As the subway racketed through darkness, he read about the forces of nature. A scholarly extract had come in the mail, in the same mail as the affidavit. Before he lived alone, he would have thrown it away without a second look, but now, as he slowly took on the careful habits of a Boston codger, he read every scrap he was sent, and even stooped in the alleys to pick up a muddy fragment of newspaper and scan it for a message. Thus, he read, it was already known in 1935 that the natural world was governed by four kinds of force: in order of increasing strength, they are the gravitational, the weak, the electromagnetic, and the strong. Reading, he found himself rooting for the weak forces; he identified with them. Gravitation, though negligible at the microcosmic level, begins to predominate with objects on the order of magnitude of a hundred kilometers, like large asteroids; it holds together the moon, the earth, the solar system, the stars, clusters of stars within galaxies, and the galaxies themselves. To Richard it was as if a faint-hearted team overpowered at the start of the game was surging to triumph in the last, macrocosmic quarter; he inwardly cheered. The subway lurched to a stop at Kendall, and he remembered how, a few days after their wedding, he and Joan took a train north through New Hampshire, to summer jobs they had contracted for, as a couple. The train, long since discontinued, had wound its way north along the busy rivers sullied by sawmills and into evergreen mountains where ski lifts stood rusting. The seats had been purple plush, and the train incessantly, gently swayed. Her arms, pale against the plush, showed a pink shadowing of sunburn. Uncertain of how to have a honeymoon, yet certain that they must create memories to last till death did them part, they had played croquet naked, in the little yard that, amid the trees, seemed an eye of grass gazing upward at the sky. She beat him, every game. The weak force, Richard read, does not appreciably affect the structure of the nucleus before the decay occurs; it is like a flaw in a bell of cast metal which has no effect on the ringing of the bell until it finally causes the bell to fall into pieces.
The subway car climbed into light, to cross the Charles. Sailboats tilted on the glitter below. Across the river, Boston’s smoke-colored skyscrapers hung like paralyzed fountains. The train had leaned around a bay of a lake and halted at The Weirs, a gritty summer place of ice cream dripped on asphalt, of a candy-apple scent wafted from a shore of childhood. After a wait of hours, they caught the mail boat to the island where they would work. The island was on the far side of Lake Winnipesaukee, with many other islands intervening, and many mail drops necessary. Before each docking, the boat blew its whistle – an immense noise. The Maples had sat on the prow, for the sun and scenery; once there, directly under the whistle, they felt they had to stay. The islands, the water, the mountains beyond the shore did an adagio of shifting perspectives around them and then – each time, astoundingly – the blast of the whistle would flatten their hearts and crush the landscape into a wad of noise; these blows assaulted their young marriage. He both blamed her and wished to beg her forgiveness for what neither of them could control. After each blast, the engine would be cut, the boat would sidle to a rickety dock, and from the dappled soft paths of this or that evergreen island tan children and counselors in bathing trunks and moccasins would spill forth to receive their mail, their shouts ringing strangely in the deafened ears of the newlyweds. By the time they reached their own island, the Maples were exhausted.
Quantum mechanics and relativity, taken together, are extraordinarily restrictive and they, therefore, provide us with a great logical engine. Richard returned the pamphlet to his pocket and got off at Charles. He walked across the overpass toward the hospital, to see his arthritis man. His bones ached at night. He had friends who were dying, who were dead; it no longer seemed incredible that he would follow them. The first time he had visited this hospital, it had been to court Joan. He had climbed this same ramp to the glass doors and inquired within, stammering, for the whereabouts, in this grand maze of unhealth, of the girl who had sat, with a rubber band around her ponytail, in the front row of English 162b: ‘The English Epic Tradition, Spenser to Tennyson.’ He had admired the tilt of the back of her head for three hours a week all winter. He gathered up courage to talk in exam period as, together at a library table, they were mulling over murky photostats of Blake’s illustrations to Paradise Lost. They agreed to meet after the exam and have a beer. She didn’t show. In that amphitheater of desperately thinking heads, hers was absent. And, having put The Faerie Queene and The Idylls of the King to rest together, he called her dorm and learned that Joan had been taken to the hospital. A force of nature drove him to brave the long corridors and the wrong turns and the crowd of aunts and other suitors at the foot of the bed; he found Joan in white, between white sheets, her hair loose about her shoulders and a plastic tube feeding something transparent into the underside of her arm. In later visits, he achieved the right to hold her hand, trussed though it was with splints and tapes. Platelet deficiency had been the diagnosis. The complaint had been she couldn’t stop bleeding. Blushing, she told him how the doctors and internes had asked her when she had last had intercourse, and how embarrassing it had been to confess, in the face of their clinical skepticism, never.
