We Are Not Ourselves(27)

She was attempting to concentrate on the little animatronic girl whose hand was traveling slowly to cover her mouth, which had fallen open at the sight of Santa Claus’s ebony boots disappearing up the chimney.

“It’s a stupefying, hypnotic loop. It puts you in a suggestible state.”

“Do you have to be so heady about everything? Do you have to analyze everything to death?”

“What’s amazing is that they’re exactly the same every year.”

“That’s an ignorant remark,” she spat. “They’re not the same at all. They put a lot of work into these. Months of planning.”

She wouldn’t have minded his objections so much if he hadn’t insisted on drawing her into a dialogue about them. Was it too much to ask to share a moment of joy?

She looked around at the other husbands. They didn’t look any happier to be there, but they stood back dully, hands folded behind them or scratching their noses. They couldn’t have been as cleverly cruel about it as Ed if they’d tried.

“And the battling of tourists,” he said. “Every year it gets worse. The jostling, the jockeying for position. They’re descending on the imperial city for their bread and circuses. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”

She started walking to the train. A couple passing in the other direction gave her curious looks, as though they could see the intensity of her disgust in her expression. She found herself unaccountably smiling at one man, giving him a manic sort of grin full of the slightly breathless ecstasy of being unmoored, and he returned it with a delighted blush. By the time she felt a tug on her elbow, she was at the next corner.

“Don’t be hysterical,” Ed said. “I was just making a few observations.”

“The world isn’t a lab.”

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back and look.”

In his worn jacket with the frayed sleeve ends, he looked like a war veteran about to ask for change for the subway.

“You’ve ruined it.”

“Don’t say that. Listen, I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I do,” she said. “You didn’t have enough fun as a kid.”

He pulled her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched steam rise from a manhole cover and felt in her chest the rumbling of a passing bus. She was keenly aware of the limits of the physical world. She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.

“One of these years,” she said, “we will come here and you will enjoy it and not make me feel miserable about it. I dream of that.”

“Let’s let that be this year,” he said. “Let’s go back and look at those windows. Please, honey. Let me make it up to you.”

“It’s too late,” she said.

“It’s never too late,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

She hadn’t been looking at him; now she stopped to. Streams of people flowed past in either direction, rushing toward obscure destinations. This was her life right here, petty as it seemed at the moment, and this was the man she’d chosen to spend it with. He was holding his hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off for the purpose of beseeching her, and she saw that he would always have flaws, that he would always be a little too intense in his objections, a little too unbending when it came to the decadence of the world. She thought, We can’t all wear a hair shirt all the time. But there he was, trying to pull her back to the scene he despised, and she saw that he couldn’t live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered. Everyone else around seemed as insubstantial as the air they moved through, the shopping bags they carried the only things anchoring them to the ground.

“Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband—her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.





11


Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.

“He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”

“Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.