The Pull of the Moon (10 page)

Early morning, the whole world seeming to be still and waiting. I am out on the porch with coffee and amazement. I spent the night with another man. How did this happen? It occurs to me that to start with seeing him come out of the woods would be wrong. It starts somewhere else
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There have been times, lately, when I have thought about suicide in a way so dispassionate I know it is serious. Oh, I thought about it in college, because everyone else was thinking about it, it was the artful thing to do. But I didn’t mean it. It was a contagious fantasy, an imagined cure for many woes. Perhaps, rather than dealing with unrequited love or a forty-page term paper, we would kill ourselves. Every woman I knew had approximately the same vision for suicide, too; we would talk about it sometimes when we got together for pizza in someone’s room late at night
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This was the scenario: we would have on eyeliner, no mascara. We would be wearing black clothes, one bangle bracelet. Our hair would be loose and flowing and extremely clean. We would be on our backs, barefoot, lying on a made bed, a poetic note of explanation in our pale, pale, hands. Dangling earrings would lie still in the small valleys behind our ear lobes, minute circles of color pooled uselessly beneath the gemstones. There would be a flurry of phone calls, people would weep and sigh and we would somehow be aware of this
.

It was fun to imagine. When we were in classes we hated, we enjoyed it especially. I remember my biology professor droning on one day about invertebrates, and I closed my eyes and saw my own last breath—deep and satisfying, my young breasts rising up one last time to nothing. I was so captured by the image I jumped when a breeze came through the window and lifted my hair, reminding me of my own hereness
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But what I felt recently was not like that. Rather, it was like this: I would be coming home from the grocery store, stopped at a traffic light. I would look out the window at a tree, at a storefront, at a person walking past and think, oh, enough. There is nothing I want to see. There is nothing left. I want to be done. The car would be smelling of scallions and my front would be aching from my collar bones to my hips
.
It was a pain like hunger, but more hollow. And more acute. Then the light would change, and I would go home and put the scallions away and fold the paper bags up neatly and store them under the cabinet
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This happened frequently, this sudden drop into despair followed by the resigned resumption of my required life; and then, perhaps somewhere in the middle of making dinner, I’d notice that the pain had gone away. I would stand still to check; and yes, it had gone away
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One afternoon, I had taken a bath and I was standing in my towel and I dropped it and had a good long look and I did not recognize myself. I stepped close to the mirror, looked into my own eyes, and did not recognize myself. I put on a robe, walked around the house, from room to room. Martin’s desk was dusty, and I used my robe sleeve to wipe it off. The phone rang when I was in the kitchen, and I stared at it, lifted the receiver and then hung it up. Then I turned off the answering machine so that when they called back I wouldn’t have to hear who it was. They did call back, whoever it was, and the phone rang and rang and rang, which you rarely hear anymore, everyone has a machine that says
, What?
What do you want? Just tell the machine
.

