PB Fic: Homecoming (1/1)
Summary: Thirty years into the future, a lesson of hope and love is taught to a despairing son.
Characters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, Original Characters
Genre/Rating: Gen, Het, Post-Series / PG
Length: ~ 1,500 words
Author's Note: A little PB Christmas fic I wrote for eight8toes and Maureen (previously known as poisonshades) in 2008. I hope they don't mind that I've unlocked it. This is what nostalgia does. Homecoming is in the same universe as Love is Friendship Set on Fire (another story I wrote about Michael's son as a grownup). In the years since PB ended I have found myself thinking about how hard it must be to be the son of Michael and Sara (Michael is alive of course, electrocuted my ass) and twice it has led to fic during the holidays. One fic a year -- that ain't bad!
This story has no Michael/Sara sexytimes; I want that but I can't write it. Whenever I think of Michael and Sara now they are always old and grey, holding hands as they watch the world go by. On to the fic!
He stops by the pastry shop that opens very early, the one next to the diner that closes very late. He gets a whole bagful of bagels, all-dressed. No earmuffs this time, so when the wind picks up and slams into him he can do no more than turn up the collar of his coat. He tucks the paper bag under it, close to his body. He rounds the corner. A parade flows on his right: the row of take-away holes-in-the-wall, laundromats, coffee shops that always seem choked with students from DePaul, and tiny bookstores selling hard-to-find titles with festive red-and-green decorations at the windows. All are closed at this hour, and save for a man walking to a bus stop and a car at a stoplight flashing red, the street is deserted. The cold is a sharp bite, the silence an empty chill. Hearth and house lies west, he’s heading north and away.
He keeps on walking.
He virtually proceeds on auto-pilot, so when he reaches the familiar brownstone he is startled by the sight. For a brief moment he wonders how he managed to find his way. Like a homing pigeon, he thinks, pressing the doorbell. Always finding true north.
A tall woman opens the door. Astonishment registers on her face, concern quickly following. A taxi and a good twenty-minute walk through snow, not to mention the time of day: he doubts I was in the neighborhood will cut it. He flashes a smile, pulling out the bag of bagels like a weapon. “I brought your favorite.”
She’s not fooled but her hands are warm on his arm. She calls out over her shoulder, “Honey, look who’s here!” then ushers him further in.
oOo
He doesn’t remember now what started the argument. Perhaps it was the window that she always wants to leave open to let in the air and the sun, the one he would much rather have shut tight. When it rains, a thin sheet of mist settles on everything in the aftermath, a veritable invitation to mold. When the weather is nice and warm and completely on her side, still he wants to seal things up, to hold the fort, and the open window is a breach in the barricade between them and a world he cannot trust. The window yawns against the inky black of night; in bed, every cell in his body screams in protest, and she lies heedlessly beside him, fast asleep.
As soon as they stepped in the front door last night, he could swear the smog slapped at his face like a wet, dirty towel. The window was wide open, mocking him, and across the room from it the tips of the leather shoes he’d forgotten to put away were moist, as if perspiring from some mild exertion. But he picked them up and shelved them, not saying a word, while she slowly made her way to close the window, utterly unapologetic.
Perhaps it was the fourth party invitation she’d declined for the two of them, or his suggestion-“declaration” would be more like it, she said-to move again to another house, somewhere further west. Maybe it was the offhand remark she should not have made to a friend of his that they bumped into on their way home, or the carton of milk she forgot to pick up, or the Saturday night home movie he’d selected that she found too low-brow for her taste. It could be any of the dozen other little telltale signs of a journey nearing its end that they’ve chosen to think of as minor, inevitable encumbrances-or that she has, if her obliviousness was any indication. Funny how that was what struck him the most about her the first time they met, this seeming peacefulness, as though she had some secret knowledge that allowed her, while the rest of them strained and strutted, to float serenely above it all. It was a sudden, relentless kind of falling, and he plunged eagerly, unmindful of remorse. It wasn’t much later that he realized that her outward calmness was in fact at its core an icy detachment for all things that failed to hold her interest-that the objects of her ardor could change quickly and irreversibly, and that he could be one of them.
