Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

There was still some time before I had to get to Sunny’s, and so I made a U-turn in the road and drove to Bedley Run, through town and then up the road past my house, and I kept going up the hill until the very end of the street, where there is a small Catholic cemetery, the pedestrian entrance to which is bowered by a delicate wrought-iron arch. It is pretty, and modest, like the well-tended plots inside the grounds. The elevation is high enough that from most every spot — at least on a clear day — you can almost make out the city skyline to the south, the high spires looming like the far parapets of a strange, empyreal country. And then, in the middle distance, when you view the dense overlay of towns and villages laid out in contiguous patches, the multiple strands of the interstates and the parkways running straight through the heart of some and bending deferentially around others, bounded and marked by the shimmering waterways and reservoirs and the gently sloped hills, you feel as though this place in which you stand is a most decent and comely kingdom, even as it is a solemn province of the dead.

The monuments are mostly severe and plain, and even the few miniature mausoleums are unadorned, dignified structures, squarish blocks of polished black granite fitted with engine-turned doors of patinated brass. As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.

Mary Burns didn’t altogether favor the tomb her husband had pre-built for them. She would have preferred a simple set of headstones over any free-standing structure, but of course she was always typically dutiful and made sure to keep up its appearance. One spring day I accompanied her to help her plant several evergreen shrubs on either side of the tomb’s door. I called the owner of the local nursery to deliver the plants to the cemetery entrance, and Mary Burns and I each rolled a wheelbarrow up Mountview Street to pick them up. We must have appeared quite a pair, dressed in our heavy canvas gardening trousers and work shirts beneath our wide-brimmed sun hats, clodding along in black rubber boots like an odd pair of itinerant landscapers. Though part of me was distracted by the idea that our neighbors might be peering out their windows at us, wondering what the exact nature of our relationship was, I was also, to be honest, almost discomfitingly flushed with a sensation I had not believed I would ever experience again. For even as we set about the work of sprucing up her late husband’s gravesite, with all the typically complicated specters and notions attending such a task, I was in fact nearly giddy, and I believe she was as well. We were happily basking, as one might say, in the warm glow of our passion, our union still in the early, intimate weeks when there is not yet talk of past or future days but only the too-swift dwindle of the hours.

That day we walked up to the cemetery we didn’t go directly in, as the nursery truck hadn’t yet arrived with the delivery of shrubs. I sat on a bench to wait, but Mary Burns suggested we leave the wheelbarrows inside the wrought-iron gates of the entrance and take a brief hike on an old bridle path, whose almost completely hidden trailhead was a block or so back down the hill. I thought we should wait for the delivery, in case the driver was unsure of what to do, but she tugged at my hand and cajoled and even pecked me on the cheek, and soon enough I agreed.

It was clear that the trail was hardly used anymore, if at all. Mary Burns said that many years ago there were a number of people in the neighborhood who kept horses, and that you could see them on the weekends strutting up Mountview, fathers and daughters in rustic dress setting out for a day-long ride. Over time the riders had fashioned a clear path, which went up over Bedley Hill and down the far side, where it meandered through several square miles of undeveloped county land. I was surprised to learn that Mary Burns often took solitary walks here for hours at a time, and that she hadn’t until now invited me along. I was also a bit concerned for her as it grew quite isolated the farther we went, the path narrowing steadily until it was no wider than a deer trail, with the ever-thickening underbrush tugging at our trouser cuffs. For even here in Bedley Run, something terrible could occur, in a place like this all cloistered and shady. A certain kind of man could happen upon her in her light cotton sweater and willowy walking shorts and think he was exempt from the prevailing laws, that everything in the domain was his to master.

After we’d hiked a quarter mile or so, I said, “You don’t find it a little dark back here?”

“Are you trying to scare me, Franklin?” she said lightly, her eyes archly narrowed. “Because you should know I don’t frighten easily.”

“I’m not trying anything of the kind,” I answered. “It just is very much removed here. Our street seems already to be miles away. There aren’t any sounds but ours.”

“That’s why I like it.”

“How far do you usually go?”

“I don’t know,” she said, continuing to lead us. I was following closely behind her, the faint scent of perfume trailing her in the damp, spring air. “I don’t keep track, I guess. But don’t worry, I know where we’re headed to.”

“I don’t mind, Mary. Wherever you take us…”

“I’m glad,” she said, suddenly turning about. She put her hands up to brace herself but I ran straight into her. She went down with a crash, instinctively grabbing a branch of a sapling that snapped and tore along the trunk as she fell. I felt awful, even as she was fitfully laughing, and I knelt to examine her. She had a trickling nosebleed, and her eyes were teary, and I had her lean against my shoulder, her head tipped back.

“My goodness, that was a surprise.”

“I’m so sorry, Mary. It’s my fault.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, her hand around my knee. I could feel her letting all of her weight ease back into my chest. “Brainy me did the about-face. Will I be getting two black eyes now?”

“I’m sure you won’t. Does this hurt?” I gently pressed my fingers against the bridge of her nose. She didn’t flinch. The blood was still coming, though in tiny rivulets, and as I had nothing to stanch it with I unbuttoned the cuff of my work shirt and she nodded that I go ahead. We stayed a minute or so that way, her face nestled into my forearm, and had someone come upon us in the narrow path, with the bright blood soaked into my sleeve, they might have thought I was attempting to snuff the life out of her. And the strange thing is that I kept having the thought that I was, or at least imagining the horror of it, for even as every cell of me was reaching toward her with utter tenderness and warmth and the drug of an amorous bloom, it seemed I could just as easily summon the harshest want in my hands, the tightness and pressure that might have no bound. And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications — whether happy or not — might simply overwhelm.

But she tightly embraced me then, turning her face into my neck. She cupped my cheek and she kissed me, deeply, with an instant fervor. Her fingers ran through my hair, along the back of my head. Before this we had held hands and hugged each other after a dinner out or a movie at the village theater, and I’d only politely kissed her good night, despite her clear willingness to linger in the car or before her front door. She would invite me in but I always made the excuse of having to go home to Sunny, which was true enough, though not because I was needed there. In those first weeks with Mary Burns I was still hoping to provide my daughter with a complete family life, and while it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother, how well she could run a house (even mine), I began to wonder if I were up to the tasks of being a worthy partner and husband. I worried whether I knew what to do, like any pubescent boy might be concerned, for honestly it had been quite a long time, long enough that I was as fearful as I was anxious and expectant. But that afternoon, on the impromptu hike, she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go and at some point I began not just to relent but to kiss her back, and with a sudden, spurring ebullience that caught us both off guard.