All Things Cease to Appear Page 14

  She turned onto her side and rested her head in the palm of her hand. Her body was like the coastline of some exclusive island, a place only certain people got to see, with white villas perched over the blue sea.

  She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out hard with disgust. I’ve been having sex since I was thirteen.

  Everybody makes mistakes, he said. You have to put that stuff behind you. It was something his mother would say.

  I’ll try, Eddy. She touched his arm as lightly as a bird landing on a branch, and he somehow felt patronized. Then she said, I don’t want to hurt you.

  He wondered why she’d say that. You won’t, he told her, but he already knew it was a lie. Don’t worry about me. I’m a pretty tough customer.

  She started kissing him all over, but he pulled her up. He didn’t want her doing any favors for him like she did for everybody else. He kissed her tenderly, and she giggled like a kid and hid her face in the crook of his arm. And then they were wrestling and she was like a boy, like one of his brothers, skinny and fierce, and he could be rough with her and it wasn’t sex, he didn’t even take off her pants—it was something else, something hungry and physical that confirmed that neither one of them would ever really be satisfied. They both knew it and he could see this quiet revelation in her eyes and it got to him and he felt a little sick.

  They fell asleep together, and in the morning, before it was even light, they crept down the stairs. He took her to the field of dead cars. They climbed up on the old bus and he played her a slow, somber tune and it came up out of him like something primal. It was the sound of his own yearning heart. She lay back on the cold metal, looking sleepy, wrapped up in his old coat, and he crawled up beside her and they looked up at the sky. She didn’t say much about her life except that she’d hitched out here from California, which he suspected was a lie, and that her father was a big-deal lawyer who represented gangsters, criminals. I grew up with pictures of dead people all over the house. There’s a lot of interesting ways to kill somebody. Eddy thought this was sad and felt bad for her. Her father wasn’t home very much, she said. There’s plenty of bad people out there.

  Women were mysterious creatures, he thought. She could be nice one day and then ignore him for no good reason. Days would pass and he wouldn’t see her. He didn’t understand it. He’d see her at work and she’d scarcely say a word to him.

  One evening he asked, What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing. Leave me alone.

  Come here.

  Get off me.

  He had to wonder if she was seeing someone else. She didn’t look right. She carried around this big leather sack with books in it. She said she wanted to go back to school. I’m not myself here, she kept saying. Her skin was ashen, a little yellow, smudges of old makeup under her eyes. He’d try to ask her, but she’d just pull away.

  It got to him. He tried not to think about it. He’d done something wrong, he guessed. He didn’t know what, and her not telling him made him crazy. It made him want her more. Then he’d think: Screw her. Because it became pretty obvious she didn’t want him back.

  Sometimes he thought about leaving. I’ll just pick up and go, he thought.

  —

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, a heat wave pushed through town. When there was no wind, you could smell the dump and the smokestacks on the river. People in town would sit out on their stoops, fanning themselves with newspapers.

  With his brothers back in school, it was just him working at the farm, scraping the clapboards. He’d show up early and quit by noon. Sometimes he’d pull up in his father’s old truck just as her husband was heading out the door. Eddy would wave. Mr. Clare would nod but always gave the impression that he was in a rush, too busy to stop. Though he was cordial enough, there was something about him that put Eddy off. He was tall and on the thin side but seemed like somebody who could take care of himself in a fight. He could turn on you for no good reason. He was like one of those dogs Mrs. Pratt took in; he could rip you apart.

  One morning, Eddy pulled in just as Clare was getting into his car, all spruced up for work. Morning, Eddy said.

  Clare smiled like a man paying his toll. Good morning, Ed.

  They spoke for a minute about the work, how he’d already gotten the first coat on and how good it looked.

  Then he said, You’re one of the Hales.

  That’s right.

  She doesn’t know you lived here. You might want to keep that to yourself.

  Something about the way he said it made Eddy want to punch him in the face.