He sits down at the table while his mother moves about preparing breakfast. It's six in the morning. In ten minutes his father will come down from his study where he’s been up writing since five. The meal will pass quietly. Then the rest of the morning will be filled with reading and chores. His mother might confer online with field doctors, or compare notes with a younger colleague. Invariably, his father will be sitting down drafting his latest innovation, another contribution to improving humanity’s lot. Essentially an old married couple’s routine, a comfortable monotony.
Perhaps it was the excess of excitement that they had at a time when they were younger, before the kids came-his parents, having had enough tension and uncertainty to last a lifetime, built their lives around a system. The order was something they guarded fiercely, even extending, believe it or not, to the measures of romance. Every year, on their anniversary, a single red rose would be waiting for his mother, presented via some random, unexpected gesture: left on top of a pile of towels or on the dashboard of her car, or brandished by a carefully picked stranger on the street saying, “Happy anniversary, Doctor.” And always, a plain white card, and the words, My sweet, my dear adversary.
“Trust our father to spoil the moment with a battle reference,” his sister once said when they were old enough to start wondering what the yearly message meant, when they were old enough to start resenting the parental system and stage episodic rebellions. A few years later he would unlock his father’s code, nestled in the very end of one of the many anthologies that his first girlfriend, an avid reader of short stories, owned, the passage leaping out at him: And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.
His sister was unimpressed, sparing only a smirk. “Our father, the plagiarist.”
“You were named after this woman,” he said. “Aren’t you the least bit intrigued?”
“Excuse me, bro. I was named after Marie Curie, not this woman. Because dad knew I was going to be smart.”
She was smart, all right, he gave her that. But not even her brains shielded her from their parents’ reputation: an engineer who staged a daring jailbreak, the doctor who ran away with him. It mattered little that this engineer and this doctor did the impossible and changed the world: in the throes of puberty and teenage angst, when all she wanted was to blend in and belong, Marie Scofield, the girl who ate equations for breakfast and comfortably ran six-minute miles before she even knew how big a deal that was, was forced to hang up her running shoes before she even put them on, because for Bonnie and Clyde-that proverbial duo on-the-run-to beget a daughter who could literally run forever if she wanted to was a joke nobody would want to pass up.
That night he read the story where the excerpt was lifted from again, a letter of an inebriated, sorrowful man to his wife of many, many years written at the eve of his seventieth birthday: the memory of another couple in happier times spurs his realization that his own marriage has been in fact been blessed-time may have dulled the fact of that great love yet there it was, undeniably so, despite everything that came afterward-that his chance at love is something he would still take if presented to him again. It was a short read, a nice one. He came to the end of the story then read it again, then again. My sweet, my dear adversary. He stared at the words, wondering if it was his parents’ private joke. He wondered if they were masking some great underlying discontentment with each other, a sadness that they concealed with a routine as steady, as precise, as impassive as a clock.
And now, sitting in the kitchen of his childhood, he wonders if he is bound to follow their footsteps. He wonders if he is capable of being happy.
It is perhaps a tad too melodramatic, but he has reason to worry. Thanks to science, genes can now be successfully tweaked to yield a baby by design, free of the debilitating qualities that marked its parents, but he and Marie had been born too early for that, and so along with their parents' eyes and height and build and intellect, they also carry the markers of their parents’ compulsions and weaknesses. Armed with that knowledge, they’ve lived their lives wary of the slightest craving, the merest obsession. There are millions like them, and nowadays intervention is commonplace and effective. Still, not everything can be predetermined, certainly not what grips a person’s heart, and so he sits in the kitchen, and wonders. And though the question (Are you unhappy?) is heavy on his lips-open them, and they will fly out, fully formed-he hesitates.
His mother makes coffee. His father returns to his study with a steaming mug, and he and his mother sit by the window looking out at the silvery morning.
