by John Crowley
The bar was dark and smelled of the previous night; Harry wondered if he’d made a mistake. They ordered. So this neuropsychologist walks into a bar, Harry thought of saying.
“There’s something I have to say,” said Dr. Macilhenny after a time, sliding the base of his glass around slowly in its satiny puddle on the bar, and then for a long moment said nothing as Harry held still waiting to hear. “I’ve just recently been forced to make a decision.”
“Yes?”
“It hasn’t been easy, and perhaps I’ve put off acknowledging what has to be done for too long. I find that I have too many commitments, and I am going to have to limit my practice.”
“Ah,” said Harry.
Dr. Macilhenny took a sip of beer and continued, looking not at Harry but out the window as though he were speaking to himself, or into his mini-recorder. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I will have to sever my relationship with the center. I won’t be seeing people there any longer.”
“Where will you be seeing them?”
“Well, for a time I won’t be.” Sip. “I’m going to be taking a leave of absence, I guess that’s what to call it. I have . . . I have a lot of personal things to attend to. Absolutely consuming. My parents. Decisions to make. I just don’t feel I can devote the time that I feel I must to people. I don’t want to do things half-assed. It’s not fair to them. But to do it right is just a huge burden.”
Harry for the first time wondered what kind of a person Dr. Macilhenny was, weak or strong, quick or slow. What if he had problems too with mentation? It seemed very important, now, that Harry know; as though the doctor should have told him before they began. “Where are we going to continue?” he said.
“Well, I’m afraid we’re not.”
“I don’t think I’m done,” Harry said. A kind of frightening looseness seemed to have come over the bar, the day outside, the surface of the table, his own hands before him. “I’m not done.”
Dr. Macilhenny checked his watch. “Well, you see, the training is a sort of ad-hoc thing, really,” he said. “There are lots of ways you can practice on your own. Play chess. Chess is nothing but strategic decision-making. Video games. There’s evidence that kids who play them show measurable improvement .”
“When will you be returning, I mean taking up this, this—”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I really can’t.” He contemplated the beer remaining in his glass with what seemed a melancholy fascination; then he looked up at the gray window and the weather, and said, “I think I’ll take a chance on it. I really have to go.”
In an hour Harry himself started home. The Oldsmobile he drove needed a road as free of danger and irregularity as possible. Harry hadn’t been particularly proud that he’d kept the same car for twenty years, though he’d marveled at it sometimes, and now he saw that keeping it was only another symptom, an inability to decide on another, to see there was a better way, a thing to do, a thing to avoid.
What was he to do, what now? Get a grip on himself, make a firm decision to be less indecisive? It occurred to Harry that Dr. Macilhenny hadn’t tried to figure out with Harry an alternative, another doctor, a plan. He hadn’t even said he was sorry. What kind of behavior was that? Unprofessional. Weird, to say the least. There sure was something the matter with him. Burnt out, maybe, overstretched, unsuited to the work? Guy ought to have his head examined, Harry thought, and just then the Olds skidded, just for a fraction of a second, as though giggling at Harry’s thought, and Harry laughed at it too. Ought to have his head examined. Giddy with detachment and helplessness Harry drove laughing away from the city along the road that went both there and back.
When Harry got home he found Hope hadn’t gone to work, afraid of the ice.
“It wasn’t too bad,” Harry said to her. “Except on the side streets. What are you doing?”
Hope had spread out before her a glossy brochure of paint samples, the kind that shows you the named oblongs of paint and also photographs of elegant rooms painted in some of the colors.
“I’m thinking of painting upstairs. Now that I’ve been going up there more I see how shabby it is.”
“It’s not bad.” Harry saw that the brochure described something called the Calm Collection: variations on neutral, basically, warmer or cooler, blue-gray to taupe to buff.
“I’m torn between bone and ash,” said Hope.
“Ah yes,” Harry said. “Ah yes.” He thought for a moment of volunteering to paint, even to help choose a color, but from his frontal lobes there issued an Inhibition just in time.
“Listen,” Hope said, and put down the brochure. “You ought to make a decision about the knife works.”
“The what?”
“The condos we looked at, in the old knife factory. Come on.”
“Right. Of course.”
“You’ve got papers to fill out. Even to start the process. You just have to do it.” She had the calm but watchful face of a man in a Western waiting to see if the other man was going to draw.
“Yes,” said Harry. “I have made a decision. I’m not going to do it.”
For a moment Hope said nothing; then she said okay with a wary hesitancy.
“I can’t do it. I have to talk to Mila. I have to.”
“You don’t need her permission, Dad.”
“That’s not it. The fire ruined her life.”
“It ruined yours.”
This seemed certain, yet Harry couldn’t feel it that way. His life seemed not to have been ruined but to have vanished, as though it had hardly been there anyway. “I never told her I was sorry. When we talked. I just stood there.” He realized he was gripping Hope’s hand where it lay on the table, and this was probably why she was looking at him with a regard he couldn’t quite read, maybe tender or concerned, or just puzzled, or none of these, something else entirely. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Do you play chess?”
