Imagine Me Gone

We’re bound to forget something in the rush. I could pack only so much yesterday with taking Alec to the doctor to get his stitches out, Kelsey to the vet, and stocking up for the trip. But I did all I could, and at least John helped Alec and Celia pick out their books when he got home from work last night. Come hell or high water, we leave at eight thirty sharp. John drums it into the children. He turns it, like everything he does with them, into a game: You’ll be left behind if you’re a minute late and we won’t come back for you! When he parades through the house and calls out, Time to go, they’ll grab what’s at hand, assuming I’ve got the rest, and race for the car to compete over the backseat and the bucket seats, Michael and Celia opening another front in their roving war, Alec running behind toward another defeat at their hands. If he’s not included he’ll whine to quash their fun. Departures speed all their wants and fears, this one most of all: summer vacation, two weeks up on the water in Maine, in a borrowed house.

The babysitter has agreed again to feed the rabbits, the guinea pig, the bird, and even Michael’s snake, which requires her to dangle defrosted mice on the end of a stick. Of the menagerie, only Kelsey comes with us, most unruly of all, and object of the children’s keenest ridicule and devotion. Their untrained mutt of a mascot, who plows through window screens and shits on beds, though I still love her through their eyes.

For the long drive I make them surprise boxes, which I hold back until we’re halfway there, giving them something to look forward to and buying me a half hour’s peace once they’re doled out. The shoe boxes are full of license-plate games, peanuts, and oranges, a little Lego set for Alec, a book for Celia, and a music magazine for Michael. I have to finish putting them together now before they come downstairs or the effect will be lost, and I manage it just a minute before Alec appears in the kitchen asking, What’s for breakfast?

He’s followed by Michael, who walks straight up to his little brother, squeezes his upper arm until Alec cries out for him to stop, and says, “Mom’s in a preparatory mode which means Dad will cook and he only cooks Viennese eggs so that’s what’s for breakfast, you little thing.”

Michael and Celia both treat Alec as akin to Kelsey on the evolutionary scale, a reliable entertainment when properly goaded.

“That hurt,” Alec says, clutching his arm, but Michael’s not listening. He’s at the radio changing the station, flying over news, violins, shouted ads, Dolly Parton, and rock ballads, up the dial and back down again three or four times before he settles on a disco song, his favorite music of late.

“Please,” I say, “not now.”

“We can’t listen to any more baroque music. It enervates the mind. We need a beat.”

Where does a twelve-year-old get “enervates the mind”? From some novel he’s reading, no doubt. Beguiled by the sound of the phrase, he’ll repeat it for a week before latching onto the next one. He tries them out at the dinner table, usually on Alec, who at seven has no recourse that doesn’t confirm his siblings’ conviction that he’s stupid. “I believe you have delighted us long enough,” Michael said the other night, as Alec tried explaining how the teams worked on field day at school. Michael waited a diplomatic second or two before glancing surreptitiously at John and me to see how we’d reacted to his bon mot. Alec kept on about sack racing, until Michael once more pinched his arm.

“Not now,” I say, so he turns the dial back to whatever it is Robert J. Lurtsema is playing this morning on WGBH, and opens the screen door to let a wheedling Kelsey into the yard, following her out.

The sun’s been up more than two hours already—5:17 this morning, a minute later than yesterday—and is already well above the tops of the pines. Finches and sparrows flutter in the square of the birdbath, which sits atilt in my bed of marigolds. It’s a rather ugly object made of coarse concrete, and it looks forlorn in winter holding askew its dome of snow, but this morning with the splashing birds making its water glisten it’s a perfectly pleasant part of the mild shabbiness of the place—the barn with the collapsed rear roof that we have to constantly remind the children they’re not allowed to play under, and the gently crumbling brick patio, where I’ve got the morning glories blooming up the drainpipe, their petals crinkled like linen around their dusty yellow centers.

Kelsey has lit off down the path into the woods—that’ll be another fifteen minutes—but Michael’s declined to follow, instead stopping at the station wagon, where he’s stepped onto the bumper, and, holding the roof rack, is bouncing the car up and down on its rear wheels, as if it were a beast he could coax into forward motion.

John appears spiffed up in one of his jaunty summer outfits, Bermuda trousers, a canvas belt, a blue Izod polo, ready to captain our seafaring adventures. It’s nothing to the children that the house on the mainland and the house on the island and the boat we use to go back and forth are all loaned to us by a partner of John’s, that we couldn’t possibly afford this on our own, not two weeks of it, not a hundred-acre island to ourselves, and mostly it’s nothing to me—a happy gift that we happened to have been given three years running now, a place I’ve come to love. It’s just that not knowing if we’ll have it, or when we’ll have it until what seems like the last minute reminds me how provisional, how improvised our lives here are.