The doctor removed the blood-pressure tourniquet from Richard’s arm and smiled. ‘Have you been under any stress lately?’
‘I’ve been getting a divorce.’
‘Arthritis, as you may know, belongs to a family of complaints with a psychosomatic component.’
‘All I know is that I wake up at four in the morning and it’s very depressing to think I’ll never get over this, this pain’ll be inside my shoulder for the rest of my life.’
‘You will. It won’t.’
‘When?’
‘When your brain stops sending out punishing signals.’
Her hand, in its little cradle of healing apparatus, its warmth unresisting and noncommittal as he held it at her bedside, rested high, nearly at the level of his eyes. On the island, the beds in the log cabin set aside for them were of different heights, and though Joan tried to make them into a double bed, there was a ledge where the mattresses met which either he or she had to cross, amid a discomfort of sheets pulling loose. But the cabin was in the woods and powerful moist scents of pine and fern swept through the screens with the morning chirrup of birds and the evening rustle of animals. There was a rumor there were deer on the island; they crossed the ice in the winter and were trapped when it melted in the spring. Though no one, neither camper nor counselor, ever saw the deer, the rumor persisted that they were there.
Why then has no one ever seen a quark? As he walked along Charles Street toward his apartment, Richard vaguely remembered some such sentence, and fished in his pockets for the pamphlet on the forces of nature, and came up instead with a new prescription for painkiller, a copy of his marriage license, and the signed affidavit. Now come … The pamphlet had got folded into it. He couldn’t find the sentence, and instead read, The theory that the strong force becomes stronger as the quarks are pulled apart is somewhat speculative; but its complement, the idea that the force gets weaker as the quarks are pushed closer to each other, is better established. Yes, he thought, that had happened. In life there are four forces: love, habit, time, and boredom. Love and habit at short range are immensely powerful, but time, lacking a minus charge, accumulates inexorably, and with its brother boredom levels all. He was dying; that made him cruel. His heart flattened in horror at what he had just done. How could he tell Joan what he had done to their marriage license? The very quarks in the telephone circuits would rebel.
In the forest, there had been a green clearing, an eye of grass, a meadow starred with microcosmic white flowers, and here one dusk the deer had come, the female slightly in advance, the male larger and darker, his rump still in shadow as his mate nosed out the day’s last sun, the silhouettes of both outlined by the same light that gilded the meadow grass. A fleet of blank-faced motorcyclists roared by, a rummy waved to Richard from a laundromat doorway, a girl in a seductive h
alter gave him a cold eye, the light changed from red to green, and he could not remember if he needed orange juice or bread, doubly annoyed because he could not remember if they had ever really seen the deer, or if he had imagined the memory, conjured it from the longing that it be so.
‘I don’t remember,’ Joan said over the phone. ‘I don’t think we did, we just talked about it.’
‘Wasn’t there a kind of clearing beyond the cabin, if you followed the path?’
‘We never went that way, it was too buggy.’
‘A stag and a doe, just as it was getting dark. Don’t you remember anything?’
‘No. I honestly don’t, Richard. How guilty do you want me to feel?’
‘Not at all, if it didn’t happen. Speaking of nostalgia –’
‘Yes?’
