Each and All by John Kuti
Chapter 16
Waiting for death was like waiting for Godot, except death always showed up eventually. And when it arrived, nothing was ever the same. Things happened. Things changed. Life went on, even when it didn’t.
Eugene was imagination to his family. Imagining the world without him was the one thing that anyone who loved him seemed unable to do. Imaginary worlds suddenly seemed somehow barren. They bled into the real one.
It wasn’t depression that hit the farm so much as it was the reality of every present moment, and without Eugene’s living imagination those moments were somehow almost impossible to face head on. Laura knew it before any one else because her relationship with Eugene existed almost entirely in their imaginations. It was her and Eugene, Arthur and Laura Lee. She looked at the notebooks he had left her and the idea of reading his real thoughts, for her and about her, was a reality she did not want to face. He was gone. That reality was gone, like youth. She didn’t know how she could face such powerful artifacts. Like everyone else, she didn’t want to face the reality that everything he was, was who he had been.
When Ian came home that night, she didn’t have a lot to say. He wanted her to talk and he persisted in trying to help her through something so unavoidably real. When they went to bed he tried to hold her, but she was so cold and inaccessible, he pulled back leaving just a hand on her hip. Then he hit the nerve that went straight to her fear, and her diaphragm congealed like clotted cream.
“What are you going to do now that your book is finished?” Ian asked gently. He was secretly hoping she would decide she could never go back to her old life and they could make a life in Eastern Ontario that was simpler, closer, more connected.
“Why are you asking me that? You know I don’t belong here. They know I’ve never belonged here. Not when I was eighteen, and not now. I don’t know what to do. I don’t belong anywhere. I belong in a book of adolescent dreams.” she replied, almost hysterically, and her voice carried her anguish.
“If your book’s published, like I’m sure it will be, you’ll have to do a lot of traveling for a while. After that, I was hoping we could find a little place on a lake and I could become a folksy country lawyer and you could write books.”
“That sounds lovely, but you know in six months we’d both be bored to death with that kind of life, and probably with each other.” Laura answered seriously. Ian didn’t know what to say. Knowing his wife, he knew she was probably right. Knowing the last months, he was hoping she had changed.
“We’re in the no-man’s land between the city and the country. We have to choose one.” Ian replied.
“There are no choices anymore.” she replied with no feeling.
In the morning, Ann Marie woke Laura and Ian. It was only then that they learned Amanda had not come home that night. It was strange but they weren’t worried, because the one thing certain on the farm was that everyone made sure everyone was safe.
Ann Marie had knocked on the patio door.
“I just came to say goodbye.” Her muffled voice came through the glass.
Laura asked her what she meant and told her to come in.
Ann Marie came in and sat on the corner of the bed and explained that she and Megan were setting out to explore the red highways of their racial heritage.
“It’s going to be like a cross between Blue Highways and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We’re going on the road to look for cowbirds.”
“I don’t understand.” Laura replied anxiously.
“Tom picked Amanda. I guess he asked her to marry him yesterday. Megan feels she can’t be here anymore. She lost. We hardly slept last night talking about what we should do with the rest of our lives, and we decided that the one thing we really have for sure is each other. We’re just going to drive and visit native bands and see what’s left of what we might have been.”
“It sounds wonderful.” Ian replied
“It sounds terrifying, if you ask me.” Ann Marie responded.
“The future is always terrifying.” Laura added, “Good luck, old girlfriend.”
Ann Marie thanked Laura and then kissed her and held her tight then she did the same with Ian, kissing him hard on the lips.
“You saved my life, and my daughter’s life. Thank Wayne for both of us. Alan is still at the cabin.”
When she was gone, Ian turned to Laura.
“Our baby’s getting married, my God!”
“I just hope it isn’t too soon.” Laura answered sounding anything but enthusiastic.
The day after a funeral is a meditation on death and a remembrance of life.
For Laura, death was a cartoon character moving in a two-dimensional world, a figure that could stretch and distort life like rubber, where things could appear from a strange kind of infinity, from nothing, where things could disappear as if they never existed. Death defied gravity, so a person could look down into space, and be suspended for a moment, before falling into nothing in a little puff of dust. Life was always about death and vice versa.
Laura couldn’t stop thinking about Eugene’s notebooks. They made her angry. They made her sad. They were precious artifacts of a wonderful life. They were always a reminder of what was gone. Like his shoes or his comb, his belt or his clothes, all the things that had known the touch of his fingers, the spiral notebooks weren’t any different. What was in them was all just a stillborn nostalgia. Laura wished he had never given them to her, even though she was so touched that he had chosen to keep them.
Left hand cords descended the scale of Laura’s heart until the last one just echoed inside her with a resonance just below hearing. It was the musical thunder of loss. The way things from the land fell to float on the lake, suddenly light and suddenly gone, was the way Eugene’s notebooks looked to her. It was the afternoon before she had the courage to touch them. She finally did it as a distraction from her growing anxiety about why Ian hadn’t come back from breakfast with Tom and Amanda, or even by himself with news of the sudden engagement.
She was surprised when she opened the first notebook that it was dated in 1961 when Eugene was just twelve years old. Reading the thoughts of a young boy was sweet, and he reminded her of the fictional Arthur. After the journals began, Eugene soon missed days, then weeks, then months without an entry, and she wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the first book when he was fifteen years old, and it was only a few days after his birthday when he made the entry: ‘I fell in love today. She was walking by old man Sider’s Latin class. She looked angry. She’s so beautiful. God help me, she’s a cheerleader.’
From that day on, the entries in the diary happened every day. She was the cheerleader.
As she read, she remembered. She remembered seeing him and the way his eyes followed her, and she thought it was the way most boys looked at her. She had looked back at Eugene, unlike the way she did with other boys, because the looking was good. If he had only known the times she had imagined his body before she ever knew it.
Reading his entries, he seemed to have no idea that she knew he even existed. The mature reality of death faded in the soft light of innocent memory. Laura was almost enjoying herself.
Almost every one of Eugene’s children on the farm was doing exactly what Laura was doing. They were pouring over the journals Eugene had kept of them, for them. Everyone was feeling the unique pleasure in finding old snapshots that no one had known had even been taken.
Tom and Amanda had vanished. It seemed that Ann Marie was the only one who knew about the engagement. When Ann Marie said goodbye to Sharon, and thanked her for everything, for saving her daughter and herself from a common middle class tragedy, she didn’t bother to tell Sharon why Megan wanted to leave, why she had given up hope of having Tom. It was Ian who told her their children were going to be married.
The regular practical routines on the farm had vanished that day. There were no assigned duties, no o
When Tom and Amanda finally appeared, it was obvious that they had been doing a lot more than reading. They both moved with the fluid grace of sexual abundance, so relaxed, so calm, so languidly at ease. Their hair looked radiant and full. Both their parents knew what they were seeing and because it was the day it was, they both accepted what they were seeing without the least anxiety.
“We have something to tell you.” Amanda began.
“So it appears.” Ian teased.
“Daddy!.... Tom and I are going to be married.”
“So I hear. That’s wonderful. I’m thrilled for both of you.” Ian answered as he embraced and kissed his daughter.
“Congratulations baby. You couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful woman. “Sharon said to Tom, and then she held him almost as hard as she had when he held her the night Eugene died. Then Tom and Ian hugged and so did Sharon and Amanda. And then it was Ian and Sharon and it was, oddly, the sweetest embrace of all. The tender roots of joy sank into the dark, heavy loam of loss and there were smiles and happiness all around.
“So when’s the wedding?” Ian asked the couple.
“Christmas. We’re both hoping to get into university next year. We want to spend one more year working on the farm, if it’s okay.” Tom answered.
“I have you both for another year. That’s certainly okay.” Sharon added. “Where are you going to be living?”
“The house boat. I’ll have to put in a wood stove. It might be a little cool.” Tom answered
“Really cool.” Ian said with more than a little envy. He wished he had had a year with Laura so close to nature when they had first been married. “Can your mother and I visit you every weekend or so?”
“That would be great.” Tom replied.
“Well,... maybe not quite every weekend.” Amanda said seriously.
That was when Ian and Sharon knew their children really had their own lives. As parents letting go, it was hard to be happy, but impossible to regret that it was so.
At the houseboat, Laura had scanned the short year when she and Eugene had once gone from being strangers to lovers, from being lovers to what might have been. Reading his account of the night he proposed was sweet and sad, and she was so glad she had said no and still, finally, she was so sorry she didn’t even want to give their love a chance. When they were young, she felt the same way about the future as she did all those decades later. It was unknowable, risky, no place to bet that anything survived, especially love.
Reading the words, remembering when it happened, sitting in his beautiful car, drinking a bottle of champagne after their graduation party, it was strange thinking that any two people so young could even begin to imagine the rest of their lives together. She told him no, she wouldn’t marry him, but she would treasure the first proposal of her life. At least that much she knew would be true. It was. It would always be true.
After that, it was heartache and loss, as Eugene wrote, telling her all the things he hoped for the two of them and all the things she was turning her back on. Like everyone in love, Eugene couldn’t understand why that wasn’t more than enough. Laura knew then, as she did reading Eugene’s thoughts, that it was never enough. She wasn’t sure if Eugene had ever come to understand that too.
There was a whole book between the time they stopped seeing one another and the time Sharon came into Eugene’s life. When the heartache was done, she was still his great listener. He told her all his thoughts and hopes and fears, and sometimes even the sweet things he experienced he wished that she would have known. The strange thing was that as she read, she could almost hear Eugene’s voice, the cadence of the rhythm and the distant echo of his father’s Dutch accent. She wondered how his voice had changed. If he was like everyone else at the high school reunion, he would’ve sounded just the same. She loved how a voice somehow survived. Laura flipped through the pages of one book after another and she saw that Eugene kept his greatest weakness for only her to know. Weakness and doubts and anxieties and anger about his marriage and his children and his life and his parents were things he told her and would never tell anyone else. He said so.
He had no idea that all those years later he would be destroying the illusion of his perfect, loving heart as she read. Then Laura realized that he probably knew that was exactly what she would be feeling. What he didn’t know was that she’d come back and learn to love him, true. He had no idea how hard it would be to lose her illusions of him all over again. Laura couldn’t go on reading. She knew she didn’t want to read those journals, ever.
If there was a Pyrrhic Victory, then this was a Pyrrhic gift. He gave her the most precious gift of who he really was, and it was a gift he had no idea would break her heart. Laura decided she couldn’t live with his gift and that he hadn’t intended anyone else to have it, Laura decided the only thing she could do was burn his journals. It made her so sad, but it had to be done.
It was then that Laura moved from the question of ‘why’ to that of ‘what if’. What if she had married him all those years ago? What if she had said yes? There never would have been the huge family: no Rosie Van Fleet, no Tranh Van Fleet, no Sharon, no Wayne, none of the other brothers and sisters. There would have been no Queer Agents of Karma. Amanda would never have been. Megan would have been lost, and with her Ann Marie and perhaps Ian, and most likely her as well. There would have been no beautiful farm, no foster families, no millions of dollars, no roses, no antiques, no Bridget Brown for her daughter to love. There would only have been the money from the Walnut Wood that she would have certainly made Eugene cut down.
There would have been the inevitable divorce and all that would have meant. There would have been no notebooks. There would have been no deciding where she belonged. The best thing she had ever done in her life was say no to his love.
Everyone knew where they belonged except her. She didn’t know anything or any place she could touch. She had Eugene’s hideous disease. People could touch her, but she couldn’t respond.
He had left her the knowledge of the course of her own emotional paralysis. She could feel the emotional connections of her life going numb, just as she came to realize what they were. Laura was having a breakdown that left her looking as she always had, the way a plate can crack in half and its pieces fit so perfectly that the break is invisible. She dug a pit in the sand then put the notebooks in it with the loose leaves of his printed memories since she had come back to the farm. She crushed a number of them before she realized she had no matches.
Tom has supplied the boathouse with everything, and that included matches. She had used them to light the propane stove just that morning to make coffee, and she put them down, but she couldn’t, for the life of her, find them. She almost tore apart the little kitchen. It was like an omen, it was the fates trying to intervene in what she wanted to do, and she had to put that thought right out of her mind. The decision was hard enough as it was. It took twenty minutes and there were still no matches until she opened the refrigerator door to get herself a drink because her mouth was so dry with anxiety. The matches were on the shelf with the milk. She almost laughed when she saw them. She forgot her thirst and she picked up the box of wooden matches and opened it and it flew from her fingers and fell to the floor, pickup sticks, another omen she had to ignore.
Even though there was only a little wind, she went through one match after another and they blew out before the paper would light. It was lik
Ian and Tom and Amanda were beside her before she noticed them.
Tom shouted, “Those are my father’s notebooks!”
“What are you doing?” Amanda screamed, “Are you crazy? You’re burning the thoughts of someone who loved you!”
