This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

And it seems to me, as I sit there, among the ornamental hedges and genuflecting chrysanthemums, as I spark my lighter with a shaking hand and inhale the smoke, that my life has been a series of elisions, cover-ups, dropped stitches in knitting. To all appearances, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted toward the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing, but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

“Danny,” she says again, leaning forward in the chair, “jeet?” We stare at each other for a moment, she and I, each of us struck by the unaccountability, the incomprehensibility, of our situation. “Jeet?” I repeat warily, and as I say it I know what it means. She is asking me, in pure Brooklyn, Did you eat?

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.