The time traveler's wife (21 page)

"Sister," she says, "what's your
name?" I hesitate. "Clare," I finally say. She looks back at
Ingrid. "Clare. A word to the wise. You are mixing in where you're not
wanted. Henry, he's bad news, but he's Ingrid's bad news, and you be a fool to
mess with him. You hear what I'm saying?"

I don't want to know but I can't help myself.
"What are you talking about?"

"They were going to get married. Then
Henry, he breaks it off, tells Ingrid he's sorry, never mind, just forget it. I
say she's better off without him, but she don't listen. He treats her bad,
drinks like they ain't making it no more, disappears for days and then comes
around like nothing happened, sleeps with anything that stands still long
enough. That's Henry. When he makes you moan and cry, don't say nobody never
told you." She turns abruptly and walks back to Ingrid, who is still
staring at me, who is looking at me with unconditional despair. I must be
gaping at them. "I'm sorry," I say, and I flee.

I wander the halls and finally find an alcove
that's empty except for a young Goth girl passed out on a vinyl couch with a
burning cigarette between her fingers. I take it from her and stub it out on
the filthy tile. I sit on the arm of the couch and the music vibrates through
my tailbone up my spine. I can feel it in my teeth. I still need to pee and my
head hurts. I want to cry. I don't understand what just happened. That is, I
understand but I don't know what I should do about it. I don't know if I should
just forget it, or get upset at Henry and demand an explanation, or what. What
did I expect? I wish I could send a postcard into the past, to this cad Henry
who I don't know: Do nothing, Wait for me. Wish you were here. Henry sticks his
head around the corner. "There you are. I thought I'd lost you."

Short hair. Henry has either gotten his hair
cut in the last half hour or I'm looking at my favorite chrono-displaced
person. I jump up and fling myself at him.

"Oompf—hey, glad to see you, too..."

"I've missed you—" now I am crying.

"You've been with me almost nonstop for
weeks."

"I know but—you're not you, yet—I mean,
you're different. Damn." I lean against the wall and Henry presses against
me. We kiss, and then Henry starts licking my face like a mama cat. I try to
purr and start laughing. "You asshole. You're trying to distract me from
your infamous behavior—"

"What behavior? I didn't know you existed.
I was unhappily dating Ingrid. I met you. I broke up with Ingrid less than
twenty-four hours later. I mean, infidelity isn't retroactive, you know?"

"She said—"

"Who said?"

"The black woman." I mime long hair.
"Short, big eyes, dreads—"

"Oh Lord. That's Celia Attley. She
despises me. She's in love with Ingrid."

"She said you were going to marry Ingrid.
That you drink all the time, fuck around, and are basically a bad person and I
should run. That's what she said."

Henry is torn between mirth and incredulity.
"Well, some of that is actually true. I did fuck around, a lot, and I
certainly have been known to drink rather prodigiously. But we weren't engaged.
I would never have been insane enough to marry Ingrid. We were royally
miserable together."

"But then why—"

"Clare, very few people meet their
soulmates at age six. So you gotta pass the time somehow. And Ingrid was very—
patient. Overly patient. Willing to put up with odd behavior, in the hope that
someday I would shape up and marry her martyred ass. And when somebody is that
patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that
make any sense?"

"I guess. I mean, no, not to me, but I
don't think that way."

Henry sighs. "It's very charming of you to
be ignorant of the twisted logic of most relationships. Trust me. When we met I
was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together
because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.
And I have been trying to do it without you noticing, because I still haven't
figured out that all pretense is useless between us. But it's a long way from
the me you're dealing with in 1991 to me, talking to you right now from 1996.
You have to work at me; I can't get there alone."

"Yes, but it's hard. I'm not used to being
the teacher."

"Well, whenever you feel discouraged,
think of all the hours I spent, am spending, with your tiny self. New math and
botany, spelling and American history. I mean, you can say nasty things to me
in French because I sat there and drilled you on them."

"Too true. Il a les defauts de ses
qualites. But I bet it's easier to teach all that than to teach how to
be—happy."

"But you make me happy. It's living up to
being happy that's the difficult part." Henry is playing with my hair,
twirling it into little knots. "Listen, Clare, I'm going to return you to
the poor imbecile you came in with. I'm sitting upstairs feeling depressed and
wondering where you are."

