And the Dark Sacred Night (3 page)

“We can do it” was Sandra’s way of telling Kit, back then, that they could do more than merely afford the house: they could make it perfect. Or (he knew this full well, and so did she) Sandra could.

The broker raved about the “possibilities” of the attic—“Pop out a couple of dormers, put a bathroom here, and you’d have the dream master suite!”—but Kit and Sandra knew they would never have the means to turn it into anything more than what it already was: an oversize, inconvenient closet; a rarely visited limbo between their sleeping selves and the sky.

So each time Kit goes up, he gives the place a brief inspection. He has never, even when Sandra thought she heard wasps, found anything amiss. The house has no fireplace and hence no chimney running through the open space, but a previous occupant built a cedar closet beside the front window. Casting a glance toward that end of the attic, Kit sees a long water stain stretching from the top of the closet all the way to a cardboard carton against its side.

The stain runs down the closet wall like the map of a rambling stream. Its source is a visible lesion at the apex of the roof where it meets the front wall of the house. The carton beside the closet, dry but warped, is labeled
TAX RECEIPTS
’03–08. Kit pries it open. The stench of mold rises from the clotted mass of pulp within.

He opens the closet, which contains mostly woolen and down-filled coats not yet retrieved for the coming winter—and also, segregated to one side in a clear garment bag, the wedding dress worn by Sandra and, before her, by her mother. Fanny already has fantasies of wearing it herself.

The dress, like the box of receipts on the other side of the closet
wall, is saturated with water. Its thick folds of satin, cocooned by its confinement, are no longer ivory but a mottled brown, as if the dress has been marinated in coffee.

“Christ,” says Kit. “Fuck.”

He hurries down to the second floor, as if there is still time to prevent this small calamity. He doesn’t even bother to take the steep stairs backward, as he should, and he stumbles forward into the hallway, his momentum carrying him through the door to the master bedroom and almost onto the bed. Grasping one of the tall bedposts to regain his balance, he looks up at the ceiling near the bay window, the space beneath the cedar closet.

The paint is unblemished, blank as ignorance.

“Fuck,” he says again. Because now he must decide whether—or shouldn’t it be when?—to tell Sandra … who wondered, a year ago, if it wasn’t time to think about a new roof. Back then, even Kit believed there was no way he wouldn’t be working full-time again by now.

Out front he sees Sandra, wearing his work gloves, packing great cushions of leaves into the paper sacks she must have remembered to buy at the garden center. He imagines her, one morning or night in the next few weeks, lying in bed and pointing up at the stain that will inevitably, water having its meddlesome way, penetrate the ceiling. “What is that?” she will say. But she’ll know. A leak in the roof they cannot afford to replace or even patch—unless one of them learns how to do it.

In the small room off the kitchen that Sandra and Kit share as an office, the phone rings. He starts toward it, but he stops before descending and sits on the top stair. He lets the answering machine take the message—a muffled female voice—and then he stands. Gently, he lifts the attic stairs until the spring takes over and the ceiling reclaims them. He watches the cord sway in an oval until it comes to a halt. “Presto,” he whispers.

He will make lunch for both of them: grilled cheese, a salad. He will tell Sandra he missed a call that was almost certainly for her. Then he will go online and cruise the various sites that he knows will never yield real work.

A month ago, at the open house in the twins’ school, he overheard two mothers discussing a fantasy site called Second Life, where people
create alternate existences, just for fun, with dream jobs, dream spouses, dream houses or apartments furnished with a giddy selfishness, their spacious closets filled with clothing in dream sizes, sleek equipment for dream sports. In such a place, however virtual, Kit could write his dream book and teach his dream students (all tall, big-chested women who do not giggle or speak in a language as sparse as Morse code or pierce their tongues or text every minute they’re not required to make eye contact with grown-ups). He could report to a dream department chair, drive his dream car (maybe one of those snotty little Coopers; why the hell not?), drink his dream beer in his dream bar (no giant screens showing Eli Manning at twice his already massive size).

Would Kit be allowed to keep his own, actual children, or could he do better than Fanny and Will? According to those mothers at the open house, the father of one of their children’s classmates had left his wife for a woman he met online in that other, orchestrated life. Later, Kit wondered if maybe that man’s first life, the one he actually lived, had begun to feel adulterous. Kit knows what it’s like, in a different way, for life to turn itself inside out.

