The possibility that there could be another man had come to him in a flash of intuition as he’d looked at her paintings. He’d been shocked by them, by their highly charged eroticism, by the depth of the plunge the woman in them was taking. It had been like looking at a death—Jessie’s death. Her previous life, all the old adaptations and roles, were breaking away and rising to the surface while the woman kept going deeper and deeper. He’d stood there confused, puzzled by what she might be plunging toward. And then he’d seen the sketch of the two lovers embracing at the bottom of the ocean. The flash had come instantly. It had struck him to the heart.
The couple at the bottom of the ocean. That place where you have gone as far as you can go. When he’d first seen the image and the crazy idea had seized him, he’d stood there for several minutes, then thought, No. It was preposterous to think Jessie capable of that. Preposterous. He’d always trusted her. Without question.
But it explained so much. Her uncommunicative behavior almost from the moment she’d gotten to Egret Island. The strange abruptness of her wanting time apart from him, her inability to articulate any real reason for it. She’d been aloof even before departing Atlanta, depressed about Dee’s leaving for college, questioning herself, her life.
And so he’d asked the question. It had just come out. Who is he?
It occurred to him that Jessie had answered him truthfully, not only because she wanted to end her deceit but because she wanted to force something to happen. Realizing this, he felt a vibration of panic in his chest. Could it be this was not a casual affair? Did she actually love this man? He spread his hand across his chest and pressed hard against the sick, betrayed feeling.
He began to feel emptied out. A deep-boned sadness. On and off during the night, he lay down and tried to sleep, but it was useless to try, and each time he would get up again and pace beside Jessie’s paintings, which sat on the floor leaning against the opposite twin bed.
Through the small window, he could see the sky lightening slightly, black turning to gray, that smoked look that comes before dawn, and for the hundredth time he looked at his watch. There was no way off the island until the first ferry run at nine, but he knew that the moment it was light enough, he would leave the house.
When he stepped into the hallway, it was not yet six. He carried his suitcase to the living room and set it down, then wandered back to Jessie’s room.
Her door was closed, and he simply opened it and walked in. She was sleeping the way he’d seen her sleep for twenty years, on her right side with her hair spread behind her on the pillow and her hand tucked under her cheek. The windowpanes were silver. Daylight had just begun to seep in. He stood there and watched her, studying the gray in her hair, the saliva gathered in the corners of her open mouth, the soft grating breath that was almost but not quite a snore, and all these things had made him want to lie down beside her.
Her wedding rings were gone from her finger. He found them on a velvet pincushion on top of the dresser, circled around a straight pin. He touched them with his finger, thinking of the geese in her painting, how she’d jettisoned them to the surface.
He twisted his gold band off his finger and placed it on top of the diamond engagement ring and platinum band he’d given her so long ago.
Nine days later, back home in Atlanta, he still felt the same hopelessness that had come over him that night.
For the last twenty minutes, the patient seated in his office had been talking about the death of her eighteen-year-old dachshund, Abercrombie, alternately recounting stories of his life and crying. He’d let her go on and on about the dog because today it was just easier, and he suspected she wasn’t crying for the dog anyway but for her brother who’d died three months earlier after years of estrangement and for whom she’d cried not a tear.
The woman pulled the last tissue from the box beside her and held out the empty carton to him like a child needing her glass refilled. He got up from his leather armchair and pulled more tissues from the louvered cabinet beneath the bookshelf, then sat down again, forcing his mind off Jessie and onto his patient’s dissociated feelings.
It had been like this since he’d returned, this painful inability to concentrate. One moment he would be listening to his patient and the next he was back at that moment—Jessie announcing the name Brother Thomas.
“I don’t know what else I could’ve done,” his patient said, sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked under her. “Abercrombie’s arthritis was getting so bad he couldn’t walk, and he was on so many steroids already. I mean, really, what else could I have done?”
“I’m sure you did the right thing by putting him down,” Hugh told her, which prompted her to begin crying again.
He watched her bent head bobbing up and down in her hands, and castigated himself for sitting in the room with her and not being present, for hearing everything she said and not listening to any of it.
His mind wandered, and he was standing once more before the picture Jessie had made with colored pencils. The man was a monk. This was not as shocking as the thought of Jessie, his Jessie, having an affair, but it was still stunning to him. She had wanted him to know; otherwise she would’ve simply answered by saying “Thomas.” He couldn’t imagine why she’d added “Brother” unless there was an unconscious message in it somewhere. What? Did she want him to know how much this man would have to give up to be with her?
Since returning, he’d felt his life continually imploding, the emptiness welling up like the immense reaches of space. Two nights ago he’d dreamed he was an astronaut making a space walk, tethered to the space shuttle by a cord that had suddenly snapped. He had simply drifted off into an abyss of darkness, watching his craft grow smaller and smaller until it was a speck of white in the silence.
His hatred for the man Jessie had been with would come over him with torrential suddenness. He would picture the two of them—how the man would touch her in places that had belonged only to him, breathing into her hair. How many times had they done it? Where? He had wakened once in a drenching sweat, wondering if they were having sex right then, at that very moment.