Amanda didn’t wait for an explanation; she started kicking sand over the little fire. Laura couldn’t say anything. They looked at her like she was some kind of monster. She got up and left them. “What is the matter with you?” Amanda shouted after her mother.
When she was gone no one knew what to say. Amanda bent down and started digging the paper out of the pit and Tom helped her do it. They gathered the singed, dirty books and tried to clean them as they did touching them with the actual reverence they felt. Ian went after Laura. Laura did not want to apologize. She did not want to explain herself. She didn’t expect anyone to understand what she had been doing and she was so glad that Ian didn’t even ask.
“I’m so sorry. This must be so terrible for you.” Ian consoled her.
“I’m all hung up. I just need some time to myself.” she said wearily, “Would it be okay, if you didn’t come for a few weeks. You’re just too much pressure.”
“That’s not going to happen. You’re obviously in too much pain. You need to stay connected to those who love you.”
“But I’m not connected. When you’re here, when she’s here, you just remind me of that and it hurts so much, and I’m having a hard time feeling anything at all. It’s so mixed up.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not leaving you alone.” Ian said firmly.
“Please. I thought about this. Please. I spent my whole life with people; I have to find myself by myself. Now that Ann Marie and Megan are gone, maybe you could move into their cabin with Amanda until the end of the summer. Maybe you can ask Sharon, if I could stay until then. I should look over Arthur and Laura Lee and make the final corrections. Please. Please understand.” Laura sounded like she was almost begging him when Tom and Amanda came inside carrying the notebooks.
“I know these are yours, and you can do anything you want with them, but I don’t think you’re in the right frame of mind to do something so final.” Amanda began, “Tom says that maybe it would be all right if we put them in the vault for a while. Please think about what you’re doing. I know this must be a terrible thing for you to get over. Please. These are so precious.”
Laura just nodded her head and looked almost as lost and hurt as Amanda had looked after she was raped. Everyone was afraid for her.
“Your mother would like to have some time to herself. Would it be okay, if you and I moved to Ann Marie’s cabin so she can be alone. I’ll ask Sharon, if it’s okay.” Ian said quietly to Amanda
Tom said he was sure his mother would agree. He couldn’t help thinking he and Amanda would have the cabin to themselves during the week. The flowers of passion were full-blown in both of them. It was like an addiction that couldn’t be described, only savored.The double rush of reciprocal pleasure was absolutely irresistible.
“Maybe you could all go and talk to Sharon. I’ll be okay. I just need some time, some space.”
Ian said they would do that and just as there were leaving he said, “We really love you, you know.”
“Really.” Amanda added softly.
“I know.” Laura replied, “Thank you.”
“I almost forgot. Tom and I are getting married this Christmas.” Amanda said, almost sadly.
“I heard. That’s wonderful. I know you’ll be very happy.” Laura replied and she looked so completely sad Amanda could only reply, “Thanks.” There were many layers to the irony. When Amanda was the last one still inside the houseboat, she turned back to her mother.
“I know something about pain. It’s not all bad. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to help you get through it. It’s what you did for me.” More irony.
Laura didn’t say anything but she knew that it was Tom, Ian, Ann Marie, Sharon and even Wayne who had really been there for Amanda.
After Ian said goodbye later that night and had gone back to Toronto with Alan, Laura was sitting watching the sunset when she saw Sharon walking along the beach, and she almost didn’t recognize her because the way she walked was so different. The resolute purpose and energy her body usually carried seemed to have vanished. She was walking slowly, casually, as if time didn’t matter, as if she was walking and holding hands with a lover.
Sharon sat down on the deck chair beside Laura before either of them spoke.
“Ian tells me you want to stay on in the house boat for a while. This is Tom’s boat, you can stay as long as he’s willing. You can stay here on the farm as long as you want to do that.” Sharon said gently.
“Thank you. I don’t know how it’s going to make any difference, but this is the only place I feel comfortable right now. Until I finish with the last corrections to Arthur and Laura Lee and some publisher has it and I lose any real connection to it, for what it’s worth, this is the place we belong. It’s not much, but it’s something.” Laura explained.
“Gene dying must be harder for you than for me. I can’t imagine how you’ll endure it. I have the kids, the farm, enough great memories for another lifetime. You had six months. You fell in love with him like I said you would, didn’t you?” Sharon replied.
“It’s true. He was the perfect dream lover. It was true when he was seventeen years old. It’s just the dreams were so different, although there’s not much to choose between them.” Laura answered, and it was the first time the two of them faced the fact that Laura had been Eugene’s first lover.
“It’s funny, thinking of you two making love doesn’t bother me the way it did when I first saw you. You’re so beautiful. When you were young, you must have been like a vision. The two of you making love together must have been so beautiful. When we made love, it was a different kind of beautiful.” Sharon confessed.
“It must have been. I think I would’ve traded that face and this body to have experienced that kind of beautiful, just once. I think it’s what Tom and Amanda must have. Arthur and Laura Lee is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. Doing that with Eugene is as close as I’ll get to that kind of beautiful. Knowing they’ll have a whole life, like you two had, is the best thing that could have ever happened.” Laura replied, opening her heart completely, emotions and ideas mixed up and tied tensely together.
“Your life’s not over.” Sharon pointed out.
“Shouldn’t I be the one saying that to you.” Laura shot back.
“I suppose. But you’re the one without anything to hold onto. That’s why you tried to burn those notebooks, isn’t it?”
“In a way. How do you deal with somebody that gave themselves completely?”
“Take it. Accepting someone’s heart isn’t necessarily about giving your own. I could never live up to his standards, and we both knew it, and it was okay.”
“I know that. I guess I know that. If I learned anything from Arthur and Laura Lee, it’s that giving and getting isn’t all that important, it’s all about being that’s always been my problem. I don’t know who to be, what to be and where to be.”
“Then you’ll need people to remind you. You’ll need people you trust to triangulate your position, if you really feel so lost. You might even think about talking to somebody who doesn’t carry old memories and guilt. Christa’s psychiatrist is a man named Brian Smith. He’s really quite wonderful. If I was in pain I couldn’t handle, he’s the only person I’d go to, except maybe Bridget Brown. C
Laura didn’t react defensively to the mention of a psychiatrist. She didn’t react at all.
“If I called Brian Smith and he came down, you two could meet and talk and you could see if you think he might be able to help.” Sharon continued.
“Sure. I always thought professionals had all the answers. I sure thought I had them.”
“I’m glad this isn’t self pity. I always believed in respecting real pain.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve earned your respect.” Laura said dryly. It sure felt like self-pity to her.
“You know very well, you always had my respect.” Sharon said and smiled with her eyes.
“I know.” Laura replied, but couldn’t manage a smile.
For the rest of the week, Laura got acquainted with the heat of the summer. Most days, she spent sitting on the deck chair, and even with the sunblock, she was turning a beautiful brown like the grasses and weeds growing in the fields, struggling to survive the dry, blazing light. Summer was a season of stress. She was almost disappointed when Tom showed her how to engage the motor for the canvas awning that spread out over each porch so she could be out of the sun.
Laura kept one pleasure, the feel of her body. Whether she was in the sun or walking along the sand, feeling the dry wind of the day or feeling it cool after dark, whether she was feeling the cool water when she went naked to it or feeling it dry softly on her skin, whether she was smelling the perfume that was alive all around her that appeared the minute the sun fell below the horizon, Laura enjoyed every moment and sensation of her body. It was all she had left of who she had been.
She tried not to think. She tried not to remember. She tried not to think of the future at all.
Feeling her body was all she could do, all that was left that she could do really well. She had always been a master of momentary pleasures, and she was finally left with the simplest ones of all. This moment!
Tom and Amanda brought her food as she had asked, so she didn’t have to go to the farmhouse for meals. She had asked about David, and he seemed to have forgotten her after three days of repeatedly saying her name; Or...Ore...Oar.
Laura gave Amanda her cell phone so Ian couldn’t make his nightly call, so she wouldn’t have to hear his unexpressed worry, his anxious hope.
Ian had a difficult week, as difficult as he had had in many months. Always trying to be the optimist, it was still difficult to imagine what their lives would be when Laura came home. It was impossible to know what would happen if her book was a success or if it just disappeared. There was no knowing what her loving and losing Eugene would mean to both of them. There was no knowing what would become of Arthur and Laura Lee. His only answer was the hope he felt in his dreams of a place of their own far from the lights and the darkness of the city. The future wasn’t any easier for Ian than it was for Laura. That was how the city was different than the farm.
On the farm, the future seemed to carry the momentum of the past, much of what had been, would be. For people in the city, jobs, homes, relationships, children might disappear in one black day. Everyone in the city could feel the transience of life moving like sand under foot, every grain of sand responding to gravity and pressure. What had been probably wasn’t going to be for very long. Life was a bargain with time. Hope could be like a morning glory hanging limp on its trellis after the first killing frost.
That was why the only thing Ian could imagine to resist the pressure of time was having something real that might survive into the future, and the only thing he could imagine like that was a place he loved, a place his family felt they belonged for the rest of their lives. Imagining a real place like that was what kept Ian going through the week. Imagining a place was something that could become real, something that could be found and created and kept and handed on. Ian finally understood the endless paralysis of the weekend gridlock around Toronto, the cars and people trapped on hot highways going and coming from cottages every summer weekend of the year. He wanted more than a cottage. He wanted more than a weekend of reality to touch with his own hands.
He wanted peace, privacy, solitude, serenity, he wanted to touch things he would have for the rest of his life. He wanted his wife and daughter to be at home in a place all their own, on land of their own. He wanted a place his grandchildren would love. Ian imagined a little lake surrounded by Crown land, a little bay, an inlet on a lake with a clear, sand beach. He imagined the lake accessible by only one road that ended at a little dock at the end of the lake from where they would have to take a boat or a snowmobile to their simple, beautiful log house. He imagined every room, the living room, the kitchen, the little library, the three bedrooms for Tom and Amanda and their children, and that was the best part of his dreams. He even started imagining the furniture and the things he would teach his grandchildren. He intended to have time for them he never had for Amanda. Finally, his life would know the best part of having money and time.
There would be a screened porch beside the lake that would be glassed in the fall with a fireplace made of granite field stones. There would be books and music and a little workshop and even a root cellar so they could be more independent. It was a stripped down version of the Van Fleet farm, without all the people, and all the furious activity. While Laura found solitary pleasure in her body, Ian was only happy in his dreams.
When Ian called Amanda and tried to share his growing excitement about his idea, he was disappointed that she was only polite in response. She had her own future and, if it wasn’t connected to the farm, it would be far away and years in the making. That’s when it first hit home that there would only be Laura and him for the rest of their lives. One child was a little base for a big thing like a family. He had never been so afraid of losing Laura as he was when he realized she was all he really had. He knew that the extroverted Laura wouldn’t ever, for a minute, consider living in such an isolated place as he imagined, but her sudden need to be alone, to stay away from people made him hope that perhaps she was changing and she had seen through the superficial attractions of the modern society that used to be so much a part of her life. He was hoping she was coming to appreciate the slow movement of time that might be possible to experience, if they returned to a more natural rhythm of life. Times were a-changin, but even more to the point, time was a-changin. A place and time together, with time to spend. He wanted life to be like a song.
Laura fell asleep every night and she lost the memory of the pleasure of her skin as she lay there alone, feeling too loved and far too unloving, her emotional chickens finally coming home to roost.
For Amanda and Tom the commitment to each other they felt so absolutely, changed only one thing between them, their sexuality. They made love whenever they could, whenever they had time, whenever they found a place that was private, and Amanda had to learn like her mother to stifle the incredible screams she felt exploding in her orgasms. She shared orgasms with Tom, and that was the best thing of all.
Pre-marital sex wasn’t encouraged on the farm, and the Van Fleet children couldn’t even be alone with a member of the opposite sex before they were sixteen. Sharon made sure her children were well aware of birth control methods because she knew what babies did to a young life. That was why there was a constant supply of condoms in the bathroom. Both Tom and Amanda made sure they were safe. It was part of their culture. It was that of both their mothers.
Still, the hormones of real love made practical issues seem very secondary. They both thought constantly about each other, each other’s bodies, each thing they had touched and how it felt when they made love. They thought about it all the time and everyone could see it in their eyes, if they really looked, so that by the end of the week the lovers were both sure they were addicted to each other the way Wayne had once been addicted to heroin. Too
At the end of the week, Amanda and Tom had gone into Belleville and ordered a special engagement ring, one they had designed themselves, a horizontal one carat diamond between two oval blue sapphires. It looked like a cresting wave. The jeweler was impressed with their design and more impressed with the fifteen thousand dollar price the two ordinary looking teenagers treated so casually, and it definitely wasn’t an engagement ring for someone who worked with her hands. Amanda would soon learn that most days she would wear it after dinner and mostly while she slept.
The day Amanda got her engagement ring was the day she started keeping a journal. She wanted to keep the special moments of her life for herself and for Tom and her children, and for the first time in her life, she even imagined she would have grandchildren one day, The first thing she wrote in her journal was her mother’s reaction to her ring.
