Physics of Sunset. Jane Vandenburgh
to go buy some and I could get a ride down the hill with you.”
“Too bad about cigarettes,” he agreed. “I liked it when there were cigarettes.”
They were both quiet again. Alec felt compelled to add: “There isn’t anything that’s come along that helps so much with social awkwardness.”
“Don’t talk if you don’t want to. What I hate most about parties, really, is that everyone nervously talks so much.” He nodded, each was silent. They stayed that way for a little while, then Anna said, “I was stuck in a corner with people discussing the homeless, and someone said they’d been put on earth to teach the rest of us gratitude.”
“Gevalt.”
She smiled at him. “The whole discussion began to make me so angry I started stammering, and I tossed my drink back so fast my brain felt like I’d been given a lobotomy with an ice pick.” Her face was now alive with self-amusement. “Then someone else told that person to stop calling them ‘the homeless’ since this term can be seen as one of derogation, both fixed and judgmental. I honestly could not stand it. So I came out here in order to drink antisocially.” She swirled imaginary wine in a glass that was now completely empty. “God, how I wish there was still something at times like these. Hashish was great—I wish there was still hashish. People were no less stupid when there were drugs, but at least we didn’t have to notice everything stupid everyone said and then remember it in such exquisite detail.”
Alec groaned. “Christ,” he said. “I’m just too old to be doing this again—my memory’s shot. I honestly can’t remember the names they changed everything to the last time. I can’t even remember that they changed the name of Grove to M.L.K. The whole title of that street is now written out ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., Way (Old Grove Street)’ on the plans at City Hall. It happened ten years ago, more! I should have adjusted by now. My father spoke Yiddish first, then English, but at least he only had to learn his second language once. And now my nine-year-old daughter comes home to inform me in her superior nine-year-old way that I have to upgrade to the new format.”
“Format?”
“She tells me I have to go out and rebuy all the music I own on records and on tapes or I’ll die without getting to ever hear what music really sounds like.”
Each was silent, each thinking about what music really sounds like.
“Life does sometimes seem like it’s becoming one constant upgrade,” Anna said. She sighed. They were quiet, then she said, “It was better when there were cigarettes.”
The birds had quieted. The night was so peaceful, they both heard it when his stomach rumbled. “Are you hungry?” she asked. She dug around in her bag and brought out a packet of airplane nuts. Anna handed these to him. “The crowd’s gone from the table. We can go back in if you like.” She said this, but neither of them stood. She dug around in her bag again, pulled out a tangerine and a pack of saltines, handed them to Alec.
They spoke quietly for another little while, had those few moments full of humor and good will. He kissed her when they each stood to say goodbye and go back in. They kissed, this felt perfectly natural. They may have lingered slightly, but not long enough that anyone watching them through the window would have been able to really tell.
6
The Parts of Speech
WASN’T LIFE ITS own grand and spacious miracle? That she who needed nearly perfect silence in order to work had somehow married a musician? This had honestly never before occurred to her. Being weak-minded, Anna was as bullied by music as she was by being in the room with an attractive person. Music approached her, tried to get inside her just after she’d gone numb. Music wanted her, wanting her to become lost to its fluency.
Fluency was what Anna always lacked. She had, in speech, not so much a real stutter as the need to halt, wait, pause at the blockades put up by any kind of disjunction. In high school this evolved from a slight stumbling to a need to fully stop at any kind of punctuation so she could peer out cautiously over the line to see what lay ahead of her. The speech pathologist taught her how to slow down, press her lips together, focus, breathe, go on.
The whole course of her life now seemed to come down to these matters of hesitation. It wasn’t that Anna hadn’t been able to finish a dissertation as much as she hesitated to even really start one. She always felt the need to eliminate as silly or wrong or clichéd or probably more untrue than true more words and phrases than she could bring herself to produce and so ended up, year after year, with fewer and fewer pages to show to her advisor.
This man came to her wedding, held Anna’s hand for a long time at the reception, staring down into her palm as if reading her future. He was more than a little drunk, became too effusive in praising her interesting mind. He wanted to ask something of her, he said. He wanted to ask Anna to not go into the house and never come back out again.
But what did she have to say about Dickinson that hadn’t already been better said? And why should anyone whisper another syllable about this poet, surely our most silent and importantly vanished one? Could Anna’s thesis be only two lines long, say just that? Could she submit one holograph page of her own loopy handwriting marked by her own wavering and infinite dashes?
She became perversely proud of it, the Ph.D. dissertation that went backward year by year toward its own inevitable nonexistence. She fell out of touch with her department, then with her advisor, finally deciding she was incapable of inflicting any part of her critical stammerings on an unwaiting world. The universe would be a better place, she knew, if less of this was written. The world also required fewer books of poetry. It wasn’t that poetry shouldn’t be made but that no one else should ever be made to actually look at it.
At forty Anna still dreamed guilty dreams of what she’d left unfinished. She dreamed of her advisor, that she saw him in the library and tried to hide within the stacks that were not stacks because they changed into the showers in the women’s gym. Through the warped optics of the glass bricks, Anna became poisonously objective. She watched her own naked body go cubist, breaking apart in a shower stall.
Why had Anna married Charlie? Was it that she once imagined Charlie’s happiness was like a language that he would be able to teach to her and that it turned out instead to be an aptitude? Like perfect pitch in music, some people had it, while most did not.
They married, made accommodations to one another, grew older, had a baby who then became a toddler. Then they went to Europe late one summer.
This was the third or fourth of the recent honeymoons given them by his parents as anniversary gifts. The two of them were sitting in a café in Prague eating dinner when Charlie decided it was time to say he’d been having an affair with one of his graduate students.
Anna licked her lips, steadied herself. It wouldn’t have been entirely honest to say she was completely shocked by this revelation. Because her sense of smell had become hyperacute when she was pregnant with Maggie, she had on occasion detected a kind of perfume on the tweed of Charlie’s jackets that smelled quite a bit like Play-Doh.
She studied the laced fingers of her hands that lay in her lap, palms upward, then looked over Charlie’s shoulder in order to catch the eye of the waiter. If this was to be another of those everlastingly introspective evenings, they were going to need another bottle of wine in order to get through it.
This was exactly what he had always loved about Anna, he said, this great calm of hers, her maturity, her self-possession. He didn’t actually say “Old Girl,” but that did undoubtedly occur to him. This was a crisis surely, but it need not be the end of them. Their baby was two and a half years old—they needed to consider, he supposed, a separation if that’s what Anna wanted; they would do whatever Anna wanted, but he wanted really to think long and hard about Maggie. There was the new study on the children of divorce, its long-term consequence. As for the student? Charlie was embarrassed to say he hadn’t been in love with her, nor she with him.