All the Time in the World (5 page)

And so, as I pondered and worried and accomplished nothing, the winter blew in with a wild snow that scoured the streets and roared through my meager shelter like the vengeful God of the Old Testament.

Of course, I was not trapped; I just felt as if I were. I thought what a brilliant evolutionary expedient was hibernation, and if bears and hedgehogs and bats had managed to work it into their repertoire why hadn’t we?

Actually, as the snow was blown against the siding of the garage it stuck there, sealing off the cracks, and my atelier became a bit cozier, though not in time to keep me from falling ill. I thought I had caught cold when I awoke with eyes watering and a sore throat. But when I tried to get up I felt too weak to stand. I could actually feel the virus humming happily through me. There comes a moment when you have to admit that you’re sick. How could I have expected otherwise, as undernourished and poorly prepared for the winter as I was?

I had never in my life felt so bad. I must have been running a high fever, because I was out of it half the time. I have an image of two alarmed young retards standing in the doorway looking down at me. Perhaps I gave them a pathetic wave of my pale, bony hand. And then one of them must have come back that night or another, because I woke up in the small hours with a hot-water bottle under my feet. And—this is the most phantasmic impression of all—once I awakened to find Emily in my bed, clothed, with her arms and
legs wrapped around me as if to provide warmth. At the same time, though, she was pressing her pelvis rhythmically against my hip and cooing something and kissing my bearded cheeks.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS
, I found myself still alive. I got up from my poor pallet and did not collapse. I was a bit weak but steady on my feet and clearheaded. If one can feel physically chastened, as if having been scrubbed down to another skin, that’s what I felt. I studied myself in the antique silver hand mirror: what a thin, gaunt fellow I had become, though with eyes bright with intelligence. I decided that I had passed through some crisis that was more a test of spirit than a lousy virus. I felt good. Tall and lean and limber. There was a stale sandwich and a glass of frozen milk beside my bed. The jars that served as my urinals were empty and aligned in a gleaming row. Sun came through the bull’s-eye window and cast an oblong rainbowed image of itself on the attic floor.

Wrapping my coat around me, I went outside into the cold pure air of the winter morning, careful not to slip on the icy steps. The bamboo copse was encased in clear ice. I looked for my friends, for some sign of them, but there was not even one track in the snow covering Sondervan’s backyard. I saw no smoke from the chimney, no lights at the back basement door that had always burned there, day and night. So they were gone, the whole crew of them, patients, staff. Do you take a houseful of mentally problematic people for a Christmas vacation? Or had the neighbors finally gotten a court to rule against Sondervan’s little sanatorium? And the doctor? Had he fled to his practice in the city? I didn’t know.

They had been like little elves tending to my illness, Herbert and Emily, there but not there.

I spent that day getting used to the fact that I was alone again in the fullness of my hermitage. It was not a bad feeling. The
childishness of the two of them had migrated somewhat to me, and, while I felt bad for them, their home, such as it was, taken from them, it was a relief to be back in my own mind, undistracted, uninvolved. That night I was once again out on my rounds, and the takings were good. I put together a fine dinner and for drink I melted snow in my mouth.

WHEN THE WEATHER SOFTENED
, leaving only patches of snow on the ground, I resumed my nighttime surveillance of my home. I found some subtle changes. Diana had done something with her hair, cut it shorter. I was not sure it was right for her. There was a jauntiness in her step. The twins appeared to have grown an inch or two since the last time I had looked in the window. Quite the young ladies. No more fighting, no door slams. Mother and daughters seemed very together, even happy. The undecorated fir tree in the dining room told me that Christmas had not yet arrived.

Why did all of this come to me as a presentiment? I was uneasy as I climbed back to my atelier. I found myself thinking of the law. I knew that, having disappeared and not been found after diligent inquiry, I would be declared an absentee and Diana, as my spouse, would become temporary administrator of my property. Had she not seen to that, I was sure that one of my partners would have seen to it for her. What I could not remember was how much time would have to elapse before I was declared legally dead and the provisions of my will would come into play. Was it a year, two years, five years? And why was I thinking about this? “Spouse”? “Diligent inquiry”? Why was I thinking with these words, these legal terms? I had expunged the law from my mind, I had wiped the slate clean, so what was the matter with me?

