Trinity, p.24
Trinity, page 24
So many of us, I thought, when I was nursing my child, go through our lives making little real effort to understand why we behave as we do, and are therefore forced to act abruptly and with more force, simply to cover up our lack of any good explanation, so that we fly around through the world like so many dull knives, more dangerous to cut with than sharp ones.
That’s what I was thinking about, while I nursed our son the night after I clipped that article out. And it was that night, after I sang to him about ash trees and the lost friends of a childhood, after I’d placed him in the crib and lightly rocked the small of his back until it seemed he’d released whatever frustration and fear had kept him crying all day and finally settled into sleep, that I walked back out of the warm darkness of his bedroom, into the light of our living room, and my husband met me and guided me to the couch.
HE SAT BESIDE ME. THEN HE TOOK MY HAND.
For a moment, he couldn’t draw his eyes away from my hand, with the result that I, too, stared at it for a moment and realized that it didn’t look like my own hand.
Then my husband started to speak. He told me he’d come to understand that his presence in our house was a mistake. He could see it was causing me too much distress, and could only continue to do so, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
You’re not happy, he said. You’re not yourself anymore.
Then he said, you’re not even writing.
I THINK I TRIED TO PROTEST, BUT HE SHOOK HIS HEAD AND PULLED me up short. We were both still staring at that strange hand.
Then he said that he cared for me too much to continue to hurt me. He said it had become absolutely clear to him that no matter how he tried to explain his actions, or apologize for having behaved in the manner he did, his presence in the house could only continue to hurt me.
He had become, he said, nothing more than a visitation of a past pain. He had become a walking reminder of a fatal mistake that couldn’t ever be fixed. And anything he did now, any attempts he might make to redefine himself once again, were bound to be failures.
Listen, he said. What I did is in me now. It’s a disease that can’t be cured, and if I stay here, I’ll only infect you.
I’ll only infect him, he said, gesturing at our son’s room.
The only hope, he said, is to remove myself. You’ll be better off in my absence.
I REMAINED THERE BESIDE HIM, STARING AT THAT AWFUL HAND, AND what I wanted to tell him was that he’d already infected me, and that he’d already infected our son.
He’d already irrevocably changed us. The violence of cutting himself out of our lives would only change us more awfully.
But while I was still formulating the words I wanted to use, my husband was already saying that he’d found a house south of town, a small place out in the country.
He planned, he said, to move out that night.
He was still looking down at my hand, which was for some reason swollen, so that when I looked at my fingers I thought they looked like the fingers of a corpse, the fingers on a severed hand my husband had brought home for me to examine.
Luckily, he said, our son was too young to notice the difference. For now, I was the one he really needed, and there would be no requirement for some awful, torturous explanation. That could come later, when the pain of the thing had eased down, and he could at least partially understand it.
I must have protested, because the next thing my husband said was in contradiction: No, he said. It’s my fault, I recognize that. Now it’s my responsibility to mitigate the damages.
Then I started crying. My husband leaned forward and kissed my forehead. Then he moved as if to kiss my mouth, but, cruelly, I turned my face from the gesture.
Hurt, he pulled himself back. He looked at me with that awful, doglike expression, but suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the dog’s expression at all. It was the expression, instead, of a man who’s carried his dog into the woods, a man who is now looking down at the dead dog in its grave, baffled by his own pain at the sight.
Then he stood to leave.
Sitting there on the couch, I was flooded with panic. He was leaving me, I realized, in the grave. Believing that I’d lie peacefully in the hole, he was leaving me to tend his own pain, and all I could do to signal the fact that I wasn’t at peace, that I was still living, that even now I was watching him leave, was to reach for him and clutch him.
It was horrible—my strange, swollen hand shooting out of the earth—but it was all I could think to do to signal the fact that I was still living. So I clutched his wrist, and pulled him back toward my body, and when I leaned forward and kissed him, with a quickness that surprised me, because he’d been so firm about leaving, his hand had already drawn up the skirt of my dress, and then he was inside me and I was biting his neck, clawing his back, trying to hold on to his body and keep him.
