The hour has come for my father-in-law to close house for the night. One last bit of encouragement proffered — “You got everything going for you”— and old Ray is lumbering into the laundry room to perform his ritual. The dutiful click of the backdoor lock, the thunderclap of a window sliding shut. Ray is an unfailingly kind, mostly bald man in a tartan bathrobe; a plumber by trade whose fervent optimism I admire for its perennial absence, to date, in myself.

His words from the pantry — “The winds pick up at eleven”— arrive at my ear not as a warning but as a prophecy so arcane it seems to confound even the soothsayer. Then I realize from my spot on the sofa that he’s only parroting the T.V., the weather report to which I’ve been paying no attention.

“More leaves for me to rake,” I say. Living under Ray’s roof rent-free since graduation, I insist on doing the yard work and whatever else I can to earn my keep. He’s grateful for the help. It saves his aching back. Tumbledown knees.

Ray pours a cup of chamomile and clunks his slippers across the rug, unwittingly spilling tea as he goes. “Just keep chumming the waters, Erik,” he says. “The right one’ll come along.”

He retreats down the hall, past the door behind which sleeps his only daughter (my wife), and I get up to blot the tea from the Belgian wool with a kitchen rag. Under better circumstances, I’d be in bed right now, already dreaming (or not), but the day’s events have left me feeling restless. More restless, I should say, than normal, and as ineffectual, I fear, as ever. I suppose what I really feel, underneath it all, as I turn off the T.V. and the end table lamp and slouch back on the sofa, is despair, and the reason why, as Ray and Beth know it—my so-far fruitless job search—is only part of the truth and does not explain, by design, the root of my trouble.

You might venture a guess, if you spied me here tonight sitting in the dark, that I’m lying in wait for someone, like a detective or a saboteur, and I admit that is in a sense true. There is someone I’m waiting on, someone I’ve been waiting on, not to walk through the door but to hear from, to illuminate my phone in some way. But after a decade of silence, the game is beginning to wear on me, and a man cannot delude himself forever. My hopes have never been high, I’ve always tempered expectations, but at this point, if I want to speak with Olivia—the woman at the heart of what I’m feeling, inseparable from my despair—I should just reach out. I want nothing more from her than closure—I’m no longer in love with her, so this is what it boils down to, essentially—honest to goodness closure, which she denied me after her trip to Spain. But closure, by necessity, must come from Olivia (there is no middleman for healing), and in the process of having closure, I run the risk of hurting the one person who really matters: Beth.

The choice, therefore, should seem obvious. If I love my wife, which I do—she turned down a promotion, temporarily uprooted so I could go back to school—and if I respect my wife, which I do—if my duty as Beth’s husband is to honour her, to shield her from pain whenever possible—then I should just forget it. Ray would tell me if I were to confide in him—and I wouldn’t, not about this, but if I did—he’d tell me to flush these thoughts down the toilet and move on. And this is sound advice; in fact, it’s exactly what I need to hear. But Ray’s wisdom, potent though it is, would fail to fortify me for long. The choice isn’t obvious, and I know myself. In a day or two, I’d circle right back to where I am now. I’d be driving to an interview, just like earlier today, and instead of rehearsing my answers to potential questions from the panel (How would your committee chair describe you? What is your teaching philosophy? What drew you to academia in the first place?), I’d be weighing the pluses and minuses of contacting Olivia, feeling no shame at all.

Does this make me a bad partner? A bad person? That I should eschew preparing my mind for the task at hand—an opportunity to secure gainful employment and thereby vacate (after a couple of paychecks replenish our bank account) Ray’s spare bedroom—in favour of contemplating an email I may never write? A call I may never make? I’m not trying to sabotage us. I’m hungry for work. We have bills, debt. Beth’s graphic design contracts won’t keep us solvent much longer. If not for her dad’s generosity, we’d be hunkered down in our car right now.

I’d stop thinking about Olivia if I could. It’s just that I can’t.

Obtaining closure would perhaps help me think less about her. But therein lies another, quite sizable risk, one I cannot overlook: for closure, inevitably, would guarantee the loss of a world in which I’ve luxuriated since our breakup; a vaporous, yellowy garden of suspicion and conjecture unspoiled by Olivia’s interpretation of things or the revelation of what she did or didn’t do that summer abroad. There’s a sense of shelter in this world, the not knowing, and the past, the remembered, excavated past, I’ve come to realize in adulthood, is perhaps my most valuable possession, a priceless commodity. Sometimes I think my version of the truth, hazy and holey as it is, might matter more to me than knowing what actually happened. And if a reason exists for not contacting Olivia (outside of maintaining respect for my wife) this is most certainly it: the preservation of my purposeful ignorance.

The concern of late, however, is I may have arrived at a place in my analysis of Olivia from which I have nowhere new to go. Like the vacuum that roves the depths of Ray’s swimming pool, whose serpentine tail rudely spits water onto the patio (I can hear him now), I retrace my steps along the same worn paths and always end up where I started. I gain nothing. And so, while closure would effectively vanquish the dream-world of my suspicion, my greatest fear is travelling these paths the rest of my life without ever travelling them with her. This fear is so pervasive, so huge that whenever I’m on the freeway, I dread that if some drunk or methhead swerved into me, and I lost my life to the ark-hard trunk of a roadside ginkgo, all my memories, all my revelations would perish with me, and I’d be robbed of the chance to share any of it with Olivia.

