Then he went out. He walked up the street to the shops. He looked in the windows at people in the restaurants, the open stores, Walgreen’s, Stu’s Deli, the lighted windows of the closed stores, the hardware store, the bookstore. He went into the park down a slope under huge trees, so dark he had to hold his hand in front of his face against invisible branches. Why have I come out here? he asked.
They must have thought of it while fixing the tire. When they went over to Ray’s car and had a conference. Let’s take them to the trailer, have a ball. What about him? Shit guys, we gotta get rid of him. Okay, here’s what we do. Separate em. Him in one car, the dames in the other. Him you take, Lou. It’s dangerous, man. Shit boy, everything’s dangerous.
He tried to remember, the iron which they used to change his tire. Was it lying on the ground when they finished? He could have picked it up. With the tire iron in his hand he could have prevented Ray and Turk from getting into his car. He could have held it in front of him with two hands. If he had to, he could have swung it and hit Ray on the head.
In the park he lost the path. He saw a light through the lacework of the trees and used it to guide him back to the sidewalk. The light was a sign in a beauty shop, closed for the night. He was trembling, and his face was scratched.
In the darkened house he sat looking out. Take me back, he said. Start over, undo this thing. Change one moment, that’s all I ask, then let history take its course. Stop me at the trailer where I did not stop. Stand me by the car door to fight Ray and Turk, give me that, no more, just one link in the logical chain. Pick up the Bangor hitchhiker, listen to the sweetness of my daughter for the man with the flowing beard, idiot father.
The house was an empty tank full of grief. Their empty ghosts floated everywhere they were not. Not the box of jewelry left open on the dresser. Neither the drawers nor the closets where her dresses hang, where he fingered their textures. He wrapped her heavy gray sweater around his head. Sentimental and pious, he watered the hanging plants she had left in the vestibule. Pick up the blue and white china. Not using the Hitchcock chairs, nor the electric can opener in the kitchen. Nor typing a letter at her old rolltop desk in what she does not call the sewing room though she does no sewing there. Nor her easel, her crazy palette, unframed canvases against the studio wall.
How detached are her two big paintings in the living room, the one all pale blue like an early morning misty seascape, the other hues of pink and orange, serene and constant, ignorant of future force and rape and hammer. Helen’s stupid stuffed panda, symbol of sentimentality with calculated big glass eyes and oversized head, does to him what it was made to do where it sits on the bed in the room full of the house that Jack built.
In the morning he waited to hear the sound of water in the bathroom. He expected to hear the screen door and the footsteps on the walk starting off to school. He wanted to say good bye when he left the house but she must have gone upstairs. When he came back in the afternoon, she would be painting in her studio, he would listen at the foot of the stairs. The afternoon advanced, he was waiting to hear the other one come busting through the screen door. After dinner he would wait for her so they could go for their walk.
He plotted these rediscoveries of absence so they would come as pulses of surprise, to maintain the steady flow of grief. They enabled him to realize it again, over and over. He would deliberately forget and then restore the order in which things happened. The strange oblongs covered by white cloth in the church were later than the canvas cocoons carried out of the bushes, which were later than the mannequins in the bushes. These came after they were driven off in the car in the night, which was later than anything that ever happened in this house. Nothing in this house was more recent than what happened by the road, nothing is newer or fresher than their death. The last you ever saw them, Tony Hastings told himself with astonishment, would always be their scared faces in the car driving down the road.
He talked it over with her. He said, The worst moment was when Ray and Turk forced themselves into the car with you. That was pretty bad, she agreed. No, he corrected himself, the worst was when I first saw something in the bushes and realized it was you. She smiled. He said, I wish you could tell me your part of it. So do I, she said.
The other one clumping down the stairs at night, two at a time, thump crash at the bottom, letting the screen door slam. He asked, what should I do with her things, the stuffed animals, the china horses, I need your advice. I know, she said.
TWO
Upstairs poor old fat Henry plays Siegfried’s Funeral March too loud like rock. Turn that down, Susan Morrow yells, then hears the telephone, which is Arnold calling from New York again. She returns to the manuscript after the call, full of the sound of Arnold’s elation. It jams her reading and obliterates Tony Hastings, wipes him out. The news is Chickwash, and Arnold’s elation is Susan’s dread, though he does not know it. If they must leave this home for the advancement of Arnold’s career. The question sharpens her eyes, makes her look at her life from this spot on the couch. Wallpaper, mantelpiece, pictures, stairs, banisters, woodwork. Outside, a lawn, maple tree, streetcorner, streetlamp. She has friends here: Maria, Norma. To take her children out of school for Chickwash’s sake. They’ll be upset, they may cry forlornly, boyfriends girlfriends and bestfriends lost forever. So may Susan, who said nothing about this on the phone to Arnold, lest she be guilty of selfishness and petty domesticity. She’s had enough of asserting rights and feeling bad afterward. She has no wish to quarrel with Arnold.
He assumes she’ll abide by his decision. He may even think they arrived at the decision together. They’ll talk about it. She’ll ask the questions he expects her to, to help him decide what he’s already decided, telling him what’s on his mind, reminding him of his interests. She’ll weigh his love for the surgeon’s art and his care for patients against prestige and the power to do good on a national scale. If she doesn’t like it, she won’t tell him lest it be taken as an attempt to influence him against his best interests. She’ll mention the children and their interests, but if he says children can adapt and speaks of the advantages to them of a Washington environment and a successful father, she’ll support him of course.
His voice like a high school kid. Virtually promised me the job, he said. Isn’t that great? It’s wonderful, dear, she said. We must talk it over, he said, we must consider what’s best for all of us, you and the children too, I won’t accept it without consulting you. All the angles. He made suggestions on how to consider all the angles.
There was more than that in the call. A bad moment, some question she asked which was not a proper response to her husband’s triumph, realized too late. It passed, an error, leaving a soil of worry after the call ended. A feeling of disaster averted, though a danger still remains of bogging down in thoughts. Stop, Susan tells Susan, let it be. It could have been worse. The evening is for reading, and to continue that she must wipe herself out of her mind.
Tony Hastings instead. He grieves, apathetic, obsessed, and she wonders what she is supposed to make of him when he turns off the lights and looks out. He’s become a character, complicated by that hint of Edward’s irony threaded through the style. She wonders if she’ll lose touch with him, if his woe slips into self-pity. She hopes the novel does not prolong his depression, for who wants to read about a depressed protagonist? She tends to be impatient with depressed people, more than Edward, perhaps. She remembers Edward’s own depression when he was trying to write, before their marriage failed.