Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

A man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence — I can never remember who wrote that.

Haim strokes the girl’s white-blond hair, so light a color that when it miraculously remained through round after round of chemotherapy it seemed providential, a gift. Now, though, I can see it coming off in Haim’s hand like spent animal fur, as he does his best to pretend that it’s not, and continues his smooth stroking in the imperfect quiet.

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There is a time in the beginning of a marriage when your wife’s body is still a discovery, when — at least if you were married young — the changes you notice on certain nights as her flesh begins its shift to the denser, solid tone of mid-range adulthood are to you still a delight, something new to learn and take pleasure in. This is almost evolutionary, you might understand later, after the birth of your first child, a graceful biological swing to the kind of ruddy corporeality that can best protect and deliver a pregnancy, but there is a period when her body is not yet on this spectrum, is still only made up of the surprise of a cupped buttock or thigh, a new fullness in your hands in the dark.

We’d been married for two years when Charlie’s body began to change. Up until that point, she had looked more or less like she had the night we first met; if anything, she’d lost weight, seemed to have become younger somehow. In the eighteen months between our first date and our wedding, she had grown more and more animated, her neural circuits blinking faster and faster, her hair becoming relaxed and silken, her skin smooth and clear, full of color. Most days during our time together in college, I dropped her off in her study room, an abandoned office in the graduate mathematics department (the office where, lost in her depression the year before, she’d spent months of long afternoons lying flat on top of her big desk, asleep), only to return after class to find the big chalkboard that dominated one wall filled with complex systems of numbers, symbols, and signs. By the time we were both graduating, Charlie had won a prestigious mathematics prize from an international science organization for her thesis work, which turned out to be the hypothetical solution to a problem that had stood unsolved for seventy-five years. This award came with a large cash award, but in order for it to be granted the judges’ committee wanted a fuller work, a long paper to be peer-reviewed, a more elaborate proof.

We moved that fall after graduation to Attica, Missouri, home of Attica State University, which had offered Charlie a fellowship with a large stipend in order for her to complete her work on the proof under their auspices. It was a good university — one of those tiny schools with a handful of highly specialized faculties, largely supported by very specific government or corporate grants for research or innovation. The only catch was that we had to move to Attica, Missouri.

It was a very small town in the southeast corner of the state, with four restaurants, a mall, and one movie theater whose reels always seemed to be slightly damaged. I was still a little in shock that for all my worrying about what we would do after graduation (what job I could get with my literature major, how we would ever be able to start paying off our student loans in six months, when they began to become due) it was Charlie — Charlie who preferred not to talk about a “careerist future,” Charlie who seemed to just drift forward in her academic life with the fickleness and detachment of a child — who ended up with the good job, the good paycheck.

Because of the low rent in town, we managed to find a small house with new fixtures and a room in the half-finished basement that Charlie, in a gesture of support, agreed could be my “office.” We took walks to the nearby city park, which had a duck pond. I spent the days staring at my computer during the hours I was supposed to be working on a novel. Charlie called it our “starter town.” If we can learn to be married here, she often said, we can be married anywhere. When I complained about things like the lack of culture in the area or the fact that the nearest bookstore was forty minutes away, she tsked and smiled, shaking her head, not looking at me. “The writer in exile,” she said.

What does one remember of the collection of selves one must inevitably prove to be to sustain a marriage over the years? The story of our time in Attica, Missouri (and even that of the years afterward, in Iowa) is so tired to me, so oft-repeated and reduced down into the kind of cocktail party summary that proves to be so startlingly effective that you eventually forget that the things which made the experience meaningful are exactly what you now excise, all the details that would most likely matter to no one else but you.

I remember spending those two years marooned in small-town Missouri learning and relearning Charlie’s body, falling in love over and over with the angularity of her jawline as it drew close to me in the morning just before she left for work, with the pulsing, contracting spasms around my fingers as she orgasmed when I went down on her. There always seemed to be something to learn. I remember leaping, shoeless, from our wooden stoop onto the hood of Charlie’s moving car to keep her from driving away after a particularly bad fight. Our fights were not even saved by being interesting, or original, and Charlie was always leaving. She’d come back a few hours later, never saying anything about where she’d gone, and be silent until she’d slept, after which it would be like it never happened. We thought we were learning how to be married. “Think of us living here,” Charlie said, “as performance art.”

Then, of course, came the things not so easily protected from the logic of narrative memory, from the construction of theories and psychology. I remember these things helplessly, and with no small amount of reluctance. An awkward visit in the middle of the day from a university administrator. A call from a colleague, urging me to come to Charlie’s office, where she had locked herself inside, and the whispered conversation that followed through the wood of the door, where I could feel her just on the other side, crying softly.

Then the day before she was to present the first half of her paper at a regional mathematics conference in Kansas City, she didn’t come home from work. At first I assumed that Charlie was punishing me for some perceived slight, perhaps going out for a celebratory dinner with some of her research assistants without telling or inviting me, and then, as it got later into the night, I thought that maybe she’d left early for the conference, gotten the dates messed up. It wasn’t until I pulled into the highway rest stop and saw her sitting there on a bench with a state trooper on either side of her, one of whom must’ve been the voice on the phone a few hours earlier telling me my wife had been found wandering the shoulder “confused,” that I even believed it wasn’t a joke. And I’ll admit that what I thought of on the ride back was the shame, the humiliation of walking toward them, of claiming Charlie, who looked so happy and surprised to see me (looking at me with, unmistakably, the wonder of a child) that it utterly broke my fucking heart.

The thought of Charlie talking to a therapist — Charlie, who, when I pressed her, often gave a survey-course-in-miniature over Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and nihilism as well as depression psychology, and applicable ontology, not to mention the medical science and epistemological implications of antidepressant, antipsychotic, or mood-stabilizing medication — was so ridiculous that I couldn’t even bring myself to demand it. The next day we got halfway to a local therapy office before I pulled the car over to the side of the road and looked out over all that blank snow and punched the steering wheel over and over again, the ancient horn bleating ridiculously. This was Charlie, whose soft, pale flesh of thigh and gluteus and back pressed into my nuzzling body in bed each night and fell asleep that way, in that hold; Charlie, who stood on Saturday mornings with her back to me in the kitchen, in T-shirt and underwear, with one hip cocked, foot turned out to the side, her legs seeming oddly short and thick in the blue light. This was my wife. I knew her.