Noah's Wife (15 page)

L
eesl plays the organ because the organ—much like Leesl herself—is not expressive.

Leesl doesn't like the phrase “not expressive,” and also she doesn't think that it is entirely fair to use it with respect either to her or to her instrument. It offends her on behalf of them both. It is true, she concedes, that it is not possible to make a note louder or softer by touching the key with her fingers, but then, this is not a piano and if Noah had wanted a pianist he would have found someone else, someone who was not Leesl; and then again, what the instrument lacks in its dull white keys it makes up for in its pedals—its tarnished pedals that she plays with her bare feet, her toes curled along the cold metal—and in its pipes, regal and gleaming.

Even though it is clear to her that no one has any intention of attending services, Leesl continues to play the organ as often
as she can. She has not seen Noah in the church since the town meeting last week, but she is not worried. She lets herself in and sits down at her instrument, certain that sooner or later he will turn up. In her experience, ministers always do.

As she plays, she remembers the way that the former town minister used to disappear for days at a time, only to resurface with grass in his hair and his face lined with deeper grooves than were there before he left. When she asked him where he had gone, he merely sat down with his journal and told her that he had come to believe that a man's religion was a very personal thing; too personal to explain.

“We've got to look for it everywhere, Leesl,” he said cryptically. “In the woods, in the hills. It's a bit of a trick, is what it is. We've got to learn to fool ourselves.”

Leesl wondered over what he meant, but she did not bother asking him to clarify. He seemed to grow more arcane with every day of bad weather. When his congregants stopped coming to church, he ceased writing sermons and began sending out his poetry instead. Most mysteriously, he began walking: strolling for hours in the woods beyond the church or marching through the abandoned neighborhoods on the outskirts of town in rectangles with ever-widening perimeters. He began to eat more, Leesl noticed, although the foods were more unusual and his gaze was vacant as he chewed. Once he told her that he was also sleeping more soundly. In general he seemed to be of good health; what was there to worry over?

“Leesl,” he once asked her, “do you believe that being unable to touch or hear or see a God means that He is everywhere at once?”

“Yes,” said Leesl simply. It is what she had been taught. “I do.”

The old minister sighed. “I've always thought so, too,” he said. “But I tell you, Leesl, lately it's been lonely up here. There have been times when a man can't help but ask himself whether a God he cannot touch is a God who isn't anywhere at all.”

The sound of the old man's voice in her mind causes her to miss a line of music, her fingers stumbling to a stop. Leesl rests her hands at her sides, her knuckles growing white around the edge of her bench. She is tired of asking herself what happened to the old minister; she is tired of the townspeople asking her, too. What are they implying, after all, when they ask her what she knew of him? Are they suggesting that she could have done something to prevent the accident? When they stop her in the street, she merely blinks at them from behind her bottle cap glasses. She refuses to admit to anyone the number of nights she has lain awake in the dark of her creaking house, imagining what she might have done differently. Once he started acting strangely, should she have followed him? And if so, does that mean that she is supposed to be following Noah now, too?

She pictures the ancient cheetah she has penned up in her garage. The cat is sixteen years old, toothless, nearly blind, with fading spots and a milder temperament than even Leesl herself.
The zookeeper showed Leesl how to mix the cat's medication into shredded meat and pass it through the garage window on the end of a shovel. For the first few days, Leesl kept her distance, but lately she has taken to opening the garage door and sitting herself down just beyond the chicken-wire fence that she constructed, watching the giant cat snooze on a bed of threadbare throw pillows, her claws dug deeply into one of Leesl's old stuffed animals. Sometimes when Leesl sings to herself she believes she hears the cheetah purr.

She slides off her bench and lifts her raincoat from the pew in which she tossed it, moves with reticence toward the door. Unlike the rest of her neighbors, she has never liked to involve herself in others' affairs; since she prefers to be left to her own devices, she assumes that others deserve the same. Live and let live, her grandmother used to say. And then, in poorly accented but musical French:
Laissez-faire, ma petite. Laissez-faire
.

But how is one supposed to live and let live in a town like this one? How is one supposed to mind her own affairs when her neighbors are so adamantly
present
, so vulnerable, so overwhelmed? With a fresh resolution in mind, she strides the last few steps of the nave and heaves the great door open. To her astonishment, she does not need to track down Noah: he is standing on the other side, his raincoat plastered to him, water streaming from his shoulders to the steps. At the sight of her, he startles.

“Oh,” he says, in some confusion. “Hello, Leesl.” The skin below his eyes is swollen.

“Noah!” says Leesl. “Where on earth have you been?”

He follows her into the nave, allows her to remove his coat. “Leesl,” he says musingly, as she peels the fabric from his skin, “if you knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, would you still plant your apple tree?”

“Excuse me?” says Leesl.

