FALLING INTO THE NIGHT

FALLING INTO THE NIGHT

He had not been conscious for five days.  During that time his liver failed and his lungs stopped working.  The failure of his liver caused his skin to turn canary yellow, which made her shake her head and avert her eyes.  When the lungs failed, she thought it was time to let him go.  But the doctors insisted both failures could be licked, and by the seventh day, his liver began to function again, and his yellowness began to fade.  The lungs took longer, but in time they began to carry the burden of respiration on their own, and one day, the old man was taken out of intensive care.  What was supposed to be ten days for a by-pass turned into a prolonged siege that lasted a month.

     The old man’s sister, three years younger, came to sit it out with her.  Her aunt had the common sense and the strength that kept her hoping, but one night, before the old man regained consciousness, she had a stroke and wound up in the same hospital.  She didn’t make it.  So there was a funeral after all.  The old man wasn’t told.  His sister was buried before he came out of his morphine stupor, which lasted a full two weeks, and the doctors forbade any mention of the sister. 

     All this happened in the month of May.  June was a time for walking on eggs.  The old man was weak and cranky.  He wanted to talk with his sister and complained bitterly that she hadn’t called.  They were the last of nine siblings and had grown close in recent years, though the sister lived in California and the old man in Florida.  When he called there, her grandchildren made excuses, which only aggravated him.  So it was a question which would do the more damage, telling him or leaving him feel the aggravation every time he called.

     By the end of June it was becoming too traumatizing for her and too much a mystery to the old man, who was already beginning to suspect his sister was dead.  The question was, should she tell him outright or should she let the inevitability of it settle on him of itself and just answer truthfully when he asked, for she knew he would figure out why his sister was out of touch for so long during such a trying time for him. 

It seemed too cruel to let the situation continue, so she told him.  There was no gentle way of saying it.  The old man was always hard to live with, because he was prone to excitability and when provoked he was intolerable.  The news provoked him.  He was angry at not being told sooner and devastated.  It proved too much.  Frail, still precariously recovering, his liver failed again.  The ordeal of a second hospitalization overwhelmed him, and he departed, almost in anger at her for holding back on his sister’s death.  A second funeral in as many months depressed her.  Now there was no one left of that generation. 

     The old man’s daughter returned home to her husband, after a three month’s absence.  He, the husband, went to California and Florida for the funerals, of course, but she held back to settle the estate and dispose of what had to be disposed of.  Her coming home was as much a trial to her as the three intervening months had been.  Her husband was not a good bachelor.  There was considerable strain which the marriage couldn’t recover from.  This is when I met her and heard her story.  She told it all to me, in tones of disheartenment, but, interestingly, without rancor. It’s a sad tale.

     Her husband, Ernest, was a huge, broad-shouldered, large-bellied man, with an immense red-brown beard and long hair tied in a pony tail.  To see him out of doors is like experiencing an eclipse.  He is so large his shadow darkens the world in front of him.  Yet he made his livelihood in the delicate world of computer hardware, working for the phone company.  He was also lusty and intemperate, easily provoked to fierce emotions, though he was not a violent man.  She, his wife, was so much his opposite as to strike wonder in all who knew them and in any who should see them walking on a Sunday afternoon in the park.  She was bony, flat-chested, unassuming in appearance, slightly concave when erect, with a long neck in proportion to the rest of her, which made her head seem to stretch for all it was worth to reach the middle of his upper arm.  She was also soft spoken, so that one had to listen hard in conversation with her.  She looked like the kind of person about whom one would have said in former days, when Freud was all the rage, “repressed sexuality”; while her husband expressed his lustiness in every centimeter of his huge existence.

     Now I had not known this curious pair before, though I had known of them, and seen them together.  As did everybody, they being hard to miss.  It was on a mild, pleasant evening in August at the home of a friend where I was a guest at a little party that I made her personal acquaintance.  The occasion for the gathering was the celebration of the opening of a new exhibit in the local art center.  On inquiring of her, I discovered that she was something of an artist herself, working in watercolors.  That news interested me, and when the opportunity presented, I struck up a conversation.

