Authors: Valerie Trueblood
At this Paul begins to shout, “Stop it! Just stop it, god damn it!” All attention shifts off what is happening with the Clue game and onto his stamping approach. Robbie's eyes flash through his tears and the girls shift their hips righteously in their pink bicycle shorts. “Stop it,”
Paul says from the doorway, in a lower voice. He looks at his hands, and turns and goes noisily downstairs, throwing an angry look back at me as if I have allowed the children to make him want to hit them.
He would never hit them. Fatherhood he accepts as a vocation. Something happened when he was a boy that required this of him. He may not be a natural husband but fatherhood is a marked-off territory in his mind: there he will not be found wanting. He always preferred to stay home rather than hire a babysitter, and he doesn't have to pick one up now, because Jenny, the oldest, is almost fourteen. Downstairs the girls hug us loosely, waiting for us to be gone. I go back up to kiss my son. I have to kneel down because he's sprawled against the girls' dresser with his arms loose beside him. “Oh, well,” he says, sniffing deeply and shakily. And he puts his head on my chest like a dog. Paul comes up, too. When I leave he squats down and talks to Robbie. I used to think Paul gave Robbie advice, but lately I have overheard snatches of their talks and I think it is more that he is begging Robbie not to be temperamental and violent and clumsy, as Paul was when he was a child, but to be happy.
Paul still calls home in the middle of the evening. But now that Jenny's old enough to babysit for other people, we think and say to each other, they're safe, the family won't let anything happen to itself.
Of course, we know a story to undo that faith, a story from Sophie's household. Sophie's toddler fell out of a doorway with no steps, in the house they were remodeling. All the while Sophie was crying with Paul at the movies and on ferries, her husband was lugging planks in and out and cutting drywall and breathing sawdust to turn the house into one in which she could lean back on the couch in front of the sunburst window, spread out her red hair, curl her thin toes and be happy. The little one fell several feet, onto cement, while in the care of her teenage sister. She was a ball of solid flesh and was bruised but not badly hurt anywhere, it appeared. Later in the day her sister could not wake her, and took her back to the emergency room, where she was found to have bleeding in her head.
The blood formed not one clot but two, it was said. It was a bad case, days of alarm, confusion, and guilt at the hospital. Sophie was
not at the meeting in Denver that she had left home the day before to attend, but in a lodge on the other side of the Cascades with Paul, and could not be found. Fortunately Paul, daily envisioning just such a thing, had left a telephone number. But snow fell; an accident closed the pass, and he was unable to rush Sophie down out of the mountains to the hospital where her child lay, and thus, while the unconscious two-year-old was being wheeled in and out and having her scans and being operated on for the clots, many things had to be known, and said, and suffered over, on the telephone. And I saw how it was then, for Sophie's husband Stan and their teenage daughter, and for Sophie herself, and even for Paul, now that Stan knew, and I felt myself banned from the circle of suffering because I had known for months and my own knowing had not shamed anybody or set in motion any such spreading sorrow.
In the tiny restaurant with its ceiling fan going and its front door open to the cool air of the street, I observed, “You're confusing the kids. Lately either you give in to everything or you're yelling. What about quiet discipline?”
He said, “Quiet discipline. Like you.” That was how it began, harmlessly enough. But something had been there all week, coming and going, flickering. Then we tried to get in everything over an hour's meal, but a silent agreement over the last few weeks not to bring Sophie into it blocked us.
It always used to come back to weeping red-haired Sophie twenty blocks away, in her house with its side cut away and draped in blue plastic, who never wanted to hurt anybody. Indeed after the baby's injury and long, stalled, only partial recovery, Sophie withdrew for months, more than half the year. Still, when spring came it was unusually warm, and under its loosening influence she was ready to sink back into desire and secrecy and tears. But Paul had had a chance to catch his breath and he was not quite ready, he was thinking it over.
