The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [65]
Slater kept wanting to stop at a bar. Or at a gas station to pick up a couple of six-packs. Dave didn’t think this was an especially good idea, but he did think he deserved something. What Dave really thought was that a responsible professional man, owner of two homes, employer of four persons, parent of three daughters, and lifelong meditative personality ought to be able to control himself. He also thought that his wife, a responsible professional woman, and ditto ditto ditto, if not ditto, ought to have been able to control herself, too. We stopped, Slater and I, at a rest area about thirty miles up the interstate, and there, without the benefit of a six-pack, we stood back from the road in the gloom of a chilly night and we screamed and screamed and screamed. After screaming, while noticing that we had screamed our throat into raw throbbing, we noticed the stars. They lay across the dark blue sky like sugar and diamonds sprinkled together. And Lord, how they shamed the flesh.
In the exhausted backwash of all this verbalizing, I realized that my plan not to be communicated with was at greater risk than ever, because I had made myself so unpleasant that it was likely she would flee to him, or at least flee from me at whatever cost. In fact, my success now rested with his resolution not to have her. Only with that. I wondered what it was about her, her circumstances or her person, that gave him pause. Or maybe it was her intrinsic passion. Maybe he had thought he saw in her cool blondness some sort of astringent distance, and now he saw that between Dana and a desired object there was no distance allowed at all. Maybe he was dazzled by the neat blouses and the deft workmanship into not seeing the defiant, greedy stare. Maybe he saw only the established dentist, not the determined dental student, the stainless-steel blonde in the doorway of the classroom, radiating tensile strength like heat. Appearances aren’t deceiving, I think, but you have to know where to look.
I should say that it was hard for me not to see her as a dramatic figure. I always had seen her that way. Maybe, in fact, he only viewed her as something of a bore, a little thing, a mere woman passing through his life. I don’t know. I never even saw him. I got home about twelve and sneaked into bed. Dana was already asleep. There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time. These days, when I lie awake at night and think about those early spring weeks, the objects of the world as they were then appear to me with utter clarity. Edges sharp, colors bright, movements etched into the silvery mirror of light and air. When I used to think of the word “confusion,” I would think of a kind of gray mist, but that is not what confusion is. Confusion is perfect sight and perfect mystery at the same time. Confusion is seeing without knowing, as if the optic nerves were still attached but the hemispheres of the brain were parted. Desire is confusion vibrating in the tissues.
Confusion and desire also include the inability to keep quiet. One of the things I remember with embarrassing clarity is all the talking I did, all the statements I made about every possible thing. They were all assertions, bombast, a waste of breath. Could I have shut up? The world was beautiful during those weeks—chill, sunny, gold-green, severe undecorated shapes of mountains, tree limbs, stones, clouds, floating together and together in a stream of configurations as the eye rolled past them. If I had it again, I would look at it better.
About this time we had what Dana would call “an early warning.” News of the impending disaster came first to Laura, through her cousin in California, then to Dave from his mother two states away. Vomiting, high temperatures in both children and adults, lethargy, sore throat, possible ear complications. Dana told Dave to rearrange our schedules for about a week, so that the illness could pass through the