TWICE-TOLD TALE

“It is annoying to have to tell the same tale twice.”

     -Homer, The Odyssey

 

***

 

Nell liked to say that she and Grant married each other two times, but that wasn’t technically true. 

They’d met when they played the leads in their high school production of Our Town, Grant as George Gibbs and Nell as Emily Webb. They were sophomores, too old to be convincing as the small children of act 1 and too young to be convincing as the adult George and Emily in act 3.

Act 2 was where they shone—the courtship and wedding of two nervous teenagers who stumble toward each other the way teenagers do. In rehearsals they were silly and giggly, but on the night of the performance Nell felt the weight of what they were doing—or pretending to do—and her face burned as if she were naked and exposed in front of the almost invisible audience.  

That was wedding number one, Nell told people at parties. Our rehearsal for the real thing. Grant looked sleepy-eyed and mysterious, as if he were listening to music no one else could hear.

           Wedding number two, the real one, was less ceremonial than the one in the play—signatures on a paper in a government office, brunch afterwards with Grant’s father and Nell’s best friend Carol. They were graduate students then with no money and a gnawing worry about their lack of decent health insurance. They moved into the dorm for married students, adopted a yellow cat with the unwieldy name of Telemachus, and ate so many ramen noodles that for the next twenty years Nell avoided pasta of any kind. 

Soon enough they finished school and settled into a reasonable life. Grant was a broker for one of the largest travel agencies in the tri-city area. Nell taught fabric design and weaving at the local community college. They rented a cozy apartment in a tree-lined neighborhood with decent restaurants and a better deli. Time passed pleasantly enough, their mid-twenties turning into their mid-thirties, Grant giving up running after he blew out his knee, Nell deciding at 40 to stop coloring her hair. The idea of children came and went and came again and went away forever. 

“Are you sad about that?” Grant asked her on her 50th birthday.

“Not sad,” she said, tasting the expensive merlot he’d bought to celebrate. “Curious, maybe, if I feel anything at all. Hard to miss what I’ve never had.”

“Hmm,” Grant murmured in agreement or mild surprise. Only later did Nell wonder which. 

Turning 50 wasn’t as startling as she imagined it would be. Her parents had both died young—her dad when she was a toddler, her mother the week after Nell graduated from high school. She felt she’d been an adult forever, orphaned and married by the time she was 21.

No one in their circle of friends seemed as old. No one, for instance, had been married as long as Nell and Grant. 

“Because we married each other twice,” Nell joked when the subject came up at dinner parties, which it did with surprising regularity. Marriage and divorce and loyalty and betrayal—topics hinted at between layers of chitchat and gossip.

By her 50th birthday, Nell had come to realize that all their disagreements were the same issues they’d always fought about, the same petty annoyances dressed up in different clothes. They never argued about anything new. They had been married so long that their silences were comfortable. When they were temporarily separated in a crowd or a mall or at a party, they didn’t have that instinctive juju that helped them find each other, the way other couples seemed to, but wandered around, lost and baffled. Buying gifts for each other became harder, not easier, as the years went by, as if their imaginations were frozen in amber. Nell wasn’t bored—not exactly—but sometimes she found herself flirting with cocktail party acquaintances, resolving that nothing would ever come from those tipsy conversations.

When she and Grant were home together, they took turns cooking, eating their meals in front of the TV. Sometimes Nell sat with her lap full of yarn that she hooked into blankets while Grant watched the travel channel, though whether he was imagining going to exotic places himself or was prepping for work, Nell wasn’t sure.

When Grant’s work hours shifted and he started coming home too late to help with meals, Nell stopped cooking and started buying take-out. She split the meatloaf or casseroles in half or left paper cartons of stir-fried vegetables on the top shelf of the refrigerator for Grant who ate them cold, getting home after Nell had gone to bed. 

“That’s how it starts,” her friend Carol said over drinks one afternoon at a trendy new bar near the college. 

