Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

“Oh, you’re here,” she’d say. “Yeah,” he’d answer, sounding not entirely sure how he’d come to be present. “It’s me.” He would sometimes sit down in the kitchen and talk about what he was doing in his studio. Sometimes he’d bring her a new toy he’d made — a colorful shooting star on a pedestal, or a new Wagner in brighter colors. They talked about Anthony, at Goucher. Usually, when he came, Nancy asked if he’d like to stay for dinner. And Tom would suggest they go out, and that he “pop” for it. But that was never what she wanted to do. She wanted him to stay. She missed him in bed. They had never talked about being apart, really. He was doing things for his own reasons. His departure had seemed almost natural.

Each time he was there, though, she would look at Tom Marshall in what she tried to make be a new way, see him as a stranger; tried to decide anew if he was in fact so handsome, or if he looked different from how she’d gotten used to him looking in twenty years; tried to search to see if he was as good-willed or even as large and rangy as she’d grown accustomed to thinking. If he truly had an artisan’s temperament and a gentle manner, or if he was just a creep or a jerk she had unwisely married, then gradually gotten used to. She considered the possibility of having an affair — a colleague or a delivery boy. But that seemed too mechanical, too much trouble, the outcome so predictable. Tom’s punishment would have to be that she considered an affair and expressed her freedom of choice without telling him. In a magazine she picked up at the dentist’s, she read that most women radically change their opinions of their husbands once they spend time away from them. Except women were natural conciliators and forgivers and therefore preferred not to be apart. In fact, they found it easy, even desirable, to delude themselves about many things, but especially about men. According to the writer — a psychologist — women were hopeless.

Yet following each reassessment, she decided again that Tom Marshall was all the things she’d always thought him to be, and that the reasons she’d have given to explain why she loved him were each valid. Tom was good; and being apart from him was not good, even if he seemed able to adjust to being alone and even to thrive on it. She would simply have to make whatever she could of it. Because what Nancy knew was, and she supposed Tom understood this, too: they were in an odd place together; were standing upon uncertain emotional territory that might put to the test exactly who they were as humans, might require that new facets of the diamond be examined.

This was a very different situation from the ones she confronted at the public defender’s every day, and that Tom had encountered with the police — the cut-and-dried, over-dramatic and beyond-repair problems, where things went out of control fast, and people found themselves in court or in the rough hands of the law as a last-ditch way of resolving life’s difficulties. If people wouldn’t overdramatize so much, Nancy believed, if they remained pliable, did their own thinking, restrained themselves, then things could work out for the better. Though for some people that must be hard.

She had been quite impressed by how she’d dealt with things after Tom had admitted fucking Crystal d’Amato (her real name). Once Tom made it clear he didn’t intend to persist with Crystal, she’d begun to feel all right about it almost immediately. For instance, she noticed she hadn’t experienced awful stress about envisioning Tom bare-ass on top of Crystal wherever it was they’d done it (she envisioned a big paint-stained sheet of white canvas). Neither did the idea of Tom’s betrayal seem important. It wasn’t really a betrayal; Tom was a good man; she was an adult; betrayal had to mean something worse that hadn’t really happened. In a sense, when she looked at Tom now with her benign, inquiring gaze, fucking Crystal was one of the most explicable new things she knew about him.

And yet, she realized, as spring came on and Tom remained in the Larchmere Apartments — cooking his miserly meals, watching his tiny TV, doing his laundry in the basement, going to his studio in the co-op — the entire edifice of their life was beginning to take on clearer shape and to grow smaller. Like a valuable box lost overboard into the smooth wake of an ocean liner. Possibly it was a crisis. Possibly they loved each other well enough, perhaps completely. Yet the strongest force keeping them together wasn’t that love, she thought, but a matching curiosity about what the character of their situation was, and the novelty that neither of them knew for sure.

But as Tom had stayed away longer, seemingly affable and well-adjusted, she indeed had begun to feel an ebbing , something going out of her, like water seeping from a cracked beaker, restoring it to its original, vacant state. This admittedly did not seem altogether good. And yet, it might be the natural course of life. She felt isolated, it was true, but isolated in a grand sort of way, as if by being alone and getting on with things, she was achieving something. Unassailable and strong was how she felt — not that anyone wanted to assail her; though the question remained: what was the character of this strength, and what in the world would you do with it alone?

“Where’s Nova Scotia?” Nancy said, staring at the sea. Since leaving Rockland, an hour back on Route 1, they’d begun glimpsing ocean, its surface calm, dense, almost unpersuasively blue, encircling large, distinct, forested islands Tom declared were reachable only by ferries and were the strongholds of wealthy people who were only there in the summer and didn’t have heat.

“It’s a parallel universe out there,” he said as his way of expressing that he didn’t approve of life like that. Tom had an affinity for styles of living he considered authentic. It was his one conventional-cop attitude. He thought highly of the Mainers for renting their seaside houses for two months in the summer and collecting fantastic sums that paid their bills for the year. This was authentic to Tom.

Nova Scotia was in her head now, because it would be truly exotic to go there, far beyond the green, clean-boundaried islands. Though she couldn’t exactly tell what direction she faced out the car window. If you were on the east coast, looking at the ocean, you should be facing east. But her feeling was this rule didn’t apply in Maine, which had something to do with distances being farther than they looked on the map, with how remote it felt here, and with whatever “down-east” meant. Perhaps she was looking south.

“You can’t see it. It’s way out there,” Tom said, referring to Nova Scotia, driving and taking quick glances at the water. They had driven through Camden, choked with tourists sauntering along sunny streets, wearing bright, expensive clothing, trooping in and out of the same expensive outlet stores they’d seen in Freeport. They had thought tourists would be gone after Labor Day, but then their own presence disproved that.

“I just have a feeling we’d be happier visiting there,” she said. “Canada’s less crowded.”

A large block of forested land lay solidly beyond a wide channel of blue water Tom had pronounced to be the Penobscot Bay. The block of land was Islesboro, and it, too, he said, was an island, and rich people also lived there in the summer and had no heat. John Travolta had his own airport there. She mused out at the long undifferentiated island coast. Odd to think John Travolta was there right now. Doing what? It was nice to think of it as Nova Scotia, like standing in a meadow watching cloud shapes imitate mountains until you feel you’re in the mountains. Maine, a lawyer in her office said, possessed a beautiful coast, but the rest was like Michigan.