WHEN WE WERE FINISHED, HE LAY WITH ME FOR A WHILE, HIS BODY behind mine on the couch, and though I couldn’t see his expression, I could feel him counting the minutes as they reached toward the hour.
Realizing that, I also kept my eyes on the clock over the mantel. I, too, watched each minute pass.
He hoped, I think, that I’d fall asleep. But I stayed awake. I watched the second hand of the clock. As a result, I was able to see that it was before the hour was finished that my husband stood up.
I kept my back to him while he dressed. I listened while he buckled his big, ridiculous belt. Then I felt him standing over me, hovering somewhat awkwardly, like the last person remaining after the end of a funeral.
He stood there like someone who can’t bring himself to leave the cemetery just yet, a man looking down at that hole in the ground and trying to think of something to say, worrying he hasn’t yet felt the appropriate sorrow.
After a moment of silence, he kneeled beside me. “I love you,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
A few minutes later, the back door clicked shut and his truck sighed and slid off down the alley, and in such an efficient if inelegant manner, my husband ended the story we’d started when I first interviewed him in that bar in New York, with the beer-soaked wood shavings on the floor, and his hand grabbing mine over the table.
IT WAS AUGUST WHEN HE LEFT, AND I MOVED THROUGH THAT month in a strange state, having strange recollections.
Once, for instance, when we were still living together, my husband told me the story of a friend of his who died early. It was a man my husband had considered a mentor, in the early days of his career, when he was still living in Tennessee. This man had died abruptly of cancer, only suffering for two or three months, and dying before his wife had time to find out that through most of their marriage, he’d been having an affair.
The wife arranged the funeral with no suspicion at all, and when her husband’s friends and family members had settled into their places, another woman also showed up: a stranger at the funeral, a woman nobody knew, younger than the man’s wife, and dressed very differently from everyone else, so differently she almost seemed to have shown up at the wrong funeral.
Still, she stayed, and grieved in such a proprietary fashion that the man’s wife—and everyone else at the funeral—immediately understood that she’d been the man’s mistress.
And in the weeks after my husband left, I remembered thinking—when he first told me that story—how cruel it was that the man died before his wife had time to find out.
Or that he died before he told her the truth, before he confessed everything to her completely, so that, having lost a husband already, she lost him again in a new way at the funeral.
Such a discovery might make anyone angry, but now—finding out in the particular moment she did—the wife no longer had any right to her anger. What could her anger do, after all, now that he’d already been drastically punished?
In the same way, after my husband quarantined himself in the country, exiling himself from our house, I lived alone with my no-longer-justified anger. All I could do, now that he was already punished, if not punished by me, was to try to understand him in the light of the new information I’d gathered.
As a result, in the wake of his departure, I became more alert than I’d ever been to the details of his personality. I felt his absence as an ongoing and intensifying presence, like the pressure in the air before a storm hits. Everywhere I went—walking my son to day care, having coffee with my neighbor, driving to the grocery store—he hovered around me, following in my wake, making his presence known but never quite materializing fully.
THAT FALL, THE SUMMER HEAT HELD THROUGH OCTOBER. IN NOVEMBER, it dropped off abruptly.
Suddenly, as if overnight, it was bitterly cold. In the mornings, each blade of grass in our front yard was furred with new frost. The sidewalk in front of our house was strewn with magnolia seed pods that looked like the severed paws of gray rabbits.
Everywhere I went in Austin, I saw signs of such brutality. I remembered Charles Whitman, or I thought of Kennedy’s recent assassination in Dallas, or the civil rights worker killings that happened the previous year, or the insane number of bombs we were dropping in Vietnam, all the incomprehensible numbers of deaths, and in the air all throughout Austin, I felt a closer violence coming.