  Scraping paint took time, but he didn’t mind. It was almost therapeutic to go over things in his mind. As much as he wanted to move on, he didn’t seem able to. He would force himself to dream a little; then everything just came back. His mother. His father’s casual abuse. He didn’t know why they hadn’t tried harder. Why they themselves hadn’t thought to paint the house; sure, they didn’t want to spend the money, but there had to be some other reason, too. They’d been content to leave everything just like it was, run-down. The place had looked like hell for years. He’d stopped bringing girls around on account of all the junk piled up. Their pride had gone away. He didn’t know how that happened to people. He hoped it wouldn’t happen to him.

  It wouldn’t, he decided. He wouldn’t let it.

  3

  SOMETIMES HE’D CATCH her staring. When he took off his shirt. He’d hear her inside with the little girl, then she’d bring her outside to play. He’d take a break and they’d sit in the shade a little while and he’d smoke and tell her his plans. He told her about the time his father ripped up his music-school application, then dragged him out in the yard and beat him with a two-by-four. You think you’re better than this, he kept saying. You think you’re better? Eddy was hurt so badly that Wade drove him to the hospital when he only had his learner’s permit, and they lied to the doctor and said it had been a tractor accident. Heading home, they got pulled over and Wade got a ticket, and when their father found it crumpled in his coat he made him sleep in the barn. That’s what it means to be stupid in this world, he told Wade, then glared at Eddy. That barn’s about as far as you’ll get.

  She almost cried, hearing this, then she got mad. He should apply again, she said, and she’d help him with the application and even write the check. You had to submit an essay, and she gave him some paper and told him to write about his life on the farm. So he wrote about how his father had grown up on this farm and his destiny was never a question or a choice, just a fact. How, when Eddy was a boy, they’d lived in a trailer out back, he and his brothers crammed like a litter of puppies on the pullout bed. How they’d steal their shoes out of the Goodwill bins behind the supermarket. He wrote about waking up before dawn to do chores every single day of the year. How the animals counted on you to survive. How, when he heard Louis Armstrong play “Someday You’ll be Sorry,” it seemed like the story of his whole life, because people had wronged him and his family and one day they’d all be very fucking sorry. Then he played it for her and she watched him with her chin resting on her hand and a twinkly look in her eyes, and when he was done she said, Hey, you can really play that thing. I’m impressed.

  Thanks. But I got a long ways to go.

  I hope you get in, Eddy. You deserve to.

  It’s kind of just a dream.

  It’s good to have dreams.

  He shrugged like he didn’t care, but he did. A lot. It was more than some dream. It kept him alive.

  The next day it rained, breaking the heat. He couldn’t paint, but for some reason he showed up anyway.

  It was almost noon, but she answered the door in her bathrobe.

  You okay? he said.

  She frowned, refusing to answer.

  Your husband here?

  She shook her head. At work.

  Where’s Franny?

  Sleeping. She looked at him like a damp flower. It’s raining.

  I’ve been waiting for it to stop.

&
nbsp; You didn’t have to come today.

  I know. He didn’t really know why he’d shown up.

  She smiled a little and held the door open. She looked weak, a little sick. I’ll make you something.

  He sat at the kitchen table and she gave him a cup of tea and fixed him a ham-and-cheese sandwich, standing there at the counter without saying anything. The quiet house was making him nervous. She brought the plate over and put it in front of him and then sat down, and when she looked at him her eyes were like a distant sky, the sky of another country, a strange and mystical place he might have seen once in a dream.

  He chewed, trying not to show his teeth. It’s good.

  My husband, she said finally. We’re—

  He waited.

  It’s just—he’s a difficult person.

  Eddy nodded because he understood.

  We’re just having some problems. She wiped her tears angrily. Most people—married people, I mean…But she couldn’t finish. She looked away and stared out at the rain.

  You know, you’re even pretty when you cry. It was a line he’d heard in a movie, but she didn’t seem to mind it. She smiled.

