Free Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page A

leave.
    “Want to go out on the porch?” Levin asked. She deposited her macaroni necklace in the corner—her string of worry beads, her rosary—and they left the room together.
    —
    I n my mute world even the dreams were voiceless,” Lucy wrote, “populated by characters who ran around as silent and frantic as Keystone Kops. A nurse flashed a circle of light in my eyes late one night, lurching me from one of these dreams. ‘You were shivering,’ she explained to me, drawing the blanket up around my shoulders.”
    Summer was ending, and they were no longer taken outsidefor recreation hour. Instead, everyone sat in the television room, old reruns blaring, the laughter of the children in front of the set strangely rapid and even, like machine-gun fire, after every gag line. Levin often came and sat with her, talking about his life, his teaching, his counting. He and his wife, Judith, lived in Connecticut and had one child. “I guess we have a pretty good life,” he said. “At least we did until recently. Jason loves kindergarten, and Judith seems fairly happy most of the time. That night when she called up my friend Lew from the math department to come over and talk to me, I think she knew what I was going through and was really scared. She and Lew came into my study, where I’d been for twelve hours agonizing over numbers, and Lew told me I was doing this to myself and that he would help me. He said he would cover my nine o’clock section in the morning, and wasn’t I teaching them eigenvalues now?”
    Levin seemed to be building himself up to some kind of minor frenzy, and his words came out faster. “Judith asked if I wanted something to make me sleep, and I said yes, and she gave me something and then pulled out the Castro convertible in the study because I couldn’t leave the room that night. This is the horrible part: all of a sudden Jason poked his head out through the slats of the banister; I guess the talking woke him, and Judith called to him in this really controlled voice, ‘Go back to bed, baby. I’ll be in to sing you our song about the windmills.’ Then I realized that I didn’t know what song she was talking about, and that I had been a negligent father and husband, and that my wife and child had a camaraderie I knew nothing about. It was like an epiphany or something.”
    Levin slumped on the couch after his monologue, his head drooping. Through the vacuum of her roaring Lucy suddenly felt what she later supposed could only have been compassion. She was no longer listening to the distant, abstract whimpering of children; this was a direct appeal. Her compassion was at once stronger and more demanding than the noise in her head, and she wanted to say something, anything. Her tongue clogged the words at first, stopped them in her throat. She tried again, opening her mouth slowly, as if it might stick. “Things will get better,” she said, and the words came out unevenly, huskily, grating against one another like the gears on a rusted bicycle.
    Levin raised his head, surprised but not completely startled. “You really talked, didn’t you?” he asked.
    Yes, she answered, yes, yes, her voice clearing and refining with each new word.
    “I guess that had to happen eventually,” he said, and he drew his long arms and legs in close to his body, folding up like a bridge chair.
    —
    T he man she was involved with ten years later never knew about her childhood. It was not embarrassment or pain that kept Lucy from telling him; it just seemed fitting that she should be silent about her silence. Richard was a graduate student at the university, and Lucy was poet-in-residence for the semester. It bothered him that she was so reticent. His last lover, he said, was a full, loud, horsy woman. During lovemaking she would usually cry out, or chuckle low in her throat, orsay, “Here. No, here.” But Lucy was quiet, and she prided herself on it. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I even matched my breathing