The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [55]
“Leah doesn’t make it easy, does she?”
“What if she’s like this forever?”
“Remember when we used to say that about Stephanie? When she was waking up and screaming three or four times every night?”
“Do you think that was the worst?”
“It was pretty bad when Lizzie swallowed that penny.”
“But that night when I had to stay in the hospital with her, I didn’t dare think it was bad at all. All those babies in the otolaryngology ward were so much worse.” She bit her lip, looked at the movie, turned her work, looked at me. “You know,” she said, “you scare me a little. You always have. Isn’t that funny?”
I thought, Compared to whom? But I said, “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. You don’t smile much, not the way most people do. You have this way of letting your gaze fall upon people when they attract your attention, but not smiling, nor reassuring them in any way that you aren’t judging them. And you’re awfully tall.”
“Awfully?”
“Well, it’s not awful. I mean. That’s just an intensifier. But you’re a lot taller than I am. I don’t think about that much, but you must be eleven inches taller than I am.”
“But you’ve been married to me for ten years. How can you say that I scare you?”
“Remember how you used to sit me on the handlebars of your bike and coast down Cloud Street? How can I say that you don’t scare me, after that?”
“Well, back then I was trying to scare you.”
“Why?”
“Because you scared me. You scared everybody. You were so fucking smart.”
She laughed. She turned her work. She said. “Dave, do you like me?”
I wanted to groan. I said, “I love you.”
“But do you like me? If you weren’t sleeping with me, would you want to talk to me and have lunch with me and stuff like that?”
“Sure.”
She sighed. “But do you think that we’re friends?”
“Sure.”
She looked at me, and sighed again.
“Why are you sighing?” This was risky and could have led to anything, but the temptation to comfort your wife, if you love her, is a compelling one in my experience.
She thought for a moment, then looked at me and said, “I don’t know. Life. Let’s go to bed.” She put down her knitting, turned off the light and the television, and led me by the hand up the stairs. She took off my shirt and my pants. Reached up to my awfully tall shoulders and ran her fingers across them. I undid the tie of her robe and cupped her breasts in my hands. She ran her hands down my chest, exploring, trying me out, looking at me again, over her shoulder in a way. I’m not going to say that I could even begin to resist.
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.