After Life (29 page)

When I got back to the house he was drinking whiskey. He never got violent when he drank, but he would, occasionally, become argumentative. I was angry that he’d spent our money on whiskey but decided not to bring it up.

“Why is it,” he asked, while I hung up my coat and hat and mittens, “that, if mediums really believe what they preach, they still freak out when someone dies?”

“They don’t ‘freak out.’ ”

“You’d think, if death were so great, that mediums would go around offing themselves whenever they got in trouble, or in debt, even. I mean, if the only difference between this plane and the other is that you can’t bring your
stuff
with you, it’s kind of like declaring bankruptcy. See what I’m saying?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No one has a memorial service for you if you declare Chapter Eleven.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” I said.

It did upset me, though. It was clear that spiritualism had lost whatever temporary charm it had held for Peter. He’d begun hiking across the frozen lake to go to Wallamee’s miserable public library every couple of days or so; it took him an hour and a half each way. He said he was reading magazines. “My mind’s gone to hell,” he said. “I can’t concentrate. I can’t even handle the freaking
New York
Times.
”

But that winter, my faith in mediumship was stronger than ever. Every morning I woke up, usually cold, usually hungry, but terribly excited about the work waiting for me that day. The more I thought about death—death in the concrete, I mean, death as in being crushed by ice, as in being stabbed by an icicle—the more important spiritualism seemed to me. It was so important! Believing, as I was sure I did, in the spirit world, I was kept from thinking that life and death were without meaning. Peter didn’t have that. Living in the half of the house we rented was like living in a cave, or a coffin, to him.

He didn’t leave me, though. He could have gone back to Oregon, or hung around with old friends in Princeton. But he still loved me. At least, that’s what I told myself. Why else would he stay? And we had sex quite often. It was a fierce business, with lots of pinching and scratching and slamming around. I always kept my eyes open, watching him, which is how I knew that he kept his shut, and that his mouth moved silently the whole time, as if he were praying for something.

Spring came. It came in a sudden rush of water: rain poured down, snowbanks shrank, and puddles and rivulets flooded the roads of Train Line. Every day the ground breathed out the smell of relief. It was strange to see the battered grass again and strange to pry open the windows and let air flow through the house. We all shook ourselves and woke up a little. Peter and I started taking walks together again. The hard ground felt unbelievably good beneath my feet after walking on snow all those months. Peter got a haircut and his cheeks regained their color, at least for a while.

Peter kept a journal. He’d kept one since he was fourteen, several volumes of those hardcovered blue laboratory notebooks. I’d never felt much urge to read it. He wrote in it when he was alone; at the library, I suspected, or when I was busy. I figured they were “deep thoughts”: observations on the beauty of nature and the stupidity of people, etcetera. There was a good chance, I thought, that I’d be embarrassed by what he wrote. Perhaps it was over my head, or perhaps it wasn’t very intelligent at all.

So I don’t know why I picked it up off his desk the first time and opened it. It was a mild, indeterminate spring day: warm but cloudy, no leaves on the trees but no snow, either. I was cleaning the house, happy that I’d survived the winter, and feeling that my life was changing. Whenever the seasons changed I felt that way. Life was opening up. I thought about growing a garden that summer. We had a small square of lawn behind the house, and I wanted to grow potatoes and carrots and maybe something like strawberries. Seed catalogs had arrived in the mail. I pored over them constantly, loving the way the pages smelled, drawing diagrams of my plot. The Silverwood had hired Peter to do some preseason painting and repair work, so he seemed slightly more cheery, too. That’s where he was that morning. I expected him back in an hour or so, for lunch.

The first thing I noticed about Peter’s journal was how regular and controlled the handwriting was. He wrote with a blue ballpoint pen, and every letter slanted the same way, and every page was filled: no margins. He’d pressed down hard, too, so that the pages were stiff and crinkly. I spotted my name.

…
unlike Naomi, who hasn’t washed her hair in a month…

What? I washed my hair far more often than that. Was he serious? I pulled my hair over my nose and smelled it. It smelled fine, like hair. I flipped through the pages.

As I read over the journal, I found references to my “large legs,” “hairy legs,” “man hands,” and “vast behind.” The nicest thing I found was from October; it referred to my “comfortably weighty presence” and “calm, simple soul.” The entries became worse and more insulting as the journal wore on. The most recent was from the day before. In it he described a fantasy about having sex with someone else.

…
she had a waist that fit in my hands as she rode above me, and we moved together, like waves peaking and crashing. Her slender, boyish hips held an ocean of pleasure, and I kept diving in, losing my breath…

This went on for several paragraphs. Then:

…
when I awoke N. was snoring. When I nudged her to roll over, her big old arm flopped across my chest, nearly driving the life out of me.

