Now Sheri asked, “Is everything all right with you?”
“I’m uncomfortable—you know. I’m so big.”
The silence that followed seemed to gain solidity with the few seconds of its duration; in another moment it might be impossible to break. They gazed out the window at the construction. A few flakes of snow spiraled down from the mostly clear sky, and made an odd moment of contrast, this little flurry from one rolling cloud that had already broken up beyond the sun-bathed hills to the east.
“I was so wrong about everything,” Sheri muttered. “I thought Tyler might want to hurt them. It made me suspicious.”
Moments before Sheri had arrived, Lily and Tyler had spent a cold hour over breakfast, Tyler’s breakfast, anyway, barely speaking. In the days since the move, they had both been surprised by the force with which their trouble returned to them, the same trouble that, in the face of Buddy’s death, had seemed rather small and unimportant—even petty. It was depressing to discover that the tension between them hadn’t really gone away at all, or even changed as a result of their mutual grief; it had simply been momentarily pushed aside. The small kindnesses, the holding on, the tender apprehension and anxiousness, and the days of a sort of shy dependence on each other had given way with the passage of time, and they were where they had been before: in the complication and confusion of knowing the baby was not Tyler’s.
Because it was in her nature to see things empathetically, she understood what he felt. At his heart’s core, he was a little boy whose mother had abandoned him, and in a way, everything else about him was predicated on that. This morning, she had tried to reach through the silence by attempting to talk about it all. But he had wanted no part of it. He turned her questions back with a baleful look, refusing to discuss it, denying that anything was wrong, and accusing her of trying to stir things up. She told him that she’d awakened in the middle of the previous night with an awful scare at the pit of her stomach and the realization, as if it had been shown to her in a dream, of how wrong it would be to keep her child’s paternity from Dominic. It was wrong, and she felt it all the more as the time for the baby’s delivery approached. She believed that keeping to the lie, basing their lives on this falsehood, would surely poison everything else, as it had already begun to do. Tyler shouted at her that it was her lie that had poisoned things, and then stormed out of the house and sped away. She sat crying in the living room with its boxes and curtain rods and newspaper-wrapped dishes. The baby climbed her rib cage and made her gasp. Finally she put herself to work getting some things in order. The sight of Sheri’s car pulling into the driveway gave her mingled feelings of dismay and relief.
Now Sheri broke a doughnut in two and dipped the end in her coffee. “Roger Gault came by this morning.” She bit into the doughnut, a large bite so that her cheeks bulged, and sat there chewing it while Lily waited. Then she shrugged, as if throwing off some doubt that had assailed her, and sat forward to dip the doughnut again. “I think he’s gonna do some work on the house.”
“There was something Buddy wanted done,” Lily said. “Wasn’t there?”
“I don’t like him,” Sheri said. “It just dawned on me this morning that I don’t like him a little bit.”
“Why do you think you feel that way?” Lily asked her.
Sheri’s eyes narrowed. “You sound like a psychiatrist.” After another long pause, she shook her head and muttered: “I don’t know. Everything’s weird, if you ask me. I’ve started seeing David again.”
“David?”
“Okay—right. I never told you his name.”
Lily was silent.
“He wanted to meet for lunch, and I said yes. I’ve seen him twice. Nick—Nick doesn’t come near me anymore.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Lily told her. “I really don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you. I don’t mean it the way it sounds. It’s just—to tell things. Like you and Dominic. I mean, if I can’t even talk to you, my best friend—”
This occasioned a long, painful silence.
“I thought we told each other things.”
Lily felt pinned under the other woman’s steady, sorrowing gaze, and for a moment wondered what Tyler might have said to his half sister about this pregnancy. She couldn’t be entirely certain about anything, now. “We can talk about anything but your marriage,” she said. “Please?”
Sheri gave forth a desperate little laugh. “That doesn’t leave much. I guess we can talk about the baby.”
“You mean this one?” Lily said, putting her hands on the tight ball of her abdomen.
Sheri sat back and folded her hands in her lap and sighed, without speaking. She fidgeted, then seemed to relent. “Nick takes care of the house just like Daddy used to—the grounds and the pool and the business. He’s steadier than he ever was before. This gentle, tender, sweet guy, and it’s not Nick. It’s not the one I married. I don’t think I’ve heard him laugh—really laugh, like he used to, that high, loud, old belly laugh—once since all this—since it happened.”
Lily said, “We all need time,” and felt the inadequacy of it. She almost apologized.
Sheri began to cry. This appeared to surprise her, and she looked around as if seeking some reason for it. Finally she straightened, grabbed her purse, and reached in, rummaging, sniffling. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I’m a mess.”
Lily went into the other room and brought back a box of tissues. Sheri took one and put it to her eyes. “You don’t need me leaning on you, honey. Forgive it.”
They were both quiet, then, gazing out at the confusion of machines and the half-finished structure across the way—someone was working over there now, a big round man in a brown jacket that looked as though it was coated with dust. And there was dark dust rising all around him as he turned the earth, hacking away at it with a pickax.
