Before My Life Began (51 page)

“It worked,” Nicky says. “Jesus Christ Almighty but it worked, Aaron. We're still
here
. I was so scared, but…”

“It's all right.”

“I imagined it happening like this a long time ago—what I'd do in a jam like this, when I was down to my final out—and I figured when you'd used up everything else, music would be the only answer, for…for it alone has charms to soothe the savage beast, right?”

Briefly, as they stumble together through the woods, she leans against him. He tells her again that everything is all right. He does not tell her that the sheriff had moved toward his son and taken the razor before she began to sing.

Much later, when they are back at Rose Morgan's, their wounds stitched and treated by a young doctor called to the S.N.C.C. office, the boy taken to a county hospital, the incident reported by telephone to state police and federal agents, and after they have told the story to the others, Nicky goes with him to his room. He sits on the edge of his bed. She looks out the window.

“The one rule I forgot to mention,” she begins, “was that you shouldn't ever go out after dark, only I just…”

“It's okay. You did fine. We knew this might happen. It happens every day to somebody, so why not us? We'll heal.” He is puzzled. “But it's like a summer job for us, isn't it? I mean, we go back to other lives when this is over—”

“You sure kiss good,” she says. “At least I can have the memory of that to warm me some long winter night.”

He sees that, despite her smile, she is trembling. He puts his arm around her.

“Would you like to sleep here tonight?”

She starts to speak, but her lips quiver. She bites down, winces, then nods.

“Come on,” he says. “It's all right. This is the life we have, right? And not another—”

They lie down. He expects that he will not sleep until the sun rises. He turns onto his side, his eyes on the window, and she presses her body against his. Her arms are around his waist, her cheek against his back, her knees pressed against the hollows behind his knees, her feet cold against his ankles. She tells him that he should not be frightened, that she will try not to take advantage. He puts his hands on top of hers.

If things were different, Nicky asks—if they had different lives—she knows they don't, but if things were different and they had met the way they have, but in some
other
time and place, does he think he might have fallen in love with her? Could he love a girl like her?

Yes.

That's all she needs to know, she says. She burrows close to him, as close as she can get, rubs her damp nose back and forth against his shoulder. She talks softly, tells him that she likes to hold him this way so that he can't see her face, so that he has to imagine it. He thinks of Ellen's fingers, touching his face, reading it. He sees Ellen in her garden, bending down, reaching for flowers, and he suddenly sees his children—Carl and Larry—in that garden, sitting on the grass, waiting for Ellen to find them. He loved Gail and yet, in his memory, it is Ellen he sees most often. Why? Is it merely because, like her, he too is now cut off forever from seeing the world he once loved so dearly? Is it because, like her, when he wants to see this world, he must now imagine it into being? Perhaps. But he senses that even when he was living in his first life, his affinity with Ellen was as strange and deep as it was mysterious. The world was there for both of them, yet neither of them could live within it in the ordinary way he yearned to live in the world. His desire to imagine a life other than the one he had been given—a desire that he refused, back then, to acknowledge—must have been at least as strong as her need to imagine a world she could never see.

Nicky clings to him, talks about how frightened she was, and while she talks he thinks of Emilie, who would be almost ten years old by now, if she is alive, and he tries to imagine
her
smile. He sees himself squatting, letting her climb onto his back, grasp him around the neck, press her cheek against the nape of his neck. He sees Gail in the doorway and she leans back, hands on her stomach. She is pregnant again. Has she remarried? How often does she think of him? The last time he saw her she was the age Nicky is now. He imagines Gail passing in front of the window, her back arched. The window is a dark-blue mirror. He wants to press his palm against the small of Gail's back, to hear her sigh with pleasure at the relief he can give to her in this way, and for a few minutes, before the world spins into blackness, he is comforted by imagining that Ellen sometimes wonders what became of him, and that Gail can see him here, with Nicky.