Downstairs, he finds that Sandra has driven off again. He could call her on her cell phone and ask where, but he won’t. He makes himself a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. He drinks a glass of low-fat chocolate soy milk. When Sandra has still failed to return, he goes into the office—ignoring the blinking numeral on the answering machine, fending off the specter of Sandra’s ruined wedding dress—and scans the
New York Times
online. He checks the five-day forecast. Very little chance of rain: one small gift.

The children return before their mother, entering the house cranky and hungry. Fanny is accusing Will of having stolen the Almond Joys from her trick-or-treat bag. She checked that morning. She knows there were two.

“I stole them,” says Kit, “and promise to replace them.” He’s happy to be the brunt of a rage stirred by something as minor as a candy theft.

“Dad, you’re just covering for him. Will is the one, I know it.”

“Innocent before proven guilty!” says Will. “Unless you’re from someplace like China.”

Kit tells them it’s time for a snack. He takes the last apple from the fruit bowl and goes to the fridge for the peanut butter.

“So tell him what you
are
guilty for, show him the paper,” he hears Fanny say to her brother, sounding like a child whom Kit would gladly exchange for another, given that Second Life.

Will calls his sister an asshole. Kit scolds him for using such a word (which he’s sure his son heard, uncensored by any adult, on the football field).

“Tell him,” says Fanny. “You have to, you know.”

When Kit delivers their plates to the table, Will hands him a note from his teacher. For the third time in two weeks, he has failed to turn in his math homework on time. Also, his subject binder is “unacceptably messy.” Would a parent please e-mail or call to arrange a meeting so they can “coordinate a strategy” to improve Will’s organizational skills? Before Kit can respond, Fanny flourishes a note of her own. This one informs him that she’s been cast as a Sugar Plum Fairy in the school’s
Nutcracker
ballet. Would a parent please sign the permission slip committing her to after-school rehearsals for the next six weeks?

Kit has no choice but to congratulate her, though it feels as if he’s rewarding her for hitting her brother over the head. When, as quietly as he can manage, he tells Will that he and Will’s mother will discuss consequences for his chronic failure to remember his homework, the boy breaks into wretched sobs and declares himself the “dummy of the family, the stupidest, stupidest one of all.” When Kit reaches to comfort him, Will runs upstairs and slams his bedroom door.

“He’ll get over it,” Fanny says in a smug, pretend-adult voice.

“You need to be more sympathetic,” says Kit. “Your brother has a harder time with schoolwork than you do. It doesn’t mean he’s less smart.”

“Boys usually do. That’s just the way it is.”

Kit wants to be appalled by her attitude, but he knows she’s aping something she heard from an adult—maybe even Sandra or himself when they thought they were out of earshot.

What, he sometimes wonders, if one child grows up to be a success and the other falls by the wayside? He once had stepbrothers, with whom he’s lost touch, and he has a half sister who’s little more than
half his age, but he’s always been, at heart, an only child. Learning that he would have two children at once was thrilling news—they’d been through so much to get Sandra pregnant—yet it filled him with panic to think of all the extra things he would have to learn along with becoming a father, things familiar to people who had real, lifelong siblings.

Sandra walks in the door and stops. She can hear her son wailing from his room. “What’s going on? You’re both just standing here? Why are you letting him cry like that?”

Fanny, still eating her snack, says, “He’s sad because he’s in trouble.” As she licks her fingers, Kit realizes that he did not ask the children to wash their hands, which reminds him that he never flushed their bathroom drain with water after filling it with whatever toxic potion eats through ossified toothpaste. He imagines a hole corroded in the pipe, which in turn recalls the leak in the roof. He says to Sandra, “There’s just a lot going on right now.” He picks up the note from Will’s teacher to show her, but Sandra is sprinting upstairs. Kit sighs.

“Dad,” says Fanny, “can I read you a new poem?”