‘I went up to Cambridge City Hall this afternoon and got a copy of our marriage license.’
‘Oh dear. How was it?’
‘It wasn’t bad. The place is remarkably the same. Did we get the license upstairs or downstairs?’
‘Downstairs, to the left of the elevator as you go in.’
‘That’s where I got our affidavit notarized. You’ll be getting a copy soon; it’s a shocking document.’
‘I did get it, yesterday. What was shocking about it? I thought it was funny, the way it was worded. Here we come, there we go.’
‘Darley, you’re so tough and brave.’
‘I assume I must be. No?’
‘Yes.’
Not for the first time in these two years did he feel an eggshell thinness behind which he crouched and which Joan needed only to raise her voice to break. But she declined to break it, either out of ignorance of how thin the shell was, or because she was hatching on its other side, just as, on the other side of that bathroom door, she had been drawing near to marriage at the same rate as he, and with the same regressive impulses. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she was saying, ‘are we both supposed to sign the same statement, or do we each sign one, or what? And which one? My lawyer keeps sending me three of everything, and some of them are in blue covers. Are these the important ones or the unimportant ones that I can keep?’
In truth, the lawyers, so adroit in their accustomed adversary world of blame, of suit and countersuit, did seem confused by the no-fault provision. On the very morning of the divorce, Richard’s greeted him on the courthouse steps with the possibility that he as plaintiff might be asked to specify what in the marriage had persuaded him of its irretrievable breakdown. ‘But that’s the whole point of no-fault,’ Joan interposed, ‘that you don’t have to say anything.’ She had climbed the courthouse steps beside Richard; indeed, they had come in the same car, because one of their children had taken her Volvo.
The proceeding was scheduled for early in the day. Picking her up at a quarter after seven, he had found her standing barefoot on the lawn in the circle of their driveway, up to her ankles in mist and dew. She was holding her high-heeled shoes in her hand. The sight made him laugh. Opening the car door, he said, ‘So there are deer on the island!’
She was too preoccupied to make sense of his allusion. She asked him, ‘Do you think the judge will mind if I don’t wear stockings?’
‘Keep your legs behind his bench,’ he said. He was feeling fluttery, light-headed. He had scarcely slept, though his shoulder had not hurt, for a change. She got into the car, bringing with her her shoes and the moist smell of dawn. She had always been an early riser, and he a late one. ‘Thanks for doing this,’ she said, of the ride, adding, ‘I guess.’
‘My pleasure,’ Richard said. As they drove to court, discussing their cars and their children, he marvelled at how light Joan had become; she sat on the side of his vision as light as a feather, her voice tickling his ear, her familiar intonations and emphases thoroughly musical and half unheard, like the patterns of a concerto that sets us to daydreaming. He no longer blamed her: that was the reason for the lightness. All those years, he had blamed her for everything – for the traffic jam in Central Square, for the blasts of noise on the mail boat, for the difference in the levels of their beds. No longer: he had set her adrift from omnipotence. He had set her free, free from fault. She was to him as Gretel to Hänsel, a kindred creature moving beside him down a path while birds behind them ate the bread crumbs.
Richard’s lawyer eyed Joan lugubriously. ‘I understand that, Mrs Maple,’ he said. ‘But perhaps I should have a word in private with my client.’
The lawyers they had chosen were oddly different. Richard’s was a big rumpled Irishman, his beige summer suit baggy and his belly straining his shirt, a melancholic and comforting father-type. Joan’s was small, natty, and flip; he dressed in checks and talked from the side of his mouth, like a racing tout. Twinkling, chipper even at this sleepy hour, he emerged from behind a pillar in the marble temple of justice and led Joan away. Her head, slightly higher than his, tilted to give him her ear; she dimpled, docile. Richard wondered in amazement, Could this sort of man have been, all these years, the secret type of her desire? His own lawyer, breathing heavily, asked him, ‘If the judge does ask for a specific cause of the breakdown – and I don’t say he will, we’re all sailing uncharted waters here – what will you say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richard said. He studied the swirl of marble, like a tiny wave breaking, between his shoe tips. ‘We had political differences. She used to make me go on peace marches.’
