T. Boyle - World's End

For all that, though, she was on her feet in the next instant, the half-full Smucker’s jar hurtling to the floor like a two-ton bomb, on her feet and out the door to the porch, where she leaned over the railing and brought up all the fire in her guts, retching so furiously, so uncontrollably and without remit or surcease, that she thought for the longest while she’d been poisoned.

It wasn’t another woman, she was sure of that. But that something was wrong, radically wrong, Christina had no doubt. She leaned back on the dog-smelling davenport her mother had fished out of the basement for her, held the steaming cup of Sanka to her lips and stared out the bungalow’s yellowed windows and into the saturate dusk that gathered in the trees like a precursor of heavy weather to come. All the world was quiet. Walter was asleep already, Hesh and Lola gone out for the night. Dropping her gaze from the trees to the pine desk beneath the window (her husband’s desk, with its hulking black Smith Corona and its neatly squared row of arcane little volumes with titles like Agrarian Conflicts in Colonial New York and Van Wart Manor: Then and Now), she felt a pang of sadness so acute it was like giving birth to something twisted and deformed, ugly as a lie. When she looked up again, she had to bite her ring finger to keep from crying out.

It wasn’t another woman, but she almost wished it were. At least then she would know what she was up against. As things stood now, she didn’t know what had gone wrong, but she had only to look into Truman’s eyes to know it was bad. For the past few nights he’d been “unwinding” after work at one of the local taphouses, lurching in at midnight with wild eyes and volatile breath, distant as an alien dropped from another world into the bed beside her. Unwinding. Yes. But before that — through the whole course of that blighted summer — he’d grown so strange and self-absorbed she hardly recognized him. Each night he would drag himself back from the foundry, his face set, hardened, all the sympathy driven out of it. He’d duck away from her embrace, spin Walter in the air and pour himself a drink. Then he’d sit down at the desk, pull open his notebook and lose himself until dinner. “How was work?” she’d ask. “Okay if we have green beans again for a vegetable? Have the Martians landed yet?” Nothing. No response. He was a monk of the sacred texts, he was carved of stone. After dinner he would read his bewildered son a chapter of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, his voice toneless and dull, and then it was back to the books. Sometimes, even on work nights, she’d wake at one or two in the morning and there he’d be, reading, underlining, making notes, his whole being caught up in the page.

“You’re working too hard,” she told him.

He looked up at her like a beast surprised over its prey, the book spread open in his lap as if it were the thing he’d stalked and killed, the bloody meat he was gnawing in the refuge of his den. “Not hard enough,” he growled.

At first she’d been sympathetic. She kept telling herself that there was nothing wrong, that he was under too much pressure, that was all. Working a forty-hour week, commuting to the City for his final courses in education and history, attending party meetings, maintaining the car, the yard, the house, and on top of it all trying to research and write a senior thesis in the space of ten short weeks: it was enough to put anyone off track. But as the summer progressed and he became increasingly withdrawn, unloving, single-minded and hostile, she began to realize that she was fooling herself, that the problem went deeper than she dared guess. Something outside of him, something poisonous and irrevocable, was transforming him. He was hardening himself. He was driving a wedge between them. He was slipping away from her.

It had begun in June, when Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum announced the party’s plans for a rally in Peterskill and Truman had started on his final project at City College, the senior thesis. Truman chose an obscure episode of local history for his paper — Christina had never even heard of it — and he set to work with all the monomaniacal concentration of a Gibbon chronicling the decline of Rome. Suddenly there was no time for dinner with Hesh and Lola, no time for cards, a drive-in movie, no time to take Walter out on the river or to throw him a ball in the cool of the evening. There was no time for sex either. He’d work half the night, frowning in the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk, and he’d come to bed like a man with an arrow through his back. The door would creak on its hinges, he’d take three steps and he’d fling himself forward, asleep before he hit the bed. On Saturdays and Sundays, all day, he was at the library. She tried to reason with him. “Truman,” she pleaded as he jotted notes or tossed one book down to snatch up another, “you’re not writing the history of Western civilization; give yourself a break, slow down. Truman!” her voice rising to a shout, “it’s only a term paper!”

He never even bothered to answer.

And what was he writing? What was he killing himself over, night and day, till his wife felt like a widow and his son barely recognized him? She took a look one afternoon. One flawless sunstruck afternoon when Truman was at the plant and Walter sat smearing pea soup into his shirt. She was hauling out the kitchen trash, arms laden with two bursting bags of bones and peels and coffee grounds, when suddenly there it was, the focus of the room, the house, the city, the county, the world itself: there, in the center of his desk, lay the battered manila folder that never left his sight except when he was stretched out unconscious on the bed or punching the clock for the bosses down at the foundry. It was a magnet, a ne plus ultra and a sine qua non. She picked it up.

Inside, in a wad thick as the phone directory, were hundreds of pages of lined yellow paper covered with the jerking loops and slashes of his tiny cramped script. Manorial Revolt: The Crane/Mohonk Conspiracy, she read, by Truman H. Van Brunt. She flipped the page. “The history of Van Wart Manor is a history of oppression, betrayal and deceit, a black mark in the annals of colonial settlement. …” The style was wild, cliché-ridden, declamatory and passionate — hysterical, even. It was like no history she’d ever read. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought the author personally involved, the victim of some terrible injustice or false accusation. She read five pages and put it down. Was this it? Was this what had taken hold of him?

She had her answer three weeks later.

It was a Saturday afternoon, a week before the concert. The course was done, the paper finished (at two hundred fifty-seven closely typed pages it was five times the length of any other submitted that semester), the degree awarded. They took the train back from the graduation ceremony and she pressed close to Truman in the gently swaying coach, thinking Now. Now we can breathe. It was late in the day when they got back to the house. Truman crossed the room and sat heavily at his desk, still dressed in cap and gown — the rented cap and gown he obstinately refused to return — the sweat seeping through the heavy black muslin in dark fists and slashing crescents. “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We’ll pick up Walter and we’ll go out someplace for dinner — someplace nice. Just the three of us.”

He was staring into the trees. He didn’t look like a man who’d just crowned three years of hard work with a supreme and enduring triumph — he looked like a thief about to be led off to the gallows.

“Truman?”