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Aaron Czarsky, Professor of History at Witherspoon Academy, selected seven small cans of acrylic spray paint from the wire cage, stepped back, and nodded to the young clerk, who reattached three padlocks to secure these materials against the predations of teenagers.
“Thank you, ma’am. Now, kindly just point me in the direction of your rolls of masking tape, please,” he said, glancing towards the ceiling of the store and smiling to himself.
For the first time since junior high school, at age 49, Aaron Czarsky was going to attempt to “make art” or “do art,” and this time he was looking forward to it. While he was hovering near sleep around 2:45 a.m. that morning, he had pictured distinctly what sort of art he wanted to try.
2
The previous evening was a warm one, and, as he marched rapidly through a strange residential neighborhood, his shoulders back and arms swinging, Aaron Czarsky decided after the first mile and a quarter that he would feel more comfortable and better able to concentrate on his problem if he unbuttoned the top four buttons of his flannel shirt. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, he had counted over and over in his mind, in time to his rapid steps.
It had been 8:37 p.m. when he had taped a note to his coffee cup on the kitchen counter at home—“I need to go for a walk. Aaron”—and he wondered if it was a cowardly act to leave the house without explaining to his wife, Sarah, even vaguely, about where he was going. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . .
He kept his eyes unfocused, above the uneven sidewalks, letting his off-center night vision detect where the tripping spots were and, half-instinctively, letting his feet avoid these. Six years as a marine taught me something useful, he had thought without losing count. Nine, ten, one, two, three, four, it, was, a, mistake, it, was, a, mistake.
Six times in the next mile he paused in the darkness to allow cars to enter cross streets or private driveways, vaguely resentful about the aggressiveness of the drivers who had no intention of yielding to a pedestrian—or of pausing at a stop sign—and yet he felt vaguely pleased that he seemed to be passing through this unfamiliar dark place unnoticed, as if he were invisible—like a ninja, perhaps, or like Lamont Cranston. Nearly two miles farther, about forty yards ahead he saw three teenage boys cross to his side of the street and open the doors of a new Mercedes convertible. They were talking loudly to each other and paid no attention to him as he passed by them. Three blocks beyond these, he noticed a pair of teenage girls cross to the opposite side of the street and go up the walk of a large split-level house with its porch lights on. In the back of his mind, he was aware that this neighborhood was several degrees “ritzier” than his own. His footsteps on the hard sidewalk were nearly silent, and he felt the rhythm of his march with the soles of his feet. It, was, a, big, mis, take, it, was, a, big, mis, take, we, do, not, get, a, long, it, IS, a, big, mis, take, we, don’t, get, a, long, it, IS, a, BIG . . . .
After four miles, Aaron Czarsky crossed a main highway and entered another strange neighborhood. Passing a Mexican-theme bar, he glanced in and considered vaguely whether he would like a beer or two—or perhaps a rum-and-Coke. It was over six months since he had had even a glass of wine, and he continued on his way untempted. We, don’t, get, a, long, at, all, no, we, don’t, get . . . . Feeling too warm, he unbuttoned his shirt completely and pulled it outside his trousers all around.
Half a mile farther, he passed a small Irish-theme bar and smiled mirthlessly at its punning name—Two Shay.
Again he thought briefly about going inside and “wetting his whistle”—or using their men’s room. He saw a public park ahead, dozens of its lights on. Three concrete basketball courts were in use, and he knew there would be an unlocked restroom there if he needed to use one.
When he had first left his house, before his cadence counting had calmed him and finally led him to what he now saw as his correct logical course, Aaron Czarsky had, in his own words, “fumed, dithered, and stewed” about three recent events—events which seemed to go far, far beyond earlier instances of bizarre behavior. Because this was a Tuesday, Aaron had had no classes to teach, and he and Sarah had begun it by carrying five pieces of furniture and twenty-seven boxes of castoffs to the end of their driveway for a Salvation Army pickup at 9:30 a.m. And then, when the truck’s driver, a slender young black man, had declined to take their small marble-top table because a small drawer was missing, Sarah had screamed that this was a charitable donation and had then thrown the sheet of marble into their street, shattering it and turning the table into trash.
