by Sue Miller
He was still concerned, if not quite loving, when we sat down together in the living room, when I tried to start and burst into tears again. When I began my tale with Eli and Dana and their long-ago love affair.
But after I’d finished that part of it and his face had sagged in sympathy and horror, after he’d agreed with me that, yes, this was a murder, no matter how it was explained, no matter what Eli had made of himself later—after all that agreeing and sympathizing were over, he’d stood and put another log on the fire, and from that distance he turned and asked me, “So what does all this have to do with your going to Boston secretly to meet him?” And I understood that where the story for me was somehow all of a piece, for him it was two quite separate narratives, with two separate meanings.
Now I fumbled again to tell it, trying in a different way to call up the magic of my own past as my seducer, to explain the pastness in my attraction. To explain Eli as my betrayer, and to connect all of this to my horror at how it had turned out. I knew that this version wasn’t strictly true. Part of me knew it wasn’t true. But I was also desperate to have Daniel’s sympathy, desperate for him not to feel what he was bound to feel. Desperate to imagine I still had the power to make things right.
While I spoke, he had come to sit at the other end of the couch. I watched his profile looking at the fire, watched it as his face pinched shut, his lips tightened in an embittered line. It seemed minutes after I’d shut up at last when he said, “You will forgive me”—those were his words: You will forgive me—“if I can’t really focus on Eli and Dana. I know that’s part of your shock and pain, but . . .” He shook his head, and his nostrils flared slightly. “Fuck it. That’s how I feel. Fuck that.”
We sat in silence for a long time then. I couldn’t answer him. I sat thickheaded, staring into the fire. Daniel never used language like that with me, to me, and I felt the words like blows.
Finally he said, without looking at me, “Be honest, Jo. Do me that courtesy. Be honest about why you went to meet him.”
It was as though I were in a nightmare, a nightmare in which the frightening thing was that I had no words. I opened my mouth and no words would come out. At the same time, I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t going to be some way for me to make him understand me.
At last I started stupidly to go over it once again. I may even have been using the same phrases, since my brain would not work to find new ones. I know I started to weep again, too, but that felt suddenly like self-pity, and I tried to stop.
Daniel was looking at me as though he didn’t know me. He stood up and crossed the room. He lifted the screen and set it in front of the fire, and then, with his back to me, he said, “You met him to screw him. You met him to fuck him. You met him to lie down with him and wreck our marriage.”
When I didn’t answer, he left the room. I heard him in our bedroom, moving around, and then he crossed the living room, holding some clothing and his glasses. Without saying another word to me, he went up the narrow stairs to the second floor.
As we passed through the long days that followed, I sometimes envied Daniel what I thought of as the simplicity of his pain, his sorrow. He had been as good as betrayed. I had been ready to sleep with someone else, it was the most astonishing accident that I hadn’t. Though occasionally it seemed to me as I rewrote things mentally that of course I wouldn’t actually have gone through with it, of course I would have stopped.
For me, the sorrow was laced with guilt. I was the betrayer, after all, and it was with a pained and startled self-recognition that I felt this as something familiar about myself. I had thought of it as new, as news, really. Something startling, something fresh I was learning about myself. It had even titillated me: I could be, I might be, a person who could betray someone.
Now it came muddled with Dana’s death, with that time in my life when I’d betrayed everything: my husband, my mother, my past. When I’d betrayed even Dana—I felt that way, I remembered that feeling—by living, when she died.
It wasn’t news, then. Or it was old news. Stale, sad news.
And of course, pressing in on me every day along with this sense of all I had ever done, now and earlier in my life, to hurt people who had only loved me, there was also the knowledge that I needed to decide what, if anything, I was going to do about Eli, about what he’d told me. About Dana’s death.
They pushed together, they merged in my mind, they became confused equivalents, Eli’s killing Dana and my casual, sleazy destruction of all I would have called fine in my life. In this mood, it took a conscious effort for me to convince myself that what I had done was different in any degree from what Eli had done. The idea that I had any morally higher ground, that I should be Eli’s accuser, seemed ludicrous.
At other times I actually thought that if I went to the police and accused Eli, there would be relief in it for both of us. It would be like accusing myself too. I imagined that to put myself through such a thing—a confession, a full confession of how I had come to have this information, even as I was also making public the information, his confession to me—would be a necessary punishment for what I had done. What was it he had said? That we were all tainted. Yes, my heart said. Yes, I am.
And then I would swing into the mood opposite this. I would recollect my rage at Eli that evening, I would call up the image he had given me of his hitting at Dana over and over, the blood leaping to every wound. I would accuse him mentally of manipulating me, trying to trick me. There was no equivalence between us! Our betrayals, our sins, our taintedness, were of an entirely different order, could not begin to be compared. Once, in this mood, I hit the examining table in my office so hard that Beattie came rushing down the hall, thinking I’d fallen or dropped something.
When I was feeling that way, what I thought was that I should report him so that he—he, the murderer—could be punished. But then I’d think about everything else he said. I’d wonder if it had been true, his sense that he’d lived his life redeeming himself by his work. And if it was true, was that enough? And was I in charge of seeing that he was punished, thereby ending the work, the good part of his life?
