I had offered to move out immediately, but she wanted me to stay “until it was really over.” That took longer than we’d thought. We continued to live parallel lives, a roommatey unmarriage, in what was, fortunately, a big Cambridge ark of a place. I moved my stuff to her daughter’s old room and slept there. We agreed on the rules: No implied guilt, no emotional entrapment, no sexual overtures. We still got dinner together. I did the heavy vacuuming. We even went to the movies and concerts as a couple. I gave her my Eames chair knockoff as a parting gift. She put together an album for me, photographs of our lives together, including Amy. We both skirted the obvious irony to that, since I had never known Amy by much more than pictures anyway, seeing her only on vacations from college, when we tried not to invade each other’s space. She had tagged me on first meeting as “seriously uncool,” words whispered to Rebecca, who passed them on to me. It became a repeated joke between us.
That had been the nature of our life in that house, always on a kind of high road of civility and good humor, which may be why I didn’t catch on earlier. We seldom argued. We “discussed,” or Rebecca did. She liked to spread it all out, identify and tag each little part. Some might call this a gender thing. I didn’t. I had encountered it in certain male colleagues, notably at faculty meetings. There are people who need to talk, who see their lives best as a journey of words. Rebecca, on the same odyssey, had always gone to a fellow therapist for “annual checkups,” and when she began weekly visits I didn’t question it. Her privilege. She was “getting to the bottom of things,” she said. But when she urged me to do the same, I refused. I had no compulsion to dig around.
But then I lost my job, lopped off in a budget cut. In itself, it was not disastrous. Untenured adjunct English teachers were always in demand in Boston at community colleges and business schools, and in due time I was high on the waiting list of two. But in that process something else “came to light,” something Rebecca was seeing now with more clarity, as she had not until lately—the “whole job thing.” Not that there was anything wrong with my earning power, she explained, or anything dishonorable about the level of student I taught. It was because I just let things happen, never recognizing my true skills (I was a “good” teacher, she knew that, but I could be “great”), letting myself bounce from school to school, teaching low level lit survey courses, with no sense of—. She stopped, hands up, palms out. No sense of something. Something. She’d been trying to put her finger on it. She couldn’t name it but it drove her nuts. That was when she began to cry. I didn’t, but a half hour later I lost my entire insides to the bathroom.
There was more to the “job thing” than Rebecca mentioned at that point, because she had promised not to bring it up again. A few years earlier I had backed away from an excellent position when I was at the top of the short list. For all its attractions it opened too many doors of involvement, the necessity of publishing, the expectation of selling myself for tenure and promotion, of selling something to students, in fact. So I turned it down. Rebecca called that “a form of acrophobia,” fear of ascending those stairs.
I was not an intellectual, I told her, and I was smart enough to know that. I was a dilettante, a piddler, my head filled with bits and pieces, no grand overview. All I wanted was to make available to whoever might be paying attention the chance of being captured by just one piece of literature by just one worthy author, which just might be a call to a lifetime of reading. That struck me as idealistic enough.
Soon after that she expressed her “wishes,” putting it the same way she might have told me she’d rather go to Maine next summer instead of the Cape. It took me several minutes of silent processing to be sure I had gotten it straight, and then I said, “If that’s the way you want it.” She nodded, as if she’d known what to expect. “Quick release,” she said. I said, “That’s right,” and walked away. I never raised it again. To question, explore, object, protest, defend, maintain, shout, plead, weep, throw, smash—that was a dark pathless forest that led to nowhere.
Now, at my desk in Antigua, Guatemala, on this rainy night, with sounds from the television in the parlor below drifting up to me—some old Western (High Noon? Yes. “Do not forsake me, O my darlin’,” Tex Ritter’s rugged baritone)—I knew what I could have told Rebecca. A moratorium is a place apart, where maybe you can get your head on straight. Thoreau, for instance, went to the woods alone because he “wished to live deliberately,” to deal “only with the essential facts of life.” I was looking for a few essential facts of my own.
No good. The truth was much more simple. I was here to re-access my Spanish, so I could translate my father’s letter, which might or might not contain a single essential fact. But that was no good either, because it embodied its own contradiction. I could study Spanish anywhere, as Catherine noted. In fact, why not just find someone to translate the letter for me there in Boston?
At least I knew the answer to that. I had no idea what it might reveal, and whatever it was I wanted my eyes to see it first. Except, I was not at all sure even I ought to see it. In the two months since I’d found it, I hadn’t opened it again, not so much because it was written in Spanish, a language I had been careful to forget, but because of the one fragment in English, the P.S. Let’s keep all this from Teddy. I’ll explain it to him myself when he is old enough and ready. That bit of accidental poetry recorded itself in my brain, in my father’s voice.
When I ran home from school that January day, my first day of school in Rhode Island, my mother praised me, not for soiling my clothes, of course, but for refusing to talk. We don’t answer questions, she said, even when the teacher asks. We don’t talk about our lives “down there.” We live “up here” now. This is where we belong. And we don’t speak Spanish or Mam. English is our language.
She didn’t mention my father, and hadn’t since the three months before when she came for me alone, picking me up at the boarding school in Florida where they had enrolled me. Where’s Dad? I asked her then. Not coming. Not coming? Why? Because he died, she said, he got very sick and he died, back there in the village. She was not being cruel. She held me tight as she said it and whispered something about being brave and accepting God’s will. But why? I asked. I asked it over and over, pounding her with the same question—why, why?—like small hard fists. Never mind about God and all that stuff. Why did my father—my father— do that inconceivable thing, get sick and die back home in Guatemala, when I wasn’t even there?
I’d known he was sick. For months, whenever he was with us in the village, I would wake up in the morning to sounds of vomiting coming from the outside toilet. It happened to everybody now and then. Our name for it was the “both-ends-bends.” You got over it sooner or later or you lived with it. I had never heard of it causing a death, and it would certainly not cause his. He would never let that happen.
I convinced myself that my mother was wrong, that he was really alive and well. I sent him telepathic messages. Why not? If God could hear me, why couldn’t he? When I faced a problem, I’d ask him to help me. “You’re supposed to, you know,” I’d say. “You’re my father.”
In time I dropped all that, confused by my mother’s silence. Whenever I mentioned him she grew quiet, in body language as well as speech. If I persisted, she hushed me, her long forefinger tapping her closed lips. If I asked her what was wrong, she shook her head, with a look that ended conversation. There was something I couldn’t be told.
I figured it was a grown-up thing, beyond my understanding. I began to fear the unspeakable. My father had done something bad. Was still doing it, back in Guatemala. Like Aladdin, I might find out that he was the leader of a crime ring, or worse. Maybe he’d killed somebody, accidentally of course, and he was hiding from the law. Hiding would be the only reason he didn’t contact me, because if he was alive and didn’t let me know it, that was worse than being dead.
I