It’s very quiet outside. A skunk passed by the window a little earlier. I didn’t see it, of course, but smelled it. And there was some sort of owl hooting out there for a bit, but, otherwise, the house and the woods around it are quiet and still. I might almost believe that I have been taken away from the world and placed somewhere else. I’ve left all the lights downstairs burning, and the porch lights are on, too, so here I am, a little puddle of brilliance in the inky void. I brought my laptop into the bedroom a while ago, and tried playing a couple of CDs to dilute the silence — Bob Dylan’s Street Legal,and then Fables of the Reconstructionby R.E.M. But the music only seemed to make me more jumpy. It masks the noiselessness of the night, but in so doing, it alsomasks the noises that I cannot stop listening for. I found myself straining to hear through the music, even if I can’t say what I was listening for. Constance’s coyotes, maybe. Or Constance herself. Or maybe the red tree, after it pulls itself free of the ground and begins an ent-like march towards the house. So, I turned the music off halfway through “Maps and Legends,” and now the stillness is broken only by the clack-clack-clackof the typewriter’s keys, the clack of the keys striking the paper.
This doesn’t seem like the time for confession. Sitting here, swaddled in the dark, and the silence pressing in on my bright electric bubble. Though, on the other hand, the tree and this house don’t seem shy about revealing theiratrocities by the stark light of midday, so why should I balk at divulging my confidences by night?
When I discovered Amanda was fucking the owner of the Buckhead sushi restaurant, I confronted her. It was a very cold day, and it was raining, on and off. A misty, ugly sort of rain for a misty, ugly sort of day. It was late afternoon, and there was fog over everything, heavy fog like you don’t often see in Atlanta. She was sitting on the chaise, reading, and I’d been pretending to edit something, the page proofs for a short story. There were pages in my lap and on the coffee table, marked in red. STET written in the margins again and again and again, which is usually the way I react to the ministrations of copy editors, whether they happen to be right or wrong. I write STET, and, half the time, I know I’m just being an asshole, but I do it anyway. They are my mistakes. Let memake them.
I can’t remember what Amanda was reading. A novel. She’d taken the day off. And I said that I knew what she’d done. She laid down her book and stared at it for a time, and then she stared at me.
“So,” she said, finally, “what happens now?”
“I don’t know what happens now,” I replied, and my voice seemed flat, betraying almost nothing of the rage that had been seething inside me for days.
“Who told you?” she asked.
“What difference does it make, who told me?”
She sighed and glanced out the windows at the fog.
“It’s true?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s true. But you know it’s true, without asking. You always know what’s true, don’t you, Sarah?”
She was baiting me, like I needed provocation, and I let the jab go. Or I tried to let it go. Every word that passed between us eliminated the possibility and served to set the future in stone.
At some point, she asked if I wanted her to leave, and I told her no. But I knew that what she was really asking for was permissionto leave, that it’s what she wanted, and I had no intention of making it easy. If she wanted to move in with the purveyor of eel and tuna, she could damn well screw up her nerve and doit on her own, without my complicity. And that’s when shegot angry, when I withheld a simple release from her predicament. She said things I have tried hard to forget, threw accusations the way some women might have thrown dishes or knickknacks or stones. And, mostly, I sat there with my pages and my red pen, listening, wishing I knew some magical incantation that might yet undo the whole mess. Wishing impossible, silly things, the way a child wishes, the way people pray to their gods. That I could have been the woman that Amanda needed, assuming that such a woman was ever born. That there were still words to set things right, words to facilitate salvage, and that I could find them. That she would just stop,and tell me she was sorry, and that it was over. That it wouldn’t happen again. And that, hearing this, I would believe it, and go back to my copyediting, and she would go back to reading her book.
“Most of the time,” she said (and I remember this; I will always remember this part), “I do not even know who you are, Sarah. You write, but you hate writing. And then you blame everything and everyone around you because writing is all you have. And now, these seizures of yours. How much more am I supposed to be able to deal with?”
“You’re sitting there telling me that you fucked this woman because I hate writing, and because I’m having seizures?” I asked. For a second, I think I might have been more flabbergasted than angry.
“Yes,”she shot back, suddenly standing up and letting the book fall to the floor at her feet. “Yes, Sarah, that’s exactlywhat I’m saying. Because, goddamn it, you never let a day go by that you don’t remind me and the whole damn world how utterly miserable you are, and how you expect us all to be miserable right along with you.”
A lot of other things were said, but that’s the upshot and the part I remember clearly. And later she told me that she was going out. I asked if she was meeting the owner of the sushi restaurant, and Amanda said who she might be meeting was her own business and none of mine. And that’s the last time I saw her alive. Most of this, I told the police. Most of it.
I told them about the affair, and that we’d argued. I suppose I should be grateful that she killed herself in another woman’s apartment. At least it spared me the embarrassment and inconvenience of being suspected of foul play. At least, the sort of foul play you can be arrested and brought to trial for. And I didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the mess.
If I wrote “Pony”—and I must surely have — the rest of my confession is there, in that story, however turned around backwards and veiled it might be, however fictionalized and prettied up with metaphor. What Amanda wanted, I couldn’t give.
The bridle chafed, I suppose.
That day, just before Amanda left, I told her I loved her, and she laughed and said, “Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”
I’m finally running out of ribbon, I think, and I don’t have another to replace this one with. Maybe I should conserve whatever is left. Isn’t that a little like the miner trapped after a cave-in, waiting for rescue and trying to make his oxygen or flashlight batteries last as long as possible? Only, I know that no one is coming for me. No one is left who might bother.
I’m going to wait a while longer for Constance. The car keys are here on the dressing table next to the typewriter. I’m only going to wait until morning.
I will add this.
Because this is true also. And because you go so far, and it hardly seems to matter whether or not you let yourself go just a littlefarther.
I was falling-down drunk the night Amanda died (that is not meant as a caveat). I was drunk, and fell asleep on the sofa, because I could not stand to look at our bed, even though it had once been only mybed. Something woke me, very late, and I’d fallen asleep with the television on. Old black-and-white movies on TCM, and for a while I lay there, half awake at best, blinking and staring at the screen, bathed in that comforting silvery wash of light.
On the TV, a young woman stared out a window. She was watching another woman who seemed about the same age as herself and who was sitting in a tire swing hung from a very large tree. It was almost exactly like the swing my grandfather put up for me and my sister when I was a kid. Just an old tire and a length of rope suspended from a low, sturdy branch. From the angle of the shot, it was clear that the window looking out on the tree was also looking down. I mean, that it must have been a second-story window. Or an attic window. The woman in the tire wasn’t swinging. She was just sitting there. There was no dialog, and no musical score, either. There was nothing but the sound of wind blowing. The woman watching from the window leaned forward, resting her forehead against the glass. With an index finger, she traced the shape of a heart on the windowpane. And then I realized that there was something approaching the tree. It came very slowly, and by turns I thought I was seeing a bear, a wolf, a dog, and a man crawling forward on his hands and knees. Whatever it was, the woman in the swing didn’t see it, but I had the distinct impression that the woman watching from the window did. After a bit, she turned away, stepping out of frame, so that there was only the window, the tree, the woman in the swing, and the whatever it might have been slowly coming up behind her.