Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [122]
“Maybe now isn’t the time to make any big decisions,” Lewis said. “Let’s concentrate on having a healthy baby first.”
“Since when do you sound like a shrink, Lewis?” Libby laughed, then began to cry. “Oh, I know Billie’s not your favorite person. I wish I knew what happened. Do you have any idea?”
“She has a mean streak,” he said.
A few days later, Libby handed him a letter to read.
Dearest Billie,
I love you and miss you desperately, and yearn to talk to you, to hear your voice, to see your beautiful face.
I’m afraid I hurt your feelings in a way I’m too dense to see—I feel helplessly, damningly oblivious. I’ll do whatever I can to make it up to you.
I can’t live in this valley without your friendship. Please come see me or call, or at least write and tell me what I can do to clear the way for our friendship to resume. If this is not possible, at least let me know why not, and where my insensitivity lies.
Love,
Libby
“Should I mail it?” she asked Lewis.
“I don’t see why not,” he said.
LIBBY sometimes played the violin when she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t loud enough to keep anyone else awake; Lewis was already an insomniac. She played Bach cello suites, transposed for the violin—dry, vigorous workouts designed, it seemed, to carry the listener down some endlessly branching path deep into the soul. Or she’d take up a fiddle tune—“Sweet Georgia Brown,” “The Maiden’s Prayer,” or “I Don’t Love Nobody”—then break it down into variation after variation, complicating, tangling, slurring, sometimes deconstructing the melody into a few coughy, unrecognizable phrases sawed this way and that; and then, gathering energy, she’d slowly tool her way back home.
One night, prodded by the violin’s restless meanderings as if by an insistent finger of smoke, Lewis hauled himself to the kitchen table. The last chapter of his dissertation was the one place where, after citing some two hundred secondary sources in the preceding pages, he could actually express his own opinions. Without looking at any notes, Lewis wrote the first sentence in longhand: “Fondness and abiding mutual interest characterize the friendship of Flaubert and Turgenev….”
LIBBY dug out her journal: First time I’ve written since you died, Red. I couldn’t face the page. Lewis has been after me. He’s only being nice, though. He never did like my journal. Pretend it’s a letter, he says. And I thought, I could write to you, which filled me with relief. Am I refusing to let you go? Who cares? I’m as entitled to denial as to the other four stages of grief. And you do seem close by. I suspect you are seeing and hearing everything.
It was odd to keep a journal where the big events were lacunae. Red’s death was missing, and—Libby counted—the four weeks that followed. A month. Is this how life was going to be, she wondered, a dreary accumulation of time without Red?
I’m housebound in bed. How nineteenth century. The invalid—what a strange, accurate word. One does feel so marginalized, so out-of-life’s-flow, so stumped by sadness here in this bed. It makes me cry to write to you, Red. Who could cry this much?
THE THOUGHT of writing to Red woke Libby up each morning. She couldn’t wait. So she went batty for a few months, nobody would blame her. There was something deliciously dotty in writing to her dead husband while wearing his pajamas. She had new empathy for her mother’s friend Betty. When her husband died, Betty wore his clothes every day for over a year—pants cuffed broadly, the sleeves of his shirts rolled up around her wrists in thick doughnuts—as if to reanimate them. Such visible, guileless grief had made Libby’s mother frantic, of course. But Libby now understood the quaint and harmless charm of Betty’s actions; and who could’ve guessed Red’s cotton pj’s would be such perfect maternity wear?
My mother calls last night. I try to tell her about Billie, how she still hasn