“No, you’re not done,” I said.
“I’m done.”
I didn’t answer this. We were silent for a while as we drove along the road that went to Presque Isle. “God, I need food,” I said, because my head was feeling strange, detached, as it gets when I need food.
William said, “And where do you suggest we find this food?” It was true that there were no places at all; we were going by trees and almost no houses, and this was the way it was for miles.
I glanced out my side window at the endless pavement with the dried grasses at its edge and I asked, “Are you jealous of Richard Baxter?” I have no idea why I asked this.
William looked at me quickly, and the car swerved just slightly. “Jesus, Lucy, what a thing to say. No, I’m not jealous of the man, God.” But after a number of minutes had gone by he said, “But you don’t hear about any Gerhardt Diagnostic Methods, do you.”
So I said, “William, you have helped countless people, you have done so much work on schistosomiasis—and you’ve taught people—”
He held up a hand to indicate that I should stop. So I did. I stopped talking.
* * *
—
As we drove, William suddenly made a noise that was almost like a laugh. I turned my face toward him. “What?” I said.
He kept looking straight ahead at the road. “Do you know one time when you and I had a dinner party—well, it wouldn’t have been called a dinner party, you never really knew how to pull off a real dinner party—but we had some friends over, and long after they had gone home, way after, I had gone to bed, but then I came downstairs and found you in the dining room—” William turned his head to glance at me. “And I saw—” Again he gave an abrupt sound of almost laughter, and he looked straight ahead again. “And I saw you bending down and kissing the tulips that were there on the table. You were kissing them, Lucy. Each tulip. God, it was weird.”
I looked out the window of my side of the car, and my face became very warm.
“You’re a strange one, Lucy,” he said after a moment. And that was that.
* * *
Each morning after David had done the breakfast dishes he would go and sit on our white couch by the window and he would pat the place next to him; he always smiled at me as I sat down beside him. And then he would say—every morning he said this—“Lucy B, Lucy B, how did we meet? I thank God we are we.”
Never in a thousand years would he have laughed at me. Never. For anything.
* * *
As we drove I suddenly had a visceral memory of what a hideous thing marriage was for me at times those years with William: a familiarity so dense it filled up the room, your throat almost clogged with knowledge of the other so that it seemed to practically press into your nostrils—the odor of the other’s thoughts, the self-consciousness of every spoken word, the slight flicker of an eyebrow slightly raised, the barely perceptible tilting of the chin; no one but the other would know what it meant; but you could not be free living like that, not ever.
Intimacy became a ghastly thing.
* * *
It was still very light out when we arrived in Presque Isle; the days were long in August, and it was not yet five o’clock. At least there was a town. But there were very few people around. One man sat on a bench on Main Street putting saccharin into a bottle of water; then he brought out a flip phone. I had not seen a flip phone in years. “Why are we here?” I asked William. “Tell me again.” And he said, “Because this is where Lois Bubar’s husband came from. Don’t you listen?”
And I thought, Oh William. Jesus, William. This is what I thought.
He had been mostly silent on the drive and I knew he was in a bad mood. It was because I had asked him about his work; this was my thinking. And I had accused him of being jealous of Richard Baxter. But William’s not talking had made me feel lonely.
The center of the town reminded me of a Western town, like in the olden days, I think because of the row of buildings that were not high that stretched down along Main Street. We pulled into the parking lot of a hotel in the middle of the town, where William had made a reservation. This lobby was small as well—as the airport hotel’s lobby had been—and the elevator was small and took forever to get to the third floor. “See you in a bit,” said William, and he kept walking down the hallway, pulling his suitcase on its wheels; his room was one door down from mine across the hallway.
“I’m starving,” I said.
“So we’ll eat,” he said, without turning around.