The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [126]
“It’s the only way I can break this off,” she said.
I was bewildered. “I’m old enough now. Why don’t you marry me?”
“You know the answer. I’m so much older.”
I was twenty-five.
“I thought it was going to stop mattering, some day.”
“I used to think so, too.”
“You think I care what people think? I don’t care what people think!”
“I know that.”
She had her profession, her standing, the trust of her patients to think about. I’d heard all of that again and again.
“Can’t it be over now?” she asked, her voice weary.
“No,” I told her, my voice as hard as hers was tired.
And it wasn’t over, although she married Ted Bursap, a general contractor. Ted was only five years younger than C. He believed that there was a future in Pluto, and his wife had just conveniently died. I’d buried her myself—in plain pine. I’d taken that as a sign of Ted’s cheapness, though it’s possible that’s what she’d wanted. C.’s marriage so grieved me that I started correspondence courses in my father and grandfather’s profession, and found I liked the law. Of course, there was a terrific law library in the house, two generations of law and philosophy books. Not to mention fiction and poetry, but I’d already gone through those. I disappeared in the evenings. That is when I discovered my grandfather’s papers, and when because of him I began reading Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Plotinus. For a while, everything written since A.D. 300 seemed useless, except case law, which fascinated me and told me that nothing had changed since those men had written.
Now that I was getting myself ahead, my mother approved of my not going out in the evenings. For a year after C.’s wedding, she and I were finished. I tried not to even look in the direction of her house. But we could not stay apart. One dusty summer evening, I watched from the cemetery as the sun turned white hot and then red. Through the pine trees, I followed this enormous ball of fire as it sank in the west. I looked in the direction that I had resisted looking, and saw Ted pull out of the driveway in his pickup. I walked between the graves and through the backyard the way I used to do, and there she was, waiting for me on the back kitchen steps. She had waited there every afternoon at five o’clock, all that year. She couldn’t help herself, she said, but she’d promised herself she never would let me know, that she’d let me get on with my life.
Ted, it turned out, had gone to Hoopdance to work out a bid on some small construction job, and he would be an hour there and an hour back, at least. Those two hours were different from any we had ever spent before. The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other’s faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.
The only problem with those old philosophers, I thought as I was walking back through the graves, was that they didn’t give enough due to the unbearable weight of human sexual love. It was something they correctly saw, though, as hindering deliberation, at war with reason, and apt to stain a man’s honor, which of course I accepted.
Ted never found out, but I told myself that he might not even have cared. From what I had seen, love and sentiment had never interested him much.
Ted had built many of those newer houses in Pluto, those with only a backyard cemetery view, and he was also responsible for many of the least attractive buildings in town. I’d hated Ted even before he married the woman I loved, but afterward, of course, I thought often of how happy I would be to bury him, how fast I’d dig his grave. And then after I began seeing C. again, coming home, knowing that Ted got to sleep with her all night, I’d imagine how satisfying it would be to cover Ted up and put a stone on his head. Just a cheap flawed rock. No quote. Next to his poor pine-boxed wife. I had also hated Ted Bursap because of the way he ruined this town—Ted bought up older properties—graceful houses