Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  The waitress had tied napkins to their necks; the napkins bore the legend “Lobster-in-the-Ruff.” Two lobsters shook claws across Jeanne’s breasts; she accepted her bib the way a child might, poutingly. They ate baked potatoes and salad and drank bitter white wine. “Do you realize,” Ian asked, “that this is our first date? I mean we’ve been having our—whatever we’ve been having—for nearly two years now. And we shared meals in public way back when. But it’s the first time we’ve eaten alone since you asked me to your house for lunch.” He dipped a claw in butter, cracked and sucked it while she watched.

  She told him how at thirty she’d asked Miles for a divorce. He had been shocked, not suspicious. He’d asked her what was wrong and could she pinpoint and discuss it, so that he could have it fixed. He’d used that expression, Jeanne said, as if marriage were a faucet that required a new washer, or a car that needed lubrication every three thousand miles. She told him “have it fixed” was not a way to solve the problem, but proof of the problem itself: he rolled up his sleeves and consulted a maintenance book.

  Miles had been baffled. His self-esteem was shaken, and it hurt her to see how he hurt. He’d asked if she were having an affair, and she answered him truthfully—this antedated Ian—“No.” He’d asked if she would like to take a vacation, go somewhere without him, or go to a doctor, or maybe go to the movies more often. She told him that the trouble was pervasive, not particular, not something you get to have fixed. They had settled down together, but it was unsettling; it was Kansas she traversed. There was beauty in it, certainly, and much that was fruitful and rich. But looking out her kitchen window—past the geraniums in the window box and past the swing set, the sandbox, the hedge, past the white Congregational Church steeple all the way up to Mount Wayne—seeing the swatches of pine and rock and maple like a crazy quilt, then the sky like a bedspread and clouds like white tassels, she still saw the landscape of Kansas, only Kansas, an interminable flatness she was doomed to forever and ever.

  Jeanne smiled. She emptied her glass. She’d been unfair to Miles, of course, not to mention Kansas. She had never visited the state and there was no reason to condemn it out of hand. But equity was not the question; landscape and weather and travel and doctors were not answers for her then. She could not explain it. She yielded when he pressed her and they stayed together for convenience’s sake, and for the twins. It would have been absurd to go. She had nowhere to go, and nothing to go to, no reason for leaving she knew how to formulate: only Kansas, always Kansas, and the loss of joy.

  That was, Jeanne said, when they met. That was when she came to dinner at the Conovers’. She had been unprepared. She had prepared herself for Samson Finney, for the old ladies and gossip and jostling and, since it was Friday and fresh seafood day at Morrisey’s, for the shrimp remoulade. She had reconciled herself to Miles, and staying on. She concentrated on the twins’ ballet, and the flute. There had been enough to do just cooking and cleaning and transplanting the geraniums; there was no room for restlessness if she re-papered the room.

  She should not tell him this, Jeanne said, it was unladylike. It was not the way that thirty-year-old wives and mothers from New Orleans are trained and supposed to behave. But she had wanted him so badly when they said good night (he’d taken her coat from the closet, remember, his hands were on her shoulders while she fumbled for the sleeves) that she had nearly propositioned him right then and there in the Conovers’ hall. He, Ian, was just back from wherever he’d been wandering, carrying his strangeness like a shield and the reserves of distance like a spear. Did he remember how Miles went ahead, was warming up the car? She could have fucked on the floor.

  He ordered a second carafe. The lobster shells lay ransacked in the bowl between them; there was butter on her chin. He wet his napkin in the finger bowl, then wiped her chin and cheeks and lips. She submitted in silence; he tore her bib free. He put his fingers in the warm lemony water and touched her eyelids. “I love you,” Ian said.

  “I know.”

  “I love you very much.”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t the end of that story.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a beginning. We’re beginning.”

  “Maybe.” She kept her eyes closed but reached up for his wrist. Her fingers closed on his watchband; she squeezed. “I’m trying not to tell you more than you deserve to hear.”

  “Deserve?”