  There was a puzzle on the table of a farm scene—a hay barn, cows, a farmhouse with a porch. With the rain pouring down, she started moving pieces around, and he knew it was to keep from looking at him. He also knew they weren’t supposed to look at each other, but it was the only thing he wanted to do. Just to sit there and watch her.

  Distractedly, she tried to fit a cardboard piece here and there. I think it goes here, he said, and guided her hand to the obvious spot. Right there.

  I’m no good at puzzles.

  It’s not the shape of the piece that matters, he told her, holding another up. It’s these missing parts. You have to fill those. Like that one, see?

  They worked together, and when they were done he said, That’s pretty good, isn’t it? Across the bottom, the puzzle said Peace and Quiet. He almost laughed, because a farm was anything but. This picturesque scene didn’t have any truth to it. It was just another part of the big fairy tale of America. If you wanted to see a real farm you’d have drunk, broke farmers and hungry animals worried for their lives. You’d have bitter wives and snot-nosed kids and old people broke down from giving their hearts and souls to the land.

  You could hear the rain running through the gutters and splattering on the windowsill. She turned in her chair to watch it.

  It’s sure coming down, he said. Just to say something.

  I love the sound of it. I love a good rain, don’t you? I sometimes just want to run out into it.

  He smiled. Me, too. I’ve had the same thought.

  She suddenly seemed to realize she was still in her robe and got up and took his plate to the sink and stood there scrubbing it. I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

  He watched the bones in her back. The rain can do that. It’s just a rainy day.

  She shook her head like he didn’t understand, he couldn’t possibly know what her trouble was.

  He went over and took the plate from her hand and set it down gently. You’re liable to break this.

  She turned around, crying full-out, and he took her in his arms and she held him hard, like a frightened child, and they stood there like that in his mother’s old kitchen with the rain pounding down and they didn’t move, they didn’t move.

  All Things Cease to Appear

  1

  ORIGINALLY ESTABLISHED as a seminary in 1879, the college overlooked the Hudson from six hundred acres on its grassy shore. Most of its buildings had been constructed using pale-gray river stones, but later additions, in the ’60s, were in the Brutalist style, long cement structures with rectangular windows, and the overall effect was dissonantly anachronistic. From where George was standing, in a small wooden gazebo on a bluff over the river, he recalled Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills, for the view was almost an exact match. In a hundred years or so, this landscape hadn’t changed much. But upriver, around Troy and the GE plant in Schenectady, industry edged along the water, monstrous with waste and PCBs. He had to wonder if it was even possible to consider Cole’s landscape with innocent, nineteenth-century pleasure, now that the environment had been corrupted—and the viewer’s gaze along with it.

  His wife criticized him for being too analytical. That’s what graduate school did to you, the residual contrariness of the terminal degree. His incarceration had finally come to an end, but, as with most inmates of one kind or another, the experience had changed him. He supposed he’d acquired a few disagreeable habits. As much as he could admire the panorama before him, unlike Thomas Cole, it didn’t move him on any spiritual level. But then what did?

  The boats of Saginaw’s crew team were on the water, gliding swiftly, their oars sweeping in perfect unison. He couldn’t help thinking of Eakins’s rowers, their broad, muscular backs, the rippling surface of the river. It was early September, a gray hot day, the air tangy with rain. He glanced at his watch and started for Patterson Hall, the building that housed the Art History Department and the domain of its chair, Floyd DeBeers. Students had arrived the day before and now drifted through the quad with fans and lamps, their movements checked, nearly procedural, as they frowned with mock confusion at their sheets of instructions.

  Climbing the stairs in his new loafers, he passed two women, one ascending, the other descending, both in longish dresses and clogs, files under their arms. There was an officious air about the place, he thought. He roamed down a hall toward the department office, an octagon-shaped room with tall windows, where he confronted a vacant desk brimming with the sort of autumnal paraphernalia he remembered from grade school—yellow leaves, miniature pumpkins, a Mason jar full of sunflowers—and a nameplate for Edith Hodge, Department Secretary. But the secretary was not at her desk.

