Oh, so suddenly there is water—abundant, clear, rehabilitating water in the form the summer rain they've been waiting for, hanging on through weeks of drought that has left tree leaves withered and pale, left lawns brittle and brown. At another moment he would surely have welcomed it, even celebrated its belated arrival. They had joked just last night about the inevitable apocalyptic desert, about T. S. Eliot's powers of prophecy, and together they had done a punch drunk rain dance (chanting shantih shantih shantih) until she fell laughing onto the sofa—
and so now there is rain:
heavy drops of it splatter against the windshield, one after another, and then several at a time, and he turns the key again—what the hell, why not?—to hear the same dry ticking of the starter. Another joke from last night, some satisfying lightheartedness in the waning hours of their first unfettered weekend together: how the governing force of the universe is Irony. How Irony is the all-powerful god before whom Job buckled and bowed in his human smallness. But without it—and here is the pleasing part of their joke—they would never be together, these two unlikely lovebirds. They would still be shuffling down their separate paths, the many impediments (his marriage was only one) still between them. Irony (there was no doubt about it) had taken a shine to them.
The joke comes back to him now, but without last night's breezy good humor; instead, it comes with a wash of self-pity and a sudden rush of anger. He turns the key halfway and flicks on the windshield wipers and considers bringing his fist down on the dashboard, smacking the steering wheel, but what would be the point? Pain does not relieve frustration. Besides (he thinks), what a gross overreaction. And where did this impulse come from anyway? After their lovely, lazy weekend, the slow, half-asleep way they made love this morning! He leans forward and squints (perfunctorily, he knows) through the windshield, but Claire is long out of sight. She left while he was still in the shower, and by now she must be arriving at her cubicle, shaking out her umbrella, sugaring her coffee, whatever she might do to shake off (or indulge for a minute or two longer) the weekend's easy good feeling. He considers bringing his fist down on the dashboard, and this time he does so, though without resolve, without conviction, without the violence he'd like to bring to bear—
and, of course, no satisfaction;
but frankly, there's a more pressing issue: what to do now, ten blocks from home and with the rain falling steadily. Not to mention the sky is growing darker, a deepening gray tinged with jaundiced yellow. The worst is yet to come, and he has no key to Claire's apartment, nowhere to wait out the rain.
He gets out of the car with what seems an adequate plan A. In his mind's eye is an image of Claire's bedroom window standing open—he is sure, in fact, that he saw it open at some point; the question is whether she has closed it since—so he trots toward the back of this irredeemably ugly building, brick and one story with character-less windows that slide horizontally on their tracks. He looks at it now as he jogs past, hands covering his head, a porous shield against the rain, to see rivulets sliding down the brick, the gangly rhododendrons choked by purple nightshade, and apprehends that the building's ugliness is something he has not, until this very moment, allowed himself to see. Maybe, he thinks, it's just kind of thing one manages to overlook (was it William James who said wisdom is knowing what to overlook?). Small acts of survival, these repressions: if he had seen this building's ugliness, for example, if he'd taken a moment and allowed it register, could he have brought himself to leave Margaret—and the house they had bought long before they had money to furnish it, that Margaret had painstakingly gardened and landscaped while he toiled away (however uninspiredly) on his book, his eyes on early tenure—and fling himself into this thing he had called (with such confidence, and right to Margaret's face) his liberation? So blithe an attitude might not have survived. And now that he has seen it, he thinks, reaching the corner and slowing his pace gradually, so as not to slip on the wet grass, isn't he faced with an obvious question: what will happen to his liberation now? Has this survival instinct blessed with the powers of repression revealed a vulnerability, or is he no longer requiring of it: is he recognizing this ugliness because there is no further need to guard himself against it?
—but this, he decides, is an exercise for another time, when he is home and dry and brewing coffee; these are not notions to begin interrogating now.
