Billable Hours

Billable Hours

by Patricia Foster

Twilight by David Wilder

It’s late Sunday afternoon, the sky a looming darkness. Last week, Hurricane Patricia wreaked havoc on Mexico, then sent a front arcing all the way to Iowa, rain drumming on the roof of our house, loosening leaves from the trees, stirring wind in the soffits. The air now is soft.
        “Wanna?” I ask.
        We turn off the lights in our bedroom, undress quickly, laughing and complaining that it’s too freaking cold, the house already chilly in late October. My husband loosens the covers, then lifts and pulls the quilts up over him so that when I slide in and snuggle close, you’d think I was trying to wear his skin. A fringe of light seeps beneath the door and I hear leaves cascading from the ash tree onto the roof. Tomorrow our front yard will be a red-gold carpet. Now there’s just us: my cold toes between his warm thighs; my arms around his neck, touching the flat mole near his right shoulder, his arms pulling me tighter, tracing the curvy bumps of my spine.
        We’ve jumped into bed because we’re anxious. In twenty-four hours, I’ll leave for a literary conference in northern Arizona and from there, a two-week international writing residency in Guangzhou, China, the longest we’ve been apart since David’s surgery for a rare cancer two years ago. All day I’ve been restless, drinking too much tea, trying to finish a paper for the conference, edit a lecture for China and sort out clothes and shoes for two different climates. “What am I doing?” I keep asking.
        “Right now, just Billable Hours,” David teases, releasing me from his hold.
        I laugh because this is our joke, code for our naked talks as if they’re a high-level therapy session, a reckoning that pushes us into shadows we usually avoid.
        

Warming up, we shift and settle. I turn onto my back and David traces a finger across my shoulder as I worry about my presentation in Arizona. “I hate my performance anxiety. My bad case of nerves.”
          “You’re not a little girl,” he whispers. And we both smile because this is what my sister says when I fuss about professional anxieties. “You’ll be fine,” David reassures, his finger sliding down my arm. “You always are.”
          Relieved by his validation, I sink into silence. Lying in our warm cocoon, I hear the rush of my blood, watch the dimming of the light, the flash of a bird swooping onto the roof as my thoughts loosen and drift. I glance at David. What will he do without me? Will he hole up in his study, working on art prints, dishes in the sink, socks littering the floor, forgetting I’ve gone?
          Though I’ve always argued for selfishness as a necessary trait for writers and artists, marriage is a greedy bastard, full of unspoken understandings and repeated misunderstandings. I press my hand to David’s chest, lightly stroking the soft grey hairs, wanting to be free of these worries, to be deep in Billable Hours, blurring the past and the present.
          I’m surprised when David leans over, whispering in my hair, “I don’t want you to go.”
          My brain thrills.
          “I never want you to go without me.”
          And just like that the world narrows to us.
          David turns me toward him, smoothing a stray curl from my face. His eyes are smoke-blue, his eyebrows almost vanishing, his nose sharp and strong. He looks, for a moment, like a saint or a guru, a thick fringe of silvery hair dusting his forehead. His gaze is direct, his voice low. “I don’t want you to go, but if China means some writing time without teaching, I can manage.” He leans closer. “You’re a beautiful writer.”
          As his flattery pours into me, I press my face into his neck, feel the heat of him, the beat of his guru’s heart. For a moment I want to lick him all over, starting with the curly grey hairs at the bottom of his throat, then down the muscle of one arm, the elbow, the wrist, my tongue a restless blur of energy, and simultaneously, for the first time since the residency invitation, I imagine walking beneath the sprawling shade of banyan trees, their twisted trunks mysteriously beautiful, the bark silvery-white and smooth. I can’t yet see myself sitting at a desk and writing in Guangzhou, but I can imagine delicate cups of oolong tea and a room of my own.
          I smile. Ambition wins! “What about you?”
          David sags into the sheets. “Been listening to marketing videos, the ‘get out there and show the world!’ kind of crap.” He sighs. “Some days I’m like sculpted water, then Bam! I’m a damn puddle.”