In Austin, as the days became shorter, evening arrived with outrageous force. At that time of day, I pushed my son in his stroller down the side streets in our neighborhood, toward the state hospital on Guadalupe. On our way home, for those few minutes before the last light was sucked from the sky, I was almost always overcome with that nameless dread that was growing within me. Then the blank sky over the roads was streaked with alarming new color, electric tangerine and neon pink, the sun’s last, desperate light caught and magnified by the low clouds, and the telephone wires that lined Guadalupe were beaded with innumerable grackles, hunched shoulder to shoulder along the sagging lengths of the wires, as if strung together on the necklace of some demented boy chief.
Occasionally, warned by a shriek I couldn’t detect, they lifted all on one wing and waved against the sky like a black flag at the head of an army. Then, just as suddenly, they landed again, and the crazed color drained out of the sky, and in the new darkness the dried husks of pecan leaves scuttled nervously off down the sidewalks.
SOMETIMES, IN SUCH A DIRE ATMOSPHERE, I WISHED FOR MY HUSBAND to come home and protect us.
Other times I was more realistic. What could he do, with his little pistol, his mere pocketknife, to ward off that bloody sky, or the waving black flags of the grackles?
Nothing. In my more realistic moments, I knew that. In the end, I didn’t attribute to him the power to protect me against the forces of destruction that hovered around me that winter. I only attributed to him the power to kill me.
And perhaps, in the end, that was the only power he’d ever had, and the only power I’d ever relied on. With his knife and the gun that he’d bought and the way he’d grabbed my neck and shaken it roughly, he’d advertised himself as a man who possessed the power to end a life swiftly.
And yet even that, I realized, had been a mere feint. Because rather than putting me out of my suffering swiftly, he’d simply walked out. He couldn’t even stand to see me feel sorrow. In the end, he left me wounded on that couch, and though he might have easily bludgeoned me to death with the buckle of that ridiculous belt, he didn’t even have the courage to kill me.
He was not, I realized, like a man who takes his old dog out to the woods in order to shoot it.
He was a man who takes his old dog out to the woods, then can’t summon the will. Though he knows the dog is in pain, he can’t kill it. He doesn’t want the blood on his hands. He’s too afraid of the guilt he’ll feel after.
So instead, he leaves the old dog to suffer in agony through a cold season, dying alone in the forest, blood seeping into the fallen pecan leaves, still lifting its muzzle at any stray sound, imagining with a surge of joy that will soon plunge in the other direction that the sound might signal the approach of its master, the one man who could come and explain the sudden change in the dog’s situation, or who, if he can’t explain it, if he can’t find the right words, will at least have the decency to simply and regrettably kill it.
THESE, OF COURSE, ARE HYSTERICAL THOUGHTS. I KNEW IT, EVEN back then. I realized that it was essential for me to stop thinking in such an uncontrolled way.
Such hysterical thoughts, as I well understood, are unforgivable thoughts in a mother. I had a child to look after. I had no right to drive myself insane for no reason. Diligently, therefore, every day, I reminded myself of the pertinent facts. Your husband only had an affair, I told myself. Many people have affairs at some point.
Who cares if he lied, I said to myself. Who cares if he left you. You’re still alive, you have a son, you have a floundering career to restart.
IN MY EFFORT TO CEASE FEELING SUCH UNTOWARD EMOTIONS, I REDOUBLED my efforts to understand the situation correctly. I could see no other way out than to understand the person who had caused the situation to start with.
By then, however, I no longer had the subject at hand. I couldn’t question him further.
Then it seemed to me that my major mistake had been to allow my subject to escape before I’d finished the portrait. I should have managed to keep him, I thought, at least until I’d written the ending. Then I rebuked myself for all the insufferable questions I’d asked. I chastised myself for conducting those endless interrogations.
At night, trying to fall asleep while the branches of the loquat clicked their fingernails on the window, I accused myself of having presided over a brutal inquisition. I’d set up, I realized, a McCarthyan trial, adjudicating my husband’s personal life. Ever since that woman called, I’d approached my husband like a prosecutor with no sense of restraint, prying into his most intimate secrets.