He reaches the back of the building, the window near the corner that he knows to be Claire's, but it's closed, and besides which, he cannot reach it. And then if he could reach it, if he somehow managed to slide it open, how on earth would he climb through to sit out the rain? He pushes his wet hair back from his forehead, licks rain from his lips, surveys the little yard (the smatterings of grass have grown far too high, but Claire will never get around to calling the landlord and insisting) and then, behind it, across low, unkempt azaleas and beyond the neighbor's muddy lawn, tucked beneath their warped, paint-peeling deck, are discarded pieces of lawn furniture, a dog's dish, a bucket—a bucket he could overturn and stand on and then, maybe...He squeezes himself between two wet and sweet-smelling azaleas, but on the neighbor's lawn he stops and scouts for someone who might see him— Maybe he should walk around to the front door and knock and ask—ask what? Can I borrow your bucket? I need it to break into that apartment across the way, or maybe you have a ladder?
There is a flash of lightning, a pause in which the rain seems to slacken, the rumble of still distant thunder. He crosses the neighbor's yard, reaches the deck, and ducks under it cautiously, considering that the dog's dish means that lurking somewhere under here is a snarly old Rottweiler on a chain, but he sees the dish is dry and cracked and rimmed with dirt. So he snatches the bucket, sprints back across the yard, and hops sideways between the wet azaleas, soaking the crotch of his jeans. At the wall he turns the bucket over and steps up until he is eye-level with the bottom track of the window, high enough to open it if the window were unlocked, but the window is not unlocked, he cannot budge it, and he is left with his hands pressed against the wet glass, a view into the bedroom he has just left, in which he has spent, with Claire, almost the entire three-day weekend. And what he sees now, hands cupped around his eyes, feels forbidden: a glimpse into an intimate space, dark and cluttered. Like a secret, he thinks. The bed is unmade. They had pushed the comforter off during the night, and it still lies on the floor, the sheets twisted loosely around it. On the nightstand is his glass of water, still half-filled; it has left a wet ring on the book he set it on. On the whole, it's a tableau suggestive of a certain degree of sloth and indulgence, a carefree disregard for the practices of domestic order (exactly those qualities he had found so "liberating"). It is far from trashed, just kind of messy, but the word that comes to him is squalid. He knows the word is inaccurate; nothing here is, in any meaningful sense, squalid, certainly not the lilacs in their wall-mounted vases, or the matching purple sheets Claire had used this weekend as an excuse to buy. But the word has come nonetheless, pressing forward until, quite literally, it changes his perspective: suddenly he possesses an image of himself from behind (as if from the deck beneath which he found this overturned bucket), and in his mind's eye he carefully paints the entire scene—himself in his blue oxford shirt and jeans soaked through, standing feet-together on the bucket and peering in through cupped hands—concluding, Now this (meaning the image he holds of himself) is squalid. And on the heels of that thought, another, a line from Heraclitus: "In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it."
The line from Heraclitus: has it come to him because the image he has just held represents the kind of difficult and puzzling truth the philosopher describes as unexpected, and for which one best be ready? Or is the specter of the most inevitable kind of guilt passing over him (as it sometimes has these last six months) like the shadow of a bird in flight? He barely read Heraclitus (skimmed, really), years ago; hardly well enough to quote him. The line came to him from Margaret, on the first postcard he received from her (on the front, Modigliani's supine and enigmatic nude), sent without a return address. She'd been living then with Brian, her fiancé the medical intern, and the unexpected, unprepared for truth she had found was him. She and Brian had been looking for apartments when (she told him this hours later, from a pay phone) she broke things off in panicky fit of weeping; by the time she called the postcard was already on its way.
The trouble with this theory, however, is that guilt's shadow passes as swiftly as it arrives. There have been predictable pangs of ambivalence, sure, and keen if occasional floods of grief, especially when he caught an unexpected glimpse of pain in Margaret's suddenly hardening face. But otherwise he has gotten off easy—testament, he knows, to the rightness of his decision, a thing he has tested time and again. He even spent an entire afternoon going item by item through a box of sentimental gifts Margaret had given him until he found the Modigliani card, and then he sat cross-legged on the floor, reading and re-reading it, trying to recreate the feeling it had once given him, the feeling of a good and reliable truth newly discovered. But his efforts left him unmoved and even a little irritated. Another truth had arrived, as suddenly and undeniably as the storm he trudges home through now, and taken its place. There's no accounting for such things. Life works according to its own mysterious laws, which is why smart, curious, educated people like Margaret continue to keep 2,500 years of philosophy on their bookshelves, right? And why others seek the (occasionally) sage council of a recently divorced friend: "Look, man, the fact is we can remake ourselves. It's practically as simple as that."
