Paul Theroux: The Lower River

“Is there something you want to tell your wife?” Doctor Bob said.

Ellis fixed his eyes on Deena’s furious face. He said, “You’re overplaying your hand.”

Shushing her — Deena had begun to object — Doctor Bob spoke to Ellis. “I see you as untethered,” and he explained what he meant.

Ellis nodded. The word was perfect for how he felt, unattached, not belonging, drifting in a job he’d taken as a dying wish of his father’s, maintaining the family business. But his heart wasn’t in it — had never been in it.

When, Doctor Bob asked, had he been happy?

Ellis said, “I used to live in Africa.”

“Oh, God,” Deena said.

“I meant in your marriage,” Doctor Bob said.

Hands together under his chin, prayer-like, Ellis became thoughtful, and tried to recall a distinct time, an event, something joyous, a little glowing tableau of pride and pleasure. But nothing came. It was thirty-three years of ups and downs, too much time to summarize. They were married: years to share, to endure, to negotiate, to overcome. Yes, plenty of happiness — he just could not think of anything specific. Marriage was a journey without an arrival.

Seeing Deena slumped in her chair, waiting out his silence, Ellis grew sad again. Just the way they were sitting apart, burdened by a kind of grief, with the doctor between them, made him miserable. It was as though they were in the presence of a terminal patient, their marriage dying, and it seemed that these last few weeks had been like that, either a deathwatch — this gloom — or a danse macabre, the hysteria at the prospect of the thing ending.

Nor could they hold any kind of coherent conversation without Doctor Bob being present. Ellis saw himself at sixty-two, Deena at sixty, as two old people who’d now, with the death of their marriage, be going their separate ways, pitiable figures bent against a headwind, or worse, with ghastly jollity, talking about “new challenges” and starting again, joining support groups, taking up yoga, gardening, volunteering, charity work, or worse, golf.

The counseling sessions continued, more rancorous, provoking new grievances, driving them further apart. But along with that melancholy vision of separation Ellis saw relief, too, the peacefulness of being alone. He guessed that Deena was feeling the same, because one day after a session, driving home, she seemed to come awake and said, “I want the house. I’m not giving up that house. My kitchen, my closets.”

“I could get a condo,” Ellis said. “But the business is mine.”

“I’ll need some money,” Deena said, and noticing that Ellis did not react, she added, “A lot of it.”

And like that, snatching, each staked a claim. At the suggestion of Doctor Bob they saw a lawyer and divided their assets.

Hearing of this, Chicky said, “What about me?”

“You’ll be all right,” Ellis said.

“But what if you guys remarry?”

Deena looked at Ellis and laughed, and he responded, laughing too, the first time in months they had shared such a moment of mirth. They stopped, not because they were saddened by the outburst but because the love in their laughter shamed them, reminding them that in their marriage they had known many happy moments like this.

Chicky, bewildered, and made stern by her bewilderment, said, “Dougie’s probably going to get laid off. We could use the money. I want my cut now.”

“‘Cut,’” Ellis said, echoing her word, “of what?”

“Your will,” Chicky said.

“I am alive,” Ellis said, wide-eyed in indignation.

“But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it. And look at Ma. She got hers.”

Had this conversation not taken place in a sushi bar in Medford Square — another example of the changes in the town — Ellis would have screamed at his daughter and hammered the table with his fist. Later, he was glad that he had remained calm and had only shaken his head at the sullen young woman chewing disgustedly at him. He replayed the conversation that night, at first bitterly, then in a mood of resignation. Let it all end, he thought; let a great whirlwind drive it all away. Then he offered Chicky a lump sum. She asked for more, as he guessed she would, and he gave her the amount he had already decided upon.

Chicky’s husband was with her when he handed over the check. Dougie was merely a spectator to the family negotiation — Chicky had always been annoyed that Ellis, refusing to hire him at the store, had said, “What is he good at?”

“I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on,” Ellis said, with the solemn resignation of his new role. “I don’t think I want to.”

“Okay by me,” Chicky said.

With her share of the will in her hand, and her back turned, he felt that he was already dead. He was sorry to think that she did not see the pity in this.

Although he moved into a condo on Forest Street — the old high school — he and Deena still saw each other. Formally, sometimes shyly, they went on dates. They were not quite ready to see other people, and even the sessions with Doctor Bob had not affected their fundamental liking for each other. The dates ended with a chaste and usually fumbled kiss, and Ellis was always sad afterward, lonely in his car. He knew that he had caused Deena pain, destroyed her love for him, made her untrusting — perhaps untrusting of all other men. In the secrecy and confidences of his messages, he had betrayed her. He could be kind to her now, but there was no way to amend the past. On some of their dates she sat numb and silent, suffering like a wounded, bewildered animal. He could not think of himself, because he knew the hurt he’d inflicted on her would never heal.

Ellis dreaded the day when Deena would say to him, “I’m seeing someone.” He told her how bad business was, and she tried to console him, urging him to sell the building, that the real estate was worth something, that it was an ideal location.

On one of these dates, she gave him the phone — the instrument of their undoing, which now seemed to him like something diabolical. Or had it been a great purifying instrument? Anyway, it had uncovered his entire private life, shown him as sentimental, flirtatious, dreamy, romantic, unfulfilled, yearning. But for what? What did all those emails mean? What in all this emotion was the thing he wanted?

He did not know. He might never know. He was too old to hope for anything more. No momentous thing would ever happen to him. No passion, no great love, no new landscape, no more children, no risk, no drama. The rest of his life would be a withdrawal, a growing smaller, until finally he would be forgotten. The name on his store would be replaced by another. His marriage was over, his daughter was gone. He could not remember much of the marriage, and yet he missed the eventlessness of it, his old routines, the monotony that had seemed like a friend. There was a certainty in routine; the torpor it induced in him was a comfort.

The day after Hock got the phone back he went to the store, keeping the thing in his pocket the whole day. After he locked up for the night (he observed himself doing this, as if in a ritual), he walked to the edge of the parking lot, where beyond a fence the Mystic River brimmed, and flung the phone and watched it plop and sink and drown in the water that was moody under the dark sky.

TO RELIEVE HIS EYES, to clear his head, Hock was standing in the open doorway at the back of his store, facing the Mystic River flowing past the parking lot, the water dark under the drizzly clouds, lumpy with debris from upstream. A week of heavy rain had filled the lakes and sent a torrent down — the river swelled at its banks, rippling like the muscles of a hungry snake. The river that had always consoled him with its movement was a special comfort now that he was in greater need of consolation; the water and that debris swept past the back of the store and poured into the harbor, into the ocean, into the world, reminding him that his phone was gone, the corpse of it, sluiced into the sea.