Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [124]
“Hello, Olive. I’m back here. I’m lying down, I’ll be right there.”
“No,” she sang out, “stay put. I’ll come find you.” She found him on the bed in the downstairs guest room. He was lying on his back, one hand beneath his head.
“I’m glad you came over,” he said.
“Are you feeling poorly again?”
He smiled that tiny smile. “Only soul poor. The body bangs on.”
She nodded.
He moved his legs aside. “Come,” he said, patting the bed. “Sit down. I may be a rich Republican, though I’m not that rich, in case you were secretly hoping. Anyway—” He sighed and shook his head, the sunlight from the windows catching his eyes, making them very blue. “Anyway, Olive, you can tell me anything, that you beat your son black and blue, and I won’t hold it against you. I don’t think I will. I’ve beaten my daughter emotionally. I didn’t speak to her for two years, can you imagine such a thing?”
“I did hit my son,” Olive said. “Sometimes when he was little. Not just spanked. Hit.”
Jack Kennison nodded one nod.
She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn’t sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds. His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.
“God, I’m scared,” he said, quietly.
She almost said, “Oh, stop. I hate scared people.” She would have said that to Henry, to just about anyone. Maybe because she hated the scared part of herself—this was just a fleeting thought; there was a contest within her, revulsion and tentative desire. It was the sudden memory of Jane Houlton in the waiting room that caused Olive to walk to the bed—the freedom of that ordinary banter, because Jack, in the doctor’s office, had needed her, had given her a place in the world.
His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now, there was only the silence of this sunny room. They were here, and her body—old, big, sagging—felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes.
What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.
And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.
Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the