Happiness

Imagined Colors

Imagined Colors On the last night in May I lay beside my wife listening to the sound of her quiet snoring. Faith, who when we first slept together was so still that I sometimes laid my hand on her to make sure she was breathing, the way she would do with Donny and Joe when they were born. In every room my docks were ticking, not quite in time, syncopated. I restore old docks for a hobby. Evenings and weekends, at my long lighted table in the basement, I sand down finials, polish spandrels, dean and fit the delicate shining gears. The only room in the house without docks is the bathroom. Falling asleep seemed to take longer each night, and when I did manage it, my sleep would be fractured by dreams. Night after night, the same dreams, fault lines along which my sleep repeatedly cracked and broke. Now I tried squinting into the sound-filled darkness, willing a picture the way Faith learned to do when she was a child, to make herself fall asleep. (My Faith has always lived in images. The pictures in her head make a world that's as real to her as the one she lives in-realer.) Out of the darkness I tried to construct a junglescape : the round eyes of the great cats; the sly, human faces of the baboons. I tried to people it with the ardent women who go for ten or fourteen or twenty years out into the bush. Jane Goodall, Mary Leakey-I placed them with the animals, luminous and unmoving in the green stillness. But the women-restless explorers, pioneers with sharp faces and sharp eyes--refused to stay put. What does a man do when he wants to understand something? I am a statistician, and what I do is watch. I know how to observe, not how to make things happen. Of course, for statistics to work, you have to have all the facts. As Marty, my boss at Boston Preferred Insurers, says, you have to get your ducks lined up. After that, though, it's a matter of waiting. I put my hand on Faith's shoulder and pushed her gently over onto her left side. The snoring stopped. The animals and their green jungle disappeared. Here's what I knew: 1.. Faith had begun to talk a lot about the life-drawing class she'd started at the DeCordova the month before 2. The class met once a week, on Tuesday nights 3. Once a week, on Tuesday nights, my wife's face was flushed and her hair sprang out in a froth of tender curls across her forehead, contradicting the lines in it, and she hummed under her breath in the kitchen. Those were the facts I had. I did nothing. I calculated, extrapolated, made my projections; and then I waited. "Housework is like alcohol," my reconstituted mother said to Faith. "Every time you do it, some brain cells are destroyed." I08 Imagined Colors When she wagged her head for emphasis, the large hoops in her ears, the exact red of her cotton jumpsuit, banged against her jaw. She speared a slice of tomato and made a single mouthful of it. "I do a lot of other things, Mother A. There's my job at the library-If "Sorting and stacking," said my mother, who doesn't think much of catalogue librarians, or any other kind of librarians, for that matter. For years she sat in the kitchen weeping and reading theology, while her children, seven of us, raised each other; when my youngest brother started school, she went to work as a window designer for Filene's in Brookline. One day a week she comes to each child's house for dinner, which she no longer cooks herself. "-you know that," Faith went on as if my mother hadn't spoken. "And there's life class." "Life class? So what do they teach you about life?" "Life drawing, Mother," I said, and Faith said at the same time, "Drawing from life. We draw live models, that's all." At that moment Donny knocked over his Batman mug. Faith jumped up from her chair and ran into the kitchen for a fistful of paper towels. When she started to mop up the milk pooling on the wooden table, my mother reached over and took the paper towels out of her...