“So I will be expecting you and Rachel for dinner on the 24th,” she says.
He tries to sound as neutral as possible. “I don’t think she will be going with me.”
“I see.” His mother regards him knowingly, and he is thankful. If one thing can be said about their family, it’s that the fewest words can run the farthest distances. He decides to let go.
“I don’t know, Mom. It’s just not working.”
“So you do know.” She covers his hand with hers, lingers. “Marie will be here on the 21st. Ben is coming with her.”
“You think it’s serious?”
His mother smiles. “Of course it is. This is your sister.”
The question is a living, breathing thing now, pushing at his teeth, struggling to be let through. He buys some time by sipping his coffee, visualizing the liquid making its way past his throat and down his esophagus, mixing with the bagels.
He takes a breath and plunges on. “There really is no easy way, is there, to know if someone is the one.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“And you can start with trumpets blazing, so sure of yourselves, only for everything to die out in a whimper.”
“That, too.”
He takes another breath, deeper this time. “And then you stay together, and pretend?”
Her mother’s nod is too sure for his peace of mind. “Yes, sometimes that’s necessary.”
“And all the pain, all of that will be worth it?”
“It’s all about give-and-take. And lots of work...”
“-I know that-”
“-a battle of wills-”
And then, like a Jack-in-a-box, it jumps out. “Like you and dad?”
His mother pauses at the question, but her eyes soften. “Yes.”
He can’t meet her eyes, and so he stares at the tabletop.
“Sometimes,” his mother goes on, her voice at once solemn and firm, “it takes so much of yourself to love somebody, so much that sometimes it feels you can’t give more, but if you are lucky enough to find someone who you can’t imagine living without, who feels the same way about you, then that person will meet you halfway, somehow. And that’s how you know when to stay.”
The cups are empty now, but nobody stands to clear the table. Memories flash before him, a flood of a full thirty years: his father locking himself up in a room for days of isolation while his mother reassures the rest of them with steadiness and calm; his mother's proscription against alcohol in the house finally explained; the long stares they got in school as children; the pregnant beat of silence in the seconds just after he introduces himself; Marie holding up a seashell to her ear as their father talks about the Fibonacci sequence and the logarithmic spiral; an ugly encounter with the press; Marie punching Miguel in the face and later apologizing to him and their father's friend Fernando, their father looming over her like a dark cloud; Marie and him seated at the back of the car on their way to a school play, watching their mother's hand playing lazily with the wisps of hair at their father's nape; an argument that got too loud...Annoyances and old scars and glimpses of beauty that he wishes were all real, because if they were then some quiet joy might have a chance in their unusual, difficult lives.
When his father returns for a refill, he finds them laughing silently. “Did I miss something?”
“We were just talking about the time you asked Lincoln to give me the rose. Remember? Lincoln-in-disguise.”
“Ah. Poor Lincoln. Mistaken for a molester. Was it a kick to the kneecaps?”
“No, dad. Mom gave him an elbow to the solar plexus.”
“Right, the solar plexus.” He leans against the sink, hands wrapping the mug. Freckles abundantly dot the skin.
He stays for six more hours, soaking up the warmth and the calm. His mother goes up to get his father while he sets the table for lunch; soon after soft laughter and a light-hearted exchange flow down from the study to him. Perhaps he's grasping at straws, but it gives him hope. He can see it, in this very house.
He finds himself thinking of the story again on his way home. He is almost at his doorstep when it comes to him, the deliberate vagueness of Marie in the story --while as disgruntled as the husband, she is painted in the broadest of strokes, as though she could be one of a thousand, a million others. One never quite knows what she did before she got married, if she had any hobbies, or if she, in fact, loved letters and would therefore appreciate her husband’s effort. Nobody would ever know, but as he enters the empty, silent flat, the open window obstinately greeting him, he finds himself hoping that she is-for all the Maries that have ever lived, and all the Maries that will ever be.
x-x-x
Notes:
The short story I refer to here is R. Bausch's "Letter to the Lady of the House". The version I'd written for Christmas had long excerpts weaved throughout, but upon re-reading I realized they no longer worked for me so I deleted them there. I've placed them here though in case I change my mind and because, damn, the writing is just so beautiful, I want to keep it where I can easily find it.
