Scissors (18 page)

Aunt Susie had opened the little house for us, a cottage situated close to the sea. Uncle Paul called it “the cabin.” They used to store a small boat and some beach accessories there. The boat was gone, but folding chairs, wooden rackets, and a net rolled into a ball were still piled up in a corner. My aunt’s children live far away. They don’t come home for holidays. They have small children of their own, and the old folks’ house isn’t a very attractive destination. In those parts even the summers have something wintry about them.

It was cold in the cabin, especially at night. The evening before, after Dan arrived, I’d loaned him a sweater (I was sure he’d forget to bring one) before lying down on the bed. I was expecting that we’d have a conversation. Not a lengthy thrashing-out, but a brief exchange with the breaking waves in the background. He lay beside me and took my hand. He stroked the finger where I used to wear my wedding band. It wasn’t there anymore. I’d taken it off and stuck it in the glove compartment. At the moment, I regretted doing that.

When I opened my eyes again, it was morning. I’d slept with my clothes on. I turned over and saw Dan sitting in the wicker chair. He was smoking (the smell of tobacco had awakened me), and I could barely make out his face. The venetian blinds behind him were parallel, horizontal lines. Dan didn’t say a word. I had the impression he didn’t see me.

“Did I tell you Christine sends you a kiss?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I spoke to her yesterday.”

He exhaled smoke. After a moment he said, “I wrote her before I left. I was answering one of her letters. I wish she wouldn’t get her feelings hurt so easily …” (He leaned
forward. The wicker creaked softly.) “ ‘Shit, Christine,’ I told her, ‘when you write a letter, pay attention to your sentences. Use commas, put periods, and I don’t know what else. But don’t write these twenty-page screeds!’ She’s twenty years old, for Pete’s sake.”

“She’s not a writer. She’s not you.”

“It’s not a question of writing. It’s a question of using short sentences.”

Dan stopped talking. I’d turned over on my back. The agreeable sensation that filled me upon waking was gone. I heard the sound of the waves, and I remembered the chaos of our family life. The times when Christine had run away, the way Vincent would look at us when we got drunk in front of him, the parties that never ended and kept him from sleeping. We’d forget to get up and take them to school. One morning, while Dan was speeding along, driving Christine to her singing class, he crashed into a police car. He was sitting in the driver’s seat in his underpants. Afterward, he mimicked the expressions on the cops’ faces. How we laughed that day. Even Christine, who’d missed her class.

Then everything got worse. It seems crazy that we remained husband and wife. We stayed together for the children, I suppose. Not so we could protect them but so we could protect ourselves. Maintain the illusion that they needed their parents.

My shoes were full of sand. It was more crumbly in Dan’s footprints, which were where I was putting my feet. I ended up walking on solid ground.

I didn’t want our weekend of patching things up to be ruined. I said, “We can change the mattress.”

He looked at me.

“There’s another mattress in the garage, leaning against the wall.”

A couple of senior citizens passed us on the beach. They had their arms around each other’s waists, and the wind was puffing up their clothes just as it was ours. The woman smiled at us. The man flicked his fingers against the visor of his cap. I smiled at them. Dan was looking at the sand.

“Is it an innerspring?”

“What?”

“The mattress in the garage. Is it an innerspring?”

“How should I know?”

“That’s what I need. It’s not a luxury item,” he added, seeing my expression. “Most mattresses are innerspring.”

“I find it hard to believe—”

“I’m telling you.”

“I find it hard to believe we’re talking about mattresses.”

I turned around. The senior citizens, no longer strolling along the beach, were walking up to Aunt Susie’s house.

“I’m sorry,” Dan said.

It seemed to me he wasn’t talking about the mattress, he was making a general apology. For having left. For the twenty years that were in the act of slipping through our fingers.

“Chloe—”

“Look.”

I’d just noticed the boat that used to be stored in the cabin. It was stranded on the beach a few yards from the waterline.

We exchanged glances. There was a light in Dan’s eyes.
I could already see us far from the shore, celebrating our reunion with a little excursion in that boat.

