1、Wakefield by E. L. Doctorow January 14, 2008 People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the ra
2、ccoon droppingswhich is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of coursewhereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage. Diana would think of her last sight of me, that same morning, when she pulled up to the sta
3、tion and slammed on the brakes, and I got out of the car and, before closing the door, leaned in with a cryptic smile to say goodbyeshe would think that I had left her from that moment. In fact, I was ready to let bygones be bygones and, in another fact, I came home the very same evening with every
4、expectation of entering the house that I, we, had bought for the raising of our children. And, to be absolutely honest, I remember I was feeling that kind of blood stir you get in anticipation of sex, because marital arguments had that effect on me. Of course, the deep change of heart can come over
5、anyone, and I dont see why, like everything else, it wouldnt be in character. After having lived dutifully by the rules, couldnt a man shaken out of his routine and distracted by a noise in his back yard veer away from one door and into another as the first step in the transformation of his life? An
6、d look what I was transformed intohardly something to satisfy a judgment of normal male perfidy. I will say here that at this moment I love Diana more truthfully than ever in our lives together, including the day of our wedding, when she was so incredibly beautiful in white lace with the sun coming
7、down through the stained glass and setting a rainbow choker on her throat. On the particular evening I speak ofthis thing with the 5:38, when the last car, where I happened to be sitting, did not move off with the rest of the train? Even given the sorry state of the railroads in this country, tell m
8、e when that has happened. Every seat taken, and we sat there in the sudden dark and turned to one another for an explanation, as the rest of the train disappeared into the tunnel. It was the bare, fluorescent-lit concrete platform outside that added to the suggestion of imprisonment. Someone laughed
9、, but in a moment several passengers were up and banging on the doors and windows until a man in a uniform came down the ramp and peered in at us with his hands cupped at his temples. And then when I do get home, an hour and a half later, I am nearly blinded by the headlights of all the S.U.V.s and
10、taxis waiting at the station. Under an unnaturally black sky is this lateral plane of illumination, because, as it turns out, we have a power outage in town. Well, it was an entirely unrelated mishap. I knew that, but when youre tired after a long day and trying to get home theres a kind of Doppler
11、effect in the mind, and you think that these disconnects are the trajectory of a collapsing civilization. I set out on my walk home. Once the procession of commuter pickups with their flaring headlights had passed, everything was silent and darkthe groomed shops on the main street, the courthouse, t
12、he gas stations trimmed with hedges, the Gothic prep school behind the lake. Then I was out of the town center and walking the winding residential streets. My neighborhood was an old section of town, the houses large, mostly Victorian, with dormers and wraparound porches and separate garages that ha
13、d once been stables. Each house was set off on a knoll or well back from the street, with stands of lean trees dividing the propertiesjust the sort of old establishment solidity that suited me. But now the entire neighborhood seemed to brim with an exaggerated presence. I was conscious of the arbitr
14、ariness of place. Why here rather than somewhere else? A very unsettling, disoriented feeling. A flickering candle or the bobbing beam of a flashlight in each window made me think of homes as supplying families with the means of living furtive lives. There was no moon, and under the low cloud cover
15、a brisk unseasonable wind ruffled the old Norwegian maples that lined the street and dropped a fine rain of spring buds on my shoulders and in my hair. I felt this shower as a kind of derision. All right, with thoughts like these any man would hurry to his home and hearth. I quickened my pace and wo
16、uld surely have turned up the path and mounted the steps to my porch had I not looked through the driveway gate and seen what I thought was a moving shadow near the garage. So I turned in that direction, my footsteps loud enough on the gravel to scare away whatever it was I had seen, for I supposed
17、it was some animal. We lived with animal life. I dont mean just dogs and cats. Deer and rabbits regularly dined on the garden flowers, we had Canadian geese, here and there a skunk, the occasional red foxthis time it turned out to be a raccoon. A large one. I have never liked this animal, with its p
