Darling Lorraine

There are moments upon which a life, having spent years pretending to have been assembled by reason and choice and deliberate intention, afterward discovers that it had in fact been balanced all along upon something as frail and invisible as the glance of a stranger across an ordinary room, and Frank, though he would later embroider the tale with inventions fit for company — that he had wandered continents, that he had been born for roads and stations and departures — knew privately that he had come from nowhere more remarkable than the neighbourhood where his parents had watched the seasons collect upon the porch railings, yet on that afternoon, when impatience disguised itself as certainty, he crossed the space between himself and the woman whose name he did not yet know with the peculiar confidence granted only to men who mistake longing for destiny. He announced himself with borrowed importance, giving not merely his name but the city from which he imagined significance might naturally proceed, and she regarded him with the expression of one who has not yet decided whether the world is amusing or merely persistent.

The city’s name was New York, New York. Mine is Frank. Hers was Lorraine.

It would take Frank years to understand that her name itself had become, almost before he knew the woman who carried it, less a collection of syllables than a country into which he had emigrated without maps and from which there would never afterward be any complete departure.

They married because people do, because days accumulate into habits and habits into furniture and furniture into mortgages and anniversaries and grocery lists, because two people, however extraordinary they imagine themselves to be, discover that most of living consists not of declarations but of deciding whose turn it is to wash the dishes while autumn rain stipples the kitchen window. There were mornings whose happiness announced itself so quietly that neither of them noticed until years afterward that they had once possessed it. There were evenings when silence rested comfortably between them like an old dog beside the fire. There were arguments too insignificant to remember and therefore impossible to forget, each one settling into the walls until the house itself seemed constructed less from lumber than from accumulated grievances never entirely abandoned.

One afternoon so ordinary that memory afterward adorned it only because catastrophe had selected it for residence, Lorraine said that she could no longer continue carrying the version of herself the marriage required. Romance, she said, had become a machine for manufacturing disappointment. She had mistaken devotion for identity, and somewhere between the grocery receipts and the folded laundry she had misplaced the person she had once expected to become.

Frank, who had never possessed the language necessary for terror, translated fear into accusation with the instinctive clumsiness of wounded men everywhere since the beginning of time. He asked whether she had ceased loving him, as though love itself were a switch hidden somewhere inside the walls. He accused her of inventing despair simply because she lingered in bed while mornings passed unclaimed. He catalogued her offences with increasing certainty until certainty itself collapsed beneath the weight of his bewilderment, and by the time he declared he no longer needed her, the words had already become transparent enough that both of them could plainly see the plea concealed inside them.

Yet departures are seldom complete. She chose to remain. Or maybe they both merely remained beside the ruins of whatever had departed. Either way, the lawn was mowed and the egg sandwiches were made with mayonnaise and little slices of dill pickle from a jar.

Outside their house the world busied itself with the arithmetic of profit, with men purchasing what other men hoped to sell and selling what they scarcely understood themselves to value. Frank discovered that the commerce of ambition possessed no vocabulary for souls like his. Every occupation he attempted seemed to require exactly those faculties he lacked: confidence without reflection, appetite without hesitation. Failure arrived so regularly that eventually it ceased to resemble disaster and instead became another piece of household furniture.

Sometimes, late in the evening when Lorraine had fallen asleep with a book about a spy or a detective slipping gradually toward the floor, he would sit before their old Yamaha piano and allow his fingers to wander over the keys with the guilty tenderness of a man visiting the life he should perhaps have lived. Music asked nothing of him except honesty. It did not demand success. It accepted uncertainty as naturally as breath. He wondered whether another version of himself had escaped into melodies while this one remained imprisoned inside invoices and unpaid bills, but the wondering itself produced no escape.

Sometimes Lorraine listened. She never praised him extravagantly. She merely remained in the next room while the chords drifted through the house, and somehow that was enough for both.

There came a Christmas morning whose brightness seemed almost embarrassed by its own simplicity. Frank awoke to the fragrance of pancakes and coffee, and they spent the afternoon before the flickering television watching an old black-and-white film whose faith in redemption seemed too innocent for adults and yet impossible not to believe while snow accumulated patiently against the windows. They laughed in familiar places. They quoted lines before Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed spoke them. For several quiet hours it appeared that forgiveness might consist not in forgetting what had wounded them but in agreeing, however briefly, to inhabit the same story once more.

He says it’s the chance of a lifetime. Now you listen to me. I don’t want any plastics! I don’t want any ground floors! And I don’t want to get married ever to anyone, do you understand that? I want to do what I want, and you’re and you’re … Mary, Mary … George, George, George …

But chances of a lifetime, like the weather, never sign contracts.

The arguments returned, now older and therefore less theatrical, stripped of youthful fury until they resembled rituals whose conclusions had been memorized years earlier. They quarrelled over trivial habits because the true subjects had grown too immense for language. The way he chewed annoyed her. He didn’t like the way her toes twitched. Each insult concealed another question neither possessed the courage to ask. Each retreat to separate rooms became a rehearsal for losses neither imagined approaching so quickly.

When illness finally entered the house it did so without malice, carrying neither justice nor punishment, merely the indifferent authority by which time reminds flesh that it has always been temporary. Lorraine’s hands, once so quick in the ordinary choreography of living, gradually acquired the stillness of weathered branches. The doctor smiled with the practiced gentleness that attempts to soften truth before delivering it, but no arrangement of kind expressions could disguise what already echoed inside the room.

Frank discovered then that love, having exhausted youth’s vocabulary of desire and middle age’s exhausting commerce of resentment, possessed still another language, quieter than either. He tucked blankets around her feet with almost ceremonial care. He left the house to purchase little sweetnesses neither of them wanted because errands themselves became declarations that tomorrow still existed. He listened to her breathing during the long nights until it seemed less the movement of air than the fading repetition of every conversation they had ever shared.

Frank would sometimes imagine that nothing had been taken at all, that she had merely crossed into another room whose doorway memory could still approach though never again enter. The house remained where it had always stood. The Yamaha retained its patient silence. The plates still occupied their familiar shelves. Yet every object had become the outline of something absent, as though the true architecture of a marriage had never consisted of wood or plaster or spoken promises but of the invisible gravity by which two imperfect souls spend a lifetime circling one another, colliding, separating, forgiving, and finally surrendering themselves to the same immense silence from which, long before either knew the other’s name, they had first emerged. This dawned on Frank, gradually at first and then with inexorable pellucidity, after that evening in April when all the trees were washed with rain and the moon in the meadow took darling Lorraine.