Todd and sandy had been friends for just a few weeks, and Sandy knew they were about to say goodbye to each other. This thing between them was an episode taking place on a small screen. A mini-flick, as Todd would say, a scenario, a sketch. One million words had flown by, but nothing had been promised or declared, and Sandy could sense the way she and Todd were using each other up minute by minute, one talky voice drinking the other dry.
Both of them loved to talk-or, more accurately, they felt compelled to talk. A hyperverbal compulsion was what they shared, according to their acquaintances, way up there on the glottal thermometer. This talkiness might be genetic, or it might be what was expected of them. They were both professors, he on the west coast, she on the east; she was in history, he was in sociology/film studies/cultural exegesis. ("Professor of et cetera"-that was one of Todd's little jokes on himself, almost his only joke.)
Friends had introduced them to each other at the reception to launch the 1998 Darlington Conference in Detroit, devoted to the subject of fin de si?cle crisis. Todd gave a paper entitled "End of the Self," about the instability of the self, the self as the sum of incalculable misunderstandings, and the selfishness of even claiming a self. Todd confided to Sandy that the text for his talk might eventually find its way into the New York Review of Books, although the editors were asking for substantial changes, which Todd was questioning-and quite rightly, he said.
Sandy presented an afternoon seminar, "Diatribe and Discourse in the 21st century," prophetic in its pronouncements, spacy, brilliant (she hoped), loaded with allusive arrows (Lacan in particular), and followed by a vigorous Q-and-A session, with Todd contributing a number of thoughtful comments and reservations.
"He's an asshole," Sandy's friend Chloe said later.
"No," Sandy countered, "not an asshole. Just an ass. One of those silly old-fashioned asses." She said this with a fond smile. All the muscles in her face and body relaxed for once.
"Like our fathers were. Or our uncles. Total asses."
"He talks in clauses, Sandy. You're not supposed to talk in clauses. And especially not with semicolons intervening. I can hear those semicolons coming at me. Little squash balls hitting the wall."
Sandy was still smiling; she couldn't help herself. "There's no law against semicolons."
Since their first meeting, Sandy's jaws and Todd's jaws had not stopped moving. They had a verbal ping-pong game going. Sexually, they seemed to belong to the same nation-the strenuous, the informed, the adventurous, the currently unattached. On the other hand, anyone could see that they were far from being matched linguistically. Todd's ruminations tended to be speculative, Sandy's narrative. "We've probably said farewell to the world of sermons and to the clenched piety of holy pilgrimages," Todd said in his lecture, question marks hovering over his words like a jangle of surprised coat hangers. "We may soon be surrendering our sacred objects and perhaps the practice of prayer-even the notion of prayer."
"You seem to be hedging your bets a bit," Sandy told him after the presentation, not wanting to smother him in blanket approval-it was too soon for that. "The use of 'probably' and 'may' and so on."
"It's ironic, but the probable now holds more force than the certain," Todd told her mysteriously, cradling her in his arms that first night, stretching his neck and kissing the tender place where her hairline met the back of her neck. "Because it more and more appears to be self-evident that nothing is really conclusive."
"You could be right," Sandy said. She was having trouble with her breathing and wasn't sure whether the cause was emotional or physical. Todd had a large, solid body. She appreciated its weight (she had been a long time between men and their bodily heft), but she also felt vulnerable being pinned down like this.
"Everything's smaller now," Todd continued, minutely shifting his body. "Our idea of love is smaller. Our friendships are smaller."
"Yes," she said. "Emphatically. Why, back in the nineteenth century love was big stuff. As big as those balloons people used to ride around the world in. Now it's more like the kind of grit that gets left behind in your jeans pocket."
"Yeah, sort of," Todd said.
He listened politely to her account of childbirth, the moment 11 years earlier when Jenny burst from her womb, as wet and compacted as a supermarket chicken, with her folded limbs and tight whorls of dark hair. But Sandy, who liked to make a terse drama of her birth event, could tell that Todd's thoughts were elsewhere. His eyes were squeezed shut; he had gone suddenly critical in a pedagogical way that was quickly becoming familiar. His arms were around her, but in her imagination he was standing a few feet away, holding a clipboard in his hand and a microphone to his lips, analysing her narrative structure and syntax.
"Womb?" he murmured. "Now, that's a somewhat romantic nineteenth-century word to bring into a modern clinical procedure."
"It's not clinical at all," Sandy was about to say, but Todd started telling her about his automobile accident in Mexico-Baja California, to be exact-as though there were some connection between birth and highway injury.