Sometimes it would seem to me that what I needed to do was simply to forgive Eli, in order to be forgiven myself. But, I’d tell myself, I didn’t have that power, that right: to forgive, or to be forgiven. It was, after all, Daniel whose forgiveness I needed. And Eli needed, not mine, but Dana’s. Or her family’s. Or society’s. And I could speak for none of them.
The days dragged by. I would wake at night and move around the cold house trying to imagine a solution, and I could not, because everything was so knitted together in my mind. There seemed nothing I could do, no action I could take, no remedy, that didn’t smack of self-interest or self-justification. And then even this fastidiousness, this self-examination, would disgust me. It seemed like a further ego-centrism, an intolerable dwelling-with-myself. Myself, whom I felt sometimes I could not bear.
And with everything else, there was, of course, the shock, pure and horrible, of having to revisit Dana’s death with this new understanding, this new way of envisioning it. Something I could not, of course, ask Daniel to help me with, though I wanted his help. I wanted him.
As one does when threatened with loss, I fell in love with him again: with the tender note in his voice as he spoke in the morning to one of the dogs; with the white oval of his face turning up at me as though I might be someone else coming into the room—or another version of myself. With the mysterious, private quality to his expression as he talked gently on the phone of someone else’s sorrow; with his long, narrow feet and the delicate tick in his toe bones when he descended the stairs from one of the girls’ rooms in the morning. I thought of us, silently together in the boat the day before it all began. I wanted him back. I wanted everything back.
Once, in the night, Daniel stumbled into the kitchen when I was there and, turning on the light, started at seeing me. There we stood, blinking at each other in the sudden harsh
light. Each of us had raised a hand toward the other. I wanted, more than anything, to go to him, to touch him. I wanted his touch. When I thought of this moment later, I saw us as actors depicting yearning across a stage set, the black windows painted into the backdrop, the strewn table and angled chairs the props, the main characters stage left and stage right, stopped in the act of moving toward each other. It seemed for an instant he might make some gesture to come toward me or that gave me permission to go to him. It seemed so, but he didn’t. His body slackened, his hand fell. He smiled, an ironic smile, a sad smile. “It’s no fun at all, is it?” he said.
During these weeks, we stayed away from each other when we could. For Daniel, this was easier. He could let his job expand to be as big as he needed it to be. Instead of being home for dinner before an evening meeting, he went to a restaurant with Mortie, or the head of the committee on renovations, or the church musical director. He let the meetings themselves proliferate. I knew his strategy. He delegated nothing, he participated everywhere. And the church, hydra-headed, many-mouthed, was all too eager to devour him. He was hardly ever home.
Since it seemed to me that I could speak to no one of what I’d done, of what I knew, of what I was so pressingly thinking about, I had fewer options. Daniel’s absence unburdened me, of course. But when he was home, usually in his study, I almost always left. And even when he wasn’t there I sometimes went out, running from the emptiness of the house. I drove aimlessly down the country roads, through the dead and dying mill towns, the expensive reconstructed communities. I parked across from working farms and watched the cows. I sat for hours next to unused fields, grown over with juniper and pines, filling in with thin maple saplings and chokecherries. I became an expert on where to find small coffee shops, the kind that featured square Formica-topped tables with plastic mustard and ketchup bottles placed on them like decorations. Or on the locations of ladies’ rooms on my routes—in the basements of old town halls, around the back of wood-frame gas stations. I came home after work and drove out in the late afternoons—growing longer, twilight an event now. I returned after dark to the dark house. This was how it would feel, I thought, if Daniel died. I thought, He is dead to me. We are dead to each other.
On a slow Saturday in early February, I left work early, at Mary Ellen’s suggestion. She’d stay, she said, her wide, flat face frowning in concern. I looked like I could use some time off. Daniel’s car was in the driveway, though he wasn’t in the house. Probably in his study, then, working on a sermon. I couldn’t bear the empty silence. I decided I would walk down to the town library.
The library was a strange, octagonal brick structure, built in the late nineteenth century—one of only two brick buildings in town, the other being the post office. It had been endowed by the last of the Adamses, whose unfriendly portrait loomed behind the main desk as you entered the central hallway. I greeted the librarian, a starchy, skinny woman with dyed black hair, who’d been there as long as we’d lived in town, and went to the nonfiction shelves. I strolled aimlessly through them for a while, pulling out a book here and there, pretending to read. I actually got absorbed briefly by an account of the ebola virus.
When I’d put that away, it occurred to me I could use the computer to locate an article Mary Ellen had mentioned to me, an article in the Globe about the reasons for the increase in the numbers of women going into veterinary medicine.
The computer room was in an alcove off the main reading room. There were six stations, all donated, hardware and elaborate software, by the same anonymous person who’d put the local elementary school on line. I looked up my article and read it with mild interest.
Then I wondered suddenly: how far back could I go?
