Yin and Yang
Robert Earle
Terry stopped at a terminal bar for a vodka—flatscreens boiling with football—and fixed on the Patriots-Bills game because he was in Boston, but any game would do. He really only wanted to lie down on some empty part of the field and close his eyes and dream about Faye.
When he stepped outside, he scarcely recognized Richard who looked much smaller despite his big parka, or because of it, but Richard spotted him and grabbed his bag and slung it into the back of his Subaru wagon.
“Twenty-six years, Terry.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever been back since?”
“I would have called you.”
“Flight all right?”
“Fine.”
“Look, I’m so sorry about Faye. Are you okay?”
“Body is, mind isn’t. After the funeral I just came to a full-stop. Couldn’t take being with anyone who was part of it.” So he decided to see people he knew long before death was ever an issue, people from long ago. “You?”
Richard shrugged and said they needed to swing by a wine shop. The roadsides were piled with snow. A bank thermometer registered 6.
“Ever like this in North Carolina?”
“Never. I don’t even remember it being like this when we were up here.”
They had lived in Newton. Faye was a paralegal. Richard was the chair of the math department at the Weston Academy. Terry was the department. And sometimes, yes, there were days like this. One morning he found the snowy campus glazed with untracked silvery white ice. No one had called him. He crunched inside and made coffee in the empty faculty room and graded papers. He did an hour’s work in twenty minutes and sat there another twenty minutes mesmerized by the whiteness beyond the windows. Frightening. He never felt comfortable up north.
The wine shop, actually wine supermarket, burned Vegas-like at the far end of a strip mall. Again he had the urge to lie down and sleep. Richard walked quickly, though, and he hurried to keep up and pretend to care what wines Richard chose. He even agreed to choose one himself, which Faye always did, not him, he knew nothing about wine except how to drink it. After they were back in the Subaru, Richard started the car and sat there.
“Forget something?” Terry asked.
Contrary to his body, Richard’s face had grown longer and broader with age. He resembled the profile on an Indian head nickel. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay. What?”
“My second wife is thirty-three years younger than me. I didn’t say that on the phone.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“The two young children you mentioned, did they come with her?”
“No, they’re mine.”
They could see one another clearly because of the overhead parking lot lights. Richard confessed something else. He suffered from anxiety.
“It’s under control, but you should know that.”
“What are you anxious about?”
“It’s not being anxious about something. It’s a condition. I was probably anxious back then and didn’t know it.”
“It seemed like energy. Nothing stopped you.”
“Sick energy. One more thing: I didn’t give our kids my last name. I’m seventy-three. Why should they be stuck with my name when I’m gone?”
“I might not see my grandchildren grow up, either. Faye was sixty-nine, I’m seventy-one.”
“At least you saw your kids out the door.”
“What about the two you had with Kitty?”
“I lost them when she and I divorced.”
“Completely?”
“100%. I don’t even know if I have grandchildren.”
Richard stared through the windshield at a pile of cleared snow, apparently intending to talk, not drive. Terry didn’t know what to make of him. He was anxious, he was afraid of death, he didn’t know if he had grandchildren, but he was a guy who had made it seem on the phone as if it hadn’t been twenty-six years since they’d seen one another, more like twenty-six days the same voice, the same way it used to rush out of his mouth, trailed by specks of spittle: “Absolutely, come on up here.” There was nothing like that in his voice now.
“And look, it was almost twenty years between me divorcing Kitty and marrying Grace, so I really never discussed Kitty with Grace. I told her I married Kitty more because she was pregnant than love and then she got pregnant again and then everything came apart.” Richard paused to allow all this to sink in. “I guess what I’m saying is you’re one of the few people who knew me and Kitty back then, and I’d as soon...”
“That I’d not talk about her?”
“Probably not.”
“We already had gone south before you and Kitty divorced.”
“You heard, though.”
“Yes.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Sure, I thought you two were yin and yang, but nothing surprised Faye. Faye said that she had been wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
Terry felt the prickling in the back of his mouth when he wanted a drink. He thought of the wine in the back. Richard had bought bottles like mad. They ended up with an entire case.
“I guess what women always wonder.”
“Whether I was up to something?”
“Yes.”
“Did she talk about that?”
“When we were here, she thought the same as me—both of you were great, not just Kitty.”
“Kitty wasn’t that great.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“No one did.” Richard still didn’t put the car into gear. He didn’t even put his hands on the wheel. He clasped them in his lap. “Is Faye why you didn’t stay in touch, what she suspected of me?”
