The Secret Lives of People in Love Read online

  As Serge came within sight of the lot, he was confronted once again with his daughter’s legacy and more than a hundred Russian apple trees nodded in recognition.

  The curling limbs of the trees were studded with apples, and children grew within the branches, laughing and hanging upside down.

  Serge unfolded his chair at the edge of the orchard and listened to the sound of apples punching buckets. Some people had brought barbeques and were baking apples wrapped in aluminium foil.

  After several hours, Serge cut his last slice of apple with the silver wedding knife and then wrapped the knife back in muslin cloth. People were beginning to go home. Children dispersed in small groups, their tiny backs bent over with cargoes of fruit. An apple is the size and weight of a human heart; they were carrying the hearts of those not yet born and those lost forever.

  It was getting chilly and Serge didn’t want to risk his arthritic hands. By morning, his nightly drop box was sure to be full of broken soles and heels worn into smiles.

  As he started to rise, Omar pushed through the crowd, his pockets so stuffed with apples that he could only run with his legs straight.

  “Shoe-man!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for you all night.”

  At the end of the block a firecracker exploded, and Omar grinned.

  “Up to your old mischief, uh?” Serge said.

  “I bought you a baked apple, but I dropped it and a dog ate it.” Omar arranged the apples stuffed into his pants.

  “The mayor of New York was here, did you see him?” Omar asked.

  Serge said no.

  “Someone threw an apple at him,” Omar said, laughing.

  “Not you, I hope,” Serge muttered.

  “No, not me—but he said that the city has bought the lot and is giving the orchard to the children of New York.” Omar lunged for an apple as it popped free from his pocket and rolled under Serge’s chair.

  “Who do you think planted these trees, Omar?” Serge asked. “Haven’t you ever wondered who started this?”

  Omar was on the ground fishing for the lost apple but managed to say, “Nobody knows who did it. The mayor said it’s one of the city’s great mysteries.”

  “But have you ever wondered why anyone would do such a thing?” Serge asked.

  “Because they love apples,” Omar said.

  Serge noticed the moon and felt the deep pull of home.

  When Omar finally found the apple under the chair, he removed one of his little socks and ripped it in half.

  “What are you doing down there?” Serge snapped.

  A pair of small hands suddenly began to skate over Serge’s shoes. The hands moved vigorously but with controlled strength. Omar spat on the sock and rubbed the heel. Serge tried to get up and shake off the scoundrel, but he had already started the other shoe. Serge sat back and closed his eyes.

  EVERYDAY THINGS

  For a moment after waking up, Thomas was only vaguely aware that he was alive. Then, like the shock of cold water hitting his body, Thomas remembered that his wife’s sister had telephoned during the night, that they had spoken briefly and nothing had been resolved.

  He lifted the blanket off his body and waded through a gray light that had seeped through the curtains and into the room. He looked at the telephone with disbelief and then made a pot of tea. While it was brewing, he sat on his bed and fought to remember a dream. He tried piecing it together, but it was as though a feast had taken place during the night in his honor and he had awoken with only a few crumbs. He looked at the telephone again.

  He could hear rain spraying the window and decided to write his letter of resignation. He sat at his desk. He swept aside bills and the report he would never finish, then pulled a crisp sheet of paper from the bed of the printer. After finishing a cup of tea, he began to write. He could feel a skin of sugar upon his teeth and after writing his own address, realized he could not steady his hand. It shook like a small, dying animal.

  He turned his head toward the telephone but did not look.

  Outside, he could hear the increasing traffic. People were going to work, radios were clicking to life in bedrooms, coffee was dripping into glass jugs, bathtubs were filling up. He gripped the handle of the teapot awkwardly and poured himself another cup.

  He could imagine his wife in the hospital, her limp body beneath the white sheet like a spread of mountains. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the nurse’s white shoes and his wife’s bare feet parted beneath the hospital sheets.

  Her sister had called in the early hours, but he had spoken very little because each time he thought of a word, it had popped like a bubble before he could nudge it past his teeth and into the telephone. Nothing had been resolved, and he thought of the hospital corridor, a long river of plastic with brightly colored lines upon the floor. He could sense the tension in her sister’s voice as she imparted everything the doctors had told her. All he could think was how beautiful the word triage was.

  He dressed. The house was cold and quiet. He poured himself more tea and drank it cold. As he poked his arms through the sleeves of his jacket, his eye caught a pair of her boots. He wanted to slip his hands inside, through the dark leather mouths and into the stomachs that cradled her feet.

  He tried calling her sister. Her telephone rang for a long time. He replaced the receiver, feeling that life was disordered in a way he had never imagined.

  He looked at his watch and thought of his old self driving to work, listening to the news, sipping coffee. He felt a strange sense of shame and naivety and knew that if he let his mind regress, it would pass a countless number of occasions in which he could have been a stronger and brighter version of himself.

  After tying his shoes, he reached into the closet for his raincoat. Instead of yanking it from the hanger, he tugged slightly at the arm and felt his hand begin to wander. It brushed against different fabrics and then stopped at her favorite coat, a long camel-hair one with a thick belt. His fingers crawled into the pocket and swam around between coins, slips of paper, and mints. The secrets of a hand.

