Jenny and the Jaws of Life Read online

  Of course no one knew what their sexual life was like—these people were not young, and the Lingards were especially discreet—but friends of both sexes imagined their marriage bed as a sunny place devoid of mystery and strife, their sex foreordained and utterly peaceful, and therefore oddly, and enviably, perverse.

  In fact, in private fact, the Lingards were so perfectly suited that they were not even aware of the joy they took in each other, joy being their natural state. With other mates they might have known ecstasy, romance, resentment, the thrill and risk of sexual war; they settled, in their ignorance, on kindness and the modest pleasures of companionship. Their sex really was sunny, pleasant, free of effort and ambition. They were mated for life, simply, like greylag geese, and like those plain purposeful fliers they were incapable of imagining any other life but this. They hadn’t the sense to be smug.

  Which is not to say they were inhuman. Once, while they were driving across Florida, Kenneth told Anita to “Shut up.” One morning he said “Look, I don’t want Grape-Nuts” with absurd emphasis, in a querulous voice that saddened and diminished them both. Once when she was practicing the violin, with an all-Beethoven concert upcoming, she told him to fix his own damn dinner. But with a single exception this was the extent of their empathic failure. They were two complex individuals who made a simple miraculous whole. In the middle of a sleepless night, at a boisterous gathering, in front of a television set blaring dreadful news of the perilous world, one would reach out and touch the other lightly, unconsciously, like a talisman.

  They had only one real fight in twenty years, and that very early in their marriage, when Anita made an offhand remark about her horoscope in the morning paper. “According to the stars,” she told him at the breakfast table, “I must avoid undertaking any important projects today.” She was trying to think of a way to turn this into a joke when he asked her to repeat herself, as he had been reading the front page. She obliged, feeling a little foolish, since she had not meant anything by it in the first place.

  Kenneth, who had been up working late five nights running, and who was ordinarily the most easygoing of men, was suddenly outraged that a reputable newspaper would run an astrology column. It was just that sort of bleak, caffeine-driven morning for him: any innocuous thing could have brought on his sudden, hungry outrage. Anita, who agreed that astrology was an insult to the intelligence, made a mild remark about the public’s right to get what they want, even if it’s bad for them. “And anyway,” she said, “it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

  For a long time they seemed not to be arguing at all, but merely carrying on an extended intellectual debate, the locus shifting from breakfast table to kitchen sink while she washed dishes, to the bathroom while he shaved, to the bedroom while they dressed, and at first they seemed mostly in accord, with Kenneth agreeing that people had the right to believe that the world is flat or that you can talk to the dead, and Anita agreeing that it was contemptible for nonbelievers to exploit their folly.

  But it gradually emerged that they did not see eye to eye on what was folly and what was not: under the general heading of “claptrap” Kenneth included theories of ESP and telekinesis, which Anita had casually assumed were plausible; and when he refused to allow that scientists had any sort of duty to test these theories out she was unpleasantly surprised. Surely, she said, the sighted should lead the blind, and outright fraud should be exposed by those best qualified to do so.

  “That takes time, Anita,” said Kenneth, tying his tie. “You can’t expect a Ph.D. to sacrifice a big chunk of his career just because some moron wants to believe that vegetables love chamber music.”

  Anita then supposed she too must be a moron, for she had more or less come to believe in the secret life of plants; and after this the argument became wildly emotional. Kenneth came from a long line of scientists, academics, and agnostics. Anita was the most rational woman in her family. Her mother and her father’s sister had each had out-of-body experiences, her sister was always talking about Velikovsky, and both her grandmothers had met Jesus Christ. Yet except for her sister these women were quite phlegmatic and otherwise sensible, and though she had always felt more intellectually favored than they were, she did not at all like to hear her husband call them “morons.”

  In the end Anita lost control and bitterly reminded him, in barely coherent, tremulous sentences, that there were other ways of looking at the world, that science would never have progressed if Galileo and Newton had been so selfish, and that her people were every bit as smart as his, even if they weren’t educated.

  Kenneth, white-faced and stony, delivered a frighteningly brilliant impromptu lecture on cultural evolution, the pernicious influence of Thomas Aquinas, the sheer staggering heft of human knowledge, generated only by the self-discipline and sober adherence to experimental verification of legions of scientists, who were anything but selfish, who were downright heroic, centurions of the enlightenment, committed to protecting and defending the truth; and he spoke, with as much feeling as if he had actually been present at the event, of the Great Library of Alexandria and its destruction by fire at the hands of an ignorant mob.

  By now they were stretched out on their bed side by side, fully clothed, exhausted by the violence of their emotions. “I love you,” Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, “but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you”; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, “You son of a bitch.”

  It was a profoundly silly fight; that is, a fight both profound and silly; it would never become a joking matter. They referred to it only implicitly, in the exaggerated care with which they attended to each other in the ensuing days, as though each were both nurse and convalescent. Privately Anita decided that they had really been fighting about something else, most likely their families, and who came from better stock.

