The Notebook (The Notebook #1)(56)

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Just let her know that I called. I should be around all night if she wants to give me a ring.”

“Will do,” he agreed. Then, after a moment: “Hey Dad? I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Did you really forget your anniversary?” I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “I did.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I remembered that it was coming, but when the day arrived, it just slipped my mind. I don’t have an excuse.”

“I think it hurt her feelings,” he said.

“I know.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end. “Do you understand why?” he finally asked.

Though I didn’t answer Joseph’s question, I thought I did. Quite simply, Jane didn’t want us to end up like the elderly couples we sometimes saw when dining out, couples that have always aroused our pity.

These couples are, I should make clear, usually polite to each other. The husband might pull out a chair or collect the jackets, the wife might suggest one of the specials. And when the waiter comes, they may punctuate each other’s order with the knowledge that has been gained over a lifetime—no salt on the eggs, or extra butter on the toast, for instance.

But then, once the order is placed, not a word passes between them.

Instead, they sip their coffee and glance out the window. Placing their napkins in their laps, they silently wait for their food to arrive. Throughout the meal, they will sit like strangers and say nothing at all, as if they believed that the enjoyment of each other’s company was more effort than it was worth.

Perhaps this is an exaggeration on my part of what their lives are really like, but I’ve occasionally wondered what brought these couples to this point.

While Jane was in New York, however, I was suddenly struck by the notion that we might be heading there as well.

When I picked Jane up from the airport, I remember feeling strangely nervous. It was an odd feeling, and I was relieved to see a flicker of a smile as she walked through the gate and made her way toward me.

I immediately reached for her carry-on.

“How was your trip?” I asked.

“It was good,” she said. “I have no idea why Joseph likes living there so much. It’s so busy and noisy all the time. I couldn’t do it.”

“Glad you’re home, then?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am. But I’m tired.”

“I’ll bet. Trips are always tiring.”

For a moment, neither of us said anything. I shifted from one foot to the other. “How’s Joseph doing?” I asked.

“He’s good. I think he’s put on a little weight since the last time he was here.”

“Anything exciting going on with him that you didn’t mention on the phone?”

“Not really. He works too much, but that’s about it.” There it was—a hint of sadness in her tone, one that I didn’t quite understand. As I considered it, I saw a young couple with their arms around each other, hugging as if they hadn’t seen each other in years.

I smiled. “I’m glad you’re home,” I said.

She looked up at me, held my eyes, then finally turned toward the luggage carousel. “I know you are.”

This was our state of affairs one year ago.

I would love to tell you that things improved in the weeks immediately following Jane’s trip, but they did not. Instead, our life went on as it had before, one unmemorable day after the next. Jane wasn’t exactly angry with me, but she didn’t seem really happy, either. Try as I might, I was at a loss as to what to do about it. It was as if a wall of indifference had somehow been constructed between us without my being aware of it, and by late autumn, two months after the forgotten anniversary, I’d become so worried about our relationship that I knew I had to talk to her father.

His name is Noah Calhoun, and if you knew him, you would understand why I went to see him that day. He and his wife, Allie, had moved to Creekside Extended Care Facility nearly eleven years earlier, in their forty-sixth year of marriage. Noah now sleeps alone. I wasn’t surprised when I found his room empty. Most days, when I went to visit him, he was seated on a bench near the pond, and I remember moving to the window to make sure he was there.

Even from a distance, I recognized him easily; the white tufts of hair lifting slightly in the wind, his stooped posture, the light blue cardigan sweater that Jane had recently knitted for him. He was eighty-seven years old, a widower with hands that had curled with arthritis, and his health was precarious. He carried a vial of nitroglycerin pills in his pocket and suffered from prostate cancer, but back then, the doctors were more concerned with his mental state. They’d sat Jane and me down in the office a year earlier, and eyed us gravely. He’s been suffering from delusions, they informed us, and the delusions seem to be getting worse. For my part, I wasn’t so sure. I thought I knew him better than most people, and certainly better than the doctors. With the exception of Jane, he was my dearest friend, and when I saw his solitary figure, I couldn’t help but ache for all that he had lost.

His own marriage had come to an end five years earlier, but cynics would say it ended long before that. Allie suffered from Alzheimer’s in the final years of her life, an intrinsically evil disease. It’s a slow unraveling of all that a person once was. What are we, after all, without our memories, without our dreams? Watching the progression was like watching a slow-motion picture of an inevitable tragedy. It was difficult for Jane and me to visit Allie; Jane wanted to remember her mother as she once was, and I never pressed her to go, for it was painful for me as well. For Noah, however, it was the hardest of all.