The Cradle Page 7

  “I’m thrilled you have a plan for that.”

  “It’s not a plan,” she said, stuffing the baggie back into her purse. “It’s logic. I’m telling you, this was an accident anyway.”

  “Okay, okay,” Bill said, hands up. “Let’s get you some water.” He pressed the overhead button for the stewardess and said, “I’m wondering if this is the kind of problem that makes them turn the plane around.”

  “I’ll be fine. So it’s some speed. I existed in the seventies.”

  “You were maybe not so on edge in the seventies.”

  “Just stop,” she said. “Stop, Bill. Okay? I’m fine. I’ll write.”

  She had a notebook. She’d stuffed it into her purse this morning. She’d thought that maybe, given the right feeling—the right evening on the beach, the right wind coming from the water—her mind would turn back to the last white note card on the board and show her some way to write it.

  It had persisted in the back of her mind these last months. She’d done nothing. She’d been thinking of Adam, and the poems had, in the last months, begun to feel embarrassing. Never mind whether or not they were good—embarrassing because she’d written them at all, because she had become a middle-aged woman writing poems in her study. It was something she should have been proud of. A younger version of herself would have been proud. Now it looked capricious and escapist, glibly bourgeoisie, some silly grab at self-therapy, not art, not anything that mattered.

  And yet the board had stayed up. The blank note card was still there. She had begun to believe that finishing it would finish everything. Write the poem, and the feeling will be out of you, there will be something complete. Everyone can move on. You will never have to think of it again. If that formula was true, then it was so close, only ten lines away, and she would have her freedom. They got the water and Bill rubbed her neck a bit and asked her how she felt. The answer was, she felt her heart beating in her chest and was aware of every artery, vein, and capillary that snaked through the skin of her face, her neck, and along the sides of her head. The round muscles at the bottom of her jaw were twitching. Already she had a headache. She said she felt fine, like she’d had too much coffee. Bill seemed skeptical, but he turned back to his newspaper. She closed her eyes, pen in hand, not knowing what she would write. She listened to the sound of the engine and she found herself there with Jonathan on some airplane as well, crossing the ocean, and then there with him as he landed.

  What was it? Hot. Humid. His letters—there were only four letters—had said that the humidity was what he couldn’t get over, and that he walked off the plane and it was like walking into water. And so she imagined him in all the places she could think to imagine him—sitting near a stream, gun resting across his legs. Sleeping in a barracks. Pacing through the jungle, crouched low, forming one arm of a triangle of other men doing the same. It was everything she’d gotten from movies.

  She wrote this. First she just listed the images that came into her mind, but she found herself, after filling a page with the images, connecting them to one another, trying to make a story out of it. She made Jonathan thinking of her at night but doing his best to not think of her at other times because thinking of her would distract him, and being distracted would get him killed. Then he was in Saigon, sitting at an outdoor café, writing a letter to her. Around him the city was alive and moving. She didn’t know what details to fill it with, so she just tried to think of people. An old man walking slowly. A prostitute yelling at another table of soldiers. Children. Palm trees? She didn’t know. She took these images and did her best to weave them in with what she had written about him in the jungle. She found herself writing whole paragraphs about things she didn’t know about, things like what Jonathan thought of his aunt and uncle in Chicago; what Jonathan thought, truly, about the war; what Jonathan planned to do when he returned. She found herself writing one of his thoughts: he didn’t know whether he would marry her. It hurt to write it. She wondered whether it was true. He had promised her he would and she had believed him, absolutely. “I understand the right thing to do,” he’d said. But. What if she had spent the better part of her life thinking of what could have been between them and he had died there, unsure whether he loved her? Whether he was trapped? Was such a thing possible? She never wrote to him about herself, back home in Chicago. She never mentioned the classes, sitting at desks, taking notes, explaining to her parents that they had not given him enough of a chance, and that when he came home, they’d know him, really know him, and she and he would be married and they would appreciate him.

  It broke down before she could bring herself to write the scene of his death. She had thought about it, of course. She had wondered. In the first days she knew only “killed in combat.” Then she became obsessed, she wanted to know the exact details. She had made phone call after phone call to any military office she could find, but those calls had been only frustrating and had gone nowhere. Later she waited for a letter to arrive from somebody Jonathan knew, somebody who’d been with him. Others had to have been there. She convinced herself that one day she’d walk to the mailbox and find a spare, simple note telling her what had happened, what they’d tried to do to help him, why it hadn’t worked, and what Jonathan had been saying. Some soldier friend of his would have taken it upon himself to seek her out and write the note and let her know. Instead his body arrived and they were not allowed to open the casket because he’d been incinerated.

  His parents came to Chicago for the funeral. Renee wrote about them—how his mother cried and how she wanted to talk to her about Jonathan and how Renee found herself unable to give the woman what she wanted, and by the end had just walked away from her. How the big father hadn’t said a word the entire time. She wrote about his beard and his gray hair, his immense body—nothing like Jonathan’s—his suspenders, the passive sadness in his eyes as he sipped water at the wake and nodded to people. How uncomfortable he was in Chicago. How out of place he felt in their home. She couldn’t remember his first name. She waited, pen poised on paper, for it to come, but it didn’t.