I did something then out of a gleeful-seeming desperation that
I still don’t understand. A couple of times a year, an old Italian man who had a knife-and-tool-sharpening business in his van would come to the back door and ask if anything needed to be sharpened. He had his van outfitted with a gas-powered grinding wheel. Diana would give him kitchen knives, poultry shears, scissors, even if they didn’t need sharpening, just because she knew he needed work. I think it was the Old World quality of this gentle peddler that appealed to her. So there I was, looking out the window and watching him come up the driveway and stand at the door while Diana went into the kitchen to find something for him.

A moment later, I was standing behind him with a big grin; I was this tall, long-haired homeless soul with a gray beard down to his chest, who, for all Diana knew, as she returned with a handful of knives, was the old Italian’s assistant. I wanted to look into her eyes, I wanted to see if there was any recognition there. I didn’t know what I would do if she recognized me; I didn’t even know if I wanted her to recognize me. She didn’t. The knives were handed over, the door closed, and the old Italian, after frowning at me and muttering something in his own language, went back to his van.

And, back in my atelier, I thought of the green-eyed glance of my wife, the intelligence it took in, the judgment it registered, all in that instant of nonrecognition. While I, her lawful husband, stood there grinning like an idiot. I decided that it was good that she hadn’t recognized me—it would have been disastrous if she had. My devilish impulse had pulled off a good joke. But my disappointment was like one of those knives, after sharpening, in my chest.

A DAY OR TWO LATER
, in the late afternoon, as the setting sun reddened the sky over the big trees, I heard a car pulling into the driveway. A door slammed, and by the time I got to the attic window
whoever it was had disappeared around the front of the house. I had never seen this car before. It was a top-of-the-line sedan, a sleek black Mercedes. Long after the sun had set and all the lights were on in my house, I could see that the car was still there. I kept going back to the window and the car kept being there. Whoever it was, he was staying to dinner. For, of course, I knew it was a he.

The moon was out, and so it was somewhat risky for me to go around to the dining room and look in the window. The shades were drawn—what was she trying to hide?—but not completely; there was an inch or two of light above the windowsill. When I bent my legs and peered in, I could see his back, and the back of his head, and, across the table from him, my smiling radiant wife lifting her wineglass as if in acknowledgment of something he had said. I heard the girls’ voices; the whole family was there, having themselves a grand time with this guest, this special guest, whoever he was.

I lurked about through dinner; they took their damn time, all of them, and then there was coffee and dessert, which Diana liked to serve in the living room. I ran around to that window and again saw his back. He was a well-tailored fellow with a good head of salt-and-pepper hair. He was not particularly tall but sturdy, strong-looking. It was no one I knew, not anyone from my firm, not one of our friends come to hit on Diana. Was it someone she had met? I was determined to keep watch and to satisfy myself that he did not stay past dinner. But surely that was not in the cards, not with the twins in the house. Nevertheless, I lingered at the window, even though the night was cold and getting colder. And then he did leave; they were handing him his coat and I turned and ran around the back of the house and took a position at the corner, where I could see the driveway. I was looking at the front of his car, and when he got in and the cabin of the car lit up, I had a clear
view of his face, and it was my former best friend, Dirk Morrison, the man from whom I had stolen Diana, a lifetime ago.

THE NEXT DAYS
were busy ones. I washed as best I could with melted snow and dried myself with one of Dr. Sondervan’s towels, a gift from Herbert and Emily. I took my wallet out of the top drawer of the old broken-down bureau. In it was all the cash I had come home with that night of the raccoon, my credit cards, Social Security card, driver’s license. I dug around for my checkbook, house and car keys—all the impedimenta of citizenry. I then contrived to get myself to town, cutting through the Sondervan backyard to the next block and thence to the business district.