I went into Ruthie’s room and I turned her bedside lamp
on and off and then I stood for awhile looking at what was left there, what she hadn’t taken with her to her apartment. In her closet were a few clothes, including the dress I bought her when we went to Mexico together. It had seemed so beautiful there, but I don’t believe she ever wore it once we got home. Still, I was happy she’d kept it. On the closet shelf were some shoe boxes and I pulled one down, looked inside and found her Doggie, his ears worn thin as paper from her using them to rub her nose when she sucked her thumb. Once, when we were on vacation, she left Doggie at a restaurant. We drove back ninety miles to get him and I didn’t say a word the whole way, I couldn’t. Now he lay in a shoebox, treasured in absentia. I smelled him and I could smell Ruthie, the way she used to smell when she was little and had just woken up. I put him back on the shelf and I left the top of the box askew, so he could breathe
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I went back into the bathroom, intending to put on the clothes I’d brought in there with me, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat on the edge of the tub and I was thinking, first I fill up the tub with water again, to help facilitate the bleeding. That much I know. There was an emery board lying next to the bathroom sink and I picked it up and drew a line across my wrists. Then I thought, no, that’s the wrong way. You go
up and down. To go crosswise is to be back in college, wanting the odd admiration that comes from wearing bandages over your wrists. This is different. This is coming from a true fatigue, a wish lacking in drama, flat with its plainness, but oh, so sincere
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I turned on the tap, and the tub started to fill. I got a razor from the medicine chest, the kind with one side protected, the kind you use to cut off calluses. I didn’t want to hurt myself while I was hurting myself. When the tub was half full, I got in and put the razor to my wrist. I held it there, the sun glinted prettily off it, and I started to cut but then immediately stopped and got out of the tub and the next time the phone rang I answered it and I was very cheerful. I thought, most of my brain is normal. But somewhere in a dangerous corner, it is not. I thought, how long can I cross my legs and converse, put away the coffee cups, bring in the morning paper? I don’t think much longer. I am so exhausted, I just don’t think much longer
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So. That is what came before what happened last night
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I was sitting out on the porch of my tiny cabin, thinking, where do I go tomorrow? In what direction? I was imagining a compass drawn on a map, a smiling sun with four of his fat rays labeled in old-fashioned script, N,S,E,W, when I heard
the sound of twigs snapping. I thought for a moment it was an animal, but then I saw the shape of a person coming toward me. I stood, backed up to the door, felt my heart beating in my throat. A man said, oh, sorry, did he startle me? I said no no, not at all. Yes I did, he said, and I said you’re right. He stepped forward into the small island of yellow coming from my porch light. His hands were in his pockets, his face apologetic. He said he was from the cabin next door, he’d just arrived that night. I took a walk in the woods, he said. Didn’t see anything. Don’t know how I could have, though, I didn’t even have a flashlight. Got pretty spooked, he said, it’s some intense dark out there. I said probably there was a flashlight in his kitchen drawer, there was one in mine. Right-hand side. In with the church key and can opener, all that stuff. He said oh really he hadn’t looked in any of the drawers. I thought, isn’t that the difference. The woman makes a home immediately; the man walks in to claim it, then leaves it. In my cabin, there was a glass full of wildflowers on the little kitchen table. The towels in the bathroom hung evenly. My magazines lay neatly stacked on the small table by the sofa, a collection of rocks I’d found and admired nearby. Nan’s here, the cabin said. If anyone wants to know
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I invited the man in for tea. He seemed so forlorn. He reminded me of little boys I’d seen standing on the edge of a group, so obviously excluded it broke your heart to watch them. He nodded, came through the door and I saw how tall he was, must have been a good 6 ’4”. I used to have a real thing for tall men—well, it was tall boys at the time. I wanted to be with a basketball player. I was tall myself, and it seemed very important to me to have the boy bend down far to kiss me. Nobody but a basketball player could do that. I only had one date with a very tall boy, and I was so excited I made a fool of myself. He never asked me out again. And he never kissed me, either, even though when he brought me home and we stood at my front door I laid my purse at my feet, signaling my readiness. “See you,” he said, and walked away. I watched him go, my tree man, my tower, my tall person who hated my guts
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After Ruthie was born, I developed a thing for beards. I asked Martin to grow one but he said no, he’d tried it once and it didn’t work, there were bare spots all over his face where it just wouldn’t come in. I said that was when you were younger, try again now and he said no. So I fell in love with our pediatrician, who had a wonderful beard. It was a play love, with a flame that went out whenever I was really around him
