Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“Oh, that, ” Thelma drawled, stepping lazily from the dressing room. “That was — what, Milo? — five years ago? There’s another one now.”

“Another Pulitzer ?”

“And a Fields, Milo. I choose carefully.”

Thelma Nastrum. Perfect and brash. Her torso still ornamented by its lily-bloom cambers. The leaf-tip corners of her eyes. And aside from a remnant, professional inquisitiveness and the normal womanly attention, she was as uninterested in him as he was in her. He’d been spending day after day here. A seventy-five-minute commute on the NJT and the short, vitalizing cab ride in the cocksure Manhattan air. A husband who was gone past dark. Andret even wore the man’s lush terry bathrobes that hung from their hoods on the wall of his dressing room, like a line of actors waiting to go onstage. An actor was what he felt like. A man pretending to a life. Thelma Nastrum wasn’t his audience but another member of the cast. His audience was back in Princeton. His audience was in Warsaw. His audience was murmuring away inside the bellicose stone-façade tableau of Upper East Side striving that was thrusting itself into view through every steel-framed window in the apartment. The rest was immaterial.

“Tell me,” she said one afternoon, “don’t you still work?”

“I’m reconsidering.”

“Reconsidering what?”

“My project. My career.” He dragged on his cigarette. “My life.”

“Please don’t ash that in here.”

“What are you supposed to do when your mind is gone?”

“Andret, please don’t ash that. Throw it in the toilet or something.”

“I haven’t had a thought in weeks. A mathematical thought.”

“They’ll return.”

“And what if they don’t?”

“Well, what about your teaching?”

“Do I teach?”

“I thought you did. Look, Andret, that ash is getting quite long.”

“I don’t give a damn about teaching.”

“Well, you’ve already won the Fields — what more do you still need to do in your life?”

He got up and paced the bedroom. As he walked he considered grinding out the butt into the dazzlingly white carpet. A nice touch-up to the photo in Architectural Digest . A hole of burnt brown to memorialize the desperation of his entire crashed-up life. Without mathematics, there was nothing in the world for him to hold on to.

In the end, though, he dropped it into the trash — he’d decided he wanted to be allowed to return — and sat down on the divan to light another. “I guess I don’t know how to answer that,” he said, pulling in the first, vivifying draw of smoke. “Let me think,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “What is the answer to that question?”

—

“MILO — I DON’T THINK it’s a good idea.”

“I don’t care. Then come over to my place.”

“Just wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow he goes to Berlin. We have to wait twenty-four more hours. Can you wait one more day for me?”

“What time does he leave?”

“At dawn.”

“I’ll be over at nine, then.”

“I have to prepare my lecture.”

“Okay, ten.”

“You can come at twelve-thirty. Just give me four hours. I’ll make you a nice lunch.”

“I teach at one.”

“Oh, that’s right. Then come on Thursday. We can spend the whole morning together.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“It’s a day and a half, Milo. If I recall, you once left me without a word for five weeks.”

“Why can’t we do it tomorrow? I crave you, Annabelle. I need to see you. You’re all I think about.”

“That’s very flattering.”

“I’ll come in the morning.”

“I said I have to finish my lecture.”

“Why does it take you so long?”

“It just does.”

“I don’t even write out my lectures.”

“I know you don’t, Milo.”

“Can’t you write it in the afternoon?”

“Milo, you know I don’t do that.”

“My place, then. Tonight.”

“Goodness — what’s gotten into you? You’re acting like a teenager.”

“I need to see you.”

“Really, this is flattering. It really is.”

“I can pick you up in a cab.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Or you can meet me at a motel. Annabelle, please.”

“Milo, you’re certainly adamant, aren’t you? But you’ll just have to wait. You’re very — I don’t know. I can’t wait to see you, either — but we’ll both have to, we’ll have to wait till Thursday.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m dying, Annabelle. Dying .”

There was a pause. Then she whispered, “You’re incorrigible, aren’t you?”

“Great. I’ll be over at eleven.”

“And my lecture? When am I supposed to prepare my lecture?”

“Perfect. Perfect. I’ll bring treats.”

—

BRIOCHE. BRIOCHE FROM the bakery on Witherspoon. He bought out the morning’s supply, along with a pair of éclairs, some jelly pastries, and a strange species of fruit tart with dates stuck into the sides. He stacked them all into a paper bag and set the bag in the trunk. Then he went back inside for a cake. He really had no idea what she liked.

Behind the woods he parked the car and set off through the trees with his load. A man in the woods with a bag of pastries and a cake box. What if there was a bear? He was almost running. Across the street from the estate, a station wagon was idling in a driveway. 11:23. Damn, damn. He could barely keep himself in the shadows while a figure leaned against the driver’s window and said a long goodbye. He stamped his feet. When the car edged down into the road, he sprinted to the back steps.

His mind was a jar of marbles tilted onto a table.

At the door he kissed her, hungrily, hungrily, and pushed her back into the foyer. He threw his overcoat onto the chair and pulled her hands to the front of his shirt, then down into his pants. Now he guided her over the rug, around the kitchen counters, backward along the hallway to the stairs. Even in her embrace he sensed resistance, but this coiled him tighter. Upstairs in the bedroom he kicked the door closed and leaned her down against the mattress, licking her neck and kissing her breasts, pulling at the wrapped silk that hid them. She began to breathe heavily. Her breath tasted of bourbon. The smell of it began floating out of her skin.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “I missed you. I need you. You have no idea.”

“My God — you’re — you smell like the woods.”

“I’ve been in the wild. I need you, Annabelle. I need you.”

When he’d arrived she’d pretended resistance, but now he noticed the Maker’s Mark and the two glasses on the bed table. And the brassy Spanish record that was still playing downstairs. And the silk top. Signs. Signs. She tugged off her skirt and then her slip and panties and kicked them onto the rug as he pushed her upward to the head of the mattress. She wasn’t accustomed to speed but she seemed to like it. He climbed on top and reached for the bourbon. When she pulled him into her, he dropped the bottle clumsily onto the table. It wobbled and stilled. She gasped. He loved that. He was panting. He could feel his mind letting go of itself, drawing away and drawing away until at last it spun out of the top of his head and flew off into the air.

Afterward, he drifted for a moment.

When he woke he could still hear the muffled music from downstairs, which now sounded slightly comical through the carpet. A snare-drum military excitement behind a pair of wailing horns. She was rummaging in the closet. His glance fell on the curtain rod over the window, and its shiny knobs dimpled for an instant and tensed toward ovoids. He rose and ransacked his pants for the pills. They weren’t there. His thoughts crowded. Then he was up and into the house. Down the stairs to the kitchen. He rifled the bag of pastries, then remembered the overcoat. Yes: he could feel them in the pocket. Three of the slippery things, down the hatch in a single swallow, and a breath of air at the kitchen window until at last he felt their arrival at the base of his brain. Ah, my lovelies. The yard looked normal: trees and birds. The sun between clouds. He raced back upstairs, the pastry bag in his hand. In the bedroom, another pull of bourbon. 12:35. He had another quarter hour before he had to leave for class. They could do it once more if he didn’t rest. Hurry. She was already in bed. He shook open the bag and offered an éclair. She laughed and tore it from his fingers with her teeth. He laughed, too, and he heard with relief the calm in his voice.