by Nancy Thayer
Willy paid the woman seventy-five dollars for her time and advice and went away, still troubled.
Today was one of February’s silver days, when the sun shone through layers of snow-filled clouds. By night a heavy snow would be falling; today the air was filled with dispersed radiance and a cold shimmering. It was early afternoon.
Willy walked listlessly through Harvard Square, oblivious to the bustle of people and cars, unaware of the shops filled with chocolates and flowers and books. She did not want to go back to the Hunters’ apartment just yet. The atmosphere there was so thick with baby these days; if little Peter was asleep, she would have to tiptoe and whisper and listen to Anne describe in detail what he did all morning; if he was awake, she would have to either sit and adore him or run little frantic errands around the house for Anne, fetching another diaper or the pacifier or the baby powder. And always Anne’s face would be ecstatic, for Anne was consumed, possessed, with love for her child. Willy was glad for Anne but troubled for herself. It was not that she was jealous of the baby. It was that she needed someone to talk to. She needed some help and did not know where on earth to find it.
She walked along down Brattle Street, and without planning it, she found herself at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The high gates were open; she wandered in and strolled along the winding paths, looking at the ornate and elegant stone monuments. She saw no one else, not even the groundskeeper’s truck. It was very quiet and peaceful, as it was meant to be, and yet the trees stretched their bare brown arms into the sky triumphantly, wordlessly proclaiming, even in the dead of winter, the vivid life that lay hushed and waiting within.
Willy loved this cemetery. She and John had come here often when they were first lovers. They had strolled arm in arm among the graves, reading off the epitaphs, exclaiming about the beauty of the flowers and bushes and carved marble. How many times had they stood on the tower at the top of the hill, leaning against each other, looking down over the gently rolling landscape of Cambridge and Boston, at the curving Charles River. They had felt united then, at the apex of time and space.
And now she was here alone. Willy realized that it was the first time she had been here alone. And she was so lonely. She could make no sense out of what was happening to her life. She could no longer pretend that something wasn’t wrong. But where could she find help? Her best friends were preoccupied with their baby; the professionals of this enlightened city had had no wisdom to offer her, or at least no solace, no helpful advice; she had no family to turn to. The women she had met in Nantucket were pleasant, but they were also busy with their own lives, and she had not become intimate with any of them yet. Not intimate enough to confess to any one of them that she was afraid her husband was having an affair with a ghost.
A ghost.
Willy sank onto the ground in a spot where the grass was thick and bent over with its weight. She did not shiver, did not feel the need to remain alert or on guard. She sat surrounded by graves, tombstones, memorials to the dead, and yet in this place she had no feeling of ghostliness. Here she was not afraid or intrigued; she had absolutely no sensation of spirits moving around her. Perhaps it was that she was just an extraordinarily dull person. An insensitive person. A realistic, practical clod of a person with no romance in her soul.
Willy bent her head and wept.
When she finally rose, she was cramped and cold and tired, and she was not refreshed. She still did not know what to do.
It was only her sense of having stayed too long at the Hunters’ that made Willy rouse herself to go back to Nantucket. She had been with Anne and Mark for almost three weeks, and Anne’s mother and father were due to arrive in a few days to stay with them and see the baby. Willy knew her presence was becoming intrusive. Her friends needed some time to have their home to themselves before their relatives came. So, in spite of their protests, she packed up and headed home.
She had managed, the last day of her stay, to do one thing for herself. She had gotten herself a cat. The pet store in Cambridge had been crowded with new kittens of all colors that were either piteously mewing or cunningly pushing their paws through the wire of their cage to play. But Willy had chosen an older animal, a cat that was almost a year old, because this cat had been sitting in her cage so calmly, queening it over all the others, clearly too proud to beg. She was a large, long-haired, tabby-colored cat with a white ruff and white feet and a dainty pink nose that Willy fancied the cat was vain about. She had such an aura of knowingness about her, this cat, and when she deigned to meet Willy’s eyes, her look was not that of an animal supplicating a higher being but rather of one equal looking at another. Willy named the cat Aimee, after the French word for friend, and thought perhaps she had found an intimate in this cat.
She would let the cat sleep on the bed, she decided. Then she would not—perhaps—miss quite so much the warmth and weight of John’s body when he spent his nights in the attic.
She took the last ferry that left Hyannis at nine and would get into Nantucket around midnight. She had not called John to tell him that she would be coming home. Now, as she sat on the ferry, staring out through the glass at the black water, black sky, listening to the steady churn of the engines of this calm and uncaring machine that carried her so thoughtlessly over unimaginable depths, she wondered about her motives. Had she neglected to call John because she didn’t want to disturb him or because she hoped to surprise him, catch him at something? At what? What was it she was worried about? What could she be thinking of? She knew his deepest secrets, she knew even what had embarrassed him when he was sixteen years old. She knew where to touch him sexually to please him. Still, he was a stranger to her now, and this simple act of returning home unannounced was filling her with an unexpected tension and a mysterious sense of guilt.