‘My mom tried to smile when she looked at my ring and she said that when we lived in Toronto, if I told her I was getting married, she would have fought me with all her might. She said she couldn’t imagine anyone as young as me and Tom being prepared for something as big as marriage, but she thought we had all changed. That’s when she told me she wished she had married Tom’s dad when he asked her when she was seventeen years old like me. What an idea! What a stupid, terrible, selfish, beautiful idea! Still, it’s kind of great to think of her wishing she’d done something just from her heart. She does the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right ones. I wished she could have hugged me or Tom when we showed her the ring. Still, I may not have the best mother in the world, but I sure have the right one.’
It was that week that Eugene’s mother took to her bed for the last time. With her growing dementia came a terrible fatigue, as if seeing her son dead had drained the life force from within her. She would only eat soup, if she was fed like a child. Her mind traveled through time so that her son’s children that she had seen become adults with children of their own, became adolescents again. She reminded them of things they had done when they were just new to the farm. She sometimes barked instructions the way she did when she was fighting Eugene and Sharon for the control she had always wanted to have over people, especially her family. The only things she controlled at the end of her life were her eyes and her bowels, just like her son.
Ten days after Eugene’s funeral, Sharon was feeding his mother and she gagged on the soup in her throat, coughed hard, just once, laid back and closed her eyes and died. It was so much easier than it had been for Eugene, and Sharon almost resented her mother-in-law for her effortless death.
Sitting with her mother-in-law in the same bedroom that the old woman had shared for so many years with Eugene’s father, Sharon looked around and saw the simple remnants of a life. All that was left of the poor old furniture that had been in the farmhouse when she had married Eugene was in that room with a few decorative things, a few personal things, photos in frames on crocheted doilies. The old iron double bed that made a metallic groan to every movement, the depression era chest of drawers with mahogany veneer, the coal oil lamps that were never used, the linen dust covers, the wooden ladder back rocker, the Delft blue of two ceramic Dutch windmills, the faded wallpaper moss roses, the China brick-a-brac and the old glass lamp on the night table were all the artifacts of her life she had been able to claim as her own. As Eugene and Sharon had become more successful and the children arrived, and had then renovated the farmhouse and made the additions, all the poor old furniture was replaced with beautiful older things, with histories of other people. Sharon remembered how Eugene’s mother had fought every change. “You’re turning my home into a museum.” she would bark. At the end of her life, nothing was left of her own life that wasn’t in that bedroom.
Sitting with death once again, it was those poor, sad remnants of a long, rich life that Eugene’s mother had been allowed to keep, that made Sharon feel sad and guilty. The civil, guerrilla war with her mother-in-law finally had cooled like the soup Sharon held in her hands in the white mug. Sharon sat for a long time and felt very hard and very stubborn. She knew how much Eugene’s mother had paid to have her as her daughter-in-law. Even on the farm, tradition and generations, and the old order of things had been fundamentally displaced by the children of opportunity. She was just a part of her generation.
Eugene’s mother’s grandchildren came in and said goodbye, and then the ambulance came to take her to the mortuary were she would be prepared for a traditional funeral. She would lie in a casket surrounded by flowers in a somber, big room with plush chairs and polished furniture. She would lie in a simple print dress and would look like a gray wax copy of who she had been. People would come and her family would wait beside her and there would be a vigilance for nothing more than memories. Old people, old friends, her two surviving children and their spouses and her daughter in law Sharon would receive sympathy, and dust off a few more memories. They would sit in the big soft chairs, on the velvet sofas, speaking low, as if Eugene’s mother was asleep and no one wanted to wake her. There were a few tears, but grief was too easy. Her son was a hard act to follow. The contrast between Eugene’s funeral and his mother’s was stark. Where he had received great garlands of grief, his mother had received nosegays of sorrow. Most of the time, during the visiting hours when she lay in state, Eugene’s mother presided over the quiet assembly of her children and her children’s children. People gathered together and were gone; people held one another and kissed with a brittle sadness.
In the filtered light of a country church filled to bursting with people, before a minister of the United Church her family had attended when her family was all her own, Eugene’s mother’s coffin glowed in the words that were said over her life. Her surviving son Frank, spoke after the minister, and it was obviously difficult for him to describe the long life, hard work, the strong values and love and the way it was passed unexpressed from a parent to child and was returned the same way. He told stories of hardship and courage and sacrifice, what it was to raise children, what it was to survive and sweat and laugh now and then. There was no poetry, no grand words because they didn’t apply as they had to her son. The poetry was simpler; it was simple reality. It was no less true.
The thing that made Eugene’s mother’s funeral different than that of the countless others that went through the little church, was the funeral procession of cars that went back to the family Cemetery. Behind the hearse, mixed in among the modern cars were the beautiful, restored classic cars of the Van Fleet children, Eugene’s children. It gave the long procession a gaiety and a freshness and a sense of fun that somehow lifted every heart that saw it.
Ian rode with Tom and Amanda in her newly restored Riviera. Laura refused to attend.
Eugene’s mother was buried beside her husband and a short way from where the newly planted violets were just beginning to take root over Eugene’s ashes. Marta Van Loon. 1921-1999. Beloved wife, mother and grandmother. Rest in Peace.
Red polished granite.
Ian came and told Laura about the funeral and she seemed almost interested. It was the kind of funeral she could understand. She even asked what Sharon had worn. Laura had agreed to start taking a herbal antidepressant. It was harmless. It couldn’t hurt. Drugs were always a good way to postpone life. Laura didn’t know that so well, until her whole life was one of pure postponement. She did less. She thought less. She ate less. She talked less. And for some reason, she suffered more. She couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t understand anything.
Ian tried talking to her about her feelings, but she just said that she was emotionally tapped out, and Ian could understand it. The last ten months had carried one shock after another, every one new, every one enormous, every one ripping at the stable foundation of their lives. Even if, as Walt Whitman promised, whatever happened to anybody could be turned to beautiful result, it didn’t seem to be of any help
The Van Fleets all remembered how Christa had fallen into her emotional swings of euphoria and despair. Laura was missing the euphoria. She was becoming purely depressed. The Van Fleets knew the face of depression. They were more frightened for Laura than Amanda and Ian were, and were even more helpless.
Amanda tried talking to her mother, but Laura just said she’d be fine.
Sharon came armed with the best Bordeaux on another starlit night when Laura just sat on the boat house porch watching the lake and the black shadow of Haystack Island breaking the invisible horizon. Sunset was still only a few hours before midnight, and so when Sharon came, Laura was still remembering the twilight filling the day with dust motes of gold, with colors that meant more to her than money. Moon rise, wind rise, waves rolled under the boat, gently rocking it like a cradle.
“I wondered when you’d come.” Laura said flatly as Sharon sat down beside her.
“Spirits to raise the spirits. Can I find some glasses?” Sharon asked, placing the two dark bottles of wine on the little table between them. Sharon didn’t wait for an answer but went into the boat house and brought out two wine glasses and a cork screw. The wine glasses were filled and Laura groaned from the pleasure of her first sip.
“If I could afford wine like this, I’d be an unrepentant alcoholic.” Laura said, sounding quite sincere.
“The wine is to loosen your tongue and lubricate your spirit.” Sharon answered, “Tell me what’s most important to you.”
“Everything, nothing. I don’t know what important means any more.” Laura answered.
“Really. That must be very confusing. That reminds me of when Christa had a meditation chant when she walked for miles every day. When she breathed in she said, ‘Everything is precious.’ When she breathed out, she said, ‘Nothing is important.’ I think she made it up herself.
“I like her so much. That’s just about it.” Laura replied. “What’s the best thing Eugene ever said to you?” Laura asked, seemingly out of the blue.
“That’s easy. Do you feel it when I come with my heart.”
“That’s pretty impressive. He never said anything with me. Did you ever come with yours?” Laura asked, watching the excited expression glowing on Sharon’s face in the porch light.
Sharon didn’t seem shocked by the question, just had a sip of wine and smiled, almost sadly. Sharon never felt her loss more than when she was with Laura. It was one of the reasons why she loved coming to see her. She nodded yes, in answer to Laura’s question.
“Really.” Laura said, sounding just like Amanda’s, ‘Really’.
“You want to talk about Eugene?” Sharon asked her friend.
“No. No. I don’t want to do that.” Laura answered, and Sharon saw Laura visibly shut down. From that point on, Laura asked no questions, and she answered Sharon’s with a few words or wan smiles. For some reason, Sharon’s simple question was just too direct. It was too open ended.
Sharon, being who she was, didn’t give up that easily. If Laura wouldn’t talk, she would. The one thing she knew about depression from raising her many troubled children, was that underneath the pain was the unspoken belief that somehow, most people felt they didn’t deserve what had happened. Underneath pain and guilt was always an innocence wanting to be recognized. For Sharon, life’s pain and its resolution came from simply coming to terms with how life was so often, so brutally, so cold-bloodedly unfair. That was her theme. It was the theme that had served her through her life and she would come at it from as many directions as she could find.
Amanda’s rape. It was helplessly suffering the suffering of her own flesh and blood. Nothing.
The dead boy in the snow and her affair with George Marshall, her betrayal of Ian. No response.
Personal selfishness and personal guilt, the possibilities she had betrayed in her life. That wasn’t it, either.
Eugene’s disease, her loss of her love after finally accepting it was real. Still nothing.
‘You are not alone in this.’ was a theme that Sharon knew most people wanted to believe, and that was why she decided to pour out her own heart as she never done in her life. For some reason, Laura’s depression, her separation from life, was something Sharon wanted to resist with all her might. It was like she was family.
“You think that you know pain. I’ll tell you about pain. You want to hear about the absurdity of suffering, the mindless heartache people inflict on one another, I know something about that.” Sharon said passionately. Sharon knew the anguish the cruel fates could inflict upon the innocent. She built a life fighting against those fates, winning again and again, but losing occasionally, with painful results that somehow never made up for the successes. It took a hard heart to resist Sharon’s experiences and her eloquence. Anyone else might have wept in the little modern Gethsemane Sharon made of the beautiful boathouse on the beach.
No tears, from either of them. Laura was obviously listening, she just couldn’t respond. Sharon thought Laura was going to be one of her failures. It almost made her angry. No one had been loved as Laura had been since she had come to the farm. No one had found love as she had found it when she had come to the farm. Sharon didn’t and couldn’t understand that that was exactly Laura’s problem.
Finally, Sharon asked the one question she always relied on when she faced the worst problems in life.
“Tell me what would have to happen to make your world better?”
Laura didn’t reply at once and Sharon could see she was thinking, seriously.
“People would have to see what was right in front of their eyes. I’d have to be able to do it too.”
“Good! I love that!” Sharon replied, excitedly. “Why don’t they see? Why don’t you see what’s right in front of your eyes?”
“Life is a blind spot. Love is a blind spot.” Laura answered seriously.
And that was it. She said she was too tired to talk any more, and Sharon could see she meant it. Under the stars and beside the rolling water, Sharon left Laura a last little speech, something to consider after she left
“You’re everything I’m not and he loved you for it. I’m everything you’re not and I think he loved me just as much.” Sharon said softly.
“More.” Laura replied, and it was Sharon’s turn for the wan smile in response. She leaned across the table and kissed Laura’s cool cheek. They looked in each others eyes.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Sharon whispered warmly.
“Me too, I suppose.” Laura replied, and her voice was as cool as her cheek. The two bottles of wine were gone. It was then she realized the reason she could have never been with Eugene. He was too extreme a romantic and she was too extreme a realist. He desperately needed her and she knew she would never be able to give herself to him. They were the opposite poles of the magnet at life’s core. That was the reality he could never see.
In a way, Laura’s depression became part of everyone’s consciousness at the farm. The children and the older people all seemed to want to rise to the challenge of finding the secret taste in life Laura could not resist, the one irresistible taste that would give her back her appetite for the basic fare of living. Everyone sent treats with Tom and Amanda. People went swimming near the boat house much more often than they usually did so they might have a chance to talk to her. Children made cards and wrote short, sweet letters. She was invited to read from Arthur and Laura Lee. She declined all the invitations. She kept to herse
In the limited patience of mothers and daughters, Amanda finally had enough.
“You’re like some princess in a tower, pining for love.” Amanda accused her mother. “You are loved! Don’t you get it?”
“I get it.” Laura replied, “I am a princess. I get it. That’s the problem. But there’s a pea under my pillow.”
Amanda rolled her eyes and left. What she hadn’t said, although just like everyone else, she had thought it. She wanted to say, ‘He’s dead. Life goes on.’
Everyone was secretly sure that Laura’s depression was caused by Eugene’s death, and so no one gave her the chance to deny it.
And she did try to get better. She tried not to give in to the gray clouds that followed her everywhere. She ate her herbal supplements. She tried to enjoy every moment. She tried to remember the good times. She even started walking and chanting with her breath, ‘ Everything is precious...... Nothing is important.’ She spoke the words to herself hundreds and hundreds of times and all it did was made her lungs feel full of the sweet summer air. She wanted to believe that people could communicate love, but she couldn’t make herself believe it.