  Privately Kenneth considered and rejected this possibility. Although mortified by his own rhetorical excess, so that the echo of his speech, especially the part about centurions and the burning of the library, would, along with his “Grape-Nuts” pronunciamento, torment him for the rest of his life, he could not deceive himself about its cause.

  Underneath his ludicrous show of passion lay the passion itself, the bedrock of his intentional life. He had suffered a brief indelible glimpse of his wife amid the torchlit stampede of his single enemy.

  Their one serious argument became for both Lingards a warning sign posted at the verge of a precipice, a dark drop of unguessable duration; and with this sign in mind they built a marriage otherwise unbounded, which was the envy of all who knew them well.

  Sixteen years later, on a gray October day, Anita and Marilyn Goldberg, whose husband, Saul, was Kenneth’s colleague and close friend, went together to inspect an attic full of old books that the executor of a recently deceased professor’s estate wished to donate to the University Women for their annual sale.

  Though both women had fortified themselves against mold and book dust with strong doses of antihistamine, the air in Professor Giddings’s cluttered attic was so dry and sour that Marilyn suffered an asthma attack and had to run out to the car to get her inhaler. Drowsy Anita nestled back against a rafter, heedless of dirt and spiders, and thumbed through an old blue volume entitled Peeps at Many Lands.

  Anita wallowed in these eccentric collections. She was an enthusiastic dawdler and without her industrious friend could easily accomplish nothing more on an afternoon like this than the further rumpling and soiling of her old woolen jumper. She liked best to imagine the lives of these dead collectors from the evidence of their books, the chatty or self-conscious inscriptions, the cryptic marginalia, the abrupt vandalism of a child’s crayon, the somber elegant script of the aged dead.

  She was reaching lazily for A Girl of the Limberlost when she saw a real girl, a small child, standing in gloom at the top of the attic stairs. The child was wide-eyed and blonde, with a pale, pretty face distinguished by a small pink crescent scar in the middle of one cheek and anot
her at the temple, suggesting that some animal, a dog, had bitten her a long time ago. “Hi, sweetheart,” said Anita, but the child responded with an unchanging stare.

  The directness of watchful children had always unnerved Anita, but there was something particularly disturbing about this one. She was dressed oddly, for one thing: instead of practical play clothes she wore a drab, dark-striped dress of some cumbersome material, like homespun cotton, tied at the waist with a black sash, and hanging almost to her ankles. It was a very old dress, Anita realized, or old-fashioned, anyway. No. Old. The genuine article. The child’s feet were bare, but Anita would not have been startled to see them encased in tiny stiff leather boots, pointed at the toe, laced to the ankle.

  “Kiddo?” said Anita. “Are you going or coming? Are you in or are you out?” But her own voice did not break the spell. Only if the child herself spoke would this happen; and Anita somehow knew the child would never speak. She held her breath, and the airless attic room ticked like a moribund clock, rocked in sudden October wind. Anita was unafraid. She regarded the child unblinking, taking in every detail, until her eyes burned; she rubbed them, and looked again, and the child had disappeared.

  When Marilyn finally puffed her way back to the attic, pausing where the child had stood, to get her breath, Anita asked her if she had passed a little girl on the way, or noticed any kids playing outside. “No,” Marilyn said, and Anita, herself an instant graying child, laughed with delight and clapped her hands.

  Kenneth learned that his wife had seen a ghost in the worst possible way: he heard it from a third party. They were dining in their own comfortable old house, with their old friends the Goldbergs, drinking their own liquor, stoking their own fire with cherry logs they had split themselves and stacked into a sturdy wedge in their own backyard. Anita was in their warm kitchen, standing over a cast-iron stockpot they had found together at a country flea market, her round cheeks brick-red in the fragrant familiar steam of their favorite beef stew. Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs’ living room, and choked the Goldbergs’ big brass ashtray with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis.

  “What do you make of Anita’s ghost?” asked Saul, as Kenneth handed him his beer. “The little wraith,” said Saul, but clearly Kenneth had no idea what he was talking about. This delighted Saul. Marilyn was the mother of his children, and on that account he loved her and would never consider abandoning her, but on that account only. Gray-bearded Saul, short and rotund, sharply dressed in clothes selected and purchased by his wife—dapper, roly-poly Saul was a zealous adulterer, discreet but ruthless, the kind that loved the capture even more than the chase; and only the Lingards made him feel, through their example, the moral weight of his infidelities, the loneliness of his married state. He always felt, beside his dear uxorious friend, a little pathetic, a little shabby. “Never mind,” he now abruptly said, with a show of discomfort.

  “A ghost?”

  “Forget it. So. What’s new?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Saul leaned into Kenneth and whispered, “Your wife has had a paranormal experience.”

  Anita and Marilyn emerged from the kitchen with a cheese board and a can of cashews. “What’s he talking about?” Kenneth asked Anita.

  “I’m afraid I spilled the beans,” Saul told Anita, “about the g-ho-s-t.”

  “Oh.”

  “You didn’t even tell him?” Marilyn rocked Anita with the heel of her meaty hand. “You’ve been yammering about that ghost for a week.” Marilyn, thick-skinned and raucous, forever cuffing and prodding and nudging with her elbow, was everyone’s mother. She elbowed Kenneth. “Wait’ll you hear.”