Putting my thoughts in an email to her would alleviate my fear. That’s a given. But let’s say I did write her, and she was pleasantly surprised to hear from me and asked in her reply if we could catch up over the phone, and after some light conversation, some feeling things out, she was obliged to join me on those paths and light the lamps and dispel the fog blocking my entrance onto paths once shrouded. Would her companionship through our common past bring me joy? Would she remind me of things—good things, lovely things—I’d somehow forgotten? Would she tell me freely how close she has kept these memories to her heart, how often she warms herself in their glow?

Or would she still harbour that blind hate she had for Beth, whom Olivia thought was trying to ruin us, when we were all in college together and she, Olivia, still loved me? Would she leverage my vulnerability to hurt me all over again? Would she tell me things—cruel things—that’d only make me yearn for the safety of my dream-world? Would she lead me down paths too thorny, too precarious to tread? Would she fail to recall that we were still dating when she left for Spain? Would she stand by her story that nothing happened there? And if she swore nothing happened, could I trust her enough to believe her? Or would she finally reveal that something happened—I’m talking infidelity here—and spare no detail in the telling?

Even after all these years, I know the hand-to-bible truth, if she did in fact cheat, would zap me like an overcurious moth, and every precious memory I have of her would become so brutally fried that I could no longer think of us without feeling hollowed out, like a useless rind, regretful that I forfeited suspicion for suffering. Is this an outcome I can live with? That there’d be nothing to salvage? That the dream-world I’ve grown to depend on, this place I oddly yet earnestly cherish, would go up in smoke, and on top of it all, I’d have another secret to keep from Beth?

When will she figure out that I only go to half as many interviews as I say I do, that the rest of the time I’m just driving out to Loomis for a pint—a damned delicious nine-dollar pint, oftentimes before noon?

 

The roving vacuum sprays water onto the patio as if to admonish me. I deserve this, his candid comment, and I respect him for it. In a whimsical move, I name him Eliot after the poet whose Four Quartets I read recently during one of my clandestine visits to the brewery. I imagine his life—the vacuum’s—for myself. A possibly pointless exercise, but mine.

I begin by taking stock of my parts: turbines, wheels, shell. I creep along the pool’s floor at a cloud’s pace. My hose, a flexible twenty feet of ribbed rubber, inhales debris. Veiny maple leaves, nut-brown oleander blooms, a drowned snake (once)—these collect in a mesh bag at my rear. When it’s full, Ray empties. I submerge again.

The cycle repeats well into fall, then for months, I’m dormant. A shadow in the deep end. Overhead, raindrops land; I read the tick marks for meaning, find none. I wait for visitors in the manner my namesake, the poet, bids his soul to wait—without hope, without faith—for my desires are incongruent with reality’s provisions.

Loneliness ensues until spring when Ray dives in to switch me back on. A heatwave inspires him to host a barbeque. Bodies, mostly flabby and male, donning ancient floral trunks, wade in waist-deep. Can’t partake of the ribs on the grill—no mouth—but I enjoy the company.

Summertime fireworks squeal and burst and Beth swims starlit laps in the nude. My tires, of which I have no control, propel me up the side of a wall. For a moment, before sinking, I feel the water she displaces; and soon the weather cools, and the leaves turn again and fall—

And I, Dr. Erik Marsh, emerging from subaqueous reverie to resume my dry-land despairing, come nose-to-nose with the toothy certainty that I’d be miserable—I’d be near-worthless—without my wife’s love.

 

“The winds pick up at eleven.” Weatherman wasn’t kidding. I hear a whistling through the gap in the French doors. Ray’s flute-like patio chimes ring out in a dizzy melody. Not sure how he sleeps with the clatter, and yet somehow.

I rise from the sofa and toss the rag, damp with his tea, into the laundry room hamper.

Outside, I cross the patio, pull off my socks and step down, ankle-deep, into the shallows. So frigid, may as well be an ice bath. I grab Eliot’s hose—the length of which floating on the surface—and pull him to me. His bag bulges with leaves; I unscrew it and step out of the pool to dispose. On the way to the trash, I compare in my mind’s eye the maples’ feeble colour to that of the freeway gingkos—the most vibrant, look-at-me yellow; as if the leaves hadn’t succumbed to change, rather embraced it.

“Eliot,” I declare, returning to the pool. “I will learn to practice a new kind of patience. I have to.” I set him on the ledge and reconnect his bag. “I will accept that some waters are better left un-chummed. This is a pact I’m making with myself, so listen.” I look over my shoulder to ensure that we’re alone. “I will not think of Olivia,” I whisper. “At least not on my way to interviews. I won’t contact her. I will appreciate my dream-world for the haven it is. If I’m going to the brewery, I’m going with Beth. I will make a good showing this season, the way I know I can. I will land a job. I will land a full-time job, with benefits. I will rise to the occasion and be the person Ray and Beth believe I am.”

The chimes tinkle, and I add, “Got all that?” But Eliot is silent, and thank God—if I heard him respond, I’d think I was losing my head. His off-white shell gleams in the light of a nearby streetlamp, and I drop him in the water, salute his descent.

I dry my numbed feet on the lawn and head back inside. Grab my phone off the sofa. No notifications. In the bathroom, I brush my teeth, relieve myself. Check my phone again.

When I crawl into bed, Beth stirs awake. “Hold me,” she says, and I do. The need is mutual. I fit myself to her shape, bury my face in her hair.

A westbound train blares in the distance, and I wait for sleep—a lucky fool entrusted with her heart, not yet worthy of its graces.