Perhaps there was; the cooler half of her brain bleeped this possibility. Human tissue. Tearing and bleeding. Sudden intervention. She had noticed that people who have been in car crashes always get around to these stories fast. They love their accidents. Road disasters are like five-star movies in their lives, the only time they've been allowed to be significant actors. "They had to pry open the door to get me out," Todd was saying. "The ambulance attendant kept saying it was a miracle I was still breathing." His voice went rough and shy with remembrance.
"It must have been terrible."
"Worse than terrible."
"How much worse?" She hoped she didn't sound as though she were mocking him.
"What?"
"I mean, how do we measure these things?"
"Do you always have to measure everything?"
A good question-or was it? "I suppose," she said slowly, easing his elbow off her upper arm, which was beginning to tingle, "that we do try to estimate the weight of experience in our lives."
"As if we can." He said this with a little snort that she found unaccountably pig-like. He said it with disappointment.
"How else can we stand back and see where we are?" she said. "Or who we are?"
"Who we are." He echoed this observation lazily, without any fight in his voice or even a pull of breath. "You know that the 'who' of that particular question is something that absolutely cannot be isolated. Our identity shifts from one moment to the next, so that we are always in a state of becoming or diminishing."
Sandy set the "we" aside for the moment. As a historian, she believed in the roundness and accessibility of events. Every date had a doorway, if you could only locate it. Every recorded birth and death had its corporeal and metaphorical dust, composed or else scattered, the little lost frights and ecstasies of fragile existence. And there was something else which lived on top of her thoughts: the notion that everyone had a mother, and from that mother, from that tight little purse with its fleshy space and opening lips, came the desire for expanded air and space.
She felt the need to say so, even if it meant risking a non sequitur. "Each of us has had a mother," she murmured into Todd's neck. "Yes," he said, but clearly without taking in the weight of her thought.
"And yours?" she said, prodding.
"My what?"
"Your mother. You haven't mentioned your mother. Not so far anyway. Is she, you know, living?"
"Living, breathing. Housewife. San Diego. Arthritis in her fingers. Goes to Bible study. Cooks turkeys."
"Mine too. Amazing. All that same stuff. Only it's Danville, Ontario." She didn't tell Todd that she had put as much distance between herself and her mother as possible, or that she broke into a sweat when she heard her mother's voice on the telephone.
"My mother worries about beetles getting into her breadbox," Todd went on jovially.
"Really?"
"It's only happened once, in 1946, I think, before I was born, but it's given her a reason to stay alive."
"Has she read your book on seismic stasis?"
"Ha!"
"how reductive," chloe said to Sandy, hearing about this conversation the next day. "Believing his mother's only worry is beetles in her bread. Her big worry is probably him. What a jerk she has for a son. Men who dismiss their mothers that easily can't be trusted."
"He said it rather sweetly, I thought."
"And I don't blame her one bit for not reading his book. Why the hell should she?"
"My mother read my book. She said I used too many big, show-off words."
"Really?"
"'Who do you think you are?'-that's what she said."
"If I were you, I'd wind this Todd thing up and fast."
"It's easy for you to say," Sandy told her. "You have Bernard. I haven't had anyone for a long time."
"Does he make you happy?"
"Happy?"
"Sandy, that's a simple straightforward question. Yes or no. Does he make your happiness gland wiggle and beg for more?"
"No. But."
it was summertime; Todd and Sandy were both free. He followed her back to Halifax and moved into the apartment she shared with her daughter. Just temporary, a few days. There was a heat wave. Then a cool wave. They spent a lot of time in bed-at least when Jenny was off at day camp. The rest of the day fell into a rhythm-reading the paper, cooking, shopping-that was comfortable, and that persuaded Sandy she was almost, in a summer kind of way, happy with her life.
At the same time, she had to admit that those twin demons, happiness and sadness, had lost their relevance. Happiness was a crock; no one, except maybe Chloe, really had it for more than a minute at a time. And sadness had shrunk, become miniaturised and narrowly defined, a syndrome, a pathology-whereas once, in a more exuberant century, in a more innocent age, there existed great gusts of oxygen inside the sadness of ordinary people, carpenters, tradesmen, housewives. Sadness was dignified; it was referred to as melancholy; it was described as autumnal in tone. Nobody got blamed for the old sadness. It was a real affliction, like colour-blindness or flat feet.
Matthew Hooke, for example, could not be described as a happy man, and yet he was thought of as a valuable person in his society.
"Who actually is Matthew Hooke?" Todd had the courtesy to ask after a week or so.
"English botanist, 1809 to 1883."
"Yeah, right. The guy you wrote the book about."
