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

her now, but she did not care. She felt she should regret this, but did not.

—Is she happy? she wondered, flicking her signal for the turn into her driveway, and then conjugated. —Am I happy? Are they happy?

She thought: when people ask these questions they mean the reverse. Is it a happy marriage? means: Is it unhappy? Is he a happy man means: is he unhappy?

People do not mean happy. Happy is never meant. On the subject of happy the mind actually draws a blank.

When she got home, grocery bags in her arms, and pushed the front door open with her hip, her foot slid as she stepped over the threshold and looking down she saw a scuffed envelope. It was unmarked so she put down her bags, picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a photograph: a shadowy figure seen through a white window curtain. It had been taken at night, from outside the window looking in.

She put the picture down on an end table and was in the kitchen pouring herself a glass of water when she realized it was her bedroom window, and the figure was her.

Glass in one hand, picture in the other, heart beating quickly, she went to find Oppenheimer, who was reading in the garden. Her hand shook as she held it out to him.

—I think, he said slowly, —someone is watching us.

A few minutes later she picked up the ringing telephone to hear, at the other end, a man’s voice she did not recognize. It said only: Get them out of your house. They are not good for you.

She told Oppenheimer about this but she did not tell Ben.

When it came to money Ben could dig in his heels. He was cautious about spending it, always in the certainty that men of any age could easily become poor, cast out onto the street to shake cups for pennies and fall to drinking malt liquor. When he heard the words old man this was the first image that entered his mind; when he heard the word poor he thought of father.

The first time he’d heard The Lord’s Prayer he had thought the words went Poor father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

And if he had to be frail-boned and brittle, if he lived that long, at least he would be sure not to be yellow-haired, brown-toothed, at the mercy of young passersby in slick garments, with clean faces, shining eyes and confident shoulders. He would not be abject.

He had opened a retirement account when he was nineteen.

But Ann had always associated those who planned too carefully for their advancing age with a denial of life, an eagerness to be done with it. She had an uncle and aunt who had lived in a small house with a dry brown lawn in Anaheim, California, for forty years. She had visited them as a freshman in college and again in her late twenties. The aunt and uncle rarely went outside; their groceries were delivered once a week. When she saw them in her twenties they sat her down and brought her a glass of iced tea, the same flavor of iced tea they had offered her when she was eighteen. She sat in the same beige armchair and placed her tea on a round, straw coaster that, though she could not be perfectly sure, also looked familiar after more than a decade.

Her aunt liked to do large sailboat and nature-scene jigsaw puzzles, which she later laminated and hung on the wall. Her uncle watched sports and collected small bottles of tequila from all over Mexico, though, being in AA, he did not drink them. But chiefly, she had seen from their reticence and rigid bodies and their obvious reluctance to hear new information, they wished that all the rush was over. They wished the job of living was already resolved and perfect in completion. If they could be statues they would, but failing that they would float forever on the surface of their lives.

Ben feared cataclysmic events but more and more she feared the lack of them. So his resistance to Hiroshima did not surprise her. It was like rope, long, quiet and strong. How were they going to get passports for the scientists, for instance? Szilard was handling the details, she told him. Szilard had investigated. Szilard was determined not to be obstructed by what he called “the logistics of being dead.” Ben said the bills would add up. He said it made no sense to spend thousands of dollars on a whim. Weren’t they giving the scientists enough already? The scientists were living off them. They, Ann and Ben, had become a charity, but far from being rich they were an unemployed librarian and a gardener.

—A charity, finished Ben, —without the tax benefits.

Ann stood behind him, arms folded, on the opposite side of the kitchen, the edge of the sink lodged sharply against the small of her back as she watched him chop vegetables with a sure hand. It was difficult to persuade from this position, looking at his shoulder blades. She felt weak.

—I can afford it, she said. —I want to use my parents’ insurance policy for the trip. They would have wanted it.

Her parents had wanted her to see the world and she had always resisted. During their lives she had never gone far afield. She had always thought travel was beside the point, an escape from what was real instead of a search for it as most travelers claimed. Even now she did not want to travel. She had no interest in Japan before other countries; she did not speak the language and she did not know the country’s history except for the single blot, the event. Because of this she would only coast along outside of the culture looking in as she suspected tourists always did, feet leaden, eyes dazzled, spending.

But she