Where I'm Calling From (43 page)

I started walking alongside the road, and it was then, for some reason, I began to think about my son. I wished him well, wherever he was. If he’d made it back to Germany by now—and he should have—I hoped he was happy. He hadn’t written yet to give me his address, but I was sure I’d hear something before long. And my daughter, God love her and keep her. I hoped she was doing okay. I decided to write her a letter that evening and tell her I was rooting for her. My mother was alive and more or less in good health, and I felt lucky there, too. If all went well, I’d have her for several more years.

Birds were calling, and some cars passed me on the highway. Good luck to you, too, brother, I thought. I hope your ship comes in. Pay me back when you get it. And my former wife, the woman I used to love so much. She was alive, and she was well, too—so far as I knew, anyway. I wished her happiness. When all was said and done, I decided things could be a lot worse. Just now, of course, things were hard for everyone. People’s luck had gone south on them was all. But things were bound to change soon. Things would pick up in the fall maybe. There was lots to hope for.

I kept on walking. Then I began to whistle. I felt I had the right to whistle if I wanted to. I let my arms swing as I walked. But the lunch pail kept throwing me off balance. I had sandwiches, an apple, and some cookies in there, not to mention the thermos. I stopped in front of Smitty’s, an old cafe that had gravel in the parking area and boards over the windows. The place had been boarded up for as long as I could remember. I decided to put the lunch pail down for a minute. I did that, and then I raised my arms-raised them up level with my shoulders. I was standing there like that, like a goof, when somebody tooted a car horn and pulled off the highway into the parking area. I picked up my lunch pail and went over to the car. It was a guy I knew from work whose name was George. He reached over and opened the door on the passenger’s side. “Hey, get in, buddy,” he said.

“Hello, George,” I said. I got in and shut the door, and the car sped off, throwing gravel from under the tires.

“I saw you,” George said. “Yeah, I did, I saw you. You’re in training for something, but I don’t know what.” He looked at me and then looked at the road again. He was going fast. “You always walk down the road with your arms out like that?” He laughed—ha, ha, ha—and stepped on the gas.

“Sometimes,” I said. “It depends, I guess. Actually, I was standing,” I said. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat.

“So what’s new?” George said. He put a cigar in his mouth, but he didn’t light it.

“Nothing’s new,” I said. “What’s new with you?”

George shrugged. Then he grinned. He was going very fast now.

Wind buffeted the car and whistled by outside the windows. He was driving as if we were late for work.

But we weren’t late. We had lots of time, and I told him so.

Nevertheless, he cranked it up. We passed the turnoff and kept going. We were moving by then, heading straight toward the mountains. He took the cigar out of his mouth and put it in his shirt pocket. “I borrowed some money and had this baby overhauled,” he said. Then he said he wanted me to see something. He punched it and gave it everything he could. I fastened my seat belt and held on.

“Go,” I said. “What are you waiting for, George?” And that’s when we really flew. Wind howled outside the windows. He had it floored, and we were going flat out. We streaked down that road in his big unpaid-for car.

I was in my room one night when I heard something in the corridor. I looked up from my work and saw an envelope slide under the door. It was a thick envelope, but not so thick it couldn’t be pushed under the door. My name was written on the envelope, and what was inside purported to be a letter from my wife.

I say “purported” because even though the grievances could only have come from someone who’d spent twenty-three years observing me on an intimate, day-to-day basis, the charges were outrageous and completely out of keeping with my wife’s character. Most important, however, the handwriting was not my wife’s handwriting. But if it wasn’t her handwriting, then whose was it?

I wish now I’d kept the letter, so I could reproduce it down to the last comma, the last uncharitable exclamation point. The tone is what I’m talking about now, not just the content. But I didn’t keep it, I’m sorry to say. I lost it, or else misplaced it. Later, after the sorry business I’m about to relate, I was cleaning out my desk and may have accidentally thrown it away—which is uncharacteristic of me, since I usually don’t throw anything away.

In any case, I have a good memory. I can recall every word of what I read. My memory is such that I used to win prizes in school because of my ability to remember names and dates, inventions, battles, treaties, alliances, and the like. I always scored highest on factual tests, and in later years, in the “real world,” as it’s called, my memory stood me in good stead. For instance, if I were asked right now to give the details of the Council of Trent or the Treaty of Utrecht, or to talk about Carthage, that city razed by the Romans after Hannibal’s defeat (the Roman soldiers plowed salt into the ground so that Carthage could never be called Carthage again), I could do so. If called upon to talk about the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’, or the Hundred Years’ War, or simply the First Silesian War, I could hold forth with the greatest enthusiasm and confidence. Ask me anything about the Tartars, the Renaissance popes, or the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Thermopylae, Shilo, or the Maxim gun. Easy. Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie.