More likely, this epigrammatic line from Heraclitus comes as a simple—and pleasing—association: this voyeur's glimpse into Claire's private space begs the automatic rise of the memory of their meeting. At a party, at one of Rob's parties—Rob who teaches the English Romantics and who, after his own divorce and a sabbatical year in sunny and decadent California, threw monthly Bacchanalia (as he called them) that never proved as depraved as he predicted or desired them to be. Soft drugs, pot, sometimes a little hash, were passed among faculty members; musicians set up in Rob's living room and improvised. Claire had come with a drummer who'd been reduced to slapping a tambourine behind three guitarists and a bongo player, and when she passed him a joint he struck up some small talk: I don't think I've seen you here before, who did you come with, what do you do? He judged her to be twenty-five, twenty-six. She complained about her cubicle job, about feeling stuck in a small, gray city, about coming home after college to fear she'll never manage to leave again, but what drew him was her sharpness, her slapping down of his mindless cocktail party philosophy. "Well," he had sought to console her perfectly banal complaints. "You always end up where you're supposed to be. A friend of mine—Rob, actually—always points to aloe, how the aloe plant grows exactly where it's needed most." She held him in a long, steady gaze, her lips pressed tightly together, and shook her head slowly—in all, the look of a disappointed mother—and then offered in a slow, deadpan drollery: "I'm deathly allergic to aloe." He nodded, said, "And bullshit theories about a benevolent universe." "Yeah," she agreed. "That too."
An overreaction? Maybe, but his thought was of how lazy his mind had become, how quick to defer to comforting platitudes, homey truisms, and he reached to clasp her shoulder, impelled to share what had come instantly and unexpectedly to mind: his favorite passage from Kerouac: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." But before the first words reached his lips his mind made an adjustment and scrolled through images of this living room, this party, Rob's guests and their lazy, empty talk—like his own—seeking nothing more than comfort, ease, predictability; these are people (he concluded, counting himself among them) who are mad in exactly the opposite ways, and he found himself launching instead, uncontrollably, into autobiographical details, a line of conversation he immediately regretted but could not stop. He told her he taught literature, twentieth century stuff, wrote a book on the Beats (a project that exhausted his interest in them utterly); he'd won the early tenure he'd sought—what? Six years ago? How could he have burnt out so quickly, and so completely? So yes, he understood her complaints, that stuck feeling she described. He has himself (he told her) been pursued by a dogged restlessness, a sometimes overwhelming urge to pack a bag and leave a note and set off into the wilderness alone. He was improvising, telling her in a tone of long-nursed disappointment about things he had never once considered. He had not, for example, been aware of any deep restlessness, but when the words came out they sounded prepared, as if the idea had been living fully formed within him. They seemed truer than anything else he could have told her, and they cast a light backward over the past two, three, five, six years—
She smiled over her drink, said, "Midlife crisis?"
"Hey," he answered. "I'm not even forty."
At the end of the night, as she was leaving with her drummer boyfriend, she caught sight of him and crossed the living room to bid goodnight. She said she might pack a bag and leave a note and set out into the wilderness even if he could not. "Now I understand why I met you," he told her, a flirtatious edge pressing forward through the deadening balm of pot and vodka. "You're here to point out my bullshit, aren't you?" Then he raised his eyebrows and offered a mock of some stern professor's council: "But if you do go, consider this a warning: In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it. That's Heraclitus," he added, and she gave him the look of admiration and pleasure one hopes to see (but never does) in students. She said, "I like smart men." And then with his own ironically arched eyebrows: "That's why I always developed crushes on my professors." She patted his arm and, shifting from a flirtatious tone to a sardonic one, added, "A man as smart as you obviously are, you'll sail through this crisis in no time."
