What Are You Reading?
.
It’s evening. He looks out onto the back porch where his wife is already lying in the hammock, her feet resting on the taut edge. ‘Split a beer?’ he suggests softly through the screen. She never starts without him, no matter how many times he starts without her, but this will only occur to him later.
‘Sure,’ she says; she doesn’t look up.
He gets the beer and then pushes the screen door open with his hip because in one hand he has a book and an open bottle and in the other a glass which he hopes not to tip. She holds her hand out. Sometimes he puts the bottle in it, though he prefers it for himself – they both do – sometimes the glass.
He lowers himself slowly, to protect his knees, towards the chair, but at nearly always the same point in the arc of sitting he hands his body over to the gravity. What the hell. When he’s settled, he looks out over the garden towards the wooden shed in the corner of the lot, and then up to the dark grey cloud in the east. The crickets sound to him like a power line. The first draughts of beer make him feel good, glad it’s summer. Glad for repetition. Glad there might be a storm. Lately, every now and then, he has an uneasy premonition – or is it a memory – he has to chase away. He opens his book, he’s re-reading Adam Bede, from which he often stops to read out loud.
He hears his wife’s phone ding and sees her slowly roll herself over to read what he guesses is a message from their daughter on the Devon coast. A smile passes beneath her lips and she holds the phone out so the screen is coming straight for him. It is a picture of their daughter on a path through a pasture above the sea. Their daughter’s hair looks grey in the picture. His wife takes back the phone and then comes at him again with a picture she is sending back of a tall pink cleome nearly exploding in bloom; she’d planted the seed herself. First she turns away, but then rolls towards him to ask,
‘What are you reading?’
*
Still in the hospital waiting room, he thought back to when he had met his wife in his first semester at college. He found it difficult to remember how time passed then, what he used to think about. He remembered confusedly choosing his classes, manoeuvring around his roommate until the borders of their territories fell into place, talking for hours to his best friend from boarding school (who was, inexplicably to him, catatonic, rocking on his spongy dorm mattress because his girlfriend had just announced they should see other people), switching out of oceanography to a class on birds, but mostly what he was thinking about was sex. He had not yet slept with a girl.
Then in November he met Joanna. He walked her home from the library and kissed her in the dark, and then, on the fourth evening, he pulled her close. She had a long thick braid and played the cello and wore belted baggy jeans and a man’s faded checked short-sleeve shirt. After a few more evenings, he reached up through the man’s shirt and cupped her breast, and then, in the dark, ran his finger back and forth across her nipple. Finally, in December, he took her into the stacks to find and then read, in whispered French, a line from a poem: Qui me rendra ces jours où la vie a des ailes? After he read it to her, he pulled her towards him and reached inside her pants and there had been a hole in her underwear and he felt the wetness. It was right before the semester ended. He couldn’t think of anything else for months. He bent over his books and thought about sex. He rowed on the crew team that spring and thought about sex.
Wasn’t everyone thinking about sex then? Finally, after decades of doilies and whiskey, it was everywhere, in fields, in the park at night, sometimes in utility closets, once in the library women’s room. They were animals, after all, or part of nature, like the flowers, stamens, pistils.
In their senior year, he and his wife got married to avoid shared rented rooms and the curfew. It wasn’t exactly that he married her for sex, but more he married for the sex, because she was the first woman he’d ever had sex with who had loved him. And because she loved him, she wanted to have sex with him, which wasn’t exactly why he wanted to have sex with her, but he did somehow love her. And then when sex became readily available he was both obsessed and bemused by his obsession all at the same time. And he had always liked the sound of the cello.
But, he hadn’t calculated the loss of the drama, or the little girl whom Joanna, and maybe even he, loved more than they loved each other. He taught the little girl songs and read her chapter books, night after night, tickled by his daughter’s tolerance of, actually delight in, repetition, putting on a different voice for each character, sometimes switching to make her protest, and then crunching his face into a look of remorse so she could laugh and shriek, thrilled with her cleverness, ‘Daddy! That’s not Gandalf!’
Before sex, when he was a boy, he was fascinated by the natural world, the songbirds and ducks, raptors and grebes. He learned the names of the clouds and stars. He remembered learning about the speed of light – that it actually took time for light to reach us, not much, but time – in comparison to which sound moved like a turtle, and learning that some stars were so far away that we were looking at their pasts, so if someone could get far enough away from him and had a strong enough telescope, maybe they could see him in the past. He thought about this sometimes, closing his curtains when he jerked off so no one on another planet would see him in five-hundred years.
That was the old world. What did he think about now?
