Living Together

Living Together

L I V I N G T O G E T H E R Claudia turned from her painting to find Ralph, her husband of fifty-two years, in her studio. All the way through the door. Seven years ago, after a critical remark about her work, she forbid him entry, so his presence on this morning was more assault than trespass. At the time of his exile, Ralph retaliated by denying Claudia his study. Boundaries in their spacious home in a suburb of Detroit were marked like the invisible fences put up for confining dogs. They were startled at what they had done and wanted to undo it but didn’t know how. The no man’s land between the study and studio, once a showplace of ordered bookshelves and carefully chosen art, fell into chaos. The crises in the newspapers had long since been resolved. Tables were littered with unpaid bills for which neither of them would accept responsibility. Dishes, clotted with moldy food, hadn’t made it to the kitchen. Clothes Claudia meant to give away lay on the sofa in a heap of past events. A maid came in once a week for a few hours. Actually the maid was many maids, whose various names neither could recall. The women never lasted long and all developed ways of working around the disorder. Sometimes they took a maternal approach, bringing cakes and cookies baked with their own hands, but when they returned the following week the offerings were still there, un4 5 touched. Occasionally they would sweep away the disorder only to be dismissed for misplacing some scrap of paper Claudia or Ralph insisted they could not do without. The winter had been long and Ralph felt in these first days of spring that he had crawled on his hands and knees through a long and endless tunnel. He headed for Claudia’s studio because something in the encroachment of the sun onto his study floor, his chair, and then as a gentle hand on his shoulder gave him a terrible hunger for a human voice. They didn’t own a television, and the cleaning lady would not be there for another day. Even their latest conflict, the battle of the thermostat, was wordless. Ralph had years of broodings about the universe and the future of mankind to communicate, but, unable to help himself, his first words on entering Claudia’s studio were a complaint, “We don’t have any tea.” He looked around the studio to see a gallery of unfinished paintings , his wife’s work of fifty years of indecision and discouragement . She had never developed her own style, but had promiscuously embraced the work of first one artist and then another, her perception always a little off as she punished herself for encroaching on someone else’s vision. Seeing Ralph, she was alarmed. Was he ill? No, he stood upright . Quickly she hid her worry. “You don’t know where the store is?” “I thought you might have some here.” “Are you suggesting I’m stealing from the kitchen?” “It hadn’t occurred to me that you knew where the kitchen was.” Their meals were taken separately. When he thought of it, he grilled a burger. Usually he made do with a can of soup and those 4 6 little round crackers that bobbed so merrily about. Claudia ordered out, regarding women in the kitchen as stereotypical. Due to arguments with restaurants over the quality of the food, the time of its arrival, and its cost, her rotation of take-outs had come down to a Korean place, which had the advantage of not understanding a word of her complaints. In turn she didn’t understand the woman who took her order, so Claudia was reduced to dining on whatever they sent; lately it had been mung bean pancakes and seaweed soup. Ralph had meant that afternoon to remain if not cordial, at least neutral, but he had fallen into the usual, and he retreated to the silence of his study. It wasn’t always like this. There were occasions when they came together, bright, silvery drops of mercury that rolled beside each other, never touching. Ralph, now retired, had headed the English department of one of the city’s smaller colleges . From time to time he and Claudia were invited to department functions. Or there might be an invitation to the...