It seemed possible to me that he was thinking he might have to stay the way he was, married. Bitter thoughts. When he was twelve, his own father left the family and married somebody else, and he was recalling that time of furious sorrow and hatred.
His father got married to a woman down the street whom they had all known. She was divorced, raising two sons whom Paul's father would later urge his own sons to think of as their brothers, during the brief visits he made. Those dwindled away in a year or two. The woman had pitch-black hair down to her shoulders and came out onto the sidewalk in her pink bunny-fur dressing gown carrying her garbage can. Fussing with the lid on the can, smoking. Paul always described her that way, on the sidewalk, inhaling. Long before they knew anything about their father's adventures, Paul and his real brothers had noted the hair, the pink fur. They had talked secretly about the woman.
As women did more frequently then, Paul's mother went on a downward slide. There were not many magazines telling wives in her position what their responsibilities were. She raved, she drank, she cornered the girl Paul took to the prom that year and wept in her arms.
Years later his father was passing through the town where Paul and I were in college, and he took Paul out to dinner. He boasted about the black-haired wife to his son. He said, “She's still a wild woman.”
“Ugh,” I said, when I heard that. Paul didn't tell me about it until after we were married.
Paul said, “I was through with it all by then.”
“That's what you think,” I said.
He thought for a minute. “If I had seen him a few years earlier and he had said that I would have killed him.”
But maybe now he was finally thinking about how his father felt. I didn't know how long this period of thinking could go on. Thinking and waiting. Nine people waiting.
The concert was part of a festival, four chamber works by different groups. Two-thirds of the way through the first one, during the pause after the andante, Paul got up from his seat and crawled across me to get out. He was gone for the rest of the quartet and the two mazurkas. When the intermission began I threaded my way through the crowd in the lobby but I couldn't see him. Finally I went up to a pair of student ushers, a boy and a girl who were laughing and
pushing each other, and said, “Did you see a man come out and leave, at the beginning of the concert?” The boy looked down at me, a woman with glasses and lines at her mouth. “Lots of people go out,” he said in a voice meant for the girl. She stepped in front of him and said, “A man did sit out here for a while. I don't know, he might have left.”
In an alcove by the cloakroom I found him in a telephone booth. This was in the time before cell phones. He was not on the phone, he was sitting in the booth with the door closed. He was leaning back as if he were asleep. For a horrible moment I thought he had gone into the telephone booth and died.
Though I had made no sound, it was too late for me to leave because he had seen me. He stood up as if he had been getting ready to come out just at that moment. He wrestled with the door, trying to push it outward instead of pulling it toward him. I remembered something I had forgotten, how when the children were babies I sometimes thought, at a certain stage of tiredness, of climbing into the crib with them. I saw myself, the wife standing outside the booth, as another person, the one who would have come into the room if I had been in the crib and said, “What are you doing?” Someone proprietary and without impulses, a balding Karenin, a jailer. “What are you doing?”
I wanted to say I saw nothing peculiar about his being in the phone booth and I was not there to bring him back. But he got the door open and came out, shaking out the knees of his pants, and without a word pressed through the crowd with me to the refreshment table. I could have said, “Are they all right?” pretending I thought he was calling the children. Or I could have said, “You called her, I know.” But I didn't want to, because of the question of whether I had driven him to it. Not what if I had, but what if I hadn't? What if I did not figure into it at all?
We had come for the Schubert trio that was last, after the intermission. About the thin slivers of torte and the half cup of coffee that went with them for six dollars, we did not make our habitual jokes. Pale now, he went off to the men's room. When he came back he was standing behind me for a while before I knew it. Then the lights dimmed and everyone surged back.
A woman in a pleated caftan with shoulder pads pushed by me so hard I hit the doorframe. I looked back to see if Paul had noticed and I began to feel chilled and uncertain. He looked ill. Surely at dinner he had fought as fiercely as I, although I couldn't remember any of the things he had said.
