Lewis tidied the house while Caroline napped, gathering her toys from the kitchen and the bathroom, the stairway and the den. He collected them in the fold of his arms and quietly assembled them on her toy shelves. Warm air breathed from the ceiling vents and sunlight ribboned in through the living room windows, striking in its path a thousand little whirling constellations of dust. Lewis pulled a xylophone trolley from under the couch. He stacked rainbow quoits onto a white peg. He carried a pinwheel and a rag doll from the hallway and slipped a set of multiform plastic blocks into the multiform sockets of a block box. He walked from the oven to the coatrack, from the coatrack to the grandfather clock, fossicking about for the last of a set of three tennis balls, and, finding it behind the laundry hamper, he pressed it into its canister. Then he held the canister to his face, breathing in its flat clean scent before he shelved it in the closet of the master bedroom. Lewis often felt, upon entering this room, as if he had discovered a place that was not an aspect of the house that he knew— someplace dark and still and barren: a cavern or a sepulcher, a tremendous empty seashell. The venetian blinds were always sealed, the curtains drawn shut around them, and both were overshadowed by a fat gray oak tree. The ceiling lamp cast a dim orange light, nebular and sparse, over the bed and the dressers and the carpet. Lewis fell back on the bedspread. The cable of an electric blanket bore into his shoulder, and his head lay in a shallow channel in the center of the mattress, formed, he presumed, by the weight of a sleeping body. He yawned, drumming his hand on his chest, and listened to the sigh of a passing car. He gazed into the tiny red eye of a smoke alarm.
When he left to look in on Caroline, he found her sleeping contentedly, her thumb in her mouth. A stuffed piglet curled from beneath her, its pink snout and the tabs of its ears brushing past her stomach. Her back rose and fell like a parachute tent. He softly shut her door. Returning to the living room, he bent to place a stray red checker in his shirt pocket, then straightened and gave a start: her mother was there, sitting on the sofa and blinking into space. Lisa Mitchell rarely arrived home before the moon was as sharp as a blade in the night sky, never once before evening. Now she sat clutching a small leather purse in her lap, and a stream of sunlight delineated each thread of her hair. It was mid-afternoon.
“Early day?” asked Lewis. He removed a jack-in-the-box from the arm of a chair, sealing the lid on its unsprung clown. Lisa Mitchell neither moved nor spoke; she simply held her purse and stared. “Hello?” he tested. She sat motionless, queerly mute, like a table lamp or a podium. Then her shoulders gave a single tight spasm, as if an insect had buzzed onto the nape of her neck, and her eyes glassed with tears. Lewis felt, suddenly, understanding and small and human. “Do you need anything?” he asked. “Some water?” Lisa drew a quick high breath and nodded.
Lewis rinsed a glass in the kitchen sink, then filled it from a bay on the door of the refrigerator, watching the crushed ice and a finger of water issue from a narrow spout. When he handed it to Lisa, she sipped until her mouth pooled full, swallowed, and placed it on a side-table. Her fingertips left transparent annulets across the moist bank of the glass, her lips a wine-red crescent at its rim. Lewis sat next to her on the sofa. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. His voice had become as gentle as the aspiration of the ceiling-vents.
“I . . . ,” said Lisa, and the corner of her mouth twitched. “He said I. . . .” Her throat gave out a little clicking noise. She trifled with the apron of her purse—snapping it open and shut, open and shut. “I lost my job,” she said. And at this she sagged in on herself, shaking, and began to weep. Her head swayed, and her back lurched, and she pressed her hands to her eyes. When Lewis touched a finger to her arm, she fell against him, quaking.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It will all be okay.” Resting against his shoulder, Lisa cried and shivered and slowly grew still. Her purse dropped to the floor as she relaxed into a sequence of calm, heavy breaths. Then, abruptly, she was crying once again. She wavered in this way—between moments of peace and trepidation—for what seemed an hour, as the white midday light slowly windowed across the carpet. After she had fallen quiet, Lewis held her and listened to her breathing. (She sighed placidly, flurrying puffs of air through her nose; she freed a little string of hiccups that seemed both deeply organic and strangely mechanical.) The sleeve of his shirt, steeped with her tears, was clinging to his upper arm, and his hand was pin-pricking awake on her back. He could feel the warm pressure of her head against his collarbone. When she shifted on the cushions, he swallowed, listening to the drumbeat of his heart. He slid his fingers over the rungs of her spine, smoothing the ripples from her blouse, and she seemed to subside into the bedding of the sofa. It was as if she were suddenly just a weight within her clothing, suspended by a hanger from his shoulder, and he thought for a moment that she had fallen asleep—but, when she blinked, he felt the soft flicker of her eyelashes against his neck. Her stockings, sleek and coffee-brown, were beginning to ladder at the knee, and Lewis reached to touch a ravel of loose nylon. He found himself instead curling a hand through her hair.