*
‘Adam Bede,’ he says. ‘Again.’
‘Ahhh,’ she says.
He hears the radio from next door, where his wife’s sister, Sarah, and Oliver live, and then one of the resident dings: the phone, the iPad, the microwave, the doorbell, the smoke alarm, the other phone, Sarah’s phone. The two sisters think of their two houses as part of one compound – the childhood dream of all sisters, his wife had told him – and the two houses have the same look: a cosmos of dust motes in each ray of summer light, the darkening sun tea on the dusty window sills, cat paw marks on the lower window panes, the smell of old fruit, shredded upholstery, unhemmed tablecloths, felted catnip mice turned toe up under the couch, extension cords burrowing underneath the faded rugs, mason jars with flowers from the garden in the summer and, piling up in the corner of the front room, the bark shreds and pine needles that blow in over winter. The front doors unlocked.
Their daughter has moved to England and is gay, and though he’d accepted this at once, his daughter is still furious at his response, which was: ‘Whatever turns you on.’ At least that seems to have been the last thing he said before she turned cold on him.
He still thinks about sex. So many women cross his path. Sometimes he thinks about gear. He goes back in and gets his laptop to check the monthly weather for the next week in Wyoming and to check the order status of the Thermarest pad. On the website, a ‘mature’ women stretched out on the product lies across the screen, the pad on top of a bed of pine needles in front of a lake. Mature, but, somehow, he tries to pinpoint it – is it the small papery fold of skin below her freckled arm that makes her sexy? He feels a small hardening. They are planning to leave in a few months and drive out west, their retirement plan. The agreement is he will make all the arrangements. Still, she could at least order her own super-plush Thermarest.
But Joanna doesn’t use the internet. It doesn’t interest her. To him, the internet is a field guide.
Some years earlier the students at the nearby college where he taught French had begun to hand their papers in on what he liked to call scrolls, those thin and perforated continuous pages, still hanging together and their edgings intact, the essays themselves beginning haphazardly somewhere on a sheet. ‘Do you think you could manage to tear that up,’ he would say scathingly, ‘before handing it in?’ And when they did, hurriedly and oblivious to the reason for his tone, they sometimes cut a sentence right in two so that he would have had to fit it together if he’d cared to read every sentence. Except one boy who looked him in the eye and tore his paper into shreds.
‘You mean like that?’
‘Yeah, like that,’ he’d said, thinking he had won.
In the smoke-filled stink of the faculty lounge, there was the consensus that students had become even more incapable of thinking since the advent of computers but he, despite his contempt, found the computers intriguing. He saw that they were a matter of language, one he could master, and one that reduced a lot of theory to on or off. Like the world, on or off, like nature, dead or alive. Soon he migrated to full-time work in the university’s computing department, where he could lean in close when the girls came for help. Smell their sweat and look down their shirts, rub the back of his hand against their breasts.
*
It was late August. They were hiking on a path through a field of lupin and tall grasses, Joanna a bit ahead. He had stopped and lifted the binoculars to his eyes to look at a red-tailed hawk in the sky above the mountainous valley. He hadn’t called to her. She’d figure it out soon enough. It was too much trouble – to wait, to share the glasses, to readjust them when she handed them back – too complicated, and by then the hawk would be gone. He turned back and looked down the path that led through the field; he didn’t see his wife. The trail took a bend to the left. Joanna! he called. He looked, and then he saw her, coming back to him. She stopped just after the bend and then, slowly, swayed left and fell. Joanna! He almost felt angry. He ran to her.
He sat in the waiting room even after the waiting was over. The sky had been so blue that morning; there had been clouds, too, but high-rising clouds, always in the distance. He’d been impatient with her that morning – though it no longer seemed like this morning. She had said the hike seemed long for a day hike, that there was no way to cut the loop short, and that there probably wasn’t cellphone reception on the mountain. ‘Nine miles?’ she’d said. ‘In one day? That’s a lot.’
He had ignored her. No one would ever know that, not even him. And even if it were too long, the stroke had felled her after not even three miles. Three miles in a day was nothing. He had kept fit and loved his sinewy body. He was thin, as if to make up for his parents who were both, in his view, obese, or had been before they died in quick succession, at the ages of eighty-six. In fact, his father was big as well as fat, and was a blowhard, always claiming a little more space than other people, a tiresome quoter, quipper and anecdoter. ‘Ignorance is of no excuse,’ his father often said, adding the grammatically vestigial ‘of’ as if to make his knowledge of the principle more erudite than it was.
