter, frowning in that lovely way she did when she was taking care of tasks. It was something in the way she gave in without a fight: their relationship had already receded into the past for her. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I just want to talk.” He couldn’t say the undiluted truth, which was that he needed her not to leave him. They sat in silence. He dug his knife into the candle wax poured in one of the many grooves furrowed into the table by generations of undergraduates. He couldn’t look at her.

  “How’s your father? Are you going home?”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t have to, if it would make a difference for me to stay.”

  “You should go,” she said. “You need to be there.”

  “I miss you so much,” he said, finally cracking. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

  “You’re running from something. You need to look at that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Her lips pulled into a little knot. “For what?”

  “For not planning anything for your birthday,” he said. “For any mistakes I made.”

  She laughed. “The only thing you did wrong was ask me to marry you. The only thing I did wrong was not say no right away.” She looked at her watch and pulled out a sealed envelope. “Can I give this to you now?”

  The ring made an airy bulge in the center. He felt his chest tightening.

  “We’re too young for this,” she said. “We’re nineteen! I should never have taken that thing. I was in shock, I guess.”

  In his silence he was laboring to deepen the groove, but the dull knife had no effect.

  “Let’s not be so serious all the time! Let’s have fun.”

  “We could make it work,” he said.

  “Let’s get the check. We’re late.” She patted his hand, looked for the waiter. “We’ve had some great conversations here.”

  He sat, quietly despairing.

  “This wasn’t one of them, Mr. Cat-Got-Your-Tongue. Mr. Eeyore. And any other animals I haven’t mentioned.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. “Could you try, for one second, not to be so damned adorable?”

  “I’m not adorable,” she said. “You just see me that way. That’s the whole problem. I’m fucked up inside, just like you.”

  • • •

  They arrived as the rest of the cast was stretching. It was going to be a physically challenging production, so Dale, the director and a theater professor, wanted them limber. Since it would be performed under the stars, outside the Reynolds Club, they would be practicing outdoors to get used to projecting their voices.

  As Connell stretched, he rehearsed what he would say to Dale. He hardly knew the man, beyond taking one of his classes, but he’d already come to see him as something of a father figure, and he dreaded disappointing him. He went to office hours and listened to Dale hold forth about plays.
He hadn’t read or seen most of the works Dale brought up, but he tried to nod along at all the right moments, and when he left Dale’s office, he marched straight to the Reg to check them out. He scrambled to read them before he saw Dale next, but he was always a discussion behind.

  “This is where we’ll be for the next two months,” Dale said as he called them together. “There’s no intimacy out here. It’s vast, echoless. The acoustics are awful.” He gestured to the heavens. “The open air swallows all but the loudest sounds. There will be no microphones. You will have to fill this space with your voices.”

  Connell watched over Jenna’s shoulder as Dale spoke. She was alarmingly buoyant. He saw her exchange a few looks with Oberon.

  “Now,” Dale said, “I want you to spread out.” Connell tried to stay by Jenna. “Form two rows. Everyone has a partner on the opposite row.” When the shifting of bodies finished, Connell saw that Jenna was his partner. “Get up real close,” Dale said. “Closer. Put your face right near your partner’s face.”

  Connell wasn’t an actor; he knew that by now. He was never sure where to look when he was onstage. He had tried out for this play to let some more Shakespeare run through his head and carve out some shared space with Jenna, who now was staring right into him. He didn’t know what to do with his arms, which swayed awkwardly by his side.

  “We’re going to do a little exercise. I want both rows to take one step back. Okay. Do you notice a difference? Look into your partner’s eyes. Are they looking into yours?”

  They were. She was laughing with what seemed like genuine mirth at the irony of their pairing.

  “Now,” Dale said, “I’m going to ask you to do something a little unusual. I want you to tell your partner you love them. Don’t be shy. Tell them you love them now.”

  “I love you,” Connell said, separated from her by a few feet. She said it too, her brows raised, a big smile on her face, as though she were trying to get him to laugh along with her. It occurred to him that she had never said those precise words to him before.

  “Now take another step back,” Dale said, “a big one. You have to try harder to see each other. Maybe not much, but a little. What happens when you get farther away? What do you have to do to compensate? Out here, you’ll be trying to reach people a long way off. Now, tell your partner you love them again.”

  Connell said it a little louder than before. Jenna seemed to mean every bit of it. There was no denying her talent.

  “Now take another step back. Forget about the distance. Say it as if they’re right next to you, only louder.”

  “I love you,” he said weakly across the expanse. He didn’t know how to use his diaphragm, and his breath ran out too soon.

  “Now two steps. This time shout it! This is love that gives a damn.”

  He did as asked, coughing as he did. She was a figure in a row of people.

  “Two more steps. Again!”

  This time he didn’t say anything, only listened. He couldn’t make out any individual voices, only a collective one making an urgent appeal.

  “One last step! Give it your best shout!”

  Jenna was a blur on the other side. His throat hurt. He threw his arms back and shouted as loud as he could.

  • • •

  His mother had called and asked him to come home and he had said he had a responsibility to the director and the cast to be in the play. He could hear from her silence that she was shocked to hear him talk of responsibility in refusing to come home and help, and the truth was that he had shocked himself by saying it.

