he unkinks his cramped arms and legs and turns over. The tears settle in the wells of his eyes, and he is loath to blink, loath to touch them, even more fearful than usual because he has no idea what this latest indignity means.
Lions charging at him yesterday, ravens today, during the frightening half hour of near-slumber, and now he is crying. It’s Sisyphean, when he’s already been laboring with his hijacked sleep, with his terror in having forgotten how to do what is natural, with his inability to figure out why this is happening, at such odds with how he otherwise perceives his life: as a mostly happy man whose marriage, young children, and professional pursuits mostly afford him pleasure and satisfaction.
A movement in the bed, Elena shifting under the striped comforter. In this year of his sleeplessness, he has learned his wife wakes in stages. He had not known that fact before. Deep sleep on her stomach until she shifts to her left side, facing away from him. Then the countdown begins. Twenty minutes until she shifts onto her back, the slightest of whistles coming through her full lips, thinned by dreams. Another twenty before she cracks one eye open, then the other.
He looks at the long line of Elena’s hip. When his misbegotten nights were new, she suggested supposedly surefire ways to shut down his nonsensical thoughts: walking after dinner; meditating before bed; taking a boiling-hot shower in their unlit bathroom and crawling wet between the cool sheets. Desperate, he tried it all. Altered his diet, too—no meat, no cheese, cut back on his drinking. Increased his exercise—yoga first, then cycling instead of yoga, and now, instead of cycling, he runs hard and fast and long every morning. But what is a boon for his body has done nothing for his soul, has not altered his inability to sink down into bliss, too aware of the spirits gathering around him in the dark. Only recently has a thought begun to form, that what he needs perhaps cannot be supplied by healthy eating or abstinence or exercise.
In the beginning, in that first month when he thought his failure to sleep was a temporary malfunction, he rocked the bed in the middle of the night and palmed the perfect globes of Elena’s ass, hoping sex would empty his brain, but Elena had sighed and mumbled, “I’ll get the pills.” A sylph in a nightgown that left her shoulders and back bare, the long yards of her black hair tight in a bun, his sleep guru refusing her mission, and when the light in the bathroom flicked on, Simon called after her, “What pills?”
Sleeping pills prescribed to Elena a year after Lucy’s birth, expired before Isabel was born.
“They’ve expired,” he’d said when she handed him the orange container. He’d looked inside and been unable to tell if, or how many, she’d ever taken.
“I think it takes decades to break down the components. They’re probably as strong, or nearly as strong, as when I got them. Give it a go. Nothing lost and all that.”
He had wanted to ask why she needed sleeping pills during that exciting time when Lucy was walking and laughing, her hands reaching out to the world, but Elena’s eyes were already closed, her breath even and composed.
For several successive nights, he took a pill that was small as a dot and weightless on his tongue, hoping she was right, but she wasn’t; potency was vanquished by time. When he told her the pills didn’t work, she looked at him in frustration. “So call the doctor and get a new prescription.” Which he did, and he took them for several more nights, but his body refused the sedation, simply wouldn’t be knocked out.
Never again has he bothered Elena during his racked hours. Sometimes he watches her sleeping, curious about what she’s dreaming, envying the way she goes under and stays under, missing how they used to wake nearly simultaneously, her first smile of the day beaming him fully alive. He’s forgotten how to sleep, but something’s changed in her, too, and he can’t trace the alteration to any specific temporal point, to any specific event, but she no longer smiles and tucks into him or rolls onto him when she wakes. Now, when she comes to, she sits upright, her face hiding its secrets from him, and it’s only when he’s back from his run, when they’re drinking their second cups of coffee, that she graces him with a smile, but it doesn’t seem to him her same I love and adore you so much smile.
He could be mistaken; it could be some pathology of his sleeplessness that is causing him to blow out of proportion the changes he senses in her, the feeling he has that she’s created subtle distance between them. But what he’s not mistaken about is that Elena no longer dresses like the woman his heart toppled for. Gone are her gauzy skirts and ruffled blouses, her tight dresses with narrow slits and strappy, sexy heels, her fitted slacks with stiletto boots, all replaced with a uniform: jeans, button-down shirt, ballet slippers. And that soft black river that once streamed over her shoulders and down her spine, that he would gather up in his hands because she left it unbound, is now always center-parted and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.
There’s a pretty Chinese bowl from a New York museum in the bathroom, a gift for her when he had been gone for weeks on a case, that holds Elena’s stock of bobby pins. In the two years since Isabel’s birth, he has often considered whether her tightly coiled hair, her adopted uniform, indicates the practicality of doubled motherhood or something far more charged—proof that the loss of her freedom is so wild within her that she must keep herself regimented and pinned together. She is a gorgeous woman no matter the clothes she wears or how she arranges her hair, but she is severe this way, and when he sees the Chinese bowl, he always wants to dump those securing pins in the garbage, shatter that bowl, bring back his sensual, loose-haired Elena, their early-morning lovemaking, her explicit love for him.
Maybe he’s a coward. Maybe he already knows the answers, but he refrains these days from asking how she feels about no longer flying away as she used to. Until Lucy, Elena wrote for glossy travel magazines, and in those halcyon days, Simon occasionally went with her to those off-the-beaten-path places when he could. Her nightstand is stacked still with the latest issues of the travel magazines that published her work. When she was breastfeeding at night she read those magazines by the low rosy light, telling him she was keeping pace with what was going on in her absence, would not count herself out of the game. Naturally, their daughters changed everything. Now he’s flying as much as she once did, which was a lot, and she refuses to say what it’s like being unable to vanish into the excited glaze of the working day. As he does when the hollowness lifts, when he has run his daily ten miles, and drunk his coffee, and kissed his daughters. As always, he kisses Elena last before he’s out the door, but where he once found the blackness of her eyes so enticing, now he is afraid to fall into them, afraid of what he will learn, or be told, fearful that if he can’t fix his failure to sleep, he can’t fix anything else.
And this morning, tears. Poised to spill down his cheeks. There’s no way he can rise and run, not when he’s this done in. Then he’s smothering his face in his pillow, heaving silent sobs, freezing when Elena shifts onto her back, worrying she’s woken and waiting to hear why he’s crying his eyes out. What would he say? He wishes he knew, but he has no answers. And then deliverance—Elena’s soft sleeping whistles.
He wipes his face against the pillowcase, then turns over again, and checks on the crack in the uneven ceiling. A hairline days ago, it has grown wider and longer and looks like it will soon split apart the paint and the plaster.
Does that crack mean the roof is going to collapse?
He needs to do something about it, call someone, make that call this morning, before they leave for Palm Springs, arrange for whatever person fixes cracks in ceilings in old houses in the hills to come Monday, first thing. He’ll even forgo his start-of-the-week run to be here, to handle it, to not put another thing on his wife’s list of things to take care of. He should pull out the house file, see what the agreement says about the roof, if any issues were noted. He doesn’t specialize in real estate, but he is a lawyer, and he would have asked the critical questions. They’ve owned this ninety-three-year-old house for a mere