Excerpts:
The fact is, we aren’t the people we were even then, just a year ago. I know that. As I know things have been slowly eroding between us for a very long time; we are a little tired of each other, and there are annoyances and old scars that won’t be obliterated with a letter-even a long one written in the middle of the night in desperate sincerity, under the influence, admittedly, of a considerable portion of bourbon whiskey, but nevertheless with the best intention and hope: that you may know how, over the course of this night, I came to the end of needing an explanation for our difficulty. We have reached this-place. Everything we say seems rather aggravatingly mindless and automatic, like something a stranger might say to another in any of the thousand circumstances where strangers are thrown together for a time, and the silence begins to grow heavy on their minds, and someone has to say something...
...we go so long these days without having anything at all to do with each other, and the children are arriving tomorrow, and once more we’ll be in the position of making all the gestures that give them back their parents as they think their parents are...
...what I wanted to say to you, what came to me as I thought about Louise and Charles on that day so long ago, when they were young and so obviously glad of each other, and I looked at them and knew it and was happy-what came to me was that even the harsh things that happened to them, even the years of anger and silence, even the disappointment and the bitterness and the wanting not to be in the same room anymore, even all that must have been worth it for such loveliness. At least I am here, at seventy years old, hoping so. Tonight, I went back to our room again and stood gazing at your sleep, dreaming whatever you were dreaming, and I had a moment of thinking how we were always friends, too. Because what I wanted finally to say was that I remember well our own sweet times, our own old loveliness, and I would like to think that even if at the very beginning of our lives together I had somehow been shown that we would end up here, with this longing to be away from each other, this feeling of being trapped together, of being tied to each other in a way that makes us wish for other times, some other place-I would have known enough to accept it all freely for the chance at that love. And if I could, I would do it all again...
Characters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, Original Characters
Genre/Rating: Gen, Het, Post-Series / PG
Length: ~ 1,500 words
Author's Note: A little PB Christmas fic I wrote for eight8toes and Maureen (previously known as poisonshades) in 2008. I hope they don't mind that I've unlocked it. This is what nostalgia does. Homecoming is in the same universe as Love is Friendship Set on Fire (another story I wrote about Michael's son as a grownup). In the years since PB ended I have found myself thinking about how hard it must be to be the son of Michael and Sara (Michael is alive of course, electrocuted my ass) and twice it has led to fic during the holidays. One fic a year -- that ain't bad!
This story has no Michael/Sara sexytimes; I want that but I can't write it. Whenever I think of Michael and Sara now they are always old and grey, holding hands as they watch the world go by. On to the fic!
He stops by the pastry shop that opens very early, the one next to the diner that closes very late. He gets a whole bagful of bagels, all-dressed. No earmuffs this time, so when the wind picks up and slams into him he can do no more than turn up the collar of his coat. He tucks the paper bag under it, close to his body. He rounds the corner. A parade flows on his right: the row of take-away holes-in-the-wall, laundromats, coffee shops that always seem choked with students from DePaul, and tiny bookstores selling hard-to-find titles with festive red-and-green decorations at the windows. All are closed at this hour, and save for a man walking to a bus stop and a car at a stoplight flashing red, the street is deserted. The cold is a sharp bite, the silence an empty chill. Hearth and house lies west, he’s heading north and away.
He keeps on walking.
He virtually proceeds on auto-pilot, so when he reaches the familiar brownstone he is startled by the sight. For a brief moment he wonders how he managed to find his way. Like a homing pigeon, he thinks, pressing the doorbell. Always finding true north.
A tall woman opens the door. Astonishment registers on her face, concern quickly following. A taxi and a good twenty-minute walk through snow, not to mention the time of day: he doubts I was in the neighborhood will cut it. He flashes a smile, pulling out the bag of bagels like a weapon. “I brought your favorite.”