The telephone startled them both. Lily got up, with some difficulty, and felt the waddling motion she made, moving to the other side of the room to answer it. It was Tyler.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”
She said, “Hey.”
Silence.
He sighed. “I’m calling to tell you I’m sorry about this morning.”
“Sheri’s here,” said Lily. “She came in right after you left.”
“Did she see me speeding away?”
She looked over at Sheri. “He wants to know if you saw him speeding away from here.”
“Oh, great,” Tyler said in her ear as Sheri shook her head and frowned.
“No, she didn’t see you.”
“You’ve got your mind made up, haven’t you,” Tyler said.
Again she looked over at her sister-in-law. “He’s telling me that I’ve got my mind made up. I don’t know for sure whether he means the fight we had before you got here or our general trouble.”
Sheri said, “General trouble?”
Lily addressed her husband. “Did you hear what Sheri said?”
“What’re you trying to do, Lily? I told you I was sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said to him.
There was another silence.
“I wish you hadn’t brought Sheri into it,” he said.
“Well,” said Lily.
“Why’d you do that?” he went on. “You know how I feel about that.”
“I thought it was funny,” Lily said. “I thought I’d try a little joking around. I thought I’d try something, you know?”
“Are we that bad?”
She didn’t answer this.
“You want to argue now? With Sheri sitting there?”
She said to Sheri, “He wants to know if I want to argue with you sitting there.”
Tyler hung up.
Sheri had stood. “I have to go.”
“He hung up,” Lily said, and put the receiver in its cradle.
“I thought you’d apologized. God. What did you mean ‘general trouble’?”
“I was baiting hi
m,” Lily said. “You know.”
Sheri shook her head and shouldered her purse. “This is the most awful winter.”
2
LILY SAW HER OFF, then went to work in the house, limited in her movements by her size and by the continual drag on her energy from carrying the baby. When the phone rang again, she almost didn’t answer it, but she thought of her mother, and her father and Peggy, and she picked up the receiver. It was Tyler again.
“I said I was sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“Is Sheri still there?”
“She left right after you hung up.”
“I suppose you told her that I hung up on you.”
“I can’t remember,” Lily said, “whether I did or not.” And in that instant, it was true. She searched for the recollection, and recovered it. She said, “Now that I think of it—yes, I did tell her.”
He said nothing.
“I think we should tell each other things,” Lily said. “I’m tired of all the secrets.”
He sighed deeply.
“I’m tired of lying,” she said.
“Well, isn’t that just perfect. You’re tired of lying.”
“I am, yes.”
“Well, maybe I’m tired of it, too.” This was said with a sigh of exhaustion.
She waited for him to go on. It was a long time.
“What’re you doing, just now?” he asked.
“I was putting things away.”
“I wish I could be there to help.”
She experienced a few seconds’ surprise, wondering at his tenacity, the element of his character that made him resist giving in to his darker impulses, even, sometimes, in the heat of an argument. She felt a little stirring of admiration for him. She strove for a lighter tone. “I’d work your hands to the bone.”
“I’d be doing something,” he said.
The sadness in his voice made her wish to reassure him, if she could. “It doesn’t have to work out wrong, Tyler.” She took a breath, and then: “When do you think you’ll be able to get home?”
“I’m not staying past closing.”
“Would you like me to bring you something to eat?”
“You’ve got enough to do there.”
They ended on these notes—gestures of consideration. He was, after all, a gentle-hearted young man whose desire for goodness and peace was genuine. She understood this about him. He wanted, at heart, to be a kindly man. He worried over it, and so few people ever gave that much thought.
She sat by the phone crying, quietly, while the light changed at the window and other men came to the building site outside, moving around with what looked like aimless wandering, the big yellow tractors rumbling back and forth across the desolation they had made.
3
SHE SPENT TWO HOURS writing every day; the results were less than pleasing, and gave her little sense of progress or accomplishment. So she returned to the reading. She had sent away for more books, and there was the university. On days when she felt good enough to make the trip—her swollen ankles pained her; it was uncomfortable being on her feet—she would drive into town and spend part of a morning in the library. She brought books home and she made notes on index cards, trying to keep in mind what she was learning about the Victorians: the way of thinking, the cultural traditions and assumptions, the values, anything she suspicioned might tell her something about how someone like Mary Kingsley could come from a society so fixed in its attitudes toward women and in its expectations concerning the relations between the sexes.
Most nights, Tyler came in from work and opened a book and sat staring at the pages, drinking beer, while she made dinner. He was reading philosophy, and the Bible. Frequently enough, he made dinner, and on occasion he came into the small kitchen and sat talking with her. They had settled into this routine. Their trouble had moved to another stage—a kind of mutual looking away. Even so, there were moments when she was tempted to believe that things would smooth out, and they would be a real couple again.