When Ian came, Tom and Amanda asked him to get Laura to join them with Sharon at a little Lakeside restaurant that had wonderful food. It was going to be the only engagement party they had. It was going to be first time they would sit down together knowing they would be part of the same family. Amanda was very excited and hopeful her happiness would make a difference to her mother, and so she was angry when her mother refused to come. Amanda actually yelled at her mother the way she had the day of Eugene’s funeral. Laura apologized and seemed very sincere and told Amanda she would just ruin the party.
“That’s just ridiculous! You could try to fake it.” Amanda shouted, “You used to sell being social for a living! You were the queen of faking it.”
“That wasn’t a living. That was just money.” Laura answered.
“And what’s more about living than your own daughter’s engagement party?” Amanda shot back.
“I know. I just can’t. You have to ask someone else about depression. Everything is precious and nothing is important.” Laura replied before she dove into the water to get away from her daughter.
“If you don’t come, it means we’ll have to talk about you all night.” Amanda shouted after her mother.
Laura was probably right about what her presence would have done at the dinner. The engagement dinner was easy and happy, easier and happier than it what have been if she had been sitting there in her new, strange placidity. The old brick Victorian house with the new, charming rose garden looked down the Lake from the screen porch where dinner was served. It was in a little Victorian village that was warm and summer busy, and it was all just what Amanda had imagined it would be.
An elegant, middle-aged woman seated them and the chef, her female partner, came in to greet them and everyone chatted before the elegant lady gave them their menus and the wine list. Everyone was excited and the woman was noticeably stunned by the size and beauty of Amanda’s ring. Amanda loved the reaction and Tom loved seeing it. The woman simply ignored the obvious question when she learned Sharon and Ian seemed to be there as single parents. There were too many permutations of families joined and severed to get into that can of worms. It was then that the woman brought and introduced her teenage daughter who would be their waitress, and when everyone was seated and her daughter was very busy serving, the woman sat down to the grand piano in the parlor off the porch, behind the open French doors. While everyone ate, the sound of Mozart and Chopin and Scriabin filled the house and filtered out into the night.
The dinner was so delicious and the wine so soothing and delightful that everyone was soon feeling the glow of young love like it was real and forever and no one talked about Eugene or Laura until dessert and coffee. Then it was all about Laura.
Sharon had talked to Christa’s psychiatrist, Brian Smith and he had agreed to come to see Laura, if Ian thought it was a good idea. Sharon explained what a difference he had made in Christa. He finally had her off antidepressants. They were actually talking about her coming home when she decided to go off to stay with Bridget Brown. Sharon was trying to make the McCalls appreciate that Brian Smith might really be able to help Laura.
“Sometimes, there are professionals who can really help.” Sharon said seriously, “I don’t usually believe in credentials, but this time I think they mean something.”
The experience Ian and Amanda had with Ann Marie gave them more than just a little faith. They both believed Laura needed help, but they just didn’t believe she’d accept it, so when Sharon told them that Laura had already agreed to meet Brian Smith, they were more than delighted. They were hopeful. They had both been desperately searching for some lifeline for Laura to hang onto to resist the inexorable gravity of her heart.
“The thing that scares me the most is not that she might not want help, it’s that she looks like she can’t even imagine it.” Ian admitted.
“She must feel like those Kosovar refugees, totally displaced from her own life.” Sharon agreed.
“Losing my dad must have been really hard for her.” Tom added, gently.
“Eugene used to say that love was getting ready to lose, we’re all born to lose, in a good way.” Sharon said, and everyone touched the seam along which every heart was broken.
Tom saw the pain of the truth flicker over every face in the candlelight, and he was most touched by how deeply it held its place in Ian’s eyes, so he tried to change the subject. He said he’d like to offer a toast, and he did.
“To the McCalls and the Van Fleets, here and far away.”
“To the McCalls and the Van Fleet’s, here and far away.” everyone repeated and touched glasses and drank the red wine.
“To the beautiful children we never deserved.” Ian offered.
“Speak for yourself.” Sharon replied before she joined Ian’s toast, “To our beautiful children.”
“I’d like to toast Fate.” Amanda asked, “Here’s to Fate, and my mom never marrying your dad.”
Everybody toasted before Amanda added that it sure had been good to her. That she could believe such a thing after what she had suffered, touched everyone else at the table.
Then it was Sharon’s turn. “There’s no end to it.”
Everyone loved saying that together, more than anything.
Tom had a second dessert and they drank more rich coffee and talked like they were all the family they had in the world. They laughed when Ian teased, and they loved how Sharon looked relaxed for the first time since Eugene’s funeral, so that it almost felt natural for them to be there without Laura, and finally, almost completely, without Eugene.
Everyone was finally thinking it was the end of the evening when the woman got up from the piano. Tom intercepted her as she passed by and asked if would be all right if he played Amanda one song.
“Certainly. That would be delightful.” the woman answered, and when Tom got up, everyone at their table followed him to the piano.
He sang,’ When I Fall in Love’ and the whole room stopped to his beautiful voice and when Amanda joined the next verse, it was breathtaking in the intimate acoustics of the room. It was the first moment of the first memory of when they fell in love, in her room, on her bed, over the phone connected to the coffeehouse. In a restless world like this is, some things didn’t cool in the warmth of the sun. Everyone watching knew what the words meant and wished they were true, and seeing them real, feeling them touching the heart like Amanda’s hands on Tom’s shoulders, was beautiful. The two parents glowed, and when the song was finished, there was a moment of silence that was as beautiful as the biggest ovation.
“I wish they could have been here.” Ian whispered to Sharon, and she smiled and nodded.
None of the strangers in the room could have imagined the recent heartache those ordinary lookin
Laura watched Smitty come down the Beach, and he was almost to the beach house before she realized the clear glass bowl he was carrying was filled with black cherries. She knew who he was, although they had never been introduced. She just knew the purposeful, casual air of a professional on a mission. She wasn’t expecting his first sentence.
“I have a bowl of cherries, would you like some?” he said breezily, “My name’s Brian Smith. Hello.”
“Sharon told me about you, I like the cherry schtick.” Laura answered, “I suppose you’d like to sit down and get me to start spitting seeds.”
“I’d like that just fine. I might like to spit some beside you.”
Smitty took his seat then placed the bowl between them.
“Sharon tells me you’ve helped Christa a lot and you might be able to help me.” Laura went right to the point.
“I might. You think I might be able to help?” he asked as he began to eat cherries and spit the pits into the lake. Laura followed suit.
“It would be nice to go back to being totally self absorbed and unaware, but it’s too late for all that.”
“Unlike most people, you seem to have a very good idea of why you’re depressed, why you want to withdraw.”
“Knowing is the reason.” Laura said sounding sad.
“I thought knowing is a good thing.” Smitty answered, “What is it that you know now that you didn’t know before?”
“That you can’t tell anybody, anything. You should know that very well in your line of work.”
“I suppose I do, but I’ll spare you the old platitude about only being able to help you, if you want to help yourself.”
“Great,” she replied, “What aren’t you going to spare me?”
“I’m not going to spare you an honest reply. How’s that?”
“Sharon was right. You are good. So, tell me honestly, what does an honest person do with their life?”
“Live honestly, I suppose.” Smitty answered, “Do you think you know how to live honestly?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Who does?”
“Everybody around here, everybody except me. I don’t know why everyone fits in here and I don’t. I don’t want to be a farm girl. I can’t be a city girl anymore. That’s the rub.”
“You sound like a teenager. Can’t be a woman and no longer a girl.”
“I like that. That’s probably exactly true. I’m probably emotionally arrested at eighteen. There’s an insight. Amanda would love it.”
“So you think it goes deeper than just fitting in?” Smitty pursued.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think I have the energy to change.”
“Or the motivation.”
“Are you kidding, I’ve got all the fucking motivation in the world, my daughter, my husband, my sweet future son-in-law, the people here who actually care about me more than I can understand, my new book that I did with Eugene that is so beautiful it breaks my heart. I have motivation, believe me. What I don’t have is a way to do them justice.” Laura answered with passion, and they both knew that was a good start. Laura started to look uncomfortable with the intensity and focus that happened so immediately, and so she asked if she could take a break and they could just enjoy the cherries. “Of course.” Smitty agreed, and they both sat and watched the dry heat of the day over the clear blue water. They sat for a very long time and that silence, sitting, was the reason Laura decided she trusted her new psychiatrist. When she spoke again, she knew she was committed.
“I suppose you want to talk about my childhood traumas?” Laura began.
“I don’t imagine they amounted to much.” Smitty said, matter-of-factly.”
“No they didn’t. What kind of a psychiatrist are you, if we’re not going to root out my old resentments about my mommy and daddy?”
“I’m not too big on the past, unless it’s a big problem. Is yours?” Smitty asked.
“All my sins are ones of omission. I’m just like anybody else.”
“You are. You really are. That wasn’t what you intended when you were eighteen, was it?
“Everyone thought I was special, except me. I thought I could pull it off. I thought I could become what everyone thought I was.”
“It sounds to me like you have. Look at all your motivations.”
“Right. I’m special. I just feel like crap. I guess that’s why you’re here, that’s what you’re supposed to help me understand. I’m just like all your other patients.”
“Not very. The only thing my patients have in common is pain. Of course that’s true of most everybody else.” he replied, “I want you to think about one question, before I come back, if you want me to come to see you regularly.”
“What question would that be?” Laura asked, curiously.
“Why isn’t the present moment enough for you?”
“That’s a great one. I will think about it, and you can come any time you want.”
“How about Tuesday’s and Friday’s? We’ll start next Friday.”
“Great.” Laura replied.
“Families often have questions, and what and how much I tell them is entirely up to you.” Smitty explained.
“I’ve got no secrets.” Laura said and gave a snort.” You can say anything you want.”
“That’s fine. You should know that I’d never say anything to them that I wouldn’t say to you. You have to trust me.” Smitty added seriously.
He got up and extended his hand and Laura looked at it for a second before she reached to take it. They said goodbye and he left her the rest of the bowl of cherries. It was one of Laura’s good days.
At the farmhouse, Smitty made his report to Ian. The look on the psychiatrist’s face was relaxed and Ian took that as a good sign.
“She wants help. She is quite engaged, and quite engaging, I may say.” he began, “She’s certainly depressed and she’s trying to stay on the surface. I think it’s more than just modern ennui. She doesn’t seem to feel she has a way to connect with her own future. She’s different than most people who get detached from their own lives because she really understands the value of her attachments.”
“That’s good to hear.” Ian responded enthusiastically, “But why has she withdrawn? She’s always been so engaged. I used to think that she couldn’t stand to be alone.”
“That may be a good thing, crawling under a porch to heal.” Smitty replied, “That doesn’t mean she’ll be able to stop the momentum of her slide. But she’s fighting. I think we have to be patient no matter how it appears in the short run. She’s agreed to see me twice a week. Is that okay with you?”
“Don’t worry about the money. Are you sure you’re going to be able to come all this way twice a week?” Ian answered.
“If it’s all right I’ll come after work. It’ll be after dinner.”
Before Smitty left, Ian asked if there was anything he could do to help Laura.
“It might be good if you kept in touch. Give her time and space, but remind her you’re all still here. It’s also sometimes good to have visits from someone she admires. Is there someone she used work with? Is there a friend?”
Ian looked troubled, and he was actually embarrassed for Laura, because, in all previous life, her only friend was Ann Marie. None of the people she had helped so much with their careers had ever become part of her life. Her relationships were like those on a movie set, intense in the moment and then quickly left behind. Ian explained there was no one. Smitty gave him a questioning look that made Ian realize how difficult Laura’s problem actually was. Like Amanda and he himself, she was learning to start her life all over. Life did begin at fifty, for some, and that wasn’t an easy thing.
“Depression, pain, change has a gestation period. W
“She did have a friend who’s an editor.” Ian interrupted, “You think it would be good if I gave him a copy of the book Laura has done with Eugene? What if it’s rejected? Would it be the wrong time for her to have to deal with that?” Ian asked. He very much wanted to help.
“Ask her. Ask her if that’s one of the things she’s afraid of.” Smitty answered Ian.
“I will. There’s a poet she worked with recently she quite respected. It seems he was fond of her as well. You think I should give him a call and tell him the situation?” Ian pursued.
“Sure. If he was a friend of hers, he’d probably appreciate knowing she’s going through tough times. It’s a poet’s stock in trade, isn’t it?”
That was how Anthony Holtz ended up coming to the farm. And it was circumstance that made him stay for a week, because the great teacher who was to come to teach at the school that year canceled at the last-minute because of a death in the family. When Sharon met Anthony, she prevailed upon him to teach her children about the passion of poetry, and Anthony did for Sharon what he swore he would never do in his life, he taught school.