"Uh-huh."
"Do you actually connect to this person? I mean, can he say to you anything that is actually meaningful? He's eighteenth century-"
"Nineteenth century." She noticed that Todd was careless about dates.
"-and probably superstitious as hell and missing half his teeth. And here you are, this very twentieth-century woman who's lying in bed at three o'clock in the afternoon in a modern high-rise apartment in Halifax, and you haven't got any clothes on, just our skin against these sheets, and the traffic going by, and you turn your thoughts to this Hooke person-"
"Matthew Hooke."
"Right. Matthew."
"You sound jealous."
"What!"
"Jealous that I can be thinking of this mildly depressed but nevertheless intelligent and accomplished nineteenth-century gentleman at the same time that you've got your hand between my legs."
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Well, who's it going to be then? Him or me?" He tried to say this as a joke, but he was not, as Sandy noticed, good at jokes.
"So." She attempted a playful tone. "Do I have to make a choice?"
"What, exactly, was so great about this man anyway? What's he done to get a biography written about him?"
"It's not a biography. It's more of a contextual monograph. A background inquiry into what made him who he was-"
"Whatever that was."
"I'm just a tiny bit surprised you don't know his work. Don't take this wrong, but, I mean, this was a man who paralleled Darwin, and whose ideas-"
"Look, I don't happen to be in that particular field. Who can know everything?"
"He did."
"He did what?"
"He was one of those late late medieval polymaths who extended right into the nineteenth century. He knew science, literature, classical languages, philosophy, architecture, music. And botany-well, that goes without saying."
"The epistemological world was smaller then."
"You are jealous, aren't you?"
"It isn't as though he was Bach or Malthus or Kant."
"He was an autodidact. A rustic from the wilds of Somerset. Never went to school."
"Oh. I get it. That's his excuse for being minor. He had hay coming out of his ears."
"No, think of him as a synthesiser. That's how I describe him, anyway, in the book. Someone who skipped the heavy theoretical work and just talked about how plants looked, how they could change shape with a little encouragement."
"You don't need to be a genius to describe various parts of a wood lily."
"Only a genius would think it's necessary to do so."
"What's that noise?"
"Oh God, it must be Jenny letting herself in."
"Jenny already?"
"Yes," Sandy said carefully, heavily. "Day camp is over for today. As it has been every day at this time. Children are put on the bus and brought home by their counsellors around the middle of the afternoon. This happens all over the western world."
"That's it then, I suppose, for today."
She looked at him sternly, her schoolmarm look, and then let her face soften, pumping a theatrical puff of air into her cheeks. "There's always tomorrow."
todd made a delicious macaroni-and-cheese supper for Sandy and Jenny, miles beyond the Kraft dinner they sometimes shared. Rat-trap cheese, tender pasta elbows, real grated onion, salt and pepper, baked slowly in cream until crisp. Ordinarily, Sandy didn't keep cream in the house. This cream was left over from the veal recipe she'd cooked for Todd at the weekend.
"Can we eat in front of the TV?" Jenny asked.
"No."
"Why not?" The beginning of a whine.
"Because we should use the time to talk. You haven't told us what you did at day camp."
"We did a folk dance-I told you already. What Irish people do."
"That sounds very interesting." Todd said. "Some of those dances go back hundreds of years."
"Yes," Sandy said. "That's true."
"Courting dances," Todd said. "Or, more primitive still, dances which celebrate signs of fertility-the beginning of menses, for instance."
"So we did this folk dancing and then we did woodwork and then we had lunch and then we did birds and wild flowers and then we waited for the bus to come."
"Well, maybe a little TV won't hurt. But only for half an hour."
"I know we agreed not to plunge into each other's history," Sandy said later to Todd, "and we've been pretty good about observing that pledge. But did you and your ex-lover ever have children?"
"No," Todd said. "We thought about it a lot and we talked about it a lot. But it didn't happen."
"That's what I thought," Sandy said.
more and more, Sandy's men friends tended to be talky types, but perhaps they always had been. Her ex-husband, Jenny's father, Stephen, was a case in point. A man of bursting garrulousness, a physicist now employed at a research institute in Kansas City-no doubt filling the sedate laboratories with his galloping cadence. He was descended from a line of Missouri farmers who expressed themselves not sparingly, as country people are assumed to do, but colourfully, rapturously, endlessly, about crops, weather and sports, and who exchanged the effervescent kind of quips which spin off from a more laconic tradition or else lean on common male assumptions: salesman jokes, penis jokes, beer jokes, jokes about city slickers or women's lib.
