The Life Room (5 page)

“No.” She couldn’t believe her luck. “It’s because I’m so happy.”

He collected butterflies and knew all the different species. He knew how to tell how old a tree was by the rings in its trunk. He could spend whole days alone, weeks, with the sole companionship of his dogs.

With soil still in their clothes and hair, William drove her home. Her mother was at work. The small house suddenly felt different now that William was in it with her. Everything was different. She no longer felt the emptiness of her father’s leaving. “Where’s your dad?” he asked.

“My dad doesn’t live here anymore.”

“You have this sad little frown on your face when you don’t know anyone is looking. Your dad put it there.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s trying to find himself.”

“I wish my dad would leave.”

One day as Eleanor and William stood kissing in front of her house, Stephen Mason waved to her from his car. She hadn’t spoken to him in three years. William jerked her close to his hips by the belt loop of her jeans. She was embarrassed and tried to inch away, but William drew her closer.

Stephen looked at her severely. “Eleanor,” he said. She saw him give William the once-over. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked at William.

“I’m leaving,” William said. “See you.” He planted a long, purposeful kiss on her mouth before he disengaged. “Are you going to be okay?”

She nodded. “He used to live behind us when I was a kid.”

William hopped in his truck and pulled away.

Confronted with Stephen’s solid physical presence—he was dressed in a leather bomber jacket, blue jeans ripped at the knees, and leather Frye boots—she considered how ethereal William was in comparison, dressed in his crumpled flannel shirts and faded corduroys, with his eyes the color of the forest. They could still hear William’s pickup round the corner.

“Can’t he afford a new muffler?” He looked down at his boots and raised his eyes. “You have a boyfriend, Eleanor?”

She nodded.

“See this piece of paper?” He took out a crumpled receipt from his pocket and lit it with a cigarette lighter. The paper curled up in flame. He threw it to the ground and stomped out the fire with his boot. “This is how it makes me feel. Like I’m burning up inside.”

She looked at him, slightly frightened. Something about him had changed and made her uneasy. His face broke into a grin and he started to laugh. “It was a joke, Eleanor.”

“I have to go in,” she said, turning toward her house.

Eleanor and William spent almost every day of high school together. She preferred being with him, away from her own silent house. In William’s presence calm descended upon her. She could spend hours with him, simply holding his hand, collecting stones near the creek, taking long hikes in the woods, identifying constellations from his telescope. And yet, a part of her was restless. Eleanor’s mother spent her time sewing, taking in hems, tucking and tacking, pinning her beautiful handmade clothes around the nude mannequin in the sewing room at home. But something about it was empty and depressing; the house had become a shrine for her absent husband. For as long as she could remember, Eleanor dreamed of moving to New York with the idea of doing something artistic—studying painting or literature or becoming a writer. When she was accepted to Columbia University for the fall, she knew she had to go.

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” William said, when she told him she was leaving. “We’re always going to be together. I know you need me. Do you know what it’s like to be outside at night? There’s this hum that is the sound of insects. One long continuous drone. If you listen hard enough you fall into the sound. It’s all around you. You can’t hear anything else. You become one with it, until it moves inside you, becomes a part of you. That’s how we are together. I’ll wait for you, Eleanor. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’ll wait, too.”

“We could get a farm one day. Or a house in the country. We wouldn’t need anyone.”

They were in the barn in back of William’s house, where his father kept the horses. They were lying on a blanket over the hay, watching the light disappear from the rafters, and it was quiet except for the breathing, wheezing, and snorting of the horses. There were three. Each in its own stall, each exerting its own weight upon her. She felt the souls of the horses, all three of them inside her, kicking up their heels, forming a part of who she was in the darkness of the barn. They had come to the barn to get away from the house where his parents had gathered for dinner. They did not want dinner. They wanted to seek all the unknown places in each other.

“I have never been so close to anyone,” William said. He took his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and pricked his finger until a bead of blood oozed out and he took her hand and he pricked her finger and they rubbed their blood and made a pact that they would never leave each other.

She liked being in the dark with William while the darkness slipped underneath their clothes and through their fingers and into their hair and in between the sounds of the horses who seemed to have quieted just then, until one slashed his tail against the stall. “Come here, Eleanor,” William said. “Come closer. Isn’t it beautiful in the darkness?” Eleanor felt herself being pulled further inside him, inside his privacy.

“I don’t understand the world,” William said. “Sometimes I feel it slipping through my fingers and I’m outside it, not a part of it, and I want to go out by the creek and listen to the rush of water.”

When Eleanor was with William she was inside that missing place and he filled it with his breathing. With his need.

The day they said good-bye they were sitting on the bed in his room. It was the beginning of September. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” William said.

“I’m not leaving you. I’m going away to school. I’ll write you every day.”

“I don’t write letters.”

She put her hand on his thigh, hoping he’d take it in his hand, but he was staring blankly out the window into the intersection of the quiet street. She gave William the Star of David necklace her father had given to her on her birthday. “Take it. This way you’ll know that we are together even though we are apart. Put it on. It’s my very best possession.”

William’s father opened the door while they were kissing on the bed, their legs and arms entwined together. “Get your lazy ass downstairs,” Mr. Woods said. “No one listens to me in this goddamn house.”

“Dad, calm down.” He looked at Eleanor and the look said,
I’m sorry
. They followed Mr. Woods downstairs.

“Watch your mouth,” Mr. Woods said. “And no one fed the goddamn dogs?” He kicked the empty tin dog dish in the kitchen. It went clanging across the tiles of the floor. “Where’s your goddamn mother?”

“You have to leave soon,” Eleanor said, after he left the room. “Promise.”