          Ah, the bane of an artist, I tell him. Divine improbability usurped by muddled reality.
          “Anyway, I’ll be working on the horse print.”
          I love this print, the horse (all driftwood and bent nails) looks moody and forlorn as if trapped in the aftermath of disaster. David’s best work suggests something hidden behind a façade, prints and paintings populated by blindfolded mannequins, partially erased bodies, sacred sheep, the occasional self- portrait.
          A story in hiding.
          It’s what I’m after too.
        

After David’s diagnosis—a cancer so rare the oncologists at the university hospital had never seen an actual case—I wrote furiously about how illness changes marriage: the hypervigilance of caretaking, the vulnerability about sex and the broken body, the reality of the bowels, of movement and pain. But in the last six months, my thoughts have shifted. Now I think about the allegiances and betrayals buried at our core: the secrets of childhood and their voices in a marriage.
        I glance at David, his eyes closed, only a sprinkling of freckles visible across his eyelids. Though we’ve been married for over thirty-five years, I don’t—and can’t—fully know his past, the facts and memories of his childhood filed away as “not relevant” or “beyond the pale,” the relationships vague. He left home at sixteen in the middle of the ‘60s, became a musician and moved to San Francisco to play in a band, letting his East Coast past disappear as if it got lost in the shuffle of long-distance travel. I’ve never met his family (all deceased) and only last year, with the help of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, did we discover he’d been in foster care for the first seven and a half years of his life. He thought he’d entered care after age three, remembering only the foster mother he loved and called Aunt Adeline and her husband, Uncle John in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.
        Adeline and John. When I read their names, I felt a jolt: the same first names as my parents as if the two of us were alchemically bound.
        The day the caseworker notes arrived, David and I sat huddled together reading, both of us stunned that he’d been placed in care at three months and had lived with at least four foster mothers before he came to Aunt Adeline and Uncle John. Some of the placements were for no more than two or three months, others for six or seven months. In one, David was removed due to the “limited mental capacity of the foster mother” and in another, the place was shut down as “unsuitable for children.” Before age two, he’d broken his collarbone twice, had untreated eczema, and was diagnosed as “retarded.”
        “You were so fucked,” I blurted as we read that section. We stared at each other, then we burst out laughing.
        “Royally fucked.” David grinned. “Move over, Pip.”
        But with Aunt Adeline, there were no scary ghosts, no disasters, only a stable home for David from age three and a half to seven and a half. Even now his face brightens when he mentions her name, Aunt Adeline, as if she’s still holding his hand. What was it that bound them together? As I’m musing about this, I hear the rain begin, the sound faint but steady, like a curtain sealing us in. Heat whooshes out of the vents, and I toss off the top blanket, feeling as I do the warmth of David’s body. He smells like winter, slightly dry and fruity, except for the faint scent of soap at his neck. I breathe him in even as I close my eyes, trying to imagine Aunt Adeline, a forty-year-old woman in her kitchen scrambling eggs and buttering biscuits, her apron clean but faded, the table already set. She taught him to read at age five and faithfully took him to Mass at a French-Catholic church every Sunday, wearing her pastel pillbox hat. Though he’s often told me these simple details, she’s barely a line-drawing in my mind, all quick strokes and gestures. What was it about her that wreaths her in devotion? Was she like my mother, the other Adeline, who always fixed my favorite foods and stayed up late to sew me a red taffeta slip?
        “You’re too quiet,” David says, surprising me. I thought he might have fallen asleep. “When you’re this quiet, you’re pondering something.” He tries to tickle me.
        “Quit!” I yank up the covers.
        “Okay, out with it. I know you. You’re not the least bit subtle. You could never be a spy.”
        “Or hide things.”
        “Right.” He folds his arms behind his head. “You didn’t get the hiding gene. Look at you. You write your secrets. What kind of madness is that?”
        “Not madness,” I say quickly. “Clarity.” A sudden wind blows rain against the window and I watch the drops sliding down the panes.
        “Well?” he whispers.
        “Ohhh, just wondering about Aunt Adeline. I’m always curious what kind of mother she was.”
