you picked up five years ago. And Dorothy: Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.
The conversion of their house into a library happens too slowly to see. The books that won’t fit she lays on their sides, on top of the existing rows. This warps the covers and makes him crazy. For a while they solve the problem with more furniture. A pair of cherry cases to set between the windows in his downstairs office. A large walnut unit in the front room, in the space traditionally reserved for the television altar. Maple in the guest room. He says, “That should hold us for a while.” She laughs, knowing, from every novel she has ever read, how brief a while a while can be.
Dorothy’s mother dies. They can’t bear to part with a single volume of the dead woman’s titles. So they add them to a collection that would have been the envy of kings. Dorothy finds an incredible deal on Walter Scott’s Complete Waverly Novels in a downtown antiquarian bookstore. “Eighteen eighty-two! And look at these beautiful endpapers. Marble waterfall.”
“You know what we could do?” Ray tosses off the idea on the way to the cashier. Next to the Scott, he slips in a copy of The Age of Intelligent Machines. “That funky wall in the small bedroom upstairs. We could have a carpenter design some built-ins.”
The plans they once had for that room now seem older than anything on their shelves. She nods and tries to smile, reaching down inside herself for a word. She doesn’t know the word. She doesn’t even know that that’s what she’s doing. Nevertheless. The word is nevertheless.
THEY HAVE A STANDING JOKE, at Christmas, a joke always ready not to be one, on a moment’s notice. One gift they give each other must be the annual attempted conversion. This year, he gives her Fifty Ideas That Changed the World.
“Honey! How thoughtful!”
“Sure changed me.”
He will never change, she thinks, and kisses him near the lips. Then she comes through with her part of the ritual: a new annotated edition of Four Great Novels by Jane Austen.
“Dorothy, darling. You read my mind!”
“You know, you could try her, one of these years.”
He tried her, years ago, and almost choked to death from claustrophobia.
They spend the holidays in their robes, each reading the gift they bought the other. On New Year’s, they struggle to make it to midnight. They lie in bed, side by side, leg to leg, but with hands firmly on the pages in front of them. Falling asleep, he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.
“Happy New Year,” he says, when the ball drops at last. “Survived another one, huh?”
They pour the bubbles that have been waiting by the bedside on ice. She clinks, drinks, and says, “We should have an adventure this year.”
The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.
“Something life-threatening,” she adds.
“I was just thinking that.”
“Maybe we should run a marathon.”
“I . . . could be your trainer. Or whatever.”
“Something we could do together. Pilot’s license?”
“Maybe,” he says, comatose with fatigue. “Welp.” He sets the glass down and slaps his thighs.
“Yep. One more page before lights-out?”
SHE DESCENDS into the real anguish of imaginary beings. She lies still, trying not to wake him with her sobs. What is this, grabbing at my heart, like it means something? What gives this pretend place so much power over me? Just this: the glimpse of someone seeing something she shouldn’t be able to see. Someone who doesn’t even know she’s been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.
FOR SOME REASON, when their anniversary comes, the Brinkmans again forget to plant anything.
THE REDWOODS knock all words out of them. Nick drives in silence. Even the young trunks are like angels. And when, after a few miles, they pass a monster, sprouting a first upward-swooping branch forty feet in the air, as thick as most eastern trees, he