MARY AND O'NEIL (9 page)

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Mama?”

“It’s me. We’re in New Hampshire. We came up to visit your brother.”

“I see. So, just how is the little squirt?”

“Not so little. He won his race. Well, not won. But he came in fourth. He’s got a new girlfriend.”

“So I’ve heard.” Kay pauses. “Mama, where are you?”

“Where am I?”

“Your voice sounds . . . I don’t know. Strange. Far away, maybe.”

“Everything is fine, sweetheart. We stopped on the way home. I was just thinking about you, is all. How’s Jack?”

“Jack, Jack. Let me see. Jack’s at the library tonight, just like every other night. Jack is Jack, in other words. It looks like he may actually get that grant he applied for, by the way.”

“The grant.” Miriam searches her memory, coming up empty. She is suddenly so sleepy that at first she thinks her daughter is talking about somebody
named
Grant. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not important, Mama. He applied for a university fellowship is all, so he doesn’t have to teach while he finishes his dissertation. We talked about it a while ago, but I can see why you wouldn’t remember.” Then, “Do you really want to talk about Jack?”

“We could. He’s your husband.”

“So he is. This doesn’t necessarily make him something to discuss, however. Mama? Is something going on there?”

Miriam touches her cheeks, and when her fingers come away glistening with moisture, she realizes she is crying.

“I think I’m just in a sad kind of mood. A winter mood. It’s snowing here, I think. Or it’s about to snow. I was just thinking about you.”

“Well I was thinking about you, too, Mama. And you don’t have to worry about me and Jack. He’s really not so bad.”

“Does he make you happy?” She is sorry the instant she has said it. “Forgive me. It’s really none of my business.”

“Of course it’s your business, Mama. Why would you think that wasn’t your business? And to answer your question, I guess I’d have to say that, on the whole, he has the
ability
to make me happy. I know a lot of women who don’t get even that.”

From the bathroom Miriam hears the groan of the pipes as Arthur shuts the shower off. “I think that’s so. I was lucky with your father.”

“Was?”

“Was what, honey?”

Kay hesitates. “You said ‘was lucky.’ Like you weren’t lucky anymore.”

“Did I? Well, that’s wrong. Am, I mean.” She nods her head against the pillow. “Am lucky.”

A momentary silence falls, though not, to Miriam, an uncomfortable one. She listens to her daughter’s breathing, even and clean, and her own, slower but somehow the same, mingling over the wires. In the glow of the lights from the parking lot outside, she imagines Kay in her cramped kitchen, sitting on a stool with the phone pressed to her ear, waiting to hear what she, Miriam, will next say.

“You know, I was thinking that I’d like to get Jack something special for Christmas this year. Can you let me know if there’s something he’d like?”

“I will, Mama. That’s sweet of you. I really will give it some thought.”

“And not a book, though I know that’s probably what he wants. Something more . . . I don’t know. Personal.”

“Okay, Mama.”

“And for you, too, of course. If there’s anything.”

“There won’t be, but thanks. Mama?”

“Yes, sweetie?” Her eyes are half closed.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? Because the problem is, I have to go now. I really, really do. I have to pick up Jack at the library, and then we’re meeting some friends for dinner. I was on my way out when you called.”

“Oh.” Miriam hears the disappointment in her voice. “Well, that’s fine. We can talk later.”

“If it was something I could change, I would. We haven’t spoken in a while, and I’m really glad you called. But Jack’s going to be waiting for me.”

“It’s really all right. You go get Jack.”

“And everything’s fine with you and Daddy?”

“Everything’s fine, sweetheart.”

“And the boyo’s okay?”

She thinks of O’Neil standing in the dormitory parking lot, his arm around Sandra, as she and Arthur drove away. But the memory, she realizes, is not accurate. At the end they had stood together without touching.

“O’Neil’s fine too. Don’t you worry. You go get Jack, okay? He’ll be waiting for you. Everything’s all right. I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Mama.”

And they hang up without saying good-bye.

