The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [59]
I got up and walked out, leaving all the dirty dishes. Was I furious with her? Was that why I had taken this revenge? In the interests of self-knowledge, I entertained this possibility. Ultimately, however, I didn’t care what my motives were. The main thing was that I had invested a new and much larger sum in my refusal to listen to any communications from my wife, and I saw that I would have to protect my investment rather cannily from now on.
For someone who has been married so long, I remember what it was like to be single quite well. It was like riding a little moped down a country road, hitting every bump, laboring up every hill. Marriage is like a semi, or at least a big pickup truck jacked up on fat tires. It barrels over everything in its path, zooming with all the purpose of great weight and importance into the future. When I was single, it seemed to me that I made up my future every time I registered for classes. After I paid my fees, I looked down at that little $4,000 card in my hand and felt the glow of relief. It was not that I was closer to being a dentist. That was something I couldn’t imagine. It was that four more months of the future were visible, if only just. At the end of every term, the future dropped away, leaving me gasping.
Dana, however, always had plans. She would talk about them in bed after we had made love. She talked so concretely about each one, whether it was giving up dentistry and going to Mazatlán, or whether it was having Belgian waffles for breakfast if only we could get up two hours hence, at five thirty, in time to make it to the pancake house before our early classes, that it seemed to me that all I had to do was live and breathe. The future was a scene I only had to walk into. What a relief. And that is what it has been like for thirteen years now. I had almost forgotten that old vertigo. I think I must have thought I had grown out of it.
The day after I stayed up all night, which I spent working around the country house, clearing up dead tree limbs and other trash, pruning back this and that, the future dropped away entirely, and I could not even have said whether I would be at my stool, picking up my tools, the next morning. The very biological inertia that propelled me around the property, and from meal to meal, was amazing to me. I was terrified. I was like a man who keeps totting up the days that the sun has risen and making odds on whether it will rise again, who can imagine only too well the deepening cold of a sunless day. I gather that I was rather forbidding, to boot, because everyone stayed away from me except Leah, who clambered after me, dragging sticks and picking up leaves, and keeping up a stream of talk in her most man-pleasing tones.
Dana supported her spirits, and theirs, with a heroic and visible effort. They drove to one of the bigger supermarkets, about twenty miles away, and brought everything back from the deli that anyone could possibly have wanted—bagels, cream cheese mixed with lox, cream cheese mixed with walnuts and raisins, French doughnuts, croissants with chocolate in them, swordfish steaks for later, to be grilled with basil, heads of Buttercrunch lettuce, raspberry vinegar and olive oil, bottles of seltzer for Lizzie’s stomach, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, for the funny papers. She must have thought she could lose herself in service, because she was up and down all day, getting one child this and another child that, dressing them so that they could go out for five minutes, complain of the cold, and be undressed again. She read them about six books and fiddled constantly with the TV reception. She sat on the couch and lured them into piling on top of her, as if the warmth of human flesh could help her. She was always smiling at them, and there was the panting of effort about everything she did. I wondered