The Hours (20 page)

Laura pays Mrs. Latch, accepts a bird of paradise from her yard. Mrs. Latch always offers something—a flower, cookies— as if that were the object of payment, and the babysitting were free. Laura, apologizing again for her tardiness, citing her husband’s imminent arrival, cuts short the customary fifteen-minute conversation, puts Richie in the car, and pulls away with a last, slightly exaggerated wave. Her three ivory bangles click together.

Once they are away from Mrs. Latch, Laura says to Richie, ‘‘Boy oh boy, we’re in trouble now. We’ve got to race right home and get that dinner started. We should have been there an hour ago.’’

He nods solemnly. The weight and grain of life reassert themselves; the nowhere feeling vanishes. This moment, now, midblock, as the car approaches a stop sign, is unexpectedly large and still, serene—Laura enters it the way she might enter a church from a noisy street. On either side, sprinklers throw brilliant cones of mist up over the lawns. Late sun gilds an aluminum carport. It is unutterably real. She knows herself as a wife and mother, pregnant again, driving home, as veils of water are tossed up into the air.

Richie doesn’t speak. He watches her. Laura brakes for the stop sign. She says, ‘‘It’s a good thing Daddy works as late as he does. We’ll put it all together in time, don’t you think so?’’

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Sh
e glances at him. She meets his eyes, and sees something there she can’t quite recognize. His eyes, his entire face, seem lit from within; he appears, for the first time, to be suffering from an emotion she can’t read.

‘‘Honey,’’ she says, ‘‘what is it?’’

He says, louder than necessary, ‘‘Mommy, I love you.’’

There is something odd in his voice, something chilling. It is a tone she’s never heard from him before. He sounds frantic, foreign. He could be a refugee, someone with only rudimentary English, trying desperately to convey a need for which he has not learned the proper phrase.

‘‘I love you too, baby,’’ she replies, and although she’s said the words thousands of times, she can hear the flanneled nervousness lodged now in her throat, the effort she must make to sound natural. She accelerates through the intersection. She drives carefully, with both hands precisely centered on the wheel.

It seems the boy will start crying again, as he does so often, so inexplicably, but his eyes remain bright and dry, unblinking.

‘‘What’s wrong?’’ she asks.

He continues staring at her. He does not blink.

He knows. He must know. The little boy can tell she’s been somewhere illicit; he can tell she’s lying. He watches her constantly, spends almost every waking hour in her presence. He’s seen her with Kitty. He’s watched her make a second cake, and bury the first one under other garbage in the can beside the garbage. He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all.

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O
f course he would know when she’s lying.

She says, ‘‘Don’t worry, honey. Everything’s fine. We’re going to have a wonderful party for Daddy’s birthday tonight. Do you know how happy he’ll be? We’ve got all these presents for him. We’ve made him such a nice cake.’’

Richie nods, unblinking. He rocks gently back and forth. Quietly, wishing to be overheard rather than heard, he says, ‘‘Yes, we’ve made him such a nice cake.’’ There is a surprisingly mature hollowness in his voice.

He will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. He will always know precisely when and how much she has failed.

‘‘I love you, sweetheart,’’ she says. ‘‘You’re my guy.’’ Briefly, for a moment, the boy changes shape. Briefly he glows, dead white. Laura remains not angry. She remembers to smile. She keeps both hands on the wheel.

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Mrs
. Dalloway

S
h
e has come to help Richard get ready for the party, but Richard does not respond to her knock. She knocks again, harder, then quickly, nervously, unlocks the door.

The apartment is full of light. Clarissa almost gasps at the threshold. All the shades have been raised, the windows opened. Although the air is filled only with the ordinary daylight that enters any tenement apartment on a sunny afternoon, it seems, in Richard’s rooms, like a silent explosion. Here are his cardboard boxes, his bathtub (filthier than she’d realized), the dusty mirror and the expensive coffeemaker, all revealed in their true pathos, their ordinary smallness. It is, quite simply, the tenement apartment of a deranged person.

