She looked at the sandwich in her hand and took a bite. When she had swallowed, she ran her tongue in behind her lips and balanced the saucer on her lap as she reached behind and plumped up the pillow. Then she smiled and leaned back against the pillow again.
“Do you remember that time we stayed overnight on the Tilton River, Mike? When you caught that big fish the next morning?” She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Do you remember that?” she said.
She did. After scarcely thinking about it these last years, it had begun coming back to her lately. It was a month or two after they’d married and gone away for a weekend. They had sat by a little campfire that night, a watermelon in the snow-cold river, and she’d fried Spam and eggs and canned beans for supper and pancakes and Spam and eggs in the same blackened pan the next morning. She had burned the pan both times she cooked, and they could never get the coffee to boil, but it was one of the best times they'd ever had. She remembered he had read to her that night as well: Elizabeth Browning and a few poems from the Rubaiyat. They had had so many covers over them that she could hardly turn her feet under all the weight. The next morning he had hooked a big trout, and people stopped their cars on the road across the river to watch him play it in.
“Well? Do you remember or not?” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “Mike?”
“I remember,” he said. He shifted a little on his side, opened his eyes. He did not remember very well, he thought. What he did remember was very carefully combed hair and loud half-baked ideas about life and art, and he did not want to remember that.
“That was a long time ago. Nan,” he said.
“We’d just got out of high school. You hadn’t started to college,” she said.
He waited, and then he raised up onto his arm and turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. “You about finished with that sandwich, Nan?” She was still sitting up in the bed.
She nodded and gave him the saucer.
“I’ll turn off the light,” he said.
“If you want,” she said.
Then he pulled down into the bed again and extended his foot until it touched against hers. He lay still for a minute and then tried to relax.
“Mike, you’re not asleep, are you?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“Well, don’t go to sleep before me,” she said. “I don’t want to be awake by myself.”
He didn’t answer, but he inched a little closer to her on his side. When she put her arm over him and planted her hand flat against his chest, he took her fingers and squeezed them lightly. But in moments his hand dropped away to the bed, and he sighed.
“Mike? Honey? I wish you’d rub my legs. My legs hurt,” she said.
“God,” he said softly. “I was sound asleep.”
“Well, I wish you’d rub my legs and talk to me. My shoulders hurt, too. But my legs especially.”
He turned over and began rubbing her legs, then fell asleep again with his hand on her hip.
“Mike?”
“What is it, Nan? Tell me what it w.”
“I wish you’d rub me all over,” she said, turning onto her back. “My legs and arms both hurt tonight.” She raised her knees to make a tower with the covers.
He opened his eyes briefly in the dark and then shut them. “Growing pains, huh?
“O God, yes,” she said, wiggling her toes, glad she had drawn him out. “When I was ten or eleven years old I was as big then as I am now. You should’ve seen me! I grew so fast in those days my legs and arms hurt me all the time. Didn’t you?”
“Didn’t I what?”
“Didn’t you ever feel yourself growing?”
“Not that I remember,” he said.
At last he raised up on his elbow, struck a match, and looked at the clock. He turned his pillow over to the cooler side and lay down again.
She said, “You’re asleep, Mike. I wish you’d want to talk.”
“All right,” he said, not moving.
“Just hold me and get me off to sleep. I can’t go to sleep,” she said.
He turned over and put his arm over her shoulder as she turned onto her side to face the wall.
“Mike?”
He tapped his toes against her foot.
“Why don’t you tell me all the things you like and the things you don’t like.”
“Don’t know any right now,” he said. “Tell me if you want,” he said.
“If you promise to tell me. Is that a promise?
He tapped her foot again.
“Well..she said and turned onto her back, pleased. “I like good foods, steaks and hash-brown potatoes, things like that. I like good books and magazines, riding on trains at night, and those times I flew in an airplane.” She stopped. “Of course none of this is in order of preference. I’d have to think about it if it was in the order of preference. But I like that, flying in airplanes. There’s a moment as you leave the ground you feel whatever happens is all right.” She put her leg across his ankle. “I like staying up late at night and then staying in bed the next morning. I wish we could do that all the time, not just once in a while. And I like sex. I like to be touched now and then when I’m not expecting it. I like going to movies and drinking beer with friends afterwards. I like to have friends. I like Janice Hendricks very much. I’d like to go dancing at least once a week. I’d like to have nice clothes all the time. I’d like to be able to buy the kids nice clothes every time they need it without having to wait. Laurie needs a new little outfit right now for Easter. And I’d like to get Gary a little suit or something. He’s old enough. I’d like you to have a new suit, too. You really need a new suit more than he does. And I’d like us to have a place of our own. I’d like to stop moving around every year, or every other year. Most of all,” she said, “I’d like us both just to live a good honest life without having to worry about money and bills and things like that. You’re asleep,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said.
