Something Is Out There (21 page)

“Can you understand me, Mr. Clayfield?”

“No,” Walker says, low. He can’t tell whether he has actually spoken. “Have they given me something for the pain?” he asks. “I hurt my hand.” He holds it up. It’s in a temporary cast.

“We’ll have to do this later,” the man says, across him. Walker turns his head to see that it’s his mother and brother.

“I hurt my hand,” he says to them.

“Oh, W-Walker,” says his mother, crying. “That poor man didn’t do anything.”

“I’m okay,” he tells her. “My hand.” He holds it up again. He sees Max move away, putting his own hands to the sides of his head. But then Max is there again, frowning at him, mouth slightly open, a dumbfounded man. “I love her, Max,” Walker says, or thinks he says. “I couldn’t stand him talking to her that way. She can’t love him, Max.” His older brother doesn’t move or change expression, and Walker comes to know that no sound at all has issued from him, no words. He looks back at his mother, crying there, faltering, being helped to a chair. And now everything dissolves, crumples, and he can’t open his eyes, can’t see. “Where is she, Max?” No answer. Max is gone, everyone is gone but the man with the silver hairs in his nose, who sits in a chair at the foot of the bed, looking through a magazine.

“Sir?” Walker says. But he still can’t utter a sound. He closes his eyes and feels everything falling from him, as though
he has begun rising on a cloud, but then very quickly the sensation changes, and it is he who is falling, drifting away, sailing down. He sees Jenny standing near the frame of the unfinished boat, arms folded, hair pulled back, eyes half closed, unseeing, as the half-closed eyes of Bill the computer salesman were, and Walker turns in the cavernous darkness of himself, searching for that other time, far away, when he was himself, not a man who would fall in love with his brother’s wife; not a man who would cheat or steal or lie; not a man—not that man—who would ever think of causing the slightest harm to another human being.

Here is how Elaine Woodson attempted to describe things to herself one predawn:

It’s like those times when the whole sky is one smooth whitish dome and you’re not aware of it as cloud cover until the thing glides off in the wind and gives you blue sky. It’s like that. A form of walking pneumonia of the spirit. I’m not even quite aware of the thing until it has lifted
.

She did not speak of it. Not to her mother, or her father—who lived alone in Santa Monica now—or her two married sisters, or her younger brother; not to friends. It was bad manners to make yourself and your troubles the subject of conversation, even with family. More than fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce.

She had never wanted to be defined by marriage anyhow.

Since the divorce—from Sean, who was pretty but unfaithful and lazy, had a drug habit, and doubtless everyone wondered what she must have seen in him to begin with—she had been working behind the counter in the Memphis Belle diner, which was close enough to Beale Street and the Peabody Hotel to remain fairly busy most of the time. She would say that her life was too hectic for her to feel sorry for herself, though this wasn’t really the case. Life was in fact not all that crowded with
events. And, as everyone knows, when there is brooding to do, people who are so inclined will make the time. She simply wasn’t the type to agonize about her own situation. She was what a friend in school once described as fortunately curious; her focus was always on the world outside herself.

The divorce was final almost a year ago, and aside from a dinner here and there, or a movie, she hadn’t been seeing anybody. She had been surprised to learn that Sean was getting married again, but that was something she thought was rather entertaining. She joked about it with her sisters, her mother. The poor sad girl, whoever she was.

Elaine remarked with a kind of serious mirth that for herself, she wanted some time to rest up. And that was true.

She did miss sex sometimes. Well, she missed closeness. She had never been able to be casual about intimacy, even as everyone else she knew tended to that, or seemed to. You couldn’t tell really what people were like alone. But for her, she had to feel that her heart was involved, that it all came from there.

These days, when she left work in the evenings, she went straight back to the little house on Cleveland Street, with its flourishing indoor plants and its book-lined walls, its neatly stacked collection of popular and classical music, and its little flower garden in back.

Home.

Where, she would say, she could breathe easily. Her life was simple. She had been telling people that she rather liked living alone. She cooked for herself, and enjoyed a good crisp glass of Sancerre or a little Bordeaux in the late evenings. Her sisters, like her father, lived far away—Belinda in Maine and Chloe in Vancouver, and they had families that kept them busy. Belinda had three children, and Chloe had two; Belinda, a dental hygienist, was married to a dentist; Chloe used the term
homemaker
to describe herself and had married a tax accountant who bought and sold antiques. Both men were handsome, blond, steady, and usually warmhearted, though they had never thought much of Sean, and had been fairly vocal about that at times. And withal, Elaine never once implied to her sisters that in her own estimation their husbands were chokingly smug and finally rather humdrum. Everybody was good friends from a distance, as their younger brother once put it. He was in college, now, at Vanderbilt, three hours away. The whole family was scattered in distance for Elaine, except her mother, who lived just across the river, in Arkansas. Now and then her mother drove over to Memphis to visit, but she seldom stayed long, since Elaine had no television. Elaine’s entertainment was reading, listening to music—particularly opera—doing some gardening, and occasionally writing little notes and snippets she was too modest to call poetry, or prose either.

Sometimes what she wrote really did take the form of a kind of playful verse:

But mostly they were more in the nature of notes to herself. For instance, this evening, she wrote:

That last word was a command, stemming from long-standing trouble remembering to do daily tasks like watering. She had always been objective about her own nature. She was thirty-three, and single again, and Sean was out in Las Vegas, working as a blackjack dealer. Always good with his hands, he’d done a little of that down in Tunica, Mississippi, before the divorce. He loved the game. But he was never very happy being married. She always had the feeling that he was only partly there. And then she had thought fondly she would have a child someday. For a while it was an area of serious tension. She hoped for it, longed for it. He dreaded even the slightest trace of the idea, said it gave him the willies. “You have a child and in a week you’re old and getting ready to die. It just makes it all go so much faster. Bang. Like that, you’re a grandfather and it’s all basically over.”

