and was rapacious but sullen in response. She was the universe that refused to release me from its bonds. Spring and its seminal imperatives hung heavy above me; relief came, amid summer’s unclothed flirtations, in her last months of pregnancy, as the beginning of an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time. My marriage, I knew, was doomed by this transgression, or by those that followed, but I was again alive, in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live.
But first, unable to face the suffocating cellar, I bought Mildred a dollhouse at the Boston F. A. O. Schwarz, with a hinged roof and tiny doorways and movable window sashes. I am sure she preferred it to the crude one I would have made. It stood in her room for many years, though the phase of life in which she could entertain domestic fantasies within its miniature walls and enthusiastically play with it soon passed. This period of my children’s childhoods seems as I look back upon it one great loss and waste, through my distraction. I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow—broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they passed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the sunshine of their love.
A line of geese overhead, honking. Not a V—for some reason, in their haste to return to the warming North, they all fly off the same wingtip, and form a single long diagonal line pointing toward the Willowbank Country Club. Green goose excrement makes the short sixth fairway, by the pond, free-drop territory, there is such an abundance of it.
And the sky has a cloudy wet-wash tousled look you never see in winter, when the sky knows its mind for certain. Spatterings of big drops abruptly turn to sunshine, making puddles flash like shields.
Driving back from a quick run to the former super-market —mostly empty aisles now but word went out that they were expecting shipments of orange juice and chicken breasts in, and the lines would be only an hour long—I heard on the radio this man with a mellow voice from Minnesota reading an old poem about spring, and as soon as I got back I tried to write down some lines. When March is scarcely here a color stands abroad on solitary fields that science cannot overtake but human nature feels. This color waits upon the lawn (maybe I heard it wrong) and shows the furthest tree and almost speaks to the poet but then, as horizons step or noons report away (probably misheard), it passes, and we stay. It was like being a psychotic and hearing the sick neurons, the degenerate voices of the gods, broadcasting inside your head. I had never heard the sadness of spring expressed before: A quality of loss afflicting our content, and then something about encroached (it sounded like) upon a sacrament Eerie, magical stuff. I never heard the poet’s name.
Spin and Phil, the collectors for the local crime overlords, came up to the house for their monthly installment. Nine hundred twenty-five welders for straight protection, one thousand for the deluxe. The money must be in cash, in bills no bigger than twenties. I’ve been paying deluxe, on their recommendation, but today I asked, “What do I get extra for the deluxe that the straight doesn’t deliver?” I think having Deirdre in the house now emboldened me. Though she is just a woman, she is one of them—valley people, people from beyond this hill.
Spin is natty, with a red-and-gray bushy mustache, a toothpick he rolls around in his mouth, and a nice tidy way of expressing himself, like an old-style movie actor. “Mr. Turnbull, what you get is active consideration, not just passive. With the deluxe, anybody gives you trouble, anybody, we come after them. With the straight, you get no hassle from us, but if anybody else gets on your case, you’re on your own. Can you follow that?”
“Just barely,” I say. “Suppose I paid you nothing, how would that differ from the straight?”
Phil is heavier-set, and still wears brown suits, which don’t ever look pressed. “It’d be ugly, Ben,” he told me, with a quick hitch in his shoulders that made his suit jacket hang worse than