I felt she expected something of me that she wouldn’t state outright. Her face would fall for no reason sometimes, and I would say, “What? What is it?” but she would say it was nothing. I could sense that I had let her down, but I had no idea how.
Once, she had a conference in L.A., but she said that she was thinking she might skip it. She didn’t like leaving me to manage on my own for so long, she said. (This was fairly early in our marriage.) I said, “Don’t skip it for my sake,” and she said, “Maybe you could come with me. Would you like that? They always have guided bus tours and such for the spouses during the day.”
“Great,” I said. “I could bring my knitting.”
“Oh, why be that way? I only meant—”
“Dorothy,” I said. “I was joking. Don’t worry about me. It’s not as if I depend on you to take care of me, after all.”
I meant that as a statement of fact. It wasn’t an accusation; who could read it as an accusation? But Dorothy did. I could tell by her face. She didn’t say anything more, and she got a sort of closed look.
I tried to smooth things over. I said, “But thanks for your concern.” It didn’t do any good, though. She stayed quiet throughout the evening, and the next day she left for her conference and I missed her like some kind of, almost, organ out of my body, and I think she missed me, too, because she phoned me from Los Angeles several times a day and she’d say, “What are you doing right now?” and, “I really wish you were here.” I wished I were there, too, and I couldn’t believe I had wasted that chance to be with her. I made a lot of promises to myself about being more easygoing in the future, not so quick to take umbrage, but then, when she came home, the very first thing she did was get mad at me about this thorn I had in my index finger. I’m serious. While she was gone I had cut back the barberry bush that was poking over the railing of our rear balcony, and you know how barberry thorns are so microscopic and so hard to get out. I figured it would just work its own way out, but it hadn’t yet, and my finger had started swelling and turning red. She said, “What is this? This is infected!”
“Yes, I think it must be,” I said.
“What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said. “I have a thorn in my finger, okay? Sooner or later I’ll see this little black speck emerging and I’ll yank it. Any objections?”
“Yank it with what?” she asked.
“Tweezers, of course.”
“Yank it with what hand, Aaron? It’s in your left index finger. How are you going to work a pair of tweezers with your right hand?”
“I can do that,” I told her.
“You cannot. You should have asked someone for help. Instead you just … sat here, just sat here for a week, waiting for me to come home so I’d have to say, ‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry, how could I have left you on your own to deal with this?’ And everyone else would say, all your family and your office would say, ‘Look at that: she wasn’t even there to take his thorn out and now he has a major infection and maybe even will need an amputation, can you believe it?’ ”
“Amputation!” I said. “Are you nuts?”
But she just reached for the matchbox above the stove and went off to find a needle, and when she came back she leaned over my finger, her lips turned disapprovingly downward, my hand squeezed tightly in hers, and she pierced the skin one time and the thorn shot out like an arrow.
“There,” she said crisply, and she dabbed the wound with disinfectant.
Then she bent her head and pressed her cheek against the back of my hand, and her skin felt as soft as petals.
Well, we survived these little glitches. We papered over them, we went on with our lives. It’s true that we no longer had quite the same newborn shine, but nobody keeps that forever, right? The important thing was, we loved each other. All I had to do to remind myself of that was to cast my thoughts back to the moment we met. To my lonesome, unattached, unsuspecting self following the receptionist down the corridor of the Radiology Center. The receptionist comes to a stop and raps on a half-open door. Then she pushes it farther open, and I step through it, and Dorothy raises her eyes from her book. Our story begins.
I got up from Nandina’s couch and looked around for my cane, which I finally found propped in a corner. I let myself out the front door; I locked it behind me; I set off down the sidewalk.
Left onto Clifton Lane, left again on Summit and down to Wyndhurst. Then south on Woodlawn a good long way until I reached Rumor Road. My road, only three blocks long and lined with flowering pear trees. It was twilight by now, but I could still hear birds singing. One bird was calling out, “ ’Scuse me! ’Scuse me!” and insects were zipping away, keeping up that background clatter that you never really hear unless you stop to think about it.
I was developing a bit of an ache in the left side of my lower back, but that always happened when I walked any distance and I paid it no attention. I started walking even faster, because I knew that beyond the slight bend up ahead I would catch my first sight of our house. The bend was marked by a single tree of a different type from the others; I didn’t know the name. This tree bore huge pink, floppy flowers, and they were so abundant this year that I drew a deep breath as I approached it, expecting a strong perfume. I couldn’t detect one, though. Instead I smelled … Well, it was something like isopropyl alcohol, the faintest, most delicate scent of alcohol floating on the breeze, mixed with plain Ivory soap. The exact scent of my wife.
Then I rounded the bend, and I saw her standing on the sidewalk.
She was some ten feet away from me, facing our house and gazing at it, but when she heard my footsteps she turned in my direction. She was wearing her wide black trousers and a gray shirt. Both were the kind of colors that blended into the fading light, and yet she herself was absolutely solid — as solid as you or I, and in fact almost more so, in some odd way; solid and sturdy and opaque. I had forgotten that rebellious little quirk of black hair that stood up from the crown of her head. I’d forgotten how she always stood tipping a bit backward, ducklike, on her heels.
She watched me intently as I came nearer, with her chin slightly raised and her eyes fixed on mine. I arrived in front of her. I drew in a deep breath. I thought I would never in all my life smell a more wonderful combination than isopropyl alcohol and plain soap.
“Dorothy,” I said.
I’m not sure if I spoke aloud. I have a feeling I may have just thought it, in the very depths of my being.
I said, “Dorothy, my dear one. My only, only Dorothy.”
“Hello, Aaron,” she said.
She looked into my face for a moment, and then she turned and walked away. But I didn’t feel she was abandoning me. I knew, somehow, that she had stayed as long right then as she was able and that she would come again as soon as she could. So I stood still and watched her leave without attempting to follow. I watched her reach the end of the block, take a right on Hawthorn, and vanish.
Then I turned and started back to Nandina’s. I hadn’t so much as glanced at our house. What did I care about our house? I walked in a kind of trance, keeping my gait as nearly level as possible, as if Dorothy had been a liquid and now I was brimful of her and moving slowly and gently so as not to spill over.
6
I waited. I waited.
For days on end I stayed suspended, waiting for her to come back.
Since our street was where she had shown up, I figured that was where she would be most likely to show up again. In fact, I kicked myself for not going there before now. Had she been wandering Rumor Road all these months, wondering where I was? I could hardly bear to think about all my lost opportunities.