“I can’t think of anything else. You go now. Tell me what you’d like.”
“I don’t know. Lots of things,” he mumbled.
“Well, tell me. We’re just talking, aren’t we?”
“I wish you’d leave me alone, Nan.” He turned over to his side of the bed again and let his arm rest off the edge. She turned too and pressed against him.
“Mike?”
“Jesus,” he said. Then: “All right. Let me stretch my legs a minute, then I’ll wake up.”
In a while she said, “Mike? Are you asleep?” She shook his shoulder gently, but there was no response. She lay there for a time huddled against his body, trying to sleep. She lay quietly at first, without moving, crowded against him and taking only very small, very even breaths. But she could not sleep.
She tried not to listen to his breathing, but it began to make her uncomfortable. There was a sound coming from inside his nose when he breathed. She tried to regulate her breathing so that she could breathe in and out at the same rhythm he did. It was no use. The little sound in his nose made everything no use. There was a webby squeak in his chest too. She turned again and nestled her bottom against his, stretched her arm over to the edge and cautiously put her fingertips against the cold wall. The covers had pulled up at the foot of the bed, and she could feel a draft when she moved her legs. She heard two people coming up the stairs to the apartment next door. Someone gave a throaty laugh before opening the door. Then she heard a chair drag on the floor. She turned again. The toilet flushed next door, and then it flushed again. Again she turned, onto her back this time, and tried to relax. She remembered an article she’d once read in a magazine: If all the bones and muscles and joints in the body could join together in perfect relaxation, sleep would almost certainly come. She took a long breath, closed her eyes, and lay perfectly still, arms straight along her sides. She tried to relax. She tried to imagine her legs suspended, bathed in something gauze-like. She turned onto her stomach. She closed her eyes, then she opened them. She though
t of the fingers of her hand lying curled on the sheet in front of her lips. She raised a finger and lowered it to the sheet. She touched the wedding band on her ring finger with her thumb. She turned onto her side and then onto her back again. And then she began to feel afraid, and in one unreasoning moment of longing she prayed to go to sleep.
Please, God, let me go to sleep.
She tried to sleep.
“Mike,” she whispered.
There was no answer.
She heard one of the children turn over in the bed and bump against the wall in the next room. She listened and listened but there was no other sound. She laid her hand under her left breast and felt the beat of her heart rising into her fingers. She turned onto her stomach and began to cry, her head off the pillow, her mouth against the sheet. She cried. And then she climbed out over the foot of the bed.
She washed her hands and face in the bathroom. She brushed her teeth. She brushed her teeth and watched her face in the mirror. In the living room she turned up the heat. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, drawing her feet up underneath the nightgown. She cried again. She lit a cigaret from the pack on the table. After a time she walked back to the bedroom and got her robe.
She looked in on the children. She pulled the covers up over her son’s shoulders. She went back to the living room and sat in the big chair. She paged through a magazine and tried to read. She gazed at the photographs and then she tried to read again. Now and then a car went by on the street outside and she looked up. As each car passed she waited, listening. And then she looked down at the magazine again. There was a stack of magazines in the rack by the big chair. She paged through them all.
When it began to be light outside she got up. She walked to the window. The cloudless sky over the hills was beginning to turn white. The trees and the row of two-story apartment houses across the street were beginning to take shape as she watched. The sky grew whiter, the light expanding rapidly up from behind the hills. Except for the times she had been up with one or another of the children (which she did not count because she had never looked outside, only hurried back to bed or to the kitchen), she had seen few sunrises in her life and those when she was little. She knew that none of them had been like this. Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read had she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.
She waited and then she moved over to the door and turned the lock and stepped out onto the porch. She closed the robe at her throat. The air was wet and cold. By stages things were becoming very visible. She let her eyes see everything until they fastened on the red winking light atop the radio tower atop the opposite hill.
She went through the dim apartment, back into the bedroom. He was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arm flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched. As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.
She wet her lips with a sticking sound and got down on her knees. She put her hands out on the bed.
“God,” she said. “God, will you help us, God?” she said.
PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES
The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner. He had worked his way through the apartment and was doing the living room, using the nozzle attachment to get at the cat hairs between the cushions. He stopped and listened and then switched off the vacuum. He went to answer the telephone.
“Hello,” he said. “Myers here.”
“Myers,” she said. “How are you? What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Hello, Paula.”
“There’s an office party this afternoon,” she said. “You’re invited. Carl invited you.”
“I don’t think I can come,” Myers said.
“Carl just this minute said get that old man of yours on the phone. Get him down here for a drink. Get him out of his ivory tower and back into the real world for a while. Carl’s funny when he’s drinking. Myers?”