     That opportunity occurred when she planted herself inconspicuously in a corner, outside the circle of conversation, which buzzed, as expected, about the exhibit, about other exhibits, and about what the artists were doing, all the while people serving themselves wine and cubes of Swiss and cheddar cheeses and wheat crackers.  From the picture I had formed of her, I was surprised to find her decked out in gold.  She wore several pieces of very old-fashioned jewelry, the most prominent being a thick, braided gold bracelet dangling with charms—the kind of thing women haven’t worn in thirty years.  She also wore a gold choker with a single pearl set in a gold shell.  It was the kind of thing one might have seen on women in the Art Deco era.  Her brown hair was pulled to the back of her head and set in a bun either held in place by or ornamented with a thick gold cord.  In spite of the gold, she was unattractive, having too bony a face and somewhat sallow a complexion.  But I liked her large, watery eyes—they held depths of sentiment which I suspected was going to make for interesting conversation.

     She began by asking what kind of artist I was.  I told her our host mentioned that she worked in watercolors but that unlike her two-dimensional artistry, I worked in three dimensions, whereupon, thinking me a sculptor, the glint went out of her eyes and she sat back in obvious withdrawal from the conversation.  I was amused by the way her braceleted hand fell into her lap with an audible jingle.  So expressive.  She wanted me to go away.  Yet she made no motion to rise or to change her own place.  I could see by that that she was used to having her wishes divined and obeyed.  The attitude rather deepened the mystery of her.  I had for a moment been seized by the image of her enormous husband walking in tow and nibbling crumbs from her proffered hand, and wondered.  But then I told her I was a writer, and that writers of necessity must round their characters or their stories fall flat.  This was the key that opened her door.

     She leaned forward again and looked me in the eyes.  There was a clear look of pleading in her own.  From our closeness, I could get past her makeup and see she had the lines in her face that suggested a more advanced age than she wanted to let show—lines that suggested also something else, like unhappiness, or a face perhaps too careworn for its actual age.  She began to talk then, taking for granted I would want to hear her story, imagining, I suppose, that I might write her—or that I might see, understand, where others didn’t.  In any event, we sat together in that corner of the room for quite a while. 

     The picture she painted of her husband after her return from Florida had the somber tones and turgid depths of a Goya oil rather than the spring bright translucency of a young woman’s watercolors.  The first month of their separation was hard on him, but he endured it.  Then she found it harder and harder to reach him, in spite of the efforts she made to call all hours of the day and night.  As her father’s condition became more delicate, and more urgently demanded her care, it became impossible to communicate with her husband at all.  She was forced to face the dilemma she dreaded: save her marriage or see her father through.  Death, as is so often the case, making the demand we dare not turn our backs upon, she resolved to see it through with her father.

     Meanwhile, Ernest suffered the long separation as best he could and tried, faithfully, to support his wife in her time of tribulation.  But being endowed with powerful needs was too much of a trial for him.  When circumstances drive a good man to faithlessness, the result can often be a kind of insanity.  One day Ernest, out shopping for dinner in the market, met an old flame.  They struck up a conversation and learning of Ernest’s wife’s absence, and the reason for it, she offered consolation.  One thing, naturally, led to another.  Before long he was visiting her intimate little place every night.  He dealt with his guilt by giving himself unreservedly to the sex, by devoting himself to it, and she encouraged him—swearing that it was all momentary, that infidelity only counted when a man cheated, but he wasn’t cheating because his wife wasn’t there.  It was simply a matter of two people dealing with their aloneness.

     But after his wife’s return, he found himself unable to end the affair.  He took extraordinary pleasure in sleeping with both of them.  It was an obsessive pleasure.  In his own mind, now gone crazy from the guilt and the over-stimulation, only the moments he was in bed with one or the other were real to him, everything else fading into ashen unreality.  Life became a pulsation of alternating beds, alternating women—the one thin and bony, but familiar, tinctured as she was with homeyness and normalcy, the other bosomy, full, and exotic.  On some nights, he would leave his wife’s bed and speed to the other woman, banging hysterically on her door till he woke her, then violently grab her and make love on the floor in front of the open door.  When the urgency of his madness passed, he would go home and sheepishly get in bed again with his wife.

     “I won him back in the end,” she said, with the saddest smile I have ever seen, “the other woman couldn’t keep up the pace.”

     She saw the look I gave her, which I couldn’t help.

     “Oh,” she said, jangling her charms as she gestured with her hand, “over the years, I learned how to get more and more from him; he was sluggish, you see, when he was younger.  He matured well.  But now, the more I demanded from him, the more he wanted to run to her.  And the more he had from her, the more I demanded from him.  It near about killed her.  Poor thing.”