It had been humbling to discover his capacity for violence and revenge. He’d acknowledged this, like all good analysts, in a theoretical way while studying Jung’s concept of the personal and collective shadow, but he knew it now as a living reality. He had stopped envisioning himself going to the monastery and taking the man by the throat, but he did not deny there were moments he wanted the monk to choke and bleed.
He would never act on it, of course, but even the wanting to, the needing to, expelled cherished notions he’d held about himself. He was not special. He was not entitled. His goodness, his enlightenment, did not set him apart. He was like all the rest, carrying around the same huge quantities of darkness.
The knowledge of this had driven him down into his own humanity. Once in a while, when he was capable of seeing himself as more than the pain he felt, he’d hoped his suffering was not being squandered, that somewhere inside it was making him pliant and tender.
The woman across the room from him, he realized, was explaining the details of her dog’s death.
“He was in such pain—just to pick him up made him yelp—so the vet came to the car to give him the shot. Abercrombie was lying on the backseat, and when he saw Dr. Yarborough, do you know what he did?”
Hugh shook his head.
“He looked up at him and wagged his tail. Can you believe that?”
Yes, Hugh thought. He could believe that.
When Jessie had called him that Sunday and asked him to come, he’d gone just like the damn stupid dog—wagging his tail. He’d thought he was going to a reconciliation. He’d thought whatever had come over her had run its course.
It had been easy to see how much she’d changed. She’d looked tired and frazzled from the ordeal with Nelle, but underneath he’d sensed aliveness. There was an unmistakable independence taking hold, a self-containment that hadn’t been there before. He’d se
en how her paintings had changed, too, exploding out of their little boxes, becoming bold excerpts of the mystifying process she was in.
In the past so much of her had been invisible to him. Looking at her in the hospital waiting room, after being apart from her for so long, he’d been able to see her again.
How often did we do that, he wondered—look at someone and fail to see what’s really there? Why had it been so hard to look at his wife and understand his need for her, the way his life was held in the accumulation of moments they’d shared?
He looked at the woman in front of him and tried for a second to see her. She was telling him now about the pet cemetery.
He touched the odd little bracelet on his wrist.
The last time Dee had phoned had been his birthday. “When is Mom coming home?” she’d asked.
He’d paused. Too long.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it? She’s been there forever.”
“I won’t lie to you, honey. We’re having a few problems,” he’d told his daughter. “But nothing that serious, okay? Every marriage has them. We’ll work it out.”
Five days later the bracelet had arrived. She’d made it herself.
He didn’t know what to tell Dee now. He didn’t know what to tell himself.
He looked at the clock in the office, just over the woman’s head. He dreaded the end of the day. At night Jessie’s paintings haunted him, waking him up. He would sit on the side of the bed remembering how the colors had grown fiercer the farther the woman went.
Last night, desperate to alleviate his anguish, he’d tried to look at what Jessie had done not as a husband but as a psychiatrist. The impulse was ludicrous, but the analytical thinking had given him a hallowed hour or two of distance from his torment. It had aerated his emotions, generated a measure of perspective. He was grateful for every small mercy.
What he’d done was go to his study and flip around in various books, reading and jotting notes. Over and over he’d come across the same idea—not the least bit unfamiliar to him—that when a person was in need of cataclysmic change, of a whole new center in the personality, for instance, his or her psyche would induce an infatuation, an erotic attachment, an intense falling-in-love.
He knew this. Every analyst knew it. Falling in love was the oldest, most ruthless catalyst on earth.
But typically you fell in love with something missing in yourself that you recognized in the other person, yet he couldn’t grasp what Jessie had seen in this supposedly spiritual man that could capture her so profoundly.
After almost an hour of this kind of thing, he’d shoved his notes back in the drawer and returned to bed. It had suddenly felt like a lot of abstract drivel. He didn’t want to apply any of it to Jessie. He didn’t want to bring the grace of understanding into it. Her reasons were unforgivable, no matter how powerful they were.
His wife had been with another man. She had betrayed him, and even if she came to him begging, he didn’t know if he could ever take her back.
“Dr. Sullivan?” his patient said.
He had pivoted away from her toward the window, his elbow on the chair arm, his chin on his fist, and was staring at the outline of the Bradford pear tree flowering profusely against the pane. His eyes were burning with tears.
Turning toward the woman, he felt intense embarrassment. She handed him the tissue box she’d been cradling, and he took one and awkwardly dabbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. He shook his head, astonished at himself.
“No, please,” she said, crossing her hands one on top of the other at her neck. “Don’t apologize. I’m…I’m touched.”
She thought his tears were for her. For her dachshund. She was smiling at him, awestruck by his godlike heart. He didn’t know how to tell her his emotion had nothing to do with her, that in fact he was being the worst possible psychiatrist at the moment.
“We all fail one another,” he said.
The woman’s eyes widened as she cast around for his meaning.
“I have failed my wife,” he added.
Jessie had failed him, yes, horribly, but he’d failed her, too. He had carelessly glossed over her. He had not given her the small kindness of letting her grow into herself.
“I have failed…people,” the woman said, as if he were trying out an innovative new approach, and she was joining in.
