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His bed, their marriage bed, was unmade, as it was every day except when the cleaning woman came, and it seemed to him to be the mess that he was, or that they had been.
“No reason to cry about it,” Olive said. (Olive had cried. She had cried like a newborn baby when she hung up the phone from Christopher after he told her.)
And then Kayley sat down at the piano and began to play—oh, how she played! She went through the sonatas of Mozart as though she could not dig her fingers deep enough into the fresh soil of the music; she played and played.
The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.
“You’re the one who made the decision to have the affair. I think you should be the one who takes responsibility for it. Not your husband.”
I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—” Her voice became calm, adultlike. “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
Cindy felt a vast and secret pride that this person from Crosby, Maine, had accomplished such a thing. In truth, Cindy did not always understand the poetry that Andrea wrote. But it was brave; Cindy knew that.
But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now. Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.
there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.”
Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore—and how they held on for dear life!
And he also knew, even tonight in his grief, that his marriage to Olive had been surprisingly wonderful in many ways, to go into old age with this woman who was so—so Olive.
He was exiled here. And the weirdness of this—how life had turned out, for himself, and Jim, and even Pam—made him feel an ocean of sadness sway through him.
And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect: This was true for Jim and Helen, and for Margaret and himself, as well.
“God, Olive, you’re a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you.
It seemed to her she had never before completely understood how far apart human experience was.
And then he nodded toward his arm, a small nod, but old marrieds that they were she understood. She began to stroke his arm again.
Olive wondered if her initial feelings for the man had been because she thought he had saved her life. Maybe you fall in love with people who save your life, even when you think it’s not worth saving.
Loneliness. Oh, the loneliness! It blistered Olive.
And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.
She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before.