        David bends his knee against my leg and lets it rest there. Trying to figure me out I expect him to say as if I’m the antagonist, the pushy-notetaker searching for clues, but today he surprises me. “She spent lots of time with me and you know how much I like that.”
        I nod.
        “I could talk to her about anything.” His voice softens. “I’d make up stories about my soldiers battling in the woods or my toys talking to each other or I’d tell her jokes or ask questions about grasshoppers and frogs or read to her, and well, she listened.” As he speaks, I see the faint blue veins at his temples, the pucker of wrinkles around his eyes. His face is serious, thoughtful. He hesitates, “You know how we think your great niece is so unbelievably smart, this fantastic kid, and we’re always astonished by the things she says?”
        The little genius, we call her.
        “Aunt Adeline treated me like that, like I was special—a smart little boy who surprised her.” As if embarrassed to admit this, David stares out the window, his face slightly flushed, his mouth pressed closed. But then he smiles. “And I could make her laugh.”
        And just like that, his love for her falls into place. Special. A special boy. A special boy who delighted her, a boy who fell into her lap. In the caseworker files, I read that Aunt Adeline and Uncle John had never had a boy placed with them (only older girls), had never fostered a young child, but in 1951, they decided to say yes, okay, they’d give this boy a try. A month later, here was David climbing out of the caseworker’s car, a precocious three-and-a-half-year old clutching his paper bag of toys, desperately needing stability and ready to tell fantastic stories but so confused about going to another new home he had a terrible stomachache.
        Feeling a mutual tug, we face each other, pulling the covers up close, covering our shoulders, shifting to get comfortable. The skin beneath David’s right eye sags, giving his face a kind of bruised tenderness, the face of a man intelligent and aging, burden etched into his gaze. It’s this look I love, not the thirty-year-old face, sharp-eyed and fine-skinned and impulsive. No, this one is better. Softer. Kinder.
        “I loved it there. Aunt Adeline and Uncle John, my two older foster sisters, and Aunt Adeline’s mother, well, she was a bit contrary, but she lived upstairs and made fantastic pies.” He’s quiet, telling me about those pies, apple and rhubarb and sometimes cherry with a latticed crust, totally yummy, the Sunday dinners they had together before his play in the woods. “It was home.” He pauses. “I knew where I was and who I was, though, of course, being a kid, I didn’t think about it that way. I guess I just felt safe.” He looks past me as if he’s seeing that private world of long ago. “Then, three years later, my mother married, and I went to live with her and my stepfather in Worcester. Everything, well, sorta exploded.”
        His mother. According to the caseworker’s notes, his mother was a gregarious, impulsive woman who faithfully visited David each month while he was in foster care, doting on him for those three hours and always wanting more.
        “By the time I was seven and a half, I was living with my mother full time.” He glances out the window, the rain steadily falling, the evening soaked with humidity. “But it was—different.” I too watch the rain trickle down the windows, the startle of a branch flapping against the roof. Night is coming.
        “I used to cry every day.”
        I’m surprised. He’s never told me this. “Why?” I ask quietly.
        But David only stares at the ceiling. Maybe he doesn’t want to tell me or maybe any thought about that time makes him too sad, too anxious. The hard stuff. To his mind, I’m a relentless detective assembling facts and feelings while he prefers the oblique, the maze, the mysterious story.
        For several minutes we lie together in silence, the house dozing. There’s the flash of car lights—a splash of rain on the glass turns silver—then an island of darkness. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I know the particulars of his childhood. And yet, in so many ways marriage is a close reading, a constant parsing of words and gestures, an interpretation of gaps and silences as well as a piecing together of implications and motivations that depend on knowing as much of the past as possible. Yes, I need stories. Not just the familiar stories but the shadow stories, the ones where desire and fear exercise their sticky feet in the dark.
        “I don’t let myself think about it,” David says finally. “I try not to think about it.” Then he sighs as if letting something go. “In Worcester, I couldn’t go out and play like I did in Sturbridge—no woods, no wild places, no ponds or swamps. And I didn’t know anyone. It was Worcester.” He pauses, “I was only seven and a half and sometimes left alone all day in the flat because my mother had to work. I’d sit on the sofa, crying, not knowing what to do. And I felt guilty. Everybody said what a great thing that I was back with my real mother. They always emphasized that, praising me, like I’d finally gotten the prize, what I was meant to have. So, I thought there was something wrong with me.”