  Anita said, “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “You saw a ghost?”

  Anita stammered and undercut everything with ineffectual, dismissive flicks of her hand. “It was nothing. Marilyn and I went out to the Giddings estate the other day to sort through some books, and I thought I saw something, but it wasn’t worth mentioning.”

  To me, Kenneth said with his mild reproachful eyes.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be interested,” Anita said aloud.

  Kenneth busied himself with poking the fire. “I take it this was the shade of old Mort Giddings. How did he look?” He grinned up at Marilyn. “Did he goose you in the vestibule?”

  “She didn’t see it,” said Saul. “My wife didn’t see the ghost.”

  Anita described the attic encounter in an offhand manner, with shrugs and headshakes that were obviously supposed to belittle it. She addressed her husband but avoided looking right at him. She looked, to everyone, like a guilty wife reciting an alibi. “Probably just some neighborhood kid playing dress-up,” she said, and her husband saw the lie.

  For the next hour, while they ate, they talked hospital politics and local gossip, but none of them forgot Anita’s ghost. Because Marilyn believed all women wanted children, she saw in the ghost child the incarnation of her barren friend’s unconscious wish. This, and the sudden strain between the Lingards, disturbed her. Marilyn loved her friends, and revered their marriage, in a sentimental way.

  Saul shared Kenneth’s pure contempt for the mere idea of ghosts, yet he had enjoyed Anita’s flustered attempt to deceive her husband, the insight it had given him into the intimate dynamics of this ideal marriage. Too, he found the spectacle of Anita’s wifely submission deeply erotic and wondered seriously for the first time about her round little body, and its tidal rhythms—what sounds she would make when she crested, and how she would feel when she broke. Hypothetically. Saul would never betray his friend, except now, in this way, riding his beloved wife on the gravy-and wine-stained tablecloth, amid goblets and lighted candles and plates of steaming garlicky stew, while all around them four old friends, three of them blind as bats, speculated about future trends in immunology.

  After dinner, over brandy, Saul told a funny story from his Cornell days, a good one with a late May blizzard and sex and frostbite, and when the laughter died down Anita sighed and said, to Kenneth, “I just wish you’d been there.” No one imagined she was talking about Ithaca. “I wish you had seen what I saw.”

  “Forget it,” Marilyn said. “If God spoke to Saul from a burning bush he’d find some way to wriggle out of it. The boys have a smart answer to everything.”

  “That’s what I want. The answer.”

  “To what?” Kenneth asked.

  “Why was the little girl dressed like that?”

  “Some kind of costume. You just said so yourself.”

  “Why was the old dress—I know it was the real thing—in such good condition?”

  “It was well-preserved.” Kenneth frowned affectionately at her. “Really, Anita.”

  “Why was she barefoot on a chilly October day?”

  “Why not? What does barefoot have to do with a ghost?”

  “It’s odd, that’s all.” Anita, who rarely smoked, lit her third cigarette in ten minutes. “How did she just disappear? All right then, she went downstairs while I was rubbing my eyes, but why didn’t Marilyn see her?” This was Anita’s trump card.

  “She’s right,” Marilyn said. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “You weren’t looking. You saw and forgot. She slipped out the back way.”

  “Or shot up the chimney! Kenneth, you had to be there. This was a strange child. She came out of nowhere and stood still looking at me, and she was, I’m sorry, unearthly, I can’t help it, and that attic room, with her in it, was an enchanted place.” She had no proof, and didn’t see, quite, why she needed it. “You’ll just have to trust me on this,” she said.

  Kenneth counted to ten, and when he spoke his voice was low and pleasant. “Were you on any medica
tion?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Benadryl,” Marilyn said. “We were sneezing our heads off that morning. Remember?”

  She wanted to say “What are the odds?” but he would just ask “Against what?” and she didn’t know the answer to that. She had nothing on her side but experience. Kenneth didn’t have to say anything. He was attending to her now with every appearance of interest, as though she were a respected colleague, an equal, and they were hashing out some difference of opinion that could go either way. He was making a great effort for her. “I surrender,” she said, and felt relief.

  Saul called her a pushover. “He hasn’t convinced you. You’re just backing off.”

  “It’s not a question of backing off. I know my husband, Saul.”

  The Lingards regarded each other in that intimate, delicately exclusionist fashion that so confounded their friends, especially Saul Goldberg. They were again, effortlessly, of one mind.

  Marilyn snorted. “So! Your husband tells you what to see, how to feel about it? That’s cute. Does he dream your dreams for you?” She put her big square hand on her husband’s thigh. “What did I dream about last night?”

  “You dreamed of me, Mama,” said Saul. “I was sensational.”

  “What I saw doesn’t matter,” Anita said. “There are no ghosts.” She was still addressing her husband, and smiling in that maddening private way. Both Goldbergs thought of Kate the Shrew placing her hand beneath Petruchio’s foot; the image affected each in a different way. “If there were ghosts, then everything Kenneth knows—and you, Saul—would be wrong.”

  “Or at least useless in explaining it,” said Kenneth.