Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

My mother was sitting in a chair, hugging her thin knees. I thought to myself that although age had shrunk her, it had also intensified her, as if the lack of remaining time had had the effect of stripping away all fat — both physical and mental.

“Golf, the law, crosswords, martinis.”

“In that order?” I smiled at her.

“Possibly.” My mother sighed and reached to pick a dead leaf from a potted plant on the table beside her. “I have never told you,” she said, “but when you were still small, I believe your father fell in love with someone else.”

I took a breath. “He had an affair?”

My mother shook her head. “No, I don’t think there was sex. His rectitude was absolute, but there was the feeling.”

“He told you?”

“No. I guessed.”

Such were the circuitous routes of marital life, at least between my parents. Direct confrontation, of any kind, had been extremely rare. “But he admitted it.”

“No, he didn’t confirm or deny it.” My mother pressed her lips together. “He found it very difficult, you know, to talk to me about anything painful. He would say, ‘Please, I can’t. I can’t.’”

As she spoke, a mental image of my father came abruptly into my head. He was sitting with his back turned to me, silently watching the fire, a book of puzzles at his feet. Then I saw him lying in the hospital bed, a long skeletal figure adrift on morphine, no longer conscious. I remembered my mother touching his face. At first, she used a single finger, as if she were drawing his features directly onto his body, a wordless outline of her husband’s countenance. But then she pressed her palms against his forehead, cheeks, eyes, nose, and neck, squeezing his flesh hard like a sightless woman desperate to memorize a face. My mother, both tough and blighted, her lips pressed together, her eyes wide with urgency as she began to grasp his shoulders and arms and then his chest. I turned away from this private claim to a man, this possessive declaration of time spent, and I left the room. When I returned, my father was dead. He looked younger dead, smooth and incomprehensible. She was sitting in darkness with her hands folded in her lap. Narrow lines of light from the Venetian blinds made stripes across her forehead and cheek, and I felt awe, only awe in that instant.

In response to my silence, my mother continued. “I am telling you this now,” she said, “because I sometimes wished he had risked it, had thrown himself at her. He might, of course, have run off with her, and then again, he might have tired of it…” She exhaled loudly, a long shuddering breath. “He returned to me, emotionally, I mean, to the degree that it was possible for him. It went on for a few years — the distance — and then I don’t think he thought of her anymore, or if he did, she had lost her power.”

“I see,” I said. I did see. The Pause. I tried hard to remember sonnet 129. It begins, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” and then the lines about lust, “lust in action.” Somewhere the words “murderous, bloody, full of blame…”

Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;

Something, something … then:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

“Who was she, Mama?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, maybe not,” I lied.

“She’s dead,” my mother said. “She’s been dead for twelve years.”

* * *

That evening, as I turned the key in the lock, I felt a presence on the other side of the door, a heavy, threatening being, palpable, alive, there, standing just as I stood, its hand raised. I heard myself breathing on the step, felt the cooling night on my bare arms, heard a lone car engine start up not far away, but I didn’t move. Neither did it. Stupid tears rose in my eyes. I had felt the same weighted body years ago at the bottom of the stairs at home, a waiting Echo. I counted to twenty, delayed for another twenty beats, then pushed hard at the door and turned on the light switch to face the reasonable emptiness of the mud hall. It was gone. This thing that was not a superstition or a vague apprehension, but a felt conviction. Why had it returned? Ghosts, devils, and doubles. I remembered telling Boris about the waiting presence, invisible but dense, and his eyes had lit up with interest. That was back in the days when he liked me, before his eyes went dull, before Stefan died, the little brother, who leapt and crashed, so smart, O God, the young philosopher who knocked them out at Princeton, who made them quake, who loved to talk to me, to me, not just to Boris, who read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell. I hate you for what you did, Stefan. You knew he would find you. You must have known he would find you. And you must have known he would call me and that I would go to him. For half a second, I saw the pool of urine on the floor mixed with watery feces staining the floorboards. No.

Stop thinking about that. Don’t think about that. Go back to the presence.

Boris had told me about presences. Karl Jaspers, wunder Mensch, had called the phenomenon leibhaftige Bewusstheit and somebody else, a Frenchman, no doubt, hallucination du compagnon . Had I been crazy as a girl, too? Bats for a year? No, not a whole year, months, the months of the cruelties when I had felt the Thing waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Not necessarily crazy,” Boris had said to me in his voice, thickened by cigars, and then he had smiled. Presences, he said, have been felt by patients, both in the psych ward and those in neurology, as well as by just plain folks. Yes, hordes of undiagnosed innocents, just like you, Dear Reader, whose minds are not cracked or disorderly or shredded to bits, but merely subject to a quirk or two.

I triedrd to remember then, as I lay on the sofa, presence-free, to unearth the distant cruelties of the sixth grade, “calmly and objectively,” as they say on television and in bad books. There had been a plot or several plots, a grandiose word for the doings of little girls, but does the age of the perpetrators or the location of intrigue really matter? Playground or royal court? Isn’t the human business the same?

How had it started? At a slumber party. Just fragments. This is certain: I didn’t want to breathe in until I fainted, gulping in the air over and over to propel me forward flat onto the mattress. It was stupid, and I had been frightened by Lucy’s white face.

“Don’t be chicken, Mia. Come on. Come on.” Whines of complicity.

No. I wouldn’t do it. Why would anyone want to faint? I felt too vulnerable. I didn’t like to be dizzy.

The girls whisper near me. Yes, I hear them but don’t understand. My sleeping bag was blue with a plaid lining. That I remember clearly. I’m tired, so tired. There is something about an aim, aiming at someone, then aiming a knife. A cryptic joke.

I laugh with them, not wanting to be left out, and the girls laugh harder. My friend Julia laughs hardest of all. I fall asleep after that. Confused and ignorant little girl.

The note in class: “AIM, dirty fingernails and greasy red hair. Wash yourself, piglet.” I saw my inverted name all at once. Mia in Aim.

“My nails are clean and so is my hair.”

Gales of laughter. High winds of cackling from the group, blowing me down into a hole. Don’t say anything. Pretend you hear, see nothing.

The pinch on the stairs.