I realize that I have forgotten my present
Henry in my joy at seeing my once and future Henry, and I am ashamed. I feel an
almost maternal longing to go solace the strange boy who is becoming the man
before me, the one who kisses me and leaves me with an admonition to be nice.
As I walk up the stairs I see the Henry of my future fling himself into the
midst of the slam dancers, and I move as in a dream to find the Henry who is my
here and now.

CHRISTMAS EVE,
THREE

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, December 24, 25,
26, 1991 (Clare is 20, Henry is 28)

Clare: It's 8:32 a.m. on the twenty-fourth of
December and Henry and I are on our way to Meadowlark House for Christmas. It's
a beautiful clear day, no snow here in Chicago, but six inches on the ground in
South Haven. Before we left, Henry spent time repacking the car, checking the
tires, looking under the hood. I don't think he had the slightest idea what he
was looking at. My car is a very cute 1990 white Honda Civic, and I love it,
but Henry really hates riding in cars, especially small cars. He's a horrible
passenger, holding onto the armrest and braking the whole time we're in
transit. He would probably be less afraid if he could be the driver, but for
obvious reasons Henry doesn't have a driver's license. So we are sailing along
the Indiana Toll Road on this fine winter day; I'm calm and looking forward to
seeing my family and Henry is a basket case. It doesn't help that he didn't run
this morning; I've noticed that Henry needs an incredible amount of physical
activity all the time in order to be happy. It's like hanging out with a
greyhound. It's different being with Henry in real time. When I was growing up
Henry came and went, and our encounters were concentrated and dramatic and
unsettling. Henry had a lot of stuff he wasn't going to tell me, and most of
the time he wouldn't let me get anywhere near him, so I always had this
intense, unsatisfied feeling. When I finally found him in the present, I
thought it would be like that. But in fact it's so much better, in many ways.
First and foremost, instead of refusing to touch me at all, Henry is constantly
touching me, kissing me, making love to me. I feel as though I have become a
different person, one who is bathed in a warm pool of desire. And he tells me
things! Anything I ask him about himself, his life, his family—he tells me,
with names, places, dates. Things that seemed utterly mysterious to me as a
child are revealed as perfectly logical. But the best thing of all is that I
see him for long stretches of time—hours, days. I know where to find him. He
goes to work, he comes home. Sometimes I open my address book just to look at
the entry: Henry DeTamble, 714 Dearborn, lie, Chicago, IL 60610, 312-431-8313.
A last name, an address, a phone number. lean call him on the phone. It's a
miracle. I feel like Dorothy, when her house crash-landed in Oz and the world
turned from black and white to color. We're not in Kansas anymore. In fact,
we're about to cross into Michigan, and there's a rest stop. I pull into the
parking lot, and we get out and stretch our legs. We head into the building,
and there's the maps and brochures for the tourists, and the huge bank of
vending machines.

"Wow," Henry says. He goes over and
inspects all the junk food, and then starts reading the brochures. "Hey,
let's go to Frankenmuth! 'Christmas 365 Days a Year!' God, I'd commit hara-kiri
after about an hour of that. Do you have any change?"

I find a fistful of change in the bottom of my
purse and we gleefully spend it on two Cokes, a box of Good & Plenty, and a
Hershey bar. We walk back out into the dry cold air, arm in arm. In the car, we
open our Cokes and consume sugar. Henry looks at my watch. "Such
decadence. It's only 9:15."

"Well, in a couple minutes, it'll be
10:15."

"Oh, right, Michigan's an hour ahead. How
surreal."

I look over at him. "Everything is
surreal. I can't believe you're actually going to meet my family. I've spent so
much time hiding you from my family."

"Only because I adore you beyond reason am
I doing this. I have spent a lot of time avoiding road trips, meeting girls'
families, and Christmas. The fact that I am enduring all three at once proves
that I love you."

"Henry—" I turn to him; we kiss. The
kiss starts to evolve into something more when out of the corner of my eye I
see three prepubescent boys and a large dog standing a few feet away from us,
watching with interest. Henry turns to see what I am looking at and the boys
all grin and give us the thumbs up. They amble off to their parents' van.

"By the way—what are the sleeping
arrangements at your house?"

"Oh, dear. Etta called me yesterday about
that. I'm in my own room and you are in the blue room. We're down the hall from
each other, with my parents and Alicia in between."

"And how committed are we to maintaining
this?"

I start the car and we get back on the highway.
"I don't know because I've never done this before. Mark just brings his
girlfriends downstairs to the rec room and boffs them on the couch in the wee
hours, and we all pretend not to notice. If things are difficult we can always
go down to the Reading Room; I used to hide you down there."