  “Mm-mn. Some of what happened just happened. Some of it might well have happened anyhow. And some of this belongs to Miles, not you or us or me or anyone.”

  “He’ll deal with it.”

  “I wasn’t prepared. I’d planned on something else that night. I’d planned on being Mrs. Fisk and chatting with Samson Finney and the other guests and drinking two glasses of wine . . .”

  The lights went out. There was a sudden gust of wind, a darkness all around them, and loud rain in the street. The waitress came with candles. She apologized. “Seems like there’s always trouble with that power company. Seems like whenever it storms we get to watch it in the dark.”

  “It isn’t a problem,” Jeanne said. Her voice was high; it broke. She was crying, he saw, had been crying perhaps since the waitress arrived, was sitting in the candlelight with her eyes awash. He reached out his hand, but she pulled hers away. “Poor Miles,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve this. I’m going home.”

  “Now?”

  “Tomorrow. First thing in the morning.”

  The waitress returned. Her name badge read Nancy; her nose had been broken and badly reset. She wore an Ace bandage on her right forearm; he asked for the bill. “You folks passing through?” she inquired. “Don’t mind me asking but are you from Canada?”

  “No.”

  “I could have swore it,” she said. She returned to the counter. Jeanne stood. “We’re going to argue,” she said. “Let’s not ever argue. I’ll leave in the morning without you, if you’d rather. I could rent a car.”

  “We’ll go together.”

  “Ian, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to act this way. I wanted to be free for you. I meant to be. I’m sorry.”

  He paid. Outside the moon was bright and the rain had ceased. They walked the length of the dock. He skirted the small puddles and listened to the harbor’s noise—the clamor and whistling and racket of seabirds and clatter of buoys and boats. Their motel had a Coleman lantern as its only light. He fumbled with the lock. The door when it swung to was heavy; Jeanne entered behind him and, wordless, lay down on the bed. She kicked off her sandals and kept her legs crossed. He kissed her ten toes, then her knees.

  Love: what Judah felt for Maggie in his bristling proud possessiveness and she in turn gave back to him unyieldingly, then yielding; what Peacock would call ownership as husbandry, then sumptuous thrift; what Anne-Maria and Joseph and the others of his family had called a kind of stewardship not sacred nor profane but proper to those who have holdings; what Hattie had deemed merely fitting and appropriate to Sherbrookes, a lifelong burden of behavior and expectation fulfilled; what he at his return had been unable to give Sally Conover and at first withheld from Jeanne—the glad renunciation of this separate thing, Ian, and the arithmetic of passion which, combining two, makes one—love became his subject then and had been all along.

  He wrote a courtly scene. He made Judah and Maggie conjoin in a circle of fire, swearing fealty while villagers watched. He had them meet by accident—the woman knocking on a door in order to gain entry and an escort through dark woods. He composed this scene several times, transposing it to Europe and varying their ages and casting the encounter in the several lights of amity, suspicion, or lust. The complicating factor in romance was marriage, and he wrote of that repeatedly also. In one draft: Maggie married someone else, and her need for Judah was illicit, entailing divorce. In one draft she was pledged elsewhere but married to Judah instead. In the third draft she was muddleheaded, trying to make up her mind. The task was how to reconcile
fidelity with freedom, to enter in the tournament unpledged. The problem was how best to keep a keen-edged sense of chivalry when lists were laundry lists. Maggie had ten white handkerchiefs; she waved them with abandon while the warriors preened. One handkerchief was knotted to each finger, and she waved them as extensions of her hands.

  So Jeanne seemed unattainable, though the physical fact of attainment happened early on. He battered at her ceaselessly. There was distance that he sought to bridge, an inward reticence that had nothing to do with restraint. The sex was unrestrained. What he wanted to demolish was her self-regarding separate self, and it was long until he learned such demolition works both ways—that boundaries once crossed are boundaries erased.