Lisa lifted her head, looking him in the eye, as his fingers swept across a rise in her scalp. He felt her breath mingling with his. Her eyes, drawing near, were azure-blue, and walled in black, and staring into his own. They seemed to hover before him like splashes of reflected light, and Lewis wondered what they saw. The tip of her nose met with his, and when she licked her lips, he felt her tongue glance across his chin. His lips were dry and tingling, his stomach as tight as a seed pod. When his hand gave a reflexive flutter on her back, Lisa stiffened.
She tilted away from him, blinking, the stones of her teeth pressing into her lip. The grandfather clock voiced three vibrant chimes, and she stood and planed her blouse into the waist of her skirt.
When she looked down upon him, her eyes were like jigsawed glass. “I think you’d better go now,” she said.
Certain places are penetrated with elements of the human spirit. They act as concrete demonstrations of our hungers and capacities. A sudden field in the thick of a forest is a place like reverence, a stand of corn a place like knowledge, a clock tower a place like fury. I have witnessed this and know it to be true. Caroline’s house was a place like memory, a place, in fact, like my memory of her: charged with hope and loss and fascination. As I stepped each morning through her front door, I saw the wall peg hung with a weathered felt hat, the ceiling dotted with stucco, the staircase folding from floor to floor, and it was as if these things were quickened with both her presence and her ultimate departure. The stationary bicycle with its whirring front fan-wheel and the dining room table with its white lace spread, the desk cup bristling with pencils and pens and the books shelved neatly between ornamental bookends: they were the hills and trees and markers of a landscape that harbored and kept her. The windows were the windows whose panes she would print with her fingers. The doorstop was the doorstop whose spring she would flitter by its crown. The lamps were the lamps in whose light she would study for school. The sofa was the sofa in whose lap she would grow to adulthood. The mirrors: the mirrors there were backed in silver and framed us in the thick of her house. Yet when we viewed the world inside of them, we did not think here is this place made silver, but simply here is this place: what does this suggest, we wondered, about the nature of material existence? When I was a small boy, I feared my attic. A ladder depended from a hatch in the hallway, and when my father scaled it into the darkness, I believed, despite the firm white evidence of the ceiling, that he was entering a chamber without a floor. A narrow wooden platform extended into open space, and beneath it lay the deep hidden well of my house: I could see this when I closed my eyes. Though Caroline’s house suggested no such fear, it was informed by a similar logic of space: the floors and partitions, the shadows and doorways, were each of them rich with latent dimensions.
It is exactly this sense of latitude and secret depth that my own house is missing. The objects here are only what th
ey are, with nothing to mediate the fact of their existence with the fact of their existence in my life. The walls may be the same hollow blue as a glacier, the carpet as dark as the gravid black sea, and I may be as slight as a boat that skirts the pass, but the walls are only walls, the carpet only carpet, and I am only and ever myself. In the evening, as the sun dwindles to a final red wire at the horizon, I switch on every light and lamp and still my house mushrooms with shadow. I walk from room to room, and everything that belongs to me drifts by like a mist, the wooden shelves banded with book spines, the shoes aligned in the closet, the rounded gray stone that I’ve carried for years—they are my life’s little accidents, a sediment trickled through from my past: they are nothing to do with me. I look, for instance, at the photograph framed on my desk: it sports a slender green tree, a piercing blue sky, and a light that is striking the face that I love. How, I wonder, did I acquire such a thing? It is a gesture of hope simply to open the curtains each morning.