We rustled, sat, settled, gazed at the stage. The musicians arrived onstage looking fresh and combed as if they had just laid aside aprons, washed their hands, and come out ready to serve us something they had prepared backstage. We grew still, the musicians smoothed their music, signaled back and forth tuning. Silence. Silence. The trio began.
It was to hear this trio, the B flat, that I had bought these tickets months before. In its andante an almost untroubled devotion would be told again and again.
When life is dark I listen to Schubert. I have taken books about him out of the library to learn why this should be so. Reading them the first time, and even rereading them, I have had such a strong feeling of woe, and of responsibility, as he stepped along his path, that it was as if I were reading about my son. For Schubert, there was no untroubled devotion. No wife, no proud children. He was himself the twelfth child of a teacher and a cook. Just five lived. So, seven deaths, for the teacher and the cook who had Schubert to bring up. He grew to only about five feet, not tall enough for the compulsory military service. He was known by the nickname Mushroom. Some of the piano music he wrote was too difficult for him to play. He drank too much wine, could not earn a living. No wife. No children. Even so, he was able to chart a despair and longing that seem to me to belong to marriage, although it may be I'm confusing marriage with life.
Schubert finished this piece in his last year, before dying at thirty-one of typhus, typhoid fever, or syphilis, depending on the biography you accept. Thirty-one. The year was 1828,
the year of mysterious pain, fevers, of businesslike attempts at sales. The year of death in youth.
Here we were, hearing his lost idiom and understanding it, as though one hundred sixty years had not chewed through the world leaving nothing Schubert would recognize, except maybe the three on the stage, two men and a woman, with the violin and the cello and
the huge piano with Bösendorfer emblazoned on its mirrorlike black side. The young man is bent over the keys guiding it. The air of an important but notâfor himâdifficult test hangs over him.
I fell in love with Paul in a class. I saw him bent over his spiral notebook, with dark circles under his eyes. He was carefully writing, shielding the page. I watched for a while and saw that he was not taking notes but writing a letter, which I felt sure was to a woman, a girl, as we said then. I started to think about how she would feel if she stopped getting the letters. When he looked up he looked straight into my eyes. He looked familiar. He had the flashing sad eyes of someone else. A boy. He looked like the boy from my grade school.
For a long time I used to say to myself,
no one can distract us from each other. Either of us.
It was impossible that anyone else could offer more than we were offering each other, in the days of the alewives coming in on the waves of Lake Michigan.
I did something.
I called Sophie. We arranged to meet at a restaurant. I knew whom to look for. I had seen her across the auditorium that night when Paul stiffened and I followed his eye. I knew she would get to the restaurant first because she was a therapist and would know that the seated person has the power. She was there, with a book, a novel. It was one of those novels that maintain the reputation of being for the serious reader while in fact everyone reads them. I wanted to say something crushing about it, for I had read it too, but I just said, “Are you liking it?” as I sat down.
“I do like it,” she said, and she added, looking at me searchingly as though I might help her, “but it's taking me forever.” Everyone complained proudly of the long climb of this awful book.
Was she pretty? No, but she had abundant red hair, and her eyes were large, and made up to highlight their blue-gray. Something about her did not look good. She had that skim-milk skin, blue under the eyes, that goes with the hair. She was not wearing her glasses. Things I had been afraid would come to me as I looked at her, physical things, did not. The need to be composed overrode any images.
“I don't know how to tell you how sorry I am,” she said. Did this mean he had told her he was going to leave us? I didn't want to ask questions; that would make me the outsider. But I didn't want to let her ask questions; that would make me the patient.
“I know you are,” I said.
“You must wonder what kind of person I am.”
I knew this was a consideration of the utmost importance to her. “I have some idea. I assume this isn't your usual way.”
“God. I would never have believed this could happen. Never. Never.”
“But it did.” We kept making these statements, one after another. Somebody was going to have to ask a question, or take a stand. The waitress came for our order and Sophie complimented her on her earrings. I could see she was going through life like this, making everything a little better for this person or that.