  It was as though, then, her heart had exhausted itself of Jonathan and moved on to the middle ground, the broken landscape. What she scribbled sounded like a children’s story. The tone was altered now, all those stories she’d written, all the ways of making the language simple, making it so any mind could come to it and read it. A transparency but something warm, and then much farther down, something complicated. That was always what she had wanted. She thought of a boy—a boy-prince but someone new, not the happily wry Thomas from her book but someone darker, older, angrier, silent, and she was writing scenes of him traveling across this broken landscape, trying to get from one place to the next, from A to B to Z. Some quest. He would meet with other travelers and speak with them and move on. She didn’t bother filling in what he was seeking, as that didn’t matter in any story—instead she wrote about him alone in the mountains and then down in the valleys, always moving forward, always intent on his path, but far above she was looking down at him, and she could see how impossible it was for him to reach his destination. Terrible, terrible things happened to him as he went, but she brushed over them and didn’t let herself show them completely. She couldn’t. From that high above, she could see that this distance he had to go was impossible. But he didn’t know it. She did not allow him to ever get up high enough to see how arduous the journey was, because had he known, there was a chance that he would have stopped. He had to not know in order to continue.

  For hours this went on. She was not well. Her eyes felt twitchy. Bill would check with her and she would say she was okay. Fine. He would look at the notebook, watch as her hand moved the pen and filled page after page. She would wait for him to ask what she was writing, but he never did. Instead he read. A little later he went to sleep.

  She kept writing, her hand sore. Her stomach was tight but she wasn’t hungry, she couldn’t imagine eating. Her mind was a straight tunnel and there was only one cle
ar circle of light ahead. She stayed with it and refused to leave it and kept writing, even as the words made less sense, as she abandoned sentences altogether for an hour. The letters of her script began to sag and angle. Her handwriting was falling apart. She was not tired, not in the least, when she leaned over toward Bill’s sleeping face and looked out the window and down and saw that, far below them, what seemed like miles down, all you could see was the ocean. Still she wasn’t through. She went back to who she had been in the weeks after the funeral, still going to class, still reading. She moved back to her parents’ home, then blank. She wrote about the long month of December, and Christmas. Her father gave her the Whitman book that year. She would not be going back for the spring semester, but he wanted her to have something to read and think about while they waited. “Your imagination should be working,” her father had said. “Whatever happens in there also happens in there.” One point to the head, one point to the belly.

  They were on the ground. The notebook was nearly full. She packed it away into her purse. Bill asked her if she was all right and she said fine and he asked her again at the luggage terminal and she said fine again.

  Someone gave them leis. It was remarkably humid here, too. She couldn’t help but notice it as she stood beside her husband on the sidewalk and waited for a cab to pull up. “What time is it?” she asked Bill. “It’s two o’clock,” he said. She thought of telling him to take off his lei, that it made him ridiculous. “It’s like we’ve been going back in time,” she said instead. “The way the time zones work.” As they waited, a woman beside her smoked a cigarette and talked on the phone. “I don’t know and you don’t know,” the woman said. “He don’t know neither. That makes several of us.” Renee looked at the woman intently. She was squat and fat, with dark brown hair. She was Hawaiian. She was wearing a white tank top and she held the phone to her ear with her right hand and moved the cigarette away from her lips with her left. She had a tattoo on her left shoulder, and when she turned and saw Renee watching her, she smiled.

  The cab came. They loaded the luggage in. Bill asked if she was okay and she said that she was but that she wanted to lie down. She felt sick when they started moving and she opened the window and closed her eyes, letting the humid air flow over her face. She didn’t open her eyes, and at the hotel, Bill got into an argument with the man behind the desk, slick-haired and young and obnoxiously professional. “Do you see, right here, my confirmation number?” she heard Bill asking, holding a slip of paper up. “No smoking,” he said. “My wife is sick. We’d like to have our room. Our room that doesn’t stink like smoke.” “I assure you, sir, it will not smell like smoke in your room. For tonight, I can put you there, and if there are any problems, we’ll move you first thing in the morning.” “This is unacceptable.” “I’m very sorry, sir, but it’s all I can do right now. We have the Pro Bowl.” “You have got to be kidding me.” “No, sir.” “What is a reservation for then, exactly? I’m curious for future reference.” “There were some extenuating circumstances this year, sir. You see, there was a miscommunication concerning a vacation package offered to fans of the Cleveland Browns.” “You have got to be kidding me.” Bill looked at her and shook his head. She smiled back at him. The light here seemed very strange. She dropped her purse and looked down at it beside her shoe. She looked up—Bill was coming toward her. She felt her hand reaching out but he was too slow, he was remarkably slow, and when she collapsed, she tried to let her knees go down first, because any other way, her body said, there was the problem of her head and the floor.

  The world spun back, and everyone was up in arms.

  At least five men were above her, fanning her.

  “I’m fine,” she said several times.

  They let her up into a sitting position. She told them she was okay.

