She says, “Wouldn’t you rather be free?”
“No. I don’t know. I love you.”
“In your way.”
In your way. A soul-wave rises in him, a surge of intolerable sadness. He has failed everyone. He has neither heard nor seen.
“We shouldn’t separate,” he says. “Not now.”
“You think we should just go on?”
He stops himself from saying,
Wouldn’t he have left
What he wants. To cough up whatever is lodged in his gut, and go to bed. Wake eventually to his old impossible life. He does want that.
Finally she says, “I guess we could try.”
He nods.
Is it this, then? Is it compassion for another, is this all that actually matters? To love, to forgive, to abide?
It isn’t that simple. The ability to care for another being, to imagine what it’s like to
Still. It isn’t nothing.
Rebecca is no longer Galatea, she is no longer Olympia. Time robs us and robs us and when we beg for mercy, it robs us some more. Here is her tired face. Here is her future face, hollowed and pallid, which arrives daily, a face that will (like Peter’s) be ever less capable of arousing the ardor even of a hapless Mike Forth, or a scheming, narcissistic Mizzy. She’s got a strand of her own dark hair plastered into her pale forehead.
At the moment they resemble nothing so much as an anonymous couple in a depot somewhere, huddled together, glad for the room’s warmth, if nothing else.
Small grayish snowflakes tumble and swirl, swirl and eddy and tumble against the window.
Peter glances out at the falling snow. Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic transgressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways—you have not imagined the lives of others.
Out there, beyond the glass, Bette Rice is laughing over a glass of wine with her husband. Mizzy is in midair, watching a romantic comedy on a miniature screen as
Snow is falling into the urn in Carole Potter’s garden, falling on the herb beds, into the petaled mouths of the oregano flowers. A white snow-sheet blows over the empty garden as skeins of falling snow turn and twist in the silvered dark.
There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.
It’s the last snow of the year. After tonight, the days and nights will grow steadily warmer, the hard little buds on the Potters’ yew trees will burst open and bloom.
And here, on this cold night, are Peter and Rebecca, in their familiar bedroom.
Something rises in Peter, more like a plant being uprooted by an invisible hand than a levitation of soul. He can feel the hairlike roots extracting themselves from his flesh. He is being lifted out of himself, shedding the husk of self, that sad hungry man, the action figure with the indifferently painted eyes and the dashed-off polyester suit. But if he’s been a clownish figure he has also been (please God) an acolyte, a lover of love, and his little earthly cavortings were meant to appease a deity, however silly and inadequate his offering. He can see the snow falling and he can see the room from outside the window, a modest chamber worried by weather but fast for now, home for now, to him and his wife, until others take their places. If he died or if he just walked out into the dark, would Rebecca feel his ongoing presence? She would. They have come too far together. They have tried and failed and tried and failed and there’s probably, in the final analysis, nothing left for them to do but try again.
He looks at her.
She is radiant in her sorrow, gauntly fabulous, present in all her particulars, in the broad, pale expanse of her forehead and the Athena-like jut of her brows, in the gray livingness of her eyes, the firm line of her decisive mouth, the prominent bulb of her almost-masculine chin. She is here, right here; she looks exactly like this. She is no failed copy of her younger self. She
“What do you think?” she says.
This is her voice, deep for a woman, with a little rasp to it, an undercurrent of burr, like a stick drawing on sand. She still retains, if you listen carefully, a trace to the old Richmond lilt, burnished by her years away to a soft, astonished rise that makes hard music of the world “think.”
Here is Peter’s art, then. Here is his life (though his wife may leave him, though he’s faltered in so many ways). Here is a woman who keeps changing and changing, impossible to cast in metal because she’s already not who she was when he walked through the door, not who she’ll be ten minutes from now.
Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe all of Peter’s chances are not yet squandered.
He kisses Rebecca, lightly, on her chapped lips.
“Yes,” he says. “I think we could try. I do. Yes.”
He begins to tell her everything that has happened.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would be little more than a figment of my own imagination without my agent, Gail Hochman; my editor, Jonathan Galassi; and the love of my life, Ken Corbett.
If the depictions of the art world contained herein are in any way accurate, it’s due to Jack Shainman and Joe Sheftel.
I would know far too little about Greenwich, Connecticut, without the generous help of Constance Gibb.
I would know far too little about almost everything without the assistance of Meg Giles.
I’m enormously indebted as well to Amy Bloom, Frances Coady, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Stacey D’Erasmo, Elliott Holt, David Hopson, Marie Howe, Daniel Kaizer, James Lecesne, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, Seth Pybas, Sal Randolph, and Tom Grattan.
Also by Michael Cunningham
