Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

The presence behind the door came and went. It was there, and then it wasn’t there. I talked my way inside whenever I felt it, using my reason to trump the potent sensation. I continued to think of the presence as a speechless version of Mr. Nobody, a nut who sent regular messages but had shifted his tone from harassing mean guy to borderline philosopher, which again made me suspect Leonard. “Reality is immaterial, made from events, actions, potentialities. Regard these mysterious subjectivities that alter the mind-world, the Zeno effect! Relay this to Izcovich, your faithless spouse. Yours, Nobody.”

Annoyed and upset by the reference to Boris, I quickly typed a response and sent it, regretting it instantly: Who are you and what do you want from me?

* * *

“I knew he had a temper when I married him,” Lola said late in the afternoon while Simon dozed on her knees and Flora jumped in and out of a small turquoise blow-up pool. “But I didn’t have kids then. Flora gets so scared.” These three sentences seemed to float in the hot air between us, and I felt sad. I wanted to say, But he doesn’t hit anyone, right? He’s not violent? The questions that rose up sank back inside me, and I never pronounced the words. Lola was wearing a green bathing suit, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Her body hadn’t entirely lost the swollen proportions of pregnancy, and her breasts were large with milk. She was a hefty girl, but looking at her I found her attractive. I guessed it was her youth — her smooth skin, her curves, her unlined face, with its gray eyes, slightly flat nose, and full lips — no part of her had succumbed to age, no brown spots or protruding veins or wrinkles or drooping skin.

“I wonder if she’ll ever take off that wig. Pete hates it. I keep telling him, who cares? She doesn’t wear it to church. I think he wanted a sweet little thing…” Lola didn’t finish. “He worries there’s something wrong with her, hyperactivity or something.”

Flora was engrossed in giving Giraffeyather violent bath. She was kneeling in the pool, bouncing him up and down as she sang, “Da, da, little Giraffey-boo. Bumba, bumba! Baby, you!” Giraffey was left floating, face down, and Flora began a new game — she lay back on her elbows and kicked vigorously enough to spray water onto my legs. “Watch, Mom! Look, Mom. Look, Mia!”

My feelings about Pete grew darker. What an idiot.

Pete’s son squirmed into wakefulness. He waved his small fists in front of his face, began stretching his knees and spine, and by the time I held him only minutes later he was fully conscious, his dark eyes like seeds locked into mine. I stroked the down on his head, examined his mouth pursing and grimacing. I spoke to him and he answered me with small sounds. After a time, he turned and began to root for food, and I felt the shadow of a familiar sensation in my breasts, a bodily memory. I handed him to Lola. Once her son was comfortably nursing, she looked over at me and said, “He didn’t want her at first. I got pregnant. We were already going to get married, it wasn’t that. It was too soon for him.” Lola leaned back in her chair. “Pete’s an anxious guy. I knew that, too. He had an older sister who was born with lots of things wrong with her and really retarded. They had to put her in a home. She never learned to walk or talk or anything. She died when she was seven. Pete doesn’t like to talk about it.” Lola examined her nail polish. “His dad never went to see her, not once. The whole thing was really awful for his mom. You can imagine.”

I could imagine. I looked up at the clouds, a dense cirrus configuration, and, as I watched a head dangling long streams of hair break away very slowly from a long attenuated neck, I realized that I had been more comfortable with the angry cipher Pete than with this new person, the young man with the dead sister.

It may have been the general emptiness of the view — corn and sky. It may have been the heat or my own quiet desperation or simply a need to fill the irremediably dull present with bluster and blabber, but when Lola asked me about life in New York, I regaled her with one story after another and listened to her laugh. I emphasized the crass, the prurient, and the outlandish. I turned the city into a nonstop carnival of poseurs, hucksters, and clowns whose pratfalls and escapades made for high entertainment. I told her about Charlie and Wayne, two poets who nearly came to blows over Ezra Pound one long-day’s-journey-into-a-drunken-night but ended up in a literal pissing contest on the roof of a building in SoHo. I told her about Miriam Hunt, the aging heiress with the big bucks, little boobs, surgical face, and Hermès bags, who true to her name stalked young male scientists eager for her money by sidling up to them and breathing sweet somethings into their ears: “How much did you say the research project you’re proposing would cost?” I told her about my friend Rupert, who, halfway through a sex-change operation, stopped, deciding that two-in-one was the way to go. I told her about the octogenarian billionaire I sat next to at a fund-raising dinner who farted and sighed, farted and sighed, farted some more and sighed some more throughout the entire meal, as if he were home alone on the toilet. I told her about my homeless pal, Frankie, whose children, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles died at a rate of about two a week after contracting colorful or rare diseases, including scurvy, leprosy, dengue fever, Klinefelter’s syndrome, tospirosis, fatal familial insomnia, and Chagas disease. Indeed, Frankie’s supply of relatives was so great, he forgot the names of the recent dead between our meetings on Seventh Avenue.

Lola’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. It doesn’t matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola’s eyes. I was no different from Flora. Watch me, Mommy! Look at me do a cartwheel, Dad! Watch Mia do verbal dances in Sheri and Allan Burda’s weedy backyard embellished with one swiftly sagging kiddy pool.

* * *

That night I received a message from Boris informing me that Roger Dapp was returning from London, which meant that he was losing his temporary digs and would be moving in with the Pause. For the time being, this was “practical.” He wanted me to know. It was only “fair.” I took it like a woman. I wept.

You may well wonder why I wanted Boris at all, a man who tells his still-wife that he’s shacking up with his new squeeze for “practical” reasons, as if this shocking new arrangement is simply a matter of New York real estate. I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue, and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaneously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it aloud. Our memories had also begun to mingle. Boris would swear up and down that he was the one who came upon the great blue heron standing on the doorstep of the house we rented in Maine, and I am just as certain that I saw the enormous bird alone and told him about it. There is no answer to the riddle, no documentation — just the flimsy, shifting tissue of remembering and imagining. One of us had listened to the other tell the story, had seen in his or her mind the encounter with the bird, and had created a memory from the mental images that accompanied the heard narrative. Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I. Boris and Mia. Mental overlap.