  “Just a glass of water,” she said, “and the room. I’ll be fine.” Someone had called an ambulance and she told Bill to send it away and he spoke with the EMTs and persuaded them to go. They turned and trudged out of the lobby, looking disappointed, carrying their big cases and their defibrillators.

  When Bill finally got them into the room, she went straight to bed and closed her eyes. She heard Bill say from the bathroom, “That was interesting,” before she fell asleep.

  When she woke up, it was dark.

  Bill was in the bed beside her, watching television, volume low.

  He glanced down and saw that her eyes were open.

  “Well, hello,” he said. “Elvis has returned to the building.”

  She sat up in bed, her back against the headboard, and ran both hands across her face and through her hair.

  “You have some kind of royal speed hangover?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “I think. I feel like the last day of my life was a movie.”

  “We have some food in the other room.”

  “How long have I been sleeping?” she asked.

  “Pretty long,” he said. “But tomorrow we’ll be fine. You’ve just redefined the whole genre of nightmare travel stories.”

  “It was like I was...I don’t know. I felt like I was watching myself through a glass case.”

  She ran her hands through her hair again, then turned and looked at her husband. His bare chest and face were both lit by the TV. He had his glasses on. She imagined him here in the room with her for all the hours she had been asleep. She thought of him at the phone, ordering food, trying to think of what she would like to have. Glass case or no glass case, she had written all those things. Her mind was pushing her, over and over again, to relive everything. She wanted it to end. She needed it to end.

  “Bill,” she said.

  “Renee,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

  “Collapsing doesn’t count as your fault.”

  She was silent.

  “What?” he said. “That was a bad day, Renee. That’s fine. Forget it. Think of it as the extra cost of chasing the sun.”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Bill smiled, shook his head. “Stop apologizing and tell me what you’re apologizing for, Renee,” he said. He sat up and muted the television. He turned to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on. Out with it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. The smallest of steps toward it, and this was happening.

  He must have been able to see the whites of her eyes and the way she was looking at him sideways. She was crying. His eyes changed.

  “Oh God,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t even say it. The words don’t even sound—”

  “What, Renee?” he said, louder.

  She looked at him intently, hoping he would simply understand. Or that by some twist of fate had always known. Or had read her notebook while she slept.

  He didn’t know. She could see by his waiting eyes that he didn’t know. “When I say them in my mind, it’s like they can’t be real,” she said, wiping at her nose. “The words, I mean. I have—there have been so many times when I’ve wanted to...”

  “You have to tell me, honey,” he said. “I’m listening. Tell me. What is it?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I have another son.”

  6

  Once, Matt went to jail. It was a bar fight. Up until about five seconds before it started, he didn’t have a clue he was about to be involved. He was sitting at the bar with a woman whom he’d met that night. Things were not going well. She’d told him that she was a hairdresser and had added nothing else, and that basically ended the entire line of conversation. You were pretty much fucked in conversation if “hairdresser” was where you stopped. They’d already talked about his job. What was left?

  Still, she looked like she wanted him to solve the riddle of the conversation and figure out a way to keep it going, and he was trying to come up with something that would o
pen a door. Typically he was not strong with such things. He liked her—he liked the way she drank, the bottle a little to the side, and he liked her laugh, which was brighter and louder than what he would have expected, based on the few dry comments she’d made since they started talking. She was not a down-on-her-luck person. There was something a little bit brighter about her than anyone else in the place. She’s maybe five years older than me, he thought. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a form appear, and he turned and looked up at the man standing before him. “That’s a pretty girl you’re talking to,” he said, and then he punched Matt in the side of the head and knocked him off the bar stool.

  It didn’t take Matt long to stand up. The man was bigger—six three or six four, with shoulders like a horse’s—but he was old. Matt knew that there was a special strategy to fighting older men. They could be like armored tanks and invulnerable, strong in unnatural, limitless ways, able to endure any punishment. But then you found the right place to hit them, and they were done. He looked about fifty-five. He had a silver mustache and his forearms were all tatted up. Everyone in the bar was silent, watching to see what Matt would do. Matt picked his hat up, then touched his head and felt the blood in his hair. He said, “She is pretty,” and the two of them went outside and about fifteen people followed. The big man walked in front of him, and as they moved, Matt looked down at his opponent’s black sport sandals.

  None of Matt’s friends were there, out in the parking lot. He looked over at his truck, thought of simply walking to it and driving off. The man said, “I haven’t liked you for the last twenty-five minutes or so.”

  “You don’t have much reason for that.”

  “I don’t like the way you sit,” said the man. Matt saw that he made a fist with his right hand and let the left hang limp. “I also don’t like the way you gesture.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Work out your feelings.”

  The man stepped forward, right arm cocked. It was all so slow Matt wondered whether the man was trying to trick him, but he wasn’t, and Matt easily stepped away from the punch, to the side, and as the man went by, he stomped his right boot down with everything he had on the man’s ankle and heard the whole thing crackle. The man collapsed to the concrete, hollering, and Matt kicked him hard in the kidney, twice, punched him in the side of the head, right where he’d punched Matt, then walked to his truck, got in, turned on his lights, reversed out of his spot, and drove away.