        I try to visualize his mother’s flat from the few things he’s told me: a three-decker in the Italian section of Worcester, a dowdy place of large rooms and many windows. with walls in need of a coat of paint, faded shades, rented second-hand furniture, a console tv, the air sour with yesterday’s food. A dreary place in comparison to Sturbridge with its wooded wildness and winding roads, its back yards and summer gardens.
        A gust of wind sweeps rain across the roof. For the first time, it’s a melancholy sound.
        “My mother wanted to get me back. If she hadn’t, she’d have given me up for adoption during those seven and a half years. But there was something—” his mouth tightens “—not quite right.” He hesitates as if uncertain of going on. “I didn’t understand it as a kid.” He looks away. “But I sensed it, more of a feeling, a charge between us: she was ambivalent about me. I was the kid she wasn’t supposed to have by a man who left her. I was the kid she had to give up, that other women raised.”
        I nod, my mind swinging open. The shadow story.
        “I think she loved me when I was a little boy because I was cute and dependent and not yet hers, but by the time I came to live with her, I wasn’t that cute, little boy who got excited about having our “happy day” every month. Besides, I’d been spoiled by Aunt Adeline’s attention.” He stares at the ceiling, his face unreadable, his pale lips becoming paler.
        When he shifts, I see him clearly. His eyes look grey, his eyebrows a faint darkness, a thicket of hair falling across his forehead. I touch the spot on the side of his face I teasingly call “my real estate,” a place I can kiss and touch because it’s mine to explore. I often tell him I can build libraries and cathedrals there, kissing around the perimeter, planting trees or trumpet vines to lace through lattices on a sunny day.
        “But the worst thing,” he continues, “was that my mother had no power over my stepfather. And after the first six months, he didn’t like me. I was just the extra kid, not his, someone to use as a punching bag. So, I did what a kid does. I wanted them to love me and I went numb.”
A shiver runs through me, a flash of recognition. Numbness, the antidote: how it slows the beating heart, keeps the panic at bay. It’s where anger burrows, where confusion hides. I imagine David as a boy becoming anxious and wary, talking to himself, trying to disappear, never dusting the dirt and grass from his knees. He can be that way now. Depressed. Distracted.
        We’re quiet, our bodies barely touching, our legs stretched out under the covers, my toes worrying the bottom of the sheet. David tents the covers with his knee, then lets it sag. I scratch the inside of my leg and listen to him breathe, the slightly nasal rasp of his sinuses, the slow rise of his stomach as night closes around us. Beyond us, the rain has slackened, the trees black and silent, the streetlights flaring. I think of the night breathing, waiting. I think of how impossible it is to know someone, to unravel the self, to peel away its protective shell, digging beneath instincts and desires, finding its burning light.
        I think of how alike we are and how different, our families both conflicted, but on either side of the class divide. And I begin telling David about what happened to me when I was seven and a half, not because it shares the disruption and violence he felt as a boy but because, like his story, the experience shaped me.
        “Until we moved to Magnolia Springs, Alabama, I had all of my mother’s attention,” I say, “probably because I’d been so sick as a baby and she feared I’d die.” David knows some of this, but not all of it, and I keep talking, roused by memories of going everywhere with my mother: to watch my eight-year-old brother crowned king at the grammar school, to deliver salt-free diets to my father’s medical clinic, to pick up pansies and caladiums in coffee cans from old Mrs. Bruce, who smelled like moldy cheese, to try on dresses in the closet-sized dressing rooms at McCrary’s Department Store where I’d sometimes see other women jiggling in and out of their clothes. I liked to stare at their fleshy ankles and soft, protruding breasts. I was so close to my mother, I breathed in her breath, tensed when she tensed, sensed when she was hurt or excited, worried or lonely.
        “But then, we moved to Magnolia Springs and the principal of a nearby school, desperate for a replacement teacher, begged my mother to take the position. That’s when everything changed.”