Dusk in November, the last of the leaves pulled away; it is a little after five, and in the cities and towns of northern New England—in Rutland and Manchester, in Montpelier and Burlington, in Concord and St. Johnsbury and White River Junction and all the rest—the weathermen and air-traffic controllers see, on their radar screens, the same thing: the arrival of the first snowstorm of the season, a widening wedge of lights poking eastward from upstate New York and the Great Lakes. Their faith in their technology is absolute, a religion of professional habit, but they cannot help themselves; the eyes long to see what the mind already knows, and what science has predicted. They see the weather on the screen (there is something Christmassy about it, this expanding cone of light), and lift their gaze to the window, and the snow.

At a long wooden table in the college library, O’Neil takes no notice of the arriving storm; he has pushed his books and papers aside to place his head in the hollow of his folded arms, and is fast asleep, and dreaming. It is a simple, happy dream—a dream of springtime and a golden field in mountains—and O’Neil is both everywhere and nowhere in it. He is the mind of the dreamer and the dream itself, the sunshine and the dreamer of the sunshine, and his pleasure is intensified by a sense of recognition: though he does not know this and never will, it’s a dream he’s had for years. Beside him rest the leavings of his enterprise—his opened calculus text, a pad of paper on which he has scrawled the first equations of a problem set, his pitiless calculator, its batteries draining away—while all around in the high-ceilinged room, students are earnestly working, their minds trained like archers’ arrows on tasks of great complexity. But nothing of this reaches him: not the scratch of their pens or the dry turning of their pages, not the buzz of the fluorescent lights or the muffled coughs and whispered conversations of a Sunday evening in a college library at midterm. Asleep, he soars alone through the vast interior space his mind has made—it seems not made of matter but light itself, to exist outside of time—and when at last he awakens, his dream of happiness exhausted, he raises his head from the table to the window to find his reflection looking back at him, and knows without seeing that beyond the darkened glass the sky has begun to issue snow.

Arthur, stepping from the motel room into autumn dusk, experiences the weather first as a kind of optical illusion; expecting neither snow nor darkness—the hour has escaped his attention—and disoriented from an afternoon in an unfamiliar place where he never planned to be, he sees stars instead, mixed with the cloud of his breath, and all the stars are falling. So persuasive is this vision that for a moment he is held captive by it, in mute awe of it. But then a lone car passes on the highway, traveling with an almost delicate slowness, and in the twin beams of its headlights Arthur sees the snow for what it is: the first, dry flakes of an approaching storm. He hears the soft sound of the car’s tires on the road, and the metronomic rhythm of its wipers; as the car vanishes around the bend beyond the motel lot, he extends a single gloved hand past the edge of the concrete overhang and feels the barely detectable tap of crystals in his leathered palm, like a series of disembodied kisses. It is a strange and satisfying sensation—it seems both to encode this instance with a bright physicality, while also possessing all the familiar qualities of deep childhood recollection, so that the moment is at once remembered and about to be remembered—and he knows what the next gesture would be, if he were a slightly different man; he would step beyond the overhang, tip his head backward, close his eyes, and taste the snow on his tongue.

“Art? What’s it doing out?”

Miriam’s voice, coming from inside the room—the door is just ajar—nudges him from his reverie. Before answering he steps into the lot. On its packed gravel surface, and on the Peugeot’s hood and windshield, a white dusting has taken hold. He tests for traction, shifting his weight without moving, and feels the soles of his loafers slide a little. It’s hard to know how bad the driving will be. Probably not very bad to start, though they are headed west, into the heart of the storm.

“I think we’ll be okay.”

She joins him outside, wearing a sweater but no coat; her hair is wet from the shower. “The TV says six inches. More in New York.” Her voice is noncommittal; she is merely presenting the evidence.

“We could stay the night here,” he offers.

Miriam looks at the car, then back at Arthur. As always, when she doesn’t know quite what she feels, or is presented with a choice that leads her no direction in particular, she pulls her eyes into a squint. “Is that what you want to do?”