When Smitty was gone, Ian got up to go as well. He was going to walk to the boathouse to ask Laura about her book and Sharon joined him and walked with him a short way before he stopped and turned and took her hands in his.
“People probably tell you this all the time, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for my family.” Ian said.
“Thank you. It looks like we’re going to be part of the same family soon.” Sharon replied gently.
“We are the luckiest family on the face of the earth.” Ian answered sincerely.
“Just like Lou Gehrig.” Sharon replied with an irony that shocked Ian.
“It must feel ridiculous that it’s all about us and Laura when you’ve just lost Eugene.”
“It’s not ridiculous at all. He would really hate knowing she was suffering.” Sharon answered.
“He was a very lucky man to have you.” Ian said, sincerely.
“Not much luckier than Laura.” Ian wondered if she meant the double meaning in the words.
Two suffering spouses saw each other’s pain, and neither one of them was sure who moved first, but they came into each other’s arms with the force of an emotion that completely surprised them. A hug became an embrace that went on a little too long, because it felt to both of them that it was over too soon, that it hadn’t lasted long enough. They didn’t want to let go. In the open air, where everyone might see, Ian bent forward and they kissed, friendship as love, respect as affection, thankfulness becoming tenderness they both felt and needed so deeply. Such a long time for such a sweet kiss.
Laura fell into her new routine. In her old life, the only routine was exercise and constant motion. In her new life, the only routine was exercise and nothing to do. Where she had been a doer, she was now a watcher. Where her old life was a dog’s breakfast of emotions, her new life was peace and pain. She thought about Smitty’s question about why the present moment wasn’t enough for her and it was amazing to her that the question could almost fill the days before he returned. The present had always been enough for her. It was all she knew, even sitting alone, isolated from everything she was, her entire former life. She didn’t know whether the question was meant to challenge her to accept the present moment completely as all the satisfaction that life might allow, or whether it was meant to challenge her to connect her present moments to her past and her future. It was the question of questions, and Laura couldn’t understand how he knew it was the perfect question for her.
She had lived her whole life in the present moment, always unsatisfied with it, always hoping the next one would give her the satisfaction she craved, always longing for more. There at the beach, her pain was just the opposite, the present moment was absolutely satisfying and the next one seemed like an abyss. She never knew she had had such an ongoing love-hate relationship with time, and it was time that contained the love-hate relationship she had with herself. Time and place had come together. As she had come to love the beach opposite Haystack Island, she had come to love the seasons and cycles, the precious trifles of nature’s ever-changing moments. If the present moment was beautiful, the place that held it was too. What was impossible to reconcile, for Laura, was that she meant no more to that place and time than a piece of driftwood buried in the sand. It was like a magician’s trick, pouring one pitcher of water after another into a cone made from a newspaper, and in the end, the newspaper would be crumpled to reveal there was nothing left inside. Time and life were like that. She was like that.
There was so much to think about when she considered the value and the meaning in each present moment, and that was why she actually anticipated Smitty’s return, because she thought that if he knew the importance of the question, he must have some idea of the answer. She actually started to count the days. That he was thirty five years old and looked like he came from central casting with the tight good looks and the perfect hair of a lead actor, didn’t escape her attention or interest. That too, she felt, was a good sign. It was so ironic that she had seemed to completely lose her libido, living a few feet from where she had had the best orgasm of her life. But those were different times, a different moment, about a different possibility.
In the meantime, while she waited, Laura liked what the hot sun did to everything. The flowers and grasses in the early summer had gone to seed and the cottonwoods exploded and there was snow in summer in drifts along the beach. Butterflies came floating on the wind, like there were caught in invisible wind currents that lifted them and dropped them like they were made of little pieces of plastic film. Yellow tiger swallowtails moved quickly like their smaller black cousins. Painted ladies and Admirals came and danced close to the sand, and the Monarch’s, generations from Mexico, finally arrived with the pungent perfume of milk weed in blossom. The shore birds came: plovers and killdeer and a pair of black headed Napoleon gulls. Two gravel voiced herons passed every evening on the way to Haystack Island and the bullfrogs. An osprey came to join the black terns and the big white common tern and the pair of kingfishers that made blue scallops in the sky as they passed along the shore. Laura loved watching them hunt, pulling little fish from the endless schools that passed the shore, sometimes moving like brown rivers beneath the boat house. Laura loved the way the porcelain osprey would shudder to shake the water from its wings when it lifted back into the air. The sun, the moon, the stars, wind, water and earth and little lives passing, time was forever in summer for everyone except Laura who came to taste every moment.
When Smitty came back, Laura actually greeted him with a kiss. His one perfect question had made him so much a part of her consciousness that it was almost like she had known him forever.
“No cherries?” Laura asked.
“No. they’re a little dangerous, if you have a long drive ahead. I was caught a little short, last time.” he explained as Laura laughed.
“You and me both.” she replied, “That was a great question you left me to think about. Do you ask all your patients that question?”
“No. Most people don’t have your expectations.”
“Here, sit.” Laura instructed, and Smitty sat in the same chair as the time before. “Can I get you something, a beer, some wine, some lemonade? They keep me very well supplied. In my old life, I’d have paid plenty for this kind of treatment.”
“I just had dinner, the beer would be nice.” Laura went to fetch it while Smitty sat and enjoyed the view. When Laura came back, she saw the effect the landscape had already had on him. He was settling like sand.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about why the present moment isn’t enough for me.” Laura began, “It used to be enough, but something’s changed. I love each moment as it happens, I just don’t know that I’ll ever be ab
“You could. Or you can find a place like this one.” Smitty answered.
“My husband would love it. It’s absurd. Life has to be more than sitting watching the sky sit up. How pointless is that?”
“Because you have no purpose staying here?”
“Exactly. Purpose is the problem. Purpose is just some arbitrary way to make yourself get up every day. I don’t have one.”
“But you told me you have all those motivations in your life, isn’t that purpose?” Smitty responded.
“I’m not Sharon. I’m not Eugene. I’m not my husband. I don’t want to live for others. I guess that’s the problem, I’m basically a selfish person, and I have no idea what I want. It’s hard to be selfish when every moment is enough.” Laura answered
“Why do you call it being selfish? “
“Because it’s for me, me. It’s all about me. It’s always been about me. What do I do when I’ve lost interest in being me?”
“And it’s not that you’re not interesting. With your mind and talent and beauty and all the people that love you, you have to admit you aren’t a dull woman.”
“I’m not dull. But why do I feel like my life is the Titanic and all that’s left is this stuff that’s floated to the surface? I feel like an unsinkable ship lying three miles down.”
“That’s depression. There isn’t a logical cause. There isn’t a logical answer. All I can tell you is you’re going to rise again.” Smitty said with absolute certainty.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have three miles of black water over you.”
“Just because it’s black looking up, doesn’t mean you’re three miles deep. It just feels like that.” he disagreed.
“I hope you’re right. So tell me why the present moment matters so much. Tell me why you asked that question.”
“Because you’re such a perceptive woman.”
“And how does that help with my problem?” Laura asked, sounding confused by his compliment.
“Where we’ve been are just footprints in the sand, and I thought you might be one of the few people who can tell directions by just looking down.” Smitty replied and Laura wondered if he could actually be right.
“If I asked you what you were most afraid of losing, what would be the first thing that came to your mind?” Smitty said changing the subject.
“Two dead invisible friends.” Laura replied almost instantly and she was surprised at how quickly the words came to her.
Do your dead invisible friends have names?” Smitty asked.
“Sure, but I don’t like to say their names out loud anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m worried they might not be invisible. I can’t believe I just said that. That sounds crazy. Why would I be worried they might not be invisible?” Laura asked, nervously.
“I don’t know. Do you ever feel that dead people might stop being invisible?” Smitty responded.
“I know dead people don’t come back. I know that very well, but I just may have a problem with people that are imaginary. I think losing Arthur and Laura Lee is harder for me than the boy that died in the car accident I was involved in last winter, and it’s harder, it’s even harder than losing Eugene. You see, I told you I was selfish. It’s always about me.”
“Are you more comfortable in imaginary worlds?” Smitty asked with fascination.
“Isn’t it ironic? I suppose I am. That’s probably why I have always been drawn to artistic types. Creative people do tend to be a tad egocentric.
It wasn’t a pleasant realization for Laura and it seemed to make her instantly withdraw. The active engagement she had in understanding her pain seemed to dry up like a stone at the water’s edge its vivid color turning soft and gray in the heat of the sun. She turned away and Smitty waited, hoping she was thinking about her footprints in the sand. He didn’t understand why the mention of her creativity and her imaginary worlds hit her so hard, but he was surprised that she could become almost unresponsive in an instant. He talked; she listened. He asked questions, she replied with single words or frustrated gestures. It was like she was a different woman. The moment had changed. It didn’t take him long to decide that he should leave it as it was, so he just sat quietly with her for a long time before he told her he’d be going but he’d come back as they had agreed. She didn’t respond one way or the other to his going, her sudden indifference actually troubling to both of them.
When he said goodbye, she didn’t get up and when he held out his hand, she looked at it before she shook it wanly. A good day had gone bad, for no reason at all. They would both have lots to think about.
When he just stepped from the boathouse porch, Laura called after him.
“Do have another question for me?” she asked.
“I have one for you, if you have one for me.” he replied, as he stopped and they looked at one another. Laura thought for a moment.
“My question for you is, ‘Why can’t we move when we’re dreaming?’”
Smitty thought for a moment before he replied.
“Then my question for you is, ‘Why can’t we dream, while we’re moving?’ “
Laura’s question was like one he would’ve expected from Christa Van Fleet. He was used to responding to difficult metaphors. In his time with her, he had learned how artists think. He liked Laura very much.
When Ian came that evening, he saw that she was distracted. When he asked about whether she wanted to talk about her meeting with Smitty, she actually gave him a short outline of their discussion. It was like a memo re: living in the moment; living with depression. He was fascinated with the approach her psychiatrist was taking. It seemed perfect for her. Laura always tried to make sense of the world she felt was basically absurd. She had always lived like an intellectual pack rat, hoarding bright bits in the nest of her mind. He loved the image of the present moment being a set of footprints in the sand. Laura didn’t want to discuss the memo about her psychological state very much, but she tried to be open.
Later, sitting on the porch of the farmhouse with Sharon, Ian had a long interesting discussion with her about the present moment and its relation to the past and the future. That was when Ian told Sharon his dream of an isolated cabin where he could read and Laura could write and he could commute to the nearest small town to be a country lawyer.
“It just so happens we own a piece of property like that, it’s part of 1000 acres we own next to a big tract of Crown land north of Verona. There’s a pretty little lake about a mile across, there’s a road that’s pretty rough, but if you had a big four-wheel drive, it would probably be accessible most of the winter. We could sever ten, twenty or fifty acres, if you’re interested. You’re family now.” Sharon said as Ian’s eyes grew with excitement.
“You’d do that? There is such a place?” Ian asked breathlessly.
“We would, and there is. There are many such places. It wouldn’t cost very much, three hundred an acre.” Sharon answered, enjoying his obvious excitement.
They talked late into the night about Ian’s dream, Ian learning how the Van Fleets could make dreams into realities in no time at all. They would supply the lumber at cost. The Van Fleets had the means to make a house appear in the middle of nowhere in just a few short weeks, once the decision was made. Talking through the practical realities and enjoying the heaven in the details of the design, the house in the wilderness took shape in their imaginations until it had a reality they could both feel pumping in their blood. Then they came to the difficult question of Laura.
They both knew she had no interest in such a dream. She had no interest in any dream at all. They talked about what would happen if her book was a success or if it was a failure. They tried to speculate on the effect each would have on their lives and on Laura in particular. They talked a
The next morning, Ian talked to Amanda over breakfast and she agreed to go with him to the boathouse to press his case. Amanda was more than skeptical about their chances of success, but she was reluctant to resist her father’s enthusiasm, even though she knew the incredible weight of her mother’s inertia.
Laura’s first response was that they would die of boredom. Ian replied that she didn’t seem bored on the houseboat by the beach.
“I know Henry David Thoreau, and you’re no Henry David Thoreau.” Laura said, but Ian was more than encouraged because he knew when Laura’s wit was engaged, she was accessible to new experiences and ideas.
“Touche. I’m no philosopher, but just imagine a place like this one, only with all the amenities. A library, a great kitchen, a music room with perfect acoustics, a place for you to write, a spectacular porch with a fireplace where we can watch the sun going down, just think of the possibilities. We could take long walks. Just think of the nature, right in front of our doors. Then there’s the privacy, the security, the emotional intimacy. It’s the Canadian wet dream of nature.”
“And how would we pay for the groceries?” Laura asked, and Ian was delighted she was thinking about groceries.