‘Any physical violence?’
‘Not much. Not enough, maybe. You really think he’ll ask this sort of thing? Is this no-fault or not?’
‘No-fault is a tabula rasa in this state. At this point, Dick, it’s what we make of it. I don’t know what he’ll do. We should be prepared.’
‘Well – aside from the politics, we didn’t get along that well sexually.’
The air between them thickened; with his own father, too, sex had been a painful topic. His lawyer’s breathing became grievously audible. ‘So you’d be prepared to say there was personal and emotional incompatibility?’
It seemed profoundly untrue, but Richard nodded. ‘If I have to.’
‘Good enough.’ The lawyer put his big hand on Richard’s arm and squeezed. His closeness, his breathiness, his air of restless urgency and forced cheer, his old-fashioned suit and the folder of papers tucked under his arm like roster sheets all came into focus: he was a coach, and Richard was about to kick the winning field goal, do the high-difficulty dive, strike out the heart of the batting order with the bases already loaded. Go.
They entered the courtroom two by two. The chamber was chaste and empty; the carved trim was painted forest green. The windows gave on an ancient river blackened by industry. Dead judges gazed down from above. The two lawyers conferred, leaving Richard and Joan to stand awkwardly apart. He made his ‘What now?’ face at her. She made her ‘Beats me’ face back. ‘Oyez, oyez,’ a disembodied voice chanted, and the judge hurried in, smiling, his robes swinging. He was a little sharp-featured man with a polished pink face; his face declared that he was altogether good, and would never die. He stood and nodded at them. He seated himself. The lawyers went forward to confer in whispers. Richard inertly gravitated toward Joan, the only animate object in the room that did not repel him. ‘It’s a Daumier,’ she whispered, of the tableau being enacted before them. The lawyers parted. The judge beckoned. He was so clean his smile squeaked. He showed Richard a piece of paper; it was the affidavit. ‘Is this your signature?’ he asked him.
‘It is,’ Richard said.
‘And do you believe, as this paper states, that your marriage has suffered an irretrievable breakdown?’
‘I do.’
The judge turned his face toward Joan. His voice softened a notch. ‘Is this your signature?’
‘It is.’ Her voice was a healing spray, full of tiny rainbows, in the corner of Richard’s eye.
‘And do you believe that your marriage has suffered an irretrievable breakdown?’
A pause. She did n
ot believe that, Richard knew. She said, ‘I do.’
The judge smiled and wished them both good luck. The lawyers sagged with relief, and a torrent of merry legal chitchat – speculations about the future of no-fault, reminiscences of the old days of Alabama quickies – excluded the Maples. Obsolete at their own ceremony, Joan and Richard stepped back from the bench in unison and stood side by side, uncertain of how to turn, until Richard at last remembered what to do; he kissed her.
GRANDPARENTING
THE FORMER MAPLES had been divorced some years before their oldest child, Judith, married and had a baby. She was living with her husband, a free-lance computer programmer and part-time troubadour, on the edge of poverty in Hartford. Joan Maple, now Joan Vanderhaven, told Richard Maple over the phone that she and Andy, her husband, were intending to go down from Boston for the birth, which was to be induced. ‘How ridiculous,’ said Ruth, Richard’s wife. ‘The girl’s over thirty, she has a husband. To have her divorced parents both hovering over her isn’t just silly, it’s cruel. When I had my first baby I was in Hawaii and my mother was in Florida and that’s the way we both wanted it. You need space when you’re having a baby. You need air, to breathe.’ Remembering her own, efficiently natural child-births, she began to pant, demonstratively. ‘Let your poor daughter alone. It’s taken her ten years to get over the terrible upbringing you two gave her.’