18、rehensile paws. More than the ape, it has always seemed to me a relative. I lifted my litigation bag as if to throw it and the creature ran behind the garage. I went after it; I didnt want it on my property. At the foot of the outdoor stairs leading to the garage attic, it reared, hissing and showin
19、g its teeth and waving its forelegs at me. Raccoons are susceptible to rabies and this one looked mad, its eyes glowing, and saliva, like liquid glue, hanging from both sides of its jaw. I picked up a rock and that was enoughthe creature ran off into the stand of bamboo that bordered the back yard o
20、f our neighbor, Dr. Sondervan, who was a psychiatrist, and a known authority on Down syndrome and other genetic misfortunes. And then, of course, upstairs in the attic space over the garage, where we stored every imaginable thing, three raccoon cubs were in residence, and so that was what all the fu
21、ss was about. I didnt know how this raccoon family had got in there. I saw their eyes first, their several eyes. They whimpered and jumped about on the piled furniture, little ball-like humps in the darkness, until I finally managed to shoo them out the door and down the steps to where their mother
22、would presumably reclaim them. I turned on my cell phone to get at least some small light. The attic was jammed with rolled-up rugs and bric-a-brac and boxes of college papers, my wifes inherited hope chest, old stereo equipment, a broken-down bureau, discarded board games, her late fathers golf clu
23、bs, folded-up cribs, and so on. We were a family rich in history, though still young. I felt ridiculously righteous, as if I had fought a battle and reclaimed my kingdom from invaders. But then melancholy took over; there was enough of the past stuffed in here to sadden me, as relics of the past, in
24、cluding photographs, always sadden me. Everything was thick with dust. A bulls-eye window at the front did not open and the windows on either side were stuck tight, as if fastened by the cobwebs that clung to their frames. The place badly needed airing. I exerted myself and moved things around and w
25、as able then to open the door fully. I stood at the top of the stairs to breathe the fresh air, which is when I noticed candlelight coming through the stand of bamboo between our property and the property behind ours, that same Dr. Sondervans house. He boarded a number of young patients there. It wa
26、s part of his experimental approach, not without controversy in his profession, to train them for domestic chores and simple tasks that required their interaction with normal people. I had stood up for Sondervan when some of the neighbors fought his petition to run his little sanitarium, though I ha
27、ve to say that in private it made Diana nervous, as the mother of two young girls, that mentally deficient persons were living next door. Of course, there had never been a bit of trouble. I was tired from a long day, that was part of it, but, more likely suffering from some scattered mental state of
28、 my own, I groped around till I found the rocking chair with the torn seat that I had always meant to recane, and, in that total darkness and with the light of the candles slow to fade in my mind, I sat down and, though meaning only to rest a moment, fell asleep. And when I woke it was from the ligh
29、t coming through the dusty windows. Id slept the night through. What had brought on our latest argument was what I claimed was Dianas flirtation with someones house guest at a back-yard cocktail party the previous weekend. I was not flirting, she said. You were hitting on the guy. Only in your pecul
30、iar imagination, Wakefield. Thats what she did when we arguedshe used the last name. I wasnt Howard, I was Wakefield. It was one of her feminist adaptations of the locker-room style that I detested. You made a suggestive remark, I said, and you clicked glasses with him. It was not a suggestive remar
31、k, Diana said. It was a retort to something hed said that was really stupid, if you want to know. Everyone laughed but you. I apologize for feeling good on occasion, Wakefield. Ill try not to feel that way ever again. This is not the first time youve made a suggestive remark with your husband standi
32、ng right there. And then denied all knowledge of it. Leave me alone, please. God knows youve muzzled me to the point where Ive lost all confidence in myself. I dont relate to people anymore. Im too busy wondering if Im saying the right thing. You were relating to him, all right. Do you think with th
33、e kind of relationship Ive had with you Id be inclined to start another with someone else? I just want to get through each daythat is all I think about, getting through each day. That was probably true. On the train to the city, I had to admit to myself that Id started the argument willfully, in a c