I had to sit down, my finger holding my place in the notebook. Sweat broke out on my forehead and under my arms. It seemed impossible that he could write this and still live with me. True, he was grim and unpleasant much of the time. I had chalked that up to the weather and having no money. What had I done to make him feel that way? Anything?

At lunch I was subdued, but Peter didn’t seem to notice. He complained about the idiocy of the people he worked with—“You’d think they’d know enough to keep all the tools in
one place,
so we could find them again. I spend half my time looking for the godawful tools…”—and expressed, again, his wish that people with low IQs would be banished to an island somewhere.

“What do you think my IQ is?” I asked him, suddenly wanting to know what he’d say.

“Considerably higher than the sum total of those fools at the Silverwood.”

“No, seriously. What do you think it is?”

He gave me an impatient look. “How am I supposed to know?”

“I’m just curious.”

He chewed on his sandwich. “I was tested when I was a child, and my score was off the charts. Of course,” he added modestly, “I’m sure IQ testing for children isn’t all that accurate.”

Peter talked like this a lot. It had never bothered me before; it wasn’t as if he did it in public or around people other than me. I thought he was just being honest. But he wasn’t honest, really. Not after what I’d seen in his journal. It hit me with a peculiar force. Why was he so critical? Incessantly, smugly, neurotically critical?

After a few days I more or less forgot about the journal entries—that is, I never actually forgot about them, but I hid them away in the back of my mind—and threw myself into my work, my garden plans, the coming spring. I treated Peter with the utmost politeness—he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss—until finally I felt normal around him. Now and then I’d recall one of the insults—
vast behind!
—and be shocked all over again, but this happened less and less as spring rolled into summer.

Part of me had stopped loving him. But another part of me desired him more than ever; I wanted to prove him wrong, somehow. I wanted to force him to love me, to want me, to fall under my spell. I wanted him to wake up one day, look at me, and think,
I
was
wrong.

In the late spring, and on into summer, something happened to Peter. At first it was just allergies. His eyes ran, his nose ran, he sneezed and coughed and stumbled bleary-eyed around the house. It was grass pollen, he said. At one point he got an infection in his throat from all the dripping and swelling, and lay around the house, shivering under quilts. Outside the air was lovely, the sun was warm, but Peter just stayed inside, sniffing. It disgusted me. I was surprised at the strength of my reaction.

“It would do you good to get some fresh air,” I told him.

“That air is
not
fresh.
”

“You’re going to look like a cave worm if you mope around all summer in the dark.”

“Why are you telling me this? Can’t you tell I’m sick?”

I told him I couldn’t sleep with him clearing his throat every twelve seconds—I timed it—and began sleeping on the sofa downstairs. I imagined him dying during the night. I’d be shocked, but I’d handle it. Trapped on the other side, Peter would be frightened and lost and utterly dependent on me. Imagining it was quite satisfying.

But even when the allergies lifted, Peter didn’t believe he was better. There was something caught in his lungs, he said. He sat up at night probing his ribs. A doctor in Wallamee gave him a chest X-ray—which we couldn’t really afford—and a clean bill of health, but by then the problem had migrated to his neck. “What are these bumpy things?” he asked me, running his fingers along his jawline.

“Glands.”

“No, not there,” he said impatiently. “Over
here.
”

I couldn’t talk him out of his hypochondria, so I decided to change my tack. I began to humor him, even encourage him. “Have you always had that freckle?” I’d ask, poking the back of his hand. Or I’d tell him, “The whites of your eyes look awfully yellow today.” I took a perverse pleasure in his reactions. He’d pretend to ignore me, but later I’d catch him staring at himself in the mirror, or looking up symptoms in a secondhand medical guide he bought at the Rummage Room. He called in sick at the Silverwood until they fired him. Every time he opened a door he had to cover his hand with his shirt before he touched the knob, in order to avoid germs.

I still took a peek at his journal now and then. Mentions of me were scarcer, but other interesting things replaced them.

I know it’s ridiculous, but sometimes I’d swear there’s poison in my food.

And,

All day I’ve had an odd buzzing in my head. Possible stroke? Oh, God. I think I’m going to die.

Some days he was better, others he was worse. I couldn’t predict it. We went to the beach in Wallamee one Saturday, and he took off his shirt, jumped in, and swam for a long time. When he came out, he was happy and chatty and had a sunburn on his nose. The next day he sat in the kitchen in his long johns, reading the
Journal of the American Medical Association
—I had no idea where he found of copy of
that
—with all the stove burners turned up. For heat, he said. It was seventy-five degrees outside.

My garden didn’t grow. I watered it enough, I thought, and gave it some fertilizer, but the tomato plants withered, the carrots stayed tiny, and the lettuce bolted the instant it came out of the ground. The strawberries never showed up. I was horribly disappointed. I had failed at this one simple project, and now I had nothing to do all summer but work and hang around melancholy Peter.