Дуглас Кеннеди: Five Days

Dad.

I got lucky on the parent front. Despite those few years of quiet, yet perceptible tension — about which neither of them ever really spoke during or afterwards — I grew up in a reasonably stable household. My parents both had careers. They both had outside interests — Dad played the cello in an amateur string quartet. Mom was something of an expert on historical needlework. They both encouraged and loved me. They kept whatever sorrows or misgivings they had about their individual and shared lives out of my earshot (and only when I was a woman in my thirties, coping with all the daily pressures of family life, did I realize how remarkably disciplined they were in this respect). Yes, Dad should have been a chaired professor at some university and the author of several ground-breaking books on binary number theory. Yes, Mom should have seen the world — as she herself once told me was her ambition when younger. Just as I also sensed she often rued the fact that she married a little too young and never really knew a life outside of that with my father. And yes, there was the great sadness that happened two years after my birth, when Mom had an ectopic pregnancy that turned frightening. Not only did she lose the baby, but the complications were so severe that she had to undergo a hysterectomy. I only found this out around the time I was pregnant with Sally and had a bad scare (which turned out to be nothing more than a scare). Mom then told me why I was an only child — something I had asked her about many years earlier, and which was explained simply as: ‘We tried, but it never happened again.’ Now, looking into the nightmare of a possible ectopic pregnancy, Mom told me the truth — leaving me wondering why she had waited so long to trust me with this tragedy that must have so upended her life at the time and still haunted her. Mom could see the shock in my eyes; a wounding sort of shock, as I struggled to understand why she never could have simply told me what had happened, and why Dad — with whom I thought there was such total transparency — had conspired with her on this huge central piece to the family puzzle. Me being me — and yes, Ben was right, I always want to make things right for those nearest to me — I never once spat out the hurt that coursed through me in the days after this revelation. Me being me I rationalized it as all coming down to their worry about the effect it might have on me, and whether (had they told me when I was much younger) I might have even suffered my own dose of survivor guilt over it. But it still bothered me. And hearing the whole terrible story for the first time when I was twenty-four. well, it just seemed to exacerbate the confusion I felt afterwards.

Dan’s reaction was direct, to the point. And though I initially considered it just a little brusque, in time I realized he had cut to the heart of the matter when, after musing about it all for a moment or two, he just shrugged and said:

‘So now you know that everybody has secrets.’

Cold comfort. Dan never does touchy-feely. But at the outset we did function well as a couple. We had little money. We had a big responsibility as new parents. We coped. Not only that, bills got paid. A house got bought. We managed to hold down two jobs and simultaneously raise two children without any sort of serious childcare (except the occasional babysitter or mother-in-law). We suffered broken nights courtesy of babies with colic and were able to laugh about our four a.m. tetchiness the next day. We were frustrated about our lack of latitude. But even though we both felt a little closed in, a little overwhelmed with children and financial obligations, what I remember most about those years together was the way we fundamentally got along, dodged so many potential areas of conflict, helped each other through rough patches without ever playing the ‘I did this for you, now you do that for me’ game. We seemed to be a reasonable match.

A reasonable match. It sounds so profoundly pragmatic, so down-to-earth, so devoid of passion. Well, ours too has never been the love story of the century. Nor, however, is it one of those marriages where the last time we made love Clinton was president. Sex is still there — but even before Dan lost his job and began to disengage from me, it had lost its basic exuberance or the sense of mutual need that fuelled it for so long. When we met the attraction was (for me anyway) the fact that he was stable, unflappable, together, responsible. Unlike the man who came before him and was.

No, I don’t want to think about that. him. today. Even though, truth be told, I think of him every day. Even more so over the past two years when the realization was hitting me so constantly that.

Stop.

I have stood still.

Stop.

You lose things and then you choose things.

Didn’t I hear someone sing that somewhere? Or as my dad once ruefully noted when he said to me, in passing, during the weekend of his seventieth birthday, ‘To live a life is to constantly grapple with regret.’

Is that the price we pay for being here: the ongoing, ever-increasing knowledge that we have so often let ourselves down? And have settled for lives we find just adequate.

Stop.

This morning underscored for me what our life together has become. Dan sleepily reached for me when the alarm went off, as always, at six a.m. Though half-awake I was happy to have his arms around me, and to feel him pulling up the long men’s shirt I always wear to bed. But then, with no attempt at even a modicum of tenderness, he immediately mounted me, kissing my dry mouth, thrusting in and out of me with rough urgency, and coming with a low groan after just a few moments. Falling off me, he then turned away. When I asked him if he was OK he reached for my hand while still showing me his back.

‘Can you tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Why should there be anything wrong?’ he said, now pulling his hand away.

‘You just seem. troubled.’

‘Is that what you think I am? Troubled?’

‘You don’t have to get angry.’

‘“You seem troubled.” That’s not a criticism?’

‘Dan, please, this is nuts. ’

‘You see! You see!’ he said, storming out of bed and heading to the bathroom. ‘You say you don’t criticize. Then what the hell do you do? No wonder I can never, ever win with you. No wonder I can’t. ’

Then, suddenly, his face fell and he began to sob. A low throttled sob — so choked, so held back. Immediately I was on my feet, moving towards him, my arms open. But instead of accepting my embrace he bolted to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. I could still hear him crying. But when I knocked on the door and said: ‘Please, Dan, let me—’ he turned on the sink taps and drowned out the rest of my sentence.

Let me help you. Let me near you. Let me.

The water kept running. I returned to our bed and sat there for a very long time, thinking, thinking, despair coursing through my veins like the chemical dye I have to shoot every day into people who may be harboring a malignancy.

Is that what I am harboring here? A cancer of sorts. His cancer of unhappiness, caused by his loss of career, and now metastasizing in so many insidious directions that.

The water was still running in the bathroom. I stood up and went over to the door, trying to discern if I could hear him still crying over the sound of the open taps. Nothing but cascading water. I checked my watch: 6:18 a.m. Time to wake Sally — unless she happened to hear all the shouting earlier and was already up and concerned. Not that Sally would ever show much outward concern — her one comment after being nearby when Dan railed against me a few weeks ago was a blasй:

‘Great to see I come from such a happy family.’

Were we ever a happy family? Do I even know a truly happy family?