Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She rubbed his back, big gentle circles. Weber’s book said that made endorphins. It worked for a minute or two, before he flipped over.

“We blew it. We should have exposed them, and instead…”

“Shh. You did the best you could. I’m sorry; I don’t mean that. I mean, you did the best that anyone could have, under the circumstances.”

Daniel was up all night. Sometime after one, he started tossing so badly she came out of her own fitful sleep enough to rest a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” she mumbled, still half dreaming. “It was only a word.”

Around three, she woke to an empty bed. She heard him out in the kitchen, pacing like a zoo creature. When he at last crawled back into bed, she pretended to be asleep. He lay still, an all-hearing ear, out in a field, tracking something big. Bring your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight . Fully motionless, even his lungs. By five-thirty, neither could pretend any longer. “You okay?” she asked.

“Thoughtful,” he whispered.

“I gathered.”

They should have just risen and had breakfast, pioneer style, in the dark. But neither moved. At last, he said, “Your friend seems very sharp. She’s right. These birder houses are just the tip of something.”

She crushed the pillow. “I knew you were thinking about her. Is that why you—?”

He ignored her. “Did you already introduce me to her somewhere?”

“Look at me. Do I look like I’ve lost my fucking mind?”

He blinked at her, his head dipping. “I told you I was sorry. It was unforgivable. I don’t know what else to say.”

She had: she had lost it. Ground down by failed caretaking. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I’m insane. What are you saying about Barbara?”

“I have the weirdest sense that I know her voice.” He stood and crossed naked to the window. He pulled back the curtain and stared into the dark yard. “She sounds like someone I know.”

Winter on Long Island:Why did they persist in staying? Surely not for the few breathtaking postcard moments: rime on the water mill, the duck pond frozen over, Conscience Bay whited out, with nothing but the invader mute swans and a single confused heron holding tight before the snow turned sooty and the real season of lifelessness settled in. Not for their health, certainly: pelted for days at a shot by tiny, sleet hypodermics. Not out of any economic necessity. Only some fathomless expiation, clinging to the former fresh, green breast of the new world.

“Dug in, in that vast obscurity beyond the city,” he told Sylvie, over a ruthlessly administered breakfast regimen of muesli and soy milk. “Where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.”

“Yes, dear. Whatever you say. How ’bout them Rangers?”

“I could be teaching in Arizona. Or guest-lecturing in California, just down the street from Jess. Better yet, we could both be retired. Living in some ramshackle farmhouse in Umbria.”

She knew her job. “Or we could both be completely dead. Then we’d have everything handled and out of the way already.” She rinsed their breakfast bowls, for the ten thousand nine hundredth time in their shared life. “Lecturing at the Medical Center in seventeen minutes.”

He watched her walk into the bedroom to dress. What did she look like to strangers? Still slim for her age, hips and waist still echoing the past, her body still waving the advertisement of vigor, long after it had any right. She’d become almost unendurably dear to him in recent weeks, the result of his Nebraskan near-derailment.

The night he’d returned, he told her why he’d rushed home. Say everything: their marriage contract from the beginning, and to salvage anything real with this realest of women, he could not hide now. He’d always believed in Blake’s “Poison Tree”: bury a fantasy if you want to nurture it. Kill it by exposure to the open air.

The dank Long Island air did not kill his fantasy. Rather, describing his awful discovery to his wife the night of his homecoming killed something else. Lying in bed alongside her, he laid it out. He felt some sick frisson of collapse, just gearing up to speak. “Sylvie? I need to tell you something.”

“Uh-oh. Real first name. Big trouble.” She grinned, turned on her side, head on an elbowed arm. “Let me guess. You’ve fallen in love.”

He squeezed shut his eyes, and she sucked air. “I wouldn’t say…,” he started. “It seems I may have gone back to Kearney, at least in part, for another look at a woman around whom, without any awareness, I’ve fabricated an entire hypothetical life.”

She lay there, the grin still poised, as if he’d just said, So this neuroscientist walks into a bar …“Syntax getting all fancy, Ger.”

“Please. This is ruining me.”

Her grin stiffened. She rolled onto her belly, regarding him as if he’d just confessed a love for donning women’s underthings. Second by second, she grew more professional. Sylvie Weber, Wayfinder. Supportive; always, horribly supportive. “Did you sleep with her?”

“It isn’t that. I don’t think I even touched her.”

“Ah. Then I’m really in trouble, aren’t I?”

He deserved the slap, even wanted it. But he shrank and said nothing.

“I know you, Man. The Weber Nobility. I know that idealist’s mind of yours.”

“This is not something…I want. That’s why I came back so fast.”

She lashed out. “Fleeing?” Then soft again, ashamed. “You didn’t know, when we talked about your making another trip out there?”

“I…still don’t know . This is not…” He meant to say lust , but that seemed evasive. As shifty as something Famous Gerald might write. More desperate scramble to make a continuous story out of chaos. “In retrospect, perhaps some part of me was looking forward to another look.”

“You weren’t aware of being attracted to her, on your first visit?”

He thought before answering. When he spoke, it was from up near their bedroom ceiling. “I’m not sure that what I felt yesterday is best called attraction.”

She drew her hands in and shaded her eyes. “How serious is this?”

How serious could it be? Three days versus thirty years. A total cipher versus a woman he knew like breathing. “I don’t want it to mean anything at all.”

Underneath her cupped hands, Sylvie cried. Her crying, so rare over the years, had always puzzled him. Detached, almost abstract. Too civil to count as real weeping. Maybe calm grief was genuine maturity, the thing that mental health demanded. But only now did Weber realize how much her vague dispassion in distress had always bothered him. The crisis that their bedrock certainty always mocked — all their binding kindnesses and silly games, Man and Woman —the estrangement they’d never understood in others was now theirs. And she was crying, without sound. “Then why the hell are you telling me this?”

“Because I can’t let it mean anything.”

She pressed her temples. “You aren’t just throwing this in my face? My punishment for…?” For what? For finding herself, finding steady fulfillment in mid-life, while his abandoned him. Something animal flared in her face, ready to hurt back. And he felt how cruelly he loved her.

He tried to say. “I’m giving you…I’m trying…”

Then she was up and out of her crouch, game again, too quickly. She sat up and exhaled, as if she’d just been exercising. She patted the bed with a palm. “Okay. So tell me what you like about this babe.” Improvement project. Life’s next step to self-mastery.

“How can I…like anything about her? I don’t know anything about her.”