And on and on and on. I spoke very little during these conversations, eventually not even curious to see if, like a tunnel through the center of the earth, her endless in-turning, her frantic affected deprecation, her spiraling mental contortions might surface somehow back into the daylight of reason. There is nothing sadder than egotism in a partner you have given your life to, because it speaks mostly to the even greater egotism true of yourself in loving your partner in spite of it. Once the heart is colonized, you can’t ever get it back, not even by killing it.
“I mean, you think I don’t know what I’ve done to you?” she said, on another of these nights. “You think I can live with myself knowing what is probably the truth about all of this? You know what I thought right at the start while I was traveling? I thought, this is what I have to do because of the day after, you know, Haim’s suffering is, you know, over, and the day after that and the day after that. I thought this is what I have to do to still be with you, this is what loving you really is, because I knew you couldn’t be with me if something bad happened, if the final, you know, emergency happened and we were standing there in the PICU and you looked at me and saw that I couldn’t handle it, that I’d checked out, that I was not moved by any of it but horrified — filled with horror at the sight of our own son — I knew that you’d never be able to be with me after that, that even if you loved me you wouldn’t be able to be with me after that. And I didn’t want to start over. And I didn’t want you to have to start over. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, this is what really loving you required: sacrificing myself, my character, taking myself out of it and letting everyone think I’m horrible — in fact, being horrible — so that you and I may live after Haim doesn’t. And this is what I had to think about the whole time I was gone, this is the truth I had to face then and that I have to live with now — that it’s possible — I can barely even say it — that I love my husband more than my son, if only because my son is barely getting to live. There, it’s horrible, unbelievable, but I’ve said it, because it’s more important than anything to be honest.”
That time I stood up and grabbed Charlie’s face with one hand like you would a child who has something that should be spat out. I could feel her teeth through her cheeks.
“How about we try something new,” I said. “How about this: no pity. No pity, not for you, not for me, and not for Haim. No pity. And no forgiveness.”
That was all later, though. That is our recent history. That first night, when I heard her come in, as I listened to her undress in the dark of our room, I didn’t say anything. She slipped into bed, and I could feel her heat — her body always so warm. And she settled in to the position in which she always slept and, as we’d done when we were younger, I felt her leg slide over, barely touching her skin against mine. I let her, felt the warmth enter my body, though later I would feel stupid about it. What can I say? There was only so much room on the mattress with which I could escape her, and I was already as far as I could go.
•
There was a time when we were not yet these people. This is how memory works, resisting your own meaningful organization. For instance, if you asked me to remember now a single day from the heady period when, simultaneously, Haim was a newborn and I was getting the bulk of the rejections for fellowships, teaching jobs, and my novel manuscript, I couldn’t do it. But if you ask me about when Haim was a toddler, when we still lived in Iowa and I thought I might still be a writer, I am immediately back standing in the small canyon of buildings in downtown Iowa City on a brisk September late afternoon, watching the sun alight on Charlie’s reddish-brown hair, which she’d dyed darker because it was cheaper to maintain, as we waited for the homecoming parade to start and Haim ran around, weaving between the families in lawn chairs in front of us and babbling loudly.
He’d just turned four years old, one of those birthdays where we along with him were suddenly older. Charlie had avoided gaining too much weight while she was pregnant (even though I told her that it didn’t matter, that she should be eating double whatever she wanted because it was what Haim wanted too) but it’d been a long, difficult delivery, and she’d lost a lot of blood and was confined to bed for several weeks afterward and then extreme caution for months after that, during which time her curves became fuller, and small rises of fat began collecting at her lower abdomen, arms, and thighs. This had seemed a gentler body, one suited for the mothering of an infant. Now, though, in Haim’s fourth year something had made her decide to regain, as much as she could, the body of her own youth. She found a gym that had a good daycare, and, at about this time, began talking to me about what we should do next, in terms of me teaching high school or doing any of the things I’d promised to try if writing didn’t work out. By this, our fifth year in Iowa, I’d been out of the masters program for as long as I’d ever been in it, and, in both Charlie’s and my mind, the luminous encouragement and private assertions of confidence the faculty had once confided in me had faded, until it almost felt like I’d dreamt them. Charlie made a modest salary as an assistant in a law office, and I had a small stipend teaching Comp 101 at the university, but we were still depending on money from my mother, which shamed us both.
Charlie’s body had, by the day of the parade, tightened and streamlined into an attractiveness that owed more to fitness than out-and-out sexuality. We were thirty years old, and I marveled at how her legs, bent in my periphery during sex, had completely changed, become slender, thin, graced with toned muscle instead of the full curves of her college years, as if this were an entirely different person than I’d first slept with. Her skin, which once seemed to lag behind her in the aging process, blushing smoothly with the cherubic health of a child, now seemed to have gotten ahead of her, and, standing there as the music of the marching bands approached, I could see again how in certain lights it seemed thin and almost grayish, the small fingers of red spreading over her cheeks sharp-edged with capillaries in the cool air.
As the floats and squads from the local baton-twirling studio passed along, I had been distracted by a small boy in front of us, sitting calmly on his father’s shoulders, watching the parade with what seemed like an intelligent reticence. Every once in a while, he’d reach out and pat the top of his father’s hair lightly, as if to say thank you. Haim was in and out of our sight, Charlie doing an awkward side-step thing along the back of the crowd to keep an eye on him as he moved. I could see some of the other parents eye the crowd in the direction he’d rocketed from, looking for someone to give the disapproving glance to, looking for me. Finally Haim came back to us and watched, leaning backward against Charlie’s legs.
When the drunken middle-aged alumnus, leaning out from the top of a passing papier-mâché “hawk’s nest” and wearing a black and gold jester’s hat, threw the necklace of beads toward the crowd I saw it falling directly to me against the blank gray sky, and I reached up and caught it. The beads, I could see now, were actually tiny plastic black and gold football helmets. I can only guess that I must’ve forgotten that Haim was back with us, or maybe that I assumed that by then he’d run off again because, in a daze, I reached up to where the small boy perched, where he was turning to see who had caught the prize, and gave it to him.