To exactly where I wanted to go, it turned out. It was a shock to see the photo of Dana, probably a high-school graduation shot, with her hair carefully flipped up, just so, at the ends, her lipstick dark, her face childishly fat. The stories were as I’d recollected them, but there were more of them than I’d thought. It had loomed large, this murder in a working-class neighborhood. It had scared people. What you could read under the surface as you went through the articles was that an attempt was being made to account for it. To be reassuring about it by offering details of the irregularity of the victim’s life. It could not happen to you, the articles were saying, because you lock your doors at night, you sleep with just your husband, you live with just your family, you are responsibly employed.
There was a photo of us, too, the house members, caught in someone’s flash as we moved in a group together: maybe leaving the police station? I couldn’t tell. I had raised my hands slightly—they resembled two large mittens—and my face was partially obscured by my hair. Larry was next to me, looking thuggish and angry. Sara peered directly at the camera, the light glinting in her glasses, her mouth slightly open, her face stupid. Eli and Duncan and John were just figures behind us, boys with hair that was too long, too sloppy, too unkempt.
I lifted my eyes then, looking away from this. And what I saw was Eli, the real, grown-up Eli, standing in the main reading room. Seeming to survey it, really, with his air of ease and assurance. He wore a parka. His long, expensive scarf was looped around his neck. There was a shaft of sunlight between us—like a lens, an angled particled brightness I had to look through. It created a strange sense of distance, of unreality.
He was smiling at someone. Now he spoke, and Jean stepped into my line of vision and stood next to him. Together they looked around the room with a civic, proprietary air, and then they turned as one, apparently to leave.
As they turned, he saw me. She had already disappeared from the frame that the doorway had made for my view of them, but he stopped now, just inside it, at its edge. It seemed for a moment he might come over to me, he might have something to say. My legs stiffened almost involuntarily to rise, my chair slid back with a hard noise that made the other occupant of the computer room look over in irritation.
And then he thought better of it. His hand lifted just a little in greeting, and he smiled at me, a sheepish smile, as though we shared a slightly embarrassing secret—and he was gone. Off, perhaps, to survey other properties in town that he, as a taxpayer, owned a share of.
I sat there, tensed, shocked, and then, in a palpable wash of emotion, abruptly rageful. His very being—his health, his evident prosperity, his smile, his lifted hand—all of this was an offense to me. It seemed unbearable that he should exist in the same world as I did. In a world where Dana was dead. It was all I could do to turn the machine off, my hands were trembling so. I slid my coat on and went outside.
It was mild that day. The roads and parking lot were wet, the snow on the fields and lawns flattened and crusted on top with its own melting. There was the sound of dripping everywhere, and the smell, every now and then, of pine, or of earth. I walked slowly home, trying to calm myself. My coat flapped open in the gentle air, my boots struck the gravel road edge with a cheerful sibilance. A few cars passed me. The air they stirred pressed my coat to my side and lifted my hair slightly.
In the house, I shed my coat. I went and sat down in the living room. It was silent but for the steady whir of the humidifier—which, I noted now, was empty. I took the water chamber to the kitchen to fill it. Its opening felt vaguely slimy when I lifted the cap off, so I scoured it with soapy hot water before refilling it. When I’d replaced the chamber and turned the machine on again, I came back into the kitchen and looked around me. Everywhere, I saw the signs of our sorrow, of our carelessness about our life together. It had to stop. It had to stop now, I thought.
I put on an apron. I unloaded the dishwasher and then reloaded it with crusted plates and pans. I wiped the counters and the table. I scrubbed the sink and bagged the trash, hauled it outside to the storage bin. I went into our bedroom next and stripped the bed. I took the sheets and the dirty clothes to the basement and started a load of wash. When I came back up, I moved along our row of hooks, gathering the clothes we’d thoughtlessl
y worn over and over through the past weeks. I threw them down the basement stairs and they landed, arms and legs spread awkwardly. I picked up the old newspapers lying around and bagged them for recycling. I stacked the scattered books. I gathered the pens and pencils, the glasses cases, the odd dishes left here and there. I was aware suddenly, above the slosh of water, the hum of motors, of my own panting, angry breath: it was as though I were doing all this instead of hurting someone, breaking something.
I had to talk about it, I realized. I thought I knew what I was going to do, but I still wasn’t sure if it was right. I needed to talk to Daniel.
Without giving myself time for second thoughts, I left the house and crossed the yard through the melted, melting snow. The barn smelled richly of humus. I knocked on Daniel’s door, and as though he’d been expecting me, his voice called out instantly and without surprise, “Come in.”
I opened the door and took a step in. He’d pulled his glasses off. He was holding them a few inches away from his face.
“I need to talk to you, Daniel,” I said.
He made a gesture of consent and set his glasses on his desk, on top of a yellow pad filled with writing in his neat, vertical hand.
I shut the door behind me and came over to the chair that faced him.
“Please. Sit,” he said when I hesitated, and I did. The room seemed dim after the bright sunlight outside. Daniel was working just by the ghostly light from the windows.
“I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do,” I said.
He shifted quickly sideways in his chair, as though bracing himself.