  He drove to the hospital. The hand that had been in her coat pocket exuded a light aroma of perfume. He thought of her spa and pictured the shelf of tiny bottles above her desk, each one containing a distilled floral essence, each bottle an olfactory fingerprint.

  He remembered the faces of her clients as they hung their coats and then peeled a magazine from the stack on the table. He remembered watching their eyes sail slowly through the pages as they anticipated the warm, scented oil upon their faces and the soothing calligraphy of his wife’s hands.

  The road to the hospital became narrow and straight. It stretched through a forest like a gray bookmark, and dead leaves—like brittle letters—bounced across the highway on their brittle ends.

  He tried to hold a portrait of her face in his mind but could not weave each detail simultaneously. He thought again of the small bottles above her desk.

  At the hospital he stood above her and listened. Birds muttered on the window ledge, a machine clicked. He sat in a chair and studied her fingers. They were long and evenly spaced. On her wrist was a clear plastic band with her name written by a computer. This made him angry. He leaned in and breathed upon her hand. It was warm, and he shuddered as his breath pushed against her skin.

  He felt numb, as though during the night his body had been filled with plaster. He wondered what was happening inside her head. He imagined a garden with the noisy dots of birds.

  The day of the operation had been the worst day. Now it was a waiting game, said her sister.

  After napping, he awoke to a shadow cast over his wife’s body.

  “Good morning, Thomas,” the nurse said.

  He nodded and asked if there was any change in her condition. The nurse consulted her charts and replied that there was no change.

  “Would you like to wash her face?” the nurse asked. He turned to his sleeping wife and imagined swishing a wet cloth through the tiny canyons and then ac
ross the plains of her cheeks. He felt awkward and his hands turned to wood.

  “I’ll get you some warm water,” the nurse said.

  She returned a moment later and placed a bowl and some cotton balls beside his wife’s bed. Thomas dipped a ball of cotton into the warm water and then squeezed it. He swished it along her forehead. She did not move. When he had finished, he patted her face with a soft towel, being careful not to cover her mouth or nose.

  The operation had lasted six hours and twelve minutes. During this time, Thomas left the hospital and walked to a park where he sat on a bench and wept violently for several minutes. He then smoked a cigarette and watched two boys throw a football to one another. In the December twilight, a dog barked. Then the park was swallowed by darkness. As he had walked back to the hospital, he felt ashamed that he had left even for a moment and wondered if her sister would be angry with him.

  He stood before the automatic doors at the hospital for a moment before continuing.

  As he had made his way back to her room, he remembered the boys playing football in the park. He thought to himself that one year from this moment, everything would be different—for better or worse.

  The nurse returned and took away the bowl and cotton balls. Thomas remembered his wife’s voice from years ago, expressing a wish to see the lavender fields of France.

  Next year for definite, he thought, when all this is behind us, we’ll do something like that.

  Four days since the operation, and everyone who visited commented on how she had lost weight, as though it were somehow complimentary. It was an uncommonly warm afternoon, and Thomas decided to walk to the park again. It felt good to walk, and he tried to imagine the splintering glass, the spontaneous explosion of the air bag—her face and crumpling body.

  He saw the park up ahead and slackened his pace. He tried to see the faces of people driving past him. They eyed him for a split second and were gone.

  A sudden loathing filled him.

  As he sat down on an empty bench he resisted an urge to sprint back to the hospital and carry her from the bed to their house and then lock all the doors.

  At that moment, Thomas realized he had changed, that he was not the same man, but like everyone else, he was the result of an accident that had once taken place between nature and chance.

  An old woman with hanging cheeks sat down beside him and sighed.

  “The evenings have become so cold,” she said. She offered him a stick of violet gum. He slipped it into his mouth and chewed. They sat mostly in silence.

  “This time next year,” Thomas suddenly remarked to the woman, “my wife and I will be in France.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, dear.” The old lady seemed delighted but then looked away. “My husband and I always talked about going to Europe.”

  “They grow lavender and you can smell it in the air as you amble through the villages,” Thomas said.

  “Wished we’d gone when we had the chance,” she said, “but life just swallows you up, doesn’t it? Just swallows you up with its everyday things.”

  That evening at the hospital, Thomas insisted that he stay with his wife—that he hold her hand and burn some of her favorite distilled essences.

  “Most people go home, get a good night’s sleep, and come back first thing,” the nurse said as she folded a towel.

  “I’m not most people,” Thomas said and truly meant it. The nurse left the room without a word.

  CONCEPTION

  I am sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off. There is broken glass strewn across the red stone floor. The back door is wide open, and moonlight drips through the trees and pools in the doorway. I am sitting at the table drinking tea in darkness, while my wife is somewhere in the fields that stretch endlessly behind our house. I hold the cup with both hands, as though engaged in holiness. I can imagine her in mud up to her ankles, her glasses spotted with rain, hair breaking like black sea on her shoulders.