A young girl whose initial charm lay between her sharp, challenging jauntiness and her suggestive shifts in tone, her cavalier calling out of his indolent pose of respectability and her perfectly aimed flattery—all of which makes him a terrible clich&ecaute;. On this point he has never been deluded, not even on the night of their meeting, when, still way too stoned and growing conspicuously quiet, sinking into himself, an island of introspection among Rob and his chattering, laughing guests, he nursed the memory of the look Claire had given him and resolved to wake bright and early (hangover be damned!) and climb the creaking steps to his writing room;
though certainly this was a kind of adolescent idiocy unbecoming (he decided as he fired the ignition, fleeing the party that was still in full swing) of one properly self-possessed, who has weighed every decision against what he knows of his own nature;
so in hopes of transcending such painfully banal vulnerabilities he drove home willing a reverie of Margaret, but he failed to find the necessary emotional pitch. His mind kept turning to those things that (he had just discovered) he wanted to escape: this dull, still coal-dusted city, his predictable, low-ceilinged career, the platitudinal certainty he has come to serve up by rote. He pulled into the driveway and sat in the car, gazing dopedly at the black, reflective dining room windows. When he finally reached for the handle he had decided: he would wake Margaret and ask (though he understood fully that this was a bad idea, a downright terrible idea): Where did we go wrong?
The entire ten-block walk, every single step at a steep uphill grade: he had not considered this fact until now. He hasn't lived a full week in the apartment, and never has he driven home, never mind walked, from Claire's. So uphill it is, and through rain drumming on the leaves overhead, washing through the gutter like a biblical flood, reducing anything a block away to a blurry, incomprehensible shape. He himself is thoroughly drenched—hair, face, neck, collar, shirt, crotch, legs, socks, shoes . . . Waterman. Bogboy. Every movement produces a series of soggy sounds. But what the hell, make peace with it. He tilts his head back and sticks out his tongue, lets little rivers rise over the curve of his upper lip and empty into his mouth. He thinks of Eskimos, stories he's heard about frozen winds so intense that merely crossing the street can take half an hour, the elements that fierce an antagonist, the simplest victory that slow in coming. These (he tells himself) are the facts of Eskimo existence, the things one must simply accept. Wind, snow, rain, a ten-block trudge uphill: the conditions one agrees to live with. Except that one didn't really agree. The old Volvo sits dead in front of Claire's apartment. Margaret kept the Subaru, the car they both knew to be reliable. Count it among the spoils of a battle never waged, of his quick and easy capitulation. He would be starting anew, casting himself into a leaner, more light-footed existence; so he shrugged deferentially when she asked about the cookware, shook his head when she asked about the maple roll-top desk, inquired out of bafflement ("Are you sure?") when he found the Miro' she loved among the things he'd packed. Where he could justify it he simply acquiesced: their canoe, two of their cameras, the house—the garden, the landscaping, the attic converted into a writing room he'd hardly seen in six years. Finished the book on the Beats and the dust began its work. "So take on something else," Rob had told him when he first complained about the deadening impact of finishing this long-stalked goal. "You're not here," Rob went on, meaning this English department like a convalescent home, "because you're a fabulous specialist. Come on. I mean, why do people like us stay at such dreary, remote little places? Was this what you hoped for when you filled out your grad school applications? A job in a department in which no one even reads anymore? Look, you and me, we're dabblers. We're experimenters. A little of this, a little of that. Isn't that the spirit that drew you to Kerouac in the first place? So go at it, man. Just go at it."
Rob so full of insights and advice. "Don't you ever get sick of it?" Margaret asked. "And I thought Ann's leaving might have humbled him a bit." Rob had just returned from his California sabbatical, and he'd spent the evening in their living room, sipping beer and explaining how his time away from school, from colleagues, from students had left him renewed, feeling more himself than ever. "You've got to apply for sabbatical," he declared. "You must be due soon, right? Listen, take the time off and go someplace sunny and beautiful and read yourself some Nietzsche. He'll convince you, I swear to it, that we can forget that whole Book of Job version of who we're supposed to be, submissive to the all-knowing, truth-providing whatever. You can remake yourself, that's your job as a human being, to make yourself according to your will."