34、ontrary spirit and with some sense of its eroticism. I did not really believe what I had accused her of. I was the one who came on to people. I had attributed to her my own wandering eye. That is the basis of jealousy, is it not? A feeling that your congenital insincerity is a universal? It did anno
35、y me, seeing her talking to another man with a glass of white wine in her hand, and her innocent friendliness, which any man could mistake for a come-on, not just me. The fellow himself was not terribly prepossessing. But it bothered me that she was talking to him almost as if I were not standing th
36、ere beside her. Diana was naturally graceful and looked younger than she was. She still moved like the dancer she had been in college, her feet pointed slightly outward, her head high, her walk more a glide than something taken step by step. Even after carrying twins, she was as petite and slender a
37、s she had been when I met her. And now in the first light of the new day I was totally bewildered by the situation I had created for myself. I cant claim that I was thinking rationally. But I actually felt that it would be a mistake to walk into my house and explain the sequence of events that had l
38、ed me to spend the night in the garage attic. Diana would have been up till all hours, pacing the floor and worrying what had happened to me. My appearance, and her sense of relief, would enrage her. Either she would think that I had been with another woman or, if she did believe my story, it would
39、strike her as so weird as to be a kind of benchmark in our married life. After all, we had had that argument the previous day. She would perceive what I told myself could not possibly be truethat something had happened predictive of a failed marriage. And the twins, budding adolescents, who generall
40、y thought of me as someone they were unfortunate to live in the same house with, an embarrassment in front of their friends, an oddity who knew nothing about their musictheir alienation would be hissingly expressive. I thought of mother and daughters as the opposing team. The home team. I concluded
41、that for now I would rather not go through the scene I had just imagined. Maybe later, I thought, just not now. I had yet to realize my talent for dereliction. When I came down the garage stairs and relieved myself in the stand of bamboo, the cool air of the dawn welcomed me with a soft breeze. The
42、raccoons were nowhere to be seen. My back was stiff and I felt the first pangs of hunger, but, in fact, I had to admit that I was not at that moment unhappy. What is there about a family that is so sacrosanct, I thought, that one should have to live in it for ones whole life, however unrealized ones
43、 life was? From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient apple tree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferen
44、t to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it. The sun was not yet up and the grass was draped with a wavy net of mist, punctured here and there with glistening drops of dew. White apple blossoms had begun to appear in the old tree, and I read the pale light in the sky as the
45、shy illumination of a world to which I had yet to be introduced. At this point, I suppose, I could have safely unlocked the back door and scuttled about in the kitchen, confident that everyone in the house was still asleep. Instead, I raised the lid of the garbage bin and found in one of the cans my
46、 complete dinner of the night before, slammed upside down atop a plastic bag and held in a circle of perfect integrity, as if still on the platea grilled veal chop, half a baked potato, peel side up, and a small mound of oiled green saladso that I could imagine the expression on Dianas face as she h
47、ad come out here, still angry from our morning argument, and rid herself of the meal gone cold that she had stupidly cooked for that husband of hers. I wondered now at what hour had she lost patience. That would be a measure of whatever slack she granted me. Another woman might have refrigerated the
48、 dinner, but I lived in Dianas judgment; it shone upon me as in a prison cell where the light is never turned off. I lacked interest in her work. Or I was snide and condescending toward her mother. Or I wasted beautiful fall weekends watching dumb football games on television. Or I wouldnt agree to
49、have the bedrooms painted. And if she was such a feminist why did my opening a door for her or helping her on with her coat matter so much? All I had to do was stand outside my home in the chill of the early morning in order to see things in their totality: Diana felt that she had married the wrong man. Of course, I didnt imagine I was the easiest person to get along with. But even she would have to admit that I was never boring. And, whatever problems we had,
