Читать книгу Known By Heart - Ellen Prentiss Campbell - Страница 9

Problem Set

Joy navigated past a stream of trucks. She hated highway driving, mistrusted her night vision. Since turning fifty last year she battled what the ophthalmologist called floaters. In Breezewood, the trucks roared onto the Pennsylvania turnpike while she continued on Route 30 toward Bedford.

Bedford, midway between her home in D.C. and his in Pittsburgh, served as the usual rendezvous point. They ate the first dinner of their weekends in the Jean Bonnet, a stone tavern at the junction of what had been two trails and then two post roads, centuries before the turnpike. Friday night locals crowded the bar for darts and beer; Joy and Daniel preferred the dining room downstairs. The thick stone walls and heavy beams muffled the din of the juke box above.

Arriving first, Joy settled into their favorite table by the fireplace. The hearth’s warmth relaxed her from the drive and the hectic week at school. A high school physics teacher, Joy had a briefcase full of problem sets to grade in the car. Now that she and Daniel met more often, she was falling behind in her work. Teaching required so much prep and clean up time. She should work until he came but, instead, Joy ordered a glass of red wine and the artichoke dip.

They had met four years before; stranded in an ice storm in the Atlanta airport, respective connections cancelled. During the delay, over tepid coffee in paper cups, he told her about his wife Selma.

Selma always had been healthy, except for one life-threatening episode of eclampsia fifteen years earlier at their daughter Monica’s birth. The doctors warned against more children; she took up running and kept blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight low. Approaching forty, she trained for her first marathon—a challenge in celebration of the milestone birthday. Every morning Selma ran the steep hills of their neighborhood. One morning, cooling down from her run, she collapsed in the driveway: a massive cardiac event.

Unknowing, Daniel sat inside over breakfast, reading the paper until a neighbor pounded on the door. Daniel began CPR learnt years before to qualify as a chaperone for their daughter’s scout trips. The paramedics arrived; Selma never regained consciousness. He blamed himself for not finding her sooner. He blamed himself for not taking up running fifteen years ago. He should have been with her.

The doctors suggested disconnecting life support. Daniel deferred, neither he nor Monica was ready to give up hope. Besides, he felt uncertain of Selma’s wishes. To his surprise, she hadn’t listed herself as an organ donor on her driver’s license. They’d never executed advance directives: that sloppiness his fault, too. Dodging the bullet when Monica was born should have warned him.

Insurance for acute hospitalization ended. At this point in recounting the story in the airport, he crumpled the empty Starbucks cup in beautiful hands—large hands, with long fingers. He wore a wedding ring.

Sounding angry, Daniel continued. I caved in and gave permission to pull the plug.

He arrived for the last shift of vigil alone; prepared to lie to Monica, to say her mother had slipped away. But Selma—blessed or cursed by her runner’s constitution—breathed on, on her own, neither waking nor dying. She had hovered in limbo for almost six months by the night Joy met Daniel.

Snow and ice socked in the airport; delays became cancellations. They rode the shuttle bus to the airport hotel and drank snifters of brandy in the bar; the Muzak system played a terrible canned version of Norwegian Wood. They boarded the elevator, each with a key card for a room. At her floor, she picked up his suitcase. “Come with me,” she said, shocking herself. Forty-six years old, a confirmed solitary, Joy lived carefully by scientific method: recognizing a problem, collecting data, testing her hypothesis. All experiments and evidence so far had proved relationships required more heat energy than she could spare. She considered herself deficient in some way, her own name an ironic misnomer.

In the dark anonymous room, lying beneath the synthetic beige blanket, they warmed the antiseptic sheets. She had almost forgotten, almost forsworn the genuine, reciprocal delight of using another body, and being used—passionately used, tenderly used.

The next morning she awoke disoriented in the suffocating artificial darkness. While Daniel spoke softly on the phone with his daughter, Joy showered—to give him privacy, and reclaim her own.

They embraced in the airport departures lounge. “I don’t know when I can see you again, but I want to,” he said. “It’s not right, to drag you into my situation. I can’t promise anything, offer anything.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m quite self-sufficient. Famous for it, actually.”

On the flight home she thought about him. She tried to dissect what had prompted her uncharacteristic boldness the night before. Instinct? Perhaps, but something more complicated than simple desire: a yearning to offer solace. Joy held the secret of him like a piece of gold in her pocket as she resumed routine.

He left a message while she was out the following Friday night, at the concert series she attended with a colleague.

“This is a singing telegram,” he said and sang—not badly—all the verses of Norwegian Wood. He made her laugh and want to call him back.

She waited until morning and savored their first long conversation, curled in bed beneath her white duvet, luxuriating in her light-drenched room—with him and alone, at the same time.

Joy never considered it an affair. That implied deceit and hurt. She betrayed no one. Nor did he, by any reasonable standard, although Selma still slumbered in her netherworld and Daniel wore his ring.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not fair to you that I’m not free.”