On the other hand, Stephen hadn't believed that every issue under the sun warranted prolonged debate. The promotion of argument for its own sake sprang from a buried need for drama, according to Stephen. Talk should be a diversion, a pleasure, a pursuit, not something that spilled out of confession or declaration, so that the self was placed on trial. For instance, he, Stephen, did not plan to be in the labour room coaching Sandy when their baby was born. He wasn't frightened of the phenomenon, or repelled by it. He simply wasn't interested, period. Yes, he loved her and yes, yes, he would love the baby when it emerged, but he was not up to what he termed "the medical side of things."
His reluctance had seemed a big thing to Sandy at the time, a betrayal which came to represent a number of other smaller failings. Later she wondered why she had made such a big deal of it. Shouldn't she have appreciated the honesty of his response? "He's got a tongue on him," her mother had said, "but he won't ever bring you real trouble."
Later Sandy and her little Jenny lived for two years with a man named Christopher Swift, who sold computer stock. His was the kind of calling that demanded a quick phrase, a smooth delivery, a word-tumbling manner which forestalled interruption. The trouble was, he couldn't shut it off. He hovered over Sandy in the evenings, showered her with words on weekends, entertaining her, persuading her, pressing against her common sense, talking her into ridiculous ventures-a time-share in Hawaii, a hiking trip to Thailand, where Jenny nearly died of diarrhoea.
There were others. Some lasted a matter of days. Mike Something-or-other and his philosophical divagations. He was a man who could turn a glimpse of an ordinary tree or shrub into an instant thesis on the insularity of the soul or the hermeneutics of regeneration. Toby Shawn (six months) was given to meditations about his grandfather's incivility, his mother's spite, his brother's fecklessness-a circle of incrimination that widened endlessly and came to include, to no one's surprise, Sandy and eight-year-old Jenny.
On lonely nights Sandy would head for the neighbourhood video store, where she rented old movies, particularly those from the forties, a time when her parents were children growing up. She would make a pot of tea, hunker down on a pile of cushions, and sit up half the night, eyes stuck to the screen, eager for the fiction of how men were once believed to behave.
She was particularly drawn to that American icon known as the strong, silent type, and a hopeful part of herself believed that such men actually existed off the screen. Didn't Hollywood effusions, for all their carelessness, persist in the refining and sharpening of our vision of ourselves? That period creature, the silent male, did not babble or condemn or theorise or hold forth. He might open his mouth from time to time and speak when required, a dense, manly rumble in his throat introducing a terse, tender monologue of withheld energy, but he was not at any point bent crooked with the weight of his opinions. Instead, his bone marrow quietly tapped into the world around him, the suppressed words subtly infantilising his sexual bulk, so that you wanted to hug him like a baby and at the same time bed him down for a night of breathless, wordless, stunned satisfaction.
sandy got a postcard from Chloe and Bernard who were in Maine, stating, in Chloe's private cryptology, "Hope you're well out of the claws of Mr Clause." Everyone was surprised that Todd hung around until early September, when classes began at San Diego State, and that the usually impatient Sandy was not exasperated by his presence. He fit in, more or less. He took Jenny to a dinosaur movie and out for a pizza afterward. His theory about the slippery self, its detachment from any fixed point of proof, had its own virtues and even its comforts-at least for Sandy. She had work to do at the end of the summer, lectures to prepare, her office to set in order. While she was out of the apartment, Todd busied himself reading about Matthew Hooke. He did this on the sly at first, working his way straight through Sandy's shelf of Hooke literature and then, finally, reading her book, Matthew Hooke: Silent Visionary. He restrained himself, he later told Sandy, from making his usual marginal notations.
"What kind of notations would you have made?" She was surprised at how nervous she suddenly felt.
But all he said was, "The usual queries. 'Is this statement supported?' Or 'More information needed here.'"
She decided not to take this as a criticism. She would imitate the even-handed, non-judgmental woman she aspired to be. "Well, you've probably noticed that there isn't a lot of hard information about Hooke's life."
"Yes, I did notice."
"The only thing to do was to fill in around the edges with the historical background."
"Right."
"Eccentrics don't often leave complete records. They don't think they need to explain themselves."
In fact, his botanical journals aside, almost nothing was known of Matthew Hooke, nineteenth-century botanist, other than that he seldom spoke.
"Good day," he is believed to have said, when presented to the royal court and honoured for his accomplishments in cross-breeding peas and broad beans. He delivered his minimalist greeting, according to Sandy's text, not in the innocent manner of a rustic, but in the full knowledge that his accomplishments released him from heavier forms of obeisance. He never married, never had children. He appeared to have lived without the consolation of sex-he who dabbled so happily, so tirelessly, with the tender male and female parts of plants.