She’s not fooled but her hands are warm on his arm. She calls out over her shoulder, “Honey, look who’s here!” then ushers him further in.
oOo
He doesn’t remember now what started the argument. Perhaps it was the window that she always wants to leave open to let in the air and the sun, the one he would much rather have shut tight. When it rains, a thin sheet of mist settles on everything in the aftermath, a veritable invitation to mold. When the weather is nice and warm and completely on her side, still he wants to seal things up, to hold the fort, and the open window is a breach in the barricade between them and a world he cannot trust. The window yawns against the inky black of night; in bed, every cell in his body screams in protest, and she lies heedlessly beside him, fast asleep.
As soon as they stepped in the front door last night, he could swear the smog slapped at his face like a wet, dirty towel. The window was wide open, mocking him, and across the room from it the tips of the leather shoes he’d forgotten to put away were moist, as if perspiring from some mild exertion. But he picked them up and shelved them, not saying a word, while she slowly made her way to close the window, utterly unapologetic.
Perhaps it was the fourth party invitation she’d declined for the two of them, or his suggestion-“declaration” would be more like it, she said-to move again to another house, somewhere further west. Maybe it was the offhand remark she should not have made to a friend of his that they bumped into on their way home, or the carton of milk she forgot to pick up, or the Saturday night home movie he’d selected that she found too low-brow for her taste. It could be any of the dozen other little telltale signs of a journey nearing its end that they’ve chosen to think of as minor, inevitable encumbrances-or that she has, if her obliviousness was any indication. Funny how that was what struck him the most about her the first time they met, this seeming peacefulness, as though she had some secret knowledge that allowed her, while the rest of them strained and strutted, to float serenely above it all. It was a sudden, relentless kind of falling, and he plunged eagerly, unmindful of remorse. It wasn’t much later that he realized that her outward calmness was in fact at its core an icy detachment for all things that failed to hold her interest-that the objects of her ardor could change quickly and irreversibly, and that he could be one of them.
He sits down at the table while his mother moves about preparing breakfast. It's six in the morning. In ten minutes his father will come down from his study where he’s been up writing since five. The meal will pass quietly. Then the rest of the morning will be filled with reading and chores. His mother might confer online with field doctors, or compare notes with a younger colleague. Invariably, his father will be sitting down drafting his latest innovation, another contribution to improving humanity’s lot. Essentially an old married couple’s routine, a comfortable monotony.
Perhaps it was the excess of excitement that they had at a time when they were younger, before the kids came-his parents, having had enough tension and uncertainty to last a lifetime, built their lives around a system. The order was something they guarded fiercely, even extending, believe it or not, to the measures of romance. Every year, on their anniversary, a single red rose would be waiting for his mother, presented via some random, unexpected gesture: left on top of a pile of towels or on the dashboard of her car, or brandished by a carefully picked stranger on the street saying, “Happy anniversary, Doctor.” And always, a plain white card, and the words, My sweet, my dear adversary.
“Trust our father to spoil the moment with a battle reference,” his sister once said when they were old enough to start wondering what the yearly message meant, when they were old enough to start resenting the parental system and stage episodic rebellions. A few years later he would unlock his father’s code, nestled in the very end of one of the many anthologies that his first girlfriend, an avid reader of short stories, owned, the passage leaping out at him: And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.
His sister was unimpressed, sparing only a smirk. “Our father, the plagiarist.”
“You were named after this woman,” he said. “Aren’t you the least bit intrigued?”
“Excuse me, bro. I was named after Marie Curie, not this woman. Because dad knew I was going to be smart.”