  He hadn’t realized how scared he was to see his father until his mother’s call. He hadn’t intended never to return; he just had no immediate plans to do so. Jenna had been the best excuse possible, but now she didn’t seem like much of an excuse anymore. He could say he was staying in Chicago to work on things with her—my future wife, he could hear himself rationalizing later, or at least that was how I thought at the time—but he saw the truth of their relationship too clearly to allow himself to pretend later that he hadn’t.

  Had he tried to grow up quickly to cover up feeling like a child? Had he asked her to marry him because he needed a grand unifying theory to explain his absence? The thing was, he himself had been scared of marrying her. He didn’t want it, really, any more than she did. He was more relieved than brokenhearted, but now he had to think about everything he wasn’t doing. He had run out of excuses not to go home.

  • • •

  He quit the play, crammed his pair of army duffels full of dirty clothes, and got on a plane. His mother said she couldn’t pick him up, so he took the bus and train and walked from the station.

  He squeezed through the back door with the bags and was struck by the punishing volume of the television coming from the den. He remembered his mother saying tests had revealed that his father had lost some hearing. He headed toward the den but found his father in the vestibule, balanced precariously on a stepladder, looking through the little windows set into the front doors. Connell muted the television and went back and called to him, but his father only mumbled something, so Connell walked over and touched his shoulder. “Dad!” he said, more forcefully. “I’m home.” The news seemed to leave no impression at all, though he’d been away for almost a year.

  “He’s out there.” His father gave Connell a serious, confidential look.

  “Who?”

  “The man,” he said darkly. “That man. He always comes.”

  “Where is he?”

  Connell raised himself on his toes and looked out. No one was there except the gardener, who had finished pruning the hedges and moved to the house next door.

  “Do you mean him?” he said, pointing. “You mean Sal?”

  “No, no, no.” His father’s eyes flashed; his hand twitched; his hushed tone and terrified stare implied that anything was possible. Connell wanted to believe in his father’s continued ability to perceive danger accurately. Had he arrived just in time?

  Connell turned again to the window; then he backed away, feeling foolish.

  “Come down off there,” he said, holding his father’s elbow, but his father stood frozen. “It’s just a step. Just put your leg forward.” His father offered a tentative foot, then retracted it and tried the other. “Lean on me,” Connell said, and his father did. Once on firm ground, he clapped a couple of times before he seemed to register his son’s presence and looked embarrassed. He went to the window again. He was animated now, his finger jabbing at it.

  “He’s there! He’s there!”

  Connell darted over. His father was right: the man was there, and he was famously unstoppable. He might deliver death and destruction; he might deliver circulars for the Food Emporium.

  “Dad!” he said. “Don’t you know that’s the mailman?”

  The mailman disappeared behind the hedge. “I don’t trust him,” his father said, and then headed for the kitchen with a surprising quickness in his step. He lifted one of the blinds in the window above the sink so high that his whole face would have been visible from the other side.

  When his father moved aside, Connell saw that the blinds were bent in several places. His mother must have reconciled herself to living with them rather than replacing them over and over. This one change amounted to a revolution in her thinking.

  His father opened the door and then the screen, which swung back hard and crashed into him as he headed outside. When he returned, he was pressing a bundle of mail against his chest with both arms. Some pieces fell to the floor and he released the remainder onto the island like a cascading pile of apples.

  “What are you doing?” Connell asked, flabbergasted.

  “I get the mail.”

  “Just like that.”

  “I get it every day.”

  “But a minute ago you were saying you didn’t trust him. You were totally spooked.”

  “He comes every day,” his father said. “I don’t know who he is.”

  “He’s the
mailman,” Connell said desperately.

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Dad,” he said, “he’s the mailman.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “But you know he’s delivering the mail?”

  “Yes,” he said reasonably. “He comes every day.”

  “So why are you suspicious of him?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” he said. “I get the mail every day. That’s my job. I have other jobs.”

  He shuffled into the den and sat down. Connell followed him and unmuted the television. The volume shot out like a cannon report. Connell retreated to the kitchen and picked up the fallen letters, wondering when the last time was that his father had opened a piece of mail and whether he’d ever open one again. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The den was drenched in noisy static, and he went in and found his father watching the electronic snow of a lost signal as though it were a program. His father didn’t stir in that crashing noise. He clutched the remote like an amulet. Connell tried to take it from him, but his father had an iron grip on it. Connell went to the television, lowered the volume, and changed the channel until the picture came up.

  “This thing,” his father said disgustedly. “It doesn’t work.” His mouth hung open, and a little drool leaked out. Connell used his father’s own shirtsleeve to wipe it up. His father gave him a knowing look. Connell wondered how much awareness still lurked in him. A faint whining hum emanated from him.

  “It’s good to see you,” Connell said, throwing an arm around him.

  His father kept looking at the television but patted his own knee. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  • • •

  They watched Columbo. Peter Falk’s Beckettian detective wore his trademark trench coat and screwed up his face in his world-weary, gently bemused way—experience and innocence mingling in him. Connell thought, Thank God for Columbo. Thank God for Law & Order reruns. He didn’t know how he would ever fill the time with his father without television.

  When the commercials came on, he had no idea what to say. His mother would ride in on a barge of stories about family friends or simply accounts of her day. Connell felt disrespectful delivering reports from the front lines of experience. He felt a little better talking about things his father knew already or that they had experienced together, but it felt awkward to introduce them into conversation. Still, he could feel it coming, the need to revert to the familiar.