In truth, I don’t know why it ended as it did. When Lewis arrives the next morning, the sun has not yet risen. The sidewalks are starred with mica, and the lawns are sheeted with frost, and the streetlamps glow with a clean white light. He steps to the front porch and presses the doorbell. When the door swings open, it is with such sudden violence that he briefly imagines it has been swallowed, pulled down the gullet of the wide front hall. Thomas Mitchell stands before him wearing striped red nightclothes, his jaw rough with stubble. He has jostled the coatrack on his way to the door, and behind him it sways into the wall, then shudders upright on its wooden paws. He places his hand on the lock plate, thick blue veins roping down his forearm.
“We won’t be requiring your services any longer,” he says, and his eyebrows shelve together toward his nose, as in a child’s drawing of an angry man.
“Pardon?” asks Lewis.
“We don’t need you here any more.” He announces each syllable of each word, dispassionate and meticulous, as if reciting an oath before a silent courtroom. His body has not moved, only his mouth and eyes.
Lewis would like to ask why, but Thomas Mitchell, taut with bridled anger, stands before him like a dam—exactly that solemn, exactly that impassable—and he decides against it. (You know why, the man would say: Lewis can see the words pooled in wait across his features. And yet, though he is coming to understand certain things— that his time here ran to a halt the day before, that his actions then were a form of betrayal—he does not, in fact, know anything.) Instead he asks, “Can I tell her good-bye?” and feels in his stomach a flutter of nervous grief.
“She’s not here,” says Thomas.
Lisa Mitchell’s voice comes questioning from the depths of the house: “What’s keeping you?”
Thomas clears his throat. He raises his hand from the lock plate, and his breath comes huffing through his nostrils like a plug of steam. “You can go now,” he says, tightening his lips. “I don’t expect to see you here again.” Then, sliding back into the house, he shuts the door. The bolt engages with a heavy thunk.
Lewis does not know where to go or what to do. He feels like a man who, dashing into the post office to mail a letter, discovers his face on a wanted flier. He stands staring at the doorbell—its orange glow like an ember in a settling fire—until he realizes that he is probably being watched. Glancing at the peephole, he feels the keen electric charge of a hidden gaze. Then he walks across the frost-silvered lawn to his car, his staggered footprints a dark rift in the grass. Lewis drives to the end of the block and parks. He looks into the crux of his steering wheel, his hands tented over his temples, and wonders whether Caroline has been told that he won’t be returning.
On the sidewalk, he passes a paperboy who is tossing his folded white missiles from a bicycle; they sail in neat arcs through the air, striking porches and driveways with a leathery slap. He walks around the house to the window of Caroline’s bedroom, his heart librating in his chest like a seesaw. The sun will soon rise from behind the curved belly of the fields. The frost will dissipate in the slow heat of morning, and his footprints will dwindle into the green of the lawn.
Caroline is awake in her bed, a sharp light streaming across her face from the open bedroom door. Her pacifier falls from her mouth as she yawns. She wiggles in a pair of fuzzy blue pajamas. Lewis presses himself to the brick of the house and watches her for a few moments. Her body casts a wide shadow over her rumpled yellow bedspread, and it looks as if there is an additional head—his—on the pillow next to hers. He touches his fingers to the window. When he curves and sways them, they look like the spindled legs of an insect. He wants to rap against the glass, to pry it from its frame, to reach across Caroline’s blankets and pull her into his arms, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he lowers his hand to his side, where it hangs like a plummet on a string, and as a hazy form moves into the glare of the doorway, he turns and retreats to his car. Driving away, he spots a filament of dawn sunlight in the basin of the side-view mirror. He will realize as he slows into his driveway that he has just performed one of the most truly contemptible acts of his life. If he were a good man, he would have found a way, no matter the resistance, to tell her good-bye; to hand her like an offering some statement of his love; to leave her with at least this much. He could certainly have tried.
