Free Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

circumstances if Adam were home, but no dog appeared, and she swallowed hard, and when she came into view of the house above the river, screened by evergreens Adam hadn’t gotten around to trimming after last January’s ice storm, the house that had always seemed so romantic to her, the weathered old burgundy-gray stone, the steep slate roofs and tall chimneys, looked to her now melancholy and abandoned. Beside the house was a field of overgrown grasses and wildflowers, predominantly chicory, not a tended lawn; Adam had laughed at, scorned, such suburban lawns; he never troubled to clear away fallen leaves, year after year. His garden grew among weeds, a lush hive of green. Moss grew on the roof of the old garage, formerly a carriage house. Parked at the rear of the house was Roger Cavanagh’s new-model American car, the wrong car. Marina would have to arrange to bring Adam’s car back from that place of death. She saw for the second time that morning Roger Cavanagh awaiting her in an opened doorway, except he was now looking at her in a way that quickened her pulse, and her unease.
    My co-conspirator. For Adam’s sake .
    Her new mood! Marina smiled to assure Roger that she wasn’t upset, she was fine. That grimace of the mouth in smiling so closely akin to the grimace of the mouth in anguish. In sexual yearning.
    When Marina stumbled on the front steps, Roger took her arm, and the sensation of his touch, his quick firm grip, stabbed through her.
    “This is a strange thing we’re doing. But it has to be done.”
    In silence they entered the stone house which was cool on even a warm midsummer morning. Marina was beginning to tremble. Wanting desperately to call out Adam? Adam! Still she was waiting for the noisy, excitable Apollo to appear, barking at them, and thumping his tail. But there was only silence. They stood in the vestibule in splotched sunshine and Middle Age: A Romance
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    shadow. A fiercer sunshine spilled into the large, cluttered living room, where you’d expect Adam Berendt to be greeting his visitors, since he hadn’t been at the front door to greet them; but the sunshine was blank and soulless. Marina moved slowly, staring at familiar sights with altered eyes. Adam’s battered leather sofa with mismatched cushions; the Shaker-style chairs he’d built carefully by hand, which matched the six chairs he’d built for Marina’s dining room; tables piled with books, magazines, newspapers, CDs; on the lofty fireplace mantel, the pair of antique pewter candlestick holders Marina had given Adam for one of his mysterious birthdays. (Mysterious because Adam never provided an exact date, only an approximate; and never specified his age.) Against the farther wall was a six-foot metallic and ceramic grandfather clock Adam had fashioned out of various idiosyncratic materials. Everyone who visited Adam admired this object, which had a working pendulum but no chimes, and no hands on the shiny ceramic clock face; Adam shrugged off the piece as “too lik-able, in the Rauschenberg mode”; he didn’t want to sell it. Marina saw with childlike relief that the pendulum was still moving. Its tinny heartbeat filled the room.
    Marina said uneasily, “It’s wrong of us to be here. Adam wasn’t expecting visitors.”
    Roger said, “There’s no Adam now. Adam is beyond all expectations.”
    They moved through the house. Like phantoms, Marina thought.
    As if they, not Adam Berendt, were dead.
    They passed by the kitchen without entering, only glancing inside.
    Tears started in Marina’s eyes: Adam’s kitchen! Except for his studio, this was his favorite room. When he invited guests for dinner, which he did rarely, everyone would gather in the kitchen and help Adam prepare the food; if Marina visited Adam, by day, it was usually the kitchen in which they sat. His windows looking out upon the river. A vista that shifted constantly. He’d spoken to Marina of a strange absence of all desire, a profound