“Aaron—you deal with this—this—man!” she had shouted and stamped up their walk and slammed their front door behind her.
An hour later, in tears, Sarah had phoned the Salvation Army and begged them to tell the driver how sorry she was, and then she had spent four hours alone in their bedroom, apparently trying to nap.
After supper, Aaron and she had driven to the market together, where Sarah had decided to break her diet and buy a small lemon meringue pie. Aaron had jokingly offered to “help her eat it,” and she had jokingly offered to break his jaw for him. At the check-out counter, a young Latina cashier had been flirting with a nearby male coworker while she scanned their items and had propelled the pie too swiftly towards Sarah, who was bagging their purchases. Meringue had smeared onto half of the clear plastic lid covering her pie, and Sarah had screamed at the young woman, “Are you some kind of ****ing idiot—or do you destroy people’s things deliberately?! We’re paying you to serve us, you stupid ****ing moron, not to flaunt your little tits and fat ass at the fellas that work here!”
Aaron, shocked, had said, “Sarah—stop it,” and Sarah had stormed out of the market, letting him complete the purchase and carry their groceries. In the parking lot, Sarah had glared at him while he unlocked and loaded their car. They drove home in silence, and when they reached their driveway, he had softly asked her what had happened back at the store.
Sarah had opened her mouth and then closed it, as if censoring her thoughts. At that moment, behind the hedge next to their driveway, a young couple who lived next door, two unmarried students who were renting upstairs rooms from a neighbor, loudly burst into laughter at some private joke, and Sarah had screamed through her open car window, “Will you just shut the **** up!”
Aaron had pressed the control to raise her window and had again said, “Sarah—stop it.” Sarah had glared at him, and he had added, “Maybe they’ll think you were only shouting at me.” Then she had stormed out of the car, into their house, and up to their bedroom. Frequently shaking his head from side to side and biting his lower lip, he had carried in the groceries and put them away, placing her pie in the freezer as she would have done herself had she been helping.
Now on the far side of the public park, Aaron Czarsky had walked the “wrong” way down a dark one-way street that had no sidewalks. In the dim cross-light coming from the park and from a house fifty feet distant, he noticed a large storm sewer—larger than any others he had seen elsewhere in this central Connecticut town. For a few moments he paused and stooped slightly to try to see whether it had a grate of any sort. It appeared to have none, but he could not be certain. He smiled mirthlessly to himself and thought, If I were to slip—and fall down into that sewer and drown, probably nobody would ever find my body—I would just become—one of—history’s mysteries. And who would really care? It would be as if my students had a holiday from my nonsense about the politics of Greece and Rome—a holiday from me. And Sarah—too—one brief holiday—for all—then all their lives would go on.
He straightened up and walked to the corner leading into this odd side street, no longer counting cadence to himself, no longer marching.
His mind drifted to the frequent parallels he had drawn between the political chicaneries and corrupt activities of ancient Athens and Rome and those discussed in contemporary newspapers. “Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun,” he had often said; “Our own politicians haven’t found any new ways to rob us that weren’t anticipated by the wise ancients at least a dozen times, two millennia ago. Not that they are necessarily plagiarizing, mind you: as in nature, things have ways of recurring by a kind of independent invention. But history can show us just how unoriginal ‘our leaders’ really are—and show us something of our own perpetual gullibility.” And he frowned, remembering that, during the last ten years, fewer and fewer of his students cared to hear this from him—and that fewer and fewer even seemed the least bit aware of what yesterday’s newspaper contained—other than sports pages, he thought, and comic strips—and ads for jeans.
