The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [21]
When she returned to the kitchen, Robert was on the telephone again. He had one arm across his chest, his hand tucked under the other arm. He was speaking quietly, answering Yes and OK, watching her as she walked into the room. “Later,” he said and hung up.
There was a long silence.
“How many of them are pilot error?” she asked.
“Seventy percent.”
“What error? What happens?”
“It’s a series of events leading to the last one, and the last one is usually called pilot error because by that time the pilots are deeply involved.”
“I see.”
“May I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Was Jack...?”
He hesitated.
“Was Jack what?” she asked.
“Was Jack agitated or depressed?”
Robert paused.
“You mean recently?” she asked.
“I know it’s an awful question,” he said. “But you’re going to have to answer it sooner or later. If there was something, if there’s anything you know or you can remember, it would be better if you and I talked about it first.”
She considered the question. Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love — soaked, drenched in love — only to discover later that perhaps you didn’t know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren’t quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitably, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane. It was the way people worked, Kathryn thought, with a need to evolve from being sick with love to making a life with someone who was also changing, altering himself, so that the couple could one day raise a child.
Some lovers didn’t make it, she knew from her parents’ example. Kathryn could not remember a time when there had not been a feeling of want and need and tension between her parents. Although it was her father who was continuously unfaithful and certainly gave Kathryn’s mother just cause to be hurt, it was her mother herself, Kathryn was certain, who had destroyed early on whatever slim chance her parents had had of happiness. For it was her mother’s fate to be utterly incapable of forgetting that time when she had been twenty-two and had met Bobby Hull, and he had fallen in love with her and had made her feel alive. For one year — a year during which Kathryn’s parents had married and then conceived her — Bobby Hull hadn’t taken his eyes off his new wife, nor left her side, so that Kathryn’s mother felt, for the first time in her life, both deeply loved and extraordinarily beautiful, a drug that turned out to be even more addicting than the bourbon to which Bobby Hull had introduced her when they met. That year, which Kathryn never doubted was the best of her mother’s life — and about which Kathryn knew more than she ought to have, since, as a child, she heard about it in great detail every time her parents fought — took on an importance that became almost sacred as time went on. And Kathryn’s father, even when he relented and actually tried to please his wife, could not begin to recreate it. The tragedy of her mother’s life, Kathryn had always thought, was the gradual withdrawal of Bobby Hull’s attentions to her, which began naturally enough, in the way that even two people who are deeply in love are eventually able to carry on with life and go to work and take care of babies, but became, as soon as her mother felt the withdrawal and named it — labeled it, so to speak — a way of being. Kathryn could hear her mother calling from the upstairs bedroom, in an agonized voice, over and over, the single word Why? Sometimes (and it made Kathryn wince to remember this), her mother begged Bobby Hull to tell her she was beautiful, which automatically caused Kathryn’s father, who could be stubborn, to be stingy with his love, even though he did love his wife very much and might have told