Jenny and the Jaws of Life Page 5

  “My sighting of the ghost is only…a historical event,” said Anita, recapturing Kenneth’s sixteen-year-old arguments. She said, to Marilyn, “It’s just like a miracle that way.”

  “What she means is that it’s nonrepeatable,” said Kenneth, “which means it can’t be tested. Which is all, ultimately, that can be said about it.”

  Marilyn was gaping at him. “Is this what you two talk about when you’re alone? What do you do, have seminars in the bedroom?”

  The Lingards laughed suddenly, mysteriously, and blushed. “We have talked about it,” said Anita. “The problem is the same for ghosts as for other para…”

  “—parascientific claims,” Kenneth said. “Parascientists just report these events. They have produced no theories to explain them. If there was a ghost in Giddings’s attic it existed independently of all known physical laws, and probably in violation of fundamental theory.”

  “So?” Marilyn, outraged, rose above the derision of husband and friends. She scolded Anita. “So, you don’t know what you know? You don’t believe what you see with your own eyes? What do you care about known physical laws? What’s it to you?”

  “It’s nothing to me,” said her friend. “It’s everything to Kenneth.”

  “Ah-hah,” said Saul Goldberg.

  And Kenneth, blindsided, glanced sharply at Anita, who reminded him just then of the glycerin-eyed bejeweled wife of a particularly obnoxious TV evangelist. He reeled before his own gross disloyalty.

  Saul raised his glass to him and murmured, “Lucky man.”

  “And you,” said Marilyn, pointing at Kenneth, “what if you had seen the ghost?”

  “He wouldn’t have,” said Anita.

  “Because he’s blind, or because there wasn’t a ghost to see?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes it does!” said Kenneth, but only Saul heard him, and roared with laughter, which everyone ignored.

  This was better than soccer, Saul’s game of choice in youth. The true nature of the Lingards’ compromise was shimmering into view, a great bubble wobbling to and fro, sinking all the while, toward its comic doom. His own bighearted, domineering wife, unaware of the trouble she was making, went on berating Kenneth and Anita. Marilyn’s job was bossing children, and she never stopped to wonder if she had the right, or listen to her own strident voice; she had no subtlety and no vanity. She hunkered forward on the couch, her tight skirt twisted and straining, her big knees wide apart. Kenneth never even glanced down between her thighs; his lack of curiosity was mildly insulting. Saul himself reached over to pour himself more wine and sneak a peek.

  Marilyn had by now forgotten that she didn’t believe in the ghost, so strongly did she disapprove of Kenneth’s bullying and poor Anita’s compliance. “How can you be so sure of yourself? You’d rather believe your own wife is nuts than be wrong about this thing. Shame on you.”

  “You can’t expect him to throw his career out the window on my account,” said Anita.

  “He doesn’t have to throw anything out the window! You can believe two things at once. He can believe his theories, and he can believe you. Don’t think so much! Who needs it? You people are crazy.”

  “They’re not my theories, Marilyn. This isn’t some pet notion I have, that she has to humor me….” There was something wrong. Kenneth felt discouraged, and annoyed with everyone, including himself, and some other negative emotion, so alien that he could not name it.

  “You never answered me. What if you had seen the ghost? Never mind, Saul, shut up. Suppose you’d seen and believed. Then where would you be? It seems to me,” said Marilyn, her face brightening at her own cleverness, “that you’ve put your faith in something pretty iffy, if this is all it would take to make your whole world fall apart.”

  Anita, eyes closed, trying to remember Kenneth’s exact words when she herself had raised a similar argument, spoke haltingly, like a hypnotized subject. “It is not possible…or necessary…to rule out the existence of a…Gegenbeispiel.” She grinned at Kenneth. “Pretty good, huh?”

  Kenneth turned away from her and jabbed at the dying fire. “She means ‘counterexample.’ No, Marilyn, we don’t live in fear of absurd counterexamples.” Kenneth was lonely. For the first time in twenty years.