“If we sold the condominium, and got anywhere near its value, we’d have almost four hundred thousand dollars left. Sharon says we could build our house for well under a hundred thousand. That would leave us twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year, even if it was invested conservatively. If we gave some of it to Tranh, God knows, we might be rolling in it. And besides groceries, there’d only be insurance and maintenance and a car to keep up. We could travel when we wanted. We’d be free for the first time in our lives. We could see Amanda wherever she was. We’d have a place for our grandchildren to come. I could be a down home country lawyer.” Ian was making the closing summation of his life.
“Not so fast about the grandchildren.” Amanda interjected.
“You may be surprised about that.” Laura answered her, and Amanda blushed to hear her mother say that. She was stunned to think her mother, her mother, thought babies might not be very far away.
“I think you should come to see the property.” Amanda responded, “You do love this boat house. You can’t stay here forever, and besides, wouldn’t it be nice to have a place close to nature, even if it was only a cottage?” Amanda pursued, and she had no idea that it was Laura’s fear about where she was going to go after the boathouse that got her to agree to go to look at the property.
“When would we go?” Laura asked.
Ian took a large scale map out of his pocket and unfolded it before Laura, as he spoke, “We could go right now. Here, look, it’s probably an hour and a half from here. Look at the beautiful little lake and the Van Fleet’s own all the forest around it. This is all adjacent Crown land. This is the road to our new house.” Ian explained excitedly.
“Okay. You have my attention. I’m not promising anything. I just can’t stand the idea of being the big wet blanket on your dreams. I don’t want to take away the enjoyment, even if they never happen.”
“You’re a wise, beautiful woman.” Ian said grandiosely.
“Right.” Laura responded, sounding like Amanda. Amanda laughed to hear it.
Two hours later they were driving a rough logging road past huge old igneous rocks heaved up out of the earth, the windows all down in the Lexus, the sweet smell of conifers, filling the car, everyone anxious, not one of the excited group having ever seen the place they were going. Sharon and Tom only knew Rosie’s description and that Eugene had said it was one of the most beautiful spots he knew, and so they were as surprised and as delighted as the McCalls when they came to the lake after ten minutes driving through the bush. The road ended on a sandy inlet, a little sweeping bay looking out on a tiny pine covered island a few hundred yards from shore. There was a natural clearing by the beach, a little meadow perfect for a house.
Everyone got out of the car and Ian ran ahead to the beach, stopped in his tracks, looked around for a moment, walked a few yards looking around like he was sleepwalking when he suddenly stopped and threw back his head and threw out his arms and shouted at the top of his voice.
“Just like Brigham Young, this is it!”
The echo from the other side of the lake came back.’ This is it. This is it. This is it.’
Ian turned around and saw everyone approaching, and even Laura was smiling.
“Isn’t this the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?” Ian demanded to know. He looked straight at Laura.
“I know. I know. You knew Brigham Young, and I’m no Brigham Young.” he said to her and she laughed.
Ian didn’t wait for her to reply as he rushed down the shore in excitement and climbed into the little clearing, exploring it, walking around its circumference like there was a house already there, and he could see it. Everyone slowly followed Ian, the pleasure of the moment and the beautiful spot was as much the pleasure of seeing his joy as anything they were feeling themselves. To Sharon, it would be her new in-laws, people she had come to love, being close enough to see regularly. To Tom and Amanda, it was like a foreshadowing of their own future, a beautiful place close to nature, unspoiled, everything that was to be, still a possibility, everything they had been, carrying their potentiality. To Laura, it was a chance to make Ian happy. To Ian, it was the meaning and purpose of a long life in which he had never really felt either.
“So what do you think?” Ian asked everyone, when they were gathered in the clearing, although the question was really directed mostly to Laura. She didn’t reply until all the others had said how much they loved the place.
“Would we have to sell the condominium right away?” Laura asked.
Ian screamed, “Yippeeeee!!!! And the echo, and the echo of the echo coming back made everyone laugh again.
“I meant could we wait before we sold the condominium. Could we buy this place and start the cottage before we had to decide about leaving the city forever?” Laura asked seriously, and she was actually nervous about being the wet blanket with her question.
“Why not? You’re going to have rich relatives soon.” Tom interjected.
Amanda slapped him and told him with her eyes, to stay out of it.
Sharon liked where he was going.
“Why don’t we sever some land around this spot, if it’s the one you really want, and then we can build the house to your specifications and we could sell it to you at cost. It would probably cost you less than the payments on your car.” Sharon offered, effectively eliminating or postponing every concern Laura might have. It was a deal she knew Laura could not refuse.
“You make it all too easy.” Laura answered, “People don’t change their lives in a moment like this. What if we change our minds? What if I decide I can’t live here?”
“Then we will have built Tom and Amanda a wonderful cottage. It would make a nice wedding present. You’d do the work. We’d do the money. What do you think Amanda?” Sharon asked her future daughter-in-law. Sharon knew how to make reality bend to her will like it was as flexible as young willow.
“I’d love it.” Amanda replied, “What do you think, Tom”
Ian was stunned that his house was about to belong to his daughter, and said so.
“This is our house, not your house.” he said, indignantly to Amanda.
“This land is my land
“Right. Laura, how can you say no?” Ian said seriously.
“I guess I can’t. When you’re with the Van Fleets, anything you wish seems to come true.” she answered, looking into her husband’s eyes. “I guess this is our land now.”
Ian looked completely stunned, and then he seemed to completely lose his mind because he started screaming ‘Yippee!’, as he ran to the shore and ran up and down the beach singing, “This land is my land, this land’s not your land, from the beautiful little beach with wonderful soft sand to that sweet little island over there, from those beautiful old rocks to all those incredible trees.” Ian ran to Laura and standing with his arms out stretched sang to her, “This land was made for you and me.” He threw his arms around her and everyone laughed as he whispered that he loved her so much.
“You are a wise and beautiful woman.” he said, breathlessly.
Ian spent the next hour and a half crashing around through the bush surrounding the lake and the meadow with Tom and Amanda who were the only ones willing to fight the mosquitoes with him. Laura and Sharon sat by the water on a blanket the McCalls always kept in the trunk for picnics they never seemed to have. At first the conversation, of course, was all about Ian’s excitement and the sudden reality that this would be Laura’s new home. She told Sharon her doubts about the whole idea. She didn’t know if she could survive so isolated from the world. She told Sharon she had no idea that Ian ever aspired to cut himself off from the world so completely.
“I don’t know if he could stand me full-time, and 24/7. All the time we’ve been together, most weeks, we could count the hours when we weren’t just sleeping or passing each other.” Laura confessed, “We may be investing everything we own in a divorce.”
“I don’t think that’s true. I think both of you are far beyond worrying about your emotional territories. You seem to have come to enjoy being alone. Maybe Ian’s a little jealous. He told me he’s tired of the emotional drain of dealing with the under belly of city life. He thinks that that part of his life is over.” Sharon explained, telling Laura things she knew but had never discussed with her husband, because there really was no option, as long as she was so committed to her own career. What surprised Laura was that Sharon had listened to him say things that went so deep. She had no idea they were that close.
“Could we really be living here in a few months?” Laura asked, sounding anxious about the idea.
“Depending on the size of the house, this is August, you could easily be living here by the end of November. It really depends on how fast you can make decisions.”
“I’m going to leave all those to Ian. The one thing we do know pretty well is our respective tastes. It’s hard to believe. You realize you may be completely changing our lives once again.” Laura said to Sharon. They both knew that Sharon bore a significant part of the responsibility for what was going to happen. She made things possible. It was a power Laura remembered well, but found hard to even imagine she still had.
“Would you feel comfortable talking about Christa’s mental illness?” Laura asked, changing the subject completely.
“I guess pain and discomfort are two different things. It always hurts to talk about Christa. It’s hard to know that such a beautiful human being can’t find a safe and happy place in this world. I don’t mind talking about it, the pain is there whether I do or I don’t.” Sharon replied.
“Everyone says she’s the most sensitive human being. Do you think it’s possible to be sensitive and find a safe and happy place in this world? I don’t have a fraction of her sensibilities, I’m sure, and I don’t know how to live with the ones I have.”
“I don’t know the answer to that. I’m a practical person. I guess you should have asked Eugene that question.”
“Among others. It must be so hard for you watching Christa in pain. The worst part of how I’m feeling is the responsibility of knowing there’s nothing I can do to go back to being my old self, and there’s nothing I can do to help those who have to watch me suffer. The worst thing about middle-class suffering is that it seems like such a self indulgence.” Laura confessed.
“I don’t think suffering has a class system.” Sharon responded.
“I guess you may be right, suffering is suffering, the motives really don’t matter.”
“You’re a wise and beautiful woman.” Sharon answered, teasing her with the Ian’s words.
“No, you are.” Laura shot back
“No, you are.”
“You are.”
“You.”
“You.”
“It’s you.”
Sharon was delighted that perhaps the most serious conversation she had had with Laura suddenly turned into ridiculous teasing. Even in pain, even talking about the most profound suffering, Laura still knew how to have fun. It made Sharon very hopeful for Laura, and even for her own daughter who knew suffering as no one she had ever met.
When Ian came back with his cohorts, looking scratched and tired and sweating profusely, the ladies on the beach could see the power of a dream. There were some kinds of suffering that were their own luxury. Ian looked like he had seen his promised land, and promised it was.
On the way back to the farm, Ian spent most of the time talking about house plans and construction, and he was excited to learn that the Van Fleets had book shelves of plans and ideas for houses collected over many years. Ian grilled Tom about his experience with subcontractors and it was talk and testosterone, like boys in a sand box, only with big trucks and big plans and big earth moving equipment. It was more testosterone than the ladies felt comfortable sharing, so they sat and listened until Sharon finally cut in, asking if the new house would have curtains.
“Of course it will have curtains.” Ian replied, sounding confused.
“Then I’d like to hear you boys, spend some time talking about curtains.” Sharon instructed. The other two women in the car agreed wholeheartedly. It slowed the conversation considerably.
Ian was scarce the rest of the weekend because he was buried under piles of plans and books and magazines about houses and building them. He would’ve liked someone to go through everything with him, but no one could stand the chaos of his happiness for very long when they were with him, and he was showing options, discoveries, possibilities, lists of things to do, lists of things to ask, lists of important people who had no idea he even existed. He was able to sleep only a few hours because his imagination kept him awake with plans and problems and questions that were important to answer, and even more important to remember. It was only Sharon who took time to hear his ideas. She had considerable experience doing that. When he said goodbye to Laura before going back to Toronto that weekend, he looked exhausted, like he just finished a Marathon swim, looking loose and happy and spent.
“You realize there are literally thousands and thousands of decisions to be made about the house?” he had said breathlessly to Laura.
“And we used to have a hard time deciding on a restaurant.” she answered.
“That was different. You can always argue about something that really doesn’t matter.” he replied, emphatically.
“I’d like to help you with your dream, but I can’t, right now.” Laura told him, honestly. “This has to be your project, your decisions. You understand?”
“I do. I’m sorry you won’t get to enjoy the process, but I do understand. There’ll be no resentments, I promise.”
She thanked him and when he held her in his arms there was a sad tenderness she knew very well.
Ian was surprised that his real, succulent enthusiasm for the new house was something he got to share with Alan. The boy, for whom style was almost a religion, loved the idea of creating a house from the ground up, savoring every detail. It was one of the most exciting things he could imagine. This was all the style magazines in a pile waiting to be opened
When Laura woke up the Monday after they decided to build their own house, opening her eyes, she was stunned to realize that it was like she had fallen from the rock face of her heart she had clung to so long, fallen from the hard face of the reality she was trying to ascend. As she had fallen asleep the night before, she had actually thought she might be almost normal, she might almost be better, and she might almost be over it, whatever it was that had made the future seem so incomprehensible. Lying there perfectly still, she had the overwhelming feeling she was falling, falling through a blackness in which space and time seemed to have traded places or meaning, or both. As she lay there she could move in any direction through her memory of everything past, and she could move in shadowy dreams of the future, she could move through time like it had walls along endless lanes, but she was stunned to learn she seemed to be paralyzed, unable to move from where she lay. Without purpose, without will, without knowing why, she just couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. As she saw her future, she knew she would have to eat and empty her bowels, and even clean herself, and although she could see it in her mind, something had happened in the night, in her dreams, that had taken away her ability to move. She lay there for hours with her eyes wide-open, and the simple joy in the moment was finally gone. It was all she had been, all she had, but it was now entirely gone. She had become Eugene. It was her sympathetic dying. Infinite hours went by. The sun fell. The moon followed. The sun rose and Laura hadn’t moved. Time was forever. She thought of Eugene frozen as she was for endless hours, for endless months, space enclosed in his body. The complete horror and reality of what had happened struck her when she finally realized the warmth she felt beneath her was her own bladder letting go. She was ashamed and horrified and didn’t care. She lay there until it was cold. A single tear was all she managed.