She was smart, all right, he gave her that. But not even her brains shielded her from their parents’ reputation: an engineer who staged a daring jailbreak, the doctor who ran away with him. It mattered little that this engineer and this doctor did the impossible and changed the world: in the throes of puberty and teenage angst, when all she wanted was to blend in and belong, Marie Scofield, the girl who ate equations for breakfast and comfortably ran six-minute miles before she even knew how big a deal that was, was forced to hang up her running shoes before she even put them on, because for Bonnie and Clyde-that proverbial duo on-the-run-to beget a daughter who could literally run forever if she wanted to was a joke nobody would want to pass up.
That night he read the story where the excerpt was lifted from again, a letter of an inebriated, sorrowful man to his wife of many, many years written at the eve of his seventieth birthday: the memory of another couple in happier times spurs his realization that his own marriage has been in fact been blessed-time may have dulled the fact of that great love yet there it was, undeniably so, despite everything that came afterward-that his chance at love is something he would still take if presented to him again. It was a short read, a nice one. He came to the end of the story then read it again, then again. My sweet, my dear adversary. He stared at the words, wondering if it was his parents’ private joke. He wondered if they were masking some great underlying discontentment with each other, a sadness that they concealed with a routine as steady, as precise, as impassive as a clock.
And now, sitting in the kitchen of his childhood, he wonders if he is bound to follow their footsteps. He wonders if he is capable of being happy.
It is perhaps a tad too melodramatic, but he has reason to worry. Thanks to science, genes can now be successfully tweaked to yield a baby by design, free of the debilitating qualities that marked its parents, but he and Marie had been born too early for that, and so along with their parents' eyes and height and build and intellect, they also carry the markers of their parents’ compulsions and weaknesses. Armed with that knowledge, they’ve lived their lives wary of the slightest craving, the merest obsession. There are millions like them, and nowadays intervention is commonplace and effective. Still, not everything can be predetermined, certainly not what grips a person’s heart, and so he sits in the kitchen, and wonders. And though the question (Are you unhappy?) is heavy on his lips-open them, and they will fly out, fully formed-he hesitates.
His mother makes coffee. His father returns to his study with a steaming mug, and he and his mother sit by the window looking out at the silvery morning.
“So I will be expecting you and Rachel for dinner on the 24th,” she says.
He tries to sound as neutral as possible. “I don’t think she will be going with me.”
“I see.” His mother regards him knowingly, and he is thankful. If one thing can be said about their family, it’s that the fewest words can run the farthest distances. He decides to let go.
“I don’t know, Mom. It’s just not working.”
“So you do know.” She covers his hand with hers, lingers. “Marie will be here on the 21st. Ben is coming with her.”
“You think it’s serious?”
His mother smiles. “Of course it is. This is your sister.”
The question is a living, breathing thing now, pushing at his teeth, struggling to be let through. He buys some time by sipping his coffee, visualizing the liquid making its way past his throat and down his esophagus, mixing with the bagels.
He takes a breath and plunges on. “There really is no easy way, is there, to know if someone is the one.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“And you can start with trumpets blazing, so sure of yourselves, only for everything to die out in a whimper.”
“That, too.”
He takes another breath, deeper this time. “And then you stay together, and pretend?”
Her mother’s nod is too sure for his peace of mind. “Yes, sometimes that’s necessary.”
“And all the pain, all of that will be worth it?”
“It’s all about give-and-take. And lots of work...”
“-I know that-”
“-a battle of wills-”
And then, like a Jack-in-a-box, it jumps out. “Like you and dad?”
His mother pauses at the question, but her eyes soften. “Yes.”
He can’t meet her eyes, and so he stares at the tabletop.
“Sometimes,” his mother goes on, her voice at once solemn and firm, “it takes so much of yourself to love somebody, so much that sometimes it feels you can’t give more, but if you are lucky enough to find someone who you can’t imagine living without, who feels the same way about you, then that person will meet you halfway, somehow. And that’s how you know when to stay.”