“I don’t remember. Pretty soon I ended up with my own school to run down there in Raleigh. Had my hands full.”
“How about when I called to see about visiting you?”
“When was that?”
“After the divorce. I got Faye. She said she’d come up with a time and get back to me, but she never did. She didn’t tell you?”
“All I remember is talking with her about the fact that we didn’t know who to contact, you or Kitty, nothing about one of you calling.”
“It wouldn’t have been Kitty. She cut things off with everyone, and pretty soon I fell into that, too. Who wanted to see me after Kitty said I cut her with a knife? I didn’t cut her. She cut herself.”
“I didn’t know that was part of what happened, just the divorce.”
“I thought if anyone would believe me, you two would.”
“Of course.”
“Except I guess Faye didn’t. I heard the same thing in her voice I was hearing from everyone here. Then when you call after all this time and say she had died, I wondered how much you knew.”
“I don’t even know how I knew about the divorce. No details.”
They sat looking out at the mound of snow beyond the Subaru’s bumper, the overhead lights casting a bluish hue along its ridge line. From time to time a car’s tires made soft crunching sounds passing behind them.
“I don’t feel comfortable hashing over this,” Terry said. “I’m sure Faye never meant you any harm. She never meant anyone harm.”
“That’s what people said about Kitty.”
“Apparently I didn’t know Kitty very well.”
“She said I was suffocating her, but can you imagine me attacking her with a knife?”
Richard was renowned for breaking chalk on the blackboard.
“Of course not.”
“I thought that was why you never called, that you went for that story. A lot of people treated me the same way.”
Terry realized whatever he thought he would be talking about during this visit—losing Faye, asking himself if he might have done more for her, feeling bereft and ashamed that he was the one who lived—wasn’t going to happen unless he found a way through Richard’s thicket of grievance.
“Why would I have called you now if I thought any such thing? Faye died, and I’m trying to put my life together again. I told you that on the phone. Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I couldn’t believe it was you, and Grace was there right beside me.”
“Was it this first thing that came to your mind, being angry with Faye and maybe me?”
“Yes, I was angry with you, too, but I didn’t want to get into it with you about Kitty. I try not to think about her. Some other life.”
“Does Grace know about the stabbing?”
“There wasn’t any stabbing.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked it that way. What did you tell her?”
“I said what I told you. It was a marriage that never should have happened. I said I blamed myself. My mistake. But it was long since over, and we had no contact.”
“Did you say anything about the kids?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Nothing. Grace and I have been together ten years now. I’m not going to ruin my last ten years talking about the past.”
Kitty had been the art teacher, always a mess with paint, clay and charcoal on her hands and arms. Terry liked her. He thought they all were pretty close. Or were they since he didn’t know about Kitty covering up her suffocation or Richard covering up his anxiety or what Faye really had been wondering? He never probed that. He let it lie. To him speaking ill of the divorced was the same as speaking ill of the dead. He had never been a fan of the past until he lost it and wanted it back.
“Would you marry a younger woman if you had the chance?” Richard asked.
“I don’t see myself marrying anyone, young or old.”
“I didn’t either. Now I have to be perfect, which I’m not.”
“Why do you have to perfect?”
“I’m afraid I’ll lose her.”
“Is that a realistic possibility?”
“No, it’s me and my anxiety and my past. I get spooked.”
“Does Grace work?”
“She’s an architect.”
“You said you left education and went into urban planning.”
“I’m retired but working as much as I ever did without being paid.”
“Volunteering?”
“Commissions and advisory councils and bond issues. All that stuff.”
“Could you cut it back?”
“I don’t want to. I’m not that good around the house.”
“Who looks after the kids?”
“We have a kind of au pair who lives in the basement with her two kids.”
The Subaru was growing too warm. Terry lowered his window a crack. Richard apparently wanted to keep talking.
“Why wouldn’t you marry again?” he asked.
“Because Faye and I were married forty-two years, and I tried something last month with a woman I knew in high school who had lost her husband, and it was a disaster.”
“What was the problem?”
“One night she put antacid on the bedside table because that was what her husband needed after they went out to dinner and had sex. Jesus Christ, I didn’t want to be this woman’s dead husband. All I wanted was Faye.”
“I do want Grace, but I have this fear that one day she’ll become Kitty, one day she won’t come out of a dark mood, one day here comes the criticism, one day she won’t like the way I look at another woman.”