This isn’t the town we were meant to live in, or even the country, and it’s not the place we want to put the children through school. We lived in London and had Michael and Celia there for a reason, because that was John’s home. And it’s where he wants to return. Living here as long as we have is a kind of accident, really. He was sent to Boston on a consulting assignment for what we thought would be eight months, so we rented this house down in Samoset up the street from my mother, in this town we used to come to in the summers, where she moved full-time after my father died, a house it turned out some carpenter ancestor of mine built back when the whole family used to live around here.

Then John’s firm in London went out of business. And here we were. Lots of space for the children to play in. Their grandmother three minutes away, which has its pluses. So John looked for a temporary job, while our furniture stayed in storage back in England. He found one, then another, and then one potentially more permanent in this new business of venture capital, and the life we’d assumed we’d have—urban, with his friends, and the parties—stayed on hold one year after the next, for eight years now, the presumption we’ll return always still with us, up ahead in the distance. Which can leave me feeling in limbo. Though most often, like this morning, when the children are happy and the weather is fine, I don’t want to think too much about it.

Behind the wheel, John wears his tortoiseshell sunglasses, completing his summer look. He’s a showman when he’s on, capable of great largesse. In his sunny moods the winningness flows like water from the tap. He prefers Ellington to Coltrane, Sinatra to Simon and Garfunkel; likes to dance in the living room after the kids have gone to sleep, and find me across the bed in the morning; and he knows he’ll never stop working or earning, because his ideas for new ventures are that good and there are that many of them, such an easy multiplication to perform. And lately I must say he’s been fine, not overbrimming, but more than half full. Steady at work, and he comes home in time for dinner and to see the children, and plays with them on Saturdays and Sundays in the yard, mowing paths in the field for them to ride their bikes on, and clearing paths in the woods, and really it’s fine, however different it may be from the gin-drinks parties at the house on Slaidburn Street, off the King’s Road, and his glittering eyes and well-dressed friends, and so much of that time in London before our wedding.

I knew him naively, then. He wasn’t raised to be understood in the way people think of relationships now. He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love me. He’s just British about it. I think when he met me he realized he might be able to escape some of that, in private at least. In his eyes, I had that American openness he admires, though in fact by coming to London I was escaping my own old world of coming-out balls and the matrons of Smith College. We were meeting in the middle, I suppose.

“At least we all speak the King’s English.” That’s what his mother said to no one in particular at the dinner table the first time I visited his parents, outside Southampton. She was apparently less appalled at my accent than she’d expected to be. His father had installed a putting green by the side of the house, where he spent most of his afternoons before coming in for a supper he preferred eating in silence. At breakfast, there was the tea cozy, and cold toast in a rack, and at Sunday lunch mint jelly with the dry lamb, and in the evening being asked if I planned on taking a bath. John was and is his mother’s favorite, the oldest, who went to Oxford and into business and wears good suits and understands there are proper and improper ways of going about things, all of which he plays up when he’s around her, keen to reflect back her image of him.

I had a job at a library, out in the suburbs. I’d get up early to catch a train to Walton-on-Thames and then the bus along the high street to the red-brick Victorian fortress, where I’d stamp and shelve books all day, and then reverse the journey, riding back into the city on half-empty trains running against the commute.

A few months ago I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night and it reminded me of what I had missed being away from America for most of the sixties, reading about the violence from overseas and hearing about it from my friends, always at a remove. There was one passage that stuck with me. After the posturing speeches followed by the melee at the Pentagon, once they’ve all been arrested and are being driven out to Virginia in buses in the dark, everyone quiet, Mailer writes it’s in motion that Americans remember. Maybe he could have dropped “Americans” and just said “people.” Either way, it struck me as true. If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.

Like, I suppose, my rides on those nearly empty trains back from Surrey in the early evenings, already dark in winter, passengers across the car visible in reflection on the glass—a fixed memory I carry now as a stand-in for the more particular instances of wanting badly to see John, to be done with the courtship so we could live together and see each other every night as a matter of course.

Or like all of this coming to me now in the car after I’ve handed out the surprise boxes and earned a lull in the children’s impatience for a while, with the windows down and the salt air rushing in on us. Remembering being at a packed, loud party at the flat with John’s roommates, everyone in ties and dresses, on the evening that the fire engines appeared at the building, and we all had to scurry down the four flights of stairs with our sloshing glasses, John running back up to grab his jacket in case the press appeared to cover the impending blaze—a jest to prevent the good cheer from dissipating on the sidewalk, which worked, keeping the laughter going until we got the all-clear and clambered back up to keep drinking.

