The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [39]
The man said, “Truck’s here.”
“Is this the place, you think?”
“No telling. Want to look around?”
“Ought not, I don’t think.”
Nothing was recognizable about this couple. There was no one in my family who could have been transformed by any amount of time into either of them. Of the license plate, I could only see that it was out of state, white. The woman stood on the porch, her back to the door. She sighed, clicked the clasp of her purse. He said, “Come on, then.” I didn’t want to look at them any more, and so I lay down among the vines and listened for the departing crunch of their wheels. It came soon enough.
At ten o’clock I staggered into bed, exhausted at last. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, disoriented and with the sound of the television in my ears, which frightened me. The sense of someone else in the house when I am waking up always frightens me. I always imagine that it is the FBI, making themselves at home, looking at my stuff, eating my food. I know that they don’t do this, that in fact it was my fellow leftists who always did this back in the old days, but it is not rational, of course. Scott used to wake up shouting if one of the cats got under the covers. He thought it was a rat, and that he was in Khe Sanh again. Sometimes if thunderstorms began while we were sleeping, he would wake himself all the way up and listen to make sure that no whistles preceded the booms. War wounds. Now I realized that Michael was watching the baseball game in the living room, and I relaxed in bed and looked out the window.
If I had broken up with Scott and he had moved away, I would now be able to call him on the phone from time to time and ask him how he is. This is literally my only conscious wish. He would be smoking a cigarette, and he would inhale audibly, and I would imagine him taking his mustache between his lip and his lower teeth, biting it a little. Then he would say, “Sandy.” We would be uncomfortable, too ready to prove, by talking fast, that we were both fine, happy, and productive, that we didn’t miss each other. He might have a wife to show me up with, and kids. I would be exactly as I am now, turning over in this very bed, reaching for this very telephone. No molecule of the scene I am looking at now would be different, except that Scott would exist somewhere. The more that Michael comes around, the more I have this wish, the more I let myself indulge the fantasy of it, of saying, “Did we love each other? Did I love you?”
It is the third inning, and Michael is pounding the couch as I come into the room. An error at second, the Cardinals. Herr makes it, dropping the ball right out of his glove. “Shit!” yells Michael. “Did you see that dumb fucker?” His eyes follow me across the room. He says, “Do you mind that I’m here?”
“I told you you could come over, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“It’s okay.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
He doesn’t say anything to this, turns his eyes back to the game. He is hurt by my manner. He says, “When I saw you were sleeping, I knew I should just go home.”
“Don’t, Michael. It’s my fault. I was up at dawn, and now I feel really terrible,”
“Why were you up at dawn?”
“Don’t quiz me.”
“I’m not quizzing you. I’m just asking.” He stands up and goes over and turns off the television.
“Are we having a fight? You know I hate fighting.”
He says, “I don’t think we’re having anything as promising as a fight.” He goes toward the screen door and opens it. I am distracted by the color of the grass as the late afternoon sun falls