  They drove that autumn to the roadbed for Route 7. Following the Old East Road past Matteson’s, he came to road signs reading: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD, 1/2 MILE. Ian parked his pickup on the road’s dirt shoulder. There were power lines. Jeanne descended lightly, unafraid; if someone recognized them, she would say they were scouting locations for next season’s children’s play. She had explained this to Miles and packed a picnic lunch. They walked past a trailer with a placard that read: PUBLIC WORKS. It was a Saturday, and therefore the site was abandoned; there were yellow trucks parked in rows. They followed the construction path up over a small rise.

  It had been raining all week. The access road was mud. As the slope increased, however, the roadbed grew firm; the tractor tracks seemed baked brick-hard, and the drainage worked. They crested the first hill. The view was immense: Green Mountains in the hazy distance, a rainbow of maple and oak in the valley beneath them, barns positioned to the west like pins where meadows intersected like green sheets of paper. There were cumulus clouds. Crows flew. A mile or so down this east slope they were constructing a bridge; cranes flanked the space like sentinels. A conduit stood ready for assembly to their left.

  A dog barked. Ian looked for it; it barked three times, then ceased. Beneath them, on a transverse path, a girl on a bicycle weaved into sight. She pedaled effortfully through the mud. They waved, but she did not look up. Bears hibernate, he said to Jeanne—or so his father used to say—in the ruined Glastonbury Inn; they sit in every single chair and sleep in all the beds. They got charcoal pits for smelting there, Judah said; this town required that mountain. We’ll go up and get us a bear.

  After some time, they settled in a clearing. Jeanne spread out a blanket, and they sat and ate. She had cold chicken in the hamper, and bread and hard-boiled eggs and fruit and cheese and wine. He talked to her about the play, about his dream of character that would not prove restrictive.

  She lay back, adjusting her skirt. The gesture was domestic, practiced, a single swift twist of her hips. Her black hair had leaves in it; he plucked them loose. He spread his arms. The clouds between the sun and Woodford Mountain made patterns on the slope’s green surface; their shadows moved like whales. “The peaceable kingdom,” he said.

  “You make me want to live with you. It does feel right.”

  “More than that. It feels complete.”

  “I’m happy. You do make me happy.” Jeanne emptied the bottle. She added ice. The wide-necked thermos had a picture of a boat at anchor. “I wish it could go on like this.”

  “I love you,” Ian said.

  She made no answer, swallowing.

  “This isn’t working, is it?” Ian asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. Averted, it was once again a dark medallion—minted in a foreign land, a currency he could not translate into use. “I stopped that road,” he said. “From going through our property, at any rate. But it’s still being built. It makes no difference, does it, that I want you to leave Miles?”

  “It does,” she said. “But not enough. Not yet.”

  The road became an ocher strip, then crested a hill and was lost.

  He saw her two days later at the County Fair. Sheriff Joe was demonstrating how to split a bullet on a knife-edge and pop two balloons at once. Then, wearing a black blindfold, he held his rifle upside down and still punctured a balloon. After each trick his wife held up a piece of paper with one bullet hole to prove he wasn’t using scatter shot; she broke the bottle whose cap he shot off to prove that the bottle was glass. There was a stall purporting to show the world’s largest steer—“Ten Thousand Hamburgers Alive! On the Hoof!” A wire cage held rattlesnakes, with cows’ skulls and tumbleweed blown all the way from the Old West; for seventy-five cents you could fish five minutes in a trout tank and keep whatever you caught.

  He wandered past the Swimming Pool Display. There were tractors for sale, and whirlpool baths, and chances on a brand-new Mustang; three Hondas would be sold to any single customer for the price of two. There were portrait painters and photographers and fortune-tellers on the midway; at four o’clock a demonstration of dressage was scheduled for the stock-car track. Men waved at him, a man alone, to try his luck at ringtoss and at basketball; he shot six electrified geese. He hit them on their beaks so that they squawked and fell. Men hawked kazoos and key chains and T-shirts reading “Dung’s Deli” and “Disco Sucks.” They sold balloons and food and hats, he bought a cowboy hat for Jane, and a leash that clamped on air and was called “The Invisible Dog.”

