nor did I speak of them: I wrestled with my terror in silence. Then we came, among the building-tops, to a place where there was a gap— a dream image, perhaps, of the Mystic River—and I froze, too panicked to step across. But then somehow she doubled back and deftly traversed the perilous gulf with me and we were together on the opposite side. It was like a flickering at the climax of a silent movie, this transposition to the safe, the northern, side of Boston.
I awoke and it was not Gloria beside me but Deirdre, her lithe and lightly sweating body emitting a faintly harsh, metallic scent, her face tucked into the crooks of her slender brown arms, which were folded around her head with a silken relaxation as she slept the heedless, unshatterable sleep of the young. Perdita, the first woman I slept with on a contractual basis, used to awake, no matter how late we had come to bed, around dawn. To the sounds of her stirring about in the bedroom and then in the kitchen below, I would fall asleep again, as if to the sounds of my mother’s morning housework back in Hammond Falls. Like the sun and moon, I as a young husband realized, men and women set and rise on independent schedules.
In the many years of my commuting, from 1977 on, there were two memorable tragedies on the Mystic River Bridge. Just before dawn one morning an overloaded truck swerved out of control and hit a bridge support with such force that the upper deck collapsed, crushing the driver and stymieing the early commuter traffic, which had to halt at a precipice not unlike that in my dream; the bridge was closed for at least a year. Then, years later, a husband who had almost persuaded the public and the police that an unknown black man had shot to death his pregnant wife when their automobile strayed into Roxbury parked in the middle of the bridge and leaped to his death as the truth began to emerge: he had done the deed, long premeditated in a brain overheated by an infatuation with a younger, non-pregnant woman. To deflect attention from himself he had fired a bullet into his own abdomen, perhaps more painfully than he had intended. His suicide note admitted nothing and was full of self-pity. The incident made us New Englanders all wonder, Inside every husband is there a wife-killer?
Deirdre keeps a very messy house. The laundry accumulates in the hamper, the dishes in the sink. She even leaves banana peels and eggshells and crusts of toast rotting within the Disposall, when it is but a few seconds’ satisfying occupation to switch it on, under running water, and listen to it grind such garbage away. Before she moved in with me, I had her enlist in NarcAnon, and she was initially enthusiastic and resolute, but I sense backsliding lately. Unaccountable fits of euphoria, with manically sexy and animated behavior, are followed by spells of withdrawn hostility. She is like a kite whose string is still held in my hands but whose distant paper shape I can see fluttering and dipping out of control.
The other night she wet the bed. I was astonished: I awoke at the sting of the warm liquid seeping through my pajamas, and when I wakened her—she was sleeping naked— and roused her to what she had done, she didn’t seem to comprehend. She fumbled with me at tearing off the wet bedding, laying a dry towel over the damp place on the mattress, and remaking the bed with a fresh sheet, but seemed still asleep, locked into some drugged continuing dream of her own. In the morning I couldn’t get her to talk about it, and indeed I didn’t press her too hard: it was embarrassing to me, too.
Some kids—I presume they were kids—smashed a window and broke into the barn. I’m not sure of everything they stole: Two bicycles, at least, that had belonged to Henry and Roger. An inflatable raft, not much of a success, for use in the pond, when Henry was still a little boy, and lonely on our hill, his brother and sister already away at prep school; I remember how he tried to make pets of the pair of ducks that nested near the pond every spring. They produced a chain of fuzzy ducklings that, one per day, would be pulled under by the snapping turtle that lived in the bottom