That night, toward dawn in his small bed under the eaves, Harry dreamed.
He dreamed that he walked in New York City where he and Mila had first known one another, the city they had left to find a space in the country for a family and a little ease and gentility. It was dark and splendid in his dream; he went from place to place within it on various errands, entering into vast interiors, one a place where many scholars sat throned in Victorian carved chairs, kind people laughing and self-effacing, and one for Harry, which he wouldn’t take; and a subway line where crowds avoided a peremptory dead body wrapped in burlap and laid up against the tiled wall; and other places, like and unlike places he had once known there, through which he walked and walked. At length the adventures had gone on so long that Harry wearied of them, and yet found himself still asleep. What to do? Well, as long as I’m asleep and dreaming, he thought, maybe I ought to try flying. It had been a long time since he had flown in dreams. He was then standing in Grand Central Station, looking upward into its night-blue sky, the people passing around him, and though a little self-conscious amid them (they took no notice of him, actually) he got a running start and then arms and legs milling he got off the ground, always the hard part, and went upward. In the thinner upper air, staying aloft was pretty easy, a matter of attention and will, he thought, and the night city (he had come to be outside under the sky) turned below him in beautiful geometries of steeple and avenue and tall bright-windowed buildings as he swooped and sailed. He tired of that too after a while, and let himself down into a vertiginous but fairly graceful running landing, like paratrooper or a pelican, and found himself on streets he thought he knew. Still asleep, and who knew for how much longer; tired of endless alteration and scene-shifting; ready for a stable waking world. What should he do? Harry knew: this street wasn’t far from his own neighborhood; he needed only (he plotted it in his mind, taking care) to turn left, then right, uptown, and keep going a couple blocks, and he’d be at his own apartment build
ing; he could go up there to his apartment and sit, just sit in his old armchair, and go no farther, and wait till he woke up. Good: Harry set off walking, and turned the corner onto the familiar avenue; but it wasn’t the familiar avenue; no a long wide esplanade lay before him lit with antique lamps, beflagged yachts drawn up to moorings, the black sea and buoys and harbor lights: and Harry thought, laughing in dismay, Oh no, this isn’t going to work, I’ll never reach the old apartment, of course I won’t, this’ll just go on: and laughing he woke. Harry woke. Snow was falling brilliantly outside the rumpled window of his room. And his heart was full and rich with gratitude, because he remembered this dream, he remembered it all, all: all.
2. Glow Little Glow-Worm
Spring can really hang you up the most, Stan found himself sing-humming as he turned off the highway and started up into the hills, but actually it wasn’t a sentiment he could say he felt. It was certainly spring, and fully so, nothing missing to make a late April day: the willows were green, tossing their long hair in the light airs like teenage girls just shampooed and proud of their tresses; and the sky had adopted that new blue; and the rushing brook by the roadside undercut tussocks of new grass, where tiny flowers white and blue sparkled as he wheeled by; and birds, and all that. Robins building nests from coast to coast. Beautiful and gratifying it was, but Stan didn’t feel the overwhelming relief and thanksgiving he once would have, that sense that what was happening to Mother Nature was happening at the same time in his own breast. It seemed to answer no deep need, lift no particular burden. Just another nice day, better than a bad day. A very nice day. Like so many demanding delights and pains, victories and defeats of past times, springs were coming and passing too quickly to engage him full force. Like a film on fast-forward. Hadn’t it just been Christmas? Stan was, he pointed out again to himself, getting old.
Also it was still bright day, Daylight Savings Time, when he turned in to his own driveway at workday’s end. Terry, his wife, stood as though stoned or stunned amid the flowerbeds, holding a rake; around her other tools, a hoe, a grubber, dirty white gloves, like an allegory of the season. She lifted a slow hand to Stanley as he got out of the truck, seeming as full of the day as he was not, a mild grin on her face: but she was ten years younger .
“So how did that house look?” she asked as they went inside together.
“The strangest thing,” Stan said. Terry washed her hands, letting tepid water cascade over her fingers for a long time. “It looks fine from the outside. Appealing, actually. Three stories, nice porch, though it’s wrapped in plastic sheeting just now, you know, for winter. Original shutters on all the windows. Big garage with an upstairs room I haven’t seen yet.”
“Marketable?” Terry asked. Stan sold real estate, mostly houses, all through the Hills, and had since he took an early retirement package from his recently downsized plant.
“Well, I don’t know.” He looked in the refrigerator for last night’s bottle of Muscadet, still half full, and pulled the squealing cork. “I told you it was lived in by these two brothers, right? For like forty years. Just the two of them. Neither ever married. It had been their parents’ house. But over time—this is what the present owner says, he’s a cousin who inherited the place, the only relative left—they became estranged, or I don’t know, fell into some kind of enmity”—he laughed, and filled glasses with gurgling wine—“and it got I guess worse and worse over time, but neither was willing to move out, and so what they did was to divide the house in half. Not horizontally, you know, by floor—vertically. They put up walls to divide the space, divide even the rooms, the kitchen, into two spaces, so they would never have to see each other. They divided the staircase in two.”