The famous four and twenty that were set before the king. At Agincourt, English longbows carried the day. And here’s something else. Everyone has heard of the Battle of Lepanto, the last great sea battle fought in ships powered by galley slaves. This fracas took place in 1571 in the eastern Mediterranean, when the combined naval forces of the Christian nations of Europe turned back the Arab hordes under the infamous All Muezzin Zade, a man who was fond of personally cutting off the noses of his prisoners before calling in the executioners. But does anyone remember that Cervantes was involved in this affair and had his left hand lopped off in the battle? Something else. The combined French and Russian losses in one day at Borodino were seventy-five thousand men—the equivalent in fatalities of a fully loaded jumbo jet crashing every three minutes from breakfast to sundown. Kutuzov pulled his forces back toward Moscow. Napoleon drew breath, marshaled his troops, and continued his advance. He entered the downtown area of Moscow, where he stayed for a month waiting for Kutuzov, who never showed his face again. The Russian generalissimo was waiting for snow and ice, for Napoleon to begin his retreat to France.

Things stick in my head. I remember. So when I say I can recreate the letter—the portion that I read, which catalogues the charges against me—I mean what I say.

In part, the letter went as follows:

Dear,

Things are not good. Things, in fact, are bad. Things have gone from bad to worse. And you know what I’m talking about. We’ve come to the end of the line. It’s over with us. Still, I find myself wishing we could have talked about it.

It’s been such a long time now since we’ve talked. I mean really talked. Even after we were married we used to talk and talk, exchanging news and ideas. When the children were little, or even after they were more grown-up, we still found time to talk. It was more difficult then, naturally, but we managed, we found time. We made time. We’d have to wait until after they were asleep, or else when they were playing outside, or with a sitter. But we managed.

Sometimes we’d engage a sitter just so we could talk. On occasion we talked the night away, talked until the sun came up. Well. Things happen, I know. Things change. Bill had that trouble with the police, and Linda found herself pregnant, etc. Our quiet time together flew out the window. And gradually your responsibilities backed up on you. Your work became more important, and our time together was squeezed out. Then, once the children left home, our time for talking was back. We had each other again, only we had less and less to talk about. “It happens,” I can hear some wise man saying. And he’s right. It happens. But it happened to us. In any case, no blame. No blame. That’s not what this letter is about. I want to talk about us. I want to talk about now. The time has come, you see, to admit that the impossible has happened. To cry Uncle. To beg off. To—I read this far and stopped. Something was wrong. Something was fishy in Denmark. The sentiments expressed in the letter may have belonged to my wife. (Maybe they did. Say they did, grant that the sentiments expressed were hers.) But the handwriting was not her handwriting. And I ought to know. I consider myself an expert in this matter of her handwriting. And yet if it wasn’t her handwriting, who on earth had written these lines?

I should say a little something about ourselves and our life here. During the time I’m writing about we were living in a house we’d taken for the summer. I’d just recovered from an illness that had set me back in most things I’d hoped to accomplish that spring. We were surrounded on three sides by meadows, birch woods, and some low, rolling hills—a “territorial view,” as the realtor had called it when he described it to us over the phone. In front of the house was a lawn that had grown shaggy, owing to lack of interest on my part, and a long graveled drive that led to the road. Behind the road we could see the distant peaks of mountains. Thus the phrase “territorial view”—having to do with a vista appreciated only at a distance.

My wife had no friends here in the country, and no one came to visit. Frankly, I was glad for the solitude. But she was a woman who was used to having friends, used to dealing with shopkeepers and tradesmen. Out here, it was just the two of us, thrown back on our resources. Once upon a time a house in the country would have been our ideal—we would have coveted such an arrangement.

Now I can see it wasn’t such a good idea. No, it wasn’t.

Both our children had left home long ago. Now and then a letter came from one of them. And once in a blue moon, on a holiday, say, one of them might telephone—a collect call, naturally, my wife being only too happy to accept the charges. This seeming indifference on their part was, I believe, a major cause of my wife’s sadness and general discontent—a discontent, I have to admit, I’d been vaguely aware of before our move to the country. In any case, to find herself in the country after so many years of living close to a shopping mall and bus service, with a taxi no farther away than the telephone in the hall—it must have been hard on her, very hard. I think her decline, as a historian might put it, was accelerated by our move to the country. I think she slipped a cog after that. I’m speaking from hindsight, of course, which always tends to confirm the obvious.

I don’t know what else to say in regard to this matter of the handwriting. How much more can I say and still retain credibility? We were alone in the house. No one else—to my knowledge, anyway—was in the house and could have penned the letter. Yet I remain convinced to this day that it was not her handwriting that covered the pages of the letter. After all, I’d been reading my wife’s handwriting since before she was my wife. As far back as what might be called our pre-history days—the time she went away to school as a girl, wearing a gray-and-white school uniform. She wrote letters to me every day that she was away, and she was away for two years, not counting holidays and summer vacations.