Margaret, standing at the sink, rinsing their beer glasses and loading them into the dishwasher: "It's all relentless enthusiasm. I can see how a sophomore might find him an inspiring teacher, but—"
From across the kitchen, rising in defense of his friend: "Oh, c'mon. Once you turn the volume down a bit, let the enthusiastic stuff cool—and granted, sometimes you have to step back from him for a while—but his ideas are usually worth considering. They make you see things differently. I'm definitely going to reread Nietzsche."
Margaret, as if she hadn't heard him: "Does he ever take his own advice? I mean, ocean-side meditation. Has there ever been anyone more in need of meditation?"
...he has stepped on something. Stepped on it without even noticing until it moved—wriggled, really; squirmed—under his foot and then gone two, three steps farther up the hill. He turns to see it still moving on the sidewalk, but in the rain it is indistinct, a mere thing, until he steps toward it and sees it's a bird, a sparrow maybe, and from its head—though it's faint, washing away as soon as it oozes onto the concrete—runs a stream of blood. What could have happened? Was it driven from the sky or a branch by the storm? He wipes his eyes of blurring rain and watches the bird—one wing still spasming, its eyes open, not blinking—until he becomes aware of his shirt, the legs of his jeans, clinging cold and wet to his pruning skin.
He resumes his trudge, and he is a full block from the bird when it hits him he has failed. It's already dead, he thinks, and more than likely that's true, its spasms the last involuntary contractions of the muscles—but still. He should have put it out of its misery. How hard could that have been? A single stomp with his heel would have done it, and then he could be sure the sparrow (if that's what it is) rests in peace. The thought darkens his mood. If he were a more compassionate man, he wouldn't have thought twice. Or a less cowardly one. He could still do it now, he thinks, but the truth is that he's afraid. He winces at the thought of its skull crushing under his foot, and he winces again at his failure to go back and do it. That's the bottom line, he thinks: he's simply a coward, a weakling, a man unable to face what must be faced. Though he did pull the trigger on this thing with Claire, didn't he? That took some guts; that's certainly bolder than putting a sparrow out of its pain, yet the image that comes to him is of Margaret's face while it was still soft and trusting, vulnerable, before it began to harden with anger and grief and bitterness, how one mid-winter night after hours spent in separate rooms, working on separate chores, he watched Margaret bend to douse the last hot coals of the fire, and the soft, tired look in her face, or the gradual extension of her wrist from the cuff of her sleeve, the silver charm bracelet dangling from it, or the way her hair had loosened from the rubber band that held it in its pony tail— The point is that something, who can ever say what exactly, caused something else to move in him, and for the first time since he had met Claire he saw his wife without searching her face for Claire's look of admiration and pleasure, and he quietly crossed the living room and set his open hands on her hips, and he waited like that for her to stand back up. When she did he pressed his nose to her neck and inhaled. She flinched a little with surprise but immediately gave herself to it, tilting her head to open her neck to him, and soon they were embraced, kissing, not overeagerly but like a husband and wife in the gentle comfort of their home. And then upstairs, in the king-sized four-poster, he lay on top, fully inside her, and they moved to a rhythm that, despite the familiarity of their movements, created a force all its own, one that drew them deeper into it, that urged them along, and he said her name softly, his mouth beside her ear—
Divorce sex. He spoke her name like that in the dark, and immediately the phrase came to him, Rob's phrase: divorce sex. "I don't know," Rob had said. "Maybe it's just that the marriage doesn't stand between us anymore, the vows, the contract, whatever"—and that's exactly what it was: at that moment the marriage, the formal arrangement of it, seemed suddenly dissolved, leaving just these two people, this man and this woman, embraced, pushing against each other, suspended in a moment that seemed pure and everlasting. He spoke her name softly in the dark, and she whispered his name in return, and she pressed her hips against his, her body clenching beneath him. "...but the sex, when we have it—we're doing the same things we've always done, but it's like we got freed up somehow." Margaret's