We went over to it and looked inside. The boat’s bottom was worm-eaten. Long strips of sand showed through the cracks. In a corner of the boat was a small yellow plastic bucket full of seawater.

“Let’s go get the mattress,” I said.

We had the whole day in front of us. An entire day to carry the mattress from the garage to the cabin.

The label contained the word “innerspring.”

Dan nodded and said, “I told you.”

“You think the two of us can carry it?”

“I can carry it by myself.”

The mattress looked heavy to me. Especially for someone whose back hurt. When Dan pulled on the side handle, the mattress tipped over onto the garage floor. The top half of the mattress was charred. The fire had apparently been extinguished before it could burn the bottom half.

“Piece of crap,” Dan said. “Unusable.”

“Why are you saying that? I’m sure we could sleep on it.”

“You want to sleep on that thing? Really?”

The fluorescent lights, which we hadn’t switched on, began to sizzle. Aunt Susie came into the garage. “Here I am, at your service!” she said.

She strode in with her usual light step, wearing her kitchen apron. My aunt knew that Dan was fond of her shortbread cookies. The visit from her neighbors, the couple we’d seen on the beach, had distracted her from her task.

When we’d arrived back, she’d been just seeing them off. I’d asked her if we could borrow the mattress. All she’d said was, “Go on, I’ll be there in a minute.”

The fluorescent lights reflected on her brown hair. “I should have warned you,” she said. “It’s been damaged.”

The lilt in her voice contrasted with Dan’s sullen demeanor. I elbowed him so he’d make an effort to smile. He gave me an uncomprehending look.

Aunt Susie seemed to want to settle the matter as soon as possible and get back to her cookies.

I said in a jocular tone, “Was someone playing with matches?”

“It was Paul. Ten days ago, he started tinkering with the car engine. He caused a short circuit and something caught fire. The flames blackened the windshield, but fortunately Paul wasn’t hurt. I heard him yell and got to him in time. I took down the fire extinguisher and …”

We were looking at the mattress.

“It was on the roof of the car,” my aunt explained.

The burn mark was shaped like a man’s head on an elongated torso.

“It could have been worse.”

I was the one who said those words, and I felt stupid.

My aunt winked and said, “Well, we won’t be giving him the launch codes.”

The wink was addressed to Dan. She was no doubt implying that he should make a story out of the incident. But that wasn’t his type of story. He did couples who ruin each other’s lives or people who can’t manage to stay sober or
make a home. He wrote about what he knew. I would have liked it if just for once he would have told a story about Uncle Paul setting off a nuclear war.

I smiled at my aunt to indicate that she was wasting her time, but she’d already turned toward Dan. “Take it if you want it,” she said.

After we carried the mattress to the cabin, we went back to the house to eat cookies. It was the first time I’d had a good look at Uncle Paul since the onset of his sickness. The previous evening, I’d seen him through the doorway of his room, sitting on the bed and unbuttoning his shirt. He’d raised his eyes as if he felt himself being watched. I’d waved at him. He hadn’t recognized me.

This evening Uncle Paul was in the living room, looking out at the ocean. Toward the horizon the sea was calm, but waves were pounding the shore. At brief intervals, trails of foam ebbed back.

My uncle was a man of imposing size. Aunt Susie used to say he could have been a sports coach. His talent was for training other people. But patience was not his strong point. If you lingered in a restroom, he was the kind of guy who would get tired of waiting for you and drive off. Aunt Susie had once paid the price for staying too long in the ladies’ at a highway service area. Now Uncle Paul couldn’t go anywhere without her.

When he woke up in the morning, she’d comb his hair. That simple act had become impossible for him. His face had the expression of someone waiting for the punch line of a joke. He’d look at you with his mouth slightly open. You’d feel
obliged to put on the same look. Or to tell a story and defer its ending so he’d have reasons to be continually surprised.

He was still able to talk. He’d speak his questions out loud. He’d wonder where he’d parked the car (he never mentioned the garage) or whether someone would come and get him at a given time (my aunt was the only person taking care of him) or who was going to come and when.

Very quickly, we all had cookies in our mouths. Dan swallowed two at once.

