An Absence of Light

But then the way Graver was looking at this might say more about himself than about Burtell. Perhaps the fact that Graver thought Burtell’s reaction to the news of Tisler’s suicide was more… reactive… than Graver had expected was because Graver himself felt so little. Or, at least, Dore would have said that. According to her, Graver was an “emotional cripple.” Someone else might have said that he was too analytical or reserved or low-key. But Dore had said “emotional cripple,” and the description had stung. In fact, Graver remembered at the time how much he had been hurt by that. Sometimes those words ran through his mind when his eyes and thoughts stopped momentarily on the cobblestone memento on his desk. Graver had spent a lot of time second-guessing his feelings after that, and he regretted that Dore had saved those words as her parting shot, after she had already filed for divorce, and they had almost stopped speaking. He would like to have talked with her about that, before the emotions that once had tied them together had been severed and cauterized. But it was too late now, and he was left to puzzle over this unflattering description in solitude. Maybe that was the way Dore had intended it to be-to leave the barb in the flesh after the sting, a lasting, reminding hurt.

It could be, though, that Burtell’s reaction was not really noteworthy. How was he supposed to have reacted? Could Graver have described a more appropriate response? What was an acceptable response when one is unexpectedly confronted with such things-outrageous acts that seemed to occur outside the realm of the probable? Tisler’s suicide had gone against the grain of everything they had understood about him, and perhaps such a deviation from expected behavior had elicited an equally surprising response from Burtell.

There is, after all, a natural framework for everything, Graver thought, ambits of behavior that evolve from a given society and a person’s place in it. There is an accretion of expectations that attach to our lives after a certain point. It is assumed that we will continue to behave as we always have behaved, that our personalities are set, an unavoidable amalgam of all the experiences we have had from birth to the present. If someone deviates from a behavior that we have come to expect from them, we are startled by it and remember it far more clearly than if they had acted predictably.

But it occurred to Graver that if by killing himself the benign and unremarkable Arthur Tisler had exceeded the parameters that others assumed of his personality, then perhaps he had done so with a clear, keen vision. Perhaps he had viewed his closing hour as an opening door, a way to liberation. Perhaps it was an act of rebellion against thirty-five years of docile predictability. By acting contrary to others’ expectations of him, he may have entered for the first time in his existence into a limitless freedom, though he had had to end his life to do it.

The old Georgian home of red brick and white wood trim sat back from a wrought-iron fence with fleur-de-lys finials that long ago had rusted away all their original paint and had acquired a dark, mossy patina. The fence and the lawn and the house were shaded by the canopies of third-generation water oaks that hovered over the property like silent old aunts whose job it was to observe the comings and goings of the generations and, perhaps, to whisper about them among themselves when the Gulf breeze, prowling inland from the sea, moved through their vast, heavy limbs.

Graver had grown immensely and immediately fond of the old house which he had bought from an elderly doctor, a childless widower who, with the practical bravery of a reasonable man of science, had decided to sell the house he had lived in all his adult life and check himself into a nursing home while he could still understand what he was doing and why he was doing it.

The house always had seemed to be just the right size for them, even when the twins got to be teenagers and the place was filled with their migrations of friends, and the smell of Dore’s cooking permeated the large rooms. For years he and the twins together had mowed the rambling lawn and cleaned the pool where the languorous summers were animated by swimming parties and barbecues. Dore had loved the place as much as he had, and most of their eighteen years there had been full of good times and good memories. Mostly. Then several years ago, after the twins had gone away to college, a worm had gotten into the apple. It was as if every minor incompatibility that he and Dore had managed to subordinate, in deference to the welfare of the family they had made, began to grow into insurmountable differences. In the end it all came to no good, and he was left with the house, a kind of consolation prize for having lost everything else. And now the twins were in graduate schools on separate coasts, each engaged to be married, and he was left pretty much to himself.