Free The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich Page B

away.”
    “I’m not.”
    But inside, I know I am and he knows it too, and it isn’t just the lie, unless the lie stands for everything I am afraid of. I do not know why it is happening.
    “You can’t stand it, can you,” he says after a long pause.
    “Can’t stand what?”
    “What I’m going through. You think it’s catching.”
    “No.”
    “You think you’ll get sadness, grief, whatever, like a virus.”
    “No.”
    “Then what is it? I lied to you, I know I did, but I never will again. I have taken a vow in my very being that I will die first. No lies, ever.”
    I nod, I want to say I believe him, I want to answer, but a nameless feeling close to dread sifts up inside me and covers my heart and takes away my words, leaving a kind of shame.
    “I don’t know what it is,” I whisper, after a time, and we sit there together in baffled silence, touching the bases of our wineglasses.
    “I spent about six hours in the woods today,” he says at last.
    “Looking at rocks?”
    “And at stumps. There’s something human about them. I’ve decided that I hate them.” Kurt frowns and shuts his eyes, cocks his head to one side as though listening to an interior voice. When he opens his eyes, they are a smoky, soft color and filled with sadness.
    “You know, I think I’ll have the halibut,” I say, then I look down at my hands, and am overtaken by a wash of despair at my clumsiness. The menu is slightly blurry and as I pretend to read it I am visited by the idea that even our most intimate sexual moments, when he sobs into my hair or I lose all sense of where my body stops or my pleasure and his begins, our nakedness, our imperfections bare to each other’s sight, our coarse humor, our dirt, lack of shame, our easy joy, have nothing to do with aspects of ourselves that, if we let them develop, become actual and other selves. The thief in me. The murderously jealous father in him. The wish I have to make him feel better, which seems so pure, may be selfish. I understand his tedious anguish.
    There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.
    “Why don’t you want me to prune the orchard?” asks Krahe.
    A surprise darkness skims up my back. It is a prickle so unfamiliar that at first I do not recognize it as anger. And in fact, my voice emerges sounding different from how I feel. It is light, maybe girlish—a mature woman’s panic.
    “I told you I like it the way it is,” I say, “dead and ruined.”
    “It could be beautiful.”
    “It is.”
    Before he can speak again, I’ve risen and turned away. I thread among tables and chairs, and then up a set of stairs, gliding my hand along the smooth banister. The feel of old wood calms me a little, but I still feel like running down the back stairs and out what was once the scullery door. Instead, I continue down the hall. The ladies powder room is furnished with an exquisite Egyptian Revival dressing table that I remember as having gone very reasonably at auction. There is also a fainting couch upholstered in striped golden satin. I sit down on it and then tentatively lie back, close my eyes.
    Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties, even to indulge the unnecessary, and maybe insulting, secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he is near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain. Unsolvable. Alive. Death has again brushed close, hurled Kendra and Davan off the bridge, tossed Tatro down a steep ditch and allowed him to die in the earliest spring growth. I am part of the chain of events that began when Davan gunned his engine on Revival Road. And the drum is part of it, too, and my taking of it. Kurt Krahe’s mowing of dead grass is part of it, as is