Noah shakes his head. “Never mind,” he murmurs.

Leesl takes his elbow and leads him gently back to his office, sits him down in his armchair, and pulls a stack of wool blankets from the closet.

“Here,” she says, dropping one of them onto his lap and wrapping another around his shoulders. “Take these. Why don't you stay right here for a while until you warm up? I'll run down the hill to find your wife. Should I brew some tea for you before I go?”

“Leesl,” he says again. “If you were to find out that all the voices you'd ever heard had been fantasies, that what you'd believed to be visions had been dreams, that all the breath and the spirit you'd felt in the world had been nothing but a cold wind blowing upon rocks and that your life up to this point had been one debilitating lie—if that was what you awoke to discover, then wouldn't
you
be frightened, too?”

His voice is small, his posture meek. His shaggy hair is falling over his forehead. He closes his eyes while the silence expands between them.

“Noah?” she says at last.

He doesn't respond. From the slow rise and fall of his chest, it would appear as though he has fallen asleep. She brushes her fingers lightly across his forehead, finds that his skin is warm to the touch. He is feverish, she decides. Who knows how long he was out there on his own? She backs out of the room on the balls of her feet, pulls the door quietly shut behind her, and goes looking for a kettle in the kitchenette downstairs.

When he comes out of his office, looking worn and frail, Leesl is waiting for him. She steps forward to meet him and places the mug in his hands. She does not comment on his ragged hair or his shoulders splashed with mud. She hopes he hasn't noticed that his beard is growing grayer by the day. She doesn't mention their conversation and neither does he; she assumes that he would prefer to bury it.

Perhaps it is because Leesl herself is not expressive that she is better able to appreciate the expressions of others. Perhaps it is because she has been so often in the church with him, the battered brown hymnal yawning wide and open before her, her fingers tripping along the cracked keys of the organ, while he works at writing sermons or dusting candleholders or placing wafers onto a gleaming silver tray, arranging them in spirals that curve inward and tumble forward into the empty center of the plate.

She plays more often and she plays more loudly because she doesn't like how silent the church has become, or how lonely she feels beneath the vaulted white ceiling even when the minister is right there with her. She doesn't like the way that Noah
stands so still on one side of the church, staring for long minutes into the navy blue sky of the stained-glass windows. She doesn't like the way he drifts so noiselessly across the soft carpet of the altar, he who used to hum off-key hymns to himself as he went. She doesn't know what to do, she doesn't know what to say, and so she continues to play, lifting her bare foot from the pedal so that the sound is unmuffled, pure and loud, so that the church is filled with songs that rise skyward to meet the rain that drums down on the dark shingles of the roof.

E
ver since taking in the peacocks, Mauro has adopted a more stately way of walking.

Sometimes when the townspeople step outside to glare at the sky or empty their rain gauges, they see him following the birds through the streets. The peacocks move slowly forward, tails closed tight as clasped fans, and Mauro struts behind them with his stubbled chin up, his chest out, and one of their feathers tucked with a handkerchief into the front pocket of his button-down shirt. If he stops to say hello to a neighbor and the birds lose sight of him, they take great bustling strides around corners until they find him again, flaring their tails in an explosion of turquoise passion. The sudden appearance of so many feathered eyes used to startle Mauro as much as it still startles his neighbors, but he has since become accustomed to these brilliant displays of affection.

The townspeople frown. “Mauro, where is your raincoat?” they demand. “Where is your umbrella? We've told you this a thousand times—you're going to catch your death out there.”

Mauro shrugs, grins. The peacock feather in his pocket is already soaked through and drooping, but he doesn't mind. There are plenty more where that came from.

To be honest, he is not too concerned these days about his death. If it will come, let it come! Since his savings and his homecoming have been washed away, part of him feels that there is not much left to live for. Part of him is determined to survive in this town. And yet another part—the strongest, perhaps—loves the peacocks so dearly that he does not care if keeping their feathers in the house portends death.

In any case, he has already dropped so many umbrellas on the floor and looked so many owls in the eye that a few feathers here or there will not change his fate now. The librarian keeps the owls caged on the shelves in the dusty biology section, and no matter how hard Mauro tries, he cannot escape their yellow gazes. It must be something about the way they turn their heads, he decides as he pages through tips on bird ownership. What is the use in fighting it?

The truth is that Mauro is tired of trying to navigate the cosmos, tired of looking for signs. His hope for a happier future is gone, and so why not simply make the best of the present? What is wrong with cheerful acceptance of the inevitable? As he walks down the streets with his peacocks, he feels oddly elevated and elated, as if he exists on a higher plane than do his neighbors.
He believes that he can see these things more clearly. He watches the townspeople come out of their houses and peer at the sky as if trying to read the clouds. Leesl leans down to check the level in her rain gauge; Mrs. McGinn's husband climbs out of his truck to determine the speed of the water rushing through the streets.

