she would have welcomed anything that promised to help him find his sense of himself again. Now she hates it and distrusts it. Once he was gentle and considerate; now he has become brusque, even deliberately rude, and proud of himself for every selfish action and bad-tempered snap at the world. When Allan was little, he used to beg Eve to read The Jungle Book to him over and over again; she remembers those wolves as dignified, protective, family-oriented. Larry’s feral inner self is a loner stalking through a kill-or-be-killed world. If only he’d read The Jungle Book, she thought.
Still, Larry was a good father. She loved to watch through the window as her menfolk played catch in the backyard, Larry contorting his body into bizarre shapes, Allan squealing with delight and trying to copy him. When Allan was a teenager, Larry took him on weekend fishing trips. Eve would ask what they did and Allan would always reply, “Nothing much.” But she saw what that undemanding companionship did for Allan: gave him a quiet confidence, an even keel.
“My default setting is happy,” Allan had reassured her when he opened his fifth rejection letter from medical school. She felt panicky, but he remained serenely sure that all would work out for the best. And it did.
The halibut is Eve’s attempt to remind Larry of their sweet days, before every dinner had to consist of red meat. But when she calls him to the table, he doesn’t come down for another ten minutes. By then the fish is dry and he eats it with an air of forbearance, as if he’s taking one for the team. He picks up an asparagus spear, watches it droop, and drops it back on his plate with distaste. It’s not my fault, Eve wants to scream at him, you’re the one who spoiled dinner.
“I’m sorry. It cooked too long,” she says, but then adds, “during the time before you came downstairs.”
“You could have given me some warning,” he says. “I was in the middle of something important.”
“Something for work?” she asks, hoping to jump-start the conversation.
“No.”
The instrument, hidden inside its case, sits on the sideboard behind Larry. Eve has prepared her tale of sleuthing through the flotsam of displaced nations and has been looking forward to telling it. Larry rarely asks about her day, and recently he has been sharing little of his own, so Eve has fallen into the habit of rehearsing their dinner-table conversation while she cooks. Now, however, she’s unwilling to offer up the instrument on the altar of forced companionship. If she did, she’d be exposing it to another blow—from Larry’s self-absorbed indifference. She feels an urge to protect it, like a lost child that she’s taken charge of until its mother is found.
“I’m going for a run,” he says, standing up before swallowing his last mouthful. He’s lost weight in the past year, and looks lean and slim. The fact that he’s healthier is the very thin silver lining.
He folds his napkin, drops a kiss on her cheek, and reaches into a cupboard for a stick of beef jerky on the way out. A year ago, he would have helped her clear up.
As she lies in bed that night, Eve realizes that not once during the lunch with Robert and Micajah did she mention her husband. She deliberately mentioned Allan, and she mentioned her business, wanting Robert and Micajah to see her as an independent woman and not just somebody’s wife. But does that mean she had to behave as if she was nobody’s wife? She wonders why neither of them asked—especially since she was wearing a wedding ring.
Half of that question is easy to answer. Robert didn’t care. He was delighted to see her only because she would be a mirror to reflect back to him his own glory as a father and a lawyer both. Any old or new acquaintance would have served.
And the other half?
Micajah didn’t care either. Which can have different meanings. One of which could be that, like her, he didn’t want to bring a husband into the space between them.
She tries to trace it back, to the first moment when she felt the beam of Micajah’s focus locking onto her. Before he brushed against her foot; before the talk of roses. When she caught him eying her dirty knees? No: out on the sidewalk when Robert whirled her round. It was she who sought his eyes, to stabilize herself. By the time she was standing on firm ground again, the connection was made.
Then, later, that shockingly intimate gaze. Could such a look have existed across the distance of a restaurant table? It was, she imagines now, how he would look at her if they were making love. It said, We are so joined, so complete, that the rest of the world does not exist. Meeting it was like riding a rodeo horse. When Micajah turned to his father and said something teasing, that was the eight-second buzzer. Whatever he said, whatever Robert replied, was white noise in her ears. That’s when she reached for her handbag, made an excuse about a just-remembered appointment, and left.
She has never seen that look in Larry’s eyes. He looked at her with love in their early years, a sparkle of pleasure at a quirk of speech or an idiosyncratic movement. But sex had always been basically a roll-on, roll-off deal. She’d thought that was how he wanted it. He’d glance at her quickly and look away, as if he was embarrassed or didn’t want to force her to look at him. Now she wonders if he didn’t dare to pause and pour his heart into hers, for fear she would close hers against him.
I might have, Eve realizes with a lurch. I was scared too.
It was the same fear that Larry felt: fear of being fully seen. She and Larry both wanted to be what the other wanted them to be; they hid their frailties, were ashamed of their faults. Maybe, she thinks, he thought that I loved an idea of him—a partial person, not the whole. He dreaded being seen—and so did I.
Now, after being held in the beam of Micajah’s steady gaze, she yearns for it. The very unlikeliness of his interest in her made pretense absurd.
Did she ever really, truly love Larry? Even yesterday, she would have answered yes, she did. Now, lying in bed, thinking about Micajah, the truth is that she doesn’t know.
I am being ridiculous, she tells herself, panicking. He touched my foot by accident. He probably looks at everyone that way. There’s no reason he would be interested in me.
Maybe he has a mother complex, she thinks. But that comes as a comfort, not a diagnosis—a possibility, not a problem. It wouldn’t be enough to make her say no.
And there she is, back again, like a compass needle dragged inescapably to the north.
The next day, Eve wakes with the spider on her face. It’s been there most mornings, for months now—a heavy darkness pressing on her brow, reaching sharp points into her eyes, her sinuses, cracking the corners of her mouth, making her head ache from the bones out.
Her breathing is shallow, though she’s so used to it that she hardly notices. Her stomach feels sour, as it usually does until she brushes her teeth. Her thighs are lead weights, and her feet are hot and uncomfortable. She sleeps with them outside the covers and often they’re cold, but there’s no way to warm them without the raging heat. Sometimes she fantasizes about chopping them off.
Many mornings, she rolls over and buries her face in the pillow, longing to drop back into unconsciousness. When that fails, she lies prone, one arm across her eyes, summoning the strength of will to greet the new day with optimism—what her mother used to call a good disposition. Eve dislikes people who feel sorry for themselves. She deals with her own burden of darkness