It was almost grave the way he kissed me in the beginning. His nerves showed like they never did with friends; with them, words were the only currency that mattered. The contrast seduced me as much as anything. The American boys I’d dated in college and immediately afterward brought their offhand confidence into the bedroom, where it struck the same slightly false note that it did in company. John might have wanted to be that smooth, but with me he couldn’t manage it. Which I’ve always decided to take as a compliment. And then, as if he’d betrayed himself in the dark, he’d up the gallantry the next day, appearing at my door with a picnic basket and a borrowed car and driving us into the countryside, where even if no one was around he still wouldn’t try to touch me, as if it proved something about his character. I fell in love watching him do that. I knew the starkness of the difference between his savoir-faire and his wordless, heavy-breathing grasp in private owed something to his never knowing exactly where he stood with me, because he couldn’t interpret me as easily as he could an Englishwoman. By the same token, I couldn’t help wondering if my being an outsider in his world was what drew him most. Which could make me skeptical of him, parsing his words and deeds for signs that he’d noticed or appreciated something about me other than my foreignness.

It was all part of what kept up a sense of mystery between us at the start. That tension of not knowing but wanting to know. You’d think that after seventeen years of being together and three children and moving together from London to a small town in Massachusetts, this kind of mystery would be dead and gone, the ephemera of early love washed out by practicality. And much of it is. He doesn’t charm me anymore. I see how he charms others, how far his accent alone goes in this country to distract and beguile, but it’s not the kind of effect that lasts in a marriage. And I am certainly no escape for him anymore, not in the simple sense of being a departure from familiarity. We fight. We disagree. He indulges the children to curry favor with them, suspending my bans on this or that, leaving me to stand alone as the enforcer. I resent not knowing when or if he’ll decide the time has come for us to go back to Britain, and I resent that it depends on his work. Not all the time, and not that I can fault him for it entirely, but I’m not quiet about it when it gets to me. Like when I’m rummaging through old furniture in my mother’s garage for dressers or side tables because the ones we bought together after our wedding are sitting in storage an ocean away and he doesn’t want to ship it all here since maybe we’ll be returning soon.

And yet there remains mystery between us. What I want to say is that we still don’t know each other, that we’re still discovering each other, and of course because it’s no longer the beginning it isn’t always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition—the not knowing, the wanting to know—but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it’s one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I’m the one who’s still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment.

Whatever it is, it’s not about nationalities anymore, or his family or mine. It’s what all that stood in for at the beginning without my realizing it. At least until his episode shortly before our wedding.

That autumn of ’63 after our engagement I could tell something was getting to him at work because whenever we met up he’d be more distracted than usual and have less to say. He was the fastest-talking person I’d ever met, that is before Michael started talking, and in the right mood I could just sit back and listen to him go on about the complacency of Harold Macmillan or the latest news in the Profumo affair, he and his friends interrupting and talking over one another, dashing and clever and well oiled with drink. I’d think of my friends who’d gotten married, junior or senior year, to men just like the ones they’d grown up with, headed now to Wall Street or law school, some of them already with three- and four-year-olds, and I’d think, Thank God! I’m not a doll in the house of my mother’s imaginings. I got out. And far.

But during that October John’s clock began to run more slowly. It wasn’t dramatic at first. He didn’t talk much about his work but I imagined it was some pressure there that was tiring him out, making him less inclined to spend evenings with friends. He just appeared let down, that was all. Harold Macmillan resigning as prime minister was the sort of thing he would usually have been reading and talking about furiously but he showed barely any interest. It was the evening Kennedy was shot—evening in Britain—that I thought to myself something must be the matter with him because when I appeared at his flat in tears he hugged me and sat me down on the couch and tried to calm me, yet it didn’t seem to have reached him at all. I didn’t expect him to cry—it wasn’t his president—but it was as if I’d told him a distant uncle of mine had expired, obliging him to pat me on the shoulder. It was unnatural.

Three weeks later I sailed back to New York for Christmas. I stayed just under a month. We wrote several times a week. Daily bits and pieces but lots of fond things, too. There were some particularly ardent ones from him—as strong about how he loved me as he’d ever said or written before.

I didn’t understand what his flatmate was saying when I called the day I got back to London and he told me that John had been admitted to the hospital.

“Has he had an accident?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But perhaps you should call his parents.”

I phoned right away. His mother handed the receiver to her husband with barely a word. “Yes,” he said. “We were rather hoping all this business was done with. His mother finds it most unpleasant.”

I had nothing to prepare me. John sat in what looked like an enormous waiting room with clusters of chairs and coffee tables, all those waiting being men, most of them reading newspapers or playing cards or just gazing through the filmy windows. His face was so drained of spirit I barely recognized him. If he hadn’t moved his eyes I would have thought he was dead.

The room got only northern light and the shades were half pulled. It just made no sense to stay in that tepid, dingy atmosphere so I said, “Why don’t we go for a walk?” I had to leave there to plant my feet back in reality, and to bring him with me.