  “All right, Smarty, but what if you had seen it?” Saul and Anita groaned, but Marilyn was like a bulldog with a bone. “Here you are, alone in an ordinary old attic, minding your own business, when all of a sudden presto! A little kid in weird clothes, only let’s say—why not?—she’s floating, no wires or anything, and there’s a human head tucked underneath her arm! And you haven’t taken any drugs, you pinch yourself and you’re wide awake, you check everything out. I mean, what would it take for you? Okay, you’ve got witnesses too. And meanwhile her head is swiveling around and around like that kid in The Exorcist, sparks are shooting out—I’m asking you, what would it take? How would you handle that, Mr. Science?”

  Marilyn laughed then, with the others, and for a while nothing had changed after all, it had maybe been a false alarm, and Kenneth simply enjoyed the sight and sound of his happy wife. But she didn’t stop laughing when everyone else did; she would stop, and glance at Kenneth, and then start afresh. She kept saying, “I’m sorry,” but she couldn’t have been, because clearly all she had to do to stop was quit recharging herself, which she finally did. She stared down at her lap, biting her lower lip like a choirgirl with the giggles.

  “What’s so funny?” Marilyn asked, and started her up all over again.

  “He’d lose his mind!” Anita said, pointing at him, pointing him out as though he were some little blob on the horizon. She saw his face and laughed harder. “Oh Kenneth, I’m sorry, but HA HA HA they’d have to cart you away!”

  During the next days Kenneth withdrew from Anita. He was pleasant to her, and polite, and frigid. This behavior was not entirely involuntary, as he well knew, but only he suffered from it. If he was trying to punish her, he was unsuccessful. Anita, to her astonishment, reveled in having displeased him. She was on her own and it made her giddy. She assumed that the estrangement would pass; she would make the most of it while it lasted. Although it did occur to her, when he would look right at her and decline to take her in and this would fail to move her in the least (except to a touch of admiration for his style), that perhaps she was numb.

  One afternoon she picked him up early at the labs so they could go furniture shopping, and because her neck was stiff she let him take the wheel, and because one of the stores happened to be in the neighborhood of the Giddings house, Kenneth went a few blocks out of his way to drive past it: and there she was, the child, on a tricycle in the driveway next door, in Oshkosh overalls and a Cabbage Patch jacket. They were close enough to make out the little pink scars on her face.

  “Is that your ghost?” he asked, and Anita could see that nothing much rode on her answer; that had this been the wrong child he would not have been embarrassed; that he was not elated now, because this was no victory for him, because there had been no contest. He had never needed proof. She could have killed him. She rolled down her window and shouted at the child: “Little girl! Little girl!” “What are you doing?” he asked, and she hissed at him, “She was trespassing, the little brat,” and he said “Jesus Christ, Anita,” and tromped on the accelerator, peeling away from the curb.

  He didn’t know why he had driven by the damn house in the first place, and now he cursed the impulse that had led him there and the rotten luck of finding the damn kid. What were the odds? She should have been in school at this hour, or visiting friends; she should have been inside her own house, which should have been elsewhere, at least on the next block, preferably on the far side of the moon. She was as outlandish and unnerving to him in sunshine as she had been to Anita in the dusty gloom. She had made a fool out of his wife. Twice.

  He told her he was sorry. He said it again that night, as they undressed for bed, and this time she answered. “Forget it,” she
said; and the next day she brought the matter up herself, and joked about Halloween costumes and premenopausal insanity. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “The more I think about it the more I’d like to go back there myself and ask her just what she was doing there in the attic, and why the old clothes and the bare feet…. You know, it really is intriguing”; and she said, “Don’t patronize me, Kenneth.”

  Then her mother, who lived alone a thousand miles away, fell and broke her hip; and though her sister lived nearby and could have taken care of her, Anita flew out to spend six weeks in her mother’s house, nursing, reminiscing, mending fences. “She won’t live forever,” she told Kenneth as she packed. “I haven’t been a very attentive daughter,” she said, not having to add, “since I married you.”

  In her infrequent visits, accompanied by Kenneth, Anita had always suffered pity for her mother, because she saw, with Kenneth’s eyes, an intelligent woman who could have had a fine mind given proper guidance and discipline; a sucker for every hare-brained idea that mystics and charlatans could dream up. In the context of daughterly love and respect this had been hard: it had been hard to see her mother exposed to the thin, wintry air of Kenneth’s appraisal. Now, on this visit, she rediscovered her mother’s strengths, her effortless humility, her naturally good sense.

