Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Nate glanced at the idling waiter, trying to clue his tutor to his presence.

“Oh, hello there,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her cardigan, from where she produced a faded newspaper coupon advertising a two-for-one entrée special. “We were wondering,” she said, handing it to the waiter, “which of your dishes qualify?”

The man’s already sagging countenance drooped. He took the worn clipping from her and turned it back and forth a few times, as if delay might save him from this final indignity.

“This is no good,” he said. “It expired. Three years ago.”

“Well that’s rather silly. It certainly succeeded in luring us in here. Are you saying you have no special offers at all?”

“Oh, no. We got specials. We introduced pad thai. It’s right up there on the board. Special. Seven ninety-nine.”

“But this is a Chinese restaurant.”

“Not next week it won’t be,” he said. “We’re closing.”

The Doberman had spotted a cat on a windowsill across the room and begun to snarl.

“I agree, Wilkie,” Ms. Graves said, “this is ridiculous. We came in here with the perfectly reasonable expectation of a discount. But never mind. On we go.”

When the moo shu arrived, she barely touched it, pouring herself a cup of tea instead.

“So. Tell me. Why is the world a problem for you?”

“How do you mean?” Nate asked.

“Well, for some people the world is a more or less obvious place. It’s transparent to them. It isn’t, in itself, a conundrum to be overcome. Which means their interests are simply tastes or preferences. But if the world’s a problem to you, your interests are different. You’re conscripted by them. You know what conscription means, don’t you?”

“I think I’m registered for it.”

“You understand my question. What interests you involuntarily?”

Smearing plum sauce over his third pancake, Nate tried to surmise what exactly she was after.

“You mean, like, what makes me unhappy?”

Wincing slightly, Ms. Graves said, “I suppose that will do, but you understand I’m not asking about the trivial here. Failing to win some prize, or that sort of thing. I ask because you listen to me in a rather particular way — and believe me, I spent years being listened to by people your age — and it suggests to me the world’s not obvious to you. I simply want to know why.”

When he asked if it would be okay if he finished the lo mein, she fluttered her hand dismissively, never removing her eyes from his face.

Seeing no reason not to, Nate mentioned his father.

“Yes. I imagined it was something along those lines. Where did he do it? In your house?”

“No, in the woods.”

She considered this for a moment.

“Inverting for you, I would imagine, the standard inquiry, Why kill yourself? to the less often asked, Why not? A sophomoric question, but then there are times in life when that makes it no easier to avoid.”

Nate nodded slowly. It was weird to be talking about this to Ms. Graves but she wasn’t wrong and she wasn’t pretending. In fact, it was a relief to tell someone about it and not receive in return awkward condolence. To just say it and have it heard.

“Mostly it’s just lonely,” he said.

“You’ll get used to that. Maybe you’ll meet someone one day. Which may or may not ameliorate the feeling. When did you say this happened?”

“Last September.”

“Ah,” she said. “You’re in the early stages. When you get to my age, the borders open up a bit. The barriers between times aren’t so strictly enforced, which is a problem that you might say I’m conscripted by. This way in which we’re not just dying animals. Do we have souls strapped to our bodies? That division seems too neat to me, but that’s an intellectual matter. It lacks force in the end. But decay — rot — that’s more complicated. It has a purpose, after all. It leads to new things. To other life.”

A few minutes later the waiter approached to ask if they would like dessert. Ms. Graves shook her head and the waiter went to fetch the bill. The remains of their food had quickly congealed. She placed a few dishes on the floor for the dogs and for a while their lapping tongues were the only sound in the dining room.

___________

BY THE MIDDLE of May, the AP exam had come and gone. But still, each Friday afternoon, Nate went to the old woman’s house. He had stopped giving her checks but she didn’t appear to notice. Her lectures, if you could call them that, grew more disjointed as the weeks passed. Comments on Henry II’s abrogation of jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts of twelfth-century England led into a discussion of precursors to the English Revolution four hundred years later, which apparently had something to do with the poetry she read aloud describing Adam’s conversation with God: “‘In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?’ Can you hear that?” she asked. “He’s asking God how a person can be content alone.”

With her voice veering from angry to elegiac, she sounded as if she were narrating stories brought to mind by family photographs, the actors all intimates, their deeds still full of consequence and culpability. At the end of an hour or sometimes two, as Nate sat at her kitchen table drinking tea or stood in the doorway to go, rather than offering him some blandishment or goodbye, she would announce without transition what she saw in his expression.

Once, she said, “Boredom is easy. Which is why sadness hides there so readily. But don’t be fooled for long. Dying of boredom. There’s reason behind that idiom. It’ll kill you sure enough.”

Her peculiar affect freed him to ask things he otherwise wouldn’t.

“What if I don’t meet someone?”

“Then you won’t. And that will be the condition under which you’ll live. But remember: people won’t save you.”

Each time, on his way to and from her house, Nate would pause at the top of the hill to see if there were any signs of life down at the big house along the river, a car in the driveway or a light on inside. No for sale sign had appeared in the yard and yet there was still no evidence anyone lived there. Since that first day, he hadn’t been able to get the place out of his mind.

Finally, on the last Friday in May, after Ms. Graves had rattled on till nearly six and Nate had left more tired than usual by her river of words, he decided there would be nothing wrong with having another look. And so he headed down the slope in the rich light of the spring evening, the grass beneath him freshly cut. Mounted on the corner of the garage, he noticed a surveillance camera and wondered if it fed its images to a screen in the house or to some security firm’s office hundreds of miles away.

He passed out of its range, walking around the far end of the mansion which consisted of a glassed-in sunroom, unfurnished, with an open-air deck above. At the rear, a brick terrace extended onto the lawn, which ran forty yards or so down to the riverbank. Nate looked through one of the smaller rear windows into a pantry lined with bare white shelves. Next to that was a room whose perfectly polished wood floors glinted in the sun. He came to a set of French doors off the kitchen, which was a huge space with a slate counter island, two stoves, two sinks, and a double-wide fridge. In the corner stood a small wooden table with one chair, dwarfed by the room they had been placed in.

There were no cameras that he could see along this stretch of the house. He tried the door handle. To his surprise, it moved smoothly downward, the door coming open a few inches. He shut it again immediately, terrified of setting off an alarm.

A minute or two passed and he heard nothing.