12

T
HEY DRIVE HOME
, through the hills of Ashfield and Conway, and down across the flatter landscape of Hatfield, Lucius delighting in the light snowfall. It is the first snow he has ever seen, and he keeps his bare hand stuck out the side window so that he can catch the flakes, lick them from his palm. The road is slick and black, the wet flakes dissolving the instant they hit pavement. Aaron watches a lone car, a dozen yards ahead, skid sideways, fishtail, recover. He downshifts from third to second, keeps the van in second gear, listens to Lucius talk about what people back home would think, could they see him now.

“Instead of flowers,” he says, “I gonna bring some gal a snowball when I come courtin' next time, don't you think? She can keep it in her icebox.”

Aaron smiles, but his smile falters. He is never comfortable when Lucius talks this way—back-home talk—and he feels that Lucius uses talk like this to put distance between them.

“Can you close the window? We'll both catch a chill. The sweat's not dry on me yet.”

Lucius rolls the window up, puts his hands between his thighs to warm them, laughs easily, then pats Aaron on the shoulder in a way that lets Aaron know that Lucius senses what Aaron feels. Lucius talks naturally—his voice guttural, his inflection almost without southern accent—asking questions about snow: what makes it stick? what makes it melt? how deep can it get in how much time? what's the worst snow Aaron has ever seen? what happens if the snow comes down mixed with rain….

The world is dim, all whites and grays except, in the patch of light illuminated by their headlights, the snow falling at a slant, a lemony-yellow. The fields stretch away to either side, cabbages and cornstalks visible here and there where they have not yet been plowed under. Thanksgiving is still ten days off. Aaron cannot remember snow having come this early, and he says so to Lucius. Lucius says that the cabbages, like soft babies' bottoms, look as if they've been sprinkled with talcum. To their left, where the Connecticut River flows less than a hundred yards away, they see nothing but white—and the whiteness does not please Aaron. He cannot see the river, or the line of trees that borders it. He senses a wall of black behind the whiteness, pressing against it: a thin, hard veneer. Aaron loves the land when he can see across it, when there are wide horizons, endless vistas. His favorite time of year—between autumn and first snow, when the leaves fall from the trees little by little, slowly revealing the landscape beyond; when he can see the hills and green fields that have been hidden for half a year, even as the green itself begins to fade to browns and lavenders and yellows and golds—this is gone now. He feels as if he is driving under an enormous dome of snow, the dome moving along with him, the side walls remaining equidistant from his van. There are pinpoints of color here and there—a splash of orange on a billboard, a yellow porch light, a green highway sign, black shutters on an old farmhouse, silver mailboxes on dark posts. Is life like that—an endless haze of gray and white, without beginning or end, with here and there a flash of color, a spot of something that suggests the
possibility
of beauty? Can one enter these points of color—of light—and pass through to the other side, to some other world?

Aaron chides himself for such musings, yet finds that he is less irritable, less tense, for letting thoughts come this way. Until recently—he has been talking with Susan about this—he had never thought of himself as a man with imagination. He could draw well, of course. He could design houses and, his great pleasure, make beautiful architectural renderings of them—design sections or construction drawings, architectural elevations—but in doing so he felt for the most part that he was only setting down what was already there, or would be there, in the physical world. He was collaborating with clients, working to order, rendering the actual: what could, in fact, in the physical world, be constructed out of wood and metal and glass and cement. But to have thoughts beyond things physical—to consider the presence of things not visible in the world—this was something he couldn't remember having done often. In the portraits he drew when he was a boy? In his drawings of apartment buildings and storefronts? Perhaps. For much as he wanted to render things as accurately as he could, he was aware that he was also trying to get at something else, that he was trying, somehow, to draw through the details to something more real, to some quality of the person or of the place that could
not
be expressed by things merely physical.