The house was dark. This did not surprise her; it was late, after all. She had thought that she would be overcome with curiosity and tenderness at the sight of her new cat, her new friend, cautiously investigating the house, for cats were like humans, individual in their reactions and responses. She turned on a few lights as she walked through the house and ended in the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator, intending to set out some milk in a saucer for Aimee to drink.
But the sight—and smell—of the kitchen took her thoughts entirely away from the cat. The rancid odor that exploded outward at her when she opened the refrigerator door made her gasp. She stood there, holding the door open, amazed, slowly realizing that everything in the refrigerator had been there more than three weeks ago when she had left Nantucket for Boston. The thickened milk clung to the sides of its clear plastic carton. Shriveled lettuce and vegetables, mildewed zucchini and mucousy green peppers lay moistly decaying in the vegetable bin. Willy shut the door and looked around at the rest of the kitchen.
Her coffee cup from three weeks ago still sat in the sink where she had left it, scum growing on the surface of the dregs. There were no other dirty dishes; either John had washed them all, or he had used no dishes during the past three weeks. Cartons of crackers sat opened on the counters, the paper torn and crumbled. At least eight mugs of half-drunk coffee sat on every available space, leaving brown rings on the table, the stove, the countertops.
Perhaps it was just the normal mess of temporary bachelorhood, and yet there was something just enough wrong with it all to send Willy racing out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
Their bedroom was dark. She had made the bed the morning she left, and it was still made, as chaste and unrumpled as she had left it. Would John leave the kitchen in such chaos and still trouble to make the bed so perfectly? She didn’t think so.
“John?” she called, but not loudly, as if she were almost afraid of his reply.
“Oh, God,” she said quietly, standing in her bedroom and the words really were a prayer.
Then she started slowly down the hall to the door to the attic.
The light was on. She climbed the stairs deliberately, not trying to hush the sounds of her st
eps but not calling out. Her heart was thudding in her chest.
The attic was very cold. Ice grew in elaborate, fantastical patterns on the inside of the windows; it was as if leaves were etched in the white frost. That was what she first noticed—the cold.
Then she saw the pictures. He had finished perhaps ten of them, and they were all large, at least nine by nine, set all around the attic on the floor, leaning against the walls. And they were all the same pictures, or at first they seemed to be—they were pictures of shadows, executed in shades of gray and black. They were abstracts; that was the kindest thing that could be said about them. The black or gray was fanned onto the canvas and blurred to the edges, and if there was a depth anywhere, it was the depth of the conical interior of lilies, a beckoning depth that pulled one in.
She did not like these pictures. They were ugly. And frightening.
Then she saw John. He was collapsed on his bed at the other end of the attic, so deeply asleep that her arrival did not awaken him. She walked across to him, her winter boots sounding heavily against the wooden floor. She stood above him, looking down, looking at her sleeping husband, the man she loved.
He looked filthy. That was what she first noticed—that and the smell. He stank. Of sweat, of exhaustion, of coffee and alcohol—and of illness. His clothes were stained and wrinkled and dirty and mussed, he had not shaved for so long that a beard and mustache had grown to at least an inch’s length on his face, and his hair was oily from lack of washing. She had never seen him look like this before, not even when he had been sick for several weeks with a debilitating flu. The sheets and quilt of the bed were twisted and rumpled, and soiled.
That was the kick in the stomach, the terrible, swift blow that made her bring her hands to her waist in an attitude of defense: the sight of those soiled sheets.
Once she had heard Mark and John laughing together about college days when a friend had arranged to rent a pornographic movie for a stag party. He had borrowed a projector from the university library but had used one of his own sheets off his bed for the screen. “God, his sheets were worse than the movie!” Mark and John had laughed.
Now Willy stared down at her filthy husband sprawled on his soiled, stained sheets, and tears came into her eyes. She was shaking, too, because of the extreme cold of the attic.
“Dear God,” she whispered. “What’s been going on?”
She knelt by the bed and took her husband’s face in her hands. “John,” she whispered. “John. Wake up. It’s me. It’s Willy. I’m home. Wake up.” She shook him slightly; she caressed his face.
At last his eyes opened. He seemed drugged. He looked right at Willy and said, without any kind of preface, after all their three weeks apart, “I’m tired. Let me sleep. Please let me sleep.” Then he closed his eyes.
“John!” Willy protested. She gently shook his shoulders. “Hey, John, come on!”
He opened his eyes again. “I need to sleep,” he repeated.
But Willy was firm. “Then you can sleep downstairs. With me. After you’ve had a shower,” she added. When he closed his eyes and turned his head away, she said, more loudly, “I mean it, John. I’m not leaving you up here in this cold alone. My God, what have you been doing? What’s been going on?”
One more time John opened his eyes. He looked at Willy long enough for her to understand that he was conscious now and that he was aware of what he was saying.
“Willy,” he said. “Go away. I want you to leave me alone.” He voice was firm. His look was firm.
The hurt plunged through her so fiercely that it was as if it were her own body that had plunged through some cold, scraping element. She recoiled in disbelief.
But they had been married for so long, and something in her now came to his defense more powerfully than to her own. Even as she felt her body flinch backward from his words, she felt something else within her rise to steel her intentions and steady her voice. She gazed back at him with a look so calm it was almost a glare.