“Is she like Kitty in some way?”
“In no way at all. She’s calm, she’s quiet, she always has a purpose, very determined.”
“She doesn’t sound as if she’s the kind of person who would turn on you.”
“Only when I get too agitated. She says it bothers the children. She says I lived so long without children that I’m not prepared for it.”
“I look forward to meeting her.”
Richard made a b-r-r-r sound as though he were cold. He pulled back his shoulders. He put his left hand on the wheel and his right hand on the gear shifter. Was he finished now? Were they leaving? He made the b-r-r-r sound again and shivered in his oversized coat.
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Something else. Probably why Faye didn’t tell you I called after the divorce.”
“What?”
“Look, here it is: Before you left Boston, I was with Faye a couple of times. I’m sorry. I thought she and I put it behind us, but I guess not, I still pissed her off, and then you call twenty-five years later, and it’s all more than I can take.”
“More than you can take?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘More than you can take?’ She just died, Richard. That’s why I came up here. Not for this.”
“She wasn’t interested in me. She was mad at you.”
“Mad about what?”
“She didn’t want to move to North Carolina.”
“I know she didn’t.”
“She knew about me and Kitty having problems and said you were having problems, too, but it wasn’t anything. She didn’t want to leave you. She went, didn’t she?”
“Oh, come on.” Terry opened the car door. He needed more air. “No wonder you don’t want me to talk about Kitty in front of Grace. Why didn’t you tell me to go to hell and hang up?”
“Because Grace was—”
“Grace was right there listening? So what? How would I tell her anything about the past? I’m the one who doesn’t know anything about it.”
Terry put one foot out on the icy snowpack.
“Please, get in the car,” Richard said. “Let’s put a lid on this. Let’s forget it.”
“No, open the back. I’ll get my bag.”
“What if I drove you to a hotel?”
“I don’t want to go to a hotel. I’m going to the airport.”
Terry got out of the car. Richard popped the back open while staying in the driver’s seat. Terry yanked his bag out and walked to the wine store where he waited for a taxi. At the airport he changed his ticket to the last departing flight and returned to the bar. The football game, still going on, didn’t draw him in. He looked at the people surrounding him, wishing they all would leave so he could lie down.
Robert Earle
Terry stopped at a terminal bar for a vodka—flatscreens boiling with football—and fixed on the Patriots-Bills game because he was in Boston, but any game would do. He really only wanted to lie down on some empty part of the field and close his eyes and dream about Faye.
When he stepped outside, he scarcely recognized Richard who looked much smaller despite his big parka, or because of it, but Richard spotted him and grabbed his bag and slung it into the back of his Subaru wagon.
“Twenty-six years, Terry.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever been back since?”
“I would have called you.”
“Flight all right?”
“Fine.”
“Look, I’m so sorry about Faye. Are you okay?”
“Body is, mind isn’t. After the funeral I just came to a full-stop. Couldn’t take being with anyone who was part of it.” So he decided to see people he knew long before death was ever an issue, people from long ago. “You?”
Richard shrugged and said they needed to swing by a wine shop. The roadsides were piled with snow. A bank thermometer registered 6.
“Ever like this in North Carolina?”
“Never. I don’t even remember it being like this when we were up here.”
They had lived in Newton. Faye was a paralegal. Richard was the chair of the math department at the Weston Academy. Terry was the department. And sometimes, yes, there were days like this. One morning he found the snowy campus glazed with untracked silvery white ice. No one had called him. He crunched inside and made coffee in the empty faculty room and graded papers. He did an hour’s work in twenty minutes and sat there another twenty minutes mesmerized by the whiteness beyond the windows. Frightening. He never felt comfortable up north.
The wine shop, actually wine supermarket, burned Vegas-like at the far end of a strip mall. Again he had the urge to lie down and sleep. Richard walked quickly, though, and he hurried to keep up and pretend to care what wines Richard chose. He even agreed to choose one himself, which Faye always did, not him, he knew nothing about wine except how to drink it. After they were back in the Subaru, Richard started the car and sat there.
“Forget something?” Terry asked.
Contrary to his body, Richard’s face had grown longer and broader with age. He resembled the profile on an Indian head nickel. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay. What?”
“My second wife is thirty-three years younger than me. I didn’t say that on the phone.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“The two young children you mentioned, did they come with her?”
“No, they’re mine.”
They could see one another clearly because of the overhead parking lot lights. Richard confessed something else. He suffered from anxiety.