His mind drifts, whiteness swirling softly inside his brain like plaster dust caught in an updraft. A cluster of houses set back from the road, to the west—a dairy farm, a four-walled fortresslike layout of buildings, with a red and silver silo jutting upwards like a bullet—makes him think of the dark, close barn, the warm bodies of cows, the sweet, musky smell of silage. He imagines a cardinal passing in front of the car, from west to east—a streak of crimson that bleeds across the white landscape, coming from nowhere, disappearing forever. He looks sideways at Lucius, and he recalls the easy way his father would sit in the bedroom with him while he drew, and of how, when he would look up from his paper, he would never know how many minutes or hours had passed. Were those happy times? Was he
ever
, in the four small rooms of that apartment, happy—at ease in
this
world?

Lucius asks him what they will do for work—for money—when they are finished with the house they are building. They are down to minor items now—cabinets and countertops in the kitchen and bathroom, paneling in the study, moldings—and Aaron says he has a few small jobs—bookcases, kitchen renovations, taking out walls, putting in walls, finishing a family room—that should keep them busy through the end of January. Other things may come along. He has a contract for a new house in North Amherst, and they can start on that in mid-April, when the frost will be out of the ground.

“Maybe something sooner. When I called Susan at noon she said that somebody's coming by tonight to talk about renovating a big old farmhouse, in Hadley. Says he admires my work.” Aaron feels the sweat evaporate, warming the air trapped between skin and clothing. A vapor barrier. “You'd like that, Lucius—restoring an old house. When you cut into the walls and floors, get past the lathing, tear away a chimney and see the innards—building the house backwards in your mind is the way I think about it, from the inside out—that does make the blood flow.”

“Well. We want to keep the blood flowing, don't we? Like the man says, gonna be one long ball-breaking winter—snow balls and blue balls—and me without a woman.”

“You can sleep a lot. Have good dreams.”

“Oh yeah. You bet I'll dream, Aaron. Dream lots. Dreams are what keep us alive, right? I had a dream. Sure. I had a dream that someday the sons of black sharecroppers would lie down with the daughters of white millionaires. Oh yes, Lord. I had a dream….”

Lucius laughs. Aaron looks out through mists of white, imagines a fawn and its mother staring back at him, bending over to pick at grass, at tufts that rise through the snow like green hair.

“There's a bone in the middle of a deer's heart. Did you know that?”

“Coon got one in his dingus, makes a good toothpick. You know
that?”

“The truth, Lucius,” Aaron says, laughing easily, “is that the winters
are
long and dark and cold here. You should think about that part of your life too.”

“Don't do much some evenings
but
think on it. Trouble is, my boss works me so hard, all I want to do at the end of day is to lay down my weary bones and sleep.”

Aaron makes suggestions he's made before, ever since he brought Lucius back with him at the end of August: that Lucius consider enrolling in courses at the university; that Lucius go to S.N.C.C. meetings or C.O.R.E. meetings; that Lucius do
something
so that his entire life does not filter through Aaron's life, so that he can begin to meet and know other people and families, so that he can meet women.

“Blow it out your ass with that line,” Lucius snaps. “You white guys been in the Movement get me, plugging all the white and black ass you can all summer long, then reaching out your hand to help us poor niggers, except we gotta do our plowin' in black soil only. Damn! You don't know shit sometimes, Levin, you're so fucking pure.”

“Pure?”

“Yeah. Pure. You probably the only guy down there, all them babes creamin' over you, who
didn't
get anything.”

“I'm a free man, too,” Aaron says. “And a happily married one.”

“I know
that
. Everybody round here knows about your famous happy marriage. Only you got to be human too. Otherwise you put strains on things natural, don't you see? I mean, when I was married, what I said was, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm married, only I ain't a fanatic about it.'”

They ride in silence, south along Route 5, Aaron concentrating on the driving, on the dots of color in the landscape: crimson, pea-green, gray, orange. The houses are closer to the road now, closer to one another. Aaron thinks of replying, of saying that he's human enough, that being married to one woman—one
interesting
woman—for eight years is no easy thing, but his mind veers to something else.