Freedom

“I’m sure that’s what she tells you. You see her every week, I’m sure she’s sold you on her version, which I’m sure is very forgiving of herself. But you weren’t living with her for the last five years before she left. It was a nightmare, and I fell in love with someone else. It was never my intention to fall in love with someone else. And I know you’re very unhappy that I did. But the only reason it happened was that your mother was impossible to live with.”

“Well then you should divorce her. Isn’t that the least you owe her after all those years of marriage? If you thought well enough of her to stay with her for all the good years, don’t you at least owe her the respect of honestly divorcing her?”

“They weren’t such good years, Jessica. She was lying to me the whole time—I don’t think I owe her so very much for that. And, like I said, if she wants a divorce, it’s available to her.”

“She doesn’t want a divorce! She wants to get back together with you!”

“I can’t even imagine seeing her for one minute. All I can imagine is unbearable pain at the sight of her.”

“Isn’t it possible, though, Dad, that the reason it would be so painful is that you still love her?”

“We need to talk about something else now, Jessica. If you care about my feelings, you won’t bring it up again. I don’t want to have to be afraid of answering the phone when you call.”

He sat for a long time with his face in his hands, his dinner untouched, while the house very slowly darkened, the earthly springtime world yielding to the more abstract sky world: pink stratospheric wisps, the deep chill of deep space, the first stars. This was the way his life worked now: he drove away Jessica and missed her the second she was gone. He considered returning to Minneapolis in the morning, retrieving the cat, and restoring it to the kids who missed it, but he could no sooner actually do this than he could call Jessica back and apologize to her. What was done was done. What was over was over. In Mingo County, West Virginia, on the ugliest overcast morning of his life, he’d asked Lalitha’s parents if they minded if he went to see their daughter’s body. Her parents were chilly, eccentric people, engineers, with strong accents. The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person’s forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn’t leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.