The Wonders of the Invisible World (29 page)

On 95 she eases her way into the leftmost lane and makes the needle inch up a hair above 70, then a hair above that. She hits
PLAY
on the CD changer, a soprano starts up, she peels the Post-It with her list off the glove-compartment door and holds it up in her line of vision. Disc One? Okay, Joan Sutherland. Whom she has yet to figure out a thing for. Holly concentrates as the voice navigates its own upper reaches; essentially, Joan Sutherland sounds shrieky, though you don’t want
that
to be your formulation. In fact, it’s Holly who’s about to shriek, in the midst of what’s starting to feel like a major mistake: trucks all around, their wheels higher than her roof, their brutal chrome radiators higher still. Their rush and roar drowns the music, and everything feels motionless, as if she could open the door, step out and stroll around. She’d better try to take this seriously. There’s a sign for a service area: two miles. Surely she can make it two more miles.

She parks next to a silver minivan that’s taken a handicap spot, then follows footprints and a pair of bicycle tracks across the snow-dusted blacktop. What kind of parents would allow their kids to ride bikes in a service area on a snowy night? If she ever—but really, let’s not even get into that. She wishes she could see falling snow.

Inside the doors it’s suddenly so warm that she shivers reflexively. She’s got bare ankles and a cotton sweatshirt. McDonald’s to the right; rest rooms and phones to the left. She punches in Mitchell’s number, then her credit card number. But it’s Seth who says
“Yellow?”
How could he possibly have got there ahead of her? Wait, how could he even have found out? But of course she’s called home by mistake.

“Holly?”

She cradles the receiver, then feels a rush and her heart thumping, as after a near fender-bender. What this little slip means is that Seth
is
her true love. Or (b) that she’s even more self-destructive than she realized.

She prefers (b). And if nothing else, she can be stubborn. When her heart stops pounding she’ll call Mitchell. No, first she’ll go in and wash her face, which feels like it’s coated with gray film.

Holly sticks her hands under the automated faucet for her little ration of water. How’s this formulation? That late capitalism tries to make you feel at the same time degraded and magically powerful: water at my mental command! Lately she’s been favoring that expression, “late capitalism,” except how could anybody know it’s late rather than still early? She pumps liquid soap into her palm and again holds her hands under the faucet in supplication, but the machine knows it’s her asking for seconds, so she moves to the next sink, which duly mistakes her for someone else.

Back in the car, she fastens her seat belt and realizes she’s forgotten to call Mitchell. She closes her eyes and she’s in bed with Seth. He reaches over. She opens her eyes and sees snowflakes bouncing off the windshield. So her wish came true. She starts the engine for some heat, and Joan Sutherland gives an ungodly shriek. She punches the
STOP
button and something like silence is restored. It’s nothing like silence.

Through the falling snow, an old man is pushing an old woman down the walk in a wheelchair, heading this way. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and no hat—what does snow feel like on a bald head?—but she’s bundled up in a puffy coat and an
I
 
NY
baseball cap. She has a no-pleasure-ever-again stare; the man is smiling. Holly jams the car into reverse, refusing to witness what happens next. A crunching thud as she hits something behind her—the front bumper of a car trying to crawl
past—and she stomps on the brakes. The man in the plaid shirt turns to look; the woman continues to stare; somebody’s getting out of the car behind her. Holly decides to haul ass, but she can’t back up, can’t go forward. She puts her head down on the wheel. Couldn’t this just stop right here?

I
wake again in our bedroom, vouchsafed another day. May I use it to Thy greater glory. In the dimness, a throbbing line of sunlight along the bottom of the window shade stabs the eye. So the rain has stopped at last. (Memory spared. Reason spared, too, seemingly.) When I turn away, my sight is momentarily burned black, and I can’t be certain whether I’m truly
seeing
Wylie’s features in the photograph on the nightstand or simply remembering them. I close my eyes again, and in afterimage the fierce light reappears.

The radio’s on downstairs and I hear that sweet song, now what on earth is that called? Sweet, sweet song. Our station comes all the way from Boston, and seems to be the one certain refuge anywhere on the dial. We still try the classical station from time to time—back in Woburn, we never deviated from WCRB—but lately we find it awfully heavy going. (I have it: “Edelweiss.”) Now I hear a rustle of sheets. Alice is in here, making up her bed. And checking on me. I don’t open my eyes. A pat to her pillow and she’s gone.

In the first weeks after my shock, I slept fourteen, sixteen hours a day, they tell me. The brain, as they explain it, shutting down in order to repair itself. It’s the queerest idea: one’s body simply shoving one aside. These days I’m down to eight or nine hours (not including my nap in the afternoon), so I assume
that much of what could be done has now been done. The key is to be thankful for what’s come back. But try as I will, it frets me: I had been, for my age, an active man. Taking care that each season’s duties be done. Trees and shrubs pruned in the spring, leaves raked and burned in the fall. I would sleep six hours a night, seldom more, and wake up—if not refreshed, at least ready for what might be required. Now, in effect, I’m a child again, put to bed early and hearing the grown-ups through a closed door. Like a child, too, with these sudden storms of weeping. I’m told they could still come under control.

Stroke: a stroke of the lash, for chastisement and correction. Yet something gentle in the word as well.

The next thing I hear is Alice down in the kitchen, so I must have dozed off again. Or, God help me, had a vastation. I can hear the stove making that snapping sound, like a dangerous thing. Then it goes silent again, or nearly so, when it lights. I say nearly so because I seem to hear the ceaseless exhale of gas and the rumble of blue flame burning. Just after my shock, my hearing became strangely acute (unless I was imagining it), as if in compensation for what I can only describe as the cubist way I was seeing things. Yet although my eyesight has returned to normal—thank You, Lord—that acute sense of hearing seems not to have been repossessed. So perhaps something else is being compensated for. I pray it’s not some cognitive function that I’m too damaged to understand has been damaged.