“You mean your brother?” he said gently, and heard the sob break loose in her and fill the room.
CHAPTER Thirty-three
I brought Mother home from the hospital on St. Senara’s Day, Saturday, April 30, a day flooded with brightness.
After thirteen days in the hospital, Mother had made enough progress to come home, which seemed to mean she was medicated enough not to hurt herself again. According to the nurse, she’d been pleasant without exhibiting aberrant behavior but had refused to open up. “These things take time,” the nurse had explained, then given me a slightly patronizing talk on the importance of Mother’s coming back weekly to see her psychiatrist and faithfully swallowing her pills.
As I boarded the ferry early that morning, preparations for St. Senara’s Day were already under way. One of the monks was on all fours at the edge of the dock laying out a rectangle of coral-colored carpet on which the mermaid chair would sit after its winding procession from the abbey. When I was a girl, the carpet had invariably been red, though one year it had turned up pink and fringed, with the suspicious look of a bath mat, which set off a small controversy.
A folding table had been set up, and Shem’s wife, Mary Eva, was setting out boxes of Mermaid Tears, which would be thrown into the sea during the ceremony.
Crossing the bay, I thought of the Mermaid Tears I’d kept on top of the crab trap in Whit’s hermitage. I hadn’t been out there since Mother had gone to the hospital, nor had I seen Whit—not once in two weeks. I’d sent him a note, passed along by Kat, explaining I would be spending my days at the hospital with Mother and wouldn’t be able to see him for a while.
He had not sent a note back. He had not walked to the edge of Mother’s backyard and looked over the brick wall and called me out of the house. I was there alone each night, and he didn’t come. Maybe he suspected that my note didn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps he’d detected the sadness beneath my words.
The morning after I’d confessed my affair to Hugh, I’d found his wedding ring on the pincushion along with mine, and no trace of him in the house. I’d rushed out, wanting to catch him at the ferry dock before he left the island, but by the time I reached the slave cemetery, I thought better of it. I remembered the way he’d recoiled, almost violently, when I’d reached for him, the rage in his voice when he’d told me to get away. He had said it with his teeth clenched. His eyes had looked so pained, so shocked, I did not recognize him. It seemed now I could at least spare him the fresh sight of me. I could do that much for him. Depression had descended then like a great fatigue, and I’d sat down beside the graves and watched a dove scratch the dirt, making small, neglected sounds that were heartbreaking to me. It was as if someone had suddenly handed me a huge stone, the weight of all the suffering I’d caused, and said, Here, you must carry this now.
So I had. These thirteen days.
It is still hard for me to understand, much less explain, the descent that comes with necessary loss, how requisite it is. It came to me like the darkening of the day.
It wasn’t that I rued what I’d done, that I wanted a reversal of some kind; I would not have taken back the way my loving Whit had impregnated me with life, with myself, the hundred ways I’d been broken and made larger. It’s that I saw the effect of it. I saw it in the immortal hurt in Hugh’s eyes, in the bracelet Dee had woven for him, in the unbearable ceremony our rings were performing on the pincushion.
Each morning I’d left the island and returned in the late afternoon. I’d sat with Mother in what they called the dayroom. With its television and sofas and strange, shuffling people, it had reminded me of Dante’s Purgator
io, which I’d read in school. The only part of the story I remembered was the inhabitants lugging huge stones around a mountain.
I’d watched the medicines make Mother docile, watched everything from a place of fallowness and grief, always going back to the moment when Hugh saw through it all and posed his question. It stupefied me daily that I’d answered him without hesitation, using Whit’s monk name. As if underscoring his spiritual credentials. As if that somehow made what we were doing loftier.
Mother had sat each day with her body slackened on the chair, moving her fingers around the Rubik’s Cube that I’d brought her from home. She’d asked me so many times about her finger I’d finally brought that, too. I’d washed it under the faucet one night, forcing myself to hold the lost piece of her in my palm and scrub the bloodstains. I’d brought it to her in a mason jar, submerged in rubbing alcohol so it wouldn’t putrefy. I’d gotten permission for her to keep it in her room, but just in case, I’d written DO NOT THROW AWAY on the side of the jar.
In the evenings I’d given progress reports to Kat and Hepzibah on the phone, warmed soup from the cans in the pantry, and listened to the endless soliloquy of sadness and blame that went on and on inside me. Whenever I thought of Whit, I’d longed to be with him, but I didn’t know anymore whether my wanting came from love or the simple need to be comforted.
Despite that, I couldn’t let myself be with him yet. It seemed perverse to make love with him given the freshness of the pain Hugh was in, that we were both in. No doubt it was illogical, but I felt I was abstaining out of respect for the death of my marriage.
Mother seemed excited as we left the hospital that afternoon. Inside the rental car, she pulled down the sun visor and dragged a comb through her white hair, then astonished me by dabbing on her old fire-engine red lipstick. She blotted her lips on a gas receipt she found on the seat. It was a gesture of such normalcy that I smiled at her. “You look nice,” I said, worried for a moment that she might respond by wiping the color off her lips, but she’d smiled back.