Others who inhabited the same southwesterly English village as Matthew Hooke, a place called Little West Nutley, knew him as a man of silence. Was he perhaps even simple, they might have wondered-a man so stretched by intensity and so out of joint with other human creatures that he misread the demands of common intercourse? The comments of his neighbours about his taciturnity were as apocryphal as almost everything about poor Hooke's life: how he discovered his bent for natural science, how he overturned contemporary ideas of hybridisation, and so on.
"The kissing part took me by surprise," Todd said.
"Of course, we don't know quite how to read that aspect of his life," Sandy replied. "We don't know how weird or non-weird that kind of behaviour was."
"I'd say it was very, very weird," Todd said.
The kissing part was revealed in a single sentence inscribed by an unnamed West Nutley vicar who had undertaken to write a village history. "Good Mister Hooke speaks to no one excepting his pea blossoms," he wrote, "but does love to kiss the ladies whenever an occasion is given."
"The guy was a pervert," Todd told Sandy. "A rapist manqu?."
"I don't see it that way," Sandy said crossly.
"Leaping out of the bushes at ladies! Come on, now. Admit it."
"There's nothing in the text about leaping out of the bushes."
Sandy felt sure that Hooke's advances, if that's what they were, amounted to an innocent hunger for women's flesh-quick, dry kisses, aimed at the cheek or perhaps even the lips, shyly stolen, timid yet assertive, silent pressings, silken, a curious mouth seeking forbidden tenderness, requiring that fleet conjunction for its own sake and not for where such a kiss might lead or even what it might declare. A Hooke kiss would be enclosed by its own small muscular effort and release, and by the impossibility of an explanation outside the momentary refreshment it offered. Its savour would break through the common parochial strictures like a new form of cloud and be permitted, even smiled over. Touch me, touch me, let me touch you in this simple but explicit way-that's all it would say. (Sandy had read somewhere that earthworms kiss, their frontal parts briefly waving, nodding at each other. Mosquitoes, too, and houseflies, if the evidence could be believed.)
"You and your friend Chloe would have him up for sexual abuse if he went around Halifax stealing kisses."
"Maybe not. Maybe I'd like one of those stolen kisses myself. Maybe I'd feel honoured to be a recipient. Or maybe I'd think it was just, you know, sort of hilarious, but at the same time okay."
"So you believe that Matthew Hooke's personality was outside the margins. Psychologically speaking."
"Maybe. But not because he kissed ladies." She gave the word a cockney spin: lie-dees."
"What about his not talking?"
"I think I can understand that."
"Really! You! So you don't think he was even a little bit weird."
"Well." She wanted to be fair. "There is that business about living with his mother."
"What business?"
"No particular business-just that he lived with her."
"Why shouldn't he live with her?"
"A grown man living with his mother. It's just-"
Sandy felt the conversation running out of control. She didn't know what it meant or who was defending whom, but she'd been here before often enough to understand how the most intricate arrangements can be dismantled by a single uttered phrase. Something hovered in the still air between Todd and her, a cloud of unbreathed thought, no bigger in size than a cantaloupe, or a human fist.
Then he said, "I live with my mother."
"Oh." Another skipped beat, "You didn't mention... I didn't realise."
"And I'll probably go on living with my mother."
"Oh."
"I didn't know it would matter to you. Or maybe I did know, and that's why I didn't mention it."
"It doesn't mean a thing, not at all, really. You've completely misunderstood me, Todd. I have nothing against men who live with their mothers."
"Tell me about it." He said this as though his mouth were full of bitter coins.
This discussion took place on their last night together. For hours afterward they lay silent on Sandy's bed, neither one of them really sleeping, and in the morning they rose to an even deeper silence, a silence she found painful but also dignified and somehow admirable. They moved politely around the apartment, two civilised adults, one of them preparing for an early flight, closing his suitcase, checking his ticket, attaching his e-mail address to the fridge with one of Sandy's fridge magnets. She made him toast and coffee, and then drove him, in silence, to the airport. The idea of an embrace seemed obscene. Shaking hands would have been ludicrous. All he said in parting was "Be sure to say goodbye to Jenny."
And give my love to your mother.
This is what Sandy told Chloe when they were having lunch a week later. "That's what I almost said to him-Give my love to your mother. The words were just about to hop off my tongue."
"What stopped you?"
"I don't know. I was afraid I might laugh. Or else cry. I mean, I'm a woman who doesn't know where her next kiss is coming from."
