The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [68]
Now he would be as one who had witnessed a miracle and would not let himself forget; as a believer who clings to signs and portents; he would refuse doubt. He felt that his father would have understood. For William had taught him the commerce of invisible forces, ions in league across enormous distances and densities. He would continue to desire, to believe, until, as when suddenly one senses someone's gaze across a room, Jean looked up. He sat, in the misery of this resolve.
Jean turned to look back across the field and saw the empty porch and the shaded windows, closed against the heat. She could not explain how native her defeat, her desolation, as if all the years of happiness with him had somehow been only a reprieve, not meant to be hers. His pity: one kind of love unintentionally mocking another. She would work until her hands ached, until the low, intense glow of twilight spread across the garden. She longed for the first clarity of autumn, wondering if the cold could cleanse her. But she knew it could not. She had squandered all the time the child had been alive inside her; she had been beseeching the dead; her ache for her mother; her mother's, for her.
From the window of her studio, Marina watched Avery and Jean, two slight figures slowly crossing the marsh. She saw the distance between them. Avery's loose shirt flapped emptily behind him in the wind.
Since their return, Jean had slept in the little room she'd once shared with Avery, and Avery on the pullout bed in Marina's studio. He felt faint satisfaction to see this bed, the evidence of his separation from Jean, disappear each morning into the sofa, as if all might so easily be restored.
Avery and Jean stood a little apart, always now there seemed space for another between them. Rows of bright lettuce stuttered above the black earth. The marsh was bordered by rain-soaked trees. They had been out of the desert for almost a month and still the smell of wet earth was sharp and strange.
Jean could barely speak.
– Are you saying you want your freedom?
– I'm saying we should both feel free, Avery said, until we know what to do.
In this perversity, he felt certain, was a kind of truth, an integrity at least. As soon as he spoke, he knew it was so. He did not know how to restore her, he was incapable. Jean's despair was as true as everything else about her. He knew one thing with certainty: nothing would heal this way, in this orbit of defeat, this brokenness.
She was so thin now, the only pouches of flesh left of her were her breasts, her sex. The sight of her moved him to the core.
Jean was thinking hard. At last she said:
– I see. Going back to school will be difficult, you've waited for this a long time, you'll need to work without distraction …
Marina was washing peaches in the sink, the window wide open to the night.
– Jean loves you, she said.
Marina waited, but there was no answer. She turned around and saw Avery, with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.
Standing behind his chair, she held him. Not one mother-cell forgets the feeling, her child crying.
Marina sat down next to him, crossed her arms on the table, and lay her head there, waiting for him to speak.
The flat on Clarendon was empty, the subleasers gone, and that is where Jean went. The return to Clarendon was terrible. She brought a suitcase of clothes, a box of books, a table and two chairs, a mattress for the floor. Everything else was left at Marina's house on the marsh.
Avery found a basement flat near the School of Architecture, where he was now enrolled, a graduate student. The first night on Mansfield Avenue, he sat at his table, incoherent with the risk he was taking, setting her free. He remembered a story Jean had told him of her parents, one of the first stories she'd told during their night in the cabin by the Long Sault. Elisabeth Shaw had come home late from grocery shopping. Looking flushed and guilty, she'd confessed to her husband that she'd been standing in Britnell's Bookshop