He was trying so hard. He had anxieties about his health now—a new development. The slightest ache or pain upset him, ruined his outlook for days at a time. “You want to know what’s wrong with me?” he said. “Every single thought I have leads to something negative. Each impulse makes me think of the uselessness of everything. I’m selling cars as fast as anybody over there, I’ve finally got the hang of the business, I’m making money, and I’m constantly carrying around this feeling that it’s completely absurd, all of it. I keep thinking that if someone were to describe me to somebody else, or if I was a character in a movie or a book, I’d be the car salesman, you know? That’s what would be in the heading for dialogue: car salesman. That’s how I’d be designated. I hate that. Just hate it. And I like the job. I meet different people every day and no two days are alike. The pay’s good. I get to drive a new car. I like the guys I’m doing it with. But it’s this other thing—this feeling that I hate. This conviction, down in my bones—that I’m reduced by the goddamn stereotype.” He shook his head and seemed to consider a moment, as if he were searching for the right word. But then she saw that he had been seeking the resolve to say something else. “But that’s only a small part of it,” he went on. “Nothing makes any sense now, or has any taste. It all looks like make work, something to occupy the mind until it’s canceled out. Like it was canceled out for Buddy. Like that. It’s all just marking time for that. I keep looking for some answer in the books, and I can’t find anything.”
“It’s part of your grief,” she said. “We’re all feeling it.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so—I’ve felt it before. I used to call it my dead time.”
“But that’s always passed, hasn’t it?”
“It’s not passing this time. I feel—dead. Down inside. People look like species—I can’t explain it.”
One night, toward dawn, he awoke with an alarming, unreal yell. She shook him, saying his name, and holding tight to him until he had come out of it, and he lay there in her arms, trembling.
“Can you talk about it? Tell me, Tyler.”
He shook his head, breathing so deeply that his throat began to rasp with it. And then he did speak: “Oh, God,” he said. “I was with Buddy and Nick somewhere. Not the trip, not when he died. We were in a room looking around. A big officelike room I’ve never been in. The three of us. But then Buddy was bleeding bad and he—he was talking to us, telling us what to do. It was the accident all over again.” He took a deep, wheezing breath and held tighter to her. “Lily, he was already dead, and he was talking to us.”
“It was a dream,” she told him.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m talking about then. When it happened. He was dying, not an hour to go, and he was talking to us. We were carrying him and he said, ‘Not that way,’ when we started down this path. So we went the other way and he made this sound like a laugh, and said, ‘Not that it’ll make any difference.’ And then he told Nick not to blame himself. He said that. And—and in this dream, I knew that was next. Buddy was bleeding and we were in this gray room and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop screaming.”
She held him, rocked him slowly. The baby was moving. Neither of them marked it, quite; it was the character of this night, the air that surrounded them—the dismal predawn—and the two of them holding on to each other in the gloom.
“I’m sorry, Lily,” he said abruptly.
She kissed the side of his face, and they remained that way for a long time, until he went back to sleep, stirring sporadically, with a jolt, as though something in his dreams had startled him. Finally he was asleep.
4
SHE HAD MANAGED to get the house in some kind of order, and on weekends he had helped—he got rid of all the mementos of his once-enthusiasm for hunting; he had put pictures up, hung curtains, all those things she wasn’t supposed to do. He worked hard, and he seemed almost happy. At intervals, his natural appetite for life would shine through, and she felt close
to him again. But there was always the fact of the pregnancy. It was clear that this, more than anything else, discouraged him. There was a forlorn softness in him about it. He never mentioned Dominic, and she had begun to hope that Dominic wouldn’t write again, or call. She knew this was wrong, and felt that at some point she would have to tell him the truth. And of course Tyler understood this, too. Doubtless it was part of what depressed him.
“Maybe I’m getting screwy,” he would say. “I can’t feel anything.”
They clung together frequently in the long nights, when neither of them could sleep, or he had experienced another nightmare, another attack of terror, or she herself had dreamed something awful and awakened in the silence, staring into the dark and making the effort to compose for herself the reasonableness of her waking existence, the reading about Mary Kingsley, the letters to her, that were for some reason so consoling and calming. Sometimes, after a nightmare, her breathing—the little catches in her breath as she fought the panic that wanted to descend on her there in the dark—would wake Tyler, and he would be sweet, understanding, asking if she wanted to talk. In several such instances he massaged her legs and ankles to remove an ache or a cramp, then put his arms around her and held her, as she had held him after his nightmares. She wondered at the fact that they were most intimate during these periods of dark, and fear. They did not make love. They were like children, scared by something for which they had no words. He kept poring over the books—Kierkegaard and Spinoza, Hegel and Pascal, several of the Christian mystics, even Aquinas. It was as if he were studying for an examination. But in the nights he seemed bereft of everything, and no word or expression seemed to affect the place where he felt the emptiness. “They don’t know,” he said to her, looking up from a thick tome about the history of western thought. “It’s all noise.”
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