I turned to my uncle and said, “We found the boat this morning.”

He screwed up his eyes.

“It had a little bucket in it. A yellow bucket.”

Dan asked my aunt, “Did it belong to your children?”

I wanted Dan to address at least a few words to my uncle, the beginnings of a conversation, but Dan didn’t understand. I frowned. He took a paper napkin from the coffee table. His knees were covered with cookie crumbs.

Aunt Susie got up to serve the tea.

“A yellow bucket? Someone must have forgotten it. Who takes milk?”

I waved the milk off. Dan held out his cup. My aunt looked at him benevolently. “What are you writing at the moment?”

“At the moment, I’m not writing anything.”

“He’s going to a colloquium.”

My voice had turned shrill, as if I was announcing an exploit.

“A meeting of writers?”

“No,” Dan said, sounding apologetic. “University professors. They study my short stories and see things in them I didn’t see when I wrote them.”

“Impressive.”

I glanced at my uncle. For an instant, I thought he looked the way he’d looked in former days. He was keeping his mouth closed. He seemed attentive.

Dan put his hands on his knees. Then he spoke, a little more softly than before: “When I went to AA meetings, everyone told their story. The rest of us listened. We recognized ourselves in the other people’s stories.”

My aunt and I exchanged glances. Dan had taken me by surprise. I’d never mentioned his drinking problem to Aunt Susie. I’d been silent about my own troubles with alcohol, too. Drinking with your husband in order to feel less alone had turned out to be a bad move.

Then something happened. Uncle Paul sat forward on his chair. He planted his feet solidly and waggled his fingers. His tongue lolled out as he tapped hard on the empty air. Every time his index fingers struck the invisible keys, he made a moist, salivating sound. Each sound corresponded to a keystroke. Not only was this a funny sight, but his movements were also somehow graceful.

He was imitating Dan at his typewriter: not just a drunken man but a man determined to stay the course despite the state into which drink had plunged him.

Uncle Paul knew more about Dan than I thought.

We sat staring, our cups suspended in midair, utterly surprised to see my uncle revive before our eyes.

During those few seconds, it seemed to me that nothing was tragic, that with a little goodwill we could overcome everything. I took Dan’s hand and squeezed it.

Dan stroked my hand as he’d done the night before, his fingers passing over mine, feeling for the wedding ring.

It was still in the glove compartment, but a vision from I don’t know where rose before my eyes, and I saw my wedding ring floating in the yellow bucket and the bottom of the boat covered with sand and water, which ebbed and flowed and made the wedding ring, the bucket, the whole boat shake.

“Dinner was delicious. Like the whole day. What a delicious day. Your aunt is a delicious person.”

“You’re talking like Gertrude Stein.”

Having said yes to everything my aunt had proposed to pour for me, I’d returned to the cabin fairly tipsy. Dan had drunk nothing but water.

My remark made him smile. When we were students, one of our games consisted of repeating the same word from one sentence to the next, as Gertrude Stein did in her stories.

Dan’s smile vanished. “I’m tired,” he said. “I feel better than I did this morning, but I’m tired. This morning I had a backache, but I wasn’t tired.”

He fell silent. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, unbuttoning my sweater. Dan lay on the burned mattress.

In a hesitant voice, he said, “I hope we can love each other.”

The only light in the cabin came from a little lamp at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t make out Dan’s features.

Was he talking about loving each other though separated or loving each other and staying together?

“Do you want to sleep with me?”

He was out of the bed now, standing beside the innerspring mattress and waiting for my answer.

I pricked up my ears for the sound of the sea.

You would have thought it had receded altogether.

I slept beside Dan on the innerspring. Or rather I snuggled up against him and waited for sleep to come.

The sound of the breaking waves returned with obsessive regularity. I set myself to counting them.

I felt Dan’s breath on my neck. Like a current of warm air filtering under the door. I forbade myself to stir, to make the slightest movement. I didn’t want to awaken him.

The minutes, the hours went by.

I counted to a hundred and then back to one without putting myself to sleep. Sentences began to form in my head. Then they crumbled away like sand castles.