Stupid, he said to himself – all that righteousness, his father’s complacent size and pressed shirts and his ‘erudition’. What a sack of shit. None of it had mattered to them – them being his own generation or the part of his generation he knew – and they had been right about that, but what did matter? Love, love is all there is. That’s what they said, but they hadn’t figured out what love, in all its limitless metamorphoses, was. Beyond sex. He remembered with some confusion that on the day before they left for Wyoming he’d announced to Joanna that he’d fallen in love with a young woman he’d glimpsed coming out of the drycleaners. Even then, he had barely known what he meant by that, or why he’d said it, when it hadn’t, in fact, meant anything, not anything at all.
And it was at this point, all this while still in the plastic hospital chair, far from home, waiting for her sister Sarah and their daughter to fly in, that he suddenly knew again that his wife was dead, that there was no reprieve from this fact, it would go on being true forever, this fact of incomprehensible absence. And already he knew that he would come to know this again and again, that it would not become clearer.
He had no one at his side anymore, or was it on his side? His side of what?
*
Winter now. At any moment, he thought, the phone might ring. His phone lay on the round table, its screen dark. At any moment – the phrase had an ominous ring. Or: He lived in dread of the moment when the phone would ring. But, in fact, he didn’t live in dread. It had at times occurred to him over the last ten years that he should be living in dread, given the way things were going from what he read in the papers, or the news, he should say. He thought about this more in the months since Joanna had died. He ran his finger across the tablecloth; it was still unhemmed, and then he turned and went out to the back porch, despite the cold, and sat down, alone. On the edges of his consciousness, a door slammed.
Then Sarah, come from the other house, was pushing open the screen door. ‘What are you doing out here in the cold?’ She sounded annoyed, as if her own question had interrupted her in the middle of her sentence. She held a cup of tea in one hand, a business-sized letter she must have picked up when she came through the front door in the other and a folded newspaper tucked under her elbow. He could still hear the low rumble of the radio from her house; she left it on, Joanna used to say, because Oliver, her husband, was gone, meaning dead. So, it was the two of them now.
He shrugged.
She sat down on the stoop, close to his chair, put her tea cup on the porch floor and shook open the newspaper.
‘Your tea will get cold,’ he said, and then, ‘Any news I need to know?’
The newspaper shook almost imperceptibly in her bony hand, and he leaned over and took an edge of it to keep it still.
‘The usual. All the damage that’s being, and has been, done. Well, here, this is happy, I suppose.’ She shook the paper from his hand and gave it a snap. ‘Identical twins find each other after thirty years. They do look similar, don’t they? One looks a bit older, had a harder time, maybe.’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How did they find each other?’
‘The internet, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘It’s all out there now, everything but the future.’
Sarah, he knew, had censured him for years; he knew she thought he’d been a lousy husband. Like him, she was older now, seventy-one, white-haired, slack-skinned yet wiry. He imagined men still found her sexy. She was as sharp as she’d always been.
She put the picture in front of him again.
*
The thing about his student was that she had been young, just a year too young, yet he sometimes fell into a fantasy of calling her. She’d answer and agree to meet in the city for a drink. She’d be an adult, not as cute as when she was sixteen, but sexier, tougher. Women reach their sexual peak at age thirty-two, men at eighteen. That was one thing he’d learned in college. She’d probably be married now, ready for an affair. They’d be at a table, outside somewhere, and she’d twirl her fingers around the rim of the glass, and then run her hand through her hair and stretch backwards from the table. There’d be a look, starting as a one-sided smile and unfocused eyes. They’d both know at the same moment where they were heading, and she’d see he was still ready, flat-stomached even though he was – he suddenly remembered this fact – seventy, and remembering that, he then realised that she wouldn’t be thirty-two – that was the age he had been back then – she’d be fifty-eight, and if the news was any indicator, she’d be angry, disgusted, outraged. Only an idiot would call.
Of course, he had Googled her repeatedly, but he never found out what he wanted to know. She seemed to be living in her mother’s old stone house in the Pennsylvania countryside. He had seen her mother’s obituary a few years ago: a well-known doctor, known for a breakthrough in ophthalmology. So now the girl lived alone, on the edge of those fields, with – suggested by the blurry photo, the only one he’d found – several dogs, and she seemed to be connected with some kind of historic preservation. She looked about forty, older even than he had been. If it was her. There was also a link to a PDF listing her among those who had contributed to the rebuilding of a Zen Buddhist monastery. The donation was in memory of someone, a name he thought he recognised, maybe another student. And then she turned up in a Frederick, Maryland newspaper obituary as someone left behind by a seventy-five-year-old woman, but there was no mention of her relation to the deceased, just that she’d been among the left. Maybe it wasn’t her at all. There were other links to click, one suggesting she might have a criminal record (which he could pay to see), which both titillated and alarmed him at first. Could she have gotten into drugs? The last time they had spoken, maybe thirty years ago, and after two years of silence, she had called out of the blue, drunk. Come to naught, alas. Then he realised that the link was only a commercially generated algorithm.