  Her mother, an old woman now, had cast aside the spirit world for the spiritual. “Card tricks,” she scoffed, “tricks with mirrors, scraps for the lost and the easily led. I was one of them, Anita, and your sister still is.” She hefted the old Bible she now kept constantly with her. “You were the brightest one of the bunch of us. You knew dross from gold.” She never proselytized. Anita appreciated her shrewdness in this, the fine discretion with which, in all her enthusiastic talk of the Christian experience, she never once referred to her son-in-law, a man whose sole accommodation to her had been his love for her daughter; a man who, in the hardest sense, had taken her daughter away. She would say only: Faith is the other way of knowing. When Anita finally left for home she had faith, if not yet in God, then in the “other way of knowing.”

  There was something different about the Lingards. People sensed it without realizing: a nagging little something that made their friends feel at once gratified and bereft. Occasionally, when her husband was holding forth on some abstract matter, Anita would laugh and roll her eyes skyward in mild ridicule, or fondly pat his knee and call him “stuffy.” Sometimes when Anita told one of her rambling, ill-assembled stories, or talked about God, which she now often did, in a hypothetical way, Kenneth would sigh and smile at her from a distance, with tolerant affection. These were terribly ordinary events, and people easily forgot—for they had never been a flashy couple—that the Lingards had once really had an extraordinary marriage. The more poorly matched pairs still envied and resented them, and yearned to be as close as the Lingards were now.

  Even the Goldbergs did not understand why these occasional dissonant moments seemed so shocking. “I don’t know how Anita stands it,” Marilyn said on one tipsy, rainy drive home, when all that Kenneth had done was fall asleep while Anita was talking, and Saul was quick to point out that his friend had been working overtime and besides, “He’d heard that story at least once before, because I have, too,” and Marilyn said, “So! That gives him the right to be rude?” and Saul said, “It’s not rude to bore your husband?” And in this cross, distracted way they began to grieve for what their friends had lost.

  They had New Year’s Eve at their house, with just the Goldbergs and two other couples. In midevening Anita consented to perform, so there was an unusual slapdash concert, Saul faking his way through the piano accompaniment to a couple of Mozart sonatas while Anita’s violin sang melodies so lucid and so congruous that they were immediately familiar. Even Kenneth, who had a poor ear, felt he must have always known this music, these sunny, disarming melodies. He guessed that she was playing well. He admired the incline of her head, her thoughtful expression, rapt yet untheatrical. He had never admired her before. It was an awful feeling. When she finished he clapped the loudest of all. I know that woman, he told himself, like talking to a friend—Hey! I know that woman!—but he didn’t, and he never had. He supposed that most people endured just this degree of solitude all their lives with good grace, even indifference. He would have given all he had to recover his durable old illusion; to spare himself the sight of his admirable wife.

  Midnight came and went, with a particularly stupid ceremony. (“Good riddance,” said Saul Goldberg. “To bad rubbish,” cheered his wife.) Everyone but Kenneth got a little drunk Anita knelt in front of the fire, swaying very slightly in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Three or four times she caught his eye and winked and said; “I feel terrific.” He supposed this was true. Lately there had been an odd, raffish air about her, as though she found adventure in the everyday solitary life. With her hair disarrayed, and firelit, and her sturdy plump body, she was an attractive woman still. She was, he had recently come to see, the image of her mother. Once recently she had said to him, “You can quit worrying. I’m not going to find Christ.” She had smiled then, her new secret smile. “I’d never do that to you,” she had said, raking him with the old woman’s shrewd, patient eyes.

  She held the floor now telling a story that the rest evidently found greatly amusing. People liked his wife. She was a likable woman. “Honestly,” she was saying, “it turned into a real knockdown, drag-out. He said, ‘Plants can’t think,’ and I said, ‘Well, excuse me.’ But the funny thing was, it really got under my skin for some reason, so that I didn’t let it go. And then—and then—he goes ‘Isaac Newton was a saint! Einstein was the savior of humanity!’” She deepened her voice and flung her arms about in a silly way, imitating him.