  Is that you, George? DeBeers called from his office, his desk chair honking and squealing.

  George poked his head in. Hello, Floyd.

  Come on in. Close the door.

  DeBeers rose to his feet and extended his hand. He was burly and discombobulated, taller than George, in a wrinkled, ill-fitting brown suit peppered with cigarette ash. His tarnished-silver ponytail, hastily fastened with an elastic band, gave him the look of a dissolute senator.

  Nice view, George said, noting the distant river.

  One of the perks of being Chair. This office is the only reason to do this miserable job.

  He flashed a smile and motioned for George to sit. Your chapter on Swedenborg, it’s actually why I hired you. He almost blushed, then admitted, We have a small following here.

  George smiled. Though he was grateful, of course, he found it disturbing and a little comical that his chapter on Emanuel Swedenborg, brief as it was, had been the deciding factor. In fact, it was the section of his dissertation that had caused him the most grief. His subject was the painter George Inness, whose landscapes had evolved over time from ornate, meticulous depictions of nature as defined by the Hudson River School to transcendental renderings of an American paradise. Late in his career, Inness had been influenced by Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher who claimed, among his varied accomplishments, to be a clairvoyant. George Inness and the Cult of Nature had been George’s rather clever title, although his adviser hadn’t appreciated the irony. While George could credit some of Swedenborg’s ideas, his proclamation of being a seer, of having the ability to communicate with angels and spirits, read like the rant of a person with an undiagnosed mental disorder. He’d been dead a hundred years before Inness had discovered him—along with William Blake and William James—but for Inness it went deeper, George thought, to that murky place within. When he was finally baptized in the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, Inness was well over forty. To George, this exemplified the classic, obsessive behavior of a man in a midlife crisis. He wasn’t about to say this to DeBeers, who for all he knew might be fighting a similar battle.

  We even do séances on occ
asion, DeBeers said, sounding half serious. You’ll have to join us sometime.

  That could be fun, he lied. But I should warn you—I’m a devoted skeptic.

  DeBeers laughed confidently, as if accepting a challenge. I used to be a skeptic myself. You couldn’t talk me into anything. You know what I believed in? Conspiracies. I was somehow under the impression that everything that went wrong in my life could be attributed to some devious plot to destroy me. That’s how I lived my life, if you can imagine. Waiting. Waiting. Always waiting. With terror! And then something did happen: I lost my wife.

  I’m sorry to hear that, George said.

  She was, well—we had something special. I don’t think I’ll ever have that kind of love again. He glanced at George apologetically. I’m on my third wife now, you know.

  No, I didn’t.

  Connie was my second—the love of my life. It was a once-in-a-lifetime connection. I was grateful for it.

  Sounds pretty great.

  It was. DeBeers nodded, momentarily preoccupied with something on his desk. Anyway, losing her—her death—got me thinking about the big questions: life and death, the afterlife, all the possibilities.

  I’m not sure there are any.

  You’re a realist, yes? One of those people who have to see it to believe it. Am I right?

  George nodded. That’s probably true.

  DeBeers leaned back in his noisy chair, pressing his hands together under his chin. So tell me this. How did a cynical agnostic like you end up with a Swedenborgian like Inness?

  He was a great painter. A great American painter. I didn’t know any of this until I started my research. I’d never even heard of Swedenborg. So, no, that was hardly a factor in my choosing Inness.

  Well, then, perhaps he chose you. DeBeers grinned, pleased with himself.

  That’s one way to look at it.

  I take it you’re not a person of faith. You’re not—he hesitated—open to it?

  He looked at DeBeers.

  I was living in Boston, DeBeers went on. This was long ago. I was like you. An academic. If you can’t prove it, it doesn’t exist. And then my wife got sick, and just like that—he snapped his fingers—she was dead. A friend took me to this church, a Swedenborg branch, and I started reading the literature, all the stuff he wrote about heaven. I found it, well…comforting. It’s actually a very beautiful philosophy. It’s about love, more than anything else. The intense love of God.