When time and space changed place and meaning, her mind was just a montage of images, and the images could come from anywhere, from any experience, from any feeling: pain, beauty and envy, lust and ambitions, shame and anxiety, hope and fear and even terror all had images dissolving, one after another, when there was nowhere to go except deeper inside. Lying there, Laura felt fabric in her eight-year old hands, she felt a brush in her long blond hair when she was thirteen, she saw her breasts changing over the years. She remembered dresses and the smells of leather and food. She remembered what was like to want something desperately. She remembered guilt that had come from her body, and she felt pleasures and how they once moved inside her. There were places she remembered, there were people she thought she had forgotten, there were things that lasted a moment, and some that lasted forever. There was Tundra. Parents and lovers and a husband and friends who were all gone in space, were still there in time to remember. There was David, like-life, the boy she had pushed out of her life, and there was the other boy and blood, so much blood. Rape and birth and death and tears and laughter were all there inside. She remembered Amanda as a baby beginning life and she remembered cascades of feelings and sights and smells of her daughter. Her mind was a cascade of memories, fast, white water in sweet, clear water; pools, dark and brackish. People came and went in time, in different bodies, and different clothes and only Amanda’s voice ever changed. Lying there, Laura listened to Amanda sing to her with her incredible voice. Music and memory, it was like sugar syrup preserving the years gone by. Laura heard Amanda sing old songs again, running on empty, running blind.
The one thing she couldn’t understand was, ‘Why?’ She lay there like a catatonic, locked in and locked out, and the day had drained away and bled into the next one, and no one came.
Respecting her privacy, no one came because she didn’t want them; no one came because they were too busy with the excitement of their lives. For Laura, it was like the story of anaesthetized people floating over their own bodies, etherized on a slab, seeing everything and being unable to respond. It was like being in a coma in which she was wide awake, a coma, a dream, and it was the morning of the second day and she was losing her sense of the world. A coma, a dream, a separate reality, she was drifting and feeling the drift, and feeling she was separating from shore made her reach back. It made her do the first thing, the first act, the first test of her own reality. She reached back. She spoke.
“I’m here.” she whispered. She didn’t know. She didn’t know if her ears really heard her voice or if what she had thought were words had come from her mouth and not just her mind. She tried again.
“I’m here.” It was worse, not better. She didn’t know if everything that was happening was all just a dream. That would explain her inability to move. That would explain how she could wet the bed. She wanted to believe she was dreaming, and wanting to believe it, for some reason, gave her the lucid ability to move, and she placed her hand on her throat.
“I’m here.” she said, and she could feel the vibrations of her voice in her fingers and then she was almost sure it was a dream. It felt distant, like a dream. And then she coughed, and the cough made her realize she was becoming delusional. She wasn’t dreaming. This was reality. She started to cough and she felt saliva stick in her throat like an inhaled fruit fly, and then she had to cough so hard, spasming so hard she had to sit up to breath. That was how she came back to believing she was there, she was real, she could move, she could feel, she could see, and if all that was true, she could get out of her bed and walk. She did that, her muscles screaming, almost stumbling, looking back at the bed and down at her body, herself, feeling frightened and lost and helpless. She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower and stood under the water that was too cold. Finally, she reached for the handle and changed the temperature and she stood there wondering how such things happened when you least expected them. Laura’s crisis echoed Eugene’s and she knew it. Living was like dying.
When Smitty came that evening, he was shocked by what he found. The bright, articulate Laura, the woman with the questions, the woman with the incredible perceptions was like someone in shock, her reactions were so slow, her engagement so tenuous, that Smitty was sure some terrible thing had happened.
He was helpless to know what to do, because the only thing she would tell him was that she couldn’t help herself anymore. She wouldn’t explain. She wouldn’t respond. She didn’t tell him that he was lucky she was sitting there dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, coincidentally dressed exactly like he was, except his runners were her sandals. After the shower she had walked around naked for hours before it occurred to her to get dressed.
Smitty sat for an hour holding her hand, trying to get her to talk. To his questions about what she was feeling or what had happened, she only said, “Nothing happened.” They felt each other’s helplessness.
“We’re going swimming.” Smitty suddenly announced after ten minutes of frustrated silence.
She didn’t say anything as he took off his shoes and bent down and took off her sandals, got up and took her by the hand, and walked her to the beach and into the warm water. She didn’t resist. She just let him lead her until they were waist deep in the water, and then he pulled her back off her feet and held her while she floated on her back, and the automatic instincts took over. She floated over his hand, using her legs and her arms, floating. And then, all of a sudden, she began to do an effortless backstroke, moving parallel to the shore. Smitty watched her go and she was twenty five yards away when he plunged in the water to follow her. Laura just
“How did you know what to do?” she asked, looking at him like he was the Wizard of Oz, and she was the Tin Man.
“It just seemed the best way to get you back into the moment, sink or swim.” he answered, “Can you talk about what happened?”
“I can’t believe you knew what to do. I don’t know what happened. We’re building a house. Everything is fine. Tom and Amanda are going to have a wonderful life. Eugene died. A boy died. I pissed myself. I don’t know what happened.”
“Let’s walk.” Smitty suggested, and Laura fell in beside him like they were lovers walking on the beach, strolling and talking, completely relaxed in each other’s company. The exhaustion of the swim made the air feel fresh and sweet. The sun gathered colors to go down.
“Tell me about your work.” Smitty asked, out of the blue. Laura looked at him in confusion but he had won her trust completely, and so she responded honestly
“My book work or my old job?” she asked, seriously.
“Let’s start with your old job. What was it like? Did you like your work?”
“I did. That’s the problem, I loved it.”
“Why?” Smitty pursued.
“Because it was always Mickey and Judy putting on a show with the gang. The only trouble was Mickey’s eight marriages and Judy ending up dead from her pills.”
“You felt your work had no real purpose.”
“What’s real? What’s purpose? I used to know how to be happy. What’s happened to me?” Laura said, sounding like she was almost pleading.
“Everything. Everything is real. Everything can have a purpose.” Smitty answered.
“Everything is precious. Nothing is important.” she replied.
“How did you hear that? Is that your mantra too?”
“I guess.”
“So what did you think about since I saw you last?” Smitty asked, changing the subject.
“Sand, water, sky, stars, sun, Franny Glass.
“Interesting elements. Franny Glass? It does beg the question.” Smitty responded.
Laura was talking. Laura was thinking. Laura was so much better than when he had arrived.
“I’m like Franny. Eugene was Seymour. She had a breakdown. He died.”
“Seymour was a suicide.” Smitty pointed out
“Ate too many banana fish, I know.”
“I thought it was a bullet to the brain.”
“That part wasn’t important.” Laura said with certainty.
“Why not? It killed him.”
“It was the banana fish. Besides, I’m not Seymour or Eugene. I’m Franny looking for some sacred tangerines. That’s not true. I’ve got all the tangerines I can handle.”
“And banana fish.” Smitty added pointedly. “You’re like Franny Glass because she had a nervous breakdown?”
“I relate to Franny Glass because I may be knocked up.” Laura replied cryptically
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. But I think my baby may be like the one in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, just a hysterical pregnancy. My baby, my book, my life.”
“Interesting. Maybe your hysterical pregnancy is more like Martha’s imaginary child.”
“Doc, you read. Interesting. You may be right. I relate to imaginary children, a lot.”
“So you think, life is like a dream?”
“Sha ...boom!”
“I thought about your question a lot,’ Why can’t we move when we’re dreaming?’ “Smitty said, changing the subject.
“You have no idea how appropriate that question is. You have no idea!” she replied, “Do you have an answer?”
“Things matter. Things happen. Shit happens. Great, beautiful things happen. The highest ambition is not just sleepwalking through life.” Smitty responded passionately. “Life is more than a dream, it’s very real. That’s why it hurt you so much. That’s why you hurt others so much, and they hurt you.”
“That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to think this is just a lucid dream. We just think we can do things. We just think our choices matter. Rapes and dead boys and beautiful dead people aren’t choices anyone makes. At best, they’re God’s lucid dreams and he has one fucked up subconscious. God is a lot more like Charles Manson than Jesus Christ.”
“You’re looking for the meaning of life, even though you don’t believe it has one.”
“I’m not looking for the meaning of life because I don’t believe it has one. I just want to know why there’s this Novocaine drip we can’t reach that I’m desperate to pull out of my veins. Tell me you don’t feel it. Tell me you feel more, not less as you’ve gotten older. Do you remember your first kiss, Doc? Do you remember the first time you were inside a woman you loved?”
Smitty looked like she had him with an ax.
“We all have Lou Gehrig’s disease of the heart. Our whole generation, the generation that always wants more and more, always ends up with less and less, except for stuff, except for stuff.”
“Like a new house.”
“Like a new house. Like more money. Like fifteen minutes of fame.”
“Now, I’m depressed.” he answered, and he wasn’t kidding.
“That’s life.” she replied, “It’s an old Frank Sinatra song. I thought about the question you left me over the weekend. ‘Why can’t we dream when we move?’ I think some people can, not me, but some people; Eugene, my husband, Sharon, Tom and Amanda, they have dreams and they walk around and make them come true. People like you and me know life is just dreaming and we don’t know what to do in them. That’s why you’re a shrink, isn’t it? You’re no more immune to life’s Novocaine drip, than I am. Sometimes you feel like a dead lip in a dentist’s chair.”
“Sometimes.” Smitty replied, looking sad and hurt.
“It’s all so ironic. We know all about irony, don’t we? We’re sensitive to life’s ironies; it’s what makes our generation so hip.”
“Have you ever thought about writing all this down?” Smitty asked, just as they arrived back at the boat house.
“What for, to try and make a placebo for the root canals of life? Isn’t that your job.”
“Ouch! I give. You realize that you sound very angry. I think that’s a very good thing.”
“Sadly, I agree with you. I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve dragged me out of a pit I thought had Teflon sides. The next time you come, I’ll tell you what I can. Thank you. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
“A small price to pay.” Smitty answered, and he would carry the scars of their meeting for just as long as she would. “I’ll see you Franny,... I mean Friday. Hello Dr. Freud.”
“Thank you.” Laura replied and extended her hand and Smitty took it.
“I had better get my shoes.” he replied and they both saw each other’s wet bodies.
Laura’s last innocence seemed to have burned away. She was back to the reality she knew, but something had definitely been lost in the extremes of her crisis. She could wait and sleep and dress and feed herself and make herself clean, but she couldn’t seem to get over the feeling inside her that life seemed dry as pith. Life was pithy. She was back to waiting for Godot.
Near the end of the week she looked up and saw the smaller of the fa
“I could use a little help.” she said to her mother, “We’re canning peaches. Wait till you taste these.”
“I don’t know anything about canning. I don’t want to do this.” Laura replied.
“You can learn. I learned. Help me with this stuff.” Amanda insisted.
“Amanda, I don’t really...”
“You do really.... Just think of this as mother-daughter bonding. Get off your ass, if you don’t mind me saying so”
Laura reluctantly helped Amanda carry the pots and jars and the half bushels of peaches into the boat house kitchen where Amanda immediately began organizing everything. She told her mother which pots to fill with how much water and she broke open the sealer lid boxes and turned on the oven before she carefully washed the sealer jars in the sink and put them in the oven. By the time the water was boiling for the sterilizing bath for the full jars of peaches, they were ready to proceed. Laura mostly stood watching, stirring the sugar syrup Amanda had told her how to prepare.
When everything was ready, Amanda started dropping the raw peaches into boiling water and instructed Laura to stand beside her ready to peel them when they came from the ice water that was in the big stainless-steel bowl in front of her. It was only moments before Amanda lifted the peaches from the boiling water and placed them in the cold water in front of her mother.
“Just peel the skin away. Start from the top.” Amanda instructed.
.”Which is the top?” Laura asked as she took one of the peaches into her hands. “What do I use to peel?”
“Your fingers. Just pull the skin away with your fingers.” Amanda answered, as the peaches continued to come until they had all been transferred into the cold water. She joined her mother who was amazed that the skins came away to the gentlest touch. Amanda peeled beside her mother and the peaches went back into the warming water as they proceeded.
“These are called Raritan Rose peaches.” Amanda explained, “They have white flesh. They are incredible.”
Amanda split the peach in her hands in two and fed the dripping white flesh into her mother’s mouth. The shock and surprise at the sweet, mild taste made Laura’s eyes wide.
The pale peaches with the deep red blush came dripping warm from the water, and one by one, they turned in her fingers as the skin fell away like wet petals, leaving a slippery wet beautiful white ball in Laura’s hands. Because they weren’t free stone peaches they were placed whole into the hot jars Amanda took from the oven. Flooded with hot syrup, they were sealed and plunged into a boiling bath of water for half an hour, while Amanda taught Laura how to make peach jam. The peaches were cut from the pits and placed for a few seconds into the blades of a food processor from where they went to the pot on the stove where they were mixed with the sugar Laura measured in equal cups with the white flesh of the peaches. Her job was to keep stirring.
By the time they were ready to put the jam in the jars, the whole peaches came out of the bath, Laura using the stainless steel tongs to transfer them to the counter, to rest on the bath towel, perfect balls in the glass gleaming white and lovely.