“It’s under control, but you should know that.”
“What are you anxious about?”
“It’s not being anxious about something. It’s a condition. I was probably anxious back then and didn’t know it.”
“It seemed like energy. Nothing stopped you.”
“Sick energy. One more thing: I didn’t give our kids my last name. I’m seventy-three. Why should they be stuck with my name when I’m gone?”
“I might not see my grandchildren grow up, either. Faye was sixty-nine, I’m seventy-one.”
“At least you saw your kids out the door.”
“What about the two you had with Kitty?”
“I lost them when she and I divorced.”
“Completely?”
“100%. I don’t even know if I have grandchildren.”
Richard stared through the windshield at a pile of cleared snow, apparently intending to talk, not drive. Terry didn’t know what to make of him. He was anxious, he was afraid of death, he didn’t know if he had grandchildren, but he was a guy who had made it seem on the phone as if it hadn’t been twenty-six years since they’d seen one another, more like twenty-six days the same voice, the same way it used to rush out of his mouth, trailed by specks of spittle: “Absolutely, come on up here.” There was nothing like that in his voice now.
“And look, it was almost twenty years between me divorcing Kitty and marrying Grace, so I really never discussed Kitty with Grace. I told her I married Kitty more because she was pregnant than love and then she got pregnant again and then everything came apart.” Richard paused to allow all this to sink in. “I guess what I’m saying is you’re one of the few people who knew me and Kitty back then, and I’d as soon...”
“That I’d not talk about her?”
“Probably not.”
“We already had gone south before you and Kitty divorced.”
“You heard, though.”
“Yes.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Sure, I thought you two were yin and yang, but nothing surprised Faye. Faye said that she had been wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
Terry felt the prickling in the back of his mouth when he wanted a drink. He thought of the wine in the back. Richard had bought bottles like mad. They ended up with an entire case.
“I guess what women always wonder.”
“Whether I was up to something?”
“Yes.”
“Did she talk about that?”
“When we were here, she thought the same as me—both of you were great, not just Kitty.”
“Kitty wasn’t that great.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“No one did.” Richard still didn’t put the car into gear. He didn’t even put his hands on the wheel. He clasped them in his lap. “Is Faye why you didn’t stay in touch, what she suspected of me?”
“I don’t remember. Pretty soon I ended up with my own school to run down there in Raleigh. Had my hands full.”
“How about when I called to see about visiting you?”
“When was that?”
“After the divorce. I got Faye. She said she’d come up with a time and get back to me, but she never did. She didn’t tell you?”
“All I remember is talking with her about the fact that we didn’t know who to contact, you or Kitty, nothing about one of you calling.”
“It wouldn’t have been Kitty. She cut things off with everyone, and pretty soon I fell into that, too. Who wanted to see me after Kitty said I cut her with a knife? I didn’t cut her. She cut herself.”
“I didn’t know that was part of what happened, just the divorce.”
“I thought if anyone would believe me, you two would.”
“Of course.”
“Except I guess Faye didn’t. I heard the same thing in her voice I was hearing from everyone here. Then when you call after all this time and say she had died, I wondered how much you knew.”
“I don’t even know how I knew about the divorce. No details.”
They sat looking out at the mound of snow beyond the Subaru’s bumper, the overhead lights casting a bluish hue along its ridge line. From time to time a car’s tires made soft crunching sounds passing behind them.
“I don’t feel comfortable hashing over this,” Terry said. “I’m sure Faye never meant you any harm. She never meant anyone harm.”
“That’s what people said about Kitty.”
“Apparently I didn’t know Kitty very well.”
“She said I was suffocating her, but can you imagine me attacking her with a knife?”
Richard was renowned for breaking chalk on the blackboard.
“Of course not.”
“I thought that was why you never called, that you went for that story. A lot of people treated me the same way.”
Terry realized whatever he thought he would be talking about during this visit—losing Faye, asking himself if he might have done more for her, feeling bereft and ashamed that he was the one who lived—wasn’t going to happen unless he found a way through Richard’s thicket of grievance.
“Why would I have called you now if I thought any such thing? Faye died, and I’m trying to put my life together again. I told you that on the phone. Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I couldn’t believe it was you, and Grace was there right beside me.”
“Was it this first thing that came to your mind, being angry with Faye and maybe me?”
“Yes, I was angry with you, too, but I didn’t want to get into it with you about Kitty. I try not to think about her. Some other life.”