Altogether, in the course of our relationship, I would estimate (a conservative estimate, too), counting our separations and the short periods of time I was away on business or in the hospital, etc.—I would estimate, as I say, that I received seventeen hundred or possibly eighteen hundred and fifty handwritten letters from her, not to mention hundreds, maybe thousands, more informal notes (“On your way home, please pick up dry cleaning, and some spinach pasta from Corti Bros”). I could recognize her handwriting anywhere in the world. Give me a few words. I’m confident that if I were in Jaffa, or Marrakech, and picked up a note in the marketplace, I would recognize it if it was my wife’s handwriting. A word, even. Take this word “talked,” for instance. That simply isn’t the way she’d write “talked”! Yet I’m the first to admit I don’t know whose handwriting it is if it isn’t hers.

Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never.

I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I suppose, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.

I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven’t read it through in its entirety, and won’t, since I can’t find it now), is utterly false. I don’t mean false in the sense of “untrue,” necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don’t want to quibble. I don’t want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No. What I want to say, all I want to say, is that while the sentiments expressed in the letter may be my wife’s, may even hold some truth—be legitimate, so to speak—the force of the accusations leveled against me is diminished, if not entirely undermined, even discredited, because she did not in fact write the letter. Or, if she did write it, then discredited by the fact that she didn’t write it in her own handwriting! Such evasion is what makes men hunger for facts. As always, there are some.

On the evening in question, we ate dinner rather silently but not unpleasantly, as was our custom. From time to time I looked up and smiled across the table as a way of showing my gratitude for the delicious meal—poached salmon, fresh asparagus, rice pilaf with almonds. The radio played softly in the other room; it was a little suite by Poulenc that I’d first heard on a digital recording five years before in an apartment on Van Ness, in San Francisco, during a thunderstorm.

When we’d finished eating, and after we’d had our coffee and dessert, my wife said something that startled me. “Are you planning to be in your room this evening?” she said.

“I am,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I simply wanted to know.” She picked up her cup and drank some coffee. But she avoided looking at me, even though I tried to catch her eye.

Are you planning to be in your room this evening? Such a question was altogether out of character for her. I wonder now why on earth I didn’t pursue this at the time. She knows my habits, if anyone does. But I think her mind was made up even then. I think she was concealing something even as she spoke.

“Of course I’ll be in my room this evening,” I repeated, perhaps a trifle impatiently. She didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. I drank the last of my coffee and cleared my throat.

She glanced up and held my eyes a moment. Then she nodded, as if we had agreed on something. (But we hadn’t, of course.) She got up and began to clear the table.

I felt as if dinner had somehow ended on an unsatisfactory note. Something else—a few words maybe-was needed to round things off and put the situation right again.

“There’s a fog coming in,” I said.

“Is there? I hadn’t noticed,” she said.

She wiped away a place on the window over the sink with a dish towel and looked out. For a minute she didn’t say anything. Then she said— again mysteriously, or so it seems to me now—”There is. Yes, it’s very foggy. It’s a heavy fog, isn’t it?” That’s all she said. Then she lowered her eyes and began to wash the dishes.

I sat at the table a while longer before I said, “I think I’ll go to my room now.”

She took her hands out of the water and rested them against the counter. I thought she might proffer a word or two of encouragement for the work I was engaged in, but she didn’t. Not a peep. It was as if she were waiting for me to leave the kitchen so she could enjoy her privacy.

Remember, I was at work in my room at the time the letter was slipped under the door. I read enough to question the handwriting and to wonder how it was that my wife had presumably been busy somewhere in the house and writing me a letter at the same time. Before reading further in the letter, I got up and went over to the door, unlocked it, and checked the corridor.

It was dark at this end of the house. But when I cautiously put my head out I could see light from the living room at the end of the hallway. The radio was playing quietly, as usual. Why did I hesitate?

Except for the fog, it was a night very much like any other we had spent together in the house. But there was something else afoot tonight. At that moment I found myself afraid—afraid, if you can believe it, in my own house!—to walk down the hall and satisfy myself that all was well. Or if something was wrong, if my wife was experiencing—how should I put it?—difficulties of any sort, hadn’t I best confront the situation before letting it go any further, before losing any more time on this stupid business of reading her words in somebody else’s handwriting!

But I didn’t investigate. Perhaps I wanted to avoid a frontal attack. In any case, I drew back and shut and locked the door before returning to the letter. But I was angry now as I saw the evening sliding away in this foolish and incomprehensible business. I was beginning to feel uneasy. (No other word will do.) I could feel my gorge rising as I picked up the letter purporting to be from my wife and once more began to read.