fingers on his back; his face pressed into her hair. "Honestly, I haven't felt so close to her in forever." He picked up the pace, urged her on with his thrusts, allowed himself to feel consumed by sensation, by his own power to be utterly here, vividly now. He pinned her wrists to the mattress, and she lifted her hips, opening herself to him, and he thought, Maybe this is what Claire has done for me—compelled a shift of perspective, allowed him to see his life, his marriage, stripped of their cumbersome trappings. "The fact is, we can remake ourselves," Rob had insisted. "It's practically as simple as that," and it was true: he was doing it now, from inside the marriage, and so was Margaret—she pushed him off, rolled over, lifted herself onto her knees like she hadn't done in years...Like this they could remake the marriage itself. He had Claire to thank for that. Claire whom he'd gone out of his way to see, arranging to bump into her at the coffee bar near her office, until their spontaneous downtown walks became habit. She once grabbed him by the wrist when he started in on his old complaints about the department dinosaurs and said, "Whoa, big fella. How 'bout you lighten up a bit, hmm?" "Lighten up," he said, nodding, "as in, don't take it all so seriously." "Now you're getting it," Claire said. They started again on their walk, but she did not let go of his wrist. "I can do that," he continued. "But can you?" "What?" she asked, puzzled by the force behind the question, and right there, on a downtown street in broad daylight, he drew her in and kissed her...His hands on Margaret's hips, but it was Claire's shampoo he smelled, her body he was now (despite himself) imagining...Divorce sex. He thought: Does this mean I'm already gone?
And it was a matter of months before he was gone, before he loaded up a rented truck and delivered the boxes and the furniture he'd agreed to take to his new apartment, and just one more day—a day not yet a week ago—before he'd come back with the Volvo for the very last of his things and Margaret, still wet from a bath and wrapped carelessly in a towel, offered him a glass of iced mint tea and stood with him in the kitchen while he drank it. They made awkward small talk—about what, who can remember, but he saw that she was letting her towel fall, showing the tops of her breasts, the long, wet trails that ran down them. She pretended not to notice his glance and offered him more tea, starting for the fridge before he could answer, and he felt the tug, remembered that night of months before, when he had watched her bend to douse the last of the glowing coals and had to have her, but he reminded himself (the stronger, counterpoised impulse) of the coming weekend with Claire, of the purple sheets she'd bought with a sense of occasion, and said more abruptly than he'd meant to that he better get going. Margaret stopped at the refrigerator door, fixed the top of her towel— What did the house look like then, after he had cleared out the boxes that for days had covered the entire living room floor? What spaces was he leaving behind? What would it look like before Margaret set to filling those spaces with things that belonged only to her? He asks these questions now, looking up through the rain to see the hospital and knowing that once he's passed it he'll have only three blocks left to climb. He cannot picture those rooms bare of his boxes; he sees only Margaret framed in the doorway, clasping her towel, fist against her chest, as he shoved the last of his boxes into the trunk of the Volvo. He sees her face—her chin held a little too high, he realizes; unnaturally high. Her jaw set, her mouth flat, her eyes aimed in his direction but seeing (he gets this now, seeing her more distinctly than he had a week ago) nothing, just gazing into some empty middle distance. Such carefully constructed impassiveness: this was how she wanted him to remember her! She held that face as he climbed into the driver's seat, closed the car door, fired the ignition. He looked back before he pulled away, and (he sees this clearly, though the stop sign at the end of the block is blurred by the raindrops he cannot blink from his lashes) she lifted her chin, robotically, then stepped backward (she did not turn around and reenter the house; she simply took one step backward) and closed the door—and does he gets it? The slowly drooping towel, the second glass of tea she'd offered: divorce sex. She would never forgive him—not that! She certainly wouldn't beg him to stay. But maybe—maybe—she wanted what Rob had described, what he himself had had one night several months before, secretly and for just a moment, before his head filled with thoughts of