I choke on something between a groan and a laugh, making a far louder sound than I intend—so loud that the girl at the register starts toward me and I have to wave her off.
“Sorry,” he says, smiling at his success, his eyes still cast down. He taps his fork against the cake plate in the “shave and a haircut” rhythm. “So you’re not stuck with me after all. You could get your own place, I could get my own place, we could hire people to take care of us, the whole thing,” he says.
Yes. I’d had the same thought—the money made separating simple. All the logistics that seemed so daunting could be handed off to someone else, someone who could be paid, whether it be selling the house or handling the medical bills or even buying us new homes in distinct and distant locations. “We could.”
“I have some news to tell you, actually,” he says. “The college is letting me keep my pension. Honorable discharge. They feel bad, I guess.”
I congratulate him. Neither of us speaks for several minutes. I draw lines in the heaps of excess frosting we scraped from the cake.
“Dramatic irony, isn’t it? We burned and we were burned. Very French, like Balzac,” I say.
He smirks. “Heavy-handed, if you ask me.”
I feel an old sardonic irritation tug at my chest. “Well, we were never so mighty, so our fall wasn’t much to see. Besides, we got away with it,” I say. “Mostly.”
“You can’t think about it like that,” he says, his eyes dark and dismissive. “Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter. To think we do is just marketing. It’s this cult of personality. You know that.”
“I don’t think that’s a very popular argument right now.”
“I’m not a very popular guy right now.” He tilts his head and spreads his hands in the style of an old vaudeville performer.
“No, that’s true, you’re not,” I say. And I imagine myself in an apartment, each space filled with the definitive and deliberate quiet of my own choices. A velvet sofa and bookshelves with a ladder. A cat, maybe, or maybe no cat, I had never craved pets. Then I picture John in his apartment, the leather club chairs from his office and faded red rugs bought by Sid （or me）。 A woman. There for the money, one way or another. Or as I look at him, his face framed by his new cap that Sid had surely procured from one of her fancy menswear stores, there for him. Does the woman bother me? Not really. It does all seem like a bit of a waste though, I think, to divide that energy, money, money, energy, when something simpler could be arranged.
Walking down the ramp of the restaurant, we stop and watch a small crew paste what appears to be an anti-evolution sign on a billboard across the road. It feels like a scene from a 1960s auteur film, the ugly poster rising against the dim sky, an old couple standing in the drizzle in front of the blinding silver building. I picture it being shot from above, the two of us small, arms linked, John’s blue cap a vibrant beacon.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says, after we witness a panel featuring a crossed-out monkey silhouette erected and flattened on the frame.
Toward the end of the drive, his breathing is measured, his position in the seat pains him. Once home it requires a huge effort to help him to the bed, where he falls asleep on his side clutching a body pillow.
Please don’t think I stay with him because of some Florence Nightingale syndrome, because he needs me and that gives me purpose and dominion or some tired story like that. The home health aide comes the very next day and cares for him until he is self-sufficient. I don’t sacrifice my independence or interests; the following night, in fact, I attend a taped screening of a new, much-lauded opera at a movie theater in Albany. No, things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom.
XXVI.
John and I use some of the money to buy an apartment in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. We sell the land the cabin stood on but keep our house in town—I still go upstate to teach two days a week during the academic year, though John mostly stays in the city. In our new lives, we watch the baby while Sid and Alexis work. We take him on slow walks in Fort Tryon Park and I look at all the bodies of all the people and concentrate on their beauty. We go to physical therapy. We go to the 92nd Street Y. We itch. We get memberships to Off-Broadway theaters. We rub prescription-strength cream on each other’s hard-to-reach places. We become “friends” of museums. We go to film festivals at Lincoln Center. We complain of numbness. We plan a visit to Hungary. We get along, we’re too frightened of what might happen if we didn’t. We talk about art and ideas. Burns come with long-term complications. Of course, it sometimes hurts to move.
Vladimir writes a novel about a younger man’s tender affair with an older woman. She dies in a fire in a cabin in the mountains. There are many descriptions, similes, and metaphors that concern the loosening quality of her skin. The book is deemed well-written but “bleak” and does not do well, though he is long-listed for a few awards.
Cynthia’s book is a surprise national bestseller, a word-of-mouth hit that wins a National Book Critics Circle Award. She explains to me that “national bestseller” doesn’t mean as much as it used to, now that nobody buys books. Vlad tells her that at least she recouped her advance, jealous but proud. She says, you will be next, baby, with generosity. It is like an ice floe has chipped off her, she is secure at last, or for now. They buy a renovated Victorian in the middle of town. When I go on semiretirement, Cynthia is offered and accepts a tenure-track position.
John finishes his epic poem, submits it to a major poetry publication. They publish it, but it is immediately met with objection by young writers of the community, who deem the poem objectionable due to its sexual content and his history. John takes up pottery making. He likes the feeling of damp clay between his hands, soothing and cool.
After a year or so I begin to write once again. I email my work to myself after every session. The book is a painstakingly researched, fictionalized account of Sadie the Goat, a female pirate from the nineteenth century who wears her own pickled ear, bitten off years prior in a barroom brawl by Gallus Mag, enclosed in a locket around her neck. I write very slowly, and very little, every day. I am skeptical, now, of the flood. I am not nicer or more appreciative than I was before. But I am more measured. This is a kind of peace, or a warning.
Sid’s baby is beautiful, and smiles all the time, a clear sign of intelligence. He lies on his mat and I read Shakespeare and Dickinson aloud so that he may absorb the benefits of their cadences. As a mother, Sid surprises me; she is natural, temperate, tender. I cannot think of any baby more lucky than he, having the parents he has.
So many systems disrupted. So many knots untangled, undone.
XXVII
One night when I’m upstate the front entrance bell rings. Once again, a visitor, unfamiliar with our town custom of entering through the back. When I open the door, a woman in her mid-thirties, ragged tissue in hand, introduces herself. I ask her in and pour her and myself a glass of wine, though since the fire and all the attendant bleariness that came with the healing process and medication, I barely ever drink anymore, wanting clarity above all else.