|
particle in the black sky of the night, and something moved in Jane’s water-filled
mind. It was the way the Lydia woman had looked at her, and then looked away,
right before going up the balcony stairs. Purposefully now, Jane made her voice
calm, almost conversational. “Bobby,” she said, “please tell me the truth. You
did see them at the Miami airport, didn’t you?”
And when he didn’t answer, she felt her bowels ache, and an age-old sliver of
anguish shuddered deep within her—how tired it made her, that particular,
familiar pain; a weight that seemed to her to be like a thick, tarnished silver
spreading through her, and then it rolled over everything, extinguishing
Christmas lights, streetlamps, fresh snow; the loveliness of all things—all gone.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t believe it.” She added, “I really can’t believe it.”
Bob pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. They sat.
“Janie,” he said.
“Tell me.” So calm. She even sighed. “Tell me, please,” she said.
She could hear in the darkness of the car how his breathing was quicker now;
and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hearts were too old for this now;
you can’t keep doing this to a heart, can’t keep on expecting your heart to pull
through.
In the dim light that shone from their front porch, his face looked ghastly and
ghostly. He must not die right now. “Just tell me,” she said again, kindly.
“She got breast cancer, Janie. She called me at the office that spring before I
retired, and I hadn’t heard from her in years. Really years, Janie.”
“Okay,” Jane said.
“She was very unhappy. I felt bad.” He still did not look at her; he stared over
the steering wheel. “I felt…I don’t know. I can tell you I wish she hadn’t called.”
Now he sat back, taking a deep breath. “I had to go to Orlando to close down
that account, so I told her I’d come see her, and I did. I went down to Miami and
I saw her, and it was awful, it was pathetic, and the next day I flew back from
Miami, where I saw the Grangers.”
“You spent the night with her in Miami?” Jane was shivering now, her teeth
would chatter if she let them.
Bob was slumped in his seat. He put his head back on the headrest and closed
his eyes. “I wanted to drive back to Orlando that night. That’s what I’d planned.
But it was too late. I didn’t feel like I could leave, and then, frankly, it was too
late for me to feel I could safely drive back. It was awful, Janie. If you could
know how stupid and awful and miserable it was.”
“So how much have you spoken with her since then?”
“I called her once, a few days after I got back, and that was it. I’m telling you
the truth.”
“Is she dead?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I probably would have heard from Scott
or Mary maybe, if she’d died, so I assume she hasn’t. But I have no idea.”
“Do you think about her?”
He looked at her pleadingly in the semidarkness. “Jane, I think of you. I care
about you. Only you. Janie, it was four years ago. That’s a long time.”
“No, it isn’t. At our age, it’s like turning a couple of quick pages. Blip-blip.”
She made a hand gesture in the dark, a quick back and forth.
He didn’t answer this but only looked at her with his head still back against
the headrest, as though he had fallen out of some tree and lay now, unable to sit
up, his eyes rolling sideways to look at her with exhaustion and terrible sadness.
“All that matters is you, Janie. She doesn’t matter to me. Seeing her—it didn’t
matter to me. I just did it because she wanted me to.”
Jane said, “But I just don’t understand. I mean, at this point in our lives, I just
don’t understand. Because she
wanted
you to?”
“I don’t blame you, Janie. It’s ridiculous. It was so—nothing.” He put a large
gloved hand over his face.
“I have to go in. I’m freezing.” She got out of the car and went up the front
steps of their home as though she were stumbling, but she didn’t stumble. She
waited for him to unlock the door and then moved past him into the kitchen, then
through the dining room into the living room, where she sat down on the couch.
He followed her, and turned on the lamp, then sat on the coffee table, facing
her. For a long time they just sat. And she felt that her heart was broken again.
Only now she was old, so it was different. He slipped off his coat.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “You want some hot chocolate? Tea?”
She shook her head.
“Take your coat off, though, Janie.”
“No,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“Oh, please, Janie.” He went upstairs and came back down with her favorite
sweater, a yellow angora cardigan.
She put the sweater on her lap.
He sat down next to her on the couch. “Oh, Janie,” he said. “I’ve made you so
sad.”
She let him help her, in a moment, put the sweater on. “We’re getting old,”
she said then. “One day we’re going to die.”
“Janie.”
“I’m scared of it, Bobby.”
“Come to bed now,” he said. But she shook her head. She asked, pulling back
from his arm, which had gone around her, “Didn’t she ever marry?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, she never married. She’s mental, Janie.”
After a moment, Jane said, “I don’t want to talk about her.”
“I don’t either.”
“Never again.”
“Never again.”
She said, “It’s that we’re running out of time.”
“No, we’re not, Janie. We still have time together. We could still have twenty
years together.”
When he said that, she felt a deep and sudden pity for him. “I need to sit here
for just a few more minutes,” she said. “You go on up to bed.”
“I’ll stay with you.” And so they sat. The lamp from the side table threw a dim
and serious light throughout the silent room.
She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young
girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out
sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great
disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome)
anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame,
and then get tired, too.
Next to her she heard her husband’s breathing change; he had drifted into a
sudden sleep, his head thrown back against the cushions of the couch. And then
she saw him give a start.
“What is it?” She touched his shoulder. “Bobby, what were you just
dreaming?”
“Whew,” he said, raising his head. In the dim light of the living room he
looked like a half-plucked bird, his thin, dry hair sticking out in different angled
patches from his head.
“The concert hall roof fell in,” he said.
She leaned toward him. “I’m right here,” she said, putting her palm to the side
of his face. Because what did they have now, except for each other, and what
could you do if it was not even quite that?
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