The cups are empty now, but nobody stands to clear the table. Memories flash before him, a flood of a full thirty years: his father locking himself up in a room for days of isolation while his mother reassures the rest of them with steadiness and calm; his mother's proscription against alcohol in the house finally explained; the long stares they got in school as children; the pregnant beat of silence in the seconds just after he introduces himself; Marie holding up a seashell to her ear as their father talks about the Fibonacci sequence and the logarithmic spiral; an ugly encounter with the press; Marie punching Miguel in the face and later apologizing to him and their father's friend Fernando, their father looming over her like a dark cloud; Marie and him seated at the back of the car on their way to a school play, watching their mother's hand playing lazily with the wisps of hair at their father's nape; an argument that got too loud...Annoyances and old scars and glimpses of beauty that he wishes were all real, because if they were then some quiet joy might have a chance in their unusual, difficult lives.
When his father returns for a refill, he finds them laughing silently. “Did I miss something?”
“We were just talking about the time you asked Lincoln to give me the rose. Remember? Lincoln-in-disguise.”
“Ah. Poor Lincoln. Mistaken for a molester. Was it a kick to the kneecaps?”
“No, dad. Mom gave him an elbow to the solar plexus.”
“Right, the solar plexus.” He leans against the sink, hands wrapping the mug. Freckles abundantly dot the skin.
He stays for six more hours, soaking up the warmth and the calm. His mother goes up to get his father while he sets the table for lunch; soon after soft laughter and a light-hearted exchange flow down from the study to him. Perhaps he's grasping at straws, but it gives him hope. He can see it, in this very house.
He finds himself thinking of the story again on his way home. He is almost at his doorstep when it comes to him, the deliberate vagueness of Marie in the story --while as disgruntled as the husband, she is painted in the broadest of strokes, as though she could be one of a thousand, a million others. One never quite knows what she did before she got married, if she had any hobbies, or if she, in fact, loved letters and would therefore appreciate her husband’s effort. Nobody would ever know, but as he enters the empty, silent flat, the open window obstinately greeting him, he finds himself hoping that she is-for all the Maries that have ever lived, and all the Maries that will ever be.
x-x-x
Notes:
The short story I refer to here is R. Bausch's "Letter to the Lady of the House". The version I'd written for Christmas had long excerpts weaved throughout, but upon re-reading I realized they no longer worked for me so I deleted them there. I've placed them here though in case I change my mind and because, damn, the writing is just so beautiful, I want to keep it where I can easily find it.
Excerpts:
The fact is, we aren’t the people we were even then, just a year ago. I know that. As I know things have been slowly eroding between us for a very long time; we are a little tired of each other, and there are annoyances and old scars that won’t be obliterated with a letter-even a long one written in the middle of the night in desperate sincerity, under the influence, admittedly, of a considerable portion of bourbon whiskey, but nevertheless with the best intention and hope: that you may know how, over the course of this night, I came to the end of needing an explanation for our difficulty. We have reached this-place. Everything we say seems rather aggravatingly mindless and automatic, like something a stranger might say to another in any of the thousand circumstances where strangers are thrown together for a time, and the silence begins to grow heavy on their minds, and someone has to say something...
...we go so long these days without having anything at all to do with each other, and the children are arriving tomorrow, and once more we’ll be in the position of making all the gestures that give them back their parents as they think their parents are...
...what I wanted to say to you, what came to me as I thought about Louise and Charles on that day so long ago, when they were young and so obviously glad of each other, and I looked at them and knew it and was happy-what came to me was that even the harsh things that happened to them, even the years of anger and silence, even the disappointment and the bitterness and the wanting not to be in the same room anymore, even all that must have been worth it for such loveliness. At least I am here, at seventy years old, hoping so. Tonight, I went back to our room again and stood gazing at your sleep, dreaming whatever you were dreaming, and I had a moment of thinking how we were always friends, too. Because what I wanted finally to say was that I remember well our own sweet times, our own old loveliness, and I would like to think that even if at the very beginning of our lives together I had somehow been shown that we would end up here, with this longing to be away from each other, this feeling of being trapped together, of being tied to each other in a way that makes us wish for other times, some other place-I would have known enough to accept it all freely for the chance at that love. And if I could, I would do it all again...