  When I arrived home and saw the broken glass and the open door, I knew she had received news from the doctors. Flapping in the breeze on the table like a white tongue is the letter, which may confirm her worst fear. I dare not read it. In the darkness I can see the cluster of words scattered across the page; like small fallen bodies they reach out for us.

  I wonder if she smashed the glass on purpose or if one of her walking poles nudged it as she twisted her back and thrashed all limbs, negotiating her crutches like giant chopsticks as she made for the empty, moonlit pasture.

  Her legs are so deformed you’d think they were rubber. I touched them for the first time on our wedding night at a bed-and-breakfast only eight miles up the mountain. On a clear day you can see it from behind our cottage. I remember the bed and the crisp, yellowing sheets. I wondered how many people had slept in it. I marveled at how the pillow, like a small theater, had staged countless dreams. At dusk, when I smoke in the garden, the lights of the bed-and-breakfast flutter beneath a faint flock of stars and remind me of our first night. We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river—we could feel the weight of each other’s stones.

  My wife’s legs are so unnaturally twisted that when she was a girl her classmates boasted of frequent nightmares in which their own legs melted into dead white snakes. And they called her names that pierced her like arrows. Every night she fell asleep bleeding and dreaming that one morning she would awake with legs as straight and strong as trees and that on Saturday morning small pink fingers would push the doorbell—a prelude to the breathless voices calling her out to play.

  My father was a miner. Her father was a welder who repaired steel-frame supports in the shafts. She dreamed that when her bones woke up and joined hands, her father would light his welding torch and turn her poles into a bicycle with a basket on the front, the sort other girls used to ferry hot parcels of fish-and-chips or crab apples poached from a tree by throwing sticks into the branches.

  Once, she threw her poles into the branches of a pear tree that grew at the edge of the schoolyard. They stuck, and when the bell rang summoning children back to their cold desks, she sat shivering outside until a teacher noticed a speck by the fence and sent for the caretaker and his retarded son, who dragged the ladder across the yard pulling faces to the window of every classroom.

  My wife is out in the fields, in the shadow of a mountain crowned by mist. Perhaps she is leaning against a stile and watches the drifting cows, their eyes as still and black as well water.

  The village we live in erupted from mud, and mothers wage an impossible war against the perpetually dissolving ground. Above the village, the sky is so stuffed with cloud that water, like some curious animal, finds its way into everything and lives on the backs of the people—slowly drowning them.

  On Saturday the unmarried and the widowed kiss and fight at the Castle Pub on the hill. Anyone not at the pub or in the ground is sprawled before blazing fires in cottages, which, like sad ornaments, dangle upon the hillsides on smoky threads. Children watch black-and-white televisions in kitchens as fathers chop heads off fish and smoke cigarettes, peering into back gardens until evening, like a grieving stranger pulls his cloak across the day.

  My tea is cold, and the moon, anchored by the hopes and wishes of those abandoned souls churning their way home from the pub, has drifted deeper into the sky.

  My wife and I have been back and forth to Wrexham Hospital in the rusting truck. They slide a needle into her spine, which like lightning splits me in two.

  And there’s the letter that I daren’t read, because I have wanted a son since my father was crushed in a collapsed shaft.

  I was a boy in this very kitchen, perched at the table in darkness waiting for him to come home and take me to the fair. I had my heart set on the acquisition of small orange fish, which were being dispensed liberally to children in thin plastic bags.

  When suppertime passed and my father was still not home, I was so angry that I drew a picture of him and
then stabbed it with my pencil. I pictured him at the pub, his face smeared with coal dust, sitting quietly with his workmates rolling cigarettes.

  Eventually, a neighbor knocked and entered. She set a plastic Thermos of soup in front of me and explained how my father was stuck in a mine and that it would be on the news. I thought of the drawing and cried.

  My mother waited at the entrance to the shaft for three days, and I slept at the neighbor’s house beneath a crucifix made from clothes pegs. I imagined myself wandering the grassy mountainside and then digging with the pencil I’d used to stab my father until his hand pushed through the soil holding a bag of fish.

  My wife is the neighbor’s daughter. Before the night my father died, I’d only seen her on Sunday afternoons tilting around her front garden like a broken toy.

  She told me that while my father’s body might be crushed under tons of black earth, the body is nothing but camouflage. She whispered that every soul is a river trying to find its way back to the sea.

  I have wanted a son since my father’s accident. I will continue where he left off. I hoped I was the crucial link. When I can bury every ounce of my disappointment about what I think the letter says, I will slip through the gate into the fields and bring her home. I never want her to know that fatherhood was the ambition of my life. I don’t want her to feel as though she has let me down; yet for a moment I consider what would happen if I packed a small bag and escaped, perhaps to London where I could work on a market, or up to Scotland where I’d mine deep lochs for eels. It’s tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.

  In this very kitchen I would listen to my mother tell stories about my dead father. The Sunday afternoon they drove up Sugar Loaf and listened to the crackling radio with a blanket spread over their legs. It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment. She told me about their first weekend away in Blackpool, fishing for crabs off the pier with cans of beer and hot sausages wrapped in newspaper. She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time.