The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [51]
It was a lovely day, and we decided upon a spur-of-the-minute trip to the house, to admire the plaster and the running water and to picnic on the front deck. Lizzie and Stephanie thought it was interesting that you could have a picnic at a house where there was a refrigerator and a stove, and viewed the whole plan as another example of Dana’s peculiar but always instructive way of looking at things. Dana let Lizzie pack the food and Stephanie pack the toys, of which there have to be enough not only for everyone to have something to play with every moment of the trip but also to look at, consider, and disregard. It was fine with me. Dana seemed to me to be sort of like a hot-air balloon. The more weight we could hang on her, in terms of children, houses, belongings, foodstuffs, office equipment, and debts, the harder it would be for her to gain altitude.
The children sat behind us and Dana sat beside me, with her feet on the lunch basket. My strategy was to talk about patients all the way, both to remind her of what we shared and to distract her from her sadness, which sprouted as soon as we passed the city limits and grew with every mile we drove. The older children played together nicely. Lizzie, in fact, read Stephanie Green Eggs and Ham, and Leah was generally cordial, allowing Dana both to talk to her and to give her pieces of apple. When the apple was gone, Dana tentatively reached out her hand, as she had done often in the past, and Leah took it and held it. I drove and talked.
I have found that it is tempting to talk about every minute of the past six weeks as if the passing of every minute were an event, which was what it seemed like. I remember that car ride perfectly—the bright, early spring sunlight flooding all the windows; my own voice rising and falling in a loquacious attempt at wit, concern, entertainment, wooing; my repeated glances at her profile; the undercurrent in all my thoughts of how is she now? And now? And now? As if she were in some terminal condition.
But it was only a car ride, two hours into the country, “a dentist” with “the wife” and “the kids.” It could have been 1950. I remember thinking that then, and wishing that it were—some confused thought about the fidelity of our mothers’ generation, or barring the truth of that, that at least whatever it was that was present would be thirty-five years in the past, if it had taken place in 1950. Well, as I say, every minute had its own separate identity.
Some nights later, we were lying in bed after making love and I was nearly asleep. Her voice rose out of the blackness of coming somnolence like a thread of smoke. She said, “I wish we were closer.” Although I was now wide awake, I maintained my breathing pattern and surreptitiously turned my chest away from her, as if in sleep, so that she couldn’t hear my heart rattling in its cage. Now she would tell me, I thought, and then we would have to act. I let out a little snore, counted to twenty, and let out another one. After a minute or so, when my heart had steadied. I turned, also as if in sleep, and threw my arm over her, and hugged her tightly, as if in sleep. My nose was pressed into the back of her neck. She said, “Dave? David? Are you asleep already?” Then she sighed, and we lay there for a long time until the muscles at the back of her neck finally relaxed and she began to snore for real.
I don’t know when she saw him, but I know that she did, because sometimes her sadness was cured. A long time ago, before she joined the choir, when Leah was still nursing five or six times a day, she read a book by some Middle European writer about a man who had both a wife and a mistress. I remember the way she tossed the book down and said, “You know, I always think of men who have wives and mistresses as having everything, but of women who have husbands and lovers as simply being oversubscribed.” Then she laughed and went on: “I mean, where would you fit it in? Would you phone him from the grocery store with two old ladies behind