Of course she can, he tells her. Fanny has fallen in love with memorizing poems. She begins by reading them aloud, several times, to her parents. Kit sits across the table from her and listens to the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay and then of A. E. Housman. The Staten Island ferry; English cherry trees in redolent bloom. So much exquisitely phrased nostalgia. For now, Kit assures himself, he can let go of the fear that she will become a punk rocker.

After reading the two poems twice—an encore for Sandra, who comes downstairs followed by a defeated-looking Will—Fanny turns automatically to pulling her homework from her (exceedingly well-organized) binder. Sandra sends her to work upstairs in her room while Will sits at the table, waiting for his parents to decide his fate. Kit, feeling as if his own crimes are yet to be revealed and judged, lets Sandra do the talking.

Is it the trick of dwindling sunlight that makes late afternoons in the fall pass more quickly than they do at other times of the year? Or is it the way in which school, still new, greedily consumes the prime of nearly every day? By the time both children are silently working and Sandra is in the office, it is dark. Kit turns on the radio to hear if a new war has begun or another oil tanker’s split open; no hurricanes
this late in the year, no significant elections in the offing, no movie stars falling off the wagon. He prepares to chop an onion, wash lettuce, grate cheese. He feels a measure of calm.

For dinner, Kit makes a risotto that includes the sun-dried tomatoes he found on sale at the supermarket. The children hate the taste and claim that it ruins the flavor of everything else, even the peas and the cheese.

“Too salty,” says Fanny.

“Don’t we get chicken or something
real
with this?” demands Will, restored to his formerly imperious self. “Is this because
she’s
a vegetarian now?”

When Sandra offers to open a can of chicken-noodle soup, Kit shouts, “No! This is dinner, this! It’s a perfectly fine dinner. Eat it or don’t. Or just eat your salad and go to bed hungry. This is not a restaurant, in case nobody noticed.”

His wife and children stare at him, as if he’s turned into a werewolf.

All conversation is stifled. The children look at the risotto and pick at it, sulking. Fanny pushes the dried tomatoes into a neat pile on the side; Will eats almost none of it, leaving a plate of cratered soggy rice that Kit will later be tempted to scarf down, just for the brief comfort of starch, but will ultimately scrape into the garbage. When everyone has finished eating, Sandra orders the children to their rooms: time to read. “Will, you especially. And let’s double-check your assignment book.”

“I do the homework! I just forget it,” he whines.

“Then you have to find a way to remember to remember.” Before she follows him upstairs to get him settled and focused, Sandra tells Kit, with a decorum he finds almost creepy, that she liked the risotto very much and wishes the children had, too. She doesn’t mention where she was for most of the afternoon, though her absence usually means she’s with a client.

Kit checks the laundry; well, at least he can sort and fold the clothes Sandra put in the dryer. As he places them in the basket, he feels like a child hoping to gain favor with a parent—or like one of his mother’s high-school students, working toward extra credit (except that his grades, if he were a student, would not be good to begin with). Upstairs, he hears Sandra cajoling Will toward a shower. Reluctant
to join the bedtime fray, he leaves the basket of clean clothes on the dryer and wanders into the living room. It’s dark and cold, the only light in the room cast by the ring of streetlights around the asphalt loop in front of the house.

He turns on a lamp, sits on the couch, and peers at the stack of books on the wooden chest that serves as a coffee table. When was the last time someone actually opened one of these books—weighty volumes on Italian gardens, trees and shrubs of the northeastern United States, the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron? He frees the atlas from the bottom of the pile and opens it to North America.

He still does not fully understand what drew him to the art of people who live in so vastly different a world from his—though most people would say,
Well, of course that’s it: the differentness. That’s what you love
. Yet except when sunk in the pages of a book and looking at gallery walls, Kit has always thought of himself—not proudly—as clinging to the familiar. Canada and Mexico are the only other countries he’s seen, and only at the urging of others. He had been studying the art of the Inuit, from Cape Barrow to Baffin Island, entirely in books and dusty anthropology museums when one of his professors challenged him to get off his curatorially lazy arse. With money he’d saved from art-handling jobs over college summers, Kit flew to Toronto, rented the cheapest car possible, and embarked on a journey along the coast of Hudson Bay to Umiujaq, Akuliviq, and Quaqtaq, places whose names he now touched in the atlas, one finger tracing an itinerary defined by a hard edge of water.