During his return walk of three miles, he amused himself by considering the parallel corruptions of the Tudor administrations, those of the first four American presidents, and those of the four most recent American presidents. In half a dozen letters to the Hartford Courant during the past three years, he had made similar points, but in a less pedantic and florid manner than the lecture he now constructed inside his own mind. Twice he chuckled to himself at his ironic humor, and twice he shrugged when recalling that none of his letters had been accepted for publication.
1
Aaron Czarsky entered his house quietly, stood very still, and listened for half a minute. Then he walked into the kitchen and tore his note off his coffee cup on the countertop, crumpled it, and tossed it into a grocery bag containing waste paper to be recycled. He stood staring towards the waste paper for another forty seconds before shrugging and stretching his shoulders.
“I was very worried,” said a soft voice behind him. Slowly he turned to face Sarah, and gazed at her with calm interest, just as he might look at a stranger in an airport or a department store who strongly resembled somebody he had known long ago.
“I went out looking for you for half an hour or forty minutes, driving all over our neighborhood. I even talked with the Afro-American guard down at the entrance to that gated community about half a mile away. He was very nice and helped me do a U-turn to get back out of there. Then I came back here and worried some more.”
After a short pause, she added, “Can you tell me where you went?”
After a longer pause, Aaron said, “Yes. I walked about six or seven miles—around the perimeter of our neighborhood, then around the edges of Soundhaven, where the richer folks hang out with their spoiled kids, and then around parts of Green Manor, where the richer blue-collar workers live and the bikers and Latinos rent rooms from Soundhaven slumlords.”
“If you will listen to me, please, I’d like to apologize—and explain some things—at least from my viewpoint. Not that I expect anything from you. I know that you may have already hardened your own views, and I can understand and appreciate that. I just would like to say a few things—if I may. I know I behaved badly tonight—to you and to others—and also on other occasions before tonight. Will you sit down and let me talk for a little while?”
Aaron stood motionless for almost twenty seconds, his arms and legs numb and heavy. He drew in a slow, deep breath. “Yes,” he said quietly.
“You are not the cause of how I am, nor are you responsible for me,” she said, as they sat side by side in their darkened living room. “You did not make me the way I am, and you are not responsible for fixing whatever is broken or cracked or bent or warped in me. If you want to leave or want me to leave, I can understand that. You’ve been one of the most patient people I’ve ever known, but probably even you have your limits. I want you to know that I don’t think you owe me a thing—I don’t expect you to give me a thing or even another moment of your life. And I will not blame you if you want—out. At least I hope I will not blame you—we never can promise how we will feel or think later. Do you hear me so far?”
“Yes,” said Aaron in a faint whisper.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, Aaron.”
“I said ‘yes,’” he said, raising the volume slightly.
“Good. You are not responsible for how I am now—or how I got to be this way. I know I just said that. You are not my parents, who gave me their DNA, such as it was, and who taught me by example how to treat or mistreat others—probably a bit of both, especially judging by how they treated each other—and how they treated me. Nor are you any of the doctors who hooked me on a variety of medications before I was two years old—and a variety of others as I got older. Nor are you one of the stoner friends I had as a high schooler or college—schooler—who introduced me to a variety of things, from wine and vodka to cigarettes and weed—and some other stuff you already know about—during the ‘70s and early ‘80s. You didn’t even know me then. We met in 1987, if you will recall. I already had my own psychological history and my pharmacological history—and genetic and behavioral history—or histories—well before we met, just as you had your own. And just as is the case with everyone else—everywhere. Do you hear me?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, Aaron, but one—one of the things I learned after my parents were dead—and by the way, I’d like to thank you again for all your support during the five years they were dying by inches—one of the . . . .”
“You’re welcome—Sarah,” he said.
