“You’re working too hard,” she told him.
He looked up at her like a beast surprised over its prey, the book spread open in his lap as if it were the thing he’d stalked and killed, the bloody meat he was gnawing in the refuge of his den. “Not hard enough,” he growled.
At first she’d been sympathetic. She kept telling herself that there was nothing wrong, that he was under too much pressure, that was all. Working a forty-hour week, commuting to the City for his final courses in education and history, attending party meetings, maintaining the car, the yard, the house, and on top of it all trying to research and write a senior thesis in the space of ten short weeks: it was enough to put anyone off track. But as the summer progressed and he became increasingly withdrawn, unloving, single-minded and hostile, she began to realize that she was fooling herself, that the problem went deeper than she dared guess. Something outside of him, something poisonous and irrevocable, was transforming him. He was hardening himself. He was driving a wedge between them. He was slipping away from her.
It had begun in June, when Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum announced the party’s plans for a rally in Peterskill and Truman had started on his final project at City College, the senior thesis. Truman chose an obscure episode of local history for his paper — Christina had never even heard of it — and he set to work with all the monomaniacal concentration of a Gibbon chronicling the decline of Rome. Suddenly there was no time for dinner with Hesh and Lola, no time for cards, a drive-in movie, no time to take Walter out on the river or to throw him a ball in the cool of the evening. There was no time for sex either. He’d work half the night, frowning in the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk, and he’d come to bed like a man with an arrow through his back. The door would creak on its hinges, he’d take three steps and he’d fling himself forward, asleep before he hit the bed. On Saturdays and Sundays, all day, he was at the library. She tried to reason with him. “Truman,” she pleaded as he jotted notes or tossed one book down to snatch up another, “you’re not writing the history of Western civilization; give yourself a break, slow down. Truman!” her voice rising to a shout, “it’s only a term paper!”
He never even bothered to answer.
And what was he writing? What was he killing himself over, night and day, till his wife felt like a widow and his son barely recognized him? She took a look one afternoon. One flawless sunstruck afternoon when Truman was at the plant and Walter sat smearing pea soup into his shirt. She was hauling out the kitchen trash, arms laden with two bursting bags of bones and peels and coffee grounds, when suddenly there it was, the focus of the room, the house, the city, the county, the world itself: there, in the center of his desk, lay the battered manila folder that never left his sight except when he was stretched out unconscious on the bed or punching the clock for the bosses down at the foundry. It was a magnet, a ne plus ultra and a sine qua non. She picked it up.
Inside, in a wad thick as the phone directory, were hundreds of pages of lined yellow paper covered with the jerking loops and slashes of his tiny cramped script. Manorial Revolt: The Crane/Mohonk Conspiracy, she read, by Truman H. Van Brunt. She flipped the page. “The history of Van Wart Manor is a history of oppression, betrayal and deceit, a black mark in the annals of colonial settlement. …” The style was wild, cliché-ridden, declamatory and passionate — hysterical, even. It was like no history she’d ever read. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought the author personally involved, the victim of some terrible injustice or false accusation. She read five pages and put it down. Was this it? Was this what had taken hold of him?
She had her answer three weeks later.
It was a Saturday afternoon, a week before the concert. The course was done, the paper finished (at two hundred fifty-seven closely typed pages it was five times the length of any other submitted that semester), the degree awarded. They took the train back from the graduation ceremony and she pressed close to Truman in the gently swaying coach, thinking Now. Now we can breathe. It was late in the day when they got back to the house. Truman crossed the room and sat heavily at his desk, still dressed in cap and gown — the rented cap and gown he obstinately refused to return — the sweat seeping through the heavy black muslin in dark fists and slashing crescents. “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We’ll pick up Walter and we’ll go out someplace for dinner — someplace nice. Just the three of us.”
He was staring into the trees. He didn’t look like a man who’d just crowned three years of hard work with a supreme and enduring triumph — he looked like a thief about to be led off to the gallows.
“Truman?”
He brought his face around slowly, and his eyes were strange with that shifting vacant gaze she’d come to recognize over the past few weeks. “I’ve got to go out,” he said, glancing away again. “With Piet. I’ve got to help Piet with his car.”
“Piet?” She threw the name back at him like a curse. “Piet?” She could see him, Piet, as pale as a hairless little grub, an ineradicable smirk on his face. “What about me? What about your son? Do you realize we haven’t done anything as a family for what — months now?”
He only shrugged. His upper lip trembled, as if he were fighting back a wicked leering little smile that said Yes, yes, I’m guilty, I’m a shit, abuse me, hate me, divorce me. He couldn’t hold her eyes.
They’d been married nearly four years — didn’t that mean anything to him? What was wrong? What happened to the man she’d fallen in love with, the daredevil with the quick smile who’d flown under the Bear Mountain Bridge and swept her off her feet?
He didn’t know. He was tired, that was all. He didn’t want to argue.
“Look at me,” she said, seizing him by the arms as he rose to go, the coarse fabric of the gown bunching under her fists. “You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” Her voice rose to a lacerating wail that filled her head till she thought it would burst. “Aren’t you?”
She knew in that instant that she was wrong, and the knowledge crumpled her like a balled-up sheet of foil. It wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t the Crane/Mohonk conspiracy or the forty hours a week at the foundry either. She was looking into the depths of him and what she saw there was as final and irrevocable as the drop of a guillotine: he was already gone.
The paper was done, and now he had the cap and gown, artifacts of his accomplishment. He slept in them through the remainder of that week, wore them to work, fluttered into Outhouse’s Tavern like the scholar-gypsy, the mortarboard raked back on his head as if it had fallen out of the sky and miraculously lighted there. She saw him in the soft light of morning as he pulled on his steel-toed boots, and she saw him silhouetted against the harsh yellow lamp in the living room as he staggered in at night: that week, that dismal fractured week that began with his commencement and ended with the concert, he didn’t spend a single evening at home.
She remonstrated at dawn, pleaded at midnight, spat out her fury and despair through the small hours of the morning. He was impervious. He lay in bed, drunk, the tattered gown wound around his legs, the breath whistling through his lips. At the sound of the alarm, he started up out of bed, fumbled into his boots and staggered out the door — without coffee, without cornflakes, without a hello or goodbye. And so it went until Saturday, the day of the concert. On that mild and fateful morning, Truman was up at first light, grinning wildly at her, spouting one-liners like a desperate comedian up against an immovable audience. He whipped up a batch of pancakes, fried eggs and sausages, clowned around the kitchen for Walter with a colander on his head. Could it be all right after all? she wondered. The pancakes were on the table, Walter was giggling at his silly Daddy, Christina smiled for the first time in a week, and Truman, leering like a court jester, like a zany, like a madman pressed to the bars of his cage, tore the ragged academic gown from his back and sent it hurtling across the room and into the wastebasket in a high arcing jump shot. Then, with a wink, he disappeared into the bedroom and returned a moment later in a sparkling pristine polo shirt — a shirt she’d never seen before, a miracle of a shirt — still creased with newness and striped in glorious bands of red, white and blue.