The question hangs. And there is an answer, Arthur knows—something correct and patient that he should now say, that Miriam is waiting to hear and that it is his job to provide. To attempt this drive is foolishness. They already have a room. The Peugeot, an expensive disappointment, is not all it could be when the roads are slick. But he has already fallen in love with the idea, driving home through the snowy dark. He loves it because he can imagine it: the slow progress of the car, the sleepy stroke of the wipers, the whirl of flakes before the windshield, like water pushed from the prow, and the lights of the other cars on the highway, refracted in the snowy air; the dry wind of the heater and the hours of silence ahead. He imagines his wife asleep beside him, her body half turned in her seat and wrapped with the old blanket they keep in the car, a sweater or coat used to prop her head against the chilly window; he imagines arriving home in darkness, first into town, its streets quiet under all that new snow with no one about, not even the plows yet, and then the house itself. It is midnight, it is one, it is after two—who knows how long the drive will take? He will wait until the car is stopped and the engine is extinguished before he awakens her, to give her the present of their safe arrival. She stirs, rubbing her eyes.
Are we . . . ?
she asks. And,
How long was I . . . ?

In front of their motel room he puts his arm around her waist and gives it a squeeze. “Come on,” he says.

Their bags are already in the Peugeot; the only thing left to do is return the key. Arthur takes it to the office, where he finds the manager sitting behind the counter, smoking and watching a hockey game on a black-and-white television with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna. The picture is so bad, Arthur thinks, that watching it must be like listening to the radio. He places the key on the counter.

“We’ve decided to take off early,” Arthur says, feeling that he should say something. “To get ahead of the weather.”

The manager rises and accepts the key without comment, depositing it into a drawer under the counter. The carelessness of the gesture suggests to Arthur that it doesn’t matter which key is which; perhaps they are all the same.

“I guess we’ll be off now.”

The manager, already back in his chair—green vinyl, with cigarette burns cut into its wooden arms—looks up, as if truly noticing Arthur for the first time.

“Right.” He takes a long, distracted drag off his cigarette and taps it into a beanbag ashtray on the table beside him. “They say it could get bad.”

“I was thinking that if we left right now, we could beat it.”

The manager gives a thoughtful nod, then returns his gaze to the TV screen. “There’s a theory,” he says.

Leaving the lot for the highway, Arthur finds that the driving is surprisingly good. Already an inch has fallen, but the snow is dry, and the road lightly traveled; there has been no chance yet for the snow to melt and then refreeze as ice. He is mindful of the speedometer, keeping the car at just over forty miles per hour, but when he looks at it a moment later, he finds their speed has drifted upward to fifty. He taps the brakes; the wheels bite soundly.

“How is it?” Miriam asks with a yawn.

“Not awful.” Arthur reaches over and touches her hand. “You want to sleep?”

She is halfway there. “For a while, maybe.”

The highway from the motel heads due south, forming a lazy curve that traces the eastern foothills of the Green Mountains. Trees press close to the road; from time to time the forest opens on one side of the highway or the other, but it is too dark for Arthur to see anything, too slippery for him to permit himself anything more than a hasty sidelong glance. In the beams of his headlights the snow has thickened to a dense, whirling mass. A single car passes them in the oncoming lane, then another, then a third, all traveling with a conscientious slowness that neither suggests nor contains panic; it is not a night, yet, that makes people afraid. Arthur thinks about these other cars, where they have come from and where they may be headed; he thinks about Miriam, dozing now beside him, and his son and daughter, elsewhere, busy with their lives, and about the days when each of them was born; he thinks about Dora Auclaire, though as he does he realizes that he does not love her at all. He will never send his letter. He will destroy it, as soon as he can, and when next he sees her—on line at the grocery story, or at the clinic dropping off some papers—he will smile, perhaps say a harmless, genial word or two of greeting, and then go about his business in such a way that she knows, instantly, that all of it is over: the lunches, the looks, the promise, unfulfilled, of something more. He will never hold her hand again, nor imagine what it would be like to be alone with her. All of this he knows, but when he comes to a fork in the highway—the lone decision he must make between the college and the Massachusetts border—he completely fails to notice it, as he also fails to notice when he veers right instead of left. He doesn’t notice the change in the highway number, the road’s sudden, suggestive rise into the hills, or the sign that says, Scenic Route Ahead, its top edge dressed with a two-inch blade of snow. None of these. He will wash Dora Auclaire from his memory, as even now the silence of the car and the whirling cones of snow before him seem to wash away the very world, everything that has ever happened to him and everything that ever will—a dream of dreaming.