"Hmm. Oh, well." Henry looks out the
window for a while. "You know, this isn't too bad."

"What?"

"Riding. In a car. On the highway."
"Golly. Next you'll be getting on planes." "Never."

"Paris. Cairo. London. Kyoto."

"No way. I am convinced that I would time
travel and Lord knows if I would be able to get back to something flying 350
miles an hour. I'd end up falling out of the sky a la Icarus."

"Seriously?"

"I'm not planning to find out for
sure." "Could you get there by time travel?"

"Well. Here's my theory. Now, this is only
a Special Theory of Time Travel as Performed by Henry DeTamble, and not a
General Theory of Time Travel."

"Okay."

"First of all, I think it's a brain thing.
I think it's a lot like epilepsy, because it tends to happen when I'm stressed,
and there are physical cues, like flashing light, that can prompt it. And
because things like running, and sex, and meditation tend to help me stay put
in the present. Secondly, I have absolutely no conscious control over when or
where I go, how long I stay, or when I come back. So time travel tours of the
Riviera are very unlikely. Having said that, my subconscious seems to exert
tremendous control, because I spend a lot of time in my own past, visiting
events that are interesting or important, and evidently I will be spending
enormous amounts of time visiting you, which I am looking forward to immensely.
I tend to go to places I've already been in real time, although I do find
myself in other, more random times and places. I tend to go to the past, rather
than the future."

"You've been to the future? I didn't know
you could do that."

Henry is looking pleased with himself. "So
far, my range is about fifty years in each direction. But I very rarely go to
the future, and I don't think I've ever seen much of anything there that I
found useful. It's always quite brief. And maybe I just don't know what I'm
looking at. It's the past that exerts a lot of pull. In the past I feel much
more solid. Maybe the future itself is less substantial? I don't know. I always
feel like I'm breathing thin air, out there in the future. That's one of the
ways I can tell it is the future: it feels different. It's harder to run,
there." Henry says this thoughtfully, and I suddenly have a glimpse of the
terror of being in a foreign time and place, without clothes, without
friends...

"That's why your feet—"

"Are like leather." The soles of
Henry's feet have thick calluses, as though they are trying to become shoes.
"I am a beast of the hoof. If anything ever happens to my feet you might
as well shoot me."

We ride on in silence for a while. The road
rises and dips, dead fields of cornstalks flash by. Farmhouses stand washed in
the winter sun, each with their vans and horse trailers and American cars lined
up in the long driveways. I sigh. Going home is such a mixed experience. I'm
dying to see Alicia and Etta, and I'm worried about my mother, and I don't especially
feel like dealing with my father and Mark. But I'm curious to see how they deal
with Henry, and he with them. I'm proud of the fact that I kept Henry a secret
for so long. Fourteen years. When you're a kid fourteen years is forever. We
pass a Wal-Mart, a Dairy Queen, a McDonald's. More cornfields. An orchard.
U-Pick-M Strawberries, Blueberries. In the summer this road is a long corridor
of fruit, grain, and capitalism. But now the fields are dead and dry and the
cars speed along the sunny cold highway ignoring the beckoning parking lots. I
never thought much about South Haven until I moved to Chicago. Our house always
seemed like an island, sitting in the unincorporated area to the south,
surrounded by the Meadow, orchards, woods, farms, and South Haven was just
Town, as in Let's go to Town and get an ice cream. Town was groceries and
hardware and Mackenzie's Bakery and the sheet music and records at the Music
Emporium, Alicia's favorite store. We used to stand in front of Appleyard's
Photography Studio making up stories about the brides and toddlers and families
smiling their hideous smiles in the window. We didn't think the library was
funny-looking in its faux Greek splendor, nor did we find the cuisine limited
and bland, or the movies at the Michigan Theater relentlessly American and
mindless. These were opinions I came to later, after I became a denizen of a
City, an expatriate anxious to distance herself from the bumpkin ways of her
youth. I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who
loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from
school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a
secret. I glance over at Henry and see that he has fallen asleep. South Haven,
fifty miles. Twenty-six, twelve, three, one. Phoenix Road. Blue Star Highway.
And then: Meagram Lane. I reach over to wake Henry but he's already awake. He
smiles nervously and looks out the window at the endless tunnel of bare winter
trees as we hurtle along, and as the gate comes into view I fumble in the glove
compartment for the opener and the gates swing apart and we pass through. The
house appears like a pop-up in a book. Henry gasps, and starts to laugh.