Claire: the last brief intensity, the delusion that time might stand still, might allow a genuine closeness with this other person who was suddenly becoming a stranger again— And he refused her, stopped her at the refrigerator door with a too abrupt No thanks, and so she saw him out, this woman who had exposed her neck to his lips, who had opened herself beneath him, whose hair he can smell through the rain... She showed him—she presented to him—the most expressionless face she could muster, lifting her chin just slightly higher than usual, a quiet demonstration of defiance: And now you will no longer know me. The recreation at that moment begun: behind the blank, imperturbable façade were the first cell clusters of the Margaret she would become, a woman who would remain closed to him forever. Her last tacitly made offer had been refused (he gets it, he thinks; he really gets it), and when she took that one step backward and closed the door (he still knows that Margaret after all; he can see her) the stiffly blank expression would collapse, she would collapse. She would sink to the floor, her back against the foyer wall, no longer caring what happened to the towel, and a pressure rises into his throat and lodges there. He tries but cannot swallow it down. He thinks of Margaret's face reflecting the last hot coals, her soft, sleepy, vulnerable expression; this was a face that had not yet begun to recast itself— Now there's a difficult and puzzling truth, one awful enough that he thinks he might choke: You will no longer know me. I will never again be the person you knew. He clasps his drenched shirt by the open collar, squeezes it tight, thinks, Wait, please don't move! meaning, What if I don't know what I'm doing?
Good grief! What's happened to his lovely, lazy weekend, the gentle gratification it brought? What's needed is a change of perspective. If Claire were here she'd demand he loosen up. It's a bird, she'd tell him, and yeah, it's sad. Who wants to see a bird dying like that? But don't get in a funk about it—and he'd hear the wisdom in her words, embrace it, maybe even make a show of jumping feet first into a puddle (God knows he can't get any wetter). Or he can hear her laugh with delight as he strips off his wet clothes and marches on in only his squishing shoes and soaking wet boxers. See? It's not so hard: he can remake himself into a spontaneous, devil-may-care kind of guy. "So fuck Heraclitus," he says aloud, meaning, how does he know the pressure burning in his throat is a truth? Isn't it merely a symptom of a mind gradually recognizing its host's deracination, a merely subjective experience requisite to one's willful remaking? For that's all that's is happening, isn't it? The natural and expected process of coming to terms that might have begun when the ugliness of Claire's apartment building hit him—a phase: the standard, banal psychological impact of transition, of divorce, of moving alone into an apartment he has not yet begun to think of as home. Of course there'll be, especially at this stage, some fallout. Who would he be if he didn't feel anything? But like the good, solid, true feeling the Modigliani card once brought him, it will pass. The fact is, we can remake ourselves. We do it all the time, or time does it to us. Nothing fixed, nothing permanent and absolute, and therefore nothing true. "I am what I am," is how God identified himself to Moses, which, on the face of it, means what exactly? "I will be what I will be"—an alternative translation of the same maddeningly nebulous, malleable assertion, a childish reiteration of the deference of the so-called truth. This is the same God who appeared to Job as a whirlwind? Who demanded, Where were you when I founded the earth? Speak, if you have any wisdom? Most certainly it is not. This is a God Nietzsche himself would have invented: There is no the way, Nietzsche claimed. This is my way; what's yours? "Well then," he says into the rain, "me too. I am what I am, I'll be what I will be." Of course Heraclitus thought a different sun rose each morning, so what the fuck did he know?
But it doesn't help. The pressure is still lodged in his throat, he has not managed to will it away. He thinks of Rob sipping beers on the sofa—on what is now Margaret's sofa, in what had been their living room. "Your job is to remake yourself—" But of course Rob (this occurs to him only now)—Rob kept his house, his job, his friends. It was Ann who packed up her car and drove off to Phoenix where she knew practically no one. It was Ann who'd set out to remake herself.
"Excuse me."
Ann who took all the risks—
"Excuse me."
Ann out there in the desert, forging a new life—
"Hey, you can't just ignore people."