“How what starts? His hours at work changed.”

“That’s what Jerry told me, too,” Carol said, “right before I found out about what he was really doing with his new secretary.”

Nell ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass. “Grant’s not having an affair.”  

“How would you know?”

“I’d know. I know him better than anyone. Better than I know myself.”

Her voice hitched slightly.

Carol leaned back and shrugged. “Suit yourself. But if I were you, I’d pay attention.”

“There’s nothing to pay attention to,” Nell said, forcing a laugh and finishing her wine.  

The next time Carol called, and every time after that, Nell was too busy to meet up.

 

***

 

Several months before Nell’s 50th birthday, blue envelopes addressed to Grant started coming to the house. The handwriting was lacy and formal, the kind of penmanship taught a generation ago. An older person, who still wrote letters instead of emails. Afterward, Nell wondered if that was why she wasn’t more curious about the writer, why she hadn’t asked Grant about his mysterious correspondent.

For several weeks after her birthday, she let the mail pile up unread on the kitchen table. A phone call from the not-so-friendly gas company about her overdue bill forced her to spread the pile of envelopes out like a game of solitaire on the tabletop.

A surprising number were blue, written in the same shaky hand. She opened the first one and pulled out a matching piece of folded blue paper.

Tuesday at 8.

That was all. It would have meant something to Grant, but to her it was a cryptic hieroglyph.

Nell felt her face flush with the same heat she remembered from standing naked—so to speak—on the stage. This couldn’t be what it looked like. Nothing to pay attention to.

And yet. A notice about an appointment? 

A rendezvous. 

She knew all of Grant’s friends—they were hers, too—but not all his co-workers. She tried to remember the last time he’d mentioned anyone at work and drew a blank. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d mentioned work at all. 

The other blue envelopes were the same—inside each one a blue piece of paper with a day and time. On the back of the envelopes she could make out an embossed return address. Gathering them into a bundle, she carried them with her to the car. 

  The house wasn’t far, a modest brick box tucked back from the road, peeling green shutters and a gravel driveway that needed weeding. Nell parked around the corner and sat for a few moments, her heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped animal.

It was the kind of house she and Grant had thought about buying and fixing up a long time ago, before inertia settled them into an apartment heavy with furniture and history, before their succession of cats, each growing arthritic and frail and being replaced by a different yellow kitten. Stupid, really, to pay rent all those years. Why hadn’t she pressed harder to move? 

The doorbell seemed exceptionally loud as she stood on the small porch, the blue envelopes in her hand. Footsteps, then the rattle of locks and doorknobs, and finally the door swung open.

A woman about Nell’s age stood there, her hair pulled up into a loose bun, her dark pants and sweater neat and stylish.

“Can I help you?” the woman said.

Nell held the bundle out to her. “Someone sent these to my house. To my husband.”

The woman took the envelopes and turned one over.  “Ulysses Grant Harper,” she read aloud. “You’re Grant’s wife? Penelope?”

“Do you know who sent these?” Nell said. She lifted her hand and braced herself against the doorframe, the late lunch she’d eaten souring her stomach.

“I did,” the woman said. “Grant’s my student. Are you alright? Has something happened?”

“Can I—can I sit down?”

She felt the woman’s hand under her elbow as her vision started to go white. Suddenly she was in a chair in a darkened room, the woman crossing the floor to turn on a table lamp. A moment later Nell felt a glass of water being pressed into her palm.

“Take a drink,” the woman directed. Nell did as she was told. The woman sat down in a chair facing her. “Now, tell me what’s going on.”

Nell took another sip of water. “You’re a teacher?”

“More of a writing coach. Retired, mostly, though I have a few students. Grant didn’t tell you?”

“No.“

“I haven’t seen him in a few weeks. Not since he finished his poem.”
“His poem?”
“Didn’t he give it to you? I’m sure he said it was for your birthday.”