He did not, though. He simply left.
Memories and dreams are the two most potent methods by which the mind investigates itself. Both of them are held by what is not now happening in the world, both of them alert to their own internal motion. I have begun to imagine that they are the same transaction tilted along two separate paths—one into prior possibility, the other into projected. In one of my earliest memories, I am walking through a wooded park with a teacher and my classmates. I carry in my hands a swollen rubber balloon, cherry red and inflated with helium. I don’t know where it was purchased, whether it was mine or how long I’d held it, but it was almost as large as the trunk of my body—I remember that. Something jostles me, or my arm grows tired, and I lose my grip. I do not think to reach for the balloon until it has risen into the trees. It floats through a network of leaf-green branches and shrinks in the light of the midday sun. Soon it is only a grain of distant red, and then it vanishes altogether, leaving the blue sky blue and undisturbed.
Remembering this moment, I often dream of Caroline. I dream her resting in my lap and dream her swaying on the swing set. I dream that she is beside me, or I dream that she is approaching. One day, perhaps, we will flee together in my car. We will pass from this town into the rest of our lives, driving through the focus of the narrow black road. On bird-loud summer mornings, as a warm breeze rolls through our windows, we’ll watch yellow-green grasshoppers pinging along the verge of the highway. In autumn, the leaves will fall red from the trees as our windshield blades fan away pepperings of rain. The heat will billow from our dashboard vents in winter, and the houses will chimney into the low gray sky. And on the easy, tonic nights of spring, we’ll pull to the side of a quiet street and spread ourselves across our ticking hood: we’ll watch the far white stars and the soaring red airplanes, ask Which is the more beautiful? Which is the more true? and in finding our answers, we will find what we believe in.
Things That Fall from the Sky
It is easier to believe that Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven. —Thomas Jefferson, 1803.
Katherine is opening a new book, gluing a lending slip to its blank front page, when she hears the noise again, a clap of sound like the report of a hammer, then another softer clap. This is the third such noise she has heard in ten minutes, and she wonders if she should investigate. “What do you think that noise is?” she asks the other Katherine—Katherine A, people call her. Katherine herself is Katherine B, and there is another Katherine, in Genealogy, who is Katherine C.
“Don’t ask me,” Katherine A says, staring into the display of her computer monitor. She floats a playing card from one stack to another. “Can’t yo
u see that I’m helping a customer?”
This is a game the Katherines play: whoever can tell the most open lie, can hatch the story least in keeping with the truth, gets to idle at the desk while the other sets to work. Katherine A, Katherine concedes, has won the first match.
It is two in the afternoon, a Tuesday, and the library is all but empty. It is quiet and peaceful, and Katherine walks between the rows of books listening to the hum of the air conditioner. Everything drifts around her with a slow, heavy current, and the bookshelves seem to waver and buckle in the silence. She imagines that the light outside the windows is sunlight shifting through water and that she is at the bottom of a deep swimming pool.
At the Z end of Bound Periodicals, she finds a man standing at a wooden table, his arms held straight in front of him and a book in either hand. He closes an eye and joggles the books up and down for a moment. Something in his bearing suggests to Katherine a measuring scale—two brass pans hanging from a balance.
She clears her throat. “Excuse me,” she says. “May I ask what you’re doing?”
“Oh, hello.” The man smiles and meets her eye. “It’s a test.”
“A test?” says Katherine.
“Yes,” he says. “A test.” He shows her the books. “Gravity’s losing.”
“I see,” says Katherine. Her tone, she hopes, will suggest to him that she doesn’t see at all. “Still, if I could ask you to—”
“You’ve heard that all objects fall at a constant speed. Drop a bowling ball and a marble from the top of a building and they’ll hit ground at the same time: that’s a law, right? But it’s not true,” he says. “Watch.” And before she can intercept him, he has squared the books in the air and released them.
The larger book, a hardback, lands on the table with a flat bang, the smaller book an instant later.