“What is this?” Mira asked. She was trying to control the alarm in her voice, so the question came out breathy, hoarse, as if she were doing an imitation of Marilyn Monroe.
“Obviously, it’s a duffel bag full of clothes,” Clark said. “I’m sure you won’t remember my having told you I’m taking the twins to visit my mother.”
“What?”
“Twins? You know, those two kids who run around here? I think you gave birth to them?”
“Clark, can you quit with the sarcasm? What are you talking about?”
“I told you weeks ago, Mira. It’s my mother’s birthday. I’m taking the twins to visit her for two days. What do you care? It’ll give you time to work.”
Mira stared at Clark. She’d been preoccupied, she knew, but she would never have forgotten something like this. Clark had never taken the twins anywhere without her, certainly not to visit his mother. Mira herself was the one who had to plan and organize every visit to Clark’s mother, for whom Clark seemed to have nothing but a terrible cocktail of pity and contempt that made it nearly impossible for him to carry on a conversation with the poor old woman without it ending in an argument.
Visiting? With the twins? “No,” Mira said, and shook her head.
Clark let his jaw drop theatrically. For a flash of a second, Mira saw his molars—a little mountain range of bone in the dark. He shut his mouth before she could look more closely, but it had seemed possible to her in that quick glimpse that his teeth looked unhealthy.
A dark spot in the back?
Maybe, she thought, it was why his breath had begun to smell strangely—not bad, exactly, but organic. On the rare occasions they kissed, she thought she could taste clover on him, or the paper of an old book.
“Uh, no?” Clark asked. “Did you just say no, I can’t take my sons to visit my mother for two days? I’m sorry, Mira, but I’m not sure you have the right to grant or deny that permission, especially since if I go without them there will be no one here to take care of them.”
“I could have made arrangements to go to if you’d told me,” Mira said. “I would have.” Even as she said it, she wondered how she could have, whether she actually would have.
“And cancel your classes? Postpone your research? God forbid, Mira! I mean, the way you go on and on about the importance of those classes, and how the whole world hinges on your student evaluations, and how if you lose a research day, the fall of Rome is sure to follow, it certainly never crossed my mind that you ‘would have made arrangements’ to go with us.”
Mira stepped away from him. She tried to imagine herself as the director of this scene. Or as its literary critic. Clark, the main character here, was far too agitated for this to be about his mother’s birthday, or even his bitterness about his wife’s work schedule.
“Why now?” she asked, attempting the dispassionate tone she took with students, with colleagues, although every nerve ending in her was vibrating with emotion. “Why are you going now? In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never once—”
“Because my fucking mother is turning seventy, for God’s sake. I don’t want to be like you, Mira, and just show up finally for the fucking funeral.”
Mira looked at her stinging hand to find that she had just slapped Clark hard on the side of his face without realizing it, without realizing that she was even capable of it.
Then she looked to up to see that he was reeling backward, swearing.
It took a few more heartbeats before she could focus enough on her surroundings again to understand that the twins, awakened from their nap in the other room by Clark’s shouting, had begun to scream and cry. And a few more heartbeats passed before Mira realized that there were tears streaking down her own face, that she was sobbing.
Clark had been the only person to whom she’d ever spoken of it, and it had been the hardest confession she’d ever made, and she remembered him cradling her head in his lap as she wept, years ago, when finally she’d told someone, and the relief that someone knew: “I didn’t go home when my father told me that my mother was dying because I was afraid I would flunk my exam . . .”
And the way he’d kissed and consoled her, and stroked her hair, and how he had kissed her tears—how she’d known then that she would marry him, that he was answer to all the prayers she’d never even said, the prayer for forgiveness.
The prayer for self-forgiveness.
“You were just a kid, Mira, really,” Clark had said. “How could you have known? You loved your mother. She knew that. She understood . . .”
Now Clark was holding a hand to his cheek, staring at her with narrowed eyes.
“Fuck you, Mira,” he said. “Fuck you.”