*
One evening, years ago, after school, already dusk, walking home – was it April? – now the smell came back to him, traces of fleeing warmth passing through the chill, that churning pull of the months towards summer even while the day gets chillier.
‘Our life,’ she’d said – he’d let the girl say ‘our’, though he knew there was no such thing – ‘will never be exactly the same as it is now.’ It would never pass again through this same constellation of temperature and smell and breeze and light again, and when she said that, he pulled her towards him and kissed her, which he knew they’d both been resisting for several weeks now. He was the older one, and her teacher, so it seemed to him to be his responsibility to make the kiss happen in this irreplicable – she had said so herself – moment.
She told him she wanted to spend her life with him; she would never love anyone else, and she would never love him less. Her naïve and desperate certainty bemused him. He had to tell her that this was not how it worked. Ten minutes in the morning, he said, was what marriage was like. If she ever found anyone who loved her the way she said she loved him, he told her, they’d only drive each other crazy. Love is really just entertainment.
After she went to college, he wrote to her only after getting her to promise that she would burn his letters. At first, he wrote that he missed her, meaning her body. She wrote back long letters, lyrical details of her life, funny, intelligent, but at the end dissolving into, or really suppurating with, long, desperate declarations of what she took for love. He hadn’t missed her at all, most days, and he wrote to tell her that, too, because it was true.
*
Suddenly, there on the porch, Sarah still across from him, he had a frightening thought, something that had never occurred to him before: maybe the girl hadn’t burnt the letters. And immediately afterward, in the clarity of the snow-cold air, it came to him: of course she hadn’t. Why hadn’t that been clear to him then? It hadn’t, because, and he wanted to make this point, he, too, was young then. The letters might be PDFs now, freed of any material limits. A wave of infinite replications swamped him, he felt the seasick nausea rising.
She could really get him. A letter, or a ring of the phone, but he wouldn’t hear it out here. The doctor had confirmed that. The upper pitches of the hearing range were what he was missing.
He’d lived a free life, without palpable shame, had slept every night for most of fifty years in the bed he shared with his wife, fed, sheltered and paid for the education of his daughter, composted the vegetable peels, without any idea of what was in store for him. Had he, would they now say, abused her? What exactly had he done wrong? And then, finally, what really puzzled him: what, I mean, what were women? What was it about them, as a group, that had always made him a little wary? They suddenly seemed too wearying an abstraction, like the geometry of curved space. And who was he to them? He had no idea. He’d probably been anthropomorphising them all along, which he realised wasn’t quite the right word, since they weren’t animals, but there was something between them, that same exhaustion of language. Why did he have to think about this, and then to think about everything else with this in mind? He ran out of thoughts just in time.
Joanna and he had believed they were the generation that changed everything, but they, too, like their parents before them, had allowed the past to rest undisturbed.
It began to snow. He stared out at the dark patch where the garden had been, the stalks of the Brussel sprouts still lying dusky green on the cold knobby soil, now with a thin sprinkling of snow. Joanna’s ashes were there, too, in the garden, turned over into the soil where the peas had been. They’d had a small ceremony – he and Sarah and his daughter.
The snow began to blow in under the porch railings. Finally, Sarah held out the letter for him to take. ‘They caught up with you,’ she said. ‘Jury duty.’
He wanted not to want forgiveness. In some dark moments, it came clear to him that he would pay. He pictured summertime, Joanna in the hammock, with a blind hand outstretched for the beer, the colder half, the one they both wanted but that he gave to her. He wanted that familiar moment they’d arrived at to be the only moment anyone would see, no matter how strong the telescope, how distant the star.
No, even more, he wanted her to be there, to look up and ask only, ‘What are you reading?’
But instead it was Sarah, standing at the screen door, having no idea what he was doing out there in the cold, and planning, he could see, on surviving him.
.
.
Image details: Reading in a Garden (Lettura in giardino), Pompeo Mariani, 1904/1905, National Gallery of Art.
Madeleine Stein’s work has appeared in The Hopkins Review, The Kenyon Review, Ambit, the Raymond Carver Review, Saranac Review, Cairo Times and Orbis. She taught at The American University in Cairo and New York University and is now living in the Hudson Valley.
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