“Does Grace know about the stabbing?”
“There wasn’t any stabbing.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked it that way. What did you tell her?”
“I said what I told you. It was a marriage that never should have happened. I said I blamed myself. My mistake. But it was long since over, and we had no contact.”
“Did you say anything about the kids?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Nothing. Grace and I have been together ten years now. I’m not going to ruin my last ten years talking about the past.”
Kitty had been the art teacher, always a mess with paint, clay and charcoal on her hands and arms. Terry liked her. He thought they all were pretty close. Or were they since he didn’t know about Kitty covering up her suffocation or Richard covering up his anxiety or what Faye really had been wondering? He never probed that. He let it lie. To him speaking ill of the divorced was the same as speaking ill of the dead. He had never been a fan of the past until he lost it and wanted it back.
“Would you marry a younger woman if you had the chance?” Richard asked.
“I don’t see myself marrying anyone, young or old.”
“I didn’t either. Now I have to be perfect, which I’m not.”
“Why do you have to perfect?”
“I’m afraid I’ll lose her.”
“Is that a realistic possibility?”
“No, it’s me and my anxiety and my past. I get spooked.”
“Does Grace work?”
“She’s an architect.”
“You said you left education and went into urban planning.”
“I’m retired but working as much as I ever did without being paid.”
“Volunteering?”
“Commissions and advisory councils and bond issues. All that stuff.”
“Could you cut it back?”
“I don’t want to. I’m not that good around the house.”
“Who looks after the kids?”
“We have a kind of au pair who lives in the basement with her two kids.”
The Subaru was growing too warm. Terry lowered his window a crack. Richard apparently wanted to keep talking.
“Why wouldn’t you marry again?” he asked.
“Because Faye and I were married forty-two years, and I tried something last month with a woman I knew in high school who had lost her husband, and it was a disaster.”
“What was the problem?”
“One night she put antacid on the bedside table because that was what her husband needed after they went out to dinner and had sex. Jesus Christ, I didn’t want to be this woman’s dead husband. All I wanted was Faye.”
“I do want Grace, but I have this fear that one day she’ll become Kitty, one day she won’t come out of a dark mood, one day here comes the criticism, one day she won’t like the way I look at another woman.”
“Is she like Kitty in some way?”
“In no way at all. She’s calm, she’s quiet, she always has a purpose, very determined.”
“She doesn’t sound as if she’s the kind of person who would turn on you.”
“Only when I get too agitated. She says it bothers the children. She says I lived so long without children that I’m not prepared for it.”
“I look forward to meeting her.”
Richard made a b-r-r-r sound as though he were cold. He pulled back his shoulders. He put his left hand on the wheel and his right hand on the gear shifter. Was he finished now? Were they leaving? He made the b-r-r-r sound again and shivered in his oversized coat.
“I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Something else. Probably why Faye didn’t tell you I called after the divorce.”
“What?”
“Look, here it is: Before you left Boston, I was with Faye a couple of times. I’m sorry. I thought she and I put it behind us, but I guess not, I still pissed her off, and then you call twenty-five years later, and it’s all more than I can take.”
“More than you can take?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘More than you can take?’ She just died, Richard. That’s why I came up here. Not for this.”
“She wasn’t interested in me. She was mad at you.”
“Mad about what?”
“She didn’t want to move to North Carolina.”
“I know she didn’t.”
“She knew about me and Kitty having problems and said you were having problems, too, but it wasn’t anything. She didn’t want to leave you. She went, didn’t she?”
“Oh, come on.” Terry opened the car door. He needed more air. “No wonder you don’t want me to talk about Kitty in front of Grace. Why didn’t you tell me to go to hell and hang up?”
“Because Grace was—”
“Grace was right there listening? So what? How would I tell her anything about the past? I’m the one who doesn’t know anything about it.”
Terry put one foot out on the icy snowpack.
“Please, get in the car,” Richard said. “Let’s put a lid on this. Let’s forget it.”
“No, open the back. I’ll get my bag.”
“What if I drove you to a hotel?”
“I don’t want to go to a hotel. I’m going to the airport.”
Terry got out of the car. Richard popped the back open while staying in the driver’s seat. Terry yanked his bag out and walked to the wine store where he waited for a taxi. At the airport he changed his ticket to the last departing flight and returned to the bar. The football game, still going on, didn’t draw him in. He looked at the people surrounding him, wishing they all would leave so he could lie down.