        Though I’m staring at the ceiling, I can feel David listening, an attentiveness I’ve always adored.
        “I’d had all of her, and then—poof! she was gone, leaving early in the morning and coming home late in the afternoon to this new place thick with heat and bugs. My mother didn’t have special time for me anymore.” I can still see her leaning into the mirror, giving a quick brush to her short dark hair, carefully blotting her lipstick, then slipping on navy blue high heels, picking up her science books and rushing out the front door. “I used to get up at 5:30 just so I could sit in the sunroom and watch her grade papers.” What I remember is the pink morning light flooding the room through latticed windows and the doves cooing in the trees, their sound urgent, mournful. It felt private and thrilling to be in that room where my beautiful mother sat so quietly on the small couch reading a stack of papers on her lap while I, her suitor, curled on the floor. Each morning, I’d slip into the room, kiss her cheek, and then settle into my corner in my pajamas to watch. Even now, I feel a flame of longing. “But my mother seemed different. Detached. I could feel it though I can’t say exactly what it was, more like there was a space between us, a shadow. I didn’t know how to grow around it, so I started pulling away too.”
        I stare at the ceiling, noticing a slight crack beginning at the far corner and spiraling toward the window. Now, of course, I know that my mother was simply overwhelmed: a woman with three children trying to assimilate to a new town, contain a difficult marriage, teach in a school of German immigrants, and create a space for her twelve-year-old brother who’d been recently orphaned and sent to her. What I imagined as abandonment was merely a loosening. But as a child, I saw only desertion.
        Even in this dark room, naked with my husband, I see the seven-and-a-half-year-old girl I used to be in her favorite brown corduroy jumper, the one with a white cow’s face appliqued on the front, flat brown buttons for eyes, black thread for nostrils, red flannel for the tongue. She’s sitting in the school cafeteria, staring, mouth clenched, at her food. “One day my second-grade teacher tried to make me eat carrots,” I tell David, “those horrible, canned carrots, all rubbery and tasteless, and I started crying because my mother would have known that I hated them. The teacher thought I was just being finicky and after lunch she made me sit under her desk for punishment. But I was really grieving. I couldn’t stop crying no matter what Mrs. Malone said. All I could think was, I want my mother and she’s gone.”
        I don’t know when David takes my hand, when the past shifts to the present, when nothing else matters. “It seems so ordinary,” I say, turning to him, “but that was it. The knife-slice. I was grieving. And it changed me.” I’ve never said this before, not even to myself.
        David kisses the hair just above my ear. “I never thought of it that way. I think I was grieving for Aunt Adeline that first year I was with my mother, missing her, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought it would mean I was betraying my mother.”
        I squeeze his hand. I lift that hand to my lips.
        Our two Adelines.
        We lie quietly, softened by what we’ve revealed, a new warmth spreading between us, caressing us. When I was young, I believed only sex enhanced intimacy, believed it was the erotic joining of bodies that released caring and empathy. And of course, it does. But longevity in marriage requires a more conscious survival. Sex and energy can’t hold the pieces together, can’t mend without the touch of words, the unraveling of feelings. Maybe endurance requires a belief in sculpted water, learning to navigate around the shadows as slowly, sometimes painfully, you discover a new language of faith. Not just touch, but something more. The chemistry of claiming. “I see him with my own eyes, and he sees me with his,” a Chinese writer from Guangzhou will tell me weeks later about her husband as we sit in a café in Jiangmen Province discussing marriage.
        When a burst of rain streams down the windows, splashing against the sill, David and I sink deeper into our bed, pulling up the covers, adjusting our pillows. Our bed. Here we exist in a world of our own making, safe and sheltered and attached. My breathing slows. My muscles begin to relax. Idly, I spread out my fingers on the warm, clean sheets. David yawns. I laugh, then I yawn too. “Billable hours,” I whisper, “keeping tabs.” But his eyes are closed, his body slack, his hands still.
        A branch taps against the window and I turn lazily toward it, happy to see the leaves glistening, wet and full.

Rough Draft by David Wilder