‘‘Richard!’’ Clarissa calls.

‘‘Mrs. Dalloway. Oh, Mrs. Dalloway, it’s you.’’

She rushes into the other room and finds Richard still in his

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robe
, perched on the sill of the open window, straddling it, with one emaciated leg still in the apartment and the other, invisible to her, dangling out over five stories.

‘‘Richard,’’ she says sternly. ‘‘Get down from there.’’

‘‘It’s so lovely out,’’ he says. ‘‘What a day.’’

He looks insane and exalted, both ancient and childish, astride the windowsill like some scarecrow equestrian, a park statue by Giacometti. His hair is plastered to his scalp in some places, jutting out at sharp, rakish angles in others. His inside leg, bare to midthigh, blue-white, is skeletal but with a surprisingly solid little fist of calf muscle still clinging stubbornly to the bone.

‘‘You’re terrifying me,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘I want you to stop this and come inside. Now.’’

She moves toward him and he raises his inside leg to the sill. Only the heel of that foot, one hand, and one fleshless buttock remain in contact with the battered wood. On his robe, red-finned rockets emit perfect orange pinecones of fire. Helmeted astronauts, plump and white as the Uniroyal Man, faceless behind their dark visors, offer stiff, white-gloved salutes.

Richard says, ‘‘I took the Xanax and the Ritalin. They work wonderfully together. I feel wonderful. I opened all the blinds, but still, I found I wanted more air and light. I had a hard time getting up here, I don’t mind telling you.’’

‘‘Darling, please, put your leg back down on the floor. Will you do that for me?’’ ‘‘I don’t think I can make it to the party,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

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‘‘Yo
u don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’’

‘‘What a day it is. What a beautiful, beautiful day.’’

Clarissa draws a breath, and another. She is surprisingly calm—she can feel herself acting well in a difficult situation— but at the same time is removed from herself, from the room, as if she is witnessing something that’s already happened. It feels like a memory. Something within her, something like a voice but not a voice, an inner knowledge all but indistinguishable from the pump of her heart, says, Once I found Richard sitting on a window ledge five stories above the ground.

She says, ‘‘Get down from there. Please.’’

Richard’s face darkens and contracts, as if Clarissa has posed him a difficult question. His empty chair, fully exposed in the daylight—leaking stuffing at its seams, the thin yellow towel on the seat embossed with rusty circles—could be the foolishness, the essential shoddiness, of mortal illness itself.

‘‘Get down from there,’’ Clarissa says. She speaks slowly and loudly, as if to a foreigner.

Richard nods, and does not move. His ravaged head, struck by full daylight, is geological. His flesh is as furrowed and pocked, as runneled, as desert stone.

He says, ‘‘I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.’’

‘‘You don’t have to go to the party. You don’t have to go to the ceremony. You don’t have to do anything at all.’’

‘‘But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then

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another
, and you get through that one and then, my god,

there’s another. I’m so sick.’’

‘‘You have good days still. You know you do.’’

‘‘Not really. It’s kind of you to say so, but I’ve felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn’t that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus fly-trap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It’s a sort of juicy, green, thriving progress. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn’t it funny that, even now, it’s difficult to say the word ‘death’?’’

‘‘Are they here, Richard?’’

‘‘Who? Oh, the voices? The voices are always here.’’

‘‘I mean, are you hearing them very distinctly?’’

‘‘No. I’m hearing you. It’s always wonderful to hear you, Mrs. D. Do you mind that I still call you that?’’

‘‘Not at all. Come inside. Now.’’

‘‘Remember her? Your alter ego? Whatever became of her?’’

‘‘This is her. I’m her. I need you to come inside. Will you, please?’’

‘‘It’s so lovely here. I feel so free. Will you call my mother? She’s all alone, you know.’’

‘‘Richard—’’

‘‘Tell me a story, all right?’’