An old man, or woman (he has to look past the cropped silver hair, the craggy face, the faint mustache before he can see she's a woman) standing in the hospital's roofed entrance. He all but reached her before he heard her voice. "Will you get me a cup of coffee?" she asks hoarsely. She's dressed in a hospital gown and slippers and is standing with one hand clutching a portable IV stand, a snaking, fluid-filled tube connecting the baggie to her forearm. In her other hand is a cigarette. "I really want a cup of coffee." She is wasted-looking, sallow, her neck and forearms shrunken and draped in loose flesh. "What's a cigarette without a cup of coffee." The fingers on the IV stand are tobacco-stained and trembling in a way that calls to mind the bird's spasms on the sidewalk. He watches her bring the cigarette to her lips and leave it dangling there. "Is something wrong with you, mister? No need to stare, for Christ's sake. Just say yes or no, or—"
He thinks, Look at what you're doing to yourself.
Her eyes narrow, she peers through the smoke, gives him a look that says, You are one nasty little bastard. "What I'm doing to myself?"
"Pardon me?"
"What do you mean what I'm doing to myself?"
But he only thought those words, didn't he?
"Is that how you talk to people?"
He shakes his head, befuddled, and cannot think of a thing to say, so he raises his hand in a feeble gesture of apology and steps backward, out from under the roof and into the rain, which is cold now against his already goosefleshed skin. He turns and lowers his head, raises his shoulders, off again, and for encouragement he pictures his apartment, seeks in it an image of comfort, of warmth, but all he finds are the boxes on the living room floor; he hears the door closing behind him and remembers fights with Margaret, his provocations designed to enrage her, to incite her into demanding the truth; how he wanted her angry with him, bent on punishing; and he remembers making love with Claire while struggling to keep out of mind the strange silences that suggested Margaret was beginning to suspect, or her stony, hardening face once she knew. He thinks of stolen moments with both of them (his thrilling new discoveries, his two great moments of liberation, both of them already committed to other men), the lunchtime and late night walks, the frantic talking and kissing before they slinked back into the lives they had already made for themselves, the thrilling promise that they would eventually slip into lives that together they'd make from the goodness of these liberations. He thinks of the first time he realized that he would someday leave Claire, too; he tasted the grief of it on one of their lunch hour walks through the city, the preemption of long-nursed boredom, of the melancholy desire for a jolt of fresh excitements. This intimacy, he knows, however real and deep and gratifying, is temporary, mortal. In the end—he sees this now, he knows—he is alone, they are all alone: Margaret stubbornly remaking herself, Claire longing to escape her boredom...And himself? He stops at the corner and looks back over his shoulder; he sees the woman who from this distance and through the rain could be a man. He watches her light another cigarette, bring it to her lips, and leave it there to free her arm to hug herself against the wet and the chill it brings, and like that she shivers, hugs herself and shivers. Or does she? Because from this distance and through the veil of rain he can see—even squinting—only the white shape of her, penumbra-like, that seems to hover above the sidewalk, and he realizes it he who is shivering, wet and cold and shivering, so he turns and lowers his head and continues on as the pressure in throat intensifies, constricts—and he thinks: Is that all there is? He has no idea what he means, but an answer rises up in him, a single clear desire as hard as a gemstone: he wants to go running back down the corridors of time and—and what exactly? Reverse his decisions? No, not that, because at this moment he has no idea what those decisions were or how he made them. His desire is simply to lock those moments in place, leave them whole, intact, until he knows the truth about himself well enough that he can return to them with the proper fealty and honor them, do them their deserved justice, love them—what he wants, for God's sake, is to love them.
He stops. Having crossed the street and reached the curb, not two full blocks from home, he stops. It would be a start, he thinks, to go back and stand beneath the roof with that woman, to get her her cup of coffee and a cup for himself, perhaps, and to stand with her. At the very least he can apologize (the thought is good; he feels suddenly clear-headed, not at all the man he was a moment before, the one he'd be apologizing for), and he can keep out of the rain a moment, maybe until his shivering stops and he can collect his thoughts and decide what should come next. He turns, lowers his head against the wind and the rain that he thinks of now as a trial, a test he will, as of this last decision, surely pass, and he crosses the street, head ducked, bracing but determined, and he reaches the curb, and he is halfway down the block before he lifts his head and sees she is gone.