Joy wouldn’t have respected him if he could easily shrug off his wife. She appreciated his loyalty to Selma, or rather to the idea of Selma, her memory.

And she suspected, from past experiments, she would not have wanted him if he had been free.

The space between them—temporal, geographic and emotional—suited Joy. By familiar paradox, she found it easier to be intimate when protected by distance. Separation fostered closeness as it had with her childhood pen pal. Free from the pressure of daily interactions, Joy had confided on the page. The other girl wrote her family was coming East to see Washington D.C. Joy’s mother invited them to dinner. Meeting face-to-face, the pen pals turned shy. Afterward, the correspondence petered out.

Until recently, Daniel and Joy could meet only at occasional, irregular intervals. He visited Selma’s nursing home bedside almost every day. And the more urgent problem requiring his vigilance was Monica’s unsettled, extended adolescence: dangerous exploits with drugs, drinking, and sex. Daniel attributed the acting out to losing her mother and reproached himself.

Joy had never met the girl but suspected Monica might be wild by temperament, one of those incorrigibles who go off the rails even with both parents fully present. She thought Daniel could have practiced tougher love with Monica: pulled her out of public school, placed her in a school like her own Sacred Heart Academy. A lay teacher, not a Catholic herself, Joy held no illusions that a single-sex parochial school constituted safe haven. Plenty of her students found trouble, too, but at least it required more effort.

Last year, nineteen-year-old Monica dropped out of college and had a baby. One more disaster it seemed at first, but she proved a conscientious mother. She married the father, an electrician. Daniel liked him, as well as the union health benefits for his daughter and granddaughter.

And turning over the worry, he really liked that. And being able to see Joy twice a month: he left work early on alternate Fridays, dropped in at the nursing home, and headed out of town.

Joy found the more frequent reunions disconcerting. The new rhythm required adjustment. Fatigued, fragmented, she lacked her usual home weekend quota of quiet time alone. Her spacious, sparely furnished apartment looked untidy and neglected. Last night she’d almost called to cancel. But she neither wanted to lie nor tell him the truth. She could not disappoint him.

Now Daniel entered the tavern. Relieved, Joy observed her response to his physical presence: a rush of pleasure. Stop overthinking, she chided herself.

He kissed her and then slid into the seat across the table, brown eyes glowing. “You look beautiful.”

The arrangement still worked, even with the shorter cycle of separation and reunions. Perhaps she would acclimate. Reassured, she fell into table talk and pleasant anticipation of the night to come.

After dinner she followed his red taillights along Route 30, the two-lane Lincoln Highway which still stretched all the way from New York to California. The darkness of country roads unnerved her. How had the first settlers walked west beneath endless tree cover? A pickup truck careened over the hill and shot past her too fast, its driver drunk or high. The thin pages of the local paper bore witness to plenty of desperation: hit and runs, driving under the influence, domestic abuse, bankruptcies.

Cresting the next hill, Daniel turned at the floodlit sign. Lincoln Motor Courts. Their headlights swept over half a dozen cottages, like playhouses or the Amish sheds for sale throughout the region. Vacancy! blinked pink neon cursive letters in the office window. A boxy Coke machine stood by the door.

Joy waited in her car, letting Daniel pick up the keys. She felt self-conscious arriving in two cars, uncomfortable at the prospect of scrutiny by whoever manned the desk in this out-of-the-way place. Two consenting adults owed no one any explanation, and no one cared, but she preferred to stay at bigger places like the restored resort hotel just outside of Bedford. However, Daniel insisted on paying for their lodging and Joy worried about cost, now they were seeing each other so often. At her suggestion, to economize, they were trying different places—without great success, so far. She had judged the bed and breakfast in town too cluttered with doilies, the small motel close to the lake bare and ugly, and the guest room upstairs from the bar at the Jean Bonnet noisy. These old-fashioned tourist cabins had been Daniel’s idea; Joy was dubious. She missed room service and spa massages. She missed quiet luxurious rooms at the end of long anonymous corridors.

So far neither had invited the other home, nor broached the possibility. It would mean double travel time for whoever visited. Explanations and introductions would be required, if Joy came to Pittsburgh. Anyway, it would be impossible to stay in Selma’s house, wrong to make love in Daniel’s marriage bed.

But Joy’s reluctance to welcome Daniel to her territory would be harder to excuse, if he asked. How to explain her satisfaction with the simple life she had constructed? How to explain its necessity? Not just because teaching, faculty politics, and the girls’ demands left her drained as a juice box discarded on the cafeteria table. More than that: she breathed most deeply and easily alone, unobserved. She craved quiet evenings to read, listen to NPR.

Joy occasionally accepted colleagues’ invitations to dinner but never reciprocated. The invitations grew rare. Joy did subscribe to the symphony with a colleague but enjoyed matinees at the movies or the theatre by herself, preferring to take in the show without worrying about a companion.

