The Age of Grief (23 page)

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “That’s your skin.”

I stood in the shower for about twenty minutes.

And then it was Friday, everyone in school, day care, work, all support services functioning, the routine as smooth as stainless steel. I was thirty-five, which is young these days, resilient, vital, glad to be in the office, glad to see Laura and Dave, glad to drill and fill and hold X-rays up to the light. In our week away, the spring had advanced, and the trees outside my examination room window were budded out.

As soon as the embryo can hear, what it hears is the music of the mother’s body—the
lub-dup
of her heart, the riffle of blood surging in her arteries, the slosh of amniotic fluids. What sound, so close up, does the stomach make, the
esophagus? Do the disks of the spine creak? Do the lungs sound like a bellows or a conch shell? Toward the end of pregnancy, when the pelvis loosens, is there a groan of protest from the bony plates? Maybe it is such sounds that I am recalling when I sit on my chair with the door to my office half closed and feel that rush of pleasure hearing the conversation in the hall, or in Dana’s office. Delilah’s voice swells: “And then they—” It fades. Dave: “But if you—” Dana: “Tomorrow we had better—” The simplest words, words without content, the body of the office surging and creaking. Dana’s heels, click click, the hydraulic hum of her dental chair rising. In my office, I am that embryo for a second, eyes bulging, mouth open, little hand raised, little fingers spread. I have been so reduced by the danger of the last few weeks that the light shines through me. Does the embryo feel embryonic doubt and then, like me, feel himself nestling into those sounds, that giant heart, carrying him beat by confident beat into the future—waltz, fox-trot, march, jig, largo, adagio, allegro? I don’t sing, as Dana does, but I listen. Jennifer Lyons, age fourteen, pushes open the door, peeps in. “Hi,” I say, “have a seat.” And I am myself again, and the workday continues.

And continued. And continued. She made lasagna for dinner. Saturday she got a baby-sitter and we went to the movies. Afterward we stopped at the restaurant next to the office and had a drink. She put her arm through mine. I watched her face. Now I could speak, but what would I say? If there was not this subject between us, I could have talked about the news, our friends, the office, our daughters, but now I could say nothing. We sat close, she put her hand on my knee. I drank the odor of her body into the core of my brain, where it imprinted.

On Sunday there was laundry and old food in the refrigerator. We mopped the floors, and Dana was seized with the compulsion to straighten drawers. I raked mulch off the flower beds and got out the lawn mower and climbed the ladder to clear leaves out of the eaves troughs. Lizzie and Stephanie spent the weekend obsessively exploring the neighborhood, like dogs reestablishing their territory. Leah took this opportunity to play, by herself, with every one of their toys that she had been forbidden over the winter. I liked her touch. She didn’t want to damage, she only wanted to appraise. I thought of my temptation to speak on Saturday night with horror. Each of these normal weekend hours seemed like a disaster averted.

Monday at noon Dana and Delilah were late, did not appear. Dave was surprised at my surprise. Man to man. He didn’t look at me. He said, looking at the floor, “Didn’t you know that she canceled everything?” Man to man. I didn’t look at him. I said, “Maybe she told me and I wasn’t listening. It was a busy morning.” Man to man. We glanced at each other briefly, embarrassed.

She was not at home at three, when I got there to wait for the big girls.

She was not at home at five fifteen, when I got back from the day-care center with Leah, or at five thirty, when I put in the baking potatoes and turned on the oven.

She was not at home at seven, when we sat down to eat our meat and potatoes. Lizzie said, “Where’s Mommy?”

I said, “I don’t know,” and they all looked at me, even Leah. I repeated, “I don’t know,” and they looked at their dinners, and one by one they made up their minds to eat, anyway, and I did, too, without thinking, without prying into the mystery, without taking any position at all.

She was not at home when Leah went to bed at eight, or when Lizzie and Stephanie went to bed at nine.

She was not at home when I went to bed at eleven, or when I woke up at one and realized that she was gone. At first I considered practicalities—how we would divide up the house and the business and the odd number of children. These were dauntingly perplexing, so I considered Dana herself, the object, the force, the person that is the force within the object. In the confusion of dental school, of fighting with my father, of knowing that my draft lottery number was just on the verge of being not high enough, of taking out a lot of student loans and living on $25 a week, I remember feeling a desire for Dana when she first appeared, when she paused in the doorway that second day of class and cast her eyes about the room, that was hard and pure, that contained me and could not be contained, and I remember making that bargain that people always make—anything for this thing.

No doubt it was the same bargain that Dana was making right then, at one in the morning, somewhere else in town.

She was not at home at three, when I finally got up and went downstairs for a glass of milk, or at four, when I went back to bed and fell asleep, or at seven, when Leah started calling out, or at seven thirty, when Lizzie discovered that all the clothes she had to wear were unacceptable, or at eight forty-five, when I checked the house one last time before checking the office. Dave caught my eye involuntarily as I opened the door, and shrugged. At eleven the phone rang, and then Dave came into my examination room between patients and said, “She canceled again.” I nodded and straightened the instruments on my tray. At two my last patient failed to show, and I went home to clean up for the girls.

She was sitting at the dining room table. I sat down across from her, and when she looked at me, I said, “Until last night I still thought I might be misreading the signals.”

She shook her head.

“Well, are you leaving or staying?”

“Staying.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

I said, “Let’s not talk about it for a while, okay?”

She nodded. And we looked at each other. It was two thirty.

The big girls would be home in forty minutes.

Shall I say that I welcomed my wife back with great sadness, more sadness than I had felt at any other time? It seems to me that marriage is a small container, after all, barely large enough to hold some children. Two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking it, deforming it. Or maybe it is not a thing at all, nothing, something not present. I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking about it.