Tuesday Nights in 1980 (15 page)

Marge, though she said she was fine when they got home, woke in the early morning to a circle of blood leaking from her and out onto the bed, spreading quickly, like a red frost.

James had panicked then. He had felt as if he couldn't breathe. He had carried Marge down the stairs and the blood had gotten everywhere. His lungs hurt and tears came. Through his wet eyes he somehow found them a cab and somehow told the driver to take them to a hospital, and he somehow listened as the doctor told them patronizingly what they mostly already knew—this doesn't happen very often in the second trimester, it is a very small percentage, but it
can
happen, and it happened to you. Neither of them thought to tell the doctor about the fall on the balcony, either because they were caught up in their panic or because they did not want to admit it had happened—as if it would have been admitting that in some way the miscarriage had been
their
fault . . . if they had only stayed home from that party . . . if they had only acted like responsible, with-child adults!

James saw behind the doctor's words a black circle, slowly moving toward him. He felt an aching in his joints, especially in his feet. The hospital, to him, smelled of fire and smoke. He felt a surreal haze forming around him as they made their way back to the apartment, thinking: How could they be on their way back to their apartment? How would they enter the living room? How would they go to sleep? Not when so much had been lost.

But they did sleep, they slept in scary depth, the kind of sleep people sleep when they do not want to face waking life. They slept through the mean light of morning that pierced through the crack in the curtains. They slept through the middle of the day. When one of them stirred, the other held them still. Not now, they said with their arms. Not yet.

When James finally did let his lids open, though, for long enough to let in the light fully, he felt immediately that something was different. Where he usually woke to a mixture of Marge's red and the season's signature—light green (spring), static blue (winter), navy-blue-almost-black (fall), or warm buttery yellow (summer)—this morning he saw nothing. Nothing, that is, aside from the light that was
actually
gliding through the windows and onto his sleeping wife, a light that held none of the colors usually so active in the prism of his mind. Stupidly he walked over to Marge's side of the bed and ran his hand through the slice of light that fell on her, as if by touching it it would change color. It didn't. Just white, bright, normal January light, falling onto his wife's pale face. He saw nothing. Felt nothing. Nothing at all.

He rushed into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, slapped his face, threw water onto it. He opened and closed his eyes frantically, thinking if he blinked them hard enough he might spark the colors back into action. But whereas the mirror usually tinted a greenish color (James himself was the color of split-pea soup), he saw only his pale, unshaven face, puffy with tiredness, long but somehow still pudgy, sliding back into his balding forehead. No split pea: just blotchy skin. He smacked at his forehead with the heel of his hand. Nothing. He pricked his skin between a pair of tweezers: pain was usually marked by the sound of crashing waves and that black spot between his eyes. Nothing.

The final test: James brought himself to look at the Ruth Kligman painting near the mirror, the one he had bought for Marge when they were first married and that made him see bright, flashy orange snakes behind his eyes—it looked muddy and empty.
How could the Ruth Kligman look empty?!
He felt his breath suck into him, the pain of tears about to come. He crumpled onto the toilet and put his face in his hands. Clear, invisible, empty tears fell—they were as meaningless as his reflection in the mirror. But they poured from him in a steady, loud stream. The blood on the stairs. The sheets. The balcony. The emptiness in his mind. He cried so hard that Marge, even in her debilitated state, hobbled from her bed into the bathroom. She saw him hunched and rocking like a madman on the toilet, crying his eyes out, and came to hug and pet him.

“It's okay,” she whispered down into his large ear. “We can try again, James. Even the doctor said, we can try again.”

But Marge began crying with him, and their two chests heaved together like the heartbeat of a broken heart.

From there things
only got worse. James tried with spastic urgency to retrieve his sensibilities—he went to countless art shows, read poems that usually made his colors go wild (O'Hara's line “how terrible orange is, and life” had once made him roller-coaster dizzy), exposed himself to extreme temperatures and odd foods—but nothing worked. O'Hara didn't work. Rutabaga didn't work. The Metropolitan Museum of fucking Art didn't work.

He soon found that writing didn't work, either, not without his sensations. He stared at blank pages and cursed his blank brain. For the immediate future, this was okay; he had enough almost-finished articles—which only needed editing and not added ideas—to keep the
Times
column going for a couple months. After that, he offered to curate a selection of guest columnists, to bide his time. But by April this was tired, and there was nothing left, and he began to miss his deadlines completely.

He asked for two weeks off from his column, then three. When he finally brought himself to cobble together a review, of Jeff Koons's window installation at the New Museum, it was immediately rejected, on grounds of being, as the Arts editor's squeaky assistant Seth had put it,
vacuous.

“Well, it
should
be vacuous!” James yelled at Seth. “The installation is a bunch of vacuums! Form as content, Seth! Didn't they teach you anything in journalism school?”

Seth just stuttered a half-assed apology, hung up on James.

This was only the first of many rejections that followed, from the paper that had so confidently published him for years, given him his own little corner of newsprint in which to spill his every whimsical thought. Each rejection came with a new qualifier from Seth:
impersonal, unrealistic, lacking oomph.
When Marge flicked through the Sunday paper to the Arts section, like she always did, James made the excuse that he was working on a more research-based piece that was taking him longer than most, and that he'd be in next week's, don't worry. He couldn't bring himself to tell her about the rejections; he still wanted to prove the
Times
, and himself, wrong. He needed to keep trying.

But another month passed without a bite from the newspaper. And then two. And then finally, in June, they gave away the column completely. To someone, according to Seth, “whose interests were more in line with the publication's.” Seth added tentatively: “Oh, and Mr. Bennett? He asked me to tell you not to send any more submissions through.”

“Excuse me?” James said.

“He says your time at the
Times
is done,” Seth said. “Okay?”