     “And what about him?” I gasped.

     “Ah,” she sighed, looking pitiable, “this is where it goes tragic.”

     She sat back in her chair again and dropped her hand jinglingly into her lap.  My astonishment suspended for the moment, I looked at her.  She had become contemplative.  The way the light played on her face gave it a sculptured look, except for the eyes, which, being large and watery, seemed now also on the verge of tears.  Altogether, she seemed rather pretty.  She was collecting her thoughts, so I took the moment to get us some wine.  She reached for the glass as I neared and said “thanks” with a look.  She took a long sip and put the glass on the lamp table beside her.

     “You have to put yourself in Ernest’s shoes,” she said, “if that’s possible.”

     “I’m not certain I can do that,” I said with a smile, being tritely moralistic, “or that I’d want to.”

     “But I had to, you see,” she said, with the knowingest look.

     How little we really know about people.  What was so astonishing about her story so far was how it conflicted with my assumptions about them, about her and her husband.  Even my perceptions of her unattractiveness were changing.  In the mood she was in now her face acquired the look of, what can I say?—wisdom? so far as that is possible in people?—and it was not at all unattractive. 

     “It came to a head,” she continued, “when she wouldn’t let him in anymore.  Ernest kept trying.  But she always bested him, and he came home from these ventures beaten.  She was not well off, you see.  I guess that explains it all.  What she wanted out of the affair.  She lived in a tiny house, a two room cottage, more like a studio apartment than a house.  It wasn’t a house at all.  It was a converted garage with only a kitchen and a bedroom with a bath.  Ernest would get the one door open and fling himself in, only to find she’d gone out the other and run for her car.  He would throw himself into her bed and roll in the sheets and beat the mattress like a crazy man, which he was.  Then he would come home, his face sunken in despair, and we would go to bed again and he would take all his grief out on me.  I don’t think Ernest was conscious during the day.  I don’t know how he got through the day.  It’s something of a mystery.  He did.  I have to admire that.  There’s something about a man at work that transcends all other aspects of life.  The short of it is, poor Ernest became impotent.  Can you understand that?”

     “This is why you said I’d have to put myself in his shoes?  Hmmm. . . .  I see.  No,” I said, “I can’t put myself there.  I can sympathize, I can see,” I assured her, “but to know by putting myself in his shoes—I’m not sure anyone can do that.”

     “We were husband and wife.  People don’t really share that and come away from it unable to see from the other’s eyes.  I understood it, understood him.  I suffered with him.  He knew that unless he could make love to her, he wouldn’t recover.  He couldn’t make love to me anymore.  So he would go to her and plead, and she wouldn’t let him in.  Then one time she did, and he was able.  He thought he was restored and assured me life was going to get back to normal.  But, you see, it never happened.  He needed both of us to make himself whole.  She never had the brains, that woman, to understand Ernest and what he was going through.  She was a mercenary, plain and simple.  When it became clear to her that she was never going to separate him from me, she ended it all by taking off.”

     “Ah,” I sighed.  “That’s what did it!”

     “Yes, Ernest kept going back to that little place, haunting it, at three o’clock in the morning.  He’d sit in the grass in his pajamas.  It was all so sad.”

     “What happened to him?” I said, seeing that she sat back again and was content with the story she told.  I had to know.

     “He left me, feeling he had nothing anymore to give me.  He still keeps all his other obligations as a husband.  But he lives now in that garage-cottage-studio-apartment thing of hers.  I think he believes it’ll come back to him there.  It’s pathetic.  Sometimes I go there early in the mornings and climb in bed with him, but it doesn’t work.  He’s gone for good that way.  We’ve tried drugs and things, but nothing works.  It’s the spirit.  It’s gone out of him.  Poor Ernest.”

     “But. . .but,” I stammered, “isn’t that only temporary?  Won’t it come back?  I mean?  There’s nothing really wrong with him.”

     “You can’t put yourself there, you know.  Perhaps only a woman can, or a wife.”

     I finished my wine.  She got up and made her excuses and after a while, seeing me still sitting where we had had our talk, she came back and sat again, but only for a moment.  She came to offer a bit of advice.

     “Love can be turmoil,” she said, patting my hand like a caring mother, though I was fifteen years older than her.  “The problem with Ernest is that he fell out of love.  Don’t let that happen to you.”