“Give me a year,” William said. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Let’s go, Eleanor.” William took her by the hand, out of the house. “I hate that motherfucker,” he said, once they were in the woods behind the house and it was far away. They walked through the woods. William showed her some slabs of rock he was collecting. “I’m building a stone wall where no one can touch us.” In the woods he wandered farther away from home. He said he spent whole days taking stones from the ridge of a hill and making a wall so that a stream could fall in one direction.

Eleanor thought about his bruised eye the first day she had met him. “Does he hurt you?”

“Only you can hurt me, Eleanor,” William said, and rested his head inside the cave of her chest.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Eleanor said again. William took out the Star of David that he had tucked inside his T-shirt. “You’re not leaving me. You’re only going away. You’re inside this gold star pushed into my skin.”

When she came home to visit she asked him repeatedly to visit her in New York. “I’ve looked into it,” she said. “There are tons of schools in New York. If you get your science credits, you can apply to veterinary school like you said you wanted to.” He was more comfortable around horses and dogs than people.

“I’m too close to them, Eleanor. At night I can hear the underside of things. I sometimes think I can hear wolves in the forest talking to each other. There’s something I have to tell you. My father hurts her. I’m working for him, looking after some of his buildings. I have to keep an eye on her. I can’t leave.”

“I’ll never hurt you. I’ll come back. I promise. But you have to figure out what you want to do.”

“I will.”

In New York she lived in libraries and classrooms. Still she thought she could hear him when she wandered through the park, as if he were calling her over the top of the trees, repeating the same rhythm over and over into the air,
come back, come back
. She loved her classes, but she was torn.

She spent her summers with him, coming back to Chicago each June and returning to New York in the fall. When she was with him she got caught up in his latest passion, and it felt as if she had never left. One summer it was raising bees to make honey. Next, it was a vegetable garden he planted for his mother. Once Eleanor was home it would take a few days of adjustment and then she’d be glad to be back in the woods with him, touched by his purity and love for nature, happy not to have to explain herself, as she had to with her new friends in New York who were different, more full of themselves. Occasionally, when she was back in class, she felt an attraction to someone else. She’d be moved by the way one of her classmates analyzed a poem or a short story, saw something in it that was different than what she’d seen, but eventually the crush would disappear and she’d long for the visceral pull that connected her to William. But each year she felt a little further away from him, and knew she had changed. When she pestered him about his plans, he said he decided he wasn’t going to college. He was looking into some kind of trade.

“I want to show you something, Eleanor,” William said. It was the summer she graduated from college and they were at his mother’s house while she was visiting her oldest son in Florida. “It feels like you’ve been gone forever.” He took her into the woods, acres and acres of it, behind his house. He was in love with streams and cascades, a boy she wanted close to her heart, but she felt he could not fully reach her. She began to see frightening things in him. She could feel his body light up inside when she was in the room, the way fireflies light in the dark. But she was afraid of becoming his sole light keeper and attachment. He traveled farther into the woods, so that the brick colonial house became smaller in the distance, but he always seemed to come back to that house. She wondered why he could never find a way to leave it.

“I want to show you the stone wall. No one knows about it except for you.” He had blue stone, flint, and beautiful white granite from a nearby quarry, and he was using the stones to build his own path, a little sanctuary in the woods. “I’m going to carve some kind of sculpture here after I finish it, to mark my place in the world. This is where I come to when I want to be alone with you.” They spent the rest of the day laying the stones he had trudged through the woods. Watching how engaged he was when he worked made her hopeful again. He taught her how to make a stone wall, how to lay each stone so the wall would not topple over. She liked the physical exertion, when all she had to think about was putting one stone upon another. She liked the familiarity of William’s kiss and the way he held her hand, and how they could sit underneath a tree and not have to say a word to each other. It was only with him that she felt she could fully relax and not have to prove herself. She trusted his love for her. He found a tree he liked and scratched their initials into the bark, enclosing them with a wobbly heart.

“My father has left. He’s living in one of his rental properties. It’s better now. I can think. I’m thinking I might learn carpentry. Or stone work. You look good, Eleanor. New York must be treating you well. You must be doing okay without me.”

She liked being back in the woods with William, but the years she had been away from home formed a wall inside her made of the stones of her own ambitions. She knew that he could not understand because he had no ambition of his own. And yet, she believed in him.
No, I’m not okay. You’re the first person I think about when I wake up, and the last before I sleep. Why can’t you get your life on track so we can be together?
“I’m okay,” she said, a little impatiently.

After they came back from the woods, William took her up to his boyhood room (there were still posters of Mick Jagger and Neil Young on his walls) with low alcoves and a brown corduroy bedspread over the bed. “It’s been four years. In all that time there’s never been anyone but you.”

She fell into his arms and they began to kiss. He wanted to get deeper inside her. His face was tense, filled with determination. He moved furiously against her, rocking the bed and the house that had been empty without her. When they finished making love, she recited a poem. “Why don’t you leave,” William said. “Go back to your books.” He got out of bed and looked over at her. He looked tired. His hair was thin and had broken off at the ends. His shirtsleeve was ripped at the elbows. Dry mud was underneath his fingernails. She saw that something had changed. He was angry that she had left him.

“I’m not leaving. I don’t want to go,” she said. “You have to come back to New York with me. It’s time. You don’t have to worry about your mother anymore.”

“I can’t come to New York. I can’t breathe in that city. There are too many people. That city would eat me alive.” He came back to the bed and sat down. “Let’s get married. I’ve thought about this. I know what I’m doing.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “That’s sweet.” Looking at him made her ache. But she was mad; she was the one who had to leave, because what else was she going to do? William could not seem to find a thread leading away from home. He could not seem to put anything into motion. His hair had come loose from its ponytail and was greasy near the part. The sparkle was gone from his eyes. She wondered if this was the way a person is supposed to look when he proposed.