Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

As soon as we know it, it is gone.

When she realized she was awake she also realized she was sweating, and her shirt was sticking to her skin. She flicked on the nightstand lamp.

How this particular woman, Ann, would have looked to an observer then, a so-called peeping tom for example, staring in the window, was this: she was a white woman, young, small, with a thin, muscled torso and a delicate, fine-boned face. She was sweating and the rings of sweat under her arms, soaking her cotton tank top, made her look like a fresh army recruit in boot camp, someone new to obstacle courses and discipline. In the past, people had caught sight of her and called her “wholesome.” They had said, many people on many different occasions—She’s so wholesome looking.

Her husband Ben was next to her in bed, and she looked down at him in the dim light cast by the bedside lamp. It occurred to her that he was not the Father of the Atom Bomb. He lay sleeping; his face was collapsed. He had nothing to hide, or if he did he had no will to hide it, she thought. If something lay hidden, he slept beside it unknowing.

It also occurred to her that Ben was not only not the Father of the Atom Bomb but less a father than a child, at least compared to the man in the desert. Feeling poised on the brink of a discovery she knew, at the same time, she would never make, she thought the words a baby. The man in the desert had been as old as the hills but also ageless.

She studied her husband’s dark hair with its few gray strands at the temples, the wings of his eyelids casting shadows across his pale cheeks, and was guilty: she had condescended to him. Even though he was sleeping and could not read her mind, he would never know it, true, but still it stood. There was an insult in that involuntary gesture of pity. She felt a pang of sorrow for both of them. But it was not childlike to be defenseless, she told herself: defenseless and weak are not the same, they are nothing alike.

No, she reassured herself as she got up and changed shirts, in fact it is the strong who feels no need to defend himself, any idiot knows that.

She padded to the bathroom and brushed her teeth absently, thinking that not having brushed them might be what was keeping her awake. Grainy teeth.

It is the weak who act ferocious, she thought, those small, yappy dogs, those tiny inbred dogs with high-pitched, shrieking barks, leash-straining, frantic, leaping savagely at huge placid Dobermans trotting past.

It takes courage, she thought, to be one in a multitude.

—The wine, she said aloud in recognition.

White wine made her maudlin.

Looking into her face in the mirror she flicked out the bathroom light and her face disappeared in the blankness of dark. Then, climbing into bed again, gently to keep the mattress from jiggling, she thought: We both lie here every night with secrets all around us.

The truth of it grazed her like a feather, brushing as faintly as a breeze but leaving a burn of feeling in its wake. We have no knives, no guns, no weapons, we have no armor at all, we lie here without barriers, near a paper-thin window, she thought, and shivered under the blankets. We are naked as the bulbs of flowers. We may not be children, we may not be innocent at all, but we will always be easy to hurt.

That was something of which she felt sure, as she looked down at Ben sleeping, propping herself up on an elbow on the sloping, fat pillow. Easy to hurt, nothing could be easier.

Ben had been woken by her restless movement and was only feigning sleep. He was doing so in order to allow Ann to fall asleep again, in order not to prevent her from taking her rest. As he lay beside her knowing she was awake he wished to gather her up in his arms and put himself in her body.

But Ann did not always sleep easily and he knew this. He was worried about her sleeplessness, how it might age her before it was her turn to be old. Sleep, he had read, is even more important for health and longevity than a nutritious diet.

That there could be a time after her, a time when he was alone, actually made him cringe if he dwelled on it too long: how empty all the buildings would be, and the streets of cities. Cavernous and gray they would echo the sound of his voice.

Shuddering he pressed his face into her shoulder, and felt the sympathy of her leaning toward him, her cheek against the crown of his head. She still believed he was sleeping.

He breathed her skin and told himself a story to drift away. Once in the future, on the surface of the moon, there were thousands who raised their arms. They sang in a tone he could not hear, beyond the threshold of the human ear. But to look at them was enough: white like ghosts, their faces beaming, they were arrayed in great number, as far as the eye could see. Behind them the mountains of the moon rose up like pillars in the airless sky.

She had grown up on a street where, at dusk on a calm day, a woman could stand on her front porch with a cocktail in her slim hand and hear the faint laughing splashes from seven swimming pools at once. Long, dark cars pulled into driveways with their silent engines purring, black men pushed lawnmowers, there were houses for finches like small wooden cathedrals.

There were even old trees with spreading limbs that shaded her as she played.

This street of green lawns on hills, velvet bands in the sky at dusk, and the smell of barbecue as the heat