******
In the television room of a lovely house on a lovely street in a quiet neighborhood of a small town, Mister and Mrs. Wyman sit in their lounge chairs, foot rests up, prepared for flight. She’s got the remote and switches channels until she settles on the Hartford station when the newscaster introduces the video of the young and handsome Attorney General standing at a podium in the Senate caucus room, flanked by a younger brother and unknown members of his family, a priest with an Episcopal collar and other supporters as he announces his run for Governor.
The sight of the young man on the TV stops Mrs. Wyman, because he’s so handsome with his hair falling in a full wave over his brow, left to right, unusual in most men, and the sad eyes, so blue, and the hard jaw, not square like some jarhead Marine, but tapered with a touch of elegance, the line from cheekbone to chin.
“Isn’t he handsome?” she says, and Mr. Wyman grunts and opens his eyes, sleepy now with time and whiskey and the last nod that took him someplace far away, gentle and kind, though out of reach, now gone, not to be remembered, as he looks at the skinny kid on the screen who’s saying something about the return of integrity to state government, about how we all can do better, about some Greek poet who wrote a play. Mr. Wyman fingers the small glass on the side table and holds it and starts to nod again wondering what it is he can do better since he’s done the best he could for so long and has accomplished so little, leaving him bereft and tired, a visitor, a watcher, like many men approaching sixty, on the sidelines of a game he once played, a game that rewards propriety and manners and absolute devotion to the boss, the company, the rightness of a life lived correctly – a life for which Mr. Wyman found a metaphor in columns of numbers and an arithmetic that seeks zero, as if seeking the grail, a magical and existential number, an unmoved and unmoving notation, a mystery and sometimes, if not a window on some other, better place, then a mirror of this place, the here and now, the unforgivable normal world, the unfortunate cipher his youngest, the gifted one, departs on occasion.
“Another drink, Henry?” Mrs. Wyman asks, and Mr. Wyman moves his glass a millimeter, which is all he has to do, and she gets up and crosses the room and fills it with rye whiskey, pouring another for herself, wiping the glass bottoms with a small towel to soak up the condensation, to make the glass cold again, to make it seem like the first and not the seventh drink of a short evening.
“I just think it’d be nice to have a handsome young man like that rise up in government,” she says, handing Henry his drink, taking her seat, moving the remote, sitting back with those foggy eyes, uncertain whether they should flash with an ever-ready indignation, or just get pleasantly sleepy in the cocoon of medicinal drink.
“Who is he?” the accountant asks, having missed the beginning, which is deadly for accountants, having missed the name or the city or the reason why all the people on the TV are so serious until the skinny kid stops talking and they let loose with smiles and applaud as if somebody had actually done something worthwhile.
“He’s Thomas Somers,” she says, “the Attorney General.”
“He’s a kid,” Mr. Wyman grunts.
“He’s Matthew’s age,” she says, defensive, defending Somers and not Matthew, which is her way of reminding her husband of failures and negation, of saying look at what this young Somers boy is doing and look at what your son’s doing - next to nothing, reliant on the state and welfare to keep him in a room where he won’t hurt himself.
“That’s awfully young,” Henry Wyman says, which is his way of telling his wife there’s plenty of time for a man like Matthew, who has troubles, problems, but who’s gifted too, who will mature in his own time, at his own speed, in accordance with the Greek concept of Kairos, capable of great things, greater than empty and self proclaimed integrity at a news conference called by one’s self to further one’s career.
“I think they even went to school together,” Mrs. Wyman says, looking, seeking out some area of the bulky carb belly of the old man, dull with numbers, where she can plunge the short wide blade of a Roman in Gaul.
“Matthew got all A’s” Henry says, nodding again, the drink more than the conversation taking him down like a diver in cold water in a lake without a bottom, sinking in the all-forgiving, all-consuming wet green darkness, made pale here and there with broad beams of light from a sun that shines only at night, and he thinks how Matthew was never afraid, full of cocky brightness, a face that lit up, and how, even as a young boy, he’d sit on the edge of his father’s chair and put his arm around his father’s neck, breaking every rule in the house, seeking out, as lightning seeks the ground, the stability that follows change, something normal, his father’s love, hidden, though not deeply hidden, under the glaze and shell of a man who’d placed his faith in obtaining a kind of certitude, settlement, equilibrium, balance, never wholly satisfactory, but workable – a kind of math that inferred greater realms of doubt and questions - realms desirous of more complex equations to reflect other passages through higher levels of chaos, spun like so much marble in the broadcloth of God.
“Henry.”
He hears his name from above the warm waters of sleep and wishes he could sink further to a realm of no-sight, no-sound, no-thought, but only vision and sense made perfect in an anesthetic heaven.
“Henry.”
Again he hears his name and need not rise through water too quickly, his spirit in danger of crumbling with the bends, rendering his soul arthritic with oxygen, but merely look upward once to the shaft of yellow, now as pale as the yellow wall and the frames of photos of the family that came before, and he turns and coughs a dry cough, an inflection, a breath, a gulp of air and looks at her, the woman he married, almost forty years ago in a small church, three stop-lights from the street with the oversized house on land his father owned and sold when things went badly, when things happened.
“What?” he says.
“Time for bed,” she says and already she’s out of her chair, moving about the room, taking the glasses and setting them in the sink in the bar in an alcove, wiping things down, a white towel with blue stripes, determined, bossy, wearing her housecoat, a Monet print, the macadam of oils, oriental, the sho-gun’s geisha with the little sticks in the tight bun and the failure of lace.
But this is not her, he thinks. She’s grown short and fat and angry with herself, with me, with everyone. She disdains the world. She has failed at kindness.
“C’mon, Henry, please, now, it’s time.”
And he remembers his last class with a tall, bald teacher at a state school, who called him aside and told him that he had a special talent for numbers, for the rigorous detail of symbols as old as Mohammed, for the love of a metaphor unobtainable by most young romantics who seek their useless gods in grass and splashy rows of barley in a lake district.
“I’ll put on the hall light,” she says, moving out of the room, so that with the questionable strength of late middle age, he stands on legs that click and then find footing, his back about to spasm as he starts across the hard floor, following her, though he can’t see her, only the lamps she’s lit to light his way through several rooms running half the length of a house too large by a factor of seven - or whatever number of drinks she poured between eight and whenever. And she calls again from a dark distance to make sure he’s up, her voice like an unhappy teacher from the fifties who prizes silence and order over everything, and he follows her like a pet, a man who’s lost the will to assert his will except with the rare explosion of rage that marked and marred his life.
“Turn them off as you go,” she says, and he hears her now, not through any web or veil of comforting sleep but in a dry and present reality he can’t escape even when he does sleep, the unhappiness of company without love, the assault and intrusion of the other when love is absent and, being the vacuum it is, fails with its absence to make room for another.
He hears footsteps, his, perhaps hers, the sliding muffled sound of slippers on carpet as she ascends the stairs, one foot after the other, and he seeks out a rhythm, a repetitive percussive to mark the ascent, to count down the last moment of this all too painful consciousness when the sounds stop, the rhythm breaks, and she makes but one chirp of question and doubt and then, with a cascade of sound, as wild as any untamed utterance of jazz, resisting all call to normalcy and order, she falls backwards, spinning like a wheel down the flight of stairs, landing at his feet in a heap of oriental myth, fabric and twisted limbs, eyes open with a kind of innocent wonderment until they close and she breathes slowly with a different rhythm, with its own presentation and refusal to be anything other than what it is, the last gasps of a small woman who found life difficult, who found comfort in food, who drank, who smoked, who loved only her first son.