“He didn’t—” 

“I thought it was for your birthday, but he was having trouble finishing it. He must have decided to give it to you later. Oh, I hope I haven’t spoiled a surprise!”

Nell put the glass to her lips again and tried to take a sip. Water splashed over her chin and she choked.

“Here, let me get that,” the woman said, starting to rise.

“He died,” Nell said. 

There it was, the story told. Her heart laid bare for another listener, her voice flat with repeated tellings.

“An aneurysm,” she recited. “The day after my birthday. He collapsed at work. Just stood up to go to lunch and fell over, like someone had pushed him. Didn’t even try to stop his fall, broke his nose when he hit the floor. It was that quick. Or so I was told. I wasn’t there, of course, so I don’t know.”

She looked up to gauge the woman’s response. She was standing with the glass in her hand, her neat dark clothes unwrinkled and chic. Her face was in shadow.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I didn’t know he wanted to write a poem,” Nell said. It sounded like a confession, or an admission of failure.

The woman shifted from one foot to the other. Nell watched the water slosh in the glass. “I have his drafts somewhere,” the woman said. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll get them for you.”

“Drafts?”

“You know, drafts. Versions. He came to me with the main ideas already hammered out. We were working on editing them down to a reasonable size.”

“One poem.” 

“Poems can be any length,” the woman said with more than a hint of asperity in her voice. “Some of the best ones are very long. Beowulf, Paradise Lost. The Odyssey. However long it takes to say what needs to be said.”

She turned on her heel and left the room. Nell could hear her distant footfalls start and stop and pick back up. Looking for the drafts, presumably, though Nell’s imagination failed her when she tried to picture Grant hunched over a piece of paper, pen in hand, sounding out rhymes or whatever it was poets did.

He hardly read and never wrote anything as far as she knew. On the weekends he had watched college sports on TV and puttered around the apartment, sometimes driving with Nell out to the countryside to eat lunch in a concrete block diner or browse for interesting kitsch in converted barns. Their marriage was a well-explored continent in their journey together: quiet, predictable, comfortably dull. Or so she had assumed.

The woman’s footsteps rattled on the floorboards as she entered the room, a bundle of papers in her hands. The size was shocking—a ream, maybe two. For one poem!  

It was confusing. How could Grant—how could anyone—have that much to say?

“I think these are in order,” the woman said. “The newest version is on top, so you might want to start there. Are you sure he didn’t give you a copy? For your birthday?”

“No,” Nell said. “I’d remember.”

She remembered that on her 50th birthday they’d talked about children, and he asked if she regretted not having them. She remembered that they’d shared a bottle of very good wine. She might have joked about surviving half a century, not suspecting she’d be a widow the next day.

“Thanks for this,” she told the woman as she rose and headed to the door.

When she got home—after she ate both halves of a sandwich from the local deli—she’d sit on the sofa and put the stack of papers beside her and read them all, front to back, all the variations, all the versions, and look for Grant in them.  

Or she might save them for another day, when she was ready to reckon with the hard truth that she hadn’t known this man at all, or at least, not the way she thought she had. When she was ready to decide if that was all right, the not knowing, perhaps the impossibility of knowing another, not truly, not really—then she might read Grant’s poem.

In the meantime she’d reminisce about the time they’d hidden behind the characters of George and Emily in Our Town, that quintessential play about love and marriage written by a gay man denied any chance of either. She’d think about how act 2 had been their first wedding, George and Emily holding hands at the altar, scared yet optimistic, unaware of the death and sorrow on the horizon of act 3 when Emily’s heartbroken question rolls across the dark: 

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?  

Nell had said those lines with a naïveté she could no longer fathom.

If she could, she might be ready to read it—this book-length poem, this epic, secret labor of love. Maybe then she could understand the outpouring of Grant’s heart the way he had planned to share it with her, and perhaps already had, for years, over and over, like a wordless tune.

***

Kay McSpadden writes short stories, one-act plays, and op-eds. Kmcspadden@comporium.net.