“No,” she told him. “It goes exactly as fast as it goes. And you look up and it’s gone bang all right, and you’re alone in a room with a urine smell coming from you because you haven’t had a shower for a week and there’s nothing but the TV. And you still die.”

Then he would resort to the old ersatz morality: “I don’t want to bring an innocent child into such a terrible world.” “Don’t lie about it, Sean. You’re afraid. Admit that you’re afraid.”

“All right. I’m afraid,” he said. “You bet I’m afraid. I’m so scared I can’t take in a full breath, you know? I can’t sigh. It’s all stuck right here in the middle of my chest, the place they
usually point out as the seat of emotion. And my number one emotion just now is fear.”

The truth was that she had been afraid, too.

Eight years of that, and she was ready to call it quits. They were both ready, the two of them. Childless, and aimless, too. They had met in college. He dropped out soon after. She finished, but didn’t want to teach or do any of the other tasks for which her education had prepared her. She took the classes because she wanted to read the books. She had a hunger for good books. Even so, she and Sean spent a lot of time smoking dope and watching television over the years, while he worked for the county keeping order among case records, and she went from job to job, mostly editing the dreadful failures of expression rife in the work of people who wrote for trade publications, in-house newsletters, and the occasional greeting card summary of a family’s year.
And this past December, when Tammy’s daddy chided her ever so sweetly for eating like a horse, Tammy looked up at him and said “neighhh.” So cute. And, we all agreed, advanced for a four-year-old
.

Mind-numbing.

They had been together almost five years before they married. And the day they went through with it, she had to resist inwardly the sense of it as a probable mistake; things were already going south. She had come to think of these eight years as the time it took to admit the truth. They were both happier separate from each other. He called now and then to tell her how he was and to ask how she was. Everything was still friendly. And of course he would never change. He was scarily like her father, both of them locked in a kind of perpetual adolescence, except that her father seemed proudly aware of the fact, and poor Sean didn’t have the slightest
intimation of it. Occasionally, through the past few months, speaking from the noise and clamor of a Vegas hall, he would say he missed her, and he wanted to know, with that nearly childlike straightforwardness, if she missed him.

She would tell him, quite honestly, no. “You be happy,” she’d say. “I’m happy.”

And he was happy; that was true now. He was about to be remarried, and was moving on, and she was glad of that, truly. And yet there had been these passages lately, under the cloud. They had nothing to do with him; she was certain of that. All this started well before he announced his new situation. But something was changing in her heart.

Today, at the diner, she watched the man in the straw hat come walking from far up the street, beyond the trolley stop, out of the shadow of the big YMCA building, his white shirt showing bright in the sun, and the straw hat looking new, a perfect yellow color with a black band. She saw him, and abruptly had an unbidden strong sense that this morning would be important, that something momentous would take place. It stopped her. She stood holding the coffeepot, paused, examining the thought. What was it about the image of a man in a straw hat, walking in sunlight, that should cause her to have such a premonitory jolt? She sought to dismiss it, but she watched him come on, anyway. He carried something under one arm and as he neared, coming up the hill, she saw that it was books. She assumed he would turn down Third Street, or walk by when he got to the block where the diner was, but his gait increased slightly, and he strode up to the door and looked in, looked right at her as if he were looking specifically
for
her, one hand held up to hold the hat on his head in the breeze. Then he pulled the door open and entered. The motion of him,
stepping to the window and looking in, startled her. It was ridiculous.

He nodded at her, took a seat at the counter, and picked up one of the menus from the little rack of them there. He asked for black coffee, and when she brought it, he ordered eggs over, with no bacon and no toast, and a small bowl of grits with cheese. They chatted pleasantly about the weather, the hot day. Nothing out of the ordinary about it. There was gray in his beard. He was fifty-something. A soft-spoken gentleman from the city, no one she knew. Her heart was beating in her cheeks.

She left him alone, and went to the register, where a very old woman was waiting to pay. She did not look at Elaine, but just handed her the check, with the money for it in exact change. “Was everything all right?” Elaine said.

The old woman nodded and shuffled out the door. The sun beat down on her head with its loose strands of white hair, and it shone on her scalp. Elaine looked away.

The man in the straw hat was reading one of his books. She worked around him, cleaning the counter, and tried to imagine how people got through. She and Sean had spent so much time stoned, out of it, sitting in front of the television. She got him to take the TV with him when he left. She did not miss it, even a little. The dramas they had watched before he took it away went on, and the depicted lives changed as they would, and it meant nothing to her and she would never be able to explain to herself how it could’ve got hold of her the way it had. She would spend a week worrying how something was going to unfold in a fictional life, and it was all soap operas, except the operas had come to prime time and the dialogue was better. She decided that what she felt about the approach of the man in the straw hat was a holdover from those hours of watching the television dramas, where everything had a meaning and the
camera eye, so much like a human eye, never looked at anything that didn’t mean something was about to happen. She was tired; she hadn’t been sleeping well.

The man was gazing at her. “You all right today?” he asked. It was customary in Memphis to put it like this—it was a rough equivalent to “how are you?” except that it was also infused with a friendly concern quite absent from the other expression. She had always loved it. You didn’t encounter it anywhere else, as far as she could tell, except Memphis. “You all right today?” As though the questioner and the person being asked were in an ongoing conversation about something through which both were struggling. It was part of the charm of where she lived.