  Everyone was laughing and glancing his way. Saul, after laughing the loudest, protested that his friend would never have said either thing.

  She said, “Whatever. This is just the gist of it, you understand. The point is that we ended up crying and yelling at each other, and I’ll never forget—” she pointed to him, she said, “Sorry, honey,” and there was nothing in her eyes but simple mischief—“I’ll never forget as long as I live this deadly serious look on his face, and he says, just like this, he says: ‘I love you, honey, but…I Would Not Burn the Abyssinian Library for You.’” All their friends screamed and rocked with laughter.

  “Alexandrian,” he said, but she couldn’t hear him. “Alexandrian,” he said again.

  “Whatever,” she said, then did a double take, goggling at him for the benefit of her public, whom she now addressed with an awed smile at him. She said, “You’re wonderful. Isn’t he wonderful?” She held out her arms to him; she knelt, in firelight, in front of the world, exacting his embrace. “I love you,” she said.

  Because he believed her, and because some things simply were not done, he joined her on stage, held her with sudden urgency, so they were both surprised, and she, startled into joy, momentarily forgot where she was, and he pressed her face gently to his chest, to hide and shield her, from what he could not say.

  Exactly then for the first time there appeared to Kenneth a woman he had never met and yet already knew, a woman as intimate as his own history. She materialized nowhere, for she had no body, although he somehow knew she would be lean and fair, and probably, though not necessarily, young. She was an invisible bundle of his own ideas; she was Athena, the daughter of his own mind. Because he needed her, she had occurred to him, and she could never, ever unoccur. She could only gather substance. He was sorry, and he put her roughly out of mind, while he still could, and he shut out the witnesses all around, and gently rocked his loving, admirable, good wife, while all the time the next one, his true companion, set out from the alien provinces, like a constant, sure-footed messenger, coming straight for him.

  Melinda Falling

  The very first time I saw her, Melinda was in midair, just below the summit of a long, winding staircase, on her way down. There were three other women on th
e wide carpeted stairs; two were prettier than Melinda, and all more chicly dressed—cocktail party, Newport; lawyers, bankers, brokers—but Melinda eclipsed them all, descending, as she did, by somersault and cartwheel. She was upside-down when I first caught sight of her, left profile to me, splayed hands poised above the stair upon which the uppermost chic woman was standing; long black skirt accordioned around her hips, plump pink face partially obscured by a curtain of brown hair. I thought: Oh, my. Her right foot came down first, glancing off the edge of a step, snapping free the golden heel of her plastic shoe, and, momentarily upright, she pivoted and went down the rest of the way sideways, arms and legs extended like spokes. She wheeled, in stately fashion, between the other two women, who stood motionless as handmaidens in a frieze, watching her. All watched her, all held their breath: she whirled in dignified silence, broken only by the soft thuds of hand and foot on thick red carpeting. She did not exactly defy gravity, but mastered it by the perfect rate of descent, so that, for instance, the hem of her skirt ebbed and flowed with tantalizing discretion. So deliberate, solemn, and utterly magical was her progress that it promised to go on forever. When finally she touched down on the floor, upright, there was a little collective sigh of disappointment and then spontaneous applause led, I believe, by me. “Magnificent!” I said “Bravo!” And I took her arm and led her away from the crowd. I was half in love already and wanted her all to myself. “Get me out of here,” she said—her first words to me—and the expression on her flushed, round face was regal, impenetrable.

  Stepping out of her ruined shoes she walked beside me like a queen (though she was actually quite short), and we were out the door and halfway to my car before I realized she was trudging, uncomplaining, through ankle-deep snow in stockinged feet. “Allow me,” I said, circling her midriff with one arm and stooping to cradle the backs of her knees. But she pretended not to understand and speeded up, high-stepping through the snow just ahead of me. Cursing my awkwardness I followed her, semiattached in this absurd posture, and cursed myself again when, ushering her into my Jaguar XJ-6, I heard the dull crack of her head colliding, en passant, against the door frame.