“You know what?” I said. “I think the nighttime stuff will start to disappear. It’s a phase of some kind—it will work its way out.”
William looked at me again and said, “It’s the ones of Catherine that really get to me. I have no idea what they’re about.” William has always spoken of his mother by her first name; he called her that as well. I can never remember his calling her “Mom.” And then he put his napkin on the table and stood up. “I have to get going,” he said. “Always nice to see you, Button.”
I said, “William! How long have you been drinking coffee?”
“Years,” he said. He bent to kiss me and his cheek felt cold; his mustache bristled just slightly against my cheek.
I turned to glance out the window at him, and he was walking quickly along to the subway; he was not walking as erect as he usually did. A little bit, the sight of him then broke my heart. But I was used to that feeling—I had it almost every time after I saw him.
* * *
—
During the days, William went to work in his lab. He is a parasitologist and he had taught microbiology at New York University for many years; they still allowed him his lab and one student assistant; he does not teach classes anymore. About not teaching: He was surprised to find he did not miss it—he told me this recently—it turned out he had felt trepidation every time he stood before the class, and it was not until his teaching stopped that he understood that that had been true.
Why does this touch me? I guess because I never knew; and because he never knew too.
And so now he went to work every day from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, and he wrote papers and did research and supervised the assistant who worked in his lab. Every so often—a couple of times a year, I think—he went to a conference and would deliver a paper to other scientists who worked in his field.
* * *
Two things happened to William after we met at the diner, and I will get to those soon.
* * *
—
Let me first just speak briefly of his marriages:
* * *
—
Me, Lucy.
William had been the teaching assistant for my biology class—he was a graduate student—my sophomore year at a college right outside of Chicago; this is how we met. He was—he still is, of course—seven years older than I am.
I came from terribly bleak poverty. This is part of the story, and I wish it was not, but it is. I came from a very tiny house in the middle of Illinois—before we moved into the tiny house we had lived in a garage until I was eleven. When we lived in the garage we had a small chemical toilet, but it was often breaking, making my father furious; there was an outhouse we had to walk through part of a field to get to; my mother had once told me a story of a man who had been killed and had his head chopped off and his head had been put in some outhouse. This scared me just unbelievably, I never picked up the cover of that outhouse toilet without thinking I saw the eyeballs of a man, and I would often go to the bathroom in the field if no one was around, although in the winter that was more difficult. We had a chamber pot as well.
Our place was in the middle of acres and acres of cornfields and soybean fields. I have an older brother and an older sister, and we had our two parents back then. But very bad things happened in the garage and then later in that tiny house. I have written about some of the things that happened in that house, and I don’t care really to write any more about it. But we were really terribly poor. So I will just say this: When I was seventeen years old I won a full scholarship to that college right outside of Chicago, no one in my family had ever gone past high school. My guidance counselor drove me to the college, her name was Mrs. Nash; she picked me up at ten in the morning on a Saturday in late August.
The night before, I had asked my mother what I should pack in, and she said, “I don’t give a damn what you pack in.” So eventually I took two paper grocery bags that I found under the kitchen sink, and also a box from my father’s truck, and I put my few clothes in the grocery bags and the box. The next morning my mother drove away at nine-thirty and I went running out into the long dirt driveway and I yelled, “Mom! Mommy!” But she drove away, turning onto the road where the hand-painted sign said SEWING AND ALTERATIONS. My brother and sister were not there, I don’t remember where they were. A little before ten o’clock, as I started to go to the door, my father said, “You have everything you need, Lucy?” And when I looked at him he had tears in his eyes, and I said, “Yes, Daddy.” But I had no idea what I needed at college. My father hugged me, and he said, “I think I’ll stay in the house,” and I understood, and I said, “Okay, I’ll go wait outside,” and I stood in the driveway with the grocery bags and the box with my few clothes in it until Mrs. Nash drove up.