Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Luckily she was now free.
    “What happened to the woman?” Jinny had said. “Did she die?”
    Neal said, “She went into the hospital.”
    “Same deal.”

    They had had to make a lot of practical arrangements in a fairly short time. Clear the front room of their house of all the files, the newspapers and magazines containing relevant articles that had not yet been put on disk—these had filled the shelves lining the room up to the ceiling. The two computers as well, the old typewriters, the printer. All this had to find a place—temporarily, though nobody said so—in somebody else’s house. The front room would become the sickroom.
    Jinny had said to Neal that he could keep one computer, at least, in the bedroom. But he had refused. He did not say, but she understood, that he believed there would not be time for it.
    Neal had spent nearly all his spare time, in the years she had been with him, organizing and carrying out campaigns. Not just political campaigns (those too) but efforts to preserve historic buildings and bridges and cemeteries, to keep trees from being cut down both along the town streets and in isolated patches of old forest, to save rivers from poisonous runoff and choice land from developers and the local population from casinos. Letters and petitions were always being written, government departments lobbied, posters distributed, protests organized. The front room was the scene of rages of indignation (which gave people a lot of satisfaction, Jinny thought) and confused propositions and arguments, and Neal’s nervy buoyancy. And now that it was suddenly emptied, it made her think of when she first walked into the house, straight from her parents’ split-level with the swag curtains, and thought of all those shelves filled with books, wooden shutters on the windows, and those beautiful Middle Eastern rugs she always forgot the name of, on the varnished floor. The Canaletto print she had bought for her room at college on the one bare wall. Lord Mayor’s Day on the Thames . She had actually put that up, though she never noticed it anymore.
    They rented a hospital bed—they didn’t really need it yet, but it was better to get one while you could because they were often in short supply. Neal thought of everything. He hung up some heavy curtains that were discards from a friend’s family room. They had a pattern of tankards and horse brasses and Jinny thought them very ugly. But she knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve pretty much the same purpose, when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.
    She was forty-two, and until recently she had looked younger than her age. Neal was sixteen years older than she was. So she had thought that in the natural course of things she would be in the position he was in now, and she had sometimes worried about how she would manage it. Once when she was holding his hand in bed before they went to sleep, his warm and present hand, she had thought that she would hold, or touch this hand, at least once, when he was dead. And she would not be able to believe in that fact. The fact of his being dead and powerless. No matter how long this state had been foreseen, she would not be able to credit it. She would not be able to believe that, deep down, he had not some knowledge of this moment. Of her. To think of him not having that brought on a kind of emotional vertigo, the sense of a horrid drop.
    And yet—an excitement. The unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet.
    “Where are you going?” he had said, when she withdrew her hand.
    “No place. Just turning over.”
    She didn’t know if Neal had any such feeling, now that it had happened to be her. She had asked him if he had got used to the idea yet. He shook his head.
    She said, “Me neither.”
    Then she said, “Just don’t let the Grief Counselors in. They could be hanging around already. Wanting to make a preemptive strike.”
    “Don’t harrow me,” he said, in a voice of rare anger.
    “Sorry.”
    “You don’t always have to take the lighter view.”
    “I know,” she said. But the fact was that with so much going on and present events grabbing so much of her attention, she found it hard to take any view at all.
    “This is Helen,” Neal said.