My first stop was the Goodwill store, where I replaced my tattered rags with a clean and minimally decent brown suit, unironed shirt, overcoat, wool socks, and a pair of brogues that were no better fitting than my wingtips but more appropriate to the season. The ladies at the Goodwill were shocked when I walked in, but my courteous demeanor and the clear effort I was making to better myself left them smiling approvingly as I left. And don’t forget to get yourself a nice haircut, dear, one of them said.

That was exactly my intention. I walked into a unisex place on the theory that my shoulder-length hair would not alarm them as it would a traditional old-time barber. Still, there was resistance—Can’t come in here without an appointment, the hairdresser-in-chief sniffed—at which point I laid two crisp hundred-dollar bills on the cashier’s table and an empty chair materialized. A layered cut and not too short, I said.

I watched in the big mirror as, snip by snip, I traveled back in time. With each falling hank of hair, more and more of the disastrous lineaments of my previous self emerged, until, big naked ears and all, staring back at me was the missing link to Howard Wakefield.
Yet a shave was still required for the transmogrification, and this took another fifty dollars, shaves not being in the repertoire of this crew of artistes. Somehow they came up with shears and a straight razor and several of the staff gathered around to agree on a strategy. I didn’t want to see. I lay back in the chair and prepared to have my throat cut. I didn’t care. I was disappointed in myself and how easily I was acclimating to the old life. It was as if I had never left.

Finally, I was sat up to see the result, and it was me, all right, looking pale and somewhat skinnier, the eyes perhaps too importunate, a new loose fold of flesh under the chin, Howard Wakefield redux, a man of the system.

That was enough for one day.

That night, in my unaccustomed togs, I slipped around to the house to see if anything special was going on. Another visitor, perhaps, a justice of the peace to accompany Dirk Morrison? But all was quiet. No strange cars in the driveway, and my wife at her dressing table, not quite naked in her negligible concession to winter. She had something on the stereo, her favorite composer, Schubert, whom she had touted to me when we were dating. It was one of the Impromptus, played by Dinu Lipatti, and it brought back the old days, before such music was no longer ours. I felt as if an artery had been opened, and ran back to my attic.

The next morning, the garage doors opened beneath me and I watched as Diana, with the girls in tow, backed the SUV down the driveway. Of course. Christmas shopping. They would head for the mall. They would lunch there as well. I waited a few minutes, took out my car keys, went downstairs, and turned on the engine of my BMW. It started right up.

I had heard about Dirk over the years that he had made himself a fortune. And why not, as he was a hedge-fund manager who was quoted on the business pages.

Remarkable how I still knew how to drive, and how I remembered all the shortcuts to the highway to New York. An hour later, the city rose up before my eyes, and in a moment, it seemed, I was in it, in all the noisy raucous chaos of souls flowing through the city’s canyons, each of them with an imperial intention. They were underground, too, rumbling along in the subways. They were stacked above my head, too, forty, fifty stories of them. It was stunning. I was in shock and barely able to negotiate the entrance to a garage.

Had I actually worked in this city most of my adult life? Would I have to again?

My Madison Avenue haberdashery was still where it had always been and my man was there standing in the suit department as if he’d been waiting for me. I had had myself barbered and had clothed myself in a reasonably presentable outfit at the Goodwill before coming here, just so that I could get through the door. He looked at me and shook his head. He beckoned. Come with me, he said.

And that is how that evening, after parking the BMW in front of the next house, and taking the trouble to reclaim my litigation bag from the attic, I stood at my front door in my black cashmere coat and pin-striped suit with a Turnbull & Asser spread-collar shirt and a sober Armani silk tie, American-flag suspenders, and Cole Haan black English calfskin shoes, and I turned the key in the lock.

Every light in the house was on. I could hear them in the dining room; they were decorating the Christmas tree.

Hello? I shouted. I’m home!