From the pink shed placentas of blossoms that had fallen in circles beneath each Peach tree in the orchard, it had only been a few months before the fruit left behind on the branches had changed from hard bitter green pills to succulent balls of white in the bottles Laura carried to keep, to keep, to keep.
After the jam was sealed and the metal tops soon began to pop with the contraction of the cooling fruit, Laura and Amanda looked with admiration at what they had done. Amanda made her mother taste the jam that was left in the pot and it was like Ambrosia.
“Now we’re going to make a pie.” Amanda announced. “This is a taste you’ll never forget as long as you live.”
Mother and daughter, in the most domestic of tasks, centuries old, turned flour to dough and rolled it out and sealed the fruit inside it and baked it until it filled the boat house with the most incredible smell.
It was amazing how easy and efficient it was. Laura and her daughter had learned to work with a speedy efficiency that somehow felt almost like athletics. It was moving things in space and time with purpose. Laura liked canning.
The dishes were done, and the pie was cooling, when Amanda poured lemonade over ice for her mother and herself. They could both feel the exertion in their muscles and in their backs as they talked, and Amanda had no idea how difficult the last few days had been for her mother. They talked like old times that had never been. Amanda, a woman who knew how things were done, shared small talk with her mother feeling as comfortable as a warm kitchen.
Laura asked about the wedding and Tom.
“He makes me so happy. He’s incredible.” was the most important thing that Amanda felt was necessary to say. It said it all.
“So are you.” Laura said to her daughter and she actually felt it that moment. When Amanda cut the pie, it was still too hot, running with sweet smelling juices, but when Laura tasted it, she realized how true it was when Amanda had said it was a flavor she would never forget. It was the Chateaux Margot of peach pies. Amanda loved watching her mother devour her dessert.
When Smitty came back that Friday, Laura was waiting for him. Swimming and peaches and anger and the taste of a pie had brought her back a very long way. The abyss wasn’t made of Teflon. She knew that, but what she didn’t know, what she couldn’t know, was what was absolutely, mind-numbingly undeniable, that she could go to sleep feeling fine and wake-up like the living dead. That was the uncertainty. That was the horror. That was what she was helpless to resist. The abyss took who it wished, when it wished. Why it wished what it did was unknowable and unspeakable. Going to sleep became harder and harder.
Laura was ready to talk when Smitty sat down in his chair.
“You didn’t leave me a question, last time.” she said, sounding disappointed.
“I didn’t have one. It was you who left me with all the questions. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the Novocaine drip. You made me look at myself and really wonder if my feelings for life were slowly going to sleep. You may be right. It’s hard to admit. Habit, responsibility, just plain old fatigue aren’t easy to resist. Sometimes I live with a novocaine drip.” Smitty confessed and Laura was uncomfortable hearing it. The last thing she wanted to do with pass on her suffering, and it was hard to listen as Smitty went on.
“Did you ever see the movie Equus? It’s about a boy who blinded a barn full of horses because he had turned horses into gods and those gods demanded his soul. The horses became part of him. He became part of them, in effect he became a Centaur, half man, half horse and the union was orgasmic. The psychiatrist was trying to cure the boy of the pain of his passion, all the while looking for some passion in his own life. It was the ultimate irony.
Laura was looking decidedly uncomfortable.
“So does he cure the boy? Does he find some passion in his own life?” she asked nervously.
“No, but he does cure the boy; and part of him is sad about doing it. It leaves the psychiatrist with the boy’s horse god asking him to account for Him. Is that what you are asking me to do, account for your missing passion?” Smitty asked softly.
“I wasn’t asking you to do anything. I can’t account for anything. I just know something is eating away my ability to feel. I can’t reach the Novocaine drip. You’re supposed to help me.” Laura said, almost desperately.
“I can’t reach it for you. I know you can’t reach mine. This is very difficult. I just want you to understand that I appreciate how difficult it is. The one thing I know is that some things are pretty resistant, sometimes things happen and new feelings are born just as intense as a first kiss. I coul
“You’re right. This place is chest deep in intensity.”
“So where is in the novocaine drip?” Smitty asked pointedly.
“Don’t you understand, I don’t belong here. I don’t belong.” Laura shot back.
“Why not?”
“These people live for values I’d never choose for myself.” she insisted.
“Isn’t that what love is?” Smitty replied, and Laura looked very agitated.
“Pardon me, what’s love got to do with it?”
“A part of loving somebody is loving them for values that are different from your own. If that wasn’t true, love would only be narcissism, being in love with your own reflection without realizing it. Do you really want everyone to have your values? How is it they are able to love you, if their values are so different?” Smitty pressed.
“I don’t know! I feel upset, confused. I don’t like this.” Laura seemed to almost be pleading for him to stop.
“You don’t understand why Eugene loved your so much, do you?” he asked, and that was the question that hit her hardest.
“What do you know about that? Who have you been talking to?” she demanded.
“No one. Somebody you loved very much just died. Somebody who loved you very much just died. It doesn’t take rocket science to recognize someone in mourning.” Smitty replied forcefully.
“I’m not in mourning.” Laura shouted, “Sharon’s in mourning. His kids are in mourning. Even my own daughter is in mourning, but I am not in mourning.”
“You’ve made that very clear.” he said, dripping with irony.
“Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to be in mourning. It’s totally absurd!”
“Why is it absurd?”
“I just don’t belong here. I think I want you to stop. I think I want you to go.” Laura said sounding desperate and angry.
Smitty got up to leave and she was surprised.
“I’ll only stay if you want me to. But what you say begs the question, Where is it you belong?”
“What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing, except trying to figure that out?” she screamed at him.
“Then my question for you to think about is whether there’s any place you’ll be immune from your novocaine drip.”
“Maybe I’m looking for my own good Jonestown.” Laura said, recovering her voice. She could see he didn’t understand. Anger was a tonic for Laura. “Everyman is an island.” Laura said almost as an afterthout. At least for our generation.”
“You have to explain that.” Smitty replied.
“I’ll explain it; but not now. Enough is enough, and never enough.”
Smitty was forced to smile and saw how angry she was, and it was then he understood she really wanted to be pushed. He extended his hand and she took it and she didn’t resist when he leaned forward and kissed her chastely on the cheek.
After Amanda, there was always Ian. His new obsession with their new house didn’t diminish the obvious concern, the obvious love he brought each weekend to Laura. It was the most difficult thing for her to face. She had been given back the confusion and the powerlessness of her youth, and she was as unable to feel anything but helpless and frightened as when she and Eugene had been young. She had no great love until he lay dying. There was nothing she could have done with it, even if he had somehow been miraculously cured. She had never expected anything but life’s compromises, and having made them, it left her with nothing but the realization that she’d made them.
‘Ian. ‘Tell me about your husband. Ian. Tell me about marriage as life’s most heart rending compromise of all. Ian. He tells me he loves me, in so many ways, and he has no idea I resent him so often, and my love for him is so far from real passion. He won’t tell me I don’t love him like Eugene loved me. I can’t tell him I just can’t do it. It’s such a betrayal.’
Laura talked to herself constantly and she didn’t like what she heard, but she couldn’t stop talking, even though no one else heard.
‘Tell me about your daughter.’ Tell you what? Tell you what a part-time, hectoring, social convener I was in her life. Tell you I resent her for the love her own father feels for her, and not me. Tell you how I have no ground to give her, and nothing to keep that I wasn’t always willing to let slip away. A room of my own, is that all there is, my friend?’
‘How can people love a self-centered, stupid girl just because she has eyes to see? My whole life has been such a waste. What do I do when most of it’s gone. How is it people love me? How is it that I love them?’
Questions and answers, life’s internal monologue: truth and lies, truth and its dares, dreams and reality, denials and admissions, commissions and omissions, Laura never stopped talking to herself.
Ian came and walked on psychic eggshells. He tried to get her to talk and he was being the good patient husband with the vulnerable, depressed wife. And when she would let him, he was a good defense lawyer presenting his case with care and serious preparation. Life was worth living. Life was worth defending, especially Laura’s. She didn’t deserve to punish herself. Life wasn’t a Kafkaesque trial. Life was doing the best you could for and with the best people you could manage to find, and then trying to do it well.
Compromise! Compromise! Compromise!
The first, not the last step, was to accept that compromise was the best, not the worst thing in life. If everyone got half a loaf, nobody would have to do without. Maturity was learning to enjoy the half you got and were given. It was learning to see the glass was half full.
Laura listened to Ian sing the praises of modern marriage and motherhood and professional opportunity. And when she made the defense rest, because she was tired, she saw him waiting for her cross-examination, her motion to dismiss her life completely. She didn’t respond, she just listened and admired his determined kind of love. She didn’t tell him that she thought the baby boom generation had gone bust. She didn’t tell him the big bang was just a whimper.
‘I am woman! I’m invincible! Please!!’
Ian went from Laura to Sharon’s and back again.
In the weeks since Eugene died, Sharon became, for Ian, the woman that he wished Laura would be. She had a strength and optimism that seemed to him was Laura’s for the taking. They had the same intellectual processing and force, the same practical focus, except Sharon had the smile and the sparkling eyes, and the connection to other people that he now understood Laura had never had in her life.
While Ian mourned his lost, living wife and dreamed of being Orpheus to her Euridice, Sharon mourned her lost husband and shared it with Ian as she knew she could never share it with anyone in her own family. Her pain would become another part of the pain of losing him. Ian was shocked to realize that Eugene had been Sharon’s only real friend.
Sharon looked and acted exactly the same, but she knew that one of the main bearing walls of her life had been cut away. She knew the house would stand, but she didn’t know the damage the loss of the wall would eventually cause. The house stood, nothing collapsed, but what she would have to do to shore up his absence, to replace for herself and for her family the strength and the structure that had been Eugene would take time and patience.
Never to touch, to feel love’s desire or feel the light of his eyes resting on her the way Eugene’s had done, was the first conscious loss that Sharon replaced with Ian’s touch and Ian’s eyes. It was all very innocent, and it was with such envy that Ian listened to Sharon speak of her loss; speak of the fear that she was only one side of the arc of time and space that sheltered her family’s life. What she had lost and what she told Ian were things he had never known
The more Sharon talked, and the more Ian envied Eugene, the more he wished that he had been more like Sharon and Laura had been more like Eugene. The dreamer Eugene, that everyone loved, was, to Ian, like a character in a book. Sharon was real and practical. What she gave could be measured and counted and counted on. She did and had done for others what Ian had never even dreamed a person could do. Like an echo of Laura and Eugene, Ian was coming to love someone who was truly, completely, absolutely married to someone else, and that someone else was dead to life. The more Ian came to admire Sharon’s life, the more he resented Laura’s betrayal of her own. He even wondered what his life would have been, if he had married someone like Sharon, even though he knew she didn’t wonder about the same question about him, or so he thought.
The one strange, illicit act and emotion they allowed themselves happened each time they embraced and kissed goodbye. What that was or what it said would never be mentioned, and it was an understanding that was unspoken as well. But, for a few seconds, their embrace was a world of its own that played inside each of them like some simple haunting refrain. It was impossible to find someone who would pour out their heart and let you see its most precious jewels, without loving them. It was impossible to find someone for whom you might pour out your own feeble store, and see that they found it more precious than you do, and not love them. Mourning became empathy, and empathy became so much more, for what was mourning except knowing that what was lost was so much more than what survived. What was precious was finding someone who would appreciate and understand how much was gone forever? What was acceptance but finding someone to whom that loss also mattered? Sharon and Ian found one another. What was lost bound them together in the present moment. In love, what had been began everything that might be, and Ian and Sharon came to love one another.
Ian felt sorry for himself every time he went back to the boathouse and sat beside Laura and watched the infinite changes over the beautiful lake. He was so glad he had the new house to create.
While she waited, Laura had become her own weather channel. She came to know the daily signs of the transformations that fell over the boat house and poured down in the rain and rose up in water, how clouds and breezes and blackness in the day could come running with the wind.
One night, when Ian had come to say goodnight to her, Laura told him she could smell lightning. Ian didn’t believe her until the lightning appeared on the horizon. Above them it was clear, stars as deep as grain, while on the horizon an electrical storm cut yellow rips over the dark distant rumbling that seemed unconnected to the strikes joining the water and the sky. Shiva, destroyer of worlds, took the horizon with a light show to end all light shows. The scars of light slashed seconds apart. There would have been no way to count them all as they sat quietly and watched the power of nature passing by, and they didn’t have anything to say that was appropriate to what they were seeing, until Ian softly admitted that the light show made him feel a sexual energy. Laura wondered whether he was hinting or asking.
“Storms are like that. It’s strange.” Laura replied, and she realized, sadly for him, that that was just where she was going to leave it. It was a moment that would never come again. It was a moment that wasn’t meant to be.
“This is better than the Bridges to Babylon Tour.” Ian replied, and that was as far as he went.