‘‘What kind of story?’’

‘‘Something from your day. From today. It could be the most ordinary thing. That would be better, actually. The most ordinary event you can think of.’’

‘‘Richard—’’ ‘‘Anything. Anything at all.’’

‘‘Well, this morning, before I came here, I went to buy flowers for the party.’’ ‘‘Did you?’’ ‘‘I did. It was a beautiful morning.’’ ‘‘Was it?’’ ‘‘Yes. It was beautiful. It was so . . . fresh. I bought the flow

ers and took them home and put them in water. There. End of story. Now come inside.’’

‘‘Fresh as if issued to children on a beach,’’ Richard says.

‘‘You could say that.’’

‘‘Like a morning when we were young together.’’

‘‘Yes. Like that.’’

‘‘Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn’t I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn’t it strange?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ Clarissa says. ‘‘Yes. It’s strange.’’

‘‘I’ve failed.’’

‘‘Stop saying that. You haven’t failed.’’

‘‘I have. I’m not looking for sympathy. Not really. I just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.’’

‘‘It isn’t the least bit foolish.’’

‘‘I’m afraid I can’t make the party.’’

‘‘Please, please don’t worry about the party. Don’t think about the party. Give me your hand.’’

‘‘You’ve been so good to me, Mrs. Dalloway.’’

‘‘Richard—’’

‘‘I love you. Does that sound trite?’’

‘‘No.’’

Richard smiles. He shakes his head. He says, ‘‘I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been.’’

He inches forward, slides gently off the sill, and falls.

Clarissa screams, ‘‘No—’’

He seems so certain, so serene, that she briefly imagines it hasn’t happened at all. She reaches the window in time to see Richard still in flight, his robe billowing, and it seems even now as if it might be a minor accident, something reparable. She sees him touch the ground five floors below, sees him kneel on the concrete, sees his head strike, hears the sound he makes, and yet she believes, at least for another moment, leaning out over the sill, that he will stand up again, groggy perhaps, winded, but still himself, still whole, still able to speak.

She calls his name, once. It comes out as a question, far softer than she’d meant it to. He lies where he fell, face down, the robe thrown up over his head and his bare legs exposed, white against the dark concrete.

She runs from the room, out the door, which she leaves open behind her. She runs down the stairs. She thinks of calling for help, but doesn’t. The air itself seems to have changed, to have come slightly apart; as if the atmosphere were palpably

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mad
e of substance and its opposite. She runs down the stairs and is aware (she will be ashamed of this later) of herself as a woman running down a set of stairs, uninjured, still alive.

In the lobby she suffers through a moment of confusion over how to get to the air shaft where Richard lies, and she feels, briefly, as if she’s gone to hell. Hell is a stale yellow box of a room, with no exit, shaded by an artificial tree, lined with scarred metal doors (one bears a Grateful Dead decal, a skull crowned with roses).

A door in the shadow of the stairwell, narrower than the others, leads outside, down a flight of broken cement stairs, to the place where Richard is. She knows even before she descends these last stairs that he is dead. His head is lost among the folds of the robe but she can see the puddle of blood, dark, almost black, that has formed where his head must be. She can see the utter stillness of his body, one arm extended at a peculiar angle, palm up, and both bare legs white and naked as death itself. He is still wearing the gray felt slippers she bought for him.

She descends these last stairs, sees that Richard is lying amid shards of broken glass, and takes a moment to realize it is simply the remains of a shattered beer bottle that had been lying on the concrete already, and not some consequence of Richard’s fall. She thinks she must pick him up immediately, to get him off the glass.

She kneels beside him, puts a hand on his inert shoulder. Gently, very gently, as if she fears waking him, she pulls the robe down from around his head. All she can make sense of in

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th
e glistening mass of red, purple, and white are his parted lips and one open eye. She realizes she has made a sound, a sharp exclamation of surprise and pain. She covers his head again with the robe.