“No,” she said, her voice quiet but deliberate. “No, John, I won’t go away. I won’t leave you alone up here. I want you to come downstairs with me.”
He closed his eyes and turned his head away. He lay there, ignoring her.
Willy looked at her husband, feeling her chest expand with pain and frustration and anger and fear. And with cunning, for she heard herself saying, “All right, then, I’ll get in bed with you.” And she rose and began to take off her clothes.
“No,” John said, twisting on the bed to look at her. “Stop, Willy. You can’t sleep here.”
She was shaking now, from the cold, from fear, from anger. She didn’t reply but kept on undressing.
“Goddammit!” John said, and pushed himself up off the bed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go. Come on. I’ll go downstairs.”
Willy gathered up her clothes; she had stripped down to her corduroy trousers and bra. She followed her husband down to the second floor, sighing in relief.
He went into the bathroom. Willy followed, her clothes in her hands, and leaned against the doorframe, watching him. When he turned, she said, “This is a lovely homecoming, I must say, John.”
John looked at his wife. He ran his hand through his hair. He seemed completely exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” he said without seeming to mean it. “I’m just so tired, Willy. I must have the flu.”
“You must,” Willy agreed. “You look like a fucking cadaver.”
This made John burst into an abrupt bark of laughter. “A fucking cadaver!” he echoed. Then he edged his way past Willy out of the bathroom and headed to the guest bedroom. “I’ve got to get some rest, Willy,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”
“John,” Willy protested, “wait a minute! You can’t go to sleep now, not yet! I haven’t seen you for three weeks. And look at you—you’ve lost so much weight. You look horrible. You’ve got to tell me what’s been going on!”
“Tomorrow,” John said, falling onto the twin bed.
“No, now!” Willy demanded. “John, why are you sleeping in the guest bedroom? Why won’t you sleep with me?”
But John did not answer. He turned on his side and, without pulling up any covers, closed his eyes and fell asleep. Watching, Willy was alarmed at how fast her husband fell asleep. She sat down on the twin bed across from him and just looked at her husband for a while. She had never seen him looking so awful. He had never seemed so distant—so cruel; he had never hurt her so much.
And that part of her that was wounded cried out for extreme and dramatic reactions now; she wanted to cry and scream and wake John up and yell at him and hit him and throw things against the walls. “Go away,” he had said to her, his voice as cold as ice. And he had not wanted her in that dreadful bed in the attic. She wanted to rage with jealousy and anger.
Yet something stronger within her again came to John’s defense, and she was not as jealous as she was afraid, afraid for John’s sake.
Aimee strolled into the room and, seeing Willy, sat just inside the doorway and meowed.
“Oh, poor kitty.” Willy laughed, glad to see the cat. “I’ve forgotten all about you. Here. Come here. Come up with me.”
With the cat curled up next to her, purring and warm, Willy began to relax. She could not puzzle this all out tonight. She had to talk to John; she had to get him to talk to her. But that would have to wait until morning. Still—still she did not want to leave his side, and so she did not rise to unpack her bag or change into a nightgown, but only snuggled under the covers and fell asleep on the guest room bed, her cat next to her, her husband across from her, sleeping his fathomless sleep.
Chapter Eight
When Willy awakened the next morning, she noticed first that John was still asleep and then that Aimee was still next to her, curled in a ball at the bend of her knees. She lay for a while appreciating the way the weak winter sun shone through the windows, filling this small room with a glazy light. Stretching, she looked at her wristwatch and was
amazed to see that it was almost eleven o’clock. She glanced back over at John, alarmed—how could he still be sleeping so deeply?
Sitting up in bed, she pondered what to do next. Should she leave him alone to sleep? He had finished so many canvases; it was possible that he had pushed himself to the point of exhaustion. It was possible that it was only that that had happened while she was gone. But she did not think so. Yet she had no proof, only her suspicions and the memory of his voice and face as he told her to go away.
For a while, petulant, she decided she would damn well stay by his side for every minute of this day. But after she had settled back down into the bed, she grew restless. She never had been good at staying in bed all day. So she rose and showered and dressed, coming in now and then to check on John, who still slept.
Several times she walked past her sewing room, but it did not lure her now. All her thoughts were intent on one thing: What could she do to get John back to normal again? How could she get him to love her—to look at her, talk to her, touch her, confide in her, to be her lover, her friend, as he had always been? How could she win him back from whatever strange mood it was that had overtaken him?
She decided to seduce him. She never had enjoyed nagging—never had had to do much of it—and she did not look forward to a day filled with scenes and questions and recriminations. Better to lure him, to seduce him, to win him back to her side with love and little luxuries.
So while he slept in the guest room for the greater part of the day—and she kept checking, and still he slept—she hummed in the kitchen, determined, cleaning up the debris of the past three weeks and filling it with the aromas of foods John loved best: her homemade whole wheat bread, beef stew in Burgundy, apple cinnamon pie.
But she discovered that in the late afternoon, when she went out to buy fresh flowers to arrange around the house, John had awakened and gone up to the attic without touching anything in the kitchen, without fixing himself so much as a cup of coffee.