  While he was receiving change, Jeanne touched his arm. “Hello.”

  He pivoted.

  She offered him a Sno-Kone. “That’s Amy over there,” she said. “Behind the cotton candy.”

  “Amy. Kathryn. How are you?”

  “We get to spend two dollars,” Kathryn said. “We get treats.”

  “Two rides on the carousel,” said Jeanne. “One upset stomach from a pizza, and a Kewpie doll.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Not long,” she said. “A year or so. You came alone?”

  He showed her the hat. “Jane’s too young.”

  “There’s animals,” said Amy. “Off in that direction. And a girl I know won first prize in the 4-H eggplant contest.”

  “And Debbie Korey’s goat got second place,” said Kathryn.

  “It did not.”

  “Did too!”

  “What’s so good about just second place?” Amy put her head back and twirled the cotton candy like a majorette. The pink concoction remained on its stick. She stuck out her tongue.

  “Is your father with you?”

  “It’s Monday,” Jeanne said. “No.”

  “Could I treat you to the Ferris wheel?”

  The twins jumped up and down. In their first display of unison, they clamored to be taken; “Mommy, please,” they said. Jeanne was wearing a white scarf. She wore white sailor pants and an azure tank top. “It won’t kill you, lady,” said the man who had sold him the leash. As if they were a family, they walked to the Ferris-wheel gate.

  In the ensuing minutes, Ian thought several things. While he paid and escorted and fastened them in, he thought how he was buying time, how time itself was purchased by the woman at his side—Jeanne looking so much younger than her peers at the concession stands, so much the bright beginner still—how as they settled back and joked about the cage and bar and bench, the girls half fearful and then wholly so with the permission to clap hands and scream, how as the world turned upside down she reached for him, the rush of wind and roar of equipment providing, somehow, privacy—saw in that reaching instant cotton candy on the seat, the glint of copper in the fold of Amy’s left penny loafer, a Pentel heart and telephone number complete with area code on the bench beside him, the legend claiming “Samantha Sucks,” greenhouses in the distance and the meadows full of cars, a Coca-Cola van unloading crates, the shins and stalls beneath them gone kaleidoscopic, with himself the turning lens—thought, This is the woman whose life is my life, joy my joy. At the top of the circle, she called out his name. They hung there poised, suspended, and then dropped.

  “Mommy, you were crying,” Amy said.

  “Not really.”

  “Yes, you wer
e.”

  “I got something in my eye.”

  “Did you two like the ride?” asked Ian.

  “Yes.”

  “Say thank you,” Jeanne instructed them.

  “Thank you.”

  Kathryn shook his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Sherbrooke.”

  “Ian. You’re welcome,” he said.

  “We have to go now.”

  “Do you? There’s a lumberjack who was the world champion. He’s putting on a show in twenty minutes.”

  “We have to,” Jeanne repeated. “It was excellent to see you. Good-bye.”

  She adjusted her handbag and turned. She walked between the twins and guided them toward the exit gate. He watched them till they disappeared, then made his own way to the lumberjack. A tree had been stripped of its bark. A fat man in a red shirt sliced a piece of paper with his ax. “People often ask me,” the man announced, “if I can shave with this ax. Well, you can’t see me shaving, so I just want to show you all how fine this ax can cut.”

  When The Green Mantle was finished, he sent it to New York. Apollonius Banos, the theatrical impresario, had been his roommate at Harvard, and they had kept in touch. Apollonius would claim to be in Ian’s debt. “I owe you, buddy,” he had said the last time they met. He lowered his head and raised his eyes and gave his upward-staring glare, his chest hair curled out of his shirt.

  Banos used to say he had the dirtiest act in Adams House; it got the little ladies where they lived. He had majored in Social Relations, and he had a theory that Harvard was a whorehouse purporting to be something else. “Put ten thousand young adults in the same place, and what do you have?” he would ask, going falsetto on “young adults.” “Faggotry, careerism, and the biggest gang bang in Boston.”