Mauro smiles to himself, shakes his head. He has a theory that everyone these days is looking for some kind of sign: some visible, tangible proof that their faith in this town has not been misplaced. Granted, he also has a theory that if a person spends a certain number of minutes walking in the rain without his slicker or umbrella, this person need not shower as often as he would in a place where it does not rain like this. He believes that carbonated beverages make a person smarter and that horses have a certain sense about the future. In recent days he has looked into the blank brown eyes of the elk and the zebra and the bongo, and he has decided that the same theory does not apply to them. They are only hungry, and stupid, and sometimes mean.

What his friends and neighbors do not understand as well as he does (and yes, he calls them his friends, even if they might not think of themselves in such terms) is that there are no signs except the ones we choose to read. The stop sign is not a stop sign if Mauro does not brake for it; the weatherman's warning is not an omen if no one here will heed it. A man chooses what he will see, what he will follow, and right now Mauro is perfectly happy to walk in the rain and follow his peacocks. Their
tails drag a little in the mud as they look for bugs along the riverbank, and Mauro ambles happily behind, making up his mind to bathe them later.

Near the river, Mauro notices that they are not alone. It is easy enough for Mauro to recognize the figure down by the water, since the minister is the only person in town who dresses all in black, from his slacks to his slicker to his boots. Mauro pauses with the peacocks beneath the makeshift shelter of a willow tree whose branches whip and quiver like ribbons in the wind. From there he watches the minister trudge down the bank to the water, sees him crouch low to the ground and stretch out a hand to feel the river coursing through his fingers. Mauro himself has done this many a time before. When money still flowed into town, the city council hired a young architect to design a series of pedestrian bridges spanning the water at measured intervals from one end of town to the other. Mauro remembers many sweltering summer afternoons spent drifting slowly downstream in his rowboat, a fishing line hanging over the side. The little craft would slide from sunlight to shade, flowing into the long shadows cast by one bridge, and then another. After he had wrestled the fish into the boat, he would watch them take great gasping breaths, their curved sides heaving, clouds floating through their mirrored eyes. Mauro used to love those summer hours. He remembers feeling content and at peace every time he set foot in that boat, happy in a way he rarely felt on land.

Why else would he have hidden his money there? He
shakes his head in consternation, still cannot believe the boat is gone.

He peers down the bank, tries to determine what exactly Noah is doing. Do all ministers share this strange affinity to water? Does Noah not remember that the last minister who went down there did not make it up the banks again?

Mauro knows that lately Noah has been acting strangely: he has seen the minister wandering at odd times through odd places in town. This must be how Noah came to be at the river on his own, staring with great concentration at a rotten log extending out into the water. Mauro watches him rise to his feet and take one cautious step out onto the log. When it holds, he takes another, his arms stretched wide for balance. He sways a little in the wind, looking like a great black bird trembling in the rain above the water. Noah takes a third step, and a fourth. A few more and he will have reached the end of the log.

As a child Mauro had once attended a circus, and the sight of Noah now reminds him of the performers he saw walking on tightropes and swinging on trapezes as if they were born to live in air instead of on land. For weeks afterward he spent several hours a day constructing his own gymnasium in his mother's garden. He balanced on fences and hung from trees, but he was no good at it—and although his mother did not scold him when he came inside with scrapes and bruises, by the time he broke his arm she lost her patience.
Basta,
she told him, enough was enough. Of course we all must test our limits, she said, but the wise man will recognize when he can go no further.

With an unfamiliar sense of foreboding, Mauro tenses beneath the willow tree, feels the tufts of coarse white hair rising on his arms. The man is a minister—not an acrobat. What is he trying to prove?

Because the log slopes down into the water, Mauro cannot tell exactly where it ends. Two steps farther and the current is washing over Noah's feet, so that although Mauro knows the minister is still standing on the rotten wood, he can no longer see it. Indeed, there is a fraction of a second before Mauro tears himself free of the tree branches and goes barreling down the bank, the peacocks shrieking at his back, when he believes that the minister
is
walking on the water, that unlike Mauro himself he has succeeded in going several steps beyond his human boundaries, that the God he has been looking for is right there hanging on to him, keeping his feet suspended just a hairsbreadth above the grasping silver waves. From the expression on Noah's face—the sudden illumination, the flare of unsullied joy—Mauro is convinced that in that instant, he believes it, too.

And then he falls. He falls like a bird shot from the sky, like the rain in a town that he will have to leave behind. He falls like Mauro's heart when the illusion crumbles to pieces before him, when the world reminds him once again—brutally, ruthlessly—that there is no one guiding his steps or holding him up; that when his foot strikes against a rock or his fingers slip one by one from his homemade trapeze, the only thing reaching out to catch him will be the earth itself, cold and hard and merciless.