Where I'm Calling From

were more grown-up, we still found time to talk. It was more difficult then, naturally, but we managed, we found time. We made time. We’d have to wait until after they were asleep, or else when they were playing outside, or with a sitter. But we managed.
    Sometimes we’d engage a sitter just so we could talk. On occasion we talked the night away, talked until the sun came up. Well. Things happen, I know. Things change. Bill had that trouble with the police, and Linda found herself pregnant, etc. Our quiet time together flew out the window. And gradually your responsibilities backed up on you. Your work became more important, and our time together was squeezed out. Then, once the children left home, our time for talking was back. We had each other again, only we had less and less to talk about. “It happens,” I can hear some wise man saying. And he’s right. It happens. But it happened to us. In any case, no blame. No blame. That’s not what this letter is about. I want to talk about us. I want to talk about now. The time has come, you see, to admit that the impossible has happened. To cry Uncle. To beg off. To—I read this far and stopped. Something was wrong. Something was fishy in Denmark. The sentiments expressed in the letter may have belonged to my wife. (Maybe they did. Say they did, grant that the sentiments expressed were hers.) But the handwriting was not her handwriting. And I ought to know. I consider myself an expert in this matter of her handwriting. And yet if it wasn’t her handwriting, who on earth had written these lines?
    I should say a little something about ourselves and our life here. During the time I’m writing about we were living in a house we’d taken for the summer. I’d just recovered from an illness that had set me back in most things I’d hoped to accomplish that spring. We were surrounded on three sides by meadows, birch woods, and some low, rolling hills—a “territorial view,” as the realtor had called it when he described it to us over the phone. In front of the house was a lawn that had grown shaggy, owing to lack of interest on my part, and a long graveled drive that led to the road. Behind the road we could see the distant peaks of mountains. Thus the phrase “territorial view”—having to do with a vista appreciated only at a distance.
    My wife had no friends here in the country, and no one came to visit. Frankly, I was glad for the solitude. But she was a woman who was used to having friends, used to dealing with shopkeepers and tradesmen. Out here, it was just the two of us, thrown back on our resources. Once upon a time a house in the country would have been our ideal—we would have coveted such an arrangement.
    Now I can see it wasn’t such a good idea. No, it wasn’t.
    Both our children had left home long ago. Now and then a letter came from one of them. And once in a blue moon, on a holiday, say, one of them might telephone—a collect call, naturally, my wife being only too happy to accept the charges. This seeming indifference on their part was, I believe, a major cause of my wife’s sadness and general discontent—a discontent, I have to admit, I’d been vaguely aware of before our move to the country. In any case, to find herself in the country after so many years of living close to a shopping mall and bus service, with a taxi no farther away than the telephone in the hall—it must have been hard on her, very hard. I think her decline, as a historian might put it, was accelerated by our move to the country. I think she slipped a cog after that. I’m speaking from hindsight, of course, which always tends to confirm the obvious.
    I don’t know what else to say in regard to this matter of the handwriting. How much more can I say and still retain credibility? We were alone in the house. No one else—to my knowledge, anyway—was in the house and could have penned the letter. Yet I remain convinced to this day that it was not her handwriting that covered the pages of the letter. After all, I’d been reading my wife’s handwriting since before she was my wife. As far back as what might be called our pre-history days—the time she went away to school as a girl, wearing a gray-and-white school uniform. She wrote letters to me every day that she was away, and she was away for two years, not counting holidays and summer vacations.
    Altogether, in the course of our relationship, I would estimate (a conservative estimate, too), counting our