“I heard you,” Myers said.
Myers used to work for Carl. Carl always talked of going to Paris to write a novel, and when Myers had quit to write a novel, Carl had said he would watch for Myers’ name on the best-seller list.
“I can’t come now,” Myers said.
“We found out some horrible news this morning,” Paula continued, as if she had not heard him. “You remember Larry Gudinas. He was still here when you came to work. He helped out on science books for a while, and then they put him in the field, and then they canned him? We heard this morning he committed suicide. He shot himself in the mouth. Can you imagine? Myers?”
“I heard you,” Myers said. He tried to remember Larry Gudinas and recalled a tall, stooped man with wire-frame glasses, bright ties, and a receding hairline. He could imagine the jolt, the head snapping back. “Jesus,” Myers said. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” “Come down to the office, honey, all right?” Paula said. “Everybody is just talking and having some drinks and listening to Christmas music. Come down,” she said.
Myers could hear it all at the other end of the line. “I don’t want to come down,” he said. “Paula?” A few snowflakes drifted past the window as he watched. He rubbed his fingers across the glass and then began to write his name on the glass as he waited.
“What? I heard,” she said. “All right,” Paula said. “Well, then, why don’t we meet at Voyles for a drink? Myers?”
“Okay,” he said. “Voyles. All right.”
“Everybody here will be disappointed you didn’t come,” she said. “Carl especially. Carl admires you, you know. He does. He’s told me so. He admires your nerve. He said if he had your nerve he would have quit years ago. Carl said it takes nerve to do what you did. Myers?” “I’m right here,” Myers said. “I think I can get my car started. If I can’t start it, I’ll call you back.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll see you at Voyles. I’ll leave here in five minutes if I don’t hear from you.”
“Say hello to Carl for me,” Myers said.
“I will,” Paula said. “He’s talking about you.”
Myers put the vacuum cleaner away. He walked down the two flights and went to his car, which was in the last stall and covered with snow. He got in, worked the pedal a number of times, and tried the starter. It turned over. He kept the pedal down.
As he drove, he looked at the people who hurried along the sidewalks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable. He found Voyles, a small bar on a corner next to a men’s clothing store. He parked in back and went inside. He sat at the bar for a time and then carried a drink over to a little table near the door.
When Paula came in she said, “Merry Christmas,” and he got up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He held a chair for her.
He said, “Scotch?”
“Scotch,” she said, then “Scotch over ice” to the girl who came for her order.
Paula picked up his drink and drained the glass.
“I’ll have another one, too,” Myers said to the girl. “I don’t like this place,” he said after the girl had moved away.
“What’s wrong with this place?” Paula said. “We always come here.”
“I just don’t like it,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and then go someplace else.”
“Whatever you want,” she said.
The girl arrived with the drinks. Myers paid her, and he and Paula touched glasses.
Myers stared at her.
“Carl says hello,” she said.
Myers nodded.
Paula sipped her drink. “How was your day today?”
Myers shrugged.
“What’d you do?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “I vacuumed.”
She touched his han
d. “Everybody said to tell you hi.”
They finished their drinks.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t we stop and visit the Morgans for a few minutes. We’ve never met them, for God’s sake, and they’ve been back for months. We could just drop by and say hello, we’re the Myerses. Besides, they sent us a card. They asked us to stop during the holidays. They invited us. I don’t want to go home,” she finally said and fished in tar purse for a cigaret.
Myers recalled setting the furnace and turning out all the lights before he had left. And then he thought of the snow drifting past the window.
“What about that insulting letter they sent telling us they heard we were keeping a cat in the house?” he said.
“They’ve forgotten about that by now,” she said. “That wasn’t anything serious, anyway. Oh, let’s do it, Myers! Let’s go by.”
“We should call first if we’re going to do anything like that,” he said.
“No,” she said. “That’s part of it. Let’s not call. Let’s just go knock on the door and say hello, we used to live here. All right? Myers?”
“I think we should call first,” he said.
“It’s the holidays,” she said, getting up from her chair. “Come on, baby.”
She took his arm and they went out into the snow. She suggested they take her car and pick up his car later. He opened the door for her and then went around to the passenger’s side.
Something took him when he saw the lighted windows, saw snow on the roof, saw the station wagon in the driveway. The curtains were open and Christmas-tree lights blinked at them from the window.
They got out of the car. He took her elbow as they stepped over a pile of snow and started up the walk to the front porch. They had gone a few steps when a large bushy dog hurtled around the corner of the garage and headed straight for Myers.
“Oh, God,” he said, hunching, stepping back, bringing his hands up. He slipped on the walk, his coat flapped, and he fell onto the frozen grass with the dread certainty that the dog would go for his throat. The dog growled once and then began to sniff Myers’ coat.