Standing above him and his flaws, I’d been like a cruel judge, condemning him with no sense of restraint.
Then, abhorring myself for that role in the trial, I’d find myself switching sides.
Your Honor, I often said to myself, while walking our son to day care, and arguing like a lawyer for the defense: it was only one little betrayal.
It was a little betrayal, I said to myself, that was, in the end, only a test of your capacity to understand and forgive.
It was a test of your ability to be a fair judge, to see a man’s nature wholly—complicated and fallen, as all our natures are—and embrace it despite its slight imperfections.
THEN, ON MY WAY HOME FROM DAY CARE, THOUGH I’D ONCE BEEN the judge, I now found that it was I who was on trial for the crime of failing to love a man despite his imperfections.
By leaving our house, therefore, my husband hadn’t punished himself, he’d punished me, and rightly, for imagining I loved him as a woman should love her husband, when in fact I was only capable of a puritanical, trite kind of judicious affection: the prudish love of a woman who won’t watch violent movies, or tolerate curse words, or keep her eyes open while fucking.
ONE MORNING, IN THE SECOND WEEK OF NOVEMBER—THE MORNING before I received the call from my editor to give me the Oppenheimer assignment—I was on my way out of the grocery store, holding a bag on one hip and my son on the other, when I was stung by a bee.
It came out of nowhere. I hadn’t been stung by a bee since I was a child in Princeton. Now it seemed almost funny, an absurd little slight, that in the face of everything else that had happened in the last year, some quixotic bee should think to attack me.
Swiftly, decisively, I brushed the bee off my hand. I buckled my son in his car seat. I loaded the groceries into the trunk. And only then did I notice that the bee was writhing in agony on the concrete.
I stood over it, looking down from above.
I realized that I must have brushed it off with more force than I’d thought. It was moving in circles, dragging one of its wings.
I watched it writhe for a while, wondering whether or not I should kill it. The sting on my hand had started to hurt, but that wasn’t what bothered me most. What bothered me was watching its little performance. Standing there, looking down from above, and watching its flamboyant, useless suffering, and feeling within myself a surge of guilt for my part in its demise, which was a much more uncomfortable sensation than hurt or even anger.
I’d have preferred, in that moment, to feel anger at the fact that it stung me, or hurt at having been stung, rather than guilt for my part in its pain.
But there it was, dragging its wing, moving in circles, aware perhaps that it had acted stupidly, that it had stung a woman who had no intention of bringing it harm, and that in its absurd act of aggression it had caused me—taken by surprise as I was—to retaliate with equally ludicrous force.
The problem, I saw now, too late to change my reaction, was not that the bee had attacked me—the sting itself was a manageable pain—but that I hadn’t foreseen the attack. Like a bad reader who fails to pick up on obvious foreshadowing, I’d failed to know that the painful moment was coming, and to prepare myself for its arrival, perhaps to plan a less brutal retaliatory attack.
Then, in the parking lot of the grocery store, I felt a rush of weariness. I had to lean against the car for a moment. We only ever know things too late, I thought. Knowledge only comes when we’ve obliterated the need to possess it.
WHEN I’D RECOVERED MYSELF ENOUGH TO STAND UP AGAIN, I crushed the bee under the toe of my sneaker. Afterward, it was nothing more than a smudge of black ash on the sidewalk, glamoured by faint iridescence.
People lie all the time, I thought, while starting the car and driving out of the lot. Behind me, in his car seat, my son blinked out at the world while it passed.
My husband lied to me for a long time. That wasn’t unforgivable. What was unforgivable was that I failed to foresee it.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, MY EDITOR CALLED ME AND ASKED ME IF I’D write a piece on Robert Oppenheimer.
A kind of farewell, my editor said. A piece covering the span of his life, anticipating his final departure.