“Thank you. One of the things I was lucky enough to learn—finally—was that I was not responsible for fixing whatever was broken in them—and wasn’t to blame for them being broken, even though they acted as if I was and often encouraged me to try to fix them in a hundred devious little ways—or at least let me make the effort to fix them if I misunderstood what they were expecting from me—like me trying to make peace between them from early childhood on and like running a thousand errands for nit-picky things I thought they wanted fetched—and so on and on and on—and on. It was something I’d heard a hundred times before from fifty different people, but I just had never incorporated it into my ‘belief system’ on a gut level. It took their deaths—and my own near death, probably, when I began taking my mom’s medications instead of throwing them down the toilet—to get me ready to internalize the concept at long last. Are you still listening? Aaron?”
“I’m still here—listening—Sarah.”
“Good. Al-Anon counselors—and Pot-Anon and Beer-Anon and Narc-Anon and Shroom-Anon counselors and—and Wine-Anon and Hash-Anon and LSD-Anon—and two shrinks that my folks hired in their two most lucid moments—and three school counselors—and two teachers—and my best friend’s mother—and Hop-Anon and Skip-Anon and Jump-Anon—and a couple dozen others I can’t remember any more at this moment—they all told me it wasn’t my fault my parents were broken. They all said it wasn’t my job to fix them—but I tried to do so every which way and any which way I could. You saw that yourself. Even you, in a huge number of lucid moments, told me repeatedly it wasn’t my fault or my job, even if you didn’t use those words—do you remember?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of. Well I remember, but even when you told me, repeatedly, I wasn’t yet ready to hear it and absorb it and make it a part of me. All right? Do you see?”
“I see.”
“Good. I hope you do. I really hope you do. I wasn’t ready then. And now maybe you’ve forgotten some of your own wisdom—your so-called ‘wisdom of the ancients.’ You—Aaron—are—not—to—blame—for—me—being—broken. You—are—not—at—all—responsible—for—fixing—me. Okay? Do you hear?”
“Yes—I do.”
She took Aaron’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“I don’t know whether you love me any more, Aaron. I do love you—despite how I seem sometimes—despite how I behave. Besides you not being responsible for my DNA and my upbringing and my addictive behavior—which I have conquered in twenty or thirty ways, you know, though it’s a constant struggle—besides that, you are not responsible for me being a woman—though especially in the early years I think you liked that fact pretty well. A woman has, as you learned before you married your first wife, a monthly cycle that causes—periodically speaking—emotional ups and downs—and sometimes they get pretty intense. They have been getting more intense with me these past few months—and here is part two—the second shoe being dropped, so to speak, which should not be a surprise to anyone who knew both your mother and my mother—it’s been getting more and more intense because I’m approaching a second little joy of womanhood: menopause. I’m not there yet, but it’s coming—which does not mean I couldn’t run a corporation or even be president. I’m on an intercept course with it, closing in every day, and I am not a candidate for any estrogen replacement therapy—not with my personal history with breast lumps and my mother’s and grandmother’s history of breast cancer. I just won’t do it—not even to get myself to ‘lighten up’ a bit, nor will I mess around with any more diazepam tablets to lower my affect and be more like a charmingly mellow zombie. It has taken me too long to kick Valium to go back on it—even at the cost of losing you. I love you, but for me, for my own sake, I will not do that again. Do you hear me?”
“I love you, Sarah.”
“Do you hear me, Aaron?”
“I—hear—you—Sarah. I—love—you—Sarah.”
“I love you, Aaron. I’d love you even if you didn’t love me. I do want what’s best for you—even if what you want is—for us to split up. I love you, Aaron. But I won’t become a zombie for us to stay together. I can tell you that none of what I did was personally directed at you, even if it seemed that way. I was being overwhelmed by a bad hormone cocktail that—that an evil dybbuk had put into my body—a bit like a bad date who slips all kinds of—bad shit—into a girl’s drink without telling her. It’s not an excuse I’m giving. It’s an explanation. There’s a difference. Sort of like men not being able to control—when a happy-chested redhead walks by in a tight sweater—the sudden increase in the sizes of their—their pupils of their eyes. It’s just hard-wired into the evolution of the sexes—accept it or not. At least that’s what I think.”