Not okay. In the lead on James's List of Running Worries: that losing his invisible powers had rendered him completely invisible. Close behind: that he was a terrible human being for not telling any of this to Marge. But he didn't want to worry her; and how she worried! He of all people knew how unproductive and paralyzing worrying could be, and he did not want to weigh on her, like he always seemed to.

So he didn't tell her; he couldn't. Not in June, when Marge's grandfather had a stroke; not in July, when he died in his sleep and she took three weeks off of work to be with her family in Connecticut; not in August, when their apartment got so hot that the slightest disturbance would surely lead to a screaming match; this was divorce weather. It wasn't until September, when he was meant to give his metaphor lecture at Columbia, and then, fearing he would have no metaphors to talk about and would have to stand in silence in front of all those eager faces, called the program director and canceled, that he knew the problem was too big to hide. Not to mention the fact of their joint savings account, which was dipping into the red zone in a way it hadn't before, pulling James's confidence and heart down with it. He'd have to tell her. That he was not an upstanding American citizen / valid human / real man, and that he had been keeping this fact from her for the better part of the year.

He took her to a diner on Sixth Avenue, where they went when they wanted to feel like real New Yorkers. At the tail end of a mostly quiet breakfast, he pressed one of his hands over the smooth part of his head, inhaled as much air as was available in the stuffy, bacon-aired room.

“If I tell you something,” he said, wishing with all his might that it wasn't fall, that so much time had not passed, “will you promise not to be angry?”

“Why would I be angry?” Marge said.

Next to Marge at the diner counter was an elderly woman with a pearl ring and puffy curls, and when Marge said this the woman chuckled, seeming to impart that
of course
she was going to be angry, a woman was always angry at her husband for one thing or another. For a second James imagined it was Marge as an old woman, and he was an old man, and they were sitting here under these diner lights as old people who had spent their entire lives together, living inside the bubble of all the unspoken things that being old together entailed. Suddenly James felt that there was no more time left on the planet.

“They took away my column,” he blurted.

“What do you mean? Why?”

He watched Marge's hand press into the speckled Formica counter. The knuckles raised like a small, knotty hill. This was Marge when matters concerning real life were on the line:
all knuckles.

“But it's because,” he went on, seeing that she was unclear on how to react. “It's because . . . well, don't think I'm insane, but . . . the strawberries are gone.”

He looked from the hand and into his wife's face. The face had gone pale.

“
My
strawberries?” she said. Her face retracted, as if she had been slapped.

“Yes,” he said. “And everything else, too.”

“And that's why they scrapped your column?”

“I've tried. So hard. I'm trying
so hard.
I've sent in fifteen articles now. Maybe twenty. None stuck. Nothing is sticking. It's like my brain was switched off or something. It's just . . .
blank.
”

The old woman got up abruptly to go to the bathroom, patting her cloud of hair with her hands. James was thankful and embarrassed.

“James, I don't even know what to say.”

“Say it will come back.”

“How could I say that? How would I know that? I'm just hearing this, James. My first time hearing this. You told me you were doing something that needed research.”

“I didn't mean to not tell you, or to lie, or . . . anything. I just didn't want to make you upset. I didn't want to be the disappointing man that I always am. The burden that I always am.”

“You're not disappointing.”

“I am.”

“You're not disappointing, James. But you cannot lie to me. That's part of the deal. It's part of the real-life deal. I don't care if you aren't making money. But I need to know about it.”

“I know that, but I just . . . I didn't want to give up. I still don't want to give up.”

“Do you think you should, though?” she said. She said it quietly, and even kindly, but she said it.

“What?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just that I feel like—for both of our sakes—maybe you need to think about what's going to work for you. For us. You're a part of a relationship, we're an
us,
remember? Something bad happened, we lost our baby, and I get it. I feel it, too. I want to go into a hole and never come out. But that was nine months ago, James, and now you have to move on. You have to be a real human in the world just like the rest of us. You have to help me. You have to work. Especially if we want to try again, with another baby.”

James felt a dull ache in his chest: an ache he had expected but that still ached. On his Running List of Worries: that another baby was an impossibility due to the fact that his sperm were lame, near invisible little tadpoles that couldn't navigate the treacherous terrain of his wife's insides. Though they were taking all the necessary steps—taking Marge's temperature religiously, keeping a journal that tracked her ovulation, having sex in the kitchen, if her timer happened to go off when they were in the middle of dinner—there was something off about the whole thing, and both of them knew it. And that something, they both also knew, was James. It was as if Marge's eggs could sense in James's sperm the just-not-himself-ness of their creator. Before, when he had had his colors, he had seen his sperm as a brilliant fireworks show, a whole Fourth of July celebration complete with the national anthem and hot dogs and fun barbecue smoke, taking off into his wife. Now: lame tadpoles.

“You're right,” James said with a suck of his breath. “You're totally, one hundred percent right. I'll pick one. Tonight, I'll pick one.”

When they got
home from the diner they would stand in the living room together and look around, and silently he would choose one of his artworks, which in lieu of months of paychecks he would sell. As he surveyed the walls full of paintings he would note with sadness that they no longer looked like they once had, like they were alive in the world, and could change it. But it did not make it hurt less to let go of one, which also meant letting go of his pride.

“The Estes,” he would say, with little conviction. “Worth the most.”

But he would really choose the Estes for Marge. He knew she didn't like the painting very much, for its cold perfection. She preferred the Kligman, whose strokes reminded her of her own internal sensibility: warm and abstract, yet pristine in its choices, deliberate and smart. She would blink up at him, twist her mouth as if to say she was sorry. And yet within the face also lay one glint of satisfaction, as if one corner of Marge's mouth were saying:
This is what you get.
He would swallow hard, mount a step stool. Together they would take the painting down from the wall, set it gently by the door.