Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

Jack said, “I’ll tell you who would do such a thing. Some young fellow who doesn’t like the look of a new Subaru.” He added, “Goddamn them to hell.” Inside the car now, he said, “ Jesus .”

“Well, it seems a foolish thing for someone to do,” Olive said, strapping on her seatbelt. And then she said, “But it’s just a car.” And somehow this made Jack even more furious.

He said, “Well, it’s the last car I will ever buy,” which was a thought he had had when he had bought the car.

He pulled up to the stop sign at the end of the street and braked the car hard, then pulled ahead suddenly; he could see Olive being slightly thrown against the back of her seat. “Oh, my, my, my,” she said quietly, as though to playfully chastise him.

But as they headed out of town, onto the open road now, Olive was silent in the seat next to him. And Jack had nothing to say to her, he still felt the sense of the bicycle overturning. But as he drove along the river without seeing anything except the white line in the road, it returned to him, the fact that Olive was his wife, and that they had had a day together of happiness before seeing Elaine tonight. But it did not feel like happiness that he had experienced with Olive, it felt far away from him now.

—

And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.

—

In the silence of the dark car Jack was aware of Olive—his wife—aware of her presence in a way that felt insurmountable. A pocket of air rose up his chest and he opened his mouth and belched; it was a long and loud sound. Olive said, “Good God, Jack, you might excuse yourself.” Jack kept staring straight ahead at the black road before him and the pale white line running down its middle.

Olive said, “I guess Gasoline knows what they’re talking about naming it that foolish name. Why don’t they just shorten it to Gas?”

Jack said, “At least I didn’t fart ,” and he was aware that he had fired a salvo—really without meaning to—and Olive did not respond.

As they finally entered the dismal town of Bellfield Corners, Olive said quietly, “I know who she was, Jack.” He glanced over at her. He could just see her profile in the dim light, and she looked straight ahead.

“And who was she?” Jack asked dryly.

“She’s that woman who got you fired from Harvard.”

“I didn’t get fired,” Jack said; this made him really angry.

“She was the reason.” Olive said this, still quietly. And then, turning her face toward him, she said, and it seemed her voice almost trembled, “I have to tell you, Jack. The only thing that upsets me about her is your taste in women, I think she is a dreadful, dreadful woman.”

When Jack did not answer, Olive continued, “At least that foolish Thibodeau girl that Henry was in love with way back when, she was mousy, but she was decent. An innocent girl. And that fellow, Jim O’Casey, that I had my almost-affair with a hundred years ago, at least he was a lovely man.”

Jack drove past the sign for the credit union; the whole town was dark except for the gas station, which seemed eerily alone with its lights.

“Oh, stop it,” Jack said. “Honest to God, Olive. Some man with six kids and a wife who says to his fellow schoolteacher, Will you leave Henry and go off with me?, then ends up drunk and wrapped around a tree, is not a lovely man, Olive. Jesus Christ.”

“You have no idea,” Olive said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I would appreciate it if you left your stupid—stupid—opinions to yourself. He was a lovely man, and that snot-wot is a creep. That dreadful woman you bedded down all those years.”

“That’s enough, Olive.”

“No, I’m not through. She was supercilious. She was just crap , Jack.”

“Olive, I’m asking you to stop this. Okay, she was crap. Who cares?”

“I care,” Olive said. “I care because it says something about you . When you’re attracted to crap, it says something about you.”

“It was many years ago, Olive.” He thought the ride was unbelievably long; he was aware of the miles to go before they got home. He drove around a curve too quickly.

“And so was my almost-affair with that man who was lovely. You never met him, you don’t know. But he was a lovely man, Jack, and you telling me that he wasn’t, it’s just horrible of you. And now I know why you would say that. Because of this woman you were so drawn to yourself.” She paused, then said, “It makes me sick .”

He almost yelled at her. He almost shouted at her to shut up, to stop it; he came so close he could feel the words in his mouth; in a way, he almost thought he had yelled these things, but he had not. And she said no more. When they got home, she got out of the car and slammed the door.

“Enjoy your whiskey,” Olive said to him as she went up the stairs; he heard her go into their bedroom. He hated her then.

Jack drank his whiskey quickly, sitting in his chair, because he was so frightened. What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.

He got up to get more whiskey, pouring it into the tumbler he had just emptied, and then he went into the bathroom, where he splashed his pee like an old man. Turning to leave, he saw his face in the mirror. He was an old man: He was half-bald, his nose seemed to have become bigger, there was no connecting this man in the mirror to who he had been when he knew Elaine. He went back and sat in his chair and sipped his whiskey. But who had he been back then? A person much older than she was, someone who thought she was beautiful, who loved her intelligence, who loved her youth, but how in the world did that make it different from any other stupid sordid story of its kind? It didn’t. There was nothing different about the story—except that it was his. And that it ended the way it did. It still amazed him, that Elaine had managed that. She must have been using him all along. Which is what Betsy had said immediately when he first told her the story, as he stood in the kitchen of their Cambridge home shaking visibly.

Elaine’s face tonight, he realized, had a coldness to it that had surprised him. Her makeup was too perfect, there was something cold about that. And then he realized: I was cold. So he probably had been attracted to, without recognizing it, this coldness in her. Betsy had not been cold—except to him. But her nature had not been a cold one. She was friendly and people liked her.

Oh, Betsy—!

Betsy, who read all those books by Sharon McDonald. Oh, how he wanted right now for Betsy to be back with him, he did not care how dull he had found her, how careless she had been of him, he did not care, he only wanted her back. Betsy, he cried inside himself, Betsy, Betsy, Betsy, you don’t know how much I miss you!

And he did. And it was not just tonight. There had been nights—a few—while Olive lay snoring in their bed, that he had sat on the front porch and—half-drunk—wept, because he wanted to be with Betsy instead. It seemed to him at such times that Olive talked only of herself—he knew that that was not (completely) true, but she was fascinated by herself in a way that was tiresome for Jack on those nights, and was this because he wanted to talk about himself instead? Yes. He was not stupid, Jack. He understood that he had as many qualities as Olive had in that way. And he also knew, even tonight in his grief, that his marriage to Olive had been surprisingly wonderful in many ways, to go into old age with this woman who was so—so Olive.