“That’s what I think, too—in my lucid moments.”
“You used to have a quip about Buddha that I liked, even though you made a joke out of it about your students.”
“Yes. Supposedly a bunch of people went up to the Buddha and said, ‘Oh Great Enlightened One’ (which is a long, redundant way of saying ‘Buddha’), ‘kindly tell us something reassuring that applies to all things in this world of constant change.’ And the Buddha thought for a couple seconds and replied, ‘This, too, will pass.’ I used to joke that his words applied to all the students who were underqualified for admission to college—but who were now being granted the highest honors at graduation and often were later being granted Ph.D. degrees—with honors. Bitter humor about grade inflation—when what it means is ‘No matter how bad things are, they will change—and eventually may change for the better—if we last that long.’”
“I’d—I would like to try to stick it out—with you—if you’ll let me,” said Sarah. “I can’t promise anything will be better tomorrow or next year even—but it is not personal—and not your fault—and I love you, Aaron.”
Aaron squeezed her hand and rubbed his shoulder against hers. Then, slowly and casually he brushed a half-dried track of moisture from his cheekbone with the cuff of his shirt and then planted a long kiss on the side of Sarah’s forehead. A moment later, Sarah was nestled under his arm, and he was stroking her cheek gently with his free hand.
Two hours later, his calf muscles stiff and his soles aching, Aaron quietly tiptoed from their bedroom to the bathroom.
While he was up, he took two more buffered aspirins and went into the living room where he jotted down a sketch that, to him, symbolized their condition. He had lain awake, considering his wife’s newly revealed wisdom and reconsidering his earlier views of her and himself. He wished to keep this insight. Too often in his life he had been told or had realized things he considered important—only to forget them. A few times he had luckily stumbled across them a second or third time, but often they were lost forever—or so it had seemed.
Just tonight even, while lying awake, he had thought up a short phrase—just two words—for her insight and own his comprehension of it. It had been a phrase with a clever double or triple or quadruple or quintuple meaning. And now he had already forgotten it.
It was ambiguous, Aaron thought, like the phrase “secret sharer” in Conrad’s book title: is “secret” a noun—like “bus” in “bus driver”—or an adjective or, deliberately, both? Is the man a sharer OF a secret? Or is he a sharer of a cabin who IS a secret from the rest of the crew—or is he both at once? Who can say what Conrad meant by it? Certainly not those twelve English professors I’ve asked in the past fifteen years. But what was that other phrase I thought about tonight—just an hour ago? It had two words, the letter P started each word, I think, and their parts of speech were BOTH ambiguous—deliberately—maybe “painting” was one—as a noun AND as a participle—and as a noun, it can refer both to an object—and—to an activity.
Aaron felt mild annoyance at his failure to recall his own defining phrase—If I’d just gotten up to pee sooner, I might have written it down—but he chose to focus his attention on trying to preserve their main insight in a concrete form, if he could do so.
Lying again beside his wife, Aaron slowly felt calmer. The painting he now pictured in his mind’s eye—the one he had hastily sketched—would be surrealistic and symbolic—like some work by—oh—Dali or Magritte, he thought with a faint smile—and it would symbolize, in his own private way, his wife’s and his very different viewpoints by means of two windows on adjacent walls of a floorless, ceiling-less structure which might be floating above an unseen planet, and the clouded sky, seen through each of those two windows, would be two very different shades of blue—and both views would be very different from the clouded sky seen above and below the two walls—walls that would also be of different colors—though related colors—and, he thought, perhaps one window will have a half-drawn shade, while the other has a partially opened venetian blind—or is that too—fancy?
Drifting closer towards sleep, Aaron Czarsky also made vague plans to construct a 3-D shadowbox of the same scene, the two window openings cut out of a folded sheet of cardboard—or perhaps two pieces of plywood—and the sky showing above, below, and through each window, but looking different each place—just as in my painting.