Joy feared that bringing Daniel too close would upset their homeostasis. She dreaded exceeding her capacity for intimacy.

Daniel tapped on her window.

He led the way around the horseshoe of cabins and unlocked their door. Joy stepped into unexpected warmth.

“I called and asked them to turn the heat on early.” He knew Joy hated the cold; he paid attention.

Rosy light from an old fashioned pink pressed glass shade on the overhead light fixture softened the room and its simple furnishings. Joy stretched with contentment. Later, making love in the close darkness, she couldn’t quite let herself go.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Just tired.”

“You know,” he whispered, “I miss you more, seeing you more. I’m like a lonely dog in a crate, when I’m at home.”

What to do if appetite generates appetite in one but not the other? What to do if one of us is a dog and one a cat? Stop overthinking, Joy told herself, curling against his warm back.

They drove in his car to the Lakeside Diner for breakfast. Joy finished first and went to the counter to have her thermos filled with coffee for later at the lake.

She returned to their booth. The stiff set of his shoulders alerted her, the cell phone on the table like a hand grenade.

“The home just called,” he said. “She has pneumonia.”

Every infection with Selma posed a potential crisis. And necessitated choosing whether to let nature take its course or to intervene. Daniel always chose treatment. Joy understood his futile determination sprang from love and guilt. And she respected his steadfastness, though it troubled her as well. Joy had never told him, but in Selma’s circumstances, she herself would rather be allowed to die.

Selma was forty-four and could survive for a very long time. Wouldn’t it be kinder to let pneumonia fill her lungs? Drowning couldn’t be any worse than the nebulous drift of a persistent vegetative state.

“You told them to start the IV?” Joy asked the rhetorical question. He always instructed the home to pump Selma full of drugs to keep her here, or half here, or wherever she lingered. Now he would leave, drive back to watch over his wife.

“Not yet. I said I’d call soon. I’m not sure.”

Startled, Joy tensed.

“Let’s go to the lake,” he said.

They parked in the deserted lot. Daniel retrieved his metal detector from the trunk; she slung her binoculars around her neck.

During warm weather they drove through the countryside, pursuing their respective hobbies. Daniel knocked on farmhouse doors, seeking out the owner in the barn if no one answered. Most granted permission for Daniel to wave his wand over their fields and the weedy margins beside the roads. He promised to show them what he found, to give right of first refusal. Daniel dug gently and meticulously refilled the small excavations. Once he found a button from the uniform of a Hessian soldier; the family didn’t want it. He turned it over to the historical society.

No one minded Joy’s birding. Occasionally a child tagged along. What do you do with the birds after you’ve seen them? Joy explained her life-list in the back of the Peterson’s guide.

When, as now, hunting season made fields and forests dangerous, they prospected for birds and treasures in the protected zone of parkland around the lake. Beach Closed proclaimed the sign. Canoes lay chained and padlocked under the eaves of the concession stand; a layer of rough ice covered the water. The sand the rangers carted in each summer crunched underfoot, riddled with frost crystals. Ordinarily she could have left him on the beach, headed into the woods, and taken the woods trail around the lake. She would have enjoyed finding him again, afterward, refreshed by the break in togetherness.

But this morning the clock ticked back in Pittsburgh; the sand ran through the hourglass. The woman Joy had never met lay in the room Joy had never visited.

He hadn’t turned the metal detector on. It lay on the sand like a discarded toy, an inert and powerless divining rod.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She exhaled a cloud of breath. “Do you want to call Monica?”

“I can’t put it on her. Or you, for that matter.”

Hunched against the wind he walked away. Joy almost followed but held back.

For once, she thought, Daniel needs to be alone.

He stopped by the stand of brittle phragmites and gazed at the lake.

Frozen drizzle stung her cheeks. Daniel needed her permission to give up. He might be able to let Selma go, and not blame himself too harshly, believing he’d done it for Joy, for the sake of their shared future. Joy could take the rap for him.

But what would happen to the two of them without Selma? Her absent presence held everything in balance, permitted Joy and Daniel’s relationship to persist; forestalled or at least obscured the likelihood of entropy, of conflict, deterioration, and disorder. Removing Selma would disrupt their closed system, expose Joy’s limited supply of energy and warmth.

He started back along the shore. She lifted the binoculars and twisted the eyepieces into focus to bring him close. Framed in her sights he appeared bruised with fatigue, old. Unable to bear it, she lowered the glasses.

I love him, Joy realized. The exception that proves the rule: loved him more than she’d believed herself capable.

Joy walked to meet him.

Mute, he shook his head. His eyes burned blank with anguish.

Joy cupped his face in her gloved hands. “You can say no. Tell them to keep her comfortable, but no treatment. Call Monica. Go home.”

A quiet, jagged sob escaped him.

“I love you,” she said.

She rested against his rough wool coat. Already Joy sensed a shift in their specific gravity—the ratio of her density to his, weighed in air.