Still, sharp as my hearing may be, it’s impossible, isn’t it, that I could hear a gas stove burning all the way down in the kitchen? Or—terrible thought—is what I’m hearing, or think I’m hearing, the hiss of unignited propane racing out of the ports spreading, expanding, filling the house? Well, and what then? Would I shout for Alice—who, being downstairs, may have been overcome already? Would I struggle up out of bed and try to make my way down the stairs after my new fashion,
bad foot scraping along after good foot and cane? Or would I simply lie here and breathe?

Well, hardly a cheerful reflection with which to begin the day.

And good cheer—not mere resignation—is required of us.
To be unhappy is to be in sin:
I’m certain I’ve read that somewhere or other. Though perhaps it was the other way around. That would certainly be easier to swallow, but so trite that I don’t see why it would have made an impression. Now, what was my point? Good cheer. I had wanted to say, it is available to us. Freely offered. We simply need to know where to look. And where not to. Back when Wylie was a little girl and Alice and I would have our troubles (I’d like to believe we never allowed them to darken her childhood), I used to say to myself,
But on the other hand, you have Wylie.
Though there were times when even that didn’t mean what it ought to have meant, and at such times I would have to be stern with myself and say,
You must think of Wylie.
All this was before the Lord came into my life.

It’s been many years, of course, since Wylie has lived at home. And many years, too, since Alice and I have had words. So things happen as they were meant to, and in the Lord’s good time. Though I dread sometimes that I will pass on before I know, with my whole heart, that this is true. When in a more hopeful frame of mind, I think the Lord would never allow it, and that His plan for me includes revelations yet in store.

Certainly Alice hasn’t presumed to question (in my hearing) the dispensation that now binds her to a piece of statuary in the likeness of her husband. (Now, that, I’m sorry to say, smacks of self-pity.)
In sickness and in health,
she must remind herself daily. She has never complained about being unable to leave me alone. Or about the friends who have stopped visiting. (We have seen the Petersons
once!
) Her strength shames me, much as I like to think that these past months have made
shame a luxury. (I have even been, God help me, incontinent.) And from little things I overhear, I gather she’s quietly making her plans for afterward. I’m afraid to ask about the details, and ashamed that I’m afraid. Isn’t this something she’s owed: a chance to talk with her husband about what must be on her mind constantly? What may in fact have been on her mind for years, since even before my illness (as she calls it) the actuarial tables were on her side. Although we’ve always taken pride (I know it’s blamable) in not being like the generality of people.

It was my conversion, of course, that made me odd man out for many of my working years. Research chemists tend to be a skeptical lot anyway, and our company was particularly forward-thinking. We were one of the first, you know, to have moved out to Route 128. Eventually I decided it was best to steer clear of certain discussions.
As much as lieth in you,
Paul tells us,
live peaceably with all men.
Poor Alice, meanwhile, has had to go from being the wife of a hot-tempered drinker to being the wife of a religious nut, so-called. I remember one day, shortly after my life had been transformed, I walked in on her ironing one of Wylie’s school skirts with the telephone wedged between ear and shoulder. “I’ll tell you, June,” she was saying, “I don’t quite get it, but I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.” Then she noticed me in the doorway and drew a hissing in-breath as her arms shrank into her ribs and the receiver clunked to the floor.

Up here we’ve found our neighbors more congenial politically than the old crowd from work, if not so well informed. The mail lady has told Alice that no one in town gets so many magazines. The people we know, other retirees mostly, take
Modern Maturity
and the
Reader’s Digest.
The younger people, I imagine, scarcely read a newspaper; Alice was dismayed to learn that only two families in town get
Time.
But of course she
can make conversation with anybody, right down to the neighbor woman, that Mrs. Paquette, whose talk even in the summertime is mostly about how she can no longer stand New Hampshire winters. She was over again the other morning—or was it earlier this morning?—for coffee and chitchat. Which is what her life amounts to, as far as I can see, though what can my life seem in her eyes? I could hear them all the way downstairs.

“Well, if anything should happen to Lew,” Alice was saying, “Florida’s the
last
place I’d go. And I would certainly not go out and inflict myself on Wylie and Jeff.”

I thought about the word
anything.

I thought about the word
if.

“I think I’d try and get myself one of those new little apartments over in Concord,” she went on. “Have you been by there?”

I knew the place she meant. Brown brick and brown window glass. I’d had no idea that she’d even noticed it, let alone that it loomed so large.

I wake again when Alice comes in and sets my tray on the dresser. How long have I been asleep this time? I struggle up to a sitting position—now, that’s something I couldn’t have done a while ago!—then she wedges the triangular pillow behind me and I collapse back on it. She’s taken to saying that I’m in the lap of luxury, getting my breakfast in bed. Can she think I don’t understand (and don’t understand that
she
understands) the truth of what’s happened to me? To which good cheer is still the only adequate response—but true cheer, not this lap-of-luxury business. She hands me my eyeglasses, then walks over and tugs down on the string with the lace-covered ring at the end. Up goes the shade, and I sit there blinking like a nasty old owl, the white hairs on my knobby chest curling out between the lapels of my pajamas. How can she stand this, unless she looks with the eyes of love? Or unless she no longer truly looks. She places the tray across my thighs, the living and the
dead. Orange juice, Postum, All-Bran and half a grapefruit. And this morning, a gaudy blossom from one of her gloxinias floating in a juice glass.