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So this tall man, Robert was his name, came in and sat in my tiny living room. Your cabin is nicer than mine, he said, looking around, and I said, oh, I’d just put a few touches in, that’s all, I’d been there a few days, was leaving tomorrow. He asked where I was from and I was suddenly very tired of explaining myself so I just said I was from Boston and I was on my way to visit my sister in Arizona, and I hoped he wouldn’t ask any questions because I knew absolutely nothing about Arizona except that I thought you could get nice turquoise there. Of course I knew absolutely nothing about sisters, either, never having had one. But what brings
you
here, I asked, and he started to answer me and then, I couldn’t believe it, he put his hands over his face and began to weep—racking, ragged sobs. I sat immobilized. I didn’t know what to do. It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry. I know it’s supposed to be wonderful, men getting in touch with their feminine side and all that, but the truth is it makes me so uncomfortable I want to scream. Even when it’s just men on the movie screens, I want to say, “Stop that!” I want to say, “Remember yourself, why don’t you! You’re a man!” It’s a bad sentiment, it’s wrong; but it’s how I feel
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Finally, he stopped crying and looked up at me, red-eyed
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“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he had a cold, which seemed suddenly like such a sweet thing, like a pale green shoot in an early summer garden, something you’d want to bend over and protect. I said no, no, it was fine, it was all right, was there anything I could do? He asked if I had some Kleenex and I went into the bedroom to get him some and when I did I had a thought: This is sexual, being in a bedroom, getting something to bring out to a man. He blew his nose—in the usual manly, honking way, I was happy to see—and then said, “I just … I’m sorry. My wife just died. I’m here to … I needed to get away.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. He looked so young. I felt a million questions jostle for position in my brain. Died from what? Were you there? What did it feel like? What did you say to each other? And then Martin appeared in my head, alive, standing with his hands in his khaki pants, his blue shirt open at the throat. I had a thought to call him and say, “Don’t! Don’t do anything! I’ll be right home!” And then the feeling passed, like a shiver does
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Robert said, “It was … well, the funeral was a week ago. Maybe it’s too soon to be gone, but I just had to …” He stood up and apologized again, he was so embarrassed. I said listen, you don’t have to apologize. He said it must be weird
,
seeing a man cry and I said oh no, not at all, hoping my face was not giving me away. He said Well, looked to the door. It was very quiet. You could hear the low buzz of the living-room lamp. I said suddenly, I have a bottle of wine, would you like a drink? He nodded, sat down again, and I poured us two coffee cups full, and we began to talk
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He told me how his wife died, it was an aggressive form of lymphoma. From the time she was diagnosed until the day she died was only seven months. She was thirty-three. He said on the day they got the bad news, she came home and changed out of her dress and he saw her standing at their bedroom window in her slip, and he thought, this is the end of normal. I don’t know how I’ll live without her, he said, I don’t know what I am without her. They had no children—she’d not been able to conceive, and he said now he didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I know children usually offer some compensation, he said, but if I had someone around with her face, with her eyes … Then he asked did I have any children. I said yes and I told him about Ruthie. I told him little stories about her growing up, from bringing her home from the hospital all the way up to moving her into her own place. He listened, but in an abstract way that let me know my words were just a calming distraction. He listened
the way a child listens to soothing words from a parent; the content doesn’t matter, it’s the fact of a kind voice that counts, that works
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I realized at one point that my throat hurt a little from talking and I looked at my watch and it was 2:50. I started laughing and he looked at me and I said do you know what time it is? I showed him my watch and he said oh I’m so sorry and I said no, you didn’t make me do this. I wanted to do this. My hair had started to fall down from the bun I’d put in so long ago, and I pulled the pins out and he said oh, you have long hair, that’s nice. I said well, when you got to be my age it looked sort of silly, but I had always had long hair, I didn’t feel myself without it. He said what do you mean “your age,” how old are you? I had an awful temptation to say, How old do you think? but I hate it when people ask that. How they cock their heads when they ask that. Then I thought of saying, I’m sixty-four, so he would say how young I looked. But I didn’t. I said, I’m fifty, and I felt ashamed. He nodded. The age of losses, I said, and he said, pardon? I nearly yelled, This is the age of losses! as though he were some wizened geezer sitting next to me cupping his hand around his ear. What are you losing? he asked. And what I thought I was losing in the face of what he had in fact lost
seemed so ridiculous. My great tragedy is that I got to live past thirty-three
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