“The staircase?”
“With a sort of flimsy two-by-four-framed Celotex wall, right up the middle of the central staircase, so each one could get to his own half without seeing the other.”
“Oh God. How sad.”
“In the kitchen,” Stan said, “you could see that one brother had put down a fresh layer of linoleum—but only on his half.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It is. I mean it wouldn’t take much to at least get rid of the dividing walls, but the whole place still isn’t going to be particularly aesthetically pleasing. As you can imagine.”
“And one of them couldn’t just leave? Or both, and leave it all behind?”
Stan shrugged elaborately, how would he know. “Solitaries,” he said. “Apparently.”
“Doubletaries,” Terry said. “Alone together.”
Stan looking at his wife holding her glass of wine thought he was right, spring was doing her good. Some sort of dry gray quality that had been in her face much of the winter had been wiped away; she looked moist, bright, like a. Well, like a flower or new leaf. He laughed again, this time at himself. “Strange,” he said.
Terry was Stan’s second wife. His first had been a years-long puzzle and grief to him, consuming him and then building him up again like a bonfire only to consume him again, even long after they divorced. He still dreamed of her sometimes, dreamed of her turning away from him in contempt or boredom, naked or malformed or not herself. He was Terry’s second too, her first a fine attentive guy who just one day silently decamped, leaving her with two kids, eight and eleven. They got divorced by mail. Stan in certain clearheaded moments saw that it was the two kids—both brown-eyed, both witty and wise, self-sufficient but still somehow empathetic to an old fart like himself—that he had fallen in love with, childless himself, and his firm love for them had won him Terry: no surprise. He and she had been married fifteen years. Both the kids still lived in the Hills, not too far away.
“So how was the doc?” he asked her.
“The doc was fine,” she said, her slow smile that seemed more teasing than it usually was. “Has a new receptionist.”
“I meant,” Stan said, “how did it go. Did she, you know. Have anything to say.”
“Not really. Have to see how it goes. She thinks it’s going fine so far but if there are side effects or whatever then you adjust. Up or down.”
Terry had begun a regimen (as the doc called it) of hormone replacement therapy. Not as old as many women who began on it, she’d been suffering from menopausal symptoms since before fifty, and lately they’d got insupportable; she was continually uncomfortable, constant hot flashes, her tender parts dried like an apple (she said), and her moods black or violent. She hadn’t been on it long, and said she already felt better. Remarkably better.
“Did you ask your question?”
“Which one?”
“You said you were going to ask if you were just supposed to go on taking these things for the rest of your life. Put off menopause till the grave.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Well.”
“No,” said Terry. “I didn’t ask. But I do wonder.”
Days were getting longer, but so nowadays for Stan were nights. Not that they took any more clock-time, but that he experienced more of their passing than he used to. No more now the closing of the eyes on the darkened scene and then opening them again on a brightening one. Now night came in parts, or acts: first, grateful slumber coming easily and right off; then a muffled ballet of shifting positions vis-a-vis partner, doing her own dance to find comfort. Realization that he is in fact wide awake, as though it’s day. Lying then on his back, arms under his head, looking into the night sky of the ceiling; speculation on the day passed and the one to come; sleeping again, but soon startled awake by strange groans of pain or anguish—just his own snores, or Terry’s, who never used to snore. Awake again, though his Indiglo watch seems to assert (hard to read without reaching for his glasses) that night’s got hours left to go. So: one half-hour, examination of conscience; one half-hour, political debate with wicked fools; random memory shopping, listening to Terry’s soft steady passage between dream states, lu
cky her; then sudden blinking off without noticing. Dreams, which when he awakens seem to him the point of the whole exercise, like a boring novel’s finally getting under way. Tonight featuring a gripping story of adultery, not his own but a woman’s, whom he encounters in her huge drab crowded house; she making it clear he is to come to her. Her husband or consort just leaving her bedroom as Stan approaches, catching Stan’s eye meaningfully or threateningly as he departs; then Stan wafted will-lessly in to where she kneels on the bed, and without preamble embracing her, madly reckless, in that certainty of wild desire that filled his wet dreams back when he had had such.
He woke erect and astonished.
Terry was restless beside him, which was probably (along with that dream embrace, he felt its force again) why he’d awakened. She rolled his way. Her skin was hot. Day was growing blue. She moaned softly.
“Hot flash?” Stan murmured. His hand against her told him she’d pulled off her pajamas in the night.
“No,” she said. “No. The meds stop them.”
“Oh right.”
No panties even. She rolled away from him again and Stan turned toward her, his nakedness (he never wore nightclothes) against hers, inserting his knees in the